In his Lectures on Biopolitics (1978-79) Foucault highlighted the contemporary intensification of neoliberal arts of government, by which economic incentive structures are designed to control human behaviour and ‘life itself’ through market transactions framed as enhancing efficiency in the distribution of goods and bads. The human subject of thi…[Read more]

Book review

Reflecting on more than twenty years engagement with the idea that development and economic growth are essential for ensuring environmental conservation and sustainability, a key experience for me has been that of dissonance. In this talk I draw on the concept of ‘dissonance’ as explored some decades ago by psychologist Leon Festinger in A The…[Read more]

The Mushroom at the End of the World by anthropologist Anna Tsing is a heterogeneous ecosystem of a book tracking the socioecological presences of a multiplicitous entity, the matsutake mushroom (Tricholoma matsutake). The outcome of a collaborative ethnographic project, Mushroom, is set to be a classic in the emerging genre of ‘multispecies e…[Read more]

The contemporary moment of global ecological crisis is also a moment wherein ‘nature’ is being named and framed as ‘natural capital’. This article considers aspects of this fabrication
of ‘natural capital’, drawing attention to three connected processes: [1] commensuration, through which different elements of the natural world are made to cor…[Read more]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider and compare different ways of using numbers to value aspects of nature-beyond-the-human through case analysis of ecological and natural capital accounting practices in the UK that create standardised numerical-economic values for beyond-human natures. In addition, to contrast underlying o…[Read more]

This engagement highlights the antagonism between wealth and the commodity value form posed at the heart of Marx’s work. In doing so, it considers methodological possibilities for both understanding and intervening in the fabricating of new alienated capitalist values from beyond-human natures.

In response to perceived valuation problems giving rise to global environmental crisis, ‘nature’ is being qualified, quantified and materialised as the new external(ised) ‘Nature-whole’ of ‘natural capital’. This paper problematises the increasing legibility, through numbering and (ac)counting practices, of natural capital as an apparently…[Read more]