Akin Ogundiran: The Historian and Archaeologist of Yoruba-Atlantic becomes Chancellor Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

I am pleased to share the good news that Professor Akin Ogundiran has been named Chancellor’s Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This distinguished title is a university-wide honor reserved for a full professor who has attained outstanding scholarly achievement in a professional field, and excelled in interdisciplinary research, teaching, and service in more than one department or college. He is the third professor in the university’s history to attain this distinguished rank—https://provost.uncc.edu/news/2019-10-28/ogundiran-receives-chancellors-professordesignation Professor Ogundiran has always been as exceptional as he was promising. He was a graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University where he bagged BA in Archaeology (First Class Honors) in 1988. This is where and when our interactions began, and that was where we sensed he was a student who would be greater than his teachers. We are proud of him, as one of the best students produced by Ife. He earned his M.Sc. in archaeology from the University of Ibadan in 1990. Ten years later, he received his doctorate in archaeology from Boston University. Within eight years, he became a professor of History and a major pillar in African Studies. In my book, The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity and Globalization, I devoted Chapter 10 to his oeuvre, stating in one of the key paragraphs that: 268 Toyin Falola In connecting West Africa to the Atlantic economy, Ogundiran is pointing to what could be characterized as the metabolic rift between supply and demand; African economies were on the supply side of the global division of labor that compelled them to produce for the Atlantic economy and, at the same time, to consume products from external sources. This division of labor, and the productive mechanism unleashed by the demand side, ultimately had implications for all aspects of institutions. Ogundiran has to grapple not only with the meaning of local history, but also with the definition of the world in which the local is situated against the background of rapidly changing events. And if, as he treats the local, he engages in issues around production and trade—as all his objects indicate—he is forced to engage in the understanding of how society relates to nature: that is, how humans ultimately relate to their environments, using and destroying them at the same time, and sometimes renewing them as well.

No Appetite for Change: Culture, Liberalism, and Other Acts of Depoliticization in the Australian Obesity Debate

There is wealth of evidence that points to the pernicious ways in which inequities in food, bodies, and health are disproportionally borne. Equally, there is a wealth of evidence that critiques the role of neoliberal imperatives for individuals to take responsibility for their health, and how this tenet reproduces inequity. However, health interventions and public policy remain immune to addressing social determinants of health and ignore the cultural dynamics of power in food systems, interventions, and policy. Drawing from ethnographic research in an Australian community that has high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and obesity, and the Australian Government’s response to the ‘obesity epidemic’, this article examines the processes and tactics of depoliticization that are used to elide political and sociocultural phenomenon. I leverage the work of Brown and Povinelli to argue that liberalism’s hold on universalisms, autonomy, and individual liberty in obesity discourses subjugates a comprehension of political relations, positioning liberal principles and culture as mutually antagonistic. It is precisely this acultural positioning of liberalism that makes it possible to remove recognition of the power that produces and contours the ‘metabolic rift’ between food systems, public health, and equity priorities. In conclusion, I consider how obesity policy might be different if we paid attention to this culturalization of politics.

Re-forming property to address eco-social fragmentation and rift

Two concepts that bridge the nature-human divide may help to diagnose and address some of the present and future problems of eco-social change in a legal context. ‘Fragmentation’ refers to loss and degradation of the habitat of nonhuman life. It is also a useful concept for understanding the fracturing of the material conditions for human life in a modern globalised world. The notion of ‘metabolic rift’, derived from Marx by John Bellamy Foster, refers to a break in the human-nonhuman circulation of natural materials, brought on by industrial agriculture and urbanisation. These related ideas provide a frame for exploring the connections between social and environmental justice and the role played by legal forms such as private property. In keeping with the imperative to re-form legal concepts to account for eco-social existence, the article presents a view of property as human and nonhuman habitat. This approach aims to use law to help recreate the conditions for the constructive inter-dependence of social and environmental goods.

Antinomies of space and nature or an open totality? Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on nature and society

The work of Henri Lefebvre has played a pivotal role in human geography in recent decades. At the same time, it has frequently been subject to partial and fragmented appropriations that isolate his insights on the production of space from his broader corpus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding his handling of the dialectical relationships between space, time, society, and nature. In particular, Neil Smith's claim that Lefebvre's conceptualization of nature was both deficient and inconsistent with his dynamic conceptualization of space has tended to dominate geographical engagements with Lefebvre in this area. Following Smith, researchers generally reconstruct the production of space as an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. We critically assess and respond to Smith's criticisms of Lefebvre. Specifically, we contrast Lefebvre's material–dialectical approach to Smith's production-of-nature thesis. While Smith's thesis is helpful in understanding how capital attempts to subsume all of nature under commodity production, Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of nature–society as an oppositional unity points both to the impossibility of capital subsuming all of nature and the dangers that its attempts to do so pose to human civilization (even survival). Lefebvre's observations, regarding the growing rupture between natural processes and spatial dynamics, which he incorporates into his own elaboration of Karl Marx's theory of metabolic rift, make his work indispensable to the development of an ecospatial critique within geography and the social sciences more generally.

The Planetary Rift

The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift.

Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis: A Lacanian/Hegelian Perspective

Metabolic rift theory has been accused of assuming an untenable ontological dualism between nature and society. In response, two of its leading advocates, John Bellamy Foster and Andreas Malm, have tried to argue that the approach is not dualist but rather rigorously realist, nonreductively naturalist, and dialectically materialist. According to Foster and Malm, metabolic rift theory is essential because it enables eco-Marxism to make an analytic distinction between nature and society while nevertheless grasping their complex interrelation. From a Lacanian and Hegelian perspective, Foster and Malm are right to preserve the dialectical distinction between nature and society but their respective accounts of this dialectic are insufficiently materialist. Foster falls into a pre-Marxian contemplative materialism. Malm hesitates between his intended realism and Kantian idealism. For metabolic rift theory to be put on a firmer materialist footing, nature must be thought along Lacanian and Hegelian lines as incomplete, thwarted, or shot through with antagonisms out of which emerge the subject and society. To put this in dialectical terms: ontologically there is only nature, out of which society and the subject emerge as an effect of nature's failure to be fully natural.

Agricultural Intensification and Soil Fertility in Atlantic Spain, 1750–1890

This article describes the intensification process of agriculture and its environmental limits regarding soil fertility in the rural community of Fonsagrada, in the inner region of Galicia in northwestern Spain. It addresses changes in land use, crops, and agricultural productivity between 1750 and 1890, framed within the theory of social metabolism and based on the method of nutrient balances. That technique measures nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium flows across the landscape within a given agro-ecosystem to assess its biophysical functioning and to detect environmental constraints related to management. The intensification of cropland resulted in net losses of potassium in outlying rough grazing land and hay meadows that served as the sources of cropland nutrients. Agricultural intensification was possible due to the close stabling of livestock, which allowed for more manure availability. Doing so, however, deprived pastureland of nutrient recover through manure deposition, which created a metabolic rift in the agro-ecosystem.

In the Shadow of Sustainable Development

The prevailing notion of sustainable development has remained ineffective at reducing environmental degradation and social inequalities. The chapter argues that sustainable development, as it has been conceived, is actually a shell game for creating neocolonial dependency in the developing world rather than more sustainable, self-sufficient nations. This chapter explains the history of colonization and urbanization, contextualizing the problem of weak, neoliberal, sustainable development using social science environmental theories, such as climate denialism, ecofeminism, environmental justice, metabolic rift, and treadmill of production. It then provides an alternative, a radical sustainability that is at once socially and ecologically egalitarian, or transformative, and restores the health of people and the planet, or regenerative. These cases are presented as alternatives to sustainable development and as examples of radical sustainability and self-sufficient, autonomous development.

An Operational Approach to Agroecology-Based Local Agri-Food Systems

In recent years, the transition to sustainability at a food systems’ scale has drawn major attention both from the scientific and political arenas. Agroecology has become central to such discussions, while impressive efforts have been made to conceptualize the agroecology scaling process. It has thus become necessary to apply the concept of agroecology transitions to the scale of food systems and in different “real-world” contexts. Scaling local agroecology experiences of production, distribution, and consumption, which are often disconnected and/or disorganized, also reveals emergent research gaps. A critical review was performed in order to establish a transdisciplinary dialogue between both political agroecology and the literature on sustainable food systems. The objective was to build insights into how to advance towards Agroecology-based Local Agri-food Systems (ALAS). Our review unveils emergent questions such as: how to overcome the metabolic rift related to segregated activities along the food chain, how to feed cities sustainably, and how they should relate to the surrounding territories, which social subjects should drive such transitions, and which governance arrangements would be needed. The paper argues in favor of the re-construction of food metabolisms, territorial flows, plural subjects and (bottom-up) governance assemblages, placing life at the center of the food system and going beyond the rural–urban divide.