Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

113 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
vernaculars are needed, however, it would be impractical to ignore the old. For the moment, I
retain the language of Nature/Society and “socio-ecological,” but emphasize from the outset that
these terms represent the results of an underlying relation – what I call, following Theophrastus
(Hughes 1994:4), the oikeios. This signifies the relation that produces manifold environments and
organisms as irreducibly plural abstractions. To take the Nature/Society binary as a point of
departure confuses the origins of a process with its results. The plethora of ways that human and
biophysical natures are intertwined at every scale – from the body to the world market – is
obscured to the degree that we take nature and society as purified essences rather than tangled
bundles of human- and extra-human nature.
Feudalism, capitalism, and other historical systems emerge and develop through this
oikeios. World-ecologies signify successive configurations of nature-society relations from which
no aspect of human experience is exempt. Far more than a simple act of discursive re-branding,
the world-ecological perspective seeks to illuminate what is often invisible in environmental
studies. In place of a thought-structure that posits the “economic” as independent (or relatively
so) from the “environment,” would it not be more fruitful to view financialization,
industrialization, imperialism (old and new), and commercialization, among many others, as
socio-ecological projects and processes in their own right?
In what follows, the shorthand “ecological” speaks to a holistic perspective on the
society-environment relation. Each dialectical movement is actively constructed by (and through)
the other. If society and environment constitute the parts, ecology signifies the whole that
emerges through these relations (Levins and Lewontin 1985). In place of environmental crisis, I
therefore embrace the language of ecological transformation. I do so because a singular object,
the environment, “does not exist and… because every species, not only the human species, is at
every moment constructing and destroying the world it inhabits” (Lewontin and Levins 1997:98).
A second conceptual-linguistic difficulty in global environmental studies implicates the
“common sense” of environmental crisis today. The signifier “crisis” is rarely deployed with less
historical and conceptual precision than in critical environmental studies. The argument for crisis
is too often built out from a catalogue of environmental problems, whose gravity cannot (I agree)
be overestimated (e.g. Foster 2009). Unfortunately, such empiricism works against a theory that
includes unconventional sites of environmental history – say, financial centers or factories or
suburban sprawls as environmental history. Nor is it conducive to a world-ecological rethinking
modernity’s greatest contradictions – between powerful and weaker states, between capital and
the direct producers, between town and country.
Capitalism as World-Ecology: Conceptual-Methodological Visions
We have become accustomed to thinking of capitalism as a social, even economic, system. There
is some truth the characterization. But it rests upon a profound falsification. It is impossible to
discern, in a non-arbitrary fashion, the boundary between capitalism, the social system, and “the
environment.” These realities are so intertwined that it is impossible, as Williams might say, “to
draw back and separate either out” (1980:83).
The point is not to do away with distinctions, but to highlight the often-invisible frames
within which distinctions are formed. The Cartesian ontology that shapes the distinctions of
“economy/society” and “environment” is fast losing its heuristic edge. These abstractions –
Nature/Society – are the product of a long history of modern thought, one premised on the search