In short, the overarching aim of my work is twofold. The first is to understand and explain the driving socioeconomic forces behind the rush to universalize the commodification and commercial enclosure of nature in search of bio-based products, inclusive of biofuels, biochemicals, bioplastics, and biomaterials. The second is to unravel the tapestry of mass deceptions, distortions, obfuscations, misrepresentations, and miscomprehensions woven together by the powerful mega-corporations and their intellectual defenders in the interest of global capitalist accumulation.
TOWARD A RADICAL ECOLOGICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
The Chinese ideogram of crisis has two characters: one for danger and the other for opportunity. This is akin to the Polanyian conceptualization of the double moments in the evolution of capitalist civilization that consist of a series of negations and affirmations, contradictions and revelations. According to Karl Polanyi, neoclassical economists, known more for their ferocity than their cogency, have succeeded in producing the utmost theoretical perversion of the capitalist economy by placing it above society and politics. This perverted laissez-faire doctrine of capitalism represents a utopian attempt to endow capitalism with natural principles of self-direction and self-regulation, a project that has sown the seeds of the system’s own ultimate destruction, since the consequent creation of market oppression and the social resistance to it have become the defining feature of this system. The resulting expansion of internal crises of accumulation impels owners of capital to attempt to overcome the perpetual internal crises through doing more of the same thing: overcoming the institutional barriers to their utopian goal of limitless growth through further market deregulation and trade liberalization, coupled with unbridled competition and capital market liberalization, ultimately reducing the state to a mere agent of accumulation.10
Granted, owners of capital have hitherto proved resilient in transforming crises into opportunities for fresh sources of accumulation through constant reorganizing of capital and restructuring of the global economy. Given the historical record, contemporary owners of capital do not see the socially constructed global hunger, the prospects of fossil fuel shortages, and looming climate change as signs of danger but as opportunities to expand the scope of accumulation as well as to reconfigure the structure of global capitalism in ways that strengthen its stranglehold on nature and society. To counter this perspective, let us look at some principles of radical ecological economics.
With respect to the organic nexus between the fundamental laws of motion governing the economy and those of nature, the French chemist Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) vigorously challenged the dominant neoclassical economic belief as one of the most dangerous formulations of our time. As he presciently argued, neoclassical economists, steeply socialized in Newtonian mechanics, had succeeded in giving the process of capitalist accumulation a pseudoscientific depiction by linking the economy to the laws of perpetual motion. With this profoundly insightful formulation, Soddy sowed the first seeds for the conception and birth of modern ecological economics.11 Picking up where Soddy left off, others took his formulation to its logical terminus by demonstrating the ontological connection of the principles of evolutionary biology with the laws of motion governing the movement of geophysical forces, warranting the need for a biophysical theory of economics.
In his widely celebrated 1971 The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen systematically and meticulously exposed the ideological foundation of neoclassical economists who present the economy as being in a state of perpetual motion. By refuting the neoclassical notion that the economy could grow indefinitely without encountering contraction and dissipation of the matter/energy flow, he developed a pioneering work on ecological economics. Georgescu-Roegen maintains that production processes are invariably governed by the laws of thermodynamics; as such, they are subject to the entropy law by which matter/energy dissipates once work is performed. This is so because natural resources flowing into the production system are transformed into commodities and wastes, suggesting simultaneous depletion of low-entropy resources and increased generation of high-entropy wastes.12
Other writers have further enriched Georgescu-Roegen’s contribution to ecological economics. Herman Daly, for example, posits that understanding the economy as a subsystem of the earth’s ecosystem is a priority of the first order if human beings are to adequately grapple with issues of social equity, conservation, and sustainability. In his view, since the economy is an open subsystem of the total environment, entirely depending on it for the inflow of matter and energy and for the outflow of its wastes, the continuous physical expansion of the economy entails more demand for throughput to increase production and more sink to dispose of the generated wastes. In other words, since the earth’s environment is finite and non-growing, short of establishing an optimal scale of the economy at which the demand of the economy for flow throughput and sink is equal to nature’s capacity to renew itself and to absorb the wastes, the end result could be a catastrophe of the highest order for the total environment on which the reproduction of the economy depends. To avert the materialization of this scenario, Daly proposes a steady-state economy, one that neither depletes natural resources nor pollutes the environment beyond its ability to regulate and control ecosystem dynamics, hydrological processes, and biogeochemical cycles. This requires placing the total biomass extraction within the carrying capacity of the environment in which harvesting rate would not exceed the existing regeneration rate, and emissions would not exceed the assimilative capacity of the present environment.13
This formulation is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics states that matter or energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from useful and available to perform work to nonuseful and unavailable and is thus unable to perform further work. Here the second law provides extremely useful insights into the functions of ecosystems by highlighting the general irreversibility of energy once it is released to the environment in the form of heat after performing work.
According to this second law, entropic processes are bound to entail continuous reductions of low-entropy throughputs and corresponding increases in high-entropy wastes. The difficulty in reversing the dissipated energy to low entropy makes the entropic process in principle unidirectional. Even though recycling may serve as a palliative, 100 percent reversion of the original state is impossible in most cases. Suppose that Alex filled his gas-guzzling car with twenty gallons of gasoline in New York, but halfway to Washington his car ran out of gas. Where did the gas go? The answer is simple, it went up into the atmosphere in the form of emission as useless and unavailable energy. However desirous Alex was to recycle the dissipated gasoline, there was no means for doing so; he had to refill his car with fresh gasoline, repeating the cycle.
The point is that if the export of high-entropic wastes to the environment is greater than the ecological system’s capacity for processing and assimilating the wastes, increases in entropic dissipation inevitably accelerate.14 Human extraction of low-entropy throughputs from the environment, and transformation of those throughputs by economic institutions into goods and wastes beyond the equilibrium point, could disrupt the natural evolutionary processes or accelerate the dissipation matrices. One of the results could be erosion of the atmosphere’s ability to cleanse itself through the natural oxidation process. The erosion of this self-cleansing and self-renewing capacity generally results from human alteration of the biochemical cycles. After all, life is supported by how nitrogen, phosphorus, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and sulfur are combined in the right proportions and cycled, since these six elements make up 95 percent of all living things on earth.15 Thus human appropriation or synthetic mobilization of these elements to produce vast varieties of