The unfolding biospheric crisis is not a crisis of “nature.” It is a crisis of capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit, and life — the terminal crisis of Cheap Nature. For five centuries, capitalism has cheapened human and extra-human work to propel endless accumulation. That strategy is now unraveling. Its signs are everywhere. The climate and biodiversity crises express a deeper exhaustion: the cheap work, human and extra-human, that capitalism appropriates but does not reproduce. Accumulation stalls. Liberal democracy implodes. Capital hyper-centralizes. Historically, modern empires and their world orders fixed and renewed such accumulation crises; they put boots on the ground to secure and extract Cheap Natures and revive accumulation. Now that Cheap Nature is exhausted, that imperial strategy -- and its global structures -- is unraveling. Forever wars, regime change, and proxy wars mark the erosion of American super-hegemony and the rise of China. These are the signs of an epochal climate-class conjuncture: a crisis of capitalism in the web of life.

Ours is not a polycrisis — a heap of separate “emergencies” — but a singular crisis working through many forms. The exhaustion of Cheap Nature, and its regimes of paid and unpaid work, is driving capitalism's mutation toward new forms of political accumulation. The rise of the BRICS, the transition toward multipolarity, the sharpening rivalries and improbable alliances of the early twenty-first century: each amplifies the contradictions of a capitalism that’s run out of Cheap Nature fixes. Whether this conjuncture delivers post-capitalist dystopias, opens pathways toward the liberation of life and labor, or both, is the great question of our times.

The Tenth Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network invites scholars, activists, and artists to think through this conjuncture — to situate its many forms in relation to each other, and within the long-run development of the capitalist world-ecology. World-ecology is a conversation and a method — not a closed theory. It insists that capitalism is an ecology of power, profit, and life. We seek transdisciplinary, creative, and heterodox work that reads biospheric, geopolitical, and accumulation crisis as a single crisis of capitalism. We welcome proposals for papers and panels from across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences that enrich world-ecology perspectives and broader debates on capitalism in the web of life.