101. It would hardly be helpful to describe symptoms without acknowledging the human origins of the ecological crisis. A certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us. Should we not pause and consider this? At this stage, I propose that we focus on the dominant technocratic paradigm and the place of human beings and of human action in the world.
166. Worldwide, the ecological movement has made significant advances, thanks also to the efforts of many organizations of civil society. It is impossible here to mention them all, or to review the history of their contributions. But thanks to their efforts, environmental questions have increasingly found a place on public agendas and encouraged more far-sighted approaches. This notwithstanding, recent World Summits on the environment have not lived up to expectations because, due to lack of political will, they were unable to reach truly meaningful and effective global agreements on the environment.
ecological crisis and the agrarian question in world-historical perspective
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197. What is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a new, integral and interdisciplinary approach to handling the different aspects of the crisis. Often, politics itself is responsible for the disrepute in which it is held, on account of corruption and the failure to enact sound public policies. If in a given region the state does not carry out its responsibilities, some business groups can come forward in the guise of benefactors, wield real power, and consider themselves exempt from certain rules, to the point of tolerating different forms of organized crime, human trafficking, the drug trade and violence, all of which become very difficult to eradicate. If politics shows itself incapable of breaking such a perverse logic, and remains caught up in inconsequential discussions, we will continue to avoid facing the major problems of humanity. A strategy for real change calls for rethinking processes in their entirety, for it is not enough to include a few superficial ecological considerations while failing to question the logic which underlies present-day culture. A healthy politics needs to be able to take up this challenge.
Metabolic rift is Karl Marx's notion of the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism",[1] i.e. Marx's key conception of ecological crisis tendencies under capitalism. Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist agricultural production and the growing division between town and country.
As opposed to those who have attributed to Marx a disregard for nature and responsibility for the environmental problems of the Soviet Union and other purportedly communist states, Foster sees in the theory of metabolic rift evidence of Marx's ecological perspective. The theory of metabolic rift "enable[ed] [Marx] to develop a critique of environmental degradation that anticipated much of present-day ecological thought",[4] including questions of sustainability as well as the limits of agricultural production using concentrated animal feeding operations.[5] Researchers building on the original Marxist concept have developed other similar terms like carbon rift.
In Capital, Marx integrated his materialist conception of nature with his materialist conception of history.[20] Fertility, Marx argued, was not a natural quality of the soil, but was rather bound up with the social relations of the time. By conceptualizing the complex, interdependent processes of material exchange and regulatory actions that link human society with non-human nature as "metabolic relations," Marx allowed these processes to be both "nature-imposed conditions" and subject to human agency,[21] a dynamic largely missed, according to Foster, by the reduction of ecological questions to issues of value.[22]
The central contribution of the metabolic rift perspective is to locate socio-ecological contradictions internal to the development of capitalism. Later socialists expanded upon Marx's ideas, including Nikolai Bukharin in Historical Materialism (1921) and Karl Kautsky in The Agrarian Question (1899), which developed questions of the exploitation of the countryside by the town and the "fertilizer treadmill" that resulted from metabolic rift.[23]
The metabolic rift is characterized in different ways by historical materialists. For Jason W. Moore, the distinction between social and natural systems is empirically false and theoretically arbitrary; following a different reading of Marx, Moore views metabolisms as relations of human and extra-human natures. In this view, capitalism's metabolic rift unfolds through the town-country division of labor, itself a "bundle" of relations between humans and the rest of nature. Moore sees it as constitutive of the endless accumulation of capital.[27] Moore's perspective, although also rooted in historical materialism, produces a widely divergent view from that of Foster and others about what makes ecological crisis and how it relates to capital accumulation.
Marx thus linked the crisis of pollution in cities with the crisis of soil depletion. The rift was a result of the antagonistic separation of town and country, and the social-ecological relations of production created by capitalism were ultimately unsustainable.[35] From Capital, volume 1, on "Large-scale Industry and Agriculture":
David Harvey points out that much of the environmental movement has held (and in some areas continues to hold) a profound anti-urban sentiment, seeing cities as "the highpoint of plundering and pollution of all that is good and holy on planet earth."[49] The problem is that such a perspective focuses solely on a particular form of nature, ignoring many people's lived experience of the environment and the importance of cities in ecological processes and as ecological sites in their own right.[50]
However, critics link these efforts to "managerial environmentalism,"[56] and worry that eco-urbanism too closely falls into an "urban ecological security" approach,[57] echoing Mike Davis' analysis of securitization and fortress urbanism. A Marxist critique might also question the feasibility of sustainable cities within the context of a global capitalist system.
The Environment has been a prominent part of the political agenda since the 1960s. The expansion of the consumer society after the Second World War in North America and Europe increased the pressure on the environment to such an extent that it became alarming. A more affluent and better educated population showed its concern for the environment and demanded a cleaner and healthier environment. The environmental movement that originated from these concerns was not very historically oriented and regarded the contemporary problems as a unique product of 20th century capitalism and industrial progress. However, some realised that a historical perspective was needed to understand the origins of the contemporary environmental crisis. This is where environmental history came into being.
This essay is divided into two parts. The first and smallest part explores what environmental history is and some or its roots. The second part deals with some of the issues in environmental history and explores the intellectual and philosophical background behind our ecological crisis. This looks in the way people though about the natural world around them during particular different historical periods. But environmental history is not solely an intellectual history and is also about the impact of humankind on the natural world and the influence of the natural world on human history. The final part of this essay will therefore look at the development of agriculture and the impact on the landscape.
Greek rationalism and Christianity created a concept in which nature was conceived as having no value until humanised. Two other aspects of this tradition are anthropocentrism and the linear conception of time instead of cyclical. This meant that history was teleological, which means that it was pointing in one direction to an ultimate goal of perfection. This manner of thinking is known as the Judeo-Christian tradition. In environmentalist literature it is not uncommon to blame the roots of our ecological crisis on the attitudes of the Judeo-Christian tradition towards nature. Lynn White, an American historian, first conceived this hypothesis in 1967 and published his ideas in an article in Science entitled "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis". In this article he argued that Judeo-Christianity preaches that humans are separate from and superior to the rest of nature. He wrote that "Christianity ... not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature". In this view nature was created by God to be used and dominated by humankind. According to White, this attitude has translated into harmful attitudes and actions towards nature with the application of technology during.17
ENVIR 401 Analysis of Environmental Cases (5) SSc/NScGuides students through the analysis of environmental case studies. Encourages synthesis of information from diverse sources and stakeholder perspectives. Frameworks are provided to help students work through the complexities of socioecological systems in a systematic way. Culminates with significant group project and presentation. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in ENVIR 301 and ENVIR 302. Offered: AWSp.View course details in MyPlan: ENVIR 401
This course explores the major themes of U.S. Environmental History, examining changes in the American landscape, the development of ideas about nature in the United States, and the history of U.S. environmental activism. Throughout the course, we will be exploring definitions of nature, environment, and environmental history as we investigate the interactions between Americans and their physical worlds. HIST 109 provides an introduction to environmental history as a field of scholarship that examines changing relationships between human beings and the natural world. Environmental history centers on the examination of various questions about such relationships, including exploring how natural forces shape history, how humankind affects nature, and how those ecological changes then reciprocally influence human life. Major themes of the course include: (1) recognizing that American history has a natural context; (2) that relationships between nature and culture change over time; and (3) that knowledge about nature is socially constructed and historically contingent. 2ff7e9595c
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