Reading the Socio-Ecological Fix Through the Lens of Labour: The Subsumption of Nature and Labour in British Columbia's Forests

Recent debates on ‘socio-ecological fixes’ explore how the reproduction of capital is pursued through the appropriation of land and resources and/or by means of fixing capital within the materiality of ‘Nature’. This chapter questions how the formal and real subsumption of Nature shapes the lives of workers and the politics of labour. These arguments are grounded through investigating two ‘fixes’ in the forests of British Columbia (BC), Canada. First, I examine how the labour of unemployed men in Depression-era BC was enrolled into relief camps in order to establish infrastructure aimed at accelerating the growth of timber production in the 1930s. Second, I explore how the financial acquisition of private forest lands on Vancouver Island in the early 2000s resulted in heavy job losses. Through profiling these two fixes against one another, the chapter explores how the formal and real subsumption of Nature shapes the lives, organisation, and politics of labour.