In her new book, Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet, Maude Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project and creator of the Blue Communities initiative, delivers an urgent warning about the accelerating financialization and commodification of nature. Barlow exposes the mechanisms, corporate actors, and illusions behind so-called “nature-based solutions” and “ecosystem services”, that in practice worsen the economic forces driving environmental collapse. These schemes, relying on greenwashing, create misleading promises of environmental protection while displacing harm elsewhere.

In an interview with the Food and Water Watch, Barlow describes a worsening trend: climate policy is being transferred to the private sector as governments contract out their responsibility to protect natural resources and the environment to the market. This, she argues, reinforces a worldview in which nature is here to serve us and is a resource for our privilege, pleasure, and profit.

These trends have heavy implications on water. In what Barlow terms the ‘corporate assault on water’, the impacts of this financialization manifests in more water and land grabs from vulnerable communities.

At the heart of Earth for Sale is a vital call to action for a rights-based, “people-up” approach to environmental justice. She stresses the importance of public and democratic decision-making about our shared resources, highlighting the strength of community action, especially those often led by Indigenous communities, that work to protect nature from being bought and sold.

As transboundary networks of solidarity continue to form, united in the fight for global justice and protection of the commons, communities are refusing to hand over nature to the profit motive. Throughout Earth for Sale, Barlow documents this frontline work, from Indigenous-led movements to local water defenders. Despite the continued struggle and plunder of the planet, for Barlow, this resistance is central to the fight. Hope, she believes, is a moral imperative.

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