Michael Ekers

Revitalizing the production of nature thesis A Gramscian turn

This paper revisits the central ontological claim in the production of nature thesis, Neil Smith’s proposition that labour is at the heart of the mutual co-production of nature and society. Surveying Smith’s work and others, we argue that there is a danger of losing the embodied, historically and geographically specific practices that are so central to the making of natures. Turning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, we find crucial resources that enable a historicized and geographically contextualized understanding of the making of natures.

The Socioecological Fix: Fixed Capital, Metabolism, and Hegemony

This article, the second of two, argues that conceptualizing the socioecological fix involves understanding how fixed capital, as a produced production force, can transform the socioecological conditions and forces of production while also securing the hegemony of particular social hierarchies, power relations, and institutions. We stress that fixed capital is inherently political–ecological in its constitution and how it shapes socioecological processes of landscape transformation. Fixed capital necessarily congeals socioecological materials and processes and can be understood as a produced form of nature tied to the circulation of value and the deployment of social labor. Fixed capital is therefore inherently metabolic and internalizes and transforms socioecologies. We also discuss the fixing of capital within socioecological landscapes as processes involving both the formal and real subsumption of nature. We emphasize the dual role of fixed capital formation in shaping the socioecological conditions and forces of production and, more broadly, of everyday life. Thus, we argue, fixed capital formation as a metabolic process cannot be fully conceptualized in narrowly economic terms. We turn to Gramsci and some recent work in political ecology to argue that socioecological fixes need to be understood in ideological terms and specifically in the establishment and contestation of hegemony.

A fix in the forests: relief labor and the production of reforestation infrastructure in Depression-Era Canada

In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the use of relief labor in the development of forest research stations represented a socio-ecological fix to the broad crisis of the 1930s that sought to: (1) secure the conditions for renewed capital accumulation, (2) tackle the problem of unemployment, and (3) address the frayed legitimacy of the state and forestry sector. I build on debates on the formal and real subsumption of nature to consider the socio-ecological dimensions of David Harvey’s theorization of the “spatial fix.”

The curious case of ecological farm interns: on the populism and political economy of agro-ecological farm work

ABSTRACT This article examines how farm interns, as a new group of non-waged agricultural workers, have come to support marginally or non-profitable agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. Are farm interns potential agents of social change alongside farmers or are they being recruited onto farms because of the precarious economic situation of their agro-ecological farm hosts? I engage with this question through drawing on debates in agrarian studies arguing that farm interns should be understood as a contemporary manifestation and negotiation of the agrarian question that re-works a number of historical agrarian trends.