Could Fool's Gold become Fool's Green?

The credit crisis has revealed cracks within the internal structures of capitalism and economics. I read Donald MacKenzie's review of the book, Fool's Gold with much interest. Having studied business and finance I can understand the desire for people who work with financial instruments to want to reduce and sell "risk" in an effort to make money out of it and reap handsome bonuses.

I shudder to think what would happen if these innovative people where given an opportunity to sell environmental risk for profit. Imagine selling environmental debt neatly packaged in a Bistro or a CDO.

The reality is that there is a lot of environmental or ecological debt out there and there is a lot of risk associated with it. Banks can be recapitalised by creating more debt (thanks to the governments and tax payers) but unfortunately there is no way to bail out the planet when it's natural capital is spent or squandered.

If the financial systems collapsed we could always go back to the land to survive on a subsistence basis. However, if the land fails then our bones, and our cars, and our mobile telephones will become part of the fossil record.