Capitalism, the Climate Crisis, and Canada's 'Relations of Mobility': Theoretical Interventions in Ecological Political Economy.

This paper approaches the intertwining crises of capitalism and climate change from an ecological political economy (EPE) perspective in order to highlight the fundamentally unsustainable character of Canada's contemporary relations of mobility and the possibilities for socio-ecological change. An important component of the nation's broader social relations, the 'relations of mobility' refer to the material and subjective systems governing how Canadian transport infrastructure is produced and how and why people and things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, the capitalist state has played a pivotal role in structuring these relations and as such it has little interest in significantly changing them. This highlights the need for a genuinely democratic, anti-capitalist politics aimed at obtaining power at the level of the 'state' - municipally, provincially, and federally - in order to change the relations of mobility for the better. This paper thus has three objectives falling under the rubric of EPE: First, it demonstrates how Canada's contemporary relations of mobility negatively impact the natural environment. Second, it historicizes the unsustainable origins of such relations within Canada's political economic structure, showing how the neoliberal capitalist state in particular is 'uninterested', 'unwilling' or 'incapable' of altering them. Finally, it makes a normative argument for the mobilization of a democratic, anti-capitalist politics as a means of confronting the unsustainable character of Canada's present relations of mobility and social relations more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]