Environmental discourse

I have this sense about environmental discourse that treats capitalism as antagonistic to the environment, as "the enemy of nature". Well the "environment" and "nature" are two very different things, so it would be a mistake for me to conflate the two of them. "Nature" is a particular way of relating to the physical and living world around us, the environment. But the two are often conflated along with other conceptions of the world around us, like "wilderness".

One can certainly make a case of capitalism as "the enemy of nature". If, say, "nature" means something we participate in, respect, see as living, as part of us, etc. -- really, a spiritual conception of the world around us -- then capitalism is antithetical. Capitalism is an economic system based on the transformation of the world into quantities, economic units, in Marxist terms, Values. A world reduced to raw material and commodities, inputs and outputs, is the opposite of a world with which we can converse, embrace, experience in a qualitative way.

But this spiritual opposition I suspect is not what is generally meant by capitalism as the enemy of nature. The implication is that capitalism will destroy not just nature, but the environment. And so the philosophical or spiritual leap to seeing the world as "nature" isn't made. The "enemy of nature" will destroy world we live in, and end life. "Nature", or the environment is left as part of a narrative that we get trapped in -- I'm thinking of Carolyn Merchant's Reinventing Eden here. In the ascensionist narrative, we are coming out of a wilderness and creating a new Eden -- this I suppose might be the capitalist narrative, where Eden is associated with the maximization of commodity production and profit. The declensionist narrative sees us falling still, from a primeval Paradise into an industrial wasteland, and we must act to stop the fall and restore Eden. Or something like that. Merchant saw these narratives as trapping us into narrow binaries and linear plots, false and/or constrained choices as it were. She proposes the alternative of complexity and dynamism, of multiple voices and partnership with the environment -- a way of reaching nature?

Well I have digressed. I think the environmental movement runs a risk in posing capitalism as the enemy of the environment. because as capitalism adjusts itself, as it surely will, to ensure the continued conditions of its reproduction, it will create a split within the environmental movement, or exacerbate the one perhaps already there. As a class, capitalists will take the necessary steps to ensure that accommodations are made to preserve capitalism. This may mean the preservation of some habitats, not because they have intrinsic value, but because they are repositories of unique genetic sequences that can be harvested or perhaps because they can be commodified as sites of eco-tourism or perhaps they are recognized as necessary carbon sinks to allow carbon-based production elsewhere. Or polar bears as a species deserve to be protected, not because they are majestic creatures, but because they have some economic value as a public relations symbol or cartoon characters or stuff-toy. And then the movement is faced with a real Sophie's Choice of which part of the planet to abandon to extinction.

Capitalism is not the enemy of the environment, but it is the enemy of nature. Where nature is something to struggle for, to achieve and embrace.

-- jd