Ecology

        

In the following I want to explore some roots of ecological thinking, with an emphasis on the question of how plants inflect ecological theory in its evolution from the natural sciences to a mode of critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences.^[1] Ostensibly, ecology as a natural science is born of the modern aspiration to identify the fundamental organizational laws of nature. It is thus seemingly concerned with empirical observations of natural plants. By contrast, ecology in the human and social sciences is typically understood to provide a more interpretive and critical understanding of politicized nature, with the aim of remediating the environmental damage of capitalist political economy.^[2] But of course, such stark delineations between the natural, social, and human sciences never hold up. As David Keller suggests in his introduction to the Philosophy of Ecology, “ecology is a complex and weakly organized subject that finds its foundations not in logical thought but from patterns of nature observed through cultural filters.”^[3] Consequently, while it is no great insight to find that political economy has deployed ecology to prop up its normative claims, it is interesting to track the transition of plants from entities mobilized for the production of a certain economic truth to plants as ecological figures used to trouble and contest political economy. In so doing, we move from an ecology that ostensibly investigates plants as biotic communities in the world to an ecology of plants whose condition of possibility is contingent on the intensified social and mechanical process of capitalism.



Economic Roots of Ecology

One does not need to dig deep to uncover the co-constituting discursive relation between political economy and ecology in the natural sciences. Economy and ecology are, after all, related historically and etymologically.^[4]The point that I want to make is that ecology has been used to sustain two different visions of political economy: the idea of the market as a scene of mutually beneficial transactions between self-interested agents, and the notion of the market as a field of competition driving survival of the fittest. Obvious as this may be, it is worth beginning here to underscore how plants become vectors in critical ecology for the critique of political economy. Insofar as animals provide a similar vector within animal studies,^[5]recent work from ecological Marxists (which I will discuss in a later section) problematizes plants within the context of our current system of industrial agriculture to develop an ecological critique that aims to separate economy from ecology.

There are of course numerous moments in the history of natural sciences where ecology is invoked to naturalize a vision of the economic market as either a harmonious field of mutually beneficial transactions or a scene of competition for survival. My aim is not to plant a stake at the origin of a historical correlation but rather merely to point to a discursive trend. We find an example of the harmonious vision articulated in the correspondence between the natural scientist Gilbert White’s declaration in 1768 that “nature is a great economist” for the way in which it “converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another” and Adam Smith’s efforts less than a decade later to present the market in idealized terms as space of potential mutualism if left to its natural course.^[6] When Ernst Haeckle coins the term “ecology” in 1866 while borrowing Darwin’s theories to underscore the absolute necessity of adaptation for survival amidst limited resources, he provides a countervision. Haeckle’s vision for an economy of nature has long served to naturalize the primacy of competition in political economy theory.^[7] Overall, political economics has been able to borrow at its convenience (with a certain amount of variation) over the last century (plus) from ecological theory in the natural sciences as it tacked back and forth between these notions of economic equilibrium grounded in, on the one hand, mutualism, and, on the other hand, economic competition for survival driven by resource scarcity.



Plants Problematizing Capitalist Political Economy

As plants transition from ostensible empirical indices of natural truths deployed in the service of capitalist political economy into vectors of critical ecological thinking, we move from plants in the wild (as it were) to plants as embodiments of a capitalist terrain. For critical ecologists, plants are not found objects awaiting scientific inquiry but rather processes within a specifically capitalist historical nature. On a disciplinary terrain, the shift from plants in nature to the nature of plants in capitalism enables a move from the natural sciences to human and social sciences. Instead of looking to the (pristine) forest and prairie, these scholars take up the problem of colonial plantations,^[8]ruderal urban flora,^[9] or the hearty fungal inhabitants of capitalism’s “blasted landscapes.”^[10]The aim of these ecological ethnographies is less prescriptive intervention than a cautious move toward the hope that plants might provide a heuristic for grasping our emerging logic of capital while helping us envision an alternative political economic order. Anna Tsing’s work on the matsutake is a good example in this regard for the way it mobilizes the mushroom to illuminate the environmental and social violence of colonialist capitalism but also as a force for thinking a new social order of the commons. Matsutake, for Tsing, reveal a thread of global supply chains whereby products move seamlessly across oceans and airspace to satisfy urban economies. In addition, they make legible the underlying economic logic of our era, what Tsing calls “salvage accumulation.” Salvage accumulation, for Tsing, is a broad, messy, and precariously configured mode of production that emerges in capitalist ruins and through which firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.^[11] Taking root in the ruined, rationalized forests of capitalist modernity while resisting incorporation into scalable, rationalized enclosures necessary for mass-commodity production, matsutake, for Tsing, exemplify salvage accumulation. At the same time, Tsing evokes a trope of mutualism when she places matsutake in an ecological relation of entangled interdependence and reciprocity with pine tries, which generate sugars for matsutake, who in turn produce necessary soil pines.^[12] In short, Tsing’s work distills an ambition in critical ecology to transform plants from products of capitalism into a vegetal force for imagining a different world order. As such, it reflects the preeminence afforded to the plant/human relationship in Metabolist readings of Marx, which I turn to below.



Metabolist Marxists—Permaculture at the End of the World and the Revenge of Killer Weeds

Recent years have seen a number of scholars building on Jeremey Bellamy Foster’s Metabolist reading of Marx to elaborate the latter’s underdeveloped ecological critique of capitalism.^[13]These ecological reevaluations put Marx’s concern with capital’s impact on the relation between the natural and the social metabolisms at the center, thus decentering a more conventional focus on the social processes of production.As such, critical perspective is shifted from labor in the factory to agricultural labor (human and nonhuman) on the farm.

         Metabolist thinkers make a convincing case for the concept’s underlying importance, pointing to Marx’s unresolved attempt in Volume I of Capital to attend to the damage that capital’s development of the social and productive forces inflicts on the environment.^[14] More importantly, especially for this essay, a Metabolist reading elevates plants and soil to a primary relation in Capital. Put simply, the formula is that labor power needs energy, which comes from solar radiation transmuted into calories through agriculture. As such, Metabolists bring Marx’s critique of political economy back to a relation with plants as the site from which to develop a novel critical ecology.

         Metabolists are concerned with plants under the current intensive state of industrial agriculture. Borrowing Marx’s terminology, we might say this state marks the real subsumption of vegetal life, the moment when its existence has become entirely contingent on capitalism’s “petro-chemical hybrid complex.”^[15]Among current Metabolists, Saitō Kohei^[16]and Jason Moore^[17]stand out for their effort to develop a corrective critical ecology. Their arguments and conclusions, though, could not be more different. A central difference between them has to do with their interpretation of the implicit nature/culture binary in Marx’s references to a widening gap between the metabolism of nature and the social metabolism. Saitō posits that Marx approaches the separation from a methodological consideration as an effect of capital, while Moore insists that there is no metabolic rift. For Moore, there are instead ongoing metabolic shifts instantiated in the continuously different ways that capitalist society organizes nature for the appropriation of more capital. These different approaches lead to different concern with plants and contrasting visions for an ecological corrective. Whereas Saitō ultimately seems to want to disentangle ecology from economy in order to recover a pure relation to plants, Moore appears to be waiting for the economic logic of ecology to reach an extreme and collapse.

         Saitō reframes Marx as having been equally concerned with environmental remediation and social revolution. But Marx failed on both fronts, argues Saitō. Examining recently recovered notebooks that Marx kept while developing his argument for Volumes II and III of Capital, Saitō claims that Marx realized after finishing Volume I that he had written himself into a logical impasse and environmental catastrophe. Not only does dialectic materialism fail to engender socialist revolution, but it also fails to provide conditions that might mitigate the damage brought about by the metabolic rift between nature and society under capitalism. As a result, Saitō claims, Marx abandons dialectical theory and turns away from the study of political economy to devote himself to the natural sciences. According to Saitō, Marx ultimately looks instead to non-Western Indigenous societies (which supposedly retained their unity with nature) and classless precapitalist society in trying to imagine a form of degrowth ecosocialism. Saitō views his philosophical project as picking up where Marx left off by going beyond Capital.^[18] In the somewhat anticlimactic final pages of his text, he offers a vision for this that resonates with countless anthropological studies of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (TIK): returning civilization to its agricultural roots and restoring plants to their precapitalist autonomy.

         In contrast to Saitō, Moore does not really propose a fix for capitalism’s ongoing ecological destruction. There is no alternative, no way out by remediating the relationship with agriculture, as there is for Saitō. Rather, his project appears to be more about diagnosing and then reorienting ourselves toward the problem. Moore insists that if we keep thinking metabolism through a nature/social binary, we remain within a Cartesian framework that is aligned with the system of value production in capitalism. Moore thus reframes the ecological dilemma in terms of a “double-internality of humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity.”^[19]Accordingly, the problem is not what society (capitalism) is doing to nature but rather how capitalism itself is a particular ecological configuration of nature. Capitalism, in this regard, is an articulation of a human and nonhuman coproductive world-making process for which Moore borrows the term oikeios. Capitalism works through the oikeios, through “nature,” Moore argues, “appropriating” its life-making excess for the accumulation of capital. In so doing, the capitalist ecology remakes the environment and the world as a “world-historical process.”

         For Moore, there is no underlying dialectical logic of capitalism (no available synthesis) that fails. Rather, his claim is that capitalism has been remarkably adaptive at reorganizing its ecology to maintain “Four Cheaps” (food, energy, resources, and labor) necessary for the continued appropriation of life energy and its transformation into capital through the valorization processes of exploitative labor. In its current iteration, capitalism has utterly subsumed agriculture, rendering the plant part of a novel “petrochemical-hybrid complex” designed to maintain the Four Cheaps. For Moore, the world-ecological system that is capitalism is going to finally reach a threshold of viability when it runs out of cheap nature and is not able to finesse another technological innovation to engineer a metabolic shift. In other words, we just have to let capitalism run its course. The only real hopeful sign we have in the meantime are things like the unintended Frankensteinian outcome of intensive GMO and the petrochemical-hybrid complex of agriculture, superweeds, which may be “signs of a revolt of extra-human nature began to register as formidable barriers to the old models of accumulation.”^[20]

         If Saitō puts us back on the farm without capitalist political economy, Moore leaves us on a desolate postcapitalist wasteland among plants that are no longer recognizable. Although it may seem ironic if not utterly cynical to suggest as much, Moore’s conclusion would appear to hold more potential. Where Saitō naively holds out the promise of a return to a recognizable ecology, Moore leaves the question of “What is ecology?” entirely open. There is no “ecology” per se that one can go back to but rather an open-ended, perpetually emerging ecological process that demands our attention and concerned engagement.

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Notes

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[1] David Keller writes, “Ecology is a subject that begins in the natural sciences but ends up crossing into the human sciences—sociology, anthropology, psychology, religion—it is the study of everything, of total reality.” David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley, “Ecology as Science Synthesis,” in The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis, ed. David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley (University of Georgia Press, 2000),14–15.

[2] Keller and Golley, “Ecology as Science,” 10.

[3] Keller and Golley, “Ecology as Science,” 16.

[4] Before Ernst Haeckle coined the term “ecology” in 1866, it was common for natural scientists to use the term “nature’s economy.” “Economy” and “ecology” are both derived from the Greek oikos, which refers to a dwelling place or house.

[5] Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

[6] In Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed., Studies in Environment and History (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. Worster (34) writes that White was drawing, in part, on Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomical schema of “geo-biological interactions” in his 1751 essay, “The Oeconomy of Nature.” White and Linnaeus invoke an image of nature as a field of well-regulated, effective, and mutually beneficial transactions between biotic entities.

[7] Worster, Nature’s Economy, 192–93.

[8] Sophie Chao, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022).

[9] Bettina Stoetzer, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin, Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices (Duke University Press, 2022).

[10] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).

[11] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 63.

[12] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 243.

[13] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000).
 
[14] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Ben Fowkes (Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), 636–39.

[15] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, 1st ed. (Verso, 2015).

[16] Kōhei Saitō, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

[17] Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.

[18] Saitō, Marx in the Anthropocene, 217.

[19] Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 5–8.

[20] Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 127.