Introduction

Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis (WSA) has profoundly influenced research and theory on global political economy and the environment. Wallerstein's insights on the modern world-system are vital to helping us achieve an accurate understanding of ongoing processes of environmental degradation and uneven consequences from the global to the local. His ideas also help us evaluate prospects for responding to challenges such as socioenvironmental inequalities and climate change in the contemporary world-system. Furthermore, the world-systems perspective helps us imagine social change and possibilities for future world-systems. In this chapter, I first review important components of Wallerstein's world-systems perspective. I then discuss examples of how each in turn is pertinent to issues related to the environment and climate change. I take a detailed look at ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) theory, which draws directly from insights from WSA (Wallerstein 1974a). I conclude by looking at what the world-systems perspective has to offer specifically regarding the global climate change crisis and possible future world-systems.

WSA

Influenced by and building upon critical development perspectives, Wallerstein encouraged the study of the global system from the perspective he called WSA. He argued that the appropriate unit of analysis is the world-system and that it is vital to take a historical, long-view approach (Wallerstein 1976a, 1979, 2000b). According to Wallerstein, analyses must be “simultaneously historic and systemic” (Wallerstein 2000b, xvii). Along these lines, Wallerstein wrote: