No Empires, No Dust Bowls: Lessons from the First Global Environmental Crisis
Professor Holleman will discuss vital insights offered by study of one of the first global environmental problems of modern capitalism, which reached its apogee in the “dust-bowlification” of agricultural lands in the 1920s and 1930s. Based on award-winning research, she reinterprets the regional crises of soil erosion in this period as dramatic manifestations of a transnational social and ecological emergency generated by the racialized political economy and ecology of white settler colonialism and the new imperialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She draws lessons from this era for our current struggles to address climate change, environmental injustice and racism, and new threats of dust-bowlification worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has only reinforced the urgency of these lessons as the abuse of nature increasingly comes back to haunt society and reinforce inequalities.
Hannah Holleman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA. Her research is in the areas of social theory, environmental politics, and environmental sociology. She is author of Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) and numerous articles, including “De-Naturalizing Ecological Disaster: Colonialism, Racism, and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s” in The Journal of Peasant Studies (2017) and “Marx and the Commons” in Social Research: An International Quarterly (2021-coauthored with John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark). She is on the board of Monthly Review, for which she also writes, and is active within the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association.
You are welcome to join the seminar on zoom by emailing Åse Magnusson.