Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective

PREFACE: R. Scott Frey, Paul K. Gellert, and Harry F. Dahms PART I: Theoretical Foundations of Ecologically Unequal Exchange
1. Paul Ciccantell, Sociology, Western Michigan University, "Ecological Unequal Exchange and Raw Materialism: The Material Foundations of the Capitalist World-Economy" The ecological unequal exchange literature analyzes one of the most important pillars of global inequality: the extraction of raw materials from and imposition of environmental damages on peripheral regions, populations and ecosystems in the capitalist world-economy for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. This literature fills a glaring hole in world-systems analysis in the 1970s and 1980s: the lack of attention to the role of and consequences for the natural environment in long term socioeconomic change. This analytic tradition examined commodity chains from their sources through to consumption and waste disposal and often employed sophisticated quantitative analytic techniques to test theoretical models of the causes and consequences of ecological unequal exchange over time and around the world. In this paper, I seek to bring the ecological unequal exchange literature into dialogue with another world-systems theoretical model that integrates global and local natural and social processes over the long term, new historical materialism or, to put it more bluntly, raw materialism. This theoretical model focuses attention on the raw materials-based industries and linked transport systems that are used to solve the most fundamental challenge to rapid economic growth: how to acquire growing volumes of raw materials at lower costs and in greater and more secure volumes than other competing economies. One key part of this process of change is how historically many rising economies utilize raw materials access strategies that focus on stealing raw materials peripheries from established hegemons, since the high costs and huge economic political challenges of creating raw materials supply systems have already been paid by the existing hegemon. The raw materials boom of the 2000s and first half of the 2010s based on China's rapid economic ascent led many firms, politicians and analysts to see a new "golden age" in which raw materials wealth could serve as the basis for development around the world by tying extractive peripheries to the Chinese market, a world in which the concept of unequal exchange seemed incredibly outdated. The dramatic decline in raw materials prices in 2014-15 because of the economic slowdown in China is rapidly transforming this golden era into widespread busts for firms and extraction regions. This historical juncture creates an opportunity for a more robust analysis integrating the insights of ecological unequal exchange and raw materialism to understand the multidimensional causes and consequences of global inequalities.
2. Mariko Frame, Environmental Studies, University of Utah, "Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Ecological Imperialism: Conceptualizing their Relation and Distinction" In the literature on ecologically unequal exchange and ecological imperialism, the role of the semiperiphery has been underexplored and ill-defined. Yet the increasing saturation of industrial capitalism throughout the emerging economies, combined with global ecological crises, has intensified their material and energy demands. This article seeks to contribute to a conceptualization of the role of the semiperiphery in the global ecology from the framework of ecologically unequal exchange, and relatedly, ecological imperialism, specifically in its relation to the periphery. The large scale foreign investment in Cambodia's land sector, which has been largely driven by investors from East Asia, is examined as a case study.
3. Paul K. Gellert, Sociology, University of Tennessee, "Bunker's Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Foster's Metabolic Rift and Moore's World-Ecology: Distinctions with or without a Difference?"Three major works stand