3. Enclosures of Nature

What happens when markets become so powerful that they disrupt natural ecosystems, reorder how people conduct their lives, and claim ownership of lifeforms? It is sometimes difficult to step outside of our culture to take stock of the actual power and far-reaching effects of markets. But once you learn to identify the commons and understand its dynamics, it becomes quite clear that the privatization and commodification of our shared wealth is one of the great unacknowledged scandals of our time. Its pernicious effects are everywhere.

This process is often called the enclosure of the commons. It’s a process by which corporations and states pluck valuable resources from their natural contexts and declare that they be valued through market prices. The point is to convert things that are shared and used by many to ones that are privately owned and controlled as tradeable commodities.

To talk about enclosure is to open up a conversation that standard economics rarely entertains—the dispossession of commoners as investors and corporations seize control of common resources. The familiar debate of “privatization versus government ownership” does not really do justice to this process because government ownership—the supposed antidote to privatization—is not really a solution. In many instances, the state is only too eager to conspire with industries to seize control of common resources for “private” (i.e., corporate) exploitation. And regulation is too often a charade that does more to legalize than eradicate market abuses.

The very concept of enclosure, then, is enormously helpful because it identifies the harmful effects of market activity and points toward the commons as an appropriate, realistic option. The word “enclosure” makes visible the antisocial, anti-environmental effects of markets and exposes the flimsy claim that “growth = progress.” The term also reminds us that any commons must preemptively figure out how to protect its shared wealth and culture in the face of relentless attempts to enclose them. Chapters 3 and 4 explore some of the more notorious, recurrent patterns of enclosure.

A few years ago, I learned of a contemporary enclosure that eerily replicated the medieval pattern of land enclosure. For more than a century, the village of Camberwell, in the fertile Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Australia, had used part of an open floodplain around Glennies Creek as a commons. It was a place for residents to keep their horses and dairy cows and to let their children fish, swim, and ride horses. In April 2005, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, “a pair of officers from the Department of Lands arrived, called together members of the [Camberwell] Common Trust, and told them the Crown land would be immediately resumed and turned over to the Ashton mine that looms over the Upper Hunter village in the form of a hollowed-out hill on the other side of the creek.”

The action was just another instance of government using its authority to seize common lands for corporate purposes. The secretary of the Camberwell Common Trust told a reporter, “When we go to community meetings with the mines they are always talking about what they will do ‘when’ they get approval. They never say ‘if ’ they get approval.” Both mining companies and government make out well from enclosures. The mining companies get cheap access to minerals and lax environmental oversight. The Australian government earned about $1.5 billion in royalties and fees at the time of the Camberwell enclosure.

Commoners are generally not so lucky. In Camberwell, blasts from the mining hollowed out the hills around the village, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Nearly two-thirds of the village population gave up fighting the mining companies and moved elsewhere.

The Camberwell experience is a classic example of state-assisted market enclosure. In the US, the government allows mining interests to extract mineral wealth on public lands under the Mining Act of 1872. Unchanged for more than 150 years, this law lets mining companies extract gold, silver, and iron ore for five dollars an acre, period. It’s been estimated that Americans have lost more than $245 billion worth of revenues over the years from this law—while ruining beautiful mountains and rivers with mine tailings and other wastes.

Similar stories from around the world can be told about timber companies raping public forests, oil companies drilling in pristine wilderness areas, industrial trawlers decimating coastal fisheries, and transnational water bottlers sucking ground-water dry.

In Latin America, transnational corporations are working with neoliberal governments to impose aggressive “neo-extractivist” policies. As Argentinian professor Maristella Svampa explains, the idea is to build megaprojects that can efficiently extract and export to industrial nations the continent’s minerals, metals, hydrocarbons, maize, soya, and other raw commodities. Cast as the only realistic path toward progress and development, dozens of dams, mines, highways, and other neo-extractivist projects are destroying entire ecosystems, communities, and Indigenous cultures. Among the more notorious enclosures are the Conga megamining project in Peru, the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in Brazil, and the road construction through the TIPNIS Indigenous territory in Bolivia.

Enclosures are a special form of theft that attract little notice, in part because governments often play a key role in legitimizing them. But in all cases, wealth that belongs to all citizens or to distinct communities is transformed into corporate-owned properties and free waste dumps. Land, water, human tissue, public spaces, human consciousness, waterways—all are raw feedstock for market use. Whatever wastes remain after these resources are monetized are dumped back into the commons, imposing further risks and costs on governments and citizens.

Seen through the lens of economics alone, the racial dimensions of capitalist appropriation may not seem so salient. But as many commentators have noted, global capitalism’s quest for more wealth dovetails with the creation of status hierarchies based on race and gender. In her book Cannibal Capitalism, Nancy Fraser notes that “capitalism harbors a structural bias for racial oppression” because, to put it simply, racial hierarchies facilitate the ability to expropriate more wealth at less expense. Unable to set limits or averse to an egalitarian ethic, capitalist enterprises have come to rely on “a stratum of unfree or subjugated people, racially marked as inherently violable,” argues Fraser. There is a distinct economic logic behind creating status hierarchies that privilege white colonizers at the expense of nonwhite commoners. To be sure, equal opportunity standards and legal reforms have been able to carve out some increments of racial justice, but they don’t address capitalism’s fierce compulsion to constantly expropriate, grow, and profit.

The unsavory realities of enclosure tend to be cloaked in the language of progress, efficiency, and development. That’s the cover story. But it is in fact a brutal act of appropriation, a raw power grab that often requires violent coercion. The great corporate powers have a limitless appetite for enclosures as a way to seize minerals from the bottom of the ocean, tap genetic secrets of exotic flora in the Global South, and copyright snippets of musical notes in order to accuse sharers of “piracy.”

It is important to note that enclosures are not just appropriations of the shared assets of commons. They are also attacks on communities and their practices of commoning. Their primary goal may be the seizure of resources, but enclosures also seek to impose a “regime change” on people. Enclosures convert a system of collective management and social mutuality into a market order that privileges private ownership, prices, market relationships, and consumerism. The goal is to treat people as individuals and consumers, not as communities with shared, long-term, cultural interests.

The ultimate result of so many enclosures is to make people deeply dependent on business outsiders whose only loyalty is to the global marketplace. Users of Microsoft products must constantly buy the next software upgrade to keep their computers running properly. Farmers who rely upon genetically modified crops must buy new seeds every year and abide by contractual restrictions on their use. Defenders of traditional ways of life are forced to fight colonizers who want to get rich by enacting the Western ideal of development. “The more we depend on money and markets to satisfy our needs and follow our desire,” writes commons scholar Massimo De Angelis, “the more we are exposed to a vicious circle of dependency that pits livelihoods against each other.”

Not surprisingly, enclosures tend to interfere with the ability of people to self-organize and control their own governance, meet their own needs, and protect their culture and way of life. A town that becomes beholden to an absentee investor or corporation quickly loses its civic sovereignty and becomes a “company town.”

Enclosures also undermine traditions and identities that  are intertwined with a beloved landscape, historic building, or a cultural work. When treasures—the designs of Australian Aborigines, the special plants cultivated by Madagascans—are shorn from their historic or natural context and reduced to a price, it is an assault on the culture of commoning. The people whose conscientious care had instilled meaning and purpose in a beloved landscape, medicinal plants, or sacred artworks are suddenly deprived of their care-wealth. Through enclosure, treasures are stripped of the qualities that make them locally distinctive and emotionally significant. They become, for better or worse, little more than inert commodities.

The Massive International Land Grab

Many people believe that enclosures are a relic of the past—something that happened in medieval times, but not now. Not so. Vast portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are currently reeling from a fierce international land grab. Investors and national governments are snapping up millions of hectares of land that traditional peoples have used for generations. These commoners rarely have formal property deeds; as lawyers might put it, they have only “customary usage rights.” The enforceable property rights belong to the government, which in theory acts as a trustee for the people. But in reality, autocratic and troubled states find it quite profitable to ignore their public trust duties and sell off vast swatches of “unowned” lands to foreigners. By brokering deals and legalizing title to the land, governments can reap new tax revenues. Well-connected officials can quietly pocket handsome bribes. In theory, development and prosperity will follow.

In practice, not so much. Some investors use the land to produce biofuels or commercial crops that are exported to world markets. Others are speculators who leave the land idle, hoping to cash in as land prices rise. Saudi Arabia has spent a billion dollars to buy seven hundred thousand hectares in Africa. India is assembling investment pools to buy up farmlands. South Korea and China are also active buyers of land.

The scale of enclosure of customary lands is massive—and so is the displacement of commoners. An estimated 90 percent of the people in sub-Saharan Africa, or some five hundred million people, do not have statutory title to their lands and are at risk of eviction. Citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Sudan, Ethiopia, and Madagascar are especially vulnerable. Worldwide, some two billion people have only customary usage rights to their lands—some 8.54 billion hectares (or 21.1 billion acres). Once their lands are seized, commoners can no longer grow and harvest their own food, draw water, or hunt wild game. Enclosures are shattering their communities and cultures.

By the light of free-market economics, turning land into private property and trading it in the market will enhance its productivity. This process is said to encourage owners to produce more food and develop the land so that it will be more valuable. Collectively used lands without property titles, by contrast, have historically been called “wastelands.” That’s because, in the eyes of the law, no one owns the land, takes care of it, or produces crops for markets.

But look behind the curtain of free-market fables and you see thousands of stable, sustainable commons that provide basic subsistence to millions of people. Not surprisingly, the land grabs are producing the familiar pathologies associated with enclosure: ecological abuses, the decimation of community, hunger, inequality, and migrations to cities in search of jobs and food. Evicted commoners find themselves displaced, dispossessed, and thrust into a world of flashy modern consumerism and shanty-town poverty: an ugly replay of English commoners at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

“In light of the fact that most allocations to investors are in the form of renewable medium-term leases of up to 99 years,” writes Liz Alden Wily, a specialist on land tenure rights, “it may be expected that loss of common properties will remove these lands from meaningful access, use, and livelihood benefit for at least one generation and potentially up to four generations.” This is a recipe for decades of famine, poverty, and political turmoil. At one time, imperial nations asserted direct military control over people and resources in order to exploit them. The neo-colonial process has become more refined. With the sanction of law, foreign investors and speculators simply negotiate deals with friendly, self-dealing governments that welcome the plunder of native lands. What could be more lucrative than the private sale of the public’s equity assets at bargain prices?

The Privatization of Water

Water is another resource that has been targeted for enclosure by many transnational corporations. Most people expect their drinking water to be a public service provided by governments or at least managed by communities. But many transnational companies see water as a valuable private commodity that can be hugely profitable. This has prompted many companies and investors to buy up groundwater aquifers, extract large quantities of fresh water from public lands for minimal or no payments, and privatize municipal water systems.

Sometimes water enclosures are achieved indirectly. Companies may choose to build expensive water purification, treatment, or desalinization systems, for example, even though conservation and preventive regulation are cheaper and could yield more reliable results (but, alas, no return on investment to private investors). The fierce international land grab now underway is often just another name for “water grabbing.”

The opening salvo in an ongoing series of “water wars” began in 2000, when the World Bank, working in cooperation with an international consortium led by the transnational engineering and construction firm Bechtel, pressured Cochabamba, then the third largest city in Bolivia, to privatize its water system. The official policy rationale was to provide incentives to private companies to improve the water infrastructure and so improve people’s access to water. But such “market solutions” are more about boosting profits than providing access. After gaining control of Cochabamba’s water supplies, Bechtel raised prices by 50 percent or more and even prohibited the collection of rain-water from roofs. Water in Cochabamba was strictly regarded as private property under the control of Bechtel.

A grassroots protest movement arose overnight. Thousands of ordinary people took to the streets with the battle cry, “Water is life!” The Coordinadora for the Defense of Water and Life called on the government to cancel its forty-year contract with Bechtel and return the water to municipal control. The protests also called for the “social reappropriation of wealth,” that is, sovereign control of the water system and its collective management by water users. Coming only months after the Seattle anti-globalization protests in 1999, the Cochabamba insurrection vividly confirmed that the globalization of commerce has more to do with stoking corporate profits than with meeting basic human and environmental needs fairly and sustainably.

Protesters ultimately prevailed in Cochabamba, forcing cancellation of the Bechtel contract and galvanizing new calls for self-determination and commons-based control throughout Latin America. Twenty-five years later, the Cochabamba protests are still remembered as one of the first major triumphs against the privatization of water. Billionaire T. Boone Pickens once spent more than a hundred million dollars acquiring ground-water aquifers in the Texas High Plains, a water grab that threatened to make water very expensive and potentially scarce for many West Texas communities. (He later sold his water rights to a regional water authority.) Transnational water companies continue to appropriate groundwater supplies throughout the world in order to bottle it—even though public water systems can provide a thousand gallons of tap water for the same price as one bottle of branded water.

The Corporatization of Food

Sometimes enclosures involve things that a community only owns morally or inherits, such as the biodiversity of nature. These are common-pool resources, not actual commons (because the social systems to manage them remain aspirational, not actual). CPRs are particularly vulnerable to enclosure because there is no organized community to resist the seizure, so they are seen as “free for the taking.” This opens the door for markets to become the structural force for reengineering nature.

A good example is the enclosure of apples in the US. A century ago, Americans ate more than six and a half thousand distinct varieties of apples. People could choose from an exotic array of cultivars with names like Scollop Gillyflower, Red Winter Pearmain and Kansas Keeper. When it came to cooking and eating, everyone had their favorites, usually local. People used different varieties for making pies, cider, and applesauce.

All that has changed dramatically. As US food companies built national markets in the twentieth century, eclipsing local production and distribution, the natural diversity of apples has essentially disappeared. Some varieties were abandoned because their thin skins and susceptibility to bruising made them unsuited for shipping. Others were too small or served only a tiny niche of the market. Red Delicious probably prevailed in the marketplace because it was so big and shiny (thanks in part to wax coating).

The point is that the shrinkage of varieties of apples was engineered by a commercial agriculture system intent on building national and international markets to maximize profits. Driven by large-scale efficiencies and corporate consolidation, it had no interest in idiosyncratic or diverse fruits. And so a bland homogeneity of apples was deliberately designed in order to boost sales. Today, writes farmer-journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg, “only 11 varieties make up 90 percent of all the apples sold in this country [the US], and Red Delicious alone counts for nearly half of that.”

Nature’s dazzling diversity of apples has been culled and diminished. Most of the remaining varieties are easy to grow and cheap to distribute and sell in large quantities. Only older people realize that apples used to be delightfully varied and locally grown—and tastier. The rest of us have been trained to accept our narrow range of choices as “the way things are.” A popular fruit has been made to conform to regimented, highly commodified markets.

Fortunately, the local food movement in its many aspects—Slow Food, community supported agriculture, organic farming, permaculture, agroecology, and beyond—is starting to resurrect many “heirloom” seed varieties that have fallen into disuse. These efforts are motivated not only by the interesting tastes and easier cultivation of locally adapted seeds but by a realization that genetic biodiversity is an important form of ecological “insurance.” Even though there are more than a thousand banana varieties worldwide, for example, the fruit industry has cultivated the Cavendish cultivar for 99 percent of the export market. Thanks to such monoculture farming, the world’s supply of bananas may be decimated by a soil-borne fungus that attacks Cavendish bananas.

The fate of the apple and banana mirrors the fate of American food more generally. As Mark Kurlansky documented in his book The Food of a Younger Land, the diversity of cuisine in the US used to be far greater before the rise of the grocery super-store, the national highway system, and the fast-food restaurant. Chain restaurants brought uniformity and low quality, displacing food that was seasonal, fresh, regional, and traditional. When food was rooted in local cultures, it shaped people’s character, attitudes, and identities. Before American food habits fell under the sway of national markets, Kurlansky writes, there were food traditions such as “the southern New England May breakfast, foot washings in Alabama, Coca-Cola parties in Georgia, the chitterling strut in North Carolina, cooking for the threshers in Nebraska, a Choctaw funeral, and a Puget Sound Indian salmon feast. It also had old traditional recipes such as Rhode Island jonny cakes, New York City oyster stew, Georgia possum and taters, Kentucky wilted lettuce, Virginia Brunswick stew, Louisiana tête du veau,” among dozens of others.

As the global reach of US corporations grew in the post-war period, so did the enclosure of countless food traditions around the world. As Western brands and fast-food chains have expanded from Bangkok to Bogota and from Mumbai to Moscow, modern, heavily marketed foods have supplanted “backward” traditional cuisines. Everyday diets have become more homogenized—and less nutritious. No surprise that the diseases associated with Western diets—diabetes, obesity, heart disease—have also proliferated.

Land, water, apples, local foods. These are only a few of the significant enclosures of nature perpetrated over the past several generations. The degradation of natural wealth has been little noticed because it has been so incremental—and because it is generally portrayed as a sign of economic and technological progress. International trade treaties then attempt to normalize enclosures as the path toward “development” and lock in legal privileges for investors at the expense of democratic sovereignty.

The range of enclosures of nature is vast and expanding. They extend from the global (the atmosphere, the oceans, outer space) to the regional (groundwater aquifers, fisheries, forests) to the local (native foods, hometown traditions, independent businesses). Enclosures also include living things (cell lines, genes, genetically engineered mammals) and infinitesimally small things (microorganisms, synthetic substitutes for nanomatter).

One of the most audacious new enclosures of nature involves the financialization of nature. Rather than treat land, water, plants, and animals as living systems with their own natural imperatives, private equity funds and other investors are madly commoditizing them as if they were brute matter. Through clever financial instruments, the finance industry has “securitized” revenues that can be generated by selling flows of water, harvestable timber, and fish catches.

Investors are increasingly claiming to save the planet through new investment strategies that bill themselves as “green capitalism,” “sustainable finance,” and ESG (“Environmental Social Governance”). But such “market-based solutions” amount to a scam and lucrative distraction. For example, much “green investment” purports to reduce carbon emissions, conserve forests, and protect hydrological cycles. But as Adrienne Buller documents in The Value of a Whale, green investments do not curb economic growth or consumption. Nor do they change “current trajectories of ecological degradation, material throughput, rising emissions, and unabated biodiversity loss.” Their most notable benefit may be to give the financial industry new products to sell and huge new inflows of investment money that can be publicly touted as “green.” “The idea that pricing, commodifying and trading nature can resolve ecological crisis on a global scale is illusive,” Buller bluntly concludes.

The financialization of nature as now structured is not a genuine solution, in other words. It is either an ineffectual distraction from the public sector leadership that is needed, or a counter-productive pressure. As Buller notes, carbon offsetting schemes developed by the industry privilege the financial interests of self-styled “green investors” over the needs of nature and local communities. This has resulted in “the forcible expulsion of Indigenous communities from their homes; the razing of long-standing local communities to clear the way for ‘conservation’ and offset projects; the seizure of land occupied by subsistence farmers, devastating communities that had previously provided for themselves; and ironically, deleterious effects on local eco-systems through the substitution of mono-species tree plantations for Indigenous biodiversity.”

The finance industry wants to expand financial markets that treat more aspects of food, land, electricity, metals, forests, and other resources not just as commodities, but as financial assets suitable for global trade and speculation. Considering how little we understand the macroeconomic and macrofinancial implications of such enclosures—not to mention the ecological disruptions that they entail—these plans are a recipe for disaster. If water were to become a commodity traded in an integrated global marketplace, for example, it could devastate local ecosystems and make this vital gift of nature unaffordable for many people.

So far, our survey of market enclosures has focused on land and other natural systems. But this phenomenon plays out in countless other areas of life. I turn now to varieties of enclosure that are converting social institutions and culture itself into private markets. Once again, in different permutations, we will see how enclosures exploit and disempower people while creating new dependencies, precarity, and inequality.