Abstract
In this compilation of previously published work, John Bellamy Foster discusses the character of the world’s contemporary ecological problems, Marx’s contribution to ecology, and ecological revolution. To those already familiar with Bellamy Foster’s work, there is little that is new here; but the great strength of the essays collected in this volume lies in Bellamy Foster’s deeply informed and sharp analysis of capitalism’s role in the emergence of ecological crisis.
Part I, on ‘Planetary crisis’, lays responsibility for contemporary ecological crisis at the feet of a globalising capital, unable to meet human needs or to limit its destructive impact on nature. Capitalist globalisation is a process that has served to erode and abolish any local or national limits to capital, making it ‘more geared to rapacious accumulation than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots’ (p. 43).
Having established the role of capital at the centre of ecological crisis, later essays in this section discuss the work of Rachel Carson and her role in establishing a connection between production, health and pollution. The subjects of peak oil, energy imperialism and Pentagon reports on the connection between climate change and US national security are all pursued.
A couple of essays in this section stand out as deserving of reaching a wider audience. One takes the reader on a critical journey from the First Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 to the second Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. In this essay, Bellamy Foster analyses the failure, through co-option by capital, of environmental reform. Agenda 21, adopted at Rio, ‘was thought to mark a decisive change in the human relation to the environment’ (p. 131). The hidden reality in Agenda 21 was securing free-market principles, and the primacy of accumulation with a green tinge. As such, Agenda 21 contained a deep and irresolvable contradiction, and the decade that was supposed to witness the implementation of Agenda 21 instead saw the defection of the
The second essay that deserves a wider hearing concerns something too often forgotten by today’s liberal environmentalists: the Jevons Paradox. William Stanley Jevons is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as a theorist of marginal utility. The paradox that bears his name came later in his career, when he was studying energy resources and the fate of the British iron industry. His investigation of the problem of coal reserves and an expanding iron industry led Jevons to theorise that any increase in energy efficiency is followed by an increase in demand for energy, with profound effects on environmental policy, especially in regard to climate.
In the remainder of the collection, Bellamy Foster considers Marx’s contribution to the development of ecology, both scientific and political. The essays are a shorter, modified version of the central chapters of Bellamy Foster’s previous work on this theme (see Bellamy Foster, 2000). There is much more to Bellamy Foster’s approach to Marx and ecology than simply the assembly of environmentally relevant quotations; rather, the approach to Marx hinges on the theory of metabolic rift.
The origins of metabolic rift lie in Marx’s engagement with science, particularly the organic chemistry of Justus von Liebig and Darwinian theories of evolution. Even in the mid-19th century, according to Bellamy Foster, ‘the discoveries of Liebig … while offering hope to farmers, also intensified in some ways the sense of crisis within capitalist agriculture, making farmers more aware of the depletion of soil minerals and the paucity of fertilizer’ (p. 172). Intensive farming depleted fertile lands at the same time as the separation of town and country meant sewage and other wastes were simply dumped, rather than being recycled back to the land as fertilisers. The resulting crisis in agriculture was accompanied by a global, and increasingly, aggressive, search for fertiliser, notably Peruvian guano and Bolivian nitrates.
The usefulness of the theory of metabolic rift, both for Marx and for modern readers, lies in its ability to analyse why capitalism is unsustainable, and why it probably always will be unsustainable. According to Bellamy Foster, ‘Marx’s view of capitalist accumulation and of the necessity of recycling the nutrients of the soil (including the organic wastes of the city) led him to a wider concept of ecological sustainability’ (p. 181). The development of a wider theory of sustainability enables Bellamy Foster to say some new and useful things. Perhaps the most interesting is the parallel between the 19th-century search for nitrates and the search for oil today. During the 19th century, British and US governments intervened in the affairs of Latin American countries to install governments favorable to British and US commercial extraction of nitrates and, subsequently, to combat communism. The world today sees similar interventions in order to secure commercial access to oil and tackle terrorism.
Some critical questions can be raised, however. In the final essays, and in the essays discussing international politics and economy, Bellamy Foster develops an approach that is very close to dependency theory. In this theory, it appears that the global political economy and division of labour are such as to condemn some to always remain peripheral suppliers of raw materials. This is a portrayal many Marxists would reject, as it turns capitalism into a structure, rather than a process. This also leads to a bigger problem with the theory of metabolic rift. This is a controversial reading of Marx for several reasons. In particular, the same few passages keep recurring throughout Bellamy Foster’s work on Marx and ecology, and this might present a reason to doubt just how central metabolic rift actually is in Marx’s political economy.
Rather than arguing over the ‘real’ Marx, however, a better approach might be to ask whether metabolic rift is useful in understanding contemporary ecological crisis and the role of capitalist economy in it. In this sense, it undoubtedly is useful in that it enables Bellamy Foster to go beyond much of the contemporary literature on ecological crisis and to get at some of the deep underlying causes in capitalism. At the same time, metabolic rift also offers a critical approach to much of the literature on liberal environmentalism and environmental economics. For these reasons, Bellamy Foster’s work is highly recommended.