In order to understand the problems relating to “sustainable development”, it is important to construct new theoretical couplings between social sciences and natural sciences. Today it may appear self evident that land use is a subject that calls for just such couplings, but there are still some theoretical insights to explore in this frontier region between society and nature. After all, “nature” and “society” have been conventionally regarded as distinct categories that require different analytical perspectives. Studies of ecosystems, land use and resource management have tended towards natural sciences, while studies of social structures have been based on social sciences.
In several ways, and for several reasons, this dualism is now being challenged. It has become increasingly evident that not only the biophysical composition of the landscape is to a large extent the result of societal processes, but also that the organisation of the social systems is largely dependent on the distribution of biophysical resources. This feedback between natural and social systems has had many expressions through history, but in modern times it seems to have escaped the conceptual apparatuses of scientific research. In the Formas-funded project “Land, power and materiality”, some ten Swedish researchers are working across disciplinary boundaries on developing new insights into what we call historico-political ecology – the comparative study of the way management of land and land based resources is used by some sectors of society for dominating and exploiting others.
Access to land and its use have, in all human communities and at all times, constituted the basis for power relations. This is most evident with respect to different rules for the ownership and use of adjacent land areas, from traditional hunting grounds and fishing rights via land ownership to the territorial claims of the national states and colonial powers. Such titles to land regulate the use of resources within a defined geographical area such as a real estate unit, a nation or an empire. They clarify who or which social groups have the primary right to use the resources of the area. But at all levels of society there have also been flows of resources across the boundaries, whether in the form of the exchange of gifts and services, tributes or international trade. These different resource flows, both within and between geographically limited units at different scales, are difficult to map, but they are of fundamental importance for the prospects of the individual units to develop new technology, to grow economically, develop their resources and conserve their environment.
Difficult to map
One reason that both historical and modern flows of natural resources are difficult to map is that the statistics that are available often make use of yardsticks that are not adequate for calculating their biophysical contents and consequences. For example, much of the statistics relating to economic history and national economics are expressed in terms of monetary exchange values which often require comprehensive research inputs to be translated into biophysical measures such as the use of energy, quantities of materials, yields per hectare or working time. But when such translations have been made, they can provide a completely new picture of the trade relations and technical systems for which they formed the basis.
For example, the newly industrialised England of the 1850s, by exchanging cotton cloth valued at £1000 on the world market for raw cotton valued at the same amount, could in actual fact exchange about 4000 hours of work in an English factory for more than 32,000 hours of slave labour in tropical cotton plantations – inclusive of the ecological footprints which these working hours represented – and at the same time for the yield of more than 52 hectares of foreign cotton fields. This arrangement formed the basis not only for the industrial revolution but also for modern national economics, the conceptual apparatus of which excludes such translations of market value into hectares and working time. Therefore, to a large extent it continues to elude us how economic growth and technical progress in such areas can be connected with the impoverishment of people and environments in other parts of the world. And therefore we continue to wrestle with the scientific question of how different societies have, through the ages, managed to represent as equitable and fair, resource transfers that were in material terms unequal.
The project “Power, land and materiality” investigates the relationship between land use and power in a number of case studies. There is, for example, comparative historical research into the metabolism of different empires, the conditions for the build-up of land-based capital, slave labour, colonial plantation systems and the environmental impacts of trade in ivory, but also contemporary research on ecologically uneven exchange, ecological footprints, agribusiness and the growing of crops for bioenergy.
Historical comparisons in order to understand contemporary land use are of key importance for the project. For example, Janken Myrdal is comparing resource flows in former empires with modern organisations such as the EU, and the comparative research of Mats Widgren on land-based capital helps judge the consequences of biofuel crops in developing countries. The two portgraduate posts in human ecology within the project also illustrate its large range in time and space. Ragnheidur Bogadóttir (Lund) is studying how the production and distribution of textiles and other products in the Inca empire represented uneven flows of invested working time and yields per hectare, while Marie Widengård (Göteborg) is investigating the sustainability of the expanding production of Jatropha for climate friendly biofuels in East Africa. By calculating real land use titles and the global environmental impacts of different production systems, the project intends to illustrate how land use issues are inextricably bound up with issues of power and resource allocation.
Author
:
Alf Hornborg
is Professor at the Department of Human Ecology, Lund University, and member of the Board of LUCID (http://www.lucid.lu.se)
E-mail:
alf.hornborg@hek.lu.se
Literature:
Together with the delegates to the international conference “Ecology & Power” in Lund in 2008, all those in the project are contributing to the volume Ecology and Power: Struggles over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future, edited by A. Hornborg, B. Clark and K. Hermele (Routledge, in print).
A. Hornborg, “Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement”, Ecological Economics 59(1):74-81(2006).