CLASIFICACIÓN DEL SUELO

The colonization of people and environments is grounded in both history and geography. Whether internal or external, rights in land and labour have consistently been the fulcrum on which relations of power have turned, to the point where they now stand as the cornerstone of contemporary global economic relations. Evidenced in the metabolic rift that characterised agricultural production in the mid-nineteenth, dissociative relations between humanity and its environs now extends well beyond its genesis. Indeed, the human consumption of non-renewable energy has consistently escalated to the point where CO2 emissions now exceed the uptake of the global sink, along with CFC’s (chlorofluorocarbons) and methane, which combine to create toxicity in both atmosphere and stratosphere277_{. Additionally, the}

production of food has been so progressively concentrated and supported by artificial means (through gene manipulation and synthetic fertilizers in particular) that the resulting environmental impacts have operated in series over time. Escalating in the 20th

and 21st

centuries, loss of top soil through erosion, overgrazing and phosphate run-off all combine to degrade the physical environments in which they occur as a generalizable condition of agriculture and farming 278 _{. Rebranded as ‘agribusiness’ these now}

internationalised production processes echo the formative yet extensive coverage of environmental degradation by Marx, Engels and von Liebig in the nineteenth century. As to the land on which these processes play out, the same may be said to apply. That is, any assumption that clearances or dispossession from common lands belongs solely to the medieval or early modern period defies all evidence279_.

In an extensive review covering the period from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, Alden Wily isolates the forces at work that reproduce the very conditions under which eviction from common land still occurs. That is, the precise form of these new clearances may have altered, yet the institutionalised force of law, coupled with privatisation and development

277 _{Bell, M.M. (2004), An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (2}nd _{ed.), Sage, London pp. 5-10} 278 _{ibid., pp.58-62}

279 _{See: “Land Rights and the Rush for Land,” in October 2011 at}

http://www.landcoaltion.org/cpl/CPL-synthesis-report. A coalition of agencies and

(‘improvements’), have effectively established continuities in common land evictions. As she notes:

…It is 2011. Hundreds of rural communities in Africa – as well as parts of Asia and Latin America – are physically confronted with eviction or displacement or simply truncation of their livelihoods and lands they customarily presume to be their own. These lands are wilfully reallocated by their governments to mainly foreign investors to the tune of an estimated 220 million hectares since 2007, and still rising. Two thirds of the lands being sold or mainly leased are in poverty-stricken and investment-hungry Africa. Large-scale deals for hundreds of thousands of hectares dominate, although deals for smaller areas acquired by domestic investors run apace.280

Here post-millennial populations face not only spatial dislocations, but also diminishing control over the preservation of ecosystems that support them. In all cases, the necessary and sufficient conditions needed to carry feudalism into the dawn of a new mode of production have largely remained in place. Indeed, it was not until 2000 that the Abolition of Feudal Tenure (Scotland) Act was promulgated, followed by the Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2001 and the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004281

.

Writing of the disappearance of the commons, Monbiot responds to an influential supporter of their conversion to private holdings - Garrett Hardin, an American biologist who lamented the ‘tragedy of the commons’ as a lost opportunity to develop a shared resource. In his commentary Monbiot characterised Nardin’s position thus:

…common property will always be destroyed, because the gain that individuals make by over-exploiting it will outweigh the loss they suffer as a result of its over-exploitation. He used the example of a herdsman, keeping his cattle on a common pasture. With every cow the man added to his herds he would gain more than he lost: he would be one cow richer…the way to prevent this tragedy from unfolding was to privatize or nationalize common land.282

280_{Alden Wily, L., (2013) ‘The Global Land Grab: The New Enclosures’, in Bollier, D. &}

Helfrich, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Levellers Press See: A coalition of agencies and universities published the data on recorded and verified deals in a report, “Land Rights and the Rush for Land,” in October 2011 at

http://www.landcoaltion.org/cpl/CPL-synthesis-report.

281

‘Age-old Scots property rights end Laws abolishing 800 years of feudal property rights have come into force in Scotland’, 28 November, 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4048529.stm

282 _{Monbiot, G. (1994) ‘The Tragedy of Enclosure’, Scientific American, January, no. 38}

Monbiot goes on to note that the paper, published in Science, provided a rational basis for entities such as the World Bank, along with Western governments, to undertake ‘…the widespread privatization of land. In Africa, among newly independent governments looking for dramatic change, it encouraged the massive transfer of land from tribal peoples to the state or to individuals’283_{. For Mobiot the tragedy wasn’t the loss of the commons, but}

rather, the impact of the enclosures. In relation to that loss, he concludes with the observation that:

As (the commons) disappear, so does much that makes our contact with the countryside meaningful: it becomes a series of unrelated resources, rather than an ecosystem of which we economically, culturally and spiritually, are a part. For human beings, as for the biosphere, the tragedy of the commons is not the tragedy of their existence but the tragedy of their disappearance.284

In moving to consider the effects of these dissonant relationships, Chapter 4 turns to the emergence of sustainability as both popular discursive icon and ‘strategic response’. In charting its course, the many and varied transformations that characterized its development call attention to the historical settings that steered it, as well as the contests that claimed it.

283 _ibid.

Chapter 4