| This dissertation investigates the rise of a concrete mode of environmental capitalism in Patagonia, one that is organized around the expansion of protected areas, the flourishing of ecotourism markets, the strengthening of conservation institutions, and the emergence of sustainable development as a model for regional growth. Based upon 18 months of historical and ethnographic research conducted in the Chaltén Border Area (CBA) in Argentina, this project scrutinizes environmental capitalism in terms of its constitutive social groups: alpine mountaineers and adventure trekkers, service workers and tourism entrepreneurs, park rangers and land managers. Examining the salience of risk imagination to environmental capitalism, the project conceptualizes each group as inhabiting and constructing a concrete regime of risk. Analytic attention to a regime of risk focuses not only on subjectivity and value creation amidst conditions of environmental uncertainty and exposure, but also on local cultures of expertise, distinction, and authority, in turn shaping the structural distribution of risk across the relations of production, consumption, and the conservation state. This dissertation argues that environmental capitalism is constituted by a hierarchy of risk imagination in which the entrepreneurial class and the conservation state have gained a hegemonic position over the CBA, marginalizing subaltern populations and seeking to naturalize class, racial, and gender inequalities. This study of environmental capitalism addresses such contemporary issues as the neocolonial resourcing of Patagonia, the neoliberalization of global conservation, the turn to the left in Latin American politics, and the impacts of climate change on Andean political ecologies. |
