Capitalist Urbanization, Climate Change, and the Need for Sponge Cities

[Pictured: State-level pilot district of Sponge City in Yuelai, Chongqing.]

By Tina Landis

Republished from Liberation School.

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021 [1]. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report [2]. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate.

Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts [3]. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost.

It was not the “industrial revolution” that produced the new sources of power needed for machinery, but the need for new sources of power that produced the industrial revolution. For the machinery required more powerful and reliable sources of energy than wind or the water wheel, animals or humans could provide. They were replaced at first by coal and the steam engine, “whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water wheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns” [4]. Capital was thus not bound to any particular place and free to move and establish new “great towns” wherever they could accumulate the greatest profits, and with this came increasing detrimental effects on people and the planet.

Today’s crisis

We see the result of centuries of unfettered capitalist development in the climate crisis today. Atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, heat waves, and drought are all becoming more frequent and extreme with climate change. This summer, with the onset of El Nino, these extremes are amplifying [5].

The first week of July 2023 was the hottest week on Earth ever recorded, with one-third of the United States under excessive-heat advisories. Sweltering heat domes brought triple-digit temperatures across the northern hemisphere from the U.S. to Europe and Asia, while countries in South America experienced record-high temperatures during their winter months [6]. Annually, around 1,500 people die of heat-related deaths in the U.S. States, a count that is likely low since many extreme-heat deaths aren’t documented as such. As of early August, extreme heat in the United States had killed at least 147 people in just five counties in 2023.

As air and water temperatures increase globally, the frequency of extreme weather increases. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters occurred every 60 to 120 days on average. In the last decade, they have occurred every 20 to 30 days [7]. Intensifying extreme weather includes more extreme flooding and extreme drought, as the air and water currents globally are becoming destabilized due to the increasing heat in the atmosphere.

Cities were, generally speaking, built near rivers or coastlines. Often, wetlands and floodplains were drained and blockaded with dams and levees to direct water away from population centers. As flooding and drought increase with climate change, these systems are creating even more detrimental conditions in the short and long term.

The U.S. has experienced an urban flooding event every two to three days for the past 25 years, costing $850 billion since 2000. Heavier rains are causing flooding in many parts of the globe, and the eastern U.S. has seen a 70 percent increase in heavy rain events annually [8]. Sea level rise also contributes to flooding events. While the 6.5-inch increase in sea level in the United States may seem minimal, this increase impedes gravity-fed drainage from working during storms and high tides, bringing water into the streets.

Capitalist cities and the surrounding urban sprawl are major contributors to climate change and environmental degradation. The majority of the world’s cities today were built for profit and speculation in mind, with little to no consideration given to negative impacts on either ecology or humanity. They were premised on the idea that nature could be controlled and dominated instead of the proven conception that construction should work collaboratively with natural cycles. Vast hardscapes—sidewalks, roads, parking lots, buildings—and gray infrastructure that channels water away as it falls, places these urban centers at odds with biodiversity and the natural cycling of water through the landscape. Green spaces that are created within urban environments are often highly managed areas separate from the rest of the city, filled with non-native ornamental plants and thirsty grasses that require intensive irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, while providing little to no benefit to native species of birds, insects, and others.

With climate change, the existing city-structures are becoming increasingly disastrous for all residents. The heat island effect that adds more warming to the atmosphere has accelerated deadly implications as the climate warms, making heat waves and droughts even more severe. Hardscapes, such as pavement, buildings, and rooftops, as well as bare earth, absorb solar radiation and continue to radiate heat long after the sun has set. Vehicles, air conditioning units, buildings, and industrial facilities also heat the atmosphere.

The heat island effect results in daytime temperatures in urban areas to be 1-7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than temperatures in outlying areas, and nighttime temperatures about 2 to 5 degrees higher [9].

What can be done? China leads the way

To cool and rebalance the climate, we need to not only eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce ecological impacts and restore what has been lost.

Just 40 percent tree cover in a city can reduce temperatures by up to 9 degrees F [10]. Trees and other vegetation not only provide shade from the sun but reduce surrounding air temperatures. Plant leaves are like miniature solar panels and transform solar radiation into sugars and oxygen. Unlike human made structures, plants do not add heat to the surrounding atmosphere; they actually cool the atmosphere when they get hot by releasing water vapor

Water also has a cooling effect on the surroundings due to evaporation. When water bodies are integrated within the landscape they not only cool air temperatures, but also supply hydration to surrounding soil and vegetation, and recharge groundwater. Global heat dynamics regulated by water are between 75-95 percent, so creating more space for water throughout landscapes and urban areas is a key climate change mitigation tool.

Wetlands, floodplains, and bioswales act as flood prevention giving water space to flow and be absorbed into the ground when heavy rains fall, unlike concrete structures that increase the power of water and cause flooding downstream or down the coast from where these structures exist. By allowing water to pool within the landscape, rather than channeling it away into storm drains, rivers and oceans as it falls, makes water available during times of drought. Gray infrastructure flood control mechanisms often fail, with greater frequently in the U.S., which received a “D” on its Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021.

These increasing challenges from climate change are happening globally, but one country in particular is taking comprehensive action to address how urban areas impact the environment and how climate impacts are demanding more resilience in urban planning.

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China is one of the countries most severely impacted by floods globally due to geographic and environmental conditions, as well as experiencing increasing droughts and heat waves. To minimize the impacts of climate change, China has implemented their sponge cIty model that aims to retrofit and create 30 cities by 2030 as climate resilient population centers. At a cost of $1 trillion, or around $33.3 billion each, transforming these cities will save billions in annual flood recovery costs and save thousands of lives [11]. For comparison, the U.S. government spends $1 trillion annually just on military expenditures. Imagine what we could accomplish if those funds went to things like sponge cities that improve our lives and the health of the planet!

Sponge cities utilize green infrastructure so that surfaces act as a sponge absorbing water. They integrate space for water to collect such as wetlands and bioswales, create vegetative cover and trees throughout including green roofs and vegetation integrated into building structures, and porous pavement and roads so water can infiltrate soil and catchments underneath to be available during dry times. These cities have areas integrated throughout that have a dual purpose, such as parks adjacent to water bodies that can be enjoyed in dry times, which then act as wetland areas during heavy rains. These sponge cities can deal with four times the amount of rainwater than a normal city, reducing flooding by 50 percent. These cities, when complete, can absorb and reuse 70 percent of rainfall.

How the sponge city movement emerged

China, over the past few decades, has seen major achievements in development. From a mainly agrarian society at the time of the 1949 revolution, China has seen the rapid industrial growth and development of urban centers and has made great achievements in overcoming the legacy underdevelopment imposed by colonial and imperialist powers that the country was plagued with for centuries. At the time of the revolution, extreme poverty, floods and famine plagued the country.

Since that time, China has made major advances, improving the quality of life of the population. In 2020, China eradicated the last vestiges of extreme poverty through the mobilization of Communist Party cadres to the countryside to investigate the needs of the people and bring services and economic opportunities to those most in need [12]. This process which began in 1949 has lifted 850 million out of dire poverty, an unparalleled achievement for humanity.

Chinese culture has historically had a deep connection with nature and connection to ancestral lands. Through rapid development and misunderstanding of the environmental impacts, Chinese cities, as with most cities of the world, have created a separation of the people from nature.

Renowned ecologist and landscape architect, Kongjian Yu, has been the driving force behind the sponge city movement within China and globally, taking inspiration from traditional Chinese irrigation systems [13]. Yu recognized the shortcomings of China’s development path and spearheaded a new way of looking at cities – “big feet” versus “little feet” aesthetics and negative planning [14].

Little feet aesthetics references the debilitating foot binding practices of imperial China that viewed unnaturally small feet on women as beautiful. Yu compares this practice to modern China’s urban development, which often mimics western architecture and imperial Chinese styles with grand plaza and parks that do not serve the general population or ecological needs. These urban parks integrate exotic plants requiring intense irrigation and other inputs with little to no ecological or human benefits.

Yu instead promotes big feet aesthetics, creating green spaces throughout cities using native plants for all populations to interact with in their daily lives that integrate urban areas into the ecosystem rather than inserting a manufactured version of nature for aesthetics only. His argument for big feet aesthetics is to bring people and nature back into coexistence for the well-being of all, which also improves biodiversity and air and water quality, and cools air temperatures. These methods also alleviate flooding and drought, which are increasing with climate change.

Using big-feet aesthetics, Yu has led the eco-city and sponge city movements in China and leads similar projects across the globe. He first made his appeals to local leaders within China and later won over President Xi Jinping to the need to marry development with ecological sustainability. The need to address environmental impacts received broad support within China’s Communist Party which included the goal of building an ecological civilization in their constitution in 2012 [15]. Sponge cities are one of many tools that China is utilizing to achieve that goal [16].

How sponge cities aid in climate change mitigation and adaptation

Yu’s promotion of eco-cities and sponge cities stems from the concept of negative planning, which has its roots in the early Chinese practice of feng-shui and focuses on urban growth based on ecological infrastructure. Rather than a city with green space included here and there, Yu’s eco-city model looks more like a natural area with urban infrastructure woven in.

It is crucial with increasing droughts and floods for urban areas to allow space for water to sit rather than trying to drain it away, which in the end gives water more power and creates flooding in other areas. Slow water systems are being embraced globally as populations experience the negative impacts of gray infrastructure and rains become more intense and erratic.

While water consumption and waste must also be addressed, particularly regarding industrial agriculture and lawns—the single most irrigated crop in the United States—we must also shift away from gray infrastructure to green. Damming of rivers and draining of floodplains and wetlands, not only decimate river ecosystems and harm biodiversity, but inhibit the recharging of groundwater resources. Aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate and as the world warms, water resources are becoming scarcer [17].

Urban development, the creation of hardscapes, and the damming of rivers only continues this trend of a drying landscape, blocking natural water cycling that replenishes groundwater and supports biodiversity.

Yu’s projects aim to work with nature instead of against it, shifting past practices of creating parks as ornamental spaces to ones that mimic wild landscapes filled with native plant species. The use of native plants is crucial to conserve water resources in dry times by greatly reducing or eliminating the need for irrigation and creating a more climate resilient system. Birds, insects and other wildlife benefit from native plant species for food and shelter, increasing overall biodiversity, which in turn increases ecosystem resilience.

A few examples of how detrimental the introduction of non-native plants can be are the example of California and Hawaii. The recent wildfires in Maui were not fueled solely by climate change-induced drought, but also due to the introduction of non-native grasses for livestock feed that dry out quickly and become tinder during drier months [18]. The same is true in California, where early colonizers replaced perennial grasses (which have deep roots and stay green even through the dry season) with annual grasses for livestock feed, which die in early summer, drying out soil and greatly increasing drought and fire risk [19].

The vegetation and bodies of water integrated throughout sponge cities also addresses the heat island effect, lowers air temperatures, and improves air and water quality.

If left to thrive, vegetation captures carbon from the atmosphere aiding in climate change mitigation. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and transpire water vapor and microbes that seed cloud formation and maintain a healthy, balanced small water cycle bringing moderate rainfall rather than deluges. Trees also transpire chemicals that are beneficial to human health, immunity, mental health, and stress reduction. They also act as windbreaks and shelter for animals during storms.

Conclusion

Sponge cities are a crucial tool to address climate change and minimize the negative impacts of urban areas on the overall health of the planet and its inhabitants. Other nature-based solutions such as reforestation of native tree species, a return to agro-ecological methods for food production, and restoration of marine habitats are also key to our survival. None of these solutions will be profitable for corporations to implement, which is why there is a lack of widespread implementation of sponge cities outside of communist China. Only under a socialist planned economy, like that of China, can real solutions to climate change be implemented on a mass scale, as resources are directed to projects not according to the needs of profit, but to those of humanity and the planet.

Tina Landis is the author of the book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism, for which Liberation School has a study and discussion guide. Additionally, they host a 4-part video course Landis taught on the relationship between climate change, capitalism, and socialism.

References

[1] United Nations Population Fund,Annual Report 2008(New York: UNFP, 2009), 20. Availablehere; Megha Mukim and Mark Roberts (Eds.),Thriving: Making Cities Green, Resilient, and Inclusive in a Changing Climate(Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2023), 75. Availablehere.
[2] Nicola Tollin, James Vener, Maria Pizzorni, et. al. (2022).Urban Climate Action: The Urban Content of the NCDs: Global Review 2022(Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2022), 6. Availablehere.
[3] Friedrich Engels,The Condition of the Working Class in England(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1845/2009). Availablehere.
[4] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 361.
[5] Tina Landis, “Atmospheric Rivers, Weather Whiplash and the Class Struggle,”Liberation News, 14 January 2023. Availablehere; Evan Branan and Tina Landis, “Heat Waves Bake the World: Workers Don’t Have to Bear the Brunt,”Liberation News, 13 July 2023. Availablehere.
[6] Ayesha Tandon, “Record-Breaking 2023 Heat Events Are ‘Not Rare Anymore’ Due to Climate Change,”Carbon Brief, 25 July 2023. Availablehere.
[7] Climate Matters, “Billion-Dollar Disasters in 2022,”Climate Central, 11 October 2022. Availablehere.
[8] Flood Defenders, “America’s Most Frequent and Expensive Disaster.” Availablehere.
[9] Sara Dennis, “Heat Island Effect,”Moody Engineering, 28 September 2022. Availablehere.
[10] Tamara Iungman, Marta Cirach, Federica Marando, et. al. “Cooling Cities Through Urban Green Infrastructure: A Health Impact Assessment of European Cities,”The Lancet401, no. 1076 (2023): 577-589.
[11] Tom Carroll, Sponge Cities: A Solarpunk Future by 2030,”Freethink, 28 April 2022. Availablehere.
[12] Tings Chak, Li Jianhua, and Lilian Zhang, “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,”Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 23 July 2021. Availablehere.
[13] See, for example, Xu Tao, Yu Kongjian, Li Dihua, and Miao Wang, “Assessment and Impact Factor Analysis on Stormwater Regulation and Storage Capacity of Urban Green Space in China and Abroad,”China City Planning Review32, no. 1 (2023): 6-16; Kongian’s website ishere.
[14] Kongjian Yu,Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City(New York: Terreform, 2018).
[15] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Document: Responding to Climate Change: China’s Policies and Actions,”China Daily, 28 October 2021. Availablehere.
[16] Ken Hammond, “China’s Environmental Problems: Beyond the Propaganda,”Liberation School, 08 December 2020. Availablehere.
[17] Tina Landis, “Colorado River Water Deal: A Bandaid or Real Progress?”Liberation News, 27 May 2023. Availablehere.
[18] Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski, “How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage,”The New York Times, 15 August 2023. Availablehere.
[19] Masanobu Fukuoka,Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security(Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).

Ecosocialism Versus Degrowth: A False Dilemma

By Giacomo D’Alisa

Republished from Undisciplined Environments.

In a recent article Michael Lowy ponders if the ecological left has to embrace the ecosocialist or the degrowth ‘flag’; a concern that is not totally new. Lowy is a French-Brazilian Marxist scholar and a prominent ecosocialist. Together with Joel Kovel, an American social scientist and psychiatrist, in 2001 he wrote An ecosocialist manifesto, a foundational document for several political organizations worldwide. Thus, entering into a discussion with Lowy is not a simple academic whim, but a demand that many politically-engaged people of the ecological left are wondering about.

Recently, members of an ecosocialist group within Catalonia en Comù, part of Unida Podemos (itself part of the centre-left coalition governing Spain), invited me to debate about the end of the economic growth paradigm. This hints that ecosocialists are interested in degrowth vision and proposals. On the other hand, during talks, speeches and discussions I have participated in, I also have noted that ecosocialist projects intrigue and inspire many degrowthers. Indeed, people on both sides feel they are sister movements. The following reflection is a first and humble contribution to making the two come closer.

In the above-quoted article, Lowy supports an alliance between ecosocialists and degrowthers, and I cannot but agree with this conclusion. However, before justifying this strategic endeavour, he feels the necessity to argue why degrowth falls short as a political vision. He narrows down his critical assessment to three issues. First, Lowy maintains, degrowth as a concept is inadequate to express clearly an alternative programme. Second, degrowthers and their discourses are not explicitly anti-capitalist. Finally, for him, degrowthers are not able to distinguish between those activities that need to be reduced and those that can keep flourishing.

Concerning the first critique, Lowy maintains that the word: “degrowth” is not convincing; it does not convey the progressive and emancipatory project of societal transformation that it is needed; this remark echoes with an old and unsolved debate for many. A discussion that Lowy should know, as well as those that have followed the last decade of degrowth debate. Sophisticated criticism has mobilized the American cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff’s study about framing. Kate Rowarth, for example, suggested to degrowthers to learn from Lakoff that no one can win a political struggle or election if they keep using their opponent’s frame; and degrowth has in itself its antagonic vision: growth. Ecological economists supported the same argument in a more articulated way, suggesting that for this reason, degrowth backfires.

On the contrary, my intellectual companion Giorgos Kallis, back in 2015, gave nine clear reasons why degrowth is a compelling word. I want to complement them with one more. Looking at the search trends in Google, after ten years, degrowth keeps drawing higher levels of attention worldwide than ecosocialism. Perhaps ecosocialism can result clearer at a glance. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the populace will be immediately convinced. Indeed, the ecosocialist concept also has similar and possibly worse problems of framing, given the post-Soviet aversion to “socialism”, but this cannot mean we should abandon the term. The recent upsurge of popularity in the U.S. of “democratic socialism” suggests that the negative association of a term can be overcome.

Ecosocialists, as degrowthers, must keep explaining the actual content of their political dream, the label is not sufficient to explain it all. Our mission is un-accomplished; granted, in some contexts, ecosocialism will result in a more straightforward message, but in other degrowth could result more convincing. For the ecological left, more frames could be more effective than just one; and, using the most appropriate in different contexts and geographies is very probably the best strategy.

Noteworthy is that these different frames share core arguments and strategies. So let me move to Lowy’s second criticism, the supposed discrepancy between ecosocialists and degrowthers about capitalism. According to Lowy, degrowthers are not sufficiently or explicitly anti-capitalist. I cannot deny that not all degrowthers self-define as anti-capitalists and that for some of them stating it is not a priority. However, as Kallis already clarified, degrowth scholars are increasingly grounding their research and policies in a critique of capital forces and relations. Furthermore, Dennis and Schmelzer have shown that degrowthers widely share the belief that a degrowth society is incompatible with capitalism. And Stefania Barca has delineated how articulating ‘degrowth and labour politics toward an ecological class consciousness’ is the way forward for an ecosocialist degrowth society.

To these arguments, I want to add an observation. In their 2001 ecosocialist manifesto, Lowy and Kovel affirmed that in order to solve the ecological problem, it is necessary to set limits upon accumulation. They go on clarifying that this is not possible while capitalism keeps ruling the world. Indeed, as they and other prominent ecosocialists affirm, capitalism needs to grow or die. This effective slogan is probably the most explicit anti-capitalist sentence written in the ecosocialist manifesto, and I can maintain that most of the degrowthers would undersign this statement without hesitation –even more in pandemic times, when the existing capitalist system seems to be predicated upon the slogan: we (the capitalists) grow and you die! Indeed, it is ever-more evident that inequality is increasing dramatically during this period. If these observations are accurate, then degrowthers and ecosocialists agree more than disagree, and together with many others in the ecological left camp, share the same common sense: a healthy ecological and social system beyond the pandemic is not compatible with capitalism.

Lowy’s last criticism is that degrowthers cannot differentiate between the quantitative and the qualitative characteristics of growth. At first sight, it seems a step back to the lively discussion in the 1980s about the difference between growth and development. However, I am sure that Lowy and other ecosocialists are well aware of the critical assessment many Latin America thinkers have done of development and its colonial legacy (see here and here, for example). So, I will interpret this criticism in a more general term: it is essential to be selective about growth, and clarify what sectors need to grow and which need to degrow or even disappear. Nothing new under the sun, I could say. Peter Victor in 2012, when he was developing no-growth scenarios for facing the threat of climate change, discussed the selective growth scenario showing its modest and short-term effects for mitigating climate change. Serge Latouche, in his 2009 book Farewell to growth, argued that the decision about selective degrowth cannot be left to market forces. And Kallis explained that growth is a complex and integrated process, and thus it is mistaken to think in terms of what has to increase and what has to decrease.

It is an error to use degrowth as synonymous of decrease (as Timothée Parrique discussed extensively), and to think that what is considered ‘good’ things (hospitals, renewable energy, bicycles, etc.) need to increase without limits as the growth imaginary commands. Those that perpetuate this logic, as Lowy seems to do, stay in the growth camp. Doing so, Lowy did not follow his suggestion of paying more attention to a qualitative transformation.

In an ecosocialist society, orienting production towards more hospitals and public transport, as Lowy suggests, does not imply overcoming the growth logic and its predicaments. A degrowth society, with a healthier lifestyle and more ecological care, probably would not need so many more hospitals. Indeed, as Luzzati and colleagues found, the increase in per-capita income correlates significantly with the increase in cancer morbidity and mortality. In a degrowth society, people would fly very much less, and this could help to diminish the speed of pandemic contagions. Agro-ecological systems will encroach fewer habitats; both these qualitative changes in societal arrangement could imply less necessity to increase the number of intensive care units.

On the other hand, increasing more and more of a ‘good thing’ such as bikes in a city is not entirely positive: as in the case of Amsterdam, where walkers felt lack of space because of the enormous number of bikes in public spaces; or China , where tens of thousands of bike have been dumped because the growth-led prospect of the shared bike in cities resulted socially and ecologically problematic, the city counsellor decided to cap bike growth and regulate the share sectors. In sum, the idea of selective (de)growth does not help to unlearn the growth logic that still persists amongst many in the ecological left camp. What is needed is, indeed, a qualitative change in our mind, in our logic and our performative acts.

Ecosocialists and degrowthers are less far apart than Lowy’s article hints. Both visions are moving forward along the same path, learning from each other in the process. Discussing some thesis or policies that one or the other is proposing will help to improve and clarify their visions, and make them less questionable at the eyes of the sceptics and indifferent people. A meaningful dialogue will help us to make our arguments and practices widely commonsensical. Ecological leftists have not to decide which is the best and the most comprehensive discourse between ecosocialism and degrowth. These visions, I tried to argue above, indeed share core arguments, and both contribute to building persuasive discourse and performative actions.

On the contrary, creating a false dilemma is not very useful for our everyday struggles. In 2015, with some colleagues, we suggested exploring the redundancy of six different frameworks (Degrowth, Sustainable Community Movement Organizations, Territorialism, Commons, Social Resilience and Direct Social Actions) for relaunching more robust and comprehensive initiatives against the continuous expansion of capitalism and environmental injustices. We concluded that fostering redundancy more than nuance should motivate the promoters of these approaches if the general aim is to effectively relaunch robust and less aleatory alternatives to capitalism. In other words, we call for focusing on the consolidation of what all these approaches have in common, not just what they diverge on. This suggestion is also valid for ecosocialists and degrowthers.

It is undoubtedly crucial that both ecosocialists and degrowthers continue refining their discourses, practices and policies for advancing toward an ecologically-sound and socially-fair world free from patriarchal, racial and colonial legacy. Nevertheless, it is equally important that they map the redundancies of their views to improve the effectiveness of their shared struggle at various scales.

Giacomo D’Alisa is a FCT postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where is part of the Ecology and Society Working Group. D’Alisa is founding member of the Research & Degrowth collective in Barcelona, Spain.

‘Ecological Leninism’: On Waging War Against the Common Cause of Corona and the Climate Crisis

By Justin Reynolds

Republished from Curious.

What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis? Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.

COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’

The book is shot through with biblical imagery of plague and pestilence, but Malm finds his lodestar in the urgent rhetoric of a 20th century prophet. The Bolshevik leader Lenin, surveying the desperate situation of Russia in September 1917, riven by war, famine and economic breakdown, urged that the powers of the state must be seized and directed against what he saw as the root causes of the crisis of his day–the chronic conflict generated by warring capitalist empires. Malm sketches an ‘ecological Leninism’ for today, a programme for marshalling the hard power of the state to rewire an economic system that is destroying us.

Use of the imagery of ‘war communism’ is bold even for the Marxist writer of Fossil Capital and The Progress of this Storm. But if Malm offends, that is his intention: ‘When there is a threat to the health or even physical existence of a population one doesn’t leave it to the least conscientious individuals to play with the fire as they want. One snatches the matches out of their hands.’

Disturbing the hornets’ nest

Our crisis, he argues, is systemic. Individual, companies, industries and nations do not intend to destabilise the conditions that support our civilisation by ripping up the planet’s ecosystems. The economic machine in which they are entangled is hardwired to do so. And as it careers onwards it disturbs more and more of the pathogens that have lived for millions of years in the depths of tropical forests, the recesses of cave systems, and the mephitic atmospheres of marshes, lagoons and swamps.

Most of those viruses have been contained within the luxuriant ecosystems that proliferate around the equator, able to move between thousands of hosts before exhausting themselves. There has always been the possibility of ‘Zoonotic spillover’, the process by which a microbe leaps from its habitual animal carrier to a human intruder. These transmissions are only as frequent as we allow them to be: so long as we don’t poke our hand into the hornets’ nest, we don’t get stung.

But as widening circuits of global trade have compelled the clearing of ancient forests, the mining of caverns and the bleeding dry of wetlands, the natural barriers between humans and the carriers of pathogens are breaking down.

Soaring demand for beef, soybean, palm oil and wood accounts for much of the depletion, as loggers and farmers cut into the heart of great forests such as the Amazon, the Ecuadorian Yasuni and the Indonesian Harapan. Some 70 per cent of the total agricultural land of Malaysia and Indonesia is now devoted exclusively to the production of palm oil. The hydrocarbons and mining industries have also established their presence, opening up timeless fastnesses such as the peatlands of the Congo basin, an ancient rainforest harbouring colonies of viruses that have slept undisturbed–until now.

And as the loggers and drillers move in, the pathogens and their carriers flood out: rats, mosquitos, insects, and, above all, bats, the most effective of viral agents, sheltering thousands of coronaviruses in dense roosts where as many as 3,000 individuals can congregate in a square metre.

The hollowing out of the world’s great biospheres has–and continues to be–primarily driven by demand from wealthy northern countries for ever more rarefied commodities:

[T]he American appetite for hamburgers is satisfied from pastures carved out of the Amazon. The import of coffee to the North presupposes deforestation in the tropical belt. Chocolate consumed in the most tremendous quantities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and supplied by a mirroring top trio of Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia comes from cocoa trees grown where wild forests once stood.

‘A drizzle of viruses’

Increasingly intense extraction has seeded a bloom of viruses. Since the turn of the millennium outbreaks have followed in quick succession: Nipah, West Nile, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika. The coronavirus is merely the first to move beyond their habitual seedbeds in Asia, Africa and South America.

The replication of northern consumption patterns in Southeast Asia provided the ideal conditions for the genesis of COVID-19. The wet markets of Wuhan have become ever more decadent and reckless in response to demand from prosperous consumers. Just as the western world increasingly demands novelties such as zebra steaks, crocodile sausages, whale, camel and python meat, so Wuhan’s wealthy patrons have come to expected ever more carnivalesque displays of pangolins, flying-foxes, racoons, dogs and rats.

Nearly 20 per cent of all the world’s species have now been commodified. And, as at Wuhan, viruses lurk among them. Unrestrained consumption ‘violently shakes the tree where bats and other animals live. Out falls a drizzle of viruses.’

Extraction means global heating, which means more viruses. Depletion of forests and wetlands diminishes their capacity to soak up and sequester carbon dioxide. And rising global temperatures open opportunities for the carriers of pathogens to move northwards beyond their ancient tropical habitats. An alarming story somewhat lost amid the noise when the pandemic took hold was the appearance of swarms of locusts more than 20 times larger than normal–embodying an area three times that of New York–across east African and west Asia. As temperatures rise they may even be able to glide over the mountain ranges that until now have confined them to southern regions.

The pandemic has inspired comparison with the great plagues of the past. But Malm suggests our predicament is different and, modern medicine not withstanding, in some ways worse. He acknowledges the parallels with the decline and fall of Rome drawn in Kyle Harper’s intriguing 2017 study The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, detailing how imperial expansion pulled in diseases causing outbreaks that shook the classical world’s foundations with catastrophes such as the Antoninian and Justinian Plagues.

But empires have risen and fallen and risen again. Today’s pandemics are entangled with climate change, a chronic ecological rupture. COVID-19 threatens to be one of ‘an avalanche of missiles’ that will continue to rain down over centuries. The process can only be stopped by inoculating ourselves against the unchecked extraction that Malm, in one of the book’s boldest images, suggests is itself a virus:

Capital doesn’t mean to destroy the intricate cellular structures of wild nature; it doesn’t have an intention formed in the mind and then engage in efforts to realise it–there is just no other way for it to replicate. … Unlike other parasites, this one cannot stay content with vegetating in the furs or veins of other species for millions of years of co-evolutionary equilibrium. It can subsist solely by expanding and, in this sense, it exhibits a sort of permanent pandemicity; it doesn’t return to lurk in the shadows until the next visitation, like Ebola or Nipah. Once it had leapt out its reservoir host on the British Isles, it commenced the long historical work of subsuming wild nature on this planet, be it in the form of a palm oil plantation, a bauxite mine, a wet market or a rat farm. All of these and uncountable other entities represent wild nature dragged into the chain of value, and given the biological fact that pathogenic microbes are constituent elements of such nature, capital must call them up too.

Impending catastrophe, then and now

Looking for a way forward, Malm, whose previous works have elaborated Marx’s concept of metabolic rift–the imbalance in our relationship with nature wrought by unsustainable production–turns to Lenin’s essay The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution.

There, Lenin, drawing on Marx’s stark assessment in the The Communist Manifesto that the fight for socialism will end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’, argued that the devastation wrought by the war was the inevitable endpoint of competition between empires for resources: humanity had to ‘choose between perishing’ or transitioning to ‘a superior mode of production’.

For Lenin the way out was both impossible and obvious: to dare to use ‘the rich store of control measures’ the Russian government, like the other warring nations, had already designed and exercised during the conflict to plan production and prevent food systems collapsing. But with a critical difference: rather than being employed to defend the status quo they should be used to overturn it. The powers of the capitalist state should be used against capitalism itself.

Like Lenin, Malm rejects the left alternatives of social democracy and anarchism as inadequate to the scale of the crisis. Social democracy is fatally entangled with a capitalist system of overproduction that is the root cause of our predicament. And by forsaking the power of the state anarchism denies itself the agency necessary to act at sufficient scale. Lenin urged something new: a state prepared to use its powers to wrench Russia onto a new path: to withdraw from the war, to commandeer the grain supply, to take control of the banking system, to redirect production for communal need.

Malm imagines what a systematic climate change programme charged with similar urgency might look like. It would audit supply chains and import flows to determine the extent of resource extraction from the south to the north. It would pare those supply chains down to a minimum of essential goods. It would redirect resources to the rewinding and reforesting of regions worn down by northern consumption. It would ban the import of meat, especially beef, investing plant proteins. And so on: in brief, it would do whatever is necessary to establish trade circuits that do not continually extract and exploit. Above all, it would require planning: ‘Comprehensive, airtight planning. Everybody knows this. Few say it.’

Malm points to recent instances of where a strong state has pushed through the noise and forced through effective climate change mitigation measures. During his tenure as Brazilian President, Lula oversaw a significant reduction in the deforestation of the Amazon, expanding protected areas and enforcing forest codes against illegal logging, measures that slashed Brazil’s CO2 emissions by some 40 per cent. And although the Chinese state’s prolific use of coal has been an environmental catastrophe, it has pushed through a massive reforestation programme.

Malm echoes Lenin’s call that ‘war must be declared on the oil barons and shareholders’. For Lenin that meant socialising the industry to ramp up production for the construction of a new Soviet state. Today we need public control to manage the sunsetting of the industry. But radically reducing fossil fuel production and phasing out carbon emissions will not be enough. We need to drawdown the excess carbon already in the atmosphere. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic reduced emissions by some 5 per cent. But a 7.6 per cent reduction is needed every year over the next decade to keep within the Paris Agreement targets.

Only the state has the power to roll out the direct air capture technologies we need at sufficient scale. And only the state can redirect the oil and gas industry away from carbon production towards carbon capture and burial: ‘The demand for nationalising fossil fuel companies and turning them into direct air capture utilities should be the central transitional demand for the coming years.’

An ‘acid taste’

Malm acknowledges that the harsh language of ‘rationing, reallocating, requisitioning, sanctioning, ordering’ leaves an ‘acid taste’. But this is what needs to be done:

Here we truly are in the situation of Lenin’s September text: everybody knows what measures need to be taken; everybody knows, on some level of their consciousness, that flights inside continents should stay grounded, private jets banned, cruise ships safely dismantled, turbines and panels mass produced–there’s a whole auto industry waiting for the order–subways and bus lines expanded, high-speed rail lines built, old houses refurbished and all the magnificent rest.

The ‘classical Marxist dream of a humanity liberated in a land of abundance’–which finds contemporary expression in manifestos for a technologically advanced ‘luxury communism’–must be sidelined for the foreseeable future: ‘those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of these needs to happen, that there will be no sacrifices or discomforts for ordinary people, are not being honest.’

Lenin of course was that rarest of polemicists: one who got the opportunity to follow through on his words. And follow them through he did, not without brutality. Malm acknowledges the cruelties of ‘actually existing’ war communism: the authoritarianism, the food requisitions at gunpoint, the militarisation of labour, the summary executions to enforce discipline in the ranks. The experience ‘of civil war ‘deposited a poison of brutalised power in the heart of the workers’ state, to which it eventually fell victim’. Freedom of expression and assembly must be sacrosanct, however dire the emergency.

But planning allowed resourcefulness. At the start of the conflict the White and allied forces held 99 per cent of the coal and 97 per cent of the oil resources that had powered the pre-war Russian state. Surrounded on all sides, and forced to live completely by their own means by an import blockade, the Soviets marshalled the resources they did have effectively, constructing a functioning ‘biofueled workers’ state’ using the boreal forests that blanketed the Russia that remained to them for construction, heat and energy. And despite having to fell so much timber, they were conscious of the need to preserve, setting half of the forests aside as inviolable ‘monuments of nature’. That legacy persists: Russia still has more pure wildernesses than other nation.

Like Lenin’s essays, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is in the best tradition of the polemic: the anger controlled, the urgency palpable, the imagery vivid, the case emphatically made, agree with it or not. And like Lenin, Malm is writing at a time of emergency. The critical difference, of course, is that Lenin wrote in the knowledge that a revolutionary vanguard was close to power.

Today’s left, at least that section offering a transformative agenda, is nowhere near. For all the talk of Green New Deals, by and large progressives retain faith in the sufficiency of a gradualist path to climate mitigation, placing hope in renewables technology and market mechanisms: solar, wind and batteries, carbon pricing and capture. In his anger Malm does not acknowledge that there is a certain tough-mindedness in pragmatism too: we need to do what we can within the context of the current political and economic environment, with the imperfect tools it affords. That means pressing for more investment in clean energy, for carbon taxes, for market regulation, and perhaps even for nuclear power and some forms of geoengineering.

But as the crisis bites harder, governments will have to take some or all of the tougher measures Malm anticipates. And the right, not the left, might be positioned to use it. Nationalist authoritarianism of various degrees has already taken hold in several nations: China, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom.

The pandemic has illustrated the public will accept harsh measures if the threat is close by. Malm: ‘No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement … ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.’

The challenge for the left would seem to be to ensure that it, not the authoritarian right, has the keys to the state when the eye of the storm arrives. That day seems some way off. Whomever holds power, and whatever one thinks of his analysis, Malm, echoing Lenin, is surely right about this: it is necessary to act now–‘this very evening, this very night’.

A High Road for the 21st Century

[Photo credit: Black Socialists in America]

By Russell Weaver

In the 1990s, American scholar Joel Rogers proposed the term “High Road” to refer to policies and institutions that jointly uphold and advance the three social values of shared prosperity, environmental sustainability, and participatory democracy. Shared prosperity refers to improvements in human well-being and equal opportunities for all humans to “participate in and benefit from” the activities that produce those improvements. Environmental sustainability refers to “efficient use, maintenance, and restoration of the environmental services needed to support human life.” And participatory democracy refers to governance according to the maxim of “of, by, and for the people.”[1]

While these values are as laudable and fundamental to social life today as they ever were, the intersecting and multiplying crises coming to a head in the 21st Century – climate change, the global COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, racial and gender oppression, state violence, police militarization and police brutality, mass surveillance, political polarization, rising inequality, and so many others – call for an updated definition of the High Road. One that makes explicit not only what the High Road stands for, but what it opposes. One that is overtly connected to a broader theory of change regarding how to build a High Road future. One that offers allies a specific set of criteria on which to evaluate policies and practices in order to inform advocacy strategies and grassroots campaigns. In short, 21st Century crises demand a 21st Century High Road (“High Road-21”).

Importantly, the High Road that Rogers built still possesses a rock-solid foundation, and we are not calling for its wholesale replacement. High Road-21 is simply about broadening and repaving the surface, painting brighter lines, and installing new lighting to illuminate the paths that lead away from the harmful, discriminatory, gridlocked systems in which most of us have spent the majority of our lives, and to which we’re told that there is no alternative.

There are alternatives. Below, we articulate four key pillars of an alternative, High Road system for the 21st Century. We then translate each pillar into one or more High Road-21 policy objectives, and we briefly situate the resulting vision into a broader theory of change. We conclude with a call to action: we ask readers to endorse this statement, and to join us in our attempts to embrace and enact High Road-21 principles and values in our many, ever-changing social roles.

The Four Essential Pillars of High Road-21

Four main, interlocking and interdependent pillars hold the 21st Century High Road in place.

Pillar 1: The High Road is Anti-Racist

High Road-21 is anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-misogynist, anti-ableist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-classist, and opposed to all other forms of prejudice. While the original High Road principle of shared prosperity is consistent with this pillar in spirit, being for shared prosperity is not enough. It is just as critical to be against all policies, institutions, norms, rules, regulations, conventions, and practices that produce, reinforce, or fail to dismantle the structures and systems that give rise to inequitable outcomes in the human population. As such, High Road-21 explicitly rejects all sources of inequity, violence, and oppression.

A policy or institution is anti-racist if it “produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.” To be anti-racist is to recognize that there:

“is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”[2]

Following from these observations, one objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively tear down, with the intent to fully eradicate, the sources of racial, social, economic, environmental, and political inequity and injustice that presently transcend all scales of our shared society, from the local to the global.

Pillar 2: The High Road is Restorative and Reparative

Whereas High Road-21 is against policies and institutions that produce and sustain inequity, it is for policies and institutions that (1) advance equity in the pursuit of justice, and (2) realign and rescale human activities so that they progressively repair and enhance the ecological systems in which an equitable and just society is capable of flourishing. In other words, High Road-21 is in part a reparative and restorative project.

In line with notions of reparative[3] and restorative[4] justice, the High Road-21 agenda aims to explicitly recognize and purposefully redress the harms caused by a legacy of Low Road – i.e., racist, inequitable, extractive, destructive – policies and patterns of social-political-environmental relations. That means that High Road-21 is committed to:

·         Including all parties – including voices for nonhuman species and ecological systems – as full, authentic participants in decision-making processes that affect them, and which have previously rendered disproportionate levels of harm onto some of them;

·         Creating new opportunities for encounters with or interactions between those parties so that all become aware of the ways in which existing institutions produce and distribute harm across our social and environmental systems;

·         Devising new solutions and crafting new institutions and policies that make amends for these patterns of harm; and

·         Striving to reintegrate or resituate parties into their shared environments with new tools and infrastructure to become caretakers and community members, not competitors.[5]

Along these lines, another objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively invest in, and develop mechanisms that convey, material and symbolic reparations to the people, places, and ecosystems on which inequitable, extractive institutions and policies have thrust disproportionate levels of harm.

Pillar 3: The High Road is Cooperative and Solidaristic

As evidenced by the list of commitments laid out above for Pillar 2, High Road-21 adopts and advances the values of democratic participation, social cohesion, government responsiveness, and the spirit of compromise.[6] Put differently, High Road-21 is cooperative and solidaristic. It views democratic society as a common-pool resource. Like a fishery or other commons, a democratic society can deliver benefits to all of its constituents. Also like a fishery, however, a democratic society is vulnerable to the polluting forces of greed, short-term profit-seeking, hyper-individualism, and rival competition. Low Road policies and institutions that reward or otherwise promote these tendencies undermine the health and well-being of our common-pool democratic society.

High Road-21 recognizes that a common-pool democratic society is most likely to be sustainably managed – and strengthened – when its members share a sense of identity and solidarity with one another. Shared identity and solidarity fuel and sustain the trusting, reciprocal relationships that are vital for prosocial cooperation to emerge and challenge the Low Road system’s prevailing forces of antisocial competition.[7] Solidarity and the cooperative tendencies that it unleashes are buttressed by processes and rules that provide for democratic self-governance and self-determination, equitable distributions of contributions and benefits, and fair and inclusive decision-making.[8] Low Road policies and practices that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few are necessarily anti-solidaristic, giving rise to the patterns of inter-group conflict and competition that are so visible in our contemporary crises.

Thus, a third objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively build new and reinforce existing mechanisms that produce solidarity and trust and promote cooperative tendencies among diverse members of society.

Solidarity and cooperation among humans contribute to the sustainable management of a democratic society. However, a cooperative, democratic society cannot thrive in the absence of healthy, supportive, life-giving ecological systems. Since at least the Industrial Revolution, an extractive, anthropocentric policy agenda has treated ecological systems as inexhaustible sources of free materials, and bottomless sinks for wastes and debris. Arguably the most visible form of human environmental impacts, global climate change, is just one – albeit the most dramatic, large-scale, and urgent – example of the environmental degradation and destruction caused by human activities.

Although human impacts on the physical world occur virtually everywhere and affect all ecosystems, environmental degradation and destruction disproportionately harm communities of color.[9] Thus, for moral reasons that are rooted both in (1) a land ethic[10] and respect for the environment, and (2) a social contract and respect for fellow humans, High Road-21 is committed to building solidarity and cooperation between humans and nature. As such, a fourth objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively create new and reinforce existing mechanisms that decenter human activities on the planet, realigning and rescaling those activities so they promote the healthy, unimpaired functioning of ecological systems.

Pillar 4: The High Road is Prefigurative

To say that High Road-21 is prefigurative is to say that it is at once visionary and practical. It builds and showcases rules, institutions, and social-environmental relations in the here-and-now – using tools of the present – that model what a High Road society can be in the future. In other words, the 21st Century High Road is not a destination to be reached at some unknown point in the future. It is a path that is already under construction across the planet – a path that leads away from the racist, extractive, short-term, Low Road infrastructure that we’ve been investing in for centuries.

It’s time to finally let the costs of those Low Road investments, and the harmful infrastructure they erected, sink. High Road institutions like worker-owned cooperatives and community land trusts,[11] mutual aid networks,[12] and local agricultural cooperatives and independent grassroots political parties,[13] are modeling what a High Road, sustainable, cooperative, democratic economy and society can look like…if we choose to invest in it. On that note, a fifth objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to immediately and actively defund or otherwise withdraw economic support from Low Road institutions, programs, and regulatory systems, and to redirect those resources to the anti-racist, reparative, restorative, cooperative, solidaristic High Road alternatives that already exist and are continuing to emerge throughout society.

High Road-21 and the Dual Power Theory of Change

The Four Pillars of High Road-21 are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. They are all vital to the structural integrity of a 21st Century High Road. As such, they should not be treated as separate elements than can or ought to be built one at a time.

Still, it is a useful thought exercise to consider the individual Pillars somewhat sequentially, in reverse order, insofar as doing so tells a story of change. If the vision is an anti-racist, reparative, cooperative, solidaristic, High Road democratic society, then how do we exit off the Low Road and start moving in that direction?

According to the theory of change to which High Road-21 subscribes,[14] one answer to this question is that we prefigure the envisioned society by modeling it in the here-and-now. That is, we use the tools and resources at our disposal in the present to build equitable and democratic institutions that directly challenge the future viability of the Low Road. For example, we:

• Form place-based “people’s assemblies” wherein participatory or direct democracy procedures set policy agendas that inform “organizing campaigns…and long-term institution building and development work” to challenge the status quo.[15]

• Organize independent political parties and mobilize voting blocs to advocate for and elect candidates – and pass referenda – that challenge Low Road power structures.[16]

• Establish community land trusts and co-housing opportunities to challenge traditional concepts of private property and property ownership.

• Build cooperative businesses to challenge stockholder-centered enterprise designs.

• Create benefit corporations, social enterprises, and limited-profit firms to challenge conventional views that businesses must put profits first, minimizing costs and maximizing revenues with every decision.

• Set up public and community-owned banks, utilities, and energy grids to challenge the misguided belief that market competition makes the private sector better suited to provide these essential goods and services.

The list goes on and on. The point is not to name every variety of High Road institution, but to affirm that they exist. Here. Now.

Collectively, these High Road institutions form the building blocks of a democratic, High Road base of real political and economic power. As that power base grows and becomes more distributed over space, it competes for economic and political legitimacy with the prevailing Low Road power base.

The notion that a democratic power coexists and competes with the concentrated power of the ruling class is what is meant by dual power.[17] To build dual power is to invest in High Road institutions and policies that are “of, by, and for” the people in a democratic society – institutions and policies designed and operated in contraposition to prevailing, highly uneven patterns of power and privilege.

According to the dual power theory of change, as the High Road expands, society can become more equitable, democratic, inclusive, and sustainable. However, while the presence of prefigurative High Road institutions and voting blocs is a necessary condition for weakening the Low Road power base, it is not sufficient. Rather, it is also essential to build solidarity between High Road institutions, and between those institutions and the population at large. If we are all to eventually live on the High Road together, then we need to see and get to know one another. The High Road, in other words, cannot be built without strong networking, organizing, and mobilization.

With a visible, networked, and expanding alternative to the Low Road in place, the potential for social cooperation – in the form of collective withdrawal from the Low Road economy and movement toward High Road alternatives – grows. As this potential gets realized, the scales start to tip in favor of the High Road. Eventually, the swelling democratic power base gains legitimacy. With added legitimacy comes greater political power to dismantle preexisting inequitable, racist, Low Road policies, and to make amends for their legacies. In other words, a strong base of legitimate democratic power paves the way for restorative and reparative measures that undo the harms of the past. In their place, the High Road power installs sustainable and anti-racist fixtures that guarantee equity and justice for all.

Over time, the interplay of (1) dismantling and making amends for mechanisms that lead to inequity and environmental destruction, and (2) building equitable, sustainable mechanisms to take their place, closes off the Low Road and helps the few who remain stuck in its gridlock to join the rest of us on the High Road.[18]

In sum, the 21st Century High Road is the welcoming, sustainable infrastructure on which we build dual power. It’s where relentlessly democratic, equitable, anti-racist, solidaristic institutions, campaigns, and policies will allow all humans to flourish as equal members of healthy, well-functioning ecological systems. Simply put, it’s where we go from here.

Take Action

To add your name and/or the name of your organization to the list of parties who support the 21st Century High Road agenda laid out above, visit www.highroad-21.org and click on the “Endorse” link at the bottom of the page. Onward, in solidarity.

Notes

[1] Rogers, Joel. “What does 'high road' mean?” University of Wisconsin-Madison, COWS, 1990. Last accessed 3 June 2020. https://www.cows.org/_data/documents/1776.pdf

[2] Kendi, I.X., 2019. How to be an Antiracist. One World/Ballantine. (p. 18).

[3] International Center for Transitional Justice, n.d. “Gender and Transitinoal Justice: A Training Module Series.” Last accessed 4 June 2020. https://www.ictj.org/multimedia/interactive/gender-and-transitional-justice-training-module-series

[4] Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, n.d. “Lesson 1: What is Restorative Justice?” Last accessed 4 June 2020. http://restorativejustice.org/restorative-justice/about-restorative-justice/tutorial-intro-to-restorative-justice/lesson-1-what-is-restorative-justice/

[5] Ibid.

[6] Fung, A., 2019. Saving Democracy from Ourselves: Democracy as a Tragedy of the Commons. In Satz, D. and Lever, A. eds. Ideas That Matter: Democracy, Justice, Rights. Oxford University Press, USA.

[7] Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press.

[8] Atkins, P.W., Wilson, D.S. and Hayes, S.C., 2019. Prosocial: using evolutionary science to build productive, equitable, and collaborative groups. New Harbinger Publications.

[9] Bullard, R.D., 2000. Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Routledge.

[10] Leopold, A., 1989. A Sand County almanac, and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press, USA.

[11]Colón, J.M., Herson-Hord, M., Horvath, K.S., Martindale, D. and Porges, M., 2017. Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond. The Next System Project, https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/Symbiosis_AtLargeFirst-corrected-2.pdf.

[12] Mutual Aid Networks, n.d. Last accessed 3 June 2020. https://www.mutualaidnetwork.org/

[13] Akuno, K., 2014. The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy.

[14] Colón et al. Also see: Akuno, K., Nangwaya, A. and Jackson, C., 2017. Jackson rising: The struggle for economic democracy and black self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi. Daraja Press.

[15] Akuno.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Black Socialists of America. “Dual power map.” Last accessed 3 June 2020. https://blacksocialists.us/dual-power-map

[18] Rogers, Joel and Wright, E., 2015. American society: How it really works, 2E. New York: WW Norton. (p. 228).

Contact: Russell Weaver is Research Director at the Cornell University ILR Buffalo Co-Lab.  rcweaver@cornell.edu | http://highroadpolicy.org

Engels on Nature and Humanity

(Pictured: A painting by English artist LS Lowry (1887 - 1976) entitled 'Going To Work')

By Michael Roberts

Republished from the author’s blog.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Marx and Engels are often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.

The charge is that other living species are merely playthings for the use of human beings.  There are humans and there is nature – in contradiction.  This charge is particularly aimed at Friedrich Engels, who it is claimed, took a bourgeois ‘positivist’ view of science: scientific knowledge was always progressive and neutral in ideology; and so was the relationship between man and nature.

This charge against Marx and Engels was promoted in the post-war period by the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxism, which reckoned that everything went wrong with Marxism after 1844, when Marx and Engels supposedly dumped “humanism”.  Later, followers of the French Marxist Althusser put the blame on Fred himself.  For them, everything went to hell in a hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped ‘historical materialism’ and replaced it with ‘dialectical materialism’, in order to promote Engels’ ‘silly belief’ that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.

Indeed, the ‘green’ critique of Marx and Engels is that they were unaware that homo sapiens were destroying the planet and thus themselves.  Instead, Marx and Engels had a touching Promethean faith in capitalism’s ability to develop the productive forces and technology to overcome any risks to the planet and nature.

That Marx and Engels paid no attention to the impact on nature of human social activity has been debunked recently in particular by the ground-breaking work of Marxist authors like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett.  They have reminded us that throughout Marx’s Capital, Marx was very aware of capitalism’s degrading impact on nature and the resources of the planet.  Marx wrote that 

“the capitalist mode of production collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance…. [It] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker.” 

As Paul Burkett says: “it is difficult to argue that there is something fundamentally anti-ecological about Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his projections of communism.”

To back this up, Kohei Saito’s prize-winning book has drawn on Marx’s previously unpublished ‘excerpt’ notebooks from the ongoing MEGA research project to reveal Marx’s extensive study of scientific works of the time on agriculture, soil, forestry, to expand his concept of the connection between capitalism and its destruction of natural resources. (I have a review pending on Saito’s book).

But Engels too must be saved from the same charge.  Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing.  While still living in his home town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), he wrote several diary notes about the inequality of rich and poor, the pious hypocrisy of the church preachers and also the pollution of the rivers.

Just 18 years old, he writes: 

“the two towns of Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of nearly three hours’ travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to shame for men’s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that, but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red. Coming from Düsseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.”

He goes on:

“First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. “

He connected the social degradation of working families with the degradation of nature alongside the hypocritical piety of the manufacturers.

“Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories — merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist’s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.”

Sure, these observations by Engels are just that, observations, without any theoretical development, but they show the sensitivity that Engels already had to the relationship between industrialisation, the owners and the workers, their poverty and the environmental impact of factory production.

In his first major work, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, again well before Marx looked at political economy, Engels notes how the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the degradation of nature go hand in hand. 

“To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” 

Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.

Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way.  And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature.

In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape into Man.”, he writes: 

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were … thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (my emphasis)

Engels goes on: 

“in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body. …”

Engels explains the social consequences of the drive to expand the productive forces.  

“But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. … When afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. …”

The people of the Americas were driven into slavery, but also nature was enslaved. As Engels put it:

“What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Now we know that it was not just slavery that the Europeans brought to the Americas, but also disease, which in its many forms exterminated 90% of native Americans and was the main reason for their subjugation by colonialism.

As we experience yet another pandemic, we know that it was capitalism’s drive to industrialise agriculture and usurp the remaining wilderness that has led to nature ‘striking back’, as humans come into contact with more pathogens to which they have no immunity, just as the native Americans in the 16th century.

Engels attacked the view that ‘human nature’ is inherently selfish and will just destroy nature.  In his Outline, Engels described that argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.”  Humans can work in harmony with and as part of nature.  It requires greater knowledge of the consequences of human action.  Engels said in his Dialectics:

“But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analyzing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.”

But better knowledge and scientific progress is not enough. For Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels said: “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.”  Science is not enough. “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.”  The ‘positivist’ Engels, it seems, supported Marx’s materialist conception of history after all.

"There is No Straight Line to a Just Food System": What We Do with Our Bodies Until Then

By David Pritchett

Two Kinds of Farming

The summer of 2012 was hot in the Midwest. By the fourth week of temperatures over ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and over two months without rain, the grass was brown and many of our crops in Northeastern Indiana were not faring much better.

I lived on a twenty-six acre farm, three acres of which my friends and I were homesteading and vegetable gardening. Our farm - "Bluefield Farm," named after the abundant chicory with its blue blossoms - was an oasis in the middle of an industrial agriculture desert. The surrounding landscape, on the other hand, was filled with acres of corn and soybean. Most of the farm lay pastured with organic hay, but we planted market gardens on about one and a half acres of the landscape.

The work was hard but rewarding. Gardens require thoughtful soil preparation--compost or manure ensure proper nutrition for the plants, and manual tillage loosens the soil so that roots can take hold and take up crucial minerals, but unlike plows, does so without killing beneficial worms and fungal threads. Hand tillage and planting of even two acres can be backbreaking, but shared labor lightened the work, and even made it enjoyable. Mentors helped us to know when to start seeds, how and when to transplant, and offered tips and strategies for dealing with insects and weeds without utilizing chemicals. Late night research provided information on companion and succession planting, to negotiate plant tolerance and space. And always, the gardens humbled us with our amateur knowledge of how to grow enough to feed ourselves with a margin of extra.

The contrast between our farm and the surrounding agricultural practices was evident on a daily basis. Our small-scale gardens were planted with seedlings before the surrounding fields were dry enough for the tractors to till. Even in the heat and drought of 2012, we had some crops that survived. The diversity of our planting plan meant that although some of our vegetables did not tolerate the hot, dry weather, some did. Surrounding us though, were thousands of acres of soybeans and corn that desiccated into brown stalks without the water they needed. The large scale of those farms of hundreds or even thousands of acres was brittle and fragile.

But it was an event that summer - a disaster - that truly marked the difference between industrial food production and the small scale agroecology we practiced on Bluefield farm. Up the road just a quarter mile was another kind of farm. A chicken farm, but more properly just a collection of large industrial buildings. This was an egg production facility, alleged to provide all the eggs for all the Kroger grocery stores east of the Mississippi. I believed this to be true, because it consisted of four buildings, each a quarter mile long and one hundred yards wide. The factory boasted of two million hens, each housed in a cage constructed such that the daily egg born of their bodies was moved on a conveyor belt to be collected, cleaned, bleached, and packaged. Production was mechanized to facilitate as little human intervention as possible, but workers were still needed for various tasks - one of the inauspicious duties was the daily chore of collecting birds dead in their cages and throwing them out.

I was in town one scorching day when I heard the news from one of the locals - the giant fans, big as airplane engines, just couldn't keep up with the heat. Those big buildings became giant ovens, and three hundred thousand chickens died from hyperthermia.

When I got home from town, I rushed over to our small chicken coop, constructed of leftover odds and ends of wood and tin nailed onto a frame of two by fours. Our ten hens were fine, pecking away at the occasional insect, and fussing about as they generally did under the shade of a tree. For the rest of the day, though, I could hear the commotion of large machinery in the distance. I was told that they buried the dead chickens--all three hundred thousand--in a massive heap of feathers, flesh, and bones.

Three Pillars of White Heteropatriarchy

Scholar of Indigenous Studies, Andrea Smith, wrote a short but incisive analysis of the interconnected nature of racism in the United States. Her thesis was that while various racialized groups experience racism in different ways, their struggles for liberation are connected as each form of racism is a pillar in white supremacy.

The first pillar is the logic of slaveability/capitalism. The logic of slavery anchors capitalism and at its worst renders black bodies as nothing more than property to be used in the cotton fields, or, after the 13th amendment, to be put to work via Jim Crow laws. Despite eventual abolishment of Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration of black persons today continues the logic of slavery by corporate prisons and prison work for low wages.

The second pillar of white supremacy, according to Smith, is the logic of genocide/colonialism. This logic holds that native people must constantly be disappearing. The myth of the Americas as open landscape for the taking necessitated the genocide of indigenous peoples who had lived in relationship to the land for thousands of years. Religious rhetoric fomented this genocide, calling the "New world" a "new Israel," which of course meant that the colonizers had the right to murder the indigenous inhabitants of the land. The logic of genocide perpetrated the forced displacement of native nations onto reservations and continues today in the myth of the disappeared Indians, spoken of as the original inhabitants who are now vanished.

The third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of orientalism/war. This logic sees Oriental nations (inclusive of the Middle East) as perpetual threats to the superior civilizations of the West. While these exotic foreigners are not disappeared or owned, they loom on the horizon as a source of fear, and thus represent the reason for the creation of the military complex that takes over the national budget of the United States and perpetuates the control of the globe by Western nations. The "War on Terror" that allows everything from drone strikes to water-boarding and indefinite detention of brown bodies continues due to this logic of the foreign threat which justifies perpetual war.

Why discuss racism and white supremacy in an essay about agriculture? Food justice advocates already argue that the food system is inherently inequitable. Class and race have too much impact upon access to healthy foods. Fresh vegetables and less processed foods cost more, and food deserts exist in many urban neighborhoods dominated by people of color.

But analysis of food injustice often misses the explicit links between racial injustice and the manner in which white supremacist logic has affected the land itself. The heart of industrial agriculture extends the three-fold logic of white supremacy against nature itself: just as capitalism commoditized Africans into slaves, so too does profit enslave the soil to constantly produce; along with genocidal policies toward Native Americans came ecocidal land management that disappeared mature ecosystems; finally, the perpetual war against the foreign threat was directed toward pests and weeds. In what follows, I look more deeply into each of these pillars of white heteropatriarchy and how they affect the land community.

Slavery

Just a short walk down the road from Bluefield farm was an old graveyard, with some markers dating to the mid-1800's. Scattered elms and oaks shaded the cemetery, and it offered a quiet place to think. I went there often, sometimes in the heat of the day for a break from weeding, and other times at night to sit pensively under the moonlight. The last part of the ten-minute walk from the farm required a walk up the knoll atop of which lay the gravestones. I did not think much of this rise in the landscape until I heard a story regarding this phenomenon. As it turns out, old cemeteries like the one I frequented often sit higher on the landscape for a reason. These cemeteries were established in the early days of settlement by Americans in the Midwest. As farmers cleared land and farmed for over one hundred and fifty years, poor land husbandry led to significant soil erosion across the landscape. Areas immune to this loss were areas that had never been cleared and farmed--places like graveyards.

Slavery, the fundamental capitalist logic behind white supremacy that allows bodies to be monetized, extends in industrial agriculture against the soil itself. This story of slavery, mineral depletion, and soil erosion goes back to the heart of the European settlement of the Americas, to the earliest of colonies.

In 1606, a shipment of colonists funded by the Virginia Company, a group of wealthy London investors, landed in eastern Virginia. They founded the colony of Jamestown, but struggled to survive, much less to turn a profit for the Virginia Company. But soon the colonists discovered that tobacco grew well in the climate and began producing thousands of pounds to ship back to England. The crop was so profitable that farmers grew only the little food they needed to feed their families and utilized the rest of the land to grow tobacco. By 1617, the colonists were able to send twenty thousand pounds of tobacco in one year across the Atlantic.

But the crop depleted soil fertility at an unsustainable rate. A tobacco plant requires ten times the nitrogen and thirty times the phosphorus that most food crops need. This meant that soon tilled for tobacco soon had to be abandoned, and more land cleared for the crop. After a decade of exporting tobacco, Jamestown colonists petitioned for new land due to soil exhaustion. In addition to the problem of depletion, tobacco farming caused severe erosion. Farmers piled up soil in mounds by hand or with a plow around each plant and left bare. Rains of any significant amount thus washed much of that bare soil away.

The work of tilling and harvesting tobacco was hard, and land clearance was even harder. Land-owning colonists soon capitalized on black and white indentured servants to help with this difficult work, but by the mid-17th century, African slaves with no prospect of freedom were brought in for the task. Within a century, there were over a hundred thousand slaves in the Chesapeake Bay region.

Cash crop agriculture soon led to the rise of class in this New World for the colonists. Wealthy landowners who could afford slaves cleared new land, farmed it for tobacco or cotton until the land was depleted, and then sold the land to poorer farmers who could not afford to buy and clear new land. Once all the land had been settled, plantation owners continued to farm the same soil even with increasingly marginal returns so that they could keep their slaves occupied.

The devaluation of land meant that farmers with wealth did not need to properly tend the soil or care for the land. As soil health declined, the productivity gap was filled by the labor of enslaved black bodies. Because white supremacy deprecated the lives of Africans, the importance of healthy soil itself could be trivialized under slavery.

Although slavery was outlawed (but still exists in the form of prison labor), this same devaluation of soil persists in industrial agriculture. Healthy soil is a rich community itself, consisting of millions of microbes, mycelium, and insects that keep organic and mineral nutrients cycling in a way that benefits not only themselves, but plants as well. But constant tillage and application of fertilizers destroys the soil community and leads to erosive soil loss and the destruction of the microbial and insect community that creates healthy soil. Under slavery, the steady loss of soil productivity was made up for with slave labor that continued to eek out marginal returns. Today, the erosion of soil and fertility is replaced by large machinery powered by fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers that make up for loss of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium due to deprivation and depletion.

Ecocide

On Nov 13, 1838, Father Joseph Petit wrote the following description of the Potawatomi Trail of Death to Bishop Bruté:

"The order of the march was as follows: the United States flag, carried by a dragoon (soldier); then one of the principal officers, next the staff baggage carts, then the carriage, which during the whole trip was kept for the use of the Indian chiefs; then one or two chiefs on horseback led a line of 250 or 300 horses ridden by men, women, children in single file, after the manner of savages. On the flanks of the line at equal distance from each other were the dragoons and volunteers, hastening the stragglers, often with severe gestures and bitter words. After this cavalry came a file of 40 baggage wagons filled with luggage and Indians. The sick were lying in them, rudely jolted, under a canvas which, far from protecting them from the dust and heat, only deprived them of air, for they were as if buried under this burning canopy - several died thus."

For the year prior, Petit had been a missionary to the Potawatomi band near Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had been away from Twin Lakes, Indiana, when the Potawatomi Trail of Death began, but had petitioned his superior so that he could join the villagers with whom he had become acquainted. By the time he was able to join the forcibly displaced Potawatomi, many had already fallen ill.

Colonialism is the logic behind indigenous genocide; this same logic conflated indigenous people with their indigenous ecosystems. What were seen as unproductive, pristine forests, were actually tended landscapes that provided for Native American life. Nut-bearing trees provided staple calories. Open meadows provided browse for deer and other game animals. A wide range of encouraged herbs and woody perennials provided for basketry, medicine, and other crafts. Even tribes that were primarily farmers were not recognized as such, since their farms did not look like those of the European settlers. Because of this, Native Americans were displaced, killed, or otherwise marginalized, and at the same time, their native ecosystems deforested and cleared for European style farms. Thus, indigenous genocide and ecocide went hand in hand.

The United States government had made multiple attempts to assimilate the Potawotamis. President Jefferson, ever the champion of the farm, expressed his hope to integrate the tribe into European ways of farming. In a letter to Chiefs Little Turtle and Five Medals, he relayed the following: "We shall with pleasure see your people become disposed to cultivate the earth, to raise heards [sic] of useful animals, and to spin and weave for their food and clothing." (Edmunds, 160).

A few Chiefs had expressed interest in learning settler agriculture, but the overwhelming majority of Potawotami had no interest in the hard lifestyle. Attempts by Quakers to create a model farm to teach the Potawotami failed; the few men who started to assist with farm work soon lost interest, and the leader of the effort, a man by the name of Phillip Dennis, soon gave up.

While the Potawatomi did assimilate somewhat by adopting some of the textiles and goods that Americans sold, they maintained their own traditional lifeways. They continued to live in the wigwam-style house common to the region, and planted small gardens of corn, beans, and squash in the summer, supplementing their diet with hunting in the winter. Officials and missionaries agreed that the tribe had not made strides toward "white civilization." They "adhered with tenacity to the manners of their forefathers while everything around them has changed," according to one report (Edmunds, 227).

Potawotami lands were ceded piecemeal over a quarter century, starting in 1816. This process was complicated by the multiple Potawatomi chiefs involved, as well as the many federal agencies and agents. Population pressure from setters arriving from the east caused problems for the Potawatomi traditional lifestyle. Over hunting and trapping by fur traders and settlers had reduced the deer-herds and small game which the natives depended upon for winter food. Settlers were happy to hunt in Potawatomi lands, but were angered when the Indians encroached upon their farms and settlements.

A conflict in LaSalle county, Illinois, was paradigmatic of settler-indigenous relations in the area. A man named William Davis set up a mill and a blacksmith shop on Indian Creek. He dammed the creek to power the mill, which prevented fish from swimming upstream where a village of Potawatomis lived. This disregard of their food supply angered the villagers, and tensions grew. Davis refused to give in despite being warned by other Potawatomi chiefs who attempted to intervene, and he gathered more settler families around his homestead in an effort to dig in. Eventually, a group of forty Potawatomi attacked the settlement, killing Davis and other men and capturing some women and children.

American settlers continued to pour into the region. Even where Potawatomi had agreed to cede land or allow settlement, land was occupied and cleared for farming so quickly that Chief Metea complained, "the plowshare is driven through our tents before we have time to carry out our goods and seek another habitation" (Edmunds, 220). When new lands were opened for settlement after sale or treaty, often the land-hungry farmers would take up residence before surveyors had properly demarcated the sections belonging to Potawatomi and those open for settlers, creating tension and confusion.

Growing tensions and rising populations of settlers added to the "Indian problem." By the time President Jackson had signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the Potawatomi had already sold much of their land, and lost much of the land community that gave them food, medicine, and shelter due to the continual encroachment of white settler farms. Stipulations in the Indian Removal Act were that the relocation of tribes would be voluntary and would move them to land west of the Mississippi.

In 1836, Abel Pepper, commissioned to attempt to purchase the remaining reservation lands in Indiana, compiled a group of dubious Potawatomi leaders he called "the Chiefs warriors, and headmen of the Patawattamies of the Wabash." Although this group had little claim over the land or recognition from the villagers, the Senate recognized the treaty as valid and ratified it. Chief Menominee, one of the leaders who refused to sign or acknowledge the treaty, gave the following charge, worth quoting in full:

"The president does not know the truth. He, like me, has been imposed upon. He does not know that you made my young chiefs drunk and got their consent and pretended to get mine...He would not drive me from my home and the graves of my tribe, and my children, who have gone to the Great Spirit, nor allow you to tell me that your braves will take me, tied like a dog....the President is just, but he listens to the words of young chiefs who have lied; and when he knows the truth, he will leave me to my own. I have not sold my lands. I will not sell them. I have not signed any treaty, and will not sign any. I am not going to leave my lands." (Edmunds, 267)

But the President was not just. White settlers had already been promised the lands around Twin Lakes, Indiana, that Menominee refused to cede. Squatters came, intent on taking the best land before the crowds, and a Potawatomi party burned a squatter's hut, leading to retaliation from settlers, who then burned down a dozen Indian homes.

Pepper requested military assistance, and Senator John Tipton gathered one hundred volunteers for a militia to remove the remaining Potawatomi to land in Kansas. On August 30, 1838, Tipton had the remaining villagers gather, and his militia surrounded the villagers and at forced them to enroll for removal, giving them five days to gather their things. Five days later, the march began. Still, Menominee would not leave the village, and so was forced at gunpoint to go, and placed under arrest with two other chiefs who also resisted.

The march began on September 4, 1838 and concluded sixty-one days later after traveling over six hundred miles to the Osage river in Kansas. Of the forty-two people who died during the march, twenty-eight were children. Petit survived the march and much of what we know is recorded in his journal.

With the Potawatomie and other indigenous tribes largely displaced from their ancestral lands, American settlers were free to turn the landscape into the acres of corn and soybean so quintessential to the modern Midwest. Of the roughly twenty million acres of old growth forest that once covered the state, about two thousand acres remain. Settlers cleared the land for farms, and harvested timber for building, fuelwood, and railroad ties.

Indigenous removal leads to ecocide. Contemporary indigenous groups vocalize this in their advocacy for themselves and for the ecosystems with which they are in relation. The Baiga, who inhabit an area of jungle in India, declare, "the jungle is only here because of us." Similarly, a statement by indigenous peoples from the Amazon articulates their understanding of the deep interrelationship:

"We have used and cared for the resources of that biosphere with a great deal of respect, because it is our home, and because we know that our survival and that of our future generations depends on it. Our accumulated knowledge about the ecology of our home, our models for living with the peculiarities of the Amazon Biosphere, our reverence and respect for the tropical forest and its inhabitants, both plant and animal, are the keys to guaranteeing the future of the Amazon Basin, not only for our people, but also for all humanity."

War

Once the snow melted on the Indiana roads, I would often ride my bike from our farm to town. I learned quickly, however, that early summer was the spraying time. I pedaled past acres of corn and soybean down the straight county roads. When the tractors were out, pulling large tanks labeled "anhydrous ammonia," I had to hope the wind was blowing the fumes away from the road. When the breeze was not in my favor, I did my best to pedal furiously, holding my breath and hoping I could pass the cloud without inhaling too much of it. At other times, the chemical applicants were not labeled, or were dropped by prop plane, and so I could not know what noxious admixtures made it into my lungs. These various chemicals - fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides - so crucial to industrial agriculture, were at the same time devastating to the community of creatures that tried to inhabit the same space as this technological system.

Summer evenings highlighted this. My friends and I could climb the roof of our barn and see our pastures and the night air above them glowing with the mating rituals of fireflies populating our land; in contrast, the farm fields around us were dark, bleak, and barren. This nightly event was a reminder that our insistence on working with spade and hand rather than by chemical mattered a great deal to the other creatures - insects, birds, and small mammals - who shared the land with us and whose interconnected lives led to a healthy ecology on our small farm. What Smith names as the third pillar of white supremacy, the logic of perpetual war, manifests itself in the war against pests and weeds.

The connection between war and agrochemical has been solid since at least World War I. Fritz Haber, a German chemist, revolutionized agriculture by finding a cheap way to convert inaccessible atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia, a form of nitrogen that could then be converted to explosives or to agricultural fertilizer. This discovery allowed Germany to continue producing both munitions and food despite trade blockage of traditional sources of nitrogen. In addition to his creation of the nitrogen fixation process, Haber became infamous by using his chemistry genius to invent weaponized chlorine gas.

Haber devised a system of pressurized canisters of chlorine which would release mist from the German trenches, needing only a steady but not too strong wind to blow the chemical fog toward Allied forces. On April 22nd, 1915, the German front in France had such favorable winds. After the release of the canister valves, a greenish-yellow cloud moved slowly toward the British and French forces in their trenches. British field marshal John French described the effect of the gas on soldiers: "smoke and fumes hid everything from sight, and hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying condition." But what was for Allied forces a death cloud was to the German army a sight of beauty.

From the journal of German Lieutenant Becker:

"As the cloud rolled forward, it was yellowish-green, a hellish, sulphurous haze. As the sun broke from behind a cloud this new and monstrously beautiful image was lit up before us."

Wrote German Lieutenant Drachner:

"A poisonous green smoke drifted out of the fire trenches as far as the eye could see. One could see the landscape bathed in the most beautiful sunshine as though through a fine veil. It looked like the scene from a fairy tale."

In 1925, the Geneva convention banned the use of chemical weapons in warfare. However, chemicals were still used in creative ways in warfare activity. One of the most widely known of the herbicides used against enemies is Agent Orange. American forces employed this herbicide in Vietnam for a two-fold purpose: first, to defoliate jungle areas where Viet Cong hid, and second, to obliterate crops that could feed the Viet Cong. Over the course of nine years, the United States military sprayed almost twenty million gallons of the chemical over South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The defoliant did its job and destroyed over five million acres of forest and crop land. "Only you can prevent a forest," joked American soldiers while deploying Agent Orange, in a sardonic nod to Smokey the Bear ads. In addition to wiping out the food systems of many peasant farmers, pollutants from Agent Orange persisted in the environment and continue to wreak devastating effects on the land and Vietnamese.

Insecticides have not been used explicitly in war but represent war against nonhuman life. The best-known synthetic pesticide, DDT, led to a Nobel Prize for its manufacturer, Paul Müller. Its toxicity for non-target species was detrimental and came under fire in the wake of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. DDT is a persistent organic pollutant which can linger in soils for up to thirty years. The chemical is fat soluble, and thus accumulates up the food chain, especially in birds that depend on insects in their diet. In addition to its toxicity to aquatic and avian life, it has been associated with human cancers, and is known to disrupt hormones.

More recently, neonicotinoids have been used as pest control. However, this class of chemicals has been linked to loss of bees, in which it has been shown to impact foraging and navigation, reduce lifespans, and decrease reproduction in queens. Bees are responsible for the pollination of seventy percent of all flowering plants. It is from these bee-pollinated plants that humans get more than thirty percent of our food.

A case study of the Sichuan province in China heralds the problem. Pomme fruits - that is, apples and pears - are the primary crop of the mountainous Sichuan region, where the flowering trees must be pollinated within five days for the trees to fruit. Use of chemical pesticides grew rapidly with their introduction to the region.

By 1990, a fifty percent decline in the production of the orchards was noticed, a trend corresponding to the rise of pesticide use beginning in the 1970's and subsequent decline of native bees and other pollinators. Even commercial bees introduced later to the orchards died as a result of the pesticides. Now, every year during orchard bloom, people are hired by the thousands to hand pollinate around two hundred thousand trees within the five-day window.

An Apocalyptic Aside

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote a play elaborating on the story of John the baptist. The biblical account simply notes a dancer, the daughter of Herodias, who danced before King Herod and his friends. The dance was so remarkable that Herod promised her anything she wanted, up to half his kingdom, yet, what she requested--after consulting her mother--was the head of John the baptist on a platter. Her mother had her own grudge against the prophet John, who had criticized her for marital machinations. Salome, unnamed in the biblical account but known by historical sources, danced her way into the center of a conflict between prophet and power.

This short story inspired Wilde's play, "Salome and the Seven Veils." Wilde deepened the story, however, by adding the motif of the seven veils. The seven veils represent a departure from the biblical story but allude to the myth of the descent of Inanna. In the story of her journey into the underworld of the dead, Inanna encounters seven gates, and at each must remove a garment, until she stands naked at the throne of the goddess of the underworld, her sister Ereshkigal. For Wilde, the veils of Salome symbolize this movement toward the deathly realm. With the removal of each veil, death dances closer.

French artist Alphonse Allais took the story even further in its allegory of death. In his rendering, Salome removes the veils accompanied by the lusty cries of Herod. "Go on, go on," he says. Yet when the last veil falls, he continues to shout for more. Salome complies by ripping the skin from her body. And still, Herod says "go on," so she continues to flay fascia with her fingernails, layer by visceral layer, until nothing is left but bone.

Apocalypse means unveiling. Originally the word referred to the lifting of a bride's veil at a wedding but has since taken on symbolic meaning. In apocalypse, everything hidden will be revealed. But the face underneath the veil is not always good. Sometimes apocalypse is the lover who tells you they are leaving. Sometimes it is the cold calm of a doctor relaying a cancer diagnosis. Occasionally it is the brief moment before dusk when the light slants through the pines and the woods reveal a momentary beauty previously unknown. But mostly, apocalypse pulls back the fabric of cloth and skin to show the bone underneath.

For writers in the ancient genre called apocalyptic, the revealing is about power, history, and hope. Their prophetic imaginations pull back the veil on empires like Babylon and Rome to expose a view from the underbelly. This kind of apocalypse is not personal. It is as big as the arc of history. The subject is not people but powers. Kings become beasts, militaries their horns. Politics play out in the imaginal realm as the beasts vie for control. Within this imaginal realm, apocalyptic writing discloses the dreams of the disempowered. An end to oppression approaches. So many heads of so many beasts become decapitated. Magical scrolls foretell future vindication. Trumpets blast sounds of triumph. Lakes of fire and glittering cities signify the fate, respectively, of the damned and the delivered.

Just because apocalypse has creative imagery does not mean that it is fanciful. Apocalypse is an exercise of what anthropologist David Graeber calls "imaginative counterpower," which is to say, it helps the oppressed name the various powers that seem to control their lives, as well as to imagine an end to these powers. As oral stories, they inspire the hearer. As texts, they show the reader a view from the belly of history, from the people with a knife to their throats as the military raids the coffers and the granaries.

And always, apocalypse shows the skeletons. In the midst of kings shouting with lust, "go on" - more power, more money, ever more consolidation of resources - apocalypse pulls back the flesh and fascia to show the bone-dead trajectory of their desire.

The book of Daniel is one such apocalyptic text, written during the Antiochean rule of Palestine to aid the imagination of an occupied people. It reflects the memory of Hebrew people exiled and taken to Babylon, and thus operates in code--"we have been under the thumb of other rulers," the story seems to say, "and managed to find a way then, so we can do so now."

In the first chapter, the author sets the tone for the book in portraying Daniel and his friends as ones who-despite being captive to empire-attempt to live faithfully to their indigenous ways within it. The story introduces Daniel and friends as intelligent members of Jerusalem's elite taken into service for the king. This assimilation of members of the elite is an important imperial strategy: in the same way that if the urban grid represents a control measure for civilians, putting the social elite at the king's table essentially puts them under his thumb.

The renaming of Daniel and his friends reveals how their lives were meant to be reshaped according to the priorities of Babylon. Just as later nation-states developed surnames in order to track, and tax populations, so the renaming of newly acquired servants is a measure of the degree to which Babylon claimed authority over the lives of the political prisoners.

Daniel's refusal of the king's food constitutes the crux of the story. Patbag, the word at issue here, is the allotted meal taken from the royal coffers to meet the needs of his courtiers. Most interpreters take this refusal to be a religious one-Jews in antiquity often maintained their ethnic and religious distinction vis-a- vis food purity by observing dietary rules. In diasporic communities, food connects people to their culture. Even modern food sovereignty movements advocate for culturally appropriate food. An overlooked area of this issue, however, is that the royal court system depended upon an empire that extracted goods from the margins of empire to benefit the center. As scholar of the Ancient Near East, David Vanderhooft, notes, wresting resources from conquered periphery to the king's palace was commonplace:

"The procedure of funneling resources from the subject populations to the heartland through seizure and exaction was no less important to the Babylonians as it had been to the Assyrians…Nebuchadnezzar campaigned almost yearly in the west, in part to insure order, but also to fill the royal coffers."

The king's table would certainly be maintained by such imperial campaigns; meat and wine would be sourced from tribute from conquered nations, meat being transportable as livestock, and wine as an imperishable good which could travel distance without spoiling. Meanwhile, For the average urban dweller in Babylon, whose had a diet that was more likely grain-based, dependent on grain was transported from the surrounding countryside. Babylon's foodprint, according to one catalogue of grain imports, consisted of an area extending from the Sippa in the north to Sealand in the south, a length of 186 miles of irrigated land. In contrast, vegetables do not travel well, so must be grown nearby.

Daniel's requested diet of vegetables and water represents an alternative to the extractive economy of empire in favor of local fare that could not be stolen from distant places. The refusal of the king's table food, therefore, can be read not just a dietary preference but rather as an act of defiance. If acceptance of the king's food symbolized political allegiance, the alternative diet was an implicit rejection of the king. The four friends might have to live in the king's court, but they would find ways to resist the politics of plunder epitomized by the patbag.

What We Do With Our Bodies

Bodies lie at the heart of the food system. This system is built upon a long history of enslaved bodies, displaced bodies, and bodies maimed or killed by war. Bodies still labor in the sunny fields of California harvesting vegetables. Food goes into our bodies, and builds our bodies. Poisoned food corrupts our bodies with cancer. The very soil into which we plant and harvest is itself full of the composted bodies of so many plants, insects, and animals. That very soil is understood by many to be the outermost skin of the body of the earth. So, when we talk about food, we are really talking about what we do with our bodies, with the bodies of so many racialized people, and with the body of the earth.

The food system is swallowed up in white supremacy. A commonly advocated solution to the ills of the industrial agriculture complex is to "vote with your fork," but such logic will not undo the centuries of colonization, slavery, and war that leave their mark on the landscape of food. In this context of historic and ongoing white supremacy, we must rethink our actions against the food system. "Eating locally," does not mean we have completely removed ourselves from the industrial complex. Your local food is still grown on native lands. At its best, nearly all foods depend somewhere down the chain upon petrochemicals. Too often, even when we buy organic foods, much of the labor to harvest the produce has come from undocumented workers--the very cheapness of our foods relies upon the precarious status of the brown bodies of latinx workers in the fields. And even when we do have access to locally grown and fairly traded foods, we are still in other ways participating in a system in which gentrification and redlining drive black folk into ghettos that are at the same time food deserts. In prisons, where inmates earn between twenty-five cents and one dollar and fifteen cents per hour, companies make a windfall profit off of labor, and the food system benefits as well. For instance, the grocery store Whole Foods, so prized for its conscious consumption, sells artisanal cheese and fish sourced from companies that use prison labor.

When we eat, we must do so knowing that our food has been held up by the system of white supremacy. And because our bodies are made of the stuff we eat, our flesh, too, is maintained by a racist food system. So we come to our gardens and dig in our soil with humility. Because as much as we want to be, we are not free of the complex and all-consuming system of oppression that bell hooks calls white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy. But eat we must, so let our eating be an act of discipline and hope. The discipline lies in learning, step by step, seed by seed, carrot by cabbage, how to feed ourselves. Because we cannot be free if we cannot eat, thus we cannot liberate ourselves without taking care of our basic need for nutrition. The hope resides in imagining with each bite the day when people live on lands their ancestors called home, and know that when they take food from the soil they stand upon lands known and tended for millennia by indigenous people.

There is no straight line to a just food system. But by learning from the history of white supremacy in the food system, we can begin to imagine new ways of taking care of our bodies. That will have to include allying with native people who are advocating for land. It will involve rejecting a logic of war against bodies of people, against pests, against the earth herself. It will mean moving beyond a capitalist logic of profit that requires productivity at the cost of the depleted bodies of workers, at the annual loss of billions of tons of soil. This will require work at the level of the body politic. Those who want to change the food system, it seems, must work at once on an individual basis as well as on the larger forces that shape the system.

An ecological metaphor is helpful here. Most plants have what scientists call a root-shoot ratio. This is the ratio of roots and leaves needed respectively, to harvest nutrients from the soil and to harvest energy from the sun. The plant requires both of these sources for life, growth, and reproduction. This root-shoot ratio changes over the lifetime of the plant as it grows and puts energy towards making pollen or seeds. But despite the change, the plant still has ultimate need for both the damp minerals belowground and the sunny energy aboveground. While sunlight capture is largely an individualistic and sometimes competitive endeavor amongst plants, the underground scene is quite opposite. Most plants have a high degree of interaction with the soil community - indeed, most depend upon a variety of soil microbes and fungi to survive. In addition, many species, especially trees, connect to each other by mycelium that penetrate the roots of many individuals, linking them in an underground network of shared nutrients and information. Examples abound. Forester Peter Wohlleben found that an ancient beech tree, long past having leaves to supply its own energy, was fed via its connect to other beeches by its root system.

In the same way, food justice proponents will have to establish their own ratio of working for system change at a large scale and smaller scale, more personal food practices to support their own bodies. Like plants, we must grow in our ability to nourish ourselves. Where plants increase their leaf mass in order to eat the sun, for us this means supporting local food sources, growing our own foods, and learning sustainable wild harvesting techniques. And yet, that is only half the work. We must also go deep, like plants, networking ensures that the larger food system, like a forest ecosystem, is healthy and promotes systemic wellbeing. This may seem daunting, as if I am advocating for a back and forth pendulum of energy. But rather than a frenetic pendulum, let this be like the root-shoot growth of a plant--sometimes expending more energy in one direction, but always sustaining the growth that has occurred opposite. Let our hands stay soil-tarnished from the garden while our feet yet remain strong from the march of all our bodies together toward a system that tends more deeply to all of us. Grow together, grow alone. Feed your body, yes, but also feed the bodies of others, and feed the land that sustains you. This is what it means to be human and to live on the body of the earth. This is what we do with our bodies.

David Pritchett is a healthcare practitioner, ecologist, and activist who writes at the intersection of these interests. His articles have been featured in Permaculture Magazine , Permaculture Design Magazine , The Other Journal , Missio Dei Journal , and in Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice (Wipf and Stock, 2016).

Decade of the Animals: Eco-Horror and the Cinematic Lessons of the 1970s

By Sean Posey

When Michael Myers donned the Captain Kirk mask in the 1978 classic Halloween (yes, that's a mask of William Shatner) he helped change horror movies forever. For most of the next decade and beyond, the horror subgenre of the slasher film dominated drive-ins, multiplexes and video store shelves.

But before Halloween surged at the box office, another now almost forgotten horror genre made waves by combining the environmental anxieties of the era with giant, murderous rabbits, vengeful dogs and bloodthirsty frogs, among other angry critters. The "Nature Strikes Back!" films of the 1970s ran the gamut from schlock masterpieces and haunting classics to the downright unwatchable. However, these films are also part of a time capsule - giving us a glimpse into an era when a building environmental crisis seemed to provoke real soul searching. What were we doing to animals and the natural world? What might they in turn do to us?

In the opening of her seminal 1962 book "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson describes an idealized American town where nature and man are still in balance, at least for a time. Foxes and deer frolic amidst orchards and fields of grain, and a general bucolic feeling pervades. But soon "a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community," Carson writes. In particular, the birds disappeared. "It was a spring without voices."

She was writing about the chemical industry and the destructive effects of pesticides on animals and the environment. "Silent Spring" played a key role in ushering in the environmental movement, which gained strength as the 1960s progressed. But in the film world, in an unplanned coincidence, Alfred Hitchcock answered Carlson's question: "The birds... where had they gone?"

The Birds hit theaters less than a year after "Silent Spring" debuted, and it quickly captured the nation's imagination. The site of something so benign as the common avian viciously turning on man terrified audiences and helped redefine horror. But it wouldn't be until the 1970s that the "eco-horror" film fully blossomed.

The 1972 cult classic Frogs, which ushered in the era's eco-horror films, replaces Hitchcock's birds with an unlikely assortment of reptiles and amphibians - all bent on extracting revenge on a polluting Florida patriarch and his unlikeable family. In the film, Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) is a cranky millionaire intent on wiping out the frog population in and around his private island so that he and his clan can properly celebrate the Fourth of July.

A wildlife photographer named Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott), who is working on a story in the area and encounters the rampant pollution, tries to dissuade him from launching his own private war on the local frog population, to no avail. "I still believe man is master of the world," Crockett tells him.

But the amphibians and reptiles are one step ahead of the game. Guided by the omnipresent frogs, which never seem to directly attack anyone themselves, a bevy of snakes, lizards and even an alligator snapping turtle wreak death and destruction on the dullard cast members. Smith leads a small contingent off the island, where it appears that a mass animal uprising is under way. Crockett refuses to leave and is trapped in his mansion as hordes of frogs - in all of their croaking wrath - descend on him.

Frogs was released the same year DDT - which was applied over Florida for years in a quest to eliminate fresh and saltwater mosquitoes - was banned. The first Earth Day had been held two years previous. "Environmentalism, much like the anti-war subculture, started to influence not only activists and the newfound socially aware, but also the style and consciousness of the new eco-horror films," writes Lee Gambin.

After Frogs, the eco-horror genre gathered steam. Perhaps the most unintentionally funny film to follow was Night of the Lepus, which premiered only months after Frogs. It opens with a news broadcast reminiscent of the TV segments from Night of the Living Dead. But instead of warning of the walking dead, the broadcaster informs the audience of the growing problem of invasive species in Australia and the American Southwest - namely the rabbit. This was a real-life problem, and the issue of invasive species was one of the most readily recognizable environmental topics of the time. Interestingly enough, the broadcaster compares rapidly multiplying rabbits to the human population explosion, a popular intellectual to subjects after Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" debuted.

As the film opens, a beleaguered rancher (Rory Calhoun) enlists a group of scientists to help tame a scourge of rabbits in Arizona. They attempt to use an experimental serum in order to scramble the animals' breeding cycle, but one of the scientific team's children switches an injected rabbit she's fond of with one in the control group. When the rabbit makes it back to the wild, it helps breed a group of oversized killer bunnies.

The director used close-ups scenes to depict "giant rabbits" in miniature sets, and in scenes where they attack up close, actors in fuzzy bunny costumes were used. Never again will you hear rabbits referred to being "as big as wolves and just as vicious." And never again will you see a character grimacing in horror as he watches a caravan of adorable but murderous rabbits appear in his rearview mirror. But beneath the bargain-basement special effects is a message about humanity's harmful tampering with ecosystems and the deleterious effects of introducing invasive species.

Oddly enough, despite featuring a fearsome animal munching on unsuspecting bathers, Jaws, released in 1975, isn't much of an eco-horror film. As entertaining and suspenseful as it is, there's a never a concrete reason given for the great white's assault on Amity Island. If anything, Jaws is more about masculinity and the relationships between men than it's about man's relationship with animals and the environment. Nevertheless, it helped spawn numerous '70s films about how tampering with animals and the natural world will bring down nature's wrath, including Piranha (Then... you were shocked by the great white shark - Now... you are at the mercy of 1000 jaws!), Tentacles (It's turning the beach ... into a buffet! ) and Grizzly (Not since JAWS has the terror been like this!).

So many eco-horror films were made in the '70s that sub-genres soon emerged, including films dedicated to deadly domestic animals. Before Cujo became a household word, 1977's The Pack introduced man's best friend as a murderous foe. In the film, a swift tourist trade is part of the backbone of a small fishing island during season, but well-heeled visitors from the city have a bad habit of leaving their recently adopted dogs behind when it's time to return to their regular lives.

The film follows one such canine that's abandoned by a departing family before joining a pack of wild dogs living in a derelict building. When a readily available food supply runs out, the dogs come for the island's human population. The Pack shows that humanity's disregard for animal life doesn't stop at wild fauna.

A group of trapped tourists who are part of the main cast are depicted as either clueless or venal. It's left to a scientist, played by Joe Don Baker, to save the group. However, Baker's character also sympathizes with the attacking animals, and at the film's end, after the main pack has been destroyed, he saves the helpless abandoned dog we've been following throughout the movie from being killed by a vengeful tourist. In The Pack, man's carelessness and disregard for the animal world extends even to a subspecies that's been his companion for at least 14,000 years.

In 1974, F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California found that chlorinated fluorocarbon gases, then found in everything from aerosol spray cans to refrigeration units, were seriously damaging the ozone layer, which helps block ultraviolet light from the sun. That environmental emergency was used as the central conceit in the 1977 film Day of the Animals, which incorporated a real-life environmental emergency to a greater degree than most eco-horror films.

The central plot involves a group of hikers ascending a mountain in Northern California just as a mysterious psychosis begins to effect wild animals in the area. The higher the altitude they ascend to, the more animals begin to act strangely, until finally, they attack. What's driving them? The hole in the ozone layer is allowing in ultraviolet radiation that in turn is causing the animals to kill, though in a karmic twist, they only target humans.

The cast consists of an assemblage of telling archetypes: a Navajo Indian who is the first to sense the rift in the natural world, a racist and misogynistic advertising executive (Leslie Nielsen) who himself goes crazy, and a New York socialite (with no love for nature) who berates her put-upon son. In the town below, news reports reveal the connection between the ozone hole and attacking animals. "God sent a plague down on us because we're just a bunch of no-good fellers," one of the yokels exclaims.

Mountain lions, bears, wolves and snakes (left over from Frogs?) proceed to chomp, tear and dismember the hiking expedition and the nearby town as martial law is declared and troops in environmental suits move in. But the animals themselves also soon die and the "shift in the ozone level" normalizes, according to news reports.

The film's pre-credit sequence announces that this is a scenario that "COULD" actually happen. As silly as it is (and as awesome as a shirtless Leslie Nielsen challenging a bear to a wrestling match is), Day of the Animals is an earnest film that's a time capsule from an era when a pending environmental crisis could be counted on to at least inspire some political action. CFCs were ultimately phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

Probably the best of the many '70s eco-horror movies is the Australian classic The Long Weekend. Focusing on an estranged couple seeking to rekindle their relationship over a weekend getaway to an isolated seashore in the bush, the film is much more of a psychological horror picture where the danger is never fully shown. The screenwriter gradually reveals the deep rifts that have eaten away at the couple's relationship as the tension builds, one that is echoed by the rifts between man and the natural world. As the two fight, litter, spray insecticide and, in the case of the husband, shoot a dugong (a kind of sea cow), animals and the landscape around them begin to grow hostile.

"My premise was that Mother Nature has her own autoimmune system, so when humans start behaving like cancer cells, she attacks," screenwriter Everett De Roche said in a 2012 interview. No one animal (a mutated bear in 1979's The Prophecy or worms in the case of 1976's Squirm) is responsible for the mayhem that ensues.

It's as if the environment itself wants to do away with the couple. In a way that few other films of its kind succeed in doing, The Long Weekend gives the viewer the sense that the ecosystem and all the animals it supports are attempting to strike back against humans.

This is reflected in the atmospheric soundtrack. A long, slow death rattle punctuates parts of the film, almost as if nature itself were crying out in agony and outrage. The Long Weekend is not only one of the best eco-horror films of any age, it's also a grim warning from the end of a decade where the environment, albeit briefly, seemed to take center stage in the cultural and political world.

By the 1980s, eco-horror films were on the wane. Dystopian productions such as the Mad Max series - also classics of Australian cinema, like The Long Weekend - figured strongly in a cinematic decade more concerned with nuclear annihilation and urban collapse than ecological crises. Films such as Escape From New York, Blade Runner,The Running Man, The Quiet Earth and Night of the Comet cashed in on the new trend. In more recent years, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road have been among a spate of films with an even grimmer outlook than the '70s eco-horror genre.

The idea of animals taking revenge against man now seems quaint. Indeed, we are currently going through what scientists call the Sixth extinction or the Holocene extinction. Approximately 20 percent of all species on Earth face extinction - a number that could increase to 50 percent by the end of the century. It wouldn't make much sense to produce a film like Frogs today as amphibian populations have been in decline for the past 20 years, according to Science magazine. A third of amphibian species are currently at risk of extinction with chemical pollution being a large contributor to their plight. Perhaps the Jason Crocketts of the world won in the end?

The eco-horror films of the future might feature poisonous jellyfish, sea snakes and other creatures that could expand their natural ranges as ecosystems change due to global warming. Or perhaps now we've come to realize that man is the most dangerous and terrifying animal of all. Rising seas, desertification, chemical pollution, scorching temperatures and other disasters (e.g. California wildfires) - all linked to manmade climate change - now seem to be nature's way of dealing with us. And that's a reality more horrifying than any screenplay.

A Marxist Perspective on Sustainability: Brief Reflections on Ecological Sustainability and Social Inequality

By Raju J. Das

Karl Marx's concept of sustainability is connected to his concepts of metabolism and reproduction. While the first connection is well recognized in recent literature (famously in the work of Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and many others)[2], the second connection is not. Moreover, sustainability is potentially connected to another crucial concept in Marx's thinking - that is, value of labour power (which is expressed as the wage that workers receive), although Marx fails to explicitly make that connection.

In this short paper, I connect sustainability to metabolism, reproduction, and value of labour power. I argue that sustainability (or a healthy environment) can be seen as an "ecological social wage" under capitalism and has to be fought for as a part of a larger fight against the various logics of capitalism, such as endless accumulation, and against the system as a whole. Therefore, ecological sustainability is fundamentally a class issue, one that concerns the working class of the world as a whole that is comprised of people with different gender, racial, and nationality backgrounds, and it is not to be narrowly seen as an ecological issue, separate from the needs and the movements of the working class.

What is sustainability?

To live and to satisfy our needs, we must enter into a metabolic relation with nature, as Marx says in chapter 7 of Capital Vol 1.[3] That is, on the basis of manual and mental labour, we must interact with nature from which we get raw materials and energy and in which we dump waste products. Nature, especially transformed nature, is a part of the means of production.

Seeing society as a temporal process, in Chapter 23 of Capital Vol 1 Marx referred to "simple reproduction" saying: "every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction", and "No society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production…"[4]

Rubbing Marx's concept of metabolism with his concept of reproduction, one can say this: in producing the things that we need, we use up the means of production, including those that come, more or less, directly from nature, and these means of production must be replenished in terms of their quantity and quality. For example, if we cut trees and pollute air to produce wealth, a part of the produced wealth -- the combined product of labour and nature -- has to be utilized to replenish the trees and to clean the air. We have to reproduce elements of nature, constantly. Not doing so constitutes a threat to sustainability.

Marx talks about sustainability more directly in Capital Vol 3:

an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the 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 householders]'.[5]

We may conclude that not to do so is to live in an ecologically unsustainable world, a world where the physical environment is not in a state of good health.

Marx's concept of sustainability is quite consistent with that of the United Nations' Brundtland Commission, established in the 1980s to promote sustainable development globally, which views sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Brundtland Commission, 1987).[6]

That capitalism has not achieved sustainability is clear from the fact that we are facing massive ecological problems, including global warming, deforestation, soil erosion, air pollution, resource depletion, etc. The question is why?

Causes of threat to sustainability

First, what is not the cause? The threat to sustainability under capitalism does not come from the fact that there are too many people on earth, nor from the fact that some erstwhile poor countries are consuming more things to live a slightly better life, nor indeed from human beings' productive activity as such (e.g. industrialization), although all these facts do involve increased extraction of resources from nature. It is rather the social form in which we live our lives and the attendant nature-dominating discursive framework that constitute the most important threat to sustainability.

The social form in which we live is not one that is just.[7] We live in an unjust world. So one may ask: what connection might injustice have to the threat to sustainability?

I see inequality as a form of injustice. And I see inequality not just as inequality in income and consumption but as class inequality. Class inequality refers to the inequality in the control over society's productive resources, including those that come directly from nature (farm land, water, minerals, etc.), and consequent class exploitation (appropriation of surplus product or surplus labour, by the class that controls the means of production from the class that does not).[8] We are talking here about inequality between those who control productive resources and their uses, and those who do not, and inequality between those who have the power to exploit others in production and outside production, and those who do not.

Lenin said: "As long as there is exploitation there cannot be equality."[9] More specifically, the capitalist or "the landowner cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the full man" (ibid.). Because of class inequality, what we receive from society (in terms of goods and services to meet our needs) is not quite in accordance with our abilities; nor is it according to the amount of work we perform (consider how much a bank CEO makes as opposed to an ordinary worker); nor indeed is it according to how much we need in order to satisfy all of our varying needs.

Class-based inequality as class-based injustice is the fundamental threat to sustainability. This requires an explanation.

Most of us have to rely on wage-work to survive because of our separation from the objective conditions of production, including nature (land, etc.). Marx called this primitive accumulation, and this is an on-going process. This separation, with respect to nature, is not a physical separation, for production in all forms of society requires unity - non-separation - of human beings with nature. The separation in question is social-political; it is in terms of class. That is: we have no control over the use of the objective conditions of production, including those that more or less directly come from nature, with which we are physically in contact in the realm of production. We do not decide how much resources are being extracted, in what manner and at what rate. We are a part of nature. We are in physical contact with nature. Yet, under capitalism, we hardly control the basis on which we interact with nature.

We live in a society which, as Marx says in Capital Vol 1, is based on endless accumulation of wealth in the form of money, as denoted by M-C-MΔ. This is a process whose aim is not to directly satisfy human needs but to make profit, on a continuous basis. And this process of endless accumulation, i.e.accumulation for the sake of accumulation, generally promotes consumption for the sake of consumption. Otherwise, how will the endless production of things find a market? And while the accumulation process tends to be endless, many of the natural resources used in production are finite. This means, among other things that there is a disjunction - a contradiction - between capital's time (turnover time) and nature's time. Endless accumulation can take two forms: it is based on increases in the output over a prolonged working-day (especially in a context where technological change has not quite occurred) or per hour (when productivity-enhancing technological change has occurred).[10] And this means intense extraction of resources from nature and expansion of wastes dumped in the natural environment.

Let us explore this disjunction, this contradiction. A capitalist is compelled to engage in endless accumulation by the logic of accumulation and is passionate about this (both logic and passion matter here), so he/she has to, and wants to, invest money today and get back the investment with a profit as soon as possible. However, nature's time, which is driven by nature's own bio-physical-chemical processes that are more or less autonomous of human activities, may not coincide with capital's time. If a seed is planted today, it may take months or years for it to become a mature tree to satisfy human needs. Impatient to make money endlessly and quickly, the capitalist system cannot give nature enough time to reproduce - replenish - itself.

The capitalist class relation seeks to convert nature into a form of capital. Letting a seed grow into a mature tree is a natural process that takes time. This is nature's time, which is, of course, different for different natural processes. But time - from capital's standpoint - is money, and this means that one has to, for example, pay interest on the capital sunk in the form of the tree that is slowly growing out of a seed. The longer the time the tree remains in its natural state, the more is the cost of capital (interest), potentially. Anything that is not a part of circulation of capital, of the M-C-M Δ process, of the money-making process, is literally a waste, an unproductive thing.

We live in a society where nature is bought and sold like other things. Once I buy a piece of forestland, I can do whatever I want to do with it. The fetishism of the commodity - the idea that things that we use inherently have a price-tag (that is, that they must be bought and sold, and for a profit, for them to satisfy our needs) - is most stark in the case of nature (as it is in case of labour power as a commodity):[11] a beach, a forest or a farmland as things appear to be ones which are inherently, by necessity, commodities, and increasingly so since the 1970s when the epoch of the post-war crisis in the advanced capitalist world began. To treat nature and its elements (land, oceans, forests), as commodities is a hallmark of the modern society we live in. This logic of commodification under capitalism counters the logic of sustainability.

We live in a society where there is a profound disjunction, a contradiction, between the global scale of capitalist accumulation, as it is governed by the globally-operating law of value or the law of competition, on the one hand, and the political framework, that is, the state-system on the other, which is nationally-based (in spite of the erosion of some of the powers of the state in certain contexts). This disjunction makes it difficult for humanity to coordinate and to plan the use of natural resources which occur geographically unevenly on the surface of the earth across countries in an effective manner.

This forces, for example, Japan as a territorially separate entity with no oil of its own, located on the earthquake-prone ring of fire, to invest in nuclear energy plants; the ecologically risky nature of nuclear plants is made riskier by their location in the ring of fire. Because of the same disjunction, or contradiction, the low-income countries, more or less deprived of technologies that the advanced countries enjoy, are having to subject the natural environment under their territorial jurisdictions to excessively high level of exploitation, in order to meet their very basic needs. The ability to sustainably reproduce nature is unequally distributed in a world which is subjected to a global logic of accumulation and which is divided by nation-states, some of which are richer and more powerful than others.

We live in a society where old value must be destroyed for new value to be produced, and this means war. In many cases, indeed, economies of advanced capitalist countries rely on the production of military weapons to keep their accumulation system going, and this often means artificially creating conditions for war, and often this war involves war between poor countries. Further, advanced capitalist countries compete with one another for monopolistic control over the politically and militarily weaker countries' markets and workforce as well as their natural resources.[12]

In short, we live in an imperialist world, and imperialism means war. And war means massive destruction of nature. It means pollution. That Agent Orange, a powerful chemical used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for anti-imperialism fighters in North Vietnam, is widely known. As a more recent example, the western-capitalist war on Iraq created a massive amount of environmental pollution, producing birth defects and other health problems, as London's Guardian reported.[13] War also means that resources are invested in killing people, while these resources can be used to replenish elements of nature (clean up rivers, oceans, plant trees), to increase the role of public transportation to reduce environmental pollution, and to enhance people's access to the things they need such as healthcare, housing, food, etc.[14] Using resources on wars or on the preparation for wars, when resources can be used to meet basic needs of people and to create a sustainable ecological environment - this problem is most glaring in the global periphery.

We live in a society where, given the high rate of labour exploitation and a large reserve army of labour globally, millions of people are deprived of a decent income with which to afford things produced in environmentally friendly ways (e.g. organically produced food), which are initially expensive in part because of the small-scale nature of production. In parenthesis, and in a slight criticism of Marx and Vladimir I Lenin, I will say that mere separation of direct producers from land, either in primitive accumulation (as per Marx), or in a process of class differentiation under the impact of market (as per Lenin), may create a market for food but not necessarily a market for ecologically produced food.

We live in a society, where there is a long-term trend towards the decline in the rate of profit as investment in constant capital to variable capital increases (because labour, as the ultimate creator of capitalist wealth, is increasingly replaced by non-labour inputs in the production process). This is also a society where there is the problem of a constant possibility of overaccumulation of capital and commodities. This problem is partly caused by lack of planning of production and by competitively-driven technological dynamism resulting in production of more and more things every hour, which, of course, requires more intense extraction of resources from nature and greater generation of wastes.[15] Responding to the declining rate of profit and the problem of overaccumulation, there is a tendency to not only increase exploitation of labour but also to make profit from new forms of commodification and from the destruction of nature.[16]

Sustainable production can be a source of profit for some capitals (consider the production of cleaner technologies; wilderness as an ecotourist place), so there can be, within limits, sustainable development within capitalism. But there are strong limits to sustainability within capitalism, in terms of both the magnitude of sustainability and the temporal and spatial scale of sustainability (how long and over how large an area sustainability can occur). This is because of the social framework within which sustainable development is promoted. This is the framework of markets-in-every-thing, of endless accumulation, and of inequality and of exploitation of people.

Capitalism takes far too much out of labour compared to what it gives it, just as it takes far too much out of nature compared to what it puts into it. There are two metabolic rifts here, joined together in the same process of capitalist accumulation: an ecological metabolic rift and a labour metabolic rift.[17]

Sustainable development means a clean environment, an environment that is a source of mental/spiritual peace, a source of material things that satisfy our needs, and a place to dump what is absolutely a waste product. It means a society where farm production and non-farm production are sectorally and geographically integrated, to the extent materially possible, thus minimizing metabolic rift between where things directly derived from nature (e.g. food, linen) are produced (say, in villages) and where they are consumed.[18]

Our needs as human beings include environmental needs. Like other needs, environmental needs cannot be fully met under capitalism or can be met only in an alienating way that impoverishes nature and us.

A large part of what is called nature is land. Land is an important means of production, and a source of food, and it has been subjected to unsustainable use under capitalism. About the relation between capitalism and agriculture, Marx says that: "the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture" and that "a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture)".[19] Paraphrasing and slightly extending Marx, Lenin says in his Development of Capitalism in Russia: "That capitalism is incompatible with the rational organization of agriculture (as also of industry) has long been known".[20] One can generalize Marx's and Lenin's point and say that capitalism is incompatible with the rational organization of our metabolic interaction with nature. Capitalism violates the principle of humanization of nature and naturalization of human beings.

Let me quote someone who is not a Marxist, Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in Economics: "The big challenges that capitalism now faces in the contemporary world includes issues of inequality (especially that of grinding poverty in a world of unprecedented prosperity) and of 'public goods' (that is, goods that people share together, such as the environment). The solution to these problems will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy." (Sen, 1999:267)[21].

So what is to be done?

Capitalism can be seen in terms of its logic, or logics, and as a system[22], that is, the totality of capitalist class relation as such. So the fight against capitalism has to be seen as a fight against both aspects of capitalism. In terms of the fight against the logics of capitalism (endless accumulation, commodification, etc.), sustainable environment must be seen as a human need. More specifically, and under capitalism, it must be seen as a part of the value of labour power itself (something Marx failed to do explicitly).

So sustainable development must be fought for as a part of the fight to improve living conditions. The fight for environmental needs must be a part of the fight for a better "social wage". We can call it an "ecological social wage" and we can extend the scope of the concept of ecological social wage to include the remunerative price not only for peasants' labour performed on their own or leased-in land[23] but also for the indigenous communities working on commonly (or state-owned) owned farm-land and forest areas.

Given that one reason for the unsustainable environment is privatization of nature, the fight for sustainability must be a fight for common property in nature: for our rivers, forests, clean air and land as forms of common property. The fight for a sustainable environment must be a part of the fight for 'nature-commons', and such a fight must be a part of the fight for treating all forms of use-values (natural and non-natural things including factories and banks) as commons, which will be subjected to democratic control by men and women and citizens of different racial, ethic and nationality backgrounds.

Fighting for a sustainable environment is therefore a class issue, in the broadest sense of the term. It is a working class issue, or, more correctly, an issue of the alliance of workers and peasants (or the alliance of workers and small-scale producers, including indigenous producers). The matter of sustainable development is a deeply class matter (even if it is not exclusively a class matter). However, the fight against the logics of the system to obtain improvements within the system of capitalism is limited because there are limits to what capital can grant as long as capital rules.

To conclude: fighting for sustainable environment must be a part of the fight against the capitalist system itself, which exploits people and which is ecologically degrading (and which promotes and/or reproduces undemocratic relations based in gender, race, ethnicity and nationality, in order to be able to super-exploit some sections and to weaken ordinary people's resistance against exploitation and ecological degradation by dividing them).

The fight for sustainable development must be a fight for a society beyond commodification, private ownership of means of production, avoidable inequalities, exploitation, and social oppression. Such a fight requires a revolutionary program, including the nationalization of all the major corporations, banks, large farms and privately owned forests and plantations, under the democratic control of working people with their different gender, racial, ethnic and nationality backgrounds. This would allow the rational reorganization of the world's economy and our relation to nature, to meet the environmental and social needs of the masses, not the capitalists' need for endless private profit.

This was originally published at Links international journal of socialist renewal.

Notes

[1] Das is an Associate Professor at York University, Toronto. His most recent book, published in 2017, is Marxist Class Theory for a skeptical world, Brill, Leiden. He is currently writing a book on Marx's Capital 1, entitled 'Marx, Capital, and Contemporary Capitalism: A Global Perspective', to be published by Taylor and Francis, London. He serves on the editorial board and on the manuscript collective of Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis.

[2] Burkett, P. 1999. Marx and Nature. St. Martin's Press, New York. Foster, J. 2000. Marx's ecology, Monthly review Press, New York. See also: O'Connor, J. (ed). 1994. Is capitalism sustainable?, Guilford Press, New York.

[3] Marx, K. 1977. Capital Volume 1, Vintage, New York.

[4] Marx, 1977: p.711.

[5] Marx, K. 1981. Capital Volume 3, Penguin, London, p. 911

[6] This is quoted in Redclift, M. 2005. 'Sustainable development (1987-2005): An oxymoron comes of age', Sustainable development, 13:4, 212-227

[7] There is a large amount of literature on Marxism and justice/injustice. For example, see: Callinicos, A. 2000. Equality, Polity press, London (chapter 3). Geras, N.1985: 'Controversy about Marx and Justice', New Left Review, 1/150; Geras, N. 1992. 'Bringing Marx to justice', New Left Review, 1/195; Nielson, K. 1986. 'Marx, Engels and Lenin on justice: The critique of the Gotha programme',Studies in Soviet Thought, 32:1, 23-63. Also, Heller, A. 1976. The theory of need in Marx, St. Martin's press, New York.

[8] Das, R. 2017. Marxist class theory for a skeptical world, Brill, Leiden.

[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm

[10] On these two forms of accumulation, which are respectively called formal and real subsumptions of labour under capital, see Das, R. J. 2012. 'Forms of Subsumption of labour under capital, class struggle and uneven development', Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 44:2, 178-200. The implications of this duality of capitalist accumulation for nature require a detailed exploration.

[11] This is also true about labour power as well, which has a natural component in so far as our limbs and our energy - the parts of our body-mind complex -- are parts of nature itself.

[12] Henryk Grossman (1929) says: 'Competition among the capitalist powers first exploded in the struggles to control raw material resources because the chance of monopoly profits were greatest here…. Because raw materials are only found at specific points on the globe, capitalism is defined by a tendency to gain access to, and exert domination over, the sources of supply. This can only take the form of a division of the world' https://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1929/breakdown/ch03.htm

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/22/iraq-children-health-cost-war-induced-air-pollution-study-toxic-waste-birth-defects

[14] Note that when basic needs of small-scale producers (e.g. peasants) are not met, they try to extract more out of nature (subjecting their land to more intense exploitation that will otherwise be the case) in order to survive, and this in turn can result in an above-normal level of environmental degradation.

[15] I am abstracting from the connection between over-accumulation of capital and the issue of the decline in the rate of profit caused by the rising ratio of the constant part of total capital relative to its variable part.

[16] This is the case even if these strategies can ultimately cause a physically and biologically degraded environment and a physically and mentally unhealthy labour force, reduce labour productivity, and increase the cost of constant capital and decrease the rate of profit.

[17] Das, R. 2014. 'Low-Wage Capitalism, Social Difference, and Nature-Dependent Production: A Study of the Conditions of Workers in Shrimp Aquaculture', Human Geography: A New Radical Journal, Vol 7(1):17-34.

[18] It also means a society where waste produced during the metabolic exchange between nature and society in the sphere of production returns to production, such that waste becomes a non-waste, it becomes productive.

[19] Marx, K. 1981. Capital Volume 3, Penguin, London, pp 216.

[20] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dcr8iv/iv8xi.htm

[21] Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[22] Magdoff, F. and Foster, J. 2010. 'What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism',Monthly Review, https://monthlyreview.org/2010/03/01/what-every-environmentalist-needs-to-know-about-capitalism/

[23] Here land refers to land as farmland, forests, and water, so land-based activities on the part of small-scale producers include farming, forest-based activities (e.g. collection of forest products), and fishing. Many indigenous communities are involved in not only farming but also collection of forest products (e.g. leaves, firewood, etc.).