“We use nature because she’s valuable, and we lose nature because she’s free,” comments Pavan Sukhdev in Banking Nature, which screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 2 March. Sukhdev, the CEO of Gist Advisory, is just one of the multitude of economists, analysts and activists interviewed in the film, which focuses on the commercialisation of the natural world. After the screening, director Sandrine Feydel joined the audience for an insightful discussion.

Sandrine Feydel

In Banking Nature, Feydel and co-director Denis Delestrac document how protecting the planet has become big business. Financial companies like Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase now promote environmental markets to investors who buy up areas of land, largely full of endangered species, so they can sell them for ‘nature credits’. Companies whose actions harm the environment are obliged to buy credits to offset the damage that they have caused. Banking nature poses the question of whether financial markets can succeed where politics has failed.

“I can’t trust that these same financial institutions that led us to the last financial crisis, big corporations that [caused] so much damage to the environment, could be the ones who now say ‘no problem, don’t worry, we’ve learned our lesson and are now able to protect biodiversity’,” said Feydel.

Feydel spoke of her unease with the methods used by the companies working in these new environmental markets, when so many of these same tactics – speculation, insider trading, market trading – had led to the devastation of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. “This is the same logic we are facing here,” said Feydel.

Members of the audience spoke of their shock at the reality of the situation, as the film at first seems largely pro-market before revealing the devastating consequences of treating nature as a financial commodity. “A lot of what is presented as green is not. This is what the film is trying to show,” said Feydel.

Feydel also spoke of how governments have facilitated the process, enabling financiers and corporations to invest heavily in nature.

“For the companies that want to mitigate the damages they are posing the environment, [they follow] the ‘mitigation hierarchy’. First, you avoid any destruction. If you can’t, you have to minimise the impact. And at the very end, if you can’t either avoid or minimise, you have to mitigate. And this is what is really shown by corporations and governments: it’s a way of pretending that they want to protect nature,” said Feydel.

Feydel also spoke in greater depth about the actual process of mitigation in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, where the first green stock exchange opened a year ago.

“Landowners had to keep 80% of the forest they own, they are just allowed to cut 20% of the forest, but the government found out that the law was not really enforced. So two years ago they decided to change the forestry code. And so now they say, ‘Oh you cut 60-70% of the forest you owned? It’s not a problem. You can go the stock exchange and you can buy credits from some other landowner who didn’t cut and still has 80% of his forest’,” said Feydel.

The session concluded with a question from an audience member about what role politics can play in this new market. Feydel said: “What was surprising when we made this film [was that] NGOs had no clue about these financing mechanisms. This is the new way of making profit for financial markets.”

For more information on Banking Nature and upcoming screenings, click here.

Rabbit a La Berlin, a film by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski which will be screened on Wednesday 20 August, examines the plights of a colony of rabbits which lived between the two barriers of the Berlin Wall. Enclosed in this space, the animals lived undisturbed lives – until the Wall was taken down. Then the rabbits had to readjust, and learn to live in a new environment (much like the people, of course, who had to unify what was once West and East). The rabbits who inhabited the “death strip” between the West and the East are not the only example of nature caught in human conflict.

The Animals in War Memorial in London. Tamsin Slater CC

Animals such as horses and dogs have long been used by the military, but the impact of war can go far beyond such matters of “utility”.  As a human endeavour, war and armed conflict can have a profound impact on the environment and natural systems: landscapes, for instance, have been transformed by advancing militaries and migrating populations. What is more, this impact is not only inflicted during the fighting of war. Military preparations, such as training and the development of a military infrastructure, also affect the environment. And in the aftermath of war, reconstruction once again leaves a mark.

The Cold War, in this respect, presents a specific example, in which a conflict was not actively fought (at least in the European arena), but nonetheless dictated human activities and shaped their movements. It therefore also affected the natural elements of this continent. The rabbits in the “death strip” lived happy, untroubled lives because no people or natural enemies were present in the enclosed space.

In another case which mirrors the Berlin rabbits’ story, groups of deer also felt the effects of the Iron Curtain, which stretched into what was then Czechoslovakia. At the time, three parallel electrified fences presented a heavily guarded border: over the years, 500 people were shot as they tried to escape into West Germany. The barrier would now traverse a combined German/Czech national park, where a wildlife crossing has been made to aide red deer who migrate in the summertime. However, a recently concluded study shows that the animals in the Sumava Natural Park in the Czech Republic now balk at crossing the area where the fences once stood. The animals on the German side present the same behaviour. Where people are now freely crossing political borders, the deer seem to have kept the Cold War distinction “in mind”.

With the 25-year anniversary of the fall of the Wall, none of the deer living today would remember the fence as it stood. Red deer typically live for 15 years, meaning that the animals now fearful of the traverse are at least of the second generation since the fall – implying that fawns would have adapted their mothers’ migratory behaviours in avoiding the barrier.

The Cold War is not the only case of a conflict that is characterised by a stand-off. It still echoes in the relations between North and South Korea that have been restrained for decades, a fact that is represented by the so-called Korean Demilitarised Zone. It lies on the original boundaries between the US and USSR brief administrations of Korea post-World War Two, and was reinstated in the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War. The DMZ roughly divides the Korean Peninsula in half: it is 250 km long and four meters wide, extending on both sides of the front line. It is a buffer zone, with large numbers of troops still stationed alongside it.

Only two small villages remain within the boundaries of the DMZ; the rest of the zone is a deadly place for people as the area remains heavily patrolled and tensions are still high. As a result, the DMZ has become an involuntary, unintended wildlife park. The area encompasses a unique geography including mountains, prairies and swamps – and thus is a unique temperate habitat. It is home to a number of near-extinct species: the Korean tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear are free to roam this “green ribbon”. While the guns and land mines are keeping people out, they are de facto keeping other species alive.

A deer runs along the train tracks at the DMZ

One important note, however, is that this ecosystem has a precarious future: demilitarised zones might not remain in that stage indefinitely, and especially not if a war were to break out. Should the tensions between the two Koreas become hotter, the troops now lurking on the border will  cross the DMZ, destroying its unique ecosystem. In a telling occurrence, South Korea’s submission to UNESCO to create an official wildlife park in the southern part of the DMZ, has been blocked by North Korea as a violation of the armistice agreement.

View the trailer for Rabbit à la Berlin here:

What is Progress? Does it by definition mean improvement? Is it possible to continue growing at the same rate? These are questions directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks address in their elaborate docu-essay Surviving Progress.

Based on the 2004 best selling book What is Progress? by Ronald Wright, the film includes interviews with scientists, philosophers and cultural critics who tackle Wright’s central thesis that, although progress sounds seductive, we are caught in a "progress trap".

Human culture has become detached from the pace of natural evolution in a world where technological innovations succeed one another at such speed that our footprint is threatening to become too large.

Surviving Progress makes connections between economics, the environment, history and science to argue that the rules the world currently lives by are unsustainable. A wide range of contemporary thinkers both amplify or argue against Wright’s warnings. Among them are chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and DNA mapper J. Craig Venter.

Directed by: Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks

Year: 2011

Duration: 87′