ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 provides the foundations for how and why we need concepts central to political economy to understand the problem of ‘unsustainability’. We begin by introducing the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’, a concept that causes us to call into question the systemic relationship between forms of human organization and the Earth’s contemporary socio-ecological predicaments. We thus show that the problem of unsustainability goes far beyond problematic technologies or specific effects of human activity, but rather relates to the deeper political and economic structures and forms of human development which condition and contextualize the production and use of such problematic technologies and activity in the first place. In other words, as a precursor for showing how central ecology is to political economy, we start with the opposite claim – to show that political economy is crucial for understanding questions of sustainability. We then provide an introduction to the field of ecological economics, which we highlight for its important contributions to thinking about the material ecological basis of contemporary capitalist forms of human organization (and especially the problem of economic growth). Finally, we shift explicitly to traditions of thought in political economy, notably the early liberals, Marx, and Polanyi, and their contemporary representatives, to explore the different intellectual resources they leave us for thinking about ecology and political economy. We conclude the chapter by proposing some core questions that contemporary global ecological political economy approaches ought to consider.
