Academic Navel-Gazing: Debating Globalization as the Planet Burns

Abstract

Since the 1990s, scholars in the Euro-American academy have debated and analyzed the causes and consequences of globalization. However, in the dominant and most cited literature, scholars have rarely engaged with globalization’s relationship to nature and the resulting process of global warming, environmental degradation, mass extinction of biodiversity, and related climate injustices. If scholars do refer to the environment at all, it is usually in vague terms of “sustainability” needed to maintain the neoliberal logics of the status quo. This essay engages with the lack of serious attention in the literature on globalization with ecological devastation leading to our current era of imminent planetary collapse. I reflect on why this has been the case and ask what the silence on nature suggests in terms of the politics of scholarly production. I argue that scholars of globalization predominantly reflect a Eurocentric and anthropocentric perspective informed by Enlightenment thought that includes a human/nature binary and the logics of progress, modernity, and resource extractivism. This blinkered worldview both assumes the dominance of Western-based scholarship and precludes an urgent need to think more holistically about humanity’s deeply entangled global futures with more-than-human worlds. I conclude that this dominant northern worldview and its embedded limitations herald the looming irrelevancy of globalization theory produced within the Euro-American academy.