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.
The hyphenated term world-ecology derives from Jason W. Moore's reinterpretation of Karl Marx, Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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.
[9] 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.
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.
[13] It can be difficult to accurately represent the application of world ecology in the context of a particular topic, as complexity makes it challenging to avoid misapprehension.
[9] Academics have suggested that misrepresentation in world-ecological literature can have catastrophic effects, because conveying incorrect information can cause issues of concern to be mistakenly disregarded.
[17] The view of the relation of world-ecology and environmentalism has been applied to a variety of cases by academics, for example Yoan Molinero uses it to analyse food distribution in agriculture.
[20] Several academics have contributed to the development and the advocacy for world-ecology some of which include: Jason W Moore is a professor of Sociology at the Binghamton University in the United States of America.
World-ecology also relates to history in the sense that it aims to deconstruct past (both recent and long term) notions of the strict separation of nature and societies, by forming a concept that suggest that the two structures function closely together.
