Re: Reflections

Dear Pat,

        Thanks for your comments and I enjoyed talking with you.  I did
not mean to imply that world-systems folks are oblivious to environmental
issues, only that the design of the 25th Anniversary Conference was not
geared to considering them.

        The future of the world-system cropped up again and again in some
of the papers and comments, but it needs perennial attention.  I have
found that my students are generally more interested in this topic than
any other, and in the final practical sense, it is all that matters to
anybody.  Light from the past deserves deeply serious attention;  but
ultimately because it also illuminates--or does not illuminate--the
future.  It helps that I have 14 grandchildren to worry about!

        Thanks again.

        Warren 

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Pat Loy wrote:

> 
> Dear Warren,
> 
> Thanks for your summary of the Fernand Braudel Center 25th Anniversary
> Conference. Overall, my impressions of it were similar to yours.  However,
> one of the hightlights of the conference for me was meeting and talking
> with people like yourself whom I had previously only known by reputation.
> 
> Like you, I was dissapointed that there was not more said about the
> environmental future. However, I don't agree with your implication that
> world-system gatherings routinely belittle or ignore the topic. The PEWS
> mini-conference at ASA this past August was titled "Globalization and the
> Environment: Prospects and Perils." Immanuel Wallerstein, in "After
> Liberalism," put the ecological crisis on his short list of phenomena that
> portend the chaos and potentially disastrous trajectory of the world-system
> over the next 50 years. And Peter Grimes and others have published papers
> on environmental issues from a world-system perspective. 
> 
> But while I would have welcomed some discussion about the environment at
> the 25th Anniversary Conference, I am not sure what I would expect to hear.
> We already know there is a crisis, as your post summarized, and we know
> that as long as the logic of capitalism dominates the world-system the
> crisis will only get worse. It seems to me that what we need to talk about
> is how we turn this situation around, a topic that would have implications
> for not only the environment, but all facets of the world-system.
> 
> This brings me to what I would have liked to have seen more of at the
> conference: a serious discussion of the FUTURE of the world-system,
> including sessions about organizational forms and immediate objectives. I
> agree with you that the concept of a World Party needs to be seriously
> considered, along with other ideas about possible organizational forms. And
> proposals such as Terry Boswell's and Chris Chase-Dunn's international
> market socialism need to be hashed out. I would hope that in the
> not-too-distant future there will be a conference dedicated to discussing
> the future of the world-system from these angles. If it happens, I look
> forward to seeing you there...
> 
>  
> -Pat Loy
> 
> 
> 
>  
>