Nature's Accountability: Stocks and Stories

摘要

Nature has been taken into account for the sake of maximizing sustained yield and producing sustainable quality in forestry, fishery and agriculture through the production of cosmopolitan science in the context of capitalist development. Taking nature into account involves bookkeeping practices, statistical tables, graphs and models. It includes standardized units and metrics to inventory and to value nutrients or populations. Such accounting follows a 'quantifying spirit' that emerged in the eighteenth century and became the basis of modern scientific nature management. If these are nature's accounts-and in an age of sustainability we probably have more of them than ever before-then what are the stories? This special issue gathers stories of nature's accountability from Carlowitz' 'sustainability' around 1700 to the models of sustainable fisheries of the late twentieth century. These stories of scientific practices taking nature into account are simultaneously a part of economic and political accountability, i.e. exercises of power, norm-setting and acts of sanctioning that co-shape how environmental problems are viewed and how to go about dealing with them. Moving beyond the history of the idea of sustainability and the explication of its normative content, this issue explores scientific efforts to take nature into account and the political and economic accountability these efforts inevitably involve. At the intersection of anthropology, economics, environmental history, the history of science and political theory, these contributions develop an interdisciplinary perspective on the history of sustainability that addresses who takes nature into account, in which ways and for what purposes.