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In his essay ‘Environment and economy’, Eric Hirsch laments the lack of dialogue between economic and environmental anthropology. Environmental anthropologists, he suggests, tend to focus on the values associated with environment and ecology, often leaving unexplored how these values relate to capital’s law of value. Economic anthropologists, for their part, tend to endorse a conception of the economy that is focused on ‘the social relations of persons and things in the establishment of value’(Hirsch 2012: 328) and that hinders their ability to analyse the role that nature plays in articulating value relations.

The basis of this, Hirsch argues, lies in two doctrines that took shape in Western Europe early in the Modern period. One is the philosophy of property and political society derived from John Locke that legitimated a particular appropriation of nature, both in Europe and, especially, in the colonies (Whitehead …