| This research explores how a market in wetland ecosystem services has been created and maintained through the fragile and constantly renegotiated association between entrepreneurial "wetland bankers," federal and state regulators, and restoration ecologists in the Chicago and Minnesota regions, USA. This research also explores the effects of this market on the wetland landscape, effects which may be ecologically complex and evident at several different scales of observation. It is an integrated study of the social, economic and ecological features of a small but growing movement to create new physical spaces for capital accumulation through the commodification of ecosystem services. As a novel application of market-based environmental policy strategies, similar to air pollution credits trading under the Clean Air Act, commercial wetland mitigation banking has recently been praised as a solution to the ecological problems of wetland loss. The ecological record of bank sites is brief, but demonstrates a compelling improvement over past practices in wetland mitigation. Banking also represents a crucial departure from any previous attempt to create "environmental commodities," in that an entire integrated and delimited ecosystem itself, rather than discrete components of it such as an organism, is conceived of as a fungible bundle of ecosystem services (though similar complications are noted in fisheries privatization). The spatial fixity of certain kinds of landscape relations characterizing wetlands poses special challenges to the emergence of a market, in which commodities are expected to behave as a liquid, flowing across space towards locations of demand. Furthermore, the claim that wetland functions can be moved across space (from the site of impact to the site of the restoration in the bank) is incompatible with scientific understandings of the ecological functions and features of wetland sites, as well as the capacities of the science of restoration ecology. The specific difficulties of treating ecosystems like mobile commodities are intensely visible in efforts over the past decade by bankers to shape a regulatory system which will allow their market to thrive. Mitigation banking presents profoundly geographical problems for researchers across many disciplines. |
