Abstract
By bringing political philosophy into dialogue with environmental history, this article offers an ecological reinterpretation of Karl Marx’s 1842 articles in the Rheinische Zeitung on the criminalization of wood theft, focusing on the “terrestrial” conflict between property rights and customary rights of use. Environmental history shows that these customary and collective rights embodied a local mode of ecological regulation, reconciling the reproduction of living environments with vernacular subsistence practices. For Marx, these relationships are the expression of a material and affective alliance, aknowledging forms of kinship between the “elementary class” of the dispossessed and the “elementary forces of nature”. At the same time, the emergence of scientific forestry, contemporary with the transition to a fossil-fuel economy and characterized by monocultures, clear-cutting and the principle of sustainable resource management, redefined the material and social composition of forested environments. The resulting class conflict between a popular ecology, grounded in collective rights of use and multispecies relationships, and a scientific, market-oriented ecology, promoted by new state institutions and private landowners in the name of conservation and productivity, could provides us a framework for reconsidering the commons not as archaic relics but as matrices for rethinking forms of ecological justice from the bottom up, rooted in lived environments and popular practices.