by Edith Cody-Rice
In her opening sentence of the afterword to this book, Maude Barlow stated “This was a difficult book to write, as I am sure it was to read”. To that I say yes and WOW. I was knocked out by this book. The research is prodigious (27 pages of notes at the end), the content dense and the connecting all the dots of these extraordinary revelations a work of extraordinary knowledge, endurance and patience.
The subtitle of the book is The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet.
The activities described in this startling book start with a human philosophical assumption – that we are masters of the universe and that nature exists to serve us and to exploit for our benefit. In fact, we are a part of nature, as recognized by indigenous peoples, deeply embedded and not above it.
The particular tranche of our exertion of mastery addressed in this book is the financialization of nature, the awarding of a market value to land, water and wildlife so they could be included in the broad considerations of capitalism. The result of this was to privatize or enclose the commons, the natural world which should be the property of us all for the common good. Financializing means that everything in nature has a monetary value and can be bought and sold to the highest private bidder.
It started out as a way of making us pay attention to nature, to include it in our considerations and decisions, but it has been twisted and abused to benefit continued pollution of the planet. The book outlines how giving nature a monetary value has permitted it to be bought and sold like a stock in the marketplace, to the detriment of us all, except possibly, the very few wealthy individuals and companies that can reap the profits.
Take the carbon credit market, of which most of us have heard. A company can purchase or create carbon credits to offset its polluting with the idea that the total effect of its pollution is a “net neutral” for the planet. Carbon trading is a market intended to control pollution, if not reduce it but it has been perverted so that its net effect has been to allow increased, not decreased pollution.
Biodiversity investing or investing in nature is seen as a method of creating offsetting carbon credits.
The voracious private sector has created natural asset companies that eye national parks around the world for exploitation. Often underfunded by governments, the government owner of a park forms a private/public partnership in which the government continues to own the land, but the private company runs it thus creating offsetting carbon credits to “neutralize” other more polluting parts of its business or to sell on to other companies and, as well, to retain all the revenues from park fees, creating two revenue streams.
Large corporations also purchase large swaths of nature and use them to create carbon credits that they can then use to “neutralize” current and increased pollution. Rewilding, for example, which involves allowing farmland to return to nature, has become a famous (or notorious) movement encapsulated in one of the earliest rewilding projects on a Sussex, England farm and described in the best selling book Wilding by Isabella Tree. Corporations see rewilding as an opportunity to build up carbon credits and have purchased huge swaths of countryside to convert. As the author states,
In Scotland, a new breed of buyers is snapping up old estates, creating deep controversy in local communities. In February 2025, The Washington Post reported “green lairds” – energy companies, fast-fashion billionaires and private equity funds with the support of governments – are planting forests and restoring peatlands to serve as carbon sinks. The end goal is biodiversity restoration in exchange for carbon credits, either to allow the investors themselves to continue to pollute or to sell shared and credits to other polluting companies….
Scottish newspapers are filled, noted the Post, with tales of failed forest planting and improbably plans to bring back long gone animals alongside articles about soaring land and home prices local families cannot afford.
This approach to nature applies not only to land but to water. Water has been made into a saleable commodity and whoever owns the “water rights” can sell to the highest bidder (whatever happened to riparian rights?) This has resulted in local water being traded away at a significant profit to communities miles away or to large agribusinesses, leaving the local community arid and impoverished.
Municipal water systems have been outsourced to private companies who have profited but failed to properly maintain these systems and used Britain’s rivers as open sewers, with the result that in Britain, an early adopter of this approach, all rivers are now polluted. England’s nine water and sewage companies are now more than 90% owned by overseas investors, not the local community or even a local company.
In short, the commodification of nature has not addressed the dangers of pollution and climate change one wit.
These are only a few examples of the many in this extraordinary book.
The ironic result of this approach, as a board member of Germany’s Allianz SE, one or the worlds biggest insurance companies has warned, is that the world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks and capitalism itself will be destroyed (I paraphrase).
In 135 of its 187 pages (excluding the notes), Ms. Barlow describes the incredible damage wreaked by the commodification of nature, but then, she turns to a chapter on solutions. One of the novel, but increasingly popular measures, is to grant nature civil rights. In Canada, the Magpie River in Quebec has been declared a person with nine civil rights including the right to flow, the right to retain its natural biodiversity, the right to be free from pollution and the right to sue! The local Innu community and municipal councils advocated for this after seeing the enormous damage caused by the damming of a nearby river. This approach is now not unique. Governments and communities across the Global South and in Europe are adopting this course in order to give nature itself a voice in human decisions.
In a review of the book, it is impossible to describe all of the actions, for good and for ill, that are taking place on this planet and which, for all but those who follow environmental issues very closely (and even for them), pass under the radar. It was a revelation to me.
If you love this planet, read this book!!
187 pages of text
published by ECW Press
Maude Barlow is appearing at the Almonte Branch of the Mississippi Mills Library on Thursday, June 18 at 6:30pm. Registration is free but required. Register here.
The event is cohosted by Mill Street Books
