theory

By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

“During the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, the phrase ‘Turtles & Teamsters, Together At Last’ jumped from protest sign to guiding philosophy. It symbolically described hundreds of thousands of Sierra Club activists (who dressed as sea turtles) and union members who marched to demand that human and environmental concerns be included in discussions of global free trade regimes. ‘Turtles & Teamsters’ also put a name to the increasingly common alliances between environmentalists and labor unions, which were no longer willing to accept that protecting the environment and jobs were mutually exclusive conditions.”

Jay McKinnon, LongBeachPolitics.org

Turtles and teamsters, together at last. Ten years after the anti-globalization movement shut down the World Trade Organization negotiations, that slogan, and the vision it embodied of trade unionists and environmentalists joining forces to halt neoliberal globalization in its tracks, continues to inspire activists in both camps. In the midst of the current global recession and a steadily worsening environmental situation, there are hopeful signs that, rather than retreating to their respective corners, trade unionists and environmentalists, particularly in the United States, are working more closely than ever to advance their common struggles.

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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.”

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