Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources

No one can say Alexander Etkind's book Nature's Evil lacks ambition. Etkind offers a huge amount of material and details on how human societies and natural resources are linked. The book aims to show that “each natural resource has its own political characteristics. Along with people who extract, process and trade it, each resource is a social institution which works according to the rules set by nature” (289). I will provide my assessment of the extent to which the author has succeeded in this endeavor after a brief overview of the book's content.The book is arranged in three parts, followed by a conclusion. The first part is the longest and introduces histories of wood, grain, animals, sugar/spices, fibers, and metal. Each material resource is discussed through four lenses: the properties of the material, the processing and labor required, the institutions, and the features of the state. Part two discusses ideas in relation to resource exploitation. We are introduced to a large set of thinkers in an attempt to shed light on economic and state development. I was completely lost when reading this part and was almost relieved to move to the third part, with its focus on energy through chapters on peat, coal, and oil—resources that literally fueled state development. The conclusion provides an outlook on humanity's future. Etkind is not very positive about that future, after almost three hundred pages describing resource overexploitation, human suffering, greed, and state-led suppression.I do not blame the author for being quite doubtful about what humans have done and will do when it comes to resources. We have ample evidence that resource extraction has often resulted in resource disappearance at the source and environmental damage. However, I do not need a book to reach that conclusion. In a book that promises “a cultural history of natural resources,” I would expect well-reasoned claims backed up by evidence about human-resource relations, how cultural meaning was historically created, possibly how properties of resources influenced or were mobilized in that creation of meaning, and similar themes. Instead, the book offers many unsupported claims. Just a few examples on the use of concepts and the empirical material may suffice before I turn to some final remarks about the book.When it comes to concepts, let me mention two problems. First, the author does not distinguish between “commons,” “communal resources,” and “resources accessible by many.” As a consequence, all shared resources are necessarily depleted, which may actually depoliticize the phenomenon of depletion. “Commons” were far from “open to all,” which was one of the reasons for heated struggles between societal groups. Second, the concept of “the state” remains abstract and despotic. Repeatedly, the author contrasts “humans” or “societies” with “states,” as if state institutions are isolated and do not need humans to act on their behalf. This simplistic idea of “the state” only obscures historical processes.The empirical material covers immense ground. In specific cases that I happen to know a little bit about, Etkind treats that source material inadequately. In the chapter on grains, the author builds on James Scott's Against the Grain (2017). I am not surprised, given that the two share an immense distrust in anything that comes close to state power. Scott simply introduces the state out of nowhere to control the population through cereal cultivation, in a classic (and unconvincing) chicken-egg discussion. In addition, in the chapter on peat, Etkind rightly emphasizes the importance of peat for the Dutch economy. It is indeed correct to state that enormous amounts of peat have been extracted, but it is incorrect to link peat extraction with the land surface dropping below sea level. While it is correct to state that large-scale peat digging created large water bodies that threatened human settlements, it was the much earlier reclamation of the peat bogs—which, according to Etkind, were “of little use to the people” (232) in the late medieval period—that started the process of land subsidence. Large-scale peat extraction for fuel started much later, when Dutch cities started to grow. This extraction was then followed by many lakes being drained again to create land.There are two major issues that prevent the author from fulfilling his claims of showing the overarching social nature of natural resources and the cultural meaning of resources as a consequence. First, the book is thoroughly Eurocentric. When non-European regions come into play, they are only the victims of European states’ exploitation. Such one-sided attention only hides the complexity of exploitation. This Eurocentrism should be problematic for any author making overarching claims about humanity. The second issue is perhaps even more important and concerns the setup of the book. Etkind relies completely on isolated descriptions of separate resources. However, in most societal settings, many resources are simultaneously being used, exploited, exchanged, and the like. Societal groups manage to control one or more resources, and very often resource use shifts because of shifts in control. For example, energy was used to produce the sugar that Etkind credits with creating the bourgeoisie (69), which brings up the question of whether we should blame the sugar (or even the existence of farming) or the fuel sources.Impressive as the book appears to be, it does not present “a cultural history of natural resources.” Perhaps Etkind's structuralist approach does not even need history, as every resource seems to end in exploitative states anyway. At best, Etkind presents isolated histories of selected natural resources within a narrow structuralist perspective. I would agree that such an approach is indeed able to show that “a natural resource” has political characteristics and is a specific social institution. It is disappointing that despite the multitude of resources that the book offers, we apparently already know the outcome anyway. There is no escape from despotism.