The end of cheap nature. Or how I learned to stop worrying about “the” environment and love the crisis of capitalism

¿Afronta actualmente el capitalismo el “fin de la naturaleza barata”? Si así es, ¿qué podría significar esto y cuáles con las implicaciones para el futuro? Estamos, de hecho, siendo testigos del fin de la naturaleza barata en un sentido específico histórico. En vez de contemplar el fin de la naturaleza barata como la reafirmación de “límites de crecimiento” externos, sostengo que, a día de hoy, el capitalismo ha agotado la relación histórica que la produce. El fin de la naturaleza barata se comprende mejor como el agotamiento de las relaciones de valor que han restaurado periódicamente los “Four Cheaps”: trabajo, alimentos, energía y materias primas. Fundamentalmente, estas relaciones de valor son coproducidas por, y a través de, humanos con el resto de la naturaleza. La cuestión decisiva, por lo tanto, enciende las relaciones que envuelven y despliegan las sucesivas configuraciones de la naturaleza humana y extra-humana, simbólicamente capacitadas y materialmente realizadas, a través de la larga duración del sistema-mundo moderno. Significativamente, la apropiación de trabajo no remunerado —incluyendo los “regalos gratuitos” de la naturaleza— y la explotación del trabajo asalariado, forman una unidad dialéctica. Los límites del crecimiento enfrentados actualmente por el capital son suficientemente reales, y son “límites” coproducidos a través del capitalismo como ecología-mundo, uniendo la acumulación de capital, la búsqueda de poder y la coproducción de naturaleza como un todo orgánico. El límite de la ecología-mundo del capital es el capital en sí mismoDoes capitalism today face the “end of cheap nature”? If so, what could this mean, and what are the implications for the future? We are indeed witnessing the end of cheap nature in a historically specific sense. Rather than view the end of cheap nature as the reassertion of external “limits to growth”, I argue that capitalism has today exhausted the historical relation that produced cheap nature. The end of cheap nature is best comprehended as the exhaustion of the value-relations that have periodically restored the “Four Cheaps”: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. Crucially, these value-relations are co-produced by and through humans with the rest of nature. The decisive issue therefore turns on the relations that enfold and unfold successive configurations of human and extrahuman nature, symbolically enabled and materially enacted, over the longue durée of the modern world-system. Significantly, the appropriation of unpaid work —including “free gifts” of nature— and the exploitation wage-labor form a dialectical unity. The limits to growth faced by capital today are real enough, and are “limits” co-produced through capitalism as world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature as an organic whole. The world-ecological limit of capital is capital itsel

Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative-Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology

Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing historical capacity has withered. This “withering” is perhaps most evident in capitalism’s failure to offer a new, actually productive, agricultural model—as agrobiotechnology failed to deliver on its promissory notes. Moving from bad to worse, a second set of contradictions is now mediated through climate change. Climate change, one among many ongoing biospheric shifts, is interwoven with the totality of neoliberal agriculture’s contradictions to produce a new contradiction: negative value. This signals the emergence of forms of nature that are increasingly hostile to capital accumulation and that can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasingly costly, toxic, and dangerous strategies. The rise of negative value—whose accumulation has been latent for much of capitalist history—therefore suggests a significant and rapid erosion of opportunities for the appropriation of new streams of unpaid work/energy. As such, these new limits are qualitatively different from the nutrient and resource depletion of earlier, developmental crises of the longue dure´e Cheap Food model. These contradictions, within capital, arising from negative value, are today encouraging an unprecedented shift toward a radical ontological politics, within capitalism as a whole, that destabilizes crucial points of agreement in the modern world-system: What is food? What is nature? What is valuable

World Accumulation and Planetary Life, or, Why Capitalism Will Not Survive Until the ‘Last Tree is Cut

How does capitalism work through the web of life

The Rise of Cheap Nature

We live at a crossroads in the history of our species – and of planetary life. What comes next is unknowable with any certainty. But it is not looking good. Environmentalist theory and research tells us, today, just how bad it is. Mass extinction. Climate Change. Ocean acidification. To these planetary shifts, one can add countless regional stories – runaway toxic disasters on land and at sea; cancer clusters; frequent and severe droughts. Our collective sense of environmental consequences has never been greater. But consequences of what? Of humanity as a whole? Of population? Of industrial civilization? Of the West? Of capitalism? How we answer the question today will shape the conditions of life on Earth – for millennia to come. Once we begin to ask this question – What drives today\u27s disastrous state of affairs? – we move from the consequences of environment-making to its conditions and causes. And once we begin to ask questions about human-initiated environment-making, a new set of connections appears. These are the connections between environment-making and relations of inequality, power, wealth, and work. We begin to ask new questions about the relationship between environmental change and whose work is valued – and whose lives matter. Class, race, gender, sexuality, nation – and much, much more – can be understood in terms of their relationship with the whole of nature, and how that nature has been radically remade over the past five centuries. Such questions unsettle the idea of Nature and Humanity in the uppercase: ecologies without humans, and human relations without ecologies. Far from merely a philosophical difference, the uppercase Nature and Humanity that dominant Anthropocene does something unintentional – but deeply violent. For the story of Humanity and Nature conceals a dirty secret of modern world history. That secret is how capitalism was built on excluding most humans from Humanity – indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, nearly all women, and even many white-skinned men (Slavs, Jews, the Irish). From the perspective of imperial administrators, merchants, planters, and conquistadores, these humans were not Human at all. They were regarded as part of Nature, along with trees and soils and rivers – and treated accordingly. To register the bloody history of this Human/Nature binary is a moral protest. It is also an analytical protest. For capitalism does not thrive on violence and inequality alone. It is a prodigiously creative and productive system too – at least until recently. The symbolic, material, and bodily violence of this audacious separation – Humanity and Nature – performed a special kind of work for the modern world. Backed by imperial power and capitalist rationality, it mobilized the unpaid work and energy of humans – especially women, especially the enslaved – in service to transforming landscapes with a singular purpose: the endless accumulation of capital. Some of us have begun to call this way of thinking world-ecological (Moore, 2015a)

Optimal Estimation of Several Linear Parameters in the Presence of Lorentzian Thermal Noise

In a previous article we developed an approach to the optimal (minimum variance, unbiased) statistical estimation technique for the equilibrium displacement of a damped, harmonic oscillator in the presence of thermal noise. Here, we expand that work to include the optimal estimation of several linear parameters from a continuous time series. We show that working in the basis of the thermal driving force both simplifies the calculations and provides additional insight to why various approximate (not optimal) estimation techniques perform as they do. To illustrate this point, we compare the variance in the optimal estimator that we derive for thermal noise with those of two approximate methods which, like the optimal estimator, suppress the contribution to the variance that would come from the irrelevant, resonant motion of the oscillator. We discuss how these methods fare when the dominant noise process is either white displacement noise or noise with power spectral density that is inversely proportional to the frequency ($1/f$ noise). We also construct, in the basis of the driving force, an estimator that performs well for a mixture of white noise and thermal noise. To find the optimal multi-parameter estimators for thermal noise, we derive and illustrate a generalization of traditional matrix methods for parameter estimation that can accommodate continuous data. We discuss how this approach may help refine the design of experiments as they allow an exact, quantitative comparison of the precision of estimated parameters under various data acquisition and data analysis strategies.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravit