>Also, while our esteemed moderator does care overly
>much for Proyect, Proyect's piece was useful IMO
>in pointing out how Marxists have used these
>sorts of rhetorical troupes to rationalize the
>subjugation of aboriginal peoples. And those
>sorts of troupes are very much like the ones
>that Benny Morris relies upon.
I have no beef with that. It was the characterization of David Harvey that set me off. Here's the full context that LNP was commenting on. Apparently arguing that American Indians and other aboriginals can fuck up their living space too is an offense against their primal innocence.
Doug
----
[from David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, pp. 188-191]
...that they were and continue to be somehow "closer to nature" than we are (even Guha, it seem to me, falls into this trap). Faced with the ecological vulnerability often associated with such "proximity to nature," indigenous groups can transform both their practices and their views of nature with startling rapidity. Furthermore, even when armed with all kinds of cultural traditions and symbolic gestures that indicate deep respect for the spirituality in nature, they can engage in extensive ecosystemic transformations that undermine their ability to continue with a given mode of production. The Chinese may have ecologically sensitive traditions of Tao, Buddhism, and Confucianism (traditions of thought which have played an important role in promoting an "ecological consciousness" in the west) but the historical geography of deforestation, land degradation, river erosion, and flooding in China contains not a few environmental events which would be regarded as catastrophes by modern-day standards. Archeological evidence likewise suggests that late iceage hunting groups hunted many of their prey to extinction while fire must surely rate as one of the most far-reaching agents of ecological transformation ever acquired, allowing very small groups to exercise immense ecosystemic influence (Sauer, 1956).
The point here is not to argue that there is nothing new under the sun about the ecological disturbance generated by human activities, but to assess what exactly is new and unduly stressful, given the unprecedented rapidity and scale of contemporary socio-ecological transformations. But historical-geographical enquiries of this sort also put in perspective those claims typically advanced by some ecologists that once upon a time "people everywhere knew how to live in harmony with the natural world" (Goldsmith 1992: xvii) and to view with skepticism Bookchin's (1990a: 97) equally dubious claim that "a relatively self-sufficient community, visibly dependent on its environment for the means of life, would gain a new respect for the organic interrelationships that sustain it." Much contemporary "ecologically conscious" rhetoric pays far too much attention to what indigenous groups say without looking at what they do. We cannot conclude, for example, that native-American practices are ecologically superior to ours from statements such as those of Luther Standing Bear that:
We are of the soil and the soil is of us. We love the birds and the beasts that grew with us on this soil. They drank the same water as we did and breathed the same air. We are all one in nature. Believing so, there was in our hearts a great peace and a welling kindness for all living, growing things. (Cited in Booth and Jacobs, 1990: 27)
The inference of "better and more harmonious ecological practices" from statements of this sort would require belief in either some external spiritual guidance to ensure ecologically "right" outcomes, or an extraordinary omniscience in indigenous or pre-capitalistic judgments and practices in a dynamic field of action that is usually plagued by all manner of unintended consequences. "The possibility of over-exploitation of a resource is perfectly compatible with our notion of peoples living close to nature, observing and acting accordingly" (Haila and Levins, 1992: 195). Furthermore, "comparative studies have suggested that all high civilizations that incorporated intensification strategies were metastable and that their growth trajectories can be interpreted as those of accelerating energy extraction, to the point that both the ecosystem and the socioeconomic structures were stretched to capacity; with steady or declining absolute caloric productivity and input-output ratios" (Butzer, 1982: 320). All societies have had their share of ecologically based difficulties and, as Butzer goes on to assert, we have much to learn from studying them.
Indigenous or pre-capitalist practices are not, therefore, necessarily superior or inferior to our own just because such groups possess discourses that avow respect for nature rather than the modern "Promethean" attitude of domination or mastery (see Leiss, 1974). Grundmann (1991a) is surely correct in his argument contra Benton (1989; 1992) that the thesis of "mastery over nature" (laying aside its gendered overtones for the moment) does not necessarily entail destructiveness; it can just as easily lead to loving, caring, and nurturing practices. It was, as we have already noted, precisely the intent of the esthetic tradition to assert "mastery without tyranny" with respect to the natural world. Uncritical acceptance of "ecologically conscious" sounding statements can, furthermore, be politically misleading. Luther Standing Bear prefaced the thoughts cited above with the very political argument that "this land of the great plains is claimed by the Lakota as their very own." Native-Americans may well have strong claims to land rights, to the use of the landscape as a mnemonic upon which to hand their sense of historical identity, but the creation of an "ecologically conscious" rhetoric about a privileged relation to the land to support them is, as we have already argued, an all-too-familiar and dangerous practice.
Inspection of the historical-geographical record reveals much about why words like "nature" and "environment" contain "such an extraordinary amount of human history' (Williams, 1980: 67). The intertwinings of social and ecological projects in daily practices as well as in the realms of ideology, representations, esthetics, and the like are such as to make every social (including literary or artistic) project a project about nature, environment, and ecosystem, and vice versa. Such a proposition should not, surely, be too hard for those working in the historical materialist tradition to swallow. Marx argued, after all, that we can discover who and what we are (our species potential, even) only through transforming the world around us and in so doing put the dialectics of social and ecological change at the center of all human history. But is there some way to create a general enough language to capture that dialectical evolutionary movement?
III. Towards an Evolutionary View
We badly need a much more unified language than we currently possess for exercising the joint responsibility towards nature that resides with the social and biological/physical sciences. The question of the unity of science has, of course, been broached many times - not least by Marx (1964). But serious problems have arisen on the social theory side whenever a biological basis has been invoked (familiar examples include the way social Darwinism founded Nazism, the profound social antagonisms generated in the debate over sociobiology and the dismal history of the eugenics movement particularly as applied to racial categories). The response on the social science side has often been to retreat from any examination of the ecological side of social projects and act as if these either did not matter or as if they had to be construed as something "external" to enquiry. I want to argue that this is not satisfactory and that ways have to be found to create if not a common language, then means to translate across discursive domains. This is, however, dangerous territory - an open field for organicist or holistic rather than dialectical modes of thinking - and it may require deep shifts in ontological and epistemological stances on both the social and natural scientific sides, if it is to succeed.
But the territory cannot be left empty of all thought about how to approach the problem. With this in mind let me propose a dialectical and relational schema for thinking through how to understand the dialectics of socialenvironmental change. The simplest schema is to break down the evolutionary process into four distinctive facets:
1. Competition and the struggle for existence (the production of hierarchy and homogeneity).
2. Adaptation and diversification into environmental niches (the production of diversity).
3. Collaboration, cooperation, and mutual aid (the production of social forms).
4. Environmental transformations (the production of nature).
I want to treat these as relational categories rather than mutually exclusive processes and thereby to insist that each internalizes effects of the others. Thus socio-biologists are correct when they argue that cooperation ("reciprocal altruism" is their preferred term) is in some sense an adaptive form of competition. The difficulty is that they make the competitive moment the shaping moment of all else (always a convenient gesture given the ideological struggle to "naturalize" capitalism) and use adaptation to absorb collaboration within the competitive framework. This is an excellent example of that habit analyzed in chapter 4, of converting internal relations among moments into hierarchical causal structures almost without noticing it. But from a relational point of view competition can just as easily be seen as a form of cooperation. The example of territoriality examined in chapter 7, is an interesting case in point. But is it not also a fundamental tenet of the liberal theory of capitalism that rampant competition between individuals produces a collaborative social effect called "society?" Adaptation and diversification of species and activities into special niches is also a form of both competition and collaboration and the effect is to transform environments in ways that may make the latter more rather than less diverse. Species may diversify further creating more diversified niches. The production of a more diversified nature in turn produces greater diversity of species.
The example of the liberal theory of capitalism, however weakly implanted it is in practice and however ideological its content, can be pressed further into service here to alert us to something else important. For within that theory it is not simply competition that matters, but the particular mode of competition, the rules and regulations that ensure that only one sort of competition - that within freely functioning markets respecting property rights and freedom of contract - will prevail. From this perspective it seems as if the normal causal ordering implied in socio-biology gets reversed because it is only through the collaborative and cooperative structures of society (however coerced) that competition and the struggle for existence can be orchestrated to do its work. But the point here is not to change the causal ordering and thereby to make it seem as if society (the mode of cooperation) has in some way contained nature (competition, adaptation, and environmental change). It is much more appropriate to suggest that competition is always regulated in important ways by the effects internalized within it of cooperation, adaptation, and environmental transformations. Thinking in these terms allows us better to see how a particular kind of environmental transformation (such as the great water projects of the US west) affects both the mode of competition (within society as well as between species) and the mode of collaboration/adaptation. Capitalistic competition consequently means something quite different in the agribusiness sector in California compared to, say, dairy producers in Wisconsin, because the forms of environmental transformation have been so radically different in the two places.
I will not elaborate much further on this idea, but it should be apparent that there are different modes of competition, adaptation, cooperation, and environmental transformation. Given the relational/dialectical theory advanced in chapters 2-4, it should also be plain that each facet of the overall process internalizes a great deal of heterogeneity within itself Such heterogeneity is a source of contradiction, tension, and conflict, sparking intense struggles for stability, hegemony, and control. A mode of production, in Marx's sense, can then be construed as a particular regulated unity of these different modalities. The transition from one mode of production entails transformations in all modalities in relation to each other, including, of course, the nature of the nature produced.
What I am proposing here is a way of depicting the fundamental physical and biological conditions and processes that work through all social, cultural, economic projects to create a tangible historical geography and to do it in such a way as not to render those physical and biological elements as a banal and passive background to human historical geography. But my purpose is also to specify these conditions and processes in such a way as to understand the possibilities for collective human activity in negotiating through these fundamental elements to generate significantly diverse outcomes of the sort that a Marxist theory of historical-geographical development envisages. Given, for example, the four "moments" in the biological evolutionary process, then organisms of any sort (most particularly the human species) can work with the moments of competition, adaptation, cooperation, and environmental modification in a variety of ways to produce radically different outcomes (such as quite different modes of production). "No natural laws can be done away with," Marx wrote in a letter to Kugelman in 1868, but "what can change, in historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws operate." What we have to pay attention to, therefore, is the particular way in which organisms (again, of any sort) work with these quite different possibilities in dynamic and interactive ways. And to do that requires that somehow the artificial break between "society' and "nature" must be eroded, rendered porous, and eventually dissolved.
While my language here is highly abstract and general, I do not find it hard to set this style of thinking into motion, to differentiate it further, to capture some of the ways in which the natural and social flow into each other without falling back into the typical reductionism of socio-biology. And there are plenty of hints that this is not necessarily an isolated way of looking at the problem. When, for example, Callon (1986) analyzes the difficulties of developing the domestication of scallop fishing in St Brieuc Bay, he treats the scallop as an active agent in the whole process, thereby breaching the common protocol that says the question of agency is confined within the social sphere. And in so doing he opens up the fluid way in which competition, collaboration (alliance formation), adaptation, and environmental transformation all run into each other as part of a more general process of socio-environmental change. Bateson (1988) likewise points out the different ways in which all species (including human beings) can affect subsequent evolution through their behavior. Animals make active choices and by their behavior change the physical and social conditions with which their descendants have to cope. They also modify their behavior in response to changed conditions and by moving expose themselves to new conditions that open up different possibilities for evolutionary change. Lewontin (1982) likewise argues for understanding a whole set of processes in which organisms "are not simply objects of the laws of nature, altering themselves to bend to the inevitable, but active subjects transforming nature according to its laws." Through efforts such as these, the uneasy boundary between the social and the natural worlds will surely be dissolved, as indeed it must, and analysis brought to the point where we might lose our fears of "biological determination" by recognizing, as Fuss (1989) so powerfully argues in her discussion of essentialism in feminism, that the distinction between biological essentialism and social construction is in is itself a false construction that thoroughly deserves to be dissolved. Haraway (1995) has produced some exemplary work on the practical and material dissolution of this boundary in social and scientific practices. But she also pays careful attention to how strictly that boundary gets policed in our thoughts, in our disciplines, and in our courses and provides food for thought as to what configurations of corporate and state power have most to gain from that policing. And it is through a critical understanding of how such power relations play out in politicalecological debates that we can arrive at a deeper conception of what ecosocialist politics might be all about.
IV. Towards an Ecosocialist Politics
Defining a proper ground for a socialist approach to environmental-ecological politics has proven a peculiarly difficult problem. In part this has to do with the way in which the socialist-Marxist movement took over from capitalism a strongly productivist ethic and a broadly instrumental approach to a supposedly distinct natural world and sought a transformation of social relations on the basis of a further liberation of the productive forces. It has subsequently proven hard to wean Marxism away from a rather hubristic view of the domination of nature thesis. In addition, Marxism has shared with much of bourgeois social science a general abhorrence of the idea that "nature" can control determine, or even limit any kind of human endeavor. In so doing it has either avoided a definition of any foundational view of nature altogether, or resorted to a rather too simplistic rhetoric about "the humanization of nature" backed by a dialectical and historical materialism that somehow absorbed the problem by appeal to a set of epistemological/ontological principles. And in those rare cases when Marxists have taken the material biological and physical conditions of existence as foundational to their materialism, they have either lapsed into some form of environmental determinism (as in the case of Wittfogel, 1953) or into a damaging materialist pessimism (Timpanaro, 1970; Benton, 1989). The effect has been to create a polarity within Marxism between "materialist triumphalism and materialist pessimism" (Williams, 1978: 9) that uncomfortably reflects the bourgeois habit of taking the triumphalist path when all goes right and invoking Malthusian limits when things go wrong.
So while there have been numerous principled writings in the Marxist tradition on the question of nature, beginning with Engels' The Dialectics of...