The world is immersed in a crisis of values, concludes the study Diverse values of nature for sustainability , coordinated by the economist Unai Pasqual and published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature . “All the countries in the world make decisions prioritizing market and short-term values, leaving those values related to the conservation of biodiversity or human health in the background,” says the professor at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3). As a consequence, at least 45% of the ecosystem functions are degraded or are being used in an unsustainable way. In other words, the economy is destroying the ecosystems on which it sustains its growth, "which forces us to act reactively instead of preventively, but there are processes such as the loss of biodiversity that are irreversible," warns Pasqual, who adds that " some types of economic growth are creating more problems than solutions.”
The expert indicates that there are three large types of groups of values that collide with each other and explains them using forests as an example. “There are instrumental values –the value of wood, for example– and intrinsic values –the benefits of forests for human health–, but there are also relational values, such as the identity bond that a community or person can have with that forest”, says the BC3 professor. With the current mercantilist logic of the economy, the values that end up being imposed are the instrumental ones.
“We have to transform our way of doing things. Markets can no longer guide the decisions we make about nature”, says the main coordinator of the study. “We must abandon the economic theories born after the Second World War, which have as their objective the growth of the economy. We need new ways of understanding the economy. It is something that many very high-level economists already know, but this thought has not yet reached economics faculties”, laments Pasqual, who has a PhD in Environmental Economics.
The study coordinated by the Basque professor identifies four levers of change. The first lever is based on identifying and recognizing the values of change. The second is to quantify these values. The third is to include these values in decision making. And the fourth and most complex involves reforming policies and institutional frameworks so that "social norms" support "values aligned with sustainability." Basically, it is about “redefining concepts such as progress, development and well-being”, explains Pasqual.
It is the Less is more (Ed. Captain Swing) posed by the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel: “Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the world, and there is only one solution that will lead to significant and immediate change: degrowth. If we want to have a chance of stopping the crisis, we have to slow down and re-establish the balance. Change our way of seeing nature and our place in it, moving from a philosophy of domination and extraction to another based on reciprocity and generation”.
In Spain, Luis González Reyes and Adrián Almazán have also joined the wave of titles on degrowth with their book Decrecimiento del qué al como. Proposals for the Spanish State (Ed. Icaria): “Various indicators show more and more clearly that global industrial capitalism is colliding against ecological limits: pandemics, devastating fires, proliferation of extreme weather events, energy disruptions, shortages. We must learn to live in a world conditioned by climate change, the ecosystem crisis and a limited supply of energy and materials”.
