This week in Environmental Studies, we examined the first two objects highlighted in the textbook—carbon dioxide and trees. Special importance has been paid to the various dimensions of these objects. Carbon dioxide was introduced as a biophysical entity, with the carbon cycle playing an important biological role, circulating through essentially all life forms and contributing to the greenhouse effect which sustains life. Human civilization has been just as carbon centered as life generally, and the Keeling curve and the climate “hockey stick” diagrams both reveal how industrial civilization has led to a remarkable increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon, leading to potentially disastrous and variable climatic changes. The textbook looked at climate change through the lenses of institutions, markets, and the political economy. An institutional focus highlights how climate change can be viewed as an international Prisoner’s Dilemma and views the failures of climate treaties as resulting from the lack of an enforcement structure. Market-oriented approaches see climate change as an externality of economic activity; under this perspective, the most efficient solutions will involve monetizing carbon, whether this involves cap and trade carbon markets, green consumer choice, and/or carbon offsets. Political economists would offer up pointed critiques of these markets, highlighting the inherent inequality behind cap and trade schemes, the failed offsetting experiments, and the potential inability of firms to reduce their subsidies from the environment and succeed economically. I think these critiques of markets are valid, though tepid; for a “radical” perspective, the political economics laid out in this chapter on carbon dioxide seem rather unambitious, lobbing easy attacks and vague critiques before settling for liberal solutions that use existing institutions and eschew a broader movement against the systems which have created modern ecological crises.
The chapter on trees begins with a history of trees and their symbolic and material importance to humanity. Trees were also considered within the context of the “climax vegetation” concept advanced by Frederic Edward Clements. Clementsian succession treats ecological disturbances as deviations that lead to only temporary changes; after a wildfire in a forest, grasses will be established first, followed by shrubs, before being shaded out by trees. More recent views have emphasized the importance of disturbance to ecosystems and “climax” communities. There is an important geographic dimension to forests; the marked worldwide decline in forest cover has been distributed unevenly, with forests in Europe and North America having recovered modestly even as sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and Asia see continuing dramatic deforestation. An optimistic view of this disparity, founded on the market response model and the idea of induced intensification, underlies the “forest transition theory.” Just as the demographic transition theory holds that economic growth will solve any population crisis, the forest transition theory holds that economic activity will eventually lead to (secondary) forest regrowth and recovery. A political economy perspective would point out that what seems to be a forest transition may simply be another spatial fix; European and American forests recover at the expense of Ghanian ones. Additionally, deforestation may be understood as capitalist exploitation of the land, with maximal growth requiring both induced intensification and extensification. The most “efficient” crop production is modern agrochemical production, and the most “efficient” forests are those which can be engineered to grow in the shortest amount of time so that they can be clearcut yet again.