Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature.

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

John Bellamy Foster. 2000. Monthly Review Press, New York, ISBN 1-58367-012-2, $20 (paper), 1-58367-011-4, $55 (cloth) 310 pages

In Marx's Ecology, John Bellamy Foster mounts an exhaustive, at times compelling, defence of Karl Marx's credentials as an "ecological thinker." In so doing, Foster takes on both environmentalists critical of Marx's supposed "Promethean" views of human-environment relations and, to a lesser extent, postmodern writers who emphasize the discursive, rather than material, basis of these relations. Although ploughing through at-times obscure and esoteric fields of socialist theory, Foster's work unearths fertile and still-relevant furrows of Marxian thought on ecology and society.

Foster challenges readings of Marx that regard him as an anthropocentrist and an exponent of the technological domination of nature. Rather, Foster asserts that "Marx's notion of the alienation of human labour was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature" (pg. 9). Foster suggests that Marx's thinking on nature sprang from the same philosophical well as modern, scientific conceptions of the environment, namely materialism. Indeed, Marx is yoked with Darwin as the twin engines of a materialist attack on natural theology and its implications for scientific inquiry and political economy in the nineteenth century. Like Darwin's ideas about natural selection, Marx's ideas about the roots of society and history in productive relations came to be read, inaccurately, as rigidly, mechanically deterministic. Their genius, Foster contends, was in their understanding of the broad, structuring forces of nature and history, combined with their recognition of the contingency of historical events or environmental circumstances.

After documenting the philosophical roots of Marx's interest in human-environment relations, Foster highlights the importance of nature to Marx's own writings. In developing his ideas about the alienation of humans from the products of their labour, Marx emphasized the alienation of labour from the land "and from its active role in the transformation of nature" (pg. 73). Marx's "materialist conception of history" was intimately related to his reading of historical geography and geology and his understanding of the basis of social relations in natural systems, particularly the soil. Foster's ecological gloss on the Communist Manifesto contends that Marx and Engels attacked the division of town and country under bourgeois capitalism as the principle outcome of this alienation from nature.

Perhaps the most notable and enduring of the environmental themes in Marx emerged from his discussions (outlined in Chapter 5) of the "metabolic" relation between nature and society, which reflected his studies of agricultural chemistry and the problem of soil fertility. Marx used the idea of metabolism to theorize both social and ecological relations; the metabolism represented the "natural" flows sustaining both social life and environmental systems. For Marx, a "metabolic rift" was created by capitalism through the dissolution of the connection between the industrial worker and the "natural" conditions of his existence. The metaphor of metabolism has been widely applied by industrial ecologists, environmental sociologists, historians and others studying the material flows sustaining industrial processes or human settlements; Marx's insights introduce important questions of political economy and social relations into this systems analysis approach.

A later chapter explores Marx's approval of and support for Darwinian evolution; Marx wrote Engels after reading The Origin of Species, suggesting it provided "the basis in natural history for our view" (pg. 197). Foster contends that this "view" was not the "struggle for existence" that Darwin posited as the motive force for species adaptation and change, but rather the general premise that organisms and the environment were mutually shaping and changed over time. Foster argues (paraphrasing Marx) that through their reading of Darwin, "Marx and Engels thus saw the human relation to nature in co-evolutionary terms--a perspective that is crucial to an ecological understanding since it allows us to recognize that human beings transform their environment not entirely in accordance with their choosing, but based on conditions provided by natural history" (pg. 205).

Although now six years in print, Marx's Ecology will be of continuing interest for scholars working on questions at the interface of nature and society, including environmental historians, geographers, cultural ecologists, and sociologists. If at times abstruse, it is a largely accessible discussion of Marx and ecology. "Red-Greens," or those active in the area of Marxist environmental scholarship (such as readers of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism), may not find Foster's ideas and arguments altogether novel or complete. At times, Foster stretches his ecological defense of Marx too far (suggesting, for instance, that he presaged ideas about traditional ecological knowledge). Still, this is a stimulating exploration of Marx's contributions to the theorization of social-environmental relations.

Reviewed by Arn Keeling, Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland