Commodifying what nature?

Abstract

In this essay contemporary Marxist writings on the commodification of nature in capitalist societies are reviewed systematically. Recent research on commodities in human geography, cultural studies and related fields have been largely post or non-Marxist in tenor and have paid relatively little attention to the ‘natural’ dimensions of commodities. By contrast, recent Marxist writings about capitalism-nature relations have tried to highlight both the specificity of capitalist commodification and its effects on ecologies and bodies. This fact notwithstanding, it is argued that the explanatory and normative dimensions of this Marxist work are, respectively, at risk of being misunderstood and remain largely implicit. On the explanatory side, confusion arises because the words ‘commodification’ and ‘nature’ are used by different Marxists to refer to different things that deserve to be disentangled. On the normative side, the Marxian criticisms of nature's commodification are rarely explicit and often assumed to be self-evident. The essay offers a typology of commodification processes relating to specific natures with specific effects to which a variety of criticisms can be applied. Though essentially exegetical rather than reconstructive, the essay tries to pave the way for a more precise sense of how the commodification of nature in capitalist societies works and why it might be deemed to be problematic.

Embedding Carbon Markets: Complicating Commodification of Ecosystem Services in Mexico's Forests

“…As previously discussed, that forest-based carbon offsets must be continuously maintained in the living tissue of trees means that the steps to commodification of alienability, individuation, and abstraction are unusually costly and complicated (Castree 2003;Robertson 2006;Lansing 2010). Although the discourse of Scolel Te and the Plan Vivo standard promises the production of co-benefits, the intense focus on commodifying carbon has supplanted activities aligned with local social and cultural values.…”

“…Because these offsets are actively produced when carbon is sequestered in trees, they have an unbreakable and continuous bond to living biomass and can therefore never be fully divorced from the place of production or the people who produce them. As with other ecosystem services, however, forest-based carbon must be physically, morally, and conceptually separated, or disembedded, from its supporting ecological and social context to be sold as a commodity; this is achieved through the processes of alienability, individuation, and abstraction (Castree 2003). These processes render things legible as commodities by extracting them from their supporting contexts and placing boundaries around them so as to isolate them for sale (Castree 2003;Robertson 2006).…”

“…The scholarship on the commodification and neoliberalization of nature has received widespread attention from geographers (Castree 2003;Liverman 2004;McCarthy and Prudham 2004;Bakker 2010), particularly with regard to the impacts on marginalized communities and the nonhuman world (Mansfield 2004;Heynen and Robbins 2005). Neoliberalism has been described as a hybrid project based on the myth of the self-regulating market in which everything, including nature, becomes commodified (Peck and Tickell 2002;Larner 2003;McCarthy and Prudham 2004).…”

“…As with other ecosystem services, however, forest-based carbon must be physically, morally, and conceptually separated, or disembedded, from its supporting ecological and social context to be sold as a commodity; this is achieved through the processes of alienability, individuation, and abstraction (Castree 2003). These processes render things legible as commodities by extracting them from their supporting contexts and placing boundaries around them so as to isolate them for sale (Castree 2003;Robertson 2006). To sell bio-sequestered carbon on a market, it must therefore be metaphorically "disembedded" from its supporting context through complex, costly, and continuous techniques of measurement, calculation, and monitoring to "abstract" it as a homogenous entity that can be exchanged on the market.…”

“…It is through this bundling process that, according to this model, ecosystem services are to be converted to commodities: physically, morally, and conceptually separated from their source (alienability, individuation, and abstraction), designated with legal title and ownership (privatization), assigned a monetary value (valuation), and disassociated from the means and places of production to be sold or traded (displacement; Castree 2003). Based on Castree's (2003) model of commodification, we recognize the "commodity status of a thing not as intrinsic to it, but, rather, assigned" (277), with the salient question therefore being not what is a commodity but what characteristics do things adopt in becoming commodities. In particular, we are interested in the ways in which the types and configurations of finance for forest-based carbon offsets intersect with grounded socionatural systems to either facilitate or complicate the commodification and disembedding of ecosystem services.…”