Unlikely partners
A personal view of the collaboration between finance and nature
Peter Harris
A Rocha co-founder
Key ideas
- Modern environmentalism emerged partly in opposition to industrial capitalism, highlighting how profit-driven business practices and chemical-intensive industries were damaging both people and the natural world.
- Over time, finance became increasingly focused on maximising shareholder profit above all else, often ignoring environmental and social costs. This led to economic systems that treated nature as an “externality” rather than something essential to human flourishing.
- The article argues that environmental movements have sometimes framed business and finance as enemies of nature, but meaningful ecological change requires collaboration with investors, companies, and economic leaders
- Although ideas like carbon credits and biodiversity markets attempt to account for environmental damage, truly regenerative economic systems remain underdeveloped, and many current financial approaches still fail to protect nature at scale.
- From a Christian perspective, the article makes the argument that human flourishing and care for creation should not be seen as competing goals. Biblical ideas such as shalom, long-term stewardship, generosity, and “the community of creation” point toward economic models that value both people and the wider living world together.
Rooftop Sky Garden – Choo Yut Shing
Are the two worlds of finance and nature conservation mutually exclusive or, in these crisis times, are there new possibilities for a fruitful collaboration? If so, some history on both sides needs to be acknowledged.
When the modern environmental movement began in the 1960s it followed a text-book tactic: name your enemy to gather your friends. Among others, Rachel Carson’s pioneering work and her influential book Silent Spring, first published in 1962, made it clear that the rapid growth of big business had effectively been poisoning the world. Pharmaceutical companies which had been involved in weapons production during the second world war period pivoted to manufacturing the key ingredients for the new weapons needed for the industrialisation of agriculture. DDT[i] was one of the first products to be identified as particularly harmful but over following decades the dangers to human health and the wider environment of increasing numbers of chemical compounds became more than obvious. The pollution that rapidly growing industries were visiting upon the world began to percolate into popular awareness, and that was before a realisation of their contribution to climate change had begun to be better understood.
Meanwhile, influenced by neo-classic economists such as Milton Friedman[ii], both industry and its investors were becoming increasingly focussed on financial return as the single metric of success. Friedman introduced his theory in a 1970 essay for The New York Times titled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”[iii] arguing that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders. He did introduce the caveat that serving the shareholder was to be done ‘within the bounds of law and ethical custom’ but one could argue that the damage was done. In a political context of de-regulation, other considerations of wider values that encompassed more comprehensive understandings of the social and environmental vocation of business were abandoned.
The emergence of more powerful communications media meant that public relations criteria pushed further towards brand protection rather than substance when it came to investing. The markets demanded a straightforward calculation of ‘money in and money out’ whether the medium for growth between the two was the planet or people. To satisfy those demands complex financial instruments were designed that simply used finance to create finance with ever more ephemeral products. Rapid globalisation of trade and events such as the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 both created a context and demonstrated finance’s increasing detachment from the economy of the real world, accelerating a process that had its origins as far back as the beginning of the industrial age. Furthermore, one of the bigger failures of the market, even on its own terms, was its inability to value nature or to price in the cost of environmental degradation.
So it was not surprising that those who could not regard the physical world around them as merely an externality, or a necessary casualty for a closed financial system, became hostile to those who were responsible for creating the trading system itself. The narrative of the emerging environmental organisations and their conservation partners was “You may be wrecking the world, but we will save it.” In their influential and controversial 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism”[iv] Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus characterised that messaging as fatally flawed, asserting that it had restricted environmental concern to a largely wealthy constituency. They posited that the very change makers who needed to re-imagine economic activity as a force for care of ‘the earth and all that lives on it’ as Psalm 24:1 has it, were excluded from the conversation and treated as enemies. However, financial and industrial leaders were precisely those whose engagement was needed if any systemic change was to come about. Rather than those changes being the business of the green brigade who would then live off philanthropic scraps from the corporate table, or merely the result of consumer pressure dragging reluctant industrialists towards ‘sustainability’, a comprehensive effort was necessary that would involve every actor in shaping the world of human endeavour.
Recent times have seen a far greater understanding of the inevitable relationships within the human economy that must all flourish if nature is to survive.[v] The data of destruction and decline and its impacts is unarguable and is evidenced not least in the plight of the insurance industry. Even so, it is only to a far lesser extent – if the deployment of investment capital in both private and public sector is to be believed – that there is a growing understanding of all the natural relationships that must be maintained if human flourishing is to be achieved. In that regard, the money tells the story which is that we are very far from discovering how financial investment can prosper at scale without depleting or damaging nature[vi]. The emergence of carbon and more recently bio-diversity credits has seemed to some to at least have the advantage of recognising the costs to planet and people of our current way of financial and industrial life. But both the methodologies and the metrics remain contentious at best while to their critics they are merely an exercise in smoke and mirrors or ‘voodoo economics’. [vii] So it could be said that for now the possibilities and aspirations of a truly regenerative economic system remain unrealised.
So how might a Christian perspective be found amid these competing claims and voices?
Firstly, Scripture maintains that the flourishing of people and nature should be possible even in a fallen world. It should never be a zero-sum game where human communities and the web of life that sustains them are set against each other as irreconcilable enemies. The idea of Shalom or comprehensive peace, as envisioned by Old Testament prophets such Isaiah and Jeremiah, is one in which both are blessed. While we wait for the Kingdom of God it is incumbent upon us to work within its commitments and to expect to see signs of its coming even in such times of distress. The orientation of the Kingdom is not intended to be merely aspirational but practical.
Secondly, because the biblical analysis is that the world is broken, the work of reconciling the apparently competing needs and interests of people and the wider creation will never come naturally nor be easy to achieve. However, if those who are creating wealth continue take an adversarial approach towards nature and, as for the most part they are currently doing,[viii] [ix]run blindly towards and beyond the real limits which are intrinsic to our finite planetary life, then current catastrophes will amplify towards increasingly disastrous outcomes[x].
Finally, and I am grateful to Nina de Souza Jensen for these insights, one of the major issues in reconciling financial and ecological perspectives is the issue of time. The former, with the exception of pension funds and sovereign wealth management, operates overwhelmingly on short-term perspectives and returns. However ecological time frames are necessarily long-term. So those who embark on investment over extended time frames such as forest restoration or tackling plastic pollution will need to be generous, and to acknowledge that they are not in control. Both are qualities that are inherent to the Christian view of the world and so can give inspiration to those who endeavour to deploy capital faithfully.
While considering Christian approaches we have to admit that many efforts which seek to align biblical values with investment neglect to consider what the theologian Richard Bauckham has called ‘the community of creation’[xi] and are instinctively anthropocentric. Traditional interpretations of Scripture over recent centuries in the western world have been highly influenced by the individual and deeply personal perspectives of successive cultural movements from the Renaissance onwards. All that is relevant for people has been exclusively highlighted at the cost of the more biblical, creational framing which gives human existence its dignity and its meaning. There is no doubt that the global church has a way to go before it becomes second nature for us to consider creation when designing outcomes of blessing.
For these and many other reasons A Rocha has been exploring how investment might be applied to some of the really difficult situations we are seeking to address around the world and we invite anyone reading this to be in touch if they feel they wish to be involved. So far we have launched modest efforts in consultancy and aligned eco-tourism but long to scale up further. And we applaud organisations such as North Star Transition and one of their founders Jyoti Banerjee who is exploring creative and collaborative ways forward inspired by their Christian faith. He and North Star understand that in a created reality everything must inevitably be connected to everything else and so take an intentionally systemic approach. They practice hope that even the most entrenched opponents may come to realise that enduring solutions can only found with the engagement of everyone involved. Most of all they and everyone who is working in this kind of way now need examples at scale of true economic growth measured by criteria that include the wellbeing of every element in the God-given creation that we hold in trust.
[i] Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a synthetic organochlorine insecticide developed in the 1940s
[ii] Milton Friedman (1912-2006) from the Chicago School of Economics
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html
[iv] 2.amazonaws.com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/legacy/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf
[v] Among others Pavan Suhkdev’s work on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) was an early attempt to get some of these externalities onto balance sheets.
[vi] https://www.unep.org/resources/state-finance-nature-2023
[vii] The principal problem with carbon trading is the logic: in order to grow the offsetting at scale there need to be greater emissions. The problem with biodiversity credits is fungibility: can there really be an equivalence between what is lost in one place and what might be added in another.
[viii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq8g20xgdjwo
[ix] https://www.ipbes.net
[x] https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
[xi] Richard Bauckham The Bible and Ecology Darton, Longman and Todd 2010
This blog post was a typical A Rocha collective effort and I am very grateful for the suggestions and comments of Elliot Aravelo, Jyoti Banerjee, Jeremy Harris, Nina de Souza Jensen, Wen Li Lim, Jorge Mourato, Matthew Phan, Simon Stuart, Phillip Wang and Christian Wright.
Peter Harris
Peter and his late wife Miranda founded A Rocha, a family of conservation organizations in over 20 countries working together to live out God’s calling to care for creation, in 1983. The A Rocha story is told in Peter’s books, Under the Bright Wings and Kingfisher’s Fire. A Cambridge graduate and Anglican minister, Peter has served as Adjunct Faculty at Regent College, Vancouver and Au Sable Institute, Michigan. Since losing Miranda in a car accident during a work trip in South Africa in 2019 he has continued to support the growth of A Rocha around the world and to explore possibilities for innovative financing of conservation projects through investment and philanthropy.
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About Peter Harris
Peter and Miranda moved to Portugal in 1983 to establish and run A Rocha’s first field study centre. Together with their four children they lived at the centre for twelve years until 1995 when the work was given over to national leadership. They then moved to establish A Rocha France’s first centre near Arles, and lived there until 2010, providing coordination and giving leadership to the rapidly growing global movement. They are now back in the UK from where they work to support the A Rocha family around the world while being closer to their own, and not least their grandchildren. Their story is told in Under the Bright Wings (1993) and Kingfisher’s Fire (2008).
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