File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 373


Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 09:46:11 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-TH: Marine biodiversity and soil fertility


In message <3.0.1.32.19980217124155.0121e880-AT-pop.cc.columbia.edu>, Louis
Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> writes 
in  characteristically misanthropic mood

> The species and ecosystems suffering most, however,
>are in the coastal waters closes to humankind. 

But Proyect's hatred of humanity is unjustified. Proyect attributes all
these extinctions to man:

>
>In 1768, only 27 years after its discovery in the Bering Sea, the last
>Steller's sea cow was killed--a fate shared by the great auk in the 1840s,
>the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s, and unknown numbers of other marine
>species. Far less publicized than loss of biological diversity on land, the
>loss of marine genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity is a global crisis
>in its own right. 
>

But of course this human tunacide pales into insignificance next to the
extinctions that nature imposes under natural selection:

'To a paleontologist, death is a fact of life, and extinction is a fact
of evolution. Some thirty billion species are estimated to have lived
since multicellular creatures first evolved, in the Cambrian explosion.
According to some estimates, thirty million species populate today's
Earth. This means that 99.9 percent percent of all species that ever
lived are extinct. As one statistics wag put it, "To a first
approximation, all species are extinct".'

Ref: Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin: 'The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity
and its Survival, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1996, p 39.

Also you should understand that the concept of 'ecosystems' is just an
anthropomorphic imposition upon nature. It is meant to imply a fragility
in the natural interdependence of species. But, like its conterpart in
economics, equilibrium theory, the theory of fragile ecosystems is a
fiction. In fact natural cycles are being overturned and reconstituted
throughout natural history. That's what the theory of natural selection
is.

Mark Jones advocated that those he called 'uppity Chinks' should be
prevented from breeding because that would put impossible strains on the
land. Yesterday I showed that he was empirically wrong to reject the
possibility of increased agricultural yields because of greater
investment.

Karl Marx explicitly rejected the theory that declining soil fertility
would lead to rising prices, because that theory overlooked
'improvements as shall have the effect of improving the quality of
improving poorer lands and converting these to rich ones' (Theories of
Surplus Value, p321.

Marx describes Ricardo's theory of declining soil fertility as 'where
Malthus found the real ground for his theory of population and where his
pupils now seek their final sheet anchor' (Correspondence, p27). In that
letter Marx insists that Ricardo's theory of differential rent is
correct, but that the presumption of declining fertility is false
because 'there is no doubt that as civilisation progresses poorer and
poorer types of land are taken into cultivation. But there is also no
doubt that, as a result of the progress of science and industry, these
poorer types of land are relatively good in comparison with the former
good types.' (p28)

A more contemporary verification of Marx's rejection of the
Ricardo/Malthus thesis of decclining productivity can be found in
Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring:

'Aggregate crop production inthe developing world grew at almost 3 per
cent per annum from 1970 to 1990, confounding Malthusian expectations
... output (primarily driven by yield increases) outstripped population
growth ... increase in food production per capita of 20 per cent in
developing countries over the period 1980-90...'

In fact the developed world massively overproduces food, due to its
favourable agricultural policies. The wine lakes, beef and butter
mountains of the European Union are just one example of the
overproduction of food. Under Public Law 480 the United States
subsidises grain production for foreign aid. As Michael Maren explains
in The Road to Hell, this grain is one fantastic boondoggle for American
farmers, leading to spectacular grain surpluses. Maren explains that
dumping these surpluses under the rubric of aid is one of the chief
causes of agricultural failure in Africa.

Whatever natural limits to food production do exist it is plain that
capitalism has not even begun to scratch the surface: Scarcity under
capitalism is man made, not natural.
-- 
James Heartfield


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