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Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change
This exciting new reader in environmental history provides a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world-systems over time. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier have brought together a group of the prominent social scientists, historians, and geographical scientists to provide a historical overview of the ecological dimension of global economic processes. Readers are challenged to integrate studies of the Earth-system with studies of the world-system, and to reconceptualize the relations between human beings and their environment, as well as the challenges of global sustainability.
426 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
198 people want to read
About the author
Alf Hornborg
25 books21 followersAlf Hornborg, Ph.D. (Cultural Anthropology, University of Uppsala, 1986), is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden. Previously he taught at Uppsala University and University of Gothenburg. He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Ecological Anthropology, Signs,, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Ecological and Environmental Anthropology.
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March 18, 2023
4.5 stars.
Comps reading. I really enjoyed most of the chapters in this edited volume, which was in some measure Marxian environmental history that extended the work of Wallerstein (and in my view Lenin, though he is only mentioned twice in this whole book). I think environmental history benefits a lot from worlds-systems theory because that sort of work better accounts for imperialism, core and periphery dynamics, and uneven development globally — a lot more than some of the other environmental history out there. Wallerstein names, among his main influences, Fanon, Braudel, and Prigogine. And I typically appreciate the types of questions that emerge from that influence. The last chapter in this volume was contributed by Wallerstein himself, who writes:
“While some environmental historians analyze this symbiotic (and in many ways) hostile relationship of humans and the natural environment (especially the soil, what grows on it, what is located under it) as a continuous historical reality, others see a dramatic worsening of this constant with the advent of capitalism as the defining system of the modern world, what Marx discussed as the "metabolic rift," a theme taken up in some detail in recent years by John Bellamy Foster (2000),3 and discussed as the "second contradiction of capitalism" by James O'Connor.
The basic difference between a capitalist system and other kinds of historical systems is the minimization of effective constraints on the endless accumulation of capital, which is the defining feature of a capitalist system. This is why capitalism may be said to have created "a new, historically unprecedented relationship ... between the economic process and nature" (Deleage 1994:38). Under capitalism, the search for profits necessarily presses producers to reduce their costs at the two key bioeconomic moments, that of the extraction of raw materials and that of the elimination of the waste of the productive process.5 The behavior that maximizes the profits of any given producer is to pay absolutely nothing for the renewal of natural re- sources and next to nothing for waste disposal. This so-called externalization of costs puts the financial burden on everyone else, which has historically meant that, for the most part, no one has paid. This therefore has meant, as J. R. McNeill (2002:11) has put it, that the "most serious overexploitation" of nature has been at precisely these two points: "sinks for wastes" and "renewable, biological resources.""
Wallerstein goes on to discuss the question of environmental reparations, which is interesting to see in a book published in 2007:
“But what are the moral questions? First of all, there is the question of reparations. As we know, environmental damage may have affected all people, but it has not affected all people equally. There are important class differentials. Even if damage is diffuse, one can escape some of its effects with money. Even more important, there are significant geographic differentials, which correlate highly with the core-periphery axial division of labor. This is why Martinez-Alier (2002:ch. 10) can speak of an"ecological debt" resulting from both the uncompensated negative externalities of raw materials-exporting countries and the use by wealthy states of the space of poorer countries for such things as carbon dioxide sinks.
This is of course not some terrible accident. It was built into the structure of the capitalist system from the beginning. Moore (2003:309) states this well:
‘The "local" environmental transformations precipitated by these [expand- ing] frontiers [ofEurope] were not simply consequences ofEuropean expansion; they were in equal measure constitutive of such expansion, condition as well as consequence. Degradation and relative exhaustion in one region after another were followed by recurrent waves of global expansion aimed at securing fresh supplies of land and labor, and thence to renewed and extended cycles of unsustainable development on a world-scale.’”
Moore has a whole chapter on deforestation and mining in this book, that Alf Hornborg summarizes in this way:
“Deforestation plays an important role also in chapter 6, where geographer Jason Moore applies Wallerstein's perspective to the sixteenth-century relocation of silver mining from central Europe to Potosi in present-day Bolivia. For Wallerstein and Moore, the early modern expansion ofEurope expressed a new kind of specifically capitalist socioecological relations predicated on the endless accumulation of capital and the export of environmental problems (cf. Moore 2003). In the mid-fifteenth century, the mining of silver, iron, lead, copper, zinc, and tin in central Europe had maintained the Roman legacy by seriously degrading the environment through air and water pollution, destruction of fisheries and wildlife, widespread deforestation, and soil erosion. The relocation of silver extraction to the New World offered not only richer ore deposits and cheaper labor power, but also displacement of a highly polluting industry. When ore quality and silver output at Potosi declined, the Spaniards devised a new technology for extracting silver from the ore as well as a system of forced labor drafts to keep the reluctant Andean miners working. The intensive mining activities brought severe deforestation, soil erosion, and floods. Moore suggests that the dual strategy of intensifying technological inputs and securing cheaper labor power represents a recurrent pattern of temporarily checking rising costs that is characteristic of early modern commodity frontiers, for example also the sugar frontier (Moore 2000). The degradation of the landscape and of human bodies was symptomatic of the same capitalist logic. The situation in the colonial New World illustrates most dramatically how the globalization of capital extended what Marx had referred to as the "metabolic rift" between town and country, so as to apply generally to the polarization of production and extraction, or core and periphery. Whether such polarizing tendencies are indeed uniquely "capitalist" in a Wallersteinian, post-fifteenth-century sense is a contested topic within world-systems discourse, but few would deny that the sixteenth-century expansion ofEurope represented some kind of discontinuity in the socio-environmental history of our planet.”
Hornborg, whose environmental history work has attempted to bring together Latour and Marx, also has a chapter in the book on cotton and the industrial revolution, which he summarizes in the introduction like this:
“In chapter 13, I present a similar understanding of the asymmetric relation between centers of industrial development and their extractive peripheries. The argument is based on previous theoretical work on the thermodynamic conditions of an industrial world order (Hornborg 2001), but focuses on the appropriation of land and labor "embodied" in the raw materials imported to Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Using historical statistics on the inputs of land and labor in cotton and wool production, I estimate the amount of British land and labor that were saved by displacing fiber production to North America. By comparing inputs of land and labor in the textile exports of England with those in some commodities imported from its periphery, and juxtaposing these data with exchange rates, I also estimate the unequal exchange of (natural) space and (human) time underlying the Industrial Revolution. Using such methods, it is possible to bring together the Marxist concern with unequal exchanges of labor time, on one hand, with the more recent concern with ecological footprints (i.e. the land requirements of a given level of resource consumption), on the other. Rather than use the contested notion of underpaid "values," however, I am content to show that the earliest stages of industrial capitalism relied on an objectively measurable, unequal exchange of embodied land and labor. Another way of saying this is that technologies for locally saving time and space often tend to draw on investments of time and space (labor and land) in other parts of the world-system.”
Stephen Bunker, who this book was dedicated to after his passing, had a chapter on how development under capitalism would inevitably be uneven, though I disagree with the way he frames Marx’s theory of value. His chapter is summarized in the intro like this:
“Bunker reiterates and expands the argument with which he pioneered the integration of ecology and world-system analysis (Bunker 1985). He posits a structural asymmetry between extractive economies in the periphery and "productive" economies in the core, which has been exacerbated with the increasing spatial separation of extraction and production. The structural polarizations of production versus extraction and of core versus periphery are in fact one and the same. One of his key points is that the dynamics of scale have inverse consequences for productive versus extractive sectors, yielding falling unit costs of production in the former but rising costs in the latter. Furthermore, as resources are depleted or technologies and market demand transformed, extractive economies are unable to sustain the continuous, cumulative development of labor and infrastructure that, by and large, have characterized productive core areas over the past two centuries. To account for such uneven development under capitalism, Bunker chooses to complement the Marxian labor theory of value with a notion of "natural values," which, like labor, are systematically underpaid and realized by the industrial core areas to which they are transferred.”
One of my favourite chapters was the the Joan Martinez-Alier chapter because it covered some of Marx’s engagements with scientists and was a wonderful little history of science piece:
“Martinez-Alier traces the early dialogue between Marxism and natural sciences such as physics and agricultural chemistry on the material dimensions of economic productivity, illustrating the difficulties that continue to plague communication between the social and natural sciences on economic matters. Although Marx was keenly interested in the metabolic flows between urban and rural areas, he did not think of these flows as inherently exploitative or as a constraint on progress, as did Malthus, but was optimistic about new technological remedies such as chemical fertilizers. IfMarx and Engels had paid more attention to Serhii Podolinsky's argument for an integration of thermodynamics and their notions of surplus exploitation, early Marxist theory might have incorporated the kind of sociometabolic perspectives that today provide a foundation for discussions on unequal ecological exchange. Martinez-Alier posits a tendency, over the past few centuries, for a shift in the character of ecologically unequal exchange between cores and peripheries of the world-system. Prior to modern transport technologies, as Wallerstein and so many other scholars have observed, long-distance transfers were largely restricted to "preciosities"
…like silver, spices, and ivory, the extraction of which has considerable ecological consequences in the periphery but slight significance for the metabolism of the core. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the unequal, long-distance exchange of bulk commodities (e.g. sugar, guano, saltpeter) had become crucial to the metabolism of some importing countries in Europe. Whether such sociometabolic connections between world-system cores and peripheries can be traced farther back in history than this is a central issue for several of the chapters in part 1.”
Mats Widgren also had an interesting chapter on Marx’s notion of land-capital. This is a brief little excerpt:
"If we are to search for antecedents to Brookfield's definition of landesque capital, it is in fact in Karl Marx's definition of "la terre-capital" or "land-capital" that more closely allied terms are to be found. With these terms, Marx meant that capital was "fixed in the land, incorporated in it" either in a transitory manner or on a more permanent basis (Marx 1959:618-619). Marx was well aware of the role that different kinds of land improvement could play, as well as the ways in which this capital could be devalued through improper use."
I also found Helga Weisz’s chapter combining the Input-Output economics of Soviet economist Wassily Leontief (who Anwar Shaikh is highly influenced by) and social metabolic analysis really interesting:
“More than fifty years ago, Wassily Leontief, the creator of input-output economics, asked himself a question that is formally equivalent to the question that I asked above, and developed a method to investigate it empirically. Since the days of Ricardo, economists generally assume that there cannot be such a thing as unequal trade, because trade would be for the benefit of all trading partners. In its neoclassical version this assumption is known as the Heckscher-Ohlin theory, which predicts that each country exports the commodity that intensively uses its most abundant factor of production. For instance, the u.S. economy was considered to be the most capital-intensive in the world (in terms of capital per worker) in 1947, the year for which Leontief made his first empirical test. The Heckscher-Ohlin theory consequently predicted that U.S. exports would require more capital per worker than U.S. imports. Using the 1947 input-output table, Leontief aggregated factor inputs into two categories, labor and capital, and computed the capital and labor requirements to produce imports and exports. He found that, contrary to the Heckscher-Ohlin theory, the u.s. imports were 30 percent more capital-intensive than u.s. exports (Leontief 1956). This empirical result came to be known as the "LeontiefParadox," and it inspired a number of studies aiming at confirming or disproving the paradox, a discussion that continues today (cf. Wolff2004).”
One of the interesting things Weisz mentions in passing is that Southeast Asian countries like Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand were net importers of materials. She seems to imply that this complicates the prevalent notion that they are being subject to unequal exchange relations. I am curious what Weisz means by net importer of materials (is this by weight, volume, dollar value?) because I know for example Canada has a number of times been shamed for the amount of garbage it has shipped to the Philippines. I think many of the commodities that MNCs ship to countries like the Philippines are not that far off from actual garbage. The value of the resources being extracted from the country by mining companies for example seem far more valuable. The Philippines is also a huge source of migrant labour, so lots of remittances are being sent into the country to further strengthen that purchasing power so I’m curious about the details of this net importation dynamic. The issue is Weisz cites a forthcoming publication that I have not been able to track down.
Anyway, there were other more middle of the road environmental historians included in this volume like J. Donald Hughes and J.R. McNeill who I’ve read elsewhere for course readings. But my favourite chapters were those that explicitly engaged with Marxist theory. This is actually not that uncommon in older environmental history (like in Cronon or Worster) but I found these engagements a bit more satisfying. Altogether a fairly enjoyable read.
Comps reading. I really enjoyed most of the chapters in this edited volume, which was in some measure Marxian environmental history that extended the work of Wallerstein (and in my view Lenin, though he is only mentioned twice in this whole book). I think environmental history benefits a lot from worlds-systems theory because that sort of work better accounts for imperialism, core and periphery dynamics, and uneven development globally — a lot more than some of the other environmental history out there. Wallerstein names, among his main influences, Fanon, Braudel, and Prigogine. And I typically appreciate the types of questions that emerge from that influence. The last chapter in this volume was contributed by Wallerstein himself, who writes:
“While some environmental historians analyze this symbiotic (and in many ways) hostile relationship of humans and the natural environment (especially the soil, what grows on it, what is located under it) as a continuous historical reality, others see a dramatic worsening of this constant with the advent of capitalism as the defining system of the modern world, what Marx discussed as the "metabolic rift," a theme taken up in some detail in recent years by John Bellamy Foster (2000),3 and discussed as the "second contradiction of capitalism" by James O'Connor.
The basic difference between a capitalist system and other kinds of historical systems is the minimization of effective constraints on the endless accumulation of capital, which is the defining feature of a capitalist system. This is why capitalism may be said to have created "a new, historically unprecedented relationship ... between the economic process and nature" (Deleage 1994:38). Under capitalism, the search for profits necessarily presses producers to reduce their costs at the two key bioeconomic moments, that of the extraction of raw materials and that of the elimination of the waste of the productive process.5 The behavior that maximizes the profits of any given producer is to pay absolutely nothing for the renewal of natural re- sources and next to nothing for waste disposal. This so-called externalization of costs puts the financial burden on everyone else, which has historically meant that, for the most part, no one has paid. This therefore has meant, as J. R. McNeill (2002:11) has put it, that the "most serious overexploitation" of nature has been at precisely these two points: "sinks for wastes" and "renewable, biological resources.""
Wallerstein goes on to discuss the question of environmental reparations, which is interesting to see in a book published in 2007:
“But what are the moral questions? First of all, there is the question of reparations. As we know, environmental damage may have affected all people, but it has not affected all people equally. There are important class differentials. Even if damage is diffuse, one can escape some of its effects with money. Even more important, there are significant geographic differentials, which correlate highly with the core-periphery axial division of labor. This is why Martinez-Alier (2002:ch. 10) can speak of an"ecological debt" resulting from both the uncompensated negative externalities of raw materials-exporting countries and the use by wealthy states of the space of poorer countries for such things as carbon dioxide sinks.
This is of course not some terrible accident. It was built into the structure of the capitalist system from the beginning. Moore (2003:309) states this well:
‘The "local" environmental transformations precipitated by these [expand- ing] frontiers [ofEurope] were not simply consequences ofEuropean expansion; they were in equal measure constitutive of such expansion, condition as well as consequence. Degradation and relative exhaustion in one region after another were followed by recurrent waves of global expansion aimed at securing fresh supplies of land and labor, and thence to renewed and extended cycles of unsustainable development on a world-scale.’”
Moore has a whole chapter on deforestation and mining in this book, that Alf Hornborg summarizes in this way:
“Deforestation plays an important role also in chapter 6, where geographer Jason Moore applies Wallerstein's perspective to the sixteenth-century relocation of silver mining from central Europe to Potosi in present-day Bolivia. For Wallerstein and Moore, the early modern expansion ofEurope expressed a new kind of specifically capitalist socioecological relations predicated on the endless accumulation of capital and the export of environmental problems (cf. Moore 2003). In the mid-fifteenth century, the mining of silver, iron, lead, copper, zinc, and tin in central Europe had maintained the Roman legacy by seriously degrading the environment through air and water pollution, destruction of fisheries and wildlife, widespread deforestation, and soil erosion. The relocation of silver extraction to the New World offered not only richer ore deposits and cheaper labor power, but also displacement of a highly polluting industry. When ore quality and silver output at Potosi declined, the Spaniards devised a new technology for extracting silver from the ore as well as a system of forced labor drafts to keep the reluctant Andean miners working. The intensive mining activities brought severe deforestation, soil erosion, and floods. Moore suggests that the dual strategy of intensifying technological inputs and securing cheaper labor power represents a recurrent pattern of temporarily checking rising costs that is characteristic of early modern commodity frontiers, for example also the sugar frontier (Moore 2000). The degradation of the landscape and of human bodies was symptomatic of the same capitalist logic. The situation in the colonial New World illustrates most dramatically how the globalization of capital extended what Marx had referred to as the "metabolic rift" between town and country, so as to apply generally to the polarization of production and extraction, or core and periphery. Whether such polarizing tendencies are indeed uniquely "capitalist" in a Wallersteinian, post-fifteenth-century sense is a contested topic within world-systems discourse, but few would deny that the sixteenth-century expansion ofEurope represented some kind of discontinuity in the socio-environmental history of our planet.”
Hornborg, whose environmental history work has attempted to bring together Latour and Marx, also has a chapter in the book on cotton and the industrial revolution, which he summarizes in the introduction like this:
“In chapter 13, I present a similar understanding of the asymmetric relation between centers of industrial development and their extractive peripheries. The argument is based on previous theoretical work on the thermodynamic conditions of an industrial world order (Hornborg 2001), but focuses on the appropriation of land and labor "embodied" in the raw materials imported to Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Using historical statistics on the inputs of land and labor in cotton and wool production, I estimate the amount of British land and labor that were saved by displacing fiber production to North America. By comparing inputs of land and labor in the textile exports of England with those in some commodities imported from its periphery, and juxtaposing these data with exchange rates, I also estimate the unequal exchange of (natural) space and (human) time underlying the Industrial Revolution. Using such methods, it is possible to bring together the Marxist concern with unequal exchanges of labor time, on one hand, with the more recent concern with ecological footprints (i.e. the land requirements of a given level of resource consumption), on the other. Rather than use the contested notion of underpaid "values," however, I am content to show that the earliest stages of industrial capitalism relied on an objectively measurable, unequal exchange of embodied land and labor. Another way of saying this is that technologies for locally saving time and space often tend to draw on investments of time and space (labor and land) in other parts of the world-system.”
Stephen Bunker, who this book was dedicated to after his passing, had a chapter on how development under capitalism would inevitably be uneven, though I disagree with the way he frames Marx’s theory of value. His chapter is summarized in the intro like this:
“Bunker reiterates and expands the argument with which he pioneered the integration of ecology and world-system analysis (Bunker 1985). He posits a structural asymmetry between extractive economies in the periphery and "productive" economies in the core, which has been exacerbated with the increasing spatial separation of extraction and production. The structural polarizations of production versus extraction and of core versus periphery are in fact one and the same. One of his key points is that the dynamics of scale have inverse consequences for productive versus extractive sectors, yielding falling unit costs of production in the former but rising costs in the latter. Furthermore, as resources are depleted or technologies and market demand transformed, extractive economies are unable to sustain the continuous, cumulative development of labor and infrastructure that, by and large, have characterized productive core areas over the past two centuries. To account for such uneven development under capitalism, Bunker chooses to complement the Marxian labor theory of value with a notion of "natural values," which, like labor, are systematically underpaid and realized by the industrial core areas to which they are transferred.”
One of my favourite chapters was the the Joan Martinez-Alier chapter because it covered some of Marx’s engagements with scientists and was a wonderful little history of science piece:
“Martinez-Alier traces the early dialogue between Marxism and natural sciences such as physics and agricultural chemistry on the material dimensions of economic productivity, illustrating the difficulties that continue to plague communication between the social and natural sciences on economic matters. Although Marx was keenly interested in the metabolic flows between urban and rural areas, he did not think of these flows as inherently exploitative or as a constraint on progress, as did Malthus, but was optimistic about new technological remedies such as chemical fertilizers. IfMarx and Engels had paid more attention to Serhii Podolinsky's argument for an integration of thermodynamics and their notions of surplus exploitation, early Marxist theory might have incorporated the kind of sociometabolic perspectives that today provide a foundation for discussions on unequal ecological exchange. Martinez-Alier posits a tendency, over the past few centuries, for a shift in the character of ecologically unequal exchange between cores and peripheries of the world-system. Prior to modern transport technologies, as Wallerstein and so many other scholars have observed, long-distance transfers were largely restricted to "preciosities"
…like silver, spices, and ivory, the extraction of which has considerable ecological consequences in the periphery but slight significance for the metabolism of the core. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the unequal, long-distance exchange of bulk commodities (e.g. sugar, guano, saltpeter) had become crucial to the metabolism of some importing countries in Europe. Whether such sociometabolic connections between world-system cores and peripheries can be traced farther back in history than this is a central issue for several of the chapters in part 1.”
Mats Widgren also had an interesting chapter on Marx’s notion of land-capital. This is a brief little excerpt:
"If we are to search for antecedents to Brookfield's definition of landesque capital, it is in fact in Karl Marx's definition of "la terre-capital" or "land-capital" that more closely allied terms are to be found. With these terms, Marx meant that capital was "fixed in the land, incorporated in it" either in a transitory manner or on a more permanent basis (Marx 1959:618-619). Marx was well aware of the role that different kinds of land improvement could play, as well as the ways in which this capital could be devalued through improper use."
I also found Helga Weisz’s chapter combining the Input-Output economics of Soviet economist Wassily Leontief (who Anwar Shaikh is highly influenced by) and social metabolic analysis really interesting:
“More than fifty years ago, Wassily Leontief, the creator of input-output economics, asked himself a question that is formally equivalent to the question that I asked above, and developed a method to investigate it empirically. Since the days of Ricardo, economists generally assume that there cannot be such a thing as unequal trade, because trade would be for the benefit of all trading partners. In its neoclassical version this assumption is known as the Heckscher-Ohlin theory, which predicts that each country exports the commodity that intensively uses its most abundant factor of production. For instance, the u.S. economy was considered to be the most capital-intensive in the world (in terms of capital per worker) in 1947, the year for which Leontief made his first empirical test. The Heckscher-Ohlin theory consequently predicted that U.S. exports would require more capital per worker than U.S. imports. Using the 1947 input-output table, Leontief aggregated factor inputs into two categories, labor and capital, and computed the capital and labor requirements to produce imports and exports. He found that, contrary to the Heckscher-Ohlin theory, the u.s. imports were 30 percent more capital-intensive than u.s. exports (Leontief 1956). This empirical result came to be known as the "LeontiefParadox," and it inspired a number of studies aiming at confirming or disproving the paradox, a discussion that continues today (cf. Wolff2004).”
One of the interesting things Weisz mentions in passing is that Southeast Asian countries like Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand were net importers of materials. She seems to imply that this complicates the prevalent notion that they are being subject to unequal exchange relations. I am curious what Weisz means by net importer of materials (is this by weight, volume, dollar value?) because I know for example Canada has a number of times been shamed for the amount of garbage it has shipped to the Philippines. I think many of the commodities that MNCs ship to countries like the Philippines are not that far off from actual garbage. The value of the resources being extracted from the country by mining companies for example seem far more valuable. The Philippines is also a huge source of migrant labour, so lots of remittances are being sent into the country to further strengthen that purchasing power so I’m curious about the details of this net importation dynamic. The issue is Weisz cites a forthcoming publication that I have not been able to track down.
Anyway, there were other more middle of the road environmental historians included in this volume like J. Donald Hughes and J.R. McNeill who I’ve read elsewhere for course readings. But my favourite chapters were those that explicitly engaged with Marxist theory. This is actually not that uncommon in older environmental history (like in Cronon or Worster) but I found these engagements a bit more satisfying. Altogether a fairly enjoyable read.
May 28, 2012
This volume took a while to get into, but once I broke through the initial tedium I was actually quite pleased with its analyses and thought provocations. A good volume to read when one is trying to understand such current predicaments as the possible extinction of orangutans due to palm oil production or Germany getting rid of nuclear energy in order to improve their green image, but instead importing dirty coal power from elsewhere, etc. I also found the arguments helpful in illuminating the metropolitan theory of Canadian history.
May 13, 2011
good slog through history with an eye toward the role of environmental degradation, which is older than civilization.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews