“Cheap Nature” focus of next Common Curriculum Series talk

Publication Date

Environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore will speak Monday, Jan. 15, at 5:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.

His talk, “From Columbus to Climate Crisis: Connecting Power, Capital and Nature in Modern World History,” is part of the Common Curriculum Speaker Series. It is free and open to the public.

Moore shows how capitalism’s logic of “cheap nature” has reached an impasse and pushed planetary life toward an unprecedented tipping point.

Moore, associate professor of sociology at Binghamton University, writes frequently on environmental history, political economy and social theory. He is the author or editor of seven books, including “Capitalism in the Web of Life” and, with Raj Patel, “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.”

He has been honored with 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 chairs the Political Economy of the World-System section of the American Sociological Association and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.

Moore will also lead a public discussion over lunch on Tuesday, Jan. 16, at 12:45 p.m. in Karp 105.

Started in 2012, the Common Curriculum Speaker Series invites individuals to campus twice a year to engage the campus community in the meaning of the liberal arts.

Speakers visit classes, particularly those in the Common Curriculum such as First-Year Preceptorial, lead discussions in informal settings and present a public talk in the Nott.

The first speaker in the series was Mark Roche, author of the award-winning “Why Choose the Liberal Arts.”

The series is sponsored by the General Education Board.