Abstract ID: 3.13818 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA

Against the backdrop of intensifying glacier retreat and expanding upslope economic development, we argue that post-glacial landscapes (PGL) are central social-natural spaces shaped by the global dynamics of the capitalist planetary metabolism. Globally intensifying capitalism drives global warming, melting glaciers, and generating PGL. But once they emerge, PGL’s dynamics result from interactions among continuing anthropogenic climate change, biogeophysical processes, and economic development, whereby PGL may become spaces for new capitalist accumulation, primary ecological succession, livestock herding, or farming. The trajectories of PGL depend on a series of feedbacks between mountains and non-mountain spaces: For example, (1) new hydrological sources in PGL may be used to meet the demands for water from the capitalist energy matrix, cities, or agrobusiness food system or (2) the detection of new/rare minerals in PGL may be harvested to feed the energy transition. These feedbacks illustrate how spatially remote PGL become part of the core of capitalist solutions to the current poly-crises resulting from anthropogenic climate change. With this manuscript, we propose a dialectic transdisciplinary framework for analyzing these complex interactions and elucidating how internal relations within PGL (hydro-ecological, socio-historical, and political economic) shape how PGL dynamically co-evolve and co-transform with non-mountain distal territories. Further, we identify arenas of transformation in non-PGL, which have created new spatial configurations, infrastructure, demographics, and institutions for involving PGL in the metabolism of capital.