Nature's Evil

Any product – grain, a table or a smartphone – consists of raw materials extracted from nature and the labour invested in its production. The table is made of wood or plastic; the smartphone contains more than a hundred different alloys and plastics. The production of goods or services requires energy, which is produced by the physical effort of humans or animals, or by burning coal or gas. Unlike labour, which conforms to rules and lends itself to generalisations, raw materials have always been a matter of chance discoveries, distant journeys, successful ventures or, alternatively, disasters. The ambitions of rulers, the caprices of nature, the mistakes of scientists, the cupidity of managers, all culminated in the sovereigns finding themselves tête-à-tête with their mines, fields, boreholes, while the intermediaries were sacrificed.

An economy that deals in metals is different from an economy based on textiles, which is different again from an economy depending on oil. In the age of empires, each of the great economic machines concentrated on a particular form of natural resource. Embedded within the culture of its time, such a mono-resource defined the epoch. To this day, the speaker of the British House of Lords sits on the Woolsack. The artists of the Italian Renaissance honed their skills on rendering the play of light on fur and silk. Spanish portraits glitter with silver, while the paintings of Dutch artists capture the light falling on black broadcloth. In their paintings, the Russian masters portrayed bearded peasants, dwarfed by the vastness of the wheat fields, as inevitably as Venetian artists depicted palatial storehouses and canals and Victorian artists steam engines and smog, symbols of the coal economy. Following the economic law of comparative advantage, this ever-growing specialisation helped nation-states and empires to acquire the things they lacked through trade or colonisation; but then a resource shift would arise, and the more exclusive the previous specialisation, the worse the crisis that followed. Viewed over the long course of its development, capitalism is not a linear ‘production of commodities by means of commodities’. 3 Rather, it is a series of world-shattering choices that focused the global economic machine on one of these commodities at the expense of many others, followed by another unexpected choice of the leading commodity and another revolutionary shift.

A specialisation in a chosen commodity turns it into a fetish , an obsession that saturates cultural imagery and directs economic practices. Karl Marx famously wrote about commodity fetishism, but the underlying process is much closer to the staple theory formulated by the Canadian sociologist Harold Innis (see chapters 3 and 7 ). 4 Bypassing the people, the mono-resource economy simplifies the cultural-political system by connecting the sovereign directly to his natural source of power. Using many examples, I will demonstrate how a dominating staple captures the cultural imagination, defines its symbols and fetishes, and shapes the kingdom’s second body . * The philosopher Bruno Latour describes a mononatural condition as the tendency of a civilisation to simplify its relations with nature. 5 In contrast to this mononaturalism , multiculturalism brings internal complexity, diversity and disenchantment.

Economists have long been writing about the fact that natural resources are more like assets than goods. The price of a barrel of oil or an ounce of gold does not depend on the cost of its extraction any more than the value of an asset depends on the salaries of a bank’s employees. Other factors define the price of gold: the rate of inflation, festivals in India, the threat of war. In contrast, the price of goods reflects the labour of engineers, workers, retailers and researchers. Labour is law-abiding; nature is contingent and, sometimes, rebellious. Unlike labour or knowledge, natural resources have a habit of running out. Extraction begins with peak productivity: the sea teems with fish, grain grows effortlessly, gold gleams in creeks, oil gushes in fountains. At the start of any extraction cycle, there is an Eldorado. As the years go by the earth loses its fertility, the mines become ever more dangerous, and the boreholes ever deeper. The fish in the sea and the trees in the forest disappear as a result of ‘the tragedy of the commons’: people exhaust a precious resource, considering it limitless because it doesn’t belong to any one individual. 6 But even an individual owner exhausts his land, which is the reason for agricultural techniques such as crop rotation. Owned privately or publicly, fountains of oil dry up and the oil has to be pumped out, while adjacent oilfields are usually less productive.