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

BOOK REVIEWS 246
according to the United Nations), this is hardly a small issue in world environmental history if
these states were built from the globalized ‘outside in’ instead of the regionalized ‘inside out’.
So the editors’ case is wrong in assuming a huge phenomenological difference where
they claim that state formation is a regional phenomenon “opposed” to world system dynamics in
more modern times. They seem unaware that the history of state formation in the past few
hundred years has been a global phenomenon as well. Moreover, the ‘second generation’ of
world-systems analysis and dependency theory have already integrated intra-regional and interregional
processes into their analysis several decades ago. See Alvin So’s review in Social
Change and Development (1990).
The editors have another conceit that environmental conflict is very modern and
localized: “Whatever one calls it, [state] developmentalism and resistance to it [i.e., its
externalities] frame much of the environmental history of the last several centuries.” However,
this is another misleading intra-regional limitation on the history of environmentalism, as it
ignores international networks of developmentalist pressures and revolts against them (like in
Chiapas in Southern Mexico in opposition to international free trade zones); or ignoring that
international war instead of local economic pressures is a major degradative force in ‘local
regions’ (like in Afghanistan or Iraq with U.S.-led-NATO or U.S. military invasion and
occupation for instance); or ignoring the internationalization of environmental movement
networks (mentioned in history books that show environmental movements are innately
internationalized and cross-cultural influences, seen in Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global
History (1999) or in Hawken’s Blessed Unrest (2007)). Second, others have argued strongly
against thinking that there is something exclusively modern about environmental protest. Sing
Chew writes that state/social movement contention over environmental conditions is far older
than “several centuries,” in his three-volume work of world environmental history starting with
World Ecological Degradation (2001), which they should know about before thinking
environmentalism is entirely a modern phenomenon. My Ecological Revolution (2009) came out
the same month as their edited book, and I argue something similar to Chew. I cannot agree that
environmental social movements are novel phenomena caused by such ‘modern’ scales of state
economic intensification when worldwide environmentalist concerns are so deeply connected
with the origins of ancient religious protest movements thousands of years ago or in the present.
Third, the editors claim to reject “periodization” strategies of world history though they
really only reject periodizations of others. They dislike framing history in economically defined
epochs or into Marxist theoretical modes of production, yet adopt their own economic
periodizations [1] based on novel energy regimes making a presumed radical break from the past
that potentially help us avoid ‘declensionist’ narratives, and [2] how recent state intensification of
the economy of only the past several hundred years is responsible for mounting anti-systemic
‘pro-environmental’ pressures. Chew and I argue otherwise: that environmentalism and its
cultural effects are a far older state-opposition phenomenon.
In short, they prefer to analyze state developmentalism as a common regional, existential
issue worldwide without reference to global issues. “We treat European capitalism and science as
culturally specific variants of patterns found much more broadly.” This view would have been
justified if they had more detailed European case chapters on this revisionist topic of treating
Marxism or capitalism in Amer-European society as a Foucauldian ‘power/discourse’ that has
affected the European/American environment’s regional definitions, uses, or conditions. This
would be interesting. Alas, they don’t do this very much except for analysis of the ‘capitalist