The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. […]
Tag Archives | First Author
The Sociology of Ecology
Environmental sociology has been divided in recent years by a debate between realists and constructionists centering on the knowledge claims of ecological science. Following a consid- eration of this debate and its relation to both environmental sociology and the “sociology of ecology,” a “realist constructionism” is advanced, taking as its concrete case the conflict in […]
Ecology
By John Bellamy Foster on July 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Nearly fifteen years ago one of us observed: “We have only four decades left in which to gain control over our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible ecological decline.” Today, with a quarter-century still remaining in this projected […]
Classical Marxism and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Ever since Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) wrote his magnum opus, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, the entropy law (or the second law of thermodynamics) has been viewed as a sine qua non of ecological economics. Georgescu-Roegen argued strongly that both the entropy law and the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of matter–energy) were incompatible […]
Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Rachel Carson was born just over 100 years ago in 1907. Her most famous book Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often seen as marking the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although an immense amount has been written about Carson and her work, the fact that she was objectively a “woman of the left” […]
Empire of Barbarism
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
“A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, […]
Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2004 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
According to Frederick Buell (2003) in his book ‘From Apocalypse to Way of Life’, perceptions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s were both narrower in scope and more apocalyptic (usually Malthusian) in tone than those of today. Rather than diminishing, the problem of the environment has only expanded in the years since Rachel […]
The American Empire
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., in which he declared that the peace that the United States sought was “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” His remarks were a response to criticisms of the United States […]
Pox Americana
This volume brings together the work of leading Marxist analysts of imperialism to examine the burning question of our time—the nature and prospects of the U.S. imperial project currently being given shape by war and occupation in the Middle East.
Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism
This introduction to “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces” reassesses Sergei Podolinsky’s place in the history of ecological economics together with Marx and Engels’s reaction to Podolinsky’s work. The authors show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Podolinsky did not establish a plausible thermodynamic basis for the labor theory of value that could have been […]
