Presented By: Science for the People
Whole Earth, Fractured Planet: Geohistory, Climate Justice, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Jason Moore, Phd - Binghamton University
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s iconic poster for the first Earth Day (1970) captured the zeitgeist of a new political imaginary: modern environmentalism. Ever since, its dominant metaphors – from Spaceship Earth to the Anthropocene – have stressed the fundamental unity of humans in facing, and creating, planetary crises. Rightly insisting that humans are part of the web of life, post-1970 environmentalism rapidly slipped into a second, more dubious, worldview: “we” created the conditions and realities of planetary crisis. The new global environmental imaginary had little sense of capitalism’s global fractures, above all the ways in which planetary color, gender, and class lines have been drawn and violently policed since 1492. As today’s climate crises unfold, so too has a resurgent Western universalism, captured in the Anthropocene’s discourse of Man versus Nature. Looking at capitalism’s long history of power and re/production, Moore shows how movements for planetary justice must directly challenge – and disrupt – the enduring legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism as fundamental drivers of climate crisis and the enrichment of the globe’s One Percent.
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