Ours is an era of planetary crisis. As scholars, activists, and citizens seek to make sense of our uncertain times, the limits of conventional environmental thinking have become clear. Rather than see "Society" and "Nature" as separate, Capitalism's Ecologies illuminates how environmental and social change are intimately entwined. Contributors engage capitalism not as a social system independent of nature, but as a world-ecology of power, culture, and capital that flows through the web of life. In this rethinking, capitalism makes nature – and nature makes capitalism. Across successive essays, emergent and established scholars explore themes of colonialism, culture, race, gender, agriculture, literature, and waste to reveal capitalism's varied organizations of humans and the rest of nature. Capitalism's Ecologies asks readers to consider new ways of thinking about social and environmental crises, how they fit together, and what we might do about them.
Jason W. Moore is associate professor of sociology at Binghamton University. He is author of Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015) and editor of Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016).
Sharae Deckard is a lecturer in the School of English, University College Dublin. She is the author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden (Routledge, 2009) and coauthor of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Michael Niblett is assistant professor of modern world literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is author of The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form, and the Nation-State (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).
Diana C. Gildea is a PhD candidate in human geography at Lund University. She is currently completing a dissertation on food, poverty, and capital in the neoliberal era.
"Capitalism's Ecologies offers vital reading for those seeking to understand the deep historical origins and dynamic complexities of the contemporary era. Beware: once you've opened your mind to a world-ecological perspective, you can never turn back!"
– Marcus Taylor, Queen's University, author of The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation
"Capitalism's Ecologies dismantles the discrete categories 'nature' and 'society' to explore the messy, complex totality of human civilization as environment-making process. Here the past and present of our place within the web of life will be interrogated for answers that might help chart a survivable future."
– Christian Parenti, New York University, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
"Hooray for the timely arrival of Capitalism's Ecologies, a new journal devoted to relational analysis of our inextricably eco-social world! Capitalism's Ecologies explores and expands the world-ecology conversation, analyzing the co-constitution of capitalism, ecology, imperialism, waste, science, agriculture, and literature."
– Rebecca Lave, Indiana University, author of Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science