Socialising Nature

What are the politics of nature in a burning world? Should nature be more strongly protected by giving it rights, or appreciated differently by creating new values? Or, should it be actively socialised by directly confronting its owners? In what follows, I argue for the third option, defending a classical socialist vision of transformation, but applying it in a wholly new, ecological context. Unlike a workplace, nature cannot simply be seized by its employees and run under democratic self-management. Nature is not just another factor of production, an input to be adjusted, a value to be determined — it is the condition and limit of our existence, our “inorganic body” as Marx described it, our self outside ourselves.^[1] To socialise nature would thus transform ourselves, as well.

To make this case, I lay out three strategies for positively transforming our relation to nature in the context of ecological crisis. The first describes the many popular attempts to bring the power of private law to the rescue of ecosystems, which I call the legalisation of nature. The second strategy encompasses the work of creating new moral concepts, frameworks and values for relating to nature, land and the biosphere in general. I call this the moralisation of nature. The third involves the collective task of challenging the underlying property relations and economic frameworks that govern our relation to the natural world. This would be a socialisation of nature. Whereas the first two strategies offer strong tools for protecting some ecosystems and better orienting our behaviour towards them, they are heavily constrained in practice, and ultimately incapable of challenging the economic imperatives that drive the plunder and degradation of nature. For these first two strategies to succeed, even on their own terms, they would have to push beyond themselves towards a project of active socialisation. That is to say: only the socialisation of nature can redeem the minimal demand of living less “wrongly”^[2] on this planet together.

Legalising Nature

The legalisation of nature names the ongoing attempt to create protections for complex ecosystems, endangered species, wildlife, bodies of water, flora and fauna by incorporating nature into the legal architecture of modern societies. Among the most prominent ways to do so is to assign legal personality to nature, so that the institutions of private law can be leveraged with all their force to protect ecosystems from unsustainable practices. Importantly, the uses of the law in this case are not environmental lawsuits to protect forests for villagers, or legal cases against toxic waste, pollution and so on — these are all essentially human-centered strategies, which presuppose that the victims of harm to nature are the humans who use it. In the era of dangerous climate change, when the stability of ecosystems themselves is being disturbed, a new legal strategy, the argument for moralisation goes, is needed, one which not only speaks from the standpoint of human interests, but from the standing of nature itself.

To do so, the strategy is to give enforceable rights to nature that can be defended by stewards, advisors, or trustees in a court of law. Such “Earth Jurisprudence” has been taking place, in different ways, throughout indigenous communities in New Zealand, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as in local statutes in the USA, Sweden, Australia, Columbia, Canada and more.^[3] The idea is simple: if an artificial body like a corporation can be granted legal personhood and thus legal standing, represented by other human beings who are obligated to act in its best interests, however so defined, then why can’t the same status be assigned to a tree, a river, or an entire forest? Although it may sound strange, there is nothing morally or legally contradictory about this strategy of assigning rights to nature — of granting rights to non-human subjects — since that is what we do all the time to other non-human subjects for various economic reasons. 

Which rights in particular are granted to nature? It depends on the particular case, but usually this involves rights to exist, to flourish, to regenerate, and to evolve. Importantly, for some, it also includes the strongest right of all: property rights. In the case of nature, this implies the right for, say, a river, a mountain range, a species of wild boar, or a swampland to be an owner of itself. All these natural goods can easily be conceptualised as “owners” of themselves, even using the standard subjective rights of private law. Lawyers have been working on this concept for at least 50 years, since Christopher Stone’s classic 1972 article on whether trees have standing.^[4] Importantly, it is not just environmental lawyers in Western courts that have pursued this strategy; the idea of “rights to nature” or “the self-ownership of nature” has much deeper roots in indigenous communities and cosmologies worldwide, for instance, in the ecological-religious concepts of Pachamama, buen vivir and Te Awa Tupua.^[5] 

These ideas are usually tied to particular religious, metaphysical and epistemological perspectives on the nature of the universe, on the ultimate sources of being and life, and on the roles of human beings as caregivers, as well as particular conceptions of time, seasonality and cyclicality, for instance, amongst Quechua, Aymara, or Maori peoples. These concepts have been used in various contexts to assign legal rights to natural objects such as rivers and forests, for instance in the Ecuadorian constitution of 2008, the New Zealand parliament of 2017, and in many cases elsewhere. However, the liberal version of this thesis that dominates in “Western” frameworks is not based on alternative indigenous cosmologies, but the established epistemological framework of modern law itself — broadly, private law.  This is because private property rights are chiefly valued in liberal capitalist societies, and it is only these rights which are able to stand up to the claims of others. 

To leverage private law for nature means using the full arsenal of property law, contract law and tort law to defend instead of destroy living nature: in short, to fight fire with fire. What else will stop a mining company from tearing apart a forest ecosystem that has major potential value to its investors but the strong property rights of the forest itself? That is, the forest’s own interest in staying where it is, as advocated by the stewards of the trust tasked with fiduciary duties to protect the rights of that particular forest and its multi-species universe of living inhabitants. 

So far, so good with respect to the legalisation strategy. There are, however, many potential pitfalls inherent to this approach. To name one, as one prominent advocate for expanding (property) rights to nature itself says: 

Expanding property rights to a previously excluded group does not change the existing framework of property. Existing land ownership, property boundaries, rights to exclude animals, and systems of recording property remain totally unchanged under my proposal. Rights expansion is not redistribution; no one takes land or property away from current landowners.^[6]

In other words, under this vision, the world stays exactly as it is: no changes in property, no redistributions of ownership. All that is required is the addition of a new right — one intended to be strong enough to counter the immense vested interests of fossil capitalists and real-estate developers, asset-management firms and palm oil companies. However, any politics of nature that neatly fits within the existing political economic framework without changing the property relations themselves is doomed, in practice, to fail. Take, for example, a confrontation between the rights of a forest and those of property owners whose developments are poised to bring jobs, growth and value to the economy. Moreover, much of the natural world in need of protection exists already as private property — how might we reconcile these conflicting rights?^[7] While some cases may be ruled in favour of the rights of a natural entity, this is hardly guaranteed, and decisions are ultimately delegated to the prerogative of the courts.

Furthermore, endowing nature with rights might be mediated through the creation of new assets in natural capital, ecosystem services or biodiversity banks. This is already a much-touted strategy of green capital, sponsored by the EU, IMF, World Bank and hundreds of NGOs, all wanting to use the ecological crisis to spur new forms of economic growth. The problem with such a strategy, as both Katharina Pistor and Adrienne Buller have shown, is that every attempt to legally create new assets leads to new forms of extraction without confronting the underlying problem, and often failing to achieve the stated goal of protecting natural “assets”.^[8]

The economic valuation of nature, furthermore, imposes a normative framework on ecosystems that denies the plurality of non-economic values which cannot always be reduced to a single number or dollar value. Abstracting particular species, services or conditions from out of their ecological context of living relations means cutting them off from what they are, devaluing their organic and symbiotic intertwinement. Such valuations can increase the harm done to ecosystems, and appear to neutrally solve problems that are inherently political or ethical.^[9] Even their “efficiency”, understood in terms of minimal interventionism, is questionable, given that they would require a strong regulatory state to enforce. For these reasons, the legalisation of nature is a highly limited strategy for promoting sustainability, curbing emissions, protecting ecosystems, and transforming our relation to land. 

Moralising Nature

If legal strategies are not adequate to the task of politicising nature in a way that can actually slow — instead of accelerate — the ongoing social and ecological catastrophe in which we live, then what alternatives are available? The legalisation of nature represents a purely formal strategy without an explicit moral conscience, without a guiding vision of what should be done. What would it mean, instead, to moralise nature? On the one hand, it can mean the attribution of moral value and worth to nature through a particular moral philosophy. Under capitalism, the primary form of “value” attributed to nature is its exchange value, not its moral value. Because the exchange value that shapes our appropriation of nature is amoral, any moralisation of nature must incorporate the natural environment within a normative framework that can provide real duties and responsibilities towards our surroundings, and not disregard them as background conditions for exploitation.

This could mean acting with a utilitarian moral vision of nature — that is, relating towards a particular natural environment or ecosystem with the purpose of making the best use of it, whatever that may entail. It could mean acting under a spiritual sense of the value of nature: one that emphasises “aesthetic beauty, ‘living’ nature, personal experience, and theological obligation”. Finally, it could entail a biocentric conception of value, one focused on the intrinsic value of the living ecosystem itself, and its holistic, interdependent flourishing.^[10] 

However, not all approaches to moralising nature imply subjecting nature to one of our many existing moral philosophies. Instead, to protect nature, we might articulate new values towards it. Many such approaches have been proposed, including the environmental philosophers Paul Taylor and Dale Jamieson’s concept of “respect for nature”, arguments for the “autonomy of nature”, biocentric egalitarianism, natural flourishing, and planetary boundaries, to name a few.^[11] These values could include conceptions of care, concern and stewardship for the natural environment; they might advocate an ethics of degrowth, or an alternative epistemology inspired or rooted in indigenous ways of life. These beliefs may entail saving resources, defending old growth forests, attending to destroyed ecologies, protecting animal species from harm and extinction via legislation, community defense, political advocacy, social protest and direct action.

In short, the purpose of moralising nature is to develop normative guidelines that can orient action towards our threatened environmental conditions of existence, for our sake and for the sake of other living things.  Whereas nature today is primarily treated as morally empty — as  a resource for use, as a sink for dumping, as a background condition, as always elsewhere — the task would be to somehow bring back the intrinsic value of nature, with attendant duties of respect, concern, care, into liberal capitalist societies. As opposed to “external” legal measures which may have little effect on a person’s own self-conception, this is a thick ethical vision which can be adopted “internally”, so to speak, in order to guide individuals in their daily practices and to alter their self-identities. Importantly, moralisation is not just something done in regards to nature; it is also something we do  to ourselves. To change our relation to nature is to change our behaviour towards each other through new forms of recognition, sanctioning, praise, disgust, and other moral emotions. Moralising the wilderness, for instance, is analogous to moralising smoking, or moralising trash. It is a way of incorporating moral standards into acts which have previously gone ethically underdetermined. 

The strong argument for moralising nature is that doing so is necessary to motivate individuals: to act, the logic goes, they have to bind themselves to a larger goal, or principle. A politics of nature cannot therefore be purely formal, objective, abstract, or imposed from without. It has to be embraced from within and become a subjective maxim of action — that is to say, one has to identify with it as one’s own will. 

As with legalisation, there are significant problems with this approach. First, moralisation cannot be required of anyone, lest it contradicts itself as a moral principle freely embraced by individuals themselves. Moral values, as opposed to legal measures, depend on their active adoption into individuals’ self-conception, instead of simply acting in line with them out of fear of force. This means there can be no imposing a specific normative orientation from the outside; respecting the autonomy of nature, for instance, can only work if one takes it up oneself as meaningful. The upshot is that the entire approach of creating new values for nature relies on a deep faith: one can only hope that the new moral value, once articulated, is adopted by others.

Secondly, moral values are not simply chosen by isolated individuals thinking themselves into a new moral worldview; rather, they are usually tied to some particular group or community in which such values are inculcated or articulated in the first place.^[12] These moral views thus remain particular to certain ethical communities, even if their aim is universal. In other words: it is one thing to advocate a new value of nature or ethics of Gaia; it is another thing to expect anyone else to agree with it. Without being part of a community in which these moral views are present, it is hard to see them as anything but another commodity in the marketplace of morality. In the context of a deeply pluralistic world with competing ethical visions, to rely on the possibility that a new moral approach to nature will be universally adopted is an unlikely strategy for success.

Socialising Nature

If the legalisation of nature remains merely formal and external, and if the moralisation of nature remains merely subjective and internal, then we need another strategy that can combine both the formal and subjective, the external and internal approaches to the natural world. If the legalisation of nature cannot be easily internalised, and if the moralisation of nature cannot be easily universalised, then we need another option that can be both internalised and universalised. Is there a politics of nature that can do this?

My answer is yes: this is the socialisation of nature, a political strategy that seeks to ground both the external and internal dimensions of transforming our relation to the natural world by democratising our relation to non-human nature, challenging the logic by which nature is appropriated as an object, value, or input into circuits of value. To socialise nature presupposes that our conception of nature as an external realm to be mastered is already the result of particular social relations of production. Nature is part of our social metabolism, imbricated in how we produce our means of subsistence. This means that how we conceive of nature is itself a class question. Socialising nature would mean rejecting the externality of nature and incorporating ecosystems into the project of social transformation, thus changing the meaning of the “social” itself. The aim is to extricate both human and nonhuman nature from harmful property relations that constrain the ability for multiple species and life-forms to flourish together.

What I am getting at is a practical socialisation of nature, just like there are calls for — and examples of — a practical socialisation of housing, health care, energy, and education. This means transforming our relation to certain basic goods through democratisation and planning. When it comes to housing, for instance, the recently successful campaign to socialise the real estate properties of mega-landlords in Berlin involves first legally expropriating them through a democratic referendum, and then transferring ownership into a new body, composed of tenants, senators, experts and consumers, who are tasked with safeguarding this good from private and state interference. Socialisation in this sense does not necessarily mean nationalisation, or collectivisation of land and agriculture. Rather, socialisation means democratising ownership and economic planning at a variety of scales. It is not primarily about taking property into state ownership or protecting the commons, though both of these might take place in the process. The task of socialising nature is rather to discover, develop and incorporate the social and ecological needs of human and non-human nature within a general plan for producing and distributing well-being for all. 

The possible forms of socialisation are as varied as the kinds of goods to be socialised. The very idea of socialisation has its roots in the German Revolution of 1918, when workers and soldiers councils called for socialisation as a way of democratising the economy, of replacing anarchic private ownership with conscious, planned control. Between 1918 and 1921, thousands of articles, books, speeches and pamphlets appeared on the topic of socialisation. Some proposed top-down models of central planning, others bottom-up models of council democracy; some proposed expropriation without compensation, others legislation without confrontation.^[13] What is relevant in this history is how some of these first socialisation plans also represent early attempts at formulating an ecological economics: that is, thinking through a dynamic economy according to its physical components and constraints, instead of its marginal utility costs.^[14] Market economies use the price signal to reduce all information down to one; our needs, however, are much more heterogeneous. How, for instance, can we monetise the value of an ecosystem? Better yet, what is the evidence in favour of doing so? Against the monism of the market, socialisation allows for a pluralism of values.

What would it mean then, in practice, to socialise not just housing, mobility, industry or health care — but natural resources, ecosystems, habitats? When it comes to natural resources like water, forests, iron, gas, the path is fairly straightforward: socialisation means taking possession away from private individuals and states, and putting these resources collectively in the hands of those who use and need them, in order to decide how to best manage them for all users, including non-human species. 

In the case of whole ecosystems, habitats, wildlife, the task is more complex. Can these be socialised? If socialisation traditionally names the process of democratising the economy, then what would it mean to democratise nature? For the time being, I can only speculate, but it would surely entail a qualitative and quantitative reckoning of our ecological interdependencies, so that informed decisions can be made about how to use, share and repair our biomes with other inhabitants of this planet. It would mean actively integrating the health of various ecosystems into our forms of life, into how we conceive of our own needs; and conversely, integrating our forms of life more deeply into various ecosystems as well. All of this is just a way of asking the question of how we can live together without exploiting each other — only in this conception, “each other” means more than just human persons. 

Socialisation, above all, allows these questions of living together to be asked and publicly decided upon in the first place, in accordance with multiple and sometimes incommensurable criteria of human and nonhuman flourishing. There is no single model here, no predetermined formula or automatic algorithm: the process of socialisation is inherently political, and will produce even more conflict over how to mediate the competing interests of joint existence. Just as workers and soldiers in 1918-19 created councils to socialise their industries and take control over the production of the economy and their lives, we can now expand the very idea of a council and the meaning of socialisation to include not just humans and their workplaces but non-human species and ecosystems as well. Legalising and moralising nature are not enough to resolve the accelerating climate, biodiversity and environmental crises of the present. As these crises are socially caused, they require a social answer: this is the work of socialising nature.