Forests as Markets

This essay argues for the deep affinities between neoliberalism and environmental thought that embraces such figures as fungi, swarms, and especially trees. While critics like Rob Nixon turn to trees to promote modes of cooperative biology and plant communication as blueprints for more symbiotic forms of sociality that offer alternatives to “hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption,” they share with neoliberalism a more fundamental ontology of what Friedrich Hayek (after Michael Polanyi) calls “spontaneous order.” Drawing on recent revisionary scholarship on neoliberalism, the first half of the essay argues that neoliberalism is less usefully thought of as an individualist anthropology than as a worldview that subordinates individuals to a nontransparent and distributed higher intelligence—that of the market. The second half of the essay illustrates the uncomfortable overlap between neoliberal and environmental imaginaries through a discussion of Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the novel has praised its power to embody the arboreal life cycle it represents, but it has remained curiously blind to the way the novel’s formal choices ask its characters to submit to the powers of a superior computerized intelligence—a gesture that is conspicuously close to the way neoliberalism compels individuals’ submission to nontransparent market forces. The novel and its critical reception, like particular strands in the environmental humanities more generally, show that the opposition between the environmental imagination and neoliberalism is neutralized by a shared commitment to fictions of spontaneous order.