Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007
Edited by Leo Panitch & Colin Leys
Monthly Review Press, 2007
304 pages, US$25
As global warming and the general degradation of the world's environment have taken the political centrestage, there is an urgent need for socialists to articulate genuine solutions to the crisis, so as to stop the corporate greenwashers and those dreaming of a mythical "green capitalism" dominating the discussion. Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007 is an important attempt to rise to that challenge.
The volume, which consists of 17 essays, does an excellent job of describing and explaining the multi-faceted ecological crisis of industrial capitalism. The opening article "Weather Report: Images from the Climate Crisis" by Brenda Longfellow records the author's travels to several ecological hot spots: from Haiti in the aftermath of a global-warming exacerbated hurricane, to the Arctic, which is experiencing unprecedented levels of melting.
"China: Hyper-Development and Environmental Crisis" addresses China's growing ecological nightmare, caused by its monumental economic growth where 2.67 million square kilometres have been transformed into desert, with another 10,400 square kilometres per year being lost to the encroaching desert. A third essay deals with the frightening implications of a petro-chemical-driven global agriculture where 40 per cent of the world's surface has been converted to crop or pasture lands, much of which is affected by "soil erosion, salination and deformation, toxic chemical pollution, and unsustainable water practices".
Two essays, Elmar Altvater's "The social and natural environment of fossil capitalism" and Barbara Hariss-White and Elinor Hariss's "Unsustainable capitalism: the politics of renewable energy in the UK", together form a convincing argument that capitalism is simply incapable of a transition to clean energy. Altvater notes that the transition from relying purely on direct flows of solar energy (previous to the Industrial Revolution) to "mineralised stocks of [solar] energy", was a "revolutionary break in the history of the societal relation of human beings to nature". Fossil fuels fit in perfectly with capitalism's relentless drive for profit — being easily transportable and highly concentrated — resulting in its current "inherent and unavoidable dependence on fossil fuels, and particularly on oil". Harriss-White and Harriss note that despite the dominance of an "aspirational discourse" in Blair government circles, where climate change is spoken of as a "top priority"and ever-more ambitious emissions targets are being announced, that in fact little is being done to challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in the British economy and renewable energy is still being blocked by powerful interests.
"Social Metabolism and Environmental Conflicts" by Joan Martinez-Alier, draws upon and elaborates on Marx's key ecological concept of the "metabolic rift" — whereby capitalism, through its rural/urban divide interrupts the natural balance of the soil. However, the essay "The Ecological Question: Can Capitalism Prevail?" by Daniel Buck seems to have missed the point. The premise of the essay is that there is a significant trend of thought within the socialist movement (although no examples are given) that believes that capitalism will simply collapse as a result of the ecological crisis of global warming, and resource depletion such as peak oil.
This premise seems quite false. Surely the main issue of concern for Marxists right now is that of humanity's survival. In fact it is capitalism's resilience, the fact that its unceasing motion towards accumulation continues regardless of the irreversible damage wrought upon the planet, that poses the biggest threat to the survival of humanity. Ironically, while the author rails against a supposed strain of mechanical-determinism within the socialist movement he then falls into a similar trap by assuming that capitalism of its own accord will gravitate to new, presumably clean, energy alternatives, stating that the "paucity of R & D investment in alternative energies … will very likely soon change". His evidence for this is that BP has renamed itself Beyond Petroleum and Chevron has made ads warning about future oil scarcity. At best, Buck's approach is one of misguided optimism, which can feed into illusions that capitalism — which got us into this mess — can somehow get us out of it.
Another weakness of the collection is the complete lack of information and analysis of Cuba's experiments with ecological planning , and the developing revolution in Venezuela. For example, the essay entitled "Feeding the World: Agriculture, Development and Ecology", makes a convincing indictment of the current global petro-chemical driven agriculture and then mentions a range of alternatives such as Brazil's Landless Workers Movement, organic agriculture projects and some other organic food production cooperatives in Europe and the US — but completely fails to mention that Cuba has successfully converted much of its agricultural sector to organic agriculture and pioneered thousands of urban gardens which provide up to 100 per cent of fresh produce in some towns. Similarly the essay on "Eco-Socialism and Democratic Planning" is convincing, but abstract.