Luke Bergmann

The dawn of Structural One Health: A new science tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital

The One Health approach integrates health investigations across the tree of life, including, but not limited to, wildlife, livestock, crops, and humans. It redresses an epistemological alienation at the heart of much modern population health, which has long segregated studies by species. Up to this point, however, One Health research has also omitted addressing fundamental structural causes underlying collapsing health ecologies. In this critical review we unpack the relationship between One Health science and its political economy, particularly the conceptual and methodological trajectories by which it fails to incorporate social determinants of epizootic spillover. We also introduce a Structural One Health that addresses the research gap. The new science, open to incorporating developments across the social sciences, addresses foundational processes underlying multispecies health, including the place-specific deep-time histories, cultural infrastructure, and economic geographies driving disease emergence. We introduce an ongoing project on avian influenza to illustrate Structural One Healths scope and ambition. For the first time researchers are quantifying the relationships among transnational circuits of capital, associated shifts in agroecological landscapes, and the genetic evolution and spatial spread of a xenospecific pathogen.

Capitalism beyond Harmonious Equilibrium: Mathematics as If Human Agency Mattered

Narrating a world of flux entails moving away from equilibrium-oriented thinking toward considerations of emergence, uncertain futures, and unintended consequences. This is not the exclusive domain of the qualitative theory construction and analysis that has dominated such thinking in sociospatial theory: it is also involved in mathematical theory construction. It requires a relational approach to mathematical theory, however, that moves beyond unidirectional claims of cause and effect, avoids deterministic and teleological thinking, and recognizes the incompleteness and openness of any such theoretical construction. These arguments are explored through an example that employs mathematical techniques often associated with complexity theory to examine unevenly shifting economic landscapes where the best guesses of capitalist entrepreneurs are interrelated with the emergent multiregional economy in which capitalists participate. This highlights the unexpectedly heightened dynamical importance of regions in a globally connected world; how cherished theoretical principles become renegotiated, as relationality leads to emergence; and that there is space for human agency, through modeling praxis appropriate to ‘incomplete systems’. We open modest cracks in the supposed wall between quantitative and qualitative approaches, oriented toward a methodological reinterpretation of what employing mathematical arguments could mean within larger, postpositivist theoretical projects in critical human geography.

Bound by Chains of Carbon: Ecological–Economic Geographies of Globalization

In an era of globalization, how are we to associate carbon emissions with particular places or peoples? Contemporary environmental science and policy often debate between assigning emissions to the territories where they are emitted and assigning emissions to the consumers they ultimately benefit. In this article, I employ a postpositivist, relational approach to construct a broader set of quantitative perspectives, each of which takes a different standpoint within global circuits of capital to narrate how regions could be connected with seemingly distant carbon emissions. By constructing, analyzing, and mapping tens of millions of global connections in empirical portraits of interrelations between regions, economies, and carbon emissions in 2004, I demonstrate that our understandings of carbon and its geographies are extremely sensitive to which standpoint we adopt. For example, I estimate that most emissions in the world supported capital accumulation in countries other than where those emissions occurred. Emissions from emerging economies such as China might also be regarded as far more implicated in the supply chains that satisfy the demands of European and American consumers than has been recognized. Many such approaches—past and proposed herein—to narrating the more-than-human geographies of carbon emissions under globalization are necessarily local epistemologies, providing partial perspectives whose findings that have a degree of mutual incommensurability. This article thus explores challenges of engaging productively with pluralism not only in qualitative approaches but in quantitative research as well. An understanding of the geography of carbon emissions that is adequate to an era of globalization will require theoretical subtlety as much as additional empirical research.

Revisiting critical GIS

Even as the meeting ‘revisited’ critical GIS, it offered neither recapitulation nor reification of a fixed field, but repetition with difference. Neither at the meeting nor here do we aspire to write histories of critical GIS, which have been taken up elsewhere.1 In the strictest sense, one might define GIS as a set of tools and technologies through which spatial data are encoded, analyzed, and communicated. Yet any strict definition of GIS, critical or otherwise, is necessarily delimiting, carving out ontologically privileged status that necessarily silences one set of voices in favor of another.

Toward speculative data: “Geographic information” for situated knowledges, vibrant matter, and relational spaces

This essay offers paths for scholars influenced by the critical social sciences and theoretical humanities to contribute to the construction of concepts and digital practices of “data” that will allow “data” to better align with their approaches to scholarly inquiry. In particular, it explores how “geographic information” might be refashioned, rereading it from simplified theoretical positions drawn from interpretative inquiry, process-relational thought, and new materialisms. Geographic information has largely called forth self-sufficient entities that have intensive properties, are indexed by location in an absolute space, and are known objectively through a geographic gaze. By contrast, this article suggests ways geographic information may be reimagined to constitute spaces as relational, matter as vibrant, and/or knowledge as situated. If all claims are seen as interpretative, the boundaries between what were previously considered the roles for reader, researcher, data structures, observer, and observed may also need to be reordered, with implications for the ways that we “interface” with data. Although such paths can be difficult to travel, they hold promise for extending the reach of interpretative and (non-positivist) empirical practice as well as favorably altering the terms on which interpretative scholars can participate in debates around, and practices of, “data” today.

Towards economic geographies beyond the Nature-Society divide

This article suggests an approach to economic-geographic quantification that is relevant to engaging the socionatural blurring of an Anthropocene. It develops representations of commodities and of economies that draw upon concepts of absolute, relative, and relational space to help move beyond legacies of the Nature-Society divide in economic-geographic thought. To supplement familiar ways of knowing commodities as bounded objects with associated single values (prices), the piece rereads input-output approaches, providing accounts of how commodities enfold relations among socionatural phenomena. It quantifies and maps the activities and flows of the global economy in 2007 in terms of their embodied carbon emissions, labor times, and harvested land areas alongside their monetary values. Comparing the perspectives that result, it identifies empirical and theoretical challenges that a political-industrial ecology could help address.

Land in Motion

Globalization entwines human lives with distant fields and forests. In response, our approach to land is relational yet also computational. We calculate and map intricate connections among land uses and distant populations mediated by both commodity chains and capital, thereby unpacking, deepening, extending, and pluralizing recent methods estimating land footprints of commodity consumption. After constructing networks of approximately 130 million direct connections among land uses, economic activities, and peoples of the world in 2007, we trace infinities of indirect interconnections. Dominant absolute-space approaches to human–environment relations facilitate local comparisons of population and resources, but our relational quantitative approach provides maps and metrics that illustrate how uneven development under neoliberal globalization results in strong global net redistributions of various per capita benefits from land use, especially from Global South to Global North. From the perspective of capital investment, the median square meter of global land use contributes to futures of human populations outside, not inside, of the country of that land. Many connections to land reach us in the form of manufactured goods and services, not just through food and fibers. Our conclusions require simultaneous examination of the indirect interconnections of all commodities, activities, and places; our characterizations of land and globalization thus differ from the forms of evidence used in studies examining single commodity chains or offered by direct trade statistics, although the results are often complementary. We show that geographical political economy and relational quantitative approaches to space have much to offer understandings of land in the Anthropocene.

A Coevolutionary Approach to the Capitalist Space Economy

What happens to technologies, firms, regional outputs, interregional accessibility, and trade when they are understood as coevolving? This paper offers a relational mathematical approach to this question, one whose embrace of disequilibrium, context, history, uncertainty, both monetary and material perspectives on economic activity, and complexity resonates productively with many qualitative theoretical approaches. I present a multiregion, multisector, multifirm model of a society shaped by the pursuit of profit and explore some of its theoretical implications through the narration of simulations, including points of contrast with the approaches and implications of geographical economics. Under different conditions, various economic geographies emerge, including interregional divergence and convergence, specialisation and diversification, as well as the possibility of transitions between these dynamical paths. The relational quantitative method advanced here suggests directions for future research into the theoretical landscapes of economic geographies emerging beyond equilibrium.

Spatiality, Maps, and Mathematics in Critical Human Geography: Toward a Repetition With Difference

Quantitative and cartographic methods are today often associated with absolute, Newtonian conceptions of space. We argue that some such methods have not always been and need not be so allied. Present geographic approaches to relational space have been largely advanced through radical political economic and feminist thought. Yet we identify quantitative and cartographic methods (taking as exemplars a range of thinkers, some of whom were most prominent in the 1960s and 1970s) that can contribute to these approaches to relational space. We suggest neglected methods to revisit, new alliances to be forged with critical human geography and cultural critique, and possible paths to enliven geographical imaginations.

Ebola in the Hog Sector: Modeling Pandemic Emergence in Commodity Livestock

Commodity agriculture represents an expanding sink for a growing array of zoonotic pathogens. The emergence of novel strains of Ebola by way of economically driven shifts in husbandry and horticulture appears one such transition. Following up experimental studies of Ebola transmission, the agroeconomic origins of the Zaire ebolavirus outbreak in West Africa, and reports of endemic Reston ebolavirus in commercial hog in the Philippines and China, we develop a series of stochastic models that explicitly integrate epidemiology, spatial dynamics, and economics. Our inductive modeling suggests repeated punctuated emergence and human spillover of foodborne pathogens are intrinsic to industrial systems of production. In contrast to traditional and conservation agroecologies, by its accelerated and geographically expansive production of genetically uniform seed and stock, highly capitalized agriculture appears especially vulnerable to sudden shifts in disease evolution and spread. Industrial food production strips out environmental stochasticity that can cap pathogen population growth. The mechanisms for such explosive epidemiologies appear fundamentally founded in economic policy and practice. A variant of the Black–Scholes pricing model implies that pathogen propagation in intensive agrifood production outpaces the margins the sector allocates to biocontrol and containment across large expanses of the model’s parameter space. The resulting financial gaps appear met by externalizing the epidemiological costs of industrial food production to livestock morbidity, contract producers, farmworker and consumer health, smallholder markets, local wildlife, off-site environments, and government budgets across administrative units. By way of the models’ results, we hypothesize that as the hog sector expands for export, including across areas of Africa in which Ebola has already emerged as a human infection, multiple Ebola strains will follow Reston’s trajectory, evolving novel phenotypes in livestock and repeatedly spilling over into human populations.