Putting Forests to Work? Enrolling Vegetal Labor in the Socioecological Fix of Bioenergy Resource Making

Abstract

Large-scale European electricity providers are increasingly replacing coal with renewable biomass wood pellets produced from working forests of the U.S. South. Adopting a posthumanist interpretation of the labor theory of value, this article argues that wood pellet manufacturing constitutes an attempt by energy capital to substitute the “dead labor” of prehistoric plants, embodied in fossil fuels, with the living, “vegetal labor” of forests of the present day. More specifically, the article contends that by capitalizing on the hybrid labor regimes through which the real subsumption of nature in working forests is achieved, energy interests seek to position wood pellets not merely as a viable alternative resource for electricity generation but as a socioecological fix for capitalist crisis linked to climate change in the European energy sector. The legitimacy of this apparent fix depends, however, on normalizing a view of forests not as gradually accumulating carbon sinks but as high-throughput carbon conveyors. Wood pellet manufacturing thus has important implications for conceptual understandings of the role played by labor—both human and vegetal—in efforts to institute socioecological fixes and also for practical efforts to challenge the inherently productivist logics of expanding forest-based bioenergy systems, whether rooted in the U.S. South or elsewhere.

让森林工作？生物能源资源生产的社会生态修复中对植物劳动力的结合

欧洲主要的电力供应商在逐渐地用产自美国南方工作林的可再生生物木屑取代煤炭。根据后人文主义对劳动价值论的解释, 木屑生产是能源资本用现在活的植物劳动力去取代史前死的植物劳动力（存在于化石燃料中）。本文主张, 这种组合式劳动力体系的资本化, 可以真正实现大自然与工作林的融合。木屑不仅是电力生产中有效的替代资源, 也是欧洲能源领域内由气候变化导致的资本主义危机的社会生态修复。然而, 这种修复的合理性取决于, 不能把森林做为缓慢积累的碳汇, 而是看做高通量的碳传输中心。木屑生产具有两个重要的含义：概念上能让我们理解社会生态修复中的人类劳动力和植物劳动力的作用, 实践上可以挑战唯生产主义者在美国或其它地方扩大林业生物能源系统的思想。

Los proveedores europeos de electricidad a gran escala cada vez más están remplazando el carbón mineral con gránulos o pellas de madera extraídos de la biomasa renovable de bosques en explotación del Sur de los EE.UU. Adoptando una interpretación poshumanista de la teoría laboral del valor, este artículo sostiene que la fabricación de pellas combustibles a partir de la madera constituye un intento del capital energético por sustituir el “trabajo muerto” de plantas prehistóricas, encarnado en los combustibles fósiles, con el activo “trabajo vegetal” de los bosques de hoy. Más específicamente, el artículo sostiene que al capitalizar los regímenes laborales híbridos a través de los cuales se está logrando en los bosques explotados la real subsunción de la naturaleza, los intereses energéticos buscan posicionar las pellas de origen leñoso no meramente como recurso alternativo viable para la generación de electricidad, sino como receta socioecológica para tratar la crisis capitalista ligada al cambio climático en el sector energético europeo. La legitimidad de este remedio aparente depende, sin embargo, de normalizar una visión de los bosques, no como sumideros que gradualmente acumulan carbono, sino como una suerte de bandas transportadoras de alto rendimiento. La fabricación de pellas combustibles tiene así importantes implicaciones para las comprensiones conceptuales del papel que juega el trabajo ––tanto humano como vegetal–– en los esfuerzos por instituir las prescripciones socioecológicas, y también para los esfuerzos prácticos de retar las lógicas inherentemente productivistas que buscan expandirlos sistemas bioenergéticos de base forestal, bien sea que se afinquen en el Sur de los EE.UU., o en otro lugar.

Key Words:

• bioenergy
• real subsumption of nature
• socioecological fix
• vegetal labor
• working forests

关键词:

• 生物能源
• 大自然真正的融合
• 社会生态修复
• 植物劳动力
• 工作林

Palabras clave:

• bioenergía
• bosques que laboran
• prescripción socioecológica
• subsunción real de la naturaleza
• trabajo vegetal

Acknowledgments

I thank Eszter Kovacs, Maan Barua, and Marion Ernwein for countless insightful conversations and for their feedback at various stages in the development of the ideas contained in this article. The clarity of its arguments was also greatly enhanced thanks to the detailed and constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers and the editorial guidance of Professor James McCarthy. I am indebted to all of the industry representatives, professional foresters, environmental campaigners, expert scientists, and academics who gave up their time to be interviewed as part of this research.

Notes

1 This approach presages new materialist scholarship, wherein resource governance is seen to be actively shaped by the “generative capacities of biophysical processes” (Bakker and Bridge 2006, 19; see also Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014).

2 This perspective chimes with Bakker and Bridge’s (2006) view of the “production of nature” as “a ‘coproduction of socionature’ in which humans and nonhumans alike participate (albeit unevenly, and subject to dynamic and evolving constraints)” (19).

3 For ethical reasons, interviewees’ names and organizational affiliations are not disclosed.

4 The term agrofuel is preferred by some to biofuel, because the former better connotes “competition for scarce crop-land, deforestation and so on” (McMichael 2009, 283).

5 In abstract terms, this move entails abandoning subterranean stocks of fossil energy (assembled very slowly, over geological timescales) and harnessing instead aboveground flows of solar energy (manifesting on much shorter time scales).

6 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

7 One notable exception is Behrsin’s (2019) careful analysis of the discursive and material pathways through which the EU’s waste-to-energy industry has effectively been “rendered renewable.”

8 Albritton Jonsson (2018) quoted William Buckland’s (1836) Bridgewater Treatise on the Natural History of the Earth, wherein the famed geologist and cleric argues that in burning coal: “We are all brought into immediate connection with the vegetation that clothed the ancient earth before one half of its actual surface had yet been formed” (89).

9 As Prudham (2005, 96) noted, a “wave of essentially extractive forestry” sequentially liquidated the majority of old-growth forest stands in the U.S. Northeast, the Great Lakes, and the Southeast in the period between the early 1800s and 1920—and was by the 1940s well on its way to doing the same in the Pacific Northwest (see also Williams 1989).

10 Because they reduce stand density and provide opportunities to eradicate unhealthy trees, thinning operations are also sometimes credited with reducing the forest’s susceptibility to wildfire and to insect-borne disease (Cunningham, Barry, and Walkingstick 2008).

11 The paper and pulp sector is declining in some localities and consolidating elsewhere, as demand for conventional paper is increasingly superseded by demand for other commodities including cardboard packaging and hygiene products.

12 Annex VI of the EU’s (2018) Renewable Energy Directive declares that “emissions of CO₂ from fuel in use … shall be taken to be zero for biomass fuels.”

13 Two distinct payments are issued, one under the UK Government’s Renewables Obligation and the other under so-called Contracts for Difference, which guarantee a specific price for any electricity generated by former coal-firing power units converted to run on biomass fuels (Drax Group 2019).

14 It is important to emphasize that these are relative measures. Moomaw, Masino, and Faison (2019) contended that older trees sequester greater absolute volumes of carbon dioxide than younger, ostensibly more vigorous trees each year, simply because of their size.

15 This is not to say that the construction of wood pellet mills does not have impacts on landowner planting decisions at a local scale (as a significant proportion of the cost of any thinning or harvesting operation arises from the onward transportation of wood).

16 Lewis et al. (2019), for example, estimated that naturally regenerating forests are around forty times more effective than planted forests at maximizing total carbon storage (in both forest vegetation and soils).

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously funded by the University of Bristol’s Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowships scheme. Any errors or inconsistencies are entirely the author’s own.

Notes on contributors

James Palmer

JAMES PALMER is a Lecturer in Environmental Governance at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1TH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the resource-making practices associated with new bioenergy economies and the broader relationships between vegetal nature, labor, and value production.