Whitaker Ecological Revolution summary environmental degra…

8/2/2019 Whitaker Ecological Revolution summary environmental degra

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Whitaker, Mark D. Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

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This research won an award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2010.

This research began to be published in book form in 2009.

This is a green theory of history.The environment is both context

and choice in human societies

that makes our environment our

self-chosen context. Environmentis simultaneously a material

structural given and something

based on human agency idealsand different idealsof what to

do with it that determines to what

uses it is employed, by whom,and for whom. Interactive

material and ideological

repercussions are rarely broughttogether without reductionism.

Such reductionism is challenged

here. Instead of economics,materialism, biological, or

cultural determinisms, twostrategies decide our human

stratification and its relation to

environmental conditions. Theseare our choices of degradation or

sustainability.

Degradation is one of two paths all humanity has had throughout world history in its

relation with its environmentand with itself. Degradation has harmed more than the

environment. It has harmed ourselves. Degradations sufferings and broken promiseshave made us culturally and materially who we are, just as sustainability movements

ever-renewed hopefulness and promises of a better present and future life has made us

who we are. Thus sustainability is another path that has happened in the past as well,

though it has been repeatedly destroyed by degradative strategies just as it becomes moresuccessful due to fatal flaws typically seen in its past strategies. This book was written to

help identify these two patterns in human-environmental history that are scenarios where

we may go in the 21st

century. It was written to provide guidance for assuring that therepeated human and environmental suffering of the degradative strategies of the past can

be countered in the future by avoiding the fatal flaws of sustainability strategies in the

past. Much of the repetition of history is degradative. Much of it that is linear issustainable.


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This is an attempt to learn from periods of our more linear history typically wedged in-between or later erased from our memories and consumption by the repetition of

degradation. In history, by our own willparticularly by the will of some over others

our unrepresentative choices have influenced the creation of a repetitious politicallydriven process of environmental degradation with its repetition of human and

environmental suffering. Since ideological choices are equally material choices, they canyield strategies of ideological hegemony through certain biased choices and uses ofmaterials and organizations. Degradation comes out of the self-interests of some,

dominating over the self-interests of others unrepresentatively and thus without stability

for such relations except equally unrepresentative versions of the same. Equally, by our

own willparticularly the will that comes from more representative deliberationourchoices become more rational and representative. This has influenced the creation of

sustainability out of our more equitable self-interest. By choosing such strategies, and

maintaining them against the reinstitution of strategies of unrepresentative domination,we escaped from past repetitions of suffering. We made a more linear and stable history

for ourselves, at least until the fatal flaws in some sustainability strategies of the past

began to mount and be surmounted by interactive degradative strategies once more. Wewere thus returned to a world of wider and even greater human and environmental

suffering, typically with our cultural memories and material consumption wiped from

many traces of our previous successes at establishing such jurisdictions.

This books is to jog our cultural memories that globally we have been heroes in

defending our slowly built sustainable and more abundant heritage as a repeatedly

defended birthright; that we have fought enemies who have imposed on us mostlyunrepresentative and degradative forms of political economy and extraction that brought

them and us only repeated destruction together; and that when given cultural space orsuccessfully defending it, we always have worked toward sustainability by inventing

ingenious interactions of culture, politics, technological, material, and environmental

interactions over time; and that we thus learn from our own mistakes of the past.Hopefully, this book will help us learn what have been the fatal flaws in human

organizational history.

Studying jurisdictionsjurisdictional formation, change, contention, and cooperation

merges many perspectives without reductionism. Jurisdictions are strategies how to

stratify via culture and materials with a choice of conflict and/or cooperation in themdepending how they are chosen and how they are organized. Strategies of jurisdictions

can be unrepresentative and unsustainable, or representative and sustainable. Our

strategies of jurisdictions influenced and created our human and environmental history.

Our jurisdictional footprint determined our ecological footprint.

This book is the first universal history of an environmentalist and interscientific

investigation of jurisdictional patterns in history and their changes over time.

Its method is based on actual case analysis of the interscientific historical process

that devolves around jurisdictional changes, instead of an historiography based on merelyphilosophical terms, deductions, or reductionism. The development of jurisdictions and


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their change is a combined political economic and cultural phenomenon. Thedevelopment of jurisdictions is equally an interscientific phenomenon, involving both

social-cultural referents of power and authority and material referents of some groups

power and authority. I follow these methods in particular cases.Thus, this book is the first comparative historical treatment of long-term patterns

of environmental degradation and environmental social movements equal attempts toestablish jurisdictional arrangements. Respectively, these two factors are involved in along-term, repeating, sociological process around state formations social and

environmental penetration versus its social opposition. I argue that the formation of

unrepresentative political clientelism/jurisdictions is responsible for environmental

degradation.The process of environmental degradation is argued to be caused by

unrepresentative state elite organizational changes in environmental relations for their

own short-term political economic benefits though with bad long-term consequences.This political organizational change facilitates a multitude of environmentally

contextualized social movements past or present. The scale of this relational phenomenon

gets bigger over time. Information comes from detailed comparative case analysis ofthree world regions with singular dominating states: Japan, China, and Europe (Roman

Empire) from 1000 BCE to the present.

The book challenges the widely assumed modern idea that environmentalism is anexample of a new social movement unheralded in human history, and it challenges

another modern assumption that environmental degradation is a similar novelty

something to be laid at the door of the past 500 years of European expansion. However,

in testing these hypotheses by taking a more comparative historical view, the politics ofstate sponsored and protected environmental degradation along with contentious political

pressures for environmental amelioration are seen throughout the human historicalrecord. Instead of only being a phenomenon of the past 50 or 500 years, an

environmentalist politics is a template of human political relations through the

contentious and cooperative way consumption is organized as an infrastructural

relationship. This infrastructural relationship has been with us since the

contentious/cooperative beginning of state formation and urbanization to the present day

of mounting global political pressures on state backed transnational corporations. Second,it is widely assumed that population is a direct variable in environmental degradation. It

is argued that population is at most an indirect variable and instead that the direct

variables of both environmental degradation or environmental amelioration are strategicand organizational. This means certain formal institutions and formal policy are the way

certain strategies sponsor different frameworks of materials and ideologies in

consumptive relationships. These choices are either characterized by a lack of

representation in their development (and thus generate conflict) or are characterized bygreater representative purposes and thus cooperative alliance. We can analyze the

political alliance purposes of such jurisdictional formations and change as well as their

degrees of representativeness. Historically, most formal institutions and formal policystrategies have been delimited to means through which only strategized informal political

alliances between select elites and aggregate consumers have been organized to maintain

three very differently organized types of informal hegemonic frameworks ofjurisdictional alliance. These three interactive strategies compete with one another.


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Regarding this comparative historical dynamic and its predictable changes, what Ioffer is a comparatively based proof of concept piece around how particular chosen

strategic frameworks of consumption and environmental degradation become

institutionalized in human societies in formal policy and formal institutions and its effectson equality, social stratification, culture, consumption, and environmental conditions.

Expansion of political clientelism and scale of consumption are typically the same issueaffecting environmental degradation and consumer choice.

One part of the argument is environmental social movement politics past or

present became expressed in major religious change movements, as oppositions to state

environmental degradation using discourses available. As a result, origins of our largescale humanocentric axial religions are connected in origin to anti-systemic

environmental movements. Many major religious movements of the past (or present)

were environmentalist by being materialist instead of merely ideological in theirconcern: they were anti-systemic ideological movements of greater material concern for

personal health (in medical movements), local ecological health, and local economic

concern, rolled into one, increasingly delegitimating participation within institutions thatbrought more risk into their lives, and increasingly calling for the establishment of their

own forms of jurisdiction. Since ecological revolutions are an endemic part of an

unrepresentative, degradation-based political economy of expansion, they continue today.China, Japan, and Europe are analyzed over 2,500 years showing how state-led

environmental degradation gets paired with religio-ecological movements in a predictable

fashion. The book describes solutions to this durable and repeating organizational

problematic as well. It should be useful to all people seeking solutions to environmentalproblems.

To elaborate the model, it argues from a comparative historical view that commonpolitical organizational factors are to blame for environmental degradation, and these

political organizational factors include sponsored and defend particular arrangements of

material issues that tend to be degradative.Ecological Revolution describes commonpolitical design characteristics as the rationale why our historical states facilitated

environmental degradation that contributed to their collapsecontributing politically,

economically, and culturally. Because of degradative state political pressures, theybecome opposed predictably by religio-ecological movements. Thus this work is a rare

example that does justice to the historical interaction of political economy and cultural

issues in world history as relatively autonomous to each other, since both of these issuesare independent variables interacting instead of determinative from each other. Most

other authors attempt to reduce these independent variables of political economy and

culture to make one a dependent variable of the other in either economic determinism or

cultural determinism.

Ecological Revolution describes a common cross-cultural and historical pattern

that repeatedly has emerged in which two powerful competing groups, in their efforts to

obtain the support of (or derive benefit from) a weaker group, engage in activities thatdegrade their common environment. One of the two groups includes the despatialized

networks of territorial state-based elites with their formal institutional, material

disbursement, and ideological sponsorship mechanisms they utilize to consolidate poweracross larger territories. First, this strategy of elite-sponsored state formation via


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centralized consumptive and ideological ambivalence has a material consequence. Itleads to consolidation of economic relations and economic shakeout of the territory over

time, resulting in mounting problems in health, ecological soundness, and economic

durability. Second, this strategy of elite facilitated environmental degradation has anideological and cultural consequence. The social risks of its political economic

consolidation slowly delegitimates any originating ideological sponsorship of state elitesattempts to construct their states as legitimated larger institutions. Mountingdelegitimation due to the three material problems above creates desires in the other group

to break away from the larger territorial state clientelism, materially and ideologically.

This is a local self-interest merging with pro-environmental sentiment interlinked, i.e., in

the name of their regional ecological self-interest that is increasingly undermined byunrepresentative state elite policies.

The other group includes these multiple regional areas of more geographically

embedded peasants/citizens. This group responds in a variety of ecologicalrevolutionary ways to political economic suffering from state-based environmental

degradation. This leads to a more anti-systemic, localized organizational culture

legitimating a variety of more autonomy-inclined and/or depoliticized movements alongwith movements of what can be called hermetic science movementsin the novel

interest in more independent empirical and material explorations of their predicament and

the novel externalities in their lives particularly exploring social organization and medicalissues. As an aside, thus the context of ecological revolution additionally explores why

certain periods of scientific advancement have began and have been pronounced within

such eras of massive religious change as well: both are autonomous movements seeing

their way in a novel plurality of more individually, independent chosen manners of life aslarger state-sponsored cultural arrangements became delegitimated. Such scientific

explorations beginning in these eras of ecological revolution are simultaneouslyoppositional material and ideological support frameworks for the latter group against

their eras version of degradation-encouraging, state based elites and their waning

authority.The term ecological revolution is stressed because the material and ecological

relations in world historys oppositional social movements have been overlooked. These

oppositional ideological movements have three common environmentally linked factors.They are anti-systemic health practices, local ecological protection movements against

state/elite jurisdiction and extraction, and involve more ecologically rationalized

economic-technological institutions within a religious mobilization. Such major religioussocial movements in world history take place in contexts of massive environmental

degradation, political economic consolidation, and immiseration. As a consequence, so-

called ideological/religious movements have in many cases had material social

institutional priorities and/or material critique priorities intertwined. Mediating variablesto this peasant/citizen response would be the case-specific issues of hinterland/frontiers,

particularities of such geographies, historical event outcomes, ongoing state/movement

interactions, depth of penetration of state elites into a wider society, and arguably theavailability or ingenuity of alternative discourses and conceptions of revolt.

Global religious movements and ideological/cultural change are often analyzed in

isolation from material, political economic issues except in histories of science andmedicine. Most research has been carried out in isolation from the ecological contexts of


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both these changes. Additionally, analysis of state formation has often been carried outwithout regard to ecological contexts. Therefore, both these anti-systemic and systemic

forces in world history rarely are analyzed as linked with a shared changing

environmental relationship in a long-term process.Ecological Revolution contributes tobringing the environment back in as an overlooked theme in both their origins and in

conceiving of their ongoing environmentally mediated, relational interaction.

To summarize, first, the book tries to show an interactive process of how a

plurality of religious social movements (including scientific movements) gets paired

against a common state-facilitated environmental degradation in a predictable fashion,

and how future state formation elites have difficulty in constructing themselves aslegitimate in the wake of such culturally decentralizing ecological revolutions. Second, it

helps explain how we got our humanocentric religious discourses worldwide from a

common mechanism of degradative state formation contributing to undermining and todelegitimating regional, ecologically sensitive religious identities toward more abstract

humanocentric ones (without these humanocentric ones in practice being divorced from

environmentally contextualized concerns or origins). Third, it helps explain why certainperiods of human history inspired more people to have empirically defined scientific

development as well. Fourth, the same mechanism of ongoing territorial state expansion

soon co-opts its novel oppositional discourses and turns them into a wider state formationlegitimation appeal. This explains culturally why in the world historical record there are

ever-larger scales of territorial states constructed over time, due to the larger abstract

cultural discourses created in the previous cycle of environmental degradation and

ecological revolution--even if each state formation tends to fail in similar manners in thefuture due to similar self-degradative, self-delegitimating processes of ecological

revolution once more, that remain unsolved.In an effort to encourage a less Eurocentric sociology and world history, the book

examines cases of this environmentally-modulated systemic and anti-systemic interaction

in Japan, China, and Europe over the past 2,500 years and into the present. Fifth, sincethis book argues that these ecological revolutions are an endemic part of a degradation-

based political economy, it has a prediction. Instead of only happening only once, this

ecological revolutionary process continues into the present. Different 'eras' (I challengethe whole idea of different political economic eras) show the same dynamic, past or

present, in expanding scales of the same process of interaction.

Sixth, it is not argued that all forms of such identity, scientific, ethical, andmedical change are tied to environmental degradation. It is only argued that an

overlooked point about truly widespread religious and ideological changes in world

history has been their connection to mobilizing a local material politics against degraded

state political economies, and the other overlooked point about how unrepresentative eliteforms of political economic organization and cultural hegemonies are repeatedly and

predictably to blame for environmental degradationinstead of blaming

people/populations in general who tend to be more the degraded victims of suchpsychopaths and their jurisdictional strategies over time instead of the beneficiaries.

Unrepresentative elite choices typically have been self-destructive of their own

environment and their legitimated leadership, and thus destructive of their own statesmaterial and cultural durability. I fail to argue that this environmental degradation is


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functionally required to occur, since choices of political organizational variables are thecause. Therefore, environmental degradation can be solved by different choices of

strategies as well, as described in my other bookToward a Bioregional State.

With this analysis, I argue that an environmentalist and consumptive politics have

been the basis of state politics through changing elite-to-base alliances of cooperation

and conflict throughout human history though these cooperations have rarely beenrepresentative, without duress, or with other choices allowed to exist as competition withthe unrepresentative clientelisms. The analysis is on these alliances. I argue it requires

adjusting our social theory from mere conflict views to concentrate on conflict and

cooperation and the degree of its representative clientelism in-between. I argue it requires

adjusting our views of economics and commodities to understand our consumption aspart of a wider strategy of a politicized infrastructure designed out of conflict, imposition,

and repression of choices instead of the possibility of a political infrastructure of

materials that maintains many choices for people. It additionally implies the requirementof adjusting our social policy to modify these unrepresentative consumptive

infrastructures and jurisdictions that contribute to environmental degradation processes.

A politicized consumptive infrastructure is a method to achieve a more interscientificsociological view on major issues of world history because it is without reductionism.

This method addresses case variations in sociological, biological, or physical issues.

As a corollary to the books findings, much can be learned in the inverse in anevaluative sense for: [1] how to construct sustainability through variables mentioned

above involved in environmental degradation; [2] when capacities for jurisdictional

interruption toward sustainability and greater representation are likely to occur; and [3]

what the political systemic difficulties would be in approaching sustainability if certainstrategies that maintain environmental degradation are typically a chosen form of

political enfranchisement of some and an intentional disenfranchisement of others.In conclusion, if the direct variables of environmental degradation are particular

unrepresentative jurisdictional arrangements of formal institutions, formal policy,

materials, and ideology, then direct variables for sustainability are more representativeversions of the same. My previous bookToward a Bioregional State (2005), the first

book devoted to green constitutional engineering, discussed some novel

recommendations for political organizational checks and balances to mollify theunrepresentative environmental degradation process discussed in this book.

More information: videos, audio interviews, and more:

http://biostate.blogspot.com

http://commodityecology.blogspot.com

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