reviewing Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts

Theory reviewing Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts 2 Climate crises have made it all the more clear that capitalism abuses nature as a "free gift," Alyssa Battistoni notes in Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.Capitalism plunders and exhausts natural resources; it dumps pollution and waste into ecosystems and the atmosphere.While it has generated unprecedented wealth in the last several hundred years, it has also generated unprecedented destruction.Yet the answer, Battistoni argues throughout the book, is not to make nature less free or less of a gift-i.e., to put a price on it, as some ecosystem services policies strive to do.Rather, what's needed is approaching nature as a site of politics, one fundamentally unaddressable by capitalism or markets.If the market has always treated nature as free, why would it be able to give it a price now?Battistoni is a political theorist of environmental and climate politics.The book's project is a history of political thought around what she names the free gift of nature: why nature has never been given a price.She traverses multiple centuries of primarily Euro-American political economic scholarship in answering this.The book has three main parts.In the first, she elucidates what the free gift of nature is.In the second, she argues