Scott Prudham

• University of Toronto

Within France, the Languedoc‐Roussillon region (now part of Occitanie) is home to about one third of the nation's area of certified organic vineyards. Each year, the world's largest organic wine fair, Millésime Bio, takes place in the city of Montpellier. This trade fair is an important site where organic wine is not only sold but also given meanin...

In this article, and the companion piece that follows, we develop an account of the socioecological fix. Our concern is to explore the ways in which crises of capitalist overaccumulation might be displaced through spatial fixes that result in the production of nature. We review Harvey's theory of the spatial fix, with emphasis on his model of capit...

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 fixe...

Polity's ‘Resources’ series is a set of scholarly books, each of them dealing with a single resource or resource-based commodity from a generally global or international perspective. As of this writing, nine books have been published in the series, six of which I review here. The series is a welcome contribution to interdisciplinary and overall cri...

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 ne...

Scott Prudham investigates a region that has in recent years seen more environmental conflict than perhaps anywhere else in the country--the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Prudham employs a political economic approach to explain the social and economic conflicts arising from the timber industry's presence in the region. As well, he pr...

This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's 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...

On 21 September 2006 UK über-entrepreneur and Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson pledged approximately £1.6 billion, the equivalent of all the profits from Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains for the next ten years, to fighting climate change. Since then, Branson has restated his commitment to action on global warming, including investment in tech...

In 2002 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled to deny Harvard College a whole organism patent over the oncomouse. In 2004, the same court ruled that Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser had violated Monsanto patents covering GM canola. Both decisions rejected whole organism patents, running counter to US precedents. Yet both, nevertheless, consolidate privat...

RajalaRichard A. Up-Coast: Forests and Industry on British Columbia's North Coast, 1870–2005. Victoria, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. viii + 294 pp. ISBN 0-7726-5460-3, $49.95 (cloth). - Volume 9 Issue 2 - Scott Prudham

In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose fo...

  In 2002 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled to deny Harvard College a whole organism patent over the oncomouse. In 2004, the same court ruled that Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser had violated Monsanto patents covering GM canola. Both decisions rejected whole organism patents, running counter to US precedents. Yet both, nevertheless, consolidate priv...

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-1940s. This approach has underpinned forest exploitation and regulation ever since, despite sometimes significant reforms over the years. Yet this approach to fore...

1. Neoliberalism and the environmentNeoliberalism is the most powerful ideological andpolitical project in global governance to arise in thewake of Keynesianism, a status conveyed by trium-phalist phrases such as ‘‘the Washington consensus’’ andthe ‘‘end of history’’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Jessop,1994; Harvey, 2000; Peck, 2001). Yet the neolibera...

In May of 2000, thousands of residents of the town of Walkerton, Ontario became ill from drinking municipal water contaminated by Escherichia coli and Campylobacter jejuni bacteria. Seven people died, while many suffered debilitating injuries. A highly unusual and risk prone local hydrological regime, coupled with manure spreading on farms near mun...

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 improv...

The logging sector in Oregon is characterized by extensive subcontracting between wood-commodity manufacturing firms and independent logging contractors. Why is this so? Considerable recent scholarship has examined the dynamics of flexible production systems, including regional contractor networks, as prominent aspects of late capitalism. Although...

Existing literature suggests that food, fiber, and raw material sectors differ from manufacturing in significant ways. However, there is no analytical basis for engaging the particular challenges of nature-centered production, and thus the distinct ways that industrialization proceeds in extractive and cultivation-based industries. This article pre...

In the recent political furor over disposition of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, focus has been directed at the ecological shortcomings of the federal sustained yield forest management doctrine. This has occurred in part at the expense of evaluation of these policies based on social criteria. Yet the sustained yield para...

In a separate paper in this issue, we have discussed natural resource accounting methodology. Resource accounting systems fit into the growing literature on environmental information systems, the distinguishing feature of resource accounting systems being that they are designed with the adjustment of macro­ econornic income and wealth tables in min...

Natural resource accounting has emerged from the need to better understand the relationship between human, social and economic systems and those of the natural patrimony. 1 This relationship consists of the provision of various environmental services to human populations, in the form of: 1. consumptive, usually market resources (biological and non-...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Energy and Resources)--University of California, Berkeley, Fall 1999. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 394-418).