Cav's Place

I happened to stumble upon the press release about a proposed Nature Relationship Index just before midnight, so I initially ended up with the most basic placeholder for a post, only including the link. But, at first glance, the idea has some merit, depending on how it’s implemented, the index is intended to evolve over time, and UNDP is asking for feedback… The problem being that it’s hard to find actual details, seeing as the paper is behind a paywall… Which is actually a serious reason for concern in itself, bad enough to make me extremely suspicious about this, at least at this early point, seeing as we’re talking about a method meant to improve conditions not just for all people, but for all life on Earth, and yet the authors published the actual proposals and the concept behind them in a place that can only be accessed by those paying utterly insane fees.
Still, I did find some details posted by one of the authors, so I’ll be commenting on that and say that, if the idea was to calculate the positive impact people can have on Nature, then I’d have wanted something that actually focuses on that, more of a Nature Restoration Index, if we’re to stick to NRI, while this idea of showing how people and Nature can coexist and thrive together while keeping Nature accessible and “used with care” runs the very high risk of turning into something like “sustainable development”, so greenwashing, because there can be no infinite growth on a finite world and we’ve passed the limits long ago already. And it’s the very fact that at the top of the proposed dimensions is accessibility, followed by use, while actual protection and restoration are at the bottom, that makes that risk seem pretty much a certainty, and by design. And, when it comes to some of the listed specifics, on top of having a hard time believing my eyes when I saw “cultural burning” listed under using Nature “with care and respect”, I have serious doubts about the role given to Indigenous communities, because those tend to be whatever shreds of past societies managed to somehow survive the onslaught of modern man, and those past societies, at their peak, also exploited and destroyed the environment, and in some cases that brought their downfall even before colonists came along, and where they didn’t, and where it may perhaps be said that at present they don’t, it’s likely because of the low numbers and reduced development, or at least reduced use of modern technology and methods, so more because they can’t than because they actually wouldn’t cause harm, and there’s no basis to say that their experience and practices would still cause little damage, not to mention actually improve the situation, if applied to modern society at large.
Not that this concept, even in this form, isn’t much better than HDI, not to mention any of the utterly harmful measurements that only focus on financial aspects, and it’s clear that an index that’d focus solely, or at least primarily, on how well countries protect and improve the environment, repairing the damage already caused and aiding other species, without looking at the benefits that people may also derive from that, is likely to generate little interest at best, and most probably a lot of backlash, people being as selfish and shortsighted as they are. But if the authors honestly intended to show what can be done in this direction, and perhaps identify places where some of those things are already being done, then that’s the path they should have taken. And, even looking at the dimensions and points listed in that article, putting safeguarding Nature first and using it last would have been an important step… And it would be the important next step, if they’re serious about the concept evolving over time.