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By now it is well established, even in the mainstream press, that the history and geography of capitalism is riven with periodic downturns, some serious enough to warrant the term "crisis." Considerable difference of opinion, however, persists when it comes to understanding these episodes of stagnation and devaluation, and whether and how the more serious ones can and do lead to qualitative transformations in the way capital accumulation "works." Within these debates, remarkably little scholarship (certainly within the geography literature) has systematically developed what we might call the political ecology of capitalist crises, that is the role of specific socio-natural transformations (both material and semiotic, political, and ecological) in constituting and resolving (if temporarily) periodic paroxysms in the uneven historical geography of capitalism. And yet, in the Anthropocene, the scope of the climate change problem continues to broaden, posing disquieting questions about global governance (Wainwright and Mann, 2012) the intensification of industrial cultivation systems in agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture more tightly couples the production of biological life with capital accumulation, with attendant political-ecological ramifications (see e.g. Fargione

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Virgin Group Chairman and UK celebrity entrepreneur Richard Branson pledged to divert all the profits from Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains for the subsequent ten years (worth an estimated »1.6 billion) to``fight global warming'' (see BBC News 2006; The Guardian 2007). The announcementöshepherded by former US President Bill Clintonöwas made in Washington DC and garnered considerable interest from the international media. It was followed by a 10 February 2007 commitment of »12.8 million (then worth about US $25 million) to the sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for deep geological storage. These initiatives arrived amid signs that public awareness about global warming and willingness to act are growing in the Anglo-American world. Rising public consciousness and engagement have been particularly evident in the UK of late. In this context, one facet of the growing profile of climate change as a decidedly public policy challenge is the proliferation of political and entertainment industry elites who have championed action to abate and offset anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.Branson, through his relentless self-promotion and attention-seeking (and getting!) ways, undoubtedly belongs in the pantheon of contemporary Anglo-American cultural elites. At the same time he represents something else. Branson's fame is primarily

This article, the second of two, argues that conceptualizing the socioecological fix involves understanding how fixed capital, as a produced production force, can transform the socioecological conditions and forces of production while also securing the hegemony of particular social hierarchies, power relations, and institutions. We stress that fixed capital is inherently political ecological in its constitution and how it shapes socioecological processes of landscape transformation. Fixed capital necessarily congeals socioecological materials and processes and can be understood as a produced form of nature tied to the circulation of value and the deployment of social labor. Fixed capital is therefore inherently metabolic and internalizes and transforms socioecologies. We also discuss the fixing of capital within socioecological landscapes as processes involving both the formal and real subsumption of nature. We emphasize the dual role of fixed capital formation in shaping the socioecological conditions and forces of production and, more broadly, of everyday life. Thus, we argue, fixed capital formation as a metabolic process cannot be fully conceptualized in narrowly economic terms. We turn to Gramsci and some recent work in political ecology to argue that socioecological fixes need to be understood in ideological terms, and specifically in the establishment and contestation of hegemony.

In British Columbia, Canada, industrial sustained-yield forest regulation was embraced together with a system of forest tenures governing private access to public forest lands in the mid-19408. This approach has underpinned forest exploitation and regulation ever since, despite sometimes significant reforms over the years. Yet this approach to forest policy has also come under fire in recent years because of pervasive signs of economic, social, and environmental exhaustion. In this paper I analyze the political circumstances surrounding adoption of this particular approach to governing forest access and forest use in the province of British Columbia. In particular, I draw on historical documentation related to two key provincial Royal Commissions on Forestry conducted in the 1940s and 1950s. These commissions provided an arena for debating alternative approaches to forest regulation in the province, and resulted in a series of recommendations that were key influences on postwar forest policy. Drawing on the debate and particularly on the positions adopted by socialists and trade unionists, I link the politics of forest regulation to the politics of class struggle and class compromise in early postwar British Columbia. This serves the purpose of highlighting important, alternative ideas about forest use values and exchange values that contrast with those that underpin conventional, commodity-oriented forestry in the province, as well as with contemporary alternatives to mainstream forestry. It also serves the purpose of exploring the organization of political consent around industrial, sustained-yield forestry, treating this model of regulation not as something ‘natural’, but rather as something politically contingent and negotiated. And finally, I examine seldom explored links between the politics of producing and regulating nature, and the politics of class struggle under capitalism more generally.

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