ABSTRACT

Nature changed in the 1970s. However we “value” nature, our conventions and practical engagements with the external world-“the environment” or “nature”— under capitalism have operated as if nature were given, a free good or source of wealth, an unlimited bounty awaiting only the “hand of man” to turn it into a bundle of resources. With decolonization and the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s coupled with the oil shock of 1973, the utilitarian presumptions that undergirded so much of the relationship to nature under capitalism hit their limits. Capitalist actors could no longer be sure that “natural resources” would be everywhere and eternally available to them. The very grounds of capitalism’s global ambition-environmental as much as spatial-had been altered. Yet at the same moment that recognition of environmental exploitation increasingly scripted capitalists as the enemy of nature, those exploitative practices, indeed nature itself, was remade for capitalism. In less than two decades, corporate capitalism reversed its dismissive opposition to environmental movements and gleefully embraced various brands of environmentalism as its own. In the course of this shift, and central to it, nature became an accumulation strategy for capital.1