Envisioning ecological revolution
By John Bellamy Foster

The goal of ecological revolution, as I shall present it here, has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

This is no longer a very controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that this raises. At one extreme, there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need is ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme, there are those who believe that the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control, giving rise to the gloomiest forebodings. Although often seen as polar opposites, these views nonetheless share a common basis. As Paul Sweezy observed, they each reflect “the belief that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest.”[1]

Warning bells

The more we learn about current environmental trends, the more the unsustainability of our present course is brought home to us. Among the warning signs:

• There is now a virtual certainty that the critical threshold of a 2°C (3.6° F) increase in average world temperature above the pre-industrial level will soon be crossed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists believe that climate change at this level will have portentous implications for the world’s ecosystems. The question is no longer whether significant climate change will occur but how great it will be.[2]

• There are growing worries in the scientific community that the estimates of the rate of global warming provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in its worst case scenario projected increases in average global temperature of up to 5.8° C (10.4° F) by 2100, may prove to be too low. For example, results from the world’s largest climate modeling experiment, based in Oxford University in Britain, indicate that global warming could increase almost twice as fast as the IPCC has estimated.[3]

• Experiments at the International Rice Institute and elsewhere have led scientists to conclude that with each 1°C (1.8°F) increase in temperature, rice, wheat and corn yields could drop 10 per cent.

• It is now increasingly believed that the world is approaching peak crude oil production. The world economy is, therefore, confronting more constrained oil supplies, despite a rapidly increasing demand. All of this points to a growing world energy crisis and mounting resource wars.[4]

• The planet is facing global water shortages due to the drawing down of irreplaceable aquifers, which make up the bulk of the world’s fresh water supplies. This poses a threat to global agriculture, which has become a bubble economy based on the unsustainable exploitation of groundwater. One in four people in the world today do not have access to safe water.[5]

• Two-thirds of the world’s major fish stocks are currently being fished at or above their capacity. Over the last half-century 90 per cent of large predatory fish in the world’s oceans have been eliminated.[6]

• The species extinction rate is the highest in sixty-five million years with the prospect of cascading extinctions, as the last remnants of intact ecosystems are removed. Already the extinction rate is in some cases (as in the case of bird species) one hundred times the “benchmark” or “natural” rate. Scientists have pinpointed twenty-five hot spots on land that account for 44 per cent of all vascular plant species and 35 per cent of all species in four vertebrate groups, while taking up only 1.4 per cent of the world’s land surface. All of these hot spots are now threatened with rapid annihilation due to human causes. According to Stephen Pimm and Clinton Jenkins, writing in Scientific American: “Substantial tracts of intact wilderness remain: humid tropical forests such as the Amazon and Congo, drier woodlands of Africa, and coniferous forests of Canada and Russia. If deforestation in these wilderness forests continues at current rates, the combined extinction rate in them and in the hot [spots around the world] will soon be 1000 times higher than the benchmark one in a million.”[7]

• According to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the world economy exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980 and by 1999 had gone beyond it by as much as 20 per cent. This means, according to the study’s authors, that “it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to regenerate what humanity used in 1999.”[8]

• The question of the ecological collapse of past civilizations from Easter Island to the Mayans is now increasingly seen as extending to today’s world capitalist system. This view, long held by environmentalists, has been popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse.[9]

These and other warning bells indicate that the present human relation to the environment is no longer supportable. The most developed capitalist countries have the largest per capita ecological footprints, demonstrating that the entire course of world capitalist development at present represents a dead end.

The main response of the ruling capitalist class, when confronted with the growing environmental challenge, is to fiddle while Rome burns. To the extent that it has a strategy, it is to rely on revolutionizing the forces of production, i.e., on technical change, while keeping the existing system of social relations intact. It was Karl Marx who first pointed in The Communist Manifesto to “the constant revolutionizing of production” as a distinguishing feature of capitalist society. Today’s vested interests are counting on this built-in process of revolutionary technological change coupled with the proverbial magic of the market to solve the environmental problem when and where this becomes necessary.

In stark contrast, many environmentalists now believe that technological revolution alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a more far-reaching social revolution aimed at transforming the present mode of production is required.

Great Transition scenarios

Historically, addressing this question of the ecological transformation of society means that we need to ascertain: (1) where the world capitalist system is heading at present; (2) the extent to which it can alter its course by technological or other means in response to today’s converging ecological and social crises; and (3) the historical alternatives to the existing system. The most ambitious attempt thus far to carry out such a broad assessment has come from the Global Scenario Group, a project launched in 1995 by the Stockholm Environmental Institute to examine the transition to global sustainability. The Global Scenario Group has issued three reports—Branch Points (1997), Bending the Curve (1998), and their culminating study, Great Transition (2002). In what follows, I will focus on the last of these reports, the Great Transition.[10]

As its name suggests, the Global Scenario Group employs alternative scenarios to explore possible paths that society caught in a crisis of ecological sustainability might take. Their culminating report presents three classes of scenarios: Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions. Each of these contains two variants. Conventional Worlds consists of Market Forces and Policy Reform. Barbarization manifests itself in the forms of Breakdown and Fortress World. Great Transitions is broken down into Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Each scenario is associated with different thinkers: Market Forces with Adam Smith; Policy Reform with John Maynard Keynes and the authors of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report; Breakdown with Thomas Malthus; Fortress World with Thomas Hobbes; Eco-communalism with William Morris, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. F. Schumacher; and the New Sustainability Paradigm with John Stuart Mill.[11]

Within the Conventional Worlds scenarios, Market Forces stands for naked capitalism or neoliberalism. It represents, in the words of the Great Transition report, “the firestorm of capitalist expansion.”[12] Market Forces is an unfettered capitalist world order geared to the accumulation of capital and rapid economic growth without regard to social or ecological costs. The principal problem raised by this scenario is its rapacious relation to humanity and the earth.

The drive to amass capital that is central to a Market Forces regime is best captured by Marx’s general formula of capital (though not referred to in the Great Transition report itself ). In a society of simple commodity production (an abstract conception referring to pre-capitalist economic formations in which money and the market play a subsidiary role), the circuit of commodities and money exists in a form, C–M–C, in which distinct commodities or use-values constitute the end points of the economic process. A commodity (C) embodying a definite use-value is sold for money (M) which is used to purchase a different commodity (C). Each such circuit is completed with the consumption of a use-value.

In the case of capitalism, or generalized commodity production, however, the circuit of money and commodities begins and ends with money, or M–C–M. Moreover, since money is merely a quantitative relationship such an exchange would have no meaning if the same amount of money was acquired at the end of the process as exchanged in the beginning, so the general formula for capital, in reality, takes the form of M–C–M’, where M’ equals M + ∆m or surplus-value. What stands out, when contrasted with simple commodity production, is that there is no real end to the process, since the object is not final use but the accumulation of surplus-value or capital. M–C–M’ in one year, therefore, results in the ∆m being reinvested, leading to M–C–M’’ in the next year and M–C–M’’’ the year after that, ad infinitum. In other words, capital by its nature is self-expanding value.[13]

The motor force behind this drive to accumulation is competition. The competitive struggle ensures that each capital or firm must grow and, hence, must reinvest its “earnings” in order to survive. Such a system tends toward exponential growth punctuated by crises or temporary interruptions in the accumulation process. The pressures placed on the natural environment are immense and will lessen only with the weakening and cessation of capitalism itself. During the last half-century the world economy has grown more than seven-fold while the biosphere’s capacity to support such expansion has, if anything, diminished due to human ecological depredations.[14]

The main assumption of those who advocate a Market Forces solution to the environmental problem is that it will lead to increasing efficiency in the consumption of environmental inputs by means of technological revolution and continual market adjustments. Use of energy, water, and other natural resources will decrease per unit of economic output. This is often referred to as “dematerialization.” However, the central implication of this argument is false. Dematerialization, to the extent that it can be said to exist, has been shown to be a much weaker tendency than M–C–M’. As the Global Transition report puts it, “The ‘growth effect’ outpaces the ‘efficiency effect.’”[15]

This can be understood concretely in terms of what has been called the Jevons Paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons, who published The Coal Question in 1865. Jevons, one of the founders of neoclassical economics, explained that improvements in steam engines that decreased the use of coal per unit of output also served to increase the scale of production as more and bigger factories were built. Hence, increased efficiency in the use of coal had the paradoxical effect of expanding aggregate coal consumption.[16]

The perils of the Market Forces model are clearly visible in the environmental depredations during the two centuries since the advent of industrial capitalism, and especially in the last half-century. “Rather than abating” under a Market Forces regime, the Great Transition report declares, “the unsustainable process of environmental degradation that we observe in today’s world would [continue to] intensify. The danger of crossing critical thresholds in global systems would increase, triggering events that would radically transform the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” Although it is “the tacit ideology” of most international institutions, Market Forces leads inexorably to ecological and social disaster and even collapse. The continuation of “‘ business-as-usual’ is a utopian fantasy.”[17]

A far more rational basis for hope, the report contends, is found in the Policy Reform scenario. “The essence of the scenario is the emergence of the political will for gradually bending the curve of development toward a comprehensive set of sustainability targets,” including peace, human rights, economic development, and environmental quality.18 This is essentially the Global Keynesian strategy advocated by the Brundtland Commission Report in the late 1980s—an expansion of the welfare state, now conceived as an environmental welfare state, to the entire world. It represents the promise of what environmental sociologists call “ecological modernization.”

The Policy Reform approach is prefigured in various international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the environmental reform measures advanced by the Earth Summits in Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. Policy Reform would seek to decrease world inequality and poverty through foreign aid programs emanating from the rich countries and international institutions. It would promote environmental best practices through state-induced market incentives. Yet, despite the potential for limited ecological modernization, the realities of capitalism, the Great Transition report contends, would collide with Policy Reform. This is because Policy Reform remains a Conventional Worlds scenario—one in which the underlying values, lifestyles, and structures of the capitalist system endure. “The logic of sustainability and the logic of the global market are in tension. The correlation between the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power erodes the political basis for a transition.” Under these circumstances the “lure of the God of Mammon and the Almighty dollar” will prevail.[19]

The failure of both of the Conventional Worlds scenarios to alleviate the problem of ecological decline means that Barbarization threatens: either Breakdown or the Fortress World. Breakdown is self-explanatory and to be avoided at all costs. The Fortress World emerges when “powerful regional and international actors comprehend the perilous forces leading to Breakdown” and are able to guard their own interests sufficiently to create “protected enclaves.”[20] Fortress World is a planetary apartheid system, gated and maintained by force, in which the gap between global rich and global poor constantly widens and the differential access to environmental resources and amenities increases sharply. It consists of “bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery.... The elite[s] have halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of environmental management and uneasy stability.”[21] The general state of the planetary environment, however, would continue to deteriorate in this scenario leading either to a complete ecological Breakdown or to the achievement through revolutionary struggle of a more egalitarian society, such as Eco-communalism.

This description of the Fortress World is remarkably similar to the scenario released in the 2003 Pentagon report, Abrupt Climate Change and Its Implications for United States National Security.[22] The Pentagon report envisioned a possible shutdown due to global warming of the thermohaline circulation warming the North Atlantic, throwing Europe and North America into Siberia-like conditions. Under such unlikely but plausible circumstances, relatively well-off populations, including those in the United States, are pictured as building “defensive fortresses” around themselves to keep masses of would-be immigrants out. Military confrontations over scarce resources intensify.

Arguably naked capitalism and resource wars are already propelling the world in this direction at present, though without a cause as immediately earth-shaking as abrupt climate change. With the advent of the “War on Terror,” unleashed by the United States against one country after another since September 11, 2001, an “Empire of Barbarism” is making its presence felt.[23]

Still, from the standpoint of the Global Scenario Group, the Barbarization scenarios are there simply to warn us of the worst possible dangers of ecological and social decline. A Great Transition, it is argued, is necessary if Barbarization is to be avoided.

Theoretically, there are two Great Transitions scenarios envisioned by the Global Scenario Group: Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Yet Eco-communalism is never discussed in any detail, on the grounds that for this kind of transformation to come about it would be necessary for world society first to pass through Barbarization. The Global Scenario Group authors see the social revolution of Eco-communalism as lying on the other side of Jack London’s Iron Heel. The discussion of Great Transition is thus confined to the New Sustainability Paradigm.

The essence of the New Sustainability Paradigm is that of a radical ecological transformation that goes against unbridled “capitalist hegemony” but stops short of full social revolution. It is to be carried out primarily through changes in values and lifestyles rather than the transformation of social structures. Advances in environmental technology and policy that began with the Policy Reform scenario, but that were unable to propel sufficient environmental change due to the dominance of acquisitive norms, are here supplemented by a “lifestyle wedge.”[24]

In the explicitly utopian scenario of the New Sustainability Paradigm, the United Nations is transformed into the “World Union,” a true global federation. Globalization has become “civilized.” The world market is fully integrated and harnessed for equality and sustainability not just wealth generation. The War on Terrorism has resulted in the defeat of the terrorists. Civil society, represented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), plays a leading role in society at both the national and global levels. Voting is electronic. Poverty is eradicated. Typical inequality has decreased drastically. Dematerialization is real, as is the “polluter pays” principle. Advertising is nowhere to be seen. There has been a transition to a solar economy. The long commute from where people live to where they work is a thing of the past; instead, there are “integrated settlements” that place home, work, retail shops, and leisure outlets in close proximity to each other. The giant corporations have become forward-looking societal organizations, rather than simply private entities. They are no longer concerned exclusively with the economic bottom line, but have revised this to incorporate environmental sustainability and social ecology as ends irrespective of profit.

Four agents of change are said to have combined to bring all of this about: (1) giant transnational corporations; (2) intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; (3) civil society acting through NGOs; and (4) a globally aware, environmentally-conscious, democratically organized world population.[25]

Underpinning this economically is the notion of a stationary state, as depicted by Mill in his 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy, and advanced today by the ecological economist Herman Daly and Whiteheadian process philosopher John Cobb. Most classical economists—including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx—saw the specter of a stationary state as presaging the demise of the bourgeois political economy. In contrast, Mill, who Marx (in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital) accused of a “shallow syncretism,” saw the stationary state as somehow compatible with existing productive relations, requiring only changes in distribution.[26]

In the New Sustainability Paradigm scenario, which takes Mill’s view of the stationary state as its inspiration, the basic institutions of capitalism remain intact, as do the fundamental relations of power, but a shift in lifestyle and consumer orientation mean that the economy is no longer geared to economic growth and the enlargement of profits, but to efficiency, equity, and qualitative improvements in life. A capitalist society formerly driven to expanded reproduction through investment of surplus product (or surplus-value) has been replaced with a system of simple reproduction (Mill’s stationary state), in which the surplus is consumed rather than invested. The vision is one of a cultural revolution supplementing technological revolution, and radically changing the ecological and social landscape of capitalist society, without fundamentally altering the productive, property, and power relations that define the system.

In my view, there are both logical and historical problems with this projection. It combines the weakest elements of utopian thinking (weaving a future out of mere hopes and wishes) with a “practical” desire to avoid a sharp break with the existing system.[27] The failure of the Global Scenario Group to address its own scenario of Eco-communalism is part and parcel of this perspective, which seeks to elude the question of the more thoroughgoing social transformation that a genuine Great Transition would require.

The result is a vision of the future that is contradictory to an extreme. Private corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the pursuit of profit. The idea of turning them to entirely different and opposing social ends is reminiscent of the long-abandoned notions of the “soulful corporation” that emerged for a short time in the 1950s and then vanished in the harsh light of reality. Many changes associated with the New Sustainability Paradigm would require a class revolution to bring about. Yet this is excluded from the scenario itself. Instead, the Global Scenario Group authors engage in a kind of magical thinking—denying that fundamental changes in the relations of production must accompany (and sometimes even precede) changes in values. No less than in the case of the Policy Reform Scenario—as pointed out in The Great Transition report itself—the “God of Mammon” will inevitably overwhelm a value-based Great Transition that seeks to escape the challenge of the revolutionary transformation of the whole society.

An ecological-social revolution

Put simply, my argument is that a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist, socialist—revolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles of working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist hierarchy. It would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. It would see wealth and human development in radically different terms than capitalist society.

In conceiving such a social and ecological revolution, we can derive inspiration, as Marx did, from the ancient Epicurean concept of “natural wealth.” As Epicurus observed in his Principal Doctrines: “Natural wealth is both limited and easily obtainable; the riches of idle fancies go on forever.” It is the unnatural, unlimited character of such alienated wealth that is the problem. Similarly, in what has become known as the Vatican Sayings, Epicurus stated: “Poverty, when measured by the natural purpose of life, is great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty.”[28] Free human development, arising in a climate of natural limitation and sustainability, is the true basis of wealth, of a rich, many-sided existence; the unbounded pursuit of wealth is the primary source of human impoverishment and suffering. Needless to say, such a concern with natural well-being, as opposed to artificial needs and stimulants, is the antithesis of capitalist society and the precondition of a sustainable human community.

A Great Transition, therefore, must have the characteristics implied by the Global Scenario Group’s neglected scenario: Eco-communalism. It must take its inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as Epicurus. The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive to accumulate wealth (capital).

As Marx wrote, the new system “starts with the self-government of the communities.”[29] The creation of an ecological civilization requires a social revolution, one that, as Roy Morrison explains, needs to be organized democratically from below: “community by community ... region by region.” It must put the provision of basic human needs—clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to the earth—ahead of all other needs and wants. “An ecological dialectic” along these lines, Morrison insists, “rejects not struggle but the endless slaughter of industrial negation” in the interest of unlimited profits.[30]

Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible—if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.

Notes

This chapter has been revised and adapted for this book from an article originally published under the title “Organizing Ecological Revolution,” in Monthly Review #57, no. 5 (October 2005): 1–10. It was based on an address delivered to the Critical Management Studies section of the Academy of Management, Honolulu, Hawaii, August 8, 2005.

1. Paul M. Sweezy, “Capitalism and the Environment,” Monthly Review 41, no. 2 (June 1989), 4.

2. International Climate Change Task Force, Meeting the Climate Challenge, January 2005, http://www.americanprogress.org.

3. The Times (London), January 27, 2005.

4. See chapter 4.

5. Bill McKibben, “Our Thirsty Future,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003.

6. Worldwatch, Vital Signs 2005, http://www.worldwatch.org; Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen, “The Oceanic Crisis,” Monthly Review 60, no. 3 (July-August 2008): 91, 94–97.

7. Stuart L. Pimm and Clinton Jenkins, “Sustaining the Variety of Life,” Scientific American, September 2005, 66–73; Stuart L. Pimm and Peter Raven, “Extinction by Numbers,” Nature, February 24, 2000, 843–45.

8. Mathis Wackernagel et al., “Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 14 (July 9, 2002): 9268.

9. Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking, 2005),10. Paul Raskin, Tariq Banuri, Gilberto Gallopín et al., Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (Boston: Stockholm Environment Institute, 2002), http://www.gsg.org.

11. Raskin et al., The Great Transition, 17–18.

12. Raskin et al., Great Transition, 7.

13. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 247–57; Paul M.Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 26–36. Much of Marx’s analysis in Capital is concerned with where ∆m or surplus value comes from. To answer this question, he argues, it is necessary to go beneath the process of exchange and to explore the hidden recesses of capitalist production—where it is revealed that the source of surplus-value is to be found in the process of class exploitation.

14. Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).

15. Raskin et al., Great Transition, 22.

16. See chapter 6.

17. Raskin et al., Great Transition, 22–24, 29.

18. Ibid., 33.

19. Ibid., 41, 77.

20. Ibid., 25.

21. Ibid., 27.

22. See chapter 5.

23. John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 147–60.

24. Raskin et al., Great Transition, 47.

25. Ibid., 71–90.

26. To be sure, Mill at this time thought of himself as something of a socialist. See John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 452–55.

27. See Bertell Ollman’s discussion in “The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now),” Monthly Review 57, no. 3 (July-August 2005): 78–102.

28. Epicurus, The Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1947), 161. On Marx’s relation to Epicurus see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

29. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 519; Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development” in Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62.

30. Roy Morrison, Ecological Democracy (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 80, 188.

http://links.org.au/node/1066

for those who prefer that sort of thing:

http://creativei.vodspot.tv/watch/2528280-video-john-bellamy-foster-%E2%80%9Cone-world-ecology%E2%80%9D

It's known-true of every species. No species can breed without restraint and not crash their population and the environment.

I don't agree with forcefully doing it, though.

I don't agree, for example, with injecting someone with hormones, or compelling them to put a device in their womb, or forcing them to undergo surgical procedures.

Having been a Child Protective Services worker for years (I've since retired), I certainly don't agree with taking an infant into custody just because an official thinks the family is too large. Parental rights are a very basic, long-recognized fundamental right, and should only be interfered with unless very compelling reasons are present, such as danger of serious physical harm or death.

So, I favor policies of education and widespread access to birth control and family planning services. If people have access to free or extremely low-cost birth control, the problem takes care of itself.

I do not, however, favor increasing the level of totalitarianism (the state compelling people to undergo things) in this world. It has enough already.

That's just my two cents' worth.

Who do you trust to make the call? Would you have the current racist/classist establishments do so? That is a recipe for the worst sorts of results.

It is capitalism's appetite for raw material and the cheapest possible labor, for the profits derived from a hyper consumer society, which has brought us to these straits. Let's deal with that first, let there be a decent life for all, and then see how it looks. And after that it is for the people to choose, mandatory is facsist.

Can you think of any case where any species has bred without restraint and has not collapsed their ecosystem and population?

It seems to me that limiting reproduction, even if by law and occasionally force, is much more humane than "letting Nature take its course". What do you feel you see that I don't?

Oh, this is disturbing! Where's my headache medicine?

Our rising population IS a serious problem, but compelling others to do what I mentioned is a line I would not cross, and I will fight to see that no one else crosses it.

because I'll bet you right now that you're going to find yourself agreeing with BP very often.

:)

All the countries that are at or below replacement level have equal educational opportunities for males and females. All the countries with high birth rates have cultures that are extremely oppressive to women, and within the U.S., it's the subcultures that are oppressive to women (Mormons, fundamentalists, etc.) that have the highest birth rates.

And, my experience has indicated that is SO true in our country, just like in other countries.

All part of that better life....

A great many analysts, including some self styled eco-socialists, are prepared to acknowledge that Marx had profound insights into the environmental problem, but nonetheless argue that these insights were marginal to his work, that he never freed himself from 'Prometheanism' (a term usually meant to refer to an extreme commitment to industrialisation at any cost), and that he did not leave a significant ecological legacy that carried forward into later socialist thought or that had any relation to the subsequent development of ecology.3 In a recent discussion in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism a number of authors argued that Marx could not have contributed anything of fundamental relevance to the development of ecological thought, since he wrote in the 19th century, before the nuclear age and before the appearance of PCBs, CFCs and DDT--and because he never used the word 'ecology' in his writings. Any discussion of his work in terms of ecology was therefore a case of taking 120 years of ecological thinking since Marx's death and laying it 'at Marx's feet'.4

My own view of the history of ecological thought and its relation to socialism is different. In this, as in other areas, I think we need to beware of falling into what Edward Thompson called 'the enormous condescension of posterity'.5 More specifically, we need to recognise that Marx and Engels, along with other early socialist thinkers, like Proudhon (in What is Property?) and Morris, had the advantage of living in a time when the transition from feudalism to capitalism was still taking place or had occurred in recent memory. Hence the questions that they raised about capitalist society and even about the relation between society and nature were often more fundamental than what characterises social and ecological thought, even on the left, today. It is true that technology has changed, introducing massive new threats to the biosphere, undreamed of in earlier times. But, paradoxically, capitalism's antagonistic relation to the environment, which lies at the core of our current crisis, was in some ways more apparent to 19th and early 20th century socialists than it is to the majority of today's green thinkers. This reflects the fact that it is not technology that is the primary issue, but rather the nature and logic of capitalism as a specific mode of production. Socialists have contributed in fundamental ways at all stages in the development of the modern ecological critique. Uncovering this unknown legacy is a vital part of the overall endeavour to develop an ecological materialist analysis capable of addressing the devastating environmental conditions that face us today.

I first became acutely aware of the singular depth of Marx's ecological insights through a study of the Liebig-Marx connection. In 1862 the great German chemist Justus von Liebig published the seventh edition of his pioneering scientific work, Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (first published in 1840). The 1862 edition contained a new, lengthy and, to the British, scandalous introduction. Building upon arguments that he had been developing in the late 1850s, Liebig declared the intensive, or 'high farming', methods of British agriculture to be a 'robbery system', opposed to rational agriculture.6 They necessitated the transportation over long distances of food and fibre from the country to the city--with no provision for the recirculation of social nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which ended up contributing to urban waste and pollution in the form of human and animal wastes. Whole countries were robbed in this way of the nutrients of their soil. For Liebig this was part of a larger British imperial policy of robbing the soil resources (including bones) of other countries. 'Great Britain', he declared:

...deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility. It has raked up the battlefields of Leipsic, Waterloo and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for a future generation of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood without any real necessity or permanent gain for itself.7

The population in Britain was able to maintain healthy bones and greater physical proportions, he argued, by robbing the rest of Europe of their soil nutrients, including skeletal remains, which would otherwise have gone into nurturing their own soils, allowing their populations to reach the same physical stature as the English.

'Robbery', Liebig suggested, 'improves the art of robbery.' The degradation of the soil led to a greater concentration of agriculture among a small number of proprietors who adopted intensive methods. But none of this altered the long term decline in soil productivity. England was able to maintain its industrialised capitalist agriculture, by importing guano (bird droppings) from Peru as well as bones from Europe. Guano imports increased from 1,700 tons in 1841 to 220,000 tons only six years later.

What was needed in order to keep this spoliation system going, Liebig declared, was the discovery of 'beds of manure or guano...of about the extent of English coalfields'. But existing sources were drying up without additional sources being found. By the early 1860s North America was importing more guano than all of Europe put together. 'In the last ten years,' he wrote, 'British and American ships have searched through all the seas, and there is no small island, no coast, which has escaped their enquiries after guano. To live in the hope of the discovery of new beds of guano would be absolute folly.'

In essence, rural areas and whole nations were exporting the fertility of their land: 'Every country must become impoverished by the continual exportation of corn, and also by the needless waste of the accumulated products of the transformation of matter by the town populations.'

All of this pointed to 'the law of restitution' as the main principle of a rational agriculture. The minerals taken from the earth had to be returned to the earth. 'The farmer' had to 'restore to his land as much as he had taken from it', if not more.

The British agricultural establishment, needless to say, did not take kindly to Liebig's message, with its denunciation of British high farming. Liebig's British publisher, rather than immediately translating the 1862 German edition as in the case of previous editions, destroyed the only copy in its possession. When this final edition of Liebig's great work was finally translated into English it was in an abridged form under a different title (The Natural Laws of Husbandry) and without Liebig's lengthy introduction. Hence, the English-speaking world was left in ignorance of the extent of Liebig's critique of industrialised capitalist agriculture.

Nevertheless, the importance of Liebig's critique did not escape the attention of one major figure residing in London at the time. Karl Marx, who was then completing the first volume of Capital, was deeply affected by Liebig's critique. In 1866 he wrote to Engels, 'I had to plough through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, in particular Liebig and Schönbein, which is more important for this matter than all of the economists put together.' Indeed, 'To have developed from the point of view of natural science the negative, ie destructive side of modern agriculture,' Marx noted in volume one of Capital, 'is one of Liebig's immortal merits'.8

Marx's two main discussions of modern agriculture both end with an analysis of 'the destructive side of modern agriculture'. In these passages Marx makes a number of crucial points: (1) capitalism has created an 'irreparable rift' in the 'metabolic interaction' between human beings and the earth, the everlasting nature-imposed conditions of production; (2) this demanded the 'systematic restoration' of that necessary metabolic relation as 'a regulative law of social production'; (3) nevertheless the growth under capitalism of large-scale agriculture and long distance trade only intensifies and extends the metabolic rift; (4) the wastage of soil nutrients is mirrored in the pollution and waste in the towns--'In London,' he wrote, 'they can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense'; (5) large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised agriculture work together in this destructive process, with 'industry and commerce supplying agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil'; (6) all of this is an expression of the antagonistic relation between town and country under capitalism; (7) a rational agriculture, which needs either small independent farmers producing on their own, or the action of the associated producers, is impossible under modern capitalist conditions; and (8) existing conditions demand a rational regulation of the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth, pointing beyond capitalist society to socialism and communism.9

Marx's concept of the metabolic rift is the core element of this ecological critique. The human labour process itself is defined in Capital as 'the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence'.10 It follows that the rift in this metabolism means nothing less than the undermining of the 'everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence'. Further there is the question of the sustainability of the earth--ie the extent to which it is to be passed on to future generations in a condition equal or better than in the present. As Marx wrote:

From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].11

The issue of sustainability, for Marx, went beyond what capitalist society, with its constant intensification and enlargement of the metabolic rift between human beings and the earth, could address. Capitalism, he observed, 'creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation'. Yet in order to achieve this 'higher synthesis', he argued, it would be necessary for the associated producers in the new society to 'govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way'--a requirement that raised fundamental and continuing challenges for post-revolutionary society.12

In analysing the metabolic rift Marx and Engels did not stop with the soil nutrient cycle, or the town-country relation. They addressed at various points in their work such issues as deforestation, desertification, climate change, the elimination of deer from the forests, the commodification of species, pollution, industrial wastes, toxic contamination, recycling, the exhaustion of coal mines, disease, overpopulation and the evolution (and co-evolution) of species.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm

I once heard the head of Hamas referred to as "one of 12 children" and I shuddered.
I know that poor cultures have more children than richer ones, cuz they expect not all will survive.
I think what you say about cultures that deny rights to women is probably true, as fundamentalist cultures have more children. Fundamentalist Israelis in my neighborhood for instance - it is not unusual to see a family of 5 children, all below the age of 6. also makes me shudder.

People talk about the "footprint", that the rich leave a much bigger footprint, and that is true. And I am certainly not advocating poor societies only should reduce their populations.

But it is clear that the earth is over-populated at least by half. If you want to be really scared, you can get one of those population clocks which shows the growth in population second-by-second- in the US and in the world, live. It is truly scary.

Over-population is key, and without addressing it, all the ecological "solutions" are worthless.
I think people are wary of addressing it, it can be interpreted in so many way. Eg some "population control" advocates use the argument to argue against immigrants to US. Or some argue that AIDS is a good thing as a means of population control, or war, or genocide, etc.

Overpopulation started with agriculture, one of the evils which can be traced to agriculture. Along with epidemics and hierarchy. Before agriculture humans roamed the earth, did not settle, did not over-populate, did not squeeze out all other species.

not a primary cause. The general tendency of the poor and uneducated to have a higher birth rate is well documented, as is the lessening of the birth rate due to a measure of prosperity and the education of women. In this day it is capitalism which causes poverty.

Fixating on population ignores the real culprit. It is capitalism which is destroying the rain forest, for the oil and minerals underneath, for it's timber, in order to convert the land for commodity agriculture. Poor people trying to make a living are minor players in this destruction. Likewise the oceans, it's not simple fisher folk that have destroyed 90% of our fish stock, it is the big boys with the big boats, the capitalists.

Nothing short of a rational planned economy will has a chance of arranging our economy on a sustainable basis, an economy based on people's needs not the profit motive.

Has the human population outstripped the carrying capacity of the Earth? Questionable in the present, if it continues to grow, undoubtedly. But as I said above, who chooses? Only the people can choose for themselves, and we must provide them with the opportunity to make the right choice, and that means changing the economic system.

We will not maintain 'planetary services', much less preserve biodiversity if the people are not on board. The habitat cannot be preserved while there are hungry people and huge disparities of wealth. Hungry, poor people rightly see environmentalism as elitists when their needs are left hanging while we obsess over the latest charismatic megafauna.

There is no going back to the Pleistocene, no undoing agriculture, it's a done deal. The best we can do is adapt those ways of our successful ancestors as best we can to the present, egalitarianism is on the top of the list because so much else is enabled by it.

Altho capitalism takes it to new depths.

China {altho it is debatable whether China IS a communist country, that is what it calls itself) - has beat all the world at pollution, pollution so bad it causes birth defects.

The countries of Eastern Europe - under a planned economy - destroyed their environment.

It is a matter of humans realizing they are part of the web of nature, not separate from it, not above it, not below it. Humans (including pre-capitalist humans) labor under the delusion that they are not animals, that they are something "between the animals and the angels".
Blame it on monotheistic religion which set up the hierarchy.

One success story of dealing with the environment and the economy is Cuba.

Environmentalism and economic justice are not mutually exclusive. They complement each other.

altho Lydia is talking about a global situation, and this article is addressing a problem in US it is somewhat related -
pregnancy as a form of partner abuse, as a way of controlling women:

"The problem is so widespread, in fact, that public-health advocates are working to cast teen pregnancy in a whole new light: not as a measure of "promiscuity," or a failure of cluefulness, but rather as a canary in the coal mine of partner violence."

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/140887/%27he_thought_a_baby_would_keep_me_in_his_life_forever%27%3A_when_partner_abuse_isn%27t_a_bruise_but_a_pregnant_belly/?page=2

It is however, the biggest cause, by far. And many of the other causes are at least aggravated by the effects of capitalism. Dealing with capitalism is the one, biggest thing we can do to turn things around.

I'm not sure wtf China is any more but it sure as hell ain't socialists. As for the former East, the main problem there was taking capitalist practice unexamined and trying to best the capitalists at their own game. And it's not as though the capitalist of the West were exactly benign during that period, the carnage is still all around us.

Hierarchy is the result of the system of production, religion is the tail of that dog.

Cuba is by far the best example of how to do things extant.

Unfortunately environmentalism, in the form of the big orgs, the players, the media
is elitist. The victories are few and the torture never stops. This is precisely because the leaders of the movement never examine the underlying cause, approach problems piecemeal, avoid at all cost the elephant in the room. Their assumption being that capitalism is the frame they must work with, either in resignation or by preference.

Population control is not something to obsess over, because it WILL happen one way or another.

There are four ways for this to happen: famine, disease, war, or raise people's standard of living. All four work very effectively and with certainty, and if we do not commit ourselves to and fight for the fourth one, we will experience one of the other three or some combination of them.

As I said above, population control will happen whether we want it to or not. It can happen by famine, disease and war, or it can happen by raising the standard of living, to include education as you point out.

The environment in China is being degraded in proportion to the influx of capital from here, and the resultant explosion of development for the sake of investor-driven capitalism.

Of course environmental degradation can not be solely "blamed" on capitalism. Actually, nothing can be blamed on capitalism. If we are going to worry about blame, which I think is not very useful, we should blame the few who actually destroy he environment, and the concern politically that we have about that is that capitalism enables and rewards their behavior.

War is not the only way that people are killed, but that does not mean that we should not oppose war. Nor is it very helpful to say "if only everyone loved everyone else, then there would be no war." That may well be true, but I don't think it is ever going to happen. It is much more effective and powerful to say that given that everyone is not always going to love everyone else, what can we do to lessen the possibility of war and eliminate its causes and mitigate its effects? Much can be done. Much has been done.

Let's say that 99% of humans are brought to the realization that they are part of the web of nature, not separate from it, not above it, and that we have succeeded in converting almost everyone to that belief. If the 1% that controls the resources has not been converted, and never will be - and that is probably the case - we have made no progress. We are putting the fate of ALL of the people in the hands of the few when we see converting people to new beliefs as the solution, and that is nothing more than a description of the problem coupled with a call for ignoring the problem that can only lead to ineffectiveness and passivity. "I have gone green, now if only everyone would, then we would have a wonderful world" is never going to solve anything. It works against solving anything.

When we say "the problem is with human nature" we are surrendering.

I do not think "the problem is with human nature", if that is what you got from my post, or maybe that is directed elsewhere.

second, re the 1% will never be converted-
It may be 1% who own 99% of the earth, but they are supported by a very large percent- whatever percentage it is- the 1% are able to maintain themselves because millions of people for example, are today spending one hundred percent of their time on M.Jackson, and will for weeks, no months.
Or on Nicole smith or whoever.
Or on soccer or basketball.
Or whatever.
If you saw the image of screaming "fans" of MJ, imagine if I went up to one of them, and said, can I speak to you for one minute of your time regarding a journalist Mohammed Omar who was beaten by Israel? May I tell you his story?

third- re the 1% who will never be converted - then what? Kill them? What is your solution?

Yes, capitalism has made it worse, but the Communists were no saints in this respect, either.