Nature As Accumulation Strategy, Neil Smith
Nature As Accumulation Strategy, Neil Smith
Nature As Accumulation Strategy, Neil Smith
NEIL SMITH
half century. The central proposition explored here is that we are currently
living through a period in which the core socio-economic relationship with
nature is being dramatically transformed.
‘wetland credits’ quickly emerged. This process was defined in federal law as
follows:
In the US the Clean Air Act of 1990, a revision of the 1972 Act, was a wa-
tershed regulatory moment in the capitalization of nature.
Today the best-known ecological commodities are probably those pro-
duced by carbon sequestration programmes. In a declared effort to slow
down or minimize global warming, these work in a similar way to wetland
credits: to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, landowners possessing
tracts of forest land (generally in poorer tropical countries) are paid not to cut
their forests, while major polluters in more industrial parts of the world can
purchase these credits as a means to allow them to continue to pollute. Alter-
natively, corporations which cut their emissions – not just carbon but sulphur
dioxide, nitrous oxide, and many other pollutants – by more than the levels
prescribed by local, national or international regulations (for example the
Kyoto accords) earn credits that can be sold on the market to producers who
fail to reach their required emission reductions. In the spring of 2006 carbon
credits in Europe were selling on the open market for about 30 euros per ton,
although the price volatility of this new commodity quickly took its toll.4
Other markets for nature credits have emerged for many ecological com-
modities: biodiversity credits, fishery credits, air and water pollution credits,
rare bird credits, and so forth. In Georgia, International Paper is breeding the
endangered red-cockaded woodpecker on land it owns; woodpecker credits
have already traded at $100,000 and International Paper hopes in the future
to earn as much as $250,000 per credit for these.5 Nature is increasingly
transformed into a biodiversity bank; as Cindi Katz has observed, nature’s
comprehensive ‘conversion to a resource in some global accounting ledger
has fundamentally altered its status and temporality’.6
Whereas the marketization of nature in this way has been championed as
a market-friendly amelioration of environmental destruction, it is also widely
understood that its effects are not wholly positive. In so far as the site of
mitigation may be kilometres or continents away from the site that benefits,
this marketization is more likely to deepen uneven development and inten-
sify poverty. The Costa Rican peasant farmer who gets carbon sequestration
credits for not cutting the forest may experience a one-time windfall but no
permanent enhancement of the family’s standard of living, whereas the US
corporate polluter buying credits contributes not only to continued pollu-
tion but to an intensified accumulation of capital. A parallel, intensified un-
evenness occurs when protected reserves are turned over for ecotourism, in-
sofar as the world’s rich, whose wealth is premised on ‘development’, are able
to consume supposedly pristine nature so long as that nature remains pristine,
undeveloped. Nor is it clear that such credits even work in ecological terms.
Biodiversity credits may leave various Amazonian habitats intact, for example
20 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2007
(or they may not), but the intensified poverty of local inhabitants often leads
to significant if not accelerated environmental degradation anyway. By the
same token, while wetland restoration in North America is regulated, there is
no guarantee concerning the quality or even the medium-term result of that
restoration, and there is certainly no evidence of overall reduction in wetland
loss. If one takes a wider geographical perspective on wetland mitigation, it
is tempting to paraphrase Engels’s assessment of ‘the housing question’: the
bourgeoisie has no solution to the environmental problem, they simply move
it around.7
The development of markets in ecological commodities is neither ac-
cidental nor simply an unintended consequence of otherwise well-meaning
environmental legislation. As Morgan M. Robertson has put it, the marketi-
zation and banking of such commodities is crucial ‘in creating and stabilizing
new areas for capitalist activity…’.8 Marketizing nature is precisely the point.
A US National Academy of Sciences committee estimates that between 1993
and 2000, more than $1 billion was invested in US mitigation permits cover-
ing perhaps 24,000 acres.9 The industry established its own umbrella associa-
tion in 1998, the National Mitigation Banking Association, which seeks to
‘promote federal legislation and regulatory policy’. Their 2006 conference,
which attracted conservation developers (no contradiction), environmental
management corporations, environmental ‘service’ providers, state and fed-
eral regulators, venture capitalists and representatives of the US Army Corps
of Engineers, among others, was entitled ‘Environmental Banking: Cultivat-
ing This Green Frontier’.10
For these and other environmental capitalists nature has indeed become
a new frontier, and not unlike earlier ‘frontiers’, that frontier became almost
instantaneously financial. An ‘environmental derivatives’ market very quickly
sprang up whereby ecological credits are bundled together and sold in bulk
to speculative financiers banking on the increased price of already established
credits. The World Bank opened its BioCarbon Fund in 2004, capitalized
with an initial $30 million and aiming for $100 million, which allows inves-
tors (minimum investment US$2.5 million) to contribute to carbon seques-
tration in return for an income generated by the sale of credits. Since 2005,
in line with Kyoto targets, the European Union has begun trading in and
regulating carbon credits. While the Environmental Protection Agency runs
an emission trading system in the US it is purely voluntary, as is the Chicago
Climate Exchange, recently established by green capitalists and NGOs.
This intensified commodification, marketization and financialization of
nature is of course an integral element of a much larger project of neoliberal-
ism.11 Neoliberalism’s substitution of private market economic measurement
NATURE AS ACCUMULATION STRATEGY 21
for social calculation, and its insistence that anything of social worth must
be tradable in the global market, applies precisely to the emergence of new
markets in ecological commodities, mitigation banking and environmental
derivatives. The power of this bundling of nature into tradable bits of capital
should not be underestimated, but nor should it be exaggerated. The neo-
liberalization of nature is far from complete, not without its obstacles, and
anything but a smooth process.12 That said, while the financialization of na-
ture may only be in its infancy, its scope and trajectory are already becoming
clear.
Financialized credits for wetlands and carbon, industrial emissions and
wildlife are part of a larger process by which the production of nature is
being dramatically intensified and its dimensions multiplied. The coloniza-
tion of terrestrial biology is very much a part of this process. Biotechnology
allows science to bore into and transform the core of specific life forms,
and this has myriad results. On the one hand, new commodities are pro-
duced, such as genetically modified (GM) seeds, crops and other organisms,
themselves involving commodification on a completely new scale: subatomic
commodities such as laboratory-manufactured genes. This in turn has set off
a frantic episode of bio-prospecting in which corporate pirates scour the
natural world for patentable genetic material. This may involve sending doc-
toral scientific adventurers to the Amazon to collect samples – raiders of a
future nature? – but it might just as well involve the laboratory manufacture
of genetically transformed mammals. Donna Haraway has explored the im-
plications of this regarding one of the first such genetically modified mam-
mals, OncoMouse™, produced by Harvard University and now owned and
trademarked by Dow Chemical.13 The surgical and medicinal applications of
myriad new genetic commodities, she has suggested, raise the prospect of a
cyborg world that dissolves sharp boundaries between human and non-hu-
man nature.
would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own
perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing.
‘In all this’, they continued, ‘ the priority of external nature remains unas-
sailed’:
nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means
the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no
longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-
islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for
Feuerbach.16
Although Marx never developed this critique in any comprehensive way, its
implications are clear. Insofar as the unresolved contradiction between an ex-
ternal and a universal world marks capitalist ideologies of nature, the critical
response is not simply a denial of either or both components of this ideology;
as ever, this ideology is not simply wrong but rather presents a distorted and
inverted vision of the world, with its origins in a very specific class perspec-
tive. The externality and universality of nature are real enough, but these are
not to be taken as ontological givens. The ideology of external-cum-univer-
sal nature harks back to a supposedly edenic, pre-human or supra-human
world, systematically erasing the very processes of externalization which make
such an ideology sensible. (By corollary, of course, this external conception of
nature becomes a powerful ideological tool for justifying racial, gender, class,
sexual and other forms of social difference and inequality as ‘natural’ rather
than social in their genesis.) Crucial here is the eclipse of the capitalist labour
process through which nature is commodified and thereby externalized. By
contrast, Marx and Engels make social labour central to nature, so much
so that the production of nature becomes ‘the basis of the whole sensuous
world as it now exists’.
If we live now amidst ‘social nature’,17 none of this in any way denies the
power or existence of ‘natural’ processes. Gravity, biological process, chemical
and geological change cannot be summarily suspended, and in no way owe
their origins or continued operation to social labour, however much their
effects may in various, limited ways be countermanded, altered, re-routed, or
differently engineered: flying in a plane is a powerful way to countermand
gravity – as long as the fuel lasts – but the work involved in making the
plane, and making it fly, just as powerfully affirms the so-called laws of na-
ture. It goes without saying that ‘natural’ science has done an unprecedented
job of deciphering how nature works, but this world-historical achievement
24 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2007
chief economist at the World Bank before taking the presidency of Harvard,
to argue that Africa was ‘underpolluted’: the environmentally-induced loss of
life in more developed countries was more expensive to the world economy
compared with the cheapness of life (lost wages) in Africa.
The fundamental victory of late-twentieth century environmental poli-
tics was precisely to highlight and isolate environmental destruction as the
integral result of capitalist patterns of production and consumption. If still
incompletely, the market has now retaken and recolonized environmen-
tal practices. Bitter mutual antagonism is replaced by financial partnership:
‘what’s kind to nature’ is also ‘kind to profits’.22 This represents a sweeping
political co-optation and victory for capital and a defeat for environmental
-cum-socialist politics. For capital, most crucially, it represents not just an
ideological victory but an extraordinary economic opportunity insofar as it
opens up an entirely new domain for capital accumulation. Any choice over
what kinds of environments and landscapes are to be produced, and for what
purposes, increasingly passes from any semblance of broad social discussion
into narrow class control orchestrated through the market.
If the commodification and financialization of nature ‘all the way down’
marks the new phase of the production of nature, a parallel shift is also under
way. The fantasy guiding the biotechnological conquest of nature involves
nothing less than an effort to bypass the very externality of nature that capi-
talism itself promulgated. Dependence on the availability of external nature
for every cycle of production represents a considerable obstacle and source of
insecurity for capital. Insofar as organisms can be harvested and engineered
to reproduce themselves continuously, the need for continued plunder of
external nature for raw materials is attenuated. The social reproduction of
nature in the laboratory – whether in a university science park or a corporate
farmer’s field, a hospital operating room or a test subject’s daily regime of
pharmaceuticals – obviously does not entirely supplant the power or neces-
sity of external nature. Rather, it absorbs nature more fully and completely
within the circuits of capital. For all that capitalism is more voracious than
ever in vacuuming a supposedly external nature in search of commodifiable
use values, we can also glimpse the start of a new capitalist regime whereby
the task of producing a usable nature begins to pass from so-called external
to social nature.
The increasingly social reproduction of nature incrementally infiltrates
any remnant of a recognizably external nature. ‘Second nature’, in Hegel’s or
Marx’s terms, is today less and less produced out of and in opposition to first
nature; rather first nature comes to be produced from within and as a part of
this second nature itself.23 Such a self-reproduction of value – reproducing
NATURE AS ACCUMULATION STRATEGY 27
They make a trenchant argument that different forms of nature translate into
different modes of organization of industrial production; the structure of
the diamond industry is quite unlike that of cattle farming, for example, due
in part to the different nature-given conditions of raw material availability,
transmutability and marketability. The real subsumption of nature, they sug-
gest, takes place when certain ‘biological systems – in marked contrast to
extractive sectors – are industrialized and may be made to operate as produc-
tive forces in and of themselves’.27 Their subsequent analysis makes a series
of distinctions, for example between nature-based and non-nature-based in-
dustries, but the crucial connection aligns the formal and real subsumption
of labour with the division between biological and non-biological industries.
‘The key to understanding the difference between formal and real subsump-
tion of nature’, they contend, ‘lies in the difference between biological and
non-biological systems and the unique capacity to manipulate biological
productivity’.28 For them, under the formal subsumption of nature, capitalists
‘confront nature as an exogenous set of material properties’, whereas under
the real subsumption of nature, capitalists are able ‘to take hold of and trans-
form natural production’.29
Powerful as the focus on biotechnological change is, this analysis too
quickly reduces the distinction between real and formal subsumption to that
between biological and non-biological industries. At a very simple level, ag-
riculture and fishing have always cultivated or confronted nature – soil, ani-
mals (domesticated or otherwise), climate – as productive forces.30 By corol-
lary, nature was never simply ‘exogenous’ for Marx, even when only formally
subsumed by capital. Boyd, Prudham and Schurman note that for Marx, ‘the
distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labour turned on
the distinction between absolute and relative surplus value’. But that is only
part of the story. What is missing here is a recognition of the crucial role
played by cooperation which for Marx was a product of the nature of human
beings in the deepest sense.31 Without cooperative human labour – the in-
nate power to work together and the larger creative ability of cooperative
compared with individualized workers – the historical hegemony of relative
over absolute surplus value would have been impossible. It was precisely the
power of technological and social organization to harness this nature-given
power of human cooperation that made the real subsumption of labour (and
the institutionalization of relative surplus value) possible.
Underlying and in part explaining this lacuna concerning labour and na-
ture is an explicit adherence by these authors to an external conception of
nature: indeed they define nature as ‘the nonhuman, biogeophysical world’,
leaving little room for any ‘nature’ in labour, as Marx theorized, or for labour
NATURE AS ACCUMULATION STRATEGY 31
CONCLUSION: NATURE AS
ACCUMULATION STRATEGY
On the basis of her research on genetically transformed organisms, including
OncoMouse™, Donna Haraway concluded in the late 1990s that the body
now represented an accumulation strategy for capital: ‘Life itself is a capital-
accumulation strategy’. Cindi Katz has broadened this into a suggestion that
nature per se may now represent an accumulation strategy for capital.37 As the
parallel with Aglietta’s analysis would indicate, the emergence of nature as an
accumulation strategy applies not simply to changes in the production of na-
ture but to changes in its consumption too.The natural foods industry which
sprang from 1960s hippie environmentalism, quickly became a multi-bil-
lion capitalist enterprise. Oil companies, among the world’s greatest polluters,
routinely advertise their decimation of nature as environmentally friendly,
not least by celebrating their purchase of carbon credits. Recycling, once
a quack demand by marginal environmentalists, is now (whatever its other
merits) a major industrial sector that not only enjoys significant state subsidy
and is run in some US states by the mafia, but has forcibly enlisted the work
of consumers – sorting, storing and even delivering recyclables – in a very
real subsumption of daily life to capital.38 In 2006 WalMart, the world’s larg-
est retail chain and emblem of capitalist consumptionism, announced that it
was ‘going green’ with organic methods, sources and products. Little wonder
that establishment environmentalists could belatedly come to the obvious
realization that liberal environmentalism is dead.39 Actually, it is only dead
as an anti-capitalist movement; it is very much alive, thriving and profiting
as a multi-billion dollar enterprise in the board rooms of the same capitalist
powers that it once challenged.
Remnant conservative opposition to environmentalism should not be
taken as contrary to this argument. As regards wetlands, for example, the
US Supreme Court seems to be squeamish about its support for existing
wetlands legislation, without which the wetlands mitigation market may not
expand as quickly as it otherwise would. On Kyoto, the US refusal to accept
the protocols agreed on by most of the world is widely seen as a narrowly
conservative and rather pugilist rejection of environmentalism. But in both
cases these challenges to environmental legislation represent not so much a
rejection of any and all environmental politics – George W. Bush is the son
of the ‘environmental president’ – as a protection of some capitalist preroga-
tives over others. Concerning wetlands, the struggle is very much about the
sanctity of private property, enlisting individual property owners against big
government. The US rejection of the Kyoto accords represents an internal
NATURE AS ACCUMULATION STRATEGY 33
NOTES
I am very grateful to Deborah Cowen and Scott Prudham for their insightful argu-
ments and suggestions which have immeasurably helped in the preparation of this
essay.
1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, in The Captain’s Bed and Other
Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956, p. 25; Stephen Kern, The Culture of
Time and Space, 1880-1918, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983; Henri
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, p. 96.
2 Federal Register. Federal Guidance for the Establishment, Use and Operation
of Mitigation Banks, 60(28), 28 November 1995, pp. 58605-58614.
3 Morgan M. Robertson, ‘No Net Loss: Wetland Restoration and the Incom-
plete Capitalization of Nature’, Antipode, 32(4), 2000; Morgan M. Robertson,
NATURE AS ACCUMULATION STRATEGY 35