Emily on the Nature of Environment

In this chapter Harvey reviews different approaches to environmentalism/ecology and suggest a dialectical historical materialist perspective is the most progressive way to engage the environmental question. Harvey begins this chapter by pointing to a fundamental problem: that money is the means through which we all must value the environment since it is our only well-understood and universal yardstick and since it speaks to and with social power. Yet money is a flawed method of valuing nature since it is actually just a representation of socially necessary labour time and an unstable and unreliable one at that; assets that aren’t exchanged on the market are difficult to assign value; money prices attach to particular things and enclose them (through private property)in ways that separate them from their wholes; money values discount the future; private property relations interfere with the proper valuation through money and present the environment as an externality to be internalised in human action; money valuation confines the field of thinking and action to instrumental environmental management and finally money does not capture the complexity of human wants, desires, passions and values – it is empty of moral passion or of humane meanings.

Given that money is not a good system of valuing nature, Harvey asks: could values be inherent in Nature? His answer is no, since values are always heavily mediated by people/subjects. Harvey exemplifies this by turning to the metaphors used in science (which is supposed have unmediated/unbiased access to nature) and exposing them as gendered and reflecting the power relations of society eg. Males as aggressive, females as passive, Individuals as inherently competitive and entrepreneurial (he notes that Darwin’s theory was accepted in Russian society which had a much more communal society).

Harvey also considers and dismisses that nature might be valued through phenomenological and metaphysical means that emphasise the powers of the knowing subject and that prescribe a political project to recover the rootedness of man. This approach is behind bioregialism that celebrates the particular, the unique and often indescribable features of a place Harvey notes that such an approach can be terribly reactionary – it can be as much about the construction of a national identity as the environment. It clearly creates an other. Next Harvey goes on to identify and characterise the major strands of environmental/ecological thinking which include authoritarianism, corporate and state managerialism, pluralistic liberalism, conservatism, moral community, ecosocialism, ecofeminism, and decentralised communitarianism.

Instead of any one of these, he posits a historical geographical materialism underpinned by a dialectical understanding of the world ( a certain form of ecosocialism). In this view the society nature distinction is collapsed and nature is understood as wholly internal to society – making a city like NYC completely natural. This view focuses on the ways we go about producing ourselves (including class relations) and the world around us. In this way all socio-political projects are ecological projects and vice versa. This vision for social/ecological change argues against the possibility of an unmediated relation with nature and thus is fully forward-looking. Finally Harvey goes on to stake out his position on a few controversial questions: the appropriate us of technology, the scale and scope of ecosocialist community, the social relations of ecological projects etc.