Interchange – Disorganizing Nature: On the Capitalocene with Jason Moore

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Since the 1970’s, environmentalists have framed our epoch as the “Anthropocene,” a period defined by man’s — and often specifically men’s — unidirectional impact on a quickly heating planet Earth. The so-called Anthropocene continues to be caused by only a small portion of the people on the planet, following hierarchies of race, gender, class, and the artificial division of Man and Nature. To call it the “Anthropocene”, however, obscures the underlying dynamics of power that got us to our current planetary crisis.

On this week’s episode of Interchange, show producer Bradi Heaberlin joins Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, in the WFHB studio to untangle the reflexes of the trappings of an Anthropocentric view of the planetary crisis and help us locate ourselves in the Capitalocene. They ask, and begin to answer, the questions: who caused the the climate crisis? Are we in an anthropocene, a period defined by the earth’s people, or a capitalocene? Moore argues that the relationship between people and the web of life is fundamentally about the ways in which capitalist power, exploitation, and appropriation move through nature and the ways nature moves through the confines of capitalist social and economic relations on earth.

GUEST
Jason W. Moore teaches World History and World-Ecology at Binghamton University and is Coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, and of numerous award-winning essays in environmental history, political economy, and social theory.

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MUSIC
Cecil Taylor – Looking Ahead!
“Excursion on a Wobbly Rail”
“Toll”
“Of What”
“Wallering”
“Luyah! The Glorious Step”

CREDITS
Host: Doug Storm
Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin
Editor: Doug Storm
Produced by the Interchange Collective
Executive Producer: Kade Young