One of the problems that has most troubled analysts of global ecological crisis is the question of scale. How momentous is the ecological crisis? Is the survival of the human species in question? What about life in general? Are the basic biogeochemical cycles of the planet vulnerable? Although few now deny that there is such […]
William Morris’ Letters on Epping Forest: An Introduction
In the initial entry for this section, we are publishing “Three Letters on Epping Forest” written by William Morris (1834-1896). Morris was an English artist, master craftsperson, designer, port, socialist, and forerunner of modern ecological thought. His designs for furniture, wallpaper, fabrics, stained glass, and other decorative arts revolutionized Victorian sensibilities spawned the late nineteenth […]
‘William Morris’ Letters on Epping Forest: An Introduction
In the initial entry for this section, we are publishing “Three Letters on Epping Forest” written by William Morris (1834-1896). Morris was an English artist, master craftsperson, designer, poet, socialist, and forerunner of modern ecological thought. His designs for furniture, wallpaper, fabrics, stained glass, and other decorative arts revolutionized Victorian sensibilities and spawned the late […]
Introduction to the Archives of Organizational and Environmental Literature
With this issue, we are introducing and new feature section of O&E entitled Archives of Organizational and Environmental Literature. Consciousness of environmental degradation stretches back over millennia; concern about ecological imperialism associated with the growth of the capitalist world economy dates back five centuries; and alarm arising from the environmental effects of machine capitalism can […]
Capitalism in the Information Age
Not a day goes by that we don’t see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of “globalization.” How is all of this reshaping the […]
The Communist Manifesto and the Environment
Most of the debate about Marx’s relation to environmental thought has focused on the early philosophical critique of capitalism in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and on his later economic critique embodied in Capital in the 1860s – since in both of these works he had a great deal to say about human […]
Hesitations Before Ecology: David Harvey’s Dilemma
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is and ambitious work that considers everything from dialectics to globalization. It is a difficult book to assess because over the course of much if not most of the work Harvey deliberately avoids the closures – not just in concepts but in arguments and synthetic vision as well […]
Free Market Democracy and Global Hegemony
Neoliberalism is usually thought of as a purely economic philosophy, stemming from the work of the arch-conservative economist Friedrich hayek and other twentieth century economist (particularly those associated with the University of Chicago), and involving an attempt to construct a much more complete justification for a pure, self-regulating market economy than could be found in […]
The Crisis of the Earth: Marx’s Theory of Ecological Sustainability as a Nature-Imposed Necessity for Human Production
Any systematic, forward-looking ecological vision must include three elements: (a) a theory of ecological crisis and its relation to human production; (b) a concept of sustainability as a nature-imposed necessity for production; (c) a vision of the transcendence of ecological crisis that establishes sustainability as a core part of any future society. All three elements […]
The Age of Planetary Crisis
The final years of the twentieth century have revealed three critical conditions likely to dominate the history of the coming century: (1) economic stagnation and globalization; (2) environmental decline; and (3) the weakness of antisystemic movements. As economic conditions stagnate and environmental conditions worsen, the material bases will emerge for a new, much broader movement […]
