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When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, 'encounterable' life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what ecosystem services are designed to address. Nevertheless, we find that reproduction of uneven species geographies is at work in both economies. The degree and nature of effect on the material conditions of nonhuman lives is, however, distinct, and our conclusion calls for greater attention to these differences.

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There are moments of clarity in life, instances that so completely focus the senses, there is no yesterday or tomorrow öonly the here and now. Such a moment came for me in the spring of 2000, on the coast of British Columbia, when my guide reached for the oar in the bottom of our boat and accidentally spooked a grizzly cub on shore. The ... three year old bawled and temporarily lost his footing. His mother, grazing sedge nearby, spun around and stopped mid-chew. We were so close, I could see the foamy, green saliva at the corners of her mouthöso close I could see her eyes focus on me. Several heart pounding seconds passed as we stared at one another, reading body language, plotting possible outcomes. Then all at once she turned and sat down. Seemingly unconcerned with our presence, she kept her back to us and her cub as she continued munching on stems and blades.'' Brian Payton (2006, page 1)I first heard about the`Great Bear Rainforest' (GBR)öwhere the grizzly mother and her cubs meet journalist Paytonöin 1996 in an environmental studies course, where my fellow students introduced a new campaign to protect the large swath of what they called the`last temperate rainforest' on earth (figure 1). The GBR soon went from our classroom onto the world stage. In only a couple of years this once unheard of place gained celebrity status; in 1999 the GBR was named the year's most important environmental campaign by Time Magazine. By 2006 the intense political struggle was resolved with substantial land-use changes, including 113 new protected areas over 2 million ha. How are we to understand the environmental politics of this region? British Columbian forest politics are not underrepresented in the academic litera-