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Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras—as the country was known under colonial rule—was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Patrick M. Gallagher offers a critical account of market-oriented conservation in the Caribbean that ranges across everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and climate policy spaces. He shows how the long material and social histories of racialized colonialism shape the making of technocratic tools for valuing nature. Gallagher traces how new forms of capitalist value emerge from the interaction among colonial pasts, contemporary conservation practices, and vivid scenarios of imminent climate change–driven disaster and loss. He also examines how people and policymakers in Belize imagine and create new ways of life in a changing environment. Ethnographically grounded and rich in theoretical insight, this book illuminates how the Anthropocene environment, newly visible and valuable at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being in Belize and around the world.
— Nikhil Anand, author of Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
Gallagher’s witty storytelling and incisive analyses show how the valuations of “ecosystems services” and “natural capital” are inseparable from long histories of colonialism and racial exploitation. Drawing on diverse ethnographic sites—fin-fish fisheries, Belize’s ties to the Biosphere project, seawall construction, GIS-based knowledge production—Gallagher builds a vivid, compelling account grounded in deftly rendered ethnographic detail.
— Melissa Johnson, author of Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize
Moving from apocalyptic Cold War imaginations to Belizean fish markets—from the abstractions of ecosystem services to the sweaty work of ground-truthing satellite images—Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World brilliantly shows us how policy and scientific abstractions are reworked by messy ecosystems, poorly understood landscapes, and sedimented colonial histories. Learn how sargasso blooms become a resource, how the advancing sea creates new commons, and how thinking with these might help us imagine more hopeful futures.
— Andrew S. Matthews, author of Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes
Patrick M. Gallagher’s Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World offers a brilliantly insightful and deeply humane exploration of how people, power, and ecosystems intertwine in Belize. Richly ethnographic and intellectually bold, this book reframes environmental value with nuance, urgency, and compelling narrative clarity. Essential reading for anyone interested in our changing planet.
— Paige West, author of Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea