Valuing Everything and Nothing: A Review of “The Value of a Whale”

Buller’s book will play an important role in a lineage of anti-capitalist green thought and theory, providing the evidence against green capitalism for philosophers, political scientists, and ecologists to come.

When I was just coming out of university I got my first “real” job working for a conservation organization. During this time, I put a lot of my heart and energy into my role as an educator, organizer, and representative. As a young person who got his start in political activism in the then-burgeoning youth climate movement, I thought this was the place for me.

Then I started noticing things that did not sit right. The first worrying sign was the organization’s relationship to the state utilities. Much of the land we were conserving was owned by the utilities whose transmission lines stood over hundreds of acres of land we stewarded. Later research showed that these utilities are the major impediment to climate action in the state of Massachusetts. Then an investigative journal published a damning piece about the organization's involvement in a bogus carbon offset scheme whereby the organization promised not to log nearly 10,000 acres of our protected land in exchange for funds we would receive as a part of a “nature-based solutions” carbon market. The problem is, we were never going to chop down those trees to begin with.

This program was unknown to many staff members, so after the piece was released, the organization scrambled, hosting staff meetings to answer questions and perform crowd control to justify their actions.Though I raised objections and had uncomfortable exchanges with management and team leaders, the organization went ahead with the carbon offset market scheme anyway. During this time, I started believing the organization was going against everything they claimed to value, including putting a price on nature. I left soon thereafter.

I was reminded of this experience while reading Adrienne Buller’s new book The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. While Buller did not reference my previous employer, she does expose many similar situations happening across the world. Through extensive research, clear prose, and a compelling narrative, Buller demonstrates how “green capitalist solutions” such as carbon offsets, pricing ecosystems, and the false promises of green growth fit within a matrix of capitalist solutions to the problems capitalism itself created. Buller’s book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the ecological crisis and critiques of capitalism.

The book best serves as an overview of capitalists’ attempts to price the natural world, prevent financial risk to shareholders, and maximize profit, all while changing little about the economic and political structures that ushered in an era of ecological breakdown. In this way, the majority of the book illuminates the “scope of solutions” provided by green capitalism such as who the key players setting the terrain for green capitalism are (economists, asset managers, the state in partnership with private corporations); how these players are doing so (turning nature into a marketplace, socializing risk and privatizing reward); and what they hope to accomplish through these efforts (to change little about the economy, political structures, and what we value culturally).

After roughly four chapters of laying the foundations for what green capitalism looks like in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Buller asks more pointed questions about alternatives, such as: “Should we accept green capitalist solutions?” In addition, she examines the power imbalance between the Global North and Global South, including an “unequal ecological exchange” where the former’s development, wealth, and waste is predicated on the plundering of the Global South’s land, energy, and labor. Here, Buller broaches topics about responsibility, justice, and the pragmatic stakes of the North continuing to underfund the South’s adaptation and development, even as those things were promised. A particularly refreshing part of Buller’s book was her repeated emphasis on the ecological crisis, not just climate change. This is most pronounced when Buller examines the disappearance of nonhuman nature as global biodiversity collapses.

In one of the book’s strongest examples of how capitalism is failing ecologically, Buller demonstrates how the promises of “green growth” are untenable, unfounded, and largely faith-based. Green growth is the idea that economic growth can be “decoupled” from environmental impact. This means that as GDP goes up a set of environmental indicators like carbon dioxide emissions, biodiversity loss, and material footprint would simultaneously go down. As it stands, “green growth” and decoupling are the most widespread response to the destructiveness of growth. In other words, green growth promises we do not have to change the world's growth dependency to tackle the ecological emergency: we can have our cake and eat it too.

But green growth does not exist. While Buller admits that countries like the UK and US have achieved some decoupling of carbon dioxide from GDP (absolute and relative decoupling respectively), they are largely doing so at inefficient time scales, in unjust ways, and neglecting analyses that go beyond carbon reductionism—focusing exclusively on CO2—and towards a more comprehensive set of “green” indicators, including biodiversity or resource use. For example, the US and Europe have reduced carbon emissions by one percent annually over the last fifteen years. This is clearly not quick enough to reduce emissions based on the United States’ own commitment to the Paris Agreement, but, moreso, fails on any commitment to justice and historical responsibility, given that the US is the largest cumulative emitter.

While the US and Europe have shown highly insufficient forms of decoupling, the global picture is even worse. Only fourteen countries have decoupled both production-and consumption-based emissions from GDP, and are still emitting more than the vast majority of the world. As it stands, GDP and carbon dioxide are still relatively coupled. Material footprint, the physical resources needed for growth, are nearly following in lock-step to global GDP. As Buller notes, there have been multiple comprehensive analyses of evidence for green growth, each concluding something similar: at best, it’s majorly overblown, if it can even be said to be taking place at all. Taking the study she provides, “Decoupling Debunked,” the authors write, “In light of the present review, we can safely conclude that there is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of the type described.” Similarly, in a 2020 paper titled “Decoupling for ecological sustainability,” the authors reviewed 179 articles published on decoupling between 1990-2019, finding “no evidence of the kind of decoupling needed for ecological sustainability.” It is safe to conclude green growth will not address the ecological crisis in the time we need to avert collapse. Instead, Buller suggests “addressing environmental breakdown may require a direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in the wealthiest countries.”

However, as Buller’s book is at pains to show, most evidence is ignored by those in power. This is because accepting such evidence would mean having to reassess the whole strategy of green capitalism—in this case, the economic growth imperative—and instead entertain post-growth and degrowth pathways, as the IPCC and IPBES have proposed. Whether it’s the lack of evidence for green growth, the failures of carbon pricing, or other “market-based solutions,” the stranglehold that capital has over human and nonhuman nature is squeezing out every last breath of our life-support systems. Buller’s analysis of the myriad of green capitalist solutions follows a consistent structure: explain the concept, reveal how entrenched it is within the halls of power, demonstrate how it is not working, then arguel that doing something different would mean questioning the whole edifice of green capitalism. Buller’s conclusion, here on the concept of green growth but also with nearly all of her examinations, can be summed up as follows: “confronted with the threat of firm material limits to expansion, concentrated wealth, and accumulation, the concept of green growth has become a necessary tool in the policy effort to minimize disruption to our existing economic model in the face of accelerating climate and ecological damage.”

One of the most important distinguishing traits of the book is Buller’s emphasis on biodiversity and her general ecological sensibility. Throughout the text, she repeatedly frames the problem as the “climate and ecological crisis,” demonstrating concern for our broader ecological free-fall and how focusing exclusively on carbon reductions is insufficient. Buller is correct to emphasize the ways in which much of the natural world is still unknown, and arguably, too complex to be fully known any time soon. Buller recognizes the irony (or hypocrisy) that neoliberalism was predicated on “the economy” being too complex for planning, even as neoliberals price and marketize the still largely unknown—and much more complex—natural world. As Buller notes, ecologists will be the first to admit we are still finding our way through the woods when it comes to nonhuman nature, with estimates about the number of species ranging from 5.3 million to 1 trillion. This leads Buller to support the precautionary principle in order to prevent catastrophic outcomes we cannot foresee. Following this, Buller, like any ecologically-minded person, subscribes to a worldview of ecological complexity, holistic analysis, and valuing the nonhuman world as more than a system of inputs.

But Buller does not just have the right sensibility. She backs her convictions up with rigorous evidence and argument. Again, like green growth narratives, Buller details at length about the ways in which “nature-based solutions”' or biodiversity offsets are limited in what they attempt to solve, and how they can often create more harm than good, especially for those in the Global South. For example, Buller references an evaluation by the Nordic Council of Ministers that shows that biodiversity offsets—where the destruction of a biodiverse ecosystem can be substituted or “offset” by developing an ecosystem of equivalent “value” somewhere else (as if it were on a balance sheet)—-“resulted in a 99% loss of habitat in areas under study.” Nonhuman nature, evidently, is not as substitutable as replacing one ecosystem with another. After millions of years of evolution creating niche, complex, and diverse ecosystems, it appears the modern idea that humans can either dominate nature or simplify it without dire consequence has been one of the most potent and dangerous myths our culture has advanced. Buller’s book convincingly makes the case that we need to think, act, and value our nonhuman relatives in different, more reciprocal and curious ways.

While Buller does make the case that our current neoliberal economic and value system is breaking the biosphere, she leaves the reader with nothing more than a sketch of what she thinks could replace green capitalism. Throughout the text, Buller coyly reveals some of her preferred values and the types of political structures she would like to see in place of green capitalist solutions. This includes a property system based on Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, an international ecosocial commitment to global justice, and a reduction in production and consumption in wealthy nations (although she does not explicitly support degrowth). To her credit, she is upfront in the beginning of the book about what The Value of a Whale is and what it is not, including that she would not provide more than a cursory exploration of alternatives to green capitalism. However, to emphatically denounce green capitalist solutions without providing an alternative is the book's greatest limit, leaving the reader wanting an exploration of a post-capitalist ecological society that Buller claims to support. I suppose I will have to read Buller’s other 2022 book release Owning the Future to get my answer. 

Nonetheless, while Buller might leave the reader wanting for alternatives, this hardly hampers how detailed, rigorous, and thorough her argument against green capitalism is. Buller’s book will play an important role in a lineage of anti-capitalist green thought and theory, providing the evidence against green capitalism for philosophers, political scientists, and ecologists to answer the questions Buller poses but does not answer: what do we value? What is humanity's role in promoting a flourishing nonhuman nature? What alternatives to green capitalism do we have?

To end, I would like to tell a short story about the importance of valuing nonhuman nature and how doing so goes beyond any economic balance sheet or ways we conceive of value now. In the beginning and the end of the book, Buller provides personal anecdotes about her own experience with whales, revealing that the creature was an inspiration behind her ecological sensibility and served as one concrete example of how capitalism was economizing the rest of the natural world (for reference, the IMF “values” a whale at $2 million). While many of us may not have the opportunity to be personally awe-struck by witnessing a whale, the impetus to protect nonhuman nature (and specifically whales) goes beyond emotional or aesthetic attachment, important as each of those are.

Humpback whales are massive specimens: weighing between 55,000 and 66,000 pounds on average and reaching close to fifty feet in length for females, and forty-five feet for males. They also move quickly. A whale typically travels between three and nine miles per hour (mph) and can reach up to sixteen mph during times of danger. For perspective, the highest speed reached by a human swimmer in competition is five mph. So how do these giant creatures swim with such speed?

Biologist Frank E. Fish has an answer: it’s all in the shape of the flipper. Whale flippers have a rugged shape with bumps found on the edge called tubercles. These bumps allow the whale to gain greater lift and reduce drag while in water, thereby reducing water resistance and helping maintain or increase speeds. After confirming the findings about the ways tubercles help with speed, Fish and his colleague, aeronautical engineer Phillip Watts, wanted to see what practical application these tubercles could have. So they partnered with Canadian filmmaker and inventor Stephen Dewar to develop and patent a new kind of wind turbine: the Tubercle Blade. Like the humpback flipper, these blades have bumps along their edges which allow them to reduce drag and cycle more wind, thereby generating more power for energy production. These blades are some of the most efficient currently available. The blades last twenty-five percent longer than the average wind turbine blade, circulate twenty-five percent more air than non-tubercle types, and are about two decibels quieter than other varieties. For their invention, Dewar, Fish, and Watts were finalists for the 2018 European Inventor Award in which the European Patent Office president remarked how their ”work shows how nature can serve as a source of inspiration and innovation and how following this inspiration might lead to refreshing and unconventional technological advances.” There is something to be said about the notion of patenting wind turbine technology that could be more widely replicated if not for profit-generating imperatives, once again demonstrating the limits green capitalism places on our collective survival.

Nonetheless, this innovation comes from a school of thought called biomimicry which uses the nonhuman natural world as a source of inspiration and example to create and design materials, structures, and systems that mimic biological processes and entities. Other famous biomimicry examples include the Japanese bullet train which was inspired by the nose of a kingfisher or the Wright Brothers mimicking pigeons to develop their first flying machine. In Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau remarks how he shaped his boat after an “amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.” It would appear some of our greatest, most taken for granted inventions are the result of careful and attentive study of the nonhuman natural world.

At a time of climate collapse and ecological emergency we face a cruel irony: the actual source of our solutions—nonhuman nature—face mass die-off or extinction at the time they are most needed. In the words of Norman Myers, “humanity might be destroying life that might just save its own.” Biodiverse nonhuman nature is integral to a functioning climate and biosphere, and some of humanity's greatest inventions and needed ingenuity rely on the nonhuman world as a source of inspiration and example, be it culturally, technologically, architecturally, politically, or artistically. Just as we could not imagine the bumps on a whale's flipper being used to provide life-saving wind turbine technology, we cannot fathom the millions of other ways nonhuman nature can and will serve as a model for our own survival, adaptation, and thought. The value of a whale can never be quantified, for who knows what nature's fecundity and awesome example we will rely on in ten, 100, or 300 years; so long as it’s still here to awe us. In the meantime, what we can do is observe, protect, and promote the nonhuman world in all its diverse complexity, admiring and valuing it as we would someone we barely know but still love anyway. Capitalism, however, will never love you or a whale. It’s best we burn the parasite from our earthly skin before it burns down the rest of the living world in its demise.

Andrew Ahern is a freelance writer based in Boston and an ecological activist involved with the Sunrise Movement and Boston DSA. He tweets @PoliticOfNature.