GEOG 1410 Lecture 14: GEOG 1410 Lecture 14 - Land, Water and Mice: The Commodification of Nature
3 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
GEOG 1410
October 24, 2017
The Commodification of Nature
Land, Water, Seeds, & Mice
Tips for Developing the Essay
● Articulation of a thesis; say something more than a basic description
● A thesis is something that someone might dispute or take issue with
Nature
● “Getting back to nature”
○ Not somewhere we live, but somewhere we need to go
○ Getting away from the built environment
Commodification
● The way in which we communicate with nature every day, without “getting back to
nature”
● The process in which nature can be bought and sold
● Economic exchange value must be established; not about what it mean personally,
but establishing something that is removed from the personal
● Even though we have a sense of value and price, value is not an established thing;
value is a relationship, established by what the exchange is worth to both parties
● Raises a lot of ethical questions
● Produces a large scale of production in order to make it efficient
1. What are these Geographies of Commodification?
2. How does the commodification of nature affect our relationship with the environment?
3. What is the basis of this commodification of nature in the first place?
Geography
● Commodification tends towards larger scales of production
● You have a large impact on transforming landscapes
● You disrupt the ecology, you change what it looks like
● As it moves towards larger scales of production, everything in the landscape is
transformed around making the process as efficient as possible
● You need to organize development around this place, so you want nothing else in the
way; if you need labourers around at any time you need to build infrastructure to
house them
● Also social and labour geographies; people may need to migrate to remote locations
● Has an impact on the physical geography, but also the social geography
The Sale of Food
● Commodification increases the scale of production, and transforms the landscapes
● Agriculture is even greater than that of mining in terms of transforming the landscape
● Often look at rural landscapes as “natural”; through the reduction of the diversity of
plants, it is completely man made
● Draws in international labour, physical labour; has an impact on the local geography
but also the social geography for those who commute to these places
Document Summary
Articulation of a thesis; say something more than a basic description. A thesis is something that someone might dispute or take issue with. Not somewhere we live, but somewhere we need to go. The way in which we communicate with nature every day, without getting back to nature . The process in which nature can be bought and sold. Economic exchange value must be established; not about what it mean personally, but establishing something that is removed from the personal. Even though we have a sense of value and price, value is not an established thing; value is a relationship, established by what the exchange is worth to both parties. Commodification tends towards larger scales of production. You have a large impact on transforming landscapes. You disrupt the ecology, you change what it looks like. As it moves towards larger scales of production, everything in the landscape is transformed around making the process as efficient as possible.
