Chapter Nine

The Nature of Environment

Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel, with its portentous subtitle “The Fates of Human Societies,” has sold well over a million copies since it was first published in 1997. As of October 2006, when it finally fell off the list, it had been among the New York Times top twenty best sellers for 205 weeks. “History,” Diamond argues in the book, “followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” Geography, he argues, is the “primary cause” that operates through the “proximate causes” of food production, animal husbandry, metallurgy (technology), disease regimes, and language. The question of geography’s role (as opposed to genetic endowments) in shaping human histories is, for Diamond, a materialist scientific question. He mobilizes both his own credentials (from molecular physiology, evolutionary biology, and biogeography) and wide-ranging scientific information (culled from archaeology, anthropology, epidemiology, linguistics, behavioral ecology, and the history of science and technology) in the search for answers. Diamond aims to provide a unified and synthetic account, a materialist scientific history, “on a par with acknowledged historical sciences such as astronomy, geology and evolutionary biology.”¹ He also writes in popular and readily accessible scientific terms.

Diamond’s is the kind of “popular propaedeutic” work that Kant might have written if only he had known how. It lays out the geographical “conditions of possibility” of human history and therefore seems to provide the perfect secular answer to the question of what kind of geographical knowledge is required to properly ground our understanding of our species being and human social evolution. Diamond claims not to be an environmental determinist in the strict sense of that term. “Without human inventiveness, all of us today would still be cutting our meat with stone tools and eating it raw, like our ancestors of a million years ago. All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.”² How he reconciles this closing statement with the opening insistence on geography as a prime cause is somewhat of a mystery. The first part of the book provides a compelling account of the ecological conditions that facilitated the domestication of plant and animal species. The argument is simple: relatively few plant and animal species were suited for domestication; of those that were, some were far more nutritious and amenable to domestication than others; and the geographical distribution of the species was strictly limited by environmental constraints to nine small areas of the globe. The initial wave of plant and animal domestication around 8000 b.c.e. therefore occurred in these few favored locations. Of these, one, the Fertile Crescent, was more favorable than the others. Diamond skillfully uses his evidence to describe agricultural origins and, incidentally, to showcase his scientific credentials. While commentators have pointed out errors and voiced criticisms, Diamond’s account of the initial wave of plant and animal domestication is probably as good as any other that we have. But the thesis of environmental causation within which he frames his account is nowhere demonstrated. The most that can be inferred is that appropriate environmental conditions were a necessary but by no means sufficient “condition of possibility” for domestication to occur in the places that it did.

The environment-as-cause thesis becomes even more problematic as the book moves forward in time. Current geographical inequalities in economic development and in the global distribution of wealth, Diamond argues, are largely explicable in terms of the initial environmental conditions that gave rise to domestication. If this is true, then racial differences and human genetic endowments do not explain the current disparities in the wealth of nations. But this also means that Western colonial and imperialist practices, in themselves, have little or nothing to do with the sorry state of, say, contemporary African development. A predatory capitalism engaging in ruthless resource extraction from Africa pales into insignificance compared to the dead weight of Africa’s environmental legacy. The well-documented history in which the fragile fertility of the tropical and subtropical soils in Africa was destroyed within one generation of colonial rule passes unremarked, as does the earlier shadowy history of a thriving decentralized rice agriculture in West Africa that was destroyed by the slave traders (though the techniques of rice cultivation lived on, as the slaves brought them to the Carolinas to found a thriving rice plantation agriculture for the benefit of their white masters). The damning histories of Belgian colonial rapine of the Congo and the violent repression of the Ogoni peoples in the Niger delta in the name of big oil do not figure in Diamond’s account because it is the “hand of history’s course at 8000 bc [that] lies heavily upon us.”³ The ghost of King Leopold of Belgium and the current directors of Shell Oil will doubtless appreciate being let so lightly off the hook. And Diamond’s tale must be comforting news—reassuring and untroubling—to many Americans who cheerfully consume a third of the world’s resources (some from Africa) while taking little or no responsibility for the consequences of such profligacy on the ground. No wonder the book is consumed with such gusto in the United States.

So how, then, does Diamond navigate across the 10,000 years between the initial wave of plant and animal domestication (about which he may well be correct) and the current state of social inequality and uneven geographical development within the global economy (about which he is dead wrong)? Plainly, the world has not stood still, and some of the initial areas of plant and animal domestication (such as the Tigris-Euphrates crescent, which today is Iraq) are hardly models of advanced development compared to northwest Europe, Japan, or the United States where no domestication occurred. Some of the human groups that pursued domestication were more advantaged than others, says Diamond. The Fertile Crescent, for example, had a particularly nutritious food source (wheat is better than sorghum) and a large enough area suited to its cultivation to support a large population with a food surplus to support other activities. Initial advantages of this sort permitted the development of technologies, germs, literacy skills, and military hardware that allowed these particular groups to spread outward “at the expense of other groups, until either the latter groups became replaced or everyone came to share the new advantages.”⁴ Competition between and conquest of human groups lies at the root of this process (there is no role here for cosmopolitan collaborations of the limited Kantian sort, or even of subtle processes of cultural transmission, though there is more than a hint of a covert theory of Kant’s “species being” in which human groups always seek domination of others). Imperial practices, wars, and conquests are absorbed (scientifically naturalized) in Diamond’s account into Darwinian struggles between human groups for growth and survival, but those who had the initial advantage win out. Political-economic choices have no fundamental role in this dog-eat-dog world.

Geographical conditions (presented mainly in terms of a fixed and unchanging spatial ordering of physical qualities), furthermore, guided migratory movements and the spatial diffusion of innovations. In this the axes of the continents played a crucial role, since latitudinal movements of crop regimes along the climatic belts is easier than movement across them (thus Africa and the Americas, where some initial plant and animal domestication occurred, were disadvantaged because north-south movements across the climatic belts are far more difficult). This same condition affects the diffusion of technologies and literacy (though why the climatic belts mattered in these instances is obscure). Eurasia, where the geographical and ecological barriers to movement were supposedly minimal, was therefore able to seize the advantage and develop the technologies and ultimately the guns (and to foment the germs) that facilitated conquest everywhere else. If we look back to the Fertile Crescent as the origin, then, it is because the geographical paths of diffusion outward were easiest from there (particularly after the productive capacities of the original hearth were exhausted by overuse, which interestingly appeals to human predilections rather than environmental causation as an explanation). Ultimately, these advantages permitted a few Spanish conquistadors to conquer a military force of many thousands in the Americas. Europe’s confused physical geography also felicitously prevented the development of any centralized state power (a negative attribute in these neoliberal times, in spite of the contemporary evidence from China), and this fostered more competition (supposedly a positive attribute, of course) and, hence, more innovation in Europe than elsewhere. In these ways, the initial “civilizational” breakthroughs in one selected hearth of plant and animal domestication spread unevenly around the world along broadly predictable geographical pathways. Bringing us up to date, Diamond even wonders “whether nuclear weapons will proliferate around the world by the same often-violent process.” ⁵

Compared to the first part of the book, the evidence advanced for the subsequent argument is speculative and shallow. To construct such a macro account of human history over 10,000 years in 200 pages obviously demands a high level of generalization and abstraction, but in this instance scientific method of any sort gives way to crude guess-work and wishful thinking. The maps deployed are of an absolute sort (recall the distinction made in chapter 7 and presented in fig. 1 in that chapter), and Diamond makes no attempt to take up the radical shifts in relative space-time produced by innovations in transport and communications that have characterized human historical geography. His account is only believable, one suspects, because the reader carries over the scientific authority established in the first part of the book to the second. Consider, for example, his comparative exploration of the fates of China and Europe, both of which should have benefited from lateral movement of innovations from the key area of initial domestication (Diamond ignores entirely the barrier of the Tibetan/Himalayan traverse). Eyeballing maps, Diamond notes that Europe’s coastline is much more indented and fragmented than China’s and posits this as the explanation for China’s “chronic unity and Europe’s chronic disunity.”⁶ A grossly simplified representation based on maps of a certain scale in absolute space is given causal power in relation to material social practices and history on the ground. China’s loss of political and technological preeminence (as well as its failure to pursue early possibilities of overseas exploration and discovery) is attributed to excessive centralization of state power because of its straight coastline. This is the crassest form of spatial determinism. The argument is easy to ridicule. Eyeballing the coastlines of the United States and China suggests the United States should be even more centralized than China. Deng clearly forgot about China’s coastline when he decentralized power to provinces, municipalities, and even villages after 1978 and hence launched China on its astonishing process of economic and technological development. Excessive bureaucratic centralization within any state or imperial apparatus sometimes (but only sometimes) has negative consequences for innovation and growth. On this point, Diamond follows the standard liberal and neoliberal dogma that excessive state control is always bad (ignoring the fact that bureaucratized and authoritarian states, such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and now China, have dominated the growth curves in contemporary capitalism for many years and that the United States is hardly a model of non–state intervention in the economy in key areas such as military technologies). This “finding” about the dangers of excessive state centralization brought Diamond glowing reviews from Bill Gates and put him close to the Microsoft engineers (fortunately the coastline around Seattle is indented enough to sustain their efforts to monopolize the software world). What Gates and Deng have in common, however, is the discovery that appropriately organized decentralization can be one of the most effective vehicles for highly centralized control. The emphasis here has to be on the meaning of “appropriately organized,” because chaotic decentralization of the sort that occurred in Russia after 1989 did not work, except for the seven oligarchs who emerged to take control of much of the economy (assembling immense personal wealth in the process). Chaotic decentralization is a chronic problem in many parts of Africa, though local elites often do very well out of it. Appropriately organized decentralization is a political-organizational choice that has nothing to do with coastlines. In his afterword to a later edition Diamond recognizes the problem of “optimal” fragmentation in a way that loses all connection with his postulate of spatial shape in absolute space as an explanation for political organization.⁷ His assertions on the causal effects of coastlines have absolutely no plausibility, let alone any “scientific” basis. They are, in short, nonsense.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs—an influential adviser to the United Nations—tells a very different but similarly environmentally loaded story about China’s rising economic power in his best-selling book The End of Poverty. Compared to Russia and Eastern Europe, it was China’s “very different geography, geopolitics, and demography,” rather than “a difference of policy choices,” that gave it an advantage after the end of communism. China’s large coastline, Sachs argues, “supported its export-led growth, whereas the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did not have the benefit of large coastlines and the resulting low-cost access to international trade.”⁸ The thesis that lack of access to navigable water was the problem for Russia is convenient, since Sachs played a very important role in administering the market-based “shock therapy” to the former Soviet Union that had such disastrous economic and social consequences in the early 1990s. (We could conclude from this that the main advantage in China’s case was that Sachs had no influence over policy there, while Russia will have to wait upon global warming to open up its Arctic coastline before it can develop.) But the big problem for China, Sachs goes on to argue, is not its homogeneity (as Diamond supposes), but its geographical diversity, particularly the north-south divide and, even more important, an east-west differential based on distance from navigable water. This echoes Sachs’s more general principles of geographical determination: using seemingly sophisticated statistical techniques, he shows that almost all the variation in the level of economic development of the world’s states can be explained by physical distance measured from the equator and from navigable water.⁹ More expansively, he suggests that “geographical advantages might include access to key natural resources, access to the coastline and sea—navigable rivers, proximity to other successful economies, advantageous conditions for agriculture, advantageous conditions for human health.” He also follows Diamond, though somewhat more cautiously, by suggesting that agricultural and health technologies could spread more easily within ecological zones defined by climatic belts rather than across them. In their analyses, both Sachs and Diamond forget, however, that spatial associations between different phenomena (for example, between the spatial distribution of cows and of pastureland, or of straight coastlines and centralized power) are no proof of causation. They also both use absolute measures of space, location, and environmental (mainly climatic) conditions as if they are unproblematic. The relativity of space-time is of little consequence, while relationality apparently has for them no meaning at all.

Interestingly, Sachs later on in the same book offers a very different account of China’s historical geography, based on the good neoliberal mythology, also advanced by Diamond, that centralized power is inimical to economic development. “What made the centralized state possible in China,” writes Sachs (in an account that grossly oversimplifies China’s complex historical-geographical evolution), “was a vast subcontinental scale society of villages. The villages themselves looked a lot like each other across a very wide space: they were rice-growing communities of hundreds of millions of people, living in hundreds of thousands of villages, with common economic and cultural characteristics. In such a homogeneous setting, a centralized administrative strategy flourished, with orders going down from the top, percolating through various levels, and reaching the endpoints in communities very similar in their basic internal organization.”¹⁰ The achievements of the centralized state that emerged on this basis (and Sachs cheerfully lays aside all the geographical north-south and east-west variation that he had earlier invoked as crucial) were, he says, remarkable, but economic development of the Western European sort, “where political and thus economic power was always decentralized,” was impossible (no matter what the regime). The centralized Chinese state was “not compatible with the dynamism of a decentralized and diverse market economy and market-based society, which depends on migration, multiple bases of power and wealth, and regional diversity.” China’s contemporary economic success arises, he then goes on to tell us, because of “the empowerment of provincial and local governments to experiment at their levels by allowing for diversity, creating a more complex division of labor and enabling mobility.” The willingness of the Chinese centralized state to decentralize, to experiment, and “to see what works” has been crucial, making policy choices (a determinant that Sachs had earlier denied) rather than an accessible coastline the principal explanation of the rapidity of growth.¹¹

What is odd about both of these popular and influential accounts by Diamond and Sachs is that the role of geography (always understood as some aspect of the physical environment including the fixed spatial ordering of the land) slips in and out of the argument as an explanatory and sometimes as an active causal agent in disconcerting ways. While physical geographical condition is frequently appealed to (in true Kantian fashion) as the “condition of possibility” of everything else, the actual dynamics described invariably entail human agency (such as human innovative capacities, technologies, and intergroup competition in Diamond’s case and market versus state behaviors and policy choices in Sachs’s case). The result is to propel developments in ways outside of direct or even indirect environmental controls, unless we are prepared, as Diamond urges, to suppose some deep and hidden connection to events 10,000 years ago, which is in principle no different from tracing contemporary global inequalities back to the big bang origin of the universe.

But the effect of attributing global inequalities to the effects of geography, construed as physical environmental and locational conditions, rather than to, say, market forces, policy choices, and imperialist practices changes radically how we think of political possibilities. If policy choices are trumped by coastline determinism (as in Sachs’s initial formulation), then why bother about policies? This turns out to be a longstanding trick. It also has popular resonance, as illustrated by an article in the journal Foreign Policy entitled “A Case of Bad Latitude: Why Geography Causes Poverty,” in which the thesis of environmental causation of global inequalities is boldly stated and then supported by the usual academic references. The Reverend Thomas Malthus long ago explained poverty and unemployment in terms of natural proclivities for human beings to procreate versus natural resource constraints, thereby denying the feasibility of rationalist and egalitarian/socialist solutions because of natural barriers. David Ricardo appealed to diminishing returns in agriculture to explain the inevitability of capitalist crises, leading Marx to comment scathingly that “when faced with a crisis Ricardo takes refuge in organic chemistry.” Ricardo could thus avoid any discussion of the inherent contradictions and class inequalities engendered by free market capitalism as an explanation for capitalism’s instabilities.¹² Furthermore, the myth that centralized state control is inimical to human development merely has to be asserted in these neoliberal times in order to be accepted without an iota of scientific justification (whereas to assert the opposite is to incur intense skepticism, followed by demands for rigorous scientific and empirical proofs). In the case of China, the environmentalist proposition that the supposed excessive centralization of power there arises out of environmental conditions has a long history. Karl Wittfogel, starting out as a Marxist materialist in the 1930s, argued for the necessity of a centralized state bureaucracy to control the massive irrigation works required to survive in that environment, and on this basis he advanced a universal thesis (elements of which can also be found in Marx) of an “Asiatic mode of production” (or even more generally, a “hydraulic society”) characterized by “oriental despotism” as its primary political form.¹³ Rain-fed agriculture in Western Europe, in contrast, supposedly created the conditions for individual liberty, decentralized democracy, and a market society (which makes the rise of fascism in Europe inexplicable, since there is no evidence it stopped raining—though much of Spain is pretty arid, so maybe this does explain Franco). Wittfogel thus turned historical materialism into a certain kind of historical-geographical materialism by viewing physical environmental conditions (nature) as the bedrock upon which all forms of human activity depended. Diamond just looks at the shape of coastlines, and Sachs (in one of his versions) focuses on climatic conditions and accessibility to navigable water.

There is one other curious angle to this debate over whether or not geography matters. Daron Acemoglu, winner in 2005 of the prestigious John Bates Clark award for the most promising economist under forty, has made his reputation in part by disputing both Diamond’s and Sachs’s arguments, proving that global inequalities have little to do with geographic, climatic, and ecological factors, and everything to do with institutions. Since the geographical factors (spatial locations and climatic belts) have remained fairly constant since 1500, he argues, they cannot possibly explain the considerable shifts that have occurred in global wealth distribution since that time. The “historical evidence suggests that European colonialism not only disrupted the social organization of a large number of countries, but in fact led to the establishment of extractive institutions in previously prosperous areas and to the development of institutions of private property in previously poor areas.” The result was “a reversal in the relative [wealth] rankings among countries affected by European colonialism,” particularly during the nineteenth century, such that impoverished and relatively empty areas (like the United States, Canada, and Australia) became wealthier, while the previously wealthy, high-population-density countries (like India, China, Indonesia, and Bolivia) all became poorer under a regime of extractive institutions.¹⁴ His measure of wealth, interestingly, rests on degree of urbanization (itself, surely, a geographical phenomenon) though later versions of this argument have rested on more conventional income and wealth estimates. The poorer countries that won out were, not surprisingly, those that encouraged investment by establishing strong private property rights regimes.

This huge shift in the geography of global wealth since 1500 is totally and conveniently ignored in Diamond’s potted history, and it would indeed be hard to come up with any explanation of it in the geographical terms to which Diamond appeals. While Acemoglu’s concern to shift the terrain of debate about global poverty from geography, about which we can supposedly do very little, to social and political questions is laudable, and while it is also helpful to have colonial and imperialist extractive practices brought back into the forefront of discussion, the categorical distinctions Acemoglu deploys are as seriously wrongheaded as those used by Diamond. To begin with, the assertion that geography has not changed much since 1500 is plainly in error. It denies, without even caring to assess the evidence, that the massive ecological transformations that have occurred since 1492—the deforestation (by sheep and goats) and land clearances, the soil erosion that destroyed much of the agricultural capacity of Mexico and Africa, the land degradation and invasions by foreign species, the desertification and rapid shifts in international trade in agricultural commodities, therapid pace of urbanization—have had anything to do with the shifts in inequality. Even more dramatic is the failure to recognize that it is the relative space-time of transport and communications that is the relevant measure of distance and location, rather than the simple physical distances of absolute space to which Acemoglu appeals. The latter have indeed remained constant, but the former have changed drastically. And it is noteworthy that the most radical transformations in relative space relations occurred in the nineteenth century (steamships and railroads), just when what Acemoglu calls “the great reversal” in the distribution of wealth mainly occurred. But this points to a deeper difficulty, because Acemoglu also assumes that institutions (such as those of the state) are not geographical affairs and that considerations of geography are separable from institutions, when institutions are in fact “produced spaces of social relations of a more or less durable sort. In the most obvious sense they are territorializations—territories of control and surveillance, terrains of jurisdiction, and domains of organization and administration.”¹⁵ To imply that the state (local or national), for example, is not a geographical phenomenon and then to represent the state’s extractive institutions as if they have no geographical grounding is plainly wrong. Many of our key institutions (state, military, religious, educational) are actively produced through the creation of particular places, spaces, and environmental qualities (new geographies). The military have their barracks, the priests their churches, the educators their schools and universities, and so on. Investments in physical and social infrastructures go hand in hand with institution building. Conversely, the production of spaces (the building of the railroads that revolutionized relative space relations in the nineteenth century) and of places (cities), and the environmental transformations that humans have wrought across the earth’s surface since the fifteenth century, have depended heavily upon the formation of institutions, such as those of the state and of finance. Acemoglu incorrectly postulates a dichotomous world in which a supposedly static geography (understood as an absolute space of location and fixed climatic belts) starkly contrasts with dynamic social institutions. Of course, the former, depicted from the outset as the fixed, the dead, and the undialectical—as Foucault complained of all traditional Kantian formulations—fails to generate change compared to the latter. But the dichotomy is completely false: the production of space and radical transformations of nature and of geography are engineered through human institutions and the organization of labor, through territorializations and deterritorializations (as in Africa in 1885), new technologies (designed, for example, to overcome the frictions of distance), and the emergence of completely new ways of life. In effect, all that Acemoglu does is to prove what he has already assumed to be true: that geography (erroneously construed as an immutable physical condition) is passive and not active in human affairs.

We must not ignore the politics of these arguments. Attributing our ills to natural environmental causes and fixed spatial orderings, about which we can supposedly do little or nothing, rather than to societal malfunctioning, about which we can take strong action, makes a huge difference in how we might understand, feel responsible for, and attempt to confront global inequalities and political repressions. And even if, as Sachs argues, it is possible to do something about the disease regimes associated with tropical climates (cheap mosquito netting for the poor), the policy invoked evades entirely the political and economic origins of much of the poverty that bedevils the global South. On these counts Diamond’s text, Malthusian arguments, and, to a lesser degree, Sachs’s proposals for confronting the problem of global poverty are deeply troubling. If this is the kind of geography to be inserted into a cosmopolitan project, then we are, I submit, in deep difficulty. Acemoglu’s reversal of the argument is, given the choice, obviously to be preferred, but he merely ends up compounding the problem by appealing to a definition of “geography” that is profoundly misleading. The extensive debate that flourishes these days within economics and political science over the “geography” versus “institutions” question, pays absolutely no mind to the growing trend within science in general to abandon the Cartesian/Kantian framework that grounds the dichotomy between physical geography (nature) and social institutions (culture).¹⁶ The transformations since the sixteenth century in space-time relations, place building, the organization of territorial and regional structures, and environmental conditions collectively amount to a massive reshaping of the world’s geography. It is astonishing to find that none of this gets registered in the economics or political science literature.

Environmental Determinisms

Diamond and Sachs have revived a long tradition of assertion of geographical and environmental influences upon human action. Bizarrely represented in Kant’s fumbling Geography, this tradition goes back at least to the Greeks. Clarence Glacken’s monumental Traces on the Rhodian Shore provides us with a comprehensive account of how this idea of environmental influences weaves in and out in Western thought with other traditions that highlight either the idea of “man’s domination of nature” or a nature-human-heavenly continuum ordered according to some God-given intelligent design with human beings occupying the pinnacle, close to God, within a “great chain of being” (a medieval idea that evangelical Christians and President Bush seem intent on reviving). Montesquieu and Rousseau, for example, frequently invoked environmental influences on human behavior and at times turned downright deterministic (Montesquieu held that islands produce conditions for individual liberties, and Rousseau, that desert climates give rise to monotheism and absolutist forms of government).¹⁷ Ellen Churchill Semple, a student of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, is probably Anglo-American geography’s most famous representative of the deterministic line of thinking. In Influences of Geographical Environment, published in 1911, she wrote:

Man is a product of the earth’s surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope, along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of the farm. Up on the windswept plateaux, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herds give him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life of a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism; his big special ideas, born of that regular ceaseless wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.¹⁸

The gendering of the passage is remarkable, but this reflects a long tradition that opposes mother earth (geography) to father time (history). Francis Bacon held unreservedly that the domination of nature by man was strictly equivalent to men dominating capricious and wayward women (which explains much of what Shakespeare was doing in The Taming of the Shrew). But also interesting is the wide array of physical environmental features to which Semple appeals. This illustrates a certain advantage that environmental determinists enjoy, since for every detectable variation in human social organization or historical transformation, there is bound to be some unique physical environmental feature (climatic, physiographic, and so forth) that can be associated with it. If association is taken as proof, then the thesis of environmental determination becomes irrefutable. Notice, therefore, how elements of Semple’s reasoning are reproduced by Sachs (all those monotonous villages in the river valleys of China) and Diamond (China’s straight coastline and imperial conquests by people that “outgrew the land that bred them”). The mode of argumentation in the second part of Diamond’s book flips from one kind of environmental association to another, and Sachs invokes coastlines when convenient and policy choices when he wants. The opportunistic environmental determinism of the second part of Diamond’s book contrasts with the more singular and systematic theory laid out in the first part, for which he deserves some credit. In practice, the more singular and systematic the theory, the more productive it is, and the more easily we can evaluate and refute it. Ellsworth Huntington, for example, in a series of books published from 1925 to 1950, sought to reduce all forms of environmental influence to climatic determinations. Climatic determinism has a long history that stretches from the Greeks to the present day (Sachs relies heavily though not exclusively upon it, for example, and even the eminent nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall took it as axiomatic). Huntington went to great lengths to carefully investigate the nature of climatic variation and in so doing furthered the development of accurate climatic classification (an activity that went back to the pioneering work of Köppen in the nineteenth century). The trouble was that Huntington’s climatic data became the basis for asserting the superiority of the temperate climates and the white populations of European descent that populated them. When he attempted to define the climatic conditions most conducive to intellectual activity and produced a map where the optimal location fell suspiciously close to Harvard, where he taught for many years (though there was another outlier in Edinburgh), his whole enterprise looked so self-serving as to be ridiculous. But his broader findings certainly had great relevance to understanding questions of agricultural productivity, and it would be hard to deny, given the appalling experience of the 1930s “Dustbowl” in the United States, that the overextension of agricultural practices into regions of high drought risk had something to do with the social disaster that followed. The mass migration from Oklahoma and Kansas to California commemorated in Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath was in part a response to climatic events, though in Steinbeck’s novel, as well as in actual history, it was a combination of drought conditions and mechanized agribusiness, backed by the bankers’ drive to foreclose on mortgaged lands, that drove the Okies out.¹⁹ An analogous case in recent times would be to attribute the disaster in New Orleans in 2005 solely to hurricane Katrina, as if socio-political and economic circumstances had nothing to do with events. There is, it turns out, no such thing as a purely “natural” disaster.²⁰

One of the more celebrated instances of geographical determinism in action arose around the work of the geographer Griffith Taylor who, in the 1920s, strongly objected on environmental grounds to the political plans for population expansion through massive immigration into Australia. Using well-grounded scientific data on climatic, hydrological, and soil conditions, Taylor drew up detailed and quite accurate maps to argue that there were strict environmental limits to the distribution and density of population achievable within the country. His concluding map of what might be possible in the way of population density and distribution by the year 2000 remarkably predicts the current patterns. In the 1920s, however, a promethean technological triumphalism combined with a white racist colonial settler mentality to promote an image of a new Australia of teeming millions to rival the United States. In this context Taylor’s writings created such a furor of opposition in the popular press that he was hounded out of Sydney University and indeed out of the country; he went to Canada where he later promoted the idea of “stop and go determinism.” While it is possible, he conceded, for human societies to stray from environmental determinations, in the long run we are bound to succumb to the inevitability of environmental limits and controls.²¹ This is the stance taken by many contemporary environmentalists. That Taylor’s predictions for Australian settlement broadly conform to later realities would seem to support his theoretical stance. This would imply, however, that the dynamics of what became energy-intensive and fossil fuel–based forms of urbanization and the shifting evolution of Australia’s position within the international division of labor, of trading relations and migratory streams (to mention just a few elements that have produced the present geographical distributions), can be attributed to environmental causes—or, less dramatically, that they were somehow all contained within environmentally imposed constraints. If Taylor and, by extension, Diamond and Sachs were scientifically serious in their environmentalism, they should be able to identify the processes whereby the environmental conditionalities (which undoubtedly exist and which can never be ignored as necessary conditions) play an active rather than passive role in the outcomes to be explained. Correlations and associations can be suggestive (as, for example, in the case of smoking and lung cancer or in the case of stomach cancers and water supply qualities), but until actual mechanisms and processes of production are identified, environmental determinations remain entirely speculative, and environmental limits remain contingent rather than determinant. In Diamond’s case, for example, there is no attempt to show the mechanisms whereby coastlines have effects on political organization.

There is a continuum of argument moving from strict environmental determinism (with a few grains of human initiative at the center) to total freedom of human action (within an aura of light environmental constraints). Taylor’s theory of stop-and-go determinism, for example, morphs into the idea of challenge and response in Arnold Toynbee’s magnum opus The Study of Civilization. Toynbee’s idea was simple enough: distinctive geographical environments pose different challenges, but the responses depend on differential human capacities and powers (such as human “character” of the sort that Kant invokes or the policy choices that Sachs mentions in one of his versions of China’s development). Toynbee proves his thesis by noting different responses to similar environmental conditions but, as Oscar Spate points out, the way Toynbee specifies “similar” leaves much to be desired. To suggest that the Nile and the Rio Grande are similar riverine environments and that, therefore, the differences in human development between them are explicable in terms of differential human response is wildly off the mark when the physical differences between the two river valleys are subjected to even casual scrutiny.²² But here, again, we encounter the problem of deciding exactly what the environmental difference is that makes a difference to human action.

At the other end of the spectrum lies an entirely different school of thought, called “possibilist,” a term derived largely from the French historian Lucien Febvre who most famously stated in 1910 that “there are no necessities, but everywhere possibilities; and man as master of these possibilities is the judge of their use.” The causal arrow here gets reversed. “Man dominates nature” and shapes her (and in the past the relation has usually been spelled out in this gendered fashion) to his will. Francis Bacon and Descartes thus celebrated “man’s” potential to dominate nature through science, engineering, and technology. This promethean argument rarely holds that absolutely anything is possible. But it does insist that what humans do depends fundamentally on technologies, cost, finance, human organization, cultural preferences, and the like. It is always, as the geographer Isaiah Bowman once quipped, possible to move mountains, but first you need to launch a bond issue.²³ Within the Marxist tradition there are abundant expressions of a promethean and productivist approach to the world, and these carried over, with some disastrous consequences, to actual practices in the Stalinist phase of Soviet development. They even affected scientific inquiry, in the lamentable Lysenko affair in which for some forty years Soviet agronomy was imprisoned in the false dogma that acquired characteristics could be inherited (a view that Lefebvre, then a member of the French communist party, refused to endorse). Whether it is accurate to derive this promethean viewpoint from Marx’s own writings is, however, a matter of contemporary contention. Other forms of possibilism are more restrained. The French geographer Vidal de la Blache, for example, recognized that the distinctive regional landscapes of France (from Brittany to Burgundy) were human constructions, but he saw the process of their emergence as one in which human action ultimately converged upon a distinctive regional personality, a harmonic symbiosis of human action with natural possibilities. Distinctive regions are not given but carved out of nature by human action.²⁴ At times, this comes close to being a regional version of the genius loci idea encountered in chapter 7: human action reveals the essential and inherent qualities of the natural world. Regional landscapes and city forms are construed, as it were, as works of art wrought by years of patient human artifice.

This benign view contrasts, however, with an extensive literature bemoaning unintended consequences. This point was made as long ago as 1864, by that extraordinary pioneer in the study of the historical geography of environmental change, George Perkins Marsh. Marsh recognized that it was often hard to distinguish between anthropogenic and naturally occurring changes in the environment, but regarded it as “certain that man has done much to mould the form of the earth’s surface.” Much of the geography we now confront is the product of human activities (an idea totally foreign to both Diamond and Acemoglu). While these changes were by no means always destructive to human interests, we too often forget that the earth is given to us “for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste” (even Margaret Thatcher voiced a similar opinion, though in her case it turned out to be good cover to close down the coal mines and smash the Miner’s Union that had long anchored the British labor movement). Human action turns “the harmonies of nature” into “discords,” said Marsh. Intentional changes pale “in comparison with the contingent and unsought results which have flowed from them” with all manner of destructive consequences.²⁵ Engels made the same point: “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforseen effects which only too often cancel the first. . . . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”²⁶

Societies may strive to create ecological conditions and environmental niches for themselves conducive to their own survival, but they cannot do so without bringing about unintended ecological consequences. Not all of these turn out to be universally bad from the standpoint of supporting human activity (there are parts of the world, such as Siberia, that may benefit from global warming through increased agricultural productivity, while other zones, such as the U.S. Midwest, may suffer considerably). But it is hard to see that the possibility of cheaper trans-Arctic shipping routes (yielding Russia the coastline that Sachs believes essential to its development) will offset the global impacts of sea level rises of a meter or more.

The gamut of opinion therefore runs from environmental determinism through stop-and-go determinism, and challenge and response, to the human domination of nature, only to double back on itself by collapsing into usually woeful accounts of unintended consequences and nature’s revenge. The so-called Frankfurt School of social scientists, one of whose most influential members in the 1960s was Herbert Marcuse, further argued that the domination of nature inevitably entails the domination of other human beings and even of human nature itself.²⁷ But nearly all these positions have in common the idea that there is a clear analytic separation to be made between “man” and “culture,” on the one hand, and “nature,” “environment,” and even “geography,” on the other. Differences of opinion exist concerning the direction of the causal arrow and the degree of reciprocal interactions and feedbacks involved. But the Cartesian/Kantian dichotomies between facts and values, things and mental constructs, the physical and immaterial worlds, carry over to the idea of a never-ending struggle between “man” and “nature,” and the presumption of some sort of causal interactions between these independent entities. The Kantian separation of geography from anthropology then makes sense; the former is the study of man in the system of nature, buffeted and tossed around in a sea of natural forces that drive social orders hither and thither, while the latter is a study of how human beings as active subjects have made themselves, forged character out of natural temperaments (as Kant put it), and overcome the deficiencies of their original environmental condition to move toward a regional symbiosis (as in Vidal de la Blache’s discussion of the production of regionality) or even toward a cosmopolitan rationality in the reshaping of both social and natural relations (Ulrich Beck’s utopian dream).

All interpretations of the relation to nature require, therefore, serious critical scrutiny, not only concerning their cogency and “truth value,” but also for their political and ideological implications. The praise heaped upon Diamond’s text by influential political figures and the book’s success (it has been made into a PBS television mini-series)is as much a political problem as a question of scientific veracity. While environmentalist (or, for that matter genetic, racist, or culturalist) readings cannot be dismissed simply because of their discomforting political implications, or because they offend some deeply cherished ideological beliefs, the eager political embrace and promotion of Diamond’s text in certain powerful quarters should alert us to a key political problem: how do we know when our relation to nature and to environmental conditions is a key determinant of our actions? So where do we begin a critical analysis and how should we proceed?

The Natural Order of Things

Words like nature and environment, with which the idea of “geography” is so closely associated, are, like space and place, contested, controversial, and full of multiple meanings. “Nature,” Raymond Williams famously pointed out, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history . . . both complicated and changing, as other ideas and experiences change.”²⁸ The “unnoticed” aspect of this poses particular difficulties, because it is hard to spot what Arthur Lovejoy calls the “incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or generation,” but which define “the dominant intellectual tendencies of an age.” Unnoticed shifts in meaning, of the sort that Diamond’s text produces, can have wide-ranging political and environmental consequences precisely because they become incorporated into policies and actions: “It is largely because of their ambiguities that mere words are capable of independent action as forces in history. A term, a phrase, a formula, which gains currency or acceptance because one of its meanings, or of the thoughts which it suggests, is congenial to the prevalent beliefs, the standards of value, the tastes of a certain age, may help to alter beliefs, standards of value, and tastes, because other meanings or suggested implications not clearly distinguished by those who employ it, gradually become the dominant elements of signification. The word ‘nature,’ it need hardly be said, is the most extraordinary example of this.”²⁹

Contemporary struggles over the meaning of nature are more than mere semantics. If, as even Marx acknowledged, our mental conceptions of the world translate into material forces that shape human history and geography, then struggles over the meanings of this word become, as Kate Soper shows in What Is Nature? a leading edge of political and cultural conflict. ³⁰

The word environment is equally contentious, but for somewhat different reasons. Environment is whatever surrounds or, to be more precise, whatever exists in the surroundings of some being that is relevant to the state of that being at a particular moment. Plainly, the spatial “situatedness” of a being and its internal conditions and needs have as much to say about the definition of environment as the surrounding conditions themselves, while the criteria of relevance vary widely and are conditional upon location in complex configurations of spatio-temporality. Business leaders worry about the political and legal environment, politicians worry about the economic environment, city dwellers worry about the social environment, and, doubtless, criminals worry about the environment of law enforcement, and polluters worry about the regulatory environment. Each and every one of us is situated in an “environment” (though often only temporarily, since we travel) and all of us therefore have some sense of what “environmental issues” might be about. When we connect the terms nature and environment to formulate a concept of “the natural” or “geographical” environment, as Diamond and Sachs do, then we find ourselves doubling up on all the ambiguities to the point where obfuscations rather than clarifications can all too easily ensue. This problem is chronically manifest in the innumerable and often conflicting ways in which a popularly acceptable and seemingly neutral concept such as “sustainability” gets framed and interpreted within environmental debates. But the confusions and ambiguities also create openings, and it is therefore possible, as A. Lovejoy suggests, for critical engagements to produce new possibilities of thinking and of action. The outcomes are not necessarily benevolent or progressive, and they are by no means easily compatible with a moral commitment to cosmopolitanism. If, for example, Diamond’s version of appropriate geographical knowledge is correct, then Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to global justice requires as a precondition that we first lift the heavy hand of that history of 10,000 years ago that weighs so heavily upon us.

The approach to the question of nature from the Enlightenment onward was largely to regard it as whatever was both external to and a universal condition of possibility for human action.³¹ Although I will later dispute this view, it is true that much of our contemporary knowledge of nature is derived from this conceit. From it come long-lasting binary distinctions between nature and culture, mind and matter, the natural and the artificial, and equally long-running disputes over nature versus nurture, facts versus values, the human domination of nature versus environmental or genetic determinism, and the like. Since much of our valuable knowledge of “nature’s laws” derives from this approach, and since the disputes and distinctions this knowledge generates continue to inform our common-sense views, then it becomes important to say something about the status of this knowledge and the concept of nature to which it gives rise. To dispute its foundation is not to deny the important insights into natural law that have been gained. The Newtonian and Cartesian mechanical view of the world presumes, however, that space and time are absolute, and, as Whitehead argues, once this exclusive presumption is made, then a very particular construction of “nature” follows. The absolute version of space and time facilitates mensurability and calculability, and underpins the elaboration of technologies and practices that are, among other things, superbly adapted to building bridges with the same mechanical efficiency as the military technologies that have been developed to knock them down. The absolute view underpins a model of explanation in which discoverable entities (individuated in absolute space and time) function as causal agents, provoking measurable effects on other entities and so giving rise to larger configurations (much as human individuals are considered ontologically prior to the creation of something called society). While figures like Leibniz disputed this Newtonian/Cartesian view, the trend was to see God as the supreme engineer, a watchmaker who eventually had to play no other role than to wind up the mechanism of the universe. The Cartesian engineer was a rational calculator, a neutral observer, a grand architect who could dominate the world with “next to God-like” precision.

By viewing nature as a universal condition of possibility for all human activity, Enlightenment science constructed nature in a way that was consistent with liberal theory (as most obviously evidenced in the relation between John Locke and Newton). The world and everything in it had to be flattened, homogenized, and reduced conceptually (as Thomas Friedman does), if not physically, to fit the absolutisms of Newtonian and Cartesian science. Everything the grand Cartesian engineer encountered had to be made cogredient and compossible (as Whitehead would put it). Nature was most easily universalized under the sign of private property rights, commodification, and market exchange, such that access to its component parts could be bought and sold at will, and its storehouse raided and plundered for anything and everything that was of utility to the fulfillment of human wants, needs, and desires. Nature was considered, as Heidegger later bitterly complained, as nothing more than one vast gasoline station. The consequences of a nascent entrepreneurial capitalism that could latch on to such understandings and the technologies they allowed were enormous. The whole of the socio-ecological world could be and was dramatically transformed as a result.

The problem with such a science is that it is both fragmented and reductionist. It works best in closed and bounded systems constituted by interactive parts (clearly defined entities, which accounts for the reliance upon the theory of absolute space and time) whose behavior determines the behavior of the bounded whole. Such a science cannot cope very easily with open systems or relative space-time processes (although it ultimately learned to do so in both instances through radical reconfigurations of the mathematics of calculability, resort to non-Euclidean geometries, systems and complexity theories, and the like), and to this day it struggles to comprehend relationalities. The greatest danger arises when valid findings for the structure and dynamics occurring in such a hermetically sealed, closed-system world get projected onto other terrains. “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process,” writes Marx in a cutting commentary that surely applies to Diamond, “are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.”³² In the history of social Darwinism, and in the current resort to genetic determinism or chaos theory, we likewise encounter the dangers that arise when nonspecialists take up established natural law concepts and treat them as universal truths. There are, for example, those who interpret current environmental difficulties solely in terms of the increasing entropy specified in the second law of thermodynamics.³³ Within closed physical systems energy dissipates over time. The problem is that if this were the only law that mattered in our universe, then the big bang would never have happened and the evolutionary process on planet earth (including the whole history of civilization), characterized by greater and greater (though admittedly localized) concentrations of energy, could not have occurred. This does not detract from the analysis that points out that the energy stored within the earth through biological processes over eons is being rapidly dissipated by a rampant capitalism, that the stored energy of the carboniferous age (coal) was the basis of capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth century, while that of the cretaceous (oil and natural gas) moved to the fore in the latter half of the twentieth century, leaving a big question mark over what the stores of exploitable energy will look like by the end of the twenty-first century. But if trees and crustaceans can store energy, then so can we. The technical problems may be huge, but it is still the case that the immense quantities of stored energy currently being used annually amount to less than 5 percent of the annual energy budget available to us directly from the sun. Until the sun burns out, that source of energy will always be with us and is potentially usable. The idea that we should regulate our lives solely around the singular and iron limits of the second law of thermodynamics is as ludicrous a proposition as that we should accept the thesis that our behavior is dictated by our genes.

That the second law of thermodynamics is in deep contradiction with that other major achievement of natural science, the Darwinian theory of evolution, is clearly recognized in Prigogine and Stengers’s book Order Out of Chaos, and they struggle mightily to reconcile the two through the application of probabilistic theory. Levins and Lewontin, in contrast, see no option except to abandon Cartesianism altogether for a more dialectical form of argument in which space and time take on relational and relative as well as absolute meanings. Given the arguments laid out in chapter 7 concerning space and time, it should be obvious, to invoke Whitehead’s observation once more, that the Newtonian/Cartesian conception of science, while a magnificent achievement in many respects and still fully applicable when it comes to building bridges and knocking them down, is far too limited to support any complete definition of what constitutes nature even from within the realm of the natural sciences. But who says that the natural sciences have a lock on the definition of nature? The sciences build models of certain aspects of nature for certain purposes. These models have changed dramatically in their scope and placement, and in their formal language over time (for example, the shift from deterministic to probabilistic mathematics or from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometries). Great “paradigm shifts” (as we now refer to them after Thomas Kuhn’s famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962) have occurred from time to time within the sciences; there has also been an increasing recognition of the social, political, and cultural foundations of the scientific enterprise that brings into question the supposed neutrality and pure objectivity of the scientist as observer.³⁴ Metaphors drawn from social life, for example, have played a crucial role in scientific inquiry (as Darwin’s appeal to Malthus’s population theories famously illustrated). “Nature” is therefore subject to heterogeneous and often rapidly shifting meanings within and across the so-called natural sciences. It is also shot through at almost every turn with all manner of social connotations.

None of this invalidates the scientific enterprise, nor does it detract from the astonishing advances that have been made in our understandings of “nature’s laws.” But it does insert a certain note of caution into our inferences from scientific findings to appropriate social meanings. What happens, for example, when Beck’s idealistic human rights cosmopolitanism is put up against contemporary findings from human genetics, and how do we respond socially and politically to the discovery of the genetic bases of certain diseases and extend that idea to beliefs concerning the genetic bases of human aggression, violence, and predatory instincts? Is it cooperation and mutual aid (as Kropotkin believed) that is coded into our genes, or competitive entrepreneurialism and the struggle for dominance (as social Darwinists typically argue)?

Species Being and the Human Order of Things

If the concept of nature is heterogeneous, unstable, and controversial even from within the perspectives of the natural sciences, then the concept of human nature is even more so. Fields such as genetics, neurobiology, or evolutionary psychology touch directly on our understandings of human endowments, and powers, and in the process render highly porous older Cartesian dichotomies between mind and brain, biological needs and moral imperatives. The thorny problem of our species being, which Kant left lingering in an uncomfortable duality between the geographical perspective (it is given by and within nature) and the anthropological (it is constructed out of human creativity), is perpetually with us. Whatever the perspective, the idea that we can pursue, as Nussbaum and Held suppose, some moral imperative toward a cosmopolitan existence in the absence of any understanding of the social ramifications of our biological being seems absurd. Yet this is what they, and indeed most practitioners within the social sciences and the humanities do. The reluctance to engage is understandable, since the uncertainties that attach to any conception of the nature of human nature make any excursus on to this terrain fraught with many dangers (religious and political as well as scientific) and characterized by not a little acrimony. The general result is a total avoidance of any serious discussion of the nature of our species being in almost all renditions of liberal, neoliberal and cosmopolitan theories.

The one person in recent years who has cheerfully thrown down the gauntlet on these issues is E. O. Wilson. In shaping the field called sociobiology in the 1970s, Wilson stirred up fierce opposition (particularly from the left), and he continues to provoke accusations of biological determinism in his most recent, and again widely read, work Consilience. The work is, in my view, flawed by the conjoining of two self-limiting beliefs. First is his absolute faith (and he readily concedes it is a faith) in reductionism. “All tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the working of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.”³⁵ The second is his deep attachment to a causal model of explanation. It is “the thread of connecting causal explanations” that makes it possible to move “back through the behavioral sciences to biology, chemistry, and finally physics.”³⁶ This formal attachment to causality sits uneasily with his critique and partial rejection of the Newtonian/Cartesian dichotomies (particularly that of mind and brain) and his firm rejection of logical positivism as a framework of understanding. Wilson also embraces the absolutism of Cartesian and Kantian constructions of space and time (and this, as Whitehead would observe, plainly affects his concept of nature). The absolute theory underpins, in turn, his appeal to causal chain explanations. But Wilson has a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary biological sciences, and we can learn a lot from him as he sets out to inject those findings into our understanding of both nature and human nature. His savage attack upon the social sciences for the “banality” of their conceptions concerning the biological foundations of human species being has to be taken seriously even though it is often a caricature. His political stance has, however, shifted in recent years toward an environmental alarmism concerned over how we, as a species, have become a geophysical and evolutionary force such that “genetic evolution is about to become conscious and volitional, and usher in a new epoch in the history of life.”³⁷ This leads him toward advocacy for an environmental ethic, thus aligning him with radical environmentalism. His fierce critique of the “pietistic and selfish libertarianism into which much of the American conservative movement has lately descended” and of the “myopia” of the economists has also helped assuage some of the more vociferous objections to his biological reductionism.

Reductionism is not wrong in principle, and those who use the term reductionist to dismiss arguments as inadmissible are plainly in error. But reduction does need to be carefully demonstrated. Wilson, like Marx, thinks that the only truly scientific method is one that moves from the materialist base (in Marx’s case, the organization of human labor practices, and for Wilson, the laws of physics) to a “predictive synthesis” of everything else (including culture, art, law, language, politics). But Wilson’s substantive work and the innumerable examples he sets out indicate that such a form of reductionism is an impossible dream. The problem derives in part from the exponential increase in complexity, but another factor is that the branching choices become infinite when it comes to genetic modifications, let alone cultural adaptations, which makes it impossible to predict one outcome rather than another. In practice, both Marx and Wilson recognize that it is far easier to move in the other direction, and discern the “earthly core” (as Marx puts it) of, say, religious beliefs in material labor practices (Marx) or in the laws of physics (Wilson).³⁸ The search for an unattainable predictive synthesis of the sort that Wilson has in mind has, however, led to very important discoveries and, like the idea of utopia, this performs a useful function.

Wilson places great emphasis on the importance of understanding relations across and between different temporal and spatial scales (defined in absolute terms). Within biology, the steps run from macro to micro, through “evolutionary biology, ecology, organismic biology, cellular biology, molecular biology, and biochemistry.” Considerable difficulties, Wilson admits, stand in the way of making these systems of knowledge “consilient” with each other. “The degree of consilience can be measured by the degree to which the principles of each division can be telescoped into those of the others.”³⁹ Wilson gives enough examples where this can fruitfully be done to make a plausible case for this kind of reductionism, at least among the biological sciences. But to telescope the findings of microbiology into those of evolution is not the same as saying that evolutionary processes are caused by or even explicable through molecular biology or biochemistry. I can telescope the findings on the genetic origins of physical handicaps in humans into an understanding of how an event like the “Special Olympics” comes about, but the latter cannot be causally attributed to genetics. Diamond’s work on domestication (generously praised by Wilson, presumably because he only read the first half of his book and did not get to the sillier stuff about coastline determinism) can be telescoped into our investigations on contemporary global inequalities but cannot be used to explain them. The problem is that Wilson (unlike Marx, who avoids causal reasoning and turns to dialectics) equates telescoping with causation, and this equation creates the difficulties.

When Wilson presses the details of his case, however, he shifts from a tightly controlled reductionism to a softer theory of epigenesis, by which he means “the development of an organism under the joint influence of heredity and environment.” Culture is increasingly significant in shaping environments. His argument, then, runs as follows: genes prescribe epigenetic rules, but culture helps determine which of the prescribing genes survive and multiply; the successful new genes alter the epigenetic rules, and these in turn change the direction and effectiveness of the channels of cultural acquisition. Genes and culture coevolve, but in a way that allows culture a shaping role: “The nature of the genetic leash and the role of culture can be better understood as follows. Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms, causing culture to evolve in a track parallel to and usually much faster than genetic evolution. The quicker the pace of cultural evolution, the looser the connection between genes and culture, although the connection is never completely broken. Culture allows a rapid adjustment to change in the environment through finely tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without corresponding precise genetic prescription. In this respect human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species.”⁴⁰

This comes close, as we shall see, to a dialectical mode of argumentation in which genes (heredity) and culture (environment) make up what Wilson calls a “coevolutionary circle.” He then goes on to state that “there is nothing contradictory in saying that culture arises from human action while human action arises from culture.”⁴¹ But Wilson cannot bring himself to abandon the causal model. He persistently reasserts its power even as its hold loosens. As the human species becomes a more powerful geophysical and evolutionary force, capable of engineering immense environmental transformations, the causal role of genetic imperatives appears more and more remote. Human cultural behavior needs, he says, to be consciously controlled if humanity, and the nature that supports it, is to survive in an adequate state. The confusions in this argument are rampant. The upshot is that “human nature is still an elusive concept because our understanding of the epigenetic rules composing it is rudimentary.”⁴²

Wilson’s injunction that we pay careful attention to questions of spatial and temporal scale and of the problems that arise as we move across and between them is well taken. There is a troubling trend in the social sciences to treat the particular spatial and temporal scale at which a particular cohort of researchers is working as the only valid scale for analysis. This creates its own forms of reductionism, such that, for example, some anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists take the local ethnographic or regional cultural scale as the true fount of all understandings. In a way, this choice of scale is understandable, since at this scale the intricacies of cultural difference become most readily identifiable, and as a result immensely illuminating and informative work has been produced on cultural differentiation at this scale. A problem arises, however, when it is then inferred that the only way to understand imperialism or neoliberalism is by working through the messiness of local ethnographic details. Since these never provide neat reflections of the larger argument, then, it is presumed, the macro-formulations of imperialism or neoliberalism (largely cast in political-economic and geopolitical rather than cultural terms) must be wrong.⁴³ Conversely, that it is difficult to assess through local studies alone the significance of the vast quantities of surplus liquidity sloshing around the world in financial markets (financing mergers and acquisitions, pushing global interest rates to all-time lows, and sparking speculative building booms or massive periodic crises that seriously disrupt the daily lives of millions of people in Argentina, Indonesiaand now the United States) cannot be used to dismiss the informative work carried out at local scales (particularly with respect to cultural forms of response to economic crises) as irrelevant or in some way subservient to the larger story. The tendency to privilege one scale against all others would not be so problematic if it did not carry over politically, as it does in the work of an anthropologist like Escobar and the geographers who jointly publish under the name of Gibson-Graham, resulting in claims that the unique place and perspective from which politics is possible is the locality (place) where the unique “truth of being” resides.⁴⁴ The task, as Wilson correctly defines it, is to work across different scales (as the Stoics implied, as Marx and Engels suggested, and as I proposed in Spaces of Hope) and to find ways to “telescope in” the political insights and energies that can be amassed at one scale into political insights and action at another. But as Neil Smith, among others, has pointed out many times, we have yet to come up with satisfactory or agreed-upon ways to do this.⁴⁵

The Dialectics of Nature

Is there some other way to meet Wilson’s objections and realize his goals, other than by a causal Cartesian reductionism? We can find alternatives either in process-based philosophy, of the sort that Whitehead articulated, or in dialectics. The latter is by far the most controversial, in part because any talk of dialectics immediately conjures up images of a closed and hermetic system of reasoning, of Hegel, of Marx, and, even worse, of the horrors of dialectical materialism as foisted on the world by Stalin. But there are, as Roy Bhaskar points out, many different forms of dialectical reasoning, and to jettison them all by reference to one aberrant strain is totally unwarranted.⁴⁶ This makes it imperative to spell out the form of dialectics that is being embraced. There have always been alternative ways of thinking of the nature-human relation other than in terms of a mutually exclusive distinction and causal relations. Spinoza, for one, provided a philosophical and ethical argument based on a refusal of such a distinction (and Spinoza’s influence is felt in contemporary deep ecology, as well as in the work of Negri, Deleuze, and many other thinkers). In the 1930s several of those within the so-called Frankfurt School pushed toward more dialectical formulations in their inquiries into nature and human nature.⁴⁷ Christopher Caudwell, also writing around that time, saw this relation to nature as

a double process—the environmentalisation of organized men, beginning all the human values—language, science, art, religion, consciousness; and the humanisation of nature, begetting the material change in nature and man’s own greater understanding of reality. Thus the development of humanity is not the increasing separation of man from a “state of nature.” It is man’s increasing interpenetration with nature. History is not, as the bourgeois supposes, the story of man in himself, or of human “nature” . . . but the story of the increasing interpenetration of nature by man as a result of his struggle with it. It is the story of economic production. The story of man is not the story of increasing subjection of man’s freedom and individuality to organization in order to cope with nature, but his growth of freedom and individuality through organization. . . . History is the study of the object-subject relation of men-nature, and not of either separately.⁴⁸

The kind of history that Caudwell proposes is radically different from Diamond’s. Three things stand out. First, the boundary between “culture” and “nature” is porous and becomes even more so over time. Nature and society are not separate and opposed realms but internal relations within a dynamic unity of a larger totality (this was the conception to which Wilson leaned when considering the coevolutionary circle of epigenesis). Caudwell dissolves the Cartesian/Kantian dichotomies through an examination of economic production and reproduction. It is, therefore, not only meaningful but essential, as Neil Smith insists, to look closely at “the production of nature,” in exactly the same way that Lefebvre conceptualizes the production of space.⁴⁹ Human beings have, through their laboring activities, played an increasingly important part in the production of nature and of environment (a fact Wilson concedes and worries about). This means conceptualizing a socio-ecological world that is actively being shaped and reshaped by a wide array of intersecting socio-ecological processes (some but not all of which are intimately expressive of human activities and desires) operating at different scales. The processes, flows, and relations that create, sustain, or dissolve the socio-ecological world must be the focus of inquiry. The geographical environment of 8000 b.c.e. has since been radically transformed (not least by human action) into something utterly different from what it was during the first stumbling steps toward plant and animal domestication (itself a clear moment when human action actively produced aspects of nature through, for example, breeding practices, as well as land modification and the use of fire).

Furthermore, the Lefebvrian dialectic among material practices (physical economic production), conceptualizations of nature (such as those given in the sciences, philosophy, and the arts), and lived consciousness of the world (“all human values,” as Caudwell calls them) must be actively engaged. “The cosmos of our culture is a different environment from the cosmos of the [ancient] Egyptian” because the material practices, the conceptualizations, and the way we live the relationality to nature have been radically transformed, along with the material environment itself, over both space and time. Third, the growth of individuality and freedom (the transformation of social relations) is achieved through forms of organization that interact and interpenetrate rather than separate out from nature. The idea that humanity has become increasingly alienated or even liberated from a nature to which it was once intimately attached is, Caudwell insists, downright wrong. There is an increasing interpenetration and deepening of the bond between the human and the natural over time. We are now, as Neil Smith puts it, involved in the “financialization and commodification of nature ‘all the way down,’” as property rights are claimed over genetic materials and biological processes, and new chemical and genetic combinations (such as genetically modified foods) are brought into being. The results, as the history of everything from agricultural clearances to anthropogenic climate change shows, are as extensive as they are problematic.⁵⁰ Genetic engineering, which poses such immense ethical questions, now, for example, puts humanity in a position to purposively intervene in the very roots of the evolutionary process rather than doing so through the slow processes of genetic modification that earlier occurred: plant and animal breeding practices or the gradual environmental transformations that created favorable habitats for new species to emerge. Meanwhile, more and more aspects of the environment are merged with the circulation of capital as property rights regimes and market exchanges (like carbon trading) are imposed upon them.

Caudwell prefigures the view that animates what I call “historical geographical materialism.” This view is, as B. Braun notes, radically anti-Aristotelian.⁵¹ Aristotle held that the world is made up of distinct and autonomous things (such as places), each with its own essence. Dialectics and process-based philosophies (such as that of Whitehead) jointly hold, by way of contrast, that “elements, things, structures and systems do not exist outside of or prior to the processes, flows, and relations that create, sustain, or undermine them.” Things have no unchanging essence because, as Whitehead once succinctly put it, “reality is the process.” Or, as Levins and Lewontin insist, heterogeneity is everywhere, and “change is a characteristic of all systems and all aspects of all systems.”⁵² There is, therefore, no solid, independent “external nature” we can appeal to as an authority (as Malthus and Semple do) or wage war against (as the prometheans do) or interact harmoniously with (as ecological utopians do). Nature and society are internal relations within the dynamics of a larger socio-ecological totality.

Putting that relation back into the analysis generates a completely different kind of historical geography from that which Diamond proposes. W. Cronon provides us with an example of what such an alternative might look like in Changes in the Land. He depicts a New England environment at the time of colonial settlement that was the product of more than 10,000 years of Indian occupation and forest use (promoting, through burning, the forest edge conditions that favored species diversity). The colonizers misread this nature as pristine, virginal, natural, rich, and underutilized by indigenous peoples. The implantation of European institutions of governance and property rights (coupled with distinctively European aspirations toward accumulation of wealth) wrought an ecological transformation of such enormity that indigenous populations were deprived of their habitat and therefore their livelihood. The destruction of the nature that the Indians had constructed out of their own social relations meant the destruction of their culture. The changes in and on the land made it impossible to sustain a nomadic and highly flexible indigenous mode of production and reproduction. In reflecting on this process, Cronon sets out the dialectical principles that animate his account (principles totally absent from Diamond’s work but hinted at in Wilson’s theory of epigenesis). A proper ecological history “begins by assuming a dynamic and changing relationship between environment and culture, one as apt to produce contradictions as continuities. Moreover, it assumes that the interactions of the two are dialectical. Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment but then culture reshapes environment responding to those choices, the reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination. Changes in the way people create and re-create their livelihood must be analyzed in terms of change not only in their social relations but in their ecological ones as well.”⁵³

Dialectics of this sort constitute an entirely different approach from that enshrined in the Cartesian/Kantian dichotomous view of the world. It centers Marx’s relational, process-based, and dynamic way of thinking, as well as the tradition of Spinoza, Leibniz, and many others. It has now been accepted as foundational in David Bohm’s interpretations of quantum theory, the approach of Maurice Wilkins to microbiology, and that of Levins and Lewontin to biology more generally. The contemporary neuro-sciences, even E. O. Wilson is forced to concede, have dispensed entirely with the “mind and matter” distinction and now formulate research in relational terms. Relational thinking has, furthermore, entered into politics directly through the “deep ecology” of Arne Naess (inspired by his studies of Spinoza) and the formulations of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in Empire (likewise inspired by Spinoza).⁵⁴ This suggests that a widespread oppositional culture is emerging from traditional ways (as contemporaneously exemplified by the causal analysis of Diamond and Sachs) of talking about nature and environment. Ecological theorizing, across the political spectrum, is now pervaded by a far more dialectical approach.

The Dialectics of Socio-ecological Transformations

Is there, then, any more systematic way to construct a dialectical approach to the dynamics of socio-ecological transformations? To answer this question requires that we come to terms with both the proper dialectical method and the substantive questions that need to be addressed. The substantive questions have long been in play. Consider, for example, the published proceedings of the Wennergren symposium “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.”⁵⁵ The symposium, held in 1955, was an attempt by anthropologists and geographers with help from, among others, earth scientists, philosophers, historians, planners, and theologians, to explore the anthropological and geographical foundations for understanding the historical geography of global environmental transformations as influenced by human activities. It was the most systematic attempt up to that time, one that in many respects has yet to be superseded, to answer Kant’s call for a systematic examination of the geographical and anthropological conditions of possibility for understanding the world around us. The theme is the coevolution of nature and culture (with emphasis upon the latter). There is much here, therefore, that comes close to the spirit of Wilson’s demand for a theory of epigenesis, without Wilson’s insistence on driving everything back to the genetic if not microphysical levels (pretty much an impossible idea back in 1955). But, as might be expected, the view of culture set out in these volumes goes way beyond Wilson’s, for it acknowledges the power and importance of myths of origins, of religion, of symbolic practices and beliefs in defining how different human societies have seen themselves in relation to the natural world. There is a clear recognition that the Newtonian/Cartesian world view transformed our way of thinking from what Herbert Gutkind called an “I-Thou” relational view into an alienated and depersonalized “I-It” objective view (thus anticipating Carolyn Merchant’s feminist thesis in The Death of Nature, as engineered by the revolutionary empiricism of Francis Bacon). Wilson’s argument that the natural leash over cultural evolution has slackened over time and that the scale of human influence has dramatically increased to the point where we have become a major evolutionary force is presciently articulated. That we needed to become more conscious and responsible with respect to future evolutionary directions was of great concern more than fifty years ago, as it is repeatedly asserted in our own times.

There is a great deal to criticize in the Wennergren volumes. There is a stunning absence of any concern for critical social and political questions, such as those of gender (not a single woman contributed to the symposium), racism, colonialism, and the continuing practices of imperialism. The dynamics of the Cold War, struggles for national self-determination, let alone anything as tendentious as the crisis-prone character of capitalism and the imperatives of global capitalist expansion, did not rate a mention. This was, after all, 1955, when McCarthyism was rampant in the United States with censorious (often self-imposed) ramifications even in the hallowed halls of Princeton. There was, as a result, an overemphasis upon supposedly objective scientific and empirical enquiry into the state of the world’s environments, although Lewis Mumford, who had strong roots in the anarchist tradition of Kropotkin via the work of the urbanist Patrick Geddes, did manage to sound the alarm at what he saw as the disastrous trajectory of contemporary urbanization. In the absence of much direct political critique, many contributors then (as now) took refuge in the abstractions of aesthetics and ethics to voice their concerns over what they saw as a profligate and uncaring approach to natural relations. But what stands out more positively in retrospect is the range of substantive themes and relationalities with which many of the contributors were prepared to engage. It is salutary, for example, to read the theologian Teilhard de Chardin’s commentaries on “the revolution in the very process of evolution” wrought by human activity, describing the “irresistible totalization” then being imposed by the powerful forces of science, and noting also how “mankind has suddenly become compressional and converging” (anticipating my later arguments concerning time-space compression). The onus for conscious change, he argues, rests on the human power of “reflexive invention” (shades of Ulrich Beck on reflexive modernity as a core cosmopolitan value). The architect/planner E. A. Gutkind focuses on how our sense and vision of the world has changed dramatically as air travel (and aerial photography) became available to us. This was far more than a technological breakthrough: it entailed a fundamental and far-reaching revolution in our cultural perspective on the world (much as space travel, satellite monitoring, and remote sensing have done for us in more recent times). Clarence Glacken examined the immense variety of discourses about nature, pointing to the shifting history and often conflicting cosmologies and opinions about our place in the natural order. He closed with a plea that cultural and environmental histories not go their separate ways but recognize their integral relation (epigenesis). Alexander Spoehr, in a short and pithy piece, persuasively argued that so-called “natural” resources were technical, economic, and cultural appraisals of elements in nature useful to a particular social order and its dominant classes (anticipating somewhat contemporary social constructionism). Lewis Mumford insisted that urbanization be seen as an integral part of natural history (presaging my own view that “there is nothing unnatural about New York City”). Others insisted that the histories and cultural mores of peasant societies must be seen as ecological as well as social and cultural phenomena. As befitted a symposium dedicated to reviving the spirit of George Perkins Marsh, there was much written about the unintended consequences of human actions and the risks that attached thereto. Carl Sauer and others made much of how the use of fire had early on dramatically altered the landscapes of the world in unintended ways. While each author tended to plow particular and sometimes unduly narrow furrows, the collective impact of the volumes was far more than the sum of its parts. It amounted, in effect, to an accounting of the then adequacies and inadequacies of anthropology and geography as foundational “propaedeutic” disciplines for understanding the environmental historical geography of planet earth. The pious hope, best articulated by the “Burkean” geographer Carl Sauer, was that it would also be the staging ground for the construction of political-ecological alternatives. We should, he said, cast aside our concern for the comforts and displays of the flesh and create “an ethic and an aesthetic under which man, practicing moderation, may indeed pass on to posterity a good Earth.”⁵⁶

The Method of Moments

The participants in the symposium returned again and again to the idea of the transformation of nature through human practices and the implications of those transformations for human life. This, of course, is the central proposition upon which Marx hangs his dialectical approach to socio-ecological relations. “Man opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.” The question of what kind of transformed natural world human beings produce and inhabit cannot be divorced, according to Marx’s formulation, from the question of what kind of human society emerges. This is the core of Marx’s dialectical reconstruction of how the socio-ecological totality works. It is a core constructed from the human standpoint, of course, but as far as Marx was concerned, that was the only possible standpoint we, as human beings, could have. What makes our labor exclusively human is that we dream up our projects before we realize them in practice. “What separates the worst of architects from the best of bees,” says Marx, is “that the architect erects a structure in imagination before realizing it upon the ground.”⁵⁷ A utopian moment, when we become conscious of this core dialectic and fight conceptually and intellectually over alternatives, is as inevitable as it is critical in defining how the dialectical relation between human action and the natural world unfolds.

This simple dialectical and relational view underpins the general argument I have made at length elsewhere: that all political and social projects are ecological projects, and vice versa.⁵⁸ But such an approach requires deeper elaboration if we are to realize its full potentiality. Marx provides us with a powerful clue as to how to do this. In comparing his method to that of Darwin’s evolutionism in the natural sciences, and in one of those rare moments when he offered some guide as to what his “scientific” version of historical materialism was really all about, he wrote that “technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, and the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.”⁵⁹ The formulation in this passage is cryptic, but read through the lenses of dialectical and process philosophy, it opens up a rich terrain for theoretical elaboration. There are, he in effect suggests, six distinctive and identifiable “moments” (as Whitehead would term them) revolving around the organization of the human labor process. Let us consider each of these moments in turn.

 

1. By technology, Marx means not only the hardware (the tools, machinery, fixed capital equipment, and the actual physical infrastructures for production and consumption) but also the software (the programming and incorporation of knowledge, intelligence, and, in our times, science into machines and production activities more generally) and the distinctive organizational forms assumed (including corporate and bureaucratic management structures, as well as the more obvious forms of cooperation and the division of labor backed by scientific management). By all of these means, the productivity of human labor stands to be enhanced.⁶⁰

2. Nature in the first instance refers to the whole immensely variegated and diversified world of phenomena and processes, always to some degree unstable and in perpetual flux (and therefore characterized by a dynamism all its own), that surrounds us in its pristine condition (sometimes referred to as “first nature”). This nature is increasingly modified, channeled, and reordered by human action over time to form a “second nature” that directly or indirectly bears the marks of human action with both intended and unintended consequences. Human beings, like all other organisms, are part of nature and as such are “active subjects transforming nature according to its laws.”⁶¹ The only difference from other organisms—and on this point both Marx and Wilson agree—is that human beings can engage in this process consciously, knowledgeably, and reflexively. This is what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees.

3. The activity of production refers to the labor process by which available raw materials are transformed into items of utility for us. Under capitalism, these labor processes are also required to produce surplus value (profit) for the capitalist, not only through the production of goods and services for direct use and consumption, but also through the production of means of production (intermediate goods and technological hardware), symbolic forms (books and art objects, religious and cultural icons, cathedrals, palaces and temples of finance, learning, state and class power, and the like), physical infrastructures (agrarian landscapes and whole cities as resource systems), spaces of transport and communications, and all those transformations in the land that produce uneven geographical developments and regionally differentiated landscapes. The labor processes required to produce and maintain spaces, places, and built environments also fall under this heading.

4. The sustenance of daily life refers to the daily processes, both social and ecological, through which individuals and social groups reproduce themselves and their social relations through working, consuming, living, engaging in sexual relations, reproducing, communicating, and sensually/existentially engaging with the world. This entails an account of our individual and collective embeddedness in the ongoing web of socio-ecological life—what Gramsci refers to as the “practical activity” of “the man in the mass,” Lefebvre refers to as “everyday life,” Braudel calls “material life,” and Habermas depicts as “the lifeworld.” This sphere also incorporates what some feminists conceptualize as social reproduction.⁶¹ Long neglected in Marxian theory, this became a critical field within which questions of gender relations and sexual orientation in relation to processes of social reproduction could be more fully explored and integrated into general theory.⁶²

5. Social relations occur between individuals and social groups as these are constituted into networks, hierarchies, and institutional arrangements (within corporate and state administrations, bureaucracies, and military apparatuses). While Marx focuses primarily on class relations, plainly these social relations are complex and frequently unstable, incorporating also reproductive units (family and kinship structures) and groupings structured around gender and sexual orientation, racial identifications, religious and linguistic affiliations, place-bound and political loyalties (as nationals or as citizens and subjects), and the like. Gender and racialized distinctions have clearly played an enormous role in the dynamics of capital accumulation, both locally and globally, and it is therefore impossible to take the class character of labor exploitation or dispossession without considering the whole complex field of social relations through which that class relation is constructed.⁶³

6. Mental conceptions of the world refer not only to how individuals think on a day-to-day basis but to the whole inherited arsenal of language, concepts, and stored symbolic, cultural, religious, ethical, scientific, and ideological meanings and aesthetic and moral judgments. These affect how the world is represented and conceptualized, and therefore lived, interpreted, and acted upon by particular people in particular social situations and in particular places at particular times. The vast heterogeneity and diversity of these ways of thinking and knowing, and the innumerable lines of dispute and conflict over adequate ways of understanding and acting in the world (highly sensitive to social situatedness in terms of class, gender, subalternity, and the like), guarantee not only a remarkable amount of conflictual intellectual activity, but also a capacity for thought experimentation that has powerful reverberations across all the other moments. Mental conceptions are always subject to reality checks in the worlds of social relations, production systems, everyday life, and technologies, and in the encounter with natural law.

 

Many of these six distinctive moments were invoked in the Wennergren symposium. Spoehr, for example, cites nature, technologies, mental conceptions, social relations, and the activities of production in his definition of natural resources. So-called “natural disasters” have since been analyzed in much the same way to emphasize their social, technologically mediated, and conceptually framed qualities. How, then, are we to conceptualize the relations among these six moments? In placing technology at the head of the list, Marx seems to give some support to the version of Marxism (most clearly laid out in G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense and accepted by Thomas Friedman) that says technologies—or the “productive forces,” as they are usually referred to in the Marxist tradition—are determinate.⁶⁴ But Marx actually speaks of technology “disclosing” and “revealing,” rather than causing. Technologies are interlinked with and internalize effects from all the other moments. The software aspects, for example, clearly overlap with the moment of mental conceptions, while social relations are fundamentally implicated in organizational forms (such as those of the division of labor). The hardware has to be produced, and technologies always entail a mobilization of natural forces according to natural law. In a parallel way technological changes generate and communicate transformative impulses into, for example, social relations, daily life, and mental conceptions, which in turn reverberate back into the technological moment. We have to conceptualize, therefore, a continuous process of conflictual transformation in and between all the moments, including that of nature itself. This is what I shall refer to as Marx’s “method of moments.” It is most clearly outlined in the Grundrisse as follows: “individual moments” within the totality “determine each other internally and search for each other externally; but . . . they may or may not find each other, balance each other, correspond to each other. The inner necessity of moments which belong together, and their indifferent, independent existence towards one another, are already a foundation of contradictions.”⁶⁵

For illustrative purposes, let us focus upon the technological moment. The perpetual search for new technologies is mainly impelled, in our world, by geopolitical rivalries over military superiority and intercapitalist competition for economic advantage. Those who capture superior technologies are more likely to come out ahead in competitive situations. These longstanding social pressures have produced a fetish belief, a blind faith, in new technologies as a possible answer to every difficult question (notice, for example, how frequently in recent times the answer to environmental problems such as global warming is said to lie in new technologies). Technological innovation, as Marx long ago noted, becomes a business in itself, feeding on this fetish belief, driven onward under the social and political relations of capitalism and imperialism.⁶⁶ The role that new technologies play, for good or bad, in our evolutionary dynamic (particularly through production and consumption systems, rapid changes in the relation to nature, and changes in human nature itself) is, therefore, a by-product of our dominant social relations (capitalist and militarist) and their accompanying mental conceptions. Technology is not some free-floating deus ex machina that haphazardly evolves in the rough and tumble of diverse human endeavors or through the singular efforts of mythical figures, be it Prometheus or the creative entrepreneur. It arises out of the chaotic ferment of interactions in and around all the other moments, impelled forward by fetish beliefs that arise in part out of the coercive laws of geopolitical and economic competition.

But then consider how our mental conceptions of the world depend upon our ability to see, to measure, to calibrate with the help of telescopes and microscopes, of X-rays and CAT scanners, and how all this technological capacity has helped change our understanding of (and the identity to be attributed to) the human body in relation to its environment (the cosmos). We, in the advanced capitalist world, recalibrate our daily lives around such technologies as automobiles, mobile phones, and BlackBerries (to say nothing of how we adapt to the organizational forms of corporations and bureaucracies), all the while creating new technological demands to deal with the daily frustrations and contradictions (gridlock in our cities produces a call for congestion pricing, which will require the implementation of new technologies of monitoring and surveillance). To what degree, D. Haraway asks in her celebrated manifesto on the subject, has human nature morphed into a cyborg nature through our rapidly involving engagements with new technologies?⁶⁷ But then look back through the other end of the telescope, and consider why it was that someone in a certain time and place had the mental conception that there was something important that could be seen in a particular way, and found a material and social situation with lens grinders and metalworkers, as well as patrons willing to support and appreciate (often in the face of social antagonism and opposition) the development of a new way of seeing with the aid of telescopes and microscopes. And then consider how capitalists, obsessed with the competitive need and desire to accelerate and expand the terrain of capital circulation, seek out and instantaneously adopt technologies (for example, cell phones) that facilitate speed-up and the diminution of spatial barriers to movement, in preference to exploring other technologies that relate to rest and stasis.

The evident existence of autonomous and fetishistic forces defining the technological moment does not imply the determinacy of that moment in relation to all the others. There is, it turns out, a long history of selecting one or other of these six moments as the determinant force. This occurs because every one of the moments internalizes autonomous forces for change that have widespread ramifications across the other moments. These impacts are easily tracked, leaving the impression of a prime moving force at work. Prioritizing the moment of nature (within which there is abundant and overwhelming evidence for autonomous shifts) gives us environmental determinism (though rarely in total isolation from the other moments, as Diamond’s “soft form” of environmental determinism demonstrates). There are those (like Gutkind in the Wennergren symposium) who put the autonomy of ideas and mental conceptions in the vanguard of all change, even without invoking the Hegelian idealism to which Marx objected. But Marx did not deny the autonomy of the “mental moment,” agreeing that ideas could be a material force in making history. Marx also famously wrote that “all history is the history of class struggle,” which bolsters the case for putting contentious social relations of class (or of gender, race, and religion) in the driving seat of history. There is a very strong tradition among some Marxists of taking this line of class relations as the ultimate determinant, a view also held by some anarchists and autonomistas who believe this is the main determinant of social change. Some feminists prefer to prioritize gender relations as the prime moving force, while other analysts, as represented in the popular tract by P. Hawken, suggest that autonomous impulses arising out of daily life and processes of social reproduction, out of the lifeworld of particular places, do, can, or will play a determinate role in socio-ecological evolution.⁶⁸

None of these deterministic readings works. Even in Diamond’s case, the first part of his book, which does work reasonably well, tacitly involves not the simple geographical causation he claims, but a dialectical movement, a coevolution, in which technological innovations, new forms of social relations, and new mental conceptions of the world (symbolic learning systems) come together with particular natural circumstances in a mutually supportive way. The only proper way to proceed, therefore, is to see and keep each of the “moments” in dialectical tension with all of the others. At one curious moment in his text, Diamond almost acknowledges as much: he suddenly shifts his language from environmental causation to that of an “autocatalytic process” of evolutionary change, described as “one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it is started. This amounts to an invocation of process philosophy rather than cause and effect! But this is not surprising since it would be relatively easy to take the most plausible part of Diamond’s account of agricultural origins in the Fertile Crescent and recast it in the theoretical framework of “moments” in a process of coevolution. The most insightful work on our evolving and coevolving relation to nature in recent times, such as Haraway’s brilliant analysis in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, has come from exploring the cross-dialectical relations among, if not all, then some of these six moments.⁶⁹ When confronted with economic or environmental crises, for example, we have to focus on the dynamic interrelations among the six moments, even as we recognize there are certain asymmetries among them. Mental conceptions concerning environmental probity, for example, pass for naught until materialized, say, as new technologies in production and as radical reconfigurations in the conduct of daily life (as environmentalists frequently and frustratedly note). Technological innovations remain empty of meaning (as Chinese history again and again showed) until they are adopted and diffused through the worlds of production and consumption, and neither of those can change without transformations in social relations and mental conceptions that make the new technologies acceptable to daily life, as well as politically and legally sanctioned (a tricky matter when it comes to interventions in human sexuality and reproduction). In specific historical and geographical conjunctures, the uneven tensions and asymmetries among the different moments may influence the overall direction of transformations within the socio-ecological totality. In one place and time technological change may seem to be in the vanguard while the other moments either lag behind or become active loci of refusal and resistance, and at another moment, revolutions in social relations or in daily life may come to the fore. Mental conceptions and utopian ideas frequently stretch far beyond what any of the other moments can bear, but in other instances ideas do become a leading force for change, at least for a while in a particular place.

We cannot, therefore, ever reduce one moment to a simple refraction of the others. Mutations in the natural order that produced the smallpox and syphilis germs that wrought such demographic havoc with indigenous populations in the past, and the HIV/AIDS and West Nile viruses, the avian flu, and the SARS that have posed direct problems to global health in recent years, were not direct products of human action. But these mutations posed immense problems for the reproduction of daily life, for our mental conceptions as well as for social relations and production processes, while calling forth immediate demands for technological responses. Yet we cannot presume even in this case that the seemingly autonomous mutations bear no trace of human influence. The extreme density of human populations and activities in, say, the Pearl River Delta in China creates a perfect habitat for the emergence of all manner of new pathogens, as seems to have been the case in ancient Mesopotamia, as Diamond notes. Nor is the nature of the responses across the moments determinate in advance: it matters whether HIV/AIDS is represented in our mental conceptions as God’s retribution for the evil of homosexuality or as a mutational accident with enormous social consequences. Movements that arise around the reproduction of daily life (for example, questions of sexual identity and preference) in particular places likewise look to the production of new technologies, demand new social relations and mental conceptions, and imply a different relation to nature. The transformation of the totality cannot occur without transformations across all six interpenetrating moments. There is no automatic response that sets a predictable (let alone deterministic) pattern of interaction between the moments. The qualities immanent within the socio-ecological totality do not move it inexorably toward some teleological end. The evolution is contingent and not determined in advance.

The six moments taken together do not, under this reading, constitute a tightly organized totality of the Hegelian sort, in which each moment is so tightly bound as an internal relation of all the others that there is no liberty or autonomy of movement. Marx’s “method of moments” leads to a theory of coevolving ecological moments within what Lefebvre would call an “ensemble” or Deleuze an “assemblage” of interactive processes. Lefebvre imagines this process as inextricably related to the production of space (an idea that Neil Smith unfolds in Uneven Development as an explicit relation between the production and transformation of nature and the production of space). Deleuze sees it in terms of processes of territorialization and deterritorialization. He defines an assemblage, for example, as “a multiplicity that is made up of heterogeneous terms”—what I refer to as moments—“and which establishes liaisons, relations between them. . . . Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys: these are not successions, lines of descent but contagions, epidemics, the wind.”⁷⁰ The assemblage, says Deleuze in a passage that helps connect the production of place with the idea of an assemblage, “has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.”⁷¹

Marx’s treatment of the assemblage of socio-ecological moments can in this way be brought to bear on processes of place formation. Put the other way round, we cannot understand processes of place formation, dissolution, and renewal without examining the bounded interplay between the six socio-ecological moments. This is how I think of the processes of city formation and urban evolution. Interestingly, when we look back at some of the best forms of historical regional geography, such as that produced by Vidal de la Blache, what we see is a way of understanding the production of regionality through a coevolution, over space and time, of the moments that Marx defines.

How are we to reconcile this way of thinking with the proposition that the labor process lies at the core of the dialectical relation to nature? Marx firmly believed that the labor process—the meshing of social relations and productive forces in the transformation of nature—was the real economic foundation upon which there arose a legal and political superstructure, and corresponding forms of social consciousness. “Arising from,” it should be noted, does not necessarily denote “determined by.” But Marx then went on to say that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”⁷² Marx seems here to deny any autonomy to our mental conceptions. That ideas are not the ultimate determinant (as Hegel and the idealists supposed) is entirely consistent with the framework of moments that we have been elucidating, but the denial of any autonomy at all to mental conceptions is not. This denial is, furthermore, contradicted by Marx’s key metaphor of the architect who, unlike the bee, erects a structure in imagination before materializing it on the ground. Marx elsewhere acknowledges that ideas can become a material force in historical change (otherwise, why would he bother to write out his own ideas so eloquently?) We should therefore reject the proposition that mental conceptions lack any autonomy as a manifestation of Marx’s overzealous quest for an impossible (but often fruitful) reductionism and of his correct concern to refute Hegelian idealism. Mental conceptions and their associated cultural transformations have a creative but not determinate role within the socio-ecological system of moments.

But Marx also argues, in this same passage, that changes in the economic foundation lead eventually to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. This reductionist statement (and, recall, not all reductionism can be ruled out automatically as illegitimate) is immediately modified by saying that “it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”⁷³ One interpretation of this formulation is entirely consistent with the theory of moments. The forms in which individuals and social groups become conscious of conflict and fight it out (in the realm of mental conceptions, for example) are relational and therefore immaterial, but how these struggles are resolved has objective consequences in the world of practices. The mechanical causal model of relations between base and superstructure that is sometimes propounded must be dissolved into a dialectic of interactive and internalizing relations between the six moments. But the only objective point in the socio-ecological evolutionary process where we can physically measure impacts and find out where we are is that of the physical transformation of nature through human labor. The parallel here is with Marx’s concept of capital as value (an immaterial but objective social relation) in motion that takes the physical forms of purchased commodities (labor power and means of production), production processes, commodities for market, and, finally, money (understood as a material representation of the immateriality of value). Only at the money point is it possible to know whether the capitalist has gained surplus value (measured materially as money profit) or not. But it is one thing to gain a materialist measure of where we are in the relation to nature or in the accumulation of capital (“with the precision of natural science”) and quite another to figure out how we got there. And that “how we got there” entails all manner of peculiarities including, for example, moving dialectically across all six of the moments that Marx identifies. Marx’s materialist point, which is well taken in this instance, is that if we end up in a relation to nature that is materially obnoxious or physically dangerous to us (famines, ozone holes, toxic pollutants, global warming)—or in a relation to the circulation of capital that is measurably unprofitable—then something in “the whole immense superstructure”—or, as I would prefer it, “across all moments”—has to change, be it social relations, mental conceptions, everyday life, legal and political institutions, technologies, or the relation to nature. The method of moments earlier outlined is in no way violated under this conception. The material measure of the relation to nature does provide a solid baseline for judgment, and this seems to introduce a certain asymmetry into how relations among the moments unfold. We cannot, in short, eat and drink ideas, and our material reproduction as species beings within nature has to recognize that elemental fact, even as we freely acknowledge that our species being is about far more than just eating and drinking. But at the heart of all these dialectical interactions among the different moments, at the core of the process of coevolution, lies the foundational question of the organization of human labor, because it is through the material activities of laboring that the crucial relation to nature unfolds. Any project that does not confront the question of who has the power to organize human labor and to what purposes and why is missing the central point. Not to address that point is to condemn ourselves to a peripheral politics that merely seeks to regulate our relations to nature in a way that does not interfere with current practices of capital accumulation on a global scale.

So what kind of geographical and ecological knowledge is required for the adequate formulation of a cosmopolitan project? And what, more specifically, is our conception of the human-nature relation? The answer is a dialectical, process-based, and interactive approach to world historical geography, of the sort that Cronon practices, Lewontin preaches, Marx theorizes through the dialectical method of moments, and Whitehead pushes forward in his process-based philosophy of nature. This is the essence of the historical geographical materialism that must be incorporated into any cosmopolitan project if that project is to have any chance of success. Any conception of alternatives, furthermore, has to answer the questions of what kind of daily life, what kind of relation to nature, which social relations, what production processes, and what kinds of mental conceptions and technologies will be adequate to meet human wants, needs, and desires. Any strategy for change has to consider how to coevolve changes across all the moments. This is as true for place construction as for the transformative activities that constitute the socio-ecological dialectic and the modes and mannerisms of the production of spatio-temporalities. Revolutions that move away from the existing state of things do so by moving across the dialectics of these integral moments.⁷⁴ A revolutionary geographical theory has to incorporate such a dialectical understanding into its very heart. So is there, then, something we can call “geographical theory”? And if so, what is it all about?