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Taming Trees: Capital, Science, and Nature in Pacific Slope Tree Improvement
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Abstract
This article traces the emergence of industrial tree improvement along the Pacific Slope of western Oregon and Washington. Anxieties about timber famine in the United States prompted research on forest genetics and Douglas-fir provenance as far back as 1913, while diminishing supplies of old-growth timber resources in this region led to tree improvement—systematic tree breeding to enhance commercially attractive characteristics—on an industrial scale beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, tree improvement has been characterized by a preponderance of co-operation among private, otherwise competitive capitalist firms, with considerable support from state agencies and from science in both research and applied settings. Pacific Slope tree improvement is explored as a case study of the social production of nature by capital and science, particularly the ways in which, in response to natural-resource constraints, the reproductive biology of forest trees has been increasingly targeted, appropriated, and subsumed as a source of industrial productivity. The general absence of exclusively private, proprietary approaches to tree improvement is discussed as a reflection of a set of particular biophysical challenges, including the “problem” of biological time. Thus, while biophysical nature is increasingly socially produced through tree improvement, the social organization of tree improvement bears the inscription of biophysical nature. The article closes with an examination of one of the main avenues by which biotechnology—including genetic engineering—is being incorporated into tree improvement. The new technological possibilities and opportunities for establishing exclusive property rights over plant varieties that biotechnology entails may lead to a more complete model of commodification in tree improvement. Some evidence of such change is already apparent. Though forestry biotechnology is subject to regulatory and wider social sanction, its advent reinforces a main theme in the article: that social and environmental change are interlocking, dialectical processes.
... Marxist scholars at the intersection of economic geography, political ecology, feminism, and science studies have examined the distinctiveness of capitalist appropriation, social construction, and the commodification of nature, including living organisms and non-living things (Castree 2003;Bakker and Bridge 2006). Instead of theorizing nature as an "infinitely malleable" object of human manipulation and positioning capital as the only source of agency, recent scholarship inquires how different animate and inanimate materialities of nature (whether water, tree growth, seeds, or animals) might be "sources of unpredictability, unruliness, and resistance to human intention," which muddle human efforts to produce nature in particular ways (Bridge 2011, p. 226;Bakker and Bridge 2006;Bakker 2012;Braun 2015;Ellis et al. 2020;Prudham 2003). ...
... Although ova nature is produced in the process of its commodification, it is not a passive or inert backdrop to human actions, a thing to be known and controlled. Rejecting the anthropocentric understanding of agency as rooted solely in human intention and the associated nature-society dualism (Bakker 2012;Haraway 1991;Latour 1993;Swyngedouw 1999), I illustrate how ova nature poses obstacles, opportunities, and surprises to capital accumulation in ways that enable and shape its dynamics (Boyd et al. 2001;Bakker 2003;Henderson 1999;Prudham 2003;Robertson 2004). Since partners' doubts about the quality of vitrified eggs diminishes their economic value, the bank must prove the "quality" of vitrified eggs to customers to increase their sales. ...
... The biotic qualities of ova-uncertainty and unpredictability of human fertility, tamed but also exacerbated by technology of vitrification-instigate egg banking to take a distinctive organizational form: extensive cooperation between private firms to ensure research and coordination of technological practices at different sites. Similarly, Scott Prudham (2003) reveals how biological constraints of forest trees reproduction present a challenge to proprietary, private forms of capital investment, inspiring co-operative institutional tree improvement strategies (although in this case assisted by state-supported science). ...
The development of vitrification techniques has increased the use of donor ova by allowing for their cryopreservation, storage, and international transportation. However, the implications of egg banking for the valuation of eggs remain little studied. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a Ukrainian egg bank, in this article I examine different mechanisms and calculations that allow the bank to transform vitrified ova—products with volatile outcomes—into valuable but uncertain commodities. This article reveals how the bank staff can never completely secure their profits because of the variability of the egg quality assessment and unpredictability of their expenses. I demonstrate how the dilemmas that arise when the egg banking industry tries to turn oocytes into commodities trigger certain efforts to develop quality control in vitrification techniques and donor selection, as well as classification and accounting schemes related to oocyte quality.
... This hybrid contextual and empirical chapter provides a greater historical and land-based situatedness to the thesis, while interrogating the role of settler colonialism in shifting fire and fungal ecologies towards largescale flushes of fire morels which support commercial harvests. I discuss the historically and ecologically situated production of post-disaster opportunity through Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman (2001)'s concept of the subsumption of nature, first at the landscape level through settler-colonial fire management regimes, then at the species level, through attempts to "tame" (Prudham, 2003) Morchella along the mushroom trail and within scientific laboratories. As such, this chapter argues that settler-colonial, scientific, and harvester 7 Neo-Marxism is a broad term which captures literature that incorporates and extends Karl Marx's theory of historical materialist analysis (that is, where "the structure of society and human relations in all their forms are the product of material conditions and circumstances rather than of ideas, thought, or consciousness (Taylor, 2018, para. ...
... Next, I shift focus to the development of the conditions necessary for the viability of a commercial morel harvest in Western Canada. In line with neo-Marxist approaches to political ecology, I bring the concepts of the subsumption (Boyd et al., 2001;Palmer, 2020) and taming (Prudham, 2003) of nature into the settler-colonial context. I argue that through fire suppression policies implemented by the Canadian settler-state, fire ecologies have shifted from producing post-fire opportunities which are distributed among non-human species and Indigenous peoples, to those which are primarily captured by the settler commercial harvesters of morel mushrooms. ...
... This section aims to make sense of this surprising distribution by connecting eco-Marxist work exploring the "subsumption" (Boyd et al., 2001) and "taming" (Prudham, 2003) of nature with the settler-colonial history of fire management in Western Canada. I connect the settler-state's view of both boreal wildfire and Indigenous peoples as "problems of nature" (Boyd et al., 2001) with their (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to tame them. ...
This thesis explores processes of opportunism and socio-political change following so-called “natural” disasters through a multi-sited case study of the post-wildfire morel mushroom (Morchella sp.) harvest in Western Canada. Morels are edible fungi which fruit en masse the first spring season following large wildfires in western North America. This work follows harvesters who picked morels after the 2016 Horse River wildfire on Treaty 8 territory (near Fort McMurray, Alberta), and the 2018 Shovel Lake wildfire on Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en, and Nak’azdli Whut’en Territories (British Columbia).
Thinking with and beyond the concepts of disaster capitalism and disaster colonialism, this thesis extends analyses of post-disaster change from considerations of states and large corporations to smaller-scale actors. As such, I consider the roles of hobbyist local harvesters, precarious pieceworkers in the wild mushroom industry, Indigenous Guardians of the Land, and forest ecologies more broadly. I demonstrate that while disaster capitalism and disaster colonialism are pervasive in the post-disaster landscape, they are not inevitable. Instead, I argue that post-disaster opportunity is emergent, contingent, and includes possibilities for reworking, resistance, and resurgence.
In this work, I argue that settler-colonial aims to subsume nature produce the ecological conditions which make the commercial mushroom harvest possible. This industry, in turn, disproportionately benefits settler harvesters over Indigenous Nations and forest ecologies. I also demonstrate that the materiality of wildfire memories affects different groups’ capacities to harvest mushrooms, influence others, and define the ethical standards of the harvest. Finally, I examine how settler claims to post-disaster opportunity on Indigenous lands¬ are connected to broader affective “settler common sense” and “white possessive” claims to adventure, freedom and commerce. Together, these findings demonstrate how the concurrent and often contradicting post-disaster opportunism demonstrated by small-scale actors relate to broader politics about natural disasters, environmental politics, resource extraction, and Indigenous governance within Canada and in other settler-colonial contexts.
... These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified" (606). 2 This point might seem painfully obvious, if not banal, if one considers the engineering science that becomes objectified in fixed capital (e.g., consider biotechnology; see Kloppenburg 1988;Prudham 2003), but it signals the need to recognize the diverse types of activities and scientific labor that contribute to fixed capital formation. Recognizing this point means engaging with the specifically metabolic character of fixed capital formation, a specifically socioecological process involving social labor (as "dead" or past labor) becoming embodied in physical forms through the transformation of various biophysical materials and processes into conditions of production. ...
... The investments in "the process of nature" accomplished through a socioecological fix represent an intervention in the conditions and forces of production. Long-term investments into reforestation that include various strategies to take hold of and augment the growth of forest trees (including so-called tree improvement) comprise one of the more textbook examples of such fixes (Prudham 2003(Prudham , 2005Ekers 2009Ekers , 2015. In turn, these investments are part of the more general process of transforming the subsumption of labor along with the means by which surplus value is produced; that is, they deepen the production of relative versus absolute surplus value. ...
... The investments in "the process of nature" accomplished through a socioecological fix represent an intervention in the conditions and forces of production. Long-term investments into reforestation that include various strategies to take hold of and augment the growth of forest trees (including so-called tree improvement) comprise one of the more textbook examples of such fixes (Prudham 2003(Prudham , 2005Ekers 2009Ekers , 2015. In turn, these investments are part of the more general process of transforming the subsumption of labor along with the means by which surplus value is produced; that is, they deepen the production of relative versus absolute surplus value. ...
This article, the second of two, argues that conceptualizing the socioecological fix involves understanding how fixed capital, as a produced production force, can transform the socioecological conditions and forces of production while also securing the hegemony of particular social hierarchies, power relations, and institutions. We stress that fixed capital is inherently political–ecological in its constitution and how it shapes socioecological processes of landscape transformation. Fixed capital necessarily congeals socioecological materials and processes and can be understood as a produced form of nature tied to the circulation of value and the deployment of social labor. Fixed capital is therefore inherently metabolic and internalizes and transforms socioecologies. We also discuss the fixing of capital within socioecological landscapes as processes involving both the formal and real subsumption of nature. We emphasize the dual role of fixed capital formation in shaping the socioecological conditions and forces of production and, more broadly, of everyday life. Thus, we argue, fixed capital formation as a metabolic process cannot be fully conceptualized in narrowly economic terms. We turn to Gramsci and some recent work in political ecology to argue that socioecological fixes need to be understood in ideological terms and specifically in the establishment and contestation of hegemony.
... For some, nature's commodification entails the ever-increasing exploitation of the environment for capital accumulation (O'Connor 1988). Others critically examine how neoliberal environmentalism attempts to utilize market mechanisms to accomplish the double duty of economic growth and ecological restoration (Prudham 2003;Robertson 2004;Castree 2008). Still others have concentrated on the ways in which nature is socially produced (Smith 2008), such that capital circulates not only around nature but increasingly through it as well (Prudham 2003). ...
... Others critically examine how neoliberal environmentalism attempts to utilize market mechanisms to accomplish the double duty of economic growth and ecological restoration (Prudham 2003;Robertson 2004;Castree 2008). Still others have concentrated on the ways in which nature is socially produced (Smith 2008), such that capital circulates not only around nature but increasingly through it as well (Prudham 2003). As Castree (2008) observed, in general this critical scholarship seeks to explore and deepen Polanyi's (1957) key argument that by embedding nature into a self-regulating capitalist market, "Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed" (76). ...
... As Castree (2008) observed, in general this critical scholarship seeks to explore and deepen Polanyi's (1957) key argument that by embedding nature into a self-regulating capitalist market, "Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed" (76). This normative critique largely rests on the twofold argument that ecological functions and services will always be incompletely governed by the logic of capital (itself riddled with contradictions) and that market exchange and price always externalize the negative social and environmental impacts of production, consumption, and waste (Prudham 2009). ...
Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transformation of nature–society relations among the Heuny people. We argue that the compensation processes of valuation, abstraction, and privatization of property relations have contributed to the variegated commodification of land and other natural resources used by the Heuny. In contrast to arguments that capitalist expansion leads to ever increasing commodification, however, we demonstrate that compensation variously decommodifies other natural resources, such as certain nontimber forest products and wild fisheries, keeping other things, such as swidden fields and forest land, noncommodified. Moreover, these processes of variegated commodification are spatially variable, largely dependent on Heuny conceptions of space, thus affecting the commodification of land and other natural resources. Ultimately, by linking compensation to processes of (de)-commodification in its various forms, we suggest new ways in which capitalist social relations are being transformed and expanded through hydropower-induced resettlement. Furthermore, we call into question the ability of material compensation to restore previous livelihood and environmental conditions, as changes brought on by the compensation process itself have much deeper and profound implications when it comes to nature–society relations.
... These trees are grown in greenhouse conditions, making it possible for foresters and forest industries to control the quality of trees that will reforest previously harvested sites. This technique is not restricted to Québec; it is applied throughout North America and has been subject to detailed analysis in geography through the work of Prudham (2003Prudham ( , 2005 and Cohen (1999,2004). In Québec, young stock plants are the products of pre-selected seeds collected from orchards strictly designed for this purpose. ...
... In In this context, forestry science and capitalism are at the centre of the colonisation of the boreal space; they colonise the forest with an industrial imaginary and territorialize space through fixed boundaries and meanings. Like colonialism, tree planting asserts the presence of science and capital as well as fosters industrial imaginaries of, and relationships with, the forest (Cohen 1993, Cohen 1999, Prudham 2003, Robbins and Fraser 2003. Although colonialism is normally associated with the power of one group over another, in the forestry context (chiefly reforestation), the subordinated aspect does not consist of a particular group of people, it consists of other imaginaries of what the boreal forest is or ought to be. ...
... This description also shows that their immediate environment (the boreal forest) plays no other role than to portray them as animal (instinctive and determined), but in which machine (productivity) and athlete (performance and competition) occupy significant places in the identity-building of tree planters. Through reforestation, tree planters are the instruments of labour who spatialize improved trees and legitimise the capitalist logic that lies behind the industrial imaginaries of the boreal forest space (seeCohen 1999Cohen , 2004Prudham 2003).The colonisation of space by forestry science discourse and capitalism can be associated with a sort of colonialism of ideas that is spread into space through highly regulated practices of tree planting. InFigure 4.11 for example, we see a tree planter colonising the boreal forest with the industrial forestry imaginaries imbedded in the improved seedlings being put into the boreal forest ground. ...
This thesis examines the politics of managing the boreal forest in the Abitibi region of Québec
in Canada. It pays particular attention to how the plurality of forest users produces multiple
forest imaginaries that are involved in the constitution of the micropolitics of quotidian practices
of the forest. The aim is to show how different forest imaginaries and their politics could inform
current forest management and open up other possibilities for the governance of, and
relationships with, the boreal forest.
By investigating the power relationships involved in the production of boreal forest politics, this
work shows how forestry science and ecology have established and exercised their authority
over how the forest is imagined and experienced. This territoriality has been articulated through
discourses and practices that promote dominant industrial relationships with the forest which
undermine other ways of imagining the relationships between forest users and non-humans.
Engaging with post-structuralism theory, phenomenology and political ecology, I demonstrate
how the multiplicity of forest users comes to know and experience the boreal forest in various
and unstructured ways which destabilise efforts to imagine and construct the forest as a static
entity. By paying attention to everyday life practices of various forest users, I show how
contestations and negotiations about different imaginaries and places of the boreal forest are
interrelated and mutually constituted. These practices and the imaginaries that they construct
work together to produce the forest as an open space which is capable of embodying a wide
range of meanings.
By investigating how the boreal forest is constituted by various unstable imaginary places and
politics, I argue that the current territoriality and politics produced by the imbrication of forestry
science and industrial forestry should be challenged by another form of governance. This new
form of governance needs to acknowledge the relational quality of imaginaries and to
democratize the politics of the forest. By showing how abstract concepts such as relational
politics can become implemented in current forest policies, the significance of institutions that
are already in place and that can serve to embody other politics of the forest is highlighted.
Apart from contributing to political ecology and environmental politics, the findings of this
research show that political projects which can seem utopian at first glance have the potential to
become tangible agents of social and environmental change.
... The adopting and adapting of legal private conservation frameworks by the communities in the Cordillera Huayhuash can be partially understood as a coordinated effort to resist outside interests that include extraction and conservation. The private conservation effort is a direct bid for autonomous local control over natural resource governance while maneuvering within neoliberal institutions (see chapter 2). 4 Second, a broad theoretical conversation about the commodification of nature has emerged as a lens that can be used to understand how neoliberal reform that began in the 1980s and continues in varied forms today has altered the relationships between the state, the market and civil society (Katz 1998;McAfee 1999;Prudham 2003;Liverman 2004;Harvey 2005;Mansfield 2007;Smith 2007;. In the Cordillera Huayhuash the expansion of mining operations, the influx of international tourists, the adoption of legal private conservation frameworks, the CDH mapping project, and even this dissertation research can be understood as forms of commodification of the natural terrain, both above and below ground, that continue to take place in the context of neoliberal reforms adopted in Perú throughout the 1990s and 2000s (see chapter 4). 5 ...
... These aspects are recognized as abstractions with less than concrete boundaries and can be combined in a variety of configurations to better understand how "things" become commeasurable and are exchanged through a common monetary denominator in societies based on capitalistic production and reproduction (Castree 2003). Recent scholarship in this vein has examined commodification across a broad swath of material resources found in nature such as water (Bakker 2005), trees (Prudham 2003), minerals (Bridge 2000), and ocean fisheries (Mansfield 2004), while other efforts look at material processes in nature such as ecosystem services provided by wetlands (Robertson 2007) and forests , and still others analyze the commodification of biodiversity (Igoe, Neves et al. 2010) or of organisms and life itself (Kloppenburg 2004;Prudham 2007). ...
Global efforts to create protected areas dramatically increased in the last several
decades. This growth is couched within the context of rising hegemonic neoliberal
economic policies that govern natural resource allocation. Research on the creation
and management of protected areas shows that conservation efforts are moving from
the domain of sovereign governments to that of the private sector and from a principal
of preservation to one of conserving biodiversity in productive landscapes. While
these shifts appear successful based on the ever increasing terrestrial surface area
considered protected, there is little known about how this “third wave” of
conservation touches down at local scales across diverse institutional and ecological
contexts. This dissertation presents a case study of how private conservation
frameworks and practices emerged in the Cordillera Huayhuash, a mineral and
biodiversity rich mountain range located in the Andes of Perú. Particular attention
was given to how economic activities such as tourism and mining influence outcomes
in local human and natural communities. To determine environmental outcomes
measures of water quality, pasture productivity and forest cover were made; the
results serve as a baseline for future assessments. Institutional and social outcomes
were assessed with mixed methods ranging from a broad questionnaire to a
participatory conservation zoning exercise undertaken in partnership with the
Peruvian government. The environmental observations show limited measurable
impacts and highlight the importance of future assessments. The institutional and
social assessment shows that the exogenous influence from the international
conservation community and the extractive industry are both powerful factors, and
that endogenous influences such as corruption and self-interested local leaders also
play important roles in shaping outcomes. The participatory zoning exercise
demonstrates a hopeful method to build bridges between the local communities and
sympathetic officials in the Peruvian protected areas service. The zoning work also
raises important questions about whose property will be better defended by the state,
that of the communities or that of the mining companies. These findings show how
the shared role of private property in both conservation and extraction needs careful
consideration when implementing market-based conservation efforts on communal
territory in extractive zones.
... The commodification of nature, as Polanyi (2001) already argued, is a necessarily incomplete and incompleteable process. It comes with caveats and unintended consequences that derive both from the abstractive dynamics of the commodification process and the uncooperativeness of nature and labour as agents in that process ( Bakker, 2004 Braun, 2008; Leach & Scoones, 2015a; Prudham, 2003). This means that the application of a market-based approach can be expected to have environmental implications beyond the immediate reduction of greenhouse gases, implications that might lead to new forms of resource extraction, pollution, environmental degradation, etc. ...
... With respect to the commodification of carbon, and the environmental outcomes it incurs, the crux of the matter, therefore, is to analyze carbon not as an already-existing commodity, but rather to put focus on the ongoing processes of commodity-making and the different obstacles they run into (Article I). Moving beyond Polanyi, recent scholarship has shed light on 'the matter of nature' as one relevant perspective on (the limits to) commodification ( Bakker, 2004 Fairhead et al., 2012; Leach & Scoones, 2015b; Malm, 2016; Prudham, 2003). The implicit objective of this literature is to move away from the anthropocentric and dualist framings that have long characterized invocations of the 'construction' or 'production' of nature and attend to the many ways in which the biophysical properties of nature matter for how social processes unfold (). ...
Governments increasingly rely on the use of market instruments to tackle climate change and help decarbonize a deeply fossil fuel-dependent economy. This dissertation examines this trend as one instance of the ‘commodification of carbon’, or the process through which emission reductions are made into commodities and then traded on the market. It engages the commodification framework and related theoretical perspectives to scrutinize the environmental outcomes that market instruments engender, and how these can be theorized. Three cases are examined: the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme, and Trees for Global Benefits, a community-based offsetting project situated in western Uganda. The environmental outcomes of each of these cases can be summarized by pointing to the specific spatiotemporal dynamics that they (re)produce. On the one hand, this dissertation shows that market instruments are prone to problem displacement because of the broader socioeconomic imperatives within which they operate. On the other hand, it argues for recognition of the specific temporality that is implied when environmental regulation is subsumed to market dynamics. Because of their prioritization of the cheapest and easiest solutions, market instruments bring the pace and form of decarbonization in line with what is deemed economically feasible, rather than with what is scientifically necessary. It is argued that this occurs at least in part because of the way that market instruments interact with the conditioning effects of our wider socioecological surroundings, specifically the way in which social power is materialized in the contemporary fossil fuel landscape. Due recognition of these dynamics offers insights on the political role that market instruments fulfill, why such instruments prove to be so popular, and what the conditions are for developing feasible alternatives.
... Capital is socio-technical work. This applies especially to the new 'frontier regions' (Mitchell, 2007;Ouma, 2015a) of the finance-driven land rush, where this work still needs to be organized and performed in the very first place: the 'taming of nature' (Prudham, 2003), the extravert organization of production to meet the demands of end investors, the formal and real subsumption of labor, the establishment of property rights, the management of political opposition and the alignment of the historical time of farming with the temporality of finance are all laborious acts in the financial economization of farmland. The words of an investor behind a large-scale grain farming project in Central Tanzania are telling in this regard: 'In some ways it's a very sobering example. ...
... 25 Farmland's 'resourceness' (Li, 2014, p. 589), similar to capital's ''capitalness", can hardly be taken for granted in ontological terms. Both work in agrarian political economy (Mann and Dickinson, 1978), as well as work in political ecology has shown this (Prudham, 2003). More recent work on resources and resource extraction in geography and anthropology helps shed further light on the fact that the resources through which returns of capital are generated are never given as such, but are made geographically and historically through material, discursive and relational investments (Barney, 2009;Li, 2014;Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014). ...
This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking through the incorporation of farmland into financial markets. Building on the notion of “operations of capital”, it sketches analytical entry points for scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make two useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps provide a more nuanced historicization of the entanglement between finance and farmland. Finance has a long history of penetrating agriculture and the new quality of the contemporary coupling of finance and farmland only becomes fully visible when adopting a more nuanced historical perspective. Rather than imagining the history of capitalism as one where industrial capitalism gives way to financialized capitalism, the concept of operations sensitizes us for the situated modes, processes and practices of financial economization that have reworked economy, society and nature at specific historical conjunctures.
Access: http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S001671851630046X
... During production, the time required for capital to circulate through land is determined not only by the labour process, but also the time for crops to grow and the seasonality of the agricultural calendar. Given the accumulation imperatives within capitalist agricultural production, there is a tendency to try and overcome such barriers of circulating capital through land (Boyd & Prudham, 2017;Henderson, 1998;Prudham, 2003). This can be achieved by altering the biophysical processes of production or transforming the morphology of landscapes in order to speed up the circulation of capital. ...
There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrarian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diversity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transformation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have produced uneven socio-spatial outcomes, namely debt-driven land dispossession. This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production, circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the empirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today.
... Other scholars, such as Ranganathan (2015), have focused on the tensions between "flow" and "fixity" as a way to reveal the relational politics that assemble storm drains and produce urban flood risk. Yet others have shown the uncooperative nature of resources to commodification Prudham, 2003;Sneddon, 2007). Despite diverse theoretical engagements, a common trend among research into socio-material politics is a focus on the biophysical characteristics and heterogeneous elements of the material world that enroll expert knowledge claims and technologies to render nature visible and governable (Landström et al., 2011;Latour, 2004b;Li, 2007a;). ...
This dissertation focuses on the factors that shape how water resource managers shape the flow, or metabolism, of water through cities. Through a comparative and mixed-method approach drawing on archival research, key informant interviews, Q-methodology, and spatial analysis, this dissertation presents a framework for understanding the social and material factors that shape urban water flows. Focusing on Chicago and Los Angeles, the study concentrates on the methods and approaches water resource managers use to control volumes of water and achieve political goals. The results reveal the shortcomings of overly technical approaches to solve water resource problems, which are enmeshed within a spatially complex set of socio-political and historical processes. I also reveal the multiple ways water resource managers approach water challenges and come to particular ways of understanding solutions for them. I identify seven perspectives on stormwater governance: Market Skeptic, Hydro-managerial, Hydro-rationalist, Hydro-reformist, Hydro-pragmatist, Market Technocrat, Regulatory and Administrative Technocrat, Institutional Interventionist, Infrastructural Interventionist. It is shown that these viewpoints are shaped through multiple institutional and bureaucratic practices. Some viewpoints are geographically and idiosyncratically defined, while others transcend geographical and institutional specificity. Whether invoking stormwater as a “new” resource to achieve water quality and quantity goals, or negotiating the role of new technologies and financial mechanisms to control the flow of water, this dissertation reveals the commonalities across different ways of understanding water in order to offer more acceptable policies.
... Moreover, the specific relations of production are subject to material dynamics that shape capital accumulation (Watts 1996). The biophysical qualities of crops, and the material processes of agroecological systems, can produce variation in the temporal circulation of capital, thereby affecting valorization processes (Prudham 2003). It is for this reason that a food regime approach must account for the 'contradictions of class and ecology' to explain 'social change in contemporary rural settings' (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010, 269). ...
Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese food regime contributes to local agrarian transitions. It argues that Chinese-Cambodian trade deals for jasmine rice, alongside Chinese investment in rice mills and irrigation, have intersected with pre-existing relations of production to make farmers' dependence on export commodity markets more precarious. In turn, farmers have received minimal state support, because national policies in Cambodia prioritize domestic agrarian capital over small farmers. This article advances food regime scholarship by analyzing the multiscalar processes, actors, and negotiations that produce specific agrarian transitions.
... 99 Cf. Boyd, Prudham and Schurman 2001;Prudham 2003;Mackey, Prentice, Steffen et al. 2013. 100 Lackner, Ziock andGrimes 1999, p. 11;Lackner, Wilson andZiock 2001, pp. ...
The left must confront the politics of removing carbon from the atmosphere – a topic rapidly making its way to the top of the climate agenda. We here examine the technology of direct air capture, tracing its intellectual origins and laying bare the political economy of its current manifestations. We find a space crowded with ideology-laden metaphors, ample fossil-capital entanglements and bold visions for a new, ethereal frontier of capital accumulation. These diversions must be cut short if a technology with the capacity to help repair at least some climate damage is to be of any use. Only socialising the means of removal will allow this to happen.
... This material aspect of nature matters here because it is (almost) immovable and implies a recurring use of natural resources, which can provide future claims on revenues whereas other assets cannot, especially as it relates to their commodification or assetization (Birch, 2019;Christophers, 2016). Indeed, the complexities of the value-nature relationship have been uncovered through research on genetically modified seeds (Kloppenburg, 2005) and forestry (Prudham, 2003). Ultimately, the ''nature'' from which monopoly rent is appropriated is a living thing, and as such, ''the living thing that we attempt to value and control can resist, escape, and overflow their value'' (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017: 304). ...
Drawing on the monopoly rent concept in the Marxist tradition, this study examines recent transformations in East Asian agriculture through a case study of edamame. The analysis develops rent as an analytical framework-edamame monopoly rents-by incorporating recent literature of ''technoscience rent'' and ''value grabbing.'' Based on empirical research of edamame industries in Taiwan and China, I conclude that before edamame industries adopted the World Trade Organization legal frameworks on patenting and intellectual property rights, edamame monopoly rents acquired more characteristics of value grabbing of heterogeneous edamame nature. After the World Trade Organization patented and established legal frameworks in the edamame sector, edamame monopoly rents acquired more characteristics of technoscience rent. Overall, this study identifies value politics and edamame rent regimes through which socio-ecological-technological breakthroughs under rentier capital accumulation have been paving new ways to internalize new commons and terrains in East Asian agriculture.
... Mansfield (2003) conceptualizes quality as an assemblage of nature, society, and economics coming together to form global systems of quality differentiation. Similarly, Faier (2011) builds on this and other work arguing for an incorporation of the non-human into our analyses of capital and production (Goodman, 2001;Prudham, 2003;Arora et al., 2013) to argue that commodity chains are co-produced through the interplay between the human and the non-human. This approach shifts our ideas of quality to include the wider context of cultural meaning beyond production, certification, and standardization. ...
Globally, governments have encouraged organic farming with smallholder farmers as a rural development strategy. However, certified organic agriculture has proven to be a paradox: certification requirements designed to promote environmentally sustainable farming often lead to agricultural intensification contrary to organic agriculture's stated goals. Meanwhile, certification itself is not the sole cause of this paradox. This article, based on 15 months of qualitative fieldwork in Jordan, argues that the paradox of organic agriculture in Jordan centers on the ways in which the ‘alternative’ organic olive oil production functionally requires producers to abandon local markets and engage in long-distance commodity chains. This shift alters how value is added to olive oil and changes technological requirements for processing, storing, packaging, and transporting the oil to international gourmet markets. By calling attention to the social relations in differing commodity networks and chains, my analysis focuses on, first, how quality and value is constructed within material and cultural systems, then how farmers become dependent on access to distant consumers, and, third, how production for these consumers alters the structure of relational and technological rents. As a result, I find that the promotion of certified organic, gourmet olive oil for sale in global markets privileges specific regions within Jordan. In short, the structure of relational and technological rents favors resource-intensive production in a Jordanian desert region over ‘traditional’ low-input production in Jordan's mountainous hinterland. In theoretical terms, this study highlights teleologies of success and modernization in agricultural development and offers an examination of those environmental, socio-economic, and political factors that prevent small-farmers from realizing rents in certified agriculture.
... In Gishwati, these imaginaries are continually reframed with reference to antecedent and cotemporaneous projects, events, and narratives that are locally relevant. As Prudham (2003) argues, attempts at deriving economic value in the production of nature are not static but rather ''unfold, changing in response to new opportunities and constraints emerging from a dialectical conversation between social and environmental change' ' (p. 638, citing Harvey, 1996). ...
Conservation-development projects are increasingly enacted across large expanses of land where human livelihoods hang in the balance. Recent initiatives–often called ‘landscape approaches’ or ‘ecosystem-based’ conservation–aim to achieve economic development and conservation goals through managing hybrid spaces. I argue that the landscape/ecosystem approach is a socioecological fix: an effort to resolve social-environmental crises through sinking capital (financial, natural, and social) into an imagined ecosystem. Rwanda’s Gishwati Forest has been the locus of diverse crises and fixes over the past 40 years, including an industrial forestry and dairy project, a refugee settlement, a privately managed chimpanzee sanctuary, a carbon sequestration platform, and, most recently, an ‘‘integrated silvo-pastoral conservation landscape.’’ This paper considers how these governance schemes have intersected with broader processes of agrarian change to generate crises that subsequent conservation/development projects then attempt to resolve. I demonstrate how visions for ecosystems privilege certain forms of governance around which imagined socioecological histories are mobilized to frame problems and legitimize certain solutions, technologies, and actors. The Gishwati ecosystem and its fixes are repeatedly defined through an imaginary of crisis and degradation that engenders large-scale landscape modification while foreclosing reflection about root causes of crises or how these might be addressed. Thus, even while conservation/development paradigms have shifted over the past 40 years (from separating people and nature to integrating them in conservation landscapes), this crisis-fix metabolism has consistently generated livelihood insecurity for the tens of thousands of people living in and around Gishwati. Imagining and enacting more just and inclusive social-environmental landscapes will require making space for diverse voices to define ecosystem form and function as well as addressing deeply rooted power imbalances that are at the heart of recurrent crises.
... The commodification of nature is the conversion of open-access or communal natural resources to commodified goods (Bridge, 2009;Castree, 2003). The topic has attracted significant research focusing on natural resources such as water (Bakker, 2000(Bakker, , 2001(Bakker, , 2007, trees (Prudham, 2003) and wetlands (Robertson, 2004). It has been regarded as a profound transformation of the human-environment relationship (Liverman, 2004). ...
This article contributes to the ongoing scrutiny of conflicts over nature with respect to the legal realm. We argue that legal geographies have been central to the boom in geothermal water extraction in China and its environmental and social effects. We examine the contesting of the legal definition of geothermal water and how it is embedded in the creation and production of China's hot spring landscape. Specifically, we focus on the biophysics of this particular natural resource to examine the scalar politics of how local governments grab natural resources, and the ways in which they produce socio‐economic consequences. The analysis illustrates the significance of critical legal geography in current political ecology studies, and suggests paying close attention to the contradictory and slippery legal practices involved in the governance and commodifying of nature. This article examines the contesting of the legal definition of geothermal water and how it is embedded in the creation and production of China's hot spring landscape. Specifically, we focus on the biophysics of this specific natural resource to examine the scalar politics of how local governments grab natural resources and the ways in which they produce socio‐economic consequences.
... In response, more recent economic geographic work, acknowledging that the 'relationship between categories presumed to be separate and pure is, at best, obfuscatory', has begun to take the 'materiality' of nature seriously (Bakker and Bridge, 2006: 6). Nonhuman nature might be 'uncooperative' (Bakker, 2003), a source of unpredictability, unruliness and resistance to human action (Bakker and Bridge, 2006;Bakker, 2012), not infinitely malleable but possessing generative capacities confounding efforts to produce nature in particular ways (Bridge, 2011;Prudham, 2003). ...
Relations between nature and capital have been a longstanding concern in the social sciences. Going beyond antinomies of posthumanist and political economic enquiry, this paper advances a set of relational analytics for incorporating liveliness into critical analyses of capital. Firstly, developing the concept of animal work, it shows how metabolic, ecological and affective labour become a productive economic force. Secondly, animating the commodity, it demonstrates how lively forces influence commodification and exchange, enabling or hindering accumulation. Thirdly, tracking animal circulation, it examines the logics of rendition that transform nonhuman life into capital. In conclusion, the paper develops a relational grammar for anatomizing the nature-capital dynamic, one that reorients the economic to be co-constituted by the ecological from the outset.
... (RL) Both DH and RL raise critical points about the complexities of the value-nature relationship that extend beyond the purely economic and political. Indeed, through genetic modification in realms like agriculture (Kloppenburg, 2005) and forestry (Prudham, 2003), humans are creating new species and ecosystems to suit the temporalities and accumulation logics of capital, the long-term consequences of which are yet to be known. At the same time, what we describe with the shorthand 'nature' is often wild, vibrant, and lively. ...
This article draws heavily upon a discussion among 11 leading scholars in nature–society geography to explore the current and historical relationships between value, nature, and capitalism. Prompted by a provocation from Robertson and Wainwright (2013) that political ecologists can no longer afford to avoid engaging with the tricky topic of Marxian value theory, we address the importance of the concept of value for contemporary work within geography on the political economy of the environment, broadly defined. We argue that scholars in nature–society geography should not only tackle the tricky questions of value head-on but that value could and should come to serve as a unifying analytical framework for the subfield.
... Smith dealt with that problem. Various historically constituted socionatures of everyday life, nevertheless, have properties and dynamics that comprise their use values and are thus actively involved in shaping their commodification (Prudham 2003;Bakker and Bridge 2006;Eaton 2011;Ekers and Loftus 2013). Mobilizing a metabolic conception of labor requires no less. ...
In this article, and the companion piece that follows, we develop an account of the socioecological fix. Our concern is to explore the ways in which crises of capitalist overaccumulation might be displaced through spatial fixes that result in the production of nature. We review Harvey's theory of the spatial fix, with emphasis on his model of capital switching, noting that the socioecological implications of the diversion of fixed capital into the built environment have been insufficiently developed by Harvey and others. We invoke Smith's writings on the production of nature to help fill this lacuna but note that Smith did not discuss the spatial fix vis-à-vis the production of nature explicitly. Moreover, neither Harvey nor Smith emphasized the role of political struggle and contestation as internal to the formation of spatial fixes and the production of nature, respectively. We draw on O'Connor's theory of ecological contradiction along with Katz and other feminist political economists who emphasized the systemic tension between the reproduction of capitalism and social reproduction more broadly, including as this pertains to the production and possible “underproduction” of nature. Our overall project is to develop an account of the socioecological fix as a way of linking capitalist crises, capital switching, and fixed capital formation with socioenvironmental transformations. Although we argue that any spatial fix has socioecological dimensions, we contend that making these connections explicit and rigorous is crucial at the current conjuncture.
... Sneddon (2007) explores a related case for Cambodian riverine fisheries, highlighting dynamics of subsumption under nonindustrial conditions. Prudham's (2003; research meanwhile demonstrates how biophysical properties of tree growth help shape the organization and accumulation strategies of North American forestry firms. While these texts go beyond the original context for which Boyd et al. devised their argument, they illustrate how attention to the specificity of natural resources and environmental conditions helps us to understand characteristics of, and developments in, various economic sectors. ...
... (Marx 1858(Marx / 1973 None of these threads are ones we took up in the original article. That said, each of us, working independently, has examined in detail ways in which distinctive labor regimes have emerged in relation to efforts to take hold of the biology of tree growth and fiber production in the forest products industries (Prudham 2003;Boyd 2015). Most recently, one of us has explored the relationship between transformations of nature and fixed capital in the context of socioecological "fixes" arising in response to crises of capitalist overaccumulation (e.g., investment in energy infrastructure; see Ekers and Prudham in press-a; in press-b). ...
... The subsumption of nature framework has inspired scholars to provide empirical examples-such as Prudham's (2003;2005) work on how firms and state bodies adapt to Douglas fir trees within North American silviculture-and to further develop the framework. Here, it is the latter that have inspired me to highlight the subsumption of nature as a material-discursive process; this is largely overlooked in Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman's original account. ...
In this article, I scrutinize three art, design, and architecture projects engaging with “cultured,” or “in vitro,” meat (primarily muscle cells cultured outside of bodies) to illuminate the entanglements of academic and extra-academic environments that have characterized cultured meat’s history to date, and the conversations that this technology has spurred. In envisioning new ways of eating, and living, these projects (a book of hypothetical recipes, The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, Catts and Zurr’s bioartistic engagements with tissue engineering, and Terreform1’s tissue-house prototype “The In Vitro Meat Habitat”) illustrate cultural practices thought to be enabled by cell culturing’s new applications. Emphasizing such visions and conversations allows me to highlight an inattention to discursive dynamics within research on natures subsumed to industrial production processes (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001 Boyd, W., W. S. Prudham, and R. A. Schurman. 2001. Industrial dynamics and the problem of nature. Society and Natural Resources 14 (7):555–70. doi:10.1080/089419201750341862[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA] [Google Scholar]). But engaging with the “subsumption of nature” framework simultaneously allows me to problematize artistic visions presenting nature as fully malleable.
... While diet manipulation and breeding improvements have transformed biological processes central to ruminant livestock production and enabled continued accumulation within the sector, there is ultimately a limit on the ability of "traditional" intensification to transform biological processes and yield improvements in emissions efficiency. Where Boyd et al. (2001) and Prudham (2003) refer to the "progressive transformation" of nature under real subsumption, it is important to qualify their account by noting that both the pace and manner of how nature is transformed is highly variable. The next section examines recent efforts to reengineer the metabolic and ecological processes fundamental to ruminant digestion that mark one such shift in the manner in which real subsumption is pursued. ...
This article examines the stomachs of ruminant livestock as a site of biotechnological intervention and analyzes efforts to reengineer ruminant digestion as a case of the real subsumption of nature. The livestock industry’s capacity to increase production is constrained by available grazing land and concern about environmental consequences of ever-increasing livestock numbers. Ruminants are also a significant source of greenhouse gases and the mitigation of methane is a recognized priority within the global climate framework. The pursuit of “sustainable intensification” and new technological fixes have been identified as preferred responses to these constraints. The case of ruminant methane calls into question assumptions about the primacy of accumulation, rather than regulation, in driving the real subsumption of nature. The pursuit of technological fixes within biologically based industries may be motivated by a need to stabilize the conditions of production, and regulation itself can provide an impetus for the real subsumption of nature.
... Many of these problems relate to the variability and socioecological complexity of forests and therefore reflect challenges in the forestry sector more widely. As Prudham's (2003; work illustrates, forestry companies have long been confronting nature as a particularly uncooperative partner, providing obstacles to the economic rationalization of industrial tree growth in the form of decades-long growth rates and species and age diversity in natural forests. As companies sought to overcome these obstacles, they increasingly embarked upon the real subsumption of nature, that is, the control of biological time and space through intensified plant breeding, the selection of more rapidly growing species, and a general tendency toward standardization and monoculture plantation in order to facilitate management and harvesting (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001;see also Scott 1999). ...
The “subsumption of nature” framework focuses on productivity increases and extractive innovations in nature-based industries. In this article, we argue that it can also be employed beyond that context in order to capture the convoluted dynamics of market environmentalism. To substantiate our argument, we draw on recent fieldwork on “Trees for Global Benefits,” a forestry-based offsetting project in western Uganda. Like industrial tree plantations, this project relies on the subsumption of carbon sequestration to market imperatives in order to guarantee the quality of its carbon credits. The ecological and socioeconomic difficulties this process engenders give rise to unintended consequences and set in motion the disciplining of the carbon offset producers themselves. The application of the subsumption framework to nonindustrial sectors in this way calls attention to the interlinked socioecological dynamics involved in the subsumption of nature, and highlights potential synergies with previous work on the subsumption of labor.
... Other scholars, such as Ranganathan (2015), have focused on the tensions between ''flow" and ''fixity" as a way to reveal the relational politics that assemble storm drains and produce urban flood risk. Yet others have shown the uncooperative nature of resources to commodification, whereby the biophysical characteristics of a resource frustrate human efforts to govern, measure, trade, and exchange them uniformly (Bakker, 2003a;Prudham, 2003;Sneddon, 2007). Although diverse in theoretical engagements, a common trend among research into socio-material politics is a focus on the biophysical characteristics and heterogeneous elements of the material world that enroll expert knowledge claims and technologies in order to render nature visible and governable (Landström et al., 2011;Latour, 2004b;Li, 2007a;Mitchell, 2002;Scott, 1998). ...
This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved in identifying stormwater as a new and underutilized water resource. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the active processes of calculating the metabolic inflows and outflows of stormwater in Los Angeles serve as a way for the city to render value and meaning to the flows of stormwater. I suggest that the ways urban metabolisms are calculated reflect a volumetric approach to environmental governance that serves to achieve certain political goals. I refer to this type of governance as volume control—a way of organizing technopolitical interventions around overcoming problems related to the volume of resources flowing and circulating into, through, and out of cities and industrial systems. I argue that understanding this form of governance relies on taking a political–industrial ecology approach that accounts for both the social and material dimensions of resource flows. While the categories and motivations of stormwater governance remain contested over time and space, it is shown that stormwater in Los Angeles needs to be understood in relation to the ecological systems and scientific, political, and cultural practices designed to make it into a resource and align with existing patterns of growth and development.
... These studies exemplify political ecology's increasing attention to how power and agency come to exist alongside social-ecological change (Robbins, 2012). Similarly, appeals for environmental governance research to pursue ''nuanced analyses of how power is produced and exercised over and through the nonhuman world" (Bridge and Perreault, 2009, p. 485) have been earnestly addressed in work on natural resource commodification, where biophysical and chemical properties of trees or water have been depicted as alternately resisting or allying with privatization efforts, necessitating recursive and intricate regulatory policies (Prudham, 2003;Bakker, 2005). Such work gives impetus for political ecology to historicize societyenvironment interactions, as in Swyngedouw's (1999Swyngedouw's ( , 2003 production of socionature analytic, which prioritizes not resulting hybrids but the historical material process of hybridization, in which multiple actors are enrolled with varying degrees of power and agency, each with the possibility of making strategic alliances such to enhance its own power (Bakker and Bridge, 2006). ...
Environmental conservation is increasingly operated through partnerships among state, private, and civil society actors, yet little is known empirically about how such collectives function and with what livelihood and governance outcomes. The landscape approach to conservation (known also as the ecosystem approach) is one such hybrid governance platform. Implemented worldwide over the past decade by international NGOs, the landscape approach employs the ‘ecosystem principles’ of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In spite of its prominence as a conservation and development strategy, little political ecology scholarship has considered the landscape approach. This article offers a case study of a conservation landscape in the Congo Basin, the Tri-National de la Sangha (TNS), which connects tropical forests in Cameroon, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic. Led by NGOs, the TNS has since 2001 relied on partnerships among logging companies, safari hunters, the state, and local communities. Although the landscape approach purports to facilitate re-negotiations of user rights, resource access patterns in the TNS appear to have molded to pre-existing power relations. Rather than incorporating local concerns and capabilities into management, local knowledge is discredited and livelihoods are marginalized. As a result, management occurs through spatially-demarcated zones, contrasting the fluidity of interactions among diverse groups: both human (loggers, hunter-gatherers, safari guides, NGOs) and non-human (trees, elephants). These findings are situated within a burgeoning literature on neoliberal environmental governance, and suggest that ensuring ecologically and socially positive outcomes will require careful and iterative attention to linkages between ecological processes and evolving power dynamics.
... Th e inclusion of these new participants in decision-making has made the process more dynamic, refl ecting the various challenges and structures present at diff erent times. At the same time, water infl uences the transformation of the economic and social landscape through the complex relationships between human beings, economic practices, and cultural factors that make water resources so socially signifi cant and thus infl uence governance practices (see, among others, Swyngedouw 1997Swyngedouw , 1999Swyngedouw et al. 2002 ;Prudham 2003 ). Changes in water management strategies lead to the emergence of new issues that redefi ne how water and its use are understood by various social groups, and can also lead to changes in institutional arrangements and power fl ows as these respond to the dynamic appropriation and understanding of water (Empinotti and Jacobi 2012 ). ...
The different chapters of this book discuss key aspects of agricultural modernization and raise some important questions about politico-economic and socio-ecological transformations taking place in countries of both the Global North (Europe in particular) and the Global South (with specific examples from Brazil and India). Our starting point is that, because of complex socio-economic interactions, environmental pressures, and fierce disputes, agriculture and rural development are today among the most controversial areas of policymaking, planning, and lobbying. With the encroachment of contemporary capitalism upon food production and biological systems, agriculture has become increasingly associated with, and subordinate to, a globalized agroindustrial complex that exerts decisive influence over technology, financing, logistics, and commercialization. In general terms, a—partial and problematic—transition from agriculture to agribusiness has taken place over the last century, with the last two decades or so seeing a further transition to neoliberalized agribusiness. Consequently, the concept of agribusiness, which was originally introduced in the 1950s at the time of Fordist agriculture in the USA, has had to mutate in order to encapsulate agricultural production based on business-friendly state interventions, policy liberalization, and the dominance of transnational corporations.
... The contributions to this issue also explicitly or implicitly highlight the 'unruly' character of carbon offsets, i.e. the fact that the commodification of carbon is difficult because of uncertainties in the measurement and realisation of project-based emission reductions (Bumpus, 2011). This resonates with broader debates in critical geography about 'uncooperative' resources, which include those that have certain biophysical and spatial characteristics, which coupled with social systems, complicate the well functioning of markets (Bakker, 2005;Prudham, 2003). Wang and Corson's article again demonstrates how the calculation of carbon savings in improved cook stoves in Kenya relies has relied on 'problematic' procedures and accounting assumptions about households' fuel wood collection rates, which results in 'dubious' environmental benefits. ...
Bioenergy derived from plants is typically defined by its capacity to act as a sustainable substitute for fossil fuels. Yet plants might also help us to rethink the very purpose of energy in the Anthropocene, with implications for prevailing attitudes toward growth, productivity, waste, and even pleasure. Drawing on resource and vegetal geographies, the energy humanities, and posthumanist accounts of capitalist production, this provocation begins by highlighting the shared reliance of bioenergy and fossil energy on the work that plants do while photosynthesizing and growing. Recognizing bioenergy as dependent on vegetal labor, rather than as a free gift of nature, serves to foreground the inherent contestability of plants’ use as energy feedstocks. By attending closely to the temporalities and rhythms of vegetal labor, the article argues that we might work with plants not just to restructure incumbent energy systems but also to reshape underlying energy cultures. A closer attunement to plants, the article concludes, could enable society to imagine and embrace new habits of energy consumption. Such habits would reify not continuous expansion or growth, nor even sustainability, but rather the patient anticipation of more transient episodes of deliberate squander and excess.
This PhD explores the politics of pewen tree (Araucaria araucana) conservation in Chile and how these are shaped by different understandings of nature and human-nature relations. Embedded within the political ecology of conservation and informed by relational approaches from environmental humanities and ontological politics, the thesis explores these debates through an in-depth example from a less widely researched field, namely tree conservation. Pewen is an iconic tree in Chile, with the highest level of legal protection. It is present in the temperate rain forest of Southern Chile and Argentina, and it can reach 50 meters high and more than 1000 years old. For Pewenche indigenous peoples, pewen is a sacred tree and a basic means of subsistence, mainly, but not only, because of its nutritious seeds (i.e. piñones). The research is based on qualitative methods: interviews with government officials, ecologists, geneticists, and Pewenche; participatory observation in workshops and meetings; field visits to pewen forests with relevant actors; and a review of policy documents, public letters and newspapers. Fieldwork was conducted between 2017 and 2018, when two key events took place: the national reclassification of pewen conservation status and the start of the Pewen National Conservation Plan. The analysis unfolds through three sections. First, it explores the politics of pewen reclassification demonstrating how the process was shaped by cultural and political meanings ascribed to species status in the assessments. Second, it explores the relationships between Pewenche and pewen as a process of becoming-with, showing how a local pewen ontology is enacted from the interaction between Pewenche and pewen in ways that challenges dominant conservation dichotomies. Third, it develops an analysis of the ways in which different human-nature relations shape pewen conservation, comparing three approaches to this (ecologists, geneticists and Pewenche) and examining how these are embedded in unequal power relations.
Water buffaloes have a seasonal cycle of reproduction. Normally they tend to reproduce more when the daylight hours decrease. This seasonal reproduction also means that most of the buffalo calves would be born in autumn and winter in Italy where buffaloes are dairy animals, and milk production would be the highest in these seasons. However, consumer demand for the PDO (Protected designation of origin) mozzarella cheese is the highest in spring and summer. In order to deal with the imbalances between the seasonality of milk production and mozzarella consumption, and the strict regulations of the PDO cheese production, farmers and veterinarians resort to a temporal fix, and they regularly deseasonalise buffalo reproduction. However, there is an obvious discrepancy between the use of this and other fixes (cryotechnologies) generally associated with industrial agriculture, and the idea of traditional and sustainable food production. By engaging with relevant economic geography and political ecology literature, this paper investigates the temporal fixes in dairy farming and agri-food production through an in-depth empirical analysis of deseasonalisation, as a particular form of the real subsumption of nature, and cryopolitics in buffalo mozzarella cheese production in Southern Italy. The work presented in this article is based on multi-sited qualitative field research of buffalo farming and mozzarella cheese production in Campania region. This paper also has wider implications on how socio-ecological fixes shape ‘just-in-time’ animal agriculture and agri-food production.
This article develops the concept of hydroponic capital in order to explain the emergence of socionatural innovations aiming to enhance food security and production efficiencies in glasshouse agrifood production clusters. It does so through an archaeology of the knowledge regimes involved in technology innovations and examines the regionalized and transnational networks of crop scientists, growers, and extension workers involved. How hydroponics resulted in an intensification of the circulation time for capital and a reduction in the scale and costs of labor inputs is explained. In doing so, advances in economic geographic understanding of innovation through an engagement with agrarian political economy and political ecological debates to explain how hydroponic capital developed through the combination of different innovatory knowledges seeking to grapple with plant pathologies and cropping systems across regionalized networks of actors are discussed. Hydroponics was a way for growers to overcome biophysical barriers to production and labor rationalization problems. The article combines an understanding of the dynamics of labor and capital in agrarian systems, since they struggle with crop biophysicality, with the granular processes of knowledge deployment by which innovation takes place to overcome these biophysical barriers in agrifood supply chains. Unlike much existing innovation research focusing on the combination of different knowledge bases, why different forms of innovation knowledge were combined to overcome biophysical barriers in agrifood innovation is explained.
Campus forests are highly managed landscapes that provide ecological services and social benefits to actively enhance our spaces of higher education. Managing these forests, however, is challenging due to multiple and at times conflicting perspectives, including aesthetics, maintenance, ecological consideration, recreation, function, and institutional continuity. Ongoing efforts to study and shape Allegheny College’s campus forest through student research, campus initiatives, and institutional efforts demonstrate how campus landscapes offer opportunities to provide educational activities and work toward more sustainable communities. Current efforts include courses developing policy and management directions for a climate resilient forest that includes agroforestry. This paper presents recent efforts by Allegheny’s Environmental Science and Sustainability department to consider the past, present, and future of its campus forest through lenses of resiliency, productivity, and history. The paper explores challenges to maintaining a sustainable campus forest, including the need to undertake a full inventory of campus forests, centralizing decision-making while remaining inclusive of varied stakeholders, and developing community relationships through those forest activities. We also outline possible solutions to these challenges, leveraging the many assets of a campus community to pursue the goal of more resilient campus forests.
In British Columbia, Canada, aging forestry scientists struggle to pass on long‐term projects to younger colleagues who may never arrive. Thanks to the government of British Columbia's radical downsizing of its forestry research institutions, many of these scientists have been forced to reconceptualize the meaning of “succession.” Central to this process are computer‐based simulations of forest change, which have become critical sites of relationality for scientists struggling to sustain key experiments and their attending intellectual legacies. Digital simulations have increasingly come to mediate the expectations and shared dependencies that constitute scientific authorship. As a result, contemporary processes of institutional reproduction can depend less on deliberate enactments of agency than on subtler processes of detachment. To have their epistemic authority recognized by funders, apprentices, and collaborators, aging scientists must increasingly foreground their vulnerabilities and prepare for the possibility of their own erasure. [expertise, aging, simulation, forestry, environmental science, British Columbia, Canada, North America]
Large-scale European electricity providers are increasingly replacing coal with renewable biomass wood pellets produced from working forests of the U.S. South. Adopting a posthumanist interpretation of the labor theory of value, this article argues that wood pellet manufacturing constitutes an attempt by energy capital to substitute the “dead labor” of prehistoric plants, embodied in fossil fuels, with the living, “vegetal labor” of forests of the present day. More specifically, the article contends that by capitalizing on the hybrid labor regimes through which the real subsumption of nature in working forests is achieved, energy interests seek to position wood pellets not merely as a viable alternative resource for electricity generation but as a socioecological fix for capitalist crisis linked to climate change in the European energy sector. The legitimacy of this apparent fix depends, however, on normalizing a view of forests not as gradually accumulating carbon sinks but as high-throughput carbon conveyors. Wood pellet manufacturing thus has important implications for conceptual understandings of the role played by labor—both human and vegetal—in efforts to institute socioecological fixes and also for practical efforts to challenge the inherently productivist logics of expanding forest-based bioenergy systems, whether rooted in the U.S. South or elsewhere.
What constitutes science? What is the relation between scientific practice and capitalist modernity? What are the responsibilities of scientists in the face of our planetary crisis? In 2016 the Zapatistas of Chiapas organized an event to reflect upon and discuss the practice and politics of science. This paper — based on a script of a presentation at the event — takes up these questions, drawing from radical thought and philosophy of science to consider science in our present conjuncture.
As concern over various environmental issues has risen at the international level, questions regarding what constitutes “nature” and how it should be portrayed and treated have gained a greater sense of urgency. This paper explores varying concepts and attributes of nature articulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (“CITES”). Much of the research on CITES comes from the fields of policy and ecology, exploring matters of biodiversity, sustainability, enforcement, functionality, and evaluation of CITES as a “success” or “failure” of policy, with little focus on issues of cultural context and ambiguities. In contrast, within the social sciences, the contemporary literature is broadly dedicated to critiquing the static, dualistic ideas of nature upon which environmental regulations are based. However, what is often missing from this discourse is how environmental policies often have an implicit understanding that these static conceptions of nature are not accurate – that within the environmental legislation process, there is “an awareness, for example, of the messy, improvised character of knowledges about nature”. This paper explores CITES’s understanding of nature, how it characterizes nature, and how these conceptions become implemented in legislative practice. It illustrates CITES as a manifestation of what Krueger calls a regulatory process of “coded and recoded text with material implications” (p. 880), wherein a relatively unchanging set of legislation can create “multiple, even contradictory, outcomes coexisting simultaneously in the same system” (p. 872).
Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism - by Gareth Bryant February 2019
Cambridge Core - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics - Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism - by Gareth Bryant
The environment is organic to the neoliberal turn, not just as more or less cooperative material inputs or as a surface on which the changes to production and labor relations play out. The frequent finding that nature is being privatized and commodified in new ways is often described as nature's neoliberalization, but these trends do not exhaust the ways in which nature is integral to recent economic transformations. This article is structured around two claims. First, the ways of representing the environment economically that the neoliberal natures literature tends to represent as quite new are actually present and important at the origins of neoliberal policy. A brief genealogy of neoliberalism and nature in U.S. economic policy of the 1970s is surveyed in support of this. Second, work on neoliberal natures has emphasized the commodification and privatization of nature under neoliberalism at the expense of analyzing the environment's role in other important features of neoliberalism. Using qualitative policy analysis and an examination of three modern cases of environmental policy, this article traces the connections between the governance of nature and the governance of other parts of the economy with reference to the more specific economic transformations identified as “post-Fordist.” These similarities are not due to the new application of an established set of techniques of economic governance but because nature was internal to neoliberalism from the beginning not just as resources but as a set of relationships useful for stabilizing capital accumulation.
Are we living in a moment of widespread financialization of nature, an epochal regime shift to ‘accumulation by conservation’? Much depends on definitions and on the questions asked. This chapter explores different ways financialization is being understood in critical scholarship and outlines five distinct but connected research areas that can help us understand the extent and effects of the so-called financialization of biodiversity conservation. These include shifting relationships, discourse, capital flows, risk management and subjectivities. The chapter suggests that those of us studying these intersections of finance and conservation need to be more specific and empirical about the forms financialization may or may not be taking. After reviewing some of the existing evidence, the chapter conclude by discussing the lack of financial capital circulating in the project of biodiversity conservation and the implications of this for how we think about the prospect of a slowing of the sixth extinction. Spoiler alert: it doesn't look good. The non-accumulation by conservation situation suggests that even the most mainstream, neoliberal approaches to environmental problems are themselves marginal and halting.
As part of their long-running project to get beyond the nature–culture dualism, political ecologists have increasingly explored the active contributions of nonhumans to environmental politics. Upon decentering humans, however, too often posthumanist political ecologies have recentered humans and animals, indexing the enlarged category of ''political actor " to narrowly shared traits like mobility or intentional-ity. Among other consequences, this tendency in political ecology's posthumanism leaves the political agency of plants largely neglected. Political ecology suffers from this neglect, but the field can benefit from an integration of the insights of vegetal politics, a literature that traces the consequences of plant capabilities in more-than-human geographies. In this article, I model this integration—a vegetal political ecology—by examining human–plant partnerships in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan's walnut–fruit forest, an ecosystem distinguished by the number of its trees that can be modified by horticultural techniques like grafting. I argue that the forest's ''graftability " incrementally undermines two different hierarchies, one typifying people–plant relationships and another that characterizes state-centered regimes of post-Soviet forest governance. Graftability thus allows Kyrgyzstani villagers and trees to act with more autonomy than they otherwise would. This antihierarchical effect is a small biological determinism conferred by the capacities of the graftable tree, and it has political consequences. Vegetal political ecology aims to similarly connect plant performances to their broader political effects; by doing so, it can help political ecologists escape the residual humanism that still characterizes their efforts at posthumanism and better illuminate the political possibilities of partnering with plants.
Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners—usually indigenous communities—to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the “social license” is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together.
The Amazon region poses a great challenge for the water resources management regime in Brazil. Its large area, widely dispersed population, and the small number of economic activities based in the region’s river basins have hampered the implementation of decentralized and participatory institutional structures as defined in Brazil’s Water Law 9433, approved in 1997. The lack of spaces for negotiation, combined with rising demand for water and energy, has led to serious conflict, as was recently the case with the Belo Monte Dam, under construction along the lower Xingu River. The growing demand for water and energy has led to conflict and distress, while state authorities and the agriculture sector have focused their attention on land tenure and deforestation, leaving water management and access as a secondary issue. However, while water is not explicitly on the agenda, it is water availability that allows intensive food production in the region to expand. So, how are formal water institutions reaching the local and municipal scale? Who are the groups involved? How are their strategies influencing water access and environmental conservation in the region?
Analysis of current works and trends in geography is conducted, with emphasis on human-environment and nature-society geography (HE-NS) in order to identify areas of conceptual overlap, promising exchange, and potential collaboration with Long-Term Social-Ecological Research (LTSER). HE-NS geography resembles the defining focus of LTSER on the coupled interactions of human societies and environments. Important conceptual connections to LTSER are identified as follows: (i) Coupled Human-Environment Interactions; (ii) Sustainability Science, Social-Ecological Adaptive Capacity, and Vulnerability; (iii) Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) and Land Change Science (LCS); (iv) Environmental Governance and Political Ecology; (v) Environmental Landscape History and Ideas; and (vi) Environmental Scientific Concepts in Models, Management, and Policy. Demonstrated promise and potential value of conceptual “points of contact” exist in each of these areas of HE-NS geography and LTSER. Concepts of spatial and temporal scale, human-environment and nature-society interactions, multi-scale and networked spatiotemporal designs, and socio-ecological science theories and methodologies offer specific examples of the bridges between HE-NS geography and LTSER in interdisciplinary environmental studies and policy, a case study of Andean watersheds in the upper Amazon basin, and conclusions.
Olivia, MN, is a town of 2,500 inhabitants in the Northern Corn Belt, known as the “Corn Capital of the World.” The author provides an eco-biography of Olivia, MN by showing how corn shaped the landscape, industry, and culture of the “Corn Capital.” Olivia serves both a case study location to document the changes in Midwestern agriculture, as well as a unique global corn research and development hub and center for corn celebrations. Both Native Americans and European settlers used corn to actively shape the landscape of the area, turning prairie and marshlands into farmland. Olivia’s economy was and is also shaped by corn as the town has become one of the key research and production sites of seed corn, therefore tying it intimately into the global agro-business network. This dissertation traces the transformation of landscape around Olivia, the history of the industrialization and globalization of the seed industry, the environmental impacts caused through the creation of the Corn Belt, as well as the ways in which corn influenced local celebrations.
Containment of transgenes inserted into genetically engineered forest trees will probably be necessary before most commercial uses are possible. This is a consequence of (1) high rates of gene dispersal by pollen and seed, (2) proximity of engineered trees in plantations to natural or feral stands of interfertile species, and (3) potentially undesirable ecological effects if certain transgenes become widely dispersed. In addition to gene containment, engineering of complete or male sterility may stimulate faster wood production, reduce production of allergenic pollen, and facilitate hybrid breeding. We review the regulatory and ecological rationale for engineering sterility, potentially useful floral genes, strategies for creating sterility-causing transgenes, and problems peculiar to engineering sterility in forest trees. Each of the two primary options — ablating floral tissuesvia floral promoter-cytotoxin fusions, and disrupting expression of essential floral genes by various methods of gene suppression — has advantages and disadvantages. Because promoters from structural and enzymatic floral-specific genes often work well in heterologous species, ablation methods based on these genes probably will not require cloning of homologs from angiosperm trees. Methods that inhibit gene expression will require cloning of tree genes and may be more prone to epigenetic variability, but should allow assay of transgene efficacy in seedlings. Practical constraints include the requirement for vegetative propagation if complete sterility is engineered and the need for highly stable forms of sterility in long-lived trees. The latter may require suppression of more than one floral gene or employment of more than one genetic mechanism for sterility.
Shade trees unable to produce floral tissues, or that produce only nonreproductive floral organs such as petals, are desirable for a number of reasons. They can reduce the need to clean flower and fruit litter, eliminate hazards from large and fleshy fruits on walks, and lessen allergenic pollen production. Research in herbaceous species has established that introduction of gene constructs created by recombinant DNA technology provides an effective means to manipulate flowers without deleterious effects on vegetative growth. Though not yet demonstrated in trees, this approach will likely be successful in both angiosperms and gymnosperms because genes that control reproductive development are similar in sequence and function among diverse plant species. Key to the practical application of genetically engineered sterility to shade trees, however, is the development of efficient gene transfer and vegetative propagation systems to deliver engineered, sterile trees to the marketplace; these systems are in place for a limited number of species. We discuss the rationale for sexual sterility in arboriculture, methods for genetic engineering of sterility, our progress in engineering sterility in poplars, and the current status of transformation and propagation methods for some common shade tree genera.
Existing literature suggests that food, fiber, and raw material sectors differ from manufacturing in significant ways. However, there is no analytical basis for engaging the particular challenges of nature-centered production, and thus the distinct ways that industrialization proceeds in extractive and cultivation-based industries. This article presents a framework for analyzing the difference that nature makes in these industries. Nature is seen as a set of obstacles, opportunities, and surprises that firms confront in their attempts to subordinate biophysical properties and processes to industrial production. Drawing an analogy from Marxian labor theory, we contrast the formal and real subsumption of nature to highlight the distinct ways in which biological systems - in marked contrast to extractive sectors - are industrialized and may be made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves. These concepts differentiate analytically between biologically based and nonbiologically based industries, building on theoretical and historical distinctions between extraction and cultivation.
This paper explores debates over the statistical picturing of the nation's finite forest resources in the Progressive-era United States. This picturing was made possible by a variety of new quantitative and graphical practices that made maps and statistics appear as objective evidence of the natural limits those objects appeared to exhibit. Drawing on the work of Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this appearance was generated through more generalized practices of enframing. Enframing involved the systematic ordering of objects to create the appearance of a world metaphysically divided in two and graspable in terms of the distinction between reality and the objective representations through which reality as such was made to appear. This binary ordering, or enframing, of appearance created the appearance of order itself as an apparently abstract framework within which the objects so enframed could be more closely regulated. Enframing the forest quantitatively transformed heterogeneous forests into an apparently calculable quantity available to new disciplinary forms of state power that Foucault argues are characteristic of modem governmentality. The timber-famine debate also highlights the question of trust and the dependence of expert authority on traditional gender and class differences, which were themselves reworked through the quantifying practices of scientific forest conservation.
Hybrid poplar clone NC–5339 (Populusalba × Populusgrandidentata cv. Crandon) was genetically modified for glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) tolerance by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation with genetic constructs (pPMG 85/587 and pCGN 1107) that included the mutant aroA gene for 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase (EC 2.5.1.19) and the neomycin phosphotransferase selectable marker gene. pCGN 1107 also harbored the coding sequence for a chloroplast transit peptide and the CaMV 35S promoter fused to the mutant aroA gene. Transformants were selected for kanamycin tolerance, and integration of the aroA gene was verified by Southern blot analysis. Cuttings of NC-5339 and the derived transformants were rooted and grown in glasshouses at separate locations, with maximum photosynthetic photon flux density of 1600 and 750 μmol•m−2•s−1. Productivity was assessed by growth studies and photosynthesis measurements at both locations. Glyphosate tolerance was tested by (i) measurement of chlorophyll concentration in herbicide-treated leaf discs and (ii) whole-plant spray tests. Plants transformed with construct pCGN 1107 were the most herbicide tolerant. Perhaps high-level expression of the aroA gene by the CaMV 35S promoter, transport of mutant EPSP synthase into the chloroplasts, or both facilitated glyphosate tolerance. Plants grown at higher photosynthetic photon flux densities (1600 vs. 750 μmol•m−2•s−1) had significantly higher maximum net photosynthesis (19.8 vs. 16.2 μmol•m−2•s−1) and more biomass accumulation (47.6 vs. 33.7 g). However, there were no significant differences between NC-5339 and transformants within location for net photosynthesis or any growth parameter. Genetic modification of hybrid poplar NC-5339 for glyphosate tolerance did not adversely affect plant productivity at either location.
First the Seed spotlights the history of plant breeding and shows how efforts to control the seed have shaped the emergence of the agricultural biotechnology industry. This second edition of a classic work in the political economy of science includes an extensive, new chapter updating the analysis to include the most recent developments in the struggle over the direction of crop genetic engineering. 1988 Cloth, 1990 Paperback, Cambridge University Press. Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society. Winner of the Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association. © 2004 by The Board of Regents of the University Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
There are three primary activities that characterize the discipline of Weed Science. These activities are weed technology, weed biology, and the ethics of weed control. Each of these activities needs to be considered as herbicide-tolerant crops (HTCs) are introduced. HTCs are the most recent refinement in the existing technology to control weeds. The potential benefits from the improved weed control must be weighed against possible increased costs of production and potential for genes that control herbicide tolerance to escape into non-tolerant plant populations. These questions about herbicide resistance are primarily technological and biological. They demonstrate the paucity of information in Weed Science on weed genetics, gene flow, fitness, and other aspects of weed-crop population dynamics. Other questions about HTCs are ethical. They require that we ask who benefits from the technology and what are the economic, ecological, and social consequences of it.
It would be convenient indeed if such a contentious issue as the relationship between population and resources could be discussed in some ethically neutral manner. In recent years scientific investigations into this relationship have multiplied greatly in number and sophistication. But the plethora of scientific investigation has not reduced contentiousness; rather, it has increased it. We can venture three possible explanations for this state of affairs: (1) science is not ethically neutral; (2) there are serious defects in the scientific methods used to consider the population-resources problem; or (3) some people are irrational and fail to understand and accept scientifically established results. All of these explanations may turn out to be true, but we can afford to proffer none of them without substantial qualification. The last explanation would require, for example, a careful analysis of the concept of rationality before it could be sustained (Godelier, 1972). The second explanation would require a careful investigation of the capacities and limitations of a whole battery of scientific methods, techniques, and tools, together with careful evaluation of available data, before it could be judged correct or incorrect. In this paper, however, I shall focus on the first explanation and seek to show that the lack of ethical neutrality in science affects each and every attempt at ‘rational’ scientific discussion of the population-resources relationship. I shall further endeavor to show how the adoption of certain kinds of scientific methods inevitably leads to certain kinds of substantive conclusions which, in turn, can have profound political implications.
Positive implications of new biotechnology for Asian forestry rapid propagation of fast-growing tree species in developing countries - potentials, constraints and future developments the role of micropropagation in clonal forestry macro- and microvegetative propagation as a tool in tree breeding - case studies of Aspen and Cashew rapid clonal propagation, storage and exchange of Musa spp. clonal forestry in the Congo of Eucalyptus hybrids vegetative propagation of Populus and Salix rooting trials with stem cuttings of Erythrina.
The complementary use of forest biotechnology along with traditional silvicultural programs has the potential to improve the quality of Canadian forests by promoting increased forest productivity, a reduction of exploitation pressure on forest lands, an increase in gene conservation, and improved forest management. However, these benefits could also be followed by undesirable effects such as pest adaptation to control methods, non-target pest emergence, reduction of biodiversity, and genetic pollution. Measures that could be implemented to circumvent these potentially undesirable effects are discussed. -from Author
Research within industrial geography has illuminated the relationship between the restructuring of manufacturing and the reshaping of urban space. Industrial geographers have paid little attention, however, to the dramatic social and economic changes occurring throughout rural America. I contend that evident sectoral and urban biases mask an underlying issue: a persistent conceptual schism between agriculture and industry, in which agriculture is comparatively undertheorized as an arena of capitalist development. As a result, a significant part of the story of economic restructuring - the transformation of farming and the creation of new forms of rural development - remains largely unexamined. This paper sets out to bridge the gap separating industry from agriculture and thereby begins to recover this lost side of industrial restructuring. I argue that the incorporation of agriculture into industrial geography involves much more than a simple mapping of industrial theory onto farm terrain; it requires an exploration of the distinctive process of industrialization surrounding farm production. A careful treatment of agricultural development allows farming to be reclaimed from the conceptual backwater, while also providing an opportunity to scrutinize industrial theory from a forgotten perspective. Drawing on recent political economic research in geography and allied fields, I focus on three themes that emerge from the study of agriculture and discuss the lessons they impart to industrial geography: (1) the importance of sectoral difference to regional development, (2) the multiplicity of industrialization paths, and (3) the importance of locality. Each theme is illustrated using examples drawn from the Midwest.
Patterns of geographic variation for seed and seedling traits of Douglas-fir from four elevations on west and east aspects of first and second ridges away from the ocean (latitude @?42@?30'N) were observed under two air-temperature regimes in a common garden. Size and germination rate were recorded for seeds; phenological and size data were recorded on seedlings through two growing seasons. The pattern of genetic variation appeared to be determined by adaptation to local moisture and temperature regimes. In east-west comparisons (inland ridge vs. coastal ridge or east aspect vs. west aspect), seeds of east aspect or inland origin were larger and germinated more rapidly than seeds of more westerly origin. Similarly, plants of inland origin or from east aspects tended to start and end elongation earlier and have smaller top: root ratios, compared to plants from the coastal ridge or west aspects. Genetic differences were generally greater between the west and east aspects of the coastal ridge than between the two aspects of the inland ridge. Variation in data of bud set and plant size was also related to elevation. The change associated with elevation was greater on the coastal ridge than on the inland ridge. Evidence is presented that indicates length of growing season and heat accumulation may change more with elevation and latitude near the ocean than inland in the Pacific Northwest. This in turn may result in steeper elevational and latitudinal gradients of genetically based variability near the ocean than inland.
Douglas-fir seedlings from a number of seed origins were subjected to drought conditions in the greenhouse and laboratory. Interior mountain seedlings showed significantly greater drought resistance than seedlings from origins west of the Cascade Mountains. Differences were also found within each of these groupings. In the Corvallis, Oregon, area seedlings produced from seed on a south slope had more drought resistance than those from a short distance away of a north slope. Differences in drought resistance may involve either drought hardiness or drought avoidance, or both.
Four dimensions seem to frame the recent study of environment-development relations: the debate on rationality, truth, and discourse, particularly that version which sees rationality as a specifically Western mode of thinking central to an understanding of what has come to be known as "development'; a mapping of development ideas as a means for understanding important shifts and realignments in development theory and practice during the 1980s and 1990s; discussions of lines of research and debate within a broadly defined political ecology; and recent discussions of social and environmental movements that redefine their causes and contents. We survey each in turn before concluding with a brief statement of position. -from Authors
The development of genetic variances in height growth of Douglas-fir over a 53-year period is analyzed and found to fall into three periods. In the juvenile period, variances in environmental error increase logarithmically, genetic variance within populations exists at moderate levels, and variance among populations is low but increasing. In the early reproductive period, the response to environmental sources of error variance is restricted, genetic variance within populations disappears, and populational differences strongly emerge but do not increase as expected. In the later period, environmental error again increases rapidly, but genetic variance within populations does not reappear and population differences are maintained at about the same level as established in the early reproductive period. The change between the juvenile and early reproductive periods is perhaps associated with the onset of ecological dominance and significant allocations of energy to reproduction.
Poplars (genus Populus) have emerged as a model organism for forest biotechnology, and genetic modification (GM: Asexual gene transfer) is more advanced for this genus than for any other tree. The goal of this paper is to consider the benefits expected from the use of GM poplar trees, and the most significant claims made for environmental harm, by comparing them to impacts and uncertainties that are generally accepted as part of intensive tree culture. We focus on the four traits with greatest commercialization potential in the near term: Wood modification, herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, and flowering control. After field trials and selection of the top performing trees, similar to that during conventional poplar breeding, GM poplars appear vigorous and express their new traits reliably. The ecological issues expected from use of GM poplars appear similar in scope to those managed routinely during conventional plantation culture, which includes the use of exotic and hybrid genotypes, short rotations, intensive weed control, fertilization, and density control. The single-gene traits under consideration for commercial use are unlikely to cause a significant expansion in ecological niche, and thus to substantially alter poplar's ability to "invade" wild populations. We conclude that the ecological risks posed by GM poplars are similar in magnitude, though not in detail, to those of routine poplar culture. We also argue that the tangible economic and environmental benefits of GM poplars for some uses warrant their near-term adoption - If coupled with adaptive research and monitoring - So that their economic and ecological benefits, and safety, can be studied on commercially and ecologically relevant scales. We believe that the growing demand for both wood products and ecological services of forests justifies vigorous efforts to increase wood production on land socially zoned for tree agriculture, plantations, or horticulture. This is the key reason for poplar biotechnology: The combination of economic efficiency with reduction of farm and forestry impact on the landscape.
The use of genetically engineered crop plants has raised concerns about the risks these crops pose to natural and agricultural ecosystems. The potential environmental hazards of transgenic woody biomass crops is discussed, and based on the biology of these crops and their transgenes, recommend a scientific framework for assessing risk. The potential impacts of transgenes based on both characteristics of the transgenic crop and potential for spread of the transgene to other organisms is considered. It is argued that risk assessment should focus exclusively on the phenotype expected from the transgene within a given plant host and environment, weighing both the costs of foregoing the benefits a transgenic variety can provide and the possibility of adverse environmental effects. Basic principles of population genetics can be used to facilitate prediction of the potential for transgenes to spread and establish in natural ecosystems. For example, transgenes that are expected to have neutral or deleterious effects on tree fitness, including those for lignin modification, reproductive sterility and antibiotic resistance, should be of little environmental concern in most biomass crop systems. In contrast, transgenes that are likely to substantially affect host fitness pose a greater risk, as are plants with transgenes which produce a substance known to disrupt ecological processes. Field experiments to determine population replacement and transgene flow are desirable for testing such predictions; however, the long generation times of tree crops makes such studies prohibitive. It is argued that a combination of demographic data from existing non-transgenic populations, simulation modeling of transgene dispersal, and monitoring field releases can be used to guide current risk assessment and can be used to further scientific knowledge for future assessment.
Le defi de la gestion des terres publiques consiste a rechercher un equilibre entre les besoins actuels et futurs de la population et la sante a long terme des ecosystemes. De plus, la gestion des terres publiques requiert d'etre attentif au public et a ses representants elus, et de s'assurer que les agences gouvernementales soient efficaces et representatives de la diversite du public americain. Les auteurs font le sommaire d'un sondage informel aupres d'intervenants cles et d'employes du Service forestier americain qui sont directement en contact avec le public. Le public a beaucoup de preoccupations au sujet de la diversite genetique et de la realisation des travaux d'amelioration genetique sur les terres publiques. De facon tres generale, meme si le choix des especes a utiliser en reboisement et la decision de regenerer naturellement ou artificiellement les forets constituent des questions en soit, ces preoccupations sont tout de meme souvent associees a des considerations d'ordre genetique. Lorsqu'on opte pour la regeneration artificielle, une preoccupation emerge au sujet de l'impact des caracteristiques genetiques des futurs arbres sur les composantes de l'ecosysteme. Ces preoccupations peuvent etre regroupees en trois categories, a savoir: (1) la reduction de la diversite genetique, (2) la perte d'adaptation et (3) les changements dans d'autres composantes de l'ecosysteme suite a la selection dirigee des arbres. Presentement, les connaissances et les preoccupations au sujet de ces questions varient enormement d'un citoyen a l'autre. Le developpement de politiques pouvant repondre a ces preoccupations du public peut emprunter differentes approches. Les objectifs plus generaux de politique de gestion des terres publiques peuvent s'appuyer sur les techniques sylvicoles, incluant la gestion des ressources genetiques. Ces objectifs generaux font presentement l'objet de beaucoup de controverse et de debats. Etant donne que le contexte politique general est dynamique, certaines options de politique concernant les aspects genetiques dans la gestion des terres publiques peuvent inclure (1) uniquement la conservation des ressources genetiques, (2) juste l'essentiel, (3) des technologies appropriees avec le support du public et (4) l'application de criteres economiques. Les auteurs discutent egalement du besoin d'un cadre afin de coordonner les politiques locales et nationales qui concernent la gestion des ressources genetiques.
Inspired by the Green Movement and invoking many of the analytical concepts of ecological science, environmental historians have offered trenchant criticisms of modern society and its relations with nature. Recently however, their position has been eroded on several fronts. Revisionists in ecological science have repudiated the idea of stable, holistic ecosystems used by many environmental historians and other Green critics to measure and assail the environmental damage wrought by society. Various assaults on the authority of science and history to represent nature and the past have also undercut the exclusive claims to knowledge that environmental historians rely upon to legitimate their critique. I review these various challenges and the responses to them in turn. In the final part of the essay, I advance the position that environmental historians and other Green critics should end their search for foundational authority, be it in science or elsewhere, and appeal instead to diverse moral, political, and aesthetic criteria to arbitrate between particular representations of nature in particular situations. This situation does not rule out appropriations from ecological science or other fields of knowledge where they prove useful and convincing, because ultimately, environmental narratives are not legitimated in the lofty heights of foundational epistemology but in the more approachable and more contested realm of public discourse.
This essay uses Marxian political-economy to make sense of an important international resource problem: the over-exploitation of the north Pacific fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) in the years between 1870 and 1911. Involving multiple economic actors and several nation states, the harvesting of the fur seal almost brought Britain and the U.S. to the point of armed conflict, almost brought financial ruin for all the parties with an economic stake in the fur seal trade, and almost brought about the extinction of the fur seal itself. In addition, the resolution of the fur seal crisis—the 1911 North Pacific Fur Seal Convention—was a precedent setting multilateral resource conservation agreement which enjoyed considerable long-term success. For these reasons, the fur seal case has resonances with present day inter national environmental problems, especially those concerning migratory ‘wildlife’. Using the fur seal example, the paper deploys ecoMarxist concepts to work on two fronts simultaneously. First, it offers a critique of currently popular neo-classical and free market approaches to explaining and resolving environmental problems. Second, it offers a critique of the also currently popular ‘ecocentric’ response to resource problems. Pointing to the inadequacies of both, the Marxian approach used offers an overarching account of the fur seal case in both its material and discursive dimensions. In conclusion, the limits of this approach are signalled and the cultural politics of theories of environmental degradation emphasized.
In this classic study, the authors assess the importance of technological change and resource substitution in support of their conclusion that resource scarcity did not increase in the Unites States during the period 1870 to 1957. Originally published in 1963.
This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist” theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, underproduction of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society. While the two processes of capital overproduction and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements” as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism” throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post-Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self-consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific” discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post-Marxist discussions of the problem of capital’s use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modem world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific” discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non-capitalist or anti-capitalist, constitute “civil society,” which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.
Technology and Culture 42.4 (2001) 631-664
In his 1948 classic, Mechanization Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion posed the following question: "What happens when mechanization encounters organic substance?" Well aware of the application of mass-production techniques to agriculture and of the role of genetics in facilitating "the structural alteration of plants and animals," Giedion nevertheless held to a basic distinction between "living substance" and mechanization. The idea of nature as technics, of biophysical systems as technological systems, would have seemed inappropriate in his framework. For Giedion, interventions in the organic growth process were qualitatively different from efforts to subject other aspects of modern life to the dictates of the machine.
In the half century since Giedion posed this question, numerous scholars have explored the relationship between nature and technology in a variety of areas, emphasizing the difficulty of making hard and fast distinctions. Environmental historians such as Donald Worster, William Cronon, and Richard White have interrogated some of the ways in which nature is incorporated into technological and political-economic systems. Historians of science such as Robert Kohler have explored how experimental creatures (drosophila in his case) are constructed as research instruments and technologies. And several historians and social scientists have investigated the role of science and technology in the industrialization of agricultural systems. Jack Kloppenburg and Deborah Fitzgerald, for example, have both demonstrated how a particular biological organism (hybrid corn) has been refashioned as an agricultural commodity and a vehicle for capital accumulation.
Following these leads, this article focuses on another organism, the broiler or young meat-type chicken, asking how science and technology have subordinated its biology to the dictates of industrial production. By looking explicitly at those technoscientific practices involved in making the industrial chicken, it offers a perspective on the course of technological change in agriculture that further blurs the distinction between nature and technology.
A product of key innovations in the areas of environmental control, genetics, nutrition, and disease management, the industrial broiler emerged during the middle decades of the twentieth century as a very efficient vehicle for transforming feed grains into higher-value meat products. By the 1960s the broiler had become one of the most intensively researched commodities in U.S. agriculture, while complementary changes in the structure, financing, and organization of leading firms created an institutional framework for rapidly translating research into commercial gain. The resulting increases in productivity and efficiency led to falling real prices, despite growing demand, and successfully brought chicken to the center of the plate for many Americans.
Like hybrid corn, the story of the industrial chicken must be seen as part of a larger process of agro-industrialization, which has not only transformed the social practices of agriculture, food production, and diet in twentieth-century America but also facilitated a profound restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology. This article explores the various and ongoing efforts to intensify and accelerate the biological productivity of the chicken -- asking how nature has been made to act as a force of production. Like Jack Kloppenburg's analysis of how capital intervenes in and circulates through nature in the case of plant breeding and biotechnology, the following story focuses quite specifically on the role of science and technology in incorporating biological systems into the circuits of industrial capital.
Yet where Kloppenburg offers an institutional analysis of how the "commodification of the seed" serves as an accumulation strategy, this essay focuses more broadly on a variety of technologies involved in accelerating biological productivity. While breeding and genetic improvement were clearly central vectors of technological change in making the industrial chicken, they were by no means the only ones. Intensive confinement, improved nutrition and feeding practices, and the widespread use of antibiotics and other drugs also represented important aspects of a larger technology platform aimed at subordinating avian biology to the dictates of industrial production.
Given the unpredictable nature and emergent properties of biological systems, however, any program aimed at the systematic intensification of biological productivity will almost inevitably be confronted with new sources of risk and vulnerability. Efforts to accelerate biological productivity must confront the vagaries of nature and the unintended consequences of attempts to simplify and incorporate biological processes...
In the mid-1960's, the problems of graft incompatibility, pollen contamination and slow and cyclic seed production caused Douglas-fir seed orchards to lose favor. Solutions now appear practical to graft incompatibility through providing compatible rootstocks and to pollen contamination through delaying floral bud development with water spray applications. The problem of slow and cyclic seed production is still unsolved.
A 96-inch-tall coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii [Mirb.]Franco) seedling was grown from seed in two years. Greenhouse temperatures of 60° to 70° F, a six-month growing season, long day, adequate winter chilling, large pots, periodic fertilization, and frequent watering are thought to be contributors to the rapid growth.
Since it began in 1966, the "progressive" system of tree improvement has been applied on 18 million acres of the Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii [Mirb.] Franco) region. It departs markedly from earlier practice, needing no grafted seed orchard. Its flexibility, low cost, minimal needs for skilled personnel, and large genetic base attracted landowners who were reluctant to invest in grafted orchards, which were then beset with many problems. The early adoption of a second phase, involving crossing of all parent trees and establishment of seedling seed orchards, has accelerated the region toward widespread use of second-generation seed about 15 years earlier than originally anticipated.
Over a decade ago, the Weed Science Society of America sponsored a symposium on the then emerging technology of herbicide-tolerant crops (HTCs). The symposium and subsequent proceedings addressed potential benefits and concerns about that new technology to control weeds. Technological, biological, and ethical questions were addressed that were likely to emerge from the widespread adoption of HTCs. It was suggested at that time that if such questions were answered, HTC development would proceed on a more solid foundation, whereas continued uncertainty and criticism would probably result if the questions were not answered. We now review developments in HTC technology. Questions and concerns posed one decade ago are still pertinent, but current knowledge is still insufficient to address them. Adoption of HTC has risen dramatically since their commercial introduction, but there is still no evidence of associated production cost reductions or enhanced yields. Additional index words: Biotechnology, herbicide-tolerant crops, weeds. Abbreviations: HTC, herbicide-tolerant crops.