The impact of capitalism upon the human ecosystem.
Investigating the origins of the 21st century landscape. A landscape that describes ecological breakdown.
Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession is being published as a series of volumes taking the reader to an understanding of why humanity is in such dire ecological straits. It starts with the natural ecosystem upon which the aboriginal British created a sustainable, subsistence human ecosystem. It continues to the evolution of Norman feudalism, the inevitable transmogrification of feudalism into capitalism on the back of the wool industry, the resultant industrial revolution, empire and exploitation of world resources. Thence to the consequent human rights outrages typified by the modern Niger Delta where the oil industry has destroyed local communities and ecosystems.
The project began as an MSc dissertation considering the landscape arising from the English capitalisation of land between the 15th and 19th centuries. A process that was continued by the British imperial plantation industry of the later 19th and 20th centuries.
Subsequent ecological work in the Niger Delta radicalised my attitude towards deploring the economic and social dispossession arising from such land capitalisation, and the consequent landscape of ecological and human degradation. As I wrote, any visitor [to the Niger Delta in the 1990s] must be either outraged by, or else callously indifferent to, the vile human cost of the oil industry. The Niger Delta is the Heart of Darkness upon which the Western world feeds.
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To purchase any of these books, please get in touch with Nick Ashton-Jones directly
