Environmentalists disagree over the issue of whether the environment should be given a price. Those who favour the idea generally do so because they believe this will lead to environmental protection. They think that policy-makers will not protect the environment unless they can see how much it is worth. They hope that by incorporating environmental costs into national accounts figures and cost&endash;benefit analyses, more notice will be taken of the environment. The well-known British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt argues that 'when you are talking to the people who are really in the business of destroying the environment, you have to use concepts that will allow them to begin to understand what we're saying' (quoted in Lohmann 1991, p. 194).

However, other environmentalists argue that such concessions will not change the power structure, and that it will not be environmentalists who put monetary values on the environment but economists employed by industry and government. The British Association of Nature Conservationists, which is opposed to putting money values for environmental effects into cost&endash;benefit analysis, says the agencies promoting schemes 'have a monopoly of information which enables them to manipulate CBA to achieve their objectives. This power will not be broken by requiring some disputable monetization of environmental effects' (Bowers 1990, p. 17).

Larry Lohmann, in an editorial in the Ecologist, responds to Porritt by pointing out that more environmental battles are won by local people chanting and demonstrating in their own language and forcing leaders to listen to them, than by people 'who allow their views to be phrased in consultants' cost benefit terms'. Lohmann displays some scepticism about environmental economics and the purported new union between nations and nature:

Since it is presumably not Nature Herself who will be attending the G-7 economic summits and whispering in the ears of presidents, however, it is hard to fight down the suspicion that this mystical union will in the end be mediated by the usual fallible individuals in three-piece suits. (1991, p. 194)

While some environmentalists hope that pricing the environment will help to shift priorities back towards environmental concerns, others argue that pricing the environment is merely a way of incorporating environmental issues into economic concerns, and that the priority remains with the economic bottom line. As was discussed in chapter 1, economists have woken up to the importance of environmental 'resources' and 'assets' as inputs to the economic system, and they have therefore sought to price and commodify them as they do labour and capital. This is a very different view of the environment from that of the environmentalist. Yet some are warning that in accepting the economist's way of incorporating the environment into the economic system, environmentalists are unwittingly accepting the economist's deformed and truncated view of the environment.

Others go further and argue that they are also implicitly accepting the ideological baggage that goes with the economic view. Rob White, of Edith Cowan University, argues:

Within this framework of general acceptance of the 'market', the issues of 'capitalist development' and 'ecological sustainability' have tended to congeal around the theme of environmental costs and how best to reduce these. The social relations of the market itself are not brought into question; the solution is not seen as involving a major social transformation or radical economic restructuring. (1992, p. 150)

White argues that the market, far from being free or operating efficiently to allocate resources in the interests of society, is dominated by a small group of large multinational corporations which aim to maximise their private profit by exploiting nature and people. He argues that, by focusing on policy measures that leave the existing market unchanged, environmental issues will continue to play second fiddle to economic interests; the logic of the system, which is based on unlimited growth, will be left unchallenged.

Environmental economics is seen by some as a deliberate ploy by those in power to counteract the possibility of social and political change arising from environmental concerns. Sara Diamond says 'Some farsighted corporations are finding that the best "bulwark" against "anti-corporate" environmentalism is the creation and promotion of an alternative model called "free market environmentalism" ' (1991, p. 54).

Environmental economics consists of reforms of basic economic systems&emdash;such as national accounts, pricing mechanisms and cost&emdash;benefit analysis&emdash;rather than any fundamental change in thinking or power relationships. It is a way of keeping things going as they have been by reducing the threat of environmental breakdown. However, some environmentalists believe that environmental degradation is a result of making environmental concerns secondary to economic concerns, and having decisions made by people who see environmental resources merely as an adjunct to production. These environmentalists see environmental economics as fiddling at the edges, adjusting the cranks and levers of the old machine, by economists working on behalf of business leaders. They argue that this will only subvert any real hope for change. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin says:

The fear of 'isolation', of 'futility', of 'ineffectiveness' yields a new kind of isolation, futility and ineffectiveness, namely, a complete surrender of one's most basic ideals and goals. 'Power' is gained at the cost of losing the only power we really have had that can change this insane society our moral integrity, our ideals, and our principles. (1988, p. 82)

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