Nancy Fraser, The New School
Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University
Moderated by Aaron Jakes, The University of Chicago
Introduction by Neil Brenner, The University of Chicago

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In this public dialogue, two of the leading social theorists of our time discuss the origins, manifestations and consequences of environmental crisis on our rapidly warming planet.

Over the last decade, political theorist Nancy Fraser and historical geographer Jason W. Moore have been among the most influential and systematic proponents of the claim that contemporary environmental emergencies are best understood in relation to—and as a direct expression of—capitalism’s underlying crisis-tendencies. On this understanding, the accumulation of capital is not simply a social or economic process that engenders damaging ecological effects. Rather, capital is itself a way of organizing nature, and thus environmental disasters such as global warming and biodiversity loss reflect its systematic devaluation or “cheapening” of the entire planetary web of life in both human and nonhuman forms. These operations are obscured, they argue, in dominant market-centric and technoscientific discourses, which treat nature as an exterior parameter or infinitely renewable resource supply for human consumption. In contrast, Fraser and Moore seek to draw attention to the “hidden abodes” of human and nonhuman reproductive work that support the operations of capital, and indeed, life itself on planet earth.

Moore and Fraser have been developing closely parallel lines of argument and discussing each other’s work for quite some time. In this conversation, moderated Professor Aaron Jakes of the Department of History, these eminent scholars will share the stage to consider what their respective approaches to an account of “capitalism’s natures” might offer to scholarship on the climate crisis, and to ongoing struggles to create more equitable, democratic, and livable ways of organizing our shared planetary existence.

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Footnotes:

15:23 - Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic anthropologist who wrote "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins Of Our Time" in 1944, analyzing the social and economic changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

19:34 - “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things” is a 2018 book authored by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel that applies an ecological approach to the history of capitalism.

20:05 - Raymond Williams was a Welsh socialist thinker and writer who published “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society” in 1976, and referred to nature as “the most complex [word] in the English language.”

22:27 - Silvia Federici is a feminist activist and writer who wrote “Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism” in 2020.

32:53 - “Environmentalism of the Rich” is a 2017 book by Peter Dauvergne that discusses the impact of environmentalist movements that focus on the concerns of the wealthy, pushing for sustainability in only some areas.

36:22 - In 2021, Ariel Ortiz-Bobea et al. published an article in the Nature Climate Change journal that concluded that anthropogenic climate change has contributed to a 21% loss in agricultural productivity since 1961, equivalent to seven years of productivity growth.

1:14:20 - Perrin Selcer is a professor in the History Department and Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan who wrote “The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth” in 2018.

1:24:22 - The “Orbis spike” is a concept from Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis’ 2015 paper “Defining the Anthropocene," published in Nature, that identifies a rapid decrease in global CO2 levels in 1610, which the authors identify as a result of forest regrowth that followed the large loss of population in the New World from diseases brought by European colonizers.

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Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) at The University of Chicago.

Recorded February 10, 2023.