commodification

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”The Metrics of Making Ecosystem Services”—comes from Volume 8 (2017). In her article, Pamela McElwee traces how definitions and metrics of ecosystem services (ES) have evolved and how they are sued, such as in biodiversity offsetting and wetland mitigation programs. Using the idea of the creation and deployment of calculative mechanisms, the article discusses how these processes proceed in different ES contexts, assesses what work has to happen ontologically to make ES commensurable and circulatable, and speculates on what the opportunities for future pathways other than commodification are.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

Quinoa’s Exceptional Interspecific Diversity

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) has been cultivated in the Andean highlands for millennia. Domesticated five thousand to seven thousand years ago by agriculturalists living along the shores of Lake Titicaca, quinoa is one of only a handful of crops to survive in the Andean Altiplano’s harsh clime. In fact, quinoa thrives at altitudes between 2,500 and 3,900 MASL, where frequent droughts, constant aridity, and extreme diurnal temperature fluctuations present a formidable environment for most agricultural production (even hardy crops like maize and sweet potatoes that thrive just 1,000 meters closer to sea level, for instance, cannot bear fruit on the Altiplano).

Tag: commodification

The Metrics of Making Ecosystem Services

Can Markets Save Agricultural Diversity?: Quinoa as a Case Study