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Long abstract:

Based on 14 months of historical and ethnographic fieldwork in India, this paper examines the logic and grammar of contemporary naturalization of economics through an examination of green financial reports, industrial reportage, and interviews with climate consultants. It argues that reconstitution of economics as a science of planetary scale speculation is underway through introduction of novel predictive methods that involve layering of different temporal scales of climate and economic modeling that argue nature is intrinsically economic (The World Bank 2022). It highlights how this 'naturalization of economics' and 'economization of nature' is far from seamless; appearance of dogmatic rationality gives way to unprecedented degrees of distortions and mediations that increasingly dissociate nature from historical processes of social metabolism (Saito 2021; Harvey 2000).

The premise that techno-scientific models of speculation are transforming economics is beginning to gain ground in the social sciences (Masco 2015; Ballestero 2019). However, dominant thinking on the matter either imagines these economic processes to be totally subsumptive (Malm 2016) or treat the “threatening” materiality of nature as external to these economic processes (Chakrabarty 2021). By focusing on ‘naturalization of economy ‘and ‘economization of nature’ , my paper provides a crucial vantage point to understand economy’s ecology-making capacities, as well as the political possibilities that are enabled and foreclosed by the expansion of large-scale financial operations as ways of containing "nature" within the life-process of capital (Foster 2022).