blindpig
05-02-2016, 02:43 PM
Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis
Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of “ecocide,” symbolized by the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the assault on Lake Baikal, and the drying up of the Aral Sea, as well as extremely high levels of air and water pollution.1 On the other hand, the Soviet Union developed some of the world’s most dialectical contributions to ecology, revolutionizing science in fields such as climatology, while also introducing pioneering forms of conservation. Aside from its famous zapovedniki, or nature reserves for scientific research, it sought to preserve and even to expand its forests. As environmental historian Stephen Brain observes, it established “levels of [forest] protection unparalleled anywhere in the world.” Beginning in the 1960s the Soviet Union increasingly instituted environmental reforms, and in the 1980s was the site of what has been called an “ecological revolution.” A growing recognition of this more complex reality has led scholars in recent years to criticize the “ecocide” description of Soviet environmental history as too simplistic.2
From the 1960s on, Soviet ecological thought grew rapidly together with the environmental movement, which was led primarily by scientists. In the 1970s and ’80s this evolved into a mass movement, leading to the emergence in the USSR of the largest conservation organization in the world. These developments resulted in substantial changes in the society. For example, between 1980 and 1990 air pollutants from stationary sources fell by over 23 percent.3
More significant from today’s standpoint was the role the Soviet Union played from the late 1950s on in the development of global ecology. Soviet climatologists discovered and alerted the world to the acceleration of global climate change; developed the major early climate change models; demonstrated the extent to which the melting of polar ice could create a positive feedback, speeding up global warming; pioneered paleoclimatic analysis; constructed a new approach to global ecology as a distinct field based on the analysis of the biosphere; originated the nuclear winter theory; and probably did the most early on in exploring the natural-social dialectic underlying changes in the earth system.4
Soviet ecology can be divided into roughly three periods: (1) early Soviet ecology, characterized by revolutionary ecological theories and key conservation initiatives from the 1917 revolution up to the mid-1930s; (2) the middle or Stalin period, from late 1930s to the mid-1950s, dominated by purges, rapid industrialization, the Second World War, the onset of the Cold War, and aggressive reforestation; and (3) late Soviet ecology from the late 1950s to 1991, marked by the development of a dialectical “global ecology,” and the emergence of a powerful Soviet environmental movement—responding in particular to the extreme environmental degradation of the decade following Stalin’s death in 1953. The end product was a kind of negation of the negation in the ecological realm; but one that was to be superseded finally by the wider forces leading to the USSR’s demise.
Although much has been written about the early and middle periods of Soviet ecology, relatively little has been written about late Soviet ecology. Western ecological Marxism emerged largely in ignorance of rapidly developing Soviet ecological science and philosophy. Yet late Soviet ecology remains of extraordinary importance to us today, representing a valuable legacy that can potentially aid us in our efforts to engage with the present planetary emergency.
http://monthlyreview.org/2015/06/01/late-soviet-ecology-and-the-planetary-crisis/
Much more to this.
The work suffers from the usual Trot-ish anti-Stalin jive that we associate with Foster and MR, despite that it is quite useful. The common lack of taking into account of political circumstances relative to the development of the economy is annoying. Something that I don't see anyone talking about is the fact that the USSR did a lot of centralization which results in massive 'brown zones', obvious and easy to criticize. In the anarchy of capitalist economy we got probably millions of scattered 'brown fields' of a few to 10s of acres, as witnessed by the pile of rusting 55 ga drums in every 3rd gully. Foster ignores the irony of his prejudice that the nadir of environment science occurred directly after Stalin died.
Poor old Vasilov, who lived high on the hog when out of country on the people's dime, had the bad luck of going to trial at a time of a crackdown against such petty booj behavior and was made an example of. Too bad, he was a great asset.
My disgust with Lysenko is even greater after reading this, he is such an embarassment. But if ya insist upon perfection then you might be an idealist.
Another excerpt:
Scarcely less important was Budyko’s analysis of the social aspects of what he considered to be the approaching “global ecological crisis.” Here he emphasized the difficulties posed by the system of capital accumulation. All economic expansion was constrained by the fact that “the stability of the global ecological system is not very great.” There was no way out of this dilemma except through economic and ecological planning, namely a “socialist planned economy” aimed at the realization of Vernadsky’s “noosphere,” or an environment ruled by reason.30
Crossing the intellectual boundaries represented by C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” Budyko connected his analysis to the ideas of Soviet social and environmental philosophers, specifically those of Ivan T. Frolov, the dynamic editor in chief from 1968 to 1977 of the USSR’s leading philosophy journal Problems of Philosophy (Voprosy filosofi). It was largely owing to Frolov’s efforts that Soviet social philosophy in the 1970s and ’80s began to revive, based on the conscious reintegration of ecological and humanistic values into dialectical materialism. In this new analysis, inspiration was drawn from Marx’s deep humanism and naturalism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, as well as from his later ecological critique in Capital. This emerging Soviet ecological Marxism deliberately circumvented the Frankfurt School in the West with its less materialist emphasis and suspicion of science—though accepting the analysis of Antonio Gramsci. Frolov and others called for the development of a “dialectical integral unity” on materialist-ecological grounds. The resulting critical philosophy and social science was rooted in the whole Soviet tradition of scientific ecology from Vernadsky to Sukachev to Budyko.31
Frolov’s Global Problems and the Future of Mankind, published in 1982, represented an important first attempt in the creation of a new ethic of global ecological humanism. Moreover, a second work that he published that same year, Man, Science, Humanism: A New Synthesis, went still further in developing this new dialectical humanism-naturalism. Although Frolov’s vision showed traces of technologism (especially in his treatment of food production), the overall perspective was deeply humanist in its analysis and its values. The human relation to nature, he indicated, quoting from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, needed to be governed not simply by the laws of sustainable production, but the “laws of beauty.” He argued in these years for “moving away from the illusion of anthropocentrism and rejecting the traditional hegemonistic relationship to nature.”32
But perhaps the most astonishing product of this revival of Soviet critical ecological thinking was the 1983 collection Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, edited by A.D. Ursul.33 This volume was remarkable in that it brought together leading ecological philosophers, like Frolov, with such major natural-scientific figures as Fedorov and Gerasimov. The understanding of Marx and Engels’s ecological thought demonstrated here—though still treated in a somewhat fragmented way—was profound. As Gerasimov explained, “Marx characterized labour as a process in which man ‘starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions [metabolism] between himself and nature’…. Man’s interaction with nature needs to be subordinated to the general principles of metabolic processes.” Similarly, Frolov, in criticizing the historically specific ecological depredations of capitalist society wrote: “The danger of an ecological crisis has become real not because the use of technical mechanisms and devices in the ‘metabolism’ of man and nature in itself…but primarily because this industrial development is realised on the basis of the socio-economic, spiritual, and practical set-ups of the capitalist mode of production.” It was essential, he argued, for society to focus on “ecodevelopment” or “ecologically justified development,” taking into account “the objective dialectic and inner contradictoriness of the interaction of society and nature.”34
Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of “ecocide,” symbolized by the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the assault on Lake Baikal, and the drying up of the Aral Sea, as well as extremely high levels of air and water pollution.1 On the other hand, the Soviet Union developed some of the world’s most dialectical contributions to ecology, revolutionizing science in fields such as climatology, while also introducing pioneering forms of conservation. Aside from its famous zapovedniki, or nature reserves for scientific research, it sought to preserve and even to expand its forests. As environmental historian Stephen Brain observes, it established “levels of [forest] protection unparalleled anywhere in the world.” Beginning in the 1960s the Soviet Union increasingly instituted environmental reforms, and in the 1980s was the site of what has been called an “ecological revolution.” A growing recognition of this more complex reality has led scholars in recent years to criticize the “ecocide” description of Soviet environmental history as too simplistic.2
From the 1960s on, Soviet ecological thought grew rapidly together with the environmental movement, which was led primarily by scientists. In the 1970s and ’80s this evolved into a mass movement, leading to the emergence in the USSR of the largest conservation organization in the world. These developments resulted in substantial changes in the society. For example, between 1980 and 1990 air pollutants from stationary sources fell by over 23 percent.3
More significant from today’s standpoint was the role the Soviet Union played from the late 1950s on in the development of global ecology. Soviet climatologists discovered and alerted the world to the acceleration of global climate change; developed the major early climate change models; demonstrated the extent to which the melting of polar ice could create a positive feedback, speeding up global warming; pioneered paleoclimatic analysis; constructed a new approach to global ecology as a distinct field based on the analysis of the biosphere; originated the nuclear winter theory; and probably did the most early on in exploring the natural-social dialectic underlying changes in the earth system.4
Soviet ecology can be divided into roughly three periods: (1) early Soviet ecology, characterized by revolutionary ecological theories and key conservation initiatives from the 1917 revolution up to the mid-1930s; (2) the middle or Stalin period, from late 1930s to the mid-1950s, dominated by purges, rapid industrialization, the Second World War, the onset of the Cold War, and aggressive reforestation; and (3) late Soviet ecology from the late 1950s to 1991, marked by the development of a dialectical “global ecology,” and the emergence of a powerful Soviet environmental movement—responding in particular to the extreme environmental degradation of the decade following Stalin’s death in 1953. The end product was a kind of negation of the negation in the ecological realm; but one that was to be superseded finally by the wider forces leading to the USSR’s demise.
Although much has been written about the early and middle periods of Soviet ecology, relatively little has been written about late Soviet ecology. Western ecological Marxism emerged largely in ignorance of rapidly developing Soviet ecological science and philosophy. Yet late Soviet ecology remains of extraordinary importance to us today, representing a valuable legacy that can potentially aid us in our efforts to engage with the present planetary emergency.
http://monthlyreview.org/2015/06/01/late-soviet-ecology-and-the-planetary-crisis/
Much more to this.
The work suffers from the usual Trot-ish anti-Stalin jive that we associate with Foster and MR, despite that it is quite useful. The common lack of taking into account of political circumstances relative to the development of the economy is annoying. Something that I don't see anyone talking about is the fact that the USSR did a lot of centralization which results in massive 'brown zones', obvious and easy to criticize. In the anarchy of capitalist economy we got probably millions of scattered 'brown fields' of a few to 10s of acres, as witnessed by the pile of rusting 55 ga drums in every 3rd gully. Foster ignores the irony of his prejudice that the nadir of environment science occurred directly after Stalin died.
Poor old Vasilov, who lived high on the hog when out of country on the people's dime, had the bad luck of going to trial at a time of a crackdown against such petty booj behavior and was made an example of. Too bad, he was a great asset.
My disgust with Lysenko is even greater after reading this, he is such an embarassment. But if ya insist upon perfection then you might be an idealist.
Another excerpt:
Scarcely less important was Budyko’s analysis of the social aspects of what he considered to be the approaching “global ecological crisis.” Here he emphasized the difficulties posed by the system of capital accumulation. All economic expansion was constrained by the fact that “the stability of the global ecological system is not very great.” There was no way out of this dilemma except through economic and ecological planning, namely a “socialist planned economy” aimed at the realization of Vernadsky’s “noosphere,” or an environment ruled by reason.30
Crossing the intellectual boundaries represented by C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” Budyko connected his analysis to the ideas of Soviet social and environmental philosophers, specifically those of Ivan T. Frolov, the dynamic editor in chief from 1968 to 1977 of the USSR’s leading philosophy journal Problems of Philosophy (Voprosy filosofi). It was largely owing to Frolov’s efforts that Soviet social philosophy in the 1970s and ’80s began to revive, based on the conscious reintegration of ecological and humanistic values into dialectical materialism. In this new analysis, inspiration was drawn from Marx’s deep humanism and naturalism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, as well as from his later ecological critique in Capital. This emerging Soviet ecological Marxism deliberately circumvented the Frankfurt School in the West with its less materialist emphasis and suspicion of science—though accepting the analysis of Antonio Gramsci. Frolov and others called for the development of a “dialectical integral unity” on materialist-ecological grounds. The resulting critical philosophy and social science was rooted in the whole Soviet tradition of scientific ecology from Vernadsky to Sukachev to Budyko.31
Frolov’s Global Problems and the Future of Mankind, published in 1982, represented an important first attempt in the creation of a new ethic of global ecological humanism. Moreover, a second work that he published that same year, Man, Science, Humanism: A New Synthesis, went still further in developing this new dialectical humanism-naturalism. Although Frolov’s vision showed traces of technologism (especially in his treatment of food production), the overall perspective was deeply humanist in its analysis and its values. The human relation to nature, he indicated, quoting from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, needed to be governed not simply by the laws of sustainable production, but the “laws of beauty.” He argued in these years for “moving away from the illusion of anthropocentrism and rejecting the traditional hegemonistic relationship to nature.”32
But perhaps the most astonishing product of this revival of Soviet critical ecological thinking was the 1983 collection Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, edited by A.D. Ursul.33 This volume was remarkable in that it brought together leading ecological philosophers, like Frolov, with such major natural-scientific figures as Fedorov and Gerasimov. The understanding of Marx and Engels’s ecological thought demonstrated here—though still treated in a somewhat fragmented way—was profound. As Gerasimov explained, “Marx characterized labour as a process in which man ‘starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions [metabolism] between himself and nature’…. Man’s interaction with nature needs to be subordinated to the general principles of metabolic processes.” Similarly, Frolov, in criticizing the historically specific ecological depredations of capitalist society wrote: “The danger of an ecological crisis has become real not because the use of technical mechanisms and devices in the ‘metabolism’ of man and nature in itself…but primarily because this industrial development is realised on the basis of the socio-economic, spiritual, and practical set-ups of the capitalist mode of production.” It was essential, he argued, for society to focus on “ecodevelopment” or “ecologically justified development,” taking into account “the objective dialectic and inner contradictoriness of the interaction of society and nature.”34