Nature on the Move III: (Re) countenancing an Animate Nature

Current market logics in environmental governance for conservation and sustainability tend to disag-gregate nonhuman natures into discrete units to which monetary value can attach, such that these new units may be released into markets of circulating commodities where they can accrue more "value."As Bram Brischer and James Igoe describe and theorise in "Nature on the Move" I and II, new techno-configurations of nature permit its circulation in emerging environmental markets, and the gathering of more monetised value through proliferating product exchanges. The new "value entities"with which these circulations are associated require abstractions of nature's immanent vitality so as to manufacture and make commensurable tradable units deemed representative of nature health and harm. Through these de-and re-territorialisations of nature, "value" may be created for some but arguably pathology is enhanced for all. These abstractions proliferate a nature that is distant, stilled and transcendent, at the same time as tuning out the communiques of other(ed) sustainability practices and socionature possibilities. My contribution in this third panel of our "Nature on the Move" triptych, then, is an experiment in bringing into the frame, conceptually at least, connective and ecological possibilities associated with animist "amodern" ontologies. I develop ethnographic and theoretical explorations of what might be implicated ecologically and ethically by a milieu of immanent embodied ecologies, enfolded in an epistemological and ontological move of "becoming-animist."Becoming-animist" is framed here as a normative subjectivity that refracts the current disconnective and virtualising impasse in both the theory and practice of socio-ecological relationships, and as such is worthy of intellectual, political and ethical engagement.