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Bioenergy, Thermodynamics and Inequalities
Larry Lohmann

15 October 2020

This chapter from the free online peer-reviewed book Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities: Knowledge, Land, Labor, Biomass, Energy, and Politics, available at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-68944-5.pdf, argues that any serious study of bioenergy and global inequalities must take account of the oppression inherent in thermodynamic energy itself.

file iconBioenergy, Thermodynamics and Inequalities

Cadenas de bloques, automatización y trabajo: Mecanizando la confianza

Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust
Larry Lohmann

15 August 2020

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.

Natures, Rights and Political Movements
Larry Lohmann

24 September 2018

Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”.

file iconNATURES, RIGHTS AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS.pdf

Challenging Capitalist Fire
Larry Lohmann

11 July 2018

Today, a capitalist organization of fire dominates the world. Biotic fires in the open -- which ordinary people have long used to nurture agriculture and forests -- tend to be denigrated, even criminalized. More intense fossil-fuelled fires in combustion chambers, boilers and turbines, meanwhile, are tacitly encouraged as a sign of progress and civilization.

What with climate change and worldwide struggles to defend livelihoods against fossil fuels, vernacular struggles against this perverse organization of fire are sure to intensify.

file iconChallenging Capitalist Fire
file iconDesafiando el sistema de fuego capitalista
file iconRemettre en cause le feu capitaliste
file iconDesafiando o fogo capitalista

Neoliberalism, Law and Nature
Larry Lohmann

5 July 2017

Effective research and other action in the field of environment and law requires an understanding of how profoundly both have changed under neoliberalism. The growth of the neoliberal state amid productivity crisis and the move to a more financialized, rent-based global economy has been accompanied by sweeping legal innovations relating to property, trade, investment, rent and criminality as well as an expansion in the mass of written law and in the gaming of legislation.

file iconNEOLIBERALISM, LAW AND NATURE.pdf
file iconNeoliberalism, Law and Nature -- version published 2019

The Anti-Politics Machine
"Development" and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
James Ferguson (with Larry Lohmann)

1 January 2016

The late James Ferguson's classic study of institutionalized fantasy and failure in international development, first published in 1991 as a book, is summarized here as an article.

file iconThe Anti-Politics Machine

Building Markets or Building Society
Responses to Food Speculation
Nicholas Hildyard

20 September 2010

 Some 154 million people were reportedly driven further into poverty in Southern countries as a result of speculation-induced food price hikes in 2007-08. What are the best strategies for bringing about the structural change needed that progressive activists can lend their support to?

This workshop presentation, while endorsing regulatory measures including banning certain investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds and vetting of derivative-based financial instruments, cautions against becoming focussed on regulation alone as an answer. Also crucial is the promotion of non-derivative, socially-based mechanisms to protect farmers and consumers from volatile food prices, as well as price interventions that do not pit Northern farmers against their Southern counterparts.

file iconBuilding Markets

Genetic Engineering in Agriculture
Whose Risks? Whose Gains?
Nicholas Hildyard

2 November 1998

A summary of the ecological risks of genetic engineering in agriculture and suggestions for resisting its introduction.

Ten Reasons Why GE Crops Won’t Feed the World
The Corner House

1 June 1998

There are at least 10 good reasons why the widespread adoption of genetic engineering in agriculture will lead to more hungry people, not fewer.

Too Many for What?
The Social Generation of Food “Scarcity” and “Overpopulation”
Nicholas Hildyard

1 November 1996

Discussions of population and food supply that leave out the relationships of power between different groups of people will always mask the true nature of food scarcity -- who gets to eat and who doesn’t -- and lead to “solutions” that are simplistic, frequently oppressive and that, ultimately, reinforce the very structures creating ecological damage and hunger. 

Sustainable Agriculture -- For Whom?
Nicholas Hildyard

1 June 1996

This presentation to the Soil Association's Annual Conference recognises that the UK government has publicly renounced industrialised, chemical-based agriculture in favour of “sustainable agriculture”. Under Agenda 21, the action plan for sustainable development signed at the Rio Earth Summit (UNCED) in 1992, it is committed to Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development or SARD, drawn up by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Yet SARD’s understanding of people’s participation, land reform, sustainable agriculture and environmental protection are quite different from that of many people’s movements. For SARD, participation is about engineering consent and getting people to participate in implementing decisions that have already been taken by someone else. SARD calls for land reform to promote is agribusiness’ access to land, not people’s control over it. And despite the rhetoric, SARD is about agricultural intensification. Overall, the policy is the same, but the language has changed.