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Book review: The Politics of Climate Change Anthony Giddens, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009, £55.00, paperback, £12.99, 256pp. The Politics of Climate Change – his latest book – tells far us more about Anthony Giddens that it does the topic described in its title. Having the capacity to say something is not the same thing as having something worth saying. The alarm bells sound as early as page two, where the 'Giddens paradox'™ is defined: '€˜It states that, since the dangers posed by global warming aren'€™t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life – however awesome they may appear – many will sit on their hands and do nothing concrete about them. Yet waiting until they become visible and acute before being stirred to serious action will, by definition, be too late'€™.To coin a neologism in one'€™s own name takes a lot of chutzpah at the best of times; to do it when such a well-known and simple idea is being described indicates a sheer lack of judgement. In this essay I want to suggest that The Politics of Climate Change bespeaks a man possessed of the desire and the means to make his views known – yet whose arguments will, alas, have little impact on their intended audience such is their inadequacy.

The events triggered by defaults on 'sub-prime' mortgages have been widely described as constituting a 'crisis'. But a crisis of what exactly? Several different explanations of the 20 month drama that unfolded from summer 2007 have been proposed by a wide range of commentators. These include journalists, academics, politicians, business-people, pundits and public administrators, among others. This essay parses this superfluity of crisis talk into five principal accounts. It focuses on the Anglo-American scene. The interpretations presented range from the simplistic and populist to the complex and specialised. They are compared and contrasted, and in each case their diverse normative implications are sketched. As a Marxist, I argue that the fifth interpretation – which speaks to macro-economic imbalances and asymmetries of class power – is the most compelling. But I also argue that each of the other interpretations can be narrated and politicised in such a way as to advance Left arguments for far-reaching socio-economic reform. Yet, this fact notwithstanding, the Left – by which I mean those positioned left of both New Labour and the Democrats – has so far failed to use the recent crisis to its political advantage. This, I suggest, is a sign of its long-standing marginality in Britain and the US – a marginality so entrenched that even an acute economic crisis has been unable to alter it. This crisis thus reveals a seeming paradox: the continued strength of neoliberal capitalism despite itself.

There now exists a significant body of theoretically informed empirical research into 'neoliberal environments'. It comprises numerous studies which together explore the connections between neoliberal principles and policies, on the one side and the biophysical world on the other. These studies are, for the most part, political economic in character and authored by so-called 'critical' geographers. However, making sense of them is by no means straightforward, despite their common focus on neoliberal environments. This is because neoliberalism and the biophysical world are complex phenomena, making an holistic and comprehensive understanding of them very challenging to achieve. Accordingly, separate studies of their interconnections have focused on one or other aspect of the complexity in a particular time and context. It is currently left to readers of these studies to synthesise them into a wider, joined-up account of neoliberal environments. This and two companion articles aim for precisely this sort of broad and coherent understanding. This article begins with a discussion of neoliberalism and explains why it necessarily has environmental aspects to it. The second companion article presents a theory of 'neoliberal environments', while the third connects that theory to the empirical findings of studies published to-date. This final article also departs from the otherwise constructive tone of its companions. Together, the three articles offer readers both an overarching understanding of 'neoliberal environments' and some tools to question the way these environments are currently understood by many geographers. © 2010 The Author. Geography Compass © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This article both synthesizes and critically evaluates a now large, multi-disciplinary body of published research that examines the neoliberalization of environmental regulation, management, and governance. Since the late 1970s, neoliberal ideas and ideals have gradually made their way into the domain of environmental policy as part of a wider change in the global political economy. While the volume of empirical research is now such that we can draw some conclusions about this policy shift, the fact that the research has evolved piecemeal across so many different disciplines has made identifying points of similarity and difference in the findings more difficult. After clarifying what neoliberalism is and explaining why the term 'neoliberalization' is preferable, the article analyzes the principal components and enumerates the social and environmental effects of this multifaceted process. By offering a comprehensive and probing survey of the salient literature, I hope not only to codify the existing research but also to guide future critical inquiries into neoliberal environmental policy.

This essay seeks to explain the constitutive role that space-time plays in the dynamics of capital accumulation. Through a close reading of David Harvey's work, I show that time and space work together in ways particular to the capitalist mode of producing, distributing, selling, consuming and disposing of commodities. This does not, I argue, mean that space-time is reducible to capital accumulation - there are, to be sure, other forms of space-time that are relatively autonomous from the now dominant mode of production. My aim is not to provide a definitive account of space-time tout court but, instead, to show both the organic connection between space and time within capitalism specifically as well as the necessary - rather than simply contingent - role that space-time plays in the dynamics of accumulation. My argument is that capitalist space is inconceivable in abstraction from capitalism's temporal compulsions, and that space-time functions as a concrete abstraction that internalizes the whole gamut of contradictions that Marx identified over a century ago. The essay makes its analytical contribution by surveying previous Marxist and non-Marxist contributions to understanding space and time in the social sciences, en route to a close reading of Harvey's Limits to Capital. The political implications of paying careful attention to capitalist space-time are explored by counter-posing Harvey's work with Doreen Massey's recent writings about spatio-temporality. © 2009 SAGE.

AbstractThis short essay takes stock of where the field of 'labour geography' has got to and where it might productively go. The first part identifies labour geography's signature characteristics as they have emerged over the last 15–20 years. These are its insistence that geography is constitutive of employment issues, its emphasis on worker agency, its analytical promiscuousness, its acute awareness of power and inequality, and its Left sensibility politically speaking. The second part of the essay is programmatic and looks to the future. It is argued that labour geographers ought to more carefully conceptualize and study worker agency; to connect labour migration more organically with existing research on place‐based workers; to develop a more substantive understanding of how states regulate employment and workers' lives; to look to synthesize different geographical dimensions of worker existence and strategy; to aim to examine working peoples' lives holistically; and to be more explicit about the normative basis of their 'pro‐labour' stance and its implications for worker strategy.Résumé Ce texte court examine ce qui a été réalisé dans le domaine de la 'géographie du travail' et les orientations fructueuses qui pourraient être suivies. La première partie détermine les traits identitaires de la géographie du travail qui ont vu le jour au cours des 15 à 20 dernières années: son insistance pour que la géographie soit partie prenante dans les questions d'emploi, son accent sur l'agence des travailleurs, sa promiscuité analytique, sa conscience aiguë du pouvoir et de l'inégalité, et sa sensibilité de gauche au plan politique. La seconde partie, programmatique, s'intéresse à l'avenir et à ce que les géographes du travail devraient faire: conceptualiser et étudier l'agence des travailleurs avec davantage de rigueur; relier de façon plus organique la migration du travail et les recherches existantes sur la main‐d'œuvre locale; offrir une compréhension concrète de la manière dont les Etats régulent l'emploi et la vie des actifs; veiller à synthétiser les différentes dimensions géographiques dans l'existence et la stratégie des salariés; chercher à analyser globalement la vie des populations actives; être plus explicite sur le fond normatif de leur attitude 'pro‐travail' et sur ses implications pour la stratégie des salariés.

This short essay takes stock of where the field of 'labour geography' has got to and where it might productively go. The first part identifies labour geography's signature characteristics as they have emerged over the last 15-20 years. These are its insistence that geography is constitutive of employment issues, its emphasis on worker agency, its analytical promiscuousness, its acute awareness of power and inequality, and its Left sensibility politically speaking. The second part of the essay is programmatic and looks to the future. It is argued that labour geographers ought to more carefully conceptualize and study worker agency; to connect labour migration more organically with existing research on place-based workers; to develop a more substantive understanding of how states regulate employment and workers' lives; to look to synthesize different geographical dimensions of worker existence and strategy; to aim to examine working peoples' lives holistically; and to be more explicit about the normative basis of their 'pro-labour' stance and its implications for worker strategy. © 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A contribution to a symposium on David Harvey's New Imperialism (2003) approaches the book symptomatically as a text that sheds light on the modalities of Marxism fostered in academia. The book's argument is briefly considered & situated in the larger body of Harvey's work. Harvey is positioned in the context of postwar academic Marxists & the problems of being a Marxist public intellectual. It is contended that The New Imperialism is characterized by a critical break whereby Harvey refuses to problematize his institutional location, deemed here a silence that speaks to the limits of academic Marxism removed from the real world. A pessimistic assessment of Marxism's future is offered. References. D. Edelman