| Biodiversity is a linchpin of ecological and social relations, alike, and its importance is difficult to overestimate. Notwithstanding its significance, and despite conservation efforts such as the establishment of parks and other protected areas, biodiversity is declining at disturbing rates. Emergent policy mechanisms such as ecotourism, payment for environmental services, and bioprospecting, are being deployed in an endeavor to stem the tide of extinction. While technical merits of such tools have been closely examined, the social origins and implications have received little attention.; Both liberal environmentalism, characterized by the mandate of sustainable development, and political economy, characterized by a critique of neoliberal governance, present such conservation mechanisms as representative of unique modes of nature-society relations. The former suggests that a reformed liberalism manages nature-society relations in a fundamentally different---and more sustainable---way than does an unreformed liberalism, while the latter suggests the transformation from a modern to postmodern ecology. Both, however, may overlook an important and enduring element of contemporary nature-society relations that belies a far greater continuity between the politics of biodiversity loss and those of its conservation, whether of conventional or emerging varieties. More specifically, both suffer from a discursive ignorance that prevents accounting for a continuity of ideas, while emphasizing a discontinuity of practices.; Several important ideas, including dualism, distinguish modernity and its ecological impacts, highlighting the continuities between conventional and emerging conservation mechanisms. Where non-hierarchical distinctions, with a few exceptions, dominated the premodern intellectual landscape, hierarchical and exclusive dualisms are a chief element of modern thought. According to the constructivist positions introduced in this dissertation, ideas, such as dualism, have material manifestations and effects. These effects are political ecological in nature---affecting nature-society relations. Moreover, they participate, in many ways, in the construction, valuation, and distribution of ecologies---the formation of nature regimes. This dissertation offers such an alternative, illustrating the usefulness of its approach in an examination of the politics of bioprospecting in Costa Rica. |
