finite world/resource depletion

["Gregoire de Nowell (ci-devant)" <GN842@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A number of interestingreplies on this thread.  A couple
of quick comments.

--John O'donnell misunderstood my representation of
Morris Adelman.  Adelman opposes the "prima facie"
argument about resource depletion, and considers 50
years of declining commodity prices adequate to make
the point.  He does however set the "prima facie
resource depletion" argument up the better to knock
it down.  I credit Adelman's work on oil with
having helped me to clarify my own thoughts on this
topic.

--David MacInnes' argument about capital intensiveness
and natural landscapes is intriguing.  It is undoubtedly
the case that the history of capitalism is intimately
tied up with the spread of capitalist property relations
in space.  This was directly responsible for hte destruction
of feudalism in Europe and the conquest of the Americas
(North and South) and continues in places like Brazil.
The establishment of property relations in the air
(airline routes) is underway as also in the electromagnetic
spectrum (radio, tv) and I expect in our lifetimes some
kind of property rights will be established over low
orbits in space (to deal with space junk and an
increasing density of communications satellites).

Once capitalist property relations have been established,
there is a tendency for capital intensity to increase.
One might get increasing numbers of machines and combines
rather than slaves or imported laborers.  I am not
certain however that the increasing capital intensiveness
has a quality-of-life-effect that can be measured on
one dimension or even several dimensions; I am not sure
that the ecological effect of combine harvesting of
cotton is worse than slave harvesting of cotton.  So
I'm not certaint that the "increasing machine"
argument (increasing capital intensiveness) establishes
a (even tendentially) linear relationship of
more capital=>worse from te point of view of
"pristine nature."

It is also the case that you can have a kind of
stylized blend of human/natural which is utterly
at variance witht eh raw nature esthetic of the
Ansel Adams variety.  Tuscany has an incredibly
rural/natural feel and yet is thoroughly "tamed"
by human intervention.

But looking at the U.S. case it seems clear that
"the world of man" is strikingly ugly and spreading.
I think that at some point in human history there
*must* be an end to the suburban-mall aesthetic, and whether
it will be a catastrophic end or slow transition is
difficult to say.  But right now the malls are
winning, and with their victory goes the kind of
spatial transformation to which MacInnes referred.

greg nowell