Reconstructing nature

Today, global ecological prescriptions are called for in order to make humanity more sustainable. But thus far, the prescriptions, that the prevalent understanding of nature and its crisis demand, have been complicit with and supportive of the growth of neoliberal systems of governance and apoliticized instruments of power. The strive for sustainability has increased the penetration of neoliberal markets and neoliberal ideas of organizing the social. For example, the concept of ‘ecosystem services’ signals a privatization and commodification of nature. The depoliticizing effects, in turn, reduce the sphere of democratic political deliberation and debate as issues are centralized under technocratic management and consensual policy-making of global institutions. In this process fundamental ideological disputes and disagreements are denied, as the current presentation of the ecological crisis as global transcends all social differences. What makes these trends possible is that during the last decades the concept of nature has been produced as finite, vulnerable, as a single, confined global entity, and in need of careful management. The conception of finiteness of nature allows the economic rationalities to reach now also into nature all around us. Global framing, which, in turn, is a historically novel assertion, introduces a need to police the whole world. The paper builds on Michel Foucault’s understanding of power and governing of populations. The intention of the paper is to show the need for and outline an alternative view on the concept of nature, human-nature interrelation and natural resources that would hold a more preferable potential.