Nature ™ Inc. critical green engagements Investigating the Green Economy and Its Alternatives Series Editors James Igoe, Molly Doane, Dan Brockington, Tracey Heatherington, Bram Büscher, and Melissa Checker Nature ™ Inc. Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age Edited by Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler, and Robert Fletcher tucson The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2014 by The Arizona Board of Regents Open-access edition published 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3095-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3921-5 (open-access e-book) The text of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivsatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nature inc. : environmental conservation in the neoliberal age / edited by Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler, and Robert Fletcher. pages cm. — (Critical green engagements: investigating the green economy and its alternatives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-3095-3 (hardback) 1. Nature—Effect of human beings on. 2. Human ecology. 3. Conservation of natural resources. 4. Neoliberalism. 5. Environmental protection. I. Büscher, Bram, 1977– II. Dressler, Wolfram Heinz. III. Fletcher, Robert, 1973– GF75.N363 2014 363.7—dc23 2013040334 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-0-8165-3921-5. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Contents Introduction. Nature ™ Inc.: The New Frontiers of Environmental Conservation 3 Robert Fletcher, Wolfram Dressler, and Bram Büscher Part I. Nature ™ Inc.–Society Entanglements 1. Capitalizing Conservation on Palawan Island, the Philippines 25 Wolfram Dressler 2. Orchestrating Nature: Ethnographies of Nature ™ Inc. 44 Kenneth Iain MacDonald and Catherine Corson 3. Nature, Villagers, and the State: Resistance Politics from Protected Areas in Zimbabwe 66 Frank Matose Part II. Representations of Nature ™ Inc. 4. Taking the Chocolate Laxative: Why Neoliberal Conservation “Fails Forward” 87 Robert Fletcher 5. Celebrity Spectacle, Post-Democratic Politics, and Nature ™ Inc. 108 Dan Brockington 6. Capitalizing Conservation/Development: Dissimulation, Misrecognition, and the Erasure of Power 127 Peter R. Wilshusen 7. Performative Equations and Neoliberal Commodification: The Case of Climate 158 Larry Lohmann vi • Contents Part III. Nature on the Move: The Global Circulation of Natural Capital 8. Nature on the Move I: The Value and Circulation of Liquid Nature and the Emergence of Fictitious Conservation 183 Bram Büscher 9. Nature on the Move II: Contemplation Becomes Speculation 205 Jim Igoe 10. Nature on the Move III: (Re)countenancing an Animate Nature 222 Sian Sullivan Conclusion. The Limits of Nature ™ Inc. and the Search for Vital Alternatives 246 Wolfram Dressler, Bram Büscher, and Robert Fletcher Bibliography 255 Contributors 287 Index 291 Nature ™ Inc. 3 introduction Nature ™ Inc. The New Frontiers of Environmental Conservation Robert Fletcher, Wolfram Dressler, and Bram Büscher The global conservation movement is undergoing profound changes. While the venerable fortress conservation paradigm has been thoroughly critiqued (Brockington 2002; Igoe 2004; Adams 2004), the community-based conser- vation (CBC) approach that aimed to replace it, along with the integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) in which CBC is commonly based, has suffered a similar fate over the last two decades (e.g., Wells and McShane 2004; Dressler et al. 2010). Indeed, the very compatibility of con- servation and development has recently been called into question by con- servationists contending that the trade-offs between livelihood and environ- mental concerns may be largely irreconcilable (e.g., McShane et al. 2011). In response, the conservation debate has seen a myriad of divergent calls for alternative strategies, such as total landscape approaches (e.g., Sayer 2009) and a (partial) return to strict protectionism (e.g., Oates 1999; Terborgh 1999). But while many novel hybridized versions of the older conservation paradigms are emerging in practice, the field of conservation also seems to be “reinventing” itself in its entirety to a degree that is not yet clearly under- stood. What is clear, however, is that this reinvention is very much tied to and in line with broader dynamics in neoliberal capitalism (Igoe, Neves, and Brockington 2010). This convergence is represented by mechanisms such as ecotourism, payments for ecosystem services, and biodiversity derivatives, as well as a variety of novel financial and technological instruments such as 4 • Introduction species and wetlands banking, carbon trade, and conservation social media, among others. With wildlife populations and biodiversity riches threatened the world over, new and innovative methods of addressing these threats are necessary—and none, we are told, are newer and more innovative than those drawing and/or relying on “the market.” As public funding for conservation grows scarcer and organizations increasingly turn to the private sector to make up the shortfall, market forces have found their way into conservation policy and practice to a degree unimaginable only a decade ago. With much at stake, it is critical to investigate how such “neoliberal conservation” (Igoe and Brockington 2007; Büscher et al. 2012) is reshaping human-nature relations fashioned over two centuries of capitalist development. Without going into depth here (but see the chapters by Dressler, Wilshu- sen, Igoe, and others for broader discussions), we see capitalist development as a powerful dynamic that originated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and has since gone through a long and complex process of inten- sification, expansion, and struggle to encompass nearly all facets of life in virtually all areas of the world to a greater or lesser degree (Meiksins Wood 2002). This dynamic, in short, centers on a particular mode of production, circulation, application, and consumption that entails a continuous need for capital accumulation and growth of private profits. Neoliberalism, by contrast, has been enacted in earnest since the 1970s and refers to a particular ideology, governmentality, and set of practices that aim to replicate capitalist market dynamics across the social and public landscape (Fletcher 2010). Capitalism and neoliberalism, thus, are not the same and should not be con- fused conceptually (Foucault 2008; Fletcher 2010). Yet, they are intimately intertwined in that both thrive on and stimulate similar principles such as commodification, competition, financialization, and market discipline. While this introduction does not intend to give an in-depth analytical and conceptual exposé of the two (convoluted and complex) concepts, we stress some of their key elements as they relate to conservation. We start from the premise that the links between capitalism and conservation are long-standing (Grove 1995; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008) and that the links between neoliberalism and conservation also rest on more than thirty years of histor- ical entanglement, conflict, and conjunction. Our aim in this introduction is to engage several key elements in these entanglements that have been central in the emerging debate concerning “neoliberal conservation” and that provide the overall structure for this volume supported by each chapter. Three main lines of critical analysis, we contend, have dominated dis- cussions of neoliberal conservation, and these will structure the different sections of this volume. The first line explores the ways in which neoliberal Nature ™ Inc. • 5 principles such as commodification, competition, financialization, and market discipline articulate with earlier conservation strategies, local socio- cultural dynamics, and rural livelihoods, producing novel mechanisms and major landscape changes in situ (Dressler and Roth 2010). The second line investigates the discourses, perceptions, and representations of neoliberal conservation and how they work to legitimate and “sell” novel relations between humans and nonhuman natures. The third line of analysis inves- tigates the combined effects of these trends by assessing the mechanisms that transcend the conservation of particular in situ natural resources to allow for the abstraction and circulation of “natural capital” throughout the global economy. Considered together, these dynamics have produced a truly global conservation frontier: a suite of networks, activities, and regulations that are rapidly changing the relations between people and nature worldwide. This frontier traverses and connects the boardrooms of global hedge funds, trees owned by small farmers, consumers, interest groups, giant nature reserves, and a myriad of species (both human and nonhuman) trying to survive in changing ecologies. It boasts grand images of pristine landscapes connected to often contradictory material realities and consequences, leaving some actors struggling to access new markets and others dispossessed by various “green grabs” (see Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012b). Building on Arsel and Büscher (2012), we refer to these new frontiers of neoliberal conservation as “Nature ™ Inc.” Just as the frontiers of Nature ™ Inc. are global and local, interconnected and dispersed, highly complex and ambiguous, so too have been academic efforts to understand them. Hence, despite the rapid proliferation and diversification of this literature, there remains a need to organize it within a cohesive analytical structure, to push critical analysis in new directions, and to map new arenas for future research beyond the bounds of current study. This is what the present volume offers, focusing on the three themes outlined above, shorthanded as (1) Nature ™ Inc.–society entanglements; (2) representations of Nature ™ Inc.; and (3) the global circulation of nat- ural capital. The remainder of this introduction lays the groundwork for this discus- sion, situating it within the history of research addressing the neoliberaliza- tion of environmental policy and practice, foreshadowing the interventions offered by our contributors. We begin by outlining the rapidly growing academic literature analyzing contemporary neoliberalism, describing how this analysis has been applied to environmental policy and in particular to describe the phenomenon we refer to as Nature ™ Inc. We then trace the development of Nature ™ Inc. over the past several decades, identifying a 6 • Introduction trend toward increasing abstraction and financialization in order to facili- tate the global circulation of “natural capital” as the emphasis has shifted from ecotourism through payment for environmental (or ecosystem) ser- vices (PES) and on to newer mechanisms like carbon markets and species banking. We conclude by providing brief overviews of the chapters that follow, focusing on the three themes detailed above. The (Mis)Uses of “Neoliberalism” As Flew (2011, 44) observes, neoliberalism “has been one of the great aca- demic growth concepts of recent years.” From a mere handful of references in the 1980s, Boas and Gans-Moore (2009) identify a dramatic surge in scholarly attention to neoliberalism in subsequent decades: between 2002 and 2005 the term appeared in more than a thousand social science aca- demic articles yearly. The concept’s popularity has only increased in the intervening years, rendering its usage increasingly diffuse “such that its appearance in any given article offers little clue as to what it actually means” (Boas and Gans-Moore 2009, 139). At its worst, neoliberalism has become “nothing more than a vehicle for academics who like to criticise things that they do not like” (Igoe and Brockington 2007, 445), while at its broadest, the term is used “as a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself, or as a kind of shorthand for the world economy and its inequalities” (Ferguson 2010, 171). This conceptual confusion is unfortunate, since neoliberalism, more precisely defined, reflects a distinct process with tremendous global influ- ence, as many perceptive analysts highlight (see, amongst others, Peck 2010; Steger and Roy 2010; McCarthy 2012). As such, we and the con- tributors to this volume argue that it remains extremely important to (be able to) engage with the term. Growing complaints that neoliberalism has become so overused that it has lost all meaning—or even that the process it refers to does not actually exist as such—risk contributing to the hegemony of neoliberalism itself by allowing the ideology to fade from the realm of public discourse and insert itself as the invisible and hence unquestionable common sense of our time (Peck 2010; Büscher et al. 2012). Neoliberalism defined more strictly is commonly identified with the wide- spread trend toward increasing relaxation of state oversight over political- economic affairs and reliance on the “invisible hand” of the market to efficiently allocate resources across the social landscape. Castree (2008a), building on Harvey (2005), characterizes neoliberalism as promoting the interrelated processes of decentralization, deregulation (or, rather, Nature ™ Inc. • 7 reregulation from state to nonstate actors), marketization, privatization, and commodification. This is not to imply a homogeneous and static pro- cess. Rather, it implies that neoliberalism diffuses sporadically, unevenly, in articulation with local sociocultural patterns and institutions (Harvey 2005; Foucault 2008; Dressler and Roth 2010; Steger and Roy 2010; Roth and Dressler 2012). Hence, many scholars have taken up the call to describe the diversity of “actual existing neoliberalisms” (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Duffy 2012) rather than positing some pure ideological edifice from which existing institutions are presumed to deviate (see esp. Brenner and Theodore 2002; Roth and Dressler 2012). Likewise, as a partial, uneven, and ongoing process, analysts increasingly speak in terms of neoliberaliza- tion rather than neoliberalism per se (see esp. Peck 2010). Yet, as Brenner, Peck, and Theodore (2010, 332) point out, “empirical evidence underscor- ing the stalled, incomplete, discontinuous or differentiated character of projects to impose market rule, or their co-existence alongside potentially antagonistic projects (for instance, social democracy) does not provide a sufficient basis for questioning their neoliberalized, neoliberalizing dimen - sions.” Notwithstanding pronounced diversity in practice, similar dynamics can be observed in a wide variety of contexts, informed by a coherent set of theoretical prescriptions (Harvey 2005; Foucault 2008; Peck 2010) and manifesting in policies and practices with a distinct family resemblance. Indeed, neoliberalism’s very flexibility can be seen as one of its most essen- tial characteristics (Peck 2010; Duffy and Moore 2010). So characterized, neoliberalism/neoliberalization has been analyzed in a number of interrelated ways. Most broadly, there is a strong distinction between treatments inspired by neo-Marxist and poststructuralist thought, respectively (Castree 2008a; Ferguson 2010; Fletcher 2010; McCarthy 2012; Wacquant 2012; Overbeek and Van Apeldoorn 2012). It is primarily in terms of their analysis of the nature and motives of neoliberal governance that the two perspectives diverge. In Harvey’s (2005) paradigmatic Marxist reading, neoliberal economics is an ideological smokescreen concealing a more fundamental class project of accumulation by dispossession aimed to employ free-market policies for private appropriation of the commons. Hence, Harvey asserts, “It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism” (119). Similarly, Overbeek and Van Apeldoorn (2012, 4) define neoliberalism as a political project aimed to restore capitalist class power in the aftermath of 8 • Introduction the economic and social crises of the 1970s and the challenge posed to the rule of capital globally by the call for a New International Economic Order. For Foucault (2008), by contrast, neoliberalism is a broader approach to human governance in general, a particular “art of government” or “gov- ernmentality.” More than a class project or ideology, then, in Foucault’s reading, neoliberalism—particularly in the US context—is a “whole way of thinking and being,” a “general style of thought, analysis and imagination” (218). In contrast to conventional understandings of governmentality (see Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006), describing the processes by which subjects internalize social norms that compel them to self-regulate in the absence of overt domination, a specifically neoliberal governmentality oper- ates through the construction and manipulation of the “external incentive structures within which individuals, understood as self-interested rational actors” (Fletcher 2010, 173), make decisions among alternative courses of action. Thus, Foucault (2008, 260, 271) describes neoliberalism as an “environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals,” a “governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables.” The distinction between these perspectives is significant and should, pace Ferguson (2010, 171–72), always be spelled out. While the con- tributors to this volume adopt different positions in this debate, we take inspiration from several recent efforts to synthesize the two perspectives into a workable framework for analysis and potential action. Ferguson, for instance, suggests that “bringing these two different referents together can be more interesting, if we don’t just equate them, but instead reflect on the conceptual themes they share (broadly, a technical reliance on market mechanisms coupled with an ideological valorization of private enterprise and a suspicion of the state), and use such a reflection to ask if the new arts of government developed within First World neoliberalism might take on new life in other contexts, in the process opening up new political possibil- ities” (173). Similarly, Wacquant (2012, 66, emphasis in original) proposes “a via media between these two approaches that construes neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third.” 1 Springer (2012), among others, pursues reconciliation of the two perspectives as well. In all, and despite their proliferation and sometimes dilution, debates and discussions concerning neoliberalism continue to display a richness and analytical sophistication that make wading through the conceptual muddle well worth the effort (see also, e.g., McCarthy 2012). Moreover, the contemporary situation makes it necessary to engage the term in one way or Nature ™ Inc. • 9 another in order to tackle the power dynamics that influence so many facets of modern life, including conservation. We describe next how these debates have played out concerning analysis of environmental policy, charting the emergence of debates concerning neoliberal conservation in particular. From Neoliberal Environments to Nature ™ Inc. Following McAfee’s (1999) prescient identification of the emerging trend involving “selling nature to save it,” the critical academic literature address- ing the process we refer to as Nature ™ Inc. became centered on analysis of neoliberal nature . Important trailblazers were McCarthy and Prudham’s (2004) seminal paper introducing a special issue of Geoforum , Heynen and Robbins’s (2005) introductory article in Capitalism Nature Socialism , and the spate of writing, anthologized in Neoliberal Environments (Heynen et al. 2007), that followed. Alongside this work, the first efforts to con- ceptualize neoliberal conservation emerged (Sullivan 2006a; Büscher and Whande 2007; Igoe and Brockington 2007), which, analysts pointed out, demands unique mechanisms in order to harness the value of resources in situ (see esp. Büscher et al. 2012). While the neoliberal environments literature has continued to develop fruitful insights (see, e.g., Bakker 2009; Castree 2010a, 2010b), the neoliberal conservation discussion quickly expanded as well, soon producing several books (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008; Brockington 2009; Duffy 2010) as well as a variety of special journal issues (Brockington and Duffy 2010a; Sullivan 2010a; Arsel and Büscher 2012; Büscher and Arsel 2012; Roth and Dressler 2012; Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012a; Corson, MacDonald, and Neimark 2013) and an array of individual articles too numerous to mention. Indeed, because of the importance, global presence, and urgency of the topic, this literature will continue to expand rapidly (assisted by the new book series on the topic initiated by the University of Arizona Press, of which this volume is the first installment). While the present volume builds upon all of this previous work, it engages in particular with Arsel and Büscher’s 2012 Forum issue of Development and Change in which the concept of Nature ™ Inc. was first advanced. The authors highlight the three interrelated dimensions of this term (“nature,” “trademarked,” and “incorporated”), observing that it follows a long line of similar attempts to highlight the increasingly corporate nature of a vari- ety of socioenvironmental processes designated by such monikers as Life Inc. (Rushkoff 2011), Green, Inc. (MacDonald 2008), Environment, Inc. 10 • Introduction (Bosso 2005), and so forth. Yet they also highlight the double meaning of the “incorporated” qualifier to signify as well the fact that within neoliberal conservation “nature needs to be rendered a distinct ‘corpus,’ an ‘entity’ that stands outside of society and economy” (Arsel and Büscher 2012, 59). Meanwhile, the “trademarked” dimension of the term emphasizes the fact that within the framework of Nature ™ Inc. the “nature” in question must be “protected, legalized, and institutionalized by particular systems of power and associated symbols” (Arsel and Büscher 2012, 60). Finally, use of the contentious term “nature” (see, e.g., Latour 2004; Goldman, Nadasdy, and Turner 2011) is intended not to designate some inert force external to human affairs but to highlight the intricate entanglement of humans and nonhumans within complex “socionatures” as well as to emphasize nonhumans’ agency as “actants” in such networks rather than as the passive objects of human manipulation. The Development and Change issue, in turn, was based on papers pre- sented at an international conference held the previous summer at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, the Netherlands, from June 30 to July 2, 2011. This conference was the first large assembly of scholars seeking to critically interrogate “the market panacea in environmental policy and conservation,” and it introduced the Nature ™ Inc. concept to frame this trend. Originally intended to attract around 60 participants, the conference’s call for papers drew over 230 submissions (of which 180 were accepted for presentation), further evidencing the groundswell of academic interest in this area. This volume offers a further cross section of these conference presen- tations, carefully selected in order to provide a sample of the range of perspectives in the emerging literature and updated to reflect the most recent developments and offer predictions of future trends. The volume thus provides the first comprehensive critical overview of the full range of contemporary debates concerning neoliberal environmental conservation, drawing together the substance of many of the special journal issues and articles preceding it. Each of these addressed important yet specific aspects of the conversation, though all failed to provide a more structural overview of the debate. This volume goes further than merely providing a state-of- the-field review of the neoliberal conservation discussion, however; it also pushes the conversation in productive new directions by providing innova- tive theoretical work and empirical material in relation to what we identify as the three most significant new “frontiers” of environmental conservation: Nature ™ Inc.–society entanglements; representations of Nature ™ Inc.; and the global circulation of natural capital. Before introducing the various Nature ™ Inc. • 11 chapters and their specific interventions, we offer a brief overview of the development of Nature ™ Inc. in order to historicize our discussion. The Evolution of Nature ™ Inc. The commodification of natural resources is, of course, not a new phenom- enon (Bellamy Foster 2000; Harvey 2006b; Nevins and Peluso 2008; Peluso 2012). The rendering of nonhumans as “fictitious commodities” (Polayni 1944) has occurred for at least as long as a capitalist mode of production has pursued its relentless quest to colonize new spaces, times, peoples, and pro- cesses across societies and landscapes (Harvey 1989, 2005). What is relatively recent, however, is the widespread effort on the part of capitalist industry to internalize natural resources as an integral component of production for “sustainable” management in the long term rather than simply externalizing environmental (as well as social) costs in the interest of short-term profit (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). This is what Martin O’Connor (1994a) calls capitalism’s “ecological phase,” which can be seen to have commenced in earnest in the 1970s—the very period of neoliberal consolidation (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010)—with the acknowledgment of the environmental “limits to growth” (Meadows, Meadows, and Randers 1972) and the convening of the first major international conference (United Nations Conference on the Human Environment) in the same year as the publication of Meadows, Meadows, and Randers’s text to confront this reality. This coincided as well with a growing recognition of the human costs of traditional approaches to conservation, entailing state-centered “fortress” style management commonly prescribing the coercion and displacement of large numbers of resource-dependent peoples (or seemingly less con- frontational resource substitutions) who were thus justifiably hostile to those responsible for their condition (see Wells and Brandon 1992; Peluso 1993; Neumann 1998; Brockington 2002; Igoe 2004; Dowie 2009). Out of this recognition grew the integrated conservation and development and community-based conservation campaigns. These campaigns sought to reconcile formerly competing concerns for conservation and development, incorporating the local peoples most dependent upon and knowledgeable about immediate resources as integral “stakeholders.” Such interventions pursued a Hegelian synthesis of sorts between opposing theses, with devel- opment planners called upon to address environmental management and conservationists compelled to include human development in their work as well. MacDonald (2010b, 527) points toward the crucial role in this 12 • Introduction mission of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an “active political space . . . in which rights and interests may be negotiated and new social relations configured around those negotiations.” He continues that “this arena can lead to creative opportunities for new, and previously excluded, groups to claim authority, but it also creates a context in which privileged positions and perspectives can be consolidated and codified in ways that structure policy and practice.” This, he argues, is indeed what happened. Central to this effort was the need to generate revenue from natural resources without substantially degrading them over time, and it was in this aim that the first seeds of Nature ™ Inc. were sown. While resource commodification in the form of extraction and processing had been (and still is) seen as a relatively straightforward process, achieving the oppo- site—commodification through conservation, or what West (2006) calls “conservation-as-development”—required novel ways of thinking and performing. How could value be generated from resources preserved in situ when value had almost always previously been created by transporting resources from their place of origin and thus fleeing the localized environ- mental and social impacts effected by this displacement? A raft of novel institutional approaches was soon developed in pursuit of this agenda, with earlier devolved CBC strategies now taking on new market mechanisms to conserve “ecosystem services” by placing an imputed market value on them, the income from which would purportedly provide local users with incen- tives to curb the extensive use of natural resources (Dressler et al. 2010). Of course, once again, this was not an entirely new phenomenon. As Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe (2008) contend, protected conservation areas, while commonly framed by proponents as bastions of pristine nature stand- ing opposed to the base forces of predatory capitalism, have, in fact, always been connected with processes of capitalist commodification, particularly in the form of the nature-based tourism (e.g., safari trips, trophy hunting) commonly promoted inside them. Yet in the neoliberal age, this com- modification has intensified and transformed to a degree unimaginable in those halcyon days of yore. Hence, one of the first moves of Nature ™ Inc. was to magnify and transform this nature-based recreation—now relabeled “ecotourism”—as an ostenibly “nonconsumptive” (and thus sustainable) form of income generation. Other means of harnessing the value of in situ resources, from bioprospecting to ostensibly sustainable forms of resource extraction (i.e., logging), were promoted as well. The chief problem with such mechanisms in terms of commodifica- tion is that the value they generate is fundamentally tied to the environ- ments they address, requiring either the movement of people to the site Nature ™ Inc. • 13 of production (in the case of ecotourism) or the transport of resources to the site of consumption (bioprospecting, sustainable forestry). Moreover, scholars keep pointing out the enormous “gender costs” of these initiatives in terms of women’s livelihoods and “lost spaces” (Harcourt 2012). 2 The “friction” (Tsing 2005) resulting from this movement increases transaction costs substantially, reducing both potential profit and the ecological gains such mechanisms ostensibly provide. Thus, a major innovation in the development of Nature ™ Inc. came with the formulation in the 1990s of the payment for environmental services (PES) mechanism. This, of course, built on the growing framing of “nature” as a “service provider” in general, a perspective also promoted by the Convention on Biological Diversity initiated in Rio in 1992 (see Robertson 2006; Sullivan 2009; MacDonald 2010b) and popularized by ecological economist Robert Costanza and colleagues’ (1997) ambitious effort to quantify all the environmental ser- vices provided by the planet. Through PES, “consumers” of ecological services could now pay their “producers” remotely, allowing for the spatial separation of consumers from the resources they (non)consume and thus a partial abstraction of value from any particular landscape, given that within the PES framework environments are rendered equivalent such that degra- dation in one location can be “offset” by preservation elsewhere (see Brock- ington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008; Sullivan 2009). This then initiated a bold new era in conservation, a shift from hybridized forms of CBC–Nature ™ Inc. to increased reliance on so-called market mechanisms. Yet even in PES there are important limitations to the accumulation process. Essentially, conservation is still tied to a particular piece of land, inhibiting the abstraction of value from dependence on any particularities of place and thus nonhuman natures’ transformation into full-fledged commodities that could circulate globally (see esp. Büscher, this volume). Hence, Nature ™ Inc. has truly come of age with the recent development of innovative financial mechanisms that facilitate this abstraction, separat- ing the creation of value from connection to any particular environment and thus allowing value to circulate freely around the globe as fully fun- gible stores of value (see Bracking 2012; Sullivan 2013b; Büscher, this volume). The rise of the global carbon market, facilitated by the “flexible mechanisms” of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Kyoto Protocol (also emanating from Rio), in which abstract carbon credits are traded between spatially disconnected players, is only one aspect of this trend (see Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Lohmann, this volume). Species and wetlands banking, in which destructive development in one area can be offset by purchasing credits ostensibly representing