Nature - autonomous learning

160 de-naturalisationFollowing Fitzsimmons (1989), the word ‘matter’ in the Activity questionhas a dual meaning.The question gets you thinking about how the physicalnature (matter 1) of the fur seals made them important (matter 2) to thefour countries involved in the fur trade throughout the 1870–1911 period.A useful way to answer the question is to distinguish the possibilities andthe obstacles that fur seals presented to both sea- and land-based sealers byvirtue of their physical constitution. In simple terms, the possibilitieswere as follows: (i) the dense pelts of seals created a market for garmentsmade from these pelts; (ii) the large number of seals (3.5 million in 1870)made commercial sealing a viable prospect; (iii) the fact the seals congregatedon land for two to three months per year made sealing attractivefor the two US companies; (iv) the fact that the seals migrated through thenorth Pacific for nine to ten months per year made sea-sealing attractivefor Canada, Russia, Japan and California sealers. In terms of obstacles, thefollowing were arguably important: (i) for obvious reasons, it was difficultto count seals in the ocean, meaning that sea-sealers were never sureof the ratio of killed to living seals; (ii) likewise, it was difficult to determinethe sex of seals at sea, meaning that many pregnant seals were accidentallykilled, thus undermining the reproductive capacity of the seal herd overtime.In sum, from a Marxist perspective the north-Pacific seal-herd casedemonstrates the systematic (rather than accidental) tendency of capitalistsocieties to overexploit their natural-resource base. This overexploitationis a product of the articulation of a particular mode of production withthe specific physical capacities of resources and environment. Thesecapacities, while quite real and tangible, are not absolute though. Rather,they are seen as being relative to the demands made on them by the modeof production.The production of natureThe society–environment dialectic examined in the previous subsectionis, if you like, an ‘external’ one. It involves situations where societies areconfronted with natural phenomena that are not readily amenable to physicalmanipulation. These phenomena can be destroyed by societies butnot created or controlled by them. Here, as Boyd et al. (2001: 557) put it,actors in capitalist societies ‘confront nature as an exogenous set of materialproperties’.This is especially true in extractive sectors of the economy like