Nature Swapped and Nature Lost : Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice

This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. __Nature Swapped and Nature Lost__ brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all. Acknowledgments 7 Contents 9 List of Figures 14 List of Tables 15 1 Introduction 16 1.1 This Is Where This Book Begins 18 1.2 The Brave New World of Neoliberal Conservation 23 1.3 The Unevenness, Inequality and Injustice of the Reordering of Places and Socionatures: A Historical-Geographical Analysis of Offsetting and Social Resistance Against It 31 References 36 2 Neoliberal Natures and Biodiversity Offsetting 42 2.1 Neoliberalism and Non-human Nature 44 2.2 Neoliberal Conservation 47 2.3 The Dialectics of Green and Un-green Grabbing After the 2008 Financial Crash 52 2.4 Understanding the Neoliberal Hegemony: The Dialectics of Coercion and Consent Under Capitalism in Crisis 56 2.5 A Brief History of the Emergence, Evolution and Neoliberal Origins of Biodiversity Offsetting 61 2.6 Key Definitions 72 2.7 Current Distribution of Biodiversity Offsetting and Compensation Mechanisms Across the Globe 75 References 80 3 Equivalent Natures and Non-places 90 3.1 Biodiversity Offsetting and the Construction of Equivalence: Insights from the Ecological Literature 92 3.2 Offsetting and the Construction of Equivalence: Insights from Critical Social Sciences 101 3.3 Offsetting’s Non-places: The Tensions Between Differentiation, Interchangeability, Homogeneity, and Unevenness in the Capitalist Production of Geographical Space 110 References 116 4 Value or Rent? A Marxist Analysis of Offsetting 124 4.1 Nature, Labor and Value 126 4.2 The Implications of Capitalist Commodity Production for Socionatures: Unraveling the Environmental Contradictions of Capitalism 134 4.3 Value or Rent? The Political Economy of Biodiversity Offsetting 139 4.4 Planetary Urbanization, Socio-Spatial Transformations and the Remaking of Places, Livelihoods and Socionatures 148 4.5 Α Double Land Grabbing: Insights from Across the Global South and North About the Links Between Offsetting, Social Inequality, and Justice 153 References 163 5 Biodiversity Offsetting in England: Deepening the Neoliberal Production of Socionatures 177 5.1 Introduction 179 5.2 Nature Conservation in the UK After the 2008 Financial Crash: Consolidating the Hegemony of Market Environmentalism 181 5.3 Biodiversity Offsetting in the UK and Neoliberal Conservation 187 5.4 The Defra Offset Metric: The Triumph of Reductionism 193 5.5 Offsetting, Depoliticization and the Neoliberal Rescaling of Governance: It Ain’t Technical 200 5.6 Offsetting and Habitat Banking: Buying Biodiversity “Off-the-Shelf”? 206 5.6.1 Can Money Capture Nature’s Destruction? A Brief Note on the Pervasive Influence of the Logic of Cost–Benefit Analysis 214 5.7 Framing the Social as Irrelevant: Obscuring the Unevenness and Inequality Behind Offsetting’s Equivalence 216 5.8 Interregnum: A Discussion with a Designer of Offset Metrics on Ecosystem Services, Offsetting and the Social Implications of the Economic Valuation of Nature 222 References 225 6 Offsetting, Urbanization and the Neoliberalization of Space in Post-crisis England 229 6.1 The Neoliberal Restructuring of Planning and the War on Red Tape 231 6.2 The Convergence of Offsetting and Urbanization: Fetishizing Economic Growth 236 6.3 The Selection of Offset Pilots: Deepening the Urban/Rural and Nature/Society Divides 241 6.4 Austerity Localism, Housing and the Presumption in Favor of “Sustainable” Development 243 6.5 Offsetting, Urbanization, and the Right to Nature as a Social Right: Community Struggles Against Large-Scale Infrastructure and Speculative Housing Development in Austerity England 248 6.5.1 Contesting Executive Housing and the Loss of Open Space in North Tyneside 249 6.5.2 The “Feathered” Obstacles to Urban Redevelopment in Lodge Hill 255 6.5.3 Green-Washing Urban Development and Large-Scale Infrastructure? The Case of HS2 Railway 260 6.6 When the Win-Win Rhetoric Meets TINA: The Tyranny of Pragmatism 268 References 272 7 Discussing with the Supporters and the Opponents of Biodiversity Offsetting 278 7.1 Introduction 280 7.2 Discussing with the Supporters of Offsetting 280 7.2.1 Interview with a Conservation Broker 280 7.2.2 Interview with a Consultant Working for the Housing Industry 297 7.3 Discussing with the Opponents of Biodiversity Offsetting 308 7.3.1 Interview with an Environmentalist 308 7.3.2 Interview with an Activist, Member of a Local Committee Opposing a Large-Scale Infrastructure Project 315 8 Afterword 329 8.1 Toward a Radical Retheorization of Offsetting: Uneven Geographies, Inequality, and Social-Environmental Justice 331 8.2 The Contradictions of the Capitalist Production of Nature and the Centrality of Class 338 8.3 The Dystopia of Offsetting’s Ahistorical and Asocial Non-places: It’s not a Flat World, After All 345 References 354 References 361 Index 398 This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people's resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting's contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting's ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all. Elia Apostolopoulou is a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK and a visiting research fellow at Harokopio University of Athens, Greece. While writing a significant part of this book she was a lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK. She is also co-editor of The Right to Nature: Social Movements, Environmental Justice and Neoliberal Natures(2019) Front Matter ....Pages i-xix Introduction (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 1-26 Neoliberal Natures and Biodiversity Offsetting (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 27-74 Equivalent Natures and Non-places (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 75-108 Value or Rent? A Marxist Analysis of Offsetting (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 109-161 Biodiversity Offsetting in England: Deepening the Neoliberal Production of Socionatures (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 163-214 Offsetting, Urbanization and the Neoliberalization of Space in Post-crisis England (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 215-263 Discussing with the Supporters and the Opponents of Biodiversity Offsetting (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 265-315 Afterword (Elia Apostolopoulou)....Pages 317-348 Back Matter ....Pages 349-404