Illustration: Nick Craine
By John Bellamy Foster
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009
This essay is excerpted with permission from John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Monthly Review Press, (2009).
Underlying the goal of ecological revolution is the premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the planet’s entire web of life is threatened and with it the future of civilization.
This is no longer a controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that it raises. At one extreme, there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need is ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme are those who believe the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control it, giving rise to gloomy forebodings.
Although polar opposites, these views nonetheless share a common basis. As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy observed, they each reflect “the belief that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest.”
