Infrastructural nature

Abstract

The assertion that ‘ecosystems are infrastructure’ is now common in conservation science and ecosystem management. This article interrogates this infrastructural ontology, which we argue underpins diverse practices of conservation investment and ecosystem management focused on the strategic management of ecosystem functions to sustain and secure human life. We trace the genealogies and geographies of infrastructural nature as an ontology and paradigm of investment that coexists (sometimes in tension) with extractivist commodity regimes. We draw links between literatures on the political economy of ecosystem services and infrastructure and highlight three themes that hold promise for future research: labor, territory, and finance.

Urban geography II: Materially important cities

“…Finally, geographers, with their sensitivity to natural processes, land politics and socio-spatial inequality will generate new frameworks for urban theory. We can see, for example, how Nelson and Bigger (2022), Robin and Cástan Broto (2021), Wakefield (2021a, 2021b) and Long and Rice (2019), to name but a few, have built on urban political ecology to set out how material urban space might be framed in a new, climatically sensitized future scholarship. And there is deep terrain to be excavated: one that requires ‘earth scientists, social scientists, archaeologists, urban planners and civil engineers’ to work together on the city as landform (Dixon et al, 2018: p. 122) or marine biologists, consumption sociologists and urban governance theorists on how the water-based city might be freed from plastic waste (Hawkins, 2021).…”

Data sinks, carbon services: Waste, storage and energy cultures on Ireland’s peat bogs

“…What is important to point out here are the ways that ‘natural’ service provision is presented as a climate solution for and by tech companies via proprietary technologies. Synthesising a growing body of literature on the topic, Nelson and Bigger (2021) have proposed the term ‘infrastructural nature’ to describe ‘policy approaches, scientific practices, discourses and investment strategies that make ecosystems legible, governable and investable as systems of critical functions that sustain and secure (certain forms of) human life’ (Nelson and Bigger, 2021: 2). The task of making ecosystems legible requires considerable scientific and technical work to map, assess, value, monetize and, ultimately, circulate an ecosystem service such as carbon sequestration (Dempsey and Robertson, 2012).…”

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…We take this ontological and epistemological plurality as an invitation to elucidate what human practices and efforts constitute labour within infrastructural processes and whether certain forms of work constitute a veritable infrastructure unto itself. In doing so, it is useful to consider Nelson and Bigger’s (2022: 10) brief taxonomy of infrastructure and labour. There, they identify three key forms: (1) labour and infrastructure, or the ways in which infrastructures reproduce precarity and different valuations of labour; (2) labour of infrastructure, or the work that builds, maintains and repairs infrastructural systems; and (3) labour as infrastructure, or the work, such as care, which becomes an infrastructure in itself as it sustains social reproduction.…”