Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age

7. Performative Equations and Neoliberal Commodification: The Case of Climate

158 chapter seven Performative Equations and Neoliberal Commodification The Case of Climate Larry Lohmann The Dilemmas of Theory Between the insight that current economic and environmental crises are being exacerbated by the new forms of commodification characteristic of neoliberalism and the detailed specification of what those forms are lies the work of a hundred lifetimes. Commodification is a many-splendored process, and it has to be. All commodities-in-the-making are different, and so are the series of acts and actors, impulses and resistances that contribute to, or block, their making or unmaking. The proliferation of ambitious, variously contested commodities that has sprung up in the neoliberal era—from wetland offsets (Robertson 2000, 2004) and collateralized debt obligations to genome information products (Sunder Rajan 2006), public services (Huws 2011), and species (Pawliczek and Sullivan 2011)—only amplifies the diversity. As the work of scholars as varied as Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 1994), Viviana Zelizer (1995), Colin Williams (2005), Margaret Radin (1996), and Brett Frischmann and Mark Lemley (2006) confirms, the idea that there exists a single, uniform process of commodification operating everywhere on the as-yet uncommodified is as unfounded as the quasi-deistic notion, equally emblematic of the neoliberal era, that everything already is a commodity (O’Connor 1994a). Performative Equations • 159 The shorthand “the commodification of nature” is loaded with a particularly great breadth of meanings. If deployed without awareness of the teeming multitude of differing cases, each with its own complexities, the term runs the risk of confusing and clarifying in equal measure. Karl Polanyi (1944) and John Maynard Keynes (1936), following a path opened by Marx, highlighted some of the distinctive features and pitfalls of the commodification of land. In the neoliberal era, Marxist-inspired thinkers, actor-network theorists, and others have revealed some of the diversity of the “black boxes” that have to be opened to expose the predicaments specific to the commodification of many other aspects of “nature” (e.g., Kloppenburg 1988; Bridge 2000; Holm 2001; Boyd 2001; Martinez-Alier 2003; Henderson 2003; Robertson 2004; Mansfield 2004; Bakker 2004; Robbins and Luginbuhl 2005; O’Neill 2006)—including those occasioned by various types of what Martin O’Connor (1994a) calls “nature’s resistance” or what Noel Castree (2003, 285) calls “contradictions between the materialities of nature and those of the commodification process.” Continually reminding such scholars of the particularities of individual struggles over commodification is a worldwide spectrum of confrontations at the grass roots over issues ranging from the enclosure of community forests to the expansion of credit involved in microfinance. Nowhere is attentiveness to the diversity of commodification more crucial than in the formulation of environmentalist strategy. “Our Earth is not for sale” may be a good rousing slogan for Friends of the Earth International , “tu no puedes comprar el sol” a felicitous line in a popular anticapitalist anthem by the Puerto Rican group Calle 13, and “Nature™ Inc.” an excellent title for an international conference of critical academics on problems connected with current trends in the capitalization of nature. But without extensive explication, such throwaway phrases are too abstract to give much idea of where to locate the challenges and opportunities that are exercising so many movements and thinkers today or of where and how to make critical interventions. In reality, Nature (whatever one might mean by this questionable “key word”) has been Incorporated in one form or another for a good long time, and various bits of Earth have been on the block for many centuries. What, if anything, is really new, and if what is new is as frightening as often claimed, what is to be done about it? Formal definitions of commodification are of limited help: their concision tends to be in inverse proportion to their applicability. Take, for example, the definition offered by Karen Bakker, one of the subtlest scholars of the commodification of water. She is at pains to dispel what she rightly regards as confusions among commodification, privatization, and 160 • Larry Lohmann commercialization. Commodification, Bakker says, is the “creation of an economic good, through the application of mechanisms to appropriate and standardize a class of goods and services, enabling them to be sold at a price determined through market exchange” (2007b, 103, emphasis added). One of the virtues of this definition is that it pinpoints the enduring prominence, in commodification, of ownership, control, and measurement. Yet such definitions are considerably less illuminating...