Boulder Again

Boulder Again returns to the city the book opened in, a hundred years later in argumentative time. It excavates what the chapter calls the primordial soup — the late-nineteenth-century intellectual formation of Darwinist biogeography, environmental determinism, eugenics, conservation biology, and colonial spatial theory that circulated as respectable Western science between roughly 1860 and 1920. Friedrich Ratzel’s 1897 Lebensraum, Johan Rudolf Kjellén’s coinage of geopolitik, the conservation-eugenics nexus, and the genealogy that connects American Manifest Destiny to the Nazi Ostkrieg are read as the deep architecture beneath every administrative instrument the book has documented. The vocabulary of Lebensraum was condemned after 1945; the architecture was not. The chapter then turns to three counter-traditions of environmental thought — Black, Indigenous, and antifascist — that have been refusing the architecture for as long as it has been operating, and develops, from their convergent commitments, an eco-cooperative imaginary built on sovereignty, resilience, and sociomaterial stewardship. It closes by asking what infrastructuring solidarity would look like in Boulder, the city where the book began.

From §The Biological Imaginary, mid-chapter:

In 1897, the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel used the word Lebensraum in his Politische Geographie to describe the relationship between a population and the territory it occupies. In 1901, he extended the concept in a biogeographical essay that stated its core premise: the finite surface of the earth is the binding constraint on all life, and the struggle for survival is therefore a struggle for space. Ratzel’s move was a translation of Darwin’s “struggle for life” recast as a “struggle for space,” converting evolutionary biology into territorial politics. While Darwin’s framework left room for adaptation, niche differentiation, and coexistence, Ratzel’s compressed the biological world into a zero-sum contest over fixed terrain.

Read Ratzel’s premise alongside Bartlett’s bacteria-in-a-bottle thought experiment. The catastrophe arrives in the final minutes, a recognition that is too late for intervention. The geographer tells his readers to consider the finite surface of the earth and the populations that draw on it. Both arguments rest on the same foundation: a bounded container, a growing population, and a natural law that governs the relationship between them. Both suppressed the same variables: social organization, technological adaptation, redistribution, political choice. Both converted a conditional projection into an unconditional destiny, and located the source of crisis in the count of population rather than the governance of the territory.

Bartlett likely never read Ratzel but he did not need to. The naturalization of politics as biology is a recurring pattern because it performs what this book has called the will to simplify: it replaces an entire political economy with a single variable — the growth rate, the territorial limit, the carrying capacity — and it makes the replacement appear to be a discovery about nature rather than a choice about governance. The exponential curve, the closed bottle, the finite surface: these are portability engines. They compress complex political questions into simple arithmetic, and the arithmetic’s authority forecloses the political questions it has absorbed. Ratzel articulated this operation in the language of biogeography. Bartlett articulated it in the language of physics. The language changed. The operation persisted.