• Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method

    Author(s):
    Jason W. Moore (see profile)
    Date:
    2017
    Group(s):
    World-Ecology Research Network
    Subject(s):
    Economic history, Environmental conditions
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    World-Ecology, Environmental history, Environmental humanities
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6JR7B
    Abstract:
    Abstract In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Journal:
    Theory and Society
    Volume:
    46
    Page Range:
    285 - 318
    ISSN:
    0304-2421
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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