Late-Stage Capitalism and the Enclosure of Environmental Data
From Totem to Carbon Markets
(This is a sequel to the previous “Whole of Life Reimagined” post)
Lenin: A Hundred Trillion Reasons to Resist the Financialization of the Commons
Vladimir Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism remains a crucial framework for understanding late-stage capitalism. Writing in 1916, Lenin dissected how capitalism, in its advanced phase, inevitably gives rise to monopolies, financialization, and imperial expansion, all of which concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few. His argument that imperialism is not merely an extension of capitalism but its necessary and final form offers a prophetic lens through which we can understand today’s crises—where financial speculation, corporate oligopolies, and ecological destruction reinforce capitalism’s own contradictions. The global inequality we now recognize as a hallmark of late-stage capitalism is not an accident but an expected outcome of this logic.
Similarly, in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Lenin emphasized that capitalism's final stage is marked by national subjugation, economic dependency, and the exploitation of the periphery by opportunists. The Global South’s struggle against Western economic hegemony today mirrors this analysis of how capitalist nations, unable to sustain themselves on internal markets, turn to colonial and neocolonial mechanisms of dependency. In this sense, late-stage capitalism is also late-stage imperialism, where financial institutions and transnational corporations perpetuate control long after formal colonization has ended.
At the moment, and it may come as a surprise by many, but one of the most precautionary warnings of late-stage capitalism is the rapid financialization of environmental data, particularly in ocean and forest conservation. In the age of climate finance, where natural ecosystems are framed as "assets" rather than living entities with inherent value, global capital has begun transforming environmental data—previously an informational commons—into a multi-trillion-dollar market, (a hundred trillion if we take the World Bank’s estimation). However, just as in previous waves of enclosure, this market is structured to exclude indigenous communities, subsistence economies, and much of the Global South.
National Accounting Systems: Totem not Ledgers
Our National Accounting Systems are synthesizing Environmental-Economic Accounting Systems (SEEA) and data systems into how we measure national wealth. However, rather than treating biodiversity loss, degradation, and depletion as a deficit, environmental data is being used and accounted for as assets, without measuring the significant impacts of loss. While the history of accounting has generally been in the service of the colonial and capitalist enterprise, it is ripe for it to be appropriated as a decolonial tool to reverse the opportunism of the largest abusers of capital. Ecological accounting, as approached by intemerate accounting, is an example of a decolonial approach to accounting methodologies.
Intemerate accounting challenges the colonial foundations of national and corporate accounting by prioritizing the measurement of ecological depletion, social resilience, and well-being over mere financial assets. Unlike conventional environmental accounting systems that integrate nature into national balance sheets as commodified assets, a decolonial accounting program should seek to quantify ecological degradation as an explicit deficit. This approach exposes the extractive logic of financialized conservation and redirects accounting methodologies toward systems of reciprocal stewardship.
A decolonial nature of accounting should be formulated in its rejection of neoliberal market-based valuation models that privilege financialized conservation over lived ecological relationships. Rather than reinforcing property rights over ecosystems through mechanisms such as carbon markets or biodiversity credits, decolonial accounting acknowledges community stewardship as the foundation of wealth. Integrating Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) into data collection and ecological assessments, ensures that indigenous and local communities maintain sovereignty over their data and environmental knowledge, and consider endogenous market systems that are intrinsic to their customary protocol and practice of reciprocity.
Through the intemerate accounting model, for example, environmental degradation is not hidden within financial abstractions but is directly accounted for as a measurable liability against national and global well-being. This approach undermines the neocolonial economic structures that perpetuate ecological extraction and proposes a system where restoration, resilience, and regeneration are primary indicators of national wealth. It transforms accounting from a tool of dispossession into an instrument of ecological justice, offering a decolonial framework for nations to measure wealth in alignment with sustainability and equity.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind, provides a foundational example in anthropology, particularly through his exploration of totemism and caste as mechanisms for maintaining ecological and social diversity. One of the key insights Lévi-Strauss offers is how totemic classification—particularly in Indigenous marriage practices—operates as a form of ecological and genetic management. In some traditional societies, groups maintain distinct totems that dictate marriage alliances, ensuring that genetic and cultural diversity is preserved across generations. This principle extends into agricultural practices as well, where separate families or castes are responsible for maintaining distinct seed lineages, preventing monoculture and enhancing biodiversity.
Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of totemism as an early ecological accounting system offers a direct contrast to the homogenizing logic of capitalist markets. Just as totemic marriage rules prevent genetic stagnation, the practice of maintaining separate gardens for different seed varieties reflects an embedded knowledge of agricultural sustainability. The colonial and capitalist approach to biodiversity, by contrast, privileges monoculture for efficiency and profit, leading to genetic erosion and ecosystem fragility. In this sense, Indigenous knowledge—encoded in structures of kinship, caste, and ecological stewardship—provides an alternative framework to late-stage capitalism’s commodification of biodiversity.
Enclosure: From Commons to Commodities
The Blue Economy, championed by the World Bank, the UN, and private equity-backed conservation initiatives, is one of the most blatant forms of environmental data commodification. Oceanic regions are now valued not for the fish, corals, or biodiversity they hold, but for the data they generate—hydrographic surveys, carbon sequestration potential, marine DNA, and biodiversity indexes. These are packaged into financial products that can be traded, speculated upon, and turned into derivatives for investors. The ocean’s ability to absorb carbon has been quantified, leading to the creation of "blue carbon" credits—tradable assets that multinational corporations buy to offset their emissions while continuing to pollute elsewhere. Under the guise of conservation, marine protected areas (MPAs) have expanded dramatically, often with funding from financial institutions. However, local fishing communities, who have sustained these waters for centuries, find themselves excluded from decision-making, displaced, or criminalized.
When Seychelles launched the world's first sovereign blue bond in 2018, it was widely celebrated. But even then, simply because of the players involved, many understood that the World Bank blue bond was designed to fund a conservation program that would not benefit the community. As part of this initiative, Seychelles engaged in a debt-for-nature swap, where it secured $21.6 million in debt relief in exchange for commitments to ocean conservation. Blue carbon credits—derived from mangrove and seagrass ecosystem conservation—were traded to offset emissions, while local fishers face increased restrictions.
Verra, the new global verification standard for carbon offsets, has approved multiple blue carbon projects that quantify and trade carbon stored in mangroves, tidal marshes, and seagrass meadows. The Blue Carbon Initiative, led by Conservation International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and others, promotes the expansion of these credits, which are sold to corporations like Shell and BP for their carbon offset portfolios.
Then there is Ocean Protocol, a blockchain-based initiative that tokenizes and sells oceanic environmental data, including biodiversity metrics and carbon absorption rates. Investors can purchase and trade these data assets, turning critical conservation knowledge into a speculative market. This initiative highlights how digital enclosures of environmental data are expanding beyond traditional financial markets.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, and BlackRock are heavily investing in satellite surveillance, AI-based fisheries monitoring, and oceanic blockchain data registries. Yet, none of this technology is designed to empower indigenous ocean governance—it exists to monetize and securitize information flows that should belong to those who live within these ecosystems. Like the oceans, forests are now mapped, monitored, and controlled through satellite technology, drones, and AI-driven tracking systems. This digital enclosure ensures that only investors, conservation NGOs, and carbon traders have access to the most valuable forest data, locking out local communities.
Similarly, the Green Economy has turned forests into carbon markets, where their ability to absorb CO₂ is measured, valued, and sold as credits. The result is land dispossession on an unprecedented scale, as forest-dwelling communities who have practiced reciprocity and land stewardship for generations are displaced to make way for financialized conservation schemes. Originally designed to fund forest protection, REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) has morphed into a mechanism for land grabs, where corporations and foreign governments lease or buy vast tracts of forest, turning them into carbon reserves. Environmental hedge funds securitize carbon offsets, allowing financial firms to make profits from the very forests they once sought to destroy. These markets are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, yet communities who have sustained these forests for centuries see none of these profits.
Late-stage capitalism’s financialization of ocean and forest conservation is not just about turning nature into a market—it is about securing that market through force, surveillance, and military control. Under the pretext of “protecting marine environments,” militaries from the US, EU, and Australia are expanding their presence in highly biodiverse, resource-rich waters. Conservation and defense are increasingly intertwined, as militarized patrols enforce commercial fishing laws that favor transnational corporations over local fishers. In places like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, indigenous groups are being forcibly removed from ancestral lands under the justification of forest conservation. Meanwhile, oil, mining, and agribusiness continue operating under different legal frameworks. Corporations and state agencies now track climate activists, indigenous land defenders, and resistance movements, framing their struggles as "threats to conservation investments." Intelligence agencies and defense contractors are already embedding environmental data into geopolitical war games, treating ecosystems as strategic assets in global power struggles.
Moral Economic Considerations: Ibn Khaldun and St. Thomas Aquinas
Neoliberal capitalism, with its emphasis on privatization, deregulation, militarization, and market-driven solutions, has co-opted environmental conservation through mechanisms like carbon trading, biodiversity offsets, and green finance. These approaches often perpetuate the very systems of exploitation they claim to mitigate, displacing Indigenous communities and Global South economies by commodifying nature in ways that don’t just hearken back to Lenin, but align through the centuries. Looking to history, there is a profound moral imperative that emerges through interfaith dialogue, guiding us toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in harmony with nature, as illuminated by Ibn Khaldun’s 14th-century warnings against unsustainable economic models and Aquinas’s 13th-century vision of the common good rooted in natural law.
A moral economic framework requires an integration of historical wisdom with contemporary ecological realities. Ibn Khaldun , in The Philosophy of History, particularly in the chapter The Science of Culture, articulates the origins of human culture as deeply rooted in social cooperation and mutual aid. He describes how economic and political structures emerge from the fundamental necessity of survival, emphasizing that wealth must be a tool for social stability rather than a means for domination. His cyclical view of history warns against the unchecked accumulation of wealth, as dynasties and civilizations rise and fall based on their ability to balance justice with economic governance. The financialization of nature and the displacement of Indigenous economies mirror his critique of unsustainable economic models, where ruling elites prioritize short-term gain over long-term social or environmental cohesion.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, Treatise on Law, Natural Law, particularly in Question XCIV, lays the foundation for the common good as the highest economic and social principle. He argues that natural law is embedded in reason and justice, requiring that laws and economic systems reflect a moral order that benefits all members of society rather than a privileged few. Aquinas’s insistence on the common good directly challenges the commodification of environmental stewardship, which prioritizes financial speculation over human and ecological well-being. Intemerate accounting aligns with this perspective while emphasizing decolonial methodologies, where wealth is measured not by capital accumulation but by reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
By integrating Ibn Khaldun’s historical materialism with Aquinas’s moral philosophy, a just economic system emerges—one that values sustainability, mutual aid, and community resilience over extraction and speculation. This framework calls for an economic model that does not merely quantify nature’s value for trade but recognizes ecological and social well-being as fundamental measures of wealth. The principles found in these historical texts offer a path away from Lenin’s analysis of late-stage capitalism, guiding a transformation towards an economy rooted in justice, sustainability, and the common good.
go to sequel: “American Perestroika: Data Imperialism”
References
Aquinas, St. Thomas (1957). “The Summa Theologica Treatise on Law XC-XCVII. Burns Oates & Washbourne, London.
Lenin, V. (1940). ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’, from Ten Classics of Marxism, International Publishers, New York.
Lenin, V. (1947). The Rights of Nations to Self-Determination. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. 1947.
Mahdi, M. (1957) Ibn' Khaldun’s Philosophy of History. George Allen and Unwin. London
Strauss, Claude-Levi. (1968). The Savage Mind. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.