Planet Earth Strikes Back: Landscapes of Toxicity in Latin American Fiction

This essay discusses how contemporary Latin American literature (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) employs the discourse of toxicity—condensed in the metaphor of bio-engineering and mutation—to process and interrogate what Jason Moore has called the “Capitolecene.” Moore proposes to understand the “accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity.” This essay considers how the co-production of nature, impelled by greed (a recurring allegory of capitalism) goes terribly wrong by generating toxic biomes. As such, these texts function as ecocritical allegories of the Capitolecene (specifically in its iteration as biocapitalism) and its human and environmental consequences.

Antinomies of space and nature or an open totality? Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on nature and society

The work of Henri Lefebvre has played a pivotal role in human geography in recent decades. At the same time, it has frequently been subject to partial and fragmented appropriations that isolate his insights on the production of space from his broader corpus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding his handling of the dialectical relationships between space, time, society, and nature. In particular, Neil Smith's claim that Lefebvre's conceptualization of nature was both deficient and inconsistent with his dynamic conceptualization of space has tended to dominate geographical engagements with Lefebvre in this area. Following Smith, researchers generally reconstruct the production of space as an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. We critically assess and respond to Smith's criticisms of Lefebvre. Specifically, we contrast Lefebvre's material–dialectical approach to Smith's production-of-nature thesis. While Smith's thesis is helpful in understanding how capital attempts to subsume all of nature under commodity production, Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of nature–society as an oppositional unity points both to the impossibility of capital subsuming all of nature and the dangers that its attempts to do so pose to human civilization (even survival). Lefebvre's observations, regarding the growing rupture between natural processes and spatial dynamics, which he incorporates into his own elaboration of Karl Marx's theory of metabolic rift, make his work indispensable to the development of an ecospatial critique within geography and the social sciences more generally.

Swyngedouw’s puzzle: Surplus-value production in socionature

This article engages with Swyngedouw’s puzzle, that is, how is surplus-value production under capitalism conceptualised given the entanglement of humans and non-human entities. It identifies how Swyngedouw’s socionature – a concept/way to express the oneness of human and non-human under capitalism – posed a critique to the tendency of labour-centred analysis in Marxist thought such as Neil Smith’s concept of ‘production of nature’ but did not engage with how surplus-value is produced. This article makes visible the role of non-wage-labour in surplus-value production through reference to Moore’s concept of value-relations and oikeios.

Performing the ecological fix under state entrepreneurialism: A case study of Taihu New Town, China

China’s eco-cities are often regarded as branding tactics of the entrepreneurial local state for economic growth and land revenue generation. However, it is not clear whether the ecological goal has been pursued at all. This paper fills this lacuna using a case study of Taihu New Town. Through an ecological fix perspective we suggest that ecological enhancement through the production of nature is attempted in conjunction with the production of the built environment. The ecological fix is not confined to an economic agenda. Under state entrepreneurialism, the central state maintains environmental governance in the name of ‘ecological civilisation’, while the local state performs the ecological fix. In Wuxi, the fixes include the removal of low-efficiency, polluting town and village enterprises (TVEs); creation of green space and infrastructure; the development of renewable energy; and low-carbon transition.

A world in reverse: The political ecology of racial capitalism

This article advances a ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ approach to further our understanding of the underlying systemic relations and logics of power driving planetary ecological crises. The particular concern here is to demonstrate how race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive society/nature relation fuelling both the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the capitalist world-system. It does so by first identifying, as a foundational space-time of racial capitalism, a socio-ecological contact zone within which Indigenous and Black peoples’ earth-worlding capacity, situated in deep time and place, is indispensable to the survival of ‘late arriving’ Euro-Western settlers. It is out of the refusal of an emergent settler-master to recognize their dependence upon Indigenous and Black earth-world-making gifts that, this article argues, race emerges as a structuring relation of power transmuting such earth-worlds into lands and bodies given by nature/Earth. Such a transmutation functions to conceal the underlying reproductive conditions – Indigenous and Black earth-worlding capacity – of that which is now marked as nature/Earth. It is, then, the racialized production of nature that accounts, ultimately, for both the excess (from appropriation of Indigenous and Black earth-worlds) and exhaustion (from erasure of their constituting conditions) of the political ecology of racial capitalism.

The World Ecology of Desalination

World-systems scholars are increasingly engaged in issues at the intersection of ecological and economic concerns since the proliferation of debates on the Anthropocene. Recently, the alternative concept of Capitalocene—age of Capital—has emerged to draw attention to the world-ecological disruption of capitalism founded on cheap nature appropriation at ever-emerging extraction zones. This paper extends these discussions to the oceanic frontier, as the latest trend in the abstraction of value from the environment. Based on original archival research conducted in the context of a larger ethnographic project on the politics of industrial desalination—creating potable water from the sea—the article analyzes how this practice emerged in two phases. First, the Cold War opened the ocean as a commodity frontier during the pax Americana. Then, when this technopolitical agenda stagnated, financialization techniques were deployed to appropriate seawater, utilizing a mode of financial engineering—desalination via financialization reinstates the cultural hegemony of the Capitalocene that privileges infrastructure for water supply management solutions. As such, the article highlights the co-production of nature with financial capitalism.

Value, (use) values, and the ecologies of capital: On social form, meaning, and the contested production of nature.

This paper connects hitherto distant strands of literature to contribute to the ongoing turn to value theory in socio-ecological studies. Starting from Marx’s understanding of value as social form, I revisit Neil Smith’s contribution to the question of value and nature and argue for a reassessment of the internal relations between valorisation and the ‘vernacular’ dimensions of socio-ecological reproduction. I approach this problem through Bolívar Echeverría’s reconstruction of the category of use-value and his understanding of the pivotal role it plays in Marx’s critique, which allows for an open and non-reductive account of the subsumption of socio-ecologies under capitalism as contradictory entanglements of abstraction and meaning. The paper mobilises these insights alongside Marxian-inspired anthropological theories of value – the work of Terence Turner and David Graeber – in order to sketch elements for a symbolic-materialist framework to approach the question of value in its cultural-moral register, its relation to value as economic form, and issues of moral economy and ecology under capitalism.

Suburban wilderness in the Houston metropolitan landscape

This article examines the intersections of community activism and wilderness in the sprawling suburban and industrial landscapes of Houston, Texas, in the United States. The Houston metropolitan region's rapid urban development, laissez-faire land use planning, and world-class petrochemical industries provide a critical context to explore the material and conceptual relations of wilderness. Building upon recent debates regarding the production of nature, the article argues that wilderness is and always has been integrated into our everyday suburban landscapes. The empirical data discussed reveals the practices and processes (re)producing wilderness materially and conceptually within the contemporary relations of urban life. It challenges us to envision wilderness as internal to society and society as internal to wilderness. The results suggest that wilderness, instead of being external and in need of protection, is internal to the human experience and therefore internal to our urban landscapes. Key Words: wilderness, urban development, production of nature, community activism, Houston, TX