#ian angus

[revolutionaryeye]

How the stop industrial nations polluting the earth and creating global warming?

Start finding out by reading Ian Angus-he seems to know his stuff:- http://socialistreview.org.uk/413/entering-age-humans For more in-depth read his journal:- http://climateandcapitalism.com/

[gospelofthekingdom]

Recognizing that capitalism causes environmental destruction is the beginning of ecological wisdom, but only the beginning.  Capitalism has been wrecking ecosystems for hundreds of years, but its assault on the entire Earth System at once is a recent development. That unique transformation requires explanation.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, capital’s need to grow drove an epochal shift to a fossil fuel-based economy, becoming, in Engels’s telling phrase, a “squanderer of past solar heat.” Using solar energy that has been preserved underground for millions of years allowed production to break through the limitations of wind, water, and muscle. The cost of obtaining and using fossil fuel was vastly less than the resulting profits. As we know now, there was a huge hidden cost in environmental destruction, especially the disruption of the carbon cycle, but such costs don’t factor into capital’s accounting.

Burning fossil fuels pumped carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, leading to a disruption of the carbon cycle that manifests as acidification of the oceans and climate change. The rift in Earth’s carbon metabolism widened slowly for a century, and then reached a tipping point in the years following the Second World War. The Anthropocene, which in retrospect, had been a possibility since the Industrial Revolution began, became a reality in the second half to the twentieth century, when the rift in the carbon cycle suddenly expanded past the point of no return.”

-Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, p. 127

[gospelofthekingdom]

In its endless pursuit of profit, capital destroys the soil, even though that will deprive future generations of food. Timber industries wiped out the great forests that once covered Europe, and never replaced them, because "the long production time . . . and the consequent length of the turnover period, makes forest culture a line of business united to private and hence to capitalist production" (Marx). Nature's cycles operate at speeds that have evolved over many millennia--forcing them in any way inevitably destabilizes the cycle and produces unpleasant results. Fertile land is destroyed, forests are clear-cut, and fish populations collapse, all because capitalism needs to operate at speeds much faster than the natural cycles of reproduction and growth. Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg justly describe such irrationality as "processes of self-destruction":

"Our economic system is now engaged in ever more inventive ways to consume the very life-support systems upon which we rely as a species; moreover, this irrational activity is reinvented as a perfectly normal and sensible process to which we all contribute and from which we all benefit."

There is, in short, an insuperable conflict between nature's time and capital's time--between the cyclical Earth System processes that have developed over millions of years, and capital's need for rapid production, delivery, and profit." 

Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, p. 121-122

[tibaert]

Leven versus kapitaal

===   LE CAPITALISME CONTRE LA VIE SUR LA TERRE Ian Angus   Les phrases ci-dessous sont tirées d’un rapport récent sur les conséquences du changement climatique : «L’élévation du niveau de la mer, les changements dans la qualité de l’eau et la sécurité de l’alimentation ainsi que l’augmentation de la fréquence des phénomènes météorologiques extrêmes sont susceptibles d’entraîner la migration…

Leven versus kapitaal

[deadassdiaspore]

[redshift-13]

As the great American labor organizer and socialist Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones said: "Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts."

by Ian Angus

Twenty years ago, a list of books about Marxism and ecology would have been very short indeed — and most of them would have been hostile to Marxism. Even the friendly books argued that Marxism needed a major overhaul before it could be considered relevant to environmental concerns.

That’s changed. Two books published at the turn of the century, Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature, and John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, initiated a new wave of work by scholar-activists who, as Burkett wrote, “consider people-nature relations from the standpoint of class relations and the requirements of human emancipation.”

The following list does not pretend to be complete. I could easily double or triple the number of titles without covering the field, but I’ve tried to keep it to a manageable length. That forced me to drop some very good books that don’t quite qualify as “essential.”

With one exception, all were published in the past 20 years. All are still in print, so far as I know.

My principal criteria were subjective: these are books that I have found particularly valuable, that I refer to frequently, and that I often recommend to others. I make no apology for including two of my own books — if I didn’t think people ought to read them, I wouldn’t have written them.

An Ecosocialist Starter Kit

Each person approaches ecosocialism with a different background and different interests. A basic book for one might be too difficult for another. With that caveat in mind, these are books I often recommend to people who want an introduction.

Michael Löwy. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe (Haymarket Books, 2015)

Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster. What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2011)

Chris Williams, Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010)

Brian Tokar. Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change (New Compass Press, 2014)

Marxist theory and ecology

These are essential books but they are not easy reading. They require careful attention and study. Each investigates Marx’s views on the relationship between society and nature from a different angle —and as Marx said somewhere, there is no easy road to knowledge.

Paul Burkett. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Haymarket Books, 2014)

John Bellamy Foster. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000)

Environment and history

The central premise of historical materialism is that the state of the world can only be understood as a product of historical change. These books both illustrate the historical materialist approach to the global environment, and illuminate developments in our past that still shape our world.

Mike Davis. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2002)

Martin Empson. Land & Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History (Bookmarks, 2014)

Peter Linebaugh. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2008)

Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016

General

These books address specific issues and topics from an ecological Marxist perspective.

Ian Angus. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press 2016)

Ian Angus and Simon Butler. Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis. (Haymarket Books, 2011)

Mike Davis. Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006)

Ashley Dawson. Extinction: A Radical History (OR Books, 2016)

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (Monthly Review Press, 2010)

Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. The Dialectical Biologist (Harvard University Press, 1987)

Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams. Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation (Monthly Review Press. 2017)

Daniel Tanuro. Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work (Merlin Press, 2013)

Del Weston. The Political Economy of Global Warming: The Terminal Crisis (Routledge, 2014)

If you think I’ve missed something essential, a book that should be on every ecosocialist’s bookshelf, please mention it in the Comments section below with a sentence or two explaining why you think it should be in C&C’s next reading list.”

[proletarianmonk]

[proletarianmonk]