An ecological-Marxist response to the Half-Earth Project

A paper I wrote together with Brett Clark critiquing a widely circulated "ecocentric" argument claiming that concerns for the fate of nature should override any concerns with social justice in conservation was just published Ahead-of-print in Conservation and Society. Building on the theory of metabolic rift, the paper offers an explicitly Marxist perspective on the proposal to set aside at least half the Earth's surface for biodiversity conservation. Here are the details:
DOI: 10.4103/cs.cs_19_99

Henri Lefebvre’s Marxian ecological critique: recovering a foundational contribution to environmental sociology

The online version of the first in a series of articles we are writing describing Henri Lefebvre's use of Marx's theory of metabolic rift and its potential in developing a geographical perspective on the same was just published in Environmental Sociology. As the title suggests, the focus of this article is on Lefebvre's potential contribution to environmental sociology. Here are the details:
DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2019.1670892

Making Space in Critical Environmental Geography for the Metabolic Rift

The Version of Record of our article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers making the case for stronger engagement with Marx's theory of metabolic rift in geography was published online today. In the article, we critically assess two other Marxist framings in geography from  which criticisms of the theory of metabolic rift have been made, then clarify several important conceptual aspects of the theory that have been misunderstood as a result of these criticisms. We then finish with a discussion of how the theory of metabolic rift relates to key themes in critical environmental geography, and how stronger engagement here could benefit the field. The article is available at Taylor & Francis Online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2019.1598841

Geographic rift in the urban periphery

The preprint of our article in the Journal of Latin American Geography describing work on the use of the concept of geographic rift---i.e., a metabolic rift referring to the spatio-geographical antagonisms associated with the disjuncture between material and value flows through the landscape---to examine the drivers and processes of land change in Morelia's urban periphery was just released. It can be accessed through Project Muse: https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.0.0106