Led by Patrick Bresnihan

From the upper limits of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to the overexploitation of natural resources, Malthusian concerns about limits and scarcity are everywhere apparent in environmental politics. Even the more progressive, radical voices echo these sentiments. In place of the open and optimistic demand that 'another world is possible', environmental activists adopt the slogan: 'There is no Planet B'. Despite the real and urgent environmental crises we face, there is a problem with founding any political project on the assumption of scarcity. While debates over how best to manage our 'common', finite planet appear to be neutral and urgent, they obscure the uneven ways in which scarcity has been produced by particular forms of social production, excluding in the process the existence and possibility of radically different, 'utopian' alternatives. This project, which will be published as a book provisionally entitled The Politics of Finitude, examines these ideas through an analysis of the Irish and European fisheries.

Part 1 analyzes how the 'naturalization' of the self-interested fisherman exploiting finite fish stocks within a global market has become the fact around which new forms of neoliberal governance have emerged, namely: the privatization of the fisheries (through individual, transferable rights of access) and the commercialization of 'environmental' practices (through eco-labeling). This amounts to an apparatus of enclosure. Enclosure in this sense applies to more than just privatization. It describes an overlapping set of institutional and technical innovations orientated around the need to 'balance' fish stocks with fishing activity within a capitalist market.

Part 2 draws on eighteen months' ethnography in Castletownbere, a commercial fishing port in the South West of Ireland, to describe the subjectivities, knowledge and value which exist beyond the neoliberal apparatus described above. These 'everyday natures' unfold between and across people, animals and things, unsettling and confounding liberal, humanist, capitalist renderings of the world. By attending to these situated forms of knowledge and value, it is possible to see how the world is not encountered as a set of abstract resources, but rather is constituted through particular social relations that change from one moment to the next. This continuous activity can be best understood in terms of 'commoning': the ongoing production of non-liberal, non-dual, non-proprietorial worlds. I go on to discuss the political significance of commoning as the basis from which to practice and organize alternative forms of common life.

The book will be published in a new book series, Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics, edited by Julie Guthman, Jake Kosek, and Rebecca Lave, and published by the University of Nebraska Press.