Jessica Dempsey

A Manifesto for Abundant Futures

The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of living together. In considering how to enact multispecies worlds, we take inspiration from Indigenous and peasant movements across the globe as well as decolonial and postcolonial scholars. With decolonization as our principal political sensibility, we offer a manifesto for abundance and outline political strategies to reckon with colonial-capitalist ruins, enact pluriversality rather than universality, and recognize animal autonomy. We advance these strategies to support abundant socioecological futures.

Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities

When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, ‘encounterable’ life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what ecosystem services are designed to address. Nevertheless, we find that reproduction of uneven species geographies is at work in both economies. The degree and nature of effect on the material conditions of nonhuman lives is, however, distinct, and our conclusion calls for greater attention to these differences.

Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of “Selling Nature to Save It”

Mainstream environmentalism and critical scholarship are abuzz with the promise and perils (respectively) of what we call for-profit biodiversity conservation: attempts to make conserving biodiverse ecosystems profitable to large-scale investment. But to what extent has private capital been harnessed and market forces been enrolled in a thoroughly remade conservation? In this article we examine the size, scope, and character of international for-profit biodiversity conservation. Despite exploding rhetoric around environmental markets over the last two decades, the capital flowing into market-based conservation remains small, illiquid, and geographically constrained and typically seeks little to no profit. This marginal character of for-profit conservation suggests that this project continues to underperform as a site of accumulation and as a conservation financing strategy. Such evidence is at odds with the way this sector is commonly portrayed in mainstream environmental conservation literature but also with some critical geographical scholarship. We present a more puzzling situation: Although for-profit conservation has long been promoted as a logical, easy fix to ecological degradation, it remains negligible to and largely outside of global capital flows. We argue that this project has important consequences, but we understand its effects in terms of how it reaffirms narrowed, antipolitical explanations of biodiversity loss, instills neoliberal political rationalities among conservationists, and forecloses alternative and progressive possibilities capable of resisting status quo logics of accumulation.

Tracking Grizzly Bears in British Columbia's Environmental Politics

Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainforest blanketing the central and north coasts of British Columbia. But this essay takes a different cut into understanding this particular political event, in that it tracks an often-unrecognized actor through the politics there: the grizzly bear. Drawing inspiration from scholarship that challenges the primacy of humans in our understandings of politics and social life, I argue that the grizzly bear influences and inflects BCs coastal forest politics; it is an important player in the transformation of the Great Bear Rainforest. I tell the story of environmental politics there by tracing the grizzly bears shifting relationships with others, including with settlers, conservation biologists, environmentalists and money, all of which are consequential for the grizzly bear, and for others in the region.

Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations

ABSTRACT How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The “or not” of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value’s necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play in the production of value. Accordingly, we present a typology of five orientations – relational, patterned positions – nature can take in relation to capitalist social relations: officially valued, the reserve army, the underground, outcast surplus and threat. What our typology suggests is that to accumulate capital, capitalism needs the diverse materials and creative forces of natures ordered in a variety of positions within society, not just as commodities. No such position is without violence and exploitation. To add some specificity to our initial analysis, we consider how these nonhuman orientations are produced in part through law. We focus on the law because it comprises a prime tool for achieving social order and because the law is a crucial site in which difference is produced and the designations of valued and unvalued are formalized and consolidated.

The Moderns' Amnesia in Two Registers

1This euphoria, he explains, is blind to its foundations: past and ongoing violence, tragedy, poverty, and suffering—inequity that is rife not only elsewhere, but also within the West’s richest countries. In an announcement of Galeano’s death in the Buenos Aires Herald, he is quoted as having described himself as “obsessed with remembering” in a “land condemned to amnesia.” 2 Amnesia. If there is a singular trait to describe An Ecomodernist Manifesto, this is it. Amnesia. In two registers. First, amnesia about the deeply uneven and violent nature of modernization. And second, about the struggles that have underpinned every effort to alleviate inequality and violence.

Fixing biodiversity loss

In the midst of the “sixth extinction” and declarations of the so-called Anthropocene, scientists and conservationists are debating the nature of planetary limits. They are also rethinking the very goal of nature conservation in a postnatural direction that is less oriented on saving pristine nature. To shed light on this contemporary debate, this paper looks back to examine three “circuits of power and knowledge” where biodiversity loss is constituted as an ecological crisis with humanity in its crosshairs and later as a more flexible problem of trade-offs. The paper contributes a grounded, empirical examination of the production of, and changing nature of “global biodiversity limits,” showing how they emerge through articulations between power laden and elite ecological-economic knowledge and frameworks, global biopolitical and ethical concerns, state-capital accumulative logics, and national security interests. Reaffirming a critical stance on limits and tracing a persistent ontology of scarcity in global biodiversity science and policy, the paper draws from the story of global biodiversity limits to inform the current discussion of the postnatural turn.

If biodiversity offsets are a dead end for conservation, what is the live wire? A response to Apostolopoulou & Adams

Ecofeminist Maria Mies describes capitalist social relations as an iceberg. The visible tip represents the formal economy, where capitalist value emerges from exploited waged labourers and the circulation of monetized goods and assets. Underneath the waterline lurks the rest of the iceberg, and its size dwarfs the tip. Here, Mies points to a much larger world of exploitation on which commodity production and profit-making depend: women, colonies and, at the very base, nature. The bodies, places and materials of the submerged, invisible iceberg supply unwaged labour and unpriced inputs and energies that are productive; capitalism depends on this deeply undervalued work. Let us restate: capitalism exploits, yes, but strangely, it is a mode of organizing society that also relies on this exploitation. As Mies ([1986]1998, p. 200) writes, ‘the exploitation of colonies, as well as that of women and other non-wage workers, is absolutely crucial to the capitalist accumulation process’; this exploitation ‘constitutes the eternal basis for capitalist accumulation’ (Mies, 2007, p. 269).

Politics of devaluation

As Kay and Kenney-Lazar show, the concept of value holds appeal for political ecologists who seek to demystify and politicize the socio-ecological relations underpinning capitalist productions of nature. But there are challenges to using value to understand capitalist natures. Much of nature is not priced, and no nature labours for a wage. This makes the labour theory of value, which tends to be prominent even in discussions of a broadly defined value, difficult to apply to nature. Having wrangled with this ourselves, we turn (as Kay and Kenney-Lazar do) to feminist political economists, who have long theorized the unwaged realm within capitalist social relations. We find that these feminists, while not unconcerned with value, are instead often set on understanding how some work is persistently devalued, or denigrated, seen as worthless – which leads them to centre patriarchy in their analyses. Building from this, we suggest the need to centre anthropocentrism – to historicize and denaturalize devaluations of nature – within work on value and capitalist natures.