Ecology Against Capitalism

180 Pages·2002·7.095 MB·English

by  John Bellamy Foster

Ecology Against Capitalism
OHN BELLAMY FOSTER
^—~V-f—

Ecology Against Capitalism
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2020 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/ecologyagainstcaOOOOfost
if
|;
%
Ecology Against Capitalism
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
©
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2002 by MONTH LY REVIEW PRESS
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher.
isbn: 1-58367-056-4 paperback — isbn 1-58367-055-6 hardback
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
122 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Printed in Canada
10 987654321
A shorter version of “Ecology Against Capitalism” first appeared in Monthly Review 53:5
(October 2001); "The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line,” Richard Hofrichter, ed.,
Reclaiming the Politics of Health: Environmental Debate in Toxic Culture (Cambridge, M A:
MIT Press, 2000); “Global Ecology and the Common Good,” Monthly Review 46:9
(February 1995); “Ecology and Human Freedom,” Monthly Review 47:6 (November 1995);
“Let Them Eat Pollution,” Monthly Review 44:8 (January 1993); “The Scale of Our Ecological
Crisis,” Monthly Review 49:11 (April 1998); “Sustainable Development of What?” first
published as the preface to the Korean edition of The Vulnerable Planet; English translation,
Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism 7:3 (September 1996); “Globalization and the Ecological
Morality of Place,” The Long Term View 3:3 (Fall 1996); “Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis—
Is Technology the Answer?” Monthly Review 52:7 (December 2000); “The Limits of
Environmentalism without Class,” Daniel Faber, ed., The Struggle for Ecological Democracy:
Environmental Justice Movements in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1998);
“Malthus’s Essay on Population at Age 200,” Monthly Review 50:7 (December 1998);
“Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility,” co-authored with Fred Magdoff, in Fred
Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, ed., Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness
Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
Contents
PREFACE 7
Ecology against Capitalism 9
The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line: The Environmental 26
and Social Consequences of Economic Reductionism
Global Ecology and the Common Good 44
Ecology and Human Freedom 52
“Let Them Eat Pollution”: Capitalism and the World Environment 60
The Scale of Our Ecological Crisis 69
Sustainable Development of What? 79
Globalization and the Ecological Morality of Place 83
Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis—Is Technology the Answer? 92
The Limits of Environmentalism without Class: Lessons from the 104
Ancient Forest Struggle in the Pacific Northwest
Malthus’s Essay on Population at Age 200 137
Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility: 154
Relevance for Today’s Agriculture
170
INDEX

Preface
The argument of this book is that the realms of ecology and capitalism are
opposed to each other—not in every instance but in their interactions as a
whole. This approach is distinguished from those that attribute the present
global ecological crisis largely to fixed human nature, modernity, industri¬
alism, or even economic development per se, in that it offers reasonable
grounds for hope that our most serious environmental problems can be
overcome without abandoning the prospect of human progress—but only
if we are willing to carry out fundamental social change, in such a way as to
make a more sustainable relation to the environment possible.
The chapters that make up Ecology Against Capitalism were originally
written as separate essays in what amounted to a running critique of
mainstream economic approaches to environmental crisis under capital¬
ism, conducted over the years 1992-2001. The writing of this book
occurred during the same period in which I was doing the research and
writing for The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environ¬
ment (1994. 1999), and Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000).
There is, however, little duplication between these three works, which are
meant rather to complement each other. The Vulnerable Planet provided a
brief historical sketch of ecological degradation from precapitalist soci¬
eties up to the present. Marx’s Ecology began the difficult task of
unearthing the legacy of materialist understandings of nature and ecologi¬
cal crisis, taking the story up to the deaths of Darwin and Marx in 1882-
1883. (I am now working on a further volume that will carry the story
forward.) Ecology Against Capitalism, as distinct from these other works, is
less concerned with providing a single historical narrative, and instead
represents an attempt to intervene directly in contemporary political-eco¬
nomic debates on capitalism and the environment—in the process touch¬
ing on such concrete issues as the spotted owl, the export of hazardous
wastes, and global warming.
7
ECOLOGY AGAINST CAPITALISM
Naturally enough, those persons to whom I am most deeply indebted, since
they consist of many of my closest friends and colleagues, overlap with
those whose support I acknowledged in my two previous books on ecology,
leaving me doubly and triply grateful in some cases. I wish to thank Paul
Burkett, Carlos Castro, Brett Clark, Michael Dawson, Michael Dreiling,
Barbara Epstein, Daniel Faber, Chuck Hunt, John Jermier, Vicki Larson,
Fred Magdoff (who co-authored one of the essays in this book), Harry
Magdoff, Bob McChesney, David Milton, Claude Misukiewicz, Jason
Moore, Andrew Nash, James O’Connor, Ira Shapiro, John Simon, Paul
Sweezy, Victor Wallis, and Michael Yates. To my family, Bill Foster, Laura
Tamkin, Saul Foster and Ida Foster, I owe the discoveries of daily life and a
constantly renewed sense of wonder.
Ecology Against Capitalism is dedicated to Paul Sweezy and Harry Magd¬
off, who have never doubted that the present as history is open, to be made
or unmade through human struggle, though not entirely under conditions
of our own choosing.