Capitalism's Ecologies: Culture, Power, and Crisis in the 21st Century

Ours is an era of planetary crisis. As scholars, activists, and citizens seek to make sense of our uncertain times, the limits of conventional environmental thinking have become clear. Rather than see “Society” and “Nature” as separate, Capitalism’s Ecologies illuminates how environmental and social change are intimately entwined. Contributors engage capitalism not as a social system independent of nature, but as a world-ecology of power, culture, and capital that flows through the web of life. In this rethinking, capitalism makes nature—and nature makes capitalism. Across successive essays, emergent and established scholars explore themes of colonialism, culture, race, gender, agriculture, literature, and waste to reveal capitalism’s varied organizations of humans and the rest of nature. Capitalism’s Ecologies asks readers to consider new ways of thinking about social and environmental crises, how they fit together, and what we might do about them.