Nature's Evil. Alexander Etkind

Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind


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out. Extraction begins with peak productivity: the sea teems with fish, grain grows effortlessly, gold gleams in creeks, oil gushes in fountains. At the start of any extraction cycle, there is an Eldorado. As the years go by the earth loses its fertility, the mines become ever more dangerous, and the boreholes ever deeper. The fish in the sea and the trees in the forest disappear as a result of ‘the tragedy of the commons’: people exhaust a precious resource, considering it limitless because it doesn’t belong to any one individual.6 But even an individual owner exhausts his land, which is the reason for agricultural techniques such as crop rotation. Owned privately or publicly, fountains of oil dry up and the oil has to be pumped out, while adjacent oilfields are usually less productive.

      My question is not which comes first, resources or institutions. The relations between them are not cause and effect but are based on cohabitation, even symbiosis. The non-human agents of history interact with working, suffering, hopeful or disillusioned human beings. Harnessing nature, people endow natural phenomena with independent agency and deprive themselves of this agency. We will discern such elective affinities between sugar cane and British mercantilism, between hemp and Russian feudalism, between oil and globalisation. Every primary commodity is a social institution, and each one is different. Different natural resources have different political qualities and generate different cultural forms of reflection.

      In recent times, post-colonial research has concentrated on the Global South, post-socialist research on the Global North – and both have contributed to our understanding of the natural history of evil. This book is Eurocentric and examines global commodities from a North European perspective. It focuses on the historical experience of Northern Eurasia, from England and Holland to Siberia, and refers only occasionally to events in China, Africa or the Indies. The North is just as global as the South. The rivers, bogs and trackless wildernesses of Eurasia are no less romantic than the high seas and deserts of the South. Living through the climate catastrophe, we feel a new power in the cold, mist-shrouded stories of the North – in the poems of Ossian, in Wagner’s operas, in Tolkien’s novels or, to give a current example, in Game of Thrones. But my book is concerned with real, not fictional history. Presenting a global picture of the rise and fall of resource-dependent empires, I often support my arguments by drawing on the historical experience of Russia. No more or less important than any other empire, the Russian state has been typical in its permanent reliance on the trade in raw materials; in its repeated crises which came with the switch from one resource platform to another; and, despite frequent setbacks, in its growing role in the external and internal colonisation of the human world.

      The historian is a prophet looking backwards,12 but economists and sociologists often believe in presentism: you can only understand the present within its own context. While I don’t entirely share this belief, neither do I agree with the kind of historicism that says that today’s news is a development of yesterday’s trends. The most important news is not a development – it is a fresh start. Material history focuses on situations of change, moments of danger, states of emergency. Following Benjamin, my position also combines the philosophies of moralism and naturalism. Evil has its roots in nature, and nature also limits it. But the choice is ours; we are making it here and now, as we always have done. We do not know the outcomes of our current choices, but we know the consequences of those that people made in the past. Paradoxically, it is the uncertainty of the future that makes historical experience relevant for the present. The world is the unity of human beings and nature; and, since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. In our gloomy age this is the task for a New Enlightenment.

      Notes

      1 * The word ‘resources’ comes from the Latin surgere (to rise up, to spring from) and the related word resurgere (to rise up again). With the prefix ‘re’, this word optimistically implies that all ‘resources’ are renewable, but this is not the case. The term ‘commodities’ is generally used to include both natural resources and processed goods,


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