Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 115population–resources relationship as well as a logical policy response.However, Harvey’s criticism was not that the logic of neo-Malthusianismwas flawed nor even that the evidence supposedly confirming that logicwas erroneous. Instead, he took issue with the assumptions about nature thatunderpinned the whole overpopulation argument. First, he questionedthe idea that the amount of natural resources people need to subsist isdetermined by their biological needs. Subsistence levels are, he insisted,defined relative to a person’s ‘historical and cultural circumstances’ (1974:235). Thus the bundle of resources deemed necessary to subsist in onesociety at one moment in time will be very different to others in the presentand future. Second, Harvey argued that ‘natural resources’ are socially,culturally and economically defined. Certain things only become resourceswhen a particular society has the means and the desire to utilise them; untilthen a naturally occurring phenomena is not a resource for that society.Finally, Harvey argued that resource scarcity is not given in nature but,rather, is the outcome of societal processes. This created scarcity arises,Harvey argued, because of power relations internal to society wherein somesocial groups command far more wealth than other groups. Morespecifically, Harvey’s Marxist viewpoint suggested that in capitalist societiesboth the lower cadres of the working class and the unemployed are deniedthe monetary wealth to purchase the means of subsistence.Thus, what neo-Malthusians called ‘overpopulation’ was, for Harvey, a ‘relative surpluspopulation’ produced by capitalism’s tendency to create poverty for themany and wealth for the few.In effect, Harvey argued that unproblematised assumptions about naturewere used as a smokescreen to justify the West’s unwillingness to redistributewealth to the developing world. For him, neo-Malthusianismwas an ideology in the double sense that (i) it concealed the truth aboutthe population–resources relationship and (ii) it justified a Western elite’sdetermination to concentrate global wealth rather than share it withneedy developing-world populations. By licensing population-controlpolicies or else ‘benign neglect’ (Hardin’s preferred option), Harvey sawneo-Malthusianism as a cunning way of justifying the poverty of the poorand attempts to monitor their reproduction.As he put it,‘whenever a theoryof over-population seizes hold in a society . . . then the non-elite invariablyexperience some form of ...repression’ (1974: 237). Harvey’s Marxistinterpretation of ‘overpopulation’ was designed to expose the truth thatneo-Malthusianism obscured and to offer very different value judgements