Sara’s Reviews > Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital > Status Update

"The greatest problem of the twenty-first century may well not be one of resource “taps” at all. The end of cheap garbage may loom larger than the end of cheap resources."

"The rise of capitalism launched a new way of organizing nature, mobilizing for the first time a metric of wealth premised on labor productivity rather than land productivity."

"For capitalism is impossible to understand as a closed system; the endless accumulation of capital is the endless internalization of nature. Capitalism is defined by frontier movement." - yep.

"An ingenious civilizational project has been at the core of this strategy, to construct nature as external to human activity, and thence to mobilize the work of uncommodified human and extra-human natures in service to advancing labor productivity within commodity production.".

"The end of Cheap Food may well be the end of modernity, and the start of something much better."

"We can say with some confidence that food—not just land—has become a central site of the world class struggle in a way that is entirely unprecedented, and unthinkable even three decades ago."

"The novelty of neoliberalism’s peculiar agricultural revolution is found in a strange mix of finance and empire, combined with coercive overproduction and forced underconsumption—without a productivity revolution"

It took about 2.5 calories of energy to deliver a calorie of food in the 1930s. The ratio then moved sharply upwards, to 7.5:1 in the 1950s, and 10:1 by the early 1970s.56 By the twenty-first century, fifteen-to-twenty calories were needed to deliver one calorie of food from farm to table, considerably more for globally sourced fruit."

"The hybrid revolution was, however, won at a heavy cost to farmer autonomy. Because hybrid crops, in contrast to open-pollinated ones, produce seed of inferior quality, hybridization “uncouples” seed from grain. This compelled farmers to make an annual pilgrimage to seed stores to purchase new seeds."

"How does capital accumulation work in an era of post-peak appropriation?"- financialization and ICT have staved off the peakagain, appropriation continues through other means.