Transcript Discussion
“Major Themes in Environmental History” First Semester 3 ECTS Marco Armiero Marie Curie Fellow – ICTA [email protected] http://marcoarmiero.webnode.it/ Announcements • • • • • • • • NO LESSON on Oct. 21st Readings already sent: Barca Worster Dust Bowl Crosby McNeill Hurley Jacoby Synthesis of the previous lesson: • Eh is the history of relationships • It entails a discussion on what nature is and generally enlarges the extension of nature • Origins of eh: cultural and historiographical • Three paths of doing eh: nature per se; economic and social history; cultural history Economic history and environmental history Typology, sources, etc. • Barca’s essay • Worster’s chapters Discussion What is Economic History? What is the “economic” in the social? What is missing? Economic history - definitions • Economic history has been defined as the history of the economic growth • Economic history takes many assumptions and concepts from neoclassical economy: – The existence of perfect markets – Scarce natural resources – Maximization of individual profit – GDP imperialism Development - the matrix of historical narratives • Development • Politics and economics ignore geography, geology, and biology to their peril, since the latter three reveal aspects of the order of things within which the former two operate and on which they depend (Hughes) • Economics, trade, and world politics are regulated, whether humans wish it or not, and whether or not they are conscious of it, by the availability, location, and finite nature of what, in the language of development, are called natural resources (Hughes) Working groups • Discuss in group what have you learnt about IR? • Could you give a short definition of IR? Telling stories about IR • IR as the mother of all the progressive narratives • Technological and institutional innovations • The agency of fossil fuel The basic assumptions of the MEG narrative • Economic growth rests on the perpetual increase of fossil energy consumption • Environmental and social costs are negligible • Natural resources need to be put under private property regimes in order to become productive. D. Landes 2003 (1969) The Unbound Prometheus for example, launched a definition of the IR as the final victory of humanity (represented by the male hero who stole fire from the gods) from the constraints of ‘natural’ conditions, thanks to new technologies and social values Narratives about energy systems • Cipolla the IR as the process by which a society acquired control over vast sources of inanimate energy • Bloch Change in energy systems is influenced by power relationships in society 'The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist' (K. Marx, 1847) • IR as liberation: • From natural constraints (solar energy) • From un-natural constraints (moral economy) I Unlimited growth Solar/organic system Wrigley • 1) nature as a pure obstacle to human life and technology as an absolute good; • 2) poverty as invariably the product of human will (not of ecological or power relationships); • 3) disasters — either naturally or socially produced — are erased from the sphere of experience of modern humanity • 4) the eventuality of total destruction is attributed to human folly and not to structural characteristics of the modern world economy. What is missing? • It systematically silences environmental and social costs and the global inequalities incorporated into current energy regimes • Industrial capitalism is not only an economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well (Steinberg, 2004 [1991], 11). J.C. Debeir, J.P. Déleage and C. Émery • Energy systems are formed not only of the ecological and technological aspects of energy sources but also, and equally importantly, ‘of the social structures for the appropriation and management of these sources and converters’. • An energy system ‘is the original combination of diverse converter chains which draw on determined sources of energy and depend on each other, initiated or controlled by classes or social groups which develop and consolidate on the basis of this control’ Clapp’s history of IR in Great Britain (1994) • It represented the shift to coal in thermodynamic fashion: mineral energy is the only natural resource which, once used, is lost forever. • This was probably the first Environmental History narrative on the IR. Ted Steinberg (Nature incorporated) • A new way of looking at the connection between institutions and technology: not the one of a progressive path towards resource improvement and wealth, but the one of nature's transformation into capital, with the increasing socio-environmental costs associated to such transformation. What does it mean that ‘industrial capitalism is not only an economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well’ (Steinberg, 2004 [1991], 11). Dust Bowl The Black Thursday or the Dirty Thirty? • Worster proposes an ecological tale about the Great Depression • It is not a separate plot, but it is the same story • Dust Bowl and Great Depression revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America (worster, 5) Capitalism as a culture • Nature must be seen as capital • Humans have right even an obligation to use this capital fro constant selfadvancement • The social order should encourage this continual increase of personal wealth • More than 40 million hectares of land • May 9th 1934: 12 million tons of dust in Chicago • In 1934 Dust Bowl’s costs were one time and half bigger than those for WWI (US) What are – or might be - the contributions of eh to economic history?