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Performing nature's value: software and the making of Oregon's ecosystem services markets

Performing nature's value: software and the making of Oregon's ecosystem services markets
Geographers of technology illustrate software code's contexts, effects, and agencies as they shape urban space and everyday life, but the consequences of code for nature remain understudied. Political ecologists have critiqued remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based conservation projects, but have not engaged more broadly with the role of software in the contested production, circulation, and application of ecological knowledge. Yet, around the world, data analytics firms and conservation nonprofits argue for optimizing environmental management through faster and bigger data collection and new techniques of data manipulation and visualization. I present a case study from the US state of Oregon, illustrating how conservationists and environmental regulators employ computer programming to plan markets in which entrepreneurs restore stream and wetland ecosystem services to earn offset credits. In these markets, code-executed algorithms constituting spreadsheets, web maps, and GIS utilities generate, relate, and make sense of the data that define credit commodities. I argue that code tends toward three effects: producing a landscape defined by wetlands' modeled value, performing social relations associated with nature's neoliberalization and financialization, and legitimating these moves. Although emphasis on the performativity of code and other technological objects is warranted, the contexts in which these are authored, deployed, and evaluated should remain central to understanding environmental governance. This is to caution against seeing technology as reducing nature and society to state or capitalist rationalities and to hesitate to differentiate prima facie code's work on space and on nature. I call for bridging political ecology and geographies of technology in ways that can explain how code is generative of environmental knowledge, change, and conflict.
- University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh United States
- University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh United States
Geography, bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography|Nature and Society Relations, SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography, bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences, SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography|Nature and Society Relations
Geography, bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography|Nature and Society Relations, SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography, bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences, SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Geography|Nature and Society Relations
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citations This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).13 popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.Top 10% influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).Average impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.Average
