John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Michael Redclift

  • Marx’s Ecology and its Historical Significance

    “Marx’s Ecology and its Historical Significance,” in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, second edition (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2010), 106-20.

    (Revised, updated, and expanded version “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective.”)

    John Bellamy Foster Introduction For the early Marx the only nature relevant to the understanding of history is human nature . . . Marx wisely left nature (other than human nature) alone. Lichtheim (1961: 245) Although Lichtheim was not a Marxist, his view here did not differ from the general outlook of Western Marxism at the time he was writing. Yet this same outlook would be regarded by most informed observers on the Left today as laughable. After decades of explorations of Marx’s contributions to ecological discussions and publication of his scientific–technical notebooks, it is no longer a question of whether Marx addressed nature, and did so throughout his life, but whether he can be said to have developed an understanding of the nature–society dialectic that constitutes a crucial starting point for understanding the ecological crisis of capitalist society.

    Due to mounting evidence, Marx’s ecological contributions are increasingly acknowledged. Yet not everyone is convinced of their historical significance. A great many analysts, including some self-styled ecosocialists, persist in arguing that such insights were marginal to his work, that he never freed himself from ‘Prometheanism’ (a term usually meant to refer to an extreme commitment to industrialization at any cost), and that he did not leave a significant ecological legacy that carried forward into later socialist thought or that had any relation to the subsequent development of ecology. In a recent discussion in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, a number of authors argued that Marx could not have contributed anything of…

  • The Canonization of Environmental Sociology

    “The Canonization of Environmental Sociology,” [PDF], Organization & Environment, vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1999), pp. 461-67. (Review essay on Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., The Sociology of the Environment, 3 volumes; and Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology).

    Environmental sociology first arose, as a distinct subfield of sociology, in the 1970s. The Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association was formally launched almost one quarter of a century ago, in 1976. The rise of the subfield was a direct response to the rapid growth of environmentalism in society at large in the 1970s. Sharing the fate of the environmental movement as a whole, environmental sociology seemed to peak in the mid-1970s and then to lose ground in the early 1980s, only to resurge once more with the renewed growth of concern about the global environment in the late 1980s.

  • Rationality and Nature

    “Rationality and Nature,” [PDF], Contemporary Sociology, vol. 24, no. 6 (November 1995), pp. 784-86. (Review of Raymond Murphy, Rationality and Nature; Richard Norgaard, Development Betrayed; and Michael Redclift and Ted Benton, ed. Social Theory and the Global Environment.)

    The emergence in the 1980s and ’90s of an increasingly global approach to ecological problems-marked by the ascendance of such issues as the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, tropical deforestation, and an annual loss of species possibly in the tens of thousands-has altered forever the relation of ecology to the social sciences. Recognizing that the entire planet is increas- ingly subject to ecological depredations and that the time available for addressing these problems is extremely short, social scientists concerned with ecological issues are becoming more aggressive in their demands for the ecological transformation of their disciplines. “Sociology,” as Raymond Murphy declares in the preface to Rationality and Nature, “has been constructed as if nature didn’t matter. It has failed to take the processes of nature into account, perceiving only the social construction of reality. Environmental problems are beginning to send shock waves through this myopic sociological structure. Sociology fabricated as if nature didn’t matter constitutes pre-ecological sociology” (p. x).