Scott Prudham

Taming Trees: Capital, Science, and Nature in Pacific Slope Tree Improvement

Abstract This article traces the emergence of industrial tree improvement along the Pacific Slope of western Oregon and Washington. Anxieties about timber famine in the United States prompted research on forest genetics and Douglas-fir provenance as far back as 1913, while diminishing supplies of old-growth timber resources in this region led to tree improvement—systematic tree breeding to enhance commercially attractive characteristics—on an industrial scale beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, tree improvement has been characterized by a preponderance of co-operation among private, otherwise competitive capitalist firms, with considerable support from state agencies and from science in both research and applied settings. Pacific Slope tree improvement is explored as a case study of the social production of nature by capital and science, particularly the ways in which, in response to natural-resource constraints, the reproductive biology of forest trees has been increasingly targeted, appropriated, and subsumed as a source of industrial productivity. The general absence of exclusively private, proprietary approaches to tree improvement is discussed as a reflection of a set of particular biophysical challenges, including the “problem” of biological time. Thus, while biophysical nature is increasingly socially produced through tree improvement, the social organization of tree improvement bears the inscription of biophysical nature. The article closes with an examination of one of the main avenues by which biotechnology—including genetic engineering—is being incorporated into tree improvement. The new technological possibilities and opportunities for establishing exclusive property rights over plant varieties that biotechnology entails may lead to a more complete model of commodification in tree improvement. Some evidence of such change is already apparent. Though forestry biotechnology is subject to regulatory and wider social sanction, its advent reinforces a main theme in the article: that social and environmental change are interlocking, dialectical processes.

Sustaining Sustained Yield: Class, Politics, and Post-War Forest Regulation in British Columbia

In British Columbia, Canada, industrial sustained-yield forest regulation was embraced together with a system of forest tenures governing private access to public forest lands in the mid-19408. This approach has underpinned forest exploitation and regulation ever since, despite sometimes significant reforms over the years. Yet this approach to forest policy has also come under fire in recent years because of pervasive signs of economic, social, and environmental exhaustion. In this paper I analyze the political circumstances surrounding adoption of this particular approach to governing forest access and forest use in the province of British Columbia. In particular, I draw on historical documentation related to two key provincial Royal Commissions on Forestry conducted in the 1940s and 1950s. These commissions provided an arena for debating alternative approaches to forest regulation in the province, and resulted in a series of recommendations that were key influences on postwar forest policy. Drawing on the debate and particularly on the positions adopted by socialists and trade unionists, I link the politics of forest regulation to the politics of class struggle and class compromise in early postwar British Columbia. This serves the purpose of highlighting important, alternative ideas about forest use values and exchange values that contrast with those that underpin conventional, commodity-oriented forestry in the province, as well as with contemporary alternatives to mainstream forestry. It also serves the purpose of exploring the organization of political consent around industrial, sustained-yield forestry, treating this model of regulation not as something ‘natural’, but rather as something politically contingent and negotiated. And finally, I examine seldom explored links between the politics of producing and regulating nature, and the politics of class struggle under capitalism more generally.

Men and Things: Karl Polanyi, Primitive Accumulation, and Their Relevance to a Radical Green Political Economy

Now is an important moment to be thinking and talking about a critical and normative green political economy. Whether via attempts to develop effective and socially just climate policies at multiple scales of governance [including REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) schemes], or to develop proliferating and controversial neoliberal instruments for dealing with undesirable environmental change, environmental governance, and environmental change in the context of contemporary global capitalism are on the agenda. What would a critical and normative green political economy for the current moment look like? This paper draws on Karl Polanyis The Great Transformation as a resource for answering that question. In particular, Polanyis discussion of problematic and dualistic notions of nature and society in early political economy and the role he accords social struggles over land in developing his theory of fictitious commodities, embeddedness and the double movement are revisited. The paper stresses how Polanyis ideas, at once conceptual and polemical, draw centrally on Marxs theorization of primitive accumulation as an inherent, ‘extra-economic’ facet of historical—geographical capitalism, a differentiated unity linking the commodification and objectification of human and nonhuman natures as exchange-values. In this respect, Polanyi offers (or seems to offer) a potential reconciliation of a politics of nonhuman and human nature through his emphasis on primitive accumulation as a site of both political struggle and epistemic transformation.

Making the Market "Safe" for GM Foods: The Case of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee

Scott Prudham and Angela Morris analyze the complex politics surrounding the regulation of agricultural biotechnology. Governments are subject to conflicting pressures in this area: on the one hand, to support the biotechnology industry, seen as an innovative and potentially transformative sector, and on the other, to respond to consumer concerns about the ethical, social, and safety implications of the new biotech products. Prudham and Morris examine governments attempt to mediate this conflict by considering the case of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee (CBAC) between 1999 and 2003. They argue that the CBAC GM foods project was, at best, a poorly conceived effort to engage with and respond to public concerns about GM foods, compromised by a prior commitment to commercialization.

Introduction: Uneven Development 25 Years On: Space, Nature and the Geographies of Capitalism

This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smiths Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the books significance for the readership of New Political Economy; it remarks on the lasting if not growing significance of Smiths intellectual and political contributions two and a half decades after one of his, and the discipline of geographys, crowning achievements. At the same time it foreshadows ways in which the text can continue to push our understanding of the interconnections among nature, capital and the production of space.

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.

On the Themed Collection, “The Formal and Real Subsumption of Nature”

The title of our (with Rachel Schurman) original Society & Natural Resources article, “Industrial Dyanamics and the Problem of Nature” (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001), signaled our overriding interest at the time in the industrialization of nature. In that article, we developed an analytical framework to investigate the ways in which the biophysical properties and processes of “nonhuman nature” are harnessed and subsumed to different logics of industrial production. We were less interested in exploring processes of commodification and the extension of markets per se, topics that were a focus of scholarly attention at the time and that continue to animate important work on so-called neoliberal natures (see, e.g., Heynen et al. 2007). Rather, we focused on production (the “hidden abode”) and the particular industrial dynamics that emerged out of the ways in which capital takes hold of and circulates through nonhuman nature. We recognized then, as we do now, that “every industry is ultimately ‘nature-based’” (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 567), but have never found that truism to be particularly useful as a point of departure for analysis. Instead we posited that there is something specific about those sectors in which firms are involved in a direct and immediate way in the appropriation and transformation of nonhuman nature. And we tried to identify general tendencies at work in those sectors where nature is confronted as a more-or-less given source of raw materials (i.e., formal subsumption) versus those where nature is (re)made to work harder, faster, and better (i.e., real subsumption). We recognize the limits of this framework as the basis for any sort of general theory of socioecological transformation; we never intended it to serve that function. Our objective was to theorize some of the ways in which capital seeks to take hold of nature and subordinate it to the dictates of industrial production. Our characterization of nature as “obstacle, opportunity, and surprise” in the original article (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 560) was intended to capture the dynamics of this confrontation by avoiding an overemphasis on constraints or obstacles while giving nature a genuine role in the production process. To be sure, our approach was “firmcentric,” and several of the interventions in this special issue have reminded us of the diversity of ways in which nature enables specific strategies of capital accumulation, including in response to regulatory interventions (see, e.g., Cooper in this issue). But we