The Ecology of Destruction

By John Bellamy Foster

Global warming and other crucial environmental problems have crossed critical thresholds. The question is no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes await but how great these will be.

The point is that not just global warming but many of other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.

Lovelock's "revenge of Gaia"--what Frederick Engels, in the nineteenth century called the "revenge" of nature, now writ large on a planetary scale--will not be automatically overcome simply through a rupture with the logic of the existing system. Yet, such a rupture remains the necessary first step in any rational attempt to save and advance human civilization.

(Monthly Review; February 2007, Volume 58 Number 9)