Tag: Agricultural Features of the Census of the United States for 1850

  • Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock

    Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock: An Introduction to George E. Waring’s ‘Agricultural Features of the Census of the United States for 1850,’” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 1999), pp. 293-97. DOI: 10.1177/1086026699123004

    In his influential Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the United States, U.S. economist Henry Carey (1858) quoted at length from a talk by an “eminent agriculturist” who had provided rough calculations for the whole United States of the loss of soil nutrients resulting from the failure to recycle organic matter. In that statement, as quoted by Carey, the dire, long- term ecological consequences of the shipment of food and fiber in a one-way movement from country to town were raised:

    What with our earth-butchery and prodigality, we are each year losing the intrinsic essence of our vitality. . . . The question of the economy should be, not how much do we annually produce, but how much of our annual production is saved to the soil. Labor employed in robbing the earth of its capital stock of fertilizing matter, is worse than labor thrown away. In the latter case, it is a loss to the present generation—in the former it becomes an inheritance of poverty for our successors. Man is but a tenant of the soil and he is guilty of a crime when he reduces its value for other tenants who are to come after him. (quoted in Carey, 1858, pp. 54-55)

  • Rationality and Nature

    “Rationality and Nature,” [PDF], Contemporary Sociology, vol. 24, no. 6 (November 1995), pp. 784-86. (Review of Raymond Murphy, Rationality and Nature; Richard Norgaard, Development Betrayed; and Michael Redclift and Ted Benton, ed. Social Theory and the Global Environment.)

    The emergence in the 1980s and ’90s of an increasingly global approach to ecological problems-marked by the ascendance of such issues as the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, tropical deforestation, and an annual loss of species possibly in the tens of thousands-has altered forever the relation of ecology to the social sciences. Recognizing that the entire planet is increas- ingly subject to ecological depredations and that the time available for addressing these problems is extremely short, social scientists concerned with ecological issues are becoming more aggressive in their demands for the ecological transformation of their disciplines. “Sociology,” as Raymond Murphy declares in the preface to Rationality and Nature, “has been constructed as if nature didn’t matter. It has failed to take the processes of nature into account, perceiving only the social construction of reality. Environmental problems are beginning to send shock waves through this myopic sociological structure. Sociology fabricated as if nature didn’t matter constitutes pre-ecological sociology” (p. x).