Crimes Against Nature: $2 million whales, wartime Britain and the economics of saving the planet | Jeff Sparrow

We can respond to environmental crisis with good planning, Jeff Sparrow writes in an extract from his book

In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher diagnoses the dominance of a business ontology', a mentality that can only conceive of human activities insofar as they're profitable.

For instance, researchers associated with the International Monetary Fund recently noted that whales - especially great whales - capture from the atmosphere considerable amounts of carbon, which they store in their huge bodies and take down to the ocean floor when they die. A single great whale can thus sequester 33 tons of carbon dioxide - a not-insignificant quantity, given that a tree only absorbs 22kg annually. Whales also feed populations of phytoplankton with their waste, and, globally, those phytoplankton capture some 37bn metric tons of carbon dioxide, four times the emissions sequestered by the jungles of the Amazon.