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- Convenors:
-
Mindi Schneider
(Brown University)
Eric Vanhaute (Ghent University)
Mattias Borg Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen)
Sven Beckert (Harvard University)
David Hsiung (Juniata College)
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- Chairs:
-
Eric Vanhaute
(Ghent University)
Mindi Schneider (Brown University)
- Discussant:
-
Tomás Bartoletti
(Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Nature for Harvest: Commodities and Resources
- Location:
- Room 13
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 21 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
How do environmental histories and commodity frontiers intersect? What can these histories reveal about environmental problems today? How do past processes of extraction and resistance in the countryside constrain/inform future options for sustainability? Join for a transdisciplinary conversation.
Long Abstract:
The central question for the roundtable is: How do we link the past, present, and future of commodity frontiers and environmental transformations to illuminate the deep roots of contemporary environmental problems?
The transformation of the global countryside has been a crucial driver of capitalist expansion over the past 600 years. Flatlands, valleys, forests, marine spaces, and mountains have been farmed, logged, fished, and quarried to provide raw materials and food for a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing global economy. This deep and often violent history looms large over today’s efforts to create a socially just and ecologically sustainable world. And yet the history of how capitalism has expanded in the countryside—and how its expansion has been contested there—is often overlooked in analyses of the ecological crises, social conflicts, global inequalities, and resource wars that characterize our contemporary moment.
This roundtable brings together scholars in environmental history, the history of capitalism, and historically-grounded contemporary social science to shed light on how to embed current socio-ecological problems in the relevant past, and how to imagine transdisciplinary research on topics including extraction, dispossession, ecological crises, social movements, uneven development, conservation, and sustainability.
The roundtable is organized by the editorial board of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI). It will be composed of CFI members, as well as guest speakers, who will openly discuss the scope and limitations of understanding entwined relationships between capitalist expansion and environmental transformations from the early modern era to the present.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Wednesday 21 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
The projects 'Sustainable Beauty For Algarvean Gardens' and 'AQUA' highlight sustainable practices of the past that can contribute to cope with current environmental challenges. This 'Back to the Garden' claim stems from local histories.
Contribution long abstract:
The two of the projects I have coordinated from 2015 to 2022, have highlighted sustainable practices of the past that can contribute to cope with current environmental problems.
The 'Sustainable Beauty For Algarvean Gardens project: Old Knowledge for A Better Future' (2015-2019, https://susbeauty.ciuhct.org) demonstrated how the import of gardens design model with lawn and palm trees to a region with water stress such as the Algarve, southern Portugal, is completely unsuitable for a region. Golf camps and the tourism industry exhaust the water resources of the region. From the nurseries disappeared the ornamental native plants and the exotic ones predominate.
Unfortunately, this is also happening with productive plants. Of the more than one hundred varieties of vineyards in the Algarve region revealed by the documentation, none is in the landscape, which is now dominated by the varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon and Touriga Nacional. The varieties of the region are no more than a collection of an Agrarian Post. On the other hand, it demonstrated that the 'the Algarve Orange' is an invention of the twentieth century, as the landscape that dominated by figs. However, oranges became the fruit subsidized by the European Union, despite citrus needs of water being much higher.
The project 'Aqua- Water Wise Management in Early Modern Garden in Portugal' (2018-2022, https://aqua.ciuhct.org) revealed that historical gardens spent less water than contemporary gardens, as a result of the development of interdisciplinary methodologies between the History of Science and Technology, Hydraulic Engineering and Landscape Architecture. In addition, the hydraulic wheels of the past have inspired low cost and sustainable solutions for reuse water which are now being Implemented by the Company of Waters of Portugal.
These local stories highlight the global destruction of Mediterranean landscape. Stemming from the Industrial Revolution, capitalism and its global patterns, tourism industry and European agricultural politics, these two projects funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology are a kind of claim as Jack McGregor did in 'Back to the Garden.'
Contribution short abstract:
By studying fertilizers and agro-ecological crises in Egypt’s cotton frontier, this contribution explores the reciprocal relations between environmental knowledge and capitalism. It seeks to understand how this relationship shaped past and present political-enviromental trajectories.
Contribution long abstract:
As Egypt’s transition into a cotton frontier accelerated at the turn of the 20th century, it faced numerous agricultural crises. These resulted from agricultural commodity frontiers’ growing dependency on agrochemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides. While this growing reliance on agrochemicals boosted cotton production, it also created ecological degradation in the form of new pests and overworked soils.
Recent articulations of the historical interactions between the history of capitalism and environmental histories have focused on how agro-ecological crises in commodity frontiers had resulted in deepening their immersion into the world capitalist system by analyzing the role capital played in physically and economically affecting those spaces. However, as much as Egypt’s agro-ecological degradation was created by the global flux of agrochemicals and capital, it was also made epistemologically comprehensible by the Western economic-agricultural sciences.
This contribution explores the historical role “modern” environmental knowledge systems played in rendering “visible” agro-ecological crises in commodity frontiers and articulating explanations for them. As Egypt’s “soil fertility” problem was defined by the contemporaries through economic-agricultural science, the proposed solutions (e.g., employing agrochemicals) further immersed the country’s countryside into the world capitalist system. Here, the reproduction of nature and further accumulation of capital were predicated on environmental knowledge that served as an epistemological framework for capitalistic development.
By studying fertilizers and ecological crises in Egypt’s cotton frontier, this contribution explores the reciprocal relations between environmental knowledge and capitalism. It seeks to understand how this relationship shaped past and present political-enviromental trajectories.
Contribution short abstract:
Histories of field science can help us understand how scientists have situated themselves within, and contributed to, expanding commodity frontiers in the past. In Latin American contexts, scientific fieldwork is still often confronted with increasing capitalist extractivism.
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution uses history of science approaches to highlight the involvement of scientific field researchers with the commodity frontiers that marked the environments and communities in which they situated their work. Historians of science have long noted that field scientists were embedded in specific landscapes and rural communities. Scientific archives (e.g. field notes) therefore contain observations of environmental transformations, often detailing expanding commodity frontiers. Beyond that, archaeologists, anthropologists and botanists were also active participants in expanding commodity frontiers. This is particularly applicable in Latin American history, where the overlap between commercial prospectors and scholarly study was considerable throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I draw on specific case studies of the expansion of the chicle industry in Guatemala’s northern Petén department in the 1940s, the banana industry’s rapid spread in the Caribbean lowlands in the 1910s, and the coffee industry in Guatemala’s Western highlands in the 1890s, where scientific and tourist infrastructure and developed alongside, and in cooperation with, the infrastructure and labour markets of commodities and extractivism.
Today, scientific researchers in many of these disciplines still share spaces with indigenous people, and work in environments threatened by increasing extractivism. They now often consider themselves as advocates for the rights of indigenous people and environmental conservation. Their work is however also entangled with contested alternative models of touristic development, such as the proposed “Tren Maya” in Mexico. We can understand such challenges better by examining the historical roots of rural landscapes as a shared space between science, commodities, and communities.
Contribution short abstract:
The paper integrates environmental history and world-ecology approaches to investigate recent processes of frontier-making in Eastern Europe. Here wilderness becomes a new resource aimed at fixing global environmental crises as the region shifts from extractivism to strict protection of nature.
Contribution long abstract:
The incorporation of Eastern Europe (EE) within global green capitalism is an unexplored phenomenon. This paper argues that EE is currently redefined as a green internal periphery of the European Union, where newly discovered wild areas act as a new resource that becomes an instrumental element in the EU’s strategies for promoting green growth and addressing climate change mitigation. The paper integrates environmental history and world-ecology perspectives to investigate recent processes of frontier-making from extractivism to strict protection of nature. Discovering, mapping and designating biodiversity hotspots as untouched nature facilitates the creation of wilderness into a new resource that can be commodified towards sustaining the green growth agendas fostered by the European Green Deal. Seen within the global efforts to secure extensive land areas for green growth, this wilderness momentum emerges as a process of re-territorialization, raising significant questions about environmental and social injustices. On the ground, conservation interventions which advance capital accumulation, such as rewilding, restoration and expanding protected areas are intimately connected with land abandonment and depopulation, triggering transformations of traditional agricultural landscapes, a decline of sylvopastoral systems, and an imminent demise of local ecological knowledge. As the frontier shifts, logging in old-growth forests ceases in favour of wilderness reserves, marginal agriculture makes room for rewilding, and pastoralism declines while large carnivores return. This frontier shift is an abrupt phenomenon and involves processes of criminalization where states' attempts to tackle illegal logging, mining or hunting lead to new forms of violence and marginalization of the most vulnerable.
Contribution short abstract:
In this paper, we examine plastic as a key commodity frontier in capitalism's expansion since the Great Acceleration. Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, we explore plastic's role in shaping extraction, accumulation, and socio-ecological challenges.
Contribution long abstract:
In this paper, I explore the transformative role of plastic as a pivotal commodity frontier in the capitalist expansion from the era of the Great Acceleration (beginning in 1945) to the present day. Drawing upon Jason W. Moore's definition of a commodity frontier as the ever-expanding edge of capitalism, this paper examines how plastic has acted as a catalyst for new forms of extraction and accumulation. Born out of mid-20th century innovation, plastic has deeply integrated into every aspect of human life—shaping everything from mobile communications to consumer products.
Taking a transdisciplinary approach, the paper seeks to illuminate the social, ecological, and economic dimensions of plastic's impact. I argue that plastic's omnipresence serves as a lens through which to understand the complexities of contemporary socio-ecological problems rooted in historical capitalist expansion. Plastic's role in the exploitation of new frontiers brings diverse ecological crises into sharp focus, from resource depletion to environmental pollution.
Lastly, this paper will explore how the plastic frontier has been contested through social movements, policy interventions, and community-based initiatives, placing this discussion within the broader debates around capitalist exploitation and environmental sustainability. By linking past innovations, current challenges, and future implications, this paper aims to contribute to the evolving dialogue on how to address the deep roots of today’s environmental crises.
Contribution short abstract:
Recent advances in biotechnology have assigned indigenous knowledge and genetic resources as novel commodification frontiers. This paper aims at analyzing the role of the Nagoya Protocol in the Amazon region as a driver of the capitalist appropriation of nature.
Contribution long abstract:
The idea of biodiversity as it has currently been mainstreamed in global science and political discourse is a very recent chapter of the relationship between humans and nature. The current sense of biodiversity as it was negotiated in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) implies the idea of quantitative megavariety of lifeforms. Until late 1970s when technological capabilities in biotechnology and the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) made astonishing progress, biological diversity was less central to capitalism expansion, since homogeneity and mass production prevailed. Such condition has ultimately changed; biotechnology from the Global North has rapidly offered possibilities for the commodification of genetic resources (GRs). IPRs leveraged the legal positions of corporations and enabled them to exclude competitors and original producers. However, most of the global biodiversity remains unchartered by modern/western science and it is furthermore controlled by indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) around the world. Colonial-inherited inequalities have led companies to appropriate GRs and knowledge from IPLCs in what has been called “biopiracy”. In 2010 parties of the CBD agreed upon the Nagoya Protocol (NP), a binding agreement that aspires to provide a framework for the access and benefit sharing emanating out of the utilization of GRs. The NP has been deemed by critical voices as the legitimation of the commodification frontier involving GRs and traditional knowledge. On the other hand, proponents of green capitalism have hailed the NP as a tool for future societal transitions. We analyze this ongoing debate in the Brazilian Amazon.