“Cheap Nature” Gets Expensive
Why are prices for so many things in so many places still rising so rapidly, even though crude oil and many agricultural commodity prices started falling back months ago from post Ukrainian-invasion highs? This critical question is vying for headline space with “natural” disasters of unnatural scale and frequency, with the war in Ukraine, and with other tales of social and economic stress.
Are these phenomena related? Is the unaccustomed inflation we’re experiencing just a result of supply-chain and other market disruptions? Perhaps magnified by droughts, floods, and war between two major resource exporters? Or by big government-spending programs aimed at kickstarting economies after Covid-closures, as central bankers’ high interest-rate strategies imply?
Or are all those events just symptoms of some bigger underlying cataclysm? Is the Earth rebelling at mistreatment by humans over recent decades or centuries, as many in the environmental community and beyond suggest? What does “earth rebelling” even mean? Do we seriously believe the Earth is an intelligent and intentional entity with capacity to “rebel?”
These are questions to which there are no simple answers people can agree on now, nor are there likely to be even when the history of this era is written decades in the future. But there are useful perspectives that can help us expand our understanding of where we are, how we got here, and hopefully, how we might start getting the Earth and its inhabitants to a better situation.
Web of Life Perspective
Binghamton University history professor and coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network Jason W. Moore provides a great example of such an insightful perspective in his prescient 2015 book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.
Arguing that human society and nature are interlinking parts of the same historic process, not separate fixed entities, Moore provides a lens for imagining how the world can apparently be so heavily impacted — through climate change, pandemics, species die-outs, resource shortages, etc. — by something that traditional thought sees as outside us and subject to human will, not exercising any cohesive “will” of its own. Something we call “nature.”
Key to this interpretation of human and non-human development in tandem is the perception that, since the 16th Century, the socio-economic arrangements we call capitalism have flourished in large part through the “appropriation via non-economic means” of work/energy around us. This equates loosely to the notion of “externalities,” which are assigned no value by our economic system and for which no one pays. But Moore’s concept is much more broadly defined, encompassing everything from rivers, to soil fertility, to forests, to slave labor, unpaid household work, and much more through a long span of history.
Holding all these things outside the economic value system — making them “external” — has created what Moore calls Cheap Nature within the system, conceived of as “Four Cheaps”: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. All these have played a central role in the growth-oriented, globalized consumer economy of the modern era, and in the way it has revved up over the last 40 years at unusual speed and disregard for non-economic impacts.
The Four Cheaps
Recently, all Four Cheaps have abruptly quit being cheap for most people in most places. In a way it’s not surprising that, if one Cheap gets expensive, the others do too, since they are all intertwined. If cheap energy helps to produce cheap food through fossil fuel-heavy agribusiness, it makes the “living wage” that businesses must pay much lower than it would be if food — and oil-based transportation — cost more. Likewise, low prices for metals that make machines, plastics that are turned into everything from polyester to cars, and other raw materials that go into the low-priced stuff help people live on low wages.
There were signs of trouble in this supposed paradise long before covid hit, but now the mutual support structure is imploding on itself. Energy is no longer cheap, either in the form of fossil fuels or as fertilizer. This reinforces higher prices for food. Metals and other raw-material prices leapt to heights after reopening in 2021. Talk of “peak” or “scarce” everything, from crude oil to lithium for batteries became rife. Costly oil and gas make energy-intensive metals more expensive, adding to the cost of producing fossil fuels.
As Moore himself put it six years ago: “Capitalism has survived not by destroying nature (whatever this might mean), but through projects that compel nature… to work harder and harder — for free, or at a very low cost. Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get nature — of any kind — to work harder.” Think of that nature as including underpaid and unpaid labor, and it’s easier to see a framework for the great resignation and similar happenings that undermine Cheap Labor.
Let’s take a quick look at what’s going on with each of the Four Cheaps, starting with energy. The West’s progressive boycotting of Russia’s enormous oil, natural gas and coal resources in the wake of its Ukraine invasion put recession-igniting heat into fossil fuel markets and advanced the transition to renewable electricity and electrified transportation. Peak oil is basically here. What renewable power will cost remains to be seen, but it won’t come with the voluminous free externalities that made fossil energy appear so cheap.
Cheap food resulted in recent decades from an agribusiness model that relied not only on cheap fuel and fertilizer, but also state subsidies for corn, soybeans, and mass-produced livestock. That model is under severe strain, if it isn’t already broken. The dominant Monsanto formula for growing commodity crops is under pressure from everything from herbicide-resistant weeds to lawsuits by cancer suffers.
Disease among factory-farmed animals is rampant, despite dangerously wide use of antibiotics, while alternating droughts and floods are challenging farmers from Italy to California to Southern China. Smaller, less pesticide- and fertilizer-dependent farming can hopefully take up the slack, but it will almost certainly cost more, again given the loss of free access to resources such as naturally fertile soil.
The story for metals and other raw materials is similar and inter-related, in that steep energy costs are adding to cost pressure resulting from resource depletion and climate change.
Cheap labor is succumbing to a set of overlapping and even more complex factors. Supply-chain breaks, wars, and tariff pressures mean companies are no longer as free to move operations to places with the lowest paid workers, while immigrants are fewer and putting less pressure on wages in many places.
Workers are standing up for their rights through strikes, resignations, and other action more than they have in decades — and getting not only better pay, but also improvements in health care, paid leave and other benefits. “Workers are standing up and speaking out against toxic work environments and demanding better treatment,” Bloomberg quoted AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler as saying.
All this adds up tomore than a glitch in the human social and economic system. It’s a fundamental disruption in the relationship between the human and non-human that, as Moore sees it, constitutes the web of life. It isn’t that this changes everything, it’s that everything is changing itself.
