Department of Anthropology

Abstract:       Stories of spectacular biospheric change abound in the early 21st century. Ours is an era of epochal planetary transition—dramatic, irreversible, and chaotic. Earth scientists call such eras “state shifts.” That’s a dry term for a reasonably terrifying situation. It means that the conditions of life will be fundamentally different within a generation. Sea levels will rise faster than anyone expected; stretches of the Middle East will become uninhabitable; and agriculture will be riskier as it is unmoored from its five-century model of eviscerating the earth for Cheap Food.          

What stories do we need to make sense of this disastrous state of affairs, to forge a politics of climate justice, and to nurture an ecology of hope? This lecture speaks to the dominant narratives of ecological crisis, focused on technology, population, and market – captured in the Anthropocene conversation – and offers an alternative story of the modern world and the crises of the 21st century. In this alternative, the modern world can be understood as a way of thinking and organizing life through binary codes – Society and Nature, the West and the Rest, Civilization and Savagery – that have cheapened the lives, work, and dignity of many humans, and the rest of nature with it. The roots of today’s crisis can be found in the audacious cheapening of life, care, and work that occurred in the centuries after 1492. An ecology of hope connects this long history of “cheap nature” with the need to revalue precisely what has been cheapened: care for humans of every age and disposition, and care for for planetary life.

BIO:          Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things(University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He is chair (2017-18) of the Political Economy of the World-System Section (ASA), and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.

Please refer to flyer for more information