Stephen G. Bunker

Raw material and the global economy: Oversights and distortions in industrial ecology

Many proponents of industrial ecology have asserted that the declining volume of raw materials used per unit of gross national product (GNP) constitutes a process of dematerialization.”; They have suggested that this process could allow continued growth in production and wealth while attenuating adverse impacts on the environment. Dematerialization, however, has been a central strategy for reducing production costs since before the beginnings of industrial capitalism. Historically it has been associated with expanded, rather than contracted, use of raw materials. Besides ignoring the historical record, proponents of dematerialization have failed to recognize that absolute volume of material consumed rather than volume relative to GNP is the significant measure in ecological terms. On a global scale, the volumes and the distances transported of major minerals have increased over the periods for which dematerialization has been claimed.

Staples, Links, and Poles in the Construction of Regional Development Theories

The developmental trajectories of extractive economies differ systematically from those of industrial economies. Analysis of these differences is difficult, because the specific characteristics and location in space of particular extracted resources distinguish extractive economies from each other far more than commodities produced and location distinguish industrial economies. The peculiar distoritions of Harold Inniss studies of particular staples as these were incorporated into general statements about regional economic development illustrate some of the tensions between ideographic and nomothetic goals in the analysis of regional economies and the dangers of resolving these tensions by collapsing the particular into the general. Subsequent use of these regional economic development models to obscure problems of particular resource extractive projects illuminates some of the unintended practical consequences of theoretical errors.

Generative sectors and the new historical materialism: Economic ascent and the cumulatively sequential restructuring of the world economy

The causes and consequences of inequality between national economies, the ascent to dominance within the world hierarchy of economies, and the dynamics driving the material intensification and spatial expansion of production and trade in the world economy have long been core questions in a wide range of fields concerned with economic change and development and with international relations. In this article, we propose that one of the fundamental mechanisms driving all three of these processes for at least the last 500 years has been a dynamic tension, or contradiction, between the economies of scale that reduce relative costs and drive national economic ascent to dominance in world production and trade, and the diseconomies of space that result from the increased consumption of raw materials that this expanded production entails. The four most rapid cases of economic ascent in the history of the world economy—Holland, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan—resolved this contradiction in similar ways that drove the ascent of these economies to the top of the system of global stratification.

Space, Matter, and Technology in Globalization of the Past and Future

In this chapter, we apply the materio-spatial logic of new historical materialism (Ciccantell and Bunker 2002) to analysis of the technological, financial, political, ideological, and social organizational innovations that sustained the successful campaigns of five nations—Portugal, Holland, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan—to dominate world trade. We use this logic to explain how the ascent of each national economy has moved the world economy further toward globalization by increasing its material intensity and the spatial expanse.

Toward a Theory of Ecologically Unequal Exchange

This chapter is a condensed reprint of the key theoretical arguments in Stephen G. Bunker’s (1985) Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. This work is an oft-cited classic in the field of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE). In it, Bunker argues that the socioecological consequences of extractive economies differ from those of productive economies. Analysis of underdevelopment in extractive export economies requires an analysis of the cumulative effects of the sequence of local modes of extraction organized in response to world-system demands. A model of EUE is presented that is a synthesis of various theories of development and underdevelopment. This model is presented through a case study of the sequence of extractive export economies in the Amazon Basin from colonial conquest to the modern era.