World-Ecology

World-Ecology is a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life. An evolving conversation rather than a theory, the world-ecology approach is unified by a critique of Nature-Society dualisms, a world-historical interpretation of today's planetary crisis, and an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender in capitalism's environmental history. Key figures in the world-ecology conversation include Jason W. Moore, Sharae Deckard, Raj Patel, Christian Parenti, Tony Weis, Neil Brenner, Kerstin Oloff, Andrej Grubacic, and Marion Dixon. Since 2015, the World-Ecology Research Network has sponsored an annual conference.

Lineages and Origins of the World-Ecology Conversation World-ecology draws on a diversity of transdisciplinary, critical traditions across the human and physical sciences. The hyphenated term world-ecology derives from Jason W. Moore's reinterpretation of Karl Marx, Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. For Braudel and Wallerstein, the rise of capitalism must be understood as the emergence of a world-economy: not the "economy of the world," but a regional division of labor bounded by its spatially necessary division of labor. The history of capitalism therefore marks the geographical expansion of a world-economy that becomes global only in the twentieth century. In Moore's early formulation, the capitalist world-economy could not be separated from its environmental history: capitalism is a "world-ecology" whose geopolitics and economic life was rooted in a particularly dynamic—and violent—relationship towards webs of life. This was evident in two major ways, Moore argued. First, capitalism as a system of endless capital accumulation required a constant search for new, lost-cost natures—including enslaved humans. Second, the destruction and depletion effected by capitalist monocultures and extractive systems exhausted cheap natures discovered in a previous era, setting in motion new frontiers of violent accumulation. Just as Wallerstein had earlier emphasized the capitalist world-economy as a synthesis of geopolitics and transnational commodity systems, Moore proposed world-ecology as a synthesis of world-economy approaches with environmental history in its widest sense.

Relation to capitalism

The world-ecology conversation foregrounds the historical development of class society across the Holocene. Most world-ecological research focuses on historical capitalism, understood as a differentiated unity of power, profit and life. The main reason to include capitalism within the new research paradigm is to view capitalism as a world-ecology: In this view, traditional concepts of capitalism are reshaped to remedy conceptual ambiguities: Accept that capitalism, nature and government function as a single whole rather than as separate entities. The suggestion that capitalism should be viewed as a World-Ecology was made by professor Jason W Moore, - a perspective that is often referred to as a "capitalist world-ecology". Moore theorizes that the idea of "cheapening", or degrading key spheres of life, is elemental in cycles of capital, power, and nature that exist in the modern capitalist World-Ecology system. As a whole, this concept may be classified as the Capitalocene. The idea of the Capitalocene designates capitalism as an ultimate driver of climate change, supported by evidence of cheap production and various dimensions of inequality. Moore's suggestion has been adapted and extended by other academics, in their papers on topics related to capitalism: One of them is Aaron Jakes, who utilized the view of capitalism as a world-ecology to analyse the historical case of Egypt, when the British government conducted foreign affairs in terms of cotton production. The view of capitalism as world-ecology discards the notion that nature and societies are mostly unrelated and separate entities, and clarifies that nature and societies form an interwoven system of intricate relations.

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