I saw Panorama on BBC1 the other day.
It was about how a solution to the problem of the disappearing Amazon Rainforest is to be found in buying parts of it from governments and allowing people to buy shares in it etc.
The idea is to give the rainforest a monetary value commensurate with the services that the rainforest renders to the people of the planet.
Surely that entails the idea that someone could buy your shares and that the value could change?
Surely the rainforest is priceless.
Would it not be easier just to have them as National Parks that it is illegal in any circumstances to destroy? If buying them is what it takes then do it.
No one owns shares in the Lake District National Park in the north of England, do they?
It would be illegal for me to buy the Lake District from the government and build on it, would it not?
It should be the same for the Amazon.
The countries in question, Brazil and Guyana, are extremely poor and are developing countries that see the "development" of the Rainforest as one of the only routes to development.
The solution is to compensate them and give them other routes to development.
Buy up their rainforest if necessary and compensate them and allow them to develop in other ways.