Commodification of nature - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The commodification of nature is an area of research within critical environmental studies concerned with the ways in which natural entities and processes are made exchangeable through the market

Market economy

A market economy is an economy in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system. This is often contrasted with a state-directed or planned economy. Market economies can range from hypothetically pure laissez-faire variants to an assortment of real-world mixed...

, and the implications thereof.

Drawing upon the work of Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

, Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi

Karl Paul Polanyi was a Hungarian philosopher, political economist and economic anthropologist known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his book The Great Transformation...

, James O’Connor

James O'Connor (academic)

James O'Connor is an American sociologist and economist.He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.-Bibliography:* Origins of Socialism in Cuba, 1970...

and David Harvey

David Harvey (geographer)

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited...

, this area of work is normative

Normative

Normative has specialized contextual meanings in several academic disciplines. Generically, it means relating to an ideal standard or model. In practice, it has strong connotations of relating to a typical standard or model ....

and critical, based in Marxist geography

Marxist geography

Marxist geography is a critical geography which utilises the theories and philosophy of Marxism to examine the spatial relations of human geography. In Marxist geography the relations that geography has traditionally analyzed - natural environment and spatial relations - are reviewed as outcomes of...

and political ecology

Political ecology

Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena....

. Theorists use a commodification

Commodification

Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....

framing

Framing (social sciences)

A frame in social theory consists of a schema of interpretation — that is, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes—that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events. In simpler terms, people build a series of mental filters through biological and cultural influences. They use these...

in order to contest the perspectives of "market environmentalism

Free-market environmentalism

Free-market environmentalism is a position that argues that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best tools to preserve the health and sustainability of the environment...

," which sees marketization as a solution to environmental degradation

Environmental degradation

Environmental degradation is the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water and soil; the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of wildlife...

. The environment

Natural environment

The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....

has been a key site of conflict between proponents of the expansion of market norms, relations and modes of governance

Governance

Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of management or leadership processes...

and those who oppose such expansion. Critics emphasize the contradictions and undesirable physical and ethical consequences brought about by the commodification of natural resources (as inputs to production and products) and processes (environmental services

Ecosystem services

Humankind benefits from a multitude of resources and processes that are supplied by natural ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services and include products like clean drinking water and processes such as the decomposition of wastes...

or conditions).

Most researchers who employ a commodification of nature framing invoke a Marxian

Marxian economics

Marxian economics refers to economic theories on the functioning of capitalism based on the works of Karl Marx. Adherents of Marxian economics, particularly in academia, distinguish it from Marxism as a political ideology and sociological theory, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the...

conceptualization of commodities as "objects produced

Commodity production

Commodity production is the production of wares for sale. It is a type of production in which products are produced not for direct consumption by the producers, as in subsistence production, but are surplus to their own requirements and are produced instead specifically with the intention of sale...

for sale on the market" that embody both use

Use value

Use value or value in use is the utility of consuming a good; the want-satisfying power of a good or service in classical political economy. In Marx's critique of political economy, any labor-product has a value and a use-value, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an...

and exchange value

Exchange value

In political economy and especially Marxian economics, exchange value refers to one of four major attributes of a commodity, i.e., an item or service produced for, and sold on the market...

. Commodification itself is a process by which goods and services not produced for sale are converted into an exchangeable form. It involves multiple elements, including privatization

Privatization

Privatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency or public service from the public sector to the private sector or to private non-profit organizations...

, alienation

Alienation (property law)

Alienation, in property law, is the capacity for a piece of property or a property right to be sold or otherwise transferred from one party to another. Although property is generally deemed to be alienable, it may be subject to restraints on alienation....

, individuation, abstraction, valuation

Valuation (finance)

In finance, valuation is the process of estimating what something is worth. Items that are usually valued are a financial asset or liability. Valuations can be done on assets or on liabilities...

and displacement.

As capitalism expands in breadth and depth, more and more things previously external to the system become “internalized,” including entities and processes that are usually considered "natural." Nature

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

, as a concept, however, is very difficult to define, with many layers of meaning, including external environments as well as humans themselves. Political ecology and other critical conceptions draw upon strands within Marxist geography that see nature as "socially produced

Social nature

Social Nature is the core concept of a geographical work on the social construction of nature, entitled Social nature: theory, practice and politics, which has been published by Noel Castree and Bruce Braun in 2001....

," with no neat boundary separating the "social" from the "natural." Still, the commodification of entities and processes that are considered natural is viewed as a "special case" based on nature’s biophysical materiality

Materialism

In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

, which "shape[es] and condition[s] trajectories of commodification."

Classical liberalism and enclosure

The commodification of nature has its origins in the rise of capitalism

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

. In England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

and later elsewhere, "enclosure

Enclosure

Enclosure or inclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land. Once enclosed, these uses of the land become restricted to the owner, and it ceases to be common land. In England and Wales the term is also used for the...

" involved attacks upon and eventual near-elimination of the commons

The commons

The commons is terminology referring to resources that are owned in common or shared between or among communities populations. These resources are said to be "held in common" and can include everything from natural resources and common land to software. The commons contains public property and...

—a long, contested and frequently violent process Marx referred to as "primitive accumulation

Primitive accumulation of capital

In Marxist economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation of capital concerns the origin of capital, and therefore of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful...

."

Classical liberalism

Classical liberalism

Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets....

, the ideological aspect of this process, was closely bound to questions of the environment. Privatization was presented as "more conducive to the careful stewardship of natural resources than the commons" by thinkers like Bentham

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...

, Locke

John Locke

John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...

and Malthus. The neo-Malthusian

Malthusianism

Malthusianism refers primarily to ideas derived from the political/economic thought of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out initially in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food...

discourse of Garrett Hardin’s

Garrett Hardin

Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the tragedy of the commons brought attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment"...

"Tragedy of the Commons

Tragedy of the commons

The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this...

" (1968) parallels this perspective, reconceptualizing public goods as "scarce commodities" requiring either privatization or strong state control.

Capitalist expansion

Marxists

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

define capitalism as a socio-economic system whose central goal is the accumulation

Capital accumulation

The accumulation of capital refers to the gathering or amassing of objects of value; the increase in wealth through concentration; or the creation of wealth. Capital is money or a financial asset invested for the purpose of making more money...

of more wealth through the production and exchange of commodities. While the commodity form is not unique to capitalism, in it economic production is motivated increasingly by exchange. Competition provides constant pressure for innovation and growth in a "restless and unstable process," making the system expansionary and "tendentially all-encompassing."

Through market globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

, the tendency Marx described in the Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party is a short 1848 publication written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the...

in which "[t]he need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe," capitalism converts nature into "an appendage of the production process." As Neil Smith

Neil Smith (geographer)

Neil Smith was born 1954 in Leith, Scotland. he is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, at the Graduate Center department of the City University of New York. From 2008 he holds a twenty percent appointment as Sixth Century Professor of Geography and Social Theory, at the...

argues, "[n]o part of the earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum, or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital."

Neoliberal nature

Since the late 1980s, an ideology of “market environmentalism” has gained prominence within environmental policy. Such a perspective is based in neoclassical economic theory

Neoclassical economics

Neoclassical economics is a term variously used for approaches to economics focusing on the determination of prices, outputs, and income distributions in markets through supply and demand, often mediated through a hypothesized maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits...

, which sees degradation

Environmental degradation

Environmental degradation is the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water and soil; the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of wildlife...

as a result of the absence of prices in environmental goods. Market environmentalism gained widespread acceptance through the rise of neoliberalism, an approach to human affairs in which the "free market

Free market

A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...

" is given priority and money-mediated relations are seen as the best way to deliver services.

A neoliberal approach constructs nature as a "world currency," valued in international markets and given "the opportunity to earn its own right to survive." This "selling nature to save it" approach requires economic valuation — either indirectly, as with cost-benefit analysis

Cost-benefit analysis

Cost–benefit analysis , sometimes called benefit–cost analysis , is a systematic process for calculating and comparing benefits and costs of a project for two purposes: to determine if it is a sound investment , to see how it compares with alternate projects...

and contingent valuation

Contingent valuation

Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of contamination...

, or through direct commodification.

While commodification efforts are propelled in large part by private firms

Private sector

In economics, the private sector is that part of the economy, sometimes referred to as the citizen sector, which is run by private individuals or groups, usually as a means of enterprise for profit, and is not controlled by the state...

seeking new areas of investment and avenues for the circulation of capital

Capital (economics)

In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process...

, there are also explicit policy prescriptions for privatization and market exchange of resources, production byproducts

By-product

A by-product is a secondary product derived from a manufacturing process or chemical reaction. It is not the primary product or service being produced.A by-product can be useful and marketable or it can be considered waste....

and processes as the best means to rationally manage and conserve the environment.

Stretching and deepening

The commodification of nature occurs through two distinct "moments" as capitalization "stretches" its reach to include greater distances of space and time, and "deepens" to penetrate into more types of goods and services. External nature becomes an "accumulation strategy" for capital, through traditional examples like mining

Mining

Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...

and agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

as well as new "commodity frontiers" in bioprospecting and ecotourism

Ecotourism

Ecotourism is a form of tourism visiting fragile, pristine, and usually protected areas, intended as a low impact and often small scale alternative to standard commercial tourism...

.

David Harvey sees this as "the wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms," a "new wave of ‘enclosing the commons’" that employs environmentalism in the service of the rapid expansion of capitalism. This "accumulation by dispossession

Accumulation by dispossession

Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey, which defines the neoliberal capitalist policies in many western nations, from the 1970s and to the present day, as resulting in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing...

" releases asset

Asset

In financial accounting, assets are economic resources. Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset...

s at very low or zero cost, providing immediate profitability and counteracting overaccumulation

Overaccumulation

Overaccumulation is one of the potential causes of the Crisis of Capital. A Crisis of Capital occurs due to what Karl Marx refers to as the internal contradictions inherent in the capitalist system which result in the reconfiguration of production...

Aspects of commodification

At the most abstract level, commodification is a process through which qualitatively different things are made equivalent and exchangeable through the medium of money

Money

Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...

. By taking on a general quality of exchange value, they become commensurable

Commensurability

Two concepts or things are commensurable if they are measurable or comparable by a common standard.Commensurability may refer to:* commensurability , the commensurability of scientific theories...

. Commodification turns on this apparent dissolution of qualitative difference and its “renegotiation,” as commodities are standardized in order to maintain a constant identity across space and time.

Commodity status is not something intrinsic to a natural entity, but is rather an assigned quality, brought about through an active process. The conversion of a whole class of goods or services necessitates changes in the way nature is concept

Concept

The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...

ualized and discursively

Discourse

Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...

represented.

There is no "single path" to commodification. Noel Castree

Noel Castree

Noel Castree is a British geographer and associate professor in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester whose research interests are in capitalism-environment relationships....

stresses that commodification in fact involves several interrelated aspects, or "relational moments," that should not be confused or conflated as they can be employed independently of each other.

Element	Meaning
Privatization	Assigning of legal title over a commodity to a particular actor
Alienability	Capacity of a given commodity to be physically and morally separated from sellers
Individuation	Separating a commodity from supporting context through legal and material boundaries
Abstraction	Setting individual things as equivalent based on classifiable similarities
Valuation	Monetizing the value of a commodity
Displacement	Spatiotemporal separation, obscuring obscuring origins and relations

Privatization is the assigning of legal title

Title (property)

Title is a legal term for a bundle of rights in a piece of property in which a party may own either a legal interest or an equitable interest. The rights in the bundle may be separated and held by different parties. It may also refer to a formal document that serves as evidence of ownership...

to an entity or process. A commodity needs to be owned, either by an individual or a group, in order to be traded. Privatization of natural entities can entail enclosure or the representation thereof (as with intellectual property rights

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

), and represents a shift in social relations, changing rights of access, use and disposal as things move from communally-, state- or unowned modes into private hands.

Alienability is the capacity of a given commodity to be separated, physically and morally, from its seller. If a commodity is not alienable, it cannot be exchanged and is thus shielded from the market. For example, human organs might be privatized (owned by their bearer) but very rarely would they be considered alienable.

Individuation is the representational and physical act of separating a commodity from its supporting context through legal and/or material boundaries. This could involve "splitting" an ecosystem into legally-defined and tradable property rights to specific services or resources.

Abstraction is the assimilation of a given thing into a broader type or process, the transformation of particular things into classes. Through functional abstraction, "wetlands" are constructed as a generic category despite the uniqueness of physical sites and different gasses and activities are equated through carbon markets

Emissions trading

Emissions trading is a market-based approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants....

. Through spatial abstraction things in one place are treated as the same as things located elsewhere so that both can form part of the same market.

Valuation is the manifestation of all expressions of worth (aesthetic

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

, practical, ethical

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

, et cetera) through a single exchange value. Monetization is thus foundational to capitalism, rendering things commensurable and exchangeable, allowing for the separation of production, circulation and consumption over great gulfs of time and space.

Displacement involves something appearing as "something other than itself." Commodities might be better thought of as "socio-natural relations" than reified

Reification (Marxism)

Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not...

as things "in and of themselves," but through spatio-temporal separation of producers and consumers, the histories and relations of commodities become obscured. This is Marx’s commodity fetishism

Commodity fetishism

In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...

, the "making invisible" of the social relationships and embeddedness of production.

Problems with commodification

Critics see environmental degradation as stemming from these processes of commodification, and generally include at least implicit criticism of one or more aspect. There appear to be three broad "problem areas" from which the commodification of nature is critiqued: practical, in terms of whether or not nature can be properly made into a commodity; moral, in terms of the ethical implications of commodification; and consequential, in terms of the effects of commodification on nature itself.

Practical problems

Much of the literature relates commodification of nature to the issue of materiality—the significance of biophysical properties and context. The qualitative differences of a heterogeneous biophysical world are seen to be analytically and practically significant, sources of unpredictability and resistance to human intention that also shape and provide opportunities for capital circulation and accumulation.

The tangible non-human world thus affects the construction of social and economic relations and practice, inscribing ecology in the dynamics of capital. While some "natures" are readily subsumed by capitalism, others "resist" complete commodification, displaying a form of "agency." The ecological characteristics of marine fish

Fishery

Generally, a fishery is an entity engaged in raising or harvesting fish which is determined by some authority to be a fishery. According to the FAO, a fishery is typically defined in terms of the "people involved, species or type of fish, area of water or seabed, method of fishing, class of boats,...

, for example, affect the forms that privatization, industry structure and regulation can take. Water, also, does not commodify easily due to its physical properties, which leads to differentiation in its governing institutions.

The demarcation and pricing of nature-based commodities is thus problematic. Divisibility and exclusion are difficult, as it is often not possible to draw clean property rights around environmental services or resources. Likewise, pricing is a problem as many species, landscapes and services are unique or otherwise irreplaceable and incommensurable

Commensurability

Two concepts or things are commensurable if they are measurable or comparable by a common standard.Commensurability may refer to:* commensurability , the commensurability of scientific theories...

. Their monetary values are thus in many ways arbitrary, as they do not follow changes in quality or quantity but rather social preference, failing to convey "real" ecological value or reasons for conservation.

Moral difficulties

A single monetary value also denies the multiplicity of values which could be attributed to nature — non-monetary systems of cultural and social importance. The environment can express relations between generations as a sort of heritage

Heritage

Heritage refers to something inherited from the past. The word has several different senses, including:* Natural heritage, an inheritance of fauna and flora, geology, landscape and landforms, and other natural resources...

. Livelihood

Livelihood

A person's livelihood referers to "means of securing the necessities of life". For instance a fisherman's livelihood depends on the availability and accessibility of fish.- In social sciences :...

, territorial rights and "sacred

Sacred

Holiness, or sanctity, is in general the state of being holy or sacred...

ness" poorly translate into prices, and dividing a communal-social value — a forest, for instance — into private property rights can undermine the relations and identity of a community.

Neoliberal policies have been implicated in greatly altered patterns of access and use. Markets generally deal poorly with issues of procedural fairness and equitable distribution

Distribution of wealth

The distribution of wealth is a comparison of the wealth of various members or groups in a society. It differs from the distribution of income in that it looks at the distribution of ownership of the assets in a society, rather than the current income of members of that society.-Definition of...

, and critics see commodification as producing greater levels of inequality

Social inequality

Social inequality refers to a situation in which individual groups in a society do not have equal social status. Areas of potential social inequality include voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, the extent of property rights and access to education, health care, quality housing and other...

in power and participation while reinforcing existing vulnerabilities. Ecosystem benefits might be considered "normative public goods" — even when commodified, there is a sense that individuals ought to not be excluded from access. When water privatization

Water privatization

Water privatization is a short-hand for private sector participation in the provision of water services and sanitation, although sometimes it refers to privatization and sale of water resources themselves . As water services are seen as such a key public service, water privatization is often...

prices people out, for instance, a sense of use rights inspires protest

Protest

A protest is an expression of objection, by words or by actions, to particular events, policies or situations. Protests can take many different forms, from individual statements to mass demonstrations...

. While neoliberal approaches are often presented as neutral or objective

Objectivity (philosophy)

Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...

, they disguise highly political approaches to resources and the interests and power of certain actors.

Problematic consequences

Through commodification, natural entities and services become vehicles for the realization of profit, subject to the pressures of the market where efficiency overrides other concerns. With climate commodities, the profit motive incentivizes buyers and sellers to ignore the steady erosion of the climate mitigation goal. Market exchange is "reason-blind," but without rational assessment of different strategies and the ecological importance of particular natural entities, commodification cannot effectively deliver on conservation.

Harvey thus declares that there is something "inherently anti-ecological" about capitalist commodification. It ignores and simplifies complex relations, obscuring origins and narrowing things to a single service or standard unit. The treatment of things as the same for a particular end — either profit or a single utility — leads to a homogenization and simplification of the biophysical. As governments and private firms seek to maximize carbon content for emissions markets, they invest preferably in tree plantations over complex forest ecosystems, eliminating species diversity, density and resulting in domino effect

Domino effect

The domino effect is a chain reaction that occurs when a small change causes a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence. The term is best known as a mechanical effect, and is used as an analogy to a falling row of dominoes...

s on processes such as water flow.

The neglect of relational aspects also ignores the emergent

Emergence

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....

and embedded character of ecosystem functions. Components are frequently dependent on each other and the result of interactions between biotic

Biotic component

Biotic components are the living things that shape an ecosystem. A biotic factor is any living component that affects another organism, including animals that consume the organism in question, and the living food that the organism consumes. Each biotic factor needs energy to do work and food for...

and non-biotic factors across space and at multiple levels. Alienation and individuation may thus be counterproductive to the provision of ecosystem services, and veils human perception of what an ecosystem is and how it functions—and consequently how to best conserve and repair it.

Incomplete capitalization and the fictitious commodity

When confronted with natural "barriers to accumulation," capitalists attempt to overcome them through technical and social innovation. This often involves the modification of nature to fit the needs of production and exchange, allowing for fuller realization of profits. Nature is "subsumed" to capitalist accumulation, losing its "independent" capacity and approaching "the archetype of a ‘pure’ commodity."

However, as nature becomes "rationalized

Rationalization (economics)

In economics, rationalization is an attempt to change a pre-existing ad hoc workflow into one that is based on a set of published rules. There is a tendency in modern times to quantify experience, knowledge, and work. Means-end rationality is used to precisely calculate that which is necessary to...

" and internalized, increasing the control of capitalists over exchange, production and distribution, a new contradiction emerges. Capitalist penetration into natural commodities can never be complete, because a certain amount of production, by definition, takes place prior to human intervention. Because natural entities and processes do not require capital or labor to be produced, and their social, cultural and/or ecological value exceeds the market value placed upon them, they are considered pseudo- or fictitious commodities. This basic fictitiousness is the origin of the material contradictions that arise when natural commodities are treated as if they were "true" commodities, as completely privatizable, alienable, separable, et cetera.

Degradation of resources, underproduction of conditions

As fictitious commodities with origins outside of capitalist production, the value of nature, counter to the neoclassical assumption, cannot be fully accounted for in monetary terms, and there is a resultant tendency toward the overexploitation

Overexploitation

Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Sustained overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource...

and "underproduction" of nature.

Natural entities that are commodified are subjected to the competitive drive for accumulation. Capitalism is "ecologically irrational," with a systematic tendency to overexploit its natural resource base. At the same time, what O’Connor terms the "conditions of production" (all the phenomena upon which capitalism depends but is unable to produce itself, including environmental conditions and processes) are subjected to indiscriminate degradation as they cannot be fully commodified. This is the "second contradiction" of capitalism, between the relations

Relations of production

Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...

and forces of production

Productive forces

Productive forces, "productive powers" or "forces of production" [in German, Produktivkräfte] is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism....

and its conditions. Capitalism undermines its own production system, "producing its own scarcity."

Reclaiming the commons?

Recruiting nature into relations of capitalist exchange "incites a good deal of push back," as these entities and services "matter a great deal to ordinary people." Social needs compete politically for access and control of an increasingly commodified nature, and as price is insufficient to resolve these competing claims, counter-movements

Social movement

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....

emerge, expressing the "crisis tendencies

Crisis theory

Crisis theory is generally associated with Marxian economics. In this context crisis refers to what is called, even currently and outside Marxian theory in many European countries a "conjuncture" or especially sharp bust cycle of the regular boom and bust pattern of what Marxists term "chaotic"...

" of capitalist nature through socio-political struggles over representation and access.

Protest movements, transnational coalitions, instances of alternative practices and counter-discourses all fall within a broad tent of resistance struggles to "reclaim the commons." This can be seen as Polanyi’s "double movement," in which tendencies toward and against market coordination interact, based in a rejection of the treatment of the environment as alienable market goods.