Copyright page

First published in French as La nature est un champ de bataille. Essai d’écologie politique, (c) Éditions La Découverte, Paris, France, 2014

This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2016

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0377-3 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0378-0 (paperback)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Keucheyan, Razmig, author.

Title: Nature is a battlefield : towards a political ecology / Razmig Keucheyan.

Other titles: Nature est un champ de bataille. English

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.

Subjects: LCSH: Political ecology. | Ecology–Political aspects. | Environmental disasters–Political aspects. | Human ecology–Economic aspects. | Environmental justice.

Classification: LCC JA75.8 .K4813 2016 (print) | LCC JA75.8 (ebook) | DDC 304.2–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006440

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Introduction

In Autumn 1982 the inhabitants of Warren County in northeast North Carolina mobilized for six weeks in opposition to a toxic waste landfill being situated in their area.¹ Four years previously, in 1978, an industrial waste management company had illegally dumped large quantities of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) – a substance used, among other things, in paint and in electrical transformers. Once these PCBs had been discovered, the state of North Carolina decided to acquire a site where it could bury them and, after looking into many possible locations, it finally opted for one close to the town of Warrenton. As is often the case in this type of situation, local residents opposed the plan, fearing for its impact on their health (as PCBs are carcinogenic substances). They launched a legal bid to stop the waste being dumped in their area but, two years later, the district tribunal rejected their complaint. It was then that the protest took on extra-judicial forms, with demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, civil disobedience, marches, meetings, road blockades … These actions led to the arrests of over five hundred people, including various local and federal representatives. In the short term, the movement did not succeed in getting the project withdrawn and only in the 2000s would the site be decontaminated.

The arguments that the protestors initially raised in opposition to the landfill site related to the pollution of the environment (both the water and the soil) by PCBs and the health risks that this substance posed. Yet as the movement expanded and became more politicized, the nature of its arguments changed. The residents and their allies insisted that the state had chosen this site for burying the toxic waste because it was an area inhabited by Blacks, poor people and above all poor Blacks. To put it another way, there was a racist basis for the decision to locate the dump there. At the time, Warren County had a 64 per cent Black population, with the corresponding figure for the area immediately next to the dump rising to 75 per cent. In its environmental management and resources policy, the state systematically favours White populations and the middle and upper classes, which it protects from this type of harmful substances. Conversely, minorities – including not only Blacks, but also Native Americans, Hispanics and Asians, as well as the poor – bear the brunt of industry's negative consequences. We can see that, still today in the United States, the improper handling of waste in the vicinity of White neighbourhoods leads to fines five times more frequently than when it takes place close to Black or Hispanic ones.² This racial discrimination is not necessarily intentional on the part of the public authorities, even if it often is so. It is systemic: that is to say, it results from a logic that is partly independent of individual will. So what allowed the Warren County movement to reach such scale was its capacity to generalize, to ‘hook’ a local demand on to a global injustice.

This episode is a marvellous illustration of this book's main argument: namely, that nature is a battlefield. Already today, it is a battlefield; and in future, as the ecological crisis deepens, it will increasingly become the theatre of conflicts among actors with divergent interests: social movements, states, armies, financial markets, insurers, international organizations … In the Warren County case, the conflict resulted from a particular form of injustice, racism. But it could also follow from other types of inequalities. Nature is not somehow free of the power relations in society: rather, it is the most political of entities.

In approaching the ecological crisis in this manner, we are clashing with what is today a dominant view; indeed, a well-established consensus maintains that humanity has to ‘overcome its divisions’ in order to solve the problem of environmental change. This consensus is driven by ecologist parties, many – if not all – of which emerged in the 1970s, based on the idea that the opposition between Left and Right was obsolete or now of only secondary importance. In France it is also promoted by ‘civil society’ figures like Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Nicolas Hulot, and there are equivalent personalities in most countries. The ‘ecological pact’ proposed by Nicolas Hulot – a charter signed by several of the candidates for the 2007 French presidential election, as well as many thousands of citizens – is typical of this conception of ecology.³ This consensus is also the backdrop to the dissatisfaction over the recurrent failure of international climate talks – most recently in Copenhagen and Rio. Such complaints are a moral condemnation of states’ incapacity to come together over common environmental objectives.

There are more sophisticated versions of this ecological consensus. One of the leading theorists of postcolonialism and author of the classic Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty,⁴ has recently published a text entitled ‘The Climate of History’.⁵ In his eyes, the ecological crisis allows us to see for the first time the prospect of humanity as such and not one of its component parts – workers, peasants, the colonized, women … – becoming the ‘subject’ of history. We humans never experience ourselves as a ‘species’, since all experience is always singular, even if it is collective. Yet in Chakrabarty's view, climate change means the emergence of conditions in which humanity must act in common in order to respond to the challenge of global warming; and this should thus lead us to re-evaluate the old notion of humanism, to which this challenge grants unprecedented significance. It should also lead us to re-evaluate the critiques of this notion, in particular the ones that (post)structuralism levelled against it from the 1960s onward. The ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ of Louis Althusser or of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things takes on different meaning when the survival of humanity is under threat from climate upheavals.

Comparing the economic and ecological crises, Chakrabarty states that ‘Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here [within the context of climate change] for the rich and the privileged.’⁶ The rich will always do well out of economic crisis but, according to Chakrabarty, this will not be the case with the ecological crisis, since there will be no ‘lifeboat’ allowing them to leave the planet. Even though Chakrabarty does recognize that this crisis also entails a class dimension, in the sense that its impact is not evenly distributed across the population, he maintains that in the last instance it transcends this dimension and that the question of humanity must therefore be put back on the agenda. As such, he argues that ‘the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities’.⁷ To say the least, this idea is rather surprising coming as it does from postcolonial studies, which have made a specialty out of rejecting all forms of universalism.⁸

Our analysis starts from a hypothesis that is exactly the inverse of Chakrabarty's. If we take seriously the idea that since the mid eighteenth century climate change has been brought on by economic development, and that this development is called ‘capitalism’, then it is unlikely that we will be able to transcend our class oppositions before we find a solution to the environmental crisis. In other words, it is unlikely that rallying the human species around common objectives is a condition of resolving this crisis. Rather, its solution may well require the radicalization of these oppositions – that is, the radicalization of the critique of capitalism. The one divides into two, in environmental matters as with so many others.

Our first chapter is entitled ‘Environmental Racism’. It will allow us to demolish the idea that humanity suffers the consequences of the ecological crisis in a uniform way. Just as there are economic and cultural inequalities, we also find inequalities in individuals’ or groups of individuals’ relation to nature and to the resources that it offers, and in their exposure to the harmful effects of development: pollution, natural and industrial disasters, water quality, access to energy … In certain cases, environmental inequalities are the result of the actions of states, whose policies are far from neutral in this regard, as we saw in the Warren County example. In other cases, they are the fruit of market logic being left to its own devices. In still other cases, they are the outcome of inextricably linked economic and political logics.

The ‘intersectionality’ of gender, race and class, which is today the object of numerous works,⁹ must therefore be completed by a fourth, complicating dimension: nature. This latter itself possesses a highly problematic (political) ontology, which can only be conceived in dialectical relation with these three other dimensions. Here we will concentrate on the question of environmental racism – that is, on the intersection between ‘nature’ and ‘race’. Even so, we can only properly understand this phenomenon on condition that we take into account the whole set of inequalities that are at work within the system.

Throughout capitalism's existence, faced with crisis situations and the aggravated inequalities that they engender, it has resorted to the two solutions of financialization and war. In generating ‘fictitious’ capital, finance allows for the deferral and thus the temporary attenuation of the contradictions inherent to capitalist production (as its subprime lending mechanism recently once again demonstrated). War is the fruit of the inevitable conflicts that these contradictions periodically generate. The shrinking of profit opportunities and the need to guarantee control over the extraction and circulation of resources – but also the growing opposition to the system – tend to make political conflictuality increasingly acute. In (literally) destroying capital, war also makes it possible to restart accumulation on new bases.¹⁰

The ecological crisis is a further case in which capitalism is putting these two solutions into effect. In other words – as this book will seek to demonstrate – financialization and militarization are the system's two reactions to this crisis. The second chapter (‘Financializing Nature: Insuring Climatic Risks’) concerns the insurance covering the climatic threat, which is today one of the main forms that environmental finance takes. We are currently seeing a proliferation of ‘trendy’ financial products related to nature or biodiversity: carbon markets, climate derivatives, catastrophe bonds … These products are aimed at mortgaging or managing the social and economic turbulence that results from the ecological crisis. They nevertheless also have the objective of making a profit from it. They are part of the financialization of capitalism that is now underway: and as we shall see, this also involves the financialization of nature. For capitalism, nature is today the object of an accumulation strategy.

Capitalism is an ambivalent system and insurance is a centrally important component of this mechanism. On the one hand, capitalism is unstable, since it generates innovation (the ‘creative destruction’ so dear to Joseph Schumpeter), globalization, class struggle and processes that exercise a corrosive effect on social order. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air.¹¹

On the other hand, capitalism requires stability, since investment and the construction of profitable markets would be inconceivable without this. How is it possible to reconcile the system's two contradictory characteristics, instability and stability? Well, in good measure it is thanks to the mechanism of insurance. This mechanism is what makes it possible to take financial risks, while also protecting the investment when things turn bad. But what happens to this insurance mechanism in a context being made increasingly uncertain by environmental crisis?

The third chapter (‘Green Wars, or the Militarization of Ecology’) looks at the growing interconnection between war and ecology. The capitalist exploitation of nature influences the manner in which armed conflicts develop. The environmental crisis resulting from this exploitation has already led to a rise in natural disasters, the increasing scarcity of certain resources, food crises, a destabilization of the poles and oceans, as well as the multiplication of ‘climate refugees’, set to number in the tens of millions by 2050. The result is green wars or climate wars – the translation of the ecological crisis onto the terrain of war. States in general and armies in particular are in the front line of the very particular ‘negative externality’ of armed conflicts. The ecological crisis is not only being financialized, but also entails the potentiality of armed conflicts.

Military figures are conscious of this growing interconnection between war and ecology. Across the last decade or so the planet's major armed forces, with the US Army first among them, have been producing reports devoted to the impact that climate change will bear on military strategy. What consequences will this change have for the way in which war is fought? If we accept that the environment is a crucial factor in any war situation, then the upheavals that it is going to go through – and is already undergoing – on account of the ecological crisis will necessarily influence the art of war. In short, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are being ecologized.¹²

Dedication

Copyright page

Introduction

Notes