Abstract

SCHAFFHAUSER, Philippe. Metabolic disaster zone on Nauru: A chronicle from Marx's political ecology. Letras Verdes [online]. 2023, n.33, pp.138-157.  Epub Aug 31, 2023. ISSN 1390-6631.  https://doi.org/10.17141/letrasverdes.33.2023.5605.

Since the late 90s, the small republic of Nauru (an atoll of twenty-one km2 located in Micronesia) is going through a deep economic and social crisis, in addition to serious environmental problems due to the depletion of phosphate mines. The objective of the article is to describe and analyze this situation to understand what happened in Nauru. To do this, comments by Karl Marx are considered, to define his political ecology, which has been emphasized by several authors: Alfred Schmidt, Manuel Sacristán Luzón, John-Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore, Kohei Saito, among others. The key concept used for the analysis of this double crisis, economic and environmental, revolves around the paradigm of "metabolism", a notion present in Marx's work, from early texts to Capital, and implemented by John-Bellamy Foster ("metabolic fracture and gap"), Jason Moore ("metabolic transformation") and Victor Toledo ("social metabolism"). The conclusions contribute to the critical reflection on the antinomic relationship between capital and nature, which has been occurring at the expense of man in general and, in this case, the Nauruan islander.

Keywords : capital; metabolism; metabolic web; nature; Nauru; phosphate.

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