Reflecting on neoliberal natures: An exchange

A decade - more or less - past the publication of the edited collection Neoliberal Environments and Neil Smith's 'Nature as an Accumulation Strategy', this forum aims to revisit and reflect on neoliberal natures, both out in the world and in the scholarly literature. In this time, there have been a number of advances in our conceptual apparatus for interpreting capital's productions of nature, ranging from financialization to vital materialism to world ecology. Further, the world has not stood still in the intervening decade. Various schemes for neoliberalizing nature have come and gone while others have launched, and the financial crisis led to widespread and often retrenched austerity even as extractivism showed no sign of abating. In light of these developments, we convened this forum to ask: what are the failures and accomplishments of neoliberal natures? Our use of the world accomplishments is not normative. We have gathered insights to reflect on the material-semiotic effects of neoliberal hegemony in the environmental register, and how critical scholars interpret, and even intervene in, those effects. The forum begins with an introduction that parses some trends in the world 'out there' and then turns 'in' to examine the neoliberal natures literature. Reflecting on a bibliometric analysis and broader trends in the literature, we argue that there remain critical gaps in explanatory frameworks driven in part by geography's troubling lack of racial and gender diversity.