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1. Environmental Costs and the Value of Nature
Economic rationality has externalized nature from the process of production, destroying the ecological conditions for sustainable development. The need to control and reverse environmental degradation now demands internalizing the values and potentials of nature.
Environmental economics (neoclassical economics of natural resources and pollution) assumes that the economic system is able to internalize ecological costs and the preferences of future generations by assigning property rights and establishing market prices on natural resources and environmental services. The reintegration of nature into the economic sphere, however, faces the problem of translating conservation and restoration costs into market prices as a standard measure of value. Valuation of natural resources is not only subject to temporal and spatial ecological conditions of regeneration and productivity that are not synchronic or commensurable with economic cycles. Social interests and cultural meanings also define values and behavior that determine concrete modes of appropriation of nature through extra-economic processes -- symbolic and power relations that affect the forms and the rhythms of extraction and transformation of nature, and that cannot be translated or reduced to market prices.
The internalization of ecological costs and conditions for sustainable development implies the need to assess the ethical values and cultural meanings assigned to nature, not only its chrematistic costs. Actually, there is no economic, ecological or technological instrument that can establish the "real value" of nature in the economy. Warning against attempts to reduce diverse environmental values to a standard unit of measurement, William Kapp noted that heterogeneous physical processes are involved in the comparative evaluation of economic, energy and environmental rationality.1 Furthermore, economics has been left without an objective value theory;2 environmental costs and the valuation of natural resources are no longer determined quantitatively, but rather depend on qualitative processes cultural perceptions, community rights and social interests established outside the market.
Environmentalism is revaluing nature, and this is reflected in the economy by the increase in prices of resources and environmental costs. The environmental movement transmits the ecological costs to the economic system through social resistance to the capitalization of nature. And social struggles to improve the conditions and quality of life are giving rise to new democratic values and cultural rights that are manifest in the social reappropriation...