Banking Spatially on the Future: Capital Switching, Infrastructure, and the Ecological Fix

Abstract

Since the onset of the global economic crisis, financiers and the institutions regulating their behavior have been subject to far-reaching criticism. At the same time, leading geo-scientists have been insisting that future environmental change might be far more profound than previously anticipated. Finance capital has long been a crucial mechanism for melting present solidities into air to create different futures. This article asks what the prospects are for the switching of credit money into green infrastructures-a switching increasingly recognized as necessary for climate change mitigation and (especially) adaptation. Most research into geographies of finance has ignored ecological questions and few contemporary society-nature researchers examine major fixed-capital investments. Unlike those geographers who criticize capitalism without offering feasible alternatives, we take a pragmatic view underpinned by democratic socioenvironmental values and attempt to identify leverage points for meaningful change. This programmatic article identifies reasons and examples to be cautiously hopeful that liquidity can be fixed in less ecologically harmful future infrastructures, thereby addressing crucial extraeconomic challenges for the century ahead. AbstractSince the onset of the global economic crisis, financiers and the institutions regulating their behavior have been subject to far-reaching criticism. At the same time, leading geo-scientists have been insisting that future environmental change may be far more profound than previously anticipated. Finance capital has long been a crucial mechanism for melting present solidities into air so as to create different futures. This article asks what the prospects are for the switching of credit money into green infrastructures -a switching increasingly recognized as necessary for climate change mitigation and (especially) adaptation. Most research into geographies of finance has ignored ecological questions while few contemporary society-nature researchers examine major fixed-capital investments. Unlike those geographers who criticize capitalism without offering feasible alternatives, we take a pragmatic view underpinned by democratic socioenvironmental values and attempt to identify leverage points for meaningful change. This programmatic article identifies reasons and examples to be cautiously hopeful that liquidity can be fixed in less ecologically-harmful future infrastructures, thereby addressing crucial extraeconomic challenges for the century ahead.

Catastrophic fixes: cyclical devaluation and accumulation through climate change impacts

“…And within political economy, hardly any attention has been paid to the role of climate change in affecting devaluation of the built environment, though as Sayre (2010) points out, climate change impacts threaten fixed capital investments ''with devaluation whether or not we act to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations; in highly uneven, unpredictable and potentially abrupt ways, global warming will make our current built environment increasingly untenable and uneconomical'' (95). Castree and Christophers (2015) argue that constraining emissions and adapting to climate change impacts will require a massive capital switch into the secondary circuit of investment to accomplish a wholesale (re)construction of the built environment. The processes that continue to facilitate the rebuilding of our current built environment are hence of no small importance.…”

Financialising nature?

“…These processes are clearly co-constitutive and largely inseparable yet the role of finance in shaping contemporary natures is frequently overlooked. As Castree and Christophers (2015) note, research on financialisation has systematically glossed over ecological questions while environmental geography has paid insufficient attention to major environmental fixed-capital investments.…”

Financiers in the forests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia: On fixes and colonial enclosures

“…Largely implicit throughout Harvey's writing is the assumption that environments are transformed through spatial fixes insofar as the built environment can be understood as a produced form of nature (Harvey, , , ). A number of writers have sought to explicate this point arguing that large‐scale investments into environmental landscapes and ecological processes can be understood as socioecological fixes, or, in more normative terms, as environmentally oriented responses to political economic and ecological crises (Castree & Christophers, ; Cohen & Bakker, ; Ekers & Prudham, , , ; Kear, ). These debates build on Moore's (, p. 190) basic argument that “capitalism does not act upon nature so much as it unfolds through nature‐society relations” and point to how fixes unfold through these same relations.…”