C&E Week 9, 10

Land Becomes an Abstraction

extraction or commodity produce introduces ecological logical in which land becomes an abstraction. People see land with dollar signs in their eyes rather than with traditional knowledge.

Maroon Communities

formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants who gained their freedom by fleeing enslavement in the Americas and running to the safety of remote mountains or the overgrown tropical terrains near plantations. They were often mixed with indigenous communites

US Postwar N Fertilizer Production

in 1940, 100k tons of N fertilizer were produced in the US. By 1950, it was 1.5 million tons. Production and consumption has increased dramatically since WWII, but production has surpassed consumption.

Land Grant Colleges

in the US, universities were granted federal land in the 1860s to establish schools of agriculture. Every state has one. They were and are sites where scientific research is translated into both commerical products and knowledge that is disseminated to farmers through extension offices. a. These colleges focuses on reseach programs in soil chemistry. They were the engine for the industrialization of agriculture.

Slavery and the Empire's Frontier

the ecological effects of agricultural fuelded by slavery were also extreme. Relying on slave labor allowed the agricultural frontier to expand very quickly. a. slabes and their descendents were continously marched West, expanding commodity farming as they went.

Commodification

the process by which something unsaleable becomes saleable. The new reductionist approach and NPK mentality to soil fertility allowed for the commoditication of fertility.

Monoculture

the production of a singel kind of plant and usually with the intent of selling it for cash. Think cotton and rice plantations.

Empire Definition

a long term domination of one society by another involving military force and colonies. Managed by bureaurcracies that keep trade moving and law and order. Resource extractio nand cultural boundary drawing was common.

Black Ecologies

a theoretical framework that describes the reality of political, social and environmental life of modernity as entwined with global historical racial capitalism. It decenters totalizing, Eurocentric frameworks that place black people as victims and analytically acknowledges and centers humanity and agency of black people

Landraces

a variety of crops that are adapted to a local ecology. They grow best into their ecology.

Bio-cultural refugia

dooryard gardens in the plantation context functioned as ecologically diverse refuges.

Slavery and Capitalism: is conventional wisdom wrong?

1) Baptiste argues that southern slavery was an integral part of the industrial development of the US 2) particularly, the most important commodity in the global economy at the time, cotton, was produced with increasing efficiency through a system of calibrated cruetly.

Labor in Capitalism (butcher vs slaughterhouse)

1) Butcher: highly skilled, owns the means of prodution, controls production, first hand contact with consumers, derives profit from products. 2) Slaughterhouse: low skills, means of production owned by factory, told what cuts to make, no direct contact with consumers, wage labor.

IMPORTANT CONNECTIONS!!

1) Columbian exchange: facilitated monocultural plantation farming of commodity crops for global exchange 2) Mobility on a global scale: ensured that many ecologicall grounded modes of production were destroyed or undermined 3) Mercantilism to capitalism: incentivize extraction and commodity production in colonized regions within a world system of cores and peripheries 4) Slavery: allowed plantation owners to pioneer systems of industrial food production. Destabilizing exsiting systems of food production.

The Demise of Moral Economies

1) EP Thompson defines moral economies as economies in which social networks and informal sanctions promote survival in times of scarcity. 2) Basically the idea that everyone is entitled to eat. When elites violate the norms of the moral economy, the poor revolt and force reform. 3) colonialism worked against moral economies for two reasons a. global mobility causes the disintegration of communities b. interdepdence is now at a much larger scale, the poor and the elite they work for may be separated by oceans.

Slavery Effects on Ethnic and Political Cohesion (ethnic fragmentation and gun slave cycle)

1) Ethnic fragmentation: insecurity from slavery led to in which people were afriad of their neighbors in Africa 2) Gun slave cycle: insecurity also fueled demand for more powerful wapons which fueled the slave trade

Robbing the Soil

1) Liebig, the author, argues for organic fertilizers. He tried to convince the mayor of london that it was wasteful to flush away human and animal waster that should be going back into the fields 2) Marx: all progress of capitalist agricultural is a progress of the art, not only of robbing the workers, but of robbing the soil a. that is, industrial agriculture could only occured if the industry commodified soil fertility.

Theory of Induced Innovation

1) a drop in the price of one of the factors of production will spur invention aimed to main the other factors of production cheaper too 2) in the US, the availability of cheap nitrogen fertilizers after WWII spurred demand for plants that could translate all the nitrogen into higher yields

Labor Management

1) a fundamental division was established between a person and the labor that their body could do. 2) tasks were divided across the plantation with individuals desinged for certain skills 3) bodies were reduced to tehir parts, children counted as hald hands, pregant women and elderly as half hands, full grown adults as full hands 4) sexual reproduction was considered a way of replenishing labor and balanced against the cost of enslaving or purchasing other adults 4) ledgers were used to tally and compare the number of hours spent working versus the quanity of through put

Concentration of Food Processing and Distribution

1) a handfu of food processing companiesare responsible for most of the middle of grocery store foods. 2) large food buyers and conglomerates wield immense legal, economic and political power. They have an interest in cheap inputs. The government is subsidizing their inputs.

What is a plantation?

1) a system of labor management, where enslaves people are mostly stripped of the control over their labor and any rights to what they produce 2) an environmental management system where monoculturally produced crops are sold and traded in international markets 3) a system of whtie political pwoer that requires the explicit ue of state force to enforce enslavement and ecologically-transformative infastructure investment. 4) an ideology of control, centralization, racism, absenteeism, violence and environmental homogenization.

Mercantilism

1) an economic system based on the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealthy in the world. The goal is to control it 2) poor people do not contribute to the economy, which is driven by taking resources 3) slaves are logical in this system: slaves have no capital, o they can never become consumers, but that's not a problem.

Class Model of Crowd Disease Evolution

1) crowd diseases evolved only when human populations became dense enough to support pathogens that killed many of their hosts 2) domesticated animals were another necessary condition for the development of these diseases, which explains why they never evolved in urban american settings 3) over time, these pathogens became less deadly where they were endemic because natural selection favored strains that didn't kill too many of their hosts.

Jared Diamond's Version of Crowd Disease

1) domestication of animals facilitated the spread of infectious disease from animals to people; mostly in the eastern hemispehre due to there being more domesticated animals there 2) urbanism facilitated the spread of crowd disease; again mostly in the eastern hemisphere due to there being more cities there 3) also native american's relative genetic homogeneity made them more susceptible to disease

European Perspective on Columbian Exchange and Slavery

1) early colonists found themselves land rich but labor poor. Native americans populations were unstable. Native americans had the home field advantage: it was easier for them to escape beyond the fronteir 2) colonization of tropical and subtropical lands allowed Europeans to produce commodities novel to Europe. 3) they imported labor.

Capitalism and conventional wisdowm

1) empires were changing from mercantilism to capitalism. 2) everyone contribtues to the economy by buying things. Good can acquire value through the creation of new markets 3) low prices = more consumption, high prices = less consumption 4) conventional wisdom said slaves were illogical in this system, so slavery was bound to die out. a. basically, people though it doesn't make sense to have slavery in capitalism because we need more ppl to buy things. People argued this would cause slavery to die out. They were clearly wrong.

Natural Fertilizers

1) farmers maintained soil fertility on ground through the use of natural fertilizers 2) bones, manure, human waste, guano bird poop, legumes, saltpeter

Agricultural Inputs were hard to commodify

1) farmers own animals, which produce fertilizers. Farmers own seeds and seeds reproduce themselves. Thus, it would be hard to commodify something that is self sustaining and reproducing. 2) farmers also own their land, know how to use it all and their labor is general.

Fossil Fuels and Farming

1) farming is the nation's largest consumer of petroleium products. 2) the replacement of labor with oil, and the capital necessary to purchase it, is one of the keys of modern farming. 3) the ecological efefcts of agriculture falls onto us instead of the industry

Epidemics, pandemics and population modeling - Henry Dobyns (1966)

1) he states that there are 90-112 million living in the western hemisphere a. revised in 1983 to 20 million b. implies a population crash of 95% within 100 yrs 2) assumes there were pandemics, the spread of recorded epidemics regionally, that killed whole populations before they ever entered the historical record.

Epidemics, pandemics and population modeling - Douglas Ubelaker (1988)

1) he states there are 1.8 million living in North American in 1500 a. implies a population crash of 50% within 400 yrs 2) assumes no pandemics and recorded epidemics were contained to local areas

First Fertilizer and Nitrogen Fixation

1) in 1842, Laws introduced the first synthetic fertilzier when he figures out a way to manfacuter water soluable phosphates. But applying single element fertilziers led to only temproary yield gains. 2) nitrogen quickly became everyone's limiting factor because in the 19th century, there was no way to synthetically fix nitrogen 3) Nitrogen fixation: transforming atmospheric nitrogen, N2, into more reactive compounds.

A powerful but not totalizing system

1) inside the plantation boundaries there were spaces of otherwise 2) outside the plantation boundaries, there were spaces of refuge. 3) vibrant maroon communities and cultures of self emanicipations. 4) outright revolt.

The Importance of Immune Individuals

1) it's true that native americans were less genetically diverse than african and eurasian people 2) but the biggest factor in the mortality rates of indigenous societies may have been that there were no community members with immunity.

Transition to Industrial Agriculture

1) laborers own nothing but time and energy 2) others own means of production 3) laborers are directed by trained managers 4) labor is highly specialized.

Industrial Food Production in the US: Who benefits?

1) manfacturers and agricultural inputs 2) manufacturers of processed foods and meats 3) grocery stores 4) consumers in strictly monetary terms

Industrial Food Production in the US: Who loses?

1) most farmers 2) rural communities 3) consumers, especially the poor, in terms of health 4) farmers in other countries 5) tax payers 6) everyone because of externalizing costs: pollution, global warming, etc.

White Political Power

1) multiple european power contesnted the north american continetn and used distinct ways of governing, interacting, enslaving and transforming native american populations 2) racial categories developed through diverse legal, religious and bureaucratic systems 3) parcels of lands were granted to french, spanish, gernman and american immigrants. State sanctioned violenced was used to protect the wealthy in properoty 4) state sanctioned violence developed to police and enforced enslavement.

Political Economy of Fertilizer

1) political economy: the interplay between economies, laws, politics and ideology that shape institutions 2) a 150 yr case study: the development of synthetic fertilizers and the industrialization of american agriculture

The Periphery

1) produced raw materials and food. Resource extraction and farming take place here. 2) agricultural commodities sent back to the cores. 3) peripheries provide low wage labor.

The Semiperiphery

1) produces mostly low value added goods and industrial production and some resource extraction take place here. 2) imperatives to extract or produce commodities usually lead to extreme environmental impacts. 3) the position in the world system can change over time. China went from the semipheriphery to the core

Pecos Pueblo Case Study

1) pueblos are indigenous towns in what is now the US Southwest 2) the pecos pubelo provides insight into the causes of population loss in the western hemisphere during colonization 3) in 1598 it was the first colony on the rio grande, 1680 there was a pueblo revolt, 1700 onward it became spanish then mexican then anglo settlement 4) in 1838, the last inhabitants of pecos abandoned the pueblo and move to jemez 5) Pecos has great data including census data from spanish missions.

Slavery Lingers Today in Many Forms

1) ruins: abandonded buildings, old equipment and gravesites. These are sites and materials that contain memory 2) landownership, land divisions and parceling 3) river ecology management and agricultural infastructure 4) industrailiation through state investment *most prominently, through the logical of industrial farming.

Environment Management

1) settlers cleared forest and drained swamps/marshes 2) they planted monocultural ecologies in plantation farms 3) nascent governments build canals, roads and leves using enslaves labor 4) landowners and the government erected factors to support monocultural production.

Industrial Agriculture Takeways

1) technologies that lend themselves to commodification will attract more investment than those that don't 2) instituional feedbacks and induced innovation can favor technologies that furthre powerful intereests or make use of cheap inputs, rather than those that are the most efficient or sustainable 3) if costs are successfull externalized, wasteful or unsustainable production methods can continue indefinitely.

Pecos Summary

1) the disappearance of Peco's population was caused by a combination of disease, warefare, starvation and abandonment. We only know that because we have exceptionally good records 2) it is impossible to know for sure how big the pre-contact population of the Western Hemisphere was, but whatever estimate you go for, the first 100 yrs of colonization was one of the greates calamities in human history.

Pecos Census Data and Warfare

1) the first epidemic small pox struck the rio grande in 1638, but the plague was first reported at Pecos in 1696. The smallpox pandemic of 1780 also struck pecos 2) two censuses in 1779 and 1789 show a 41 percent drop in population, much of which may have been due to this single event. 3) the arrive of horses during raids by the apache and comanche altered the balance of power between movile and settled tribes. Spanish slave raids disrupted what had been largely peaceful relations betwen the Pecos and Apache 4) Casaulties from raids were low because their aim was to steal maize, which resulted in famines and mass starvation 5) During the last 40 yrs of Pecos inhabitance, 14 raids were carried out. These raids may have convinced the last settlers it was time to abandon the home. 6) analyze of histroical pecos human remains shows a decreased consumption of meat, maize or both as spanish settlements increased. This indicates a lack of access to suitable land or a lack of suffiencent human labor for agriculture.

Reductionist Apporach to Fertilizer (organic chemistry book)

1) the idea that soil fertility can be reduced to its individual elements. 2) justus von liebig's book on organic chemistry in its applications to agricultural and physiology transformed understandings of soil fertility. 3) this was the more commodifiable version of soil fertility

Industrial Agriculture Happened Anyway

1) the industrialization of agriculture is not a natural process nor is it necessarily progress, in the sense of somethign becoming more economically rational (efficient) 2) tractors are only more efficient than oxen under certain circumstances, fertilizer is only better than manure if you have a way of fixing or mining it, cheap things are often cheap because they have public funding

The Columbian Exchanged (Disease and Depopulation)

1) the reunion of human populations in the eastern and western hemispehre had huge biological effects. This also caused the accidental and purposeful introduction of invasive species 2) crops were being introduced to new areas for the first time. Ex Asia did not have chilli pepers until the columbian exchange 3) European and African so-called crowd diseases swept through native american communities, sometimes resulting in mortality rates of up to 95%. In some cases, the very first explorers reported packed landscapes. A few decades later the same places were empty.

African Perspective: The Age of Exploration was really the Age of Exploitation.

1) the slave trade transformed west african economies 2) rampant kidnaping and slave raiding disrupted socieiteis and tore families apart, but making remaining communities less resilient and skills. 2) the slave trade fueled commodity production leading to less diverse and resilient agricultura 4) there is a common misconept that there was nothing coming out of africa but enslaved people and exotic goods.

Slavery Effects on Populations in Africa

1) the trans atlantic slave trade was unprecendented in scale. 12 million people taken from African. The other three combined exported 6 million 2) historians estimate that by 1850, the population of the entire continent was half of what it would have been if the slave trade never occured. 2) many also died in raids or while being marches to coastal ports.

The World System and the Environment

1) the world system introduces a global logic of extraction and commodity production that transforms environments 2) where you are in the world system influences how you relate to the environment and your exposure to risks.

Empire Frontiers

1) the zone between empires and people outside of them is called the frontier. It is a place where the empire ends and wildnerness, savagery or otherness begins 2) the frontiers became ecological and social boundaries.

Human Ecology Effects of Slavery

1) there were less people to produce food in african villages. Less men especially. Breakdown of gender roles and transmission of knowledge 2) the slave trade was reliant on african surplus food production. Slaves awaiting export become commodity crop produces. Maize and African rice suppied slave ships.

Native American Perspective on Columbian Exchange and Slavery

1) widespread interal displacement. War captives were sold to Europeans rather than integrated into society. Escape of internally displaced indigenous slaves was common. 2) silver and gold mining in mexico and south american generated huge demand for slave labor, much of which came from indigenous populations 3) slave raiding added to the social disintegration caused by disease and ecological transmission. 4) in some places, cultural and political alliances formed with revolting or escaped african salves.

The Demise of TEK

1) with so many people on the move and many communities disrupted by disease, warfare slavery and migration, there has been a general loss of traditional local knowledge. 2) the biological invasions of the columbian exchange have transformed ecosystems. 3) a lot of catastrophic ecological blunders due to ignorance and arrogance.

Externalizing Costs

An externality is any action that affects the welfare of an individual or group without direct payment or compensation. It may be positive or negative. Ex. Think pollution. Fossil fuel industries don't have to face the costs of pollution directly. They are externalized to us in the form of increased chronic health issues. *agricultural is generally able to externalize costs because the costs are diffused, delayed and indirect.

Until about 1900: Seed Keeping

Harvest were divided into food and seed stock on farms. Seed improved by population improvement. There was no way to exclude ownership of seed Seed exchange networks and markets were complex. *Plant breeding wasn't very profitable because seeds could only be sold once, and then they reproduced themselves.

Alientation

Marx says: an estrangement of people from their humanity the results from being a member of a social class. a. in the case of laborers: you don't own what you make. Your labor yields a wage, not goods or profits b. you can't determine your relationship with the means and modes of production c. in industrial production, a worker becomes an instrument. d. many people were forced to participate in wage labor economies through colonialism because they lost the means of subsitence - their land.

Black Rice

The columbian exchange wasn't just plants, animals and people. It was also knowledge and social relations Carney argues that some west african slaves used TEK to recreate tidal rice cultivation in the american south.

Case Study: Catalhoyuk, Turkey

This ancient city lived in 9500-8000 KYA. Identification of whipworms in human paleofeces. Analysis of sediment from the floors of these rooms revelaed that 5 out of 7 contained human feces.

Manure Markets

a common practice until teh 1900s in which human waste from latrines was collected at night by tubmen and used as fertilizer. 1) relates to the idea of the earliest public architecture. People came together to produce more and share what they made.

The World System by Immanual Wallerstein

a. This is a system of the world's economy. b. It includes the core, semiperiphery and periphery. c. The periphery provides low wage labor and raw materials to the other groups. While the core provides high profit value added goods to the other groups The locations of each section was established by colonialism beginnings in the 1500s. The core was the US and Europe. The semiperiphery was in asia and parts of south america. The periphery was mostly africa.

Small Pox - quintessential crowd disease

a. evolved from roden viruses by at least 1500 BCE b. passed through direct contact, bodily fluids, or by dessicated particles of scabs. These might airborne and remain viable in clothing for two weeks.

Where do crowd diseases come from?

a. mostly in the eastern hemisphere, but we have no idea exactly when or from what animal in most cases b. this could easily having nothing to do with domestication; humans, our pre-human ancestors and out closest relatives (apes) have been in the Eastern hemisphere for millions of years vs only 20,000 for the Western hemisphere. c. plenty of wild animal hosts.

Effects of Epidemics

a. we need to consider many factors when assessing the effect of an epidemic disease on a population b. what is the disease? c. how is the disease spread? (airborn, sex, food or water, mosquitos)

Mobility on the Global Scale

after 1492, people were now living in places they have no knowledge of (no TEK). There was also increased racism because colonizers didnt think locals have anything to tell them

Production of Commodities

after 1492, there was an interest in mercantilism that evntually evolved to global capitalism. There as more and more people focused on extraction or the production of commodities. There was homogenous and unsustainable food production.

Slavery after 1492

after the columbian exchanged opend up, there was an increase in slavery. Depopulations of parts of West Africa and Western Hemisphere. Massive social disruptions and loss of TEK.

What are crowd diseases?

an infectious disease that can only be sustained in large, dense populations. Often acute and efficiently transmitted. There are only two outcomes: death or immunity. Without a large population, these diseases burn themselves out. Ex. measules, mumps, smallpox, influenza, typhus, plague

Soil Depletion in the US and Europe

by the early 19th century, soil depletion was becoming a widespread issue. a. extensive farming like crop rotating allowed for fallows in which soil became fertile again b. intensive farming meant having a lot of crops in large areas continously. This depleted the soil fertility

WWI and WWII Cheap Fertilizer

german chemical company BASF started producing nitrogen fertilizer using the Haber method. During WWI and WWII, fertilizer companies became explosives companies - leasing to cheap fertilizers in interwar and post-war years.

The Haber Process: Industrial N Fixation

in 1909, Franz Haber invested a way to synthesize ammonium from atmospheric nitrogen. It is still used today. It was used to create synthetic fertilizer and explosives - poision gas.

Effects on African States

many pre-slave trade medieval states fell as a result of a general breakdown of law and order.

Urbanism

recall that urbanism is only possible to the extent that farmers produce surplus food. Moreover, there is nothing inevitable about the break in the nutrient cycle that happened during industrialization.

Concentration of Markets

the agricultural market is concentrated to very few companeis. Bayer, BASF, Chem-China and Corteva collectively own 60% of all proprietary seed sales worldwide. This concentration of markets is maintaing this particular mode of production.

NPK Mentality

the discovery that three elements were the most important to soil fertility: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

Vitalistic Approach to Fertility

the idea that the sum is greater than its parts. There is a vital element of soil fertility that cannot be reduced to individuale elements. This was the less commodifiable version of soil fertility.

Specializing (local vs global production)

the introduction of production of commodities caused people to become specialists. In doing so, they lose skill and control of TKE. 1) Local production: diverse and like an ecosystem; farmers produce a variety of food from their community 2) global production: every community produces one thing, relies on the market for everything else.

The Columbian Exchange

the migration of plants, animals and microorganisms between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. It was the first time that animals and plants moved cross-continently after 1492.

Heteriosis (Hybrid Vigor)

the phenomenon of increased biological function in the hybrid offspring of two inbred parents. In plants, usually meant increased fertility (more or bigger fruits) or vigor (faster, more prolific growth). *the catch was that if you save the seed, the second generation will be subject to inbreeding depression because it is the offspring of two homogenous lines. **Hybrids made seeds a commodity: farmers couldnt maintain seed stock onsite, they had to purchase it.

The Inbred-Hybrid Method

the rise of the inbred-hybrid method allowed for the commodification of seeds.

Conflict of Interest in Science and Commerce

there existed a conflict on interest between the government, commerce and science in the land grant colleges. The land grant school of Auburn was charged with testing fertilizer samples and was, in fact, funded by their sale.

The Core

these are countries where capitalism is concentrated. It produced high value added goods or services. Creates law preventing harmful or unpleasant environemntal effects. The relationship between the core and periphery is relative

Law of the Minimum

yield is proportional to the amount of the most limiting nutrient, whichever nutrient it may be.