Conference—Transformation
Jason W. Moore
The Way Out of the Climate Crisis

Global warming, natural disasters, a financial crisis, famines, and the coronavirus pandemic: in the still young 21st century, catastrophes of global proportions are already piling up. The disastrous consequences of capitalist modes of production for human beings and the environment have never been as evident as they are today. Jason W. Moore posits that our present-day upheavals all share the same root cause: the manner in which capitalism dominates both nature and humankind. He sees capitalism as a “world ecology,” in the sense that rather than affecting the natural world from the outside, it works within it. The fact that capitalism is able to create a “cheap” version of nature based on raw materials, energy, and labor is simultaneously its strength and the source of its problems. However, this model is now being called into question—and in an era of planetary crisis, the time has come not only to think about a revolutionary transformation of capitalism, but also to undertake it.

Bio
Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer as well as a professor of sociology at Binghamton University in New York. The focal points of his research are capitalism and the environment and their historical developments as well as current crises. His books and essays on the environment, capitalism and social theories are well-known. In 2003, Moore was awarded the American Society for Environmental History’s Alice Hamilton Prize. The German translation of his 2015 book, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, was published 2020. Here, he examines the dialectics of capitalism and nature in a historical reading.