Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Commodifi cation
Scott Prudham
Introduction
The nexus of commodifi cation with environmental change and environmental poli-
tics is of immense and growing interest to geographers and activists alike. There are
several good reasons for this. First, the global criss-cross of commodities via far-
fl ung networks of production, investment, coordination, distribution, and exchange
leaves behind traces of myriad kinds with important and intertwined social and
environmental implications. This includes by-products such as persistent organic
pollutants, gaseous emissions from combustion and other chemical processes, and
an assortment of organic and inorganic wastes. It also includes ecosystems trans-
formed by and for production, for example, forests converted to plantations for
fi bre or other products, and land devoted to agricultural production. Even the city
itself, emerging from dense intersecting networks of commodity production and
exchange, is sustained in part by complex metabolic transformations of biophysical
nature in the production of urban spaces (Cronon, 1991; Gandy, 2002; 2005;
Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003).
Second, direct forms of the commodifi cation of what we understand as nature
(both non-human
and
human, it must be said) seem to have proliferated in recent
years. This includes new or reinvigorated commercialisation of discrete resources
from water to fi sh to seeds to genes (see, e.g., Bakker, 2003; McAfee, 2003; Mans-
fi eld, 2004a; McCarthy, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2005), propelled in substantial measure
by private fi rms seeking new avenues for the circulation of capital in and through
discrete biophysical processes (Kloppenburg, 2004). Yet, it bears noting, no small
amount of the impetus for this recent acceleration in nature's commodifi cation
comes from explicit policy prescriptions advocating privatisation and market
exchange as means to better conserve and rationally manage natural resources and
the environment (McAfee, 1999; Liverman, 2004). A proliferation of so-called
'market-based' mechanisms in environmental governance has deepened the com-
modifi cation of particular biophysical processes and entities under the infl uence of
a broad 'neoliberalisation' of nature (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Heynen et al.,
