Containing Environmentalism: Risk, Rationality, and Value in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez

ABSTRACT

This article revisits regulatory debates about environmental valuation following the Exxon Valdez oil spill to argue that the spill can be seen as a constitutive moment in the rise of neoliberalism. I show that rationalizing environmental values was not simply about applying market rationality to the natural world, but entailed reexamining the nature of that rationality itself and its relevance to social behavior. I then trace the reverberations of these debates beyond the realm of environmental policy, highlighting an underappreciated legacy of the Valdez: the first credit default swap, executed in response to an unprecedented punitive fine leveled against Exxon. Illuminating the linked histories of environmental valuation, corporate environmentalism, and financialization through that event, I argue that environmental valuation is a political problem through which neoliberal strategies for the governance of life (both human and nonhuman) have been forged.

KEYWORDS:

• Value
• neoliberalism
• contingent valuation
• Michel Foucault
• Exxon Valdez

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from the generous editorial assistance of Randall Cohn, as well as comments from Bruce Braun, Matthew Huber, George Henderson, Morgan Adamson, Laura Cesafsky, Charmaine Chua, Jessica Lehman, and Kara Wentworth. Earlier versions were presented at the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference, February 26–28, 2015, University of Kentucky-Lexington; and the World Society, Planetary Natures Conference, July 9–12, 2015, Binghamton University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The contemporary notion of “ecosystem services' is, in this light, not simply a concept invented by conservationists in order to better communicate with economists (as the story is often told), but is also embedded in a broader shift in economics toward an understanding of the totality of economic life in terms of the productive consumption of “services.”

2 See discussions in U.S. House of Representatives (1991a and 1991b).

3 Examples of these studies are collected in Hausman (1993).

4 The quotes in this and the following paragraph appear in NOAA (1992, 88–113).

5 The company made good on its promise and the litigation was not settled until 2008, when the Supreme Court reduced the punitive damages to only $507 million (Exxon Shipping v. Baker 2008).