Giovanna Ricoveri: Anti-Capitalist Political Ecology Pioneer

Capitalism Nature Socialism has lost an insightful, lively, critical voice and precious international collaborator, Giovanna Ricoveri. She was the principal force behind the Italian instantiation of this journal that appeared in 1991 (named, as literal translation, Capitalismo Natura Socialismo), thanks to the pivotal assistance of Valentino Parlato. In profound spatio-temporal con- tinuity with the present, that first issue featured the work of one of our current Co-Editors in Chief, Daniel Faber. Germinal works by James O’Connor and Elmar Altvater, among others, were also included in trans- lation, as part of an effort to share ideas across continents. Through Capita- lismo Natura Socialismo, eventually renamed Ecologia Politica – Ricerche per l’Alternativa (Political Ecology – Research for the Alternative), Giovanna embarked on an arduous intellectual-activist road towards creating a broadly leftist, Marx-inspired environmentalist paradigm, infused with radical material feminism. The first issue, hardly by chance, featured a review of Maria Mies’ classic Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, and Giovanna’s thought converged substantively with Vandana Shiva’s and Elinor Ostrom’s thinking.