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Concerted clamors ring in the corridors of our planet: "Nature is dying, and with it, life on earth. Humans! Your end is approaching." Are we then battling the postendist phase of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the "unborn"-those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of present politics and society? How are we, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "responsible for our rose"? (Anderson 1987: vii) Are we entering a new eco-logics of nature? And how is a Green politics formed that may, in the process, globe the earth? Loren Eiseley observes: It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soils, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned-escaped, it may be-spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master. (Eiseley 1960: 123-24) What happens to nature now? Is nature now...

"For most indigenous communities, communal lands and natural resources have fundamental spiritual, social, cultural, economic and political significance that is integrally linked to both their identity and continued survival. Denial of the inherent and inalienable rights to their traditional land and natural resources is often at the root of human rights violations, giving rise to intra-state tensions and laying the foundation for emerging and ongoing conflicts. Full enjoyment of their land rights, including access to and control over the lands and their natural resources, would imbue indigenous peoples with the economic independence they need to preserve their distinct cultures and determine their futures. Immediate resolution of this issue is critical to ensuring that indigenous peoples are able to enjoy the rights to which they are entitled, and to enhance stability at the national level. It is suggested that one possible means is through the strategic reconceptualisation of self-determination. More specifically, the implementation of alternative manifestations of this right, particularly the effective realisation of the emerging right to autonomy, recognised in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, would enable indigenous peoples to have effective, de facto control over all aspects of their political, social, cultural and economic survival."

"This article investigates the treatment of gender issues in "research for development" natural resources management (NRM) projects. Through discussion of an NRM research project in the United Kingdom and India, the article explores how the use of inaccurate gender stereotypes results in projects being compromised. The article seeks to explain why this happens despite widespread appreciation of the centrality of gender issues to NRM and poverty. In explanation the article identifies the significance of difficulties in the partnerships between the natural and social science dimensions of these projects. The study demonstrates that instead of easy and equal partnership, the relationship between natural and social science practitioners and practices remains characterized by inequality and poor communication, with serious consequences for the understanding of, and response to, gender issues."

Uneven Development endeavours to derive a theory of uneven geographical development by putting in motion a 'historical dialogue' between Marx's critical theorisation of capitalism and the geograhical reality of capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, and by theorising the relations between material nature and the spatial dynamics of capitalist accumulation. The result, however, is a theory of uneven development predicated on a logical rather than a historical conception of capitalism, which furthermore supersedes the question of the production of nature in conceptualising the spatial dynamics of (contemporary) capitalism. This article argues for a re-theorisation of uneven geographical development that considers the production of nature, namely extractive industry, as a point of departure in theorising the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalist accumulation, focusing briefly on the concentration and centralisation of capital.

Neil Smith's Uneven Development has had profound impacts on the way geographers have come to understand questions related to space and nature. In this short piece I explain what UD brings to a longstanding literature and set of debates that is commonly named 'the Agrarian Question' and revolves around agriculture's unique relationship to capitalist relations of production. Smith's distinctive approach that sees nature and space as produced by capitalist relations of production helps resolve some of the longstanding debates within the study of agriculture. While this piece applies the production of nature thesis to one particular social scientific field, I hope it points to the currency and significance of this understanding for many other academic fields and for political economy more generally.

This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the book's significance for the readership of New Political Economy; it remarks on the lasting if not growing significance of Smith's intellectual and political contributions two and a half decades after one of his, and the discipline of geography's, crowning achievements. At the same time it foreshadows ways in which the text can continue to push our understanding of the interconnections among nature, capital and the production of space.

"Nature and Eros is an integral educational process offered to graduate students at the California Institute of Integral Studies. This course was developed in response to the illusion, operative throughout Western industrialized culture, that we are separate selves living upon the earth. Across many disciplines we are awakening to the knowledge that we are living organisms intricately woven into the ever-evolving vibrant web of life. The central aim of Nature and Eros is to support a shift in our perception of this larger web and activate the lived recognition of our deepest identity as an inextricable part of cosmic evolution."

"This paper is focused on Tanure Ojaide's poetry as ecocritical art for negating ecological imperialism, which he envisions is one of the major causes of political impasse, ecological malaise and socio-economic dissonance in the Niger delta of Nigeria as well as a fundamental obstacle to its remaking. In order to remake this region for environmental and developmental sustainability, Ojaide's poetics advances the possibility of this through art of resistance, a kind of dissidence poetry couched in ecocriticism that negates ecological imperialism, a capitalist practice that destroys the Niger delta environment. Ecocriticism is a type of aesthetics or artistic representation that considers the nature of the relationship existing between literature and the natural environment. The central idea of this paper is that Ojaide's ecocritical poetry is premised on questioning as well as negating imperialist operations in the Niger delta, where the activities of the multinationals in partnership with Nigeria's political class have left a ledger of destruction, deprivation and violence. Thus, in Ojaide's contention, since art is a refraction of realities in human world, it could be a potent instrument in remaking Nigeria for sustainable development through the insights and possibilities that it offers."

This commentary on Neil Smith's Uneven Development revisits his production of nature thesis and uses it as a jumping off point to explore how human bodies matter in contemporary capitalism. It argues that human bodies are increasingly subsumed within capitalism in ways that go beyond the roles of humans as labourers and purchasers of goods and services in a system of commodities producing commodities. Bodies are also treated as property, transportation and as conditions of production within circuits of capitalisms. Bodies also absorb the externalities and excesses of production and provide new spaces of accumulation in their degradation.

"Justice occupies a special place in the pantheon of virtues. For the ancients, it was often conceived as the master virtue, the one that orders all the others. For Plato, justice had exactly this overarching status. A just individual, he tells us in The Republic, is one in whom the three parts of the soul-reason, spirit, appetite-and the three virtues associated with them-wisdom, courage, moderation-stand in the right relation to one another. Justice in the city is precisely analogous. In the just city, each class exercises its own distinctive virtue by performing the task suitable for its nature, and none interferes with the others. The wise and rational part does the ruling, the brave and spirited part does the soldiering, and the rest, those lacking special spirit or intelligence but capable of moderation, do the farming and the manual labouring. Justice is the harmonious balance among these constituent elements."

"In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time."

""Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent. First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991-1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry. By the early 2000s there was a growing number of lawsuits, most notably the Cloud and Baxter class actions. In 1998, following RCAP, the federal government issued a "statement of regret" for physical and sexual violations and established the Aboriginal Healing

"In "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein claims that people only appreciate contemporary works of culture retrospectively. Stein keenly quips, "the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer." Kenneth Goldsmith's new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, aims to lessen the lag, for this is a critical poetics that seeks to clarify. Donning his outlaw status as UbuWeb innovator, conceptual poetry provocateur (as evidenced in his Harriet blog posts for the Poetry Foundation, from which this collection is largely culled), and author of works including Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003), and The Weather (2005), Goldsmith, not quite making a claim to the classic, seeks to advance understanding of avant-garde work being done now."

"Through readings of Cherríe Moraga's book of poetry and prose The Last Generation and memoir Waiting in the Wings, this essay argues that Moraga's refusal to ascribe to any notion of ideological or political purity-whether normative or queer-regarding reproductive sexuality indexes the dual nature of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power in the contemporary moment. That is, Moraga's complex identifications as butch and mother, queer and nationalist confounds any categorical definition of radical politics or recalcitrance to power. In the wake of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a new mode of power emerged that constitutes surplus as both surplus labor-produced out of the conditions of exploitation-and surplus existence-produced out of conditions of devaluation. In this new capitalist configuration, Moraga's very inconsistency can be read as a condition of "crisis.""

"Community informatics (CI) is a form of activism that involves the application of information and communication technologies in pursuit of community development within localities. This article draws on discourse theory (DT) to re-evaluate activists' self-interpretations that rely on community, and to make sense of the political struggles at the heart of CI. It is argued that activists' community discourse constructs, through articulation, locally "resistant" collective identities and an associated collective agency capable of appropriating technology in pursuit of unfulfilled social demands. However DT also suggests that the socially progressive nature of CI is not guaranteed by recourse to the social ideal of community."

"Folk conceptualizations of racism can be defined as ordinary people's understandings of the sources and persistence of racism. They function as equalization strategies - by denying the legitimacy of racism - and guide beliefs regarding antiracism strategies. I explore folk explanations of racism among black professionals in Brazil and South Africa by drawing on sixty interviews with members of these groups. In Brazil, racism is understood as an historical lingering, a product of ignorance, which will disappear with time and education. In South Africa, racism is viewed as more resilient, as a part of human nature and as a consequence of the competition for resources. These explanations of racism are closely related to the antiracism narratives that are salient in these two contexts: while Brazilian respondents affirm their belief in racial mixture and moral education, South African respondents are more uncertain about the possibilities of weaker racial boundaries in their country, relying on institutional constraints as their main antiracism strategy."

"This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans)."

"Gramsci's writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci had been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist-technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the 'Gramscian tradition' as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost 20 years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci's contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and provide an analysis of Gramsci's writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of Gramsci's work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part I, I question the use of the notion of 'Gramscian tradition' made by its critics, and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In Parts II and III, I consider Gramsci's specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part II, I consider Gramsci's pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active i

The global financial crisis of 2009-2010 has further underscored the demise of social democracy as a legitimate political alternative, for example, due to an absence of a clearly articulated alternative approach to the crisis offered by Social Democratic parties, even though neoliberal deregulated markets have proven to be vulnerable to the corrupt and opaque practices that created a massive crisis of systemic confidence. The author contends that the Maastricht process has transformed the Western European party system away from parties based on ideology and toward catchall issue-oriented parties. For Socialist and Social Democratic parties, this has meant the end of the centrality of the welfare state in their ideological domain. However, other trends have been equally damaging. Unionization, which has been in decline since the 1980s, primarily because of the changing nature of the labor force in postindustrial societies, has been further affected by the Maastricht criteria, which sought to enhance the competitiveness through increasing productivity, reducing wage costs, and significantly restructuring the labor relations that organized labor had achieved. For Social Democratic parties, the changing demographic of its support base, the ideological collapse of the Soviet Union, the adoption of the Maastricht convergence agenda, and the rise of a debt-infused consumer culture has meant death.

Leading sociologists have approached the climate crisis by emphasising a way forward and identifying hopeful directions. What sense is to be made of suggestions that we are instead on the brink of a 'collapse' in which the crisis is not resolved but leads to the end of existing civilisation? Partly based on three studies of contemporary opinion in the Hunter Valley in Australia, a coal industry centre, this discussion is also based on an examination of the public response to climate change world wide, the nature of the crisis as understood by science, the political response so far and the economic problems of replacing fossil fuels. What social theories might help explain what is happening? It is concluded that 'collapse' can be understood by conceiving capitalist society as a social machine, informed by a 'social imaginary'.