History in the Anthropocene: A Socioecological Approach

Peter Suechting ’15

Environmental Studies Department

April 10th, 2015

Table of Contents

List of Figures – 1

Abstract – 2

Acknowledgements – 3

Introduction – 4

Chapter 1 – 22 Metabolic Paradigms in Socioecological History

Chapter 2 – 39

Capitalism

Chapter 3 – 60 Fisheries and Ecology

Chapter 4 – 81

Socioecological History

Conclusions – 104

Works Cited – 111

1

List of Figures

Figure 1 – The Great Acceleration: pg. 6

Figure 2 – From the Holocene to the Anthropocene: pg. 6

Figure 3 – Trophic Level Structure (Lake Turkana): pg. 66

Figure 4 – Historical Overfishing: pg. 71

Figure 5 – The Gulf of Thailand (and EEZ): pg. 86

Figure 6 – Historical Reconstruction of Gulf of Thailand Catches (1950-2010): pg. 88

2

Abstract

I take as my starting point the idea that humans have made a new geological

epoch for themselves in which to live, known as the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene

implies two things: first, that we are leaving the Holocene stability that nurtured the

development of human civilization into its current form; and second, that humans have

become geological (rather than simply social or biological) agents. Geological agency

presents radically new and unprecedented challenges in the writing of history: first,

humans acquire this type of agency only historically and collectively, requiring historians

to work on broad spatial and temporal scales in order to fully capture its dimensions;

additionally, the geological epoch of the Anthropocene marks the collapse of the

distinction between the social sciences and the natural sciences. Consequently, historians

must include dual social and ecological perspectives in their approach to writing history

during the Anthropocene. The combination of broad spatial and temporal scales (what

Braudel calls la longue durée) and an interdisciplinary socioecological approach

characterizes the new kind of history that I argue is important to humanity’s safe passage

through the Anthropocene.

In my thesis, I argue that this paradigm can be effectively modeled using the

concept of metabolism; I discuss historical lineages of thought that make use of

metabolism and draw out the metabolic concepts that I find useful. But ultimately, I find

the approach lacks explanatory power insofar as it fails to include important social and

ecological analyses. To compensate for this lack, I refer to critical lineages of thought

from both the social sciences and the natural sciences. Finally, I apply my new historical

methodology that makes use of socioecological metabolism to analyze a case study in the

Gulf of Thailand, where production techniques have decimated laborers and marine

ecosystems alike.

3

Acknowledgements

So many people deserve my thanks for the support they provided throughout this difficult

but rewarding process. First of all, my thanks goes to Ted Melillo, who believed that I

had something valuable to say. Second, my brother, Max Suechting, who was always

willing to read drafts, provide comments, and generally talk at length about ideas. Third,

my family was a source of love and support throughout my years at Amherst College.

Mom, Dad, Zack, Max, Sandy, and Dixie: I love you all so much. Finally, my thanks go

out to all my friends and loved ones here at Amherst College. To the homie patrol –

Julian, Juleon, Matt, Andrew, and Owen: you guys are my fire (and my reason to come

home at night). To the Army of Darkness: thank you for giving me a reason to stop

working on my thesis. To Julie Xia: thank you for your constant friendship. To Ricky

Altieri: thank you for the laughs. To Luke Kahn: thanks for keeping it super real. And to

Androo Wang and Ethan Corey: thank you for your love of oddness.

4

Introduction:

“I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting and flowing

under my eyes.”

-- The Time Traveler from H.G. Wells’ famous novel, The Time Machine1

“The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it.”

-- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, literary theorist and philosopher2

I. The problem of the Anthropocene:

Modern humans live on a planet whose naturally arising environmental processes

are no longer the sole dictator of its evolutionary trajectory. Collectively, humans exert

influence on a pervasive and fundamental level over even the most basic planetary

processes. As a result, the planetary conditions that arise from this intersection of human

and environment can no longer be considered entirely natural. Illustrating this point quite

clearly, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology recently released a statement in response

to the severe Australian heat waves of January 2013: “Everything that happens in the

climate system right now is taking place on a planet which is a degree hotter than it used

to be.” US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth drove this point even further home last year

when he remarked that, “The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is

caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected

by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister

1 Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. S.l.: Floating, 2008. Print. 2 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print. 338

5

than it used to be.”3 Human transformations of the environment pervade the Earth system

so thoroughly that all weather events are in some way responding to anthropogenic

forcings on the climate system. We can no longer draw a clear demarcation between what

is “human” and what is “nature” – the two are now one.4

It is only recently that human environmental transformations began to entail

planetary-scale consequences. Scientists can point to a moment of intensification in

human enterprise and associated increase in anthropogenic environmental impact taking

place after World War II, around the beginning of the 1950s, which they call “The Great

Acceleration” (Figure 1).5 The six or seven decades of The Great Acceleration only

account for a microscopic fraction of the Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history. Much of that

history has been marked by catastrophic change. But the most recent 10 - 11 thousand

years of that history was different. The Holocene – or “new whole” – was characterized

by relative climatic stability (Figure 2).6 This stability nurtured the rise of human

3 Hamilton, Clive. "Climate Change Signals the End of the Social Sciences." The Conversation. N.p., 24 Jan. 2013. Web. 4 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197-222. JSTOR. Web. 5 Steffen, W., J. Grinevald, P. Crutzen, and J. Mcneill. "The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369.1938 (2011): 842-67. Web. – The top portions of these figures (Figure 1.a) illustrate the increasing rates of change in human activity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Significant increases in rates of change occur around the 1950s in each case and illustrate how the past fifty years have been a period of dramatic and unprecedented change in human history. The bottom portion of these figures (Figure 1.b) illustrate global scale changes in the Earth system as a result of the dramatic increase in human activity: (i) atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration; (ii) atmospheric nitrous oxide concentration; (iii) atmospheric methane concentration; (iv) percentage total column ozone loss over Antarctica, using the average annual total column ozone, 330, as a base; (v) Northern Hemisphere average surface temperature anomalies; (vi) natural disasters after 1900 resulting in more than 10 people killed or more than 100 people affected; (vii) percentage of global fisheries either fully exploited, overfished or collapsed; (viii) annual shrimp production as a proxy for coastal zone alteration; (ix) model-calculated partitioning of the human-induced nitrogen perturbation flues in the global coastal margin for the period since 1850; (x) loss of tropical rainforest and woodland, as estimated for tropical Africa, Latin America and South and Southeast Asia; (xi) amount of land converted to pasture and cropland; and (xii) mathematically calculated rate of extinction. Adapted from Steffen et al. 2011. 6 Steffen et al. 2011, 849, 851-2 – Figure 2: Comparison of some major stratigraphically significant trends over the past 15,000 yr. Trends typical of the bulk of immediately pre-Holocene and Holocene time are compared with those of the past two centuries. Note: denudation stands for deforestation.

6

civilization. Yet, in the past few decades, human activity increased in size and

technological potency to the degree that it is destroying the Holocene’s stability.7 And

human civilization, despite conscious and unconscious tendencies to perceive it as

separate it from its environment, nonetheless remains firmly embedded within this

rapidly changing Earth system.

7 Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, Marten Scheffer, Carl Folke, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Björn Nykvist, Cynthia A. De Wit, Terry Hughes, Sander Van Der Leeuw, Henning Rodhe, Sverker Sörlin, Peter K. Snyder, Robert Costanza, Uno Svedin, Malin Falkenmark, Louise Karlberg, Robert W. Corell, Victoria J. Fabry, James Hansen, Brian Walker, Diana Liverman, Katherine Richardson, Paul Crutzen, and Jonathan A. Foley. "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity." Nature 461.7263 (2009): 472-75. Web. 472

Figure 1 - The Great Acceleration

Figure 2 - From the Holocene to the Anthropocene

7

The growth of human enterprise in the latter part of the twentieth century and into

the twenty-first century represents the birth of a new geological epoch. The first scientists

to put forth this new geological periodization were atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and

biologist Eugene Stoermer. They published a brief essay in a May 2000 International

Geosphere-Biosphere Programme newsletter documenting the transformations humans

have made and continue to make to the planet and its systems:

During the past 3 centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, accompanied e.g. by a growth in cattle population to 1400 million. [...] Urbanisation has even increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years. [...] 30-50% of the land surface has been transformed by human action; more nitrogen is now fixed synthetically and applied as fertilizers in agriculture than fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems [...]; more than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind; human activity has increased the species extinction rate by thousand to ten thousand fold in the tropical rain forests (9) and several climatically important “greenhouse” gases have substantially increased in the atmosphere: CO2 by more than 30% and CH4 by even more than 100%. Furthermore, mankind releases many toxic substances in the environment. [...] Coastal wetlands are also affected by humans, having resulted in the loss of 50% of the world’s mangroves. Finally, mechanized human predation (“fisheries”) removes more than 25% of the primary production of the oceans in the upwelling regions and 35% in the temperate continental shelf regions.8

The scale of these transformations, and their pervasive effects, argued Crutzen and

Stoermer, constitute the ascendance of a new geological epoch that they tentatively titled

the “Anthropocene.” Although this concept is controversial, the Stratigraphy Commission

of the Geological Society of London, the world’s oldest association of earth scientists,

recently put forth evidence supporting this periodization. A 2008 paper published by the

Commission’s Anthropocene working group, a group formed exclusively to consider the

merits of Crutzen and Stoermer’s proposed periodization, confirmed humanity’s entrance

8 Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. "The ‘Anthropocene’" The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme 41 (2000): 17-18. Web. 17

8

into the Anthropocene and recommended adoption of the periodization to the greater

Stratigraphy Commission.9

The notion of the Anthropocene suggests two things: first, that the Earth is

moving out of the Holocene, the current climatically stable geological epoch that

nurtured the rise of human civilization; and second, that human activity is responsible for

this transition. Since its introduction, the term has been widely accepted by the global

change research community. Popular media sources covering climate change and other

environmental issues have also begun to use the term because it represents such a neat

encapsulation of the planetary scale and complete-ness of anthropogenic environmental

change.10

Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre led by Johan Röckstrom recently

defined nine planetary boundaries that mark humanity’s “safe operating space.” These

nine boundaries are associated with the planet’s biophysical subsystems and processes

and include: climate change; rate of biodiversity loss (both terrestrial and marine);

interference with the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles; stratospheric ozone depletion;

ocean acidification; global freshwater use; change in land use; chemical pollution; and

atmospheric aerosol loading. If boundaries in these key subsystems and processes are

crossed – and four have already exceeded “safe” levels: climate change, loss of

9 Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Angela L. Coe, Paul R. Bown, Patrick Brenchley, David Cantrill, Andrew Gale, Philip Gibbard, F. John Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Waters, John Marshall, Michael Oates, Peter Rawson, and Philip Stone. "Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene." GSA Today 18.2 (2008): 4. Web. – There are many proposed dates on which to drive the “golden spike” of our geological entrance into the Anthropocene. Some propose the year 1610, when the ecological effects of the Columbian Exchange begin to be visible in the atmosphere’s chemical composition. Others recommend the 1970s when nuclear tests globally dispersed radioactive isotopes into the environment and our bodies, while still others say that the pervasiveness of plastic particles in the world’s sediments and oceans will create a marker of human presence in geological deposits for ages to come. The debate continues to rage over which day most accurately marks our entrance into the Anthropocene and will not likely be settled soon. 10 Steffen et al. 2011, 843

9

biodiversity, land-use change, and nitrogen and phosphorous cycle interruptions – it will

generate irreversible environmental change, with potentially catastrophic results for

humanity.11 In a sense, these nine boundaries define the crux of the problem of the

Anthropocene: protecting planetary livability for humans.

New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin likened scientific recognition of

humanity’s planetary impact to the finding of the “edge to our petri dish” – an edge

defined by Röckstrom’s nine boundaries.12 Now that we have run into this edge, we must

change those core societal features that drove us to this confrontation, or else we will

likely go the way of many species before us: extinction. Of course, the Earth will

continue on after human extinction as it always has; organismal populations will continue

to adapt and evolve, and the climate system will find its way to a new climatic state.

Indeed, the planet’s durability has led some commentators to suggest that, although there

is only one physical planet, there are actually multiple Earths taking place on this planet

in succession. Different assemblages of life, different biogeochemical cycles, different

climate systems, and different continental configurations characterize each Earth. Our

planet has witnessed many of these Earths, but humans have only ever known the

Holocene Earth and its stable conditions.13

What the Anthropocene will bring in terms of planetary configurations is a matter

of scientific debate. But none of the predictions bodes well for the health of human

civilization. The Anthropocene is therefore a recognition of both humanity’s newfound

geological prowess and its expanding geological vulnerability. This central contradiction

11 Röckstrom et al. 2009, 472 12 Revkin, Andrew. "Confronting the 'Anthropocene'" Dot Earth. New York Times, 11 May 2011. Web. 13 Hamilton, Clive. "Can Humans Survive the Anthropocene?" N.p., 25 May 2014. Web. 6

10

– between humanity’s simultaneous geologic mastery and vulnerability – will be the one

the Anthropocene resolves. The hope is that humanity will witness the resolution intact.

II. A collapse of histories:

Due to our entry onto the planetary stage as a geological force, we are now

witnessing the distressing collapse of social history into natural history, and vice versa.14

During the Anthropocene, the social history of the humans is the natural history of the

world. Our movement into the Anthropocene raises a question: how can we curb and

consciously direct the ecosystemic transformations we set in motion in order to ensure

survival of human civilization? The answer to this question lies in the intersection of

social history and natural history, where complex human social systems map onto and

intervene in equally complex natural systems.

This new type of socioecological history takes the environment seriously, noticing

how humans impact the environment, and how the environment in turn impacts humans.

Such a perspective is useful for considering how to curb various forms of anthropogenic

environmental degradation. For example, it is impossible to explain why humans have

destroyed fifty percent of the world’s mangroves and why this is bad without invoking

the social context of the capitalist economic arrangement in which it happened and

explaining the ecological importance of mangroves that makes their destruction a

tragedy. First, due to the way value is assigned within the social context of capitalism,

actors in the shrimp export industry perceive the mangroves as a non-performing asset

14 Chakrabarty 2009

11

that must be transformed into a performing one: shrimp farms.15 And second, such

mangrove ecosystems are essential to human life for the protection they provide against

storms and erosion, as well as the habitat they provide for juvenile and breeding marine

animals.

Historically, combined social and ecological – socioecological – perspectives

have been absent within the writing of history. Among historians, there has been a

tendency towards dividing the history of humans from the history of the natural world.

This tendency derives from eighteenth-century Italian political philosopher Giambattista

Vico, who posited that humans could only ever hope to understand human affairs (verum

ipsum factum: the true is identical with the created).16 By marking off certain portions of

the world as knowable to humans and certain portions as unknowable, Vico set in place a

distinction between natural and human affairs that would remain potent into the early

twentieth century.

In 1946, R.B. Collingwood, a historian in the Viconian tradition, remarked that

nature had no “inside.” “In the case of nature,” Collingwood wrote, “this distinction

between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are

mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace.

[...All] history properly so called is the history of human affairs.”17 Collingwood’s

argument split the natural and social histories of humanity into two separate objects of

study. He ignored the history of the human body and how humans have historically

provisioned it, while focusing exclusively upon the social and cultural constructions of

15 Martinez-Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Pub., 2002. Print. 82 16 Chakrabarty 2009, 201 17 Collingwood, R. G., and T. M. Knox. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1946. Print. 214-6

12

the human mind. Distinguishing between these two halves of human existence,

Collingwood believed, relied on the possibility of agency. Nature, as a mere series of

events, had no agency in Collingwood’s view. Humans, by contrast, had agency that

originated from their “insides,” or interior experiences. These interior experiences could

be historicized, unlike empty nature.

During the twentieth century, other formulations of the connection between

natural and social history arose. Consider Stalin’s brief essay on the Marxist philosophy

of history, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, published in 1938:

Geographical environment is unquestionably one of the constant and indispensable conditions of development of society and, of course, [...it] accelerates or retards its development. But its influence is not the determining influence, inasmuch as the changes and development of society proceed at an incomparably faster rate than the changes and development of geographical environment. [...] Changes in geographical environment of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand years are enough for even very important changes in the system of human society.18

Stalin’s passage captures an assumption concerning how social and natural history

interact common to most mid-twentieth century historians; although the environment

changes, it happens at such a slow rate as to be inconsequential to human history. Man’s

relation to his environment was almost timeless and therefore was irrelevant to the

purpose of history.19 Though somewhat more inclusive of natural history in its admission

that environmental change is a constant, Stalin’s form of history nevertheless partitions

the environment off from its main concerns in social history.

The rise of the field of environmental history in the late twentieth century

continued this historiographical trend of including the environment as a factor in (even a

key architect of) social history. Alfred Crosby Jr.’s book The Columbian Exchange

18 Stalin, Josef. "Dialectical and Historical Materialism." 1938:. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Chakrabarty 2009, 204

13

pioneered the emerging field of environmental history in the 1970s by offering a much

different interpretation of the human-environment interaction than previous Viconian

interpretations. Contrary to Collingwood’s notion that humans were first and foremost

social agents, Crosby asserted that, “Man is a biological entity before he is a Roman

Catholic or a capitalist or anything else.”20 In other words, social customs, practices, and

forms arise later and only as consequences of humanity’s biological agency.

Although important for breaking down the conceptual binary between natural and

social history, Crosby’s notion of biological agency makes only limited contributions

towards understanding the collapse of natural and social history. Climate science, in

particular, convincingly demonstrates that humans have become a geological force on our

planet, which introduces a whole new spatial and temporal scale to history. A single

biological agent cannot induce this kind of widespread change in atmospheric

composition. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “Biological agents, geological

agents - two different names with very different consequences.” Biological agency has

been a condition of humanity for the duration of its history as a species, while geological

agency is something humans only assume “historically and collectively.”21

III. The Braudelian longue durée:

“History - science of the past, science of the present,” historian Lucien Febvre

once wrote. Febvre’s point was that understanding the conditions of the present is the

ultimate goal of history. As a discipline, history can uncover the pre-modern

contingencies of present conditions, unlocking the possibility of deeper and more

20 Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972. Print. xxv 21 Chakrabarty 2009, 206

14

meaningful analysis. Science, a method for uncovering how natural systems operate and

change over time and come to exist in their present form, is therefore intimately

intertwined with the project of history. In the end, science and history pursue essentially

the same goal, though modern disciplinary boundaries often prevent recognition of this

fact.22

Fernand Braudel, a student of Febvre’s and perhaps more well-known than his

teacher, introduced the important notion of la longue durée, the idea of toggling between

vast historical scales and more temporally and spatially demarcated events. La longue

durée is a useful concept for thinking about the present conditions of the Anthropocene,

but it requires some unpacking first.

Braudel divides the idea of a durée into three temporal categories: short, medium,

and long. The short durée is basically the time of an event, but Braudel uses it

adjectivally as well to indicate a period of time that is “event-ish.” Immanuel Wallerstein

(whose translation of Braudel I depend upon) argues that the idea of the short durée is

more accurately conceived of as “episodic history” - an episode is like an event, but

encompasses the amount of time that precedes and concludes the event-ish period in

which we are interested. However, the short durée is the trickiest with which to work

because so many things appear to happen with no apparent explanation in the brief

temporal frame of the episode.23 Thus, the short durée necessitates the addition of a

longer temporal frame of analysis: the medium durée.

In French, Braudel describes the medium durée as a conjuncture. Conjunctures

are much longer than a typical event or a period of episodic history. They take place over

22 Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Braudel on the Longue Durée: Problems of Conceptual Translation." Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32.2 (2009): 155-70. Web. 168 23 Ibid., 161

15

time scales of a decade up to fifty years. For Braudel, conjunctures are cycles with a

rising A-phase and falling B-phase. Braudel argues that, in the analysis of something, it is

very important whether that thing is occurring in the rising or fall phase of some curve,

such as prices or population. The cyclicity of these conjuncture curves is an important

modifier of how episodic history plays out in the present.24 However, there are non-

cyclical things that are also non-episodic. These are the long-lasting socio-historical (or,

as I think of them, socioecological) institutions that hold sway through long periods of

history. We need another durée to encompass these institutions.

The long durée Braudel calls a structure. The English cognate of this French word

means the same thing, but the word structure itself can connote many different things.

With respect to the long durée, Braudel is focused upon those structures that exist

throughout long periods of history. At one point, Braudel refers to structures as both

“pillars of and obstacles to reality.”25 Later, he refers to them as “troublesome” and

“complicated,” as if they are people to be dealt with. Braudel’s long-lasting structures are

forces with which we interact in the course of lives yet we do not fully understand.

Structures hold up reality in the sense that they reinforce and stabilize existing

ideological orders, but, in doing so, structures can also become obstacles to our clear

perception of reality.

Braudel identifies one final durée: the trés longue durée. Where structures are

long-lasting enough to be almost immobile from the relatively short temporal frame of a

human observer, something that exists in the trés longue durée is totally immobile in the

24 Ibid., 162 25 Ibid., 162

16

lengthiest temporal frame.26 It is a constant condition of the world in which we live. In

relation to the collapse of the distinction between social and natural history, we are

witnessing the intervention of the trés longue durée – the parametric environmental

conditions of our planet that produce its livability and exist independent of any human

institution – into human society.

IV. Socioecological history and geological agency:

The intervention of the trés longue durée leads us back to the question of

geological agency. How does one write the history of a geological agent? To begin with,

such a history is less concerned with individual actors – in other words, biological agents

– and more concerned with the broad temporal and spatial patterns of human-

environment interactions.

Temporally, we need socioecological history on a scale approximating that of the

Earth we live upon. Although human and planet are linked by a shared evolutionary

history, they are two fundamentally different systems engaged in an unequal relationship

of power. The planet dictates the parametric conditions we must respect in order to

continue inhabiting it, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s epigraph to this introduction

indicates. To discover what those parametric conditions are, we need deep history on the

scale of the planetary system that we inhabit. In addition, history on vast temporal scales

reveals the broad patterns of interaction humans have maintained with their environments

over the course of their existence as a species. Identifying which aspects of those patterns

are unsustainable is crucial to our long-term survival on this planet.

26 Ibid., 162

17

Recorded history generally refers to the past four thousand years for which

written records exist, whereas deep history refers to the past beyond that written edge.

We need both of these histories in the construction of a socioecological history of

geological agency. There are already social and natural historians who study deep history.

Archaeologists, for example, are social historians who study humanity’s deep history by

analyzing human artifacts - text, art, and tools. Similarly, paleoclimatologists are natural

scientists who work on reconstructing a basic understanding the Earth’s deep history all

the way back to its planetary origins over four and a half billion years ago with the use of

natural artifacts – various environmental formations like tree rings, coral reefs, ice cores,

and sediment cores that store important climate signals like atmospheric composition,

global temperatures, and species composition – called proxies.

Like the Time Traveler of H.G. Wells classic science fiction novel riding upon his

Time Machine, watching the Earth’s surface “melting and flowing” before his eyes, the

historical view employed by archaeologists and paleoclimatologists alike uses bits of

evidence hidden in the landscape of the present to reconstruct a narrative of

socioecological change leading from the past to the present. The present Earth becomes

endlessly contingent, and therefore mutable, from this perspective. A particular form of

social organization, for example, or some natural process like the patterns of ocean

circulation, owes its existence to some previous social or natural development. Keeping

such contingencies in mind, we can reveal the planet’s parametric conditions that produce

livability, in addition to new possibilities for societal formations that respect these

conditions.

18

Spatially, we need to place the social and natural histories of socioecological

phenomena and patterns into conversation. When not engaging in active interdisciplinary

conversation, the two histories offer divergent assessments of socioecological problems

and possibilities. For example, Crutzen and Stoermer conclude their introduction of the

Anthropocene with a hopeful note, that proper research and “wise application of [...]

knowledge” will “guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental

management.”27 Such a hopeful assessment of the future assumes that we will rationally

respond to the climate crisis by limiting emissions and helping poorer countries adapt to

the changing climate. However, many political, economic, and cultural institutions of

long standing prevent rationality and the wise application of knowledge from being

humanity’s guiding light in its relationship with the Earth system.

Likewise, without a proper understanding of natural systems, social historians can

often oversimplify problems and thus provide solutions of limited utility. A popular and

potent refrain within the social sciences, for example, is to blame capitalism and the

inequalities it has generated for bringing humanity to its planetary edges. Capitalism did

create conditions in which only a few rich nations are to blame for pushing the climate

out of its Holocene stability (rich countries, of course, are also the most well positioned

to adapt to changing conditions while the poorer countries will suffer the brunt of the

consequences), but a more equitable and just world reliant on fossil fuels would face the

same problem of the climate forcings associated with greenhouse gas emissions.28

Critiques of capitalism are not the final diagnosis of the Anthropocene crisis. Social

historians must also address the general issue of an energy-intensive and fossil fuel

27 Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 18 28 Chakrabarty 2014, 10

19

dependent human society on a planet with an atmospheric system sensitive to changes in

chemical composition.

V. Consilience:

Chakrabarty argues that humanity needs to adopt a new mode of thought, which

he calls “species thinking.” This is a way of imagining humanity as the product of a

natural history of life and recognizing “the way different life-forms connect to one

another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another.”29

Though humans are pushed and prodded along their development by the often irrational

impulses of society, we yet interact with natural systems at all points of our lives, which

exert their own influence as they push us through course of history. There is much work

to be done in understanding this interface between society and ecology. This task has,

unfortunately, only become more difficult. The present that we wish to understand, the

Anthropocene, represents a definitive collapse of society and ecology into each other,

such that we can no longer speak about one without the other.

To get at this interface we require a new kind of history bringing together natural

and social histories of the local and the global, critiques of capitalism, planetary sciences,

and species thinking upon multiple temporal and spatial scales. However, it yet lacks

consilience, a term introduced to the public by Edward O. Wilson to denote a unity of

knowledge, in which multiple disciplinary strands of evidence converge in support of a

solid conclusion.30 Wilson was concerned that the rise of natural sciences to their eminent

position of today had created disciplinary walls between the various branches of science,

29 Chakrabarty 2009, 217 30 Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998. Print.

20

which prevented scientists from recognizing the unity of purpose they shared. To this

diagnosis we could also add the work of social scientists, who share that same unity of

purpose with all natural scientists yet are prevented from perceiving it by disciplinary

walls. To spread awareness of the unity of purpose between natural and social scientists

requires some conceptual link. I propose that that link can be found in the concept of

metabolism.

Metabolism is the theoretical and material process by which human and nature

link at source and sink, and can therefore become the foundation of a new

socioecological history to guide us through the disorientation and chaos of the

Anthropocene. Chapter 1 will focus upon metabolism and the intellectual lineages of

thought that make use of it. I will argue that these metabolic paradigms lack total

explanatory power, however, requiring further analytic paradigms from both sides of the

human-environment dialectic. Chapter 2 will offer a critique of capitalism, the social

mode of production that conditions our socioecological metabolism. Chapter 3 will

explore the parametric conditions that marine ecosystems require in order for their

ecological metabolism to function. And finally, Chapter 4 will examine the way in which

capitalist social formations intervene in marine ecological systems through biophysical

means, and how the summed pattern of interaction both degrades social labor and creates

a metabolic rift in ecological systems.

21

Chapter 1 - Metabolic Paradigms in Socioecological History:

I. The human-environment dialectic:

“Human beings have a history because they transform nature,” wrote the French

anthropologist Maurice Godelier. This was the key hypothesis of Godelier’s famous

work, The Mental and the Material (1986), in which he examines the fact that “human

beings, in contrast to other social animals, do not just live in society, they produce society

in order to live.”31 As evidence for this fact, Godelier notes that domestication, “begun

about 10,000 BC, soon became the starting-point for an irreversible development of

multiple forms of agriculture and stockbreeding that in their turn wrought profound

changes in social life.”32 When humans domesticated plants and animals, they unlocked

the possibility of geographically permanent human societies. And geographical

permanence in turn propelled far-reaching social transformations: “Was it not within

certain of these agricultural or agro-pastoral societies that the first stratifications of caste

or class and the first forms of State emerged (about 3,500 BC) in Mesopotamia, then in

China, in Egypt, in Mexico?” remarks Godelier.33 The first domestication of certain

animal and plant species marked a revolution in how humans interacted with, and

transformed, their material environment. Rather than nomadic tribes passively following

the ecological availability of solar energy in plant and animal biomass, humans directly

intervened through their labor into ecosystems so as to better control and appropriate

31 Godelier 1986, 1 32 Ibid., 2 33 Ibid., 2

22

their material and energy.34 The Neolithic Revolution, as it is known, unlocked new

evolutionary trajectories for human society.

A few millennia later, the advent of fossil-fuel use sparked a similar process of

dual socioecological transformation, resulting in the crucial outcome of urbanized human

populations. The adoption of fossil fuel-based energy systems during the Industrial

Revolution de-linked human energy use from an area-dependent solar-controlled

agricultural system.35 Area-independent energy sources directly facilitated England’s

urbanization through a series of developments. Spatially concentrated (i.e. urbanized)

human populations require imports of energy and material from a productive periphery.

First of all, fossil-fuel powered mechanisms, such as steam tractors, increased labour

productivity. With machines, one agrarian worker could feed five non-agrarian workers

in post-Industrial Revolution England, whereas in pre-Industrial Revolution England,

three agrarian workers were needed to feed one non-agrarian worker.36 In addition, that

agricultural produce, as well as other key resources, must be delivered to urban centers,

requiring an advanced system of transportation, fueled by large quantities of energy. A

technology-resource complex of coal (energy-dense, cheap, and easily-transportable),

iron, and steam engines therefore formed the biophysical mechanism of England’s

industrialization and, crucially, urbanization.37

The relationship between human and environment is one of dialectical tension.

Each realm transforms the other and responds to the transformed conditions in turn. This

dialectical relationship constantly produces new patterns of human-environment

34 Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007, 15 35 Ibid., 32-3 36 Ibid., 84-5 37 Ibid., 84

23

interaction, a co-evolutionary process that accumulates as history. But why do we

transform nature? To take Godelier one step further, humans themselves can be

understood as transformations of nature. Our bodies, made of flesh, blood, bone, and

brain, are merely biochemically conversions of environmental material and energy. This

type of internal transformation is unavoidable; we have to eat, breath, and drink in order

to survive, grow, and reproduce. As Karl Marx famously wrote, “Man lives from nature,

i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to

die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that

nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.”38 Exterior nature and interior nature

are therefore not separate, but remain linked by our own bodies. Human and nature are

two aspects of one geo-biospheric system.

In the early nineteenth century, the disciplines of biology and chemistry

established the concept of metabolism as a way to study the chemical processes and

biological operations of organisms. A standard biology textbook describes the purpose of

metabolism as follows:

To sustain the processes of life, a typical cell carries out thousands of biochemical reactions each second. The sum of all biological reactions constitutes metabolism. What is the purpose of these reactions – of metabolism: Metabolic reactions convert raw materials, obtained from the environment, into the building blocks of proteins and other compounds unique to organisms. Living things must maintain themselves, replacing lost materials with new ones; they also grow and reproduce, two more activities requiring the continued formation of macromolecules.39

The textbook later defines metabolism as “the totality of the biochemical reactions in a

living thing.” The process of metabolism proceeds down:

...metabolic pathways, sequences of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, so ordered that the product of one reaction is the substrate of the next. Some pathways synthesize,

38 Marx 1974, 328 39 Purves et al., 113

24

step-by-step, the important chemical building blocks from which macromolecules are built, others trap energy from the environment, and still others have functions different from these.40

The result of biochemical transformations of nature, our bodies require both the

extraction of material and energy for fuel and structure, and the disposal of its waste

products into some environmental sink. This is unavoidable. If an organism does not

satisfy its metabolic necessities – eating, drinking, breathing, and excreting – it cannot

survive, grow, or reproduce. Life is therefore only possible through maintenance of a

metabolic connection that, due to its material conditions and consequences, necessarily

transforms the ecosystems in which an organism lives.

Marx wrote that “man lives from nature…” early in his career. Later, with the

introduction of metabolism in science, Marx found a more precise method of discussing

this complex interdependence. Crucially, it could be used to analyze both sides of the

human-environment dialectic. Natural laws on one side govern the operation of various

geobiospheric processes that produce, store, cycle and recycle material and energy.

Institutional norms on the other govern how labor is divided and material, energy, and

waste are distributed.41 For Marx, metabolism was the overarching framework of the

human-environment dialectic. He expressed this idea in his concept of socio-ecological

metabolism (Stoffwechsel), in which humans related to nature through labor: “It [the

labor process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel]

between man and nature, the ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human

existence.”42 Humans are metabolically linked to nature, requiring a source on one end,

40 Ibid., 130 41 Foster 1999, 381 42 Marx 1976, 283-90

25

and a sink on the other. In between, humans intervene in nature through labor, the

product of metabolized environmental material and energy.

Although change and transformation in both society and its environment are

constant, one thing remains static: the metabolic relationship dictated by our bodies.

Hence, we can use metabolism and the relationship between humanity and its

environment that it implies as a conceptual foundation for socioecological history. My

conception of socioecological metabolism begins with Crosby’s biological agency –

humans as biological agents – but embraces even broader social and ecological

perspectives on metabolism, upon which I will expand later. The benefit of a

socioecological metabolic perspective is that it pays attention to the way in which societal

forms interact with material things and processes. It can connect particular social forms

(e.g. capitalist modes of production) with environmental consequences by theoretically

and materially linking socioecological sites of resource extraction to socioecological

resource distribution to post-consumption socioecological waste disposal.

Socioecological metabolism – the socioecological linkages between human

society and its material environment – is my focus in this chapter, which leaves behind

pure social, ecological, or biological perspectives. First, I will discuss the field of

industrial metabolism arising from the intersection of sociology, ecology, and the

application of thermodynamic principles. Next, I will introduce a new perspective arising

from within industrial metabolism known as material-flow analysis (MFA), which

provides valuable socioecological metabolic profiles of the historical development of

human civilization. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the shortcomings of the

26

industrial metabolic and MFA approach, which I argue neglects crucial theoretical

perspectives in both social and ecological metabolism, respectively.

II. Industrial Metabolism

A proponent of macroscopic perspectives on human civilization within the

environment, Ecologist Howard Odum (2007) once argued that human cities were

analogous in their energetic processes to that of a dense oyster reef, or an “animal city.”

Human cities, like oyster reefs, concentrate consumers and so are dependent upon strong

inflows of resources and strong outflows of waste. In relation to oyster reefs, the

movement of water creates strong flows bringing in food energy and removing the heat

and waste generated by respiration. Similarly, human cities acquire the energy embodied

in food and fuel with the help of a fossil-fuel based transportation system. Waste is

similarly removed so that it does not build up to toxic levels.43 The value in

conceptualizing human cities in this way is that it reveals the broad outlines of their

socio-ecological organization in time and space.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, physicist Robert Ayres constructed a

new perspective upon socio-ecological metabolism that he called “industrial

metabolism.” Ayres wanted to draw out the material processes that allow the economy to

function (i.e. produce and consume), so he analogized its functioning to that of the

metabolism of a biological organism. For Ayres, industrial metabolism was, “the set of

physico-chemical transformations that convert raw materials (biomass, fuels, minerals,

metals) into manufactured products and structures (i.e. ‘goods’) and wastes.”44 Like

43 Odum 2007, 9-11 44 Ayres and Simonis 1994, xi

27

biological metabolism, industrial metabolic processes proceed down metabolic pathways;

a given resource enters the economy when an economic actor extracts it from the

environment. Once it enters the economy, economic actors transform it by some

industrial process and distribute the product to a consumer, who disposes the waste of

consumption back into the environment. The key difference between this type of material

cycle and the material cycles of the natural environment – say, the hydrological cycle or

the carbon cycle – is that the natural environment’s cycles are closed, whereas the

economy’s are open.45 A negligible amount of material is recycled in the economy; the

vast amount of material that enters the economy exits as waste.

Whether metabolism can be conceptually applied to biological levels greater than

the cell and the organism is a matter of debate in biology. That ecosystems – a multitude

of organisms – convert energy and cycle nutrients is taken as a matter of fact. The “tough

point,” according to social ecologist Marina Fischer-Kowalski, “is whether there exist

any kind of controls, information-mediated feedback cycles or evolutionary mechanisms

working on the systems level as such, and not just individual organisms.”46 Whatever the

outcome of this debate, it is widely accepted that ecosystems have self-organizing

properties that optimize energy and material use. Systems ecologist Eugene Odum

suggested, for example, that ecosystem succession operates to increase control of the

physical environment “in the sense of achieving maximum protection from its

perturbations” – i.e. homeostasis. The resulting ecosystem exhibits maximum amounts of

biomass and biological complexity.47 In this sense, the ecosystem as a whole can be

considered to be regulating its own metabolism, though not on any sort of information-

45 Ibid., 6 46 Redclift and Woodgate 1997, 121 47 Odum 1969, 262

28

mediated feedback cycle. Instead, ecosystem succession is probably more similar to some

type of evolutionary mechanism; ecosystems with greater biomass and biological

complexity recover from physical perturbations more readily. Similarly, we can think

about industrial metabolism as a system that operates along similar lines of self-

organization in its material and energy use. However, there is a crucial distinction

between ecological and industrial metabolisms, the way in which they self-organize.

Ecological metabolism, on the one hand, responds to the ecological forcings such as

climate, resource availability, etc. On the other hand, industrial metabolism responds to

economic impulses such as profit, efficiency, power, etc.

III. Historical socioecological metabolism

Within industrial metabolism, Marina Fischer-Kowalski and her colleagues at The

Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna, Austria developed an approach for uncovering how

material and energy move from the environment into the economy and back again. Her

approach is based upon the first law of thermodynamics, which states the principle that

energy and matter can never be created or destroyed, but can only transform states or

forms.48 Based on this thermodynamic principle, any resource that enters the economy

therefore must either exit again as waste, or must accrete onto society’s biophysical

stocks, in other words, human population biomass, domesticated animal population

biomass, physical infrastructure, durables, and so on.49

Fischer-Kowalski’s approach brings to light how material and energy flow

between the various biophysical stocks of human social systems and their constitutive

48 Ayres and Simonis 1994, 6 49 Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007, 17

29

environments. Appropriately, her method is known as “material-flow analysis” (MFA).

Early systems ecologists like Howard Odum analyzed ecosystems using compartment

models. These models broke ecosystems down into defined compartments, which

transformed inputs according to some internal structure into outputs. At this point, the

model could be used to analyze how material and energy flowed between compartments,

how it was stored within compartments, and how these flows were regulated – the

metabolism of the ecosystem. Similarly, MFA can be used to break human society into

various compartments through which we move various flows of material, energy, and

waste.50

A few concepts taken from MFA methodologies are useful for understanding

socio-ecological metabolism. First, Fischer-Kowalski and Helmut Haberl define a

socioecological regime as a “specific fundamental pattern of interaction between (human)

society and natural systems.”51 Second, their interpretation of society is that it is “a

structural coupling of a cultural system with material elements, among them, as its

functional focus, human population.”52 And third, two programs determine the evolution

of the societal structural coupling: the cultural (determining meaning and intention) and

the natural (determining material effectiveness, e.g. of resource-technology complexes

such as coal, iron, and the steam engine).53 Both programs evolve over time as new

cultural forms, new technologies of material and energy use, or new ecological forms

arise. Industrial metabolism and the MFA methodology can therefore be useful for

considering the historical development of social metabolism.

50 Ibid., 16 51 Ibid., 8 52 Ibid., 11 53 Ibid., 11

30

Finally, Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl identify three different ideal-typical ‘states’

in human history. That is, humans have created over the course of their history three

different socio-ecological regimes – “patterns of society-nature interactions that remain in

a more or less dynamic equilibrium over long periods of time” – and transitions between

those regimes.54 First, there were hunter-gatherer societies. Then, during the Neolithic

Revolution, hunter-gatherer societies transitioned into agrarian societies. And finally,

during the Industrial Revolution, agrarian societies transitioned into industrial societies, a

transition that has yet to take place or is still happening in many countries in the global

South.

Focusing on the qualitative and quantitative changes in the interface between

human society and its material environment that occur during transitions between socio-

ecological regimes provides valuable insight into the drivers of this relationship. Fischer-

Kowalski and Haberl analyzed one such transition in Austria from the agrarian socio-

ecological regime to its industrial successor. Primary reliance upon area-dependent solar-

energy harvest, or agriculture, limited the agrarian Austrian socioecological regime in its

physical growth and spatial differentiation. Most Austrian land had to be devoted to

generating biomass to feed people and livestock, the only source of mechanical labor

besides humans themselves. That land of course also required a share of Austrian labor to

cultivate it for human purposes, so most Austrians were farmers by trade; in 1800 around

2.6 million out of 3 million total Austrian citizens were rural agricultural workers.55

Energy reliance upon area-dependent biomass harvest created other limiting

factors for the agrarian Austrian socioecological regime. The low energy density of

54 Ibid., 14 55 Ibid., 32

31

biomass and the difficulty of maintaining soil fertility without nutrient subsidies and

fossil-fuel-derived energy are two such factors that together prohibited the growth of the

Austrian agrarian socioecological regime beyond certain energy thresholds. For pre-

Industrial Revolution (in Austria, taking place c. 1940 as measured in terms of energy

and material use56), Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl estimate that the solar-energy powered

agrarian regime was capable of harnessing energy yields of only 30-50 gigajoules per

hectare (GJ/ha). These energy yields could in turn sustain a maximum population density

of only 30-40 people per kilometer. Material use was similarly low, and probably ranged

from around 5 to 6 tons per capita, with biomass accounting for more than 75 per cent of

that total material use.57 These measures describe the basic features of an agrarian

metabolic profile, characterized by relatively low material and energy use due to an area-

dependent solar energy system.

Post-Industrial Revolution an entirely new pattern of material and energy flows

arose in Austria. The Austrian industrial socio-ecological regime distinguishes itself from

the previous agrarian regime by its radically different energy system, which enables

energy consumption far exceeding that of the previous agrarian regime. Flowing from

point sources of highly concentrated energy (fossil fuels, the product of geologically

stored and distilled solar energy), the current socio-ecological regime no longer depends

upon annually renewable area-dependent energy. Energy consumption reaches 200 Gj/ha

(in comparison to the agrarian 30-50 GJ/ha). This much energy consumption would

56 Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl analyze socioecological regimes, meaning that their primary focus is upon the biophysical indicators and patterns that characterize such regimes. Therefore, the transition from an agrarian regime to an industrial one (industrialization) is measured by how it affects those biophysical indicators and patterns. Austrian biophysical indicators of material and energy use and population do not show the effects of industrialization until c. 1940. Hence, I use 1940 as my periodization for the beginning of the industrial socioecological regime. 57 Ibid., 32

32

roughly require the annual aboveground net primary production (NPP) of a forest

covering the entire Austrian territory if generated by an area-dependent solar energy

system.58 Austria is not one gigantic forest, but devotes its land to various forms of use,

including but not limited to agriculture. In effect, the emergence of the fossil-fuel energy

system de-linked energy provision from area, eliciting fundamental changes in how

humans use and live on the land.

The consequence of this extraordinary energy system transformation, which

Fischer-Kowalski considers the core feature of the industrial socioecological regime, is

that Austrian society has surpassed most of the practical limits of the agrarian

socioecological regime with respect to spatial differentiation and material and energy use.

Spatially, cities arose as the core focus of population as dispossessed agricultural

populations moved from the farm to the city to find jobs. Total Austrian population

increased as well, from roughly 3.6 million (c. 1830) to around 8.1 million (c. 1980). But

as a share of the total population, agricultural population (farmers and families) declined

from 75% to 5% of the overall population.59 Per-capita material use increased by a factor

of 3, reaching approximately 18 tons, in comparison to the agrarian 5 to 6 tons. This is

directly attributable to the transformed energy system, which opened up far-reaching and

efficient means of transportation.60 Consumption became globalized, with the effect that

Austria no longer depended upon harvests of material and energy through agriculture and

forestry obtained within its borders. Now it depends heavily upon the harvest of non-

renewable resources like minerals, metals, and fossil fuels from distant places that are

energy-intensive to extract, transport, and process.

58 Ibid., 32 59 Ibid., 34 60 Ibid., 38

33

MFA provides a valuable profile of the metabolism of historically variable socio-

ecological regimes. For example, Austria’s and England’s industrialization urbanized

their human populations, spurring the rise of the advanced networks of trade and

transportation that are so crucial to the provisioning of our own metabolic livelihoods

today. Furthermore, MFA also reveals again that the economy is, at its base, a system of

material and energy flow, dispelling popular notions that it is and will remain unaffected

by the conditions of the material environment.

IV. Social and ecological limitations:

The industrial metabolism approach emphasizes human civilization’s biophysical

basis: its dependence upon the proper functioning of a variety of ecosystems and earth

systems and its fundamental existence as a system of material and energy flows. Such a

perspective re-embeds the economy within its material environment and makes a

convincing case for instilling recognition of thermodynamic principles on a systemic

level to achieve greater sustainability. Yet the approach runs out of steam when it comes

to certain culturally and ecologically-derived drivers of unsustainability in the

socioecological metabolic interface. Describing society as an entirely biophysical

structure does reveal the material linkages between the human economy and its

environment at the two bioeconomic points of extraction and excretion. But it stops short

of revealing the cultural and ecological linkages between the two bioeconomic points.

The spatial arrangement of extraction and excretion is shaped and formed by cultural

(political, economic, social) and ecological forces. As a theory, industrial metabolism

explains little to none of the cultural or ecological nature of this formation.

34

Regulation of the biophysical economy is wholly dependent upon its human

component, a component that responds in large part to culturally derived impulses.

Culturally influenced humans regulate industrial metabolism directly through their labor,

and indirectly as consumers of the output.61 “This system is stabilized,” wrote Ayres, “at

least in its decentralized competitive market form, by balancing the supply of and

demand for both products and labour through the price mechanism. Thus, the economic

system is, in essence, the metabolic regulatory mechanism.”62 Tellingly, Ayres does not

call the economic system capitalism, revealing his reluctance to invoke the cultural

factors in play within socioecological metabolism. But despite this shortcoming, Ayres

does raise an important question: can capitalist price mechanisms adequately account for

thermodynamic laws and realities? And furthermore, what happens when they cannot or

do not?

Keeping this objection in mind, notice that the MFA analysis of Austrian

industrialization is now revealed as incomplete. Industrialization and urbanization were

part and parcel of the project of global capitalist expansion, and they remain today as

integral aspects of capitalist social relations. But capitalism is nowhere accounted for in

the MFA analysis, which argues that the transformation of the energy system is the most

important difference between agrarian and industrial socioecological regimes. We

therefore need another theoretical approach that can address the role of capitalism in the

socioecological expansion of industrialization and the urbanization of human populations.

Similarly, the biophysical economy is wholly dependent upon resources and

waste sinks derived from its ecological component, which produces certain resources and

61 Ayres and Simonis 1994, 3-5 62 Ibid., 5

35

recycles waste based on its own internally arising ecological processes. Although we

might not always think of the economy as a system that responds to ecological forcings, it

certainly does. There are many examples of such economic restructuring in the face of

ecological transformation, but one example (applicable to later portions of this thesis

related to fisheries) captures it well. In his 2012 book, The Mortal Sea, Jeffrey Bolster

describes how European fishing communities in the Northwest Atlantic responded to

change and transformation in marine ecosystems:

It is not just coincidence that right whales were hunted in coastal waters during the seventeenth century, halibut during the nineteenth century, and bluefin tuna during the twentieth; or that lobstering accounts for the lion’s share of fishermen’s effort in the early twenty-first century. Although market whims and changing technology were partly responsible for those shifts, a greater truth is that each human generation’s chances existed in light of what the ecosystem could produce, which, in turn, was contingent upon natural factors and the impacts of previous harvesters.63

Fisheries were born, developed, and died along with the fortunes of the ecological

communities that supported them. Numerous tales of ecological richness in Atlantic

marine communities from early European explorers and settlers in North America

abound.64 But these rich communities faded as humans hunted them to extinction. Now,

modern capture fisheries provide animal protein to more than a billion people worldwide

and produce significant economic value (approximately $80 billion in 2000).65 But there

is widespread scientific agreement now that humans have massively depleted the ocean’s

fish.66 Indeed, many commercially and ecologically important fish populations have been

reduced to 10% of their pre-industrial-fishing biomass.67 The current model of

63 Bolster 2012, 6 64 Ibid., 12-13; Franklin 2007, 11-12 65 Pauly and Alder 2005, 480 66 Bolster 2012, 7 67 Pauly and Alder 2005, 481

36

industrialized fishing fleets that currently fish the sea must undoubtedly change in face of

the massive ecological degradation it causes globally.

Socioecological metabolism describes the crucial interface between human

society and its material environment, where society fulfills its biological purpose of

sustaining humanity’s metabolic exchange with environmental resources and sinks. On

an individual level, a portion of this metabolic exchange, like breathing, we conduct

directly with the environment. The other portion of exchange – eating, drinking, using

energy, or removing waste – occurs by the organizational activity of other humans.

Describing this social system as merely a pattern of material and energetic flows is

reductionist and lacks cultural analysis that provides insight into aspects of

unsustainability in the socioecological metabolic interface. In addition, the resources that

humans extract from the environment are made available through the functioning of

various geobiospheric systems that operate according to their own internally arising

processes. Human waste deposition (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions) also affects the

functioning of these systems. Describing the geobiospheric system as a free gift, an

endless supply of material and energy, and an endless acceptor of human waste is also

reductionist, and lacks ecological analysis that provides similarly crucial insights into

aspects of unsustainability in the socioecological metabolic interface. As it primarily

describes an interface between human society and its material environment,

socioecological metabolism must include insights from both sides of the human-

environment dialectic in order to offer a complete analysis of socioecological issues.

37

Chapter 2 - Capitalism:

“If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5-6 [degrees Celsius] warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so and that won’t be good for large mammals like us. People say the

world is robust and that’s true - there will be life on Earth. But the Earth won’t be robust for us. Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core

body temperature of 37 [degrees Celsius], will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem. [...] It’s clear the economic system is driving us

towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilizations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are

today.”68

- Dr. Will Steffen, climate scientist, in an interview with The Guardian (January 15, 2015)

I. Socioecological relationality - finding an ecological critique of capitalism:

Many of those concerned with the degradation of the geo-biosphere frame their

critique of the global capitalist system as concern for the sanctity of ecological systems.

This concern is well intentioned, but ignores the fact that humans are metabolically

linked to the geobiosphere and therefore, to some extent, must transform the ecological

systems in which we live. We require sources of environmental material and energy, and

we must deposit waste into some environmental sink. This is unavoidable, and it results

in the co-transformation and -evolution of both society and environment.

We do have to transform ecological systems for our own metabolic requirements,

but we do not have to irrevocably destroy them and, with them, future generations. The

ecological critique of capitalism stems from this pragmatic recognition of the plight of 68 Milman, Oliver. "Rate of Environmental Degradation Puts Life on Earth at Risk, Say Scientists." The Guardian N.p., 15 Jan. 2015. Web. <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/15/rate-of-environmental-degradation-puts-life-on-earth-at-risk-say-scientists> -- Alf Hornborg’s 2001 book, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and the Environment, advances a similar idea of technology as a belief system. In essence, Hornborg argues that we fetishize modern technologies, believing them to operate independent of their privileged position in a global yet finite system of resource flows.

38

future generations. As Will Steffen, one of the world’s foremost climate scientists argues,

the Earth is not a static and immutable system, but is rather one in constant flux. Different

assemblages of life on Earth depend on its planetary conditions. Currently, humans acting

under capitalist conditions are pushing Earth towards planetary conditions inhospitable to

humanity. This is unacceptable if we wish to maintain human life upon Earth.

Capitalism is a social system formed out of a material world, which necessitates

consideration of its temporal dimensions. For instance, some resources, like fossil fuels,

are not renewable on human timescales. Social actors burning fossil fuels in the present

also destroy the possibility of burning those fuels in the future. In addition, the burning of

fossil fuels produces material waste that accumulates in the Earth system, with further

consequences for future generations. Material life prompts temporal considerations like

these, which Wallerstein (2003) explores in depth using the example of healthcare:

[Roughly speaking], there are four generational claimants to the distribution of resources at any given time: the young, the adults, the elderly, and the unborn. Much of modern politics, not only the politics of the environment, is concerned with this distributive question. Take, for example, the question of health. On the assumption that there exists a given quantum of resources to devote to health needs, what percentage should be allocated (by whatever mode of allocation we use) to children, adults, and the elderly? The unborn enter the picture as well when we decide how much resources we should devote to long-term and long-shot investments in medical research whose benefits may only be seen 25-50 years from now, if then. Similar questions can be raised about educational allocations. And obviously, they are central when we discuss the bioeconomic allocations involved in ecological decisions.69

For Wallerstein, an economy is, at its heart, a particular “mode of allocation” tasked with

distributing resources among four generational claimants – the elderly, the adult, the

young, and the unborn. A logical (arguably moral) mode of allocation would presumably

distribute resources equitably between the four generations.

69 Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The Ecology and the Economy: What Is Rational?" Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 27.4 (2004): 273-83. Web. 4

39

How could an economy equitably distribute resources among generational

claimants? And why does capitalism fail to do so? Clark and York (2005) describe

capitalism as a system that lacks a “drive to maintain the social metabolism in relation to

the natural metabolism (a measure of sustainability).”70 Socioecological relationality –

maintaining social metabolism (i.e. the economy) so that it does not disrupt the natural

metabolism (i.e. planetary systems) that produce human livability – could ensure long-

term sustainability and thus more equitable generational distributions. Capitalism lacks

such relationality because it creates conditions that force actors to always compete for

greater accumulations of wealth.71 To pursue a goal other than the accumulation of

wealth is impossible given the way in which capitalism conditions production: if an

enterprise cannot produce profitably, it will be beaten out by the competition. Short-term

profits therefore provide the most immediate impulse of capitalism, an impulse which

contradicts humanity’s longer-term need for socioecological relationality.

The purpose of this chapter in my thesis is to discover how capitalism creates

social and ecological degradation and fails to maintain socioecological relationality. First,

I will offer my basic understanding of the socioecological metabolic interface,

characterized by two bioeconomic points of extraction and excretion. Next, I will

demonstrate how capitalism transforms the spatial relationship between these two points,

geographically estranging them and thereby disrupting socioecological relationality by

creating rifts in ecological metabolism. Following on this discussion, I will examine the

ecological contradictions inherent to capitalism’s historically specific form of value.

70 Clark, Brett, and Richard York. “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift.” Theory and Society 34.4 (2005): 391–428. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. 408 71 Ibid., 408

40

These ecological contradictions condition capitalist society to disrupt ecological

metabolism, thus creating metabolic rifts.

II. Socioecological metabolism and the emergence of capitalism:

The interface between society and its environment occurs within our biological

metabolism. The metabolic interface within us links to the non-human environment at

two points, first at extraction of a given resource and second at excretion of the waste

products of its use. This characterization, of course, appears rigid and precise, while the

interface in reality never exists as such a clearly demarcated set of boundaries among the

economy, humans, and the environment. But such a characterization is useful for

exploring the basic relationship between humans and environment and the way in which

capitalism has transformed this relationship. Capitalism did not bring into existence

human’s bi-dimensional metabolic interface; it has endured as a condition of human

existence (and all other species’ existence) since the evolution of planetary life. But

capitalism did change how humans linked their two metabolic points of extraction and

excretion.

The two competing notions of human agency that Chakrabarty and Crosby

offered are useful examples of how capitalism changed not only how society linked the

points of our socioecological metabolic interface, but also where these points

geographically occur. A biological agent, for example, gathers the resources necessary to

satisfy its metabolic requirements of growth, survival, reproduction, and so on from local

ecosystems, and then deposits the waste of its use back into those local ecosystems. It is a

41

process of organismal and environmental exchange occurring over a fairly constrained

region.

By contrast, a geological agent exists as a partially embedded component of a

broader network of trade, and therefore gathers its resources from many and diverse

ecosystems from all around the planet. Following from this geographical estrangement

from its resource base, a geological agent also lacks the ability to deposit its waste back

into the ecosystems that supplied its resources. The globally unified system of trade in

commodities that capitalism gave rise to is the source of this total geographical

estrangement, which transforms human’s biological agency into geological agency by

consolidating their metabolic activity into one whole with planetary impacts.72

The emergence of capitalism within Europe and its growth into a pan-European

world-economy was an uneven process. Consequently, it is difficult to say much of worth

about the broad outlines of this emergence without going into details and depths not

achievable here. But there are four aspects of its emergence that are worthwhile to note.

These four aspects describe capitalism’s rise as a socioecological process, a single

development transforming society and its contextual and constitutive environment. On

the most basic level this is quite obvious. World-systemic processes of capital

accumulation have obvious and serious effects on landscapes and ecosystems, such as

deforestation, erosion, and pesticide resistance. And further, they also are fundamentally

dependent upon ecological materials like topsoil, forests, or minerals.73 Therefore, it

makes sense that we can see the effects of world-systemic processes in their constituent 72 Marx, Karl. (1867) 1976. Capital, vol. 1. New York: Vintage. 129 – Marx argues that commodity production collects the “total labour-power of society” into one whole, “count[ing] here as one homogenous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour.” In this way we can consider geological agency as arising out of the way capitalism collects labour together into one global mass and sets it in motion towards the production of commodities. 73 Hornborg 2001, 55

42

local ecosystems, and vice versa. A socioecological description of capitalism’s

emergence renders clear the way in which its social development was made possible and

conditioned by its simultaneous ecological development.

In his ecological reinterpretation of Wallerstein’s The Modern World System,

environmental sociologist Jason Moore contends that four key aspects characterize

capitalism’s historical and geographical development as a world-system. First, “there was

a process of equalization across space. Through the production of a new geographical

scale – the capitalist world-economy – Europe’s leading strata brought together formerly

isolated or only loosely-articulated areas into a single division of labor.” Second, “there

was a process of [geographical] expansion [, in which] the imperative of geographical

expansion emerges as the spatial corollary of ceaseless capital accumulation.” Third,

“with divergence [...a] new globalizing relation between core and periphery took shape.”

And finally, Moore adds his own ecological twist to Wallerstein’s historical geography:

“[T]here was agro-ecological transformation.”74

Capitalism’s emergence and geographical expansion created a global world-

system for the first time in history. It features a single and global division of labor

(importantly, a division of labor that is both social and ecological). But rather than a

geographically specific designation of divided labor, the division is more accurately an

evolving structure at multiple scales, “within regions, states, and the world-economy.”75

Broadly, we can perceive this structure in how we associate the Midwest and its

population with corn production, for example, or the Congo with copper production and

the Middle East (and now, North Dakota) with oil production.

74 Moore, Jason. "The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism." Theory and Society 32 (2003): 307-77. Web. 311 75 Ibid., 324

43

Jason Moore describes this epochal transformation as “the emergence of a capitalist

world-ecology,” in which neither capitalism nor ecology are strictly context, but “two

moments of the same world-historical process.” He lays out their relationship in further

detail:

With the rise of capitalism, local ecologies were not only transformed by human labor power (itself a force of nature), but brought into sustained dialogue with each other. The interaction of multiple local and regional ecologies became far more than the total of their respective parts, as capitalism began to create a new relational universe for ecosystems no less than social actors. [...] This “separation in unity” (as Marx would say) constitutes a dialectical antagonism between capitalism’s drive to accumulate endlessly and the demands of ecological sustainability.76

Capitalism emerged through the work of social actors upon ecosystems. These actors are

driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation to transform ecosystems into vehicles

for commodity production. Capitalism reoriented ecosystems and the fruits of their

ecological production towards global commodity markets, whereas previously they had

been oriented into themselves.77

The effect of this capitalist arrangement is to separate what Marx calls ecological

“unity.” Unity, in his interpretation, comprises ecological metabolism. Ecosystems

require the cycling and recycling of material and energy. When they are arranged to fit

accumulation imperatives – to produce commodities and accept waste for the global

capitalist system – that unity becomes interrupted. This arrangement could be considered

an ecological division of labor, in which ecosystems become organized into various

commodity production zones or waste sinks. Together, ecological and social divisions of

76 Ibid., 323 77 Gregory Rosenthal introduced the idea that plants, animals, and geological materials could have diasporas in the same way that people can in a lecture titled “People and Nature in Motion: Circuits of Economic and Ecological Change in the Diasporic Pacific,” delivered March 23rd, 2015 at the international symposium Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (Alumni House, Amherst College).

44

labor create metabolic rifts. A metabolic rift is a rupture in the metabolism of a system,

whether ecological or social.78 Socioecological divisions therefore characterize the

overarching structure of capitalist ecology.

III. Contradictions of value:

The law of value that the capitalist system establishes is central to understanding

the crisis humans face in maintaining socioecological relationality. Capitalist value stands

in contradiction to real value. Marx argued that human production remains dependent

upon “many means of production which are provided directly by nature and do not

represent any combination of natural substances with human labour.”79 The environment

forms the physical material of commodities. In other words, environmental labor

produces the physical material upon which capitalism depends. Yet these natural products

enter the economic system as free gifts that do not receive value from capitalism's

process of valuation.

Marx makes an important distinction between use-value and exchange-value.

Use-value denotes a thing’s physical usefulness. Food maintains our physical existence,

for example, while oil powers our machines. The Earth is the ultimate progenitor of use-

values; to use Marx’s words, the earth is “active as an agent of production in the

production of a use-value.”80 But despite the Earth’s active production of use-values

(which we can broadly think about as the production of planetary livability in the form of

food, water, fuel, etc.), which is foundational to our existence and therefore is valuable

78 Clausen, R., and B. Clark. "The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production." Organization & Environment 18.4 (2005): 422-44. Web. 427 79 Marx 1976, 290 80 Marx, Karl. (1863-65) 1981. Capital, vol. 3. New York: Vintage. 955

45

(in the general sense of the word), it does not enter into capitalism’s particular

crystallization of value. This is because value is assigned within the capitalist system to

commodities by their exchange-value, not their use-value.

Exchange-value is measured in terms of abstract social labor. With respect to the

value of oil, for example, Clark and York (2005) write that, “[its value] is determined by

the human labor embodied in the obtaining and processing of the oil and the capital

invested in the operation” – i.e. the socially necessary labor required to produce it. We

abstract from this characteristic of embodied labor into a price. The result, Clark and

York conclude, is that, “The value of oil has nothing to do with nature or natural

cycles.”81 Here we find a contradiction between the social metabolism that capitalism

configures and the ecological metabolism that the Earth configures. Capitalism denies the

value of the environmental labor embodied in the production of oil and so it fails to

compensate (and thus, renew) the environmental systems that perform the labor.

Marx also recognized the distinction between “real wealth” and (capitalism’s

historically-specific form of) “value.” Both labor and natural processes contribute to real

wealth, which consists of use-values. By contrast, abstract labor alone contributes to

value, which consists primarily of materially nonexistent exchange-values. “A thing can

be a use value, without having value,” writes Marx. “This is the case whenever its utility

to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c.”82 The Earth

creates planetary livability, a product with infinite use-value to humans, yet because it

does not arise from social labor it is not valuable. We should rethink our dependence

upon a system that perceives the Earth as a free gift, and by extension, denies the value of

81 Clark and York 2005, 408 82 Marx 1976, 29

46

the planetary labor that it performs in provisioning us with the metabolic necessities of

our existence.

Capitalism, a system of commodity exchange, relies upon a scheme of uniform

value. Uniform value makes exchange, and thus accumulation, of capitalist value

possible. The material particularities of geological or ecological processes do not fit well

into a paradigm of uniform value, however. Similarly, human labor and all of its social

particularities do not fit well into capitalism’s paradigm of uniform value either. The

result is that the value of commodities, products of particular ecological and social

processes, becomes unidimensional: oil is reduced to the abstract units of human labor

required to extract and process it so that it becomes equivalent, despite the social and

ecological particularities of its formation, to, say, ten bushels of wheat. The natural and

social characteristics of both “human and extra-human nature” must be “extinguished,” in

other words, to make generalized exchange possible.83 The accumulation of capitalist

value thus contradicts, “the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.”84

Something must solve, “the contradiction between value’s ‘social generality’ and

its ‘material particularity’ - between the abstraction of social labor and the specificities of

the external environment and the concrete labors [both human and ecological] that work

it up,” to make accumulation possible.85 Money emerges to mediate (however

temporarily) this contradiction. It does so by abstracting from socioecological

specificities, dissolving the qualitatively different forms of social labor and material

diversity into one generalized form. A barrel of oil can be bought for $80, for example,

while unskilled labor can bought for as cheaply as $8 an hour. The crucial aspect of this

83 Moore 2003, 325 84 Marx 1976, 638 85 Moore 2003, 325

47

example is that both oil and labor can be valued in monetary terms, despite the widely

divergent social and ecological processes that produced them. Dissolving divergent

socioecological contexts of production is the primary purpose of money, which can

thereafter act as foundation for a system of general social exchange unburdened by

socioecological particularities or concerns.

The generalized way in which capitalism values the world has very real material

consequences. Hornborg (2006) describes money as “the vehicle by which ideas about

reciprocity and relations of exchange are translated into material processes capable of

transforming not only human societies and technologies, but the entire biosphere.”86

Monetary capital accumulation, by dissolving socioecological particularities into

generality, compels the radical simplification of human and extra-human nature.87

Ecologically, vast monocultures have become the dominant form of capitalist agriculture.

And of course, in order to maintain monocultural simplicity, agri-business requires

pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides as enforcers. Socially, workers become mere

“interchangeable parts,” to be switched out and replaced by another if a problem with the

former should arise. Workers rebel against interchangeability, however, requiring

measures to maintain it. The labor force must always be more numerous than the jobs

they can perform, for example. Capitalism accomplishes this task in two ways: first, by

reducing the concrete labors associated with production (increasing productivity) and

second, by geographically incorporating new regions and populations so as to grow the

reserve army of labor.88 In socioecological terms, money generalizes the material world

86 Hornborg, Alf. 2006. Ecosystems and world-systems. In: C. Chase-Dunn and S.J. Babones, eds. Global social change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 161-175. 240 87 Moore 2003, 326 88 Ibid., 326

48

of labor and land, turning humans and ecosystems alike into vehicles for commodity

production and, ultimately, profit generation.

A world in which capital accumulation reigns supreme is a generalized world,

socially and ecologically arranged so that each human and ecosystem is geared towards

the specialized production of one particular commodity. The result is a global disruption

of ecosystems and social systems. The solution, as Hornborg (2006) concludes, might be

to transform “the very idea and institution of money itself.”89

IV. Justus Von Liebig & the Town-Country Division:

Within capitalist agriculture, recognition of the importance of the soil’s ecological

unity began to form during the nineteenth century when the German chemist Justus von

Liebig published his Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and

Physiology. Liebig’s work documented the role of major soil nutrients (nitrogen,

phosphorous, and potassium) in plant growth. The discovery ignited a scientific

revolution in soil chemistry, further sparking the development of a fertilizer industry that

applied the newly-discovered principles of soil chemistry to task of expanding

agricultural yields. In 1842, wealthy English landowner and agronomist J. B. Lawes

invented the first artificial fertilizer with soluble phosphates. In 1843, he began industrial

production of his new “superphosphates.”90

Although most agricultural interests perceived the possibility of intensifying

production via artificial fertilizers as inherent to Liebig’s work, the revolution in soil

chemistry cut both ways. The newfound recognition of the importance of soil nutrients

89 Hornborg 2006, 240 90 Melillo, E. D. "The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930." The American Historical Review 117.4 (2012): 1028-060. Web.

49

made farmers even more acutely aware of their depletion in the soils worked by capitalist

agricultural methods. And Liebig also saw the critique embedded in his own work.

During the 1850s Liebig’s focus shifted from soil chemistry and its manipulation to an

ecological critique of capitalist agriculture informed by soil chemistry. In his Letters on

Modern Agriculture (1859), Liebig described intensive British agriculture as a system of

robbery, in which the soil was being exhausted by a continuing tendency to increase

production and concentrate ownership, with no attention paid to regeneration of the

land.91

“Rational agriculture,” Liebig wrote, “in contrast to the spoliation system of

farming, is based on the principle of restitution; by giving back to the fields the

conditions of their fertility, the farmer insures the permanence of the latter.”92 We could

consider rational agriculture as a circle: food travels from field to plate, through the

human body, and finally back into the earth whence it came. Following the Neolithic

Revolution (ca. 10,000 B.C.), agrarian societies adopted a variety of methods for

recycling key agricultural nutrients back into the ecosystem. In addition, many societies

discovered the usefulness of cultivating nitrogen-fixing legumes like alfalfa, clover,

peanuts, beans, peas, and lentils.93

Capitalist agriculture, by contrast, is linear: food travels from agricultural field to

urban table and never back again. Agricultural linearity arose during the 1800s, when

European and North American farmers began to abandon circular methods of nutrient

recycling. Urban centers had previously supplied poudrette, a nutrient-rich mix of dried

91 Liebig, Justus. Letters on Modern Agriculture. London: Walton and Maberly, 1859. Print. 92 Ibid., 183 93 For more on the nutrient recycling methods of early agrarian societies see Edward Melillo’s (2012), “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930.” pp. 1034-5.

50

human excrement with charcoal and gypsum, along with furnace ashes, ground bone, and

the dried blood from slaughterhouses to nearby agricultural fields. These fields

reciprocated the nutrient supply with produce from their fields. But near the mid-1800s,

agriculture began to rely more heavily on foreign commodities - imported seeds,

machinery, and fertilizers – which became more economically efficient to use than the

traditional circular systems of ecologically minded agriculture.94

Liebig lamented capitalism’s tendency towards agricultural linearity. “If it were

practicable to collect, with the least loss, all the solid and fluid excrements of the

inhabitants of the town, and return to each farmer the portion arising from produce

originally supplied by him to the town,” Liebig wrote, “the productiveness of the land

might be maintained almost unimpaired for ages to come, and the existing store of

mineral elements in every fertile field would be amply sufficient for the wants of

increasing populations.”95

Arranging agriculture as a linear supply chain unidirectionally moving material

and energy from rural producer to urban consumer systematically degrades agricultural

soils. Yet the capitalist emphasis on short-run profits precluded the possibility of ever

circularizing this system. Farmers producing under capitalist conditions cannot care for

the long-term vitality of their soil, and the celebrated advances in soil chemistry can

therefore not be used to supplement soil fertility, but has to be used to restore its depleted

stocks instead.

94 Melillo 2012, 1035 95 Liebig 1863, 261

51

V. Metabolic rifting:

Liebig’s work documented the effects of alienating social metabolism from

ecological metabolism, which creates rifts in ecological metabolism. But the cause of

metabolic rifting is not just a simple lack of circularity in agricultural production and

consumption, which could be easily remedied by the institution of systems of restitution

for soil nutrients. Capitalist conditions of production actively create linearity and prevent

circularity in agricultural production.

Contemporaneous to Liebig’s important publications, Karl Marx published his

first volume of Capital during the early 1860s.96 Liebig’s work profoundly influenced

Marx, who studied it in order to understand the operation of the natural system of soil

within the human-nature dialectic. Writing to Engels in 1866, Marx recounted how he

had to “plough through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, in particular Liebig

and Schönbein, which is more important for this matter than all the economists put

together.”97 Liebig documented capitalist agriculture’s failure to maintain the means of

reproduction of the soil, and Marx followed this argument in his own, that by its failure

capitalist agriculture systematically exploited the soil. This failure was a direct result of

the town-country division of labor inherent to capitalism:

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.98

96 Marx 1976 97 Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental

Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 105.2 (1999): 366–405. Web. 17 Nov. 2014. 379 98 Marx 1981, 949-50

52

Marx offered a similar and equally important distillation in volume 1 of Capital:

Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.99

Capitalist production shrinks the agricultural population, concentrating rural land

ownership and growing the urban population as dispossessed laborers move to cities. But

the metabolic requirements of humans remain the same. Consequently, a social rift in

metabolism forms in which urban humans become separated from the land that feeds

them. In turn, the rift in social metabolism interrupts ecological metabolism by

preventing the return of the nutrients necessary for its operation. Unaltered, ecological

metabolism returns material back to the free environment so that it may be used in future

organismal metabolism. Marx calls ecological metabolism the “eternal natural condition

for the lasting fertility of the soil.”100 Maintaining ecological metabolism is therefore

quite obviously the foundational element of building socioecological relationality into

humanity’s relationship with its environment.

The division between city and countryside has only intensified since Marx’s time.

In the middle of 2009, global urban population (3.42 billion people) surpassed global

rural population (3.41 billion people) for the first time. The urban population is expected

to further increase by 84 percent in 2050 to 6.3 billion urban residents, assuming current

trends hold.101 Accordingly, along with the massive increase in human population has

come both an increase in its metabolic demands and an increase in its materially

99 Marx 1976, 637 100 Ibid., 637 101 United Nations Population Division

53

transformative potential. Marx discusses two consequences of capitalist production: first,

that by geographically separating social metabolism from its ecological metabolism it

ruptures the nutrient cycling of ecological metabolism, thereby creating a metabolic rift;

and second, that it concentrates the “historical motive force of society.” Such a

concentration of labor power (about 3 and a half billion urban humans, currently)

alienated from the ecosystems they work upon is undoubtedly one ingredient of the

geological agency that we unwittingly acquired over the course of historical

development. In addition, such population figures reveal the scope of the geographical

estrangement capitalism has developed between the bioeconomic points of extraction

(taking place in the global periphery) and excretion (taking place in urban cores).

VI. Metabolic Rifting as Historical Cycle:

Rifts in ecosystem metabolism reverberate into the economic system. Capitalist

enterprises, facing resource exhaustion and degradation, must pull resources from

elsewhere to compensate. The result is a cleaving of new metabolic rifts as new resource

zones are exploited to replace the lost fertility. During the early nineteenth century, there

was widespread concern about the degraded condition of Britain’s soils after decades of

intensive capitalist agriculture. In response to the crisis Justus von Liebig published

breakthrough research on chemical fertilizers and soil in 1840. The work, titled Organic

Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, imagined a future where

chemical fertilizers would restore soil fertility depleted by agricultural production.102

Only a year later, French scientist Alexandre Cochet published his experimental

work on Peruvian guano, deposited on three granite islands off the coast of Peru known 102 Melillo 2012, 1037

54

as the Chinchas. The Guanay cormorant, the Peruvian booby, and the Peruvian brown

pelican produce this guano from their diet of anchovetas and Pacific sardines that grow in

the cold, nutrient-rich upwellings off the Peruvian coast. These yearly deposits of guano

were preserved and fossilized over millennia by an extremely dry climate, thus creating

massive storehouses of nitrogen, phosphates, and alkaline salts. Together, the work of

Liebig and Cochet revealed how these storehouses could be used to infuse fertility into

degrading soils. With this revelation, capitalist enterprises sprang into action to pump the

fossilized nutrients northward, into American soils, and across the ocean into European

soils.103

As the guano supplies began to dwindle during the late 1870s, a new source of

nitrates arose in the form of sodium nitrate.104 The switch between the two demonstrates

again how the exhaustion of resources in one area catalyzes the exploitation of new

commodity frontiers.105 Deposits in the deserts of northwestern South America – in Peru,

Bolivia, and Chile – provided the majority of the sodium nitrate mined in the world.

Miners (calicheros) dug for caliche, the most nitrogen-rich form of extractable nitrates,

sending the product of their labor to nitrate refineries (oficinas) owned by wealthy

Chilean salitreros and financed by British and American capital.106

On July 3, 1909 Fritz Haber rendered Chilean nitrates obsolete when he

discovered how to fix atmospheric nitrogen into an agriculturally useful form of

ammonia. He reported to the directors of chemical firm Badische anilin- und Soda-Fabrik

(BASF) in Ludwigschafen: “Yesterday we began operating the large ammonia apparatus

103 Ibid., 1037 104 Ibid., 1045 105 Ibid., 1037-38 106 Ibid., 1046

55

with gas circulation [...] for about five hours without interruption. During this whole time

it functioned correctly and produced liquid ammonia continuously.”107 Haber’s ammonia

apparatus produced conditions necessary for a reaction between nitrogen and hydrogen

that generated ammonia (NH3). Later, chemical engineer Carl Bosch standardized

Haber’s process, allowing BASF the means to start producing ammonia on a commercial

scale in 1913.108 In the year 2000, Vaclav Smil wrote, “at least four out of every five

children born during the next half a century in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East

will synthesize their body proteins from nitrogen fixed by the Haber-Bosch synthesis of

ammonia.”109

Of course, this process did not mark the closing or reparation of the metabolic rift

associated with nitrogen. It merely transferred the location of resource extraction to a new

resource frontier: oil reserves. The Haber-Bosch process requires temperatures between

450 and 600 degrees Celsius, high pressures of between 200 and 400 atmospheres, and

enriched iron catalysts.110 These conditions are only possible by the combustion of fossil

fuels. It is no wonder then why many critics of capitalist agriculture deride it as “the art

of turning oil into food.”111

VII. Conclusions: Capitalism produces a socially and ecologically generalized world. Social labor

and ecological labor are organized and divided so as to produce commodities and

generate profit. These socioecological divisions of labor concentrate social metabolism

107 Fritz Haber, as quoted in Melillo 2012, 1053 108 Ibid., 1053 109 Vaclav Smil 2005, as quoted in Melillo 2012, 1054 110 Ibid., 1054 111 Clark, Brett, and Richard York. “Rifts and Shifts: Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises.” Monthly Review. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2015. 399

56

and its labour-power into one collective geologically-formidable entity which operates

separately from and out of proportion to the ecological metabolism that supports it. In

this way, capitalism’s emergence “created an ‘irreparable rift’ (rupture) in the metabolic

interaction between humans and the earth, one that is only intensified by large-scale

agriculture, long-distance trade, massive urban growth, and large and growing synthetic

inputs (chemical fertilizers) into the soil.”112

The pursuit of profit drives socioecological divisions of labor by mandating the

use of the most economically efficient modes of production. Broadly, economic

efficiency within agriculture requires large-scale monoculture of commodity crops, which

reduces ecological complexity and disrupts ecological metabolism. More specifically, the

pursuit of profit removes the possibility of reinvesting in the environmental processes

that, through their environmental labor, produce the material basis of the commodity. The

consequence of this is systematic degradation of the soil. This not only intensifies the

metabolic rift formed by orienting environmental production towards commodity

markets, but also creates new rifts as new environmental spaces are oriented towards the

production of new commodities (i.e. fertilizers) that can temporarily mitigate the

depletion of the soil.

112 Ibid., 398-9

57

Chapter 3 - Fisheries and Ecology:

“Your Earth is still your Earth, but between the efforts of your people to destroy it and ours to restore it, it has changed.”113

-- Jdayah speaking to Lillith, from Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn (1987)

I. Life and contingency:

Within Buddhist traditions there is an ancient Sanskrit concept –

pratītyasamutpāda – which roughly translates to “dependent-arising.” The concept of

dependent-arising broadly refers to the nature of all things as contingent upon multiple

causes and conditions. Such a notion of interdependence and absolute contingency is

fundamental to humanity’s future within the Anthropocene. The human species is

dependent upon many other species for its survival. Of course, these species also respond

to the basic metabolic requirements we do as they attempt to survive upon the surface of

this planet. Together, the species of Earth must survive on Earth, a planet with a history

longer and more complicated than any species, and a future that is always to some extent

inherently unpredictable and unknowable. Life on such a planet can only arise through

interdependence and thus, the history of life is a history of contingency. The aim of this

chapter is to construct a history of contingency surrounding one particular form of

human-environment interaction: fisheries.

I will begin first with an examination of the deep history of the oceans and what

that tells us about the parametric conditions of human subsistence upon them. Next, I will

examine recent scholarship that combines lengthier historical, archaeological, and

113 An Oankali alien named Jdayah speaks these words to Lillith, an African-American woman, in the wake of the nuclear destruction of Earth at the hands of humans. The Oankali have since restored the Earth and plan to repopulate it with humans, but only for a price – Butler, Octavia E. Dawn: Xenogenesis. New York, NY: Warner, 1987. Print.

58

paleoecological records of human fishing activities to examine the long co-evolutionary

history of interaction between humans and marine environments.

II. The oceans in la longue dureé:

The Earth formed about 4.53 billion years ago, coagulating from the rotating disk

of dust that would comprise our solar system. As more and more debris smashed into its

growing bulk the Earth began to melt, forming a glowing sphere of molten rock. At this

time, a planet of Mars’ size smashed into the infant Earth, breaking off a large chunk of

rock that would later form our Moon. As oceanographer Callum Robert (2012) explains,

the consequences of this collision have given us much to be thankful for: “We owe a lot

to this collision. It knocked Earth’s axis of rotation askew, which gives us seasons. Over

the vast plain of geological time the Moon has slowed and stabilized the Earth’s rotation,

giving us longer days.”114 It also moderates our tides, making them less extreme than

otherwise.

The Earth is unique within the solar system for its liquid surface water. Some

scientists hypothesize that this water originated in icy comets and asteroids that brought

the water to Earth as their orbital trajectories crossed. Others hypothesize that water

molecules floating around in space stuck to dust particles. As the Earth coalesced out of

this dust, water was trapped in its growing bulk. The Earth actually has enough water for

five to ten oceans trapped in its rock (basalt is half a percent water, by weight).

Consequently, when the early Earth began to heat and melt, water escaped from its rock

into the atmosphere where it existed as a dense vapor for over a hundred million years

after Earth’s melting. It eventually cooled and rained back down onto the Earth’s surface, 114 Roberts, Callum. The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. New York: Viking, 2012. Print.12

59

creating oceans of liquid water.115 We owe everything to this development. Liquid water

is a key ingredient of life – at least all life that we know – and without it, life today would

not be possible.

The first forms of life evolved during the early Archaean period (following the

fiery Hadean eon when Earth was molten rock), sometime between 3.8 and 4.1 billion

years ago. Methane-producing microbes appeared during this period and begin to release

methane, warming the world. In the Earth’s early history, the Sun was 25% less bright,

and therefore, elevated methane levels were absolutely crucial for maintaining liquid

water and the possibility of life.116 After methane came oxygen. 2.5 billion years ago the

first traces of oxygen make their way into the geological record. Over the next 150

million years, oxygen permeated the entire world, laying further foundations for the

diversification of life.

Metabolic pathways that use oxygen produce sixteen times more energy than

equivalent anoxic (non-oxygen) pathways. The evolution of larger-bodied animals

dependent upon greater quantities of energy was made possible by the evolution of

oxygenic metabolic pathways. The Great Oxidation Event, occurring around 2.9 billion

years ago, set off a chain of evolutionary events leading up to the emerging dominance of

oxygen-utilizing organisms. By the Cambrian period 542 million years ago, global

oxygen levels were about 12% of what they are today.117 During this period, every major

animal group got its evolutionary start. Importantly, predation emerged as a major animal

activity and mechanism of natural selection. The foundations of modern food webs were

laid in Cambrian seas as organismal populations participated in what scientists call an

115 Ibid., 12-13 116 Ibid., 16 117 Ibid., 22

60

evolutionary arms race. Some animals evolved better ways to escape predators, while

others evolved better ways to catch those who would escape.118

Vascular plants emerged on land around 420 million years ago. 30 million years

later, they had developed mechanisms to draw nutrients from the soil and thus build

bigger, more stable bodies. By 370 million years ago (another 20 million years later)

plants had completely covered the continents. Plant roots and other adaptations for

nutrient extraction from the soils greatly increased weathering rates, which brought

phosphate (a key nutrient involved in photosynthesis) in large quantities to the seas.

Consequently, marine primary productivity boomed, allowing food chains to support

more trophic levels and bigger predators. From 370 million years ago to 250 million

years ago, sharks and other reptiles evolved to take advantage of the abundance of life in

the oceans. During the Miocene epoch (from 23 to 5 million years ago) giant sharks as

big as great whales roamed the seas, and giant sperm whales with teeth three times bigger

than modern sperm whales ate other whales.119 Everything was bigger because the

foundations of the food webs were productive enough to transfer greater biomass through

food webs, thus supporting larger animal bodies at higher trophic levels.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the deep history of the oceans, it is the

extraordinary contingency of modern planetary conditions. There are at least five major

extinction events scattered throughout the Earth’s deep history. The Permian extinction

251 million years ago, for example, wiped out more than ninety percent of marine species

and two thirds of terrestrial species.120 But life survived, diversified, and the seas became

filled with life – different life, but life nonetheless – once again. Similarly, extended and

118 Ibid., 23 119 Ibid., 23 120 Ibid., 25

61

diversified food webs and ecosystems were contingent upon the increase in nutrient

delivery to the seas. Greater nutrient availability amplified primary productivity,

increasing the biomass available to be converted into subsequent trophic levels, thus

extending and widening the possibilities of marine food webs.

It is difficult to imagine an ocean of such abundance as we look at the picked-

over, degraded remains of modern oceanic food webs. There is a glimmer of hope,

however, if we imagine the barren oceans of today as a starting point. From this

beginning, there are two possible futures: one in which we strive to find humanity’s

ecological niche once again, helping the oceans repopulate and re-diversify, and one in

which we do not, inscribing in the geological record a sixth mass extinction that could

potentially include humanity on its list. However, no matter which course we choose – re-

diversification or extinction – the oceans and the species that inhabit it will not be the

same as they were prior to anthropogenic depletion. Instead, to quote Jdayah’s epigraph

with slight modification: “between the efforts of [our] people to destroy it and ours to

restore it, it has changed.”

III. Marine ecosystems - integrity and interdependence:

Marine ecosystems have complex trophic-level interactions that tie organisms,

from microscopic phytoplankton to the large apex predators, into resilient food webs with

great integrity. According to fisheries ecologist Daniel Pauly, a trophic level is “the

number of steps in a food web that separates an organism from the primary producers

[trophic level 1] at the base of that food web.”121 Marine ecosystems operate as pyramids.

121 Pauly, Daniel. 5 Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems. Washington, DC: Island, 2010. Print. 5

62

The base of the pyramid is formed by the primary producers and is defined as trophic

level 1. Primary production on the first trophic level harnesses the sun’s energy and

stores it using material from the free environment. The biomass formed by trophic level 1

will provide the energy and material to support all subsequent trophic levels. However, as

primary production moves upwards towards higher trophic levels through its

consumption by higher trophic-level species, a large percentage of it is wasted on each

subsequent trophic level for body maintenance, reproduction, and other organismal

activity.122 Typically, the efficiency with which primary production moves upwards from

one trophic level to the next is about 10%. This means that, of the total primary

production available to perform work on one trophic level, about 90% is used for

organismal metabolism while only 10% moves with its productive potential intact to the

next trophic level. The ever-decreasing transfer of biomass from one trophic level to the

next shapes the pyramid-like structure of ecosystem food webs.123 An example of trophic

level structure (from the lightly-fished Lake Turkana located in the Kenyan Rift Valley)

is provided (see Figure 3).124

122 Ibid., 54 123 Ibid., 18-19 124 Ibid., 255

Figure 3 - Trophic Level Structure (Lake Turkana)

63

Of course, such a schematic illustration of ecosystems could convey the

impression that they are rigid and immutable, maintaining a consistent structure

throughout time. In fact, this could not be farther from the truth. “Ecosystems are natural,

but never timeless,” writes Jeffrey Bolster in The Mortal Sea, his 2012 book from which I

quoted in my introduction. Bolster’s point here concerns the distinction between

“natural” and “static,” two words often thought to connote essentially the same thing.

When Bolster refers to ecosystems as “natural,” he is referencing the way in which their

structure, composition, and function is naturally determined, in other words by natural

intra- and inter-species interactions and the natural conditions of the physical

environment. These interactions and conditions change throughout time as species evolve

and new environmental conditions arise, meaning that ecosystems are never “static.”

Rather they exist in some type of dynamic equilibrium, constantly shifting and

responding to changing environmental conditions and intra- and inter-species

interactions. The idea of an “ecosystem” therefore arises from both necessity and

convenience as a way to describe the sum of the complicated interactions among various

species populations and the physical environment. An important addition to this

distinction is that ecosystems are only “natural” to the extent that they respond to non-

human natural events, like storms. Anthropogenic forces like overfishing or habitat

alteration exert significant pressures on ecosystems as well.125 Separating out natural

from anthropogenic factors in ecosystem structure, composition, and function is therefore

important to establishing what an ecologically intact (natural) ecosystem looks like.

Although we should not conceive of marine ecosystems as static structures, nor

should we view them as eternally fluctuating, with no clear beginning, middle, or end in 125 Bolster 2012, 17

64

sight. Always focusing on the constant changes inherent to ecosystems destroys any hope

of finding a foundation for the maintenance of socioecological relationality. Along these

lines Donald Worster argues that environmental historians who fixate too much on

change run the risk of advocating relativism and confusing environmental issues and

hence, policy solutions. Relativism destroys the possibility of either ecological or social

stability. Socioecological changes are therefore neither good nor bad – just relative.126

Instead of relativistic claims about the eternity of change, Worster argues that, “[all]

change is not the same, nor are all changes equal.” Some changes in nature work for us,

and some work against us. We might be able to separate out the good changes from the

bad in the present moment, but not always. To protect ourselves from misguided

judgments on what is good change and what is bad, environmental preservation and

conservation should be founded upon “the idea that preserving a diversity of change is a

good and safe thing to do.”127 In other words, conservation should preserve ecological

possibility.

How, then, do humans proceed in their relationship with an environment

undergoing many and different changes at once? Worster concludes that “‘History’ has

given way to ‘histories.’ Each of those histories needs space to play itself out in, to

unwind its narrative. That is precisely what conservation must understand and aim to do:

Provide the space [...] so that all the many interactive histories may unfold - the history of

a coral reef alongside the history of a coastal city, the history of a tropical rainforest

alongside the history of a political struggle.”128

126 Worster, Donald. "Nature and the Disorder of History." Environmental History Review 18.2 (1994): 1. Web. 4 127 Ibid., 14 128 Ibid., 14

65

Preserving marine ecosystems means giving them the environmental space they

need to play out their own internal dynamics in perpetuity. It is along these lines that

historian Mike Davis argues that cities, usually perceived as environmental villains, could

become the cornerstone of an ecologically vibrant and environmentally sustainable

world. “Where there are well-defined-defined boundaries between city and countryside,

urban growth can preserve open space and vital natural systems, while creating

environmental economies of scale in transportation and residential construction,” Davis

wrote, emphasizing the spatial efficiency that comes with urbanization. Geographically

constrained urbanization with well-defined borders between city and environment can

effectively partition the most extreme anthropogenic impacts off from the most crucial

environmental systems that support us.

But how does Worster’s and Davis’ abstract conception of environmental

preservation translate in practical terms? Pauly (2010) recommends decommissioning a

substantial portion of the world’s fishing fleet to reduce fishing capacity, in addition to

partitioning the world’s oceans into lightly-fished commercial zones and marine

protected areas (zones where no fishing at all takes place).129 Pauly’s solution accords

well with both Worster’s and Davis’; both would give humans and ecosystem their own

environmental space in which to play out their histories without significant interference.

IV. Fishing in la longue dureé:

Fishing has been a part of human subsistence for thousands of years.

Archaeological evidence documents human coastal settlements from 10,000 years ago

that exploited marine resources for food and material. Importantly, as Jackson, et al.’s 129 Pauly 2010, 108

66

(2001) investigation into historical overfishing reveals, “[o]verfishing and ecological

extinction predate and precondition modern ecological investigations and the collapse of

marine ecosystems in recent times.”130 Much of the impact that fisheries create is

therefore part of a deeply rooted pattern of interaction between humans and their

environment. Many modern commentators suggest that capitalism and industrialized

fisheries are the ultimate force creating this lack of socioecological relationality, but this

is not exactly true. While capitalist conditions exacerbate ecological degradation, in fact,

the socioecological pattern of interaction between humans and the oceans is much deeper.

Changing this pattern of interaction into one that can sustain our socioecological

civilization in the long term is necessary.

Scientists are beginning to apply historical fishery data to establish more accurate

historical baselines on fishery stocks.131 Much ecological research is founded upon

localized studies done over the course of only a few years. In addition, most of these

studies have been conducted after the 1950s and without longer-term historical

perspective.132 The spatial and temporal limitations of these studies fail to encompass key

factors affecting the long-term health and composition of marine ecosystems, such as the

long life-spans of ecologically important species, rare but regularly occurring extreme

environmental disturbances, and longer-term cycles in oceanographic regimes and

productivity. Consequently, much of the conclusions reached fall prey to “shifting

baseline syndrome,” in which “the baseline is set with a short-term perspective and

130 Jackson, et al. 2001, 629 131 See Thurstan, Ruth H., Simon Brockington, and Callum M. Roberts. "The Effects of 118 Years of Industrial Fishing on UK Bottom Trawl Fisheries." Nature Communications 1.2 (2010): 1-6. Web.; and Myers, Ransom A., and Boris Worm. “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities.” Nature 423.6937 (2003): 280–283. Web. 4 Apr. 2015. 132 Jackson et al. 2001, 629

67

represents an increasingly exploited state over time.”133 The strategies that emerge to

remediate anthropogenic damage to fisheries are correspondingly shortsighted and fail to

tackle the root causes of the damage.

Of course, any attempt to find a real baseline is a project doomed to failure

because there exist no absolute steady states in ecosystems that could provide a

baseline.134 Change is a constant. However, we can discover what ecosystems looked like

before significant human impacts, and by doing so, discover which changes are natural

(non-human) and which are anthropogenic. Preserving the natural internal dynamics that

create the ecosystem’s entire diversity of natural changes then becomes the goal of

conservation, with which historical baselines can assist.

Deep historical research into paleo-ecosystems is difficult and complex because it

must sort out numerous paleo-climatic, -oceanographic, and -anthropogenic factors going

far back in the history of the Earth. Although far from precise, the resultant history still

reveals major structural and functional changes in marine ecosystems occurring as a

result of human activity.135 For example, Jackson et al. (2001) examine the marine kelp

forests of the Northern Pacific, which have formed during the last 20 million years.

Various kelp species, sea urchins, sea otters, and the extinct Steller’s sea cow are the

main components of this marine ecosystem.

133 i.e. Pauly 1995 as cited in Jennings, Simon, and Julia L. Blanchard. "Fish Abundance with No Fishing: Predictions Based on Macroecological Theory." Journal of Animal Ecology 73.4 (2004): 632-42. Web. 632 134 Bolster 2012, 18 135 Jackson et al. 2001, 629

68

Up to the late Pleistocene (around 12

thousand years ago) sea cows

roamed the northern Pacific

Rim. But by the end of the

Pleistocene and into the early

Holocene (around 11 to 10

thousand years ago),

aboriginal hunters had

decimated sea cow

populations. Sea cows lasted

for many thousands of years

longer in the western

Aleutian Islands, which were

not peopled until around

4,000 years ago. But when

people arrived, the sea cow populations again suffered. By the time the Europeans

appeared in the region in 1741, sea cows only existed in the Commander Islands, the only

islands still not populated by aboriginal people. Twenty-seven years later, in 1768,

European fur traders killed the last sea cow.136 The general state of sea cow populations

before and after fishing is recorded in Figure 4.137

136 Ibid., 630-631 137 Ibid., 630 – Simplified coastal food webs showing changes in some of the important top-down interactions due to overfishing; before (left side) and after (right side) fishing. (A and B) Kelp forests for Alaska and southern California (left box), and Gulf of Maine (right box). (C and D) Tropical coral reefs and seagrass meadows. (E and F) Temperate estuaries. The representation of food webs after fishing is necessarily more arbitrary than those before fishing because of rapidly changing recent events. For example, sea urchins are once again rare in the Gulf of Maine, as they were before the overfishing of cod,

Figure 4 - Historical Overfishing

69

Other elements of the kelp forest ecosystems in the Northern Pacific have a

similarly intertwined relationship with human society. Prior to human settlement of the

region (10 to 11 thousand years ago) kelp forests were rich and abundant. The kelp

flourished because sea otters, which ate the sea urchins that grazed on kelp, exerted a top-

down control on sea urchin populations. In effect, their presence helped mitigate the

impacts of sea urchin grazing. However, beginning around 2,500 years ago, Aboriginal

Aleuts (Aleutian islanders) greatly reduced sea otter populations. In response, sea urchin

populations and body sizes substantially increased due to the waning of sea otter control

by predation. By the 1800s, sea otters hovered at the brink of extinction, driven there by

European fur traders who hunted the otters for their pelts. Kelp forests collapsed as the

uncontrolled sea urchin populations exploded. In the 20th century, legal protection of the

sea otters partially reversed their decline, and the kelp forests have since recovered to a

certain extent.138

V. The ecological effects of single-species targeting:

Historically, humans exploit marine ecosystems by targeting certain species.

There are many reasons for such specific targeting, such as ecological availability,

cultural preference, or commercial value.139 But the effects of this pattern of interaction

due to the recent fishing of sea urchins that has also permitted the recovery of kelp. Bold font represents abundant; normal font represents rare; “crossed-out” represents extinct. Thick arrows represent strong interactions; thin arrows represent weak interactions. 138 Ibid., 631 - Kelp forests are again declining, however, this time because killer whales have shifted their diet to include sea otters. Previously, killer whales fed primarily upon seals and sea lions. Due to other forms of anthropogenic environmental degradation, however, seals and sea lions have declined to the degree that killer whales can no longer survive on these species alone. Consequently, killer whales have added sea otters to their diet, with cascading ecological consequences. 139 Jeffrey Bolster’s example from Chapter 2 of this thesis (Bolster 2012, pg. 6) reveals how fisheries on the Eastern coast of North America shifted fishing effort between species as the ecological availability of various fish populations waxed and waned in response to anthropogenic depletions and natural environmental fluctuations over the centuries.

70

are the same no matter the motivation. Marine ecosystems exist as highly integrated

assemblages of various species determined by environmental conditions. So when one

species is decimated, its decline sets off wild cascades through the ecosystem’s trophic

levels; when sea otters decline, the kelp declines due to uncontrollable growth in sea

urchin populations, and so on. Jackson, et al. (2001) also tell a similar socio-ecological

history of both coral reef ecosystems and estuaries. But the essential pattern is the same

as the kelp forests. Basic diagrams of before and after ecosystem structures of these key

marine ecosystems are provided in the aforementioned figure above. Overall, the

insertion of human predation into marine ecosystems results in a drastic rearrangement of

its components towards human consumption that highly degrades the integrity of the

ecosystem.

Fisheries often focus on the fish (Trophic Level [TL] = 4) that eat fish (TL = 3)

that eat zooplankton (TL = 2) that eat phytoplankton (TL = 1).140 Salmon, a commercially

popular fish, generally eat at this fourth trophic level in marine ecosystems. A few basic

calculations working backwards through the trophic levels (based on Pauly’s

aforementioned estimation that ecosystems are only 10% efficient at transferring primary

production from one trophic level to the next) provides an indication of how much

primary productivity humans remove from the ocean by targeting high trophic-level fish

like salmon. For example, a single adult salmon of 10 pounds required 100 pounds of

trophic level 3 fish which, in turn, required 1000 pounds of trophic level 2 zooplankton

that required, ultimately, 10,000 pounds of trophic level 1 phytoplankton. Catching a

single adult salmon, in other words, requires 10,000 pounds of primary productivity.

140 Pauly 2010, 35

71

Pauly and Christensen (1995) published a review of global fishery catch statistics

that employs this technique of calculating the primary productivity required (PPR) to

support a given catch. By using the PPR technique in conjunction with ecosystem

modeling software, Pauly and Christensen could determine how much primary

production humans appropriate from the oceans annually. In aggregated form, Pauly and

Christensen determine that humans appropriate about 8% of global marine primary

productivity. On the face of it, this appears to be a fairly small percentage. Broken down

by ecosystem, however, the figures become much more dire. From the open oceans,

which supply only a small proportion to global fishery catches, humans take only 2% of

primary productivity. In ecosystems much more important to commercial fisheries,

humans take a much larger percentage. From upwelling ecosystems (where cold,

nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean is brought to the surface to fuel intense primary

productivity and hence, large and diverse marine ecosystems), humans appropriate over

25% of primary productivity. Similarly, humans take 24% of primary productivity from

tropical shelves, and from non-tropical shelves humans take over 35% of primary

productivity.141 Such high PPR values in the continental shelf ecosystems are mainly due

to the operation of industrial fisheries at high trophic levels.142

By appropriating too much primary production, humans can substantially alter

ecosystem composition, reducing higher trophic-level predators and leading to

domination by lower trophic-level species. The logic behind this phenomenon is simple:

if one were to reduce the size of the base of the pyramid (i.e. reducing primary

productivity) to 50% of its former size, the subsequent levels would be proportionally

141 Ibid., 14 142 Ibid., 15

72

reduced as well. Fewer animals would inhabit each trophic level, and there might be

fewer trophic levels overall.

Pauly, et al. (1998) documented the consequences of such major appropriations of

marine primary productivity by humans in a 1998 publication in Science. Landings from

global fisheries have shifted in the past 45 years or so (1950-1998) from large piscivorous

(fish-eating) fish to smaller invertebrates and planktivorous (plankton-eating) fish,

especially in the Northern Hemisphere where industrialized fisheries are most developed.

Pauly thinks that this may imply “major changes in the structure of marine food webs.”

143

On first inspection, this might seem to be a welcome change. Eating lower

trophic-level fish reduces the amount of primary productivity required and, furthermore,

because there is a greater amount of biomass at lower trophic levels, catches will be much

greater in volume. However, the shift to lower trophic-level fish has generally not been

voluntary, but rather has been spurred by declining catches of higher trophic-level fish.

Globally, the trend indicates that fisheries landings are declining in recent decades by

about 0.1 trophic levels per decade. If the current trend of fishing down the food web is

not reversed, it is likely that fisheries across the world will collapse.144 Large sections of

the human population depend upon marine ecosystems to supply them with their daily

protein intake.145 In addition, many marine species hold important cultural meanings for

the human societies that live in relation to them.146

143 Ibid., 37 144 Ibid., 44 145 Pauly and Alder 2005, 494 146 Ibid., 492

73

The movement of fisheries down marine food webs has an even deeper history

not captured in Pauly’s assessment, based as it on a relatively limited time period. Large

fishes that were formerly abundant are no longer caught by commercial fisheries or even

scientific surveys.147 Industrial fisheries have decimated large predatory fish, like the

salmon or the bluefin tuna, in particular. Myers and Worm (2003) found that

industrialized fisheries have reduced predator populations in the global ocean by 90%.

The scientific recognition of such widespread reductions in marine abundance and

diversity is mirrored in the historical accounts of fisheries, in which early explorers in

North America logged countless entries full of wonder at the incredible abundance of

pre-exploitation North American seas.148 The ecosystem cascade effects of such apex

predator reductions are bound to be widespread and could be irreversible.149 Although

this former abundance is left out of Pauly’s review, based as it is on FAO landing

statistics and not historical data, the overall decline associated with fishing down marine

food webs would be unaffected and could be potentially underestimated.

The decrease in biomass of large fish will cause smaller, faster-growing fish to

predominate. As commercial fisheries remove the higher trophic level, longer-lived, and

bigger fish the ecosystem will begin to turn over faster. Jennings and Blanchard (2004)

predict that “[f]ast turnover at low abundance will lead to greater interannual instability

in biomass and production, complicating management action and increasing the

sensitivity of populations and communities to environmental change.”150 The slow

growth and long lives of larger fish provide stability to an ecosystem, buffering it against

147 Jennings and Blanchard 2004, 636 148 For examples, see Jeffrey Bolster’s 2012 book The Mortal Sea, Callum Roberts’ 2012 book The Ocean of Life, or H. Bruce Franklin’s 2007 book The Most Important Fish in the Sea. 149 Myers and Worm 2003, 282 150 Jennings and Blanchard 2004, 636

74

rapid fluctuations in environmental conditions. Intact food webs are stable food webs, in

other words. Hence, Pauly suggests that the only way fishery management can proceed is

to begin rebuilding fish populations “embedded within functional food webs, [in] large

‘no-take’ marine protected areas.”151

VI. Conclusions:

In relation to the oceans, humans face an ecological crisis of devastating

proportions if we continue to interact with marine ecosystems as we historically have.

Global fish catches peaked in 1988 and since then global catch estimates, though

fluctuating, have tended to decline by 360,000 tonnes per year. Removing the highly

variable Peruvian anchoveta catches from the mix shows an even more drastic decline of

about 660,000 tonnes per year.152 The point about declining fish stocks is driven home by

the FAO’s classification of 70% of the major marine fisheries as fully or overexploited.153

We need to change this pattern of interaction.

Overall, the general approach humans take in relation to marine ecosystems is

much older than industrialization and capitalism. It is a pattern based on exploiting a

single species at a time until it is gone. Pauly (2010) characterizes this pattern of

interaction as “grab all [you] can, and eat it.”154 The eventual consequences of such an

opportunistic style of exploitation are hinted at in the decline of mean trophic level of

fishery catches – fishing down the food web. The logical conclusion of such a trend is

that we will empty the oceans of fish – or, at least, fish that we like. Soon, all that will be

151 Pauly 2010, 45 152 Ibid., 70 153 Ibid., 65 154 Ibid., 60

75

left will be microbes, harmful algae, and jellyfish. The northern Benguela ecosystem, off

Namibia in southwestern Africa, provides a glimpse into this possible future: “15 million

tonnes of good fish, such as hake and sardine, have been replaced by 12 million tonnes of

jellyfish […], which are now busy eating up the eggs and larvae of the remaining fishes,”

wrote Daniel Pauly, documenting a real-life example of fishing down the food web.155

Recovery of the Benguela ecosystem will almost certainly be predicated on a reduction in

fishing activity, and conservation efforts focusing on rebuilding a functional food web

with jellyfish (and humans, for that matter) rehabilitated back into sustainable ecological

niches.

The ocean’s deep past provides hints at the ocean of this potential future.

Beginning 420 million years ago, vascular plants emerged on the planet. Over the next 30

million years, they evolved mechanisms to draw nutrients from the earth. This

development drastically increased the rate of nutrient delivery to the oceans, enabling

primary production to boom. The larger base of primary production consequently could

support greater biomass at the higher trophic levels of the food webs and more trophic

levels in the food web overall. This rise in marine primary productivity is the major

reason why marine food webs grew and diversified during this period. Now, during the

Anthropocene, humans appropriate anywhere from 25% - 35% in the marine ecosystems

most important to human fishing activity. The consequences of such major appropriations

of primary production will be to reverse the primary-production driven evolutionary

diversification of the ocean’s deep past. We should expect marine food webs to devolve

to a state with lower biomass, fewer trophic levels and less biodiversity. Pauly (2010)

dubs this hypothetical future ocean the “age of slime,” in which “it will be as if the 155 Ibid., 61

76

evolutionary sequence had been reversed […], with the more derived, larger animals

being replaced by simpler, smaller ones, all the way down to bacteria.”156 An ocean of

slime – all its incredible abundance and diversity lost – would be a massive failure on the

part of humans.

We need to employ Chakrabarty’s “species thinking” in order to begin re-

embedding humans into marine ecosystems as functional and beneficial components.

Humans should be absent predators, able to respond via scientific observation and

knowledge to the fluctuations of the natural world so as to correspondingly reduce our

fishing efforts when necessary and thus prevent overexploitation. Of course, this entire

project begins with preserving the ecological integrity of marine ecosystems and

protecting their ecological possibility for change. By doing so we can sustain the

ecosystems that give us life.

156 Ibid., 60-61

77

Chapter 4 - Socioecological History:

I. The intersection of society and ecology:

Humans have long been connected to the ocean and its metabolism through

fishing. Subsistence fishing is the earliest and longest-standing form of human interaction

with marine ecosystems. Through this intimate link, humans gained a deep understanding

of fish migrations, tides, and ocean currents. But the relationship between humans and the

oceans did not remain static. The introduction of commodity markets and private

ownership under the capitalist mode of production significantly altered how humans

related to the ocean through their labor. For example, the dispossession of fishermen

from their historical fishing grounds and their enfoldment into capitalist labor forces has

alienated them from the marine ecosystems they use to know deeply. Consequently,

many fishermen work with little knowledge of the marine ecosystems they transform

through their labor. Overall, the social, economic, and technological development of

human society has spurred epochal transformations in the human-ocean dialectic, with

significant negative consequences for marine ecosystems.157

With the rise of industrial capitalism – characterized by “mechanization,

automation, and mass production/consumption” – profit-oriented investments in efficient

production (for example, fish capture) technologies made the large-scale depletion of

fisheries a possibility.158 An expansion of fishery catches in turn led to market expansion,

driving further investment in efficient fish-capture technologies. For example,

developments in freezer technology, marketing, and distribution allowed Midwestern

157 Clausen, Rebecca, and Stefano B. Longo. "The Tragedy of the Commodity and the Farce of AquAdvantage Salmon®." Development and Change 43.1 (2012): 229-51. Web. 430 158 Ibid., 430

78

consumers in the United States to consume the products of marine ecosystems – for

example, cod and haddock - for the first time. The opening of a Midwestern market for

fish products enhanced profits within the fishing industry. Consequently, companies

invested some of the capital back into their fleets in order to exploit their gains. This

drove further expansion of fishing efforts and further expansion of consumption in a

positive feedback loop.159 By viewing the ocean as an instrument for capital

accumulation, capitalism has created conditions encouraging the growth of global fishing

capacity far beyond the ability of marine ecosystems to supply fish or other marine

organisms.

The consequences of the mismatch between industrial fishing capacity and marine

ecological capacity are apparent today in the widespread depletion of fish from the ocean

and the degradation of the marine environment. Global fish landings grew alongside

fishing capacity until the 1980s when they peaked at annual high of 80 million tons. Ever

since the 1980s, global landings have declined.160 And this decline persists despite fishery

movement down the food web to lower trophic levels, which should yield higher volumes

of fish. The failure of fisheries to land higher catch volumes at lower trophic levels is

itself an indication of how seriously industrial fisheries have degraded marine

ecosystems.161

Ecosystems maintain their integrity by the complex interaction of multiple

trophic levels of species. By contrast, fisheries target one species, often fishing it into

extinction, with little regard to the species-level and ecosystem-level effects. The

disappearance or depletion of one species disrupts the entire ecosystem as the ecological

159 Ibid., 432 160 Pauly 2010, 70 161 Pauly and Alder 2005, 482

79

controls it previously exerted fade away. Species extinctions and subsequent major

alterations to the structure, function, and operation of marine ecosystems are clear

examples of metabolic rifting in the ocean, itself a consequence of the way in which

capitalism fails to properly value, and thus relate to, its ecological context.

Of course, such major alterations to marine ecosystems are not a consequence of

industrial fishing alone. As Jackson, et al.’s exploration of the deeper history of human

interventions into marine ecosystems demonstrates, humans have long induced major

alterations to marine ecosystems and pushed some species into extinction. However, the

rise of industrial fishing has massively increased the ability of humans to deplete fish

stocks and thus, marine ecosystems around the world are now over-exploited and close to

collapse.162

This chapter will explore the intersection of society and environment in the Gulf

of Thailand. I will first discuss a particular case study in Thailand, where The Guardian

revealed the horrifying social and ecological consequences of Thai shrimp production.

Then I will attempt to link the insights gained in the previous three chapters to this case

study. To do so, I will construct a socioecological history of Thai fisheries and

aquaculture. Such a history provides insight into how capitalist modes of production

combine with the biophysical mechanism of fossil-energy systems and other technologies

and resources to intervene in marine ecosystems. Following this discussion, I will explore

how capitalist supply chains connect consumers to the degraded ecosystems that support

them, but prevent these consumers from obtaining full knowledge of their degradation.

Finally, I will discuss how recognition of the conceptual and material metabolic linkages

162 Jackson, et al., 2001

80

between social struggles could help organize and direct social activism towards a more

positive and sustainable socioecological future.

II. Social systems and ecosystems - a case study in the Gulf of Thailand:

Estimates suggest that the global seafood industry is worth almost $7.3 billion

dollars. Thailand, in particular, benefits enormously from this trade and has built up its

GDP upon seafood exports.163 Currently, Thailand leads the world in exporting prawns

(shrimp), shipping out approximately 500,000 tonnes of the small crustaceans every year.

Four of the largest supermarket retailers, Walmart, Costco, Tesco, and Carrefour, as well

as many other small retailers, source their prawns from Thailand.164

But Thailand’s economic success is built on violence and ecological degradation.

In June 2014, The Guardian published a series of investigative reports on the particular

supply chain that delivers prawns to the plates of Western consumers. The report revealed

the social and ecological consequences of Thai prawn farming in terrifying detail. Thai

government officials estimate that half a million people are enslaved within Thai borders

– 300,000 of those work as slaves in the fishing industry.165 Those enslaved are largely

people who have been excluded from the growth of globalization, dispossessed by land

grabs and plantation agriculture or by war and environmental damage.166 The ships on

which slaves live and work often stay out at sea for years at a time, being serviced and

refueled by cargo boats that take the catch back to port and deliver more slaves to replace

163 Lawrence 2014 164 Hodal, Kelly, and Lawrence 2014 165 Ibid. 166 Lawrence, Felicity. “Thailand’s Seafood Industry: A Case of State-Sanctioned Slavery?” the Guardian 10 June 2014. N.p., n.d. Web.

81

those who have died; murdered by their boat captains, killed by sheer overwork and little

food, or driven to suicide by despair.167

The supply chain functions like this: slave ships working in the waters off of

Thailand net huge quantities of trash fish, the conglomeration of small (often juvenile) or

otherwise inedible fish pulled up alongside the catch of targeted commercially viable

species. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that the Thai

fishing industry removes 350,000 tonnes of trash fish from the oceans annually. The

Guardian traced this fish to the factories where it is ground down into fishmeal for

onward sale to Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods. CP Foods uses this fishmeal to feed its

farmed prawns, which account for about 10% of Thailand’s total prawn exports of

500,000 tonnes. After the prawns are fattened on slave-harvested, trash fish-based

fishmeal, CP food sells them onwards to international customers through retail

distributors like Walmart, Costco, Tesco, and Carrefour.168

How did Thai fisheries become such degrading forces in social and ecological

systems? The answer to this question relies upon the work done in the previous three

chapters, each of which identifies one aspect – biophysical, social, or ecological – of the

globally destructive pattern of human interaction with the environment. Chapter 2

focused upon socioecological metabolism, identifying the energy system transformation

associated with industrialization as a key biophysical component of the current

socioecological regime. Chapter 3 focused on the way that capitalism conditions

167 One escaped slave recounts having his teeth smashed in by a brutal captain. Other slaves tell stories about watching fellow slaves beaten to death and then pitched overboard. Another tells the story of a slave (name unknown) who was torn apart between four ships when he tried to rebel. Ei Ei Lwin, a Burmese fisherman, claims he saw 18 to 20 people killed in front of him during his time as a slave on a Thai fishing vessel. 168 Hodal, Kate, Chris Kelly, and Felicity Lawrence. “Revealed: Asian Slave Labour Producing Prawns for Supermarkets in US, UK.” The Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web.

82

economic production. I argued that capitalist conditions create metabolic rifts by

enforcing socioecological divisions of labor, divisions that geographically estrange the

bioeconomic points of extraction and excretion associated with humanity’s collective

metabolism. Finally, Chapter 4 focused on the basic pattern of interaction humans

maintain with marine ecosystems which disregards the integrity of ecosystem’s dynamic

structure with targeting of single species. From these chapters we get three components –

fossil-energy systems, socioecological divisions of labor, and single-species targeting –

that together combine to push Thailand’s marine ecosystems into their current socially

and ecologically degraded state.

III. A socioecological history of Thai fisheries:

The Gulf of Thailand (GoT) is a large marine ecosystem bounded on its western

and northern sides and most of its eastern side by Thailand. Cambodia and Vietnam each

share a small portion of its eastern shores (Figure 5).169 It comprises an area of about

350,000 square kilometers and is unique in that it lies almost entirely within Thailand’s

Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), meaning that only Thai boats are legally allowed to

fish it by international agreement.170 Historically, fishing in the GoT took place on a

small scale. GoT fishermen used bamboo stake traps and gillnets deployed from the

shore. In 1917, GoT fishermen began to use sail and non-engine boats in conjunction

with gillnets and squid cast nets. By the 1930s, GoT fishermen adopted engines, and by

169 Teh, Lydia, Dirk Zeller, and Daniel Pauly. "Preliminary Reconstruction of Thailand's Fisheries Catches: 1950-2010." Fisheries Centre - The University of British Columbia (2015): n. pag. Web. 1 – Thailand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and shelf waters of < 200 m. 170 Chuenpagdee, Ratana, and Pauly, Daniel. 2004. “The Gulf of Thailand Trawl Fisheries,” p. 204-220 In: J. Swan and D. Greboval (compilers), Report and Documentation of the International Workshop on the Implementation of International Fisheries Instruments and Factors in the Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries. Mauritius, 2-7 February 2003. FAO Fisheries Report. No. 700. Rome. 204

83

1953, 453 GoT boats operated with engines. Yet engine-powered boats represented only

a small proportion (20%) of total GoT fishing effort. The majority of fishing boats in

1953 were still small and non-engine powered.171

In the early 1960s, fishermen in the GoT became acquainted with trawling, a

particularly effective and ecologically destructive form of fish-capture technology.

Trawler numbers tripled within the first ten years of their introduction, and catches

concomitantly increased through the

1960s. In 1989, trawler numbers

peaked at 13,100 vessels. But from

1976 onward the growth rate in

catches began to decline from 8%

annually to less than 2% annually. The

slowing of growth in total catches was

accompanied by another foreboding

trend: catch per unit effort (a measure

of how much fish is caught by a

standardized amount of effort)

declined from 300 kilograms per hour

in 1963 to 50 kilograms per hour in the

1980s and to 30 kilograms per hour in 1990.172 Despite the massive growth of Thailand’s

industrial fishing capacity through 1989, or more likely because of it, catches declined as

measured in both total catches and catch per unit effort.

171 Teh, Zeller, and Pauly 2015, 2 172 Ibid., 1

Figure 5 – The Gulf of Thailand (and EEZ)

84

It is important to note that small-scale fishing efforts, although they are

sometimes destructive of their resource base, as in the case of fishing technologies like

dynamite and cyanide, are not the culprit behind the degradation of the GoT marine

ecosystem. Small-scale fishing has remained relatively stable in its fishing capacity

throughout the GoT’s recent history, and catch increases and consequent ecological

degradation result from the build-up of industrial fishing capacity alone.173 For

illustration of this point, see Teh, Zeller, and Pauly’s historical reconstruction of catches

in the GoT (Figure 6).174

Figure 6 – Historical Reconstruction of Gulf of Thailand Catches (1950-2010)

Two sources drove the build-up of Thailand’s industrial fishing capacity. First,

the trawl operators generated massive profits from their efficient fishing technologies,

which they reinvested into more trawlers. And second, cheap loans from the Manila-

173 Ibid., 2 174 Ibid., 8 – Reconstructed catches (within the Thai EEZ) showing (disaggregated) contribution of different fishing sectors. The dotted lines marks the aggregated catch information supplied to the FAO, which also severely underreports the total catches originating from within the Thai EEZ.

85

based Asian Development Bank for further development of the GoT fishery drove more

fishermen to enter the business. The end result was an industrial fishing apparatus way

out of proportion to the ecological system it exploits. In the early 1960s, the GoT

ecosystem largely drove its own composition, structure, and function through its own

internal dynamics.175 But the introduction of trawling technology and the subsequent

expansion of its use changed that. Catches and catch per unit effort significantly declined

from the 1960s onward.176 In addition, the effects of fishing down the food web are

visible as well. As Ratana Chuenpagdee and Daniel Pauly remarked in a 2004 report to

the UN FAO, “[D]emersal catches, which had earlier increased in response to the build-

up of effort [trawling], began to stagnate, and to slowly decrease, while the catch

composition changed both within species (towards small individuals [...]), and between

species (toward small, short-lived species [...]), i.e., toward an ill-named mix of ‘trash

fish.’”177 Industrial fishing is driving the GoT towards domination by smaller, faster-

growing fish, leading to an ecosystem with faster turnover-times in terms of biomass

regeneration and hence, greater instability and sensitivity to any environmental or

anthropogenic disturbances.178

To the two sources mentioned in the paragraph above we can add a third, indirect

source: coastal aquaculture. Coastal aquaculture easily absorbed the rising amounts of

trash fish produced by the GoT fishery, subsidizing its continued ecological depletion.

Rather than foreign capital (for example, the Asian Development Bank) pushing its

development, the Thai government is responsible for its build-up. During the period of

175 Chuenpagdee and Pauly 2004, 206 176 Ibid., 205 177 Ibid., 206 178 Jennings and Blanchard 2004, 636

86

industrialization of the GoT fishery, the Thai government advocated and incentivized the

development of coastal aquaculture as a way to increase Thailand’s economic production

and generate income from exports (however, such a focus on export-oriented production

is likely a product of the influence international lending institutions exert upon Thai

governmental policy).179

Coastal aquaculture has also had further ecological impacts beyond subsidizing

the GoT’s ecological depletion. Shrimp farms boost primary production in the GoT

through run-off into the rivers that feed into them, which in turn leads to frequent harmful

algal blooms, oxygen depletion events (anoxic dead zones), food poisonings, and other

pollution effects.180 In addition, with respect to aquaculture, the culture of low trophic

level animals (i.e. oysters or mussels) has remained flat or even declined, whereas the

culture of high trophic level carnivores like salmon, sea bass, bluefin tuna, and shrimp

has rapidly increased. Typically, aquaculture operations provide the protein these

carnivorous fish need in the form of fishmeal ground from the bodies of low trophic-level

fish hauled in as bycatch (this arrangement is visible in the case of Thai shrimp

production which feeds trash-fish-based fish meal into shrimp aquaculture operations). In

other words, we are farming up the food web – a sinister supplement to the fishing down

that occurs in the open ocean – by using low trophic level fish to feed more economically

valuable high trophic level fish. The resultant operations look more like a conventional

agribusiness feedlot than any sort of sustainable aquaculture operation.181

Extensive shrimp farming began in Thailand in 1935 along the eastern coast of

the Gulf of Thailand. By the mid-1980s, Taiwanese technology allowed the industry to

179 Chuenpagdee and Pauly 2004, 208 180 Pauly 2010, 53 181 Chuenpagdee and Pauly 2004, 205

87

intensify production with high stocking densities. Intensive operations rely upon shrimp

larvae supplied by hatcheries, the use of processed feed, frequent water flushing, and

general mechanization. Taiwan’s own prawn industry collapsed in 1987 from disease,

reduced resistance from the overuse of antibiotics, overstocking, incorrectly processed

food, and groundwater overexploitation. In short, it hit its ecological limits and quickly

suffered the consequent backlash. After Taiwan’s decline as a producer, Thailand quickly

emerged to fill the vacant economic niche, intensifying production in 80% of its farms

during the period from 1987 to 1991. At its peak, Thailand produced 30% of the global

shrimp supply and 45% of the global tiger prawn supply. Thailand seems to be suffering

a similar fate to Taiwan’s, due to its reliance upon the same production model. Since

1995, Thailand’s yields have been dropping because of disease problems. Intensification

has subsequently dropped off from 84% in 1995 to 25% in 1999.182

Although the government and the aquaculture industry claim that the side

industries that have sprung up in the wake of shrimp farming, like hatcheries, feed

producers, agro-chemicals, processing plants and exporters, contribute to employment,

many question the industry’s actual contribution to Thai welfare, either social or

ecological.183 The move towards intensification has transformed the industry from labor-

intensive to capital-intensive, meaning that there are fewer farmers and that they control

more wealth and capital and hire fewer laborers.184 The prawn-farming industry also

steadily converts mangroves into prawn farming ponds. The sequential exploitation of

mangrove ecosystems is driven by government policies and the environmental damage

182 Huitric, Miriam, Carl Folke, and Nils Kautsky. "Development and Government Policies of the Shrimp Farming Industry in Thailand in Relation to Mangrove Ecosystems." Ecological Economics 40.3 (2002): 441-55. Web. 443 183 Ibid., 444 184 Ibid., 441

88

wrought by the prawn farms, which degrade the prawn pond’s local environment to the

point that it must be moved elsewhere to continue generating profit. As a result of this

sequential degradation, since 1961 shrimp farming has halved the mangrove areas.

Furthermore, local communities are often forced off their land when shrimp farms

appropriate their mangrove territory through perverse government policies. Shrimp farms

also force other local communities from their sustainable livelihoods in the mangrove

ecosystems through indirect means. Their broader environmental impact degrades the

area surrounding the shrimp farm with farm effluents, salinization, and water depletion.

In sum, there is no reason to believe that the benefits of Thai shrimp farming have

outweighed the loss of mangrove ecosystems and the loss of livelihoods for those who

lived sustainably from the mangroves.185

IV. Socioecological divisions of labor in commodity production:

Tropical prawns used to be a luxury good. Now, they are relatively cheap and

abundant, and many people eat prawns on a regular basis.186 But although they are

monetarily cheap, their human and environmental costs are high. “Without the slaves-

press-ganged on to Thai fishing boats to work unpaid, the economics of the modern

prawn industry would not add up,” wrote Felicity Lawrence in The Guardian.187 We

could also add to this analysis marine ecosystems, which subsidize cheap prawns without

any return benefit. Within the modern prawn industry, dispossessed immigrants and

marine ecosystems have functionally been converted into vehicles for low-cost prawn

production. Rebecca Clausen and Stefano Longo (2012) call this the “tragedy of the

185 Huitric et al. 2002, 444 186 Lawrence 2014 187 Ibid.

89

commodity,” referring to the social and “ecological disorganization that results when

competitive markets and complicit governments act to extend the influence of capital

over nature.”188

Why has this happened? The first and easiest answer is the market demands of

consumers for cheaper prawns. Many of us have benefitted from and enjoyed cheap

prawns, but would we continue to enjoy them if meant continued slavery and marine

degradation? I suspect that we would not. Consumers do not construct supply chains.

Rather we are the recipients of whatever comes through the supply chains. The industries

that purport to meet our wants and needs construct supply chains – that is, they buy raw

materials and produce something. The purpose of this supply chain is not, ultimately, to

fulfill consumer demand. Instead, it is to realize one goal: profit. Prawns are therefore no

more unique than any other globally traded commodity in that their primary purpose is to

be a vehicle for profit generation and capital accumulation.

The basic difference between capitalism and other historical systems, according to

Wallerstein, is its primary focus upon the endless accumulation of capital. To this end, it

must minimize effective constraints on limitless capital accumulation. Ecosystemic

processes that renew resources and absorb waste are a necessary complement to societal

processes that extract resources and produce waste. But the ecological complement,

because it constrains economic activity by imposing costs, is absent within the capitalist

system. “Under capitalism,” writes Wallerstein, “the search for profits necessarily presses

producers to reduce their costs at the two key bioeconomic moments, that of the

extraction of raw materials and that of the elimination of the waste of the productive

188 Claussen and Longo 2012, 232

90

process.” The behavior that maximizes profits, in other words, is to “pay absolutely

nothing for the renewal of natural resources and next to nothing for waste disposal.”189

If Wallerstein’s argument is valid, the profit motive should create a similar pattern

of socioecological degradation in the production of other commodities. This is, in fact,

what we see: “[S]lavery in various forms is part of the soya chain in Brazil that feeds the

industrial chicken factories of the west, the all-year salad crops from Spain, and has even

been uncovered in the supermarket egg chain in the UK,” writes Felicity Lawrence of the

The Guardian.190 Brazilian soya, for example, is being grown illegally in the Amazon

region by felling large areas of virgin forest. Though only a tiny proportion of soya is

consumed directly by humans, clearing land for its production is taking over from timber

harvesting as the major driver of deforestation in some regions. This is because soya is an

important raw material in the production of vegetable oil, animal feed, and other

industrial products. Amazonian soya enters the supply chains of McDonald’s, KFC,

Tesco, and a few major grocery retailers as animal feed for industrial beef feedlots.191

Cheap soya therefore means cheap meat (for cheap Big Macs). But producing cheap soya

requires under-compensation of land (deforestation) and labor (slavery).192

Capitalist economies produce commodities, which are the material vehicles

through which capitalists can accumulate surplus value and realize profit.193 Therefore, in

order to accumulate value, capitalists must extend their influence into the ecological and

social world by commodifying it – organizing it in such a way so as to produce 189 Wallerstein 2003, 2 190 Lawrence 2014 191 Lawrence, Felicity, and John Vidal. "Food Giants to Boycott Illegal Amazon Soya." The Guardian 24 July 2006: n. pag. Print. 192 Of course, slavery only becomes widely practiced in those nations and states lacking strong legal constraints to it. The United States made use of slave-labor for a long time before popular mobilization forced the government to abolish slavery and install legal constraints. 193 Clausen and Longo 2012, 232 – cite Marx here instead

91

commodities. Material objects become commodities when their production is oriented

toward exchange value and realizing profit. If a material object cannot generate profit,

then it is not produced and never becomes a commodity. The entire process of producing

a commodity is therefore constrained by its ability to generate profit.194 Typically,

profitability comes with efficiency, requiring a particular industry to specialize in the

production of one or two commodities that it can produce most efficiently. In this way,

whole human populations and entire ecosystems are devoted to the production of one

particular commodity, which will be pulled from them and placed into a global market to

be bought at the lowest possible price.

In relation to the commodification of prawns, profitability is impeded by the cost

of labor and the demands of ecological metabolism in the marine ecosystem. If properly

attended to, the labor force and marine ecosystems would demand investments of

substantial sums in order to ensure the sustainability of the operation. However, because

profit is the primary imperative in the production of shrimp, marine ecosystems cannot be

protected and renewed and labor must be enslaved (unless strong legal constraints exist to

prevent enslavement as is the case in the United States and other countries).

Those who acquire the metabolic necessities of life through capitalist pathways do

so through numerous and globally diverse supply chains. Products that we find on

supermarket shelves across the globe do not just appear there. Rather, their existence on

those shelves is a direct result of a supply chain that pulls raw material and energy from

locations around the globe, combines them in certain ratios, and then disperses the

products of those combinations globally to a network of retail distributors that sells those

products to consumers. Every supply chain - from product to product, and retailer to 194 Clausen and Longo 2012, 232

92

retailer - is unique. Consequently, when consumers purchase the products of this vast and

complex network of supply chains, they participate in something about which their

knowledge is necessarily limited. There are simply too many supply chains of too great

complexity for even the most informed consumer to make decisions about which supply

chains to consume from and which to avoid.

This proliferation and diversification of supply chains is necessarily predicated

upon a global capitalist society linked by international trade. With such an arrangement,

international divisions of labor are possible. Importantly, these are both social and

ecological divisions of labor, such that entire human populations and ecosystems are

rearranged to fit the accumulation imperatives of capitalists. In relation to the GoT, the

Thai fishing industry has effectively re-oriented its marine ecosystems to produce a few

commodities: fish and fishmeal (to be fed to prawns – a high-value commodity through

which to generate profit). In addition, the industry has re-oriented the large surplus

population of dispossessed immigrant workers to feed their labor into the production of

fishmeal and eventually prawns – again, to produce commodities and generate profit.

This socioecological division of labor therefore pushes workers into jobs of constantly

reducing complexity and opens the door for their exploitation, and pushes ecosystems to

produce one product, reducing their ecological complexity and running in direct

contradiction to the demands of its metabolism and hence, sustainability.195

195 See Harry Braverman’s “Labor and Monopoly Capital” (Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. Print.) for greater detail on the “de-skilling thesis,” which posits that capital must continuously reduce the complexity and intellectual content of labor in order to maintain its control over the labor population and thus, continue appropriating the surplus value that labor generates. For a concise exploration of the relationship between capital and labor see Michael Yates’ essay in the Monthly Review reviewing Braverman’s work (Yates, Michael D. "Braverman and the Class Struggle." Monthly Review 50.8 (1999): 2. Web.) Important to my work here is that capital must de-skill both social labor and ecological labor in order to more completely appropriate the surplus value each generates.

93

V. Socioecological relationality and the “Environmentalism of the Poor”:

Three components – fossil-energy systems, socioecological divisions of labor, and

single-species targeting – combined pushed the Gulf of Thailand into the socially and

ecologically degraded state in which it exists today. The primary relationship humans

maintain with marine ecosystems has been to target single species, contradicting the

demands of ecological metabolism (and hence, sustainability) for intact ecosystem food

webs and physical environments. Fossil-energy systems (along with the broader resource

and technology complex of nets, boats, and so on) are the primary biophysical

mechanism with which humans relate to marine environments to perpetuate this

interaction. In and of themselves they are neither good nor bad, but neutral. They could

be used in moderation towards positive ends. In the GoT, however, fossil-energy systems

have been used towards socially and ecologically detrimental ends. Engine-powered

boats deploying trawling technologies significantly deplete the stocks of target fish

species, disrupting the GoT ecosystem. Layering capitalist conditions of production on

top of this biophysical mechanism and the pre-existing human-ocean dialectic of single-

species targeting further intensifies the rift between social and ecological metabolism and

destroys socioecological relationality. Single-species targeting, aided by fossil-energy

systems, is encouraged in the extreme by the process of commodification (which makes

the ecologically destructive trawls seem like an appropriate technology), a process which

requires global socioecological divisions of labor (divisions made physically possibly by

fossil-energy systems).

94

Finding socioecological relationality and repairing the rift between social and

ecological systems requires transforming each of these components of our

socioecological metabolism. Unfortunately, they are intertwined in such a way as to make

their individual transformation difficult. Fossil-energy systems (and trawling

technologies) are the most efficient and hence, profitable, mechanisms with which to fish

the seas. Therefore, the way capitalism conditions production requires producers to use

them. Regulating use of the seas so as to enforce the ecosystem-based management that

Pauly (2010) recommends also imposes costs on the production process, meaning that,

again, producers acting under capitalist conditions will attempt to circumvent or prevent

such regulations. Somehow, humans need to find a way to produce the material and

energy we need to sustain our metabolism without disrupting the ecological metabolism

that supports it. The ultimate goal of human civilization during the Anthropocene should

be to create socioecological relationality in our relationship with the planet.

From where could socioecological relationality come? Wallerstein’s ecological

critique of capitalism is based on the fact that it allocates waste and degradation to future

generations. Waste and degradation are also allocated to present generations as well, in

particular populations in the peripheral global South and marginalized populations in the

developed countries of the capitalist core. “There is a new tide in global

environmentalism,” wrote Joan Martinez-Alier (2002). “It arises from social conflicts on

environmental entitlements, on the burdens of pollution, on the sharing of uncertain

environmental risks and on the loss of access to natural resources and environmental

services.”196 Here, Martinez-Alier is speaking about the “environmentalism of the poor,”

variously known as liberation ecology, livelihood ecology, popular environmentalism, 196 Martinez-Alier 2002, vii

95

and the environmental justice movement as well. “[The] main thrust of this third current

is not a sacred reverence for Nature but a material interest in the environment as a source

and a requirement for livelihood; not so much a concern with the rights of other species

and future generations of humans as a concern for today’s poor humans.”197

In general, the environmentalism of the poor points out that economic growth

unfortunately also means greater environmental impacts, and emphasizes the unequal

geographic distribution of those impacts.198 Hence, the environmentalism of the poor is

an umbrella term for the large variety of environmental movements mobilizing against

unequal ecological distribution – distribution of key metabolic resources like water, food,

and so on; distribution of the wastes of human production; and distribution of

environmental space in which to live. Unequal ecological distribution conflicts can be

broken down into three stages that roughly correspond to the sources, distributions, and

sinks of global industrial metabolism. First, there are sites of extraction – material and

energy sources – where the land and labor of poor and marginalized people are

dispossessed of each other and/or degraded and destroyed. Second, there are sites (and

relationships) of material and energy distribution in which the poor and marginalized get

less and lower-quality products and the rich get more and higher-quality products. And

third, there are sites of waste deposition – sinks – where poor and marginalized local

communities must deal with the ecological effects of often toxic and hazardous waste that

more powerful actors force upon them.199

197 Ibid., 10 198 Ibid., 10 199 A non-comprehensive list of ecological distribution conflicts from all three industrial metabolic stages can be found in Martinez-Alier (2002), pg. 258

96

Sites of material and energy extraction, the original sources of industrial

metabolism’s material and energetic requirements, are often the most visible and widely

publicized degraded environments. From the destruction of Amazonia for oil and beef

pasture, or the tar sands of Alberta, to the blown-up mountain-tops of West Virginia, the

sites of material and energy extraction are unhealthy, destroyed environments. A well-

known example of this first metabolic stage is the shrimp export industry discussed

earlier in this chapter located in Thailand, but also in Honduras, Ecuador, India,

Philippines, and Sri Lanka. The shrimp industry must clear-cut mangrove forests in order

to construct shrimp ponds, which after a few years degrade the local environment to the

point that the operation is forced to relocate, cutting more mangroves down in the

process. There is a movement underway, however, intending to stop the destruction. It is

led by and composed of poor people, who live from the mangroves in a sustainable way.

The shrimp industry, as it destroys both the land and a way of life, poses an existential

threat to these people. Therefore, when the poor fight to save their ecosystems, they are

also fighting to save their lives.200

Conflicts of material and energy distribution, which can be thought of as roughly

corresponding to the second metabolic stage, are not as well publicized and often are not

understood as related to global unequal ecological distribution. They should be, however,

because environmental issues are quite often issues of social distribution of crucial

resources. Food deserts are an example of the way in which capitalism conditions the

social distribution of resources. Urban poor and minority communities often lack access

200 Ibid., 80 - Imagine if this movement became linked in some way to those slaves working the fishing boats in the Gulf that catch the trash fish for shrimp farm fishmeal. The movement would have many things to say on the social and ecological iniquity involved in Thailand’s entire fishing and aquaculture industry which could likely affect radical and positive change.

97

to fresh and healthy foods because they live in food deserts. Furthermore, the food outlets

to which they do have access lack healthy options, offering only cheap, highly processed,

and unhealthy foods. These foods can lead to obesity, heart disease, and other diet-related

diseases.201 Wealthier classes, by contrast, because they can pay much higher prices for

healthy food have access to all sorts of high quality outlets, from localvore shops and

local small-scale farms to larger-scale quality retailers like Whole Foods. Though this

metabolic distribution makes economic sense, it is not equitable, under-serving large

populations of poor Americans.

Waste sinks, the third metabolic stage, are also extremely contested sites of

unequal ecological distribution. Capitalism creates conditions in which it makes

elementary economic sense to site waste dumps in the poorest parts of a country where

political, economic, and social power is limited.202 When he was chief economist of the

World Bank, Lawrence Summers (now Obama’s top economic advisor) wrote an internal

memo, stating, “The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-

wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. [...] The measurement of the

costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased

morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health-impairing

pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country of

the lowest wages.”203 Though disgusting and repellant, the economic logic is indeed, as

Summers wrote, sound. In the United States the environmental justice movement

organizes against local instances of such “environmental racism.” Corporations,

201 "Food Deserts." United States Department of Agriculture, n.d. Web. 202 Hornborg 2001, 29 203 Foster, Clark and York 2010, 95

98

politicians, and other powerful actors often locate toxic and harmful processes and wastes

in poor and minority communities with no wealth or political power to contest the site

selection. Examples of this include urban air pollution from manufacturing processes,

transfer stations for municipal garbage and hazardous waste, and various other

environmental dangers that tend to cluster in poor and minority neighborhoods.204

“The environmental justice movement is potentially of great importance,” writes

Martinez-Alier, “provided it learns to speak not only for the minorities inside the USA

but also for the majorities outside the USA (which locally are not always defined racially)

and provided it gets involved in issues [...] beyond local instances of pollution”

(Martinez-Alier 2002, 14). The importance of the environmental justice is not unique,

however, but is in fact universal to all environmental struggles of the poor. Though

Martinez-Alier later notes that “[t]here are points of contact and points of disagreement

among these varieties of environmentalism,” I think that their overall goals converge

more than they diverge. In general, these struggles are all located at some point along the

global capitalist chain of metabolic linkages and pathways. Sites of shrimp production,

for example, are merely the beginning of a long metabolic chain of commodities that will

later distribute shrimp to those who can pay and excrete the waste of its production into

the environmental space of those who cannot - poor people and ecosystems. By

recognizing these fundamental metabolic connections, environmental groups can begin to

recognize the global capitalist structure that provides the logic and means of local

environmental degradation. With such unifying knowledge, each struggle could begin to

create subversive links to others along each link of the metabolic chain. By the combined

action of the billions of people who must find sustainable ways to harvest the metabolic 204 Ibid., 11

99

necessities of life from their ecosystems, it is possible to create a society that properly

and sustainably relates to its planetary context. This society would be the only one that

could make it through the Anthropocene in a socially and ecologically equitable way.

100

Conclusions

I. A new kind of history:

The goal of my thesis has been to consider the practices of writing history (as well

as the usefulness of those practices) in light of humanity’s entrance into the

Anthropocene. Beyond mere social and biological agents, the notion of the Anthropocene

requires considering humans as geological agents: we burn massive quantities of

geologically stored carbon, fix more nitrogen than natural processes, appropriate more

than half of all accessible fresh water, and push species into extinction at a rate that is a

thousand to ten thousand times greater than is usual in natural systems, just to name a few

aspects of our global impacts.205 Because human social systems now exert physical

influence on even the most basic planetary processes, the distinction between society and

environment has essentially collapsed.206 This presents new and unprecedented

challenges in attempts to understand our world and the histories (of planet, life, and

humanity) that have formed it – and foremost among these challenges is that we face in

the present moment a complicated, but critical, intersection of these three histories. As

humans, we must strive to ensure our own survival by helping to move through this

historical turning point and emerge with humanity and its ecological foundations intact.

But such a task requires putting these previously separate (and separately historicized)

histories into conversation. This thesis represents my attempt to construct this new kind

of socioecological history.

To write a socioecological history, I needed to lay out some conceptual tools with

which to work first. In Chapter 1, I argued that the concept of metabolism could provide a

205 Crutzen and Stoermer 2000 206 Chakrabarty 2009

101

conceptual framework which could knit together the insights of the social and natural

sciences. I concluded Chapter 1 by arguing that merely exploring the metabolic interface

between society and ecology lacked explanatory power and that a complete

socioecological history required insights from both sides of the human-environment

dialectic. Consequently, Chapter 2 of my thesis focused on capitalism, the dominant

social structure determining how humans interact with their environment, in addition to

Marx’s hugely influential critique of it. Following from Chapter 2’s social insights,

Chapter 3 examined the deep history of the oceans and marine life in addition to the

historical patterns of interaction humans have maintained with marine ecosystems.

Finally, Chapter 4 used a case study in the Gulf of Thailand to examine the way in which

human social systems intervene through biophysical mechanisms into marine ecosystems.

II. The danger of big history:

The nature of the task I set for myself in constructing a socioecological history of

geological agents required broad spatial and temporal scales. Humans only assume

geological agency historically and collectively, so I needed to examine it in the longue dureé in

order to fully capture its dimensions. Consequently, my socioecological history focused broadly

on patterns in the development of and interactions between environment and human society.207

Selecting such a large spatial and temporal frame was a conscious choice and one

that was integral to the work that I wanted to do. In Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big

History (2004), historian David Christian writes that:

As the frame through which we view the past widens, features of the historical landscape that were once too large to fit in can be seen whole. We can begin to see the continents and oceans of the past, as well as the villages and roadways of

207 Chakrabarty 2009

102

national and regional histories. Frames of any kind exclude more than they reveal. And this is particularly true of the conventional time frames of modern historiography, which normally extend from a few years to a few centuries. Perhaps the most astonishing thing the conventional frames hide is humanity itself. Even on time frames of several thousand years, it is difficult to ask questions about the broader significance of human history within an evolving biosphere. Yet in a world with nuclear weapons and ecological problems that cross all national borders, we desperately need to see humanity as a whole. […] So, it is not true that history becomes vacuous at large scales. Familiar objects may vanish, but new and important objects and problems come into view. And their presence can only enrich the discipline.208

The concerns that Christian raises here are the ones that interested me the most. I too

wanted to get a handle on “humanity itself” as it related to the “evolving biosphere” that

gave it life. Such fundamental questions necessitate abstraction, generalization, and

macroscopic points of view.

But as even Christian recognizes, “frames of any kind exclude more than they

reveal.” The kind of spatially and temporally encompassing socioecological history I

constructed here is therefore no more than one single narrative, excluding certain details

and themes and emphasizing other ones. It is by no means unifying or complete; future

historians will need to argue with, deconstruct, and, ultimately, improve upon it. Without

such questioning, the kind of grand narrative that I attempted to write becomes

hegemonic and hence, dangerous.

In demonstration of the seductive power of grand narratives, billionaire Microsoft

founder Bill Gates recently began an educational campaign in support of David

Christian’s version of big history. After seeing a DVD of one of Christian’s big history

lectures and being persuaded by the unity of its historical account, Gates offered

Christian his formidable financial support. Gates’ support has many concerned that 208 Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, CA: U of California, 2011. Print. 8

103

Christian’s big history could become the rule of the day in high schools across the

country. Such blanket adoption could turn it into an unquestionable narrative and create

stagnation in the teaching of history. Christian’s history necessarily downplays nuance

and crowds out traditionally marginalized voices in favor of grander historical figures. If

the teaching of history is institutionalized this way, students of the past may well forget that the

smaller, localized, and often marginalized histories are just as important to the discipline of

history as grand narratives. Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, makes

this point well in an interview with New York Times Magazine reporter Andrew Sorkin:

When I think about history, I think about different perspectives, clashing points of view. I wonder how Bill Gates would treat the robber barons. I wonder how Bill Gates would deal with issues of extremes of wealth and poverty.” The Big History Project doesn’t mention robber barons, but it does briefly address unequal distribution of resources. Ravitch continued: “It begins to be a question of: Is this Bill Gates’ history? And should it be labeled ‘Bill Gates’ History’? Because Bill Gates’ history would be very different from somebody else’s who wasn’t worth $50-60 billion.” (Gates’ estimated net worth is approximately $80 billion.)209

Unequal distribution of resources is, of course, a central topic of discussion in both

environmental circles and society at large (i.e. Occupy Wall Street, Syriza), yet it is easy

to imagine it being glossed over in favor of grander, more impressive themes about

progress and the rise of civilization.

But the truly important assertion is the one Ravitch makes right away: history is

about “different perspectives” and “clashing points of view.” Without differences of

opinion, arguments, and oppositional narratives history stagnates and begins to service

those in power. Science, too, operates this way: scientific inquiry has never been a

completed project, but rather continues to change and accrue. As soon as a hypothesis is

put forth, the scientific community deconstructs it, disproves it, and replaces it with 209 Sorkin, Andrew R. "So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class..." New York Times Magazine 5 Sept. 2014: n. pag. Web.

104

another, better one, which may survive for slightly longer before also going under. The

end result is that we collectively stumble our way forward to some measure of truth.

III. A convergence of histories:

The type of history I envision is not one that should be read as a grand, unified

narrative; instead, my thesis is an attempt to write a history of multiple and separate

historical strands (which, admittedly, develop over very large temporal and spatial scales)

that I believe have converged in the current historical moment to push humanity into a

position of geological agency. This intersection – of the natural history of the planet, and

the social history of humans – is materially expressed in the biophysical structures of

society (for example, human population, physical infrastructure, domesticated animals

and plants, and so on) that exist at the metabolic interface between societies and their

environments. I wanted to understand this type of convergence because it is what

characterizes the Anthropocene as a geological epoch.

“We seem to have difficulties understanding exactly in which sense human ideas

and social relations intervene in the material realities of the biosphere,” wrote the

anthropologist Alf Hornborg (2001). “Rather than continuing to approach ‘knowledge’

from the Cartesian assumption of a separation of subject and object, we shall have to

concede that our image-building actively participates in the constitution of the world. Our

perception of our physical environment is inseparable from our involvement in it.”210 The

difficulty Hornborg points out is the one with which I have primarily grappled with over

the course of this thesis; for example, I was consistently faced with the conceptual

difficulty of deciding whether capitalism was purely a set of social rules under which 210 Hornborg 2001, 10-11

105

social actors agreed to operate, or whether it also contained a material element that

enforced its logic upon social actors. By combining insights of disparate fields together, I

began to get a handle on how to address this question and, by extension, how social

systems intervene in and create material realities, and vice versa.

Let us examine industrial technology for a moment. To borrow from Hornborg

(2001) again:

Seen as a total phenomenon, industrial technology represents the conjunction of three different factors, or levels of reality: (1) thermodynamics and other properties of matter and energy, or nature, for short; (2) technical knowledge, or ideas about how to assemble various components and substances so as to exploit such material properties; and (3) economics, defined as sociocultural institutions for exchange between individuals and groups. In sum machines are part nature, part knowledge, and part exchange.211

We see in industrial technology a similar convergence of histories. The material form of

the machine is created from nature – environmental material – that developed over the

course of natural history. But the material form is also specifically arranged by human

knowledge, which developed over the course of social history. In addition, that machine

operates as a consequence of a certain pattern of social exchange, which delivers fuel and

takes away waste. Without such social relations creating conditions in which it can

operate, the machine is useless. In these ways, the industrial machine is some particular

conjunction of social and natural histories within a biophysical structure.

Broadly, the notion of converging histories is the most appropriate method for an

examination of the Anthropocene and geological agency. Although it takes place on the

scale of big history, the socioecological history I constructed is not an attempt at weaving

a grand unifying narrative, but rather is methodological testing for the writing of

socioecological history. This methodology is interdisciplinary, and attempts to find the 211 Ibid., 10-11

106

ways in which social and natural histories metabolically converge in socioecological

realities.

107

Works Cited

Introduction Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories." Critical Inquiry 41

(2014): 1-23. Web. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35.2

(2009): 197-222. JSTOR. Web. Collingwood, R. G., and T. M. Knox. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1946.

Print. Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of

1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972. Print. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. "The ‘Anthropocene’" The International

Geosphere-Biosphere Programme 41 (2000): 17-18. Web. Hamilton, Clive. "Can Humans Survive the Anthropocene?" N.p., 25 May 2014. Web. Hamilton, Clive. "Climate Change Signals the End of the Social Sciences." The

Conversation. N.p., 24 Jan. 2013. Web. Martinez-Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts

and Valuation. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Pub., 2002. Print. Revkin, Andrew. "Confronting the 'Anthropocene'" Dot Earth. New York Times, 11 May

2011. Web. Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin, Eric F.

Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, Marten Scheffer, Carl Folke, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Björn Nykvist, Cynthia A. De Wit, Terry Hughes, Sander Van Der Leeuw, Henning Rodhe, Sverker Sörlin, Peter K. Snyder, Robert Costanza, Uno Svedin, Malin Falkenmark, Louise Karlberg, Robert W. Corell, Victoria J. Fabry, James Hansen, Brian Walker, Diana Liverman, Katherine Richardson, Paul Crutzen, and Jonathan A. Foley. "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity." Nature 461.7263 (2009): 472-75. Web.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University

Press, 2003. Print. Stalin, Josef. "Dialectical and Historical Materialism." 1938:. N.p., n.d. Web. Steffen, W., J. Grinevald, P. Crutzen, and J. Mcneill. "The Anthropocene: Conceptual

and Historical Perspectives." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A:

108

Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369.1938 (2011): 842-67. Web.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Braudel on the Longue Durée: Problems of Conceptual

Translation." Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32.2 (2009): 155-70. Web. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. S.l.: Floating, 2008. Print. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998. Print. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Angela L. Coe, Paul R.

Bown, Patrick Brenchley, David Cantrill, Andrew Gale, Philip Gibbard, F. John Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Waters, John Marshall, Michael Oates, Peter Rawson, and Philip Stone. "Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene." GSA Today 18.2 (2008): 4. Web.

Chapter 1 - Metabolism

Ayres, Robert U., and Udo Ernst. Simonis. Industrial Metabolism: Restructuring for Sustainable Development. Tokyo: United Nations UP, 1994. Print.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. "Prologue: The Historic Ocean." Introduction. The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2012. N. pag. Print.

Fischer-Kowalski, Marina, and Helmut Haberl. Socioecological Transitions and Global Change: Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land Use. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007. Print.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology (1999): 366–405. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Franklin, H. Bruce. "The New World of Fish." The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America. Washington: Island/Shearwater, 2007. N. pag. Print.

Godelier, Maurice. "Preface: The Mental and Material." The Mental and the Material: Thought Economy and Society. London: Verso, 1986. N. pag. Print.

Marx, Karl. (1867) 1976. Capital, vol. 1. New York: Vintage.

Marx, Karl. 1974. Early Writings. New York: Vintage.

Odum, E. P. "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development." Science 164.3877 (1969): 262-70. Web.

109

Odum, Howard T. "This World System." Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-first Century: The Hierarchy of Energy. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. N. pag. Print.

Pauly, Daniel, Jacqueline Alder, Andy Bakun, Sherry Heiliman, Karl-Hermann Kock, Pamela Mace, William Perrin, Kostas Stergiou, Ussif R. Sumaila, Marjo Vierros, Katia Freire, and Yvonne Sadovy. "Marine Fisheries Systems." Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005): 476-511. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Redclift, M. R., and Graham Woodgate. "Society's Metabolism: On the Childhood and Adolescence of a Rising Conceptual Star." The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997. N. pag. Print.

Chapter 2 - Capitalism Clark, Brett, and Richard York. “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate

Change, and the Biospheric Rift.” Theory and Society 34.4 (2005): 391–428. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Clark, Brett, and Richard York. “Rifts and Shifts: Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises.” Monthly Review. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2015.

Clausen, R., and B. Clark. "The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production." Organization & Environment 18.4 (2005): 422-44. Web.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 105.2 (1999): 366–405. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. NYU Press, 2010.

Foster, John Bellamy, and Hannah Holleman. "The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic." Journal of Peasant Studies 41.2 (2014): 199-233. Web.

Hornborg, Alf. 2006. Ecosystems and world-systems. In: C. Chase-Dunn and S.J. Babones, eds. Global social change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 161-175.

Hornborg, Alf. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment. AltaMira Press, 2001.

110

Liebig, Justus von. Letters on Modern Agriculture. London: Walton and Maberly, 1859. Print.

Liebig, Justus von. The Natural Laws of Husbandry. New York: D. Appleton, 1863. Print.

Marx, Karl. (1867) 1976. Capital, vol. 1. New York: Vintage.

Marx, Karl. (1863-65) 1981. Capital, vol. 3. New York: Vintage.

Marx, Karl. 1974. Early Writings. New York: Vintage.

Melillo, E. D. "The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930." The American Historical Review 117.4 (2012): 1028-060. Web.

Milman, Oliver. “Rate of Environmental Degradation Puts Life on Earth at Risk, Say Scientists.” the Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2015.

Moore, Jason W. “Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective.”Organization & Environment 13.2 (2000): 123–157. Web.

Moore, Jason. "The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism." Theory and Society 32 (2003): 307-77. Web.

“United Nations Population Division | Department of Economic and Social Affairs.” N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The Ecology and the Economy: What Is Rational?" Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 27.4 (2004): 273-83. Web.

Chapter 3 - Marine Ecology and Fisheries Bolster, W. Jeffrey. "Prologue: The Historic Ocean." Introduction. The Mortal Sea:

Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2012. N. pag. Print.

Butler, Octavia E. Dawn: Xenogenesis. New York, NY: Warner, 1987. Print. Jackson, Jeremy B. C. "Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal

Ecosystems." Science 293.5530 (2001): 629-38. JSTOR. Web. Jennings, Simon, and Julia L. Blanchard. "Fish Abundance with No Fishing: Predictions

Based on Macroecological Theory." Journal of Animal Ecology 73.4 (2004): 632-42. Web.

111

Myers, Ransom A., and Boris Worm. “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish

Communities.” Nature 423.6937 (2003): 280–283. Web. 4 Apr. 2015. Pauly, Daniel. 5 Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems. Washington,

DC: Island, 2010. Print. Pauly, Daniel. "Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries." Trends in

Ecology & Evolution 10.10 (1995): 430. Web. Pauly, Daniel, Jacqueline Alder, Andy Bakun, Sherry Heiliman, Karl-Hermann Kock,

Pamela Mace, William Perrin, Kostas Stergiou, Ussif R. Sumaila, Marjo Vierros, Katia Freire, and Yvonne Sadovy. "Marine Fisheries Systems." Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005): 476-511. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Roberts, Callum. The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. New York: Viking, 2012. Print.

Thurstan, Ruth H., Simon Brockington, and Callum M. Roberts. "The Effects of 118

Years of Industrial Fishing on UK Bottom Trawl Fisheries." Nature Communications 1.2 (2010): 1-6. Web.

Worster, Donald. "Nature and the Disorder of History." Environmental History Review

18.2 (1994): 1. Web. Chapter 4 - Socioecological History Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the

Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. Print. Chuenpagdee, Ratana, and Pauly, Daniel. 2004. “The Gulf of Thailand Trawl Fisheries,”

p. 204-220 In: J. Swan and D. Greboval (compilers), Report and Documentation of the International Workshop on the Implementation of International Fisheries Instruments and Factors in the Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries. Mauritius, 2-7 February 2003. FAO Fisheries Report. No. 700. Rome.

Clausen, R., and B. Clark. "The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the

Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production." Organization & Environment 18.4 (2005): 422-44. Web.

Clausen, Rebecca, and Stefano B. Longo. "The Tragedy of the Commodity and the Farce

of AquAdvantage Salmon®." Development and Change 43.1 (2012): 229-51. Web.

"Food Deserts." United States Department of Agriculture, n.d. Web.

112

Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s

War on the Earth. NYU Press, 2010. Hodal, Kate, Chris Kelly, and Felicity Lawrence. “Revealed: Asian Slave Labour

Producing Prawns for Supermarkets in US, UK.” The Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web. Hodal, Kate, and Chris Kelly. “Trafficked into Slavery on Thai Trawlers to Catch Food

for Prawns.” The Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web. Hornborg, Alf. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology,

and Environment. AltaMira Press, 2001.

Huitric, Miriam, Carl Folke, and Nils Kautsky. "Development and Government Policies of the Shrimp Farming Industry in Thailand in Relation to Mangrove Ecosystems." Ecological Economics 40.3 (2002): 441-55. Web.

Lawrence, Felicity. “Thailand’s Seafood Industry: A Case of State-Sanctioned Slavery?”

the Guardian 10 June 2014. N.p., n.d. Web. Lawrence, Felicity, and John Vidal. "Food Giants to Boycott Illegal Amazon Soya." The

Guardian 24 July 2006: n. pag. Print. Martinez-Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts

and Valuation. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Pub., 2002. Print. Pauly, Daniel. 5 Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems. Washington,

DC: Island, 2010. Print. Pauly, Daniel, Jacqueline Alder, Andy Bakun, Sherry Heiliman, Karl-Hermann Kock,

Pamela Mace, William Perrin, Kostas Stergiou, Ussif R. Sumaila, Marjo Vierros, Katia Freire, and Yvonne Sadovy. "Marine Fisheries Systems." Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005): 476-511. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Teh, Lydia, Dirk Zeller, and Daniel Pauly. "Preliminary Reconstruction of Thailand's Fisheries Catches: 1950-2010." Fisheries Centre - The University of British Columbia (2015): n. pag. Web.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The Ecology and the Economy: What Is Rational?" Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 27.4 (2004): 273-83. Web.

Yates, Michael D. "Braverman and the Class Struggle." Monthly Review 50.8 (1999): 2. Web.

113

Conclusions

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197-222. JSTOR. Web.

Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, CA: U of

California, 2011. Print. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. "The ‘Anthropocene’" The International

Geosphere-Biosphere Programme 41 (2000): 17-18. Web. Hornborg, Alf. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology,

and Environment. AltaMira Press, 2001.

Sorkin, Andrew R. "So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class..." New York Times Magazine 5 Sept. 2014: n. pag. Web.