Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University

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 coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network. He can be reached at: jwmoore@binghamton.edu.

Abstract

The trajectory of the climate crisis needn’t be a doomsday scenario. To get beyond today’s proliferation of climate doomsday porn, we’ll need to look closely at two entangled histories. One turns on the Cold War imaginary of nuclear armageddon, whose quite tangible “bomb” metamorphosed into Paul Ehrlich’s landmark The Population Bomb, in which “too many people” portended a not-too-distant doomsday of famine, poverty, pestilence, and war. While the particulars have changed since 1968, today’s dominant environmental imaginary routinely narrates the climate crisis as a clash of Man and Nature, with End Times clearly visible on the horizon: a climate bomb. A second history looks at the mosaic of human-centered relations of power and re/production in the web of life -- a history in which climate conditions and changes figure prominently. Giving special focus to the relations of climate, class, and civilization over the past seven centuries, environmental historian Jason W. Moore shows how climate shifts have been implicated in profound suffering and violence, but also in the emergence of new possibilities for egalitarian politics. Not for nothing, the “little ice ages” of late antiquity and the later middle ages witnessed the epochal weakening of mass slavery and serfdom. To make sense of these new possibilities, however, we’ll need to let go of “Man and Nature” and its love affair with the apocalypse -- and begin to unthink the climate bomb.