Why Nature Matters, and Not (Always) in the Way You Might Think
Professor Moore spoke at the Susquehanna Group of the Sierra Club in Endicott, NY on January 19, 2016.
Finance.
Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century
connected? In this
talk, Jason W.
Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a
common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including
human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist
thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a
“world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s
greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity
to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That
capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the
pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes
readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the mosaic of
crisis and limits today. He
shows how thinking about humanity as part of nature is key to
understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of
liberation and sustainability in the century ahead.
Bio
Jason
W. Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology at Binghamton
University, where he teaches world history and world-ecology. He is
author of Capitalism
in the Web of Life
(Verso, 2015)
and editor of Anthropocene
or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM
Press, 2016). He writes frequently on the history of capitalism,
environmental history, and social theory.
Moore is presently
completing Ecology
and the Rise of Capitalism,
an environmental history of the rise of capitalism, and with Raj
Patel, Seven
Cheap Things: A World-Ecological Manifesto –
both with the University of California Press. He is coordinator of
the World-Ecology Network.
Many of his essays can be found on his website: www.jasonwmoore.com.
