Environmental Anthropology

Social scientists commonly know that time is a social construct and a tool for governing by those holding power. Yet, how exactly is time used for governing? This article examines how timescape (embodiment of approaches to time) works in practice as a tool of power by considering multiple networks of time that manifest in al-Batuf/Beit Netofa Valley planning policy. This valley's agriculture, mostly owned by Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, is considered by ecologists and officials a unique traditional agriculture landscape and wetland habitat that has become scarce in Israel due to its development and wetland drainage. Assembling separate modes of anthropological inquiry that attend to time as a technique, I show that knowledge, ethics, and time management are not separate spheres of governance but rather interwoven as one timescape tool of governing. Thus, the case of al-Batuf/Beit Netofa elucidates the ways in which time is used for governing in the context of an agricultural-environmental development policy and plan.

Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.

Course: Contested Natures: The politics of knowing, living, developing and conserving nature
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
        Werner Heisenberg
We live in a global society that has committed through international agreements to protecting nature and its biodiversity, but we rarely stop to think about what defines nature; who has the power to define it, own it or access it; and how culture informs how we understand nature and live with it. 
In this course, we will examine central cultural and socio-political trends and concerns regarding the interactions between nature and society.  We will explore multiple ways of understanding nature in diverse societies, examine nature as a resource for exploitation, as an asset to be protected and managed, and as a natural-cultural construct – in order to understand a wide range of meanings and practices that comprise human-nature dynamics.
This course engages predominantly with socio-cultural and environmental anthropology literature and it often intersects with environmental history, social studies of science, and sociology. Classroom lectures will provide the necessary disciplinary background.

Ultimately climate change is the product of consumption; greenhouse gases are produced by making things and energy, moving things, and carrying people around. Simply put, more people are using more energy and creating and using more “stuff” than ever before in the history of the planet. Besides lamenting the passing of low-impact village-level societies, what does anthropology have to say about consumer culture which might actually be useful in thinking our way towards more sustainable levels of consumption? I argue that a drastic re-orientation of the way we teach anthropology is in order; what do we want our students to learn about the world and what kind of skills do they need? The same argument can be made for the public messages we extend in our popular publications.

This article examines the productivity of agriculture at the Postclassic polity of Xaltocan, Mexico. Employing multiple lines of data (remote sensing, artifactual, ecofactual, chronological, demographic, historic, ethnographic, and environmental), it reconstructs the potential productivity of an integrated raised field, chinampa system that surrounded the polity. This exercise reveals that the system was capable of producing a sizeable caloric surplus above the needs of the kingdom's estimated total population and the number of laborers necessary to maintain full production. To situate the processes related to agricultural production, the paper considers how farmers' strategies were articulated with multiple institutions. Increased integration between political, social, and household institutions possibly fostered residents' incorporation into the body politic and provided mechanisms to finance the political economy. Such integration and dependency fractured, however, when Xaltocan was conquered.

This course takes eco-feminist and critical race studies approaches to the anthropology of gender and sexuality, taking “eco-feminism” as an identity, an object of analysis, and as a methodological approach. While “Feminism” in practice need not be (though often is) gender-specific, as a political and academic practice it often carries racialized inflections towards its objects of its inquiry as well as its activism. The term, “eco”, from the Greek “oikos,” means “dwelling,” “household,” “home,” or “family”, laying the foundation for examining the roles that gender and sexuality play in changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the human. These different meanings of the “eco” in eco-nomy and eco-logy shape scholarly analyses as well as the lived experiences for those do not feel “at home” in a white hetero-normative structure. In investigating the intersections and interconnections of gender and sexuality with race, ethnicity, and class, we will consider “eco’s” various forms and how humans come to think about the concept of  “home.”  An overarching question for this course revolves around whether, if, or when, one should separate environmental justice from social justice – and what the possibilities and limits are to fusing naturecultures (Haraway). The readings will cover classic anthropological approaches, current critical theory and philosophy, as well as less-often-read scholars whose voices often fall between the lines – or at the margins of – mainstream academic discourse. This is an attempt both to decolonize the syllabus as well as show how thoughts and bodies, as well as body politics become colonized. What does it mean to decolonize bodies through words? How can language create and maintain (earth) body politics? How has the concept of “home” – the “eco” continued to structure ideas about who and what bodies may chose to, or be let, to live? How do notions of “home” and what is “normal” gain their gendered, sexualized, racialized texture? What does it mean to “be at home in one’s own body?” When it comes to people’s choices about their bodies, it is crucial to understand how certain human and nonhuman bodies and lives matter, and how others do not.  The fundamental anthropological divisions of “nature” and “culture” frame how we think about what it means to be human as well as what it means “to be free to choose” what we do with our bodies. Authors include Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gloria Anzaldúa, along with Andrea Smith, and Winona LaDuke. We will read these authors along with Marilyn Strathern, Donna Haraway, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Friedrich Engels, and the Gender Nihilists, to name a few.

This article analyzes the processes of risk visualization characterizing disaster risk reduction policies and, in particular, the digital artifacts the international world of disaster management uses in an effort to view threats to the planet and render them open to human experience. The purpose of these artifacts is to foster experiences that grant both quantitative shape and social form to the nature of global risks. Tangible Earth, the first interactive digital globe, is the most sophisticated of these artifacts in that it strives to gather a wide, varied audience of humans and enroll them in co-producing the risks affecting the Earth. This process of delving into experiences of the globe as mediated by digital equipment mobilizes diverse ontologies: there is a “naturalist ontology” that represents nature as independent of the social sphere, as a force that remains insurgent and unpredictable despite efforts to quantitatively capture it through earth-monitoring instruments and probabilistic calculations, and there is also an “analogist ontology” in which nature is cast as indistinguishable from the social sphere on the grounds that both human and non-human collectives share the same propensity for resilience.

In the 1990s the Secretary General of the 1992 UN ‘Earth Summit’ and initiator of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (Maurice Strong) asserted in a series of widely quoted lectures that ‘global sustainability’ could only be achieved through the principles of business: “Earth Incorporated” should thus be run ‘with a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account’. In the wake of this statement, the world has become awash with business-oriented solutions to environmental harm. The natural environment is now widely conceived as the provider of ‘ecosystem services’ that should be paid for; as a series of variously calculable, substitutable and exchangeable units of ecological and economic value; and as a ‘bank of natural capital’ that should be invested in and may be leveraged financially.
In this chapter I honour the role that Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch played for me as I sought to understand and respond critically to the world-making capacities of market-based approaches to the management of environmental health and harm. I focus on three main matters of concern:
- parallel and different dimensions of the visioning of the ‘reproductive capacities’ of the bodies of both women and the earth as labour that should be paid for, focusing in particular on implications of the commutation to money payments effected by so-called ‘payments for ecosystem services’ discourse and practice;
- innovations in associated techno-statistical divisions of nature as ‘the world’s body’ and the ways these are acting to facilitate the bonding of nature to capital in unforeseen ways;
- the implications of the historical transition to capitalism as the unfortunate outcome of anti-feudal struggles for the possibility of a longer–lasting social programme for change linked with contemporary contestations over the capitalization of nature as ‘earth incorporated’.
I close with some reflections on the positioning and potential of struggles in a moment of populist politics in which women’s bodies and the natural world are once again experiencing intensified capture, violation and erasure.

Questo articolo presenta un'analisi storica e antropologica di alcune dinamiche socio-politiche legate alla produzione del cotone nella Repubblica dell'Uzbeki-stan. L'intento ultimo è di riflettere su come lo sfruttamento del lavoro e, in particolare, dei lavoratori della terra, sia fortemente intrecciato a politiche di centralizzazione del potere, nonché direttamente legittimato dall'autorità dello Stato, tanto da poter parlare di sfruttamento istituzionalizzato o sfruttamento produttivo (Viti 2007, p. 256). L'articolo mostrerà come tale sfruttamento sia necessariamente connesso a pratiche di depauperazione ambientale. L'industria cotoniera è il mezzo tramite cui precise dinamiche di asservimento sono ripro-dotte attraverso l'uso del diritto e del potere esecutivo, il controllo sulla terra e sui prezzi di mercato, la costruzione della propaganda di Stato, la limitazione e il controllo delle libertà individuali.

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

Storytelling has been theorised as a performative, narrative practice, but it has not been employed often as a trope in studies of musical performance. This article outlines a theoretical context for exploring the possibilities of such a conceptual move within musicology by referring to the anthropological and performance studies approaches of Turner and Schechner. Benjamin’s reflection on the storyteller as a narrator of memory and history frames the presentation of a case-study on the Baltic Youth Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ямсков А.Н. Социальная экология и этноэкология // Антропологическая наука в высшей школе: Методические материалы к оригинальным авторским спецкурсам для специальности № 350100 – Социальная антропология. – М.: ИЭА РАН – РГГУ, 2006, с. 111-144

A critical response to the trends in environmental history well summarized by Paul Sutter in "TheWorld with Us: The State of
American Environmental History", Journal of American History 100 (2013): 94-199.  The entire forum is available here: http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/issues/1001/#articles

The use of coastal sand as building material or market commodity is a common practice on Wallis Island. Today, with the current threats posed by climate change, this practice increases the dangers associated with rising sea levels. Thus it is important to investigate the complex interplay between motivations, perceptions of need and risk, time scale and public acceptance that underlie sand mining. Political power dynamics and traditional land tenure are the two key factors that determine the future of this issue.

We review human effects on biodiversity using archaeological and ethnographic cases with contrasting ecologies, population densities, and economies. Relevant trends include increasing human populations, settlement sizes, and permanence; intensification of subsistence and political economies; world colonization; and changing environmental values. Although humans have always transformed ecosystems, many pre-industrial societies maintained diverse and stable environments that are now considered natural. Disastrous strategies have resulted from values associated with colonization, market economies, property systems, resource extraction and production technologies, and the isolation of decision-makers from environmental consequences. Present-day solutions should engage decision-making by local communities, especially Indigenous and traditional societies, empowering them to shape policies and achieve conservation goals.

In this paper, I argue that frontiers are dilemmas composed of multiple dualities, be they exclusive and inclusive powers, connected space and national periphery, or modernity and primitiveness. These dilemmas, in consequence, become the mechanism to create a leeway for the state to ‘tailor’ different meanings of frontier to meet the contingent market demands. I use tea production on China’s southwest frontier as an example to demonstrate that dilemma is not an end result, but a mechanism to rearticulate the relationship among frontier, the state and the market economy. Specifically, I argue that dilemmas on China’s southwest frontier have been forged by the Chinese state with its incompatible desires between ‘modernisation’ and ‘primitiveness’ of the tea landscapes in Yunnan, a province on China’s southwest frontier. Meanwhile, the incompatible desires and the resulting dilemmas on China’s southwest frontier have further mobilised the state to flexibly rework its power to reconstruct the frontier to meet contingent market demand. Based on the shifting meanings of tea landscapes, the state has flexibly ‘shuttled through’ the dilemmas between development of modernisation and preservation of primitiveness on the frontier.

Ямсков А.Н., Власкина Т.Ю. Рыболовецкие сообщества и традиционное рыболовство на казачьем Юге России // Этнографическое обозрение, 2013, № 5, с. 3-13

Предваряя серию статей по истории и этнографии традиционного рыболовства преимущественно казачьего населения низовьев Дона, Волги и долины Терека, авторы кратко рассматривают роль этой отрасли хозяйства на стадии формирования и последующего развития казачества Юга России. В статье также анализируются некоторые экологические, экономические и правовые аспекты организации рыболовства, в частности, причины истощения рыбных ресурсов и конфликты между рыболовецкими сообществами и государством в сфере регулирования вылова и охраны рыбы.

Employing Mauss's notion of the fourth obligation, giving to the gods, this article develops a formulation of ritual exchange to examine the interactive nature of ritual practice. As a modality of interaction, ritual exchange is contingent upon enduring normative beliefs, such as perceived obligations to spiritual entities, and the social positions of ritual practitioners. Consequently, ritual exchange evinces not only the material and immaterial nature of sacred beliefs but also the potential flexibility and fungibility of social interaction. By considering a relatively under-utilized form of data to study past ritual, archaeobotanical remains, we employ this perspective to explore the ancient Maya practice of offering foods in several caves in western Belize. These data exhibit complex configurations of commonality and variability, suggesting the potential flexibility and latent fungibility of ritual exchange.Employing Mauss's notion of the fourth obligation, giving to the gods, this article develops a formulation of ritual exchange to examine the interactive nature of ritual practice. As a modality of interaction, ritual exchange is contingent upon enduring normative beliefs, such as perceived obligations to spiritual entities, and the social positions of ritual practitioners. Consequently, ritual exchange evinces not only the material and immaterial nature of sacred beliefs but also the potential flexibility and fungibility of social interaction. By considering a relatively under-utilized form of data to study past ritual, archaeobotanical remains, we employ this perspective to explore the ancient Maya practice of offering foods in several caves in western Belize. These data exhibit complex configurations of commonality and variability, suggesting the potential flexibility and latent fungibility of ritual exchange.RésuméEn recourant à la quatrième obligation selon Mauss (l'offrande aux dieux), l'auteur élabore une formulation des échanges rituels afin d'examiner la nature interactive de la pratique rituelle. En tant que modalité d'interaction, l'échange rituel dépend de la pérennité de croyances normatives, telles que les obligations perçues envers les entités du monde des esprits et le statut social des officiants. En conséquence, l'échange rituel évince non seulement la nature matérielle et immatérielle des croyances sacrées, mais aussi la flexibilité et la fonctionnalité potentielles des interactions sociales. En examinant les vestiges archéobotaniques, données relativement mal utilisées pour étudier les rituels passés, nous appliquons ce point de vue à l'étude des pratiques des anciens Mayas qui déposaient des offrandes de nourriture dans des grottes de l'Ouest du Belize. Ces données font apparaître des configurations complexes de points communs et de variabilité, qui suggèrent une flexibilité potentielle et une fonctionnalité latente des échanges rituels.En recourant à la quatrième obligation selon Mauss (l'offrande aux dieux), l'auteur élabore une formulation des échanges rituels afin d'examiner la nature interactive de la pratique rituelle. En tant que modalité d'interaction, l'échange rituel dépend de la pérennité de croyances normatives, telles que les obligations perçues envers les entités du monde des esprits et le statut social des officiants. En conséquence, l'échange rituel évince non seulement la nature matérielle et immatérielle des croyances sacrées, mais aussi la flexibilité et la fonctionnalité potentielles des interactions sociales. En examinant les vestiges archéobotaniques, données relativement mal utilisées pour étudier les rituels passés, nous appliquons ce point de vue à l'étude des pratiques des anciens Mayas qui déposaient des offrandes de nourriture dans des grottes de l'Ouest du Belize. Ces données font apparaître des configurations complexes de points communs et de variabilité, qui suggèrent une flexibilité potentielle et une fonctionnalité latente des échanges rituels.

In 2013 – the year when CO2 emissions hit the 400 ppm threshold for the first time in human history – the annual State of the World report (Worldwatch Institute 2013) was devoted to understanding whether achieving a sustainable society is still possible. Part two of the report, Getting to True Sustainability, opened with a call for the re-engineering of cultures to create a sustainable civilisation. In her contribution to it, anthropologist Melissa Leach reflects on the difficulty of achieving sustainability due to path dependencies in infrastructure (oil refineries, combine-harvesters, fridge-freezers, etc.) and social systems (corporations, governments, habits, etc.). Leach (2013: 236)
writes: ‘The challenge is … to open up understanding and action around sustainability to reveal and empower alternative pathways that might currently be hidden, including those that emerge from the experiences, knowledge, and creativity of … citizens … in particular places’. In this chapter I take up Leach’s challenge by offering an ethnographic understanding of ‘quiet sustainability’ (Smith and Jehlička 2013) in the form of organic food consumption. Looking at organic foods in Palermo, Italy from a ‘post-Pasteurian’ perspective (Paxson 2012), I pay particular attention to those aspects concerned with the cultural perception of environmental problems and the role of science and technology in food production (Lien and Nerlich 2004). By doing so, I argue that the beliefs and feelings of people who eat organic foods allow a glimpse of the values that stem from a rejection of excess, which has several points of contact with the most recent sustainability theories of the Anthropocene (Moore 2016) and planetary boundaries (Wijkman and Rockström 2012).

The paper explores the contribution of social and cultural anthropology to the study of environmental disasters and climate change as it is reflected in the literature. It then makes some suggestions how the anthropology of and in Southeast Europe can contribute to these issues and the reasons why social anthropologists from and of Southeast Europe should engage more in environmental issues. It concludes that engaging in these issues will not only refresh the discipline theoretically and methodologically in the context of zonal anthropologies but can also offer the discipline of social anthropology a more conspicuous political voice.

This course investigates a wide variety of environmental conservation projects in Africa.  We will examine efforts by colonial and post-colonial states to preserve wilderness in national parks, and how local residents have responded.  We will study projects developed by international organizations which link environmental conservation with economic benefits for local people. Finally, we will look at indigenous African efforts to conserve natural resources and to restore degraded lands.  Throughout the course, we will compare and contrast the perspectives and interests of conservation biologists, government officials, and local residents, among others.

This paper describes the arrival of a man-eating leopard in a small Himalayan town in India and the local state's subsequent struggle to control the big cat. By focusing on what went on within the apparatus of the state during this period, this paper attempts to contribute to the study of modern time in bureaucracy. It argues that the startling inefficiencies in the effective governance and regulation of the big cat stemmed from a clash of various social times that were unfolding simultaneously. It outlines five distinct forms of social time that were in play during this period, which led to long periods of waiting and allowed for the articulation of a searing critique of the Indian state by town residents. Ultimately this paper contributes a rethinking of current theories of bureaucratic time that focus on the production of disempowered waiting, risk analysis, and anticipation. Instead it argues that a study of low-level bureaucrats and citizens shows that a central task of bureaucracy is to attempt to mediate conflicting forms of social time. Moving away from accounts of bureaucratic indifference, this paper depicts failure as an impasse arising out of attempts to bring incommensurable forms and representations of time into congruence. These failures importantly imperil the legitimacy of bureaucrats and can lead to a radical critique of the state.

This chapter uses historical and ethnographic research to describe ‘landfilling’ as a regime of waste treatment in the Israeli/Palestinian context; and follows the winding tensions and surprises as the regime has unfolded over time.
This chapter has two aims. The first is to show that landfilling is more than just a straightforward means of putting trash out of site. It also constitutes trash as a particular kind of spatial, institutional, epistemic, and symbolic problem. The second aim is to explore two main contradictions of the landfilling regime that became apparent in my research in the Israeli/Palestinian context: The story of landfilling as an ultimate environmental success story, and the ambiguous meaning of ‘landfill scarcity’ (the view that Israel as a uniquely small country, in which landfilling sites are ‘naturally’ limited).
I argue that landfill scarcity is an example of what Ezrahi (2012) has termed a ‘political fiction’ — an idea that props up a political-moral order, and which is so central to that order that it resists fact-checking. In the Discussion section, I explore what new tensions and contradictions are bridged by this persist fiction, as the regime of landfilling gives way to the new regime of recycling.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Bogotá and the southwestern Amazonian state of Putumayo, Colombia, this book moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms. It weaves together an ethnography of two kinds of practitioners—state soil scientists and campesinos—who attempt to build alternatives to illicit crops and the militarized, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to replace them. In the context of the US-Colombia war on drugs, the book examines the struggles and potential collaborations between farmers, agrarian movements, state officials, and scientists over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, sustainability, and what constitutes a good and dignified life. It argues that peace is not only a political condition characterized by the official end to armed conflict, but also crucially a condition for life that is grounded in soils, and all the complex relations of which they are composed and decompose. A growing body of literature at the interfaces of cultural anthropology and science studies has made important contributions to our understandings of the intensified shift in the capitalist appropriation of material and immaterial worlds. This book both builds upon and departs from this literature by foregrounding the emergence of socio-ecological proposals that strive to exist and persist as alternatives to this reductive, market-oriented view of life. It also poses questions about what can be learned from turning our attention to “litter layers” rather than stable “soils”—in other words, toward processes that never became the industrialized or chemical soil that has taken center stage in global concerns over anthropogenic climate change.

Dal 9 marzo scorso sono vigenti le modifiche apportate agli articoli 9 e 41 della Costituzione con la riforma introdotta dalla Legge Costituzionale n° 1 approvata in Parlamento l'11 febbraio 2022 e pubblicata nel n° 44-22/02/2022 della Gazzetta Ufficiale Finalmente la tutela dell'ambiente è posta al centro dell'attenzione nazionale: essendo stata espressamente inserita tra i principi fondamentali della Costituzione, ricompresi fra gli articoli 1-12 della Carta, oltre a un interesse pubblico è anche un dovere che impegna lo Stato in primis ma anche tutti i cittadini, in particolare i proprietari di terreni, i gestori di aziende agricole e i titolari e manager di società e imprese che svolgono qualsiasi tipo di attività economica nel Paese.

Course Description: In this course you will learn about differences regarding how people perceive and interact within their natural & built environments. This year, the course is structured around the loose theme of “seeking sustainability.” As such, there will be an emphasis on how people define sustainability and adapt to make their environments better. To be sustainable implies that environments are healthy, with available natural resources, clean rather than polluted, resilient, and accessible to all. In the final few weeks, you will read and discuss questions such as, ‘How is biodiversity important in our everyday lives?’and ‘How is food security maintained in ecologically fragile environments?’. Along the way, you will practice some ethnographic interview techniques, conduct a topical interview with a friend or relative, and analyze it for key themes. Your interviews and personal interests in environmental topics will form the basis for writing your class term paper.

The articles included in this special collection examine the implementation of varied conservation agendas, seeking to integrate the strengths of a political ecology framework with insights derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS). By taking an ethnographic approach to the study of conservation projects, they challenge the nature/culture divide so central to the Western philosophical tradition and draw attention to the ways in which nature and culture are co-constituted in and through practice.

What does it mean to do violence in deep time? How is deep time evoked in our understanding of environmental harm? Environmental transformations have figured prominently in the recent history of Mongolia. Shifts in land use have been associated with severe pasture degradation, and the precarity of herding livelihoods has been a factor accelerating urbanization. Most recently, the intensification of mining activity has been a particular source of social and economic change. These contexts have led to a political and religious reevaluation of human relationships with the land. This article focuses on literary and musical interventions (particularly rap music in the first part of the article and the literary work of G. Mend-Ooyo in the later part) that draw attention to this changing relationship with the environment, which the article portrays as a potential rupture. We explore how these works domesticate deep time, nesting personal histories within the temporal depth of the landscape and crosshatching biographical, mythological, and geologic understandings of time. Yet we then see how this domestication comes to be threatened by developments that sever the relationship between people and land, leading to the disturbing prospect of being left stranded in the face of an inhospitable deep time. W hat is the span of a human life in relation to deep time—that is, in relation to the timespan of the geologic processes that shape and reshape the terrain under our feet? The term deep time itself seems to have been coined by the journalist John McPhee in his book Basin and Range, which narrates the experience of field geologists encountering the vastness of time made manifest in the rock formations they encounter. " Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the

The Anthropocene has been a generative concept in recent years and its influence can be felt across a wide range of fields. New Conservation and big data ecology are interrelated trends in ecology and conservation science that have been influenced by the technological developments and social concerns of the yet-to-be ratified Anthropocene epoch. Advocates of these ideas claim that they will revolutionize conservation science and practice, however they share many of the same underlying economic metaphors as the frameworks they seek to replace. The use of economic concepts, such as value, allows ecological science to be made legible outside of scientific communities, but that legibility places limitations on the possibilities for thinking about conservation outside of a market-based framework. If there is to be a threshold moment for new ecological thought, it will need to overcome the ideological limitations of valuation.