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The following paper explains how American agriculture was a product and producer of global environmental change. It suggests that capitalist agricultural revolutions were central to this development. Utilizing a world-ecology framework, I challenge and extend political Marxists conceptualization of agricultural revolutions on three fronts. First, social property regimes and class relations must incorporate how the extension of the law of value has been a global process to capitalist development. We must consider how global forces conditioned productivity revolutions, and, in turn, how those productivity revolutions reconditioned global forces. Second, historicizing and theorizing agricultural revolutions must include the question of nature. The unpaid work of human and extrahuman natures were crucial to reproducing capital's cheap food model. And third, capital's golden-ages have been premised on successive agricultural revolutions provisioning cheap food, energy, and raw materials. The succession of agricultural revolutions alludes to how as a productive system agriculture creates and resolves recurring crises and limits. I make these claims based on the forces, patterns, and trends of American agriculture in the world-economy. I argue that the United States engendered three successive agro-industrial revolutions that constituted, and constitutive of, global socio-ecological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the exhaustion of socio-ecological relations in the coalfields of West Virginia. We use the term socio-ecological to signify "the interwoven character and the indispensable unity of social and natural life" (Araghi 2009: 115). In particular we use classic literatures on labor history in the coalfields of central Appalachia and contemporary studies of mountaintop removal to think about phases of socio-ecological relations of the coal industry. We argue for the interrelationality of the social and the ecological in place of conventional eco-Marxist approaches which treat these as relatively independent units. This enables us to situate nature as an active component of capitalist developmental processes. We argue that the exhaustion of socio-ecological relations in the coalfields of West Virginia is an outcome of material practices within the phase of extraction using mountaintop removal, historical changes in the conditions of production in the coalfields, and of new forms of competition from other regions and energy sources. We find that the relative exhaustion of central Appalachian coal is tempered by favorable international markets and a specialization in metallurgical coal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]