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The long ecological revolution

Foster, John Bellamy
http://links.org.au/long-ecological-revolution

Publisher:  LINKS - International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Date Written:  02/12/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

Up until the rise of the ecological movement in the late twentieth century, the conquest of nature was a universal trope, often equated with progress under capitalism (and sometimes socialism). To be sure, the notion, as utilized in science, was a complex one. As Francis Bacon, the idea's leading early proponent, put it, "nature is only overcome by obeying her." Only by following nature's laws, therefore, was it possible to conquer her.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Recent years have brought these issues renewed relevance, with the climate crisis and the introduction of the Anthropocene as a scientific classification of the changed human relation to the planet. The Anthropocene is commonly defined within science as a new geological epoch succeeding the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years; a changeover marked by an "anthropogenic rift" in the Earth System since the Second World War. After centuries of scientific understanding founded on the conquest of nature, we have now, indisputably, reached a qualitatively new and dangerous stage, marked by the advent of nuclear weapons and climate change, which the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dubbed "Exterminism, the Last Stage of Imperialism."

From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene--which stands not just for the climate crisis, but also rifts in planetary boundaries generally--marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large on a more egalitarian and sustainable basis. A long and continuing ecological revolution is needed--one that will necessarily occur in stages, over decades and centuries. But given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation--marked by climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, loss of freshwater, deforestation, toxic pollution, and more--this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation. This means opposing the logic of capital, whenever and wherever it seeks to promote the "creative destruction" of the planet. Such a reconstitution of society at large cannot be merely technological, but must transform the human metabolic relation with nature through production, and hence the whole realm of social metabolic reproduction.

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