The menace presented by the ecology of bushes and weeds makes it imperative that farmers forge and maintain social relationships that are conducive to access to and control over labor for ecologically shaped tasks. Yet farmers have not always met the terms of labor contracts and have been confronted with various forms of resistance that have had implications for production levels. Resistance has often been timed to occur when labor scheduling for optimal production is most critical, especially during the period of weeding. As a result of such resistance, even the wealthier households who are contributing to the state’s growth...

In an ecosystem, the producers are plants, which produce biomass for their own use and some surplus that permits other organisms to live as parasites. Some of these other organisms provide essential local services to the plants, mainly by transporting seeds and pollen. The closest analog of an economic system is a colony of ants or termites or bees, with its specially bred ‘‘workers’’ that gather food and bring it back to the hive or nest. The hive resembles capital, at first glance. It happens that a colony of bees provides an essential service (pollination) for the plants. At first...

“Paying attention to labour is strategic not only to expose the assumptions that sustain the green economy paradigm, but also to understand the ways in which green economies intertwine with processes of labour transformation, such as employment casualization. Interventions on the role of green economies in transforming contemporary work are arising within political ecology debates. For example, Neimark recently used the case of environmental service payments to rethink precarious and informal labour in the Global South (Neimark, 2018). My analysis points out that green recruitment mobilizes environmentalist values, beliefs and tropes to articulate an ideological representation of green work. As...

Moving beyond the classic “agrarian question” and instead grappling with a contemporary “global agrifood system question” enables us to better situate empirical work related to food production and consumption. To this end, I offer three potential directions for future research. First, a fuller engagement with labor along the entire supply chain will generate a better understanding of the role of retail, processing, marketing, distribution, and foodservice sectors in shaping the global agrifood system. Second, a process‐oriented approach to examining food production can better explicate the connections between the rural–urban and Global North–South and link the experiences of food chain workers...

(p.1685) any technological breakthrough, if adopted on a sufficiently wide scale, will have far-reaching externalities, both positive and negative.

(p.1685) any technological breakthrough, if adopted on a sufficiently wide scale, will have far-reaching externalities, both positive and negative.

(p.1692) One could argue that, in its earliest days, the fossil fuel revolution was mostly beneficial and relatively harmless. Its disastrous side effects were the result of the sheer breadth and depth of the penetration of fossil fuel-based products into every aspect of human life. Moreover, the collateral inertia associated with the vast investments made over the years have created the pronounced path dependency that has caused so much difficulty as we try to migrate away from fossil fuels. We are now making important decisions about big data—decisions about issues such as technology platforms, governance mechanisms, ownership structures, and access rights....

impacts that work induces structurally, independently of the labour process itself. Work induced Mobility comprises phenomena such as commuter traffic or business travel; mobility that only exists because work necessitates it. Notably, it needs to be fast, i.e. energy intensive, owing to business-people's busyness and employees' time constraints (Feenberg 1999). Work induced Infrastructure includes built infrastructure such as office buildings, factories, warehouses and industrial estates, their water, power and hea ting/cooling supply, ancillary power plants, roads, tracks and parking sites, as well as technical and supportive service infrastructure. This infrastructure is built and maintained only for the purpose of allowing...

Ecosocialism now reveals itself as a struggle for use-value and through a realized use-value, for intrinsic value. This means it is a struggle for the qualitative side of things: not just the hours worked and the pay per hour and benefits, but the control over work and its product, and of what is beyond mere necessity a control that eventuates in the creation and integration of new ecosystems, and also incorporates subjectivity, beauty, pleasure, and the spiritual. These demands were part of the labor tradition, as workers asked for not just bread but roses, too. We would take it to...