Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 17.2 Water and the Malthusian Myth
In a classic essay of 1974 on natural resources and the ideology of science, David
Harvey argued that the environmental sciences of the postwar period were
fi xated erroneously on 'population pressures'. Drawing upon Marx, he argued
that so-called surplus populations could not be understood apart from global
capitalist processes through which lands and waters were enclosed and through
which labour was induced to urbanise. Barring catastrophe, he argued, there is
no essential relationship between population growth and resource scarcity, as
Malthusians argue. Consider the case of water. Eric Swyngedouw (2006) argues
that universally available potable water would be possible were it not for the
social, political, and economic relationships that structure (in)access to it. That
is, access to potable water is structured by access to capital. 'In Mexico City,
for example, 3 percent of households have 60 percent of all urban potable water,
while 50 percent make do with 5 percent. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, 65 percent
of urban dwellers receive 3 percent of the produced potable water at a price
that is at least two hundred times higher (20,000 percent) than that paid by a
low-volume consumer connected to the piped urban water network' (pp. 199-
200). Meanwhile the capital used for private development of water (its develop-
ment is increasingly privatised) has been restructured, coming more from
international sources, a trend promulgated by the World Bank. And yet what
these private companies have begun to discover is that they cannot conduct
business profi tably without public assistance and fi nancing. The road to more
water runs through capital, but capital has to run through the state. Swynge-
douw concludes that 'transforming H20 into a useful “thing” requires remodel-
ling and reorganising the socio-hydrological cycle so that it serves particular
socio-physical ends (irrigation, recreation, sanitation, etc.) The resulting hydro-
social cycle is embedded in and organised through the commodifi cation of water'
(p. 206). It is not an independent resource base to be drawn down by 'over-
population'. For other scholars working on natural resource issues, the above is
not to say that capitalism cannot have a 'Malthusian effect'. See for example
Bernstein and Woodhouse (2006).
conditions - and therefore exposes capitalism as a predatory system, whose natural
necessity is radically unnecessary - periods of restructuring intensify that very expo-
sure. It becomes apparent that capitalism requires more planning and regulation,
not less, and cannot abide by the neoliberal reforms sweeping the globe. Social
movements geared to politicising the conditions of production are thereby handed
an opportunity to constantly call capitalism and desires for capitalism into question.
Thus, it is the very forms of socialisation already widely embraced to deal with the
second contradiction (e.g., 'political bipartisanship in relation to urban redevelop-
ment, educational reform, environmental planning' (O'Connor, 1997, p. 168)) that
point a way forward out of capitalism. Through the crises generated by the second
contradiction - O'Connor hypothesises a possible 'second path to socialism'. Such
a second path would in fact pose a challenge to socialism as such, necessitating that
it be as equally green as it is red (a major theme of the prominent annual socialist
review,
Socialist Register
2007).
