The emergence of more powerful communications media meant that public relations criteria pushed further towards brand protection rather than substance when it came to investing. The markets demanded a straightforward calculation of ‘money in and money out’ whether the medium for growth between the two was the planet or people. To satisfy those demands complex financial instruments were designed that simply used finance to create finance with ever more ephemeral products. Rapid globalisation of trade and events such as the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 both created a context and demonstrated finance’s increasing detachment from the economy of the real world, accelerating a process that had its origins as far back as the beginning of the industrial age. Furthermore, one of the bigger failures of the market, even on its own terms, was its inability to value nature or to price in the cost of environmental degradation.

So it was not surprising that those who could not regard the physical world around them as merely an externality, or a necessary casualty for a closed financial system, became hostile to those who were responsible for creating the trading system itself. The narrative of the emerging environmental organisations and their conservation partners was “You may be wrecking the world, but we will save it.” In their influential and controversial 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism”[iv] Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus characterised that messaging as fatally flawed, asserting that it had restricted environmental concern to a largely wealthy constituency. They posited that the very change makers who needed to re-imagine economic activity as a force for care of ‘the earth and all that lives on it’ as Psalm 24:1 has it, were excluded from the conversation and treated as enemies. However, financial and industrial leaders were precisely those whose engagement was needed if any systemic change was to come about. Rather than those changes being the business of the green brigade who would then live off philanthropic scraps from the corporate table, or merely the result of consumer pressure dragging reluctant industrialists towards ‘sustainability’, a comprehensive effort was necessary that would involve every actor in shaping the world of human endeavour.

Recent times have seen a far greater understanding of the inevitable relationships within the human economy that must all flourish if nature is to survive.[v] The data of destruction and decline and its impacts is unarguable and is evidenced not least in the plight of the insurance industry. Even so, it is only to a far lesser extent – if the deployment of investment capital in both private and public sector is to be believed – that there is a growing understanding of all the natural relationships that must be maintained if human flourishing is to be achieved. In that regard, the money tells the story which is that we are very far from discovering how financial investment can prosper at scale without depleting or damaging nature[vi]. The emergence of carbon and more recently bio-diversity credits has seemed to some to at least have the advantage of recognising the costs to planet and people of our current way of financial and industrial life. But both the methodologies and the metrics remain contentious at best while to their critics they are merely an exercise in smoke and mirrors or ‘voodoo economics’. [vii] So it could be said that for now the possibilities and aspirations of a truly regenerative economic system remain unrealised.