The Making of Speculative Biodiesel Commodities on the Agroenergy Frontier of the Brazilian Northeast

In this paper, I examine the speculative dimensions of biodiesel production in Northeast Brazil under the National Program for the Production and Use of Biodiesel (PNPB), by focusing on the case of castor oil plant (Ricinus communis) in semi-arid Bahia, a promising flex crop that was said to generate social, environmental and economic benefits, especially for the historically marginalised Northeast peasantry. I argue that speculative practices over castor have relied on state policies and discourses as well as biophysical and biotechnological (im)materialities that are transforming agrarian relations in ways that compromise peasants’ control over their (re)productive systems while promoting the expansion of the agroindustrial frontier. By examining the everyday, performative and place-based character of speculative biodiesel practices and their uneven and contested socioenvironmental implications, this paper contributes to current political ecology debates on the nexus between agroenergy development, nature’s capitalist valuation and rural dispossession.     

误会与想象--透过对“铜雀瓦砚”的认识谈艺术品的塑造

清乾隆朝所修《西清砚谱》卷一中收录的几方"铜雀瓦砚",当时被认定为汉砚,备受重视。本文通过近年来邺城地区考古发现的瓦作遗存,判定这几方瓦砚并非汉砚。铜雀瓦砚在宋代即受到追捧,而实际上,"铜雀瓦砚"并非东汉晚期的铜雀台瓦,是使用东魏北齐时期压磨黑光瓦件所制。在这一结论基础上,作者透过"铜雀瓦砚"的诞生,分析了某些艺术品的塑造,不单纯只是匠人的创作,还夹杂着历史、想象与物质的复杂互动。     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.