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Paper short abstract

Money’s assumed resilience shapes how ecological processes become commensurable. This paper shows how the US dollar, sustained by global oil trade, enables unequal ecological and economic exchange by stabilizing extractive flows through monetary valuation.

Paper long abstract

Markets and market‑based policy instruments are often assumed to be resilient, capable of “fixing” the ecological problems that markets themselves have produced. While STS and political ecology scholars have examined how such instruments operate, the expertise they mobilize, and the environmental representations they rely on, comparatively little attention has been paid to the most ubiquitous artifact underpinning market exchange: money. Social theory has long debated what money is and how it reshapes social relations, yet its role in making ecological processes commensurable remains underexplored.

This paper conceptually examines the relationship between commensuration and ecological processes by analyzing how money is predicated on a specific notion of resilience. Monetary exchange presupposes the circulation of labor‑time, the extraction of raw materials, and the embodied energy in manufactured goods. I argue that the money‑artifact renders ecological degradation legible, exchangeable, and governable by appearing both neutral and resilient.

I illustrate this through the US dollar, widely regarded as the world’s most resilient currency. As the global reserve currency, the dollar holds a unique position in international trade, particularly in relation to oil. Continued global dependence on oil sustains demand for dollars, enabling the United States to export its currency in exchange for raw materials and manufactured goods, which is also reflected in its trade deficit. This supports both ecological and economic unequal exchange on a global scale. And this shows that the resilience at stake is not ecological but institutional, since it stabilizes extractive flows by translating heterogeneous ecological processes into commensurable monetary values.