Geopolitics, Development and the Anthropocene: Power, Food, Energy

Geopolitics as a Material Science

Geopolitics (Kjellen): merge geography and politics into a science on how the ability to control access to resources and to defend national interests creates the material base for a nation's behaviour.

Late 19th to early 20th century: Competition for global power between imperial nations.

Classical geopolitical theorists

Mahan: Naval power is central to projecting power. This influenced U.S. strategy to build global naval bases. Example: bases in Guam, the Caribbean basin, etc.

Ratzel: Darwinian view of a hostile world and struggle for survival.

Mackinder: Focus on geographic benefits or limits to material conditions and transportation technology; the interplay of land power and sea power. The Heartland geostrategic model: "Who controls Eastern Europe controls the world" (formulated in 1919).

From Multipolarity to Bipolarity

After World War II the world shifted from a multipolar imperial order to a bipolar order. Independent nation-states emerged instead of colonies subject to mother countries. Europe was too weak to reassert dominance abroad.

Example: 1945 declarations of independence across Southeast Asia such as Vietnam; 1947 Indian independence from Britain.

World War II left European powers in ruin. The Soviet Union resisted U.S. capitalist democracy by choosing communism, and vice versa.

U.S. universalization of economic ideas

Universalization: The USA argued that interdependent economies would bring international stability. The U.S. posed as an advocate of freedom through free trade and aid.

Example (counter geographies): The Soviet plan required Germany to pay reparations and to control Eastern Europe; the U.S. plan aimed to reintegrate Germany into the global economy and to make Eastern European countries independent nations.

Examples: Marshall Plan (1948) provided aid to Western Europe after WWII to prevent the spread of communism; the 1949 Truman Doctrine committed the U.S. to support nations resisting communism.

Example: 1949 NATO pact of collective security—an attack on one is an attack on all.

Example: Both superpowers became nuclear powers; the Soviet atomic success came in 1949.

Example: Korean War (1950): North Korea backed by China and the Soviet Union; South Korea backed by the USA and the UN.

Example: Vietnam.

Japan's imperial expansion

Japan in an era of major industrial and imperial expansion. Examples: 1931 Manchuria invasion; 1937 Nanjing massacre.

In 1919, under the Treaty of Versailles, Japan proposed a Racial Equality Clause to be excluded from anti-Asian policies for immigration and trade—"the best Asians"—but the clause was denied by the USA and Britain (the White Australia policy).

Japan expanded enterprises throughout the South Pacific islands and imposed taxes on other colonial powers. Japan attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, bringing the U.S. into WWII.

Cold War: Development and Conflict

Development: The U.S. planned to shape Southeast Asia by supporting governance forms favorable to U.S. interests, but Vietnam claimed rapid independence and asserted counter-geographies of immediate sovereignty.

Example: In 1950 there was an overlap of colonial and Cold War struggles: China and the Soviet Union supported Vietnamese independence while the USA supported French rule in the area.

Example: 1945 liberation of rice from Japanese control involved alliances and intelligence activity.

Domino theory: The U.S. funded interventions to prevent communist expansion, often supporting violent war. The U.S. dropped more ordnance in some campaigns than in all of WWII, causing massive civilian deaths.

Example: U.S. bombing and incursions into Cambodia under Nixon contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and genocide that killed roughly one third of the population.

Vietnam's dependence on the U.S. economic and military backing included support for regime leaders such as Ngo Dinh Diem; by 1965 the government became increasingly authoritarian.

1970: U.S. troops withdraw, and after the civil war Vietnam is unified under a communist government.

Mentality: Global framing as "good vs. evil"—"corruption can spread like disease, like rotten apples" (quote attributed to a U.S. secretary of state). Geopolitical ideology battles over which national model best fits the world and how power should be spatially spread.

Propaganda, map metaphors and threat narratives formed the U.S. Cold War imaginary to justify military interventions and development aid as moral missions "to save the world."

The world did not fit the U.S. mentality of rapid development; little effort was often made to understand local traditions. The claim that "tradition is an obstacle to modernity" became a frequent justification for intervention.

Global colonial legacies were reworked; many people were not effectively liberated.

There was a dominant narrative of a "noncommunist manifesto"—a democratic development model presented as the natural evolution of societies and best practice. W. W. Rostow advised military and economic strategy in WWII and the postwar period, merging academic and military thinking that shaped Cold War intellectual policy.

Rostow's final stage: Mass consumption and wealth create welfare systems and trade relations that work. The takeoff stage of development was seen as vulnerable to Soviet "infection," which justified U.S. management through capital expansion and recruiting post-colonial nations to U.S. ideology (neocolonialism).

Escobar: The U.S. economic "missionary impulse" imagined a world in need of U.S. knowledge and pity.

Four-Point Program and Modernization Theory

Four-Point Program: The U.S. claimed to "make available the benefits of progress to the world" under democratic ideas and not to civilize or exploit. However, the narrative of helping societies transition to modernity often served U.S. power and capitalist interests.

Rostow's stages and Modernization Theory: The idea of a linear economic evolution of societies suggested that all nations fit the same model of progress.

Internationalization and aid as security

Development aid was a direct response to communist ideology and often functioned as a security measure—militarizing and monetizing foreign development to protect economic and ideological interests.

Example: 1954 Princeton meeting evaluated aid success: had aid built alliances or not?

Decisions were made to coerce developing nations with an ideological philosophy presented to local populations to outshine Soviet promises. Aid needed a counter-narrative to Soviet offers.

Example: International Voluntary Service (IVS) in Vietnam, 1956–1963, was framed as heroic but intended to establish political dominance and entered a context of prior civil war tensions.

The U.S. pushed agricultural projects that often did not reflect local desires and ended up benefiting elites rather than peasants.

Example: water pumps that people could not install or maintain.

Some IVS volunteers, like Don Luce in Vietnam, opposed U.S. policy, arguing it was authoritarian and imposed rather than supportive.

Example: Cedric Johnson argues that the end of Fordist industry and the welfare state marked a shift into neoliberalism during and after the Cold War.

Relationships between government, business and banks became dominated by multinational banks and financial service agencies. World cities were pressured to minimize public spending and incentivize private investment, pushing export-led growth and creating export processing zones (EPZs): special trade areas that enable compressed time-space for production and trade.

James C. Scott: Modernization and development projects often underestimate local knowledge and the voices of local people and their needs, missing insights about livelihoods and subsistence priorities.

Green Revolution and Its Myths

Green Revolution (1960s–70s): The era of high-yield agriculture in response to fears of mass starvation and the "population bomb."

Example: 1966 famine in Bihar, India, was used to argue that India had passed a "point of no return."

Example: Mexican agricultural programs in the 1960s responded to perceived threats of population and food shortage.

U.S. elites helped create the myth of the Green Revolution—Cold War ideology framed U.S. scientists and development agents as saviors who would fix world agriculture and recruit allies. The narrative presented the "benevolent power of science" as rescuing humanity from overpopulation.

Myth: Smallholder, low-intensity methods were portrayed as unsuitable and unable to lead to economic growth. Tradition was framed as a threat to U.S. capitalist geopolitical order.

Chemicalization: Agricultural engineering emphasized chemical inputs and mechanization rather than approaches that work with natural ecological processes and local social, geophysical, and environmental systems.

Industrialization mechanized the relationship between people and land and was often presented as the only way to sustain population growth. Conflicts and ideology usually stemmed from competition for resources and markets.

Quote: "The soil–food web is such an amazing correction to that extremely false idea of life is a pyramid with man on top" — Vandana Shiva, agricultural and social activist and researcher.

Norman Borlaug: Promoted high-yield varieties through nonprofit research at CIMMYT and introduced high-yield wheat to India in 1967 and earlier in Mexico. These varieties favored large-scale farmers who could afford large quantities of fertilizer and inputs.

Example: High-yield wheat required heavy fertilizer use—100–150 pounds of fertilizer per acre in some accounts—benefiting those who could afford inputs and disadvantaging subsistence farmers.

Mexican poverty was framed as a strategic problem that justified U.S. intervention. A 1970 Nobel Prize celebrated India’s record harvest and advanced the narrative of saving billions of lives.

Negative effects: Reliance on fertilizers, insecticides and mechanization displaced small farmers, depleted groundwater, and created socioeconomic stratification. High production did not always increase small farmers' incomes; local varieties sometimes outperformed modern ones without heavy inputs.

There is a need for strategies attentive to local ecological conditions and social realities. Claims of scale-neutrality (that the Green Revolution is appropriate for all farm types) are often inaccurate.

Pentagonism and Militarism

Pentagonism (Juan Bosch, 20–21st centuries): militarism institutionalized into imperial political economy.

Militarism reflects imperialist nature and political economy, with massive military spending transforming the meaning and nature of warfare.

Example: Huge spending during the 1968 Cold War era—Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia—transformed warfare and industry.

Step 1: Colonialism (16th–18th centuries). Step 2: Imperialism (late 18th–20th centuries). Lenin: "Imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism" and is parasitic.

Oligarchy: Small groups concentrate government power. Oligopoly: Industries dominated by a few companies that dictate markets.

Global redivision of labor shifted industry to the Global South. Step 3: Pentagonism (20th–21st centuries) merges imperialism with science, technology and domestic exploitation through public funding for military industry.

- Rich countries with large internal markets can overdevelop and profit internally.

- Expanded capitalism at scale: military control of economics, resources and trade.

- Militant foreign involvement is often not meant to conquer abroad but to justify and sustain a military–industrial economic base at home.

Example: Cold War funding for the U.S. military ensured a strong industry, safeguarded the economy, and ensured geopolitical dominance. Today the U.S. budget and presence reflect this legacy: high annual defense spending, hundreds of military bases worldwide, and thousands of troops deployed in many countries.

Example: Unified Combatant Commands divide the world into regions—a geography of U.S. military presence.

Example: Military–industrial propaganda and corporate marketing (e.g., aircraft and weapons companies) romanticize the merging of war and technology.

Wartime profit often occurs before military equipment is used, delivering fast returns to war merchants and creating a domestic constituency for military spending.

Atomic Geographies

Manhattan Project: The first atomic weapons program, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a major military–scientific investment.

Example: New Mexico, USA, became a site of testing and development; the military has invested heavily in technology since World War I—sometimes referred to as "weaponizing physics."

First tests occurred in 1945. Uranium and plutonium supplies included material taken from the Congo.

Fallout aftermath caused illness and environmental damage, harming many, including large numbers of Latino and Native U.S. populations.

Example: Hiroshima, August 1945—U.S. bombing from a B-29 killed an estimated 100,000–160,000 Japanese civilians.

Questions arise: Why Asia and not Germany or other parts of Europe?

Example: Shinkolobwe mine in the DRC. Uranium was mined under Belgian colonial rule after discovery in 1915. By 1942 the U.S. acquired large amounts and moved them in secrecy.

Since then, thousands of tests have been performed and nuclear arsenals accumulated globally. France primarily tested in Algeria and the French Pacific (Polynesia), causing lasting local harm.

Term: "Racialized empty spaces"—remote or colonized zones used for testing and dumping. Tests caused blindness, cancer, birth defects, and radioactive contamination carried by wind and water.

Examples: 1960 Algeria protests; Treaty of Pelindaba establishes Africa as a nuclear-free zone banning use of nuclear weapons in Africa. 1982 New York protests against nuclear testing.

Dollar Diplomacy and Monetary Power

Dollar Diplomacy: A large share of global currency reserves are held outside the U.S. The U.S. dollar's stable reputation globally stems from a strong U.S. economy.

International financial monitoring gives the U.S. unique access to exchange data and tools such as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (an example of pentagonism intersecting with finance).

International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank: Globalization de-territorialized money and created flows through imperial systems of control.

Money sovereignty: The state's legal control over its currency.

Currency zones and examples:

• France created a franc for some of its African colonies after 1945; the system guaranteed French regulation of value and preserved French control over monetary policy in countries like Senegal and Cameroon after political independence.
• End of WWII: the U.S. dollar becomes the global reserve currency, replacing European dominance. The dollar was effectively tied to gold for a time and gave the U.S. huge power over trade and finance.

The dollar offered cheap lending and large-scale mobility. As the dollar became dominant, wage and price changes affected workers and could provoke resistance from nationalist movements opposed to loss of economic sovereignty.

Threats: Debt, inflation, diplomatic advantage by sanctions, geopolitical disputes and alliances that result in U.S. domination.

Example: Eric Helleiner on dollarization and U.S. influence; adoption of the U.S. dollar in some economies aligned those countries with American business interests in specific sectors such as sugar.

Debt: From Neocolonialism to Neoliberalism

Debt and neocolonialism: Formal political independence was often undermined by foreign economic influence, creating new forms of colonial dependency.

Cedric Johnson (The Deluge): Neoliberalism advanced the idea that "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills"—promoting private property rights, free markets and free trade while undermining labor rights, social provision and environmental regulation. Social democracy was often deemed an impediment to capital accumulation.

Neoliberalism favored opportunistic use of the state to extend market logic into all spheres of life, facilitating the global movement of capital and profit. Its genesis is rooted in Cold War-era rejection of the planned state (both Soviet-style socialism and Keynesian welfare) and promotion of a new order of market rule.

Pan-African movements and anti-imperial thought

Kwame Nkrumah: Became president of Ghana, the former Gold Coast colony of Britain. He promoted political union of the African diaspora and national development free from foreign domination.

Influences included:

• W. E. B. Du Bois: Led the 1900 Pan-African conference in London.
• Marcus Garvey: Advocated Black economic institutions, shipping lines, and Africa-centered consciousness and pride.

Neoliberalism created space-time compression, extraction and waste production essential to free-market expansion, producing a metabolic rift. Some theorists argue that a mentality shift based on ecological and temporal intelligence is required for a positive relation between humans and nature.

George Padmore: Born in Trinidad, he studied in the U.S., joined the communist party and later promoted Pan-African socialism blending ideas from Du Bois and Garvey.

In 1945 the Pan-African Congress with major players signaled new militancy and calls for total African independence.

Reading (Nkrumah): International development aid often functioned as revolving credit to develop industries abroad and funnel wealth back to former colonial powers. Neocolonial agreements could be presented as raising living standards abroad while keeping the global South in depressed conditions.

Investment capital came in many cases from earlier colonial exploitation, and new investment often increased stratification without improving bargaining power for local labor. Market-assisted agrarian reform promoted by institutions like the World Bank often opened opportunities but involved serious dangers and did not guarantee broad or integral agrarian reform that ensured peasants' access to land and productive resources.

Such policies sometimes ignored social movements and agrarian struggles, risking reversal of local gains and producing cycles of land loss and debt that expelled peasants into further misery.

Quote: "We need to be clear that peasants and indigenous people are not naturally poor, but rather they have been impoverished... the failure of development banks and the destruction of natural resources is not their fault..." (Rosset).

Example: The documentary "Life and Debt" examines IMF interventions in Jamaica: powdered milk imports, subsidized U.S. products and structural adjustments undermined local dairy and beef farmers, forcing cuts to health and education spending and creating cycles of debt.

Structural adjustment measures required by the IMF often mandated massive cuts in social spending as conditions for loans, producing increased social inequality and expanded policing and surveillance to manage the fallout.

Anthropocene, Plantationocene and Capitalocene

Anthropocene/Capitalocene: The legacy of colonialism and the negative effects of resource extraction show that social systems are not designed for a dynamically shifting ecological world.

Anthropocene: Crutzen and Stoermer argued humans have become a geological force shaping the planet. Debates remain about start dates—use of fire, agriculture, industrial fossil-fuel burning, the steam engine, or nuclear testing.

Issues include species loss, deforestation for urban expansion and agriculture, resource extraction, changes in climate patterns, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and the chemicalization of living systems.

Example (Chakrabarty): The wall between human and natural history is breached; human history must be understood as part of the history of life. The universal framing of human responsibility obscures particularities and unequal impacts—developing a global politics "without the myth of a global identity." This critique aligns with calls to avoid simplistic universalism.

Plantationocene: Emphasizes contemptuous, extractive agricultural production reliant on fossil fuels and unequal land politics, highlighting the colonial plantation legacy.

Capitalocene: Focuses on the large-scale systemic nature of economic activity and its colonial implications: fossil-fuel extraction and wealth transfer from the Global South to the Global North, producing systemic inequality and disproportionate vulnerability to environmental harm.

Example: Japan, North America and Europe between 1850 and 1950 had high energy use that left poorer countries unable to benefit from technological gains and left them most vulnerable for decades.

Climate migration and place identity

Climate refugees flee destruction of agricultural lands, floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising ocean levels. Without resources to prevent or adapt to these threats, poorer communities must relocate.

Globalization increases mobility but reduces connection to place, sacrificing ties to local responsibility, specificity and maintenance in favor of universal modernity and cosmopolitan values.

Alternatives promote the interdependence of people and place: for example, the Banaban term Te Aba means the people and place together.

• Rosset: Land versus territory—peasants working the land call for agrarian reform that recognizes territorial perspectives and the rights of people who live on and care for land.
• Territory is not only geographic space but also identity, ways of knowing, historic memory and communal rights to natural resources.
• Calls for a new concept of agrarian reform that recognizes socio-environmental functions of land, sea and natural resources within the context of food sovereignty.
• Rosset: The failure to implement integral agrarian reform is a problem for all of society; many urban and migration problems stem from this failure. Integral agrarian reform could produce food security, jobs, social stability and true peace.
• Just agrarian reform requires equitable access to natural and productive resources, policies favoring peasant farming for markets, and investments in rural education, health and infrastructure.

Abstraction of commodities: Denial of the social context and physical origins of commodities—food becomes an abstract product. Consumers often have no awareness of producers or territories.

Robin Wall Kimmerer blends plant science and Potawatomi teachings to emphasize gift economies, reciprocity and responsibility in relationships with land and species.

Many societies historically had animist traditions that revered, feared and respected land. Contemporary conservation or stewardship programs sometimes aim to reconnect with traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), but they can be co-opted, romanticized, or politicized.

Problems include: (1) Sacrificing local values for economic development (e.g., Trans Mountain Pipeline in Canada, 2024); (2) Generalizing First Nations needs can create internal political divides; (3) Romanticizing or appropriating TEK can create hierarchies and polarization.

Scholars call for highly conscious politics attentive to biophysical realities and for major shifts in collective mentality. Naomi Klein's On Fire calls for an alternative economic geography built on limits and conditioning trade around environmental realities. Science fiction imaginaries also suggest alternatives.

Energy Regimes: Organic to Mineral

Organic energy regimes: Based on solar energy via photosynthesis. These regimes have limits of scalability and availability; 19th-century industrialization created the desire for power sources not subject to photosynthesis.

Example: Limits of wood for shipbuilding led to deforestation and resource pressures in Britain and colonial projects like the Sumatran rubber plantations for the Dutch East Indies.

Industrial demand led to fossil fuel and mineral energy regimes central to modern industry.

Coal: Burnt ancient sunshine became central to industrialization, wealth accumulation, and steam power, transforming geography and enabling large-scale factories and standardized production. Coal was geographically mobile and could be shipped and traded, enabling faster commodity transport.

Example: Sacrifice zones such as parts of Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley—urban centres gained at the expense of environmental and public health in resource extraction areas. Rivers became coal highways; deforestation increased flood vulnerability; mines released pollution and disease.

Example: Imperial Japan and China’s Fushun coal mines fueled Manchuria railway and Japan’s industrial and military rise; coal extraction supported WWII steel production, electricity and petroleum power. Fushun was eventually exhausted by overextraction.

Oil: Millions of years of biomass compressed into fossil fuels; combustion releases byproducts and long-term environmental harm.

Soil and Food Systems

Soil formation takes 500–1,000 years for a healthy habitat to form naturally and is central to human survival. Industrialization in the 18th–19th centuries depleted soils in many regions and displaced Indigenous peoples and other traditional stewards.

The fertilizer era reduced reliance on local nutrient cycles and created a soil economy dependent on external inputs.

Example: Guano fertilizer: seabird guano from uninhabited islands was a major 19th-century resource. Science and agriculture merged to justify intervention during Green Revolution fears of starvation.

Neo-ecological imperialism: Importing energy and nutrients from other ecosystems, using distant sinks for waste and escaping local recycling limits for industrial benefit.

Example: The Guano Islands Act (1856) and 19th-century competition to claim guano islands reflected geopolitical contention over nutrient sources.

Negative globalization of guano effects: Examples include Nauru and other phosphate islands where colonial mining destroyed environments and livelihoods, leaving islands uninhabitable and economically dependent or impoverished.

Examples from modern reporting: Journalistic accounts (e.g., Tabuchi, NYT) document farms poisoned by PFAS chemicals from sewage sludge used as fertilizer. Such "forever chemicals" move through grass, cattle, milk and human tissues; contamination persists and is inadequately regulated.

Only one U.S. state (Maine) has systematically tested farms for PFAS and banned sludge use, while the EPA has been criticized for promoting sludge without adequate PFAS testing. Whistle-blowers and researchers have raised concerns; regulatory capture and lack of transparency create ongoing public-health risks.

Calls to hold polluters accountable emphasize that chemical companies aware of PFAS dangers must pay for harms caused by contamination.

Power, Environment and Land Rights

Example: French foresters like Lavanden in 20th-century Algeria and Morocco portrayed nomadic pastoralism as desertification when it was often a suitable and sustainable land use. Colonial policies restricted traditional land use, criminalized local practices, and imposed taxation that forced people into wage labor.

Privatizing land and forcing settlement enabled commodification and control, impoverishing local populations by the 1930s and creating long-term legacies reflected in modern African policies.

Early conservation NGOs often had colonial roots and were sometimes run by former colonial officials. They sometimes blamed Africans for environmental degradation and excluded locals from national parks. Postwar international organizations and NGOs promoted preservation while sometimes dispossessing local people, limiting national sovereignty in the postcolonial era.

Ecology became political economy: local people vs corporations. In the neoliberal age, states sometimes police forests and then open them for large-scale commercial cultivation (e.g., palm oil in Indonesia), which displaces villagers and sparks legal and social conflict.

Natural Disasters and Social Vulnerability

Disasters are defined by social vulnerability as much as by geological or meteorological events.

Example: Hurricane Katrina (2005): New Orleans had large areas below sea level; racialized and poor communities lived in the most vulnerable zones. Recovery efforts largely benefited higher-income groups, and reconstruction followed neoliberal priorities.

Disaster capitalism extracts profit from shocks and uses crises to rework market policies and infrastructure to benefit investors rather than the vulnerable.

Example (Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge): Katrina revealed vulnerability, corruption and unresponsiveness, but instead of producing progressive social change, the disaster facilitated further neoliberalization.

Diseases and Epidemiology as Geopolitics

Example: John Snow’s cholera investigation in London (1854) used mapping of water pumps to identify a source of infection—foundational to epidemiology.

AIDS and globalization: Spillover from primate hosts to humans in Central Africa and subsequent spread involved colonial-era labor migrations and global travel. Geopolitical context (colonial legacies, migration, trade and labour patterns) shaped disease emergence and spread.

21st Century: New Green Revolution and Corporatized Agriculture

Example: In 2006 the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation launched alliances for a New Green Revolution in Africa claiming to support small farmers, but outcomes often failed to meet local needs.

Hybrid seeds and corporate varieties sometimes required heavy inputs and favored agribusiness interests. Monsanto and other corporations sought to control seed varieties and distribution, pushing models that favored commercial agriculture over local varieties adapted to local conditions.

Critics call this "climate-stupid" agriculture: practices that deplete topsoil, export fertilizer drift to other places, and rely on herbicides to protect monocultures.

Rosset: Rethinking agrarian reform must recognize the class struggle against capital-dominated agriculture.

Commodities in Motion

Industrialization and Green Revolution methods claimed that surplus production allowed freedom, but commodification of food and mass agriculture caused loss of food sovereignty. Food became a geopolitical commodity producing social, environmental and health disparities.

Standardization of food emphasizes appearance and shelf life over taste, biodiversity and local culture. Ultra-processed food industries create obesity linked to poverty and food deserts in racialized communities.

Advocates call for food sovereignty and the deindustrialization of diets.

Example: The rise of sugar since the 15th century—from New Guinea domestication to becoming a global commodity—illustrates long-term transformations of diets, labor and colonial extraction.

Example (debt peonage in sugar): Systems where workers are compelled to pay debts with labor persist. In India’s Maharashtra, many sugar mills are politically controlled; sugarcane workers often do not own land and rely on advances that trap them in cyclical indebtedness and hazardous work.

Example: U.S. military intervention in Honduras historically protected trade interests, including banana plantations that displaced small farmers and spread crop diseases, requiring more chemical inputs.

Example: Advanced robotic assembly lines at companies like Tesla reflect hyper-industrial standardization and rapid production changes marketed as building the future.

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