Phil,Neil,the Production of Nature and me

The Production of Nature (PoN) thesis is, for me, the most enduring attempt across geography to capture the relationship at the heart of the discipline. Sauer’s (1925) “naively given section of reality.” It provides the analytical potential to explore the core global questions of climate change, biodiversity loss, development and poverty reduction, and attempts to achieve sustainable futures.

Perhaps O’Keefe et al. (1976) enabled me to always consider differentiated vulnerability as intuitive. Disasters simply don’t affect society equally. Smith (2005) used this to great affect in exploring the causes of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. It truly wasn’t until I comprehended the PoN thesis that drove his argument that I understood its power. It was clear that poverty and environmental risk were deeply entwined, but what was the motive force driving the creation of this vulnerability?

Rereading Uneven Development (Smith, 2008) in 2009 immediately after a global economic crash, a new president, and a Capital seminar was revelatory. And at the heart of this was the PoN thesis. I’d argue that a serious engagement with Marx’s thought is a prerequisite for understanding the full breadth of the thesis. A non-deterministic, non-naturalizing, non-teleological, grounded theory with direct real-world analytical possibility. I found this open dialectical framing makes possible a fruitful engagement with the work of Yapa (1996), in expanding the scope of what is understood at the nexus of both environmental and social production and reproduction.

The interplay between the empirical description in “Rethinking Katrina” and explanation of the theoretical in PoN and UD was evident, and for me must be central to any critical understanding of human–environment relations. In the 3rd ed, foreword he wrote of the need for a “new critical climate change approach.” This remains increasingly critical as a supermajority of the world’s political leaders have accepted the need for decarbonization and a move to net-zero. This opens the opportunity for both progressive and reactionary ideologies of how nature should be produced and reproduced to be contested. The Green New Deal is perhaps as close as mainstream politics has got to articulating this vision. Viewed through the PoN lens, we are immediately faced with defining the response to climate change. Is the point to center the vulnerable, to center the external nature we are inextricably bound to, or to maintain the growth-driven capitalist system of social organization.

In whose material interests is nature produced? Who benefits when social disasters can be explained away by an external nature, albeit one that almost everybody acknowledges we are complicit in shaping. Whose vulnerability gets centered? What, or who, is entitled to be made resilient? Bouncing between analytical and geographical scales, between disasters and development, it is the PoN thesis that remains essential for a coherent understanding. Are we trying to produce a net-zero, but still profit-driven economy? The PoN forces us to engage with a logic of capitalism that is more likely to find new ways of extracting value from nature, than simply collapse in the face of accelerated environmental change (Smith, 1992).

Personally, this has been as important in the classroom as in framing research ideas. From existential disciplinary questions about geography’s unifying forces, to anticipating the widespread acceptance of the Anthropocene as a foundational framing of the current epoch. Questions of conservation, livelihood sustainability, disaster risk reduction, and climate vulnerability all benefit from being framed in the context of “What type of natures are we trying to produce and reproduce. And for whom?” Understood expansively, in an open dialectical framing, the PoN thesis retains immense analytical power and purpose. If we accept the specific forms and means by which capitalism transformed nature, we can confidently talk of living in the specifically Capitalocene (Moore, 2015).

I think Phil’s somewhat offhand comment offers insight. David Harvey brought Marxism into geography. But Neil Smith brought geography into Marxism. Given the immense regard he had for Harvey’s work, this mustn’t be understood as a slight. Rather, it was specifically the PoN thesis that provided a conceptual and material base for the differentiated production of space, and the consequent uneven geographical development of the capitalist mode of production. It was Phil’s contention that nothing had done more to advance Marxism as an intellectual endeavor than this framing of the political economy of the environment. I’d also place it in the context of geographical attempts to satisfactorily capture the human–environment relationship. By pushing the margins of the discipline he reestablished the importance of core geographical concepts.