Ecosystem of globalization - research proposal

I assembled a research proposal on the "ecosystem of globalization", using the concept of "ecological revolution" to test the idea of globalization as an "epochal shift." The research proposal was done as, well, as homework for a research methods seminar; the quantitative research was never done, but I did do a paper, or two papers out of the literature review ("Speculative capital and the ecosystem of globalization", a longer, more rambling piece, and a condensed version, "The ecosystem of globalization").

I tried to think about how one identifies an "ecological revolution", in order to know if the investigation would show that there is an "ecosystem of globalization" emerging. I proposed looking at the environmental impact of three (speculative) financial structures associated with globalization; and assessing them according to seven categories. Here's the section that laid out my criteria:

Categories for assessing ecosystem impact

Non-human categories (after Simmons, 1996)

(1) Biological productivity: A significant change moves the ecosystem from one type to another, where types are identified as forest; woodland, grassland or savannah; desert; cultivated land; urban; other terrestrial. The rationale is that each of these ecosystem types has a distinct net primary productivity (Simmons, 1996), and a shift from one ecosystem to another indicates a shift in biological productivity.

(2) Population dynamics and diversity: A significant change includes the removal of a keystone species, a key engineer species, or extinction, e.g. associated with unique habitat loss.

(3) Stability: A significant change is indicated by a potential change in (1) or (2).


Human-nature categories (after Merchant, 1989)

(4) Production process, including economic productivity: A significant change in the production process is indicated by a new form of motive power or central technology (e.g., the steam engine, the microchip (Davis, 2000))

(5) Social reproduction process: A significant change in the reproduction process is indicated by new productive relations.

(6) Property forms: A significant change in property forms is indicated in types of ownership or a changed the relationship of the owner to the thing owned. E.g., significant changes include a change from common ownership to private ownership, or single owner to corporate ownership, or tenant owner to absentee owner.

(7) Consciousness (representations of nature, narrative, ways of thinking about nature): A significant change in consciousness is indicated by a change in narrative (e.g., from progressive to declensionist, or declensionist to recovery), or change in valence (a role or character reversal, e.g., from nature as Eden to nature as vengeful), or a change in mode of participation (e.g., from subject-object to partnership) (Merchant, 1995).

For example, one identified impact of timber REITs is an increase in land ownership turnover (Block and Sample, 2001; Hagan, Irland and Whitman, 2005). After examining the impact of turnover, timber REITs might be categorized as:

-- signficant to stability (3) (e.g., rapid turnover has the potential of leading to clear-cutting or parcelization that leads to a change in ecosystem type or habitat loss), property forms (6);

-- insignificant to population dynamics and diversity (2) (i.e., some insignificant change is expected), (7) owners' and local inhabitants' way of thinking about the forest;

-- not applicable to biological productivity (1), economic productivity (4) and social reproduction (5).

In the case of land turnover, the applicable effects might be deemed to be relevant at the local and possibly regional level, but not at the global level.

[See the proposal for the references]

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