Creating an Ecological Society

Toward a Revolutionary Transformation

Fred Magdoff, Chris Williams

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781583676318
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sickened by the contamination of their water, their air, of the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing them. It is now clearer than ever that capitalism is also degrading the Earth’s ability to support other forms of life. Capitalism’s imperative—to make profit at all costs and expand without end—is destabilizing Earth’s climate, while increasing human misery and inequality on a planetary scale. Already, hundreds of millions of people are facing poverty in the midst of untold wealth, perpetual war, growing racism, and gender oppression. The need to organize for social and environmental reforms has never been greater. But crucial as reforms are, they cannot solve our intertwined ecological and social crises. Creating an Ecological Society reveals an overwhelmingly simple truth: Fighting for reforms is vital, but revolution is essential.

Because it aims squarely at replacing capitalism with an ecologically sound and socially just society, Creating an Ecological Society is filled with revolutionary hope. Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who have devoted their lives to activism, Marxist analysis, and ecological science, provide informed, fascinating accounts of how a new world can be created from the ashes of the old. Their book shows that it is possible to envision and create a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable. And possible—not one moment too soon—for society to change fundamentally and be brought into harmony with nature.

PART ONE

Why an Alternative Is Essential

1

The Social and Ecological Planetary Emergency

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.

—SITTING BULL, LEADER OF THE HUNKPAPA LAKOTA SIOUX¹

Climate change is a social justice issue. With the climate crisis, as with the economic crisis, governments have prioritized the interests of those who caused the problem, despite the consequences for ordinary people. We are not “all in it together.” An increased understanding of this has led the climate movement to grow in size and to adopt more radical slogans.

—SUZANNE JEFFERY²

ON JUNE 24, 2012, IN THE GALÁPAGOS archipelago, birthplace of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lonesome George took his final breath. This giant Pinta Island tortoise, five feet long and over two hundred pounds, was the last surviving member of Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii. Giant tortoises can expect to live well into their second century. At roughly a hundred years old when he died, George was in the prime of his life.

A sad little note scrawled on a blackboard at the Darwin Research Station marked Lonesome George’s death: “We have witnessed extinction. Hopefully we will learn from it.”³ But what can we learn from these giant tortoises? What can we learn from this irrevocable loss? What is the cultural, scientific, and biological significance of these tortoises to humans?

When the Spanish first landed on the islands 600 miles off the coast of modern-day Ecuador in the sixteenth century, giant tortoises numbered around a quarter million. Because they were so abundant, the archipelago was named after the old Spanish word for tortoise, galápago. Three centuries later, in his diary entry of September 15, 1835, Darwin noted what “seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals,” which have “of course been greatly reduced.” Darwin went on: “It is said that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as 700,” though giant tortoises were still abundant when he made his visit.⁴ On October 8, Darwin describes himself and the ship’s crew as living “entirely on tortoise meat” and that “young tortoises make excellent soup,” but he nevertheless found “the meat to my taste is indifferent.”⁵

Almost inevitably, then, these giant tortoises formed part of Darwin’s earliest musings on natural selection:

When I recollect the fact that [from] the form of the body, shape of scales and general size, the Spaniards can at once pronounce from which island any tortoise may have been brought; when I see these islands in sight of each other and possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure and filling the same place in nature, I must suspect they are only varieties. The only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant asserted difference between the wolf-like fox of East and West Falkland Islands. If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of archipelagoes will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of species.⁶

The phrase “such facts would undermine the stability of species,” written down for the first time in his notebooks documenting the five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle, point toward a theory that only emerged in print two decades later. Immediately recognized by the other revolutionary giant of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, the importance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, could not be overestimated. According to Marx, Darwin’s book, published in 1859, was an “epoch-making work” that formed “the basis in natural history for our view,” because it undermined the God-centered view of creation and gave life science a firm theoretical footing on solid materialist ground.⁷

Giant tortoises have existed on Earth for ten million years. In contrast, Homo sapiens have walked the Earth for approximately 200,000 years, a mere 2 percent of that time.* Yet in less than the life span of one individual giant tortoise, the subspecies has gone from numerous enough to fill the holds of ships to the extermination of all of C. nigra abingdonii by humans. In the world as it currently exists, the extinction of this giant tortoise leaves us not with the question “will we learn?” but with “which species will be threatened next?”

Perhaps it will be the leatherback turtle. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s oldest and largest nature conservation organization, which compiles the Red List of Threatened Species, has placed this primordial leviathan on the “critically endangered” list—one category away from “extinct in the wild.”

Relics of a distant past, leatherbacks have existed on Earth practically unchanged for 100 million years—ten times longer than the Galápagos tortoises. Next to the leatherback, Homo sapiens pales into temporal insignificance. Mature leatherbacks can be over six feet long, four feet wide, and weigh up to a ton. Able to swim to depths of 3,600 feet—over three times deeper than a nuclear submarine—leatherbacks change their body temperature to cope with the cold, their pliant shells allowing them to survive the immense pressure of the ocean depths.

To sit on a tropical beach in the middle of the night, close to an egg-laying mother, listening to the heaving power of her gargantuan lungs, gazing at a creature of such evolutionary perfection, is a deeply affecting moment. How much will humanity lose if these creatures are lost forever?

We don’t know exactly what the average leatherback life span is, but we do know that species placed on the critically endangered list are likely to be extinct within ten years. Leatherbacks have experienced a population decline of more than 90 percent since 1980.

The turtles are threatened by the full gamut of economic activities dictated by the profit motive. Industrialized fishing methods, such as gillnet, trawl, and long-line fishing, trap the turtles as unwanted “bycatch.” One study of Pacific Ocean turtles estimates that more than 200,000 loggerheads and 50,000 leatherbacks are killed each year solely through inadvertent entanglement in long-line fishing.⁸

Just as turtles have become rare, the system responds and sets in motion further declines. Local consumption of turtles and their eggs was once a sustainable practice, but with the growth in world trade, a highly profitable multinational black market in turtle eggs has developed. While a turtle egg might sell for $1 in Costa Rica (a not insignificant sum considering a single nest can hold more than fifty of the perfectly round, pearl-white eggs), international consumption and smuggling associated with the drug trade means the price can reach as high as $100 to $300 per egg in international markets.⁹

As turtles return to the same beach that they were born on, largely unchecked coastal economic growth for tourism or real estate development is a further threat. Electric lighting on previously dark beaches confuses the turtles’ navigation, resulting in fewer females making it onto land to lay their eggs.

Along with thousands of other species, leatherbacks are threatened with extinction by an economic and social system that is based on relentless, profit-driven expansion that promotes industrial fishing methods, chemical pollution, and egg harvesting for the black market. Which begs the question: How can we save these magnificent wild animals and, by extension, humans?

The current biodiversity crisis, whereby species are being driven to extinction at rates up to a thousand times greater than the geological statistical norm, is simply one aspect of a global ecological crisis. Whereas in the past such crises were local or regional, humans are now changing the whole biosphere in a multiplicity of ways: our actions are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere; acidifying the oceans; contaminating the soil, the water, the air, and organisms worldwide with toxic chemicals; altering the land through deforestation of vast areas of tropical and boreal forests; and warming the entire planet. Whereas once we wiped out individual species, now we threaten whole biota.

THE AGE OF HUMAN-INDUCED GLOBAL CHANGES

The decline of sea turtle populations is but one example of the changes to global ecosystems that have been caused by human activity. Since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, humans have lived in the geological epoch called the Holocene. But according to the 2016 panel of geologists convened to examine the issue, in their report to the Geological Congress, we have now entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, which is dominated by the activities of a single species. Scientists have drawn this conclusion from an analysis of the long-term impacts of human activities on the biosphere: climate change from fossil fuel combustion that increases carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and causes ocean acidification, plastic pollution, the disruption of the natural cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus by modern methods of agriculture, the widespread introduction of toxins into the environment, and the irradiation of the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing.

One way of viewing these huge changes has been put forward by an international group of scientists who proposed nine planetary boundaries “within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.”¹⁰ We have already crossed or are close to crossing four of these nine boundaries—climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. As lead researcher Will Steffen notes, “Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human well-being in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries.”¹¹ One of the proposed boundaries is biodiversity, or “biosphere integrity.” As Colin Waters and his colleagues note in Science magazine:

Although Earth still retains most of the species that were present at the start of the Holocene, even conservative estimates of extinction rates since 1500 CE are far above mean per-million-year background rates, with a notable increase from the 19th century onward. Current trends of habitat loss and overexploitation, if maintained, would push Earth into the sixth mass extinction event (with ~75 percent of species extinct) in the next few centuries, a process that is probably already underway.¹²

The article goes on to note that the most significant reason for mass extinction is due to land-use changes and the restriction of “wild” nature to smaller and smaller areas. “The terrestrial biosphere has undergone a dramatic modification from 1700 CE, when almost 50% of the global ice-free land area was wild and only ~5% was intensively used by humans, to 2000 CE, when the respective percentages were 25% and 55%.”¹³

Species evolve in interaction with one another and depend on the presence of others. Thus, when one species becomes extinct or shifts its range, detrimental effects may occur to the stability and survival prospects of other species and the healthy functioning of the ecosystem as a whole.

The Warming Planet

The Paris Climate Agreement, signed in December 2015 by world leaders from 194 countries and the European Union, states that human-caused climate change represents “an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet” that will require “deep reductions in global emissions.” The agreement notes “with serious concern” the “significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”¹⁴

The agreement goes on: “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.”¹⁵ Currently there is no mechanism in place to achieve these lofty—and urgently necessary—objectives.

Based on temperature records dating back to the nineteenth century, 2016 was the third year in a row to set a global temperature record. Compared to the base period of 1880-1920, the earth was warmer in 2016 by an average of 2.27°F (1.26°C), a level last seen over 100,000 years ago.¹⁶ Even if we stopped all production of fossil fuels right now, today, we are already locked in to at least another 1.8°F (1°C) of average warming. The amount of warming guaranteed if the Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement do everything they say they’re going to, will put the world on track for a truly catastrophic warming of up to 7.2°F (4°C), warmer than the planet has ever been during our existenc...