Agrarian Questions, Urban Connections, and Planetary Possibilities: Fire, Water, Earth and Air

From 2020 to 2021, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center explored historical and current elements of the “Agrarian Question” in different territories of the planet. The material conditions of agrarian life are deeply connected to the political, social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges of contemporary existence at a planetary scale. Agrarian spaces are central to geopolitical disputes over land and other natural resources, and rural social movements play a key role in defending biodiversity and food production. Moreover, agrarian spaces are linked to urban places through the flows of people, goods, money, information, and waste. In this context, some questions discussed were, for example, how have regimes of capital, particularly those associated with agribusiness, industrial, financial and trading corporations fractured rural communities transnationally, and how have they been they are able to resist? How have rural social movements internationally sought an exit point from hegemonic modes of agricultural oppression and primitive accumulation? How have rural social movements connected and organized with urban social movements? The 2021-2022 seminar will build on its discussions of these and other questions using four linked online panels and themes around fire, water, earth, and air. The rubric of water summons the environmental and social impacts of rising sea levels, corporate -fishing, water pollution, and associated relations between commodity circulation and sea lanes or oceanic cable networks. The privatization of water and water grabbing by agribusiness, mining, dams and other predatory corporations are major threats to distribution and access of water as a human right, accentuating that water is a primary arena of socio-economic contestation. Similarly, using earth at a global scale, we imagine examining earth as soil, as a biodiverse base of socialization, of food production versus mono-cropping of commodities, or earth in terms of the geo-economics and labor relations of mining (rare earth metals, for instance), or the problem of soil erosion and water pollution through the use of chemical inputs based on fossil fuels, genetically modified seeds, and large irrigation systems in agribusiness plantations, which are a main cause of environmental destruction and climate change. The theme of fire is a provocation on questions of deforestation, the increasing impact of wildfires and the destruction of biodiversity, which is also linked to increasing risks of global pandemics and of climate change. Air will be discussed in several vital registers, including both obvious interrelations of pollution and industrial agriculture, such as in the expansion of mono-cropping plantations for agrofuels, but also via the commodification and financialization of land and other natural resources. These themes may differentiate topics yet the overall aim is to consider critical questions of co-constitution and interdependency. For instance, a discussion on displacement of rural communities is related to an examination of housing, food and labor exploitation in urban areas. What might begin as a local discussion of labor and land is enmeshed in broader concerns over radical politics of planetary survival and justice. Thus, fire, water, air, and earth, are not just mnemonic devices but constitute a heuristic for social change.