Banking Nature
Icarus Films • 55m
Directed by Denis Delestrac, Sandrine Feydel • Documentary • 2014 • 90 minutes
BANKING NATURE is a provocative documentary that looks at the growing movement to monetize the natural world-and to turn endangered species and threatened areas into instruments of profit. It's a worldview that sees capital and markets not as a threat to the planet, but as its salvation-turning nature into "natural capital" and fundamental processes such as pollination and oxygen generation into "ecosystem services."
Once we start measuring the value of nature, we can start turning it into securitized financial products. BANKING NATURE asks whether can we trust the very same people whose management of the mortgage market nearly led to a global economic collapse to safeguard nature by turning it into financial instruments for speculators?
"A beautiful and very challenging and provocative treatment of the current effort to save nature and the planet by applying market economics, models, and tools to global environmental crises."—Science Books and Films
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