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ALI,
Harris (with Roger KEIL)
Please see abstract listed under KEIL,
Roger.
ALTVATER,
Elmar
Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion (Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)
Is there an Ecological Marx?
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)
Marx is ambivalent with regard to the conception of nature in
his critique of political economy. Sharing the interpretations
of mainstream economics, nature is transformed from an ecological
into an economic entity dissolving its holistic totality and its
integrity into an ensemble of individual natural resources. In
addition, Marx's critique of political economy with regard to
the societal relation to nature is targeted to understanding human
needs, thus transforming nature into use values. These categories
have to be explicated. Therefore, the question "Is there
an ecological Marx?" can only be answered by analysing these
categories and the dynamics of the system following the laws of
accumulation, as is bound to natural laws. Central categories
in this respect are accumulation in time and expansion in space
(globalisation), entropy and irreversibility. Such analysis makes
it possible to address Jim O`Connor’s seminal approach to the
"second crisis" of capitalism.
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BARTCZAK,
Andi W.
Double-Edged Sword: Science for
Profit, Science for Environmental Justice
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation and Political Ecology
I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)
Most nonscientists consider science a field that they could never
master: they innocently trust scientists or those who claim to
have scientific knowledge. There is true science, where researchers
pose hypotheses and then design experiments to determine if their
hypotheses are true. There is junk science, where a business funds
the research and dictates the conclusions; the co-opted scientist
designs the experiment so that it will lead to the predetermined
conclusion. There is soundbite science, where one or two facts
are used to “prove” a foregone conclusion, despite evidence
to the contrary. There are many examples of true science investigating
hazards to people and the environment, such as the research done
on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) discharged by General Electric
into the Hudson River. There are also examples of scientists who
twist their science to serve their paymasters; a case in point
is the junk science commissioned by General Electric to prevent
dredging of PCBs from the Hudson River. And there are people with
technical backgrounds who take one or two facts out of context
to support moneymaking schemes: a case in point is the timber
industry’s use of experts claiming that forest management
and fire prevention can be best accomplished by logging the largest
(and most valuable) trees. True science explains that we don’t
know enough to “manage” complex ecosystems, while cutting
the largest trees increases the risk of catastrophic fires in
forests.
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BOND, Patrick
Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion
(Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)
Global Governance Quandaries: Red-Green Activist Analyses,
Strategies, Tactics and Alliances
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday
11:15, TEL 0016)
The recent 'global public goods' discourse has accompanied greater
awareness of international-scale ecological problems, including
global warming, water shortages and degradation, fossil fuel scarcity,
species extinction and fisheries depletion, weapons proliferation,
public health epidemics, and the impact of major 'development'
projects on politics and economics, to name a few. The emergence
of social movement networks aiming, simultaneously, at social
and environmental justice, from local to global scales, is a potential
counterweight to neoliberal international agencies and governments.
But the red/green activists have yet to seriously consider, much
less reach consensus on, scale politics and programmes. They often
suffer divergent analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances,
as witnessed in several emblematic campaigns, including battles
over megadams and extractive minerals/petroleum industries. This
is not a terminal problem, however, and the paper attempts to
identify points where militant particularist approaches can achieve
not only convergence, but synthesis and greater impact.
view
Patrick Bond's paper
view Patrick Bond's presentation
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BUCK,
Christopher
Experience First! Adorno
and Radical Environmental Thought
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)
In this paper I argue that Adorno’s philosophy can contribute
to a constructive intervention into the debate between deep and
social ecologists. By adopting Lukacs’ analysis of the commodity
form, Adorno avoids the tendency of deep and social ecologists
to posit either ideological or material forces respectively as
the essential cause of the ecological crisis. Moreover, Adorno’s
critique of idealism’s presupposition of an unmediated separation
of subject and object provides the groundwork for a reconceptualization
of the relationship between humans and nature. In short, Adorno
invites people to reflect on the way in which they are “natural”
insofar as they are living beings that must participate in culturally
mediated acts of self-preservation. As embodied subjects that
encounter the world with both mind and body, humans can cultivate
an affinity with external nature that enables them to experience
it as more than manipulable matter. These non-instrumental experiences
of nature can motivate people to engage in ethical and political
projects. While Adorno famously denies the probability, if not
possibility, of realizing his vision of reconciliation, his critics
tend to overlook the theoretical justifications for this pessimism.
For Adorno, the question is not “What is to be done?” but rather
“What, at this particular historical juncture, prevents people
from participating in transformative practices?” His answer to
this question has implications for the politics of radical ecology:
it suggests that radical environmentalists ought to direct their
attention towards the structural conditions that inhibit people
from experiencing the world in non-instrumental and non-anthropocentric
ways.
view Christopher Buck's paper
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CASTREE,
Noel
The Political Economy of
Environmental Change:
From Blunt Tools to Sharp Instruments
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)
Over the last 3 decades political economists have built up a formidable
arsenal of concepts and evidence that pose fundamental questions
about the way environments are transformed in capitalist societies.
In this presentation I will argue that a number of theoretical
confusions and normative elisions threaten to diminish the critical
power of what contributors to journals like CNS have been arguing
over recent years. Surveying a range of Marxian and neo-Marxism
literature, I call for a systematic effort to identify points
of commonality and difference in the arguments put forward to
explain and evaluate environmental change in capitalist societies.
I maintain that diminishing intellectual returns will set-in unless
a concerted effort is made among Marxists and fellow-travelers
to clarify their objects of critique. At a time when the creative
destruction of natural environments proceeds apace, political
economists need to present a more unified, precise and qualified
critique of this destructive creativity.
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CHESTERS,
Graeme (with Ian WELSH)
Complex Ecologies of Struggle
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice III
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)
This paper will explore the discursive ways in which ecology has
functioned as a locus for thinking radically about social change
and consider the implications of these ‘ecologies’ for Marxist
and post-Marxist social and political theory. From philosophical
treatises on the ecology of freedom (Bookchin), through social-psychological
theories of the subject and ecologies of the mind and ideas (Bateson,
Guattari) and on to the ‘political ecology of knowledge practices’
articulated by radical-empiricists of the Deleuzian mould (Delanda,
Massumi, Protevi), this is a fertile terrain of dissonant and
dissident thinking. Emerging from extensive empirical engagement
with the alternative globalisation movement over a number of years
this paper will suggest the importance of these ‘ecological’ insights
for consideration of the implications, strategies, tactics and
trajectories of the global movements contesting neo-liberal capitalism.
The authors will argue that the emergence of complex ecologies
of struggle simultaneously suggests the need for reappraisal of
Marxist models of social change whilst revealing an ontology of
radical potentiality.
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DEMIROVIC,
Alex
Crisis and Nature
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday
14:00, TEL 0006)
In general crisis is conceived of being a mere economic crisis.
Left and Marxist theory succeeded in broadening the scope of the
conception of crisis to political and also to cultural processes
and at least to the reproduction of the subjectivity of individuals
itself. From the beginning to the end of the eighties there was
a discussion going on how to integrate the so called question
of ecology into Marxist theory. Here too the concept of crisis
was useful to make understandable processes of destruction of
the environment. Discussions leaded to the elaboration of the
concept of a second contradiction of capitalism or a crisis of
the societal relation to nature. Since the nineties we can observe,
how the state attempt to cope with this crisis. The state therefore
is undergoing structural transformations. In the paper some of
the consequences of the reorganisation of the state will be discussed.
The paper will examine whether the expectations of some of the
representatives of the regulation school that a new type of social
compromise including environmental issues is right or the crisis
is still reproduced but in new forms and also a higher level.
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DORSEY,
Michael
Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion
(Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)
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EKERS,
Michael
The Canadian Tree-Planting
Experience:
Producing Natures, Alienation and Critique
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
IV
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0014)
Over the past twenty years over a half-billion trees a year are
planting in Canada. These trees which themselves are part human
and part nature, are planted by a young, unorganized labour-force.
This paper will explore the socio-natural intricacies of the tree-planting
industry, which contributes to both the production of distinctive
capitalist socio-natures and a defining experience for up to 10,000
individuals a year. The first section of the paper explores how
the tree-planting industry contributes the production of nature,
involving the planting of cyborg trees, the exploitation and alienation
of labour, the economic calculus and competition of individual
planters, all of which become embodied in the material landscape.
The second section tries to uncover the unique subjectivity of
tree-planters, who are generally white university students with
a history of privilege. It will be suggested that aside from the
financial incentives of planting, the tree-planting experience
involves transference of privilege, an encounter with the ‘other’,
and a chance to engage with ‘nature’, but in the process objectifies
individuals as wage-labourers. However it will be argued that
the tree-planting experience cannot be thrown out as simply being
bourgeois, but rather represents a limited critique of the alienation
of wage-labour and the banality of everyday life. This paper will
shed light on a unique industry that has truly produced capitalist
socio-natures and will illustrate the transference, alienation
and critique that is latent in the tree-planting experience.
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ERVINE,
Kate
A Critique of Green Developmentalism:
The Case of Chiapas
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice III
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)
At an estimated cost of $90.05 million U.S. dollars and a project
life spanning two phases of 7 years in total, the Mexico-Mesoamerican
Biological Corridor (MMBC) has been touted as a ‘win-win’ opportunity
for the mainstreaming of biodiversity conservation and sustainable
development practices into the Mexican policy-making process,
specifically in the recipient states of Chiapas, Quintana Roo,
Yucatan, and Campeche. While substantial funding is to be provided
by the Mexican State itself, the Global Environment Facility (GEF)
and the World Bank are similarly playing key roles in the evolution,
implementation and funding of the MMBC. Utilizing a political
ecology perspective, this paper undertakes a critical analysis
of the ‘green developmentalist’ agenda of mainstream global environment
and development institutions. In particular, it contends that
rather than providing a means through which environmental degradation
can be meaningfully addressed, the ‘green developmentalist’ agenda
instead provides a vehicle through which capital develops new
methods and strategies for capital expansion while simultaneously
failing to address the role of the capitalist system itself plays
in furthering ecological destruction. Moreover, adapting the notion
of ‘coercive conservation’ to the case of Chiapas, it is argued
that the MMBC paves the way for the Mexican State to rearticulate
its spatial and political control in areas where its legitimacy
has been contested by popular indigenous struggles for autonomy
and self-government that have challenged both state development
plans and private interests in the region.
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FABER,
Daniel
International Capitalism, Ecological
Injustice, and Unsustainable Production
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
V
(Sunday 11:45, TEL 0016)
To sustain economic growth and higher profits in the new global
economy, international capital is increasingly relying on ecologically
unsustainable forms of production. Motivated by increased competition
and the growing costs of regulation, business is leading a political
movement for “regulatory reform,” rollback of environmental laws,
worker health and safety, consumer protection, and the like. Termed
“neo-liberalism,” the effect has been an increase in the rate
of exploitation of working people (human nature) and the environment
(mother nature). It is the least politically powerful and most
economically marginalized sectors of the population which are
being selectively victimized by this process and the resulting
ecological crisis. Global economic restructuring, facilitated
by neo-liberalism, is implicated in this deterioration. Growing
environmental injustice and unsustainable production are thus
two sides of the same political-economic coin and are now so dialectically
related to each other as to become part of the same historical
process.
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FREUND,
Peter
Fast Cars/Fast Foods:
Modes of Consumption, Space-Time, Health and Environmental Consequences
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
III
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)
Capitalism has encouraged some unhealthy and enviromentally destructive
modes of consumption(e.g., fast foods).Such modes, once established,
help stabilize, make predictable and in general help control markets.
Such modes also help naturalise a way of life-including unhealthy
environments and "life styles". The focus here is on
an eminently contemporary capitalist mode of consumption-mass
motorization. Increasingly, individual passenger car transport
systems in highly developed forms characterise "rich nations"
and are being globalised to other nations. Many of the unhealthy/environmentally
destructive consequences of auto-centered transport systems emanate
from its impact on space and time. Mass destruction of the landscape,
the unhealthy fouling of the ambient environment, the intensive
exploitation of nonrenewable resources are some consequences.
Health is affected by the production of injuries and fatalities,
ontologically insecure public spaces, a spatial-temporal organisation
that works against physical fitness. Vulnerability to such effects
is enhanced by spatial and individual social inequalities produced
by class, gender, race-ethnicity, age, and disability. The status
of a nation as "poor " or "rich" is also relevant.
Car centered transport has an affinity with sprawl. In recent
years, adverse health and environmental consequences of sprawl
have become more salient. It is these that are the focus here.
The conclusion will address parallels between fast food /fast
cars. Both are characterised by their effects on space-time and
both are energy-resource intensive (oil/land). Supersize meals
at Macdonalds are the culinary equivalent of S.U.V.s. It may not
be a stretch to argue, in the spirit of a G.M. excecutive, that
miniburgers make mini profits. How might red greens facilitate
emancipating and sustainable spatio-temporal arrangements and
uses of technology? Socialists need to fantasize about alternative
modes of consumption that are "healthy" and leave a
smaller ecological footprint yet meet needs and are pleasurable
for the greatest number of people possible.
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GINDIN,
Sam
Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion
(Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)
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GOLDMAN,
Michael
The World Bank and the
Making of ‘Green Neoliberalism’
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)
This paper will highlight the phenomenal role of the World Bank
over the past fifteen years as the trailblazer in constituting
a hegemonic type of ‘global environmentalism’ that fuses neocolonial
forms of conservation and eco-rational logic with neoliberal forms
of capitalist politics and capital accumulation. In this period,
the Bank has been pivotal in facilitating what Jim O’Connor (1998)
and Martin O’Connor (1994) have called the “green stage” of capitalist
development, and what I call “green neoliberalism.” The paper
lays out an analytic framework for understanding both the nature
of World Bank power and immanent forms of counter-hegemony in
the world today.
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GONZALEZ,
George A.
Urban Sprawl, Global Warming,
and Oil Depletion:
The Unraveling of the Modern Economy
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
II
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)
The author describes urban zones as areas where goods and services
are consumed. U.S. cities are particularly configured to maximize
consumption. This is because of their highly sprawled form. U.S.
cities are so sprawled because of the influence of local growth
coalitions, made up of large land holders and developers, as well
as of local economic interests that benefit from an expanding
local consumer base. More decisive in creating urban sprawl in
the U.S. is the fact that during the 1920s and leading into the
Great Depression, the U.S. had an abundance of capital and an
industrial base geared toward the production of consumer durables,
especially automobiles. Urban sprawl was the means to absorb this
excess capital and the output of U.S. productive capacity. Urban
sprawl, however, is predicated on the unsustainable consumption
of fossil fuels, especially oil. Additionally, the level of fossil
fuel consumption necessitated by urban sprawl is environmentally
destabilizing in-so-far as it brings about the rapid warming of
the globe. Given that urban sprawl is key to the stability of
the modern economy, global warming and oil depletion bring its
viability into question. The analysis put forward here is consistent
with the business dominance view of public policymaking.
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GÖERG, Christoph
Ecological Imperialism:
A New Level in the Domination of Nature Postfordist Relationship
with Nature and Adorno’s Theory of Non-Identity
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)
The presentation will focus on a more theoretical problem: the
role of ecological problems for a theory of society building on
Marx´ critique of political economy. Therefore at least four strongly
connected questions will be highlighted. Concerning the basic
contradictions of capitalism, first, the fundamental role of societal
relationships with nature in and for the development of societies
must be analysed, encompassing much more than the explicit reflection
on existing or threatening environmental problems. Secondly, the
actual historical situation (the emerging “postfordism”) in the
development of societal relationships with nature must be grasped,
keeping in mind the power relations among dominant actors (i.e.
the New Imperialism) as much as the scope for environmental reforms.
To estimate this scope, thirdly, we have to focus on the conflicts
carried out for the shaping of societal relationships with nature
and the institutional aspects of their regulation, but keeping
in mind new forms of technological and scientifical constructions
of nature, too. Fourthly, the limits in this kind of constructions
have to be analysed reflecting on what T.W. Adorno called the
Non-Identity of Nature. Following Adorno, limits in the appropriation
of nature are not given in nature itself, but have to be determined
in a critique of current forms of the domination of nature. And
that means today: of the new Ecological Imperialism.
view Christoph Goerg's presentation
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GULICK,
John
Soybeans and the Sino-Brazilian Socio-Ecological Division of Labor
Session: World Order, Imperialism and Global Ecological Politics
I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)
When the global justice movement hit its stride at the turn of
the 21st Century, it became a commonplace among the movement’s
champions that a decentralized “network of networks” – indigenous
peoples’, peasant, and urban poor organizations in the Global
South linked with solidarity campaigners in the Global North –
now constituted the leading edge of resistance to the Washington
Consensus. However, the Anglo-American invasion and occupation
of Iraq shifted attention to the lingering reality of geopolitical
struggle in the world. This in turn resuscitated the notion that
states (rather than radical red-green civil society organizations)
outside the capitalist core could serve as vehicles for ecological
and social justice – or, at very least, as instruments to open
up some breathing room for bottom-up initiatives of the Global
South grassroots. The G-20’s derailing of the WTO Cancun Ministerial,
led by large-market developing countries such as Lula’s Brazil
and Hu’s China, might be cited as one instantiation of this premise.
For both intellectual and political reasons, this newfound recognition
of the significance of state power outside the imperialist centers
is welcome. However, it is important to realize that the big players
of the non-OECD world essentially seek the institutionalization
of a global capitalist order that, instead of selectively applying
neo-liberal policies in the service of metropolitan accumulation,
consistently abides by its Ricardian “comparative advantage” promises.
Not only does this agenda bias the interests of sub-imperialist
elites above those of the Global South’s poorest and most vulnerable,
it is also founded on a set of increasingly untenable assumptions
about the availability of cheap hydrocarbon fuels and inputs and
the predictability of regional climates. In this paper, we explore
one case-study that distills the ideological and practical limitations
of the Group of 20’s agenda, namely emergent patterns of bilateral
trade and investment between Brazil and China. Focusing on one
dynamic aspect of these patterns – the exchange of Brazil’s industrially
farmed soybeans for light manufactured goods assembled in China,
with ocean-going container ships connecting the two locales of
commodity production, transformation, and consumption – we make
the following arguments about the resulting “socio-ecological
division of labor”: 1) It accelerates the destruction and degradation
of human, animal, and plant habitat in both the Cerrados and the
Amazon rainforest (accelerating global climate destabilization);
2) It undercuts the subsistence of peasant smallholders in Northeast
China; and 3) On both continents, it locks into place irreversible
land use changes and inflexible physical infrastructure investments
that will remain commercially useful only as long as world market
prices for hydrocarbon fuels and inputs remain low enough to underpin
global economies of scale in general and energy-intensive industrial
agriculture in particular.
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GUNSTER,
Shane
City Dreaming: Commercial
Discourse and the Production of Urban Space
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
II
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)
My paper will offer a critical account of the representational
strategies used to represent urban spaces in contemporary television
advertising, specifically attending to the complex interplay between
signifiers of natural and urban space. Although there is a rich
scholarship on the depiction of cities in media such as film and
literature, there has been virtually no attention directed to
the use of urban environments in the construction of ads for a
wide range of brands and commodities. I will address this gap
by conducting a critical review of the representation of cities
in television commercials gathered from a systematic sampling
of US and Canadian television during the Fall 2004 season. Two
sets of questions will guide my analysis. First, how does advertising
produce and negotiate the simultaneous depiction of cities as
utopian spaces (e.g. as entertaining, diverse, productive, exciting,
etc.) and dystopian spaces (e.g. as dangerous, mundane, polluted,
overcrowded, etc.)? Second, what is the relationship between nature
and the city in TV advertising and how might this affect the ways
in which we think, feel and dream about nature, the city and,
above all, the relations between them? Drawing upon the critical
theory of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin and contemporary
critics such as Mike Davis and Andrew Ross, I will argue that
simplistic dualisms such as utopia/dystopia and city/nature are
inadequate in terms of explaining the significance and the effects
of how the culture industry constructs urban space in the context
of advertising. We need a far more complex understanding, for
example, of how nature serves not only as a foil to the city,
but also as a potent allegory for how urban environments are (often)
now experienced in a reified form, frozen and petrified by capitalist
urbanization into a ‘second nature’ that appears just as inscrutable,
unpredictable and ungovernable as ‘first nature’. This paper is
part of a larger project that is exploring the use of utopian
and dystopian imagery in commercial discourse and its effect upon
the possibility for social and political mobilization.
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HALEY,
Brendan
Social Democracy and Ecological
Modernization: Sweden and Canada
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)
This paper will study Sweden’s policies of ecological modernization
in order to learn lessons for similar policy proposals emanating
from Canada’s New Democratic Party and labour union movement.
In Canada, NDP leader Jack Layton has proposed a form of “green
industrial policy” and environmental investment strategies that
are similar to the “greening of the Swedish welfare state” (folkhemmet)
that was implemented by the Swedish Social Democrats from 1996
to the present. The study is interested in the successes and failures
of the “greening” of the Swedish welfare state, how environmental
issues are reconciled with the aspirations of the labour movement
and social democracy and the model of development proposed by
the labour union movement and social democratic parties. These
questions will be assessed through policy research as well as
through interviews with relevant actors in Sweden and Canada.
The study will evaluate if forms of ecological modernization are
a viable economic strategy for the labour union movement and social
democratic parties. As well as if there is a willingness to move
“beyond” ecological modernization, which appeals to traditional
concepts of competitiveness and economic growth, towards a political
strategy that encourages explorations of alternative concepts
of development.
view Brendan Haley's paper
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HERMANN,
Christoph
European Integration
and the Impact on the Environment
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)
A number of authors have characterized the process of European
integration as consolidation of Neoliberalism in Europe. Among
others, Stephen Gill, has coined the term ‚new constitutionalism’
to account for the institutionalisation of neoliberal policies
such as the promotion of ‚free’ trade, monetary restraint, budgetary
austerity, privatization and flexibilisation of labor. “New constitutionalism,”
in his words, “is an international governance framework. It seeks
to separate economic policies from broad political accountability
in order to make governments more responsive to the discipline
of market forces and correspondingly less responsive to popular-democratic
forces and processes.” Yet while Gill centers his analysis on
economic issues, including the Growth and Stability Pact, environmental
issues play a particular important role when it comes to sustainability,
accountability and democratic processes in Europe. In this paper
the impact of European integration and the alleged propensity
to neoliberal restructuring on the environment will be assessed.
Special attention will be paid to the principle of mutual recognition
that has guided much of the recent integration process. Despite
some important progress in environmental policies, mutual recognition
is used as a substitution for the introduction of common European
standards – including environmental standards. The paper will
discuss the share of competencies between the European Commission
and the member states in environmental issues and the consequences
for the protection of the environment. It will also address the
influence of big European and international companies and their
‘lobbying power’ in preventing the establishment of strong and
effective protection measures. In addition the draft-constitution
for the European Union will be analyzed and the role of environmental
protection in relation to other policy issues will be discussed.
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HEYNEN,
Nik
Starving for Revolution:
The Black Panther Party’s Production of Revolutionary Art and
the Urban Political Ecology of Hunger
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)
There is no revolutionary art as yet. There are the elements of
this art, there are hints and attempts at it, and, what is most
important, there is the revolutionary man, who is forming the
new generation in his own image and who is more and more in need
of this art. How long will it take for such art to reveal itself
clearly? Leon Trotsky (1923)
In Raymond Williams’ tradition of “out-Marxizing” the Marxists
of his time through producing more holistic explanations about
historical material conditions, there is still work to do for
the sake of understanding ecological imperialism and the uneven
production of urban political ecology. This paper will excavate
the uneven socionatural relations that necessarily inspired the
revolutionary art of the Black Panther Party’s Minister of Culture,
Emory Douglas to better elucidate strategies for radical opposition
to the contradictions of capitalism. Douglas’ art drew on the
debilitating inequality within much of the African-American lived
experience, but did so from a perspective of defiance and hope,
which now shines as a utopian example for further radical resistance.
While Douglas’ work focused on many topics ranging from global
imperialism to local police brutality, this paper will engage
the uneven socionatural relations that are manifest in one of
Douglas’ most familiar themes, that of inner city hunger as it
is an under-theorized/under-examined quandary within Marxist urban
political ecology. Douglas’ art, the art that was/is most responsible
for representing the politics of the Black Panther Party through
their newspaper, synthesizes the charged politics of scale ranging
from his bodily experiences to wider African-American experiences
of material inequality. In response to Trotsky’s proclamation
and question, it is the formation of this “revolutionary man”
through everyday life on the brutal streets of Oakland that produced
a means of powerful resistance to imperial oppression. Douglas’
works of revolutionary art provide a useful lens through which
to dialectically unpack the political economy of urban hunger,
thus furthering the contributions of radical left ecology and
possibilities of radical response to the contradictions of capitalism.
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HUBER,
Matthew
We are All Resource-Dependent
People: Towards an Urban Political Ecology of Consumption Acknowledging
Resource-Use, Livelihoods and Nature in Cities
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)
Political ecology claims to examine the dialectics of nature and
society by offering a “toolkit” situating local resource-use and
concomitant “livelihoods” in broader historical, political-economic
and cultural context. Yet the bulk of this research has been confined
to rural, primary-production contexts. This paper emerges from
the conviction that “resource-use” does not begin and end with
extraction. Indeed, political ecology’s failure to see “resource-use”,
“livelihoods” and “nature” within cities—manifest not only in
parks, rivers, and gardens, but also materials, energy and wastes—has
led many to ignore the role of specifically urban processes in
the nature-society dialectic. This paper provides a theoretical
edifice for constructing an urban political ecology of consumption.
Using Marx’s theory of the commodity relation (and its “fetishisms”),
I assert that sites of commodity exchange and “final” consumption
contain veiled, but ever-present, “accumulated” relations between
labor and nature. As the majority of commodities are consumed
in urban contexts, these sites are uniquely shielded from natural
“sources”—the material provisioning through the socioecological
relations of production—and “sinks”—the socioecological circulation
of waste. Furthermore, as consumption literature emphasizes, the
sites of commodity exchange not only serve capital’s need for
surplus-value realization, but also constitute discursive “terrains”
of cultural meaning. Yet, the dialectical “nature-society” repercussions
of these “consumer cultures” remain largely under-theorized. By
situating the “denaturalized” cultural contexts of everyday consumption
within the historical-geography of material practice, I conclude
that political ecology can substantially unpack how urban livelihoods
are structured by mostly unacknowledged power over and entitlements
to nature.
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to the program
KEIL,
Roger (with Harris ALI)
The Urban Political Ecology
of Infectious Disease: The Case of SARS in Toronto
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)
Political ecologists have begun to look seriously at the relationships
of globalized urbanization and the spread of infectious disease.
Historical and medical geographers (e.g. Diamond 1999; Craddock
2000) have long examined the historical ties between urbanization
and infectious disease. More recently, often under the impression
of the changing global conditions after 9/11, the relationships
of (re-)emerging disease, migration and globalization have come
under critical review (McMurray and Smith 2001; Sarasin 2001;
Gandy and Zumla 2003) On the basis of such work, we are proposing
to take a look at this relationship through the lens of urban
political ecology (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). As Frederick Buell
has pointed out, the political ecology of infectious disease in
an age is specific as it raises fundamental questions about whether
“modernity is failing, not ironically defeating itself” (Buell
2003: 130). To what degree does the globalized urbanization process
itself – ostensibly billed as a modernization process – contribute
to this development. Using the Toronto SARS outbreak as a case,
on the basis of the articulations of Toronto into the global cities
network, and informed by newer political ecological work (Forsyth,
Latour, Law, Luke, Whatmore, Castree), we will work out the specific
urban political ecology aspects of emerging infectious disease
in an age of global urbanization.
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to the program
KÖHLER,
Bettina
Faculty of Architecture and Planning
The Making of the Global
Water Crisis
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)
This paper joins the assumption that the use of water is and has
always been a contested terrain, referring to complex material,
social and symbolic realities at various spatial scales. Against
this background the growing popularity of a global water crisis
is analysed. Although referring to problems, as serious as the
lack of access to drinking water of great part of the world population,
the global water crisis is analysed as a produced discourse, which
has itself political implications. The paper examines how central
features of the discourse, as the privileging of a global scale
perspective and the focus on a certain kind of scientific rationality
and technical solutions – which have been key-elements in recent
policy programmes in the context of ecological modernization –
contribute directly to the ongoing commodification process of
social relations and nature.
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to the program
KOVEL,
Joel
The Conditions of Ecosocialism
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)
We need to concretely imagine-prefigure the contours of a post-capitalist
society in an ecologically rational relationship with nature.
The task is not a matter of drawing up blueprints but of conceiving
the transformation in terms of a radically different mode of production.
The central feature of this would be the reconfiguration of production
into terms of ecosystems rather than commodities. The chief goal
of this presentation will be to rethink the internal relations
between these two points of view, building upon O'Connor's insight
into use value as the neglected aspect of socialism's conceptualization
of political economy. If we are to define use value in ecosystemic
terms, as the point of insertion of consciousness into nature,
we are in turn obliged to introduce a subjective dimension into
ecological thought. However, introducing the ecocentric ethic
essential for the new mode of production, the category of intrinsic
value needs to be integrated with use values.
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to the program
LANGELLE,
Orin
Corporate Globalization’s
Destruction of Earth’s Life Support Systems
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)
Corporate globalization requires “unlimited growth” - a never-ending
increase in the transformation of “resources” into capital. One
third of the Earth’s natural wealth was lost from 1970-95. The
Smithsonian estimates that the Earth loses over 300 species per
day due to habitat destruction. Many native peoples are threatened
with extinction and global warming threatens all life on earth.
Corporate globalization has pushed the Earth’s life support systems
to the brink of collapse. This ecological crisis demonstrates
that an economic system based on accumulation of wealth and unlimited
growth is unsustainable. Violence skyrockets in regions of the
world where coveted resources are concentrated, such as the Mideast
and equatorial regions. While resources diminish, conflicts escalate.
Targeted violence is one tool of corporate globalization. Another
tool impacting populations is economic violence. The World Bank/IMF’s
policies are designed to wrest control of natural resources from
resident populations - mainly indigenous peoples and people in
the Global South. Even human beings are used as expendable resources.
The WTO and trade agreements like NAFTA provide legalities for
corporations and disenfranchise communities - overturning human
rights, environmental and workers’ rights laws. These forms of
coercion are two sides of the same coin of corporate globalization.
Social movements can magnify their effectiveness by linking together
to create a powerful movement for change that addresses the common
economic, social and political roots of our issues.
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to the program
LUKE,
Tim
The Structures of Sustainable
Degradation:
Eco-Managerialism, Eco-Judicialization, and Eco-Commercialism
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
IV
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0014)
This paper examines the systems and structures that nest in rhetorics
of sustainable development, collaborative governance, and natural
capitalism, especially in North America, as responses to worldwide
environmental crises experienced during the past generation. There
are now elaborate discursive networks, policy coalitions, and
technological formations that inter-operate in the most advanced
market economies, locally and globally, as interventions bent
upon attaining "sustainable" development amidst severe
environmental stress. Yet, these responses seem instead to only
be developing highly adaptable structures of sustainable degradation,
which closely manage, carefully juridify, or completely commercialize
the practices whereby Nature's truly sustaining ecologies are
exploited for the short-run benefit of the few with short-run
costs to the many. In the end, however, they are producing structures
of long-run ecologically degraded ruination for all.
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to the program
MAHNKOPF,
Birgit
The Impact of Regional and
Bilateral Agreements on Trade and Investment on Sustainable Developing
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)
The negative effects of free trade and foreign investment on the
environment cannot be denied any more. Nevertheless, the liberalization
of trade and foreign direct investment are considered as the only
way of economic and social development in many developing countries.
While multilateral agreements under the WTO (such as GATT, TRIPs
and a new Multilateral Investment Agreement) are being fiercely
opposed by social movements, interregional and bilateral agreements
do not face a similar attention. However, these treaties which
grew rapidly in number during the mid of the 1990s, include similar
rules and can lead to far-reaching obligations for developing
countries in areas where WTO decisions have not been taken yet
or blocked by southern resistance. It is not just the US which
pushes its economic interests in treaties outside the WTO. The
EU is pursuing its own liberalization and deregulation scheme
multilaterally within the WTO and at the same time in regional
and bilateral agreements. Since most of the regional and bilateral
agreements have been in force for a few years only, knowledge
of the potential development impacts of these agreements is still
limited. In the paper I will elaborate the main elements of regional
free trade and bilateral investment agreements the EU already
has negotiated and currently is negotiating with various developing
countries as far more restrictive “WTO-plus” arrangements. Secondly,
the requirements of a development-friendly approach to investment
rules and the goals of an alternative order of world trade will
be sketched. Thirdly, the role of ecological clauses will be discussed.
view Birgit Mahnkopf's paper
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to the program
MARTIN,
George
Comparative Patterns and
Social Ecologies of Global Motorization
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
II
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)
The global diffusion of motorized urban sprawl is a significant
material driver of local and regional social ecological change
around the world. The agencies and infrastructures of this motorization
promote built environments that are voracious consumers of oil,
and are substantial contributors to ambient pollutions and global
warming. While it has become a focus of environmental regulation
in the North, motorized urban sprawl is being increasingly diffused
to the massive urban centers of the South. In the South, the scales
of the social ecological impacts of motorized sprawl in the 21st
Century carry the potential to dwarf those recorded in the North
in the 20th Century. While alarms have been sounded by environmentalists
and others about the threat of greatly increased global greenhouse
emissions posed by the development of this motorized urban sprawl
in the South, this paper develops a framework for understanding
a neglected topic: The differential social ecological patterns
of motorized urban sprawl around the world. These patterns shed
light on the range of ways in which the current intensification
of global capitalism impact local and regional areas.
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to the program
MARTINEZ-ALIER,
Joan
Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion (Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)
Environmental Justice and Regional Planning
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice I
(Saturday
9:30, TEL 0010)
Do cities produce anything of commensurable value in return for
the energy and materials they import, and for the residues they
excrete? Are the internal environmental conflicts over these resource
flows in cities successfully pushed onwards to larger geographical
scales? The more prosperous the city, the more successful it may
be at displacing environmental loads, and the more successful
also in solving internal environmental conflicts. Social movements
against some of the "externalities" produced in cities
could push for urban sustainability. Low-income groups, working
class, and people of color constitute a movement for environmental
justice, connecting environmental issues with racial and gender
inequality, and with poverty. Environmental conflicts in European,
Latin American, and Asian cities will be considered.
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to the program
McMAHON,
Michael
From Neoliberal Threats
to Social-Nature: Lessons from Great Lakes Basin Struggles?
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)
“The era of neo-liberal globalization appears to be drawing to
a close.” This controversial opening to a 2001 contribution to
CNS (12 (4) p. 67) is one that I build on with the help of related
interventions running from the CBC’s “Dead in the Water” (2003),
to its “H2O” (2004), to the still more recent outcomes of cross-border
negotiations around Great Lakes waters in the wake of late-1990s,
neoliberal threats. The former Canadian public television programs
highlight reversals to the water privatization agenda around the
world, even as they dramatize the return of the heavy hand of
the capitalist state via a would be US move on Canadian waters.
And here the main point of the paper is framed: ecological activists
in both Canada and the United States may all too easily have accepted
the neoliberal threats of 1990s as hard and fast givens, especially
with regards to the “uncooperative commodity” that is water. In
turn, a good number of environmentalists became complicit with
state-led proposals to permit exports of water to service sprawl
beyond the margins of the Great Lakes basin, to avoid the still
bigger threat of WTO-framed, long-distance water sales. This is
the so-called Annex 2001 process. One of the questions it begs
is this: If the era of neo-liberal globalization is drawing to
a close with the help of new state-citizen alliances, how are
we to proceed to better construct “social-nature relations”? How
might such scalar constructions and productions of nature provide
a basis for challenges to supra-regional entities such as post-9/11
“North America”, where capital remains very much alive, if not
well?
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to the program
MIES,
Maria
War is the Father of all
Things" (Heraclit) but "Nature is the Mother of Life”
(C.V. Werlhof)
Session: Keynote Address
(Friday 19:00, TEL 0016)
The contradictions of global capitalism manifest themselves these
days more and more in WARS. Wars, conquest, colonialism were not
only its first words, they are also its last words. Wars are "necessary"
preconditions for the beginning and the ongoing functioning of
capitalism (ongoing primitive accumulation). The capitalist economy
and the military system follow the same principles, the war logic
(destruction called production, universal competition, conquest,
creating a world empire). This war logic, however, is not restricted
to the military and the economy as such, it permeates all spheres
of life and transforms all social relations into war relations.
This is particularly true for the relation between humans and
nature. Nature is being treated as an enemy who has to be conquered
by basically militaristic science and technology. Capitalists
legitimate this global war system by promising, that thus an abundance
of "things" (Heraclit) would be created, poverty would
disappear and human beings would be set free from the fetters
of nature. According to our ecofeminist analysis this global capitalist
war system has indeed filled our supermarkets with "things,"
but to do this it had to destroy nature, to subordinate and exploit
other peoples, classes and races all over the globe. Feminists
understood that women were also treated as part of this "wild
nature" which had to be conquered and subordinated. Therefore
Capitalism did not overcome patriarchy, it only modernized it.
This means that patriarchal wars of destruction are seen as creators
of all things and even of peace and freedom. If socialists want
to overcome this capitalist-patriarchal war system they must try
to overcome the war logic not only in its direct militaristic
manifestations but above all in the philosophy underlying the
concepts of progress, productive forces, science and technology
and the relationship of humans to nature and of men to women.
Nature is not our enemy but the Mother of Life.
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to the program
MORAES,
Andrea
Meanings of Public Participation
for the Brazilian Watershed Management Committees
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice
(Saturday
9:30, TEL 0010)
Demands for public participation emerged in the 1970s as a critical
response to top- down development projects that failed to reduce
the poverty they supposedly were designed to combat. Authors such
as Paulo Freire defended the idea of participation as a means
of transforming society through collective self-inquiry, reflection
and action. In this context, participation had an emancipatory
meaning and was understood as a way to mobilize and include those
actors who had traditionally been excluded. Some twenty years
later, the term participation has become a buzz-word. Public participation
is used in all fields of knowledge and policy: from education
to rural development. Large development agencies and governments
adopted the idea of participation (involving local people) as
a means for achieving more effective interventions. The emphasis
turned to the efficiency aspect of participation, and participation
often did not imply a shift in power or real involvement in critical
decisions. Can this new-style participation actually mobilize
and empower previously excluded interests, actors and communities
in civil society? Or does this type of participation rather re-establish
the privileged position of established actors? This paper will
report the work in progress about the meanings of public participation
for members of the Brazilian watershed management committees of
São Paulo state – Brazil. During the 1990s, Brazil began to face
the previously unthinkable finitude of its water resources – thanks
to rapid population increase, deterioration of water quality,
pollution, as well as the pressure from grass roots and environment
movements. The result was the creation in 1997 of the Federal
Water Law that instituted the National System of Water Management
where water was understood as a limited resource to be managed
territorially and shared as a public good. In order to deal with
different interests an integrated public management was proposed
through the creation of Watershed Management Committees – formed
by 1/3 of government representatives, 1/3 of municipalities and
1/3 of civil society.
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to the program
O’DONNELL,
Thomas W.
The Global Oil System: Resources, Technology, and the New U.S.
Strategy
Session: World Order, Imperialism,
and Global Ecological Politics V
(Sunday 11:45, TEL 0016)
In spite of the insecurity of supplies, depletion trends and global
warming, oil stubbornly remains the basis of transportation everywhere.
The present oil system emerged with the shocks of the late 1970s
to early 1980s, and the formation of a cartel of OECD consuming
states – the International Energy Agency (IEA) – to counter the
OPEC producers’ cartel. The IEA accumulated large strategic oil
reserves; the constant threat to release these undermined the
producers’ embargo weapon, and gradually forced OPEC to restrict
prices to a band favored by the IEA and its dominant member, the
U.S. In time, OPEC acceded to join a "consumer-producer dialogue"
with the IEA, the International Energy Forum (IEF), and, after
the invasion of Iraq, the “Permanent Secretariat” of the IEF was
formed (May 2003) – a significant development in energy globalization.
"Cheap oil" has been fundamental to US policy, fostering
oil addiction and relentlessly remaking the transportation infrastructures
of all consuming states in the image of the automobile-intensive
U.S. This addiction brings with it dependence and subordination
to Washington, organizer of the global oil market control institutions.
Under this regime the oil-poor EU is steadily being reduced to
an oil-dependent and automobile-intensive status like that Japan
has long endured. And China too, already having exhausted its
cheap-to-extract domestic oil, is sliding into a similar state.
But, the cheap oil system now faces two crises. First, Saudi Arabia,
the "central bank of oil," is suffering several internal
crises which alarm Washington, and, second, a mismatch looms between
global oil demand and pumping capacity, driven especially by Chinese
demand. In response, the Clinton and the Bush Administrations
(Cheney Energy Plan) launched an offensive to radically expand
the global pumping capacity of oil, pushing all producing states
to accept large private oil investments, to submit to ‘transparency’
and to a more highly centralized global market-control apparatus.
U.S. actions in Iraq, in the Caspian basin, with and against Russia,
in Venezuela and Mexico, in Nigeria – and its sharp clash with
"Old Europe" plus Russia and China over its 2003 seizure
of Iraq – must be reconsidered in this light. The priority of
maintaining oil hegemony is the basis for the otherwise inexplicable
U.S. policy of opposing any real fight against global warming,
and for adamantly refusing to modernize its own mid-20th-century
transportation infrastructure.
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to the program
PANAYOTAKIS,
Costas
Conspicuous Consumption, Economic Inefficiency and Ecological Degradation
Session: Marxism, Critical
Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)
Mainstream economists are increasingly becoming aware of the economic inefficiency generated by consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Their discussion of these issues fails, however, to recognize the links between consumerism and the class nature of capitalist society. This paper explores these links and shows that a class-based analysis of capitalist consumerism undermines the mainstream economic interpretation of environmental problems as the result of economic ‘externalities’.
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to the program
PERKINS,
Ellie
Public Participation and
Ecological Valuation: Inclusive = Radical
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice
(Saturday
9:30, TEL 0010)
This paper discusses the gender and class implications of participation-based
political-economic valuation processes, which are increasingly
used in Europe, North America, and elsewhere as a basic component
of environmental and public policy decision-making. While avoidance
of purely market and money-based valuation is generally attractive,
public participation processes can potentially exacerbate gender,
ethnic, class, and other inequities. This in turn is likely to
have negative environmental implications. The paper focuses on
the complexities of conceptualizing and designing practical alternatives
to market-based valuation systems which are gender- and diversity-sensitive
and take into account the different kinds of relationships with
the environment held by different members of society. Such alternative
valuation systems are a necessary foundation for feminist and
ecological economics. Whether, and in what way, they may be part
of a more radical political-economic transformation is addressed
in the final section of the paper.
view Ellie Perkins' paper
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to the program
PETERMANN,
Anne
Global Warming, Carbon Trade,
and Genetically Engineered Trees
Session: World Order, Imperialism,
and Global Ecological Politics I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)
Twelve years ago governments ratified the Convention on Climate
Change. Five years later, they agreed on the Kyoto Protocol, which
was to establish concrete commitments to reduce fossil fuel emissions
from Northern countries. The Kyoto Protocol established emission
reductions of only 5.2% below 1990 levels-which scientists agree
is completely inadequate to address global warming. Even these
targets, however, are being evaded through schemes such as carbon
trading and the establishment of carbon "sinks" like
GE tree plantations that will in fact further worsen global warming.
Comparing satellite maps from ten years ago to images today reveals
a clear trend of plantations replacing native forests. Studies
done by the US EPA and the World Resources Institute found that
in tropical areas plantations at best sequester only 1/4 the carbon
as native forests. The conversion of native forests to carbon
sink plantations diminishes carbon sequestering potential. Communities
disproportionately impacted by climate change and fake "solutions"
like GE trees plantations include indigenous peoples, the poor,
women, children and the elderly. In addition, governments and
institutions like the World Bank are encouraging accelerated use
of increasingly limited fossil fuel stocks, causing more and more
military conflicts around the world, magnifying social and environmental
injustice. If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic reductions
in fossil fuel use are inescapable, as is the protection of remaining
native forests. In response, peoples' movements are rising up
around the world to demand real action on climate change and to
challenge the privatization of the air through a massive "carbon
market," included in the Kyoto Protocol.
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PETERS,
Frederick
The Valuation of Water: What
European Water Policy has Made of James O’Connor’s 2nd Contradiction
and What the Left Can Do about It
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)
The valuation of water has been under debate in the environmental
activist and academic circles in Europe, as it has in been in
the rest of the world, since the first waves of privatisation
of water infrastructure in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Economic
“shock treatment” applied to Eastern Europe in the 1990s lead
to much pressure on governments there to carry out similar privatisation
schemes around water infrastructure, with mixed results. The European
Union has also recently completed negotiations on an umbrella
legislation called the Water Framework Directive. With European
enlargement, countries such as Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary
and the Baltic Nations, have thus been subject to a two pronged
process of “Europeanisation” of their water infrastructure among
other sectors of the public and private sphere. On the one hand
there has been the application of market economy principles to
their economies. On the other, there has been the application
of new regulatory regimes with far reaching effects on issues
such as water and the environment. While the issues of the valuation
of water and water infrastructure have been debated among the
left, much of it in the pages of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism,
following O’Connor’s publication of his Second Contradiction of
Capitalism, policy and law makers in the European Union as well
as (largely) European Capital have made pretty clear judgements
on how it should be valuated. This paper reviews the debates on
the valuation and capitalisation of water that have come up in
reaction to neo-liberal economics and “fee market” discipline,
and looks at the history of recent developments in the European
Union and their effects on urban and rural water provision and
the capitalisation of water.
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to the program
PHILIP,
Kavita
Nature, Culture, Capital, and
Empire: Reflections on Doing Environmental Histories of the Global
South
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
V
(Sunday 11:45, TEL 0016)
This paper draws on my published work in colonial environmental
history of South Asia (Civilizing Natures, 2004), as well as on
ongoing work on the technologies of the new imperialism. I offer
some methodological reflections on doing political and historical
scholarship on nature, culture, science, and technology in the
global south, with particular reference to the South Asian experience
with colonialism and the new imperialisms. Nineteenth century
scientific theories of non-western nature and natives shaped the
belief, persistent to this day, in an epistemological divide between
universal science and local knowledge. This essentialism has characterized
both liberal and conservative histories; but more radical political
analyses suggest a more complex picture of networks and connections.
Local knowledges from the peripheries of empire were constitutive
of both the form and content of science at the metropolitan centre.
For instance, indigenous Indian knowledge of forests and cropping
techniques influenced the thinking of late eighteenth century
Hippocratic and Physiocratic thinkers in Britain, spurring the
theory and practice of a romanticist environmentalism. Caribbean
and South Asian plant species radically changed the shape of European
botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in terms of
taxonomic advances, and by altering the geographic scope and economic
power of botanical research. Anthropology was quite literally
dependent on colonial infrastructures--including scientific voyages
and botanical projects--in order to obtain access to its object
of study, the non-western native, who in intricately constrained
ways participated in the construction of anthropological knowledge.
Botany, anthropology and forestry in the nineteenth century (like
many other sciences, from geography to linguistics) had their
most important sources of data, their objects of investigation,
located at colonial sites. The colonies were the laboratories
for nineteenth century sciences of race and of resources. Drawing
the maps of global power was simultaneous with, and constitutive
of, the process of drawing the maps of self and other, nature
and culture. Histories of colonial science entail the critique
of our current narratives of the history of western science itself,
and their rewriting into an integrated narrative that analyzes
the discourses of exploitation and romanticism within the same
theoretical framework that analyses the claims of science. This
paper suggests ways in which we might shape the study of nature,
culture, capital and empire in the contexts of prior colonial
histories as well as of the emerging world order.
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to the program
RICOVERI,
Giovanna
Towards Ecological and Social Justice in the South and the North
Session: Ecosocialism,
Feminism, and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15, TEL 0016)
Under the present conditions of neo-liberal globalization, capitalism
survives only as a result of exploitation of natural wealth and
the use of violence in appropriating resources. Biodiversity (mainly
in the South) and public services (mainly in Europe) are the last
frontier of a global economy of plunder. The result is the emergence
of politics as “public space”. Representative democracy is limited
as the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and trans-national corporate
bodies make fundamental economic decisions. This induces insecurity
among people and communities, thereby erasing cultural identities,
individual and collective liberties, civil and social rights creating
ideal humus for “humanitarian” wars and pre-emptive wars against
terrorism. Environment and natural resources become a focal point
of struggle in both North and South against neo-liberal globalization,
whereby social groups resist and organize to develop the conditions
for real democracy (in water use, food distribution, and public
participation), in contrast to formal democracy, where the more
powerful dominate.
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to the program
ROELOFS,
Joan
Socialism and Ecology
Session: Ecosocialism,
Feminism, and Environmental Justice III
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)
Disillusionment with Marxism and the revival of anarchism brought
Charles Fourier’s theories back onto the stage in 1968. Nevertheless,
socialists and ecologists have barely explored the strange yet
practical treasures they hold. Skepticism about the “revolutionary
project” and indications of a shrinking proletariat have led to
searches for a “third way,” or at least, a different way. Marxism
was also challenged by the Green movement that arose in the 1970s,
calling attention to feminist, ecological, and multicultural concerns
neglected by traditional radical parties. Post-modernism and post-Marxism
disturbed the rigid categories and boxes into which ideas and
ideologies have been stuffed by scholars and activists. “Utopian
socialism” was a label that had stuck. It was used first by capitalists
and then by Marx and Engels, loyal bedfellows in this conspiracy
at least, to discredit early socialists. Today there are more
people willing to admit that both “the invisible hand” of capitalism
and the “proletarian revolution” of Marxism could fit into the
“utopian” box, while the so-called “utopians” were brimming with
practical suggestions and experimental, rational, and peaceful
methods for healing society’s woes. Even their visionary, imaginative,
and rather fantastic aspects had the very practical effect of
serving as recruitment tools. We can find excellent resources
for a contemporary ecological socialism appropriate for the whole
planet in Fourierism and other neglected (often reviled) socialist
theorists. This paper will describe some relevant ideas of Fourier,
William Morris, Robert Blatchford, R.H. Tawney, and the Fabian
socialists.
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to the program
ROSEWARNE,
Stuart
Removing the Veil and Reclaiming
Economic Space: Migrant Women Workers, the Hidden Employment and
the Manufacture of Transnational Identities
Session: Ecosocialism,
Feminism, and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15, TEL 0016)
Feminist scholarship has been critically important in documenting
the changing patterns of international migration and, more particularly,
in unveiling the predominance of migrant women workers in the
contemporary era of international migration. This has been crucial
to contesting the tendency for women migrants to be treated as
invisible in this global movement of people. It has also prompted,
if not necessitated a rethinking of – via a gendering of – theories
of international migration. One emphasis, largely formed within
a socialist-feminist framework, has been preoccupied with revealing
the subordinate position of many migrant women workers. Here the
emphasis has been on documenting the distinct labour market experiences
of migrant women workers, on women concentrated in the informal
sphere of the economy, working as domestic workers and sex workers.
A contrasting emphasis has focused the migrant experience in the
definition of identity, in an unveiling of migrant workers’ differential
experiences to explore the multiplicity of factors – familial,
political, economic, social, cultural and symbolic – that structure
place within the host nation and thereby give voice to transnsationalism.
This paper seeks to take issue with these emphases by examining
the struggles of migrant women workers who are contesting dominant
institutionalised constructions of economic identity. The study
will focus on ways in which migrant women workers are organising
to regularise informal sector and clandestine work and redress
the institutionalised invisibility and labour market marginalisation
across the occupational spectrum. This leads on to consideration
of how collective organising has assumed a transnational dimension,
based on political links as well as economic exchanges and investments.
One particular concern will be to analyse the importance of the
construction of transnational identities in providing leverage
for progressing political and industrial claims in the pursuit
of women negotiating a place in the public sphere of the economy.
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RUDY,
Alan
Revisiting the Second Contradiction
and its Critics
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)
My paper responds to the criticisms of the second contradiction
by Foster/Burkett, Benton, Dickens, Sandler and Martin Spence.
In short, there are flawed tendencies to a) conflate "conditions"
with "nature"; b) abstract the theory from the changing
historical materiality and movements associated with conditions
of (re)production; and c) collapse the macroscopic/modal scale
and inter- relatedness of the second contradiction with local/formal
and discrete environmental crises. These misunderstandings generate
contradictory claims that O'Connor is overly-determinist and -contextualist,
overly-pessimistic and -ptimistic. Some of this derives from O'Connor's
own stress on ecological over the personal and communal conditions.
I stress the relation of the second contradiction to Fiscal Crisis
of the State and O'Connor's work on "culture" and the
capitalist mode of cooperation in a clarification of the roots,
intent, and efficacy of the theory.
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SALLEH, Ariel
Neo-Liberal Denial: an ecofeminist
reflection on the genetic engineering industry
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
(Sunday 10:00
, TEL 0014
)
This paper is an ecofeminist reflection
on the genetic engineering industry, highlighting contradictions
in its discourse and practice. These contradictions are symptomatic
of the denial of human interconnection with living ecosystems,
and they serve well to legitimate neo-liberal enclosure and commodification
of nature. As ecofeminists see it, the socially constructed divide
between humanity and nature is foundational to Western capitalist
patriarchal institutions. These include economics and science,
ethics and the law. In genetic engineering, this dissociation
shows up in the ontological split between humanity v nature; in
the epistemological schism between determinism v fluid genomics;
in the methodological fracture between fact v value in risk assessment;
the semantic disconnect between patent originality v substantial
equivalence; in the neo-liberal policy distinction between coexistence
v colonisation; and in the democratic contradiction of us v them.
The global consequences of genetic engineering are irreversible,
so it's critical that our political deliberations challenge this
industry at every turn.
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SANDBERG,
L. Anders (with Gerda R.WEKERLE)
Please see abstract listed under WEKERLE,
Gerda R.
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SCHAFFER,
Harwood (with John GULICK)
Please see abstract listed under GULICK,
John.
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SMITH,
Neil
Making Nature’s Nation
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
V
(Sunday 11:45
, TEL 0016)
George Bush has told us: "Liberty is universal.... Liberty
is the natural desire of all people." As such, Bush harks
directly back to an eighteenth century confusion of nature, liberalism
and Americanism that has become virtually instinctive in western
thought. This paper argues that western ideologies of nature are
not only the preserve of an environmental politics but are alive
and well, profoundly influential, in a broader popular discourse
and that alternatives have to take seriously the centrality of
labour in our understanding of nature. It critiques the connections
of nature, liberalism and Americanism that are suddenly back on
the intellectual agenda.
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SPERBER,
Irwin
Structural and Ideological
Contradictions in the Environmental Movement: Why the Movement
is Dead in the Water and What to Do About It
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice
(Saturday
9:30
, TEL 0010)
Much criticism has been directed at environmental organizations
for their lack of effectiveness, their ambiguity over objectives,
and their failure to reach a broad consensus even on the meaning
of “environmentalism” itself. In view of the predatory track record
of corporate polluters, mature capitalist societies are precisely
the ones in which the need for a strong environmental movement
is most urgent. At the same time, these societies have potent
obstacles standing in the way of such a movement’s emergence.
The most prevalent of these obstacles include: (1) an extreme
dependence on foundations and agencies that selectively award
funding to organizations that are cautious and non-confrontational
in their mode of political discourse and withhold it from those
that are militant, disruptive, or “irresponsible;” (2) a preoccupation
with maintaining special taxation status (e. g., “tax exempt”
or eligible for tax-deductible donations) in compliance with criteria
imposed by agencies of state power; (3) an internal chain of command
that reflects, reinforces, and runs parallel to that of a multinational
corporation: a board of directors and chief executive officer
that excludes the rank-and-file from decision-making and operates
at a high level of secrecy; and, (4) an ideology of scapegoating
and shifting responsibility for organizational failure exclusively
to anyone or anything outside the organization so that no candid
self-examination of such failure or self-correction can take place.
Heightened self-awareness regarding these obstacles is the first
of several steps necessary to mobilize the environmental movement.
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TURNER, Terisa E. (and Leigh S. BROWNHILL)
The Future in the Present Oil Wars
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics IV
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0014)
The future in the present oil wars is two-fold. First there is a strike in the production of labour power. Evidence of this strike is the global use of nudity by women to express their refusal of oil wars and the destruction of oil exploitation itself. Second there is a strike in the production and consumption of oil. The refusal to produce has in the new century been expressed significantly by women who have forced shut-downs of petroleum production because the curse of oil has made life impossible. The refusal to consume has been expressed worldwide through many boycotts of major petroleum corporations. This coordinated production- consumption strike denies oil capital its commodity and markets. Therefore it undermines the power and existence of these corporations in a fundamental way. Both strikes have their positive promises. Women’s nakedness strike against death affirms a life-centred as opposed to profit-centred political economy and morality. The simultaneous production-consumption strike provides organizational groundings for direct deals in which producers and consumers themselves attribute value to the exchange. This auto-valuation is premised on producer and consumer control. Such control is a necessary condition for bringing to an end the combustion of hydrocarbons and hence global warming. The prominence of women in these two strikes follows from the fact that women are at the centre of both the creation and the use of the four foci (nature, unpaid work, social services and built space) of enclosure and destruction by globalizing capital. The trenchant defense by women and their allies of these crucial bases of life has provoked corporate resource wars. If we understand and join the two strikes at the heart of these wars we enhance the possibilities of victory, understood as life for all.
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VAN
HOOREWEGHE, Kristen L.
Intersecting Capitalism,
Patriarchy, and the Environment: Looking at the NAFTA through
a Gendered Lens
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)
As a result of increased pressure from non-governmental organization
(NGOs) and from women throughout the world, development organizations
have begun to recognize the importance for integrating gender
into their policies and strategies. The problem however, is that
this integration serves the interests of capital accumulation
and is not necessarily in the best interest of women. Rhetoric
such as globalization, free trade, development, and progress are
being used by governments, international institutions, and NGOs
without critical consideration of the capitalist and patriarchal
system in which they are embedded. This research seeks to examine
the consequences by analyzing the impacts of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the women of North America. Under
NAFTA capital accumulation is prioritized over other components
of development such as adequate working conditions, access to
health care, and a clean environment. NAFTA’s inability to extend
beyond a neoliberal approach to incorporate women reproduces the
capitalist patriarchal hierarchy and contributes to the powerlessness
of women in North America. The intersection of capitalism, patriarchy,
class, labor, and the environment must be examined to gain a better
understanding of what development should mean for all and not
simply for Western patriarchal ideology. Examining NAFTA with
a renewed focus on the sexual division of labor and the four social
relations of production, reproduction, sexuality, and child rearing
and socialization, will reveal the inadequacies of NAFTA as a
development strategy in promoting human and environmental advancement
in a capitalist patriarchal system, particularly for women in
northern Mexico.
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VAN
WAGNER, Estair
Participatory Democracy in the Global City: Promise and Potential
for Urban Environmental Justice
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)
As the forces of global ecologies and political economies converge
to shape and define urban life, global city governance is increasingly
defined and constrained by worldwide networks and the problems
of scale. In the face of globalization, participatory democratic
approaches are being looked to as potential tools to democratize
local governance and meet the challenges of ecological injustice
at the local level. With citizens playing a direct role in deciding
the financial priorities and planning of the region, participatory
budgeting has emerged in Brazil as the most concrete representation
of participatory democracy. It promises a tool to democratize
local governance and confront issues of wealth distribution, poverty
and environmental injustice. From an urban political ecology perspective
this research examines the potential for participatory budgeting
in Toronto as a tool for social and environmental justice. As
a global city embedded in the neo-liberal political economic structure
of trans-national capitalism, Toronto is participant in and subject
to global flows of people, capital and ideas which shape and define
the possibilities for the democratization of urban governance.
Does participatory budgeting in the context of North American
cities have the potential to challenge neo-liberal capitalism
and empower oppressed and marginalized communities to redefine
ecological and economic relationships? If so, the promise of participatory
democracy for environmental justice lies in the simultaneous structural
change to the legal and political foundations of local governance,
and the cultivation of a radically different political culture
that questions neo-liberal capitalism and articulates an alternative
political-economic framework.
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VINZ,
Dagmar
Gender, Nature, and Time
Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Sustainability
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15
, TEL 0016)
Only if economic, social and ecological times are coordinated,
paths for sustainability will be opened up. Socio-ecological time
politics is thus a key to sustainability and the transformation
of time pattern in society is necessary for an ecologically sustainable
and gender equal future. In the context of globalization, however,
a time concept gains hegemony, which is characterized by the appreciation
of speed, flexibility and short-term decisions. Globalization
processes go hand in hand both with the expansion in space and
with the acceleration in time, and form a basis for the turn to
a new flexible capitalism. Instead of leaving processes of ecological
and social reproduction their time both the societal relation
to nature and gender relations are transformed by current tendencies
of acceleration and speed in society, economy and culture. In
my presentation I first want to describe the transformation of
time structures in the context of globalization and then give
examples for its effects on nature and gender relations. I will
especially refer to examples which are related to the production
and consumption of industrial food. The question is how the crisis
of social and ecological reproduction are interlinked. In the
last part I want to present my consideration on perspectives for
socio-ecological time politics which are designed to challenge
the hegemonic time concept and to promote ecological sustainability
and gender justice. This will include concrete considerations
how to implement time politics as an essential part of sustainability
strategies.
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WALLIS,
Victor
Socialism and Technology:
A Sectoral Overview
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)
This paper goes beyond general comparisons of socialist with capitalist
technology to focus on particular sectors of economic activity.
The goal is to provide a concise but representative overview of
the ways in which capitalist priorities have conditioned the development
of the various spheres of activity and then to discuss, in each
case, what sector-specific responses would be consistent with
an overall socialist approach. I view socialism in explicitly
ecological as well as social/economic terms, based on the contention
(found already in Marx) that the natural world as well as humanity
- most immediately, the working class- is put at risk by the drive
for accumulation and profit. I see the need to pursue this line
of inquiry as having become more rather than less urgent following
the end of socialism’s first epoch. The problems which occasioned
the original socialist project - poverty, war, technological domination
- have not been attenuated but rather have deepened. The sectors
considered in my paper are grouped as follows: 1) agriculture/forests/
fisheries, 2) industry/transport/energy, 3) information/communications/education,
4) surveillance/repression/military, 5) public health and healthcare
services. In discussing the capitalist impact on these sectors,
I draw on recent research to argue that the distorting effects
of the corporate agenda—and of governmental policies geared to
it—have reached extreme levels, not only in environmental terms,
but also in terms of new and unhealthy patterns of human behavior.
All this makes socialist transformation at once more difficult
and more urgent than it was in an earlier period.
view Victor Wallis' paper
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WEISSMAN,
Evan L.
Urban Agriculture’s Promise in a “Developing” World: Cuba as a
Case Study
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology
I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)
The neoliberal model of “development” has particularly detrimental
effects on agriculture. Worldwide, hunger continues to pose great
problems for the whole of humanity. Despite popular belief, hunger
is not a problem of food availability, but caused by unequal distribution
exacerbated by neoliberal development. Agriculture once supported
capital accumulation, as technological advances would boost food
production and thus free up sources of labor. Now, food itself
is a commodity, and agriculture directly serves to foster capital
accumulation. Additionally, as agriculture becomes less labor
intensive and land is ever more unavailable for cultivation, the
world’s population becomes increasingly urbanized. The commodification
of agriculture and the growing urban identity of world populations
devastate global food security. This paper examines the promise
of urban agriculture to enhance food security, focusing on the
success of Cuba. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 undermined
Cuban food security, as former subsidies were no longer available.
To feed its population, Cuba initiated the largest organic agriculture
effort in history. In doing so, Cuba successful thwarted potentially
devastating hunger and possible famine. Although much has been
written on Cuba’s success, often overlooked is urban agriculture
and the unmistakable popular characteristic of the movement. A
systematic examination of the Cuban case exemplifies the importance
and feasibility of urban agriculture and provides a model for
other nations. Degradation of the planet is inextricably linked
to the degrading conditions of life for the majority of the world
population. Cuba provides a model for simultaneously addressing
the root of both.
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WEKERLE,
Gerda R. (with L. Anders SANDBERG)
Contested Natures, Land and Development: The Emergence of Bioregional Citizenship in an Exurban Region
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation and Political Ecology
I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)
In the recent years, the Oak Ridges Moraine has gone from a landform seldom mentioned to iconic status in environmental protection. The ORM has emerged as a bioregion that is seen as sacred nature to be preserved. The bioregional focus on a land ethic that links human and non-human nature and an economy of nature challenges some of the basic principles underlying both the commodification of nature and of property within capitalist economies. While bioregionalism has emerged as a major scientific and academic discourse, and it also became a political tool to allegedly resist or fight sprawl. Environmental mobilization against urban sprawl on the moraine brought together unlikely alliances of groups whose interests seemed mutually exclusive or even opposed. This presentation will focus on the tensions and intersections of different actors (environmentalists, homeowners, planners, farmers, quarry owners, developers, etc) in the development of “bioregional citizenships” over the struggles for nature, land, and economic development. It therefore raises questions about the extent to which the bioregional conservation agenda serves to further extend and create a stable environment for capitalist development and neoliberal governance models by strategies to control land and nature associated with policies characterized by privatization, exclusion and constraints on deliberative democracy.
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WELSH, Ian (with Graeme CHESTERS)
Please see abstract listed under CHESTERS, Graeme.
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WILSON, Zoe J.
States, Socialism and Sanitation:
Challenges from Africa
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics III
(Sunday
10:00, TEL 0010)
According to the World Health Organization 80% of all diseases and 25% of deaths
in the developing world are caused by polluted water. More than 90% of waste
water worldwide is discharged into the environment either uncontrolled or after
unsatisfactory treatment. Simultaneously the spectre water of water scarcity is
creeping across the globe. In Africa alone, 300 million, one third of the
continent’s population already live under conditions of acute water scarcity.
Yet, in some circles, the mindset that remains that developing countries we’ll
just follow the model the industrialized countries, which is to pipe pressurized
safe water 24/7 to everybody. Paradoxically, at the same time, conventional
waste water systems are increasingly seen as systems where drinking water is
misused to transport waste into the water cycle, causing environmental damage
and hygienic hazards. More daunting still is that in most of Sub-Saharan African
today, countries lack either water availability, investment dollars, capacity,
political will, or all of the above, to address urgent water and sanitation
issues. Where, then, can urgent solutions lie for the people who the live the
consequences, in the short, medium and largely unpredictable longer terms?
Drawing on examples from across Africa, this paper weighs the pros and cons of
emerging philosophies and technologies associated with “appropriate” water and
sanitation solutions and the challenges they pose to traditional approaches to
“nature, capitalism, socialism.”
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WISSEN, Markus
Urban Politics and the Commercialization
of Infrastructure in the Water Sector
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Sunday
10:00, TEL 0006)
Urban technical networks are "the mediators through which the perpetual process
of transformation of nature into city takes place" (Maria Kaika and Erik
Swyngedouw). In the Fordist phase of capitalism they were more or less hidden
and considered as neutral elements of the urban fabric. With the crisis of
Fordism and the accelerated neoliberal restructuring, however, they became
increasingly contested. In search for a post-Fordist "spatial fix" (David
Harvey), which could contribute to solving problems of over-accumulation of
capital, private business discovered the former publicly driven infrastructural
networks in the water, energy or telecommunication sector as an interesting
field for investment. In doing so it was supported by the privatisation and
liberalisation policies of neoliberal governments on a local, national and
European scale. The result often was an infrastructural unbundling within which
the "cherries" were commercialised whereas the less lucrative rest remained
under public control. The proposed contribution to the CNS conference will take
the commercialisation of networked infrastructures as a lens through which
recent developments of urban politics and urban political ecology are observed.
Starting from empirical evidence in the water sector of German cities it will be
shown how infrastructural commercialisation goes along with a rescaling of urban
politics and with an accelerated introduction of entrepreneurial elements into
the governance of cities. Furthermore it will look at the distributional
consequences of these processes and ask to what extent new forms of uneven
development are produced.
view Markus Wissen's paper
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