Silver linings and wishful thinking? More than human geographies of the coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated worldwide lockdown measures have several implications for geographical understandings of society–nature relations and of animal life. For some, the temporary lowering of carbon dioxide emissions during the lockdown has been cause for hope for a silver lining to the pandemic. Some commentators have even adopted the misanthropic diagnosis that humanity is the virus, a stance that invokes racialised assumptions about which parts of the global population should be reduced in order for ‘nature’ to survive. Animal geography has a tradition of addressing the ways in which supposedly improper relationships with non-human animals can serve to racialise specific groups of people. This has been useful in criticising the media fascination with wet markets and Chinese eating habits. However, when pointing to spectacular examples of the ways in which wild animals have responded to lockdown conditions, some geographical commentators have too readily accepted the notion that humans have ‘abandoned’ urban areas. They have been less attentive to the fact that the lockdown was experienced in very different ways by different social groups. This opinion piece concludes by setting out what an approach rooted in ecological Marxism might offer these debates and how it points to the more systemic changes needed to forge a more socially just relationship with the rest of nature.

The World-System and the Earth System

Efforts to conceptualize the role of asymmetric resource transfers in the capitalist world-system have been constrained by the emphasis on surplus value and the labor theory of value in Marxist thought. A coherent theory of ecologically unequal exchange must focus on asymmetric flows of biophysical resources such as embodied labor, land, energy, and materials. To conceptualize these flows in terms of “underpaid costs” or “surplus value” is to suggest that the metabolism of the world-system can be accounted for using a monetary metric. This paper rejects both labor and energy theories of value in favor of the observation that market pricing tends to lead to asymmetric resource flows. The Marxist labor theory of value is an economic argument, rather than a physical one. In acknowledging this we may transcend the recent debate within ecological Marxism about whether “nature” and “society” are valid categories. Nature and society are ontologically entwined, as in the undertheorized phenomenon of modern technology, but should be kept analytically distinct. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has been contingent on the societal ratios by which biophysical resources are exchanged on the world market. The failure among Marxist and world-system theorists to properly account for this central aspect of capitalist accumulation can be traced to the pervasive assumption that market commodities have objective values that may exceed their price. Instead of arguing with mainstream economists about whether market assessments of value are justified, it is more analytically robust to observe that market valuation is destroying the biosphere.

Against Hybridism: Why We Need to Distinguish between Nature and Society, Now More than Ever

It is fashionable to argue that nature and society are obsolete categories. The two, we are told, can no longer be distinguished from one another; continuing loyalty to the ‘binary’ of the natural and the social blinds us to the logic of current ecological crises. This article outlines an argument for the opposite position: now more than ever – particularly in our rapidly warming world – we need to sift out the social components from the natural, if we wish to understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them. Tracing the current of hybridism to the writings of Bruno Latour, this article ends with a critique of the foremost proponent of a hybridism in Marxist garb: Jason W. Moore. Against his theories, it suggests that historical materialism is a form of property dualism that distinguishes between social and natural relations while considering them equally material in substance. That is also the analytical premise of ecological class hatred, the flames of which ecological Marxism seeks to fan.