This post is part of a symposium on Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Read the rest of the posts here.
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I have followed Alyssa Battistoni’s writing on environmental politics and political economy for over a decade, so it’s gratifying to see Free Gifts out in the world. Her argument is an important one: when we talk about “nature,” we are partly talking about a series of human judgments, concepts, and institutions. As Raymond Williams put it more than 50 years ago, when we speak of a landscape, what we’re really invoking is a kind of person who views the terrain in a certain way. In the same spirit, Battistoni argues that all accounts of the “value” of the non-human world are tied up with broader accounts—and regimes—of value: economic, aesthetic, political.
To treat any version of nature’s value as a fact, just something we have to accept and start out from, means concealing the human judgments behind this fact, and so effacing our freedom to judge and choose. More specifically, influential economic accounts of nature’s value both have this effect—they plug natural phenomena into existing market-modeled value as commodities, externalities, ecosystem services, etc., without acknowledging that these modes of value themselves express and conceal choices—and set up natural phenomena to be valued only in relation to the ways they can be made profitable, so that nature ends up either commodified or discarded. The further twist in her argument is that this is not just how we treat nature: it is how we treat one another, in ways that we also imagine as “natural.” Battistoni’s argument is about capitalism, but the principle seems to generalize: any system of political economy premised on an unquestioned account of value will limit our freedom—our ability to decide how to value the nonhuman world, as well as one another. In moving beyond these limitations, politics has a special role to play. For it is the domain in which we recognize—at least potentially and in principle—that we can and do choose the terms of our collective life, including the modes of value by which we will steer and be steered.
This vision, attractive in many respects, faces challenges from a few directions, and I’ll be interested to see how Battistoni develops these themes in future work. One is the question of how a politics of free collective decision could genuinely hold itself open to the question of the value of the non-human. While Battistoni convincingly argues that everyone who wants to naturalize nature’s value, even those advancing some kind of anti-commodification crypto-politics (spiritual, aesthetic, or otherwise), is evading politics, it is not immediately clear what it would look like to relate to nature without falling into this trap. There is currently lots of interest—in politics and law, not just in the environmental humanities—in the “personhood” of non-human entities, such as rivers and ecosystems, and in the “rights of nature.” But, to my mind at least, no one has really shown how the voice of the non-human can enter into legislation, litigation, elections, etc.
The ground problem is a linguistic gap: politics in all its forms, including law, is a mode of language use, and we share language only among humans. All efforts to overcome this gulf end up privileging certain human advocates and their conceptions of nature’s value, whether this is on grounds of scientific expertise or cultural authenticity. New Zealand’s governance regime for the Whanganui River includes a major role for local Maori, while Ecuador’s constitutional “rights of nature” provision incorporates the indigenous conception of “Pacha Mama.” Such privileging may be defensible on various grounds, but it seems inconsistent with Battistoni’s call for a politics that is its own ground of decision, without deference to pre-political benchmarks of value. So I wonder how she thinks about these questions as problems for the politics of value.
The question I have just posed is a salient instance of a larger question that Free Gifts invites: what is Battistoni’s conception of politics? Politics is where the arguments of the book lead, but in the book “politics” sometimes seems to stand for the general idea of free collective choice over value rather than for any institutional specification. This is fair enough, as a definitional starting point and as a normative ideal; but as all the book’s critical arguments highlight, so much depends on institutional specification. Certain procedural definitions of legitimate politics are initially useful for imagining what it might mean to refer all questions ultimately to political judgment: for instance, an appeal to democracy defined as a majority vote of political equals. But given that most questions will never get taken up in this manner, any politics soon becomes a system of representation, delegation, entrenchment, etc. A democrat has to ask where the “voice of the people” comes in—at key junctures of popular sovereignty such as constitution-making, in regular elections, in referenda or citizen juries? What kinds of institutional modes would best suit the conception of freedom that Battistoni wants to advance, with meaningful collective choice over the vision of value we are going to live by, among ourselves and in relation to the larger living world? The case for a turn to politics brings us merely to the threshold of these questions. It would be great to know more about how she thinks of majoritarianism, representation, delegation, constitutionalism, etc., in relation to the sort of politics that interests her.
I’m also curious to see where Battistoni’s thinking will go in relation to two approaches to nature and value that she rejects, but which I think are hard to discard entirely. The first is functionalism: the idea that how people value and use any aspect of non-human nature is substantially determined by the combination of what we need and what we can get from it—that is, determined by human interests, the material characteristics of the resource, and the available technology. This thought is shared among thinkers as various as Harold Demsetz and G.A. Cohen. Is it wrong? How big is the effective space that the turn to politics opens up, relative to functionalism? Battistoni writes in a way that suggests the answer should be “quite big,” but the tradition of functionalism suggests otherwise, and I’m not sure Free Gifts gives us sufficient reason to reject it.
The other tradition that’s interesting here is moralism. It’s anathema to Battistoni’s way of thinking that there might be an incorrigible conflict between some human nature (“nature” now in the sense of “how people are”) and the ecological limits of the planet. That kind of eco-moralism is figured here as anti-political. And there is no doubt that it both tends to constrain the scope of politics and makes what ambit is left to politics much more nearly tragic in its significance. But on the face of it, all arrangements of political economy to date have become channels for people to put pressure on natural systems without much regard for those systems’ capacity. At some point the balance of plausibility begins to shift from pinning this onto a system of value to pinning it onto something about human appetites and needs. I emphasize balance: on the one hand, effective human motives vary with technology, politics, institutions and culture; on the other, certain kinds of human interests have to be taken more or less as given. But I suspect the mistrust of treating anything about people as foundational except our political capacity results in somewhat understating the way that something in the neighborhood of human nature figures in all of this.
Really, what I’ve called moralism here is the flip side of functionalism. The paired questions are: what kinds of relatively durable considerations put limits on the kinds of political choice that Battistoni calls for, and what kinds of political judgments follow if there are enduring, tragic conflicts between perennial human motives and the kinds of ecological values that many of us also want to take seriously?
