Analysing the Discourse of ‘Green’ Capitalism: The Meaning of Nature in ‘Nature-Based’ (original) (raw)
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Green capitalism, and the cultural poverty of constructing nature as service-provider.
Radical Anthropology, 2009
'People differ not only in their culture but also in their nature, or rather, in the way they construct relations between humans and non-humans.' (Latour 2009: 2) LOSS We hear a lot these days about loss. In April 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated that banks, insurance instruments and pension funds have ‘lost’ some US 4.1trillionfromtheglobaleconomy.Theamountslosttotaxpayersviagovernmentremovalofthetoxicassetslitteringthefinancialsectoraresohugeastobealmostmeaningless.AccordingtotheIMF,UKtaxpayershavealreadylostover£1.2trilliontoBritain’sfinancialsector,whileinNorthAmericatheInspectorGeneraloftheTroubledAssetReliefProgram(TARP)statedrecentlythatpotentialgovernment/taxpayerassistancecouldtotal4.1 trillion from the global economy. The amounts lost to taxpayers via government removal of the toxic assets littering the financial sector are so huge as to be almost meaningless. According to the IMF, UK taxpayers have already lost over £1.2 trillion to Britain’s financial sector, while in North America the Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) stated recently that potential government/taxpayer assistance could total 4.1trillionfromtheglobaleconomy.Theamountslosttotaxpayersviagovernmentremovalofthetoxicassetslitteringthefinancialsectoraresohugeastobealmostmeaningless.AccordingtotheIMF,UKtaxpayershavealreadylostover£1.2trilliontoBritain’sfinancialsector,whileinNorthAmericatheInspectorGeneraloftheTroubledAssetReliefProgram(TARP)statedrecentlythatpotentialgovernment/taxpayerassistancecouldtotal23.7 trillion. Meanwhile, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) asserts that the wildlife crisis actually is worse than the economic crisis, with almost 900 species lost already in an analysis of some 45,000, and no fewer than 16,928 of these currently threatened with extinction. Habitat loss to ‘development’ is a major cause of these extinctions. Greenpeace reports of the Brazilian Amazon that “one acre [is] lost every 8 seconds”, the hamburger-cattle sector identified here as the major driver of clearfelling in this landscape. ...
2014
Does capitalism today face the "end of cheap nature"? If so, what could this mean, and what are the implications for the future? We are indeed witnessing the end of cheap nature in a historically specific sense. Rather than view the end of cheap nature as the reassertion of external "limits to growth, " I argue that capitalism has today exhausted the historical relation that produced cheap nature. The end of cheap nature is best comprehended as the exhaustion of the value-relations that have periodically restored the "Four Cheaps": labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. Crucially, these value-relations are co-produced by and through humans with the rest of nature. The decisive issue therefore turns on the relations that enfold and unfold successive configurations of human and extra-human nature, symbolically enabled and materially enacted, over the longue durée of the modern world-system. Significantly, the appropriation of unpaid work-including "free gifts" of nature-and the exploitation wage-labor form a dialectical unity. The limits to growth faced by capital today are real enough, and are "limits" co-produced through capitalism as world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature as an organic whole. The worldecological limit of capital is capital itself.
in The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Wiley-AAG
Green capitalism is an approach to managing the relationships between economic activities and the environment that presumes a large degree of compatibility between capitalism and current efforts to reduce human impacts on the non-human world. It is founded on the principle that private property, entrepreneurial freedom and market exchange are the most efficient ways of dealing with natural resource use and environmental degradation. It is expected that once markets can account for the economic value of natural capital they will stimulate individuals and firms to reduce environmental impacts. The growing influence of green capitalism on policy-making has given rise to a large body of critical work. The strongest critiques have emerged from a broadly Marxian perspective. Critics argue that any attempts to reduce environment impacts will need radical economic and cultural changes that are not possible within a capitalist framework.
Environmentalism and the Domination of Nature
SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory
This chapter examines critical theory’s conceptualization of capitalism’s domination over nature, from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt to the work of contemporary scholars like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. This literature situates domination over nature in social mediation, specifically that labor mediates and determines the human relationship to nature. However, the narrative of domination over nature as reflected by these scholars is also incomplete. In particular, each of these scholars roots domination over nature in an anthropological notion of labor, a notion of labor per se. In doing so, these scholars examine labor in capitalism one-dimensionally. Yet, as Karl Marx points out, what makes capitalism historically-unique is that labor has a dual-dimensionality, that labor is not merely concrete but also abstract. As Norbert Trenkle and Moishe Postone point out, the abstract dimension of labor in capitalism has a socially-mediating character that produces an abstract form of social domination. It is in analyzing this abstract dimension that what is historically-unique about capitalism’s domination over nature can be unveiled.
Natural resource extraction is understood as existing within a singular capitalist economy that promotes primary production as a source for unimpeded economic growth and expansion. Due to the seeming hegemony of capitalism, the environmental movement has worked against the exploitation of resources by working against capitalism itself or, more recently, working with capitalism. In both cases environmental management, conservation, and environmentalism are practiced relative to a capitalist economy. This has led to, for example, ecological strategies such as "green capitalism" which advocate for protection and preservation of natural resources within the context of capitalist economic growth and profits. This "capitalocentric" approach reduces the possibilities for environmental management, conservation, and environmentalism because it ignores the non-capitalist economic activity that often coincides with resource use and extraction. In order to provide an alternate economic discourse by which we can understand the multiple economies of resource extraction, I rely upon the emerging "diverse economies" literature in economic geography and political ecology. This approach allows me to assess mushroom hunting as a distinctly non-capitalist class process. By recognizing the diversity of economy, activities such as mushroom hunting and the gathering of other non-timber forest products, typically ignored as either archaic or irrelevant relative to “the” economy, can be discussed in economic terms more suited to their positions independent of capitalism. This in turn produces openings for new forms of resource management previously unimaginable.
Review of International Political Economy, 2013
ABSTRACT This article aims to better understand the discrepancy between a relatively high level of awareness of the ecological crisis on the one hand, and insufficient political and social change on the other. This discrepancy causes a crisis of what we call the ‘Rio model of politics’. We approach the problem from the perspective of the concept of ‘society-nature relationships’ (gesellschaftliche naturverhältnisse), which can be situated in the framework of political ecology and, in this article, is combined with insights from regulation theory and critical state theory. The empirical analysis identifies fossilist patterns of production and consumption as the heart of the problem. These patterns are deeply rooted in everyday and institutional practices as well as societal orientations in the global North and imply a disproportionate claim on global resources, sinks and labour power. They thus form the basis of what we call the ‘imperial mode of living’ of the global North. With the rapid industrialisation of countries such as India and China, fossilist patterns of production and consumption are generalised. As a consequence, the ability of developed capitalism to fix its environmental contradictions through the externalisation of its socio-ecological costs is put into question. Geopolitical and economic tensions increase and result in a crisis of international environmental governance. Strategies like ‘green economy’ have to be understood as attempts to make the ecological contradictions of capitalism processable once again.
Selling Nature to save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1999
New supranational environmental institutions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the ‘green’ World Bank, reflect attempts to regulate international flows of ‘natural capital’ by means of an approach I call ‘green developmentalism’. These institutions are sources of eco-development dollars and of a new ‘global’ discourse, a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm. By the logic of this paradigm, nature is constructed as a world currency and ecosystems arc recoded as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology industries. Nature would earn its own right to survive through international trade in ecosystem services and permits to pollute, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to traditional crop varieties and shamans' recipes. I contend that green developmentalism, with its promise of market solutions to environmental problems, is blunting the North-South disputes that have embroile...