World-Ecology

This working paper examines the concept of metabolism and its potential as a critical analytical lens to study the contemporary city from a political perspective. The paper illustrates how the metabolism concept has been used historically, both as a metaphor to describe the technological, social, political and economic dimensions of human-environment relations, and as a concrete analytical tool to quantify and better understand how flows of matter and energy shape the territorial and spatial configurations of cityscapes. Drawing on the example of the urban water metabolism of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), the paper shows how the metabolism concept can be applied to study the politics of water in the city.

The introduction of second-generation ecopsychology has prompted a debate about which way the field should go. In this article I suggest that the choice is actually not between first-generation and second-generation paths but rather between radical and mainstream ones. By the term radical I do not mean extremist politics; I refer merely to the perception that our collective problems are of a deeply rooted or thoroughgoing nature and to the corresponding conviction that these will not be solved without significantly altering our thought and action. That ecopsychology is best understood as a radical ecological transformation of psychology can be seen by considering the various meanings of ecology, the implications of conceptualizing the psyche ecologically, and the challenges of being truly holistic. This understanding of the field reveals the first generation as a largely unrealized, inherently radical ecopsychology, the second generation as a largely denatured, mainstreamed ecopsychology. My position, then, is that ecopsychology will find good form, and resolve the first-generation/second-generation impasse, only if developed in a manner faithful to its radical nature. This will include directing eco-psychology away from psychology's historically individualistic praxis to the collective level of cultural and social engagement. I conclude this article with the idea that as a critical dialogue between ecology and psychology, ecopsychology shows the latter's anthropocentric, philosophical , methodological, and political economic biases. With this idea in mind, I offer some responses to the second-generation authors in the interest of furthering the dialogue about the development of the field.

Pre-print draft of an article to be published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing

In the work of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, land is shown to be a complex and contested resource to which the typically abject fates of her female protagonists are inextricably bound. As she put it in a 2001 interview shortly before the publication of her final novel: " the connection between women and land in Zimbabwe is negative ". This article situates Vera's work in the context of debates over Zimbabwean land reform, and considers examples of how the " negative " connection between women and land is articulated in her fiction through contrasting leitmotifs of abjection and habitat, culminating in the cautiously redemptive conclusion of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002). The discussion draws on Silvia Federici's work on women, the body and primitive accumulation and on Jason Moore's theory of negative-value in the capitalist world-ecology, to account for why, in Vera's work, the female body is invariably positioned, abjectly, at the nexus of colonial governance and what David Moore has described as Zimbabwe's postcolonial regime of " violent accumulation " .

In the unfolding climate crisis, two questions loom large in the search for planetary justice: What is a radical politics of work in an era of climate crisis? What is a radical politics of nature in an era of disposable workers and precarious work? Through Working Environments, Unruly Natures, the 2020 meeting of the World-Ecology Research Network speaks to the work/life nexus of planetary justice. Highlighted by recent calls for a Green New Deal and Degrowth, we will explore the intimately connected-and profoundly global-dimensions of work, workers, and life across the long history of the capitalist world-ecology. Recognizing the dialectic of productive and reproductive work as the pivot of modern environment-making and class formation, we invite paper and session proposals that unpack the connective relations between work, working bodies, and working environments-past, present, and future. We especially welcome proposals that situate capitalism's mobilization of paid and unpaid work in their racialized, gendered, colonial, and multi-species moments. This includes the deep history of labor politics, working class protest, and social revolution in their connections with world-ecological crises and capitalist restructuring. Identifying the strategic relations between neoliberal dispossession, proliferating climate disasters, and widening inequality, Working Environments, Unruly Natures pursues new syntheses, narratives, and conceptualizations of twenty-first century crisis that can inform the emergent politics of planetary justice.

作者： 拉傑・帕特爾（Raj Patel）、傑森・摩爾（Jason W. Moore）▎譯者：林琬淳

哥倫布航行世界各地，「其他世界」的人和資源都臣服於他，他則為效忠的國王和皇后征服處女之地。性和取得銀礦的討論方式不該相提並論，然而在有人遷居到地球另一端的同時，他們用性別語言統治財產、征服產權的方式，與性征服雷同。從一開始，統治廉價自然和廉價工作，為的不只是改變人類如何擁有以及擁有什麼，同時也改變誰可以擁有和誰要工作，以及他們的出生和受到照護的方式。

烹飪、教導、養育、治療、組織和敬神這些工作，都早於資本主義。照護工作主要透過使用火而造成現代人類第一次大規模的生態改變。不過在資本主義的疆界，照護活動歷經劇變，反應和強調出現代基督教早期關於性與權力的概念。

Rozdział "Tania natura" z książki: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore: "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (Black Inc., Carlton 2018) w przekładzie: Andrzej W. Nowak, Przemysław Czapliński. Przekład zamieszczony w książce: "O jeden las za daleko". Red. P. Czapliński, Joanna B. Bednarek, Dawid Gostyński (2019). Autorzy opisują zapoczątkowany w XVI wieku proces wyodrębnienia natury z rzeczywistości ludzkiej i przekształcenia jej w "naturę tanią" - eksploatowalną, zyskowną, należącą do bogatszych. Na początku XXI wieku taniość natury dobiega końca, co znaczy nie tylko, że produkty naturalne (woda, pożywienie) będą coraz droższe, lecz także, że w postaci zakłóceń klimatycznych urealniają się wielowiekowe koszta niszczenia natury. [The authors describe the process of separating nature from human reality initiated in the 16th century and transforming it into a "cheap" nature - exploitable, profitable, belonging to richer ones. At the beginning of the 21st century, the cheapness of nature is coming to an end, which means not only that natural products (water, food) will be more and more expensive, but also that the centuries-long costs of destroying nature become real in the form of climatic disruptions.]

Yuk King Tan’s video Limits of Visibility (2012) transports the viewer to the bay of Hong Kong and the cargo area where a tonnage of paper (the perpetual waste, even in the digital age) is compacted into modular cubes, stacked and waiting to be craned onto long barges. Tan asserts that the ‘material is prepared to become another kind of vast colony [see plate 11]. Sent to less developed countries [to be] further broken down and salvaged, the waste material is a literal paper trail about the scale, power and wastage of economic development and trade.’

Afghanistan’s opium production has soared despite eradication efforts. This is partly due to a prolonged drought linked to climate change. But it is also due to the collapses of traditional irrigation systems and the social cohesion upon which the maintenance of those systems depend. This crisis, in turn, raises deeper questions about prevailing notions of the “natural” and the “social” as dichotomous and distinct.

Lewis and Maslin explore geological markers for the beginning of the "Anthropocene"-beginning, in their periodization, in either 1492 (naming the birth of capitalism as the cause of planetary crisis) or 1945 (naming elitedriven militarization as its cause). In this essay, I argue for a synthesis of these two dynamics, locating both the birth of capitalism and a transformation of elite-driven militarization in the conquest of the New World during the Long Sixteenth Century. As such, I propose narrating planetary history through a "capitalocene as polemocene," "the age of capital as an age of war" framework.

This article demonstrates how massive allotments of food allowed lumber workers to fight the limitations of their bodies for the sake of industrial production. I argue that, as machines were quickening the speed of work and increasing production in America, workers had to adjust their metabolism to keep pace. The process whereby food is turned into energy for work is an important place where nature and labor met, yet it has scarcely been examined by historians. This article will address that lacuna.

Loggers provide a excellent example of how the body coped with the stresses of industrial modernity. To produce wood for the mills, they ate as much as 8,000 calories, or 6 lbs. of food a day. This article begins with an explanation of the obstacles companies overcome to bring large quantities of food into wilderness lands. It then shows why remuneration in food remained an important part of woods labor into the twentieth century even as other aspects of wage earning changed. Finally, a close examination of a 1904 government study of loggers' diets demonstrates exactly how food wages created industrial bodies and allowed for unparalleled feats of work in the woods.

Questo libro parla di lavoro e fatica, di vite alla ricerca di un futuro migliore:
di vite e lavoro di persone che producono ciò che mangiamo. La produzione
del cibo è sempre più nascosta da pubblicità, brand, marchi, racconti,
che fanno dimenticare a che prezzo e dentro quali rapporti sociali i
beni agricoli diventano disponibili. Questo lavoro mette al centro, invece,
proprio il lavoro vivo nei campi, negli allevamenti, sotto le serre, guardando
ai migranti, sempre più protagonisti a livello mondiale dell'industria agricola
capitalistica, e a un insieme di territori, quelli del Sud Europa, del
Mezzogiorno e dell’enclave della Piana del Sele, nella provincia di Salerno.
È il lavoro, con le sue caratteristiche e modalità di svolgimento, a costituire
il punto di vista privilegiato di questa ricerca. Il mondo dell’agricoltura viene
osservato dal lato del lavoro vivo, concentrandosi sui rapporti sociali di
produzione vigenti prima che tutto venga assorbito dal marketing e subordinato
ai superprofitti delle grandi imprese internazionali e multinazionali
finanziarizzate. Per questo motivo, la ricerca si è avvalsa soprattutto di interviste
e colloqui con una molteplicità di lavoratrici e lavoratori, condividendo
con loro ore e ore di vita quotidiana.
È con questa densità – la densità della vita, dei progetti connessi alle migrazioni
e dei rapporti di produzione fondati sullo sfruttamento – che la ricerca
ha cercato di entrare in comunicazione, per restituire un quadro delle
relazioni di potere che governano l’agricoltura capitalistica e delle strategie
che i lavoratori mettono in atto per non farsi sopraffare e proteggere sé stessi,
rivendicando diritti e dignità

Mike McCormack is an award-winning writer and a lecturer in creative writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway. McCormack’s conscious rearticulation of the West of Ireland as a site of experimental modes of incarceration, virtual imaginaries, and energy regimes, addresses imaginative aporias around Ireland’s production of nature. The environments represented in his works are sites for the weird and uncanny, including near-future realities of offshore clone labour and robot citizenship, machinic fetishism, cloud seeding, and the technological sublime.
In this interview McCormack reflects on a number of questions surrounding his own formal experimentation, the contiguities among religion and technology, contemporary developments in Irish science fiction, representations of rural Ireland, and the compositional rituals of the everyday.

This is a pre-print version of the final interview, details below:
De Loughry, Treasa, and Mike McCormack. “‘…a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid’: A Conversation with Mike McCormack.” Irish University Review 49.1 (2019): 105–116.
Special Issue on “Food, Energy, and Climate: Ireland in the World-Ecology.”  Eds. Sharae Deckard and Lucy Collins.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/iur.2019.0383

and Keywords Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land art, theatricality, and "performing landscapes." With the advent of the Capitalocene discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore's analysis for the Capitalocene illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of industrial humanity. By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern "primitivist" nature. The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler's phenomenological analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its effects on the viewer's body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from

Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing historical capacity has withered. This “withering” is perhaps most evident in capitalism’s failure to offer a new, actually productive, agricultural model – as agro-biotechnology failed to deliver on its promissory notes. Moving from bad to worse, a second set of contradictions is now mediated through climate change. Climate change, one amongst many ongoing biospheric shifts, is interwoven with the totality of neoliberal agriculture’s contradictions to produce new contradictions: negative-value. This signals the emergence of forms of nature that are increasingly hostile to capital accumulation, and which can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasingly costly, toxic, and dangerous strategies. The rise of negative-value – whose accumulation has been latent for much of capitalist history – therefore suggests a significant and rapid erosion of opportunities for the appropriation of new streams of unpaid work/energy. As such, these new limits are qualitatively different from the nutrient- and resource-depletion of earlier, developmental crises of the longue durée Cheap Food model. These contradictions, within capital, arising from negative-value, are today encouraging an unprecedented shift towards a radical onto-logical politics, within capitalism as a whole, that destabilizes crucial points of agreement in the modern world-system: What is Food? What is Nature? What is Valuable?

¿Afronta actualmente el capitalismo el “fin de la naturaleza barata”? Si así es, ¿qué podría significar esto y cuáles con las implicaciones para el futuro? Estamos, de hecho, siendo testigos del fin de la naturaleza barata en un sentido específico histórico. En vez de contemplar el fin de la naturaleza barata como la reafirmación de “límites de crecimiento” externos, sostengo que, a día de hoy, el capitalismo ha agotado la relación histórica que la produce. El fin de la naturaleza barata se comprende mejor como el agotamiento de las relaciones de valor que han restaurado periódicamente los “Four Cheaps”: trabajo, alimentos, energía y materias primas. Fundamentalmente, estas relaciones de valor son coproducidas por, y a través de, humanos con el resto de la naturaleza. La cuestión decisiva, por lo tanto, enciende las relaciones que envuelven y despliegan las sucesivas configuraciones de la naturaleza humana y extra-humana, simbólicamente capacitadas y materialmente realizadas, a través de la larga duración del sistema-mundo moderno. Significativamente, la apropiación de trabajo no remunerado —incluyendo los “regalos gratuitos” de la naturaleza— y la explotación del trabajo asalariado, forman una unidad dialéctica. Los límites del crecimiento enfrentados actualmente por el capital son suficientemente reales, y son “límites” coproducidos a través del capitalismo como ecología-mundo, uniendo la acumulación de capital, la búsqueda de poder y la coproducción de naturaleza como un todo orgánico. El límite de la ecología-mundo del capital es el capital en sí mismo.

Sicilian sulphur was an essential commodity for the Industrial Revolution, approximately from 1750 to 1840. It was used for the emerging production of sulphuric acid and chlorine, applied in the finishing of textiles, and synthetic soda, also utilized in the finishing of textiles as well as soap- and glass-making. The innovations in finishing were essential for the textile industry, otherwise the developments in productivity in cotton cultivation, spinning and weaving would bump against a bottleneck. The substitution of synthetic soda for natural ones (potash, barilla, kelp) were important due to constrains of supply during the Napoleonic Wars and the decreasing ecological surplus of natural sources. Chemical innovations were key in both cases, and gave occasion to a spin-off, the chemical industry as a separate branch. In particular, the lead chamber process, which synthesized sulphuric acid using sulphur, nitre and water vapor, and the Leblanc process to produce synthetic soda from salt and sulphuric acid, were major innovations, comparable to the mechanical ones.  And yet, these developments rested on the appropriation of child labor force and the geological activity of the Earth in Sicily. This appropriation was so important for capital accumulation that, when facing a constraint in supply, the English Navy was mobilized. It is shown that this process unfolds through an alienated mechanism of capital accumulation, in which the investment in fixed capital in Britain was inevitably tied to the supply of cheap circulating capital in order to valorize value. Imperialism was ready to remove any constraint to the flow of cheap circulating capital.

The central role that infrastructures of circulation and connectivity -logistical, financial, and digital- have come to perform in the reproduction of agro-food systems calls for an expanded conception of agriculture that integrates dialectically the production of economic value and its subsequent realization in the sphere of exchange. Through the case of Walmart's expansion in Chile, and on the basis of a critical theorization of the circulation of capital, this paper proposes an agrarian question of circulation in which the apparently distinct realms of food production, transport, storage, and consumption are brought together into a contradictory and yet unitary whole. The case of Walmart Chile is illustrative of how the reconfiguration of spaces of urban mass consumption and the organizational restructuring of agro-industrial hinterlands constitute each other in intricate ways. An agrarian question of circulation, the paper concludes , bears important political implications for rethinking the scope and extent of contemporary discussions on agrarian reform being put forward by transnational rural organizations.

Enclosed is a philosophically oriented impassioned plea for a revolution in the way we think about the future in light of climate change. It was composed as a university and public presentation for the Institute for Culture and Society' series on Revolutions at my home institution, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2017. As I read it again now, I am impressed--though saddened--by the urgency of its commonsense message: we must act. We must act collectively, globally, and with deliberation to stem the growing tide of climate change catastrophe.

Yet, I fear we are moving just as swiftly--backwards.

Wendy Lynne Lee

Le dérèglement climatique nous aurait fait entrer dans « l’Anthropocène », définie comme cette ère géologique où, depuis l’industrialisation, l’espèce humaine serait devenue la force écologique majeure, notamment avec ses émissions de gaz à effet de serre. Mais est-ce vraiment « l’espèce humaine » de manière indifférenciée qui est responsable du dérèglement climatique ? Des historiens ont mis en doute cette vision simpliste, en faisant de l’industrialisation fossile – et donc du dérèglement climatique – un processus résultant avant tout des dynamiques du capitalisme, proposant à cette occasion un nouveau concept en substitut de celui d’Anthropocène : le Capitalocène.

This project focuses on the intersections of nature, discourse, and capitalist modernity in the production of landscapes.  It does this through looking at the historical development of the lower Colorado River borderlands from the mid-sixteenth century to the early twentieth century.  During this period, colonizing Euro-American agents posited the region through numerous landscaped narratives that included, but were not limited to, indigenous frontier, desert, and farmland.  The focus of this project is to ask, what were the historical processes inherent not only in the production of these narratives but also in how they were legitimated and maintained?  How were these narratives used as justifications for the appropriation and dispossession of specific groups?  How did such narratives translate themselves into the construction of built environments and the power relations inherent within them?  And finally, how were these constructed landscapes and their narratives both formed and formative of larger structural processes?

To answer these questions, this project focuses on the concept of landscape.  While landscape is a term used differently in the lexicon of numerous academic disciplines, it is used here within the context of political economy and historical sociology, particularly world-systems analysis.  On the one hand, world-systems analysis provides us with the tools for understanding historical processes of capitalist expansion, as well as its incorporation and production of physical environments.  On the other hand, world-systems analysis provides the conceptual tools for understanding both the structure and role of knowledge, in both its factual and aesthetic forms, in these undertakings.  In other words, world-systems analysis provides a historical framework in how landscapes have been produced, maintained, and transformed.

By focusing on landscape, however, this project also works in expanding the parameters of world-systems analysis, which has been criticized in the past as being too structural in its approach to historical phenomenon.  Instead of seeing the landscape as something produced by a larger world-economy, this study posits the landscape as a historical construct that is not only shaped by larger structures but also shaping of them.  To provide this historical account, this project focuses on four distinct, yet interrelated and simultaneous moments through the more extensive history of the lower Colorado River Borderlands.  These moments can be described as dispossession, conceptualization, engineering, and legitimation.  Dispossession focuses on the various ways through which European agencies not only exterminated indigenous peoples but with them, socio-ecological relationships and worldviews.  Conceptualization looks at how the historical worldview of European agents perceived, valued, represented, organized, and conflicted with both geographies and their people.  This conceptualization is not only shaped by aesthetical notions of what was beautiful but also on newly forming scientific theories focused on geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, and biology.  Engineering looks at the material and conceptual ways through which the European imagination was realized into material structures that networked into larger relations and spatial-temporal scales.  Finally, naturalization focuses on the ways through which newly constructed material and conceptual landscapes and the peoples that inhabited them were legitimated and naturalized into new power relations.

To look at the ways through which these moments are fully realized and linked to larger structures and processes, this dissertation has been written into three major parts, which are outlined by historical period.  The first part focuses on the negotiated incorporation of the region by Spanish and Hispanic agencies from the mid-sixteenth century until the late eighteenth century. While this region had been settled for thousands of years by an interconnected and transforming network of indigenous tribes, these Spanish and Hispanic agencies, unable to fully colonize the region, posited it as an indigenous frontier.  The second part focuses on the remaking of the region with the American colonization of the area following the Mexican-American War in 1848.  This period not only brought about vast upheaval to the region’s socio-ecological organization, positing it as a “desert,” and integrating it into both national and international networks.  The third, and final part, of this project looks at the transformation of this “desert” into a “garden.”  While historically-specific, this conversion is related not only to regional and national negotiations but its relationship both to an expanding world market in food and the remaking of environments linked to an export-oriented trade.  In all of these parts, the focus is to bring together seemingly disparate processes in a way that provides a more holistic account not only on the historical development of the lower Colorado River borderlands but how this development was both formed through and formative of larger socio-ecological processes.

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

This paper discusses representations of and relations with nature in Western fairy tales as imbuing the values of capitalist symbolic order. The fairy tales are here understood symbolic representations of the capitalism-in-nature concept. In the interpretation by Bruno Bettelheim, a fairy-tale helps a child find meaning in life, grasp family relations and overcome childhood fears of maturation. In this paper I attempt to expand Bettelheim's already extraordinary insights by placing them within the framework of the capitalist order, discussing in particular how various forms of bourgeois values-labour, nuclear family, commodity, desire-lurk in from the woods of the fairy tales. Opening the world of fairy tales to children can thus be seen as an early introduction to the logic of capitalism, conveying a natural order rewarding resolution to the child who recognizes and integrates these values. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to denaturalizing the totality of capitalist logic and to evacuate the symbolic order that produces capitalism-in-nature. In the western literary canon, fairy tales have a unique place. They have a profound effect on their young audience, as they bring meaning and, from a very young age, enrich the lives of their listeners, like no other form of literature. In his unique study of fairy tales "The uses of enchantment", Bruno Bettelheim transcribes the symbolic elements of the fairy tale, uncovering hidden meanings that are addressing concerns of a child. These literary works-part of childhood for millions of children-retold over centuries and then collected across Europe during the early modern age, provide comforting and secure elements of identification, aid children in their growth, and guides them as they struggle to create meaningful relationships in the world. In classical psychoanalytic tradition, Bettelheim reveals the mysteries of the fairy tales as the content of the unconscious. The fairy tale organizes the unconscious material for the child and guides her through her doubts and fears toward maturation and a meaningful existence in the world. As a something of an intervention, I will offer a different reading of the Western fairy tale; i.e. a material critique of Bettelheim's reading of it. In other words, I will engage in a dialogue with Bettelheim and the reader to bring forward the material substrate of the fairy tales; in order to expand on Bettelheim's phenomenal analysis as I will try to place it in its corresponding historical context. Namely, the content of the fairy tales is neither ahistorical nor universal, as it may appear from his analysis. The fairy tale emerged through a transformation from gory and violent folk tales, as the emerging bourgeois society commenced a profound shift in values. Many early tales have strong religious connotations, yet the most famous fairy tales seem have subdued the religious overtones. As fairy tales had been collected during the birth of the European bourgeois secular society, the religious canons of morality and the good life faded from the collective consciousness and were replaced by a radically different ethos: that of the capitalist morality entrenched in private

The Popular Anthropocene limits our thinking about possible answers —
and the stories they’re embedded in — before we can really get started. By asking us to return to view of environmental problems premised on “humans” against “nature,” this Anthropocene returns us to the thinking that created these crises in the first place. Far from an innocent binary, the binary of “man” and “nature” has been fundamental to colonial rule, environmental change, and genocide ever since Columbus landed on Hispaniola. The idea of Humanity as the agent of environmental crisis —
today crystallized in the language of anthropogenic change — has been an indispensable weapon in capitalism’s arsenal.

Who is responsible for the climate crisis? For everyone who isn’t a climate denialist, there’s an easy answer to the question: humanity. Who, in their right mind, would challenge the idea that climate change is anthropogenic (made by humans)? Are we not living in the Anthropocene: the Age of Man as geological force? Well, yes and no. It turns out that saying “Humans did it!” may obscure as much as it clarifies. A world of political difference lies between saying “Humans did it!” — and saying “Some humans did it!” Radical thinkers and climate justice activists have begun to question a starkly egalitarian distribution of historical responsibility for climate change in a system committed to a sharply unequal distribution of wealth and power. From this standpoint, the phrase anthropogenic climate change is a special brand of blaming the victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty. A more nearly accurate alternative? Ours is an era of capitalogenic climate crisis.

This is the introduction, with table of contents, to Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). Order from PM Press: https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=779 .

Accepted version of article published in Textual Practice, 2020.

In recent years ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have undergone a 'hydrological turn', sometimes referred to as the emergence of the 'blue humanities'. This 'turn' has, however, typically focused on the maritime and oceanic rather than the fresh water essential for the reproduction of much life on earth. In this article I analyse contemporary Canadian poet Rita Wong's 2015 collection undercurrent for thematic and formal insights into how dominant ways of understanding water have enabled its exploitation within the capitalist world-system. I argue that Wong's poetry resists a concept that geographer Jamie Linton calls 'modern water' (2010: 14), or water as ultimately reducible to abstract molecules of 'H₂O' circulating within the hydrological cycle. Wong's poems illustrate how this concept has facilitated the exhaustion and contamination of the world's water in the pursuit of profit, amplifying these concerns in formal strategies that situate local Canadian water histories within what Jason W. Moore describes as capitalism's 'world-ecological regime'. I combine world-systems theory with Indigenous, ecofeminist and posthumanist thought to show how Wong's poetry models non-anthropocentric modes of relating to water and other water-dependent beings that move towards environmental justice.

The role of fertilizer in spreading commercial agriculture during the first food regime (ca 1870 to the First World War) is well established. What is less understood is the role of fertilizer in industry at this time. This paper details superphosphate fertilizer, part of a class of chemical fertilizers that emerged in the metropoles from the 1870s, and its role in the transformations in world agriculture as well as in industry. Superphosphate fertilizer was not just for the soil. The manufacture of superphosphates also provided a base for the growth of chemical industries. This growth was constitutive of industrial transformations in imperial states—the second industrial revolution—in which mass production units became integrated through a handful of chemicals. One of these chemicals is sulphuric acid, of which superphosphates require large amounts in their manufacture. As the main market for sulphuric acid through the interwar period, superphosphate manufacturing created synergies with other industries and thus made sulphuric acid cheaper. By connecting the manufacturing centres of fertilizer to the multiple farming regions undergoing accelerated commodity production, this study shows that the first food regime and the second industrial revolution were mutually constitutive moments to explain transformations in agriculture and the state system in the long 19th century.