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Nature Swapped and Nature Lost

Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice

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  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Elia Apostolopoulou

    1. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

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  • Offers a theoretically-informed and socially rooted, radical critique of the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies
  • Critically analyses social contestation and community struggles against biodiversity offsetting in England
  • Draws attention to the way offsetting exacerbates inequality by producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 1-26

  3. Neoliberal Natures and Biodiversity Offsetting

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 27-74

  4. Equivalent Natures and Non-places

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 75-108

  5. Value or Rent? A Marxist Analysis of Offsetting

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 109-161

  6. Biodiversity Offsetting in England: Deepening the Neoliberal Production of Socionatures

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 163-214

  7. Offsetting, Urbanization and the Neoliberalization of Space in Post-crisis England

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 215-263

  8. Discussing with the Supporters and the Opponents of Biodiversity Offsetting

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 265-315

  9. Afterword

    • Elia Apostolopoulou
    Pages 317-348

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 349-404
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Keywords

About this book

This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods.


The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes.  


Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.





Reviews

“Ever wondered why capitalism, neoliberalism, and nature conservation are at odds? Here is the answer! This book is an exquisite rendition of the irremediable tension between sustaining the environment and mobilising nature for capital accumulation, convincingly demonstrating that market environmentalism cannot deliver a socially sane and ecologically sound world.” (Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester, UK)

“This book offers a radical, scholarly and socially relevant critique of biodiversity offsetting. Detailed theoretical analysis and compelling examples convincingly demonstrate the political economy behind what many persist in seeing as a neutral technical instrument for nature governance.” (Bill Adams, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development, University of Cambridge, UK)

“This book offers an innovative Marxist analysis of biodiversity offsetting. It deserves to be closely read by all those interested in the design and outcomes of market-based mechanisms for environmental protection and social contestation against them.” (Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, Bath-Spa University, UK)

“It is one thing to critique something like biodiversity offsetting as just another mad neoliberal attempt to make nature visible to the market. It is quite another to go beneath this absurd surface, and explain biodiversity offsets within broader political economic processes of capital accumulation and the frenzy of investment in the urban built environment – particularly in the post-2008 crisis world. In Nature Swapped and Nature Lost, Elia Apostolopoulou has done the latter – and significantly deepened our understanding of the relationship between neoliberal natures and the uneven geographies of global capitalism today.” (Matthew Huber, Syracuse University, USA)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Elia Apostolopoulou

About the author

Elia Apostolopoulou is a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK and a visiting research fellow at Harokopio University of Athens, Greece. While writing a significant part of this book she was a lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK. She is also co-editor of The Right to Nature: Social Movements, Environmental Justice and Neoliberal Natures (2019).

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Nature Swapped and Nature Lost

  • Book Subtitle: Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice

  • Authors: Elia Apostolopoulou

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46788-3

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46787-6Published: 24 June 2020

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46790-6Published: 24 June 2021

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-46788-3Published: 23 June 2020

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIX, 404

  • Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Environmental Policy, Environmental Geography, Environmental Management, Sociology, general

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