Climate, class, and civilizational crises in the Holocene

Watch the recording of the recent webinar given by environmental historian and guest speaker Professor Jason Moore.

In this lecture, the environmental historian Jason W. Moore explored the entangled relations between climate history, class societies, and civilizational crises in the Holocene. Giving special focus to the Little Ice Age origins of capitalism, Moore showed how the durable structures of imperial power, world class formation, and profit-obsessed frontier-making formed through a new civilizational project that altered planetary life, beginning in the sixteenth century. Drawing attention to successive climate shifts and their connections with social unrest and political instability, this longer view reveals capitalism's ecologies of power, re/production and profit as climate-dependent. The unraveling of capitalism's ecologies in the era of climate crisis points not towards the "end of the world," but rather towards a new era of political possibility at the end of the Capitalocene's business- and politics-as-usual.