Mon 3 March: Ecology, History and Unequal Exchange

Response to Michael’s Reflection:

I shared your unease with some of the manner of Hornborg’s analysis, and completely agree that it would have helped his argumentation if he had explained in basic terms what his principal political assumptions are, particularly with regards environmental justice. His argument makes more sense if it is read as a response to a basic political positioning which states what it believes in. Without this, the analysis seems to attempt to speak for itself in a way which I do not think is wise. That is to say, his conclusions are not politically neutral, but he suggests that they could be.

Your reflection references an issue which I found interesting and difficult in what Hornborg said with regard local sustainability about which you asked him (about delicious bananas). I did not think his answer to your question was fully convincing. He argued (in the lecture but also in other conversations during the seminar etc) that we should return only to a local mode of production. I know this is also a very attractive model for many environmentalists (you included to some extent I think Michael!), but I would contest that it is always the best socio-ecological approach. Ecological resources are not evenly distributed across the world. If everyone returned to local production there would therefore be a consequent inequality in the ability (and certainly the ease) with which different populations were able to achieve different levels and qualities of life, including in fundamental issues such as life-span, as well as in areas such as labour input per calories produced. Hence a unitary localism does not appeal to me as a model of sustainability. A classic example is that of the Jamaican milk industry; imports of milk powder in the 1980s destroyed the local milk industry and stopped Jamaicans being able to have local milk, but the imports of cheaper milk powder benefited poor families and infant health. That, and any other, story is not straightforward at all and I don’t want to oversimplify it, but in essence I believe that trade can, in theory, be a source of social benefit. Simply because trade is not fair and is a factor in driving ecological damage at the moment is not an adequate analysis to prove that trade cannot be fair, nor that it could never be ecologically sound. Which is not to say that localism, organic etc cannot be extremely beneficial, but that I do not believe it is adequate.

One further point you raise is about the strength of Hornborg’s basic analysis. I agree with you in essence, and I’m part of the 80%! However, I think it is important that in criticising global capitalism as the source of all ills we do not fall into the trap of suggesting that other approaches are necessarily better, and that the current world system is somehow ultimately bad. Environmental history (the bits of it I’ve read, anyway!) demonstrate that multiple different systems result in multiple types of damage. Judith Shapiro’s book Mao’s War Against Nature demonstrates that a Maoist system resulted in devastating environmental damage, and we should resist simplistic renderings that says that global capitalism equals environmental destruction. We don’t have another global system to compare it against; perhaps a population of over 7 billion people would do what we’re doing to the world under a different system anyway? Or worse? For example, there’s no guarantee that more income equality would lead to less environmental damage; this sometimes seems to be a suggestion implicit in what you could broadly term Marxist analyses.

To be clear – I’m not suggesting that you’re making this argument, my point is that perhaps a world-systems type approach can easily fall into this kind of determinism.

Thanks Michael!

Reply to Yu Wang’s reflection
Dear Yu,
If I understood your reflections correctly, you suggest that the nation-state is not a correct unit of analysis for global environmental history because we live in a world divided into three different regions based on the division of labor. This is an interesting way to analyze the way commodities fluctuate as well as environmental degradation.
I surely agree that some people provide the resources and the cheap labor for producing new products, other people enjoy the high-tech gadgets, and then the waste accumulates to the detriment of other groups of people, but I believe that your representation of three different world regions is way too simplistic and does not represent the reality. The world is not divided in three regions, I think it’s much more complex. In every part of the world, there are people who pay the cost of land degradation and environmental pollution. Even in the United States, the wealthiest state of the world and the holy temple of consumerism, communities of immigrants and lower class workers pay the price of pollution with their own health while they can’t afford the latest I-pad.
Besides, in your reflection you do not really seem to answer the question “What is wrong with the nation-state as a unit of analysis for GEH?”. In the beginning of the year we read a brilliant essay by American historian Richard White “The Nationalization of Nature” in which he clearly explained that since nature knows no frontiers, the nation-state appears as a flawed scale of analysis for environmental history. The nation-state conception of history is inherited from a certain vision of history that emerged in Western Europe during the modern era.
It appears that in a world where everything is connected, considering history through the lens of the nation-state scale does not make sense. As Hornborg argued on Monday afternoon, environmental history should be about connections and not comparisons. I certainly agree with his advocacy of a world-system analysis instead of a nation-state analysis when it comes to understanding environmental history.

Comment on Yaqi’s reflection:

Yaqi provided here a balanced and critical reflection on a world-systems approach following Alf Hornborg. I totally agree with you that such a perspective offers two advantages: first, it illuminates that the world is strongly connected (not just since people talk about ‘globalization’) and that any analysis that focusses on environmental problems in only one country or on even only one continent falls short in the addressing the full chain of events that lead to social and environmental problems. Second, a world-systems approach helps to understand why the world is connected in this particular way and why that triggers continuously to multiple crises: because the logic of capitalism that is based on the permanent accumulation of various resources (time, land, money ect.) and leads to an unequal ratio of these materials. For a global perspective, a world-systems approach might indeed be one of the most fruitful ones in Environmental History.

Nevertheless, as you pointed out, it looses its explanatory power when it comes to a lower scale, be it national or local. World-systems scholars might be so occupied with analyzing with global connections and processes that they loose their eyesight for local and national factors. The nuclear crisis of Chernobyl could be traced back to a couple of human failures that do not reach out the regional scope. Mao Zedong’s Great Sparrow Campaign could be rooted in a modern undervaluation of ecology, but was conceived and affected millions of people within the national borders of China. The fact that there is a world-system does not mean that there are no connections on a lower scale, nor does it mean that these systems affect societies or nature in a minor way than the global system. It is always up to the Historian to scrutinize all connections she or he can observe in her or his work – and depending on each case, their will be different factors that are more relevant than others.

Finally, I would like to refer to your thoughtful metaphor in your conclusion. In appreciating the connectedness of the human body, Chinese medicine had been ahead of Western medicine and might still be (I don’t want to know how many poor patients had unnecessarily lost body parts because doctors just chopped off the hurting region of the body). However, I think you can go even further and extend this idea to the sphere outside the single body, that is society. Your headache might be caused by something wrong in your feet. But that might have been affected by overly pressure due to hard labour which is demanded by a lord, state or company. You can apply this extended metaphor even to contemporary nations. This morning I heard in the news that China’s Premier Li Keqiang announced on the National People’s Congress a “war” on pollution while slowing down economic growth. Indeed you can diagnose that environmental pollution is triggered by overly economic growth. But you can also “zoom out” and trace the vast flows of goods to the so-called “Industrialized Countries”. Why should China have to cope with the negative effects of its export economy alone if was the West that had outsourced those harmful economic activities before, to countries they have already exploited in the past? I think, if it comes to the health the Chinese national body, a world-systems approach might be the best diagnosis.

Reply to Nick’s post
By Yongliang Gao

I agree with you that if technology is used locally, perhaps a larger gap would be occurred between the North and South. In my opinion, I think it is rather difficult to use technology locally considering current world system. The world is like a pyramid, and the North stands on the top of it while the South stays on the bottom. The North manipulates financial circuit and core technology while the South is forced to accept it because of the lack of money and technology. This means, to alleviate world’s inequity and injustice, the South ought to use the technology in a way the North does in order to climb to the top of the pyramid, because just like what Hornborg had said, money invests technology and technology makes money. In this sense, technology should be used globally rather than locally.

Besides, I agree with you on the zero-sum theory. I believe technology does not cause a zero-sum consequence. Instead, it is the world system that technology builds on lead us to the zero-sum scenario. We should not in any circumstances, contaminate technological progress because nobody is willing to go back to the time when technology was not as influential as it is today and besides, nobody can do it. Rather, we should keep moving and use it wisely.

Reponse to Sarah’s reflection by Morag Ramsey

I definitely agree with you in many respects about the gains of studying Horborg’s work when it comes to his insights about inequalities and power relations.

However, I am not sure I agree with Hornborg’s reflection that wealthy people do not think of the inequalities and time and resource lost by others to provide them with technologies, such as a laptop. This may be naivety on my part, but in some respects I feel this idea of an unequal exchange is not an uncommon way to see the world, especially in past few decades with different negative connotations associated with ‘sweatshops’ and such. I feel it is probably not that radical to understand that certain technologies come at the expense of others, and I hope that it is a general bewilderment at how an individual can change such an entrenched and powerful system of unequal exchange, and not a total lack of humanity, that keeps consumers consuming. Although during our discussion, Hornborg did mention that he does not advocate for, or think individual guilt over one’s consumption habits is a desirable outcome of learning about this system.

It is quite possible my own paradigms and perspective of the world taints the way I think others understand it, but it just does not seem like much of a stretch to grasp that there is an unequal exchange that occurs globally. I feel when I hear this kind of argument I have a hard time understanding who is the exact ‘perpetrator’ of the general deteriorating global environmental state. Hornborg spoke of dismissing the anthropocene as lacking depth in how it perceives the ‘we’ of humanity, but I’m not sure I feel entirely convinced the other way of looking at it is more constructive by having just two dimensions. I agree that it is overly simplistic to think of humanity as one actor when it comes to the environment, but I feel that the alterative explanation is unsatisfactory in someway. Perhaps it is because the individual is dismissed as an actor to some extent, and I am overwhelmed thinking of it purely in terms of systems. I am unsure about all of this obviously! And hopefully things become clearer eventually.

I thought your inquiry into the psychological state of ‘affluent westerners’ who have access to such technologies was an interesting avenue to pursue, and I wish we had had time to discuss it more thoroughly in the seminar!

”..we tend to be deluded by modern technology.” (Hornborg 2011: 3)

What does technology entail according to Hornborg? Technology is not just the manifestation of human innovation! Technology does not save time and space! Technology is not non-controversial!

From Hornborgs perspective technology is the main driver of inequality in the world. The arguement goes that technology is part of the infrastructure that enables accumulation of capital and an unequal exchange within the global economic system. Net transfers of physical resources as labour time, hectars of land, energy and material volume is needed to produce technology and to build and maintain the infrastructure it requires. Therefore technology does not save time and space it only moves whose time and space is used in the production process and where it moves depend on the exchange rate.

The ideology of reciprocity within the economic system is from this perspective flawed as the flows of matter and energy are assymetric. The use of money discuises this problem of reciprocity as it operates as a univeral solvent of value and creates a market where anything is interchangeable. However, argues Hornborg, there are absolute values however obscured by using universal exchange rates. In the process of solvence these values can morph and accumulate into a different shape as for instance climate change.

So, the potential capacity of technology to save time and space is always on the expense of human time (and surely also pig, cow, tiger etc. time) and natural space. The technical end product only saves time and space in the environment it is (used). Therefore there always has to be an unequal exchange rate or else there will be no accumulation of capital. In a zero-sum world there are no gains to be made through technological innovation.

Technological development is part of the grand idea of progress, a sign of able men and great nations – a key to surplus production and economic growth. In history this is closely linked to developments within agrarian technology which has led on to expanses of territory and power.

Hornborg makes the distinction between two different types of technology which we might call local innovative solutions which are attached to a particular area and problem within a cultural domain of utility and universal technology which aspires to solve problems of a particular type not within a cultural domin of utility. Hornborg takes the example of the construction of veapons to kill a particular type of animal in a in a particular type of environment

What is most interesting to me from Hornborgs argument is the distinction made between the particular and the universal in connection to value and how the problems that arise when solvent is used to make all values inexchangeable are made visable. I however do not agree that information technology and advances within medicin are any different to other technology. They are also drivers in this game of capital accumulation and unequal exchange and would perthaps. It is widely known that advances within these fields are available to the ”winners” within the system and to a lesser extent to the ”loosers”.

Current Themes and Debates in Global Environmental History
Yu Wang
History department&Global Environmental History
wytt2002@sina.com

Reply to saelrodr’s comment
Dear Saelrodr:
Thank you so much for your comments on my recfection. I also notice that I forgort to mention my view in the end about question “What is wrong with the nation-state as a unit of analysis for GEH?” I have to say that the function of analtysing GEH as a unit of the nation-state is not easy to get proper answer when we look at different situations. I agree that nation- state as unit will help people to focus on GEH on a high level and also give the politicions more pressure to do more things agaist the polution today. What I really question is, how to ask and even believe in that the political system could make the balance between “The central government with local governments” and “Economic development with environmental protection”? We can not escape from the question about police implementation. In China, the local goverments always have big pressure of develop economic. The proportion of GDP accounted extremely important achievements in local government evalution system.From the south to north, from the east to west, the unbanlanc economic development characteristics making it is easier to transfer the results of the environmental damage from an rich area to other poorer regions.
Another significant issue is the envrionmant law as a legal issue. National level does have more power higher level on pass environmental protection laws, but the abstract concept of state, especially for the country that democratic process has not been established totally, the countries always play in the adverse environmental effects. They excluside individuals own jurisdiction on environmental rights. China, for example, due to the previously mentioned the different interests betwteen local government and the central government, China more emphasis on environmental protection by the State as a subject. But the result is that individual citizens lose their right to sue. Environmental pollution is treated as public interest litigation from legal level, and the state becomes to the only prosecution body. What we notice is in China, Nation-State as the subject of proceedings, almost never prosecuted any environment pollution behavior, but the consequences of pollution are borne by everyone like us.
My conclution about the question is, “the nation-state as a unit of analysis for GEH” is too general, ignore the particularity of national structures. And the realistic results is due to this particularity powerless to prevent contamination.