Introduction: Ecologically Unequal Exchange in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Refiguring the Plantationocene

“…Second, and related to existing work on ecologically unequal exchange (e.g. jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2020.983 Roberts and Parks 2007;Hornborg 2009;Jorgenson and Rice 2012;Frey et al 2019), scholars might also give sustained attention to the plantation's role in "the unequal material exchange relations and consequent ecological interdependencies within the world economy, all of which are fundamentally tied to wide disparities in socio-economic development and power embedded within the global system" (Jorgenson 2016: 6). Third, we envision future research that might take the form of in-depth historical and ethnographic case studies of socioecological transformation in regions of the planet that have been visited by the plantation.…”

R. Scott Frey and the Unfinished Agenda of Unifying Economy and Environment in the World-System from Extraction to Waste

“…In such work, it is vital to understand how systemic structures shape decisions made in the logic of capital accumulation, which degrade nonhuman nature and undermine human livelihoods while creating wealth for a small sliver of the population (Gellert 2005(Gellert , 2010. Such decisions occur under what is understood as neoliberalism in investment houses in the core of the world-system and also regional centers of capital such as Singapore for Asia, but they are also made by politico-bureaucrats and military elites in states often dubbed 'developmental,' or in world-systems terms, semi-peripheral or peripheral (Kaup 2015;Gellert 2019). Scott's insights into the spread of toxics to a frequently acquiescent periphery address this as well.…”

“…To be sure, Scott's empirical bent meant that he did not have as much patience or interest in the debates on ontology and epistemology that have preoccupied me in recent years (Gellert 2019). Still, he privately told me that he appreciated the way I navigated the terrain between the dialectics of Foster's metabolic rift and the ontology of Moore's world-ecology in support of Bunker's mode of extraction and concern with indigenous insight into more sustainably living with(in) the earth.…”

“…In this brief reflection essay, I review Scott's contributions to our understanding of what Scott called environmental 'anti-wealth' that is spread to the peripheries of the world-system and how these intersect with other work, including my own, on the ongoing extraction of value from peripheries. More than once along the way from my job interview to the conference to the book production he reminded me how much he admired the work of my PhD mentor, Stephen Bunker, and we both happily republished some of this early and influential environmental sociology in the book (Frey, Gellert, and Dahms 2019;Bunker 1985). I conclude with reflections on Scott's unfinished agenda research agenda focused on unifying commodification and waste in the world-system.…”

Ecologically unequal exchange: A theory of global environmental injustice

“…; The Journal of World‐Systems Research, 2017, v23, issue 2, Gellert, Frey, and Dahms eds. ; Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective, , Frey, Gellert, and Dahms, eds. These build on an earlier special double‐issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, , v50, issue 3–4, Jorgenson and Clark, eds., and multiple other published articles that utilize ecologically unequal exchange theory.…”