Commodity and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Commodity and Environment Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The commodity is intimately located at the interface of economy, society, and the environment. Referred to as “the DNA of capitalism” and the heart of contemporary market economies, the commodity appears as such a simple and obvious thing. We buy things to fill a perceived or required need. When one gets down to it, though, commodities are fascinatingly complex and multifaceted. They are vessels for a multitudinous array of social, political, economic, geographical, and environmental relationships. Think of just some of what went into bringing you that cup of coffee that started your day: the intensive labor of a small farm family in Mexico (or Ethiopia, Vietnam, Indonesia) or that of a plantation worker in Brazil (or Guatemala, Kenya, Columbia); the pesticides used; the processing/pulping plant with concrete drying slabs and bean-grading equipment; the containerized coffee sacks driven, shipped, and driven again to a massive roasting facility; and the store clerk who placed the carefully grown, harvested, sorted, roasted, and shipped coffee beans wrapped in a vacuum-sealed one-pound foil bag on the supermarket shelf.

And, yet, when we hold up a cup of coffee, a frozen chicken, new shoes, an mp3 player, a banana, or indeed any commodity-we are unable to “see” those relations behind these objects. This is what Karl Marx called the fetishism of commodities. An incredibly complex concept at the best of times, commodity fetishism can be understood as the ability of the commodity to hide the relations-social or otherwise-of its production. Commodities appear as if they are independent and naturalized forms apart from the people and environments that produced them. This leads to confusion and a concealing of these relations between people and ecologies, which are replaced and reconstituted as reified relations with commodities. As the geographer Michael Watts puts it, this obfuscation “…is central to the alienation [of both producers and consumers] rooted in a world in which everything is for sale, and everything is a thing.” Further, looking back at the cup of coffee, the concern is for how this obfuscation works to veil the exploitation of small-scale, marginalized farmers and plantation workers as well as the ecological destruction caused by, among other things, chemical-intensive coffee production. Considered this way, drinking our morning java is an act of connection that brings us into relationships with literally hundreds of thousand of people; global economic, political, and trading institutions; and local, regional, and-to an extent-global ecological systems.

Commodities contain and express three forms of value. First, they have a use value in that they satisfy a human want and can be “used” for something. Coffee’s historic use value has been to not only wake us up in the morning but make us more productive as laborers. Second, commodities have an exchange value, meaning they have the ability to be exchanged for other commodities. A bag of coffee might be exchanged for a hammer, four banana bunches, or a ready-to-eat chicken. Rather than this bartering of commodities, these days economies are organized into thoroughly monetized commodity systems. Watts describes this commodity circulation as the “process by which a commodity is exchanged for money, which in turn permits the purchase of another, different commodity.” And, importantly, value is not imputed into commodities through price, but through the amount of labor expended to produce them.

The third form of value is loosely known as sign value and involves the semiotics of commodities: the social construction of value through branding; aesthetics; and an association with quality, status, and/or taste. This often translates into greater monetary price for particular branded commodities such as a Starbuck’s latte or a bag of fairly-traded, shadegrown, organic coffee. Yet, this might not always be the case: Relatively low-cost McDonald’s food sold outside the United States is a consumable proxy for “American culture” or “modernity.”

Commodification is the process whereby something becomes a commodity. There are two essential moments of commodification: the material manipulation and transformation of “nature” into a priceable and sellable form; and the semiotic production of commodities through the use of meaningful symbols, logos, brands, language, and images that surround us in contemporary society. Still, commodification is often incomplete or partial. Many peasants produce much of their own food or other consumable goods, yet also sell commodities like livestock or cultural products to enable the purchase of cooking utensils or their children’s schooling.

Additionally, there are what Karl Polanyi calls fictitious commodities. These “special” commodities-labor, land/nature, and money-are treated as commodities and enter markets but are not intentionally produced in commodity-like form. Thus, labor can be sold as units of money per hour, but people are not produced as commodities as such. The exception-and a nefarious one at that-is of course slavery.

Commoditization is the process of the spread of commodification to all parts of society and life. Jürgen Habermas called this the “colonization of the lifeworld” through the deepening and broadening of the commodity form. Commoditization is a defining feature of post-modern society as literally everything is now for sale, from genetic material, bodies (i.e., babies and women) and body parts, clean air, knowledge and ideas, to whole ecosystems.

Commodificiation and commoditization are complicit in and influenced by processes of globalization. We can see this most vigorously in the spread of American products in the iconic forms of Coke, the Big Mac, and Mickey Mouse. Some argue this contributes to the homogenization of global culture through the marginalization of local difference. George Ritzer characterizes this as the “globalization of nothing” in the vacuous commoditization and consumption of signs through global brands. Others, like the anthropologist Daniel Miller, argue that cultures make these products “theirs,” localizing global brands culturally and economically. His work speaks to how, in a local context, Coke has come to express differentiation as the “sweet black drink” from Trinidad.

Commodities have biographies. They are “born,” create and follow chains and circuits across places and people, are marketed, consumed, used, and discarded. Commodity biographies tell stories-from the rich and vibrant to the plain and mundane-of the trials, tribulations, and travels of goods in market economies. Commodities also have varied and moveable social lives as they slip in and out of various meanings, forms, uses, and trajectories over time and space. The most obvious example might be the cans and bottles set on the curb to be recycled by the local municipality, sold to a manufacturer, and transformed into a new product. Yet, those commodities (and their changing values) become part of “secondhand commodity cultures” such as goods sold at a charity shop or a garage sale, or items “re-gifted” to friends and family. Many go through an established circuit: they are first created as a product, invested with a value; then used as a “useful” object; then used up or not used at all, becoming “valueless” (a jacket that doesn’t fit any more); and finally, given to a charity shop where they are “re-valued” and sold as second-hand goods. The success of eBay is a billion-dollar testament to the circulating social life of commodities and the re-valuation of goods.

In modern societies, unregulated commodification and commoditization are a large part of the environmental problem. We can see this most clearly in crude extraction industries, such as agriculture, forestry, and mining, but also in commodity manufacturing. Access to extractive and other resources fuels conflicts and warfare the world over. Further, it is the complex interweaving of both the aforementioned commodity moments and the creation of desire which puts considerable pressure on environmental resources. For example, marketing of grossly oversized SUVs for the urban “jungle” fosters demand for gas-guzzling behemoths, promotes overconsumption, further resource extraction, and a dose of pollution.

Deeper commodification has been posited as the solution to environmental problems. This is exemplified through “cap and trade” pollution control, whereby both pollution (and by proxy, clean air) are turned into purchasable commodities; the commodification of nature in the outright purchase of landscapes and rainforest reserves by environmental groups (e.g., the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International); and the commodification of ecosystem services in carbon trading program with the purchase of “carbon sinks” (such as forests and grasslands) in the global south by carbon dioxide-emitting corporations located in industrialized countries.

Bibliography:

Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things (Cambridge University Press, 1986);
Ian Cook, “Follow The Thing: Papaya,” Antipode (v.36, 2004);
Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Berg, 2003);
Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer, Geographies of Commodity Chains (Routledge, 2004);
Journal of Rural Studies, “Special Issue on Embeddedness, Quality, and Alternative Food Practices” (v.19, 2003);
Daniel Miller, “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink From Trinidad,” in The Cultural Politics of Food (Blackwell, 2005);
Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (Basic Books, 2000);
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1944);
George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing (Pine Forge, 2004);
Michael Watts, “Commodities,” in Introducing Human Geographies (Arnold, 1999).