The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Podcast for Social Research, Episode 93: Nature's Value — Alyssa Battistoni in Conversation with Nafis Hasan and Ajay Singh Chaudhary

·1 hr 39 min·5 clips

BT cotton raises yields, but Ajay says it can turn agriculture from net positive to consumptive.

1. The Podcast for Social Research episode centers on Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts and Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s The Exhaust of the Earth. 2. Alyssa Battistoni is an assistant professor at Barnard College, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 3. Nafis Hasan frames the discussion around the question of how capitalism organizes nature, extraction, and labor. 4. Nafis starts with The Giving Tree and asks how a children’s book can clarify the “free gift.” 5. Alyssa says the boy in The Giving Tree strips the tree of apples, branches, and trunk, then sells those parts for money. 6. She argues that the story becomes disturbing when read as an adult because the tree’s body is turned into commodity value. 7. Alyssa connects that reading to deforestation in the Congo, where trees are cut and sold for firewood because people need to survive. 8. Ajay says his own work traces extraction “across circuits,” including social position, geography, and the mental and physical divide. 9. He uses the phrase “human ecological niche” instead of nature and links extraction to what he calls a “vicious cycle” of shrinking human flourishing. 10. Alyssa says classical political economists treated soil fertility, wind, and sheep organs as “free gifts” to production. 11. She says Marx criticized that view by arguing that capitalist wealth and material stuff are not the same thing. 12. Ajay says the free gift shows up inside production, not only outside it, because machinery and cooperative labor are themselves shaped by nature. 13. He cites Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital to show how coal supports factory discipline and hyper-efficiency. 14. Alyssa says capital tries to make agriculture run on a 24-hour clock through breeding, GMOs, and genetic modification. 15. Ajay discusses Alex Blanchett’s work on standardized hogs, where animal bodies are engineered for uniform, repetitive labor processes. 16. They also discuss BT cotton, patented seeds, higher inputs, and the debt cycles faced by smallholders in India and the United States. 17. The tone is analytical and conversational, with both speakers correcting each other and comparing books in real time. 18. The format moves between theory, examples, and side comments about Muji pens, guano, and tariff politics. 19. Listeners interested in Marx, climate politics, and agriculture will get the most from it. 20. Listeners looking for a short, purely introductory overview may want something simpler.

As heard by us

A sharp, patient conversation about nature, enclosure, and climate politics that resists easy romanticism.

This conversation treats nature as a political problem rather than a postcard. It connects conservation, enclosure, and the way parks can welcome visitors while still keeping others out.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want climate theory that pushes back on romantic ideas of nature.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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