Putting Nature To Work ANTHROPOCENE, CAPITALOCENE, & THE CHALLENGE OF WORLD-ECOLOGY Jason W. Moore 1 Suddenly, nature is everywhere. Finance, food, climate, energy, employment – the question of nature is today entwined with “social” contradictions as never before. But how should we think nature? And what kind of thinking do we need in the 21 st century, an era marked by unprecedented – and spi- ralling – biospheric instability? For scholars and activists who take nature seriously, there have been two very different responses to this question. The first response unfolds from the premise that human organization – a civilization, a world market, an empire – is more or less independent of the web of life. This is the perspec- tive of Humanity and Nature. (Note the uppercase ‘H’ and ‘N’.) In this per- spective, modernity’s social, technological, and demographic vectors are generating environmental consequences that will soon limit civilization as we know it. There is broad spectrum of interpretive positions here, but one concept stands out about all others: the Anthropocene. It is a concept suffi- ciently popular and plastic to admit a dizzying array of arguments, extending from The Economist to the great Marxist historian Mike Davis. And if the Anthropocene is not exactly an argument in itself, it asserts the primacy of a well-worn dualism with roots in the rise of capitalism itself: the binary of Humanity and Nature. The second response to our question – How do we think nature in the 21 st century? – agrees with much of the Anthropocene empirical survey. This re- sponse concurs: we have entered a new period of unprecedented biospheric instability, and modernity’s “business as usual” must change. Nor is there disagreement that modernity’s transformation of the biosphere since 1950 has been unprecendented. 1 The difference is in how history works, and how the unfolding biospheric and civilization crisis of the 21 st century is unfold- ing. These scholars and activists insist that the root of the problem is not simply modernity, but modernity in the web of life. I call this the perspective of humanity-in-nature, which is also the perspective of nature-in-humanity. Here again, there is a broad spectrum of positions. While the critique of Humanity/Nature dualism has a long history, a new argument has gathered 1 Cite as: Jason W. Moore (2015), “Putting Nature to Work,” in Cecilia Wee, Janneke Schönenbach, and Olaf Arndt, eds., Supramarkt: A micro-toolkit for disobedient consumers, or how to frack the fatal forces of the Capitalocene. Gothenburg: Irene Books, 69-117.