Mon 3 March: Ecology, History and Unequal Exchange

Morag Ramsey
Alf Hornborg Reflection: According to Hornborg, what is technology?

Technology is a word that encompasses many dimensions to Alf Hornborg. In his book, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World, he spends a great deal of time introducing his own ideas about technology and how they contrast with a more traditional understanding of the word’s definition. What seems to be one of Hornborg’s biggest grievances with ideas about technology is the way it is imagined as politically innocent (Hornborg, 35).

For Hornborg, this idea of technology being politically innocent partly stems from the manner in which technology is separated from other cultural categories. As he stated in his first chapter, “’technology’, ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ are cultural categories that train us to think about socio-ecological realities in particular ways.” (Hornborg, 8) This is problematic to Hornborg as it separates entities that he views as being completely intertwined, and allows people to disconnect actions and results occurring in one cultural category from the other. As Hornborg illustrated in his lecture, a brief examination of two global maps, one showing electricity at night and the other GDP per capita, illustrates very clearly that economics and technology are closely connected. As Hornborg simply stated, where there is money there is technology.

This connection between economics, technology and ecology illustrates Hornborg’s bigger picture of technology. For Hornborg, the truest way to see technology is a result of a triangular exchange where someone gains the privilege of more time and space at the expense of someone else’s time and space. As Hornborg commented in chapter four of his book, “Technologies designed to solve one kind of problem will, ironically, tend to generate even more severe problems of another kind, for other groups of people.” (Hornborg, 67) To illustrate his point, Hornborg mentioned open pit copper mining in South America. This work dramatically underpays the miners for their work, and uses up a large swath of their land to extract the copper for exportation. There is a displacement of space and time from one area of the world to another in order to gain a technological advantage. (Which Hornborg would argue is not only a technological advantage, but an economic and an ecological one as well.) A process that leaves such economic, ecological and technological discrepancies between what can be seen as the global north and the global south is not politically innocent, which is what Hornborg stresses throughout his work.

In addition to a looking at technology as a triangular exchange, Hornborg also points to how technology predisposes a global price difference, which only contributes to the inequality. He used the example of price difference between slave labour in Alabama versus labour in England to illustrate his point. While Hornborg’s treatment of technology is extremely interesting and thought provoking, I am slightly disappointed we were not able to hear his lecture on his local currency project as a way to implement a positive change. I was interested to hear how Hornborg’s idea of technology would develop if this triangular exchange disappeared, as he did not have time to expand on this idea.

What is wrong with the nation-state as a unit of analysis for environmental history?

Reading through Hornborg’s book there was hardly a point I did not agree with. I thought he put forward a well substantiated argument and methodology on how to study environmental history and environmental impacts that was not just theoretical but also included many anthropological examples. I was in the group talking about the nation-state and if it is a useful concept in the analysis of environmental history. While our discussion took us away from the above question, we did talk about the nation-state as a concept that should/should not be present in the study of environmental history.

To reiterate my thoughts on yesterday’s discussion, I think that the concept of a nation-state should be part of any environmental historical research. The nation-state is the centre of political power nowadays, and it is also a place/space where the general public should (theoretically) have the power to propose new laws, enforce economic change, express their mind etc. Through their actions they should be able to change their countries’ economic outlook. It is also in the nation-state that politicians have the power to make economically irrational decisions and go against a dominant economic thought or the dominant economic system, like neoliberalism. Each nation-state should be seen as a living and changing entity within an economic system that is different from the other, and operates differently. So, in the current global capitalist system, the US does not operate like Sweden, which does not operate like China. This is because each nation-state is trying to do what is best economically and best for its people in the situation that it is at that point, and because the politicians leading the nation-states and their populations have different ideological outlooks.

There are huge global corporations, which transcend the boundaries of the nation-state and which have the power to affect their economy and laws through lobbying. However, the nation-state would hardly allow the corporation to touch its sovereignty and the corporation would have to comply with the nation-state’s laws.

While the nation-state is a necessary and useful concept in the analysis of environmental history, it is not useful as a unit of analysis, which is unchangeable and devoid of external contact. For one, the idea of a nation-state only started gaining ground some 300 years ago or less. Using the nation-state as a unit of analysis means that we lose some of the historical background of certain economic tendencies within the space now occupied by the nation state. Moreover, there are not many environmental histories just as there are not many environments in the world. The world’s environment operates in unity, so the non-appearance of El Nino can produce droughts in East Africa. So saying that the British Empire did not have any major environmental impacts in the 17th and 18th century because it did not deforest its own lands, but imported wood from East Europe would be a major historical fallacy. Nation-states, empires, regions, etc. have economic ties to other places. The economic ties do not stop at the boundary of that nation-state.

That is why Hornborg thinks of the nation-state as not a useful unit of analysis of environmental history, but rather focuses on the economic ties themselves, as these are not bound by political entities, but are shaped by the dominant economic system and that system’s/people’s needs.

Kristina Berglund
Reflection on discussion seminar and lecture with Alf Hornborg, 3rd of March 2014

According to the instructions I will try to answer one of the questions discussed at the seminar, namely what in Hornborg’s perspective technology is. Hornborg rightfully argues that in modern society, we seem to have an unconditional faith in technology, a belief that technology is the answer to continued growth and development but also the solution to current climate change and environmental challenges. This view of technology is heard from politicians, economists as well as many ‘ordinary’ citizens. But in this view, technology is seen as detached from the social and physical realities that are prerequisites for the existence of the technology in the first place. In other words, we put an immense faith in technology without questioning the underlying factors that made it possible, namely unequal resource transfers causing environmental and social degradation in the areas where the resources are exploited from. Therefore, Hornborg question wheather the modern concept of technology isn’t just a ‘cultural illusion’, and a way of organizing society that turns the blind eye to the fact that technology is a zero-sum game where we in the rich part of the world “save time and space at the expense of humans and environments in the poorer parts”.
A central concept to Hornborg’s argument about technology and modern society is what he calls ‘machine fetichism’ – the kind of illusion that allow us to view machines without any regard of what unequal exchange of time and space, such as natural resources extraction and labor that made the machine possible. We have thus become so ‘dependent’ and greedy for our cherished machines (mobile phones, cars, computers etc.) that we must maintain them at any cost, “even at the cost of the land that support us”.
Horborg’s view of technology is very central to his whole argument about how the modern socity is organized and founded – on unequal exchanges of resources that has benefitted a small part of the world’s population at the expense of the less priveleged’s space and time. When ‘doing’ environmental history therefore, Hornborg argues that we must acknowledge these connection between areas and places in the world, instead of comparing them. We must recognize what is happening in the marginalized areas of the world as a concequence of the richer part of the world maintaining our advantaged positions aquired from the creation of industrial society, with consumerism, burning of fossil fuels and ‘globalized’ society. Hence, we must acknowledge that there are different kinds of environmental problems in the core and the peripheries, that there is not THE global environmental history but different environemental histories depending on which part of the world you are referring to.
For me, Hornborg’s arguments are very clear, sound and easy to comprehend. Since this is not always the case, I found this session very appealing and interesting. Hornborg said various times that his arguments might be very provocative, but I do not think they are. I think it is obvious that we have to rethink our economic system, that the market is not fair and that we have built our wealth on the expense of marginalized people and their environments (and in the extension also ‘our global environment’). The challenge I guess, is to make politicians and economists to think along these lines, and not to mention the large and powerful coorporations. I don’t know what will be needed in order to accomplish this, if it is a severe economic crisis or the end of fussil fuels, but it is indeed a challenge of huge proportions.

In the discussion group I joined we explored the gains of applying a world-systems perspective on global environmental history, and asked if anything is lost in taking this approach. The world-systems perspective necessitates that the principal unit of analysis is the earth in it’s core and periphery divisions. By identifying the fluid dynamics between core and periphery in global environmental history we are capable of moving beyond static taxonomies and conceptualizations of state, and trajectories and impediments of development. Using world systems perspectives, which was developed as a way of understanding the capitalist system in which we currently operate, we are capable of tracing the formation of contemporary macro-scale inequalities of access to labor, resources, land, and capital. Another aspect of world-systems theory is the emphasis on inter-disciplinary approaches specifically drawing on and trying to integrate research in social and natural sciences as well as humanities, which is all useful I think for accounts of global environmental history.
The world-system perspective could be criticized perhaps at it’s inception for the focus on the industrial revolution in Europe as being the foundation of the capitalist world economy, but also for taking a reductionist approach to social systems as units of analysis. However, new theoretical developments spearheaded by people like Alf Hornborg demonstrate that the application of world-system perspectives to global environmental history is an incredibly useful adaptation. By challenging our understandings of “the natural world” and including environmental systems alongside social systems as units of analysis, we can achieve a more nuanced perspective on issues central to global environmental history such as human culture, economics, politics, global biophysical repercussions of human actions, and how global patterns of environmental change are portrayed as natural, justifiable, and fair.
Finally, what I find most intriguing is how Hornborg parallels and contrasts the accumulation and control of landesque capital in the past, and in the contemporary capitalist world-system. I find this a fascinating method for highlighting how ingrained our mystifications of cultural concepts such as wages, salaries, and market value are, and how these constructs, just like Incan minkas act to appropriate labor and land and enforce unequal exchange. Of course this drive to highlight capital accumulation in pre-capitalist world-system societies could be used to justify how inescapable and “biologically natural” inequalities are in social systems, and this is a paradox worthy of consideration (as mentioned during the seminar). However, what I find valuable is using examples from pre-modern societies to demystify and deconstruct the current cultural concepts that form the foundation of capitalism as a world-system. To me this demonstrated that while world-systems may be relatively modern the cultural foundations that capitalism encompasses are not. Therefore evaluating pre-industrial global environmental histories from a world-systems perspective still has applications. Examining the formation and dissolution of inequalities in access to labor, resources, land, and capital in past social systems we can comment on the cultural mystifications of the exploitation of subordinates and perhaps transcend objective constructions of nature, technology, and labor.

Current Themes and Debates in Global Environmental History
Yu Wang
History department&Global Environmental History
wytt2002@sina.com
Reflection 2 (2014-03-04)
— Hornborg, A. 2012. Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World.

What is wrong with the nation-state as a unit of analysis for environmental history?

I was in the group talking about the nation-state and if it is a useful concept in the analysis of environmental history. I would like to explain my point of view from another perspective . I think the way to evaluate the ecological environment is not built on the basis of a fair evaluation , the evaluation results of this approach is to make the most backward developing countries bear the blame pollution of the environment , but did not take into account the globalization of trade as the historical background. Measure ecological status should not only be limited to who developed the resources, but also be clear who is the ultimate consumer of resources.
The 21st century is the global trade century, the world is divided into three regions which is based on the division of labor, namely “the high -tech , capital-intensive and high-wage products located in the core area ”,“low-tech , labor -intensive and low-wage products where in the marginal region”, and the third is mixing zones. Three different regions bear the economic structure in different roles : the core area is control the world financial and trade markets, acting as a price determined. The marginal zone is responsible for providing cheap raw materials and cheap labor as well as the sales market to the core area. The world system presents a serious inequality in the way that undervalued prices. A large number of products exported by developing countries , but the value has long been seriously underestimated , that is, the final price of the product does not contain hesitation mining, processing or environmental pollution caused by transport costs and social costs. On the surface looks like a fair and mutually beneficial trade , but in fact is not ture. Developing countries do not have ability to affect the final price, as no trade option but only to keep explitate their existing natural resource , and in the end make itself as a huge waste landfill. Commodities and resource depletion and environmental pollution costs are transferred to developing countries. This is an important reason for developing today’s context of globalization of trade continued to deteriorate .

Reflection on Alf Hornborg (2011): Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange – Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World

Question 3: What is technology?

Alf Hornborg’s main argument relies on the interconnectedness of the world: social and environmental problems are the consequence of an unequal exchange of resources which is concealed by dominant ways of representing economic and technological progress (Hornborg 2011: 102). Thus, the very aim of Environmental History should not be to to conduct comparisons between social-environmental phenomena but to analyze the connections between them.

As Hornborg specified in his lecture, the rationale modern technology is to save time and space. Labor is to be exercised and land used more efficiently – for those who can afford technology and on the cost of those who can not. This “social strategy” requires price differences in parts of the world. The steam engine in England could ony be developed to an industrial scale because the costs of labor and land were cheaper on US cotton plantages, the latter providing the resources and buying the end product of the early English textile industry. According to Hornborg, the reason why technology is perceived as a “cornucopia”, a gift of Western development, is fetishism: “The mystification of unequal relations of social exchange through the attribution of autonomous agency or productivity to certain kinds of material objects, for instance money” (definition given in the lecture).

Furthermore, Hornborg distinguishes between two kinds of technology. The first one is based on prices and thus the appropriation of time and space of others. The second one is locally developed and thus can be beneficial for all members of a society. While the first one can be found among basically all modern technologies, the second one can only be achieved in a society which is organized in a radically different way.

Hornborg’s approach is strongly compelling. Even more, it is almost impossible to disagree with his simple but critical explanation for environmental and social crises: the world as the reservoir of a vast zero-sum game which led to an unequal distribution of resources that is concealed through the fairy tale about technology by the global elites. To disagree with his perspective would be to disagree with the connectedness of the world, with the dominance of unequal exchanges, with technology as not inherently good, progressive and problem-solving. To not follow his line of thought would entail to leave out fundamental aspects of how the modern world is constituted and functioning. To do so might even contribute the vast “project” of concealing the unequal exchange of human, natural and financial resources. His logic, it seems, is water-proof.

However, there is something that made me feel uneasy while I was reading and listening to him. I do not think it was the insight that the whole Western world, including me and everyone else in the classroom, is sitting in the boat of the global conquerors. The idea of an unequal access and use of resources among the world’s citizens is not new for me: I think everyone who feels convicted to environmentalist ideas knows the internal struggle when buying or using something that is not locally produced or served. The same applies to a critical stance towards the world healing and saving effects of technology. In this sense, Hornborg offers everyone who feels that “something is going wrong out there” with a global framework, a connection of all dots of unease, or in other words, an ontology for environmentalists.

Nevertheless, my strange feeling did not come from a disagreement with Hornborg, but from the way he presented his arguments. Although he is disguising the ideological character of technology, economic growth and sustainable development, he is not clear about his own normative assumptions. Problematizing any unequal exchange of resources (whatever they might be) makes only sense from a strong egalitarian point of view. It is based on the assumption that the world’s resources had been distributed equally in a distant past or that it is possible and desirable to achieve such a situation in the future. Of course such a perspective is shared by the large majority of Hornborg’s readers – or as Anneli called it yesterday, 80% of the audience – but at least I missed a clear positioning of Hornborg. That is not to say that he has to label himself as a (Post)Marxist or something else but to clarify why asymmetrical accumulations and machine fetishes are undesirable phenomenas of the modern world. It would make his arguments more practical and accessable for people who want to engage in a struggle for a more equally and sustainable globe but miss a scholarly base for their endeavor. Of course, one can argue that Hornborg would be criticized for losing his objectivity as a professor of a Swedish university which should be maintained more than anything else. But I am sure that he would be more satisfied about a group of young people holding up his book – in a David Graeber way – while protesting than a couple of righteous scholars.