The Value of Nature

ABSTRACT: In classical political economy, natural agents appear as contributors to production, conventionally understood: sheep's viscera help produce wool; wind drives the sails of merchant ships; fertile soil helps crops grow. But each of these is dependent on countless others that go unmentioned. Soil is "produced" by countless worms, fungi, mites, and other insects, which decompose organic debris and transfer nutrients between plants. Bacteria in the sheep's gut help the sheep digest grass; bees pollinate the plants the sheep eat; the plants capture solar energy and convert it to a form the sheep can process—which brings us back to the soil. Even the wind wouldn't blow in the same way without temperature patterns linked to global climate regulation, itself maintained by a complex array of living systems. These natural agents don't go directly into commodity production—but they regenerate the ones that do. More than that, they constitute Earth's "life support systems"—the carbon cycle, water purification, soil fertility, and other elements that make the planet habitable. Thus, anthropologist Anna Tsing argues, "making worlds is not limited to humans." Rather, "all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water." These multispecies activities are more than world-making: they are planet-making. The actions and interactions of various life forms, from amoebas to sequoia, have over millions of years shaped Earth's very geology and atmosphere so significantly as to make it a qualitatively different kind of planet than Mars or Venus.