I hear you. You’re describing the feeling of being trapped in a paradox, a system, with no apparent exit ramp. If only financial incentives were aligned…, is indeed a laudable thought. I think of it as an outcome, rather than an input.
I don’t reject incentive systems on dogmatic grounds. There’s nothing inherently wrong with incentive systems, so long as they incentivize the right thing. Often times, instead, what they incentivize is the very mindset that created the problem. For example, clear cutting a forest to install solar farms (here and here)…or paving the Amazon to obtain balsa wood for windmills. Rare earth mineral mining for clean energy, etc…the list is long.
On the flip side, incentives have successfully motivated farmers in Bolivia to protect their watersheds, loggers to cease clear-cutting, and the curtailing of acid rain. It’d be wonderful to develop more and better ways to align money with ecology. If I had my druthers, I’d:
pay farmers to practice regenerative agriculture
pay countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, and Brazil to preserve their rainforests…and simultaneously stop paying them to cut them down.
eliminate hidden subsidies that make local and ecological practices uneconomic
eliminate hidden subsidies that perpetuate the use of industrial chemicals
cancel “third world” debt since much of it was incurred only to extract resources for Western consumption.
As a general principle: No one should be allowed to profit by externalizing costs onto someone else.
In practice and on the whole though, these ideas are fraught with the difficulties you’ve identified. How to calculate long-term, highly distributed costs such as economic damage caused by global climate change? How to assign monetary value to such things as species extinction, the destruction of beautiful views, and human mortality.
However you choose to proceed, the main principle I suggest is to not totalize economic logic. That is, don’t let people get away with pretending that financial incentives we assign toward environmentally desirable outcomes truly represent the value of the land, water, biodiversity, etc. It is surely a good thing to align money with ecology, but let’s do so without reducing ecology to money, nature to commodity, the infinite to the finite, quality to quantity, and the world into a pile of instrumental stuff. Think of it as a reframing of the problem space.
To put it another way, if we must proceed with financial incentives, as you suggest, let’s detach them from the notion that they say anything about the intrinsic value of the life and beauty that’s being assigned a number. We can measure only what we can see, so anything outside our cultural blinders escapes our accounting. What is visible to us? Tons of CO2. Hectares of forest cover. Concentrations of ground-level ozone. Acidity of oceans. Numbers of species. In the service of these measurable things, let’s not willingly sacrifice what is invisible or unimportant to our eyes: generations-old social practices that allow traditional people to coexist with the land; the integrity of sacred sites; complex ecological dependencies that we have not yet learned to see or measure. I highly recommend Charles Massy’s book, Call of the Reed Warbler for a practical treatment of such things.
Furthermore, we unwittingly smuggle our invisible biases into our choice of what to measure and how to measure, biases that tend to be aligned with the financial interest of the power that be, including in your case, perhaps, corporate members, donors or Board members. By including the voices of people and places who are almost always left out, we begin a process of re-ordering our values toward ecological healing.
Our economic paradigm separates us from nature through its linearity, its demand for endless growth, and its reduction of nature into “resources”. When this paradigm begin to shift, financial incentives follow suit.