Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 17.3 Nature as actor: the north Pacifi c fur seal
During a 40-year period, beginning in the 1870s, north Pacifi c fur seals, valued
for their pelts, were hunted by competing Americans, Canadians, Russians, and
Japanese sealers to near extinction. How could seals have possibly been agents
under these conditions? Castree insists we notice both the
possibilities
for value
expansion as well as the
obstacles
posed by the north Pacifi c fur seal. The possi-
bilities posed included the sheer density of the pelts that 'created a market for
garments made from those pelts' (p. 160). It included the very large number
(more than 3 million) of seals to be exploited, a measure of the seals' ecological
success. That the seals migratory lives stretched across the Pacifi c Ocean and
included both land and sea habitats, invited the success of sealers from the coun-
tries named above who then utilised a variety of hunting strategies (land- and
sea-based). And yet the nature of seals also posed obstacles. The diffi culty of
maintaining a count of seals while they were in their ocean-going migratory phase
made it impossible to know the proportion of living to killed seals. It was also
not easy to tell male from female seals, resulting in a large number of pregnant
seals hunted down. Seal nature then could be seen as having had a hand in
developing the international regulatory apparatus that followed the over hunting.
As Castree notes though, just why these material/natural features of seals mat-
tered (among their many other features) is 'relative to the demands made on them
by the mode of production' (Castree, 2005, p. 160).
appear into capital, nor are autonomous from it. They are both/and, in a context
where different natures are going to matter differently from situation to situation
(cf. Benton, 1996b).
There is some precedent for theoretically inserting the specifi c properties of
nature into theorisations of capital. Marxist writers have for a long time noted that
certain natural processes pose obstacles to capital and induce it to innovate. (This
is not to suggest that such obstacles are the only goad to change. Inter-capitalist
competition as such plays a strong role in fostering the search for new resource
frameworks through which to accumulate capital. See Storper and Walker [1989];
Buck [2006].) I have indicated one such natural obstacle already, the body of the
worker, the obstacles to which have been reckoned with by the passage from formal
to real subsumption. Another 'classic' case is that of agricultural production. See
Box 17.4.
The inventiveness of the commodifi cation process, with respect to even a force-
full nature, seems to know no end, as Neil Smith suggests (see also the prescient
essay by Enzenberger [1996], originally published in 1974, especially his discussion
of the eco-industrial complex). To the above examples we can add carbon credits,
wetlands credits, even woodpecker credits - in sum, the buying and selling of the
right to pollute or degrade nature. All are startling innovations. These credits are
sophisticatedly packaged to take their place alongside any other security and allow
polluters to play the part of environmentalist. Like the environment itself, it seems
environmental problems have no essence. An environmental problem is not a
problem if it can be traded for a benefi t elsewhere. Such is the imposition of value
fl ows globally when 'a $40 ton of unproduced Costa Rican carbon is entirely equi-
