[Marxism] The bio surplus

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

(when I recently commented on Marx's value theory, I neglected to qualify
what several Marxists authors point out, namely "the environment" is to a
large extent also created and reproduced by human labor. This is, if you
like, the deeper meaning of Marx's concept of the "organic composition of
capital", i..e. the transformation of the biosphere by human work through
the capitalisation of nature. This clip from the New Scientist by Fred
Pearce sheds some new light on that - JB).

Map of consumption turns up a few surprises

New Scientist vol 182 issue 2453 - 26 June 2004, page 9

NORTH AMERICANS can breathe a sigh of relief. By at least one measure, they
are not the planet's environmental pariahs. So concludes a study comparing
how much of the planet's biological resources countries consume, with how
much their territory produces through photosynthesis.

Marc Imhoff of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who led the
study, says it shows the "uneven footprint of human consumption" on the
land. It places Europeans and Asians in the environmental doghouse, but
shows North Americans to be relatively light consumers.

Several recent studies have looked at the ecological "footprint" of nations,
according to how much of the world's resources they consume. Others have
investigated the overall biological productivity of the planet's ecosystems
by measuring net primary production that is, plant matter produced by
photosynthesis from solar energy. But until now, nobody has combined the two
into a detailed, region-by-region balance sheet of who consumes more than
they produce, and vice versa.

First, {Marc Imhoff of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland]
mapped the net primary production of land ecosystems using satellite images
of global vegetation. This produced an estimated global biological
productivity of 57 billion tonnes of carbon a year. Next, he calculated how
much of this resource humans use. The figure came to around 11.5 billion
tonnes of carbon per year, three-quarters of it used to produce food and
firewood. That is almost 2 tonnes for each member of the world's population.

That means about a fifth of all the biological matter produced by
photosynthesis on the planet's land surface each year is consumed by humans.
"This is a remarkable level of co-option for a single species," Imhoff says.

He then produced detailed maps comparing the supply and demand sides of the
"balance sheet" for each part of the world. The findings are often
counter-intuitive. As expected, rich people use more of the planet's
biological resources. More striking is the comparison of consumption
patterns with domestic biological productivity. Sparsely populated areas
consume less than 1 per cent of the productivity of their lands, while large
urban conurbations consume many hundred times more than they produce.

Larger regions show more moderate trends, with South America and Africa
doing best. The huge biological output of their rainforests ensures that
their citizens consume respectively only 6 and 12 per cent of what their
land produces. At the other end of the spectrum are densely populated
western Europe, and east and south Asia, where there is little natural
vegetation left but vast human demand for food, firewood and fibres. Western
Europe consumes 72 per cent of what it produces; east Asia consumes 63 per
cent; and south Asia consumes a record 80 per cent.

By comparison, in North America photosynthesis produces 6.7 billion tonnes
of carbon a year, 9 times as much as western Europe but its people consume
some 1.6 billion tonnes, only 3 times as much as western Europeans. The
result is that North Americans consume a relatively modest 24 per cent of
their net primary productivity, which is close to the global mean.

http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg1822453
1.200




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