UN talks in Japan do nothing to prevent the trashing of the planet.
''Countries join forces to save life on Earth'', ''a landmark'', ''historic'', a ''much-needed morale booster'', the international media chorused following last week's agreement in Japan to protect the world's wild species and places.
The evidence suggests that we've been conned. The final version of the declaration isn't available but the draft agreement, published a month ago, contained no binding obligations. Nothing I've heard from Japan suggests that this has changed.
The draft saw the targets for 2020 that governments were asked to adopt as nothing more than ''aspirations for achievement at the global level'' and a ''flexible framework'' within which countries can do as they wish. No government, if the draft has been approved, is obliged to change its policies.
In 2002, the signatories to the convention agreed to something similar, a splendid-sounding declaration that imposed no legal commitments. They announced they would ''achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss''. Mission accomplished, the press proclaimed, and everyone went home to congratulate themselves. Earlier this year, the UN admitted the 2002 agreement was fruitless: ''The pressures on biodiversity remain constant or increase in intensity.''
It strikes me that governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed. They fight viciously and at the highest level for the right to turn rainforests into pulp, or marine ecosystems into fishmeal. Then they send a middle-ranking civil servant to approve a meaningless promise to protect the natural world.
Japan was praised for its slick management of the meeting, but still insists on completing its mission to turn the last bluefin tuna into fancy fast food.
Russia signed a new agreement in September to protect its tigers (the world's largest remaining population), but an unrepealed law in effect renders poachers immune from prosecution, even when they're caught with a gun and a dead tiger.
The US, despite proclaiming a new commitment to multilateralism, refuses to ratify the convention on biological diversity.
It suits governments to let us trash the planet. It's not just that big business gains more than it loses from converting natural wealth into money. A continued expansion into the biosphere permits states to avoid addressing issues of distribution and social justice: the promise of perpetual growth dulls our anger about widening inequality. By trampling over nature, we avoid treading on the toes of the powerful.
A massive accounting exercise, whose results were presented at the meeting in Japan, has sought to change this calculation.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity attempts to price the ecosystems we are destroying. It shows that the economic benefit of protecting habitats and species often greatly outweighs the money to be made by trashing them. The catchment protected by one nature reserve in New Zealand, for instance, saves locals $NZ136 million ($A104 million) a year in water bills. Three-quarters of the US haddock catch now comes from within five kilometres of a reserve off the New England coast: by protecting the ecosystem, the reserve has boosted the fishery.
I understand why this approach is felt to be necessary. I understand that if something can't be measured, governments and businesses don't value it. I accept the reasoning that the rural poor, many of whom survive exclusively on what the ecosystem has to offer, are treated harshly by an economic system that doesn't recognise its value. Even so, this exercise disturbs me.
As soon as something is measurable it becomes negotiable. Subject the natural world to cost-benefit analysis and accountants and statisticians will decide which parts of it we can do without. All that now needs to be done to demonstrate that an ecosystem can be junked is to show that the money to be made from trashing it exceeds the money to be made from preserving it.
That, in the weird world of environmental economics, isn't hard: ask the right statistician and he'll give you any number you want.
The approach reduces the biosphere to a subsidiary of the economy. In reality, it's the other way around. The economy, like all other human affairs, hangs from the world's living systems. Nature is turned into a business plan, and we are its customers. The market now owns the world.
But I also recognise this: that if governments had met in Japan to try to save the banks, they would have sent more senior representatives, their task would have seemed more urgent, and every dot and comma of their agreement would have been checked by hungry journalists.
When they meet to consider the gradual collapse of the natural world, they send their office cleaners and defer the hard choices for another decade, while the media don't even notice that they have failed to produce a written agreement.
George Monbiot is a columnist for The Guardian.
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