Enterprising Nature

Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics

Jessica Dempsey

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781118640555, 9781118640609
• eBook ISBN: 9781118640531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Winner of the 2018 James M. Blaut Award in recognition of innovative scholarship in cultural and political ecology!

Enterprising Nature explores the rise of economic rationality in global biodiversity law, policy and science. To view Jessica's animation based on the book's themes please visit http://www.bioeconomies.org/enterprising-nature/

• Examines disciplinary apparatuses, ecological-economic methodologies, computer models, business alliances, and regulatory conditions creating the conditions in which nature can be produced as enterprising
• Relates lively, firsthand accounts of global processes at work drawn from multi-site research in Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; and Nagoya, Japan
• Assesses the scientific, technical, geopolitical, economic, and ethical challenges found in attempts to 'enterprise nature'
• Investigates the implications of this 'will to enterprise' for environmental politics and policy

1
Enterprising Nature

In the beginning, There Was failure

In book- and paper-stuffed academic offices, walking down cold and dark streets in Norway alongside government bureaucrats, on Skype interviews with bankers – everywhere I went in the course of my research people talked about the failures of biodiversity conservation. “We tried to make people care about nature for its own sake,” said global experts, “without the results.” I read about failure within the pages of Science and Nature; I decoded profound disappointment in the stilted text of multilateral policy documents. Over beer in a noisy Palo Alto bar, the chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva, explained the problem in his straight-shooting manner, “No one cares about biodiversity outside of the Birkenstock crowd.” Biodiversity, he went on to say, “is something that suburban white kids care about and nobody else.”

While I remain unconvinced that no one cares about biodiversity outside of white, suburban hippies, such tired resignation makes sense. The decimation of nonhuman life on earth continues. Despite conservation-oriented laws and policies at every level of governance from local to international, and the establishment of thousands of protected areas, “there is no indication of a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss, nor of a significant reduction in pressures upon it” (CBD 2010a, 17). A study published in Science found that most indicators of the state of biodiversity are in decline, and the pressures underlying this shift are also increasing. One in five species of vertebrates are classified as threatened, with that figure increasing every year; 322 vertebrate species have gone extinct since 1500. Declining diversity is apparent in agriculture, where 75% of genetic diversity has been lost since the 1900s. Marine ecosystems, too, face mounting pressures; one quarter of oceanic pelagic sharks and rays are classified as threatened or near threatened. What threatened status indicates is a loss of overall abundance of most animals almost everywhere on the earth, a process biologist Rodolfo Dirzo and his colleagues term defaunation: they estimate there are 28% fewer vertebrate animals across species today than there were only four short decades ago; a startling 35% fewer butterflies and moths over the same time period.¹ In a conference hall in Trondheim, Norway, Robert Watson, former chief scientist at the World Bank, declared that 2010 – the UN-declared Year of Biological Diversity – should be a time not to celebrate, but rather to mourn biodiversity’s loss.

What does this loss spell for the future of the planet? The impacts of biodiversity loss on global ecosystem function are difficult to study, and even more difficult to pin down with any certainty. In spite of focused research programs around the world, scientific understanding of the functional role of biodiversity remains in many ways elusive. Certainly there are risks to living on a planet that’s less diverse, but those risks remain hard to quantify in general terms. What these alarming statistics tell us is that we are living in a world that is becoming distinctively less lively, less colorful, and less diverse in the realm of nonhuman life. A key assumption I make in this book is that this earth simply is a better place with more color, more kinds of lives, and more ways of living and living with nonhumans. The radical difference of which biodiversity is a part – what many now call biocultural diversity – matters.

What can be done to stem this tide of loss? How can beleaguered environmental activists, bureaucrats, and ecologists generate the political will to spur governments, business, and the general population to take the urgent action that’s needed? For many ecologists and their allies, the answer lies in a turn toward economics. “The majority of the global population now lives in cities and is disconnected from nature,” said Pavan Sukhdev, the head of a major international initiative to economically value biodiversity. This is “not just a physical distance but also an emotional distance.” This disconnection, Sukhdev went on, is “so real” that “we have got to speak the language of economics to show there is a connection.” For many actors concerned with the conservation of biodiversity, a turn to economics feels like the last hope. Biodiversity, a jaded Canadian bureaucrat-scientist explained to me, must be made relevant to the Ministry of Finance for it to survive. For world-renowned biologist Hal Mooney, there is an urgent need to turn biodiversity into something that both policy-makers and citizens can care about. “When you say that biodiversity delivers services which are a benefit to society,” Mooney told me, you begin to speak in language policy-makers understand, and they can “go to their constituents and say, biodiversity is really important for you, personally, because of the services it provides.”

In this book, I explore this turn to economics, the efforts to speak a new language in global biodiversity conservation. Enterprising Nature is a critical exploration of the ascent of what is becoming a new maxim in this field: “In order to make live, one must make economic.”² In other words, for diverse nonhumans to persist, biodiversity conservation must become an economically rational policy trajectory, sometimes even profitable. The proliferation of this mantra is the analytical target of this book, which investigates the roots of this refrain and the international alliances and relations that cohere in producing it.

Drawing on four years of intensive, multi-site field research in places such as Nairobi, London, and Nagoya, and on my decade-long involvement in global biodiversity policy-making, this book traces disciplinary apparatuses, ecological-economic methodologies, computer models, business alliances, and regulatory conditions that, together, I argue, aim to create the conditions wherein nature, or parts of nature, can prove itself as “enterprising.” This is a nature that no longer needs the bonds of human care or ethical concern, a nature that is certainly not a public investment burden. Rather, the hope is this will be a nature that is entrepreneurial, a nature that can compete not only in the marketplace but also in modern state governance. An enterprising nature.

Enterprising nature seems, theoretically and practically, an approach to biodiversity conservation that is entirely compatible with current, predominantly capitalist, global political-economic relations. Producing enterprising nature, however, as this book chronicles, is not straightforward or easy. Challenges arise at every step: there are scientific debates over how biodiversity supports ecological functions and services, and methodological debates on how to tether ecological data to economic value. Also prominent are geopolitical struggles and global political economic forces that have hampered international conservation for decades. The result is that this increasingly dominant discourse remains, by and large, on the margins of policy-making and capital flows.

The story of enterprising nature, then, holds an alarming paradox. Conservation is trying to make itself more relevant to market and state governance through economization, but all these efforts fail to become operational in a way that can let diverse ecologies live. Enterprising nature, I argue, is best conceptualized as promissory, a socioecological-economic utopia whose realization is always just around the corner. The story of enterprising nature is one of waiting, of waiting for the conditions that can make the work of nonhumans legible to processes of liberal governance and perhaps facilitate their entry into mainstream processes of accumulation.

Are you Being Served? Two Images of Enterprising Nature

An image from a 2005 edition of the Economist reveals the persistent tensions in the enterprising nature ideal. That image, which appears as this book’s cover, shows a sharp-looking, somewhat jolly, white, middle-aged accountant behind a desk, doling out money to an orderly line of half-human, half-plant/animal creatures, which appear as happy-ish and perhaps bored laborers. It’s payday in a tropical location of some sort and the creature’s hand movements suggest impatience. All recipients of the bags of money defy the human–nonhuman species boundary in some ways; a half-conifer–half-man is followed by a mountain goat–sheep-with-boots, a hand-bag-toting, high heels–wearing bald eagle, followed by an odd-looking leopard or maybe jaguar. The image reveals the dream of enterprising nature: orderly, efficient socioecological relations mediated through a monetary transaction.

In the Economist, the cartoon accompanied an article titled “Are You Being Served?” that followed the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). The MA was the first global survey of ecosystem services, a study warning that changing ecologies are increasingly impacting human well-being. Despite the dire findings of this assessment, however, the tone of the Economist article is enormously optimistic. The article heralds a new age of ecological-economic accounting. While ecosystem valuation, the Economist staff writer notes, was at one time “a fraught process,” it is now “improved,” mostly due to the knowledge of ecologists, who “know a great deal more than they used to about how ecosystems work” (Economist 2005, 77): they know how different ecosystems deliver services (such as water purification, fiber production, carbon sequestration, etc.) and in what quantities. We know, in other words, how we are “being served.”

The tone of the article suggests not simply improvement in knowledge and accounting, but the arrival at a milestone in human progress: diverse creatures and systems can now be fully brought into the balance sheets of firms and governments, informing the most efficient state or firm investments or payments. “There is no longer any excuse for considering them [ecosystems] unquantifiable,” the article reports (77). The optimism of the Economist article – in spite of the fact that it is describing a devastating report of a planet being rendered less and less hospitable to humans – lay within the certainty that an ecological-economic synthesis (as found in the MA) will tell us, once and for all, how to live on this planet, how to create a permanent order of socioecological relations. In its depiction of an orderly line-up of creatures awaiting payment, the cartoon shows a triumph of a rational system of value allocation, of enterprising nature. The image, though, sidelines critical questions at the heart of this project: what is the right way for humans to live in relation to nonhuman nature? Who decides this and from what location? What socioecologies are investable, worthy of payment, and on whose terms and authority?³

The desire for enterprising nature is a powerful, end-of-history call that reveals troubling signals in environmental politics. What this “will to enterprise” shows, I argue, is a desire for a neutral, objective, efficient, and automatic relationship with nonhuman bodies and populations. Nonhuman nature, this increasingly influential approach pronounces, is best inhabited via an accounting relationship, one that can tell us, neutrally and objectively, through an ecological-economic calculus, how to optimize allocations of the services nonhumans provide. This way of thinking about the human place in nature reasserts, perhaps more than ever, a will for human omniscience regarding relations among humans and nonhumans, a “god trick” here dangerously articulated with neoclassical economics.⁴ Though an economic logic may show the need for greater investments in nonhuman lives, that investment must be ef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acronyms
• Preface
• 1 Enterprising Nature
• 2 The Problem and Promise of Biodiversity Loss
• 3 An Ecological-Economic Tribunal for (Nonhuman) Life
• 4 Ecosystem Services as Political-Scientific Strategy
• 5 Protecting Profit
• 6 Biodiversity Finance and the Search for Patient Capital
• 7 Multilateralism vs. Biodiversity Market-Making
• 8 The Tragedy of Liberal Environmentalism
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement