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The Nature of the State: A Deep History of Agrarian Environmentalism

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The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory

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Abstract

This chapter explores agrarianism as a mode of environmental political critique through several sections. Sections 1 is a brief exposition of the “new agrarian” environmental movement. Section 2 engages the environmental writings of Wendell Berry as an influential Western proponent of agrarian environmentalism, engaging the criticismSections that this movement is handicapped by a fundamentally apolitical focus on private virtue. Sections 3 and 4 draw upon Leo Marx and others to trace the problems and the promise of contemporary Western agrarianism to their literary roots, focusing primarily on Virgil and Hesiod. Section 5 draws on recent archaeological scholarship to argue that agrarian political critique as well as the agrarian environmental aesthetic is rooted in the production of “rural space” that attends the formation of the earliest states. The final section compares and contrasts two visions of nature within contemporary environmental thought: agrarian nature and nature-as-wilderness. I conclude with the suggestion that agrarian nature is, paradoxically perhaps, “the nature of the state,” but is not to be disvalued on that basis.

I am grateful to Veronica Sotolongo, Matthew Tuten, and Liam Currie for research and editing help.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kenneth W. Grundy, River of Tears: The Rise of the RioTinto Zinc Mining Corporation (London: Earth Island Press 1974): 101–104.

  2. 2.

    Terence Wesley-Smith and Eugene Ogan, “Copper, Class, and Crisis: Changing Relations of Production in Bougainville,” The Contemporary Pacific 4, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 245–267.

  3. 3.

    Anthony J. Reagan, “Causes and Course of the Bougainville Conflict,” The Journal of Pacific History 33, no. 3 (November 1998): 269–285.

  4. 4.

    Liam Fox, “Bougainville President Says Panguna Mine Moratorium Remains in Place,” Radio Australia, Australian Broadcasting Company, accessed February 9, 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/radio-australia/programs/pacificbeat/bougainville-president-says-panguna-mine-off-limits/13134904.

  5. 5.

    Rod McGuirk, “Bougainville Votes for Independence from Papua New Guinea,” The Diplomat, accessed December 14, 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/bougainville-votes-for-independence-from-papua-new-guinea/.

  6. 6.

    See also Joshua McDonald, “Will Bougainville Reopen the Panguna Mine?” The Diplomat, accessed November 22, 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/11/will-bougainville-reopen-the-panguna-mine/.

  7. 7.

    Darby Ingram, “Bougainville President Rejects Panguna Mine Claims,” National Indigenous Times, accessed February 1, 2021, https://nit.com.au/bougainville-president-rejects-panguna-mine-claims/.

  8. 8.

    Daniel Jones, “Panguna Mine Dilemma,” filmed 2008, Eel Films, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv8Q5hH0cys.

  9. 9.

    Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1934): 77.

  10. 10.

    Specific arguments along these lines are discussed in the final section.

  11. 11.

    Joan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003).

  12. 12.

    Timothy Doyle, Environmental Movements in Minority and Majority Worlds: A Global Perspective (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

  13. 13.

    Some examples of movements that marry agrarianism with environmental justice are the Movimiento Sin Tierra in Brazil, the Chipko and rivers movements in India, as well as various anti-mining movements from the Philippines to Peru. Such movements often mobilize the interests of small agriculturalists and foreground agrarian political themes. See, for example: Alexander Dunlap, “‘Agro si, mina NO!’ The Tia Maria Copper Mine, State Terrorism, and Social War by Every means in the Tambo Valley, Peru,” Political Geography 77, no. 1 (2019): 10–25. See also Mariana Walter and Lucrecia Wagner, “Mining Struggles in Argentina. The Keys of a Successful Story of Mobilization,” The Extractive Industries and Society 8, no. 4 (2021). The international agrarian reform movement Via Campesina has attempted to forge solidarity among such movements across the post-colonial world, due to the similarities among them. For a general discussion of environmental movements in the Global South, see Martinez-Alier, Environmentalism of the Poor.

  14. 14.

    See Eric T. Freyfogle, ed., The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2001).

  15. 15.

    For example, see Wendell Berry, “Foreword,” in The Vandana Shiva Reader, Vandana Shiva (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

  16. 16.

    J.A. Montmarquet, “Philosophical Foundations for Agrarianism,” Agriculture and Human Values 2, no. 2 (1985): 5.

  17. 17.

    Skepticisms toward commerce are clear themes in classical Western agrarian texts, including those of Hesiod, Virgil and Cato the Elder. Beyond an aesthetic pacifism that characterizes pastoral imagery, the works of Hesiod and Virgil in particular are notable for providing a counterpoint to the martial ethos that was otherwise so prevalent in the classical world. Hesiod provides the clearest example of agrarian antipathy toward power politics. Hesiod and Virgil will be explored in more detail below. Anti-mercantile agrarianism is also present in classical Chinese thought. See Roel Sterckx, “Ideologies of Peasant and Merchant in Warring States China,” in Ideologies of Power and Power of Ideologies in Ancient China, ed. Yuri Pines, Paul R. Goldin, and Martin Kern (Boston: Brill, 2015): 211–248.

  18. 18.

    Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (New York: Harcourt, 1969): 79.

  19. 19.

    Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community (New York: Pantheon, 1992): 36–8.

  20. 20.

    See Paul B. Thompson, “Chapter 1: Sustainability and Environmental Philosophy,” in The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010): 18–41.

  21. 21.

    See especially Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002).

  22. 22.

    Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace, 287.

  23. 23.

    Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Urbanization” OurWorldInData.org (2018), accessed February 1, 2022, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization.

  24. 24.

    For a synopsis of data for the United States bearing on this question, see Russell McLendon, “Urban or Rural: Which Is More Energy-Efficient?” Treehugger, accessed February 1, 2022, https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-energy-efficient.

  25. 25.

    F.K. Benfield, People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think about Greener, Healthier Cities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2014).

  26. 26.

    Judith D. Schwartz, “Soil as Carbon Storehouse: New Weapon in Climate Fight?” Yale Environment 360, accessed March 13, 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new_weapon_in_climate_fight.

  27. 27.

    R.J. Zomer, Deborah A. Bossio, Rolf Sommer, and Louis V. Verchot, “Global Sequestration Potential of Increased Organic Carbon in Cropland Soils,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (November 2017): 1–8.

  28. 28.

    Claire Lesur-Dumoulin, Eric Malézieux, Tamara Ben-Ari, Christian Langlais, and David Makowski, “Lower Average Yields But Similar Yield Variability in Organic Versus Conventional Horticulture: A Meta-analysis,” Agronomy for Sustainable Development 37, no. 5 (2017): 45.

  29. 29.

    James Morison, Rachel Hine, and Jules Pretty, “Survey and Analysis of Labour on Organic Farms in the UK and Republic of Ireland,” International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 3, no. 1 (2005): 24–43.

  30. 30.

    Craig Pearson discusses the benefits of “community well-being and rural social capital” associated with the labor density of regenerative farming systems in Craig J. Pearson, “Regenerative, Semi-closed Systems: A Priority for Twenty-first-century Agriculture,” Bioscience 57, no. 5 (2007): 409–418.

  31. 31.

    See Wendell Berry, “In distrust of movements,” The Land Report 65 (1999): 3-7.

  32. 32.

    Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970): 87.

  33. 33.

    Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977): 23.

  34. 34.

    William Major, “Other Kinds of Violence: Wendell Berry, Industrialism, and Agrarian Pacifism,” Environmental Humanities 3, no. 1 (2013): 31.

  35. 35.

    I discuss the limitations of eco-labeling and sustainability as a consumer choice in Jake P. Greear, “Decentralized Production and Affective Economies: Theorizing the Ecological Implications of Localism,” Environmental Humanities 7, no. 1 (2016): 107–127.

  36. 36.

    Nora Hanagan, “From Agrarian Dreams to Democratic Realities: A Deweyan Alternative to Jeffersonian Food Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2015): 34–45.

  37. 37.

    See Part One of Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).

  38. 38.

    See Stephanie Nelson, “Hesiod, Virgil, and the Georgic Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 368.

  39. 39.

    Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964): 5.

  40. 40.

    Lawrence Buell, Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995): 439.

  41. 41.

    Timothy Sweet, American Georgics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022): 2.

  42. 42.

    This use of terms is implied in Montmarquet’s broad definition of “agrarianism” quoted above. (Montmarquet, 1985).

  43. 43.

    Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 22–3.

  44. 44.

    Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 3–55.

  45. 45.

    Sweet, American Georgic. Michael G. Ziser, “Walden and the Georgic mode,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 31, no. 2 (2004): 186 – 208. David Fairer “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-Georgic,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 40, no. 1 (2011): 201–218.

  46. 46.

    See Levi Bryant, “Military Technology and Socio-political Change in the Ancient Greek City,” The Sociological Review 38, no. 3 (1990): 484–516.

  47. 47.

    See lines 225–237 of Hesiod’s Works and Days. References to Hesiod’s work here and below are to line number rather than page number, and are taken from Glen W. Most, ed. and trans., Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, (New Haven, CT: Harvard, Loeb Classical Library, 2006).

  48. 48.

    Stephanie Nelson, God and the Land, The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008): 152.

  49. 49.

    Hesiod, Works and Days, 383.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 450.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 570.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 230–237.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 11–26.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 121–130.

  55. 55.

    One prominent proponent of the plausible but now generally discredited “hydraulic hypothesis,” centering on irrigation agriculture as a key antecedent to the state, is Karl S. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale, 1957).

  56. 56.

    James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 214.

  58. 58.

    See Nerissa Russell, “Spirit Birds at Neolithic Çatalhöyük,” Environmental Archaeology 24, no. 4 (2019): 377–386.

  59. 59.

    For an introduction to Çatalhöyük, see Ian Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006).

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 7.

  61. 61.

    See Robert J. Sharer and Loa P. Traxler, The Classic Maya (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 2006): 688.

  62. 62.

    According to Bruce Trigger, between 70 and 90 percent of available labor had to be devoted to food production, leaving precious little surplus to be exploited by ruling classes. Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003): 313.

  63. 63.

    Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 60.

  64. 64.

    Erik Browne writes, “In the decades before 900 AD, many people in the region had been forced to live behind stockade walls due to endemic violence.” Erik E. Browne, Mound Sites of the Ancient South: A Guide to the Mississippian Chiefdoms (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013): 63.

  65. 65.

    G.R. Milner, “Mississippian period population density in a segment of the central Mississippi River valley,” American Antiquity 51, no. 2 (1986): 228.

  66. 66.

    Timothy Pauketat writes of the demise of the “Cahokian peace,” “Without the mantle of Cahokian peace covering the Mississippi, village based tensions and ethnic level tensions re-emerging, with squadrons of warriors prowling the landscape and with one village’s warriors fighting those of other villages.” T.R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009): 168.

  67. 67.

    Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi, ??.

  68. 68.

    Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003): 300.

  69. 69.

    Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State, 52.

  70. 70.

    Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 131–132.

  71. 71.

    Robert McCormick Adams and Hans J. Nissen, The Uruk countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972): 21.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 32.

  73. 73.

    Victor David Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1995): 91–126.

  74. 74.

    Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State, 94. See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500. Deleuze and Guattari refer to state space as “striated space.” Conversely, non-state space—particularly the space of nomadic societies—they call “smooth space.” The sense of this conceptual distinction is most apparent in the physical architecture of the earliest cities-states. Modern cities are in fact far more organic—more village-like—than the most ancient urban spaces, which are highly planned, often carefully oriented with sophisticated astrological considerations and elaborated with rectilinear and symmetrical architectural motifs. On the cosmological architecture of early cities, see also Kevin Lynch, Good City Form (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1981). It is the agricultural landscapes of early state territories, however, which afford the principal example for Deleuze and Guattari, as the land is physically striated with the plow but also orchestrated and taxed according to grid-like or tree-like conceptual schemas overlaid on agricultural populations and territories by governments.

  75. 75.

    See Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 120–121. See also Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State, 60 – 61.

  76. 76.

    Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 142.

  77. 77.

    Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State, 112. Here Yoffee is again following Scott, who makes this argument with respect to modern states.

  78. 78.

    See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

  79. 79.

    Quote attributed to Ch’en Hsiang around 350 BCE by A.C. Graham “The ‘Nung-chia’ 農 家 ‘School of the Tillers’ and the Origins of Peasant Utopianism in China,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 42, no. 1 (1979): 66.

  80. 80.

    Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991): 28.

  81. 81.

    Dave Forman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991): 69 (original emphasis).

  82. 82.

    Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018): 59 (original emphasis).

  83. 83.

    Berry, The Unsettling of America, 87.

  84. 84.

    Berry, The Art of the Commonplace, 287.

  85. 85.

    This basic narrative is arguably discernible thought Heidegger’s corpus, but see especially Martin Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” in Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (New York: Continuum International, 2006).

  86. 86.

    Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–1207.

  87. 87.

    John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

  88. 88.

    See Mindi Schneider and Philip McMichael, “Deepening, and Repairing, the Metabolic Rift,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 37, no. 3 (2010): 461–484. See also Ivan Scales, “Green Consumption, Ecolabelling and Capitalism’s Environmental Limits,” Geography Compass 8, no. 7 (2014): 477–489.

  89. 89.

    Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 18.

  90. 90.

    Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1991): 40.

  91. 91.

    Ibid.

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  1. Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, USA

    Jake Greear

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  1. Jake Greear
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Correspondence to Jake Greear .

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  1. Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Joel Jay Kassiola

  2. Department of Political Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Timothy W. Luke

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Greear, J. (2023). The Nature of the State: A Deep History of Agrarian Environmentalism. In: Jay Kassiola, J., Luke, T.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14346-5_8

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