Deepening the Critique: Ecological Modernization and Biocultural Diversity in the Capitalist World-System
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Journal of Labor and Society
Publication Date
12-9-2025
Abstract/ Summary
This paper overviews two contrasting approaches, ecological modernization and biocultural diversity, to understanding and responding to the current proliferation of socioecological crises globally. Through a world-systems lens, it becomes apparent that these approaches occupy very different places within the enduring legacies of colonialism and contemporary forms of ecological imperialism/neocolonialism. At closer look, the foundational premises of ecological modernization are not only likely to continue the dynamics of inequality and environmental injustice in the capitalist world-system, but also result in the continued loss of biocultural diversity. While existing critiques of ecological modernization have highlighted neocolonial dynamics of green grabbing, the critique must be deepened to include loss of biocultural diversity, and with it the extinction and closing off of richly diverse, non-capitalist spaces that have evolved for millennia. Biocultural approaches, as opposed to ecological modernization technocratic solutions, also hold practical, grassroots and just approaches to environmental crises that emphasize the rights of indigenous and local communities. Biocultural approaches have developed with long-histories outside the Eurocentric, Cartesian paradigm of ecological modernization, and this paper also discusses the implications of these biocultural perspectives for Left movements seeking radical structural change.