ABSTRACT
Liberation ecology integrates critical approaches to political economy with notions derived from poststructural philosophy. The quest is to understand the ways human practice transforms the Earth and the ways in which environmental practices, institutions, and knowledges might be subverted, contested, and reformed. In this sense Liberation Ecologies speaks to a critical analysis of environmental degradation and rehabilitation framed by something called development, and also the liberatory potential of struggles and conflicts exactly around these processes. Liberation ecology starts from Marx’s presumption that society-nature relations are the outcomes of the metabolic activity of the labor process-by which nature is humanized and humans are socialized-but posits this metabolism as social, cultural, and discursive as much as it is narrowly “economic.” If nature, to use O’Connor’s language, is a production condition in contradiction with the impulses of a profit-driven commodity economy, the particular ways in which it is configured and transformed must, in our view, be linked to the complex ways in which power, knowledge and institutions sustain particular regimes of accumulation. This so-called “third leg” of the analysis of modernity-the Foucauldian complement to Weber and Marx-represents a central part of liberation ecology as a theoretical enterprise.
