Ruminations with 'climate cattle': Towards a theory of metabo-politics

Keywords: Bovine geographies, metabo-politics, climate cattle, metabolism, cows, climate change
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 20

Abstract

A young boy sings as he walks through a field of cut-out cows farting and burping: “to change emissions, Burger King went on a mission, testing diets that will help reduce their farts.” In this recent advert, Burger King promises that by altering cow diets, they can reduce methane emissions from their cows, and consumers can continue to enjoy their burgers at a lower environmental cost. In this paper, we examine the production of ‘climate cattle’ through the conceptual lens of metabo-politics: a novel mode of governance that occurs across geographical scales, from the microbial to the corporeal to the planetary. Metabolism is a multi-scalar, plural concept, both everywhere and nowhere (Barua et al., 2020). It stems from both 19th century developments in the biological, chemical, and physical sciences, and from political economy. In the rumen of cattle, these two traditions meet. We draw on expert interviews with researchers, farmers, and engineers who are experimenting with novel bovine feeds designed to reduce methane emissions from bovine eructation and flatulence. Although the success of these experiments is heavily contested, companies continue to market these products and consumers are increasingly interested in them. Climate cattle are thus being reimagined as forms of environmentally-friendly lively capital. We show that the rumen has become a site through which climate governance is enacted, specifically via the relationship between microbes, cows, feed, and methane. This, we suggest, involves a new mode of governance over metabolic flows, rather than over bodies (anatamo-politics) or populations (biopolitics).