Meeting of the Korean Sociological Association, Dec.

2009; Korea University; Seoul, Korea

제목: Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial
Religions; China, Japan, Europe, 1000 BCE to the present (book talk) [published April 2009; 636 pages]
발표: Mark D. Whitaker (이화여대 사회학과) [Ph.D., Sociology; UW-Madison, U.S.A.], mwhitaker@ewha.ac.kr
토론: 공석기 (서울대 아시아센터)

Abstract (1,289 words):

Though most claim environmental degradation or environmental social movements are only modern
phenomena, this is the first comparative historical treatment of long-term patterns of environmental degradation
and environmental social movements. Respectively, these two factors are involved in a long-term, repeating,
sociological process around state formation’s social and environmental penetration versus its social opposition.
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.
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. 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, local ecological health, and local
economic concern, rolled into one, increasingly delegitimating participation within institutions that brought
more risk into their lives. 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. Ecological Revolution describes common
political design characteristics as the rationale why our historical states facilitated environmental degradation
that contributed to their collapse—contributing politically, economically, and culturally. Because of degradative
state political pressures, they become opposed predictably by religio-ecological movements.
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 across larger
territories. First, this strategy of elite-sponsored state formation via centralized consumptive and ideological
ambivalence has a material consequence. It 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.
Mounting delegitimation 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 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 variety of more autonomy-inclined and/or depoliticized movements. These
are simultaneously oppositional material and ideological support frameworks for the latter group against
degradation-encouraging, state based elites.
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 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.
Global religious movements and ideological/cultural change have often been analyzed in isolation from
material, political economic issues. 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 its
ecological contexts. Therefore, both these anti-systemic and systemic forces in world history rarely have been
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 a model of their ongoing environmentally mediated, relational interaction.
First, the book tries to show an interactive process of how a plurality of religious social 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, 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. 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.
It is not argued that all forms of such identity 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 elite forms of political economic organization are repeatedly
and predictably to blame for environmental degradation. Elite choices typically have been self-destructive of
their own environment, their legitimated leadership, and their state’s durability. I fail to argue that this
environmental degradation is functionally required to occur, since choices of political organizational variables
are the cause. Environmental degradation can be solved by different strategies of state formation, described in
my other book Toward a Bioregional State.
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