Morgan Robertson

The nature that capital can see: science, state, and market in the commodification of ecosystem services

The development of stable markets in ecosystem services is now a major neoliberal policy initiative in the United States and elsewhere. Such markets, however, require ecosystem scientists to play a new and challenging role in certifying the value of the commodities traded, which are defined using the holistic measures of ecology rather than the uncontroversial measures of weight, volume, or time. As ecosystem science increasingly serves as a metrical technology for the commodification of ecosystem services, its fine and fragile distinctions increasingly bear the weight of capital circulation. In this paper I report on fieldwork among ecosystem assessment technicians, and suggest that this new round of the commodification of nature may overwhelm the capacity of science to provide stable representations of commodity value. The methods and techniques of ecosystem assessment must describe a nature that capital can ‘see’—that has an uncontroversial measure—in order for trade to occur. However, these assessment methods currently produce unstable data that are rendered meaningful in economic terms only by dint of creative and ad hoc efforts at translation by field technicians. It is suggested that this may represent a practical limit or crisis point in the expansion of capital relations, or at least a complication in the streamlined neoliberal narratives about the commodification of ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism

Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosystem services in geography by exploring the internal heterogeneity and tensions within the world of ecosystem service policies. In describing these debates on their own terms, we find a diverse and wide-ranging set of actors and viewpoints.

Mitigation under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act: where it comes from, what it means

The requirement to mitigate impacts to wetlands and streams is a frequently misunderstood policy with a long and complicated history. We narrate the history of mitigation since the inception of the Clean Water Act Section 404 permit program in 1972, through struggles between the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Army Corps of Engineers, through the emerging importance of wetland conservation on the American political landscape, and through the rise of market-based approaches to environmental policy. Mitigation, as it is understood today, was not initially foreseen as a component of the Section 404 permitting program, but was adapted from 1978 regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality as a way of replacing the functions of filled wetlands where permit denials were unlikely. EPA and the Corps agreed in 1990 to define mitigation as the three steps of avoidance, minimization, and compensation, principles which must be applied to permit decisions in the form of the environmental criteria in EPA’s 404(b)(1) Guidelines. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the compensation component of mitigation has become nearly the sole focus of mitigation policy development, and has been the subject of numerous guidance documents and memoranda since 1990. Avoidance and minimization have received far less policy attention, and this lack of policy development may represent a missed opportunity to implement effective wetland conservation.

Emerging ecosystem service markets: trends in a decade of entrepreneurial wetland banking

Markets in ecosystem services are now commonly considered by policy makers to be effective ways of achieving the goals of federal environmental protection laws. However, little empirical data currently informs policy development around such markets. Can a market-like arrangement solve the problems of compensatory wetland replacement under the Clean Water Act? This research examines the dynamics of the Chicago, Illinois market in wetland credits over a 9-year period, and shows that, although successful in many ways, it is prone to regulatory turbulence and may not fully address losses of wetland function. Market-based approaches to environmental policy problems will proliferate as more policy makers become convinced of the power of markets to achieve effective environmental conservation. Due to the new challenges of standardized commodity measurement that are present in these markets, environmental scientists are likely to be increasingly drawn into policy development and evaluation. This article is intend...

Privatizing stream restoration in the US

In this paper, we use a case study of the stream restoration field to demonstrate how the particular state and market logics of neoliberalism are shifting both the practice of restoration scientists and the relations between public and private sector science. In particular, the embrace of neoliberal environmental management regimes has intensified the demand for environmental scientists to produce applied science that can: (1) be taught as a standardized package; (2) be used by agencies to justify decisions; and (3) form the basis for new markets in ecosystems services. At this point, private sector science produces the most influential knowledge claims, the most widely used applications, and the primary educational system for stream restoration in the US. We argue that the needs of markets and regulatory agencies are heavily implicated in this privatization process, and that the resulting impacts on restoration science and the dynamics of the stream restoration field in the US thus cannot be described without attention to political—economic relations.

Evaluation of a Market in Wetland Credits: Entrepreneurial Wetland Banking in Chicago

With the rise of market-led approaches to environmental policy, compensation for permitted discharge of dredge or fill material into wetlands under Section 404 of the U.S. Clean Water Act has been purchased increasingly from entrepreneurial third-party providers. The growth of this practice (i.e., entrepreneurial wetland banking) has resolved many challenges associated with wetland compensation. But it has also produced (1) quantifiable temporal loss of wetland ecological functions, (2) spatial redistribution of wetland area, and (3) a degree of regulatory instability that may pose a threat to entrepreneurial compensation as a sustainable component of wetland-compensation policy. We used achieved compensation ratios, lapse between bank credit sale and the attainment of performance standards, distance between impact and bank site, and changes in bank market area to examine these 3 factors. We analyzed data from a census of all such transactions in the Chicago District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, compiled from site visits, Corps databases, and contacts with consultants and Section 404 permittees. Entrepreneurial banking provided compensation at a lower overall ratio than nonbank forms of compensation. Approximately 60% of bank credits were sold after site-protection standards were met but before ecological performance standards were met at the bank site. The average distance between bank and impact site was approximately 26 km. The area of markets within which established banks can sell wetland credits has fluctuated considerably over the study period. Comparing these data with similar data for other compensation mechanisms will assist in evaluating banking as an element of conservation policy. Data characterizing the performance of entrepreneurial wetland banks in actual regulatory environments are scarce, even though it is the most established of similar markets that have become instrumental to federal policy in administering several major environmental protection laws.

The Value of Nature to the State

In recent years geographers have produced a considerable literature on the creation of markets in environmental goods and services. This literature reveals numerous complications with such market-based conservation strategies, yet it has failed to address the conception of value that underlies capitalism and drives the capitalist state. To address this gap, we offer an analysis of how the concept of the value of nature has been taken up in U.S. environmental regulatory debates over the creation of markets for wetland services, where state actors creating new regulations must attempt to specify the value of nature. In 2008 the U.S. government adopted a rule governing the creation and sale of wetland credits. This rule initially attempted to define value as a way of both grounding the credit commodity in underlying phenomena and defining the object that state intervention was designed to protect. But in final negotiations and drafting the term became so controversial that its definition was deleted and its use radically restricted. To draw meaning from this situation, we draw on nineteenth-century debates over value in political economy. Our central finding is a cyclical tendency for conflicts to arise over whether to define value as something either inherent (e.g., to a physical process) or essentially relative. Agents of the state involved in creating environmental policy today are caught in the same dilemma as were value theorists of the mid-1800s: They recognize that they must specify the value of nature in justifying state environmental strategy and the expansion of capital into ecosystem services but struggle with the limits of doing so by extracting elements of nature and placing them in capitalist value form. Political ecologists and others will similarly struggle to understand the basis on which capitalist states confront nature—even as the consequences of this encounter are increasingly well documented—without a return to value theory.

Stacking ecosystem services

Ecosystem service markets are increasingly used as a policy solution to environmental problems ranging from endangered species to climate change. Such markets trade in ecosystem credits created at restoration sites where conservation projects are designed and built to compensate for regulated environmental impacts. “Credit stacking” occurs when multiple, spatially overlapping credits representing different ecosystem services are sold separately to compensate for different impacts. Discussion of stacking has grown rapidly over the past three years, and it will generate increasing interest given the growing multibillion-dollar international market in carbon, habitat, and water-quality credits. Because ecosystem functions at compensation sites are interdependent and integrated, stacking may result in net environmental losses. Unless stacked compensation sites and impact sites are treated symmetrically in the accounting of environmental gains and losses, stacking may also cause environmental gains at compensa...

Why You Should Pay Attention to Stream Mitigation Banking

tream mitigation banking is rapidly becoming a major driver of the stream restoration industry, particularly in the Southeast. Like other types of mitigation banking regulated by the Clean Water Act Section 404 program, stream mitigation banking (SMB) gives developers the option to offset construction impacts by purchasing “credits.” These credits are generated by for-profit companies that restore damaged streams on a speculative basis and are approved by federal regulatory agencies. In states such as North Carolina, SMB has now eclipsed wetlands banking in terms of number of credits bought and sold. SMB is becoming a major private-sector source of stream restoration funding, perhaps presaging a major shift in what has been until now a predominantly publicly funded market. In addition to its growing eco-nomic importance, the emerging practice of SMB is worth attention because many of the tensions and debates that have been settled in the more established practice of wet-lands mitigation banking are still unresolved, and thus potentially open to input from practitioners and scientists. The most important of these are the proper amount and location of compensation, and how stream credits should be certified and measured.Mitigation banking began in the early 1990s, when private developers frustrated with the slow pace of Section 404 permitting and the high cost of creating new on-site wetlands proposed the creation of large consolidated areas of constructed wetlands as advance compensation to the Chicago, Savannah, and Jacksonville Districts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps). Working together, developers and local Corps and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff developed the regulatory rules necessary to define, create, and maintain a market in a new commod-ity: wetlands credits (Robertson 2006). As will by now be familiar to most

Territorialization, science and the colonial state: the case of Highway 55 in Minnesota

This paper examines a recent conflict over the rerouting of Highway 55 in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. During a three-year struggle over the project, a group of indigenous people argued that the space where the highway would pass was sacred and of historical importance. We analyse a Cultural Resource Assessment prepared by a team of scientists that responded to these claims and cleared the way for the reroute. Our reading, which draws from the literatures of postcolonial studies and sociology of science, examines the way scientific claims are made to evaluate the sacredness of the site. We find that science works to produce the effect of state territorialization - or the iterative making of the space of the state - by placing ecological phenomena and indigenous testimony ‘within’ a non-sacred Minnesotan space.