I here argue that nature ought indeed to be brought in to the realm of political economy, but question the category of natural capital: instead, extending the insights of feminist theorists regarding undervalued forms of production, I articulate an expanded idea of hybrid labor that understands the “work of nature” as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world. This approach poses the value of nature as inherently political and suggests the potential for new forms of more-than-human politics.

Dubbed “natural capital,” the nature in question is not the raw resources needed for commodity produc-tion in the manner of coal or cotton. Rather, it is composed of the “services” that ecosystems provide to human societies through continued function: reg-ulating carbon cycles, pollinating crops, filtering water, decomposing waste.

Hybrid labor helps thread the needle between anthropocentrically instrumental and purely intrinsic value, recognizing the useful, material productivity of nonhu-man nature without reducing it to the status of object or tool. Finally, it aims to call a more-than-human political collective into being, and to propose a relationship to nonhuman nature grounded in interdependence and solidarity rather than unidirectional management, ownership, or stewardship. Rather than turning to ethics or economics, hybrid labor brings nature into political economy—with emphasis on the political.

In his 1968 article “On Economics as a Life Science,” the ecological econ-omist Herman Daly argued that existing theories of value were deeply defi-cient in their failure to account for the ecological processes that underpinned them. “In a very real sense,” he wrote,

the entire physical environment is capital, since it is only through the agency of air, soil, and water that plant life is able to capture the solar energy upon which the whole hierarchy of life (and value) depends. Should not these elements receive the same care we bestow upon our other machines? And is not any theory of value that leaves them out rather like a theory of icebergs that fails to consider the submerged 90 per cent?

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, ecological economists and ecologists concerned about environmental destruction developed the concept of nature as capital as a provocative metaphor meant to draw attention to the importance of ecosystems for human societies: the language of capital seemed a practical and effective way to translate the value of ecosystems to the general public.

The concepts of natural capital, and the related concept “ecosystem services,” are now widely used in environmental economics and have become increasingly prominent in mainstream economics, environmental policy, and even ecological research.10 Natural capital functions as an umbrella term that aims to capture a general sense of the value of nature to human societies, while ecosystem services refer to particular activities—for example, honey-bee populations provide a fertilization service; earthworms, decomposition.

The geographer Morgan Robertson observes that the current move to define and price ecosystem services represents a “monetization . . . of the conditions of life” on par with that of the commodification of human labor; the result has been the creation of, as Sara Nelson puts it, “a biospheric service economy.”

Of growing interest is the more general category of biocapital, defined by Stefan Helmreich as the “economic enterprises that take as their object the creation, from biotic material and information, of value, markets, wealth, and profit.”

It is therefore all the more imperative to be thoughtful about which representations we deploy. What are the effects of seeing something as capital? And what might result from seeing things otherwise?

Wendy Brown observes that when human beings become human capital, their role as political actors—whether as citizens, rights bearers, laborers, publics, the demos—dwindles as all activity is cast in market terms. Thus education, for example, is valued for its potential to increase GDP; political speech itself is equated to money.