John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Organization & Environment

  • Marx and the Dialectic of Orgainc/Inorganic Relations

    “Marx and the Dialectic of Orgainc/Inorganic Relations: A Rejoinder to Salleh and Clark” [PDF] (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 14, no. 4 (December 2001), pp. 451-62. DOI: 10.1177/1086026601144006

    Our article “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature” (Foster & Burkett, 2000) appeared in Oraganization & Environment exactly a 1 year ago. Our purpose in that article was a very specific one made very clear from the beginning. We were concerned with addressing one of the most persistent and seemingly peretrating criticisms of Marx for his supposed insensitivity to ecological issues, namely, the claim that in referring to nature as “the inorganic body of a man” in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884, a work otherwise known for its ecological values, thus, sinning irredeemable against ecology and no less so against dialectics (Marx, 1974, p. 328).

  • William Stanley Jevons and The Coal Question

    “William Stanley Jevons and The Coal Question: An Introduction to Jevons’ ‘Of the Economy of Fuel‘,’” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 14, no. 1 (March 2001), pp. 93-98. DOI: 10.1177/1086026601141005

    William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is best known as a British economist who was one of the pioneers of contemporary neoclassical economic analysis, with its subjective value theory rooted in marginal utility. His applied economics and theoretical insights marked new points of departure for later economist who would more fully shape the neoclassical tradition. But Jevons is also remembered as an early contributor to ecological economics and energetics as a result of his pioneering work The Coal Question (1865-1906), Which raised fundamental issues regarding energy efficiency and the economy of fuel (Martinez-Alier, 2987).

  • The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations

    “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature,” [PDF], (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 13, no. 4 (December 2000), pp. 403-25. DOI: 10.1177/1086026600134002

    Ecological thinkers have suggested that in applying an “organic/inorganic” distinction to humanity-nature, Marx embraced a dualistic and antagonistic conception of the human-nature relationship. The authors confront this view by considering how Marx’s various applications of the concepts organic and inorganic were shaped not only by standard scientific usage but also by Marx’s engagement with Hegel’s natural philosophy and the historical struggle between materialism and teleology. They find that Marx’s usage was based on an explicit disavowal of all mechanistic and dualistic views of the human-nature relationship. In Marx’s mature works, all fixed oppositions between organic and inorganic gave way to a fully dialectical understanding of ecological processes. Marx’s growing concern with the “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature generated by capitalist production led him to link the question of communism with that of ecological sustainability. Their analysis thus sheds light on the opposition between idealist and materialist visions of ecology.

  • E. Ray Lankester, Ecological Materialist

    “E. Ray Lankester, Ecological Materialist: Introduction to ‘The Effacement of Nature by Man,” Organization and Environment, vol. 13, no. 2 (June 2000), 233-35. DOI: 10.1177/1086026600132004

    E. Ray Lankester (1847 to 1929) is largely forgotten today—his impor- . tance is only just now being rediscovered. Yet, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Lankester was at the very pinnacle of the British scientific establishment and a well-known, even larger-than-life, public fig- ure. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1993) The Lost World, the central protagonist is a brilliant but bellicose evolutionary biologist and comparative anatomist, Professor Challenger, who was most certainly modeled after Lankester, with whom Doyle was well acquainted. That Doyle had Lankester in mind at the time that he was writ- ing The Lost World cannot be doubted because in introducing the question of van- ished dinosaurs, Challenger refers to “an excellent monograph [Extinct Animals] by my gifted friend Ray Lankester” (Doyle, 1993, p. 35).
    A member of the Royal Society, Lankester was the most famed Darwinian evolutionist in the generation following Darwin and Huxley, and from 1898 to 1907, he was the director of the British Museum of Natural History—a position that stood at the apex of his profession. Lankester had been Thomas Huxley’s protégé, trained to carry on the evolutionary cause. Later, he became a close friend of Karl Marx in the last few years of Marx’s life and was to be one of the mourners at Marx’s funeral. He was also a close friend of H.G. Wells, an admirer of William Morris, and a mentor to J.B.S. Haldane, one of the great scientists of the next generation, central to the development of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Lankester was to gain considerable public fame as an essayist on natural history, in a tradition established by such great scientists as Huxley and Tyndall. It was in this context that he wrote some of the most powerful essays on ecological degradation ever authored—the most important of which is “The Effacement of Nature by Man” (Lankester, 1913, pp. 365- 372), reprinted in this issue.

  • 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.