The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm
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we really say that the climate of planet Earth, as a major component of nature, is independent of human activity – not created by humans? Is it not precisely the other way around now? This would seem to be a case for the theory of ‘the production of nature’. Laid out by Neil Smith in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, it says that nature is anything but independent; it might have been so in some distant pre-human mist but no longer. Nowadays, nature is produced to the core, from within, in its totality, as the forces of capital reshuffle and rework matter in accordance with their logic. When did primeval nature succumb to such awesome social power? Smith is unclear on this point. In some passages, he seems to argue that the production of nature is indeed a phenomenon specific to capitalism; in others, he hints at a much earlier date of human annexation. Unproduced nature ceases to exist wherever one species has set foot: ‘Human beings have produced whatever nature became accessible to them’ – not only over the past few centuries, but as long as they have cuddled in caves and foraged in forests.20 Here, the purpose of the theory seems to be not so much to track a historical shift as to collapse the natural into the social altogether, irrespective of dates and epochs, a priori as it were. Indeed, Smith posits ‘a social priority of nature; nature is nothing if it is not social.’21 One geographer who has often stood up for his theory, Noel Castree, states that it ‘is intended to oppose the idea of an independent, non-social nature’, postulating a fusion ‘from the very start’.22
What are the analytical gains of this move? In the first edition of his classic from 1984, Smith precociously mentions anthropogenic climate change as one instance of the production of nature, but in the afterword to the third edition from 2008, he has something else to say: we cannot know to what extent the climate is changing due to human activities.23 Even trying would presuppose the false separation.
The attempt to distinguish social vis-à-vis natural contributions to climate change is not only a fool’s debate but a fool’s philosophy: it leaves sacrosanct the chasm between nature and society – nature in one corner, society in the other – which is precisely the shibboleth of modern western thought that ‘the production of nature’ thesis sought to corrode.24
This sounds like an admission that the theory would not, after all, be very relevant for the study of global warming. If we must refrain from saying that it is caused by social and not by natural factors – distinguishing the two: singling out one, ruling out the other – how could we acknowledge its existence, let alone investigate it as a result of history?
In Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy, the most illuminating piece of work to emerge from that subdiscipline since Soper, Simon Hailwood underscores that the very notion of anthropogenic causation requires one of independent nature. ‘If it is important to say that humans made this, caused that, are responsible for such and such, then we need to run the idea of at least some occurrences as not of our doing’ – as that which, in our case, preceded the fossil economy and would have continued without it: the typical Holocene climate.25 As Smith himself admits, one cannot catch sight of global warming if one has removed the background of non-social nature (hence, in his logic, only a fool would try).26 It seems to follow that some sort of distinction between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ remains indispensable, both for research on the history of the fossil economy and for climate science as such; in the field of event attribution, incidentally, simulation of recent storms is contrasted to models of what the weather would have been like in the absence of human influence.27 That is how the historical imprint is detected.
But still: is not the climate of today precisely produced? Retaining a nature without human influence in counterfactual computer models is certainly not a way to prove its continued existence. Might the theory be useful if restricted to the past two centuries? To explore this possibility, we must turn to some other attempts to pursue the intuition that nature is now social all the way down.
THE END OF NATURE?
In 1990, one year after Jameson’s Postmodernism was published, Bill McKibben proclaimed ‘the end of nature’ in a book of the same name, today regarded as the first popular book on climate change. Before almost everyone else, he sensed that the altered composition of the atmosphere turns everything inside out: the meaning of the weather, to begin with. A sudden downpour can no longer be shrugged off or an Indian summer enjoyed as a caprice of nature. All weather must now be distrusted as an artefact of ‘our ways of life’, including on a Svalbard mountaintop or an Atacama sand dune, in areas that pass as remote wilderness: with CO2, the human fingerprint is everywhere. ‘We have produced the carbon dioxide – we have ended nature’ – or: ‘By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.’28
Under what definition has nature disappeared? It might seem, at first glance, that McKibben is operating with a definition akin to Soper’s – ‘independence’ being the key term – but he pushes it one crucial notch further. He is not referring to nature as a set of material structures and processes with causal powers of their own, not to the end of photosynthesis or respiration or cloud formation; all such things, he affirms, are here to stay. Rather, ‘we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us – its separation from human society’, meaning its purity, its condition of being perfectly pristine, untouched, unaffected by people.29 Only under this definition can nature possibly be said to have ended. But is it a reasonable one?
If I mix my coffee with sugar, I do not thereby come to believe that the coffee has ended. I believe it has shed one condition and assumed another: it is no longer black coffee, but sweet. Normally, in our daily lives and languages, we do not hold that when A comes into contact with B it ceases to exist – a private company remains a private company as it parleys with the state; a lake stays a lake even if tons of sediment pour into it. This should be an idea particularly commonplace to anyone familiar with Marxist dialectics: capitalist property relations do not vanish the moment they become entangled with feudal or socialist ones; capital can only expand by constantly relating to its arch-foe labour, and so on, throughout a world in which a unity of opposites is an unsurprising state of affairs. Should we proceed differently with nature? Is there any reason to build a certain condition – namely, absence of social influence – into the definition of this particular thing, as a touchstone of its very existence?
We might call this the purist definition. McKibben presents no justification for it; he simply takes it for granted. But if we consider nature on a slightly smaller scale, it does seem difficult to uphold. Take the oceans. They are now marred by plastic waste swirling around in giant gyres, acidification, overfishing and other human impacts that extend into the deepest, darkest recesses – so can we say that they ipso facto are no more? Hardly. The oceans are in a different state, but they are with us as much as ever – and if this applies to the oceans, which form a fairly significant component of what we know as ‘nature’, why not also to that majestic totality? There seem to be two possible solutions here. Either one injects sacredness, some form of (ironically) supernatural value into the definition of nature, or one holds on to an extreme form of dualism, which would allow for the belief that the essence of nature is its absolute segregation from human society.30
Now, if we conclude, as we should, that the purist definition is analytically untenable, it does not follow that McKibben is wrong to lament the end of a certain condition of nature.31 I might have reason to cry out in distaste when someone pours sugar in my coffee; there might be a good deal more compelling reasons to mourn the loss of every pristine place on earth. The point here, however, is that McKibben’s sad tidings are analytically unhelpful for our purposes. On the purist definition, the coal the British uncovered on faraway shores belonged to nature prior to their arrival, but as they (or rather their workers) began to dig and heave it, the material somehow fell out of nature, into the sphere of humans. But if the coal had already exited nature, how could the CO2 then possibly have a lethal impact on it? The antinomies of dualism would reappear at every stage of such