Agriculture, Climate, and Capitalist World-Economy: Rethinking the Global Crisis

Our relationship with nature has been constantly changing throughout modern history. The ways in which we interact with extra-human natures in order to grow food and build empires has radically and successively transformed since the sixteenth century. With these transformations, the perception of our interactions with extra-human natures has changed as well. The modern perception of Humans versus Nature is challenged with a new ideological framework. This paper introduces the world-ecological framework, which recognizes the relationships of human and extra-human natures as deeply intertwined and dialectical histories. The world-ecological framework is contrasted with the modernist ontology in the debate of naming our current epochal era: Anthropocene versus the Capitalocene. Thinking through the global crisis using the world-ecological framework exposes the influence of capitalism on agriculture and climate. This paper uses the world-ecological framework to examine capitalist agriculture’s relationship to climate change as well as illustrate the limits and threats this relationship poses to the capitalist world-ecology