ABSTRACT
Many of what we call ‘environmental problems’ can be ascribed to the labour process, to the technical division of labour, to the multiple ways in which knowledge is constructed and used and to the ways in which modern societies manipulate nature to produce commodities. All this is not to say that the labour process, including such processes within the home and outside the formal economy, offers a total understanding of modern societies’ relations with nature. But it is a good starting point, and it is a sphere of social life which has gone almost entirely missing in contemporary environmental analysis. However, people’s alienated relations to nature, to one another and to the products of their work cannot be wholly appreciated through a narrow concentration on the labour process. It is certainly with this process that many social and environmental problems start. But to develop the argument we need to take it a stage further, examining not just the division of labour in general but its spatial and temporal forms.
