Alf Hornborg

The paper traces the common roots of climate change and diversity loss to the phenomenon of general-purpose money, viewed as a recent addition to the biosemiotics of the planet. Money is the driver of increasing greenhouse gas emissions as well as the homogenizing processes of globalization. From an evolutionary perspective, the money sign can be understood as emerging from the human capacity for symbolism, yet it is not itself a symbol, as it can be given any meaning that its owner wishes. The appearance of money has fundamentally transformed social and human-environmental relations, coinciding with a loss of concern about morally compelling forces in nature. As Marx observed, in exemplifying how human artifacts that are contingent on social relations are perceived as powerful in themselves, money is an instance of fetishism. In serving as a veil that obscures the asymmetric global trade in embodied labor and other biophysical resources, money prices are also the condition for technological fetishism. Money is central to the social condition of modernity and the decontextualizing logic of the market, which tends to reduce both biological and cultural diversity. In contrast, Indigenous societies suggest alternatives to monetization and homogenization, prompting us to revise aspects of our modern worldview.