Innovation, Justice, and the Value of Nature

Industrial societies have long treated nature as a freely available “natural resource” and as a public dumping ground. The results have been catastrophic. Extinctions, pollution, global climate change, and pervasive environmental injustice are just a handful of the terrible consequences of taking the value of ecology – and equity – for granted.

What should be done? One worldwide policy trend is to double down on economic thinking: let’s figure out ways to assign monetary values to nature and innovate new, often market-oriented governance institutions to help “internalize” the terrible costs of industrial society. An opposite approach is to disavow economic approaches to environmental governance, perhaps because we think nature is intrinsically valuable or priceless, and instead build institutions that attempt to isolate nature from the economic sphere.

Rather than taking either of these “paradigm-first” approaches, at RESL we investigate real-world innovations in climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation to try to understand how they interweave economic and moral considerations at once. A major component of RESL’s work is developing a more fully sociological account of the valuation of nature that can better explain how politics, morality, and justice shape innovations in environmental governance.

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