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The elephant in the room in all mainstream proposals for governing and responding to ecological crisis is pious adherence to the tenets of market-led economics and statecraft. The inevitability of the price mechanism and market rationality are embedded throughout countless aspects of our lives. In this sense, green capitalism is not limited to a specific approach to policy design or type of solution; it also reflects an entrenched cultural sense of what is possible, reasonable and good. For instance, a study of media articles found that four in every five articles discussing the economy used positive language about economic growth, without the need (or perhaps the ability) to specify what the benefits of growth might be. Received common sense is that growth is a rising tide that ‘lifts all boats’, even if the gains are distributed extremely unequally, and even when this tide is lifting us toward catastrophe. This perspective – adhering to the fairness and naturalness of markets, the goodness of aggregate growth, and the inevitability of capitalism as a perhaps flawed but ultimately insurmountable system for organising our lives – dominates the governance and functioning of the global economy, as well as the prevailing agenda for confronting ecological crisis. Market-led economics and governance also hold a monopoly over what is deemed ‘utopian’ – in other words, a fruitless, silly exercise that fails to engage with practical realities. In this way, green capitalism has been allowed to function as ‘the adult in the room’, to the detrimental exclusion of alternative perspectives on how best to confront ecological crisis.

— Value of a Whale by Adrienne Buller