Topic: Climate History, Climate Crises, Climate Revolts: A Ridiculously Brief History
Speaker: Jason Moore
Time: Aug 27, 2025 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Summary:
In this talk, environmental historian Jason W. Moore reinterprets climate crises through successive climate-class conjunctures, exploring their role in civilizational crises across the longue durée—and unpacking their implications for twenty-first-century climate narratives. Far from an allegedly eternal conflict between Man and Nature—a mystical cosmology born in the aftermath of 1492’s bloody conquests—these conjunctures foreground the dynamics of surplus labor in the web of life. For this reason, moments of “bad” climate have been moments of economic depression, political crisis, and popular revolt: they are climate-class conjunctures. Drawing on the world-ecology framework, Moore illustrates how unfavorable climate change in western Asia amplified the socio-ecological tensions of class societies. He examines key conjunctures: the Dark Ages Cold Period (c. 400-800) and the crisis of the Roman West; the arrival of the Little Ice Age and feudal crisis (c. 1300-1450); the “long, cold seventeenth century” (c. 1550–1700), reinforced by imperialist genocides and marked by economic volatility, and widespread rebellion; and the late eighteenth-century revolutionary wave (c. 1783–1820) during the Little Ice Age’s final cold snap. Climate, in these conjunctures, acts not as an abstract eco-determinist force but as a contradiction multiplier, exacerbating tensions from the point of production to geopolitics. Moore distills three lessons. Adverse climates enable “Great Levelings” of class society (Scheidel); they intensify socio-ecological contradictions; and they illuminate how climate crises are, ultimately, crisis of surplus labor in the web of life. By reframing today’s climate crisis as a signal moment of capitalism’s epochal crisis, Moore rejects climate doomism and climate fix-ism, suggesting instead that the climate crisis shapes an ongoing transition away from capitalism. Whether this shift toward new modes of political accumulation—emerging very differently from Beijing and Washington—will foster greater democracy or sustainability remains uncertain. But one thing is: the century ahead is one of civilization crisis… and political possibility.
Biography:
Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
Many of his essays can be found here: http://jasonwmoore.com
slides (not available)
Leave a Reply