Keith refers to the following, “the Preface to the paperback edition to Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold, on the history of credit derivatives which brought down the world’s financial system. She writes in conclusion: ´The story of the 2008 financial crisis is a story not only of hubris, greed and regulatory failure, but one of these deeply troubling problems of social silence and technical silos. If we do not use the crisis as an opportunity to tackle these problems seriously, then it is a crisis we may well be doomed to revisit, albeit in an innovatove new form´.” In the US in general, there is a deafening silence around the issues that Sian has so elegantly laid out in her working paper. However, in Latin America, Africa and Asia, I have found that people frequently discuss these same issues — both intellectuals and the average citizens.

The debate about the monetization of biodiversity is not new, a colleague, Margery Oldfield, wrote her Masters thesis on this issue back in the 1970s. Since the 70s, people who are concerned about nature for its intrinsic values have been uneasy about the move to put $ values on nature. I myself wrote a piece called “Ethics and Economies” in a book entitled Biodiversity published in 1991.

What is new is the rising silence, starting in 2000, as the conservation industry moved into the billion dollar, marked publically in 2003 when IUCN secretariat announced its million dollar partnership with Shell at the World Parks Congress in Durban, and then the IUCN head turned off the microphones for public comment when comments from the floor were outraged. At the same Congress, there was a major (failed) effort to set up a Peace & Reconciliation process for parks that were forcibly taken from the people who had prior rights to them. And the members of that caucus put tapes over their mouths in silent protest to the railroading of that issue. Some silence is coerced and some is purchased.