whitaker ecological revolution summary w jurisdictional issue book cover

Whitaker, Mark D. Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History [email protected]

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Dissertation Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and Environmental Amelioration; Principles, Patterns, and Outcomes (2008)

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, as

Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions;

China, Japan, Europe

This book is the first universal history of an environmentalist and interscientific investigation of jurisdictional patterns in history and their changes. Its method is based on actual case analysis of the interscientific historical process that devolves around jurisdictional changes, instead of an historiography based on philosophical terms, deductions or reductionism. Development of jurisdictions and their change is a combined political economic, environmental and cultural phenomenon. Development of jurisdictions, an interscientific phenomenon, involves both social-cultural referents of power/authority, material referents of some groups’ power and authority, and its effects on environmental relations. 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 to establish jurisdictional arrangements. Respectively, these two factors are involved in a long-term, repeating, sociological process around state formation’s social and


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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 and social 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 of three 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 an example 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 of state sponsored and protected environmental degradation along with contentious political pressures for environmental amelioration are seen throughout the human historical record. 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 a politically infrastructural relationship. Another term equally for this is a ‘jurisdictional alliance’ between certain elites, via certain strategies of institutions, policy, material and ideological appeals/distribution, with certain followers—against other options of all the same. This jurisdictional/infrastructural politics between elites and base groups 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 strategic and organizational. This means certain formal institutions and formal policy are the way certain informal political strategies of jurisdiction are created. Such jurisdictions get built by elites sponsoring different frameworks of materials and ideologies in consumptive and cultural relationships for themselves and their allies—against other elites, their allies, and their material or ideological choices that would be different. Such jurisdictional arrangements and/or political consumptive infrastructures are choices. Jurisdictions are either characterized by a lack of representation in their development (and thus generate conflict) or are characterized by greater representative purposes and thus cooperative alliance. We can analyze the different intercompeting political alliance purposes of such jurisdictional formations and change as well as judge them on their degrees of representativeness. Historically, most formal institutions and formal policy strategies have been delimited to unrepresentative 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 of jurisdictional alliance. These three interactive strategies compete with one another.


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Regarding this comparative historical dynamic and its predictable changes, what I offer 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 effects on equality, social stratification, culture, consumption, and environmental conditions. Expansion of political clientelism and scale of consumption are typically the same issue affecting 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 large scale humanocentric ‘axial religions’ are connected in origin to anti-systemic environmental movements. Our institutionalized history of degradation has created much of the origins of our world’s axial religious heritage. Many major religious movements of the past (or present) were ‘environmentalist’ by being materialist instead of merely ideological in their concern: 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 jurisdictions that brought 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 environmental problems. To elaborate the model, it argues from a comparative historical view that common political 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 common political design characteristics as the rationale why our historical states facilitated environmental degradation that contributed to their collapse—with environmental degradation contributing politically, economically, and culturally. Because of degradative state political pressures, they become 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 issues are 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 that degrade 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 power


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and jurisdiction across larger territories. First, this strategy of elite-sponsored state formation via centralized consumptive and ideological ambivalence has a material consequence. Historically its very success as a jurisdiction, infrastructure, and political alliance leads 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 an ideological and cultural consequence. The social risks of its political economic consolidation slowly delegitimates any originating ideological sponsorship of state elites’ attempts to construct their states as legitimated larger institutions and jurisdictions. Mounting delegitimation due to the three material problems above creates desires in the other group to break away from the larger territorial state clientelism and jurisdiction, 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” in jurisdiction that is increasingly undermined by unrepresentative state elite policies. The other group includes these multiple regional areas of more geographically embedded peasants/citizens. This group responds in a variety of ‘ecological revolutionary’ ways to political economic suffering from state-based environmental degradation. This leads to a more anti-systemic, localized organizational culture legitimating a plurality of more political autonomy-inclined jurisdictions, including depoliticized movements rejecting previous elite settlements, and along with movements of what can be called hermetic science movements—enjoined in the novel interest for more independent empirical and material explorations of their increasing risky predicament and the novel externalities in their lives particularly exploring social organization and medical issues. As an aside, thus the context of ecological revolution additionally explores why certain periods of scientific advancement have began and have been very pronounced within such eras of massive religious change as well: both are autonomous jurisdictional movements seeing their way in a novel plurality of more individually, independent chosen manners of life as larger state-sponsored cultural arrangements became delegitimated. Such scientific explorations beginning in these eras of ecological revolution are simultaneously oppositional material and ideological support frameworks for the latter groups against their era’s version of degradation-encouraging, state-based elites and their waning political jurisdiction and cultural authority. The term ‘ecological revolution’ is stressed because the material and ecological relations in world history’s 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 religious social 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 variables to 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 the availability or ingenuity of alternative discourses and conceptions of revolt.


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Global religious movements and ideological/cultural change are often analyzed in isolation from material, political economic issues except in histories of science and medicine. Most research has been carried out in isolation from the ecological contexts of both these changes. Additionally, analysis of state formation has often been carried out without 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 ‘to bringing 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 as legitimate 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 to delegitimating 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 certain periods 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 formation legitimation 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 the future 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, since this 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 challenge the 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, and medical 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 jurisdictional politics and to mobilizing a local material politics against degraded state political economies, and the other overlooked point about how unrepresentative elite forms of political economic organization and cultural hegemonies are repeatedly and predictably to blame for environmental degradation—instead of blaming people/populations in general who tend to be more the degraded victims of such psychopaths and their jurisdictional strategies over time instead


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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 state’s material and cultural durability. I fail to argue that this environmental degradation is functionally required to occur, since choices of political organizational variables are the cause. Therefore, environmental degradation can be solved by different choices of strategies as well, as described in my other book Toward 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 been representative, without duress, or with other choices allowed to exist as competition with the 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 as part 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 requirement of 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 interscientific sociological 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 book’s findings, much can be learned in the inverse in an evaluative 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 certain strategies that maintain environmental degradation are typically an intentional chosen form of jurisdictional 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 representative versions of the same. My previous book Toward a Bioregional State (2005), the first book devoted to ‘green constitutional engineering,’ discussed some novel recommendations for political organizational checks and balances to mollify the unrepresentative environmental degradation process discussed in this book.

More information: videos, audio interviews, and more:

http://biostate.blogspot.com

http://commodityecology.blogspot.com

whitaker ecological revolution summary w jurisdictional issue book cover

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