Natures, rights and political movements

Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus, private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”. Emerging political movements for “rights of nature” aimed at countering evolving capitalist movements for “rights to nature” need to be aware that such contrasting regimes of rights/natures are constantly in play, and are being used by all sides, on the “middle ground” that defines this conflict. Natures fit for capital The word nature has a lot of meanings, and they are always changing. For Raymond Williams (1983, p. 219), it was “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language”. Distinguishing nature from what is not nature is an unending struggle. When we grow crops, are we dealing with nature or something that is not nature? Maize, rice and potatoes have been with us for millennia, we influencing (creating) them and they influencing (creating) us. When we look at a forest, we are almost always looking at something that has been shaped by millennia of human burning, planting, sharing, cultivating and gathering. Are we looking at nature or at something that is not nature? Or at both? In what circumstances do we even want to ask such questions? I think about what it is for me to remember my way home. My eyes fall on that familiar rock, I lift my head and there is that old tree in the distance, and after that there will be two more streets, the bend in the road and then the building with the butcher shop. Is my memory something that I have inside me that is separate from nature, or is my memory also in nature – in the pathway, the rock, the tree and the streets? No need to travel to Melanesia (Strathern, 1980) or the Amazon (Viveiros de Castro, 1998) to find places or circumstances in which nature/culture bifurcations to which we may have grown accustomed suddenly look odd. Nevertheless, our schoolteachers told us that behind all the different things human beings do there is an unchanging background consisting of things like atoms and energy. Human societies are like characters in a cartoon. Captain America walks around in the foreground, but the background often stays pretty much the same from frame to frame. This background, our schoolteachers said, is called “nature”. So, we’re surprised when we learn that for many Amazonian societies, it is, roughly speaking, the background that is culture, and what move around in the foreground are natures (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Kohn, 2013). Which raises the question: what are the reasons for dividing nature from society in the peculiar way that our schoolteachers advocated, and to say that this is the most important distinction there is? In societies dominated by capital there are in fact many such reasons, probably more than there ever were before. These reasons tend to be “free-floating” in the sense spelled out by Daniel Dennett (2018). They don’t presuppose intelligent, intentional prior design, comprehension or even consciousness. They are unlikely to be reasons that individual capitalists, for example, can be said to “have”. They don’t necessarily need a Descartes to articulate them. But they’re adaptive for the accumulative environments that have proliferated especially since the 16th century, which they continually modify in turn. They are there in the way people and things act (Zizek, 1991; Marx, 1976 [1867]) even if not in what they believe. For example, human beings are divided from land so that they can be put to work and produce surplus that becomes profit. Various processes result in the half-successful creation and re-creation of supposedly non-natural humans who can make commodities out of supposedly non-human natures, which are created and re-created through similarly half-successful procedures. The bifurcation is then sharpened and generalized globally through fossil-fuelled mechanization (Huber, 2008) and thermodynamics (Lohmann and Hildyard, 2014; Caffentzis, 2013). Relationships are reconfigured in millions of ways that result in the emergence, by the 19th century, of relata (Barad, 2007, pp. 136ff.), consisting of real abstractions (Moore, 2015, pp. 30, 55-56, 197) known as “resources” (potential or actual) and “labour” (potential or actual), that is, of new forms of non-human and human. For example, when people move into centres of mechanization, the land they leave behind changes as well as the people themselves. Farmland changes into large-scale plantations, mineheads or reservoirs. Fertility of the agricultural fields that remain changes from being a matter of manuring, firing and rotation with local cultivars towards being more a matter of importing guano from Peruvian islands, saltpeter from the Atacama, or Haber-Bosch nitrates from gas extracted from new fracking sites in the US. Each import entails certain kinds of treatment of human beings and land far from the fields where the new fertilizer itself changes the soil structure. Animals change over time, too. The 19th century saw a difference in the treatment of horses when they became part of the steam economy (Forrest, 2017), and the 20th century in the treatment of cattle and chickens when they were isolated and amassed on feedlots and factories, their recourse to commons cut off and their rates of growth reorganized according to the free-floating rationales of capital. The domestic beast-that-can-betortured was part of a nature that was as artifactual as the mythical, purely wild deer and buffalo of the “primordial” Americas (Hribal, 2012; Mann, 2006; see also Berger, 2009). Almost by definition, resources are passive and under threat from society. To survive the threat, they have to be “managed sustainably” by experts who inhabit an ancestral line that stretches back at least to the 18th-century European foresters working to keep insular colonial plantations productive (Grove, 1997). To put it another way, sooner or later many resources have to become as “renewable” as possible. Alternatively, the “populations” to which resources are counterposed have to be surveyed, reorganized, “digitized” and trimmed (or expanded). Or certain resources have to be cut off from contact both with ordinary people, and, to some extent, with individual capitals, and placed under legislation establishing protected areas or other special reserves. Such actions – usually undertaken by states – embellish, embroider, elaborate and strengthen existing Cartesian bifurcations still further, adding their bits to help produce the “nature” and “society” of educated people, which seem always to have been there and to be “separate from the practices in which they are brought into being and reproduced” (Mitchell, 2002, p. 296). These capitalist environmentalisms – together with regulation more generally – tend to generate their own imaginary featuring powerful managerial agents situated above both nature and society that can step in to govern their mutual relations. In one limiting case, this even includes fantastical agents charged with “ending capitalism” while keeping capitalist nature more or less as it is. (For a contrast between such “global” imaginaries and alternative “spherical” imaginaries, see Ingold, (2000).) Law, mapping, school curricula, statistics, economics, climatology and other disciplines and institutions help to stage, produce, format and secure a bifurcation of the world into implementation and plans, material and discursive, real and abstract, material and technological, violence and law, “exchange and rules for exchange”, “objects and ideas, nature and culture, reality and its representation, the nonhuman and the human” (Mitchell, 2002, pp. 10, 82–83). “Biopower” (Foucault, 2003), in tandem with its more recent complement “geopower” (Yanez, 2018; Bonneiul and Fressoz, 2016; see also Moore, 2015; Robertson, 2004), add immense detail and density to these reifications. Maintaining these bifurcations – which are manifested in innovations such as “the economy” (an object datable very roughly from the 1930s) and “the climate” (a similar object emerging over a longer period) – is itself, as Timothy Mitchell (2002) argues, key to maintaining elite power in contemporary capitalist societies. But the reasons for their entrenchment remain freefloating and generally evolutionary and need not invoke either “agency” or “structure”. A new stage: ecosystem services A further stage in this history – one of special contemporary interest – is ecosystem services. This particular new nature, and the “free-floating” reasons for its emergence, have evolved in a context of crisis afflicting earlier capitalist environmentalisms. Later 20th-century overaccumulation saw increasing reliance on the production of waste-based consumption as a means of absorbing surplus (Pineault, 2016; Foster, 2011) at the same time that post-1970 environmental legislation was promulgated in what amounted to both a symptom and a cause of the “maxing out” (Moore, 2015, pp. 119–120, 226) of free waste sinks that industrial capital had long relied on. Exchange of ecosystem services was expressly designed as a way of cheapening that regulation (Lohmann, 2006) – which from its earliest days had been questioned as a dangerous check on economic growth (Lane, 2015, p. 28) – or making it more flexible, “reasonable” and streamlined from the point of view of commercial developers (Robertson, 2004). Instead of reducing their environmental impact at home, businesses could now comply with environmental norms and laws by buying low-cost units of environmental compensation (CO2 emissions reduction equivalents, units of bat conservation, units of watersh