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210 14 Debt, Theft, Permaculture Justice and Ecological Scale Gerry Canavan If, as Fredric Jameson once wrote, it has become easier to imagine “the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and of nature” than the end of capitalism, this is in part because we are increasingly aware that the two phrases describe in fact the same event.1 But the imagined extinction of alternatives to capitalism associated with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” that so concerns Jameson carries with it a type of ideological shadow: if capitalism is, as K. William Kapp once put it, “an economy of unpaid costs,” then our increasing recognition that the bill is finally coming due must be recognized as a kind of nascent revolutionary consciousness.2 Bruno Latour, who in his most well-known book famously declared, “We have never been modern,” recently wrote that “it has now almost become common sense that we were able to think we were modern only as long as the various ecological crises could be denied or delayed.”3 Though Latour and I part ways on many questions about ecology, on this he is surely correct: we cannot believe anymore that we are modern, that is, we cannot believe anymore that we have made some final break with the material realities of soil, air, and water that sustain us and on which everything depends. This essay seeks to make a preliminary accounting of the circuits of dependence that characterize capitalism ’s relationship with the environment through the assertion of an ecological debt that has long been in arrears, though the bearers of this mortgage may be distant in both space and time. Debt, Theft, Permaculture | 211 The Second Contradiction of Capitalism When approaching ecology as the “second contradiction” of capitalism, commenters often begin with a passage on soil ecology from Capital, volume 1, chapter 15: “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.”4 John Bellamy Foster has traced Marx’s interest in (and horror at) this “metabolic rift” to its origins in the work of Justus von Liebig, whose recognition of the breakdown in the cycle of soil replenishment led to the development of a process to replenish fields artificially through the use of chemical fertilizers—which led to a colonial project of importing guano and other materials from places as far off as Peru and the South Pacific, and which itself ultimately leads to an unbalancing of the nitrogen cycle and further ecological degradation of soil, water, and the climate.5 Nature magazine recently published an article identifying the nitrogen cycle as one of three ecological boundaries whose crisis thresholds we have already far overshot; with 35 million annual tons projected as the “safe” annual limit, we currently convert over 120 million tons of nitrogen per year.6 Scientific management of the soil has, in this way, only made the problem worse. In the soil cycle we find a first mode for imagining ecological debt. Here we have ecological debt at a kind of zero-level: when you grow food and ship that food far away—when, that is, you strip necessary minerals from the soil and ship them out of the local ecosystem—you destroy the long-term sustainability of your own agricultural practices. In a sense here the “debt” is owed to oneself, or at least to one’s local area and immediate descendants, and because of the local temporal and spatial scales involved it is a debt whose repayment manifests as a relatively urgent concern. The agricultural capitalist is motivated to embark on some sort of rational management of the soil if only to protect his own assets, even if his management is always fitful and incomplete, and in awkward balance with the pursuit of profit. The more fraught cases are those in which the consequences of the ecological debt rebound, not on you, or even on your descendants, but on other people living in distant spaces and times. This is the power plant whose emissions blow across a mountain range into some another nation, or the factory whose toxic dumping floats downstream into someone else’s water basin, or the civilization that uses up the entire fossil fuel reserve of the planet in a single hundred-year spree. If, in the case of the...

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