The Anatomy of Biosolutionism. Anticipation, Speculative Futures and the Becoming-Environmental of Economics
The Anatomy of Biosolutionism. Anticipation, Speculative Futures and the Becoming-Environmental of Economics
Thursday, 10 July 2025
Location: SJES003 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Distributed Paper
How did nature become calculable? In the context of multiple economic and ecological crises of the present, questions of how to value and valorize nature have been given increasing prominence. The intensification of the commodification of life and ‚accumulation through conservation’ show the extent to which the safeguarding of species and ecological futures are increasingly outsourced to capital markets, leading to a the conceptual framing of nature as a ‘planetary service economy’ or as an ‘asset’.
This paper provides a cartography of economic solutions to ecological crises from an historically informed perspective. Focusing on the period between the late 1960s and the present, it examines the intellectual history of market-based approaches to integrating nature into circuits of capital through anticipatory knowledge. I investigate how nature has become calculable, governable and investable through the dis/contuinities in the interwoven intellectual trajectories of the economy vis-à-vis ecology. Adopting an approach that merges Science and Technology Studies (STS) with a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, the study sensitively navigates the intricate histories of time-specific imaginaries of the future travelling between the sciences, esp. ecology vis-à-vis economics in the 1960s to earth system science and economics in the present day, to model planetary futures. This exploration unfolds as a two-sided road, revealing the simultaneous ‘environmentalization of economics’ and the ‘economization of the environment’, mutually constituting yet fractured.
This paper provides a cartography of economic solutions to ecological crises from an historically informed perspective. Focusing on the period between the late 1960s and the present, it examines the intellectual history of market-based approaches to integrating nature into circuits of capital through anticipatory knowledge. I investigate how nature has become calculable, governable and investable through the dis/contuinities in the interwoven intellectual trajectories of the economy vis-à-vis ecology. Adopting an approach that merges Science and Technology Studies (STS) with a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, the study sensitively navigates the intricate histories of time-specific imaginaries of the future travelling between the sciences, esp. ecology vis-à-vis economics in the 1960s to earth system science and economics in the present day, to model planetary futures. This exploration unfolds as a two-sided road, revealing the simultaneous ‘environmentalization of economics’ and the ‘economization of the environment’, mutually constituting yet fractured.
Conceptually, I put forward the argument that this two-sided road can be fruitfully understood through the register of ‘biosolutionism’, i.e. the regime of governing environmental crises under conditions of uncertainty about the future with the adaptation of (bio-)economic solutions. I show how specific future imaginaries postulated in concepts such as ‘carrying capacity’ and ‘safe operating space for humanity’ serve as ‘political technologies’ in the environment-economy nexus.