The Business of biodiversity or the making of necrodiversity

Biodiversity is being quickly eroded, with serious consequences for human and ecosystems well-being. In the face of such loss, business and the market are being enrolled as key players in environmental conservation, the argument being that by putting a price on biodiversity, it will be better valued and preserved. The paper draws on the idea of economic performativity to offer a critique of such ‘economization’ and suggest that the translation of biodiversity conservation into economic resources has profound consequences for the way we understand, and care for, biodiversity. The first part of the paper attends to the process of economization through which biodiversity becomes a business opportunity. In the second part, it is argued that this process of economization produces a much impoverished biodiversity, reduced to a collection of substitutable dead objects to be counted, priced and exchanged or offset – ‘necrodiversity’. It also assumes that we can only care for biodiversity by pricing it, effacing other valuation systems. The third part of the paper seeks to open up our understanding to alternative representations that attend to the vitality and complexity of biodiversity and invite different forms of ethical action. These alternatives suggest that biodiversity conservation may best be fought on the terrain of rights than on the market.