Santiago Acosta et al., “World-Ecology in the Web of Latin American Culture” (Mediations vol. 36, no. 1)

The role of nature in Latin America has been central to both elite and grassroots political perspectives since the colonial era. These debates and struggles have taken on many forms, from concerns about the extraction of natural resources, labor, and the meaning of humanity itself, to ideas about conservation and tourism, food production, and energy. One of the main ways these issues have been explored is through culture, yet despite intensifying interest in the Environmental Humanities within Latin American studies — and Latin America’s centrality in dire contemporary environmental crises and dilemmas — culture’s place in materially rooted discussions remains elusive.

 

One possible opening, however, is offered by world-ecological approaches inspired by Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life (2016) that have gained increasing traction within Latin American Studies.1 Not only does it offer a longue durée account of colonialism and the capacity to think labor and value in new ways, but Moore includes the “cheap” or unpaid work/energy from gendered and racialized human and non-human natures in the making of capitalist value. He also notes the impinging role of negative value or the limits that emerge where nature can no longer be summoned for free (e.g., superweeds). This expansion of Marxism’s labor theory of value leads Moore to a theory of crisis, framed as a tendency of the rate of the ecological surplus to fall. For Moore, capitalism both isand makesits own organizational form of nature (rather than a form that draws on a nature conceptualized as external to it), and this process requires not just the machinery of exploitation but, importantly, geopolitical and cultural power.