Reading the socio-ecological fix through the lens of labour: the subsumption of nature and labour in British Columbia's forests

Michael Ekers

Chapter 33 in Handbook of Labour Geography, 2025, pp 542-554 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Recent debates on ‘socio-ecological fixes’ explore how the reproduction of capital is pursued through the appropriation of land and resources and/or by means of fixing capital within the materiality of ‘Nature’. This chapter questions how the formal and real subsumption of Nature shapes the lives of workers and the politics of labour. These arguments are grounded through investigating two ‘fixes’ in the forests of British Columbia (BC), Canada. First, I examine how the labour of unemployed men in Depression-era BC was enrolled into relief camps in order to establish infrastructure aimed at accelerating the growth of timber production in the 1930s. Second, I explore how the financial acquisition of private forest lands on Vancouver Island in the early 2000s resulted in heavy job losses. Through profiling these two fixes against one another, the chapter explores how the formal and real subsumption of Nature shapes the lives, organisation, and politics of labour.

Keywords: Labour geographies; Socio-ecological fix; Subsumption of nature and labour; Forestry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781785363399
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781785363405.00057 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:16884_43

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().