Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 161mining, fishing, sealing and whaling (for instance, diamonds are given innature: they can be mimicked in laboratories but not made like for like).However, things are different in farming and forestry – two cultivationbasedsectors of the economy. In these sectors, ways have been found toproduce nature ‘all the way down’: that is, physically.The term ‘the productionof nature’ was coined by Neil Smith in 1984 – over a decade beforegenetically modified crops, transgenic animals and bioengineered treesmade it seem a prescient rather than fanciful one. As a Marxist, Smithinsisted that firms operating in a capitalist economy will seek to overcomethe ‘barriers to accumulation’ that are thrown up by the non-human world.For him, these firms will try to find ways to ‘making nature to order’ inorder to realise profits. Here, the non-human world becomes a mere meansto the end of profit-making: the overriding objective of firms in capitalistsocieties. For Smith, then, nature is becoming increasingly ‘internal’ to thelogic of capitalist societies. It is a ‘second nature’ far removed from the ‘firstnature’ bequeathed by evolution.Smith’s point may now seem rather obvious given that such thingsas genetically modified organisms are today a recognised part of the productrange of biotechnology firms (like Monsanto). However, from his perspectiveit is still important to understand precisely how and with whatconsequences (social and ecological) particular elements of the non-humanworld are being ‘produced’ (see Smith 1996).What’s more, when Smithwas writing back in 1984 he was not predicting the future, but, rather,talking about the present and the past. In other words, he was arguingthat elements of the non-human world had been materially produced fora very long time. For him, the common-sense belief that society andenvironment are two separate physical domains was blinding peopleto what was going on under their very noses: namely, the deliberatealteration of non-human entities by a selection of capitalist enterprisesfor profit purposes, rather than any higher goals.The Marxist sociologistJack Kloppenburg (1988) has provided a now-classic analysis of the productionof nature in the era preceding our own. His book First the Seedexplained how and why capitalist firms gained physical and proprietarycontrol over one of the biological bases of commercial agriculture worldwide:namely, seeds.This analysis of seeds, which I will now summarise,exemplified empirically what Neil Smith argued theoretically: that capitalistfirms increasingly fabricate a non-natural nature with potentially direhuman and environmental consequences.