Marc Tadaki and Kai Chan
The idea that we need to “sell nature
to save it” has become somewhat of a truism in discussions about the
conservation of nature. Financial flows change the world, the argument goes,
and if conservationists can alter those flows, they can change the world. This
has led, in recent decades, to collaborations between ecologists, economists
and governments in attempts to mainstream biodiversity and ecosystem services
into a variety of economic framings and tools. By bringing biodiversity into
the domain of economic calculus, perhaps the inherently enterprising capacities
of nature can be valued and preserved. In other words, by extending the market
to include biodiversity, nature should save itself!
Enterprising
Nature is the first book by Jessica Dempsey, an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. In Enterprising Nature, Dempsey draws on
over 10 years of research into global biodiversity politics to offer a fresh
perspective to these ever-important debates about the financialization and
commodification of nature. In simple terms, Dempsey sets out to evaluate
whether “selling nature to save it” is actually working as a political
strategy. By tracing the networks of people and ideas that have influenced conservationist
arguments to commodify nature, Dempsey takes readers through a cumulative series
of choices made by scientists and their collaborators that has resulted in framing
the conservation “problem” within a market-based framework. In so doing, she
provides a window into a room that many of us have long inhabited, but whose
dimensions and dynamics we have never seen so clearly. Throughout this account,
Dempsey points to other ways of framing local and global biodiversity that have
been rejected and marginalized along the way. By revisiting these choices and their
alternatives, she argues, a new global biodiversity politics can be envisioned,
and perhaps, pursued.
The argument of Enterprising Nature is developed over eight concise but meaty
chapters. The introduction sketches the contours of an emerging global
discourse of an “enterprising nature” that seeks to bring biodiversity within economic
tools and framings. In the first section of the book, Dempsey examines two major
developments in the history of enterprising nature: the ecological thinking promoted
by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and others in the 1970s and 1980s, and the work
conducted within Stockholm’s Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics. Through
these developments, scientists shifted away from a radical critique of
capitalism to instead create an “ecological-economic tribunal for (nonhuman)
life” (p57). This involves constructing an inventory of ecosystem functions and
then assigning equivalences, weightings, and rankings to these functions so
that certain functions can be prioritised for human needs.
The book’s second section examines contemporary
international efforts to value biodiversity within a market framework. In the
realm of global science and governmental policy, initiatives such as the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the decision-support tool InVEST are used to
explore the assumptions, exclusions, and implications of embedding economic frameworks
in policy settings. In the private sector, Dempsey then analyses attempts by
scientists to represent biodiversity as a material risk to investment actors.
This risk-based “venture ecology” (p128) is less concerned with making
ecosystems into commodities, and more concerned with using ecological data to
reduce risk and make a “smoother space for development” (p129). As an end-goal
for conservation, then, venture ecology seeks only strategic degradation rather
than large-scale rehabilitation of ecological functioning.
The third section of the book considers
whether any of the promised finance is flowing from the institutionalization of
these new economic instruments. Dempsey maps out the figurative ecology of
biodiversity finance: its main ‘species’ of actors (e.g., NGOs, government
agencies, bankers), their natural habitats of interaction, and their functions
within the system. She draws on observations from conferences on biodiversity
finance to consider the progress being made in attempts to economize and
commodify biodiversity, noting the challenges and failures that characterise
many of these attempts, including the failed proposal for a “Green Development
Mechanism”. In the international policy arena, Dempsey reports her experiences of
meetings under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, analyzing
how colonial histories and North-South power differentials justify parties’
resistances to contemporary proposals to create financial mechanisms for
biodiversity conservation.
Dempsey concludes that the promise of “selling
nature to save it” has born sparse and stunted fruit; that this promise is
“Conceptually dominant, but substantively marginal” (p234). Rather than allying
with existing elites and seeking to extend capitalist structures of extraction
and exploitation, Dempsey argues that scientists should instead consider
allying with green social movements, indigenous communities, and all those who
are seeking to challenge the economic relations that have produced (and
continue to produce) ecological devastation at a planetary scale.
The book is a must-read for environmental
scientists who have long been immersed in a world where efforts to ‘enterprise’
nature (i.e., sell it, broadly) are seen as necessary politically, and where critics
are too often dismissed as utopian dreamers. Dempsey cannot be dismissed so
easily. Though the book is ultimately critical of attempts to economize nature,
it is sympathetic to the scientists, economists, and others who have tried to
leverage ecosystem services as a political strategy to halt and reverse ecological
degradation. Dempsey’s most compelling doubts and criticisms are often our own,
articulated through the surprising frank words of frontline proponents for
‘enterprising’ nature—e.g., wondering whether the ‘enterprising’ nature project
has truly yielded much, for all the celebration, or claiming that ecosystem
service markets are merely a fad. Dempsey even highlights the radical political
implications of ecological science, while also drawing attention to the
explicit and intentional choices that many scientists have made to ally with
corporate and political power to make their case for conservation. Against
these capitalist and elitist tendencies, Dempsey advocates for a “critical
ecology” that will “discard dreams of mastery, to embrace highly dynamic,
uncertain, and deep unknowns of the future” (p121), and that such an ecology should
be “conducted… not to serve elite needs, but to serve [social] movements with a
real chance of creating abundant, diverse futures” (p121).
The central challenge posed by the
book lies in its prescription for conservation’s future success. Given that
Dempsey, by her own admission, was always a sceptic of the neoliberal turn in
conservation, readers may not be fully convinced by a journey that resulted in
continued scepticism. Dempsey’s call for a grassroots politics of opposition to
the fundamental capitalist forces causing environmental degradation may ring
true but idealistic: of course it is needed, but can it redirect the juggernaut
of global supply chains and consumer demands, when even the fiercest ecological
activists cannot escape these relations? Ultimately we are all complicit in the
destruction wrought by the capitalist logics of property, value, and profit,
and many of us are already willing to challenge these fundamentals if given the
chance. While emerging nuanced strategies seek to
practically rework economic tools and logics in search of environmental
justice, this book opts for an oppositional stance to financialization in toto,
which may also prove constraining. However, nuances aside, the book does open
these issues for discussion in a productive way, and for this reason it
deserves a wide and engaged readership.
In sum, Enterprising Nature provides
an empirically rigorous and analytically insightful assessment of the “selling
nature to save it” hypothesis. Scientists, economists, policymakers, and
conservationists of all stripes will benefit from this novel analysis of the
interrelationships between biodiversity science, policy and finance. Dempsey
excavates some important choices to scientists about how we choose to “do
politics” through our science and through our alliances. With the terrain of
biodiversity science and politics set to shift drastically over the coming
years in the U.S. and internationally, more than ever conservationists need new
and radical ideas; and this book provides some.
