Replacing cheap nature? Sustainability, capitalist future-making and political ecologies of robotic pollination

Richie Nimmo

doi:10.1177/2514848620987368

Abstract

This article undertakes a critical examination of emergent technologies involving the use of robots to carry out crop pollination in the context of declining populations of bees and other insect pollinators. It grasps robotic pollination research and development as a future-making practice, which imagines and partially materialises one possible future by inscribing a specific ontology in the present which is geared to enact that future. Unpacking this, the article traces how artificial pollination reframes pollination ecology around a productivist ontology and inscribes a web of meanings around nature, technology and economy which point to a future where insect pollinators are largely absent or extinct. It argues that this effectively backgrounds alternative futures in which structural transformations of agriculture and the world food system are able to mitigate and avert pollinator decline and biodiversity loss, and also reveals the deep rationale of artificial pollination. While invoking notions of sustainability and food security, robotic pollination defines these in highly anthropocentric, economistic and self-referential terms, as a matter of enabling the reproduction of agro-industrial capital accumulation. Drawing upon the political ecology of Jason W Moore, the article situates robotic pollination as a future-making project in relation to capitalist strategies of accumulation through the appropriation of ‘Cheap Nature’, to show how the automation of pollination would enact a shift in the composition of agro-industrial capital, with systemic consequences inimical to both ecological sustainability and sustained accumulation. In this respect, robotic pollination is a case study in the propensity of capital to invest in the making of sustainable futures only insofar as sustainability equates to the reproduction of capital within the web of life.

Highlights

It was with the emergence of what became known as ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ in 2006– 2007 (Cox-Foster et al, 2007; VanEngelsdorp et al, 2008), referring to the phenomenon of rapid large-scale disappearances of honey bee colonies, that the longer term trend of declining honey bee populations began to receive sustained attention
The research is grounded in textual discourse analysis of a purposive sample of documentary sources comprising: scientific publications by several research teams, institutes and companies involved in developing robotic pollination technologies; their websites and promotional materials; media coverage of such projects; and scientific literatures on pollination ecology
The analysis of these texts is informed by sociological thinking around the politics of futures and future-making (Adam and Groves, 2007; Urry, 2016), and robotic pollination technologies are understood as partly materialised imaginings of possible futures – entanglements of matter and meaning which work to enact particular futures and to circumscribe others (Brown and Michael, 2003; Michael, 2017; Tutton, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

It was with the emergence of what became known as ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ in 2006– 2007 (Cox-Foster et al, 2007; VanEngelsdorp et al, 2008), referring to the phenomenon of rapid large-scale disappearances of honey bee colonies, that the longer term trend of declining honey bee populations began to receive sustained attention. Robotic pollination is not a ‘techno-fix’ (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011) in the sense of inscribing technology as an ecological saviour, since the future it imagines and partly materialises is one in which the only sustainability that matters is the sustainability of agro-industrial capital accumulation.

Results

Conclusion