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120 Out of the Frying Pan by contemporary ecological Marxists such as John Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York, Becky Clausen, Jason Moore, and others.25 Essentially, metabolic rift refers to a rupture in the cycles of exchange within natural systems, including material and energetic exchanges between humans and nature. Marx and ecological Marxists have argued that the key sphere in which this exchange takes place is that of production, in which humans—as part of the labor process—transform nature (including themselves) in the pursuit of needs satisfaction. The labor process —and the social relations that condition it—thus becomes the central area of human endeavor through which our relationship with the environment is determined. Marx’s initial example of a rift in the metabolic relationship between humans and nature was the town-country divide that emerged as a result of the separation of the English peasantry from the land and their concentration in towns as wage laborers. The result was that the fertility of the land, embodied in food and fiber, was separated from the land through exchange and consumption, becoming a concentrated sea of pollution in the towns rather than being returned as a nutrient to the soil from which it came. As intensifying agricultural production bled the soil of its fertility under these conditions, capital and the state scrambled to manage the burgeoning crisis by importing fertility from elsewhere in the form of guano, bones, and crops.26 The rift was then theorized at the world-systems level by Foster and Clark27 and by Moore.28 Moore takes the notion of metabolic rift and integrates it with Wallerstein’s world-systems approach to suggest that “the rupture in nutrient cycling between the country and the city in historical capitalism” can be examined on a world scale, exploring the relations between core and periphery:29 With the transition to capitalism, a new division of labor between town and country took shape—on a world scale and between regions . . . Nutrients were pumped out of one ecosystem in the periphery and transferred to another in the core. In essence, the land was progressively mined until its relative exhaustion fettered profitability. At this point, economic contraction forced capital to seek out and develop new ways of exploiting territories hitherto beyond the reach of the law of value.30 More recently, scholars have used the theory of metabolic rift to explain how capitalist dynamics have contributed to global climate change31 and the crisis of marineecology.32 Thesemorerecentcontributionshavemovedawayfromthespatial analysis that was characteristic of Marx’s metabolic rift (in which rifts opened in part because of the intensification of the exploitation of nature—soil in particular —and in part because of the social and geographic separation of workers 121 Out of the Frying Pan from the soil) and highlight instead how rifts within natural ecological systems open in response to capitalist interventions. Technological and managerial transformations in processes of production motivated by the dictates of profitability (and in some cases, such as aquaculture, in response to previous manifestations of rift)33 result in “disruption or interruption of natural processes and cycles, the accumulation of waste, and environmental degradation.”34 The emphasis increasingly is less on how humans are physically separated from the land and more on how the specifics of the labor process—the process of transforming nature for human use—as shaped by the social relations of capitalism result in the opening of rifts within natural systems. The rift concept allows us to grasp and illustrate how human interventions in natural systems for the production of either use value or exchange value shape landscapes and ecosystems. As the state comes to bear a heavier burden for the mediation and conditioning of human relationships to nature and to regulate the labor process in the hopes of staving off “second contradiction”–style crises, scholars are obliged to account for its actions in the formation of metabolic rifts. One of the most dramatic and effective human interventions in nature, in a wide variety of places, landscapes, and ecosystems, is the manipulation of fire. Prior to industrialization, large-scale transformations of nature by human populations took place almost exclusively through the use of fire. Land clearing, and in some cases the precise manipulation of ecosystems in the service of encouraging and discouraging certain flora and fauna, was and is carried out by use of the torch. Fire has unquestionably been a pivotal element in multiple anthropogenic transformations of the western United States, from the arrival of Native...

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