Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

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. Environment is simultaneously a material structural given and something based on human agency ideals and 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 brought together without reductionism. Such reductionism is challenged here. Instead of economics, materialism, biological, or cultural determinisms, two strategies decide our human stratification and its relation to environmental conditions. These are 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 promises have 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 more successful 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 the repeated 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 is sustainable.

Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

This is an attempt to learn from periods of our more linear history typically wedged inbetween 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 politically driven process of environmental degradation with its repetition of human and environmental suffering. Since ideological choices are equally material choices, they can yield strategies of ideological hegemony through certain biased choices and uses of materials 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 deliberationour choices 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. We were 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 mostly unrepresentative and degradative forms of political economy and extraction that brought them and us only repeated destruction together; and that when given cultural space or successfully 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 them depending 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 merely philosophical terms, deductions, or reductionism. The development of jurisdictions and

Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

their change is a combined political economic and cultural phenomenon. The development 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 to establish jurisdictional arrangements. Respectively, these two factors are involved in a long-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 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 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 strategic and 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 by greater 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 policy strategies 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 of jurisdictional alliance. These three interactive strategies compete with one another.

Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

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. 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 institutions 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 collapsecontributing 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 across larger territories. First, this strategy of elite-sponsored state formation via

Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

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 along with 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 medical issues. 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 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 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 religious social movements in world history take place in contexts of massive environmental degradation, political economic consolidation, and immiseration. As a consequence, socalled 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 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

Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

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 degradationbased 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 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 degradationinstead of blaming people/populations in general who tend to be more the degraded victims of such psychopaths 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 states material and cultural durability. I fail to argue that this environmental degradation is

Whitaker, Mark D.

Ecological Revolution: A Green Theory of History

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 books 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 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 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.

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