This recognition has not simply been missed by economists; as often as not, it has been flatly rejected. One classic example is David Ricardo (1772–1823), one of Adam Smith’s most influential successors. Ricardo remains a popular figure in economics, not least because his arguments on behalf of free trade arrangements proved to be highly useful to the British Empire in its time, and of course to the American Empire in ours; you can still find his arguments on this subject presented as simple fact in the pages of most freshman economics textbooks.1 Another of the core elements of Ricardo’s economic theories, though, is the claim that land retains its “original and indestructible” economic value no matter what economic use is made of it.2
This is an odd claim. Even in the early nineteenth century, when Ricardo originally made it, plenty of people could have set him straight; the fact that bad farming practices could make soil useless for farming was well known in Ricardo’s time, and so was the impact of industrial pollution — though of course we have gained a great deal more bitter experience with both since then. Whatever the reasons for his claim, Ricardo’s ideas concerning land prefigured the way that natural resources have been treated by most economists ever since. This is as true of radical economists as of their capitalist rivals; recent proponents of “green socialism,” for example, might find it useful to reread Marx, who explicitly rejected the idea that the “free gifts of Nature” could have any value at all.3 (The disastrous mistreatment of the environment common under Marxist regimes in the twentieth century was thus not accidental, but a logically necessary outgrowth of Marxist theory.) Nearly the only concession made to the ecological dimensions of economics in the mainstream, and it’s a fairly recent one, is the concept of “externalities” — the recognition that if somebody does something that fouls the environment, other people may suffer a loss of economic value as a result, and might deserve compensation for that.4
Now of course this is true, and Garrett Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of the commons built on that insight to remind us that a society that permits the advantages of ecological abuse to go to individuals, while the costs are shared by the whole society, is effectively subsidizing the destruction of its environment. Still, both the “externalities” argument and the structure Hardin built on it miss the central issues raised by the interface between the environment and economics. Both tacitly accept Ricardo’s fantasy of invulnerable land as the normal state of affairs, apply it to the entire environment, and then focus attention on those supposedly exceptional situations when somebody does manage to make land (or some other environmental resource) less valuable.
To show where this thinking falls short, let’s take a closer look at the land whose value Ricardo considered “indestructible.” He was talking primarily about land as an economic factor in agriculture, and so shall we. What he apparently did not realize, but every country farmer knew in his time — and ecologists have demonstrated in fine detail in ours — is that fertile land suitable for growing crops does not simply happen. Like anything else of value, it must be made, and once made, it must be maintained. The only thing that sets it apart from the products of human industry is that the vast majority of the labor needed to make and maintain agricultural land is not performed by human beings.
Soil suitable for crops, after all, is not simply rock dust; pound for pound, it is among the most complex substances in the known universe. A large part of it — in the best soil, well over half — is organic matter, some living, some dead but not yet wholly decayed, some dissolved into organic colloids complex enough to give analytic chemists sleepless nights. All of these are put there by the activity of living beings over long periods of time. Energy and raw materials flow constantly through soil, uniting bacteria, fungi, algae, worms, insects and many other living beings into one of the most intricate ecosystems on Earth. Plants participate in and depend on this bewilderingly complex world; they draw water and mineral nutrients from it, and cycle leaves, root fibers and a wide range of chemical compounds back into it.5
The farmer who wants to grow crops is attempting to extract wealth from the underground ecosystem of the soil. She can ignore that, and simply plant and harvest with no attention to the needs of the soil, but if she does, the soil will be depleted of nutrients in a few years and her crops will fail. Alternatively, she can replace nutrients with chemical fertilizers, predators with pesticides, and so on. If she does this she will have to use steadily larger doses of chemicals to get the same yields, and if the society she lives in runs short on petroleum and natural gas feedstocks for these chemicals — as ours shows every sign of doing — she will be left with soil too sterile and pest ridden to grow anything. If she wants to fulfill Ricardo’s promise and hand the land on to her grandchildren in the same condition that she received it from her grandparents, she will have to provide the things the soil needs for its long-term health. Put another way, she will have to barter with the soil, giving it the things it will accept in exchange for crops.
This is the premise of organic agriculture, of course. It’s a premise that has proven itself in the Asian farming regions that inspired the organic pioneers of the early twentieth century to devise a more general system of agriculture that works with rather than against natural cycles,6 and in the farms now using organic methods to get yields roughly comparable to those of chemical agriculture. The organic approach has many dimensions, but one may not have received the importance it deserves. To an organic farmer, land is not a commodity that can be owned but a community with which she interacts, and that community has its own economy on which the farmer’s economy depends.
Imagine, to develop this concept into a metaphor, that our farmer got her crops, not from her fields, but from the village of an indigenous tribe near her home. The inhabitants of the village are deeply conservative, and their own economy follows traditional patterns not subject to change or negotiation. If the farmer wants crops, she must find out what the villagers are willing to take in exchange for them, and that will be determined by the internal dynamics of the village economy: what is already produced in surplus amounts, what is scarce, what is desired and what is detested by the villagers. Her relations with the village, in other words, would be exactly the same in outline as those of an organic farmer with her land.
The same thing is true of every other form of economic activity, though the dependence on Nature may be less obvious in some cases than in others. Behind the human activities that produce secondary goods lie a bewildering range of nonhuman activities — the biological cycles that yield soil fertility, crop pollination and countless other things of economic value; the hydrological cycles that put fresh water into reservoirs and taps; the tectonic processes in the crust that put economically useful metals and minerals into veins in the rocks; and, of central importance just now, the extraordinarily complex interplay of biological and geological processes that spent half a billion years storing away countless billions of tons of carbon under the earth’s surface in the form of fossil fuels.
Conventional economics assumes that these things get there by some materialist equivalent of divine fiat. This disastrously misstates the situation. These natural goods are produced by an exact analogue of the way that secondary goods are produced: raw materials are transformed, through labor, using existing capital and available energy, to produce goods and services of value. The difference is that all this economic activity takes place in the nonhuman world. Human beings do not manage the production of natural goods, and the disastrous results of attempts to do so to date suggest that we probably never will. In at least some cases, however — maltreated farmland is a good example — we can interfere with the production of natural goods, and suffer the consequences when this mismanagement