On Nature, Degradation, and Life-Making in Late Capitalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper grapples with scholarly debates at the intersection of environmental degradation and capitalist accumulation. We review recent literature engaging with nature and value theory to show how a narrow conception of nature perpetuates a capitalist “production bias” that inadequately accounts for the more-than-capitalist relations involved in reconfiguring natures for capitalist value production. We argue for a return to the foundations of green Marxism that cast environmental degradation as a crisis of reproduction and draw connections with critical scholarship on wasting and a corpus of radical Indigenous, Black, and feminist scholarship which understand the value of nature to originate in life-making. We do so in order to consider environmental degradation from the politics and uneven experiences of life-making – a term we use to signal the material reproductive relations capital appropriates; the persistence of these relations in degraded environments; and the existence of these relations independent of capitalism and capitalist value. Bringing these literatures in conversation, we recast environmental degradation as a crisis of life-making, a conceptual move we argue is necessary to properly account for the more-than-capitalist relations that give historical and geographic form to environmental degradation in late capitalism.