Work, Energy, and the Value of Nature: From Planetary Conquest to Epochal Crisis in the Capitalist World-Ecology

The media can be accessed here: http://streaming.osu.edu/knowledgebank/Mershon17/Jason_Moore.mp4Where and when do we find the origins of today’s planetary crisis? In this lecture, Moore argues that rise of capitalism in the centuries after 1450 marked an environment-making revolution greater than any since the dawn of agriculture. Arguing that capitalism develops not only through economic process but by cultural and territorial conquests, Moore shows how the modern world was forged in a peculiar – and destructive – relation of work and energy. In this account, the work of human and extra-human natures is foregrounded, implicating the creation of “Nature” and “Humanity” – including the powerfully racialized and gendered expulsions of humans from “Humanity.” At its core, capitalism works through a strategy of Cheap Nature: one premised on the de-valuation of ‘women, nature, and colonies.’ The limits of this strategy are increasingly revealed in the ongoing exhaustion – and growing opposition to – of Cheap Nature in the early 21st century