Abstract
Urbanization is today’s defining global development trend (United Nations 2018). Even though it has been traditionally linked with the concentration of people in cities, urbanization is now extending beyond city borders, perforating the urban-rural divide (EEA 2017). From highways crossing indigenous land and erstwhile hinterlands, like the Amazon, to pipelines crossing the Carpathian Mountains, for some the wildest part of Europe, a planetary form of urbanization (Brenner and Schmid 2015; Merrifield 2013) is being projected into novel geographies, connecting erstwhile rural places with an expanding urban fabric via material, energetic, informational, and infrastructural links (Brenner and Schmid 2011, 2015).
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The term “Brave new world” is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Aldous Huxley took the term and offered a dystopian version of the brave new world in opposition to Shakespeare’s optimism expressed in the quote above.
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Gerritsen (2009) in a report published in March 2009 about the expected global infrastructure boom writes: “The global infrastructure boom will intensively unfold between 2009–2015 and will transform how the world looks, gets educated, moves goods and services, creates wealth, treats the sick, cares for the poor, powers its homes and businesses, and wages war. The amounts of infrastructure money about to slosh into the world economy defy imagination: the Obama administration will spend $150billion of its $787 billion stimulus plan on infrastructure and is expected to add to that; China has pledged $585 billion and stands ready to do more; India is expected to spend $500 billion on infrastructure over from now till 2015; the EU $252 billion; Japan $129 billion; Canada $12 billion; Australia $4.7 billion, Singapore $13.8 billion; Germany $42 billion; and so on. CIBC World Markets estimates total infrastructure spending over the next 20 years at $35 trillion. Some $3 trillion of fiscal adrenalin will be injected into the global economy in the next 24 months alone. The only other time in human history when this much money has moved this quickly into the global economy was during WWII and that event of course reset the world order for the next 60 years, with America at the helm”.
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A reference should be made here to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the single largest infrastructure project since the Marshall Plan that is expected to cost at least US$1 trillion. Called the “21st century Silk Road”, the initiative involves the development of trade routes across the globe, crossing sensitive ecosystems while enabling a massive number of large-scale infrastructure investments profoundly changing places and livelihoods.
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This refers to the global scale and variations are observed in different countries.
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For more information see GEO-6, Part A: State of the Global Environment, Chapter 7: Biodiversity. Available at: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27659/GEO6_CH6.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
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At the time of writing the Environmental Justice Atlas has already reported 3.062 social conflicts around environmental issues across the globe (see https://ejatlas.org/).
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The concept of alienation (Entfremdung) is dominant in the classic German philosophy, including the important work of Hegel. For Marx, human alienation from non-human nature is intrinsic to value’s formal abstraction from use value (Burkett 1999) and is related to the alienation of labor (Marx 1964). As we read in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of (Marx 1844: 1964, p. 29) “the more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor – to be his labor’s means of life; and, second, in that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker”.
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Apostolopoulou, E. (2020). Afterword. In: Nature Swapped and Nature Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46788-3_8
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