Producing Capitalist Landscapes: Ethnographies of the Green Transition and its Contradictions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue “Producing capitalist landscapes: Ethnographies of the green transition and its contradictions” lays out the foundations of our shared approach to the study of capitalist processes of socioenvironmental transformation and spells out some of the main findings and common themes that traverse the articles in the collection. Thus, in the first part we present the basic tenets of Marxist historical ethnography, and discuss how it can be applied to the study of capitalism as an environment-making historical system. A brief summary of the articles in the special issue shows that each one of them represents a particular take on the study of the production of capitalist landscapes within the context of the green or low-carbon transition. In the second part we engage with three common threads that emerge from the collection: the dialectic between capitalist value, social worth and processes of cultural and economic devaluation; the role of the state in coordinating the production of environments appropriated to the goals of capitalist accumulation; and the symbolic and environmental dimensions of technological fixes.