Abstract
Jessica Dempsey’s Enterprising Nature presents a hegemonic idea in the full-blooded midst of its making. In a pithy presentation of swathes of research, she tells the story of the unsteady emergence of the unsteady notion of enterprising nature: ‘nature that is entrepreneurial, a nature that can compete not only in the marketplace but also in modern state governance’. But her book is not an account of the rise of ecosystem services and the ‘making economic’ of nature. It is, rather, an account of what she calls the ‘alarming paradox’, that ‘conservation is trying to make itself more relevant to market and state governance through economization, but all these efforts fail to become operational in a way that can let diverse ecologies live’ (p. 3).
In laying out the paradigm, Dempsey quotes Pavan Sukhdev, an Indian economist and head of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Project: ‘The majority of the global population now lives in cities and is disconnected from nature […this is] not just a physical distance but also an emotional distance’. Sukhdev, and the myriad economists and ecologists Dempsey populates her story with, argue that – faced with vertiginous global biodiversity loss – this disconnection from nature is what ecological economics is trying to combat. It is in the service of a last-ditch effort to save nature that the language – and thence the whole gamut – of economics must be deployed.
Dempsey’s account of the efforts of liberal environmentalism is as sympathetic as it is unflinching. She writes with the clarity of purpose and style of a scholar-activist with her feet, as Donna Haraway might have it, deep in the mud: the mud of Global Biodiversity Politics. It is to Dempsey’s enormous credit that she turns the potentially soporific, acronymous regions of international policy negotiations into what is a highly readable and at times even gripping narrative. She hangs her story around key technologies – ecosystem accounting tools such as Stanford’s InVEST and the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool – and key events. She tracks the emergence of biodiversity accounting in American universities, captures the curious spatialities and temporalities of international conferences, and revels in the banalities through which international politics is continually made (square brackets play a crucial part in her account).
The intricacy of these accounts serves a crucial purpose in revealing the central irony of enterprising nature: it is meant to be an approach tailor-made to fit biodiversity smoothly into neoliberal state and private interests, yet it struggles and fails to come into being. There is, however, an irony in this argument itself. Dempsey is committed to bringing forward alternative accounts of nature to that of ‘making economic’, and her research and practice articulate the tireless work of activists of many stripes in resisting this ‘making economic’. The paradox she identifies, however, relies to some extent on sliding over the success of these very resistances. Perhaps enterprising nature has in part struggled to come into being because it has been met with such committed opposition. While exploring these resistances, she doesn’t grant them consonant agency in her overall analysis. Nonetheless, the central tenet remains: in spite of the vast efforts spent trying to squeeze biodiversity into commodity form, enterprising nature remains marginal and ‘promissory’ (p. 3).
Curiously, though perhaps deliberately, what is most absent from Dempsey’s story is any biodiversity itself. The book’s analytical focus remains in the very human and object-oriented, technological realm of meeting rooms, mapping and computing. The critters of biodiversity remain somewhere out there, beyond. The book does not (and does not pretend to) give an account of how economics, markets and finance intervene in the lives of animals. This absence is doubtless a paradox intrinsic to the subject of her study, and the book’s consequent sense of hollowness is, perhaps, appropriate.
Dempsey’s purpose is not to dismiss ecosystem services science. She argues, instead, for viewing ecosystem services as a ‘strategy’, which could be applied as a tool by radical new alliances. One of the finest points of her book is the clarity and directness of her political and intellectual proposals. As laid out in her ‘abundant futures’ manifesto alongside Rosemary-Claire Collard and Juanita Sundberg, she calls again here for ‘stranger’, decolonizing collaborations in defending global biodiversity. She argues that powerful global NGOs should eschew the comfortable embraces of corporations and seek alliances with organizations like Via Campesina and the Third World Network. In so doing, NGOs might find ways of turning the technologies and intellectual achievements of work on ecosystem services to their mutual advantage. She calls, too, for a movement for biodiversity loss akin to fossil fuel divestment.
Dempsey lays bare a central paradigm of global biodiversity politics. Her fine analysis of the workings of international environmental governance sheds light on opaque mechanisms and institutions. The ‘global’ is not the only scale at which biodiversity is political, and the contestations which emerge when the making economic of nature meets actually existing biodiversity at other scales and in contrasting geographies remain to be explored. But Dempsey’s admirable book not only sheds light on the intricate workings of the international – it also opens up specific possibilities for making global biodiversity politics anew.