Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 17.4 Nature as actor? Food and forest production
In much agricultural production, the natural environment and natural forces
loom large. As a generalisation, agriculture is space extensive, it relies on soils
requiring a high degree of maintenance, its suffers inclement weather, it involves
waiting out the growing season until crops can be harvested and profi ts made,
and so on. How does capital take on such risky business? Indeed, why would it?
In an infl uential book, Goodman et al. (1987) explored these sorts of questions.
Building on the work of Karl Kautsky, Susan Mann, James Dickinson and other
Marxist theorists of the 'agrarian question', they argued that capital has devel-
oped two basic strategies to deal with agriculture. Over time, productive activities
that once were the remit of the farm household or village economy were
appro-
priated
and redeveloped on an industrial basis, e.g., farm implements and machin-
ery or food processing and preserving. A strategy of
substitution
was also devised,
whereby 'natural' material inputs were replaced by industrially produced inputs:
fossil fuels replaced draught animals, and to a degree people, as a power source;
manufactured, chemical fertilizers replaced manures and mulches; factory pro-
duced food additives replaced whole foods. Appropriation and substitution speak
to the power of industrial capital to get around certain nature-imposed obstacles
(cf. McMichael 2006 on 'metabolic rift'). Finance capital has played an important
role too. Again, as a generalisation, the history of capitalist agriculture is of
increasing capital intensiveness: farmers have had to purchase more and more
inputs, and frequently more land, in order to remain successful. They have not
always had the money to do so, and still often do not. This has enlarged the role
of fi nance capital in capitalist agriculture. Over the course of the 20th century,
banks, insurance companies, and the securities 'industry' have all developed
fi nancial instruments (e.g., crop loans, farm mortgages, bonds) as a way to capi-
talise on the obstacles nature poses (see Henderson, 1999). This does not mean
that environmental constraints or the matter of nature are left behind. It does
mean that these can worked-up to the same old ends: making money. Thus, in
the timber industry of the Pacifi c Northwest of the United States, that Scott
Prudham (2005) has written about in
Knock on Wood,
the long growing season
of Douglas Fir, and no less the specifi c woody traits of that species matter to
the regional geography of production, to labour relations in the forest, and
to the scale of timber fi rms. But precisely through these natural dynamics, and
the environmental effects that the industry produces (e.g. reduction of spotted
owl habitat) new inducements to capital also result: commercial forest tree breed-
ing, business-friendly eco-regulation. None of this is free from contradiction;
capital does not get the playground to itself.
table - the commodity equivalent - with a $40 ton of produced carbon from the
Houston oil industry. . . . And whether carbon is or is not released into the atmo-
sphere becomes, literally, a matter of capitalist equivocation' (Smith, 2006, p. 29).
To these developments Smith provocatively asks, what will happen when the credit
system collapses and cannot impose itself as that which it is not? (p. 34 - see also
p. 25).
