IJ
CS
Zero-Sum World
Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental LoadDisplacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchangein the World-System
Alf Hornborg
Lund University, Sweden
Abstract
This article discusses various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability failsto acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmentalproblems. It traces some lineages of critical thinking on environmental load displacementand ecologically unequal exchange, arguing that such acknowledgement of a globalenvironmental ‘zero-sum game’ is essential to recognizing the extent to which cornucopianperceptions of ‘development’ represent an illusion. It identifies five interconnected illusionscurrently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations thatacknowledge the political dimensions of global ecology: 1) The fragmentation of scientificperspectives into bounded categories such as ‘technology’, ‘economy’, and ‘ecology’.2) The assumption that the operation of market prices is tantamount to reciprocity. 3) Theillusion of machine fetishism, that is, that the technological capacity of a given populationis independent of that population’s position in a global system of resource flows. 4) Therepresentation of inequalities in societal space as developmental stages in historical time.5) The conviction that ‘sustainable development’ can be achieved through consensus.The article offers some examples of how the rising global anticipation of socio-ecologicalcontradiction and disaster is being ideologically disarmed by the rhetoric on ‘sustainability’and ‘resilience’.
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INTRODUCTION
The social sciences in the early 21st century face a challenge so formidable thatthey may prove incapable of dealing with it, in which case our current capitalistcivilization may well share the fate of ancient Rome and similar historical
International Journal of Comparative Sociology
Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publicationshttp://cos.sagepub.comLos Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC Vol 50(3–4): 237–262DOI: 10.1177/0020715209105141
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International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50(3–4)
instances of socio-ecological collapse (Tainter, 1988). This alarmist introduction ismeant to underscore the urgency of the analytical task that I attempt to outlinein this article. The currently globalizing connections through market exchangeand technologies of trade and communication are widely celebrated as a roadto a more integrated, prosperous, and even egalitarian future world, yet thereis overwhelming evidence that precisely these connections continue to generatedevastating ecological deterioration and increasingly severe inequalities withinand between nations (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; United NationsDevelopment Program, 1998). Almost seven billion human beings are currently,to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, suspended in a global ‘web of significance’ thatseems inexorably to bring us all closer and closer to socio-ecological collapse.There is nothing inevitable about this process, many of us are aware of its funda-mental direction, yet we seem quite unable to halt it.This incapacity to evade catastrophe has two basic aspects that are intricatelyinterrelated. One is that our way of thinking and talking about the world preventsus from grasping or at least efficaciously questioning the mechanisms propellingthis development. The other is that there are extremely powerful interests atstake. We are not all sitting in the same boat, as the metaphor goes. We are sittingin at least two different boats, but one is pulling us all toward disaster. There aredefinitely powerful social groups who have very much to gain – at least within theanticipated time-frame of their own lifetimes – from the current organization of global society. As Michel Foucault and many other social scientists have shown,it is precisely these social groups who tend to exert a primary influence over theway social processes are defined – and even questioned. The language devisedto manage socio-ecological ‘problems’ viewed through such system-servinglenses will naturally constrain our capacity to actually ‘solve’ problems in thesense of changing the direction of societal development, which may well requirefundamentally reorganizing social institutions. The language of policy andmanagement thus tends to avoid questions of power, conflicts, and inequalities.Although conspicuously present – and increasingly problematic – in globalhuman society, such issues are rarely identified as problems to be solved. Thereis rather a pervasive assumption of consensus with regard to appropriate policyand management.A crucial challenge for social sciences struggling with these issues is thatthe global ‘webs of significance’ in which we are all suspended, and which aregenerally described for us in terms of flows of money and information, havevery tangible material properties and consequences. These material aspects of global society are widely ignored in social science, in part because they implicateknowledge and methodologies generally reserved for the natural sciences. Norcan they be fully grasped by the natural scientists themselves, simply becausethese researchers generally have a poor understanding of society. Yet the logicof these material aspects of society – what are increasingly referred to as ‘socio-ecological’ systems – urgently needs to be understood (Berkes and Folke, 1998;
Hornborg
Zero-Sum World
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Hornborg and Crumley, 2007). But even here, in contemporary attempts totranscend the academic distinction between social and natural sciences, thereis a clear divergence between perspectives emphasizing, respectively, consensusand conflict. In this article, I will take power, contradiction, and ‘capital accumu-lation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003) as a point of departure for understandingthe disastrous course of current socio-ecological processes. In other words, I willargue that economic growth will generally tend to occur
at the expense
of othersocial groups. I will also briefly demonstrate why the hegemonic interpretationsand policies that instead assume consensus (e.g. the functionalist discourse on‘resilience’) are so misguided.The article is divided into three parts. The first discusses how a population’sperceptions of technology, economy, and ecology are conditioned by its positionwithin global systems of resource flows, and how mainstream modern perceptionsof ‘development’ can be viewed as a cultural illusion confusing a privileged posi-tion in social space with an advanced position in historical time. The second parttraces some lineages of critical thinking on environmental load displacementand ecologically unequal exchange, arguing that such acknowledgement of aglobal environmental ‘zero-sum game’ is essential to recognizing the extent towhich cornucopian perceptions of ‘development’ indeed represent an illusion.The third part, finally, offers some examples of how the rising global anticipationof socio-ecological contradiction and disaster is being ideologically disarmed bythe rhetoric on ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’.
1. MACHINE FETISHISM: TECHNOLOGY/ECONOMY/ECOLOGY AS CULTURE
In the mainstream language of policy for sustainable development, the words‘technology’, ‘economy’, and ‘ecology’ are used in an unreflective, matter-of-fact way that suggests bounded categories of reality given once and for all andexempt from critical scrutiny. This is the language of positivism and simple em-piricism, the diametrical antithesis to those traditions in social research thatemphasize a deeper and second look at the surfaces of the world that presentthemselves to our senses. In this latter tradition I would include what DavidHarvey (1996) calls ‘dialectics’, but also the whole thrust of ‘deconstruction’ and‘defamiliarization’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1986) that has characterized so muchof the work in humanities and some of the social sciences in recent decades.Researchers from these traditions will find it easier to digest what I am nowgoing to propose, viz. that our notions of ‘technology’, ‘economy’, and ‘ecology’are
cultural
categories that train us to think about our socio-ecological realities inparticular ways. These three categories represent overlapping phenomena, theanalytical separation of which diminishes our chances of grasping the totality of which each gives a glimpse. The three concepts represent distinct and extremelyinfluential fields of research lodged in separate academic faculties, yet each cansimultaneously be used as a point of departure for extensive anthropologicalreflection on how mainstream thought is culturally constituted (e.g. Croll and
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