Towards economic geographies beyond the Nature-Society divide

This article suggests an approach to economic-geographic quantification that is relevant to engaging the socionatural blurring of an Anthropocene. It develops representations of commodities and of economies that draw upon concepts of absolute, relative, and relational space to help move beyond legacies of the Nature-Society divide in economic-geographic thought. To supplement familiar ways of knowing commodities as bounded objects with associated single values (prices), the piece rereads input-output approaches, providing accounts of how commodities enfold relations among socionatural phenomena. It quantifies and maps the activities and flows of the global economy in 2007 in terms of their embodied carbon emissions, labor times, and harvested land areas alongside their monetary values. Comparing the perspectives that result, it identifies empirical and theoretical challenges that a political-industrial ecology could help address.