The old 'appeal to their enlightened self-interest' gambit. It never works, and turns you into a monster when you twist your language to try and make yourself intelligible to the sociopaths who run the society. Eg: 'ecosystem services' and all the pish about 'national security'. It doesn't wrestle with the awkward fact that collapse of ecosystems is the main way civilisation measures its success. De-forestation, draining of wetlands, damming of rivers, ploughing up prairies all serve to increase GDP and facilitate the expansion of agriculture, industry and the spread of urbanism. This is the only 'national security' elites (and most non-elites, if we're being honest) care about.

They keep asserting their confidence that 'ecosystem degradation' will lead to 'crop failures', but don't seem to notice the contradiction when going on to note that 'food production is the most significant cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss'. What happens when the crops fail, though? Weeds, shrubs, trees, the return of banished wildlife - ie: ecosystem restoration. Crop failures are viewed as bad, but if you care about ecosystem health it's really continued crop success that's the problem - certainly the way mass agriculture is currently practised.

In short, they're trying to find a win-win solution that leaves capitalism and the whole superstructure of industrial civilisation intact. But that edifice exists precisely because of the destruction of the wild, non-human world. There's no way around it: in order for 'nature' to win the current human societies have to lose, and lose big. The good news is, once we've dispensed with the delusion that a nation can bring meaningful security to anything other than disembodied capital, we can try to find other ways of being secure - as part of the living world.

cheers,
I