3286. Christian Parenti and Eco-Modernism

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, October 5, 2019

As should be abundantly clear at this point, the Bhaskar Sunkara publishing empire has little to do with ecosocialism. It unfurled its banner in the Summer 2017 Jacobin issue that included Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s recommendation of nuclear energy as well as other ecomodernist nostrums. In the latest Catalyst, there’s an article by pro-nuclear Syracuse University professor Matt Huber that continues along those lines. All three have a special animosity toward any notion of ecological limits, with Huber being irked by André Gorz’s call: “The only way to live better is to produce less, to consume less, to work less, to live differently.”

Two days ago, Christian Parenti’s “Saving the Planet Without Self-Loathing” appeared in Jacobin that, like the three authors mentioned above, took a hard line against the idea of ecological limits. He wrote:

This worldview has driven much of conservationism. It is at the heart of the concern with “overpopulation.” It lurks within the common left anxiety about “development” and “growth.” And it is found in the “jobs vs. environment” debate.

To start with, there are two ways of understanding overpopulation. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, wrote “The Population Bomb”, a book that by the authors’ own admission was an attempt to apply Malthus’s ideas to the contemporary world. On the other hand, the combination of an expanding population expecting to enjoy the life-style of the average citizen in a G8 country will be impossible to realize. The world’s population today is 7.6 billion and is expected to be around 11 billion by the end of the century. If a car, air-conditioning, and meat 3 or 4 times a week are considered non-negotiable, then we are in trouble.

Last August, Leigh Phillips wrote an article for Jacobin titled “In Defense of Air-Conditioning” that had this subtitle “Opposition to air-conditioning is just another form of austerity politics. Nothing’s too good for the working class — especially not freedom from the heat.” He assures us that there would be no downside to making air-conditioning a universal right since Canadians enjoy electricity without environmental consequences: “While it may seem fantastical in much of the US, north of the border, the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, and Québec have grids that are almost entirely fossil-fuel free (91 percent, 95 percent, and 99 percent clean, respectively), primarily from hydroelectric or nuclear power.” Leaving aside the obvious risks associated with nuclear power, one has to wonder if Phillips has any idea of the damage hydroelectric dams have done to indigenous people in Canada as I pointed out in a CounterPunch article 5 years ago. Perhaps Phillips agrees with Huber that such “marginal” populations do not offer sufficient social weight for an effective “strategy”. Perhaps? No, probably definitely.

Parenti alludes to the common left anxiety about “development” and “growth.” It sounds to me as if he is trying to pick a fight with “degrowth” advocates like Jason Hickel but is not quite up to the task. It should be mentioned that Parenti believes that there are technical solutions to climate change that might be capable of allowing everybody to keep their air-conditioners running 24/7. As pointed out by Ian Angus, Parenti wrote an article for Dissent that backed carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as a “fairly simple” way of solving the climate change crisis. Angus debunked this claim:

There is only one commercial plant in the entire world that captures CO2 directly from the air. According to the journal Science, it takes in just 900 tons of CO2 a year, roughly the amount produced by 200 cars. The company that built it says that capturing just one percent of global CO2 emissions would require 250,000 similar plants. “Fairly simple” just doesn’t apply.

Parenti’s main goal in this article is to debunk the notion that “Western environmentalism has long suffered from”, namely an implicit Malthusianism that sees humanity as intruders upon a harmonious and static thing called “nature.” It might have been helpful if Parenti had named some names but it is likely that he is referring to Deep Ecology, a movement with some misanthropic tendencies that are associated with David Foreman, who was a co-founder of Earth First! Foreman left the Sierra Club after it rejected his anti-immigration proposals. Nowadays, Foreman is involved with the Rewilding Institute, a project that might lead to a ban on cattle ranching in most of the West and repopulating it with native grasses and bison. In my view, something like this will be necessary for the survival of humanity whether or not Parenti gets it.

Parenti addresses the Jacobin readers as if they were in junior high school:

The truth is, we are not intruders. In reality, humans have always been an environment-making species. In fact, every species is.

What we call “nature” or “the environment” is ultimately just the sum total of layer upon layer of organism-environment interactions. Thus it is dynamic, not static. Every organism interacts with, and impacts, its environment. At the same time, every organism is always also part of the external environment of all other organisms.

Environment making is what life forms do. Bees need flowers from which to collect nectar and pollen; in the process of their foraging, bees pollinate flowering plants, helping them reproduce and spread. Thus, bees are central to producing a habitat that produces bees.

To survive, beavers need beaver ponds. But they do not find their niche habitat — they make it by compulsive dam building. When beavers build, they also destroy. In areas they flood, previously established plant communities drown — including, on occasion, bee habitat.

This is followed by a little lecture on Engels’s “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” that from Parenti’s presentation sounds to my ears like early ecomodernism:

Just as our ancient ancestors “learned to consume everything edible” thanks to the technology of fire management, Engels noted that fire allowed humans “to live in any climate” and thus “spread over the whole of the habitable world.”… The further afield early humans moved, the more technology they created and used, the more environments they helped shape.

How odd that Parenti would not refer to the section in Engels’s article that most ecosocialists know almost by heart:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.

Like a physician reassuring a 75-year old person with some deadly illness that they can live to 78 at least, Parenti tells us: “In other words, human labor can have life-encouraging effects, or it can do the exact opposite, depending on how labor and production are organized.” So, everybody knows what this means. Capitalism is life-discouraging and socialism is life-encouraging.

Except that the examples supplied by Parenti of “life-encouraging” human labor don’t have very much to do with socialism. He hails a fish farm in Spain and Chinese rice-growing. While there’s no point in denigrating such efforts, you don’t get the sense of the apocalyptic future that faces us at the end of the 21^st century. Like everybody else on the Sunkara Express, Parenti believes in the Green New Deal. While the Jacobin/DSA sees this as tantamount to overthrowing capitalism, those with cooler heads see it as something likely not to come into existence under capitalism.

In a 2015 article written before the GND had become for the Jacobin/DSA what Trotsky’s Transitional Program was for me in my impetuous youth, Parenti wrote an article titled “Shadow Socialism in the Age of Environmental Crisis” that will give you a clear idea on where he stands on the most urgent issue of our day, namely how to get rid of the capitalist system that Malcolm X called “vulturistic”.

Shadow socialism is nothing more than government ownership of, for example, canals and railroads in the 19^th century and the New Deal in the 20^th:

Then comes the New Deal in which America’s Shadow Socialism becomes explicit. The effort to get out of the crisis of the Great Depression relied on the state to jump-start capitalism, to redistribute wealth downward to common people, to create markets by giving poor people jobs and income so they could buy the products of industry and keep the economy turning over. And the state itself purchased (and still purchases) large amounts of technology, invested heavily, and consumed a vast amount of output.

In the conclusion of his article, Parenti sheepishly apologizes to wild-eyed young radicals who probably made the mistake of reading Howard Zinn rather than Michael Harrington:

Let me end with that and an apology or explanation. I know this doesn’t sound revolutionary or radical, but what I’m trying to do is to be very, very realistic. Because I don’t think it is sufficient to be outraged about this and invoke the righteousness of our cause. We have to come up with credible solutions and stories that will really work and strategies that will work at different time frames. So, okay, what I’ve suggested here is not the solution to all problems associated with capitalism. It’s not even the solution to the environmental crisis. It’s just a realistic approach to dealing with climate change so as to buy time, so as to pull back from the brink, so that we can continue struggling. If we don’t take things that seriously and get comfortable with the contradictions implied in that, I think we will not be able to address the climate crisis. But we do have the means to do it economically and technologically, and so it is just a matter of politics.

Is this the end result of Parenti making a career as a professional intellectual rather than as a professional revolutionary as I tried back in 1967? He worked for George Soros’s Open Society for many years and is now ensconced in the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in NY. It is becoming clear to me that it exactly such people who are providing the brain-power, such as it is, for Sunkara’s publishing empire. But don’t fret. This kind of pablum leaves a vacuum that will be filled by genuine sans culottes, not the pretend kind that write for Jacobin.

2955. Artificial Nature: Deleting a Species

By Rowan Jacobsen, Pacific Standard, June 20, 2018

In a windowless London basement, behind three sets of locked steel doors and a wall of glass, thousands of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes cling like Marvel supervillains to the sides of white mesh cubes. The room is negatively pressurized, so air is constantly sucked inward to ensure that the mosquitoes, which have been subjected to a new and astonishingly powerful kind of genetic engineering, never escape.

If the modifications to these whining mosquitoes were perfected, and they were somehow able to make their way to sub-Saharan Africa, they would have an effect on their kin unlike any animal that has ever existed. The Anopheles are equipped with a genetic tool that ensures that they are either sterile—they can't produce viable eggs—or, if fertile, that they will pass that sterility gene on to nearly every offspring. And the same would be true for their descendants, which would continue to spread the genetic sabotage into future generations.

If some future version of the mosquitoes were released, these deadly modifications could spread through the African tropics, crashing the population as they went. And because Anopheles is the primary African vector for the parasite that causes malaria, its collapse would likely take down malaria with it. Within a few years, the last great scourge of humanity, which kills upwards of half a million people per year, would be vanquished on the African continent. It would be one of the greatest health achievements of all time. And yet the intentional eradication of a species is not something we should pursue without a lot of foresight, and the release of highly invasive genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the wild is itself deeply disturbing.

Known as a gene drive, the ability to force particular genes into future generations of an entire species only became available to humans with the development of CRISPR, the gene-editing tool that has enabled us to make precise changes to an organism's DNA. Kevin Esvelt was a fellow at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in 2013 when he figured out how to build a gene drive. In a 2014 paper, he proposed several applications for his invention, including hobbling weeds that had become resistant to herbicides, reducing malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and eliminating invasive rodents on islands, where they wreak havoc on indigenous birds and plants.

Many traditional conservationists were horrified by the prospect, yet other groups embraced it. The Gates Foundation made gene drive a centerpiece of its anti-malaria efforts, and the eco-warriors at Island Conservation, who have long used poison to combat invasive mice and rats, seized on gene drive as a more precise weapon in their war to save native species. New Zealand is considering using a gene drive in its push to eliminate invasive rodents, weasels, and possums by 2050. Kevin Esvelt wants to engineer mice that are immune to the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, whose cycle of transmission goes from mice to ticks to people. Dengue, Zika, and several other mosquito-borne diseases are promising gene-drive targets. A lab in California is working to limit the damage caused by an invasive species of fruit fly, and labs in Australia and Texas are developing "daughterless mice" (capable of conceiving only male offspring). The first gene-drive field trials are anticipated within the next decade.

With earlier-generation GMOs, such as Monsanto's Roundup Ready crops, arguments often hinged on the potential for those genes to escape into the environment. Conservationists believed escape was inevitable, while corporations downplayed the risk, but nobody was suggesting that GMOs be let loose in nature—until now.

When I first heard about gene drive, I thought of "ice-nine," the form of water in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal for adjacent water molecules, turning them solid. At the end of Cat's Cradle, the frozen body of a man who has committed suicide by drinking ice-nine falls into the sea, and all the world's oceans and rivers are forever frozen, extinguishing most life on Earth. Gene drives have similar dystopian potential. In theory, a single lab could alter the entire planet. And the technology has arrived far quicker than our ability to grapple with its staggering implications.

Gene drives work by gaming inheritance, forcing their way into the genetic make-up of future generations. Sexually reproducing species usually have two versions of each of their genes, one inherited from each parent, and they randomly pass one of those to each offspring. Individuals that inherit more useful genes thrive, and are therefore more likely to reproduce and pass on those good genes, while individuals that inherit disadvantageous genes are less likely to get the chance to reproduce. In this way, evolution causes detrimental genes to disappear from the gene pool.

Conventional genetic engineering is limited by the rules of reproduction. Most engineered traits have a 50/50 chance of being passed down, and unless a trait confers some advantage to the organism, it should eventually disappear. Since most genetic engineering to date has bred traits that benefit people, not the organisms themselves, so far no GMOs have made significant inroads into nature. But a gene drive can practically guarantee inheritance. And since beneficial genes are favored by natural selection anyway, the unique value of engineering a gene drive lies in propagating a detrimental trait, possibly even all the way up to extinction.

To make a gene drive, you start with the gene-editing tool CRISPR, which consists of two parts: a gene-slicing enzyme and a string of genetic code that tells the enzyme where to cut. CRISPR is shockingly easy to use. You don't need a world-class lab, and you don't have to be a genius. I've created antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a friend's kitchen. You just order your CRISPR from a DNA-synthesis company (the going rate is $65 plus shipping), specifying the exact 20-letter sequence of DNA you want it to target. It arrives as a few drops of liquid in a test tube. You add that liquid to another test tube containing cells of the organism you want to modify, along with any new DNA you want inserted, then heat it up. 

The CRISPR finds the spot, makes the cut, and the new DNA gets stitched in place.

Kevin Esvelt was part of the team at Harvard that helped develop CRISPR, and he was the first to realize that the CRISPR mechanism itself could be inserted directly into an organism's genome to create a gene drive. Once there, the CRISPR would eliminate the natural counterpart of the gene it is attached to, and the cell would copy the functioning, genetically engineered version of the gene (containing the CRISPR) in its place. The organism would then have two working copies of the CRISPR gene, one of which would be guaranteed to be passed down to each of its offspring, where the process would repeat, until virtually every individual in a population carried the engineered trait.

It was a brilliant insight, with enormous implications. According to the unwritten rules of science, Esvelt's next move should have been to quietly create a gene drive in his lab and then publish a paper announcing the achievement to the world and staking his claim to it. Instead, he paused to consider the consequences.

When I first met Esvelt in 2017 at Editing Nature, a summit convened at Yale University's Institute for Biospheric Studies to weigh the ramifications of engineering the wild, I was struck by his demeanor. He seemed haunted and tightly wound, as if he'd just come from a dark future he was hoping to save us from. His boyish smile and wispy blond hair reminded me of Tintin, but his gravelly, leading-man's voice vibrated in an unusual timbre. Like the long dungchen horns of Tibetan monks, it seemed to resonate with both awe for the world and sorrow for its eventual passing.

As soon as Esvelt realized how easy it would be to build a gene drive, he knew he had a potential ice-nine on his hands. "This thing self-scales," he told the biologists, conservationists, and ethicists gathered at Yale that day. "You can't run a field trial. You can't introduce it anywhere in the endemic environment without having it spread probably to every population."

After his 2013 discovery, Esvelt knew others would soon hit upon the same insight, and he felt that the runaway nature of gene drive was not something that could be trusted to biotech specialists working in isolation. "Your decision to go ahead and build it in the lab means that you are performing an experiment that could affect other people," he said. "And if you don't tell them that you're doing it in advance, you're actively denying them a voice in the decision. And frankly, that's wrong."

Esvelt pictured the headline sure to follow an accidental gene-drive release: "Scientists Convert Entire Species to GMOs. Is CRISPR to Blame?" He feared that a botched trial could turn the public against the technology and destroy its vast potential. So shortly after their breakthrough, he and his colleagues at the Wyss Institute called a meeting of top ecologists, biologists, ethicists, and national security experts. They explained the technology to the group, and discussed the best plan of action. And their remarkable conclusion was that the only way to ethically explore the potential of gene drive was to change the culture of science. "We need to at least tell other people what we are thinking of doing before we even begin experiments," he explained. "This is difficult, because every incentive in science points against it. If you share your brilliant idea, you're inviting some larger, better-funded lab with spare hands to steal it, get it working first, publish, and get the credit."

Esvelt decided to make an example of himself. He published his paper before doing any experiments, with the hope that all gene-drive research would follow the precautions and protocols he laid out, the most important of which was pre-registration of all experiments so they could be vetted by all potential stakeholders. Since then, he has spent as much time lobbying against the unwise use of gene drives as he has advocating for them, sometimes using language that distresses his fellow scientists. "We are walking forwards blind," he said in a 2016 interview that is frequently cited by gene-drive opponents. "We are opening boxes without thinking about consequences. We are going to fall off the tightrope and lose the trust of [the] public."

Not since Robert Oppenheimer has a scientist worked so hard against the proliferation of his own creation. "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success," Oppenheimer said in 1954. "That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."

And that is how it has been with gene drive. Esvelt now runs something called the Sculpting Evolution group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When I sat down in his office and asked him if he had convinced many scientists to forego the technical sweets, he shrugged. "It will never happen unless we change the incentives," he said. "Most scientists, however supportive in theory, say they just can't take the risk." The allure of scientific immortality—or at least tenured professorship—is simply too strong, and while those working with gene drives claim to follow rigorous safety protocols, few are willing to openly share what they are inventing behind the closed doors of their labs.

We are on the cusp of a gene-drive explosion. Many agricultural pests are potential targets, as are weeds that have evolved resistance to Roundup. California's cherry growers are funding gene-drive research to eliminate the spotted-wing fruit fly, which lays its eggs in soft fruits. Tata Trusts of India recently gave the University of California–San Diego $70 million to train a new generation of Indian scientists to use gene drives for agriculture and disease control. And in the fall of 2017, the biotech firm Oxitec released genetically engineered diamondback moths (which infest broccoli, cabbage, and other brassicas) in a field trial in upstate New York. The moths carry a gene that kills females in the larval stage, and though there is no gene drive involved at present, it would be a logical next move.

The most vocal critics of gene drives have been two conservation organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group. Jim Thomas, co-executive director of ETC, told me that, for all the emphasis on curing disease and saving endangered species, he sees "Big Ag" lurking in the background. "Ultimately, I think that's where this technology lands," he said. "It becomes a kind of insecticide. If there's money to be made here, that's what’s going to drive it." Thomas sees potential for abuse in the developing world. "How does a powerful technology shift power relations? And what does that mean for those that are marginalized and vulnerable?"

In September of 2016, 30 environmental luminaries, including Jane Goodall, David Suzuki, and Vandana Shiva, joined with ETC to publish an open letter calling for a moratorium. "We believe that a powerful and potentially dangerous technology such as gene drives, which has not been tested for unintended consequences nor fully evaluated for its ethical and social impacts, should not be promoted as a conservation tool," they wrote. "Given the obvious dangers of irretrievably releasing genocidal genes into the natural world, and the moral implications of taking such action, we call for a halt to all proposals for the use of gene drive technologies."

Friends of the Earth joined ETC in bringing the call for a moratorium to the December 2016 meeting of the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity, which covers the equitable use and regulation of biological resources, including genetically modified organisms. The Convention has previously halted controversial technologies such as ocean fertilization and sterile-seed crops by establishing moratoria, but with gene drive it merely called for better risk-assessment. Friends of the Earth and ETC vowed to continue to rally support for a moratorium, which will be debated in Montreal this July and then voted on at the next meeting in Egypt this December.

Most gene-drive scientists accuse these groups of exaggerating the risks of genetic engineering and playing to the public's fears, but Natalie Kofler, who founded Yale's Editing Nature initiative to facilitate public deliberation around gene editing, thinks it's vital to take their point of view seriously. "The followers of those groups share a worldview with many people that I discuss this with on a daily basis," she told me. "They feel deeply that it is wrong to tamper with the DNA of wild things. There's a sacredness to it that we shouldn't mess with. And that is a worldview that is very quickly dismissed by scientists and technologists. And because it's not being acknowledged as something valid for discussion, I think it's creating a huge polarization."

Still, Kofler finds the idea of a ban on research "totally ridiculous." This is a brand-new technology, she said. "Right now we don't know nearly enough about how it works, how the public perceives it, or how it will impact the environment to take stances of opposition or support. Right now, we need to be comfortable to stay in the gray zone—to comprehensively explore this issue with the degree of openness and transparency that it deserves. So, if anything, more research—scientific and sociological alike—needs to take place."

Jim Thomas points out that there's a difference between a moratorium and a perpetual ban: "There's a feeling that taking a judicious pause and taking the time to think carefully means nothing is ever going to move forward. But that's not what a moratorium is."

When the stakes are as high as they are with gene drive, who could argue with a judicious pause? People in Africa, Esvelt says. Every year you delay work on gene drives, another half-million people die. "Who am I to tell somebody who's lost children to malaria, and has more children at risk, that they can't do it because somebody else doesn't agree? Why should some people get veto power over a technology that could save the lives of other people's children?"

And yet, despite that sentiment, Esvelt keeps making things more difficult for his colleagues. Last November, I along with several other journalists received an unusual email from him. 

"I'm writing because we have a couple of papers coming out next week that are personally embarrassing for me, but are likely consequential enough for gene drive, conservation, and science policy that you might find them interesting," he wrote. What followed was a surprising statement: "My decision to list invasive species control as a potential application of gene drive in our original 2014 eLife paper was an embarrassing mistake.... It was profoundly wrong of me to even suggest it." Additional modeling, he explained, showed that gene drives were even riskier than he'd thought. For that reason, one of his new papers concluded, with the possible exception of malaria, "we should not even consider building drive systems likely to spread indefinitely beyond the target area."

The new papers triggered a wave of fresh panic in the media. "'Gene Drives' Are Too Risky for Field Trials, Scientists Say" reported the New York Times. Most of the coverage focused on Esvelt's mea culpa, and when we met in his MIT office shortly after, I asked him if that was the reaction he'd expected.

"Of course!" he responded. "I'm not totally naive. 'Inventor tries to stuff genie back in bottle'—that's a story. It doesn't happen very often that a scientist says, 'I was wrong.' Maybe it should happen more often."

Esvelt believed that other researchers were underestimating the risk of engineered organisms escaping a field test, even on an isolated site, in part because of a wild card beyond the scope of any mathematical model—human nature. "You build it, you try it anywhere, and someone who has an interest is going to move it illegally to take advantage. It would be totally cost-effective for someone to hire mercenaries to fly in, capture mice, and fly out again. But that's not the sort of thing most scientists think about."

I was reminded of Jeff Goldblum's chaos mathematician in Jurassic Park. "If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us," he warns the park's designers, "it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously.... Life finds a way."

Some of Esvelt's colleagues saw the move as a publicity stunt: Instead of drives "likely to spread indefinitely," Esvelt was recommending a new, self-limiting type called Daisy Drive that he had recently designed. In Daisy Drive, multiple drives are linked in an organism's genome in a kind of daisy chain. Drive A drives Drive B, and B drives C, and C drives D, and so on. But because nothing drives A, it follows normal inheritance patterns and gets quickly diluted in the gene pool. Those individuals who don't inherit A have nothing to drive B, which then gets diluted in subsequent generations. Like the stages of a rocket, the drives continue to fall away until the whole system stops working after a set number of generations. In theory, Daisy Drive allows you to affect a local population for a set amount of time.

Esvelt now hopes to use a self-limiting drive such as Daisy to combat Lyme disease in the northeastern United States, where it has become so prevalent that many people no longer risk walking in the woods and fields. Almost 40 percent of Nantucket residents have reportedly contracted Lyme disease, and that is where Esvelt has proposed to begin his "Mice Against Ticks" experiment, as well as on neighboring Martha's Vineyard. To make sure the local stakeholders understand the implications, Esvelt has been holding community forums on the islands since 2016, and most residents seem open to the idea. After an initial field test on an isolated and uninhabited island, he would release thousands of Lyme-resistant mice on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. If all went well, the eventual goal would be to release Daisy Drive mice on the mainland. The Lyme infection cycle would then be broken, and eventually, the Daisy Drive would disappear as well. After a few generations, the mice would revert to normal.

A number of self-limiting drives have now been proposed by Esvelt and other researchers, but so far they exist only on paper, which makes Jim Thomas skeptical. "Precision in biology and ecosystems is a bit of a pipe dream," he told me. Ecosystems are remarkably complex, and viruses and parasites have tremendous capacities to evolve.

When I mentioned this critique to Esvelt, he gave me a knowing nod. "The thing everyone is overlooking is, how do you know your gene drive is going to behave over time the way you intend? We've never before engineered something that we anticipate to evolve out of our control. Perfect prediction is impossible." But unlike the skeptics, he believes you can get close enough to proceed with confidence. "You need to model very large populations over multiple generations. We can't do that in mice or mosquitoes, but we can in worms."

And they are. This winter, on the sixth floor of a nondescript MIT office building, behind a locked door with a black-and-orange Biosafety Level 2 warning sign, I held up dozens of petri dishes filled with what looked like twitching, emaciated commas. These were roundworms, C. elegans, also known as nematodes, and there were 5,000 to 10,000 of them per dish, reproducing every three days. "We can do 100 generations in a year with a population of 100 million," Esvelt told me. "If we really wanted to push it, we could probably do a population of a billion. I can't think of another organism that would let us do that."

One of Esvelt's postdocs placed a dish of worms under a microscope and turned on a black light. Through the lens, I could see the silvery squiggles snaking through the agar, eating bacteria. Each had a glowing red esophagus thanks to a fluorescent gene (originally from a jellyfish) that made it easier to track which ones had received the genetic modifications.

These worms will be the first organisms on Earth to harbor a Daisy Drive. Their lives will be confined to thousands of test tubes managed by a liquid-handling robot that can be programmed to move precise amounts of liquid between tubes. Each test tube will harbor an isolated population of worms, so the Sculpting Evolution team can test what happens when Daisy Drive worms invade a new, unmodified population. They can also test whether an engineered drive evolves into something unexpected, given enough time and population growth, and whether an "immunizing reversal drive" can be built that will target such a runaway drive and reset it.

Eventually, the worms could have enough genetic diversity to serve as a decent stand-in for any wild population, and all experiments on them will be pre-registered for feedback from the scientific community. To keep life from finding a way, Esvelt told me the project has five layers of safety containment: physical (the roundworms are kept in a locked lab, and they aren't nearly as mobile as mice, mosquitoes, or fruit flies), ecological (there are no wild C. elegans to breed with on the mean streets of Cambridge), reproductive (most wild C. elegans are hermaphrodites and aren't interested in sex anyway), molecular (the self-limiting Daisy system), and more molecular (the gene drive targets a unique DNA sequence that has been engineered into the Sculpting Evolution worms but isn't found in wild worms).

If all gene-drive research hewed to these standards, I'd sleep better at night. But despite the recommendations from Esvelt, as well as the National Academy of Sciences, there are currently no binding rules in place. And even if everyone currently working on gene drives behaves responsibly—and they seem to be—it's easy to see how, eventually, as the technology spreads, someone, somewhere along the way, will get sloppy.

Public alarm grew louder in December of 2017, with the release of a cache of 1,200 emails between scientists and other gene-drive proponents that had been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. "Gene Drive Files Expose Leading Role of U.S. Military in Gene Drive Development," announced a press release, which noted that most gene-drive projects—including the London mosquitoes, Texas mice, and MIT roundworms—were being funded by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Safe Genes program. Although DARPA had publicly announced it was funding the projects months earlier, this was not well known to the general public, and a number of news outlets ran with the story. The Guardian's headline read, "U.S. Military Agency Invests $100m in Genetic Extinction Technologies."

In its response, DARPA pointed out that its goals were defensive: "Our feeling is that the science of gene editing, including gene drive technology, has been advancing at a rapid pace in the laboratory," wrote the agency's chief of communications. "These leaps forward in potential capability, however, have not been matched by advances in the biosafety and biosecurity tools needed to protect against potential harm if such technologies were accidentally or intentionally misused."

The Safe Genes projects focus on learning to limit the reach of gene drives and on ways to detect and disable them, but none of that comforts Jim Thomas. "This has been the history of bioweapons research," he told me. "It's always presented as supposedly defensive: 'We have to develop these tools so we can respond in case someone else develops them.'" Thomas fears the agency's agenda may be much broader. "They're putting a finger in every single major gene-drive project so they can be close to them. So they can understand how these things work." Thomas worries that Daisy Drive is the equivalent of small-scale, tactical nukes. "Once you have this illusion that you can locally control a gene drive, then that opens the door for using it in agriculture or as a weapon." But few experts believe gene drives could make an effective weapon against other people—they are just too slow and obvious. There are easier ways to wage war.

During my most recent visit with Esvelt, I asked if he could imagine some situations where the technologies were too risky to pursue, even in a confined environment. Easily, he said. "There are areas where I would say, no research. And have!" It was after hours on a cold winter night in Cambridge, and Esvelt was looking even more pale and ragged than usual. Still, I pressed him for details. What kind of technology would be too dangerous for research? He shook his head and said, "There are some things I’ve thought of that I'm never going to tell another living soul."

When any new technology arrives, the debate veers toward the best- and worst-case scenarios, the big dreams and the big fears. Gene drives are going to cure malaria. Gene drives are going to become bioweapons. That's our nature. But it's easy to forget how rarely the extremes come to be.

The real test will be after we have a few minor successes controlling diseases or agricultural pests with gene drive. Suddenly we will have one of the greatest hammers ever invented, and we will go looking for nails. Every fast-reproducing plant or animal whose behavior we don't like will be a candidate for redesign. Cockroaches that hate the scent of garbage. Poison ivy that doesn't cause a rash. Fire ants with no fire. There are loose nails everywhere that just need a few whacks to make our lives more comfortable.

"Why not?" goes the counterargument. We've been hammering nature for years. Pollution, habitat destruction, pesticides, insecticides, greenhouse gases. Yale doesn't convene an ethics panel every time somebody clear-cuts a forest or dynamites a reef to harvest the fish. Why is it different once genes are involved?

And yet it is.

Anyone who's ever taken the time to hike to the pristine valley or paddle to the uninhabited island knows the sublimity of finding oneself in a place where the agenda is non-human. It's a reminder that there are ways of being in the world that have little or nothing to do with human ways, patterns of existence that get us out of our own heads and expand the conversation of what it means to be a quivering coil of DNA on the third planet from the sun. It's a form of diversity, and every species is a kind of culture, a cohesive and elegant web of quirks, predilections, and traditions.

We've dammed Glen Canyon. We've littered Everest with ropes and oxygen tanks. Our pawmarks are all over even the wildest places. But we have yet to conquer the DNA of wild things. For the time being, that frontier has been visited by only a handful of early explorers.

In deciding if we have the right to drive a gene through a species, we might think of each genome as a national park, an untrammeled space in a non-geographical dimension. A refuge from an increasingly humanized world. I can hate the whine of a mosquito in my tent and still revere the pristine landscape of its genome. Engineering that genome would be like putting a road system through the Gates of the Arctic. There would be some obvious benefits—and something less obvious would be lost forever.

With every new technology, we tend to shoot first and ask questions later. It's a dynamic built into the DNA of our culture, which rewards the intrepid individuals who plant their flag on the virgin coast. Those ice-nine mosquitoes in their negative-pressure vault may end up being hugely important. They may, in fact, be a gift. A living metaphor of interconnectedness and of consequences, they may force us to consider if the time has come to throw out the Age of Exploration model and create a new system of science that rewards wisdom over cleverness.

That's a big ask, and it may seem absurd right now, as we survey the vast genetic frontier stretching away before us. How could we not poke around just a little? But we have a lot of experience with lost frontiers at this point, so perhaps there's still time to ask what we ought to do with this one. What if, after gazing from the decks of their caravels at the towering forests and teeming estuaries of the New World, the early explorers went back to their funders in Europe and said: Sure, we could make the place safe and productive. We could fill it with cities and farms and factories. But here's the thing: It isn't bad the way it is. It's full of mysteries and other ways of being. So ... this is going to sound crazy, but what if we just left it alone?

2739. The Long Ecological Revolution

By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, November 2017

Cover of the Jacobin magazine issue Earth, Wind & Fire" that promotes ecomodernism

Aside from the stipulation that nature follows certain laws, no idea was more central to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and to the subsequent development of what came to be known as modern science, than that of the conquest, mastery, and domination of nature. Up until the rise of the ecological movement in the late twentieth century, the conquest of nature was a universal trope, often equated with progress under capitalism (and sometimes socialism). To be sure, the notion, as utilized in science, was a complex one. As Francis Bacon, the idea’s leading early proponent, put it, “nature is only overcome by obeying her.” Only by following nature’s laws, therefore, was it possible to conquer her.1

After the great Romantic poets, the strongest opponents of the idea of the conquest of nature during the Industrial Revolution were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of classical historical materialism. Commenting on Bacon’s maxim, Marx observed that in capitalism the discovery of nature’s “autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs,” particularly the needs of accumulation. Yet despite its clever “ruse,” capital can never fully transcend nature’s material limits, which continually reassert themselves, with the result that “production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.” Its treatment of natural limits as mere barriers to be overcome, not as actual boundaries, gives capital its enormously dynamic character. But that same refusal to recognize natural limits also means that capital tends to cross critical thresholds of environmental sustainability, causing needless and sometimes irrevocable destruction.2 Marx pointed in Capital to such “rifts” in the socio-ecological metabolism of humanity and nature engendered by capital accumulation, and to the need to restore that metabolism through a more sustainable relation to the earth, maintaining and even improving the planet for successive human generations as “boni patres familias” (good heads of the household).3

In his Dialectics of Nature, written in the 1870s, Engels turned the Baconian ruse on its head in order to emphasize ecological limits:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first…. 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 creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.4

Although key parts of Marx and Engels’s ecological critique remained long unknown, their analysis was to have a deep influence on later socialist theorists. Still, much of actually existing socialism, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, succumbed to the same extreme modernizing vision of the conquest of nature that characterized capitalist societies. A decisive challenge to the notion of the domination of nature had to await the rise of the ecological movement in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Here criticism of the ecological destruction brought on by modern science and technology and by unbridled industrialism—associated with a simplistic notion of human progress focusing on economic expansion alone—led to an alternative emphasis on sustainability, coevolution, and interconnection, of which ecology was emblematic. Science was said to have been misused, insofar as it had aided in the violation of nature’s own laws, ultimately threatening human survival itself. Through the development of the concept of the biosphere and the rise of the Earth System perspective (in which Soviet ecology played a crucial role), science increasingly came to be integrated with a more holistic, dialectical view, one that took on new radical dimensions that challenged the logic of the subordination of the earth and humanity to profit.5

Recent years have brought these issues renewed relevance, with the climate crisis and the introduction of the Anthropocene as a scientific classification of the changed human relation to the planet. The Anthropocene is commonly defined within science as a new geological epoch succeeding the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years; a changeover marked by an “anthropogenic rift” in the Earth System since the Second World War.6 After centuries of scientific understanding founded on the conquest of nature, we have now, indisputably, reached a qualitatively new and dangerous stage, marked by the advent of nuclear weapons and climate change, which the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dubbed “Exterminism, the Last Stage of Imperialism.”7

From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene—which stands not just for the climate crisis, but also rifts in planetary boundaries generally—marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large on a more egalitarian and sustainable basis. A long and continuing ecological revolution is needed—one that will necessarily occur in stages, over decades and centuries. But given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation—marked by climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, loss of freshwater, deforestation, toxic pollution, and more—this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation. This means opposing the logic of capital, whenever and wherever it seeks to promote the “creative destruction” of the planet. Such a reconstitution of society at large cannot be merely technological, but must transform the human metabolic relation with nature through production, and hence the whole realm of social metabolic reproduction.8

No revolutionary movement exists in a vacuum; it is invariably confronted with counterrevolutionary doctrines designed to defend the status quo. In our era, ecological Marxism or ecosocialism, as the most comprehensive challenge to the structural crisis of our times, is being countered by capitalist ecomodernism—the outgrowth of an earlier ideology of modernism, which from the first opposed the notion that economic growth faced natural limits. If ecosocialism insists that a revolution to restore a sustainable human relation to the earth requires a frontal assault on the system of capital accumulation—and that this can only be accomplished by more egalitarian social relations and more consciously coevolutionary relations to the earth—ecomodernism promises precisely the opposite.9 Ecological contradictions, according to this ideology, can be surmounted by means of technological fixes and continued rapid growth in production, with no fundamental changes to the structure of our economy or society.10 The prevailing liberal approach to ecological problems, including climate change, has long put capital accumulation before people and the planet. It is maintained that through new technologies, demographic shifts (such as population control), and the mechanisms of the global “free market,” the existing system can successfully address the immense ecological challenges before us. In short, the solution to the ecological crises produced by capitalist accumulation is still more capitalist accumulation. All the while, we have been rapidly nearing the “climate cliff” (i.e., the breaking of the carbon budget) represented by the trillionth metric ton of carbon released into the atmosphere, now less than twenty years away if current trends continue.11

In these dire circumstances, it is dispiriting but not altogether surprising that some self-styled socialists have jumped on the ecomodernist bandwagon, arguing against most ecologists and ecosocialists that what is required to address climate change and environmental problems as a whole is simply technological change, coupled with progressive redistribution of resources. Here again, the Earth System crisis is said not to demand fundamental changes in social relations and in the human metabolism with nature. Rather it is to be approached in instrumentalist terms as a formidable barrier to be overcome by means of extreme technology.

The best current example of this tendency on the left in the United States is the Summer 2017 issue of Jacobin, entitled Earth, Wind, and Fire. According to the authors in this special issue and their related works, the solution to climate change and other ecological problems is primarily one of innovation in the development and application of new technologies and does not require a critique of the process of capital accumulation or economic growth. Activist groups such as Greenpeace and most ecosocialists come under attack for their “catastrophism” or apocalypticism, their direct action, and their emphasis on the need for qualitative changes in the human relation to the environment.12 The entire issue, packed with colorful charts and graphics, espouses a techno-optimism in which ecological crises can be solved through a combination of non-carbon energy (including nuclear power), geoengineering, and the construction of a globe-spanning negative-emissions energy infrastructure.

If this stance is “socialist,” it is only in the supposedly progressive, ecomodernist sense of combining state-directed technocratic planning and market regulation with proposals for more equitable income distribution. In this vision, ecological necessities are once again subordinated to notions of economic and technological development that are treated as inexorable. Nature is not a living system to be defended, but a foe to be conquered. As if to punctuate this position, the Jacobin issue includes as an epigraph a quotation from Leon Trotsky, taken from his Literature and Revolution (1924):

Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing “on faith,” is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad.13

Trotsky was hardly alone in promoting such reckless productivism in the early 1920s, and can be at least partly excused as an individual of his time. To repeat the same error nearly a century later, however, when we face the destabilization of the world’s ecosystems and human civilization itself, is to capitulate to the forces of destruction. The current attempt to claim the conquest of nature and ecomodernization as a “socialist” project is dangerous enough that it warrants a thorough critique. Otherwise, we risk turning back the clock on the vital political and theoretical advances made by the ecological left over the last half-century.

The New Promethean Socialism

The first half of Jacobin‘s playfully titled Earth, Wind, and Fire issue is fairly uncontroversial from a left standpoint, cataloguing capitalism’s environmental depredations and calling for radical change. However, editorial board member Connor Kilpatrick sets the tone for the issue’s second part when he suggests that Donald Trump and capitalist entrepreneurs appeal to a broad public by promising a future of economic growth and new technology, while the ecological movement offers only “a politics of fearmongering and austerity.”14 The second half makes the implications of Kilpatrick’s criticism explicit, developing over the course of several articles a thoroughly ecomodernist, techno-utopian vision that is ultimately incompatible with the goals and methods of the grassroots ecological movement.

The penultimate article in the issue, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s “Planning the Good Anthropocene,” along with Phillips’s prior work, captures the essence of this putatively progressive ecomodernist perspective. Phillips is the author of the 2015 book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, and Rozworski is a Toronto-based union researcher and commentator, who frequently writes for Jacobin.15 In his book, Phillips directs polemical attacks on such varied left thinkers, living and dead, as Theodor Adorno, Ian Angus, Brett Clark, David Harvey, Max Horkheimer, Derrick Jensen, Naomi Klein, Annie Leonard, Herbert Marcuse, Bill McKibben, Lewis Mumford, Juliet Schor, Richard York, and myself. He also challenges the concept of planetary boundaries of leading Earth System scientists. At the same time, Phillips gives his ecomodernist seal of approval to Erle Ellis, Roger Pielke, Jr., and the Breakthrough Institute (where both are senior fellows); Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, authors of the Accelerate Manifesto; and Slavoj Žižek (for his attack on the notion of Mother Earth).

One chapter in Phillips’s book, criticizing Greenpeace’s Leonard, is titled “In Defense of Stuff”; another, attacking the work of several thinkers associated with Monthly Review, is called “There Is No ‘Metabolic Rift.'” Phillips dismisses the idea that Marx advanced ecological values, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and accuses the entire ecological left of “doom-mongering” and “catastrophism.” Klein is said to promote an “eco-austerity” that is ultimately no different from the neoliberal version. Phillips flatly rejects the notion that there are limits to economic growth, asserting that “you can actually have infinite growth on a finite world,” by making more with less. According to some estimates, he informs us, “the planet can sustain up to 282 billion people…by using all the land.”16

For Phillips, bigger is beautiful: “The socialist must defend economic growth, productivism, Prometheanism.” The former Soviet Union, for example, is faulted not for its extreme productivism, but only for its lack of democratic planning and insufficient concern for human welfare. He presents a sweepingly anthropocentric definition of nature: “We are nature, and all that we do to nature is natural.” It follows that “our skyscrapers are not separate from nature; they are nature.” (By the very same logic, one might add, so are our nuclear weapons.) Human progress means transgressing all purported natural limits. Viewed in these terms, “energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.” Other species have value only insofar as they provide utilitarian benefits to society. Thus “we should care when species go extinct, not because of their intrinsic worth…but because the loss of species means a decline in the effectiveness of the services that living systems provide to humans.”17

Overall, the New Left of the 1960s and its successors are faulted for rejecting the “Promethean ambition” of ever more production—”more stuff.” Likewise, Phillips sees the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement as out of step with social needs, precisely because it attempts to reconnect workers to the land. What is required is “a high-energy planet, not modesty, humility and simple living.” Ecomodernism would concentrate the land and rely on large-scale agricultural production.18

So enamored is Phillips of nuclear power as the solution to climate change that he says that “a substantial, global reversal of neoliberalism and an embrace of a strong, democratic public-sector ethos” is climatically advantageous mainly because it will allow us to deploy “what is absolutely the strongest weapon we have in our arsenal against global warming,” namely nuclear power. No mention of Fukushima here.19

Phillips and Rozworski bring this same perspective to their contribution to Jacobin‘s special issue—and were no doubt enlisted for that precise purpose. They tout nuclear power as a viable alternative to fossil fuels, as part of a broader ecomodernist fantasy in which economic growth has no limits and humanity rules as the “collective sovereign of Earth.” Although they endorse some form of state planning, they raise no direct objection to the commodification of nature, labor, and society under capitalism, and seem unconcerned by the ways that existing structures of production and consumption distort and exploit human needs. Instead, the future lies entirely with the new machines that can provide humanity with ever more goods, while commanding on an ever-increasing scale “the biogeophysical processes we must understand, track, and master” in order to “coordinate ecosystems.” The goal is self-consciously one of Promethean control of nature through science and technology. It is hardly surprising therefore that Phillips’s outlook, as first articulated in Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, has been lauded by the premier corporate-funded ecomodernist think tank, the Breakthrough Institute, or that the title phrase of the Phillips and Rozworski piece, “The Good Anthropocene,” is lifted directly from Breakthrough Institute’s An Ecomodernist Manifesto.20

In another bold appropriation, Peter Frase, author of the 2016 book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, entitles his contribution to the issue “By Any Means Necessary”—a phrase made famous by Malcolm X, but here denoting planetary-wide interventions in nature. Four Futuresshows Frase to be enamored with the idea of the Promethean mastery over the earth. The “grand future” he depicts in what purports to be a realistic ecosocialist scenario (albeit drawing on science fiction) consists of “terraforming our own planet, reconstructing it into something that can continue to support us and at least some of the other living creatures that currently exist—in other words making an entirely new nature.” Like Phillips and Rozworski, Frase has no interest in reducing our impact on nature or treading lightly on the earth; rather we must “manage and care for nature”—the better to serve our own interests. Following the conservative philosopher of science and Breakthrough Institute senior fellow Bruno Latour, Frase insists that in the face of the global ecological crisis we need to be engaged in “Loving Our [Frankenstein] Monsters.” That is, we must learn to identify with the technological-industrial world we have created (or are in the process of creating), with its planned markets, smart parking meters, robo-bees, and new potentialities for geoengineering the planet—all viewed as perfectly compatible with “socialist ecology.”21

In “By Any Means Necessary,” Frase focuses on climate change. Chiding the ecological movement for its “green moralizing,” he calls on the left wholeheartedly to embrace attempts to geoengineer the planet. He praises Oliver Morton’s 2015 book The Planet Remade, which proposes to inject sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays (though scientists have pointed out that the added calamitous effects of this are likely to be far worse than global warming alone).22 Frase himself makes a case for “cloud brightening,” by which clouds can be made to reflect more sunlight away from the earth. “We have to recognize,” he writes, “that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature.” If the left fails to embrace planetary geoengineering, “the bourgeoisie will simply carry out their work without us.” In Frase’s view, socialists have no choice but to climb onto the geoengineering bandwagon, even if this means going against the ecological movement. Still, “the purpose of raising the prospect of geoengineering in a left context,” he says, is “not as a substitute for decarbonization, but as part of a larger portrait of ecosocialism.”

There is no danger, Frase assures us, to be found in geoengineering technology itself, only in how it is managed (a sophism akin to “guns don’t kill people, people do”). Defending himself in advance against “the charge of hubris and Prometheanism,” he states—no doubt with an eye on Engels—that “the socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature is never under our control, and there are always unintended consequences.” But missing from his analysis is any notion that social relations themselves must change in order to effect qualitative shifts in the human metabolism with nature. Rather, the object seems to be keeping the whole juggernaut going as much as possible, with neither social nor ecological relations seriously addressed in what amounts to a technological tinkerer’s solution. The only alternative to such an extreme ecomodernist strategy, we are led to believe, is a “hair shirt” austerity—a term that Frase uses in common with Phillips to ridicule the ecological movement.23

Daniel Aldana Cohen’s article “The Last Stimulus” promotes a form of Green New Dealism. Against those on the left who argue for the need to develop a steady-state economy—a system no longer governed by the drive for unsustainable and destructive economic growth—Cohen insists that we should take seriously the hype surrounding green capitalism:

Global political and financial leaders now want to invest a trillion dollars a year in clean energy alone. The budget for climate adaption policies will be comparably huge…. Business as “usual” is changing fast…. Thanks to political pressure, millions of workers’ retirement funds are already investing in a happy old age in a stable climate. Globally, trillions of dollars in workers’ retirement savings are up for grabs…. Regional and national governments all over the world are setting up green banks, financial institutions to help shape the booming investment in the energy transition…. This past year, employment in the solar sector expanded seventeen times faster than in the economy as a whole.

From this, Cohen derives his thesis that “so far, green capitalists are the ones shaping the future. They get it. We could too.” While not an advocate of unbridled Prometheanism like Phillips and Frase, he nevertheless sees the solution largely in the fairly conventional terms of state management of technology, the market, and urban development.24

Christian Parenti, a Nation columnist and author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2012), is the best-known of the Earth, Wind, and Fire contributors. The foreboding title of his article, “If We Fail,” refers to the worst-case scenario of unmitigated climate change, namely the Venus Syndrome. As described by climatologist James Hansen and recounted by Parenti, the earth would end up “a lifeless rock swathed in boiling-hot, toxic, water vapors.” Parenti seizes on this apocalyptic image to urge the left to accept drastic technological solutions, which fortunately, he says, are well within reach. Citing an experiment in Iceland, he advocates the building of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) plants that would strip carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it by depositing it in basalt rock. This CCS-in-basalt approach, he claims, offers a “fairly simple,” readymade solution to the climate problem. The only difficulty he sees is that such a CCS scheme must be sponsored by the state rather than left to private enterprise, since it offers few opportunities for profit. And this is where progressives with their support of affirmative government have an essential role to play. The “good news” is that “a radical climate solution, counterintuitively perhaps, requires that we use more, not less, energy. But energy, in the form of solar energy, is the one economic input that is truly infinite.”

Parenti does not, however, address the immense obstacles to the building of CCS plants on the scale and with the speed he imagines. As the energy analyst Vaclav Smil has pointed out, “In order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry, whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storage took generations to build.” CCS technology requires unimaginable quantities of water: as much as 130 billion tons every year, or about half the annual flow of the Columbia River, would be needed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide equal to the annual emissions of the United States alone. And the problems only start there, since the larger technological, economic, and ecological obstacles to such massive attempts at negative-emissions technologies are gargantuan, raising unimaginable difficulties.

If Phillips in his analysis argues that all is nature—that everything in society, from farms to factories to skyscrapers, is “natural”—Parenti suggests the opposite: all is society, to the point that the natural world can scarcely be said to exist at all. It is easy from this standpoint to argue, as he does, in favor of meat factories and fish farms as partial solutions to our ecological problems—while the consequences for ecosystems and the animals themselves are rendered invisible. “Our mission as a species,” he writes, “is not to retreat from, or to preserve, something called ‘nature,’ but rather to become fully conscious environmental makers. Extreme technology under public ownership will be central to a socialist project of civilizational rescue, or civilization will not last.” In both these views (all is nature and all is society), employed in this way, the object is identical: to wish away ecological contradictions and seek the total conquest of the environment, effectively maintaining, rather than fundamentally transforming, existing social and economic structures.25

In her short article “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,” cultural critic Angela Nagle takes that organization and the broader ecological movement to task. She rejects what she calls Greenpeace’s “diminutive direct action” and the “‘deep green’ primitivism” often associated with the radical environmental movement. Instead she opts once again for hyper-technological solutions to environmental problems, including the global expansion of nuclear energy plants, declaring that “human interference in the natural world is now the only way to save it.” With respect to Trump’s claim that global warming is a myth concocted by China “to make US manufacturing noncompetitive,” Nagle quips that on first hearing this her “only sense of shock…was that someone was actually talking about manufacturing again.” Like Phillips, Rozworski, Frase, and Parenti, she urges the left to abandon its “aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity” and to love our monsters.26

Other articles in the issue launch similarly one-sided attacks on the Sierra Club (Branko Marcetic, “People Make the World Go Round”) and food cooperatives (Jonah Walters, “Beware Your Local Food Cooperative”). In the latter article, we are led to believe that some of the more radical food cooperatives in the 1970s were simply the product of “Maoist true believers” and “self-styled guerrillas, schooled in the messianic Marxism-Leninism of the late New Left” and “following the model of the Black Panther Party”—in a series of pejoratives designed to throw scorn on these experiments.27

What is remarkable about the contributions to Jacobin‘s special issue on the environment and related works by its writers and editors is how removed they are from genuine socialism—if this involves a revolution in social and ecological relations, aimed at the creation of a world of substantive equality and environmental sustainability. What we get instead is a mechanistic, techno-utopian “solution” to the climate problem that ignores the social relations of science and technology, along with human needs and the wider environment. Unlike ecological Marxism and radical ecology generally, this vision of a state-directed, technocratic, redistributive market economy, reinforced by planetary geoengineering, does not fundamentally challenge the commodity system. The ecological crisis brought on by capitalism is used here to justify the setting aside of all genuine ecological values. The issue’s contributors instead endorse a “Good Anthropocene,” or a renewed conquest of nature, as a means of perpetuating the basic contours of present-day commodity society, including, most disastrously, its imperative for unlimited exponential growth. Socialism, conceived in these terms, becomes nearly indistinguishable from capitalism—not a movement to replace generalized commodity society, but homologous with the fundamental structure of capitalist modernity. At best, this represents a foreshortening of the socialist vision for the sake of success in the liberal political arena. But the cost of such a compromise with the status quo is the loss of any conception of an alternative future.

The Long Ecological Revolution

How then are we to see the necessary ecological and social revolution of our time? In the nineteenth century, Engels emphasized the imperative for society to develop in accord with nature as the only genuine scientific view: “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves—two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality.”28 Moreover, there was no way to shortchange natural necessity. Engels argued that the Baconian ruse of the conquest of nature—obeying nature’s laws for the sole purpose of promoting capital accumulation—would ultimately prove disastrous, since it ignored the larger consequences in the pursuit of short-term gain. In contrast, the object of “scientific socialism” was not a vain attempt to conquer nature, but rather the advancement of human freedom in accord with the conditions imposed by the material world.29

Today, the growing awareness of such problems, and of the inescapable human connection to the natural world as a whole, has led scientists to explore more sustainable forms of development, as in agroecology, biomimicry, and systems of ecological resilience. “The overarching goal of an ecological society,” Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams write in their new book Creating an Ecological Society, “is to maintain the long-term health of the biosphere while equitably providing for human needs.”30 This is not an impossible task, but it does require the development of science at a higher level—one not simply concerned with mechanical manipulation of the earth and its inhabitants for private gain, but founded on the understanding and concern for the complex collectivities that constitute living systems and human life itself. This requires ecological planning, but that in turn is only possible if social relations also change, reconceiving freedom in terms of needs deeper and wider than those of individual self-interest in a commodity economy.

What this means is that we should not be stampeded by the climate crisis—however catastrophic its likely consequences—into embracing the very same attitudes toward the human relation to the natural world that generated the current unprecedented threats to human civilization. To do so is to seal our fate. We cannot escape the long-term ecological consequences of capitalist development through the Faustian bargain of building more and more nuclear power plants around the globe, or by recklessly injecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere—all for the purpose of infinitely expanding commodity production and capital accumulation. Beyond their technical and economic infeasibility, such plans must be opposed because of the immense, unforeseen repercussions that would inevitably result. To argue, for example, for CCS technology as the primary solution to the climate crisis (there is no question that such technology might play a positive role at some level) is to argue for devoting an immense share of resources to such plants, rivaling in scale the world’s entire existing energy infrastructure, with all sorts of added ecological and social costs and consequences.31

There are better and faster ways of addressing the climate crisis through revolutions in social relations themselves. Moreover, any purportedly socialist approach to environmental problem that focuses only on climate change, ignoring or even rejecting the idea of other planetary boundaries, and sees the solution as purely technological, represents a failure of nerve. It constitutes a refusal to embrace a new, wider realm of freedom, to meet the challenge that historical reality now imposes on us.32 Humanity cannot continue to develop in the twenty-first century without embracing more collective and sustainable forms of production and consumption in line with biospheric realities.

Here it is important to recognize that today’s monopoly-finance capitalism is a system built on waste. The larger part of production is squandered on negative (or specifically capitalist) use values, in such forms as military spending; marketing expenditures; and the inefficiencies, including planned obsolescence, built into every product. The consumption of ever more meaningless and destructive “goods” is offered as a substitute for all those things that people truly want and need.33 Indeed, as Marxist economist Paul A. Baran wrote, “people steeped in the culture of monopoly capitalism do not want what they need and do not need what they want.”34 Beyond the mere physical necessities of food, shelter, clothing, clean water, clean air, and so on, these include love, family, community, meaningful work, education, cultural life, access to the natural environment, and the free and equal development of every person. The capitalist order drastically limits or perverts all of this, creating artificial shortages in essential goods in order to generate a driving desire for non-essentials, all for the purpose of greater profitability and polarization of income and wealth. The United States alone currently spends more than a trillion dollars a year both on the military and on marketing—the latter aimed at inducing people to buy things that they would not otherwise be disposed to purchase.35

There is no doubt that the current planetary ecological crisis requires technological change and innovation. Improvements in solar and wind power and other alternatives to fossil fuels are an important part of the ecological equation. It is not true, however, that all the technologies needed to address the planetary emergency are new, or that technological development alone is the answer. The wonders of smart machines notwithstanding, there is no solution to the global ecological crisis as a whole compatible with capitalist social relations. Any ecological defenses erected in the present must be based on opposition to the logic of capital accumulation. Nor can intervention by the state, acting as a kind of social capitalist, do the trick. Rather, a long ecological revolution adequate to the world’s needs would mean altering the human-social metabolism with nature, countering the alienation of both nature and human labor under capitalism. Above all we must be concerned with maintaining ecological conditions for future generations—the very definition of sustainability.

From this standpoint, a multitude of things can be done now, if humanity mobilizes itself to create an ecological society.36 Given the vast waste inherent in the regime of monopoly-finance capital, which has penetrated into the very structure of production, it is possible to implement forms of revolutionary conservation that both expand the realm of human freedom and allow for rapid readjustment to the necessity imposed by the Earth System crisis. It is far more efficient and feasible to cut carbon emissions drastically than it would be to construct a globe-spanning CCS infrastructure, which would rival or exceed in size the current world energy infrastructure. It would be far more rational to carry out a rapid, revolutionary phase-out of carbon emissions than to risk imposing new threats to the diversity of life and human civilization through attempts to geoengineer the entire planet.

Ecological Marxism offers an opening-up of human freedom and creativity in manifold ways, calling upon humanity as a whole to rebuild its world on ecological foundations in line with the earth itself. Promises of a global technological fix—which becomes more nonsensical if one looks beyond climate change to the numerous planetary boundaries threatened by the capitalist “conquest of nature”—can only lead to elite politics and elite management. It is the ultimate hubris, the final call for the human domination of nature as a means of class domination. Such Promethean views are designed to avoid the reality of the contemporary social and ecological crisis—namely, that revolutionary changes in the existing relations of production are unavoidable. Modernizing the forces of production is not enough; more important is establishing the conditions for sustainable human development. Much can be learned from indigenous and traditional forms of working the land: because human society under capitalism has become alienated from the earth, it follows that less alienated societies offer vital insight into the practice of a more sustainable existence.

Critics on both left and right might reply that it is “too late” for an ecological revolution. The answer to this, as Magdoff and Williams eloquently state, is:

Too late for what? To struggle for a better world means taking the world as it is and working to transform it. Although the ecological and political conditions and trends are in many respects quite desperate, we are not condemned to continue degrading the environment or our social conditions…. A certain amount of global warming will continue regardless of what we do with all of its negative side effects…. However, we can stop the slide to an even more degraded Earth, poorer in species and in the health of remaining species. We can use the vast amount of available human and material resources to reorient the economy to benefit all people. An ecological society will allow us to do all the things that are currently off the table, that capitalism has repeatedly shown itself unable to achieve: providing all people with the ability to develop their full potential.37

But to achieve these things, we will need to break with “business as usual,” that is, with the current logic of capital, and introduce an entirely different logic, aimed at the creation of a fundamentally different social metabolic system of reproduction. To overcome centuries of alienation of nature and human labor, including the treatment of the global environment and most people—divided by class, gender, race, and ethnicity—as mere objects of conquest, expropriation, and exploitation, will require nothing less than a long ecological revolution, one which will necessarily entail victories and defeats and ever-renewed striving, occurring over centuries. It is a revolutionary struggle, though, that must commence now with a worldwide movement toward ecosocialism—one capable from its inception of setting limits on capital. This revolt will inevitably find its main impetus in an environmental proletariat, formed by the convergence of economic and ecological crises and the collective resistance of working communities and cultures—a new reality already emerging, particularly in the global South.38

In the long ecological revolution before us, the world will necessarily proceed from one earthly struggle to another. If the advent of the Anthropocene tells us anything, it is that humanity, through a single-minded pursuit of economic gain benefitting a relative few, is capable of producing a fatal rift in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. It is time therefore to find another path: one of sustainable human development. This constitutes the entire meaning of revolution in our time.

Notes

1. ↩Francis Bacon,Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 29, 43. On the Baconian “ruse” and Marx’s response, see William Leiss,The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1974). In Latin, as in most languages with gendered nouns, “nature” (natura) is feminine, bringing out the patriarchal aspects of Bacon’s views. For a powerful ecofeminist critique, see Carolyn Merchant,The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
2. ↩Karl Marx,Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 334–35, 409–10. Oddly, Michael Löwy quotes this same passage from Marx as a “good example of the sections of Marx’s work that bear witness to an uncritical admiration for the ‘civilizing actions of capitalist production,'” and the overcoming of natural boundaries. Though plausible on its face, Löwy’s position reflects a deep misunderstanding of Marx’s argument, part of a dialectical critique of the Baconian “ruse”—that nature is to be conquered by a kind of subterfuge—and of the general attitudes of bourgeois science. Equally important is the theoretical context in which Marx wrote, namely the dialectic of barriers and boundaries first introduced in Hegel’sLogic. Based on this dialectical understanding, Marx insists that capital is ultimately unable to overcome natural boundaries, even as it temporarily surmounts them by treating them as mere barriers. This overarching contradiction leads to perpetual, recurrent crises. Michael Löwy, “Marx, Engels, and Ecology,”Capitalism Nature Socialism 28, no. 2 (2017):10–21. For a comprehensive treatment of Marx’s argument, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’sGrundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” in Marcello Musto, ed.,Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Routledge, 2008), 100–02. See also István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 568.
3. ↩Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 636–38;Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 754, 911, 949; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
4. ↩Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 460–61.
5. ↩John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,”Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 1–20.
6. ↩Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?”Anthropocene Review 3, no. 1 (2015): 67; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
7. ↩E. P. Thompson,Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41–80; Rudolf Bahro,Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster (Bath: Gateway, 1994), 19.
8. ↩For the larger theoretical implications of the question of the relation of social relations to forces of production, and its connection to recent disputes in Marxian theory, see John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, “Socialism: A Time to Retreat?”Monthly Review 52, no. 4 (September 2000): 1–7. The concept of “social metabolic reproduction” is central to the work of István Mészáros, beginning with hisBeyond Capital.
9. ↩The notion of a long ecological revolution is meant to draw on Raymond William’s earlier notion of a “long revolution.” For Williams, cultural and ecological materialism were always intertwined, reflecting the long convergence of the Romantic and Marxist traditions. See Williams,The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), andPolitics and Letters (London: New Left, 1979).
10. ↩For critiques of ecological modernization theory, see Richard York and Eugene A. Rosa, “Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory,”Organization and Environment 16, no. 3 (2003): 273–88; John Bellamy Foster, “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism,”Organization and Environment 25, no. 3 (2012): 211–37; and Jeffrey A. Ewing, “Hollow Ecology: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Death of Nature,”Journal of World-Systems Research 23, no. 1 (2012): 126–55.
11. ↩Trillionthtonne.org.
12. ↩Peter Frase, “By Any Means Necessary,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 81.
13. ↩Leon Trotsky,Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), 251.
14. ↩Connor Kilpatrick, “Victory Over the Sun,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 22–23.
15. ↩Leigh Phillips,Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2015).
16. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 9, 23, 32–33, 39–40, 59–63, 67–68, 88, 132, 217–34, 246–49, 252; Leigh Phillips, “Why Eco-Austerity Won’t Save Us from Climate Change,”Guardian, November 4, 2015. In attacking the notion that Marx developed an ecological critique through his theory of metabolic rift, Phillips claims incorrectly that the concept of metabolism in science is restricted to chemical operations within the body, in isolation from its “exchange” with its environment. He also rejects recent scholarship (beginning with Hal Draper) suggesting that the famous phrase “the idiocy of rural life” in the standard English-language edition of theCommunist Manifesto was a faulty translation. In nineteenth-century usage, the German wordIdiotismus retained the meaning of its Greek origin,idiotes (a private or isolated person) and is more correctly translated as “isolation”—conveying the idea that rural workers were isolated from thepolis. Phillips simply declares that since Marx was not afraid of being politically incorrect he would not have shied away from calling rural workers “idiots” (in the contemporary English-language sense). Here one can only quote Spinoza’s famous phrase: “Ignorance is no argument.”
17. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 60, 76, 85, 252–63. It should be noted that “Prometheanism” has two historic meanings. The first, derived from Lucretius, associates the Promethean myth with the Enlightenment and seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The second and more common contemporary meaning, used here, uses it to denote extreme productivism or industrialism. Marx referred to Prometheus in both senses, lauding Epicurus as the Prometheus of the Enlightenment in antiquity, and later criticizing Proudhon for his mechanistic Prometheanism. See Foster,Marx’s Ecology, 10, 59, 126–30.
18. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 89, 190, 255.
19. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 202-03.
20. ↩Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, “Planning the Good Anthropocene,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 133–36; Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 67–68; “The Year of the Good Anthropocene: Top Breakthroughs of 2015,” Breakthrough Institute; “Leigh Phillips, Science Writer and Journalist,” Breakthrough Institute http://thebreakthrough.org/people/profile/leigh-phillips;Ecomodernism Manifesto, 7.
21. ↩Peter Frase,Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2016), 91–119. Frase’s notion of “Loving Our Monsters” is taken from Bruno Latour’s article “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children,” Breakthrough Institute, Winter 2012.
22. ↩The most popular geoengineering solution, the injection of sulfur particles into the atmosphere (sometimes euphemistically called “solar radiation management”) is widely regarded in the scientific community as a solution more dangerous that climate change itself, since it would do nothing to stop the build-up of carbon emissions in the atmosphere, while creating whole new planetary dangers. The moment such sulfur injection stopped, climate change would resume on higher levels than ever before, as determined by the higher carbon dioxide concentration in the environment. The dangers of this form of geoengineering include a drier planet with more severe droughts and monsoons, possible erosion of the ozone layer, and disruption of photosynthesis. Further, it would do nothing to mitigate ocean acidification. Cloud brightening, endorsed by Frase, raises similar objections: if done over the Atlantic, it could contribute to the desertification of the Amazon, introducing new global ecological problems without alleviating any of the underlying causes of climate change. Nicolas Jones, “Solar Geoengineering: Weighing the Costs of Blocking the Sun’s Rays,” Yale Environment 360, January 9, 2014, http://e360.yale.edu; Christopher Mims, “‘Albedo Yaughts’ and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change?”Scientific American, October 21, 2009.
23. ↩Frase, “By Any Means Necessary,” 73–81; Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 105.
24. ↩Daniel Aldana Cohen, “The Last Stimulus,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 83–95.
25. ↩Christian Parenti, “If We Fail,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 114–27; “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis,”Dissent (Summer 2013);Tropic of Chaos (New York: Nation, 2012); Andy Skuce, “‘We’d Have to Finish One New Facility Every Working Day for the Next 70 Years’—Why Carbon Capture is No Panacea,”Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 4, 2016; “The Quest for CCS,” Corporate Knights, January 6, 2016, http://corporateknights.com; Vaclav Smil, “Global Energy: The Latest Infatuations,”American Scientist 99 (May–June 2011): 219.
26. ↩Angela Nagle, “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 130–31. One might think that Parenti’s references to the Venus Syndrome would leave him open to charges of “catastrophism.” But such criticisms are seldom levelled at those taking ecomodernist stances, precisely because they tend to present ready-made technological solutions that minimize challenges to the status quo.
27. ↩Branko Marcetic, “People Make the World Go Round,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 106–07; Jonah Walters, “Beware Your Local Food Cooperative,”Jacobin (Summer 2017): 137–38.
28. ↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 105.
29. ↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 461–63.
30. ↩Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 247.
31. ↩Carbon capture technology is most likely to be effective in the form of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
32. ↩The conception of freedom as the recognition of necessity is fundamental to Marxist theory. It was first introduced in Hegel’sLogic and was incorporated into the materialist conception of history by Engels inAnti-Dühring. See Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 105–06.
33. ↩John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,”Monthly Review 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1–16.
34. ↩Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 30.
35. ↩On military spending, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,”Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 1–19. On marketing, see Michael Dawson,The Consumer Trap(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1. The total quantities of both military spending and marketing have increased massively in the years since these works were written.
36. ↩On the possibilities presented by an ecological revolution, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 124–33; Magdoff and Williams,Creating an Ecological Society, 283–329.
37. ↩Magdoff and Williams,Creating an Ecological Society, 309–10.
38. ↩On the concept of the environmental proletariat, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 398–99, 440–41.