Join the Cosmonaut Ecocrew as they discuss Andreas Malm’s piercing 2016 text Fossil Capital and attempt to dispel the myriad of myths that have been erected around the energetic transition to coal. The fateful intertwining in mid-19th century British cotton districts of capital and fossil fuels is examined in the context of class struggle, the ascendancy of the steam engine, and alternative futures that were incompatible with the logic of capital.
Check the previous episodes of this series:
Remi and Niko join Comrade Adam from Red Library to discuss Kohei Saito’s Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy: Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. We discuss the concept of metabolism, Marx’s evolution of thought on ecology being the core realm of capitalist crisis, agricultural chemistry, the role of a Marxist ecosocialist perspective to stop the destruction of capital across the planet, and much more even including Žižek’s thoughts on ecology!
Note: The episode ends a bit abruptly as technology bailed on us in the final moments.
Join us for the second installment in Cosmonaut’s critically acclaimed ecology podcast series to discuss Jason Moore’s “Capitalism in the Web of Life”. Niko, Matthew and Remi discuss how this work merges concepts from Marxist ecology and world-systems analysis to reveal how capitalism organizes nature as a whole oikeios, and how this sets limits to capitalist accumulation once “the Four Cheaps” (energy, food, work and raw materials) become scarce and capitalism is forced to shift to new regimes of accumulation. The team talks about how Moore’s concepts of oikeios and capitalism-in-nature extends the dialectical relationship of organism and environment, and how this can be applied for a socialist project, as well as addressing the critiques of Moore’s work from other ecosocialist schools.
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Capitalist food production is based on ecological destruction, imperialism, inhumane labor practices, and the degradation of human health. A socialist program that guarantees healthy food for all is the only alternative. By Katie Paige, Kelly Alana, and Renato Flores.
The first surplus in human history is food. Food needs to be produced by labor, but labor can produce more food than is required for the producer to survive. This generates a surplus which can be used to feed others, who can then take on other jobs. Agricultural surpluses facilitated the settlement of humans into towns and cities, the first steps to developing society as we know it. Indeed, the rhythms of food production and consumption have been deeply ingrained in our culture since time immemorial. Cultivation and communal eating rituals are commonplace: harvest festivals, potlucks, the Passover Seder, or the Christian communion are just a few examples.
Today, billions of people are still intimately involved in the cultivation of crops. But the distribution is hardly uniform. While 70% of the world population are farmers, agricultural workers constitute only 2% of the population in industrialized countries. This means that for 98% of people in the Global North, food is acquired through the capitalist market. Meanwhile, the entry of capitalism into food production has completely changed the way we produce and consume food. The value of food is reduced to the profits which can be obtained, and every step is taken to maximize these profits. As consumers of a commodity, we have been alienated from our historical relationship with food, with severe consequences for the environment and our health. The production process behind our food and its overall effects on the environment is concealed. We only see the abstract labor of food producers in the shape of heads of lettuce or shrink-wrapped cuts of meat.
Food was not always in the circuit of capitalism. Historically, most farming methods have been sustainable, with a deep relationship to nature and its rhythms. Methodical large-scale environmental damage only arose with the advent of capitalism. This is not to say that environmental damage did not exist, but it was only with the advent of resource-intensive, cash-crops such as sugar and cotton that cultivation became unsustainable by design rather than by accident.1 As the Atlantic capitalist-slave economy was being formed, plantation owners would privatize an “unclaimed” piece of land, overexploit it in the search for shorter and shorter production cycles, and later abandon it, moving on to the next place. The slow westward drift of the Southern system of slave plantations in the US is a testament to this.
With the export of commodities far from where they were produced, nutrients were no longer returning to the ground they came out of. This was theorized as a global “metabolic rift” between the soil and its products, a disconnect in the inputs and outputs in the agricultural system.2 At first, plantation owners left behind an exhausted soil which took decades to replenish. But eventually, there was no new land for producers to move into. Instead of moving to sustainable agricultural cycles with lower yields, alternatives were sought after which would bring nutrients back into the soil in the shape of fertilizers. The first fertilizer used en masse was guano. It was harvested first in Peru, and later across many islands in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean. The guano trade was the starting shot for the mass-scale transport of nutrients across the world. And, in good capitalist fashion, it led to imperialist expansion and conflict. The United States passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856 which allowed private citizens to lay claims to guano deposits in uninhabited islands, followed by the annexation of nearly 100 islands in the Caribbean. But the largest deposits lay further South, which the governments of Chile, Bolivia, and Peru fought over in the Pacific War of 1879-84.
The victory of Chile in the Pacific War gave Chile hegemony over the Southern Pacific and contributed to its comparative wealth amongst its neighbors. But guano mining was not enough, it was geographically limited and required large supply chains which were endangered in the first World War. The use of guano as a fertilizer was superseded by the development of the industrial Haber-Bosch process, which produces ammonia out of nitrogen, hydrogen, and a great amount of energy. Soils could now be kept productive for decades, as this process allowed for the mass production of artificial fertilizers. But the input-output disconnect was not eliminated, just reframed. This modern version of the metabolic rift is described by John Bellamy Foster: the inputs of the agricultural system (such as commercial fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and fuels) come at a high energy cost and are made into “downstream products” which are processed over and over again before being sent to retail outlets for sale to the public.3 The lack of circular flows in the system is reflected as an unbalanced flow of energy and nutrients, generating an unsustainable system.
The change in food production and distribution accelerated throughout the last century. Capital has permeated everything we eat. It wrestled the control and distribution of food away from small producers and commodified a basic need for survival. Today, small farming has given way to cash crops, monocultures, and factory farms. With this dominance, capitalist agriculture has increased its damage to the environment by orders of magnitude, transforming depleted agricultural sites into wastelands through excessive fertilizer and pesticide use. And if the waters become too polluted and the soil is too contaminated to continue production, the inherent mobility of capital means operations can just be moved. No mind is paid to the people whose livelihoods have been destroyed and who can no longer produce food for themselves, forcing them to rely on imports or starve. Modern farming destroys all in the name of profit, a “rape and run”.4
Sale points have also been completely transformed: local and seasonal markets have been replaced with massive grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and convenience stores. Putting the global market in charge seems like an advantage. Certain fruits and vegetables appear always in season, as global supply chains mean seasons have been abolished. It’s always time for apples if you can bring them from Chile or New Zealand. But the choice we can make in a supermarket is limited. Profit determines what grocery shelves stock, so processed cash crops like sugar, corn, and soy become capitalism’s favorites– and nearly everything we can purchase contains both in high quantity. Profit also determines how food is stocked with disastrous consequences. As it is more profitable for supermarkets to have an overabundance of produce, large food waste is generated at the point of retail. The numbers are gigantic: over a hundred kilograms of food per person is thrown away per year in industrialized countries.
To compound things, as we have become further alienated from the production of our food, we have also seen a massive rise in preventable food-related illnesses, especially in the Global North. Diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are now the largest killers in the United States. And due to capitalism’s twisted logic, treatment or mitigation of these diseases has become extremely profitable for pharmaceutical companies. From a liberal point of view, the state should step in and regulate the externalities and prevent large ecological damage. But instead, regulatory agencies are living proof of the Marxist theory of the state. They are full of former and future agribusiness executives who turn a blind eye to the gross safety violations or even work with these businesses to help bolster sales and profits. Tax loopholes, lax workplace regulations, and the use of immigrant and prison labor have made agribusiness companies billions in profit, with externalities pushed on taxpayers.
So where does a socialist program for food start? It must seek to alleviate and eliminate all the effects capitalist production has. One must start by naming the issues. In the rest of the essay we detail some of the most pressing, namely, (1) the current use of food as an imperialist spear, (2) the extreme impact our meat diets cause on the environment and how this level of meat consumption is unsustainable, (3) labor in the meat industry, and (4) the systemic racism that affects food distribution.
The adverse effects of international free-market policy on food affordability has a long history. Capitalism in Ireland led to the Irish Potato Famine taking the form that it did. The opening of India and China by force to capitalist markets in the late 1800s is responsible for the reappearance of large famines in those regions.5 Today, rather than force, it takes more subtle forms. American and European agribusiness has often required the help of the World Trade Organization to extend their domination to the international market. The earlier imperialist flow is reversed: rather than the profits realizable from international exports excluding the locals from the food market as in late 1800s India and China, the enforcement of free-trade policies causes a flooding of the local market with cheap imported food goods. This leads to the disappearance of local production– which means the loss of food self-sufficiency– while the Global North remains self-sufficient. This can only result in mass-scale domination. Once international prices, largely uncontrollable by local and national governments, increase again, food becomes unaffordable. Famines are brought back to areas from which they had largely disappeared. Good examples of this are the neoliberal policies imposed on the Horn of Africa in the 1960-70s, which are directly linked to present-day famines.
After their local agriculture is destroyed, countries in the Global South usually turn to the same “rape and run” capitalist agriculture to produce cash crops that can be sold in the market. Chemical companies like Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont rebrand themselves as biotech companies, and cloak themselves with a mission of “feeding the world”, a cover for rapacious profit-seeking. These companies bioengineer and later patent the seeds of certain cash crops, like corn and soy, to withstand the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.6 Farmers are no longer able to save their seeds and replant them the following season but instead are locked into buying seeds and their corresponding pesticides from the company every year. This is highly profitable for these corporations, but traps farmers in a loop of spiraling debt which eventually leads to loss of their lands– or even of their lives, as in the plague of farmer suicides in India.
Many countries become reliant on very few, or even single crops, like sugar, cocoa, or coffee, to balance their budgets. This not only causes accelerated environmental degradation but also subordinates the lifelines of countries into the chaos of the market. Price fluctuations can make or break economies. Indeed, the economic instability of Ghana which followed the declining price of cocoa in the world market was one of the factors leading to the coup that removed the pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah from power.7 Price fluctuations can even be used by malicious state actors to destabilize popular leftist leaders through the tanking of exchange rates. Food is a spear of imperialism because those who feed you control you. Basic necessities can be made unaffordable, and thus any “rebel” leader can be brought to heel easily with the threat of mass starvation. This was done several times to rouse opposition to Chavismo just before elections in Venezuela. In this context, it hardly comes as a surprise that one of Thomas Sankara’s primary emphases was on food self-sufficiency, or that the Zapatista movement centers the struggle around corn.8
Not all foods are created equally. Some foods take a much greater toll to produce than others. These include two products heavily consumed in western countries: industrial meat and dairy. The high profitability of these sectors in the last century has led to a quadrupling of meat production in the last 60 years. This is not only because of its production structure, which gives it the opportunity to extract a larger amount of surplus labor, meaning higher profits down the line, but also due to the shortening of production cycles via growth hormones and creative engineering. It also has provided a profitable venue for excess cash-crops such as soy for feed.
But this is not simple. Raising and slaughtering approximately 60 billion livestock per year requires food, water, land, and medication. It is by far the most resource-intensive food that we produce.9 Meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein worldwide while using 83% of all farmland and generating 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emission, mainly in the shape of methane and of nitrous oxide. This is true for even the very lowest-impact meat and dairy products, which still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing. This is because of trophic change: the position an organism occupies in the food web. To produce animal calories requires producing the plant calories that feed them, and many more calories go into an animal than what we get out to consume.
A way to quantify this is the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), the ratio of energy in to calories out. To reduce energy consumption and mitigate carbon footprints, moving to foods with higher EROEI is essential. By doing this, we will also reduce the quantity of land allocated to food production worldwide. By switching to a sufficient diet without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75%, an area described as the equivalent to the US, China, European Union, and Australia combined. The EROEI of livestock meat is so low that the grain used to feed livestock in the US alone could feed about 800 million people. To satisfy the ever-increasing desire for meat, additional land is constantly consigned to the circuit of capital. As a result, the use of land for meat production is the largest contributor to habitat loss and species extinction: it is responsible for over 70% of rainforest clearing and is propelling the current mass extinction of wildlife and reduction in ecosystem diversity. Meat production is also the leading cause of ocean acidification, which creates dead zones where life cannot exist. For example, the largest dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico was caused almost single-handedly by Tyson Foods.
Environmental damage does not affect everyone equally. Meat companies are usually located in poor, rural communities where they can pollute the environment without much fear of repercussion from the locals, a form of environmental racism. But there also are pushbacks everywhere factory farms are being built, especially in North Carolina. During the last year, two separate nuisance lawsuits were won by residents, forcing pork farmers to pay out tens of millions of dollars in damages to the local community. Within North Carolina, pigs not only outnumber humans, they also produce 8-10x the amount of fecal waste. Due to the lax environmental regulations on untreated waste, hog farmers build football-field-sized trenches called “lagoons” to dispose of all the raw waste material. When lagoons become too full for ordinary pumping, excess waste is liquified and pumped through a series of sprinklers and sprayed directly into the air. According to an op-ed published in the NYT: “The bacteria from these lagoons have been known to pollute groundwater and surface water, permeating nearby communities with noxious fumes. These lagoons also breached after Hurricane Florence, spraying hog manure all over the floodwaters and communities nearby. People living near these lagoons are at increased risk of asthma, diarrhea, eye irritation, depression, and other health problems.” A 2016 report conducted by Julia Kravchenko from the Duke University School of Medicine found links between exposure to waste from hog farms and acute blood pressure increase, impaired neurobehavioral and pulmonary function. Her report also discovered carcinogenic effects induced by chemicals from hog farming waste.
Even while knowing the disastrous effect of meat on the environment and especially on climate change, capital is still projecting increases in meat consumption in the near future. In its death drive it is even actively subsidizing these products, and regularly buying the unsold surpluses overproduced by the food industry. In 2016, the US had an excess production of 1.2 billion pounds of cheese, with no market demand to dispense with it. This amount is increasing, due to a recent drop in milk consumption and the importation tariffs on US goods imposed by Trump’s administration. Instead of addressing this overproduction by downsizing operations, creative efforts by the state have been made to reprocess and squeeze as much of these products as possible into the food on a supermarket shelf. The USDA, in partnership with the industry-created Dairy Management Inc., a corporation funded by federally-mandated checkoff fees on dairy products, spends $140M million dollars every single year to increase dairy consumption. Dairy Management has injected increasing amounts of cheese into the US diet; for example, in 2018, Pizza Hut was pressured to add extra cheese in their products, after Dairy Management convinced them that consumers wanted more pizza.
Meat companies do not just harm the environment but are also home to the worst abuses of labor. This has been documented for over 100 years, starting with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. With extremely tame regulatory agencies, it is not a surprise that labor conditions are abysmal in the food industry, because all capitalist industries will maximize the profit they make from their workers to the greatest extent they can get away with. The industry preys on immigrants and prisoners, as their labor is the easiest to exploit. Meat companies intentionally build their factory farm facilities in rural, low-income areas, generally populated by a desperate, non-white reserve army of labor which will be willing to work for less under worse conditions. Bathroom breaks prevent the processing line from moving quickly, so workers wear diapers to work and are forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. Covid-19 outbreaks in meat factories have been among the worst because meat plants refused to slow down or take safety standards seriously. Accidents are commonplace. Just in the US, there are two reported amputations every single week. US meat industry workers are three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker, that factor increasing to seven times more likely with repetitive strain injuries for pork and beef workers. These numbers are probably underestimated, due to the prevalence of undocumented workers who are afraid of retribution if they report their injuries.
The injuries extend beyond just physical ones. Slaughterhouse work is extremely traumatic and has been linked to a variety of disorders, including PTSD and the lesser-known PITS (perpetration-induced traumatic stress). It has also been connected to an increase in crime rates, including higher incidents of domestic abuse, as well as alcohol and drug abuse. Virgil Butler, an ex-Tyson poultry plant worker turned environmental activist, was quoted saying
“The sheer amount of killing and blood can really get to you after a while. Especially if you can’t just shut down all emotion and turn into a robot zombie of death. You feel like part of a big death machine and pretty much treated that way as well. Sometimes weird thoughts will enter your head. It’s just you and the dying chickens. The surreal feelings grow into such a horror of the barbaric nature of your behaviour. You are murdering helpless birds by the thousands (75,000 to 90,000 a night). You are a killer.”10
Butler further detailed the isolation he and his colleagues faced, saying,
“You feel isolated from society, not a part of it. Alone. You know you are different from most people. They don’t have visions of horrible death in their heads. They have not seen what you have seen. And they don’t want to. They don’t even want to hear about it.”
Forming and joining unions has the potential to increase the pay, safety standards, and working conditions within this industry, but that is precisely why these agribusiness giants fight so hard against the right of the workers to freely associate. A report by the Human Rights Watch, titled Unfair Advantage, goes into great detail describing the lengths companies like Tyson, Perdue, and Smithfield go to crush any workplace organizing that may arise, going as far as threatening workers with firing and deportation, spying, harassment, intimidation and outright shutting down facilities where workers attempt to unionize. In the 1970’s Perdue Farms purchased several unionized poultry plants in the Delmarva Peninsula, immediately shut them down and fired all the union workers only to reopen the plants as non-union facilities. One of the more horrifying examples of threats and intimidation comes from a 1995 case in which the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found Perdue guilty of threats, intimidation, and confiscating materials related to organizing after workers reported what they described as a “KKK-style cross burning” at the plant with the cross bearing a union t-shirt. This kind of harassment and intimidation is commonplace within the animal agriculture industry.
Many of these intimidation tactics tend to be aimed at immigrant and undocumented workers. In 2001 Nebraska Beef workers filed for an election with the NLRB to seek representation with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). In the weeks prior to the vote, workers described a number of intimidation tactics used by the company to scare them out of voting to unionize such as targeting and calling in undocumented workers individually telling them that a ‘yes’ vote would get them deported and that if they opposed the unionizing efforts they would receive a 25 cent per hour raise. They also lied to the workers, telling them that if they were to unionize the union would not allow them to travel to Mexico for important events. Ultimately these intimidation tactics succeeded and the effort to unionize was defeated. Upon review by the NLRB, management was ruled guilty of multiple violations of workers’ rights in connection with the election.
There are dozens of examples like the ones previously mentioned, and these kinds of illegal tactics used to destroy unionizing efforts have led to an astonishingly low level of unionization within the agriculture industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2017 union members made up just 2.1 percent of all private-sector agriculture workers. Even minor resistance is severely punished: the largest ICE raid in US history was conducted at a chicken processing plant, shortly after the women of the plant won a sexual harassment lawsuit for $3.75M. It remains to be seen what organizing happens in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, with meat workers’ lives on the line.
As mentioned previously, the choice we have in a supermarket seems limitless but actually is not, and this impacts heavily what we consume. Structural racism comes into play as the adverse effects of certain food both disproportionately affect brown and Black communities and might constitute the majority of the products available in supermarkets close to them. The structural racism of “food deserts” (places where access to affordable and nutritious food is limited or absent) has reached mainstream discourse. But other problems with food distribution are not so well discussed. For example, take dairy, the largest source of saturated fat in the standard US diet. Dairy has been linked to numerous food-related illnesses. People of Western European descent better digest lactose than the vast majority of POC, who tend to have dairy allergies. But poor people cannot simply choose to buy other foods. With healthier alternatives pushed out of the market, animal products, processed grains, and sugars are the only thing available as they are highly subsidized and push externalities onto the taxpayer. Despite their unhealthiness, they are the only available nutrition poor families can buy due to their artificially cheap prices.
It is estimated that one in every eight people in the US is “food insecure”, a euphemism for going hungry. The rate becomes even higher when looking at children in the US: one in every six is “food insecure”. Many families rely on charitable support, welfare, and school lunch programs to feed themselves and their families, and millions of children rely on notoriously unhealthy, highly processed school lunches. It hardly comes as a surprise that the number of children in the US facing obesity and food-related illness has spiked, especially among low-income kids. Children as young as ten years show signs of hardened arteries, a precursor to heart disease. According to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, “Socioeconomic position as early as age 2-3 years was linked to thickness in carotid artery measurements at age 11-12.”
Capitalism sets up the poor and working-class for an artificially shortened lifetime of health problems and medical debt with our current food culture. The Standard American Diet, a diet consistent with very little whole plant-based foods and excessive processed meat, cheese, refined grains, and sugars has been pushed on us by capitalism. Low-income and food- insecure individuals people are far more likely to develop chronic diseases, with scientific journals reporting that “A number of studies have reported cross-sectional associations between food insecurity and self-reported chronic disease, including heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and general health status.” This has helped lead to what is known as the “death gap”: wealthier Americans live on average 10-15 years longer than low-income Americans. This becomes even starker when looking at communities of color, with African Americans 1.5 times more likely than whites to be obese, twice as likely to suffer heart disease and strokes, and twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. These numbers are very similar for Latine communities as well. Furthermore, obesity, or “fatness”, is recast as a marker of personalized failure and shunned in popular culture. By turning the responsibility for this systemic failure into a personal one, this further protects the system, while degrading the self-esteem and physical health of millions of people, especially of color.11 This means that capitalism not only alienates us from food to the detriment of our health, it also generates an industry of dietary products to supplant this alienation. This industry ranges from ‘miraculous’ food to professional psychological advice, which very often do not work because the root cause is never addressed: the fact that our food is unhealthy, addictive, and unequally distributed.
Food-related illness is estimated to cost nearly $25 billion per year and is set to increase to $50 billion per year by 2050. This helps to generate massive profits for pharmaceutical companies, who have no incentive to push for preventive medicine, including the distribution of healthy foods. An even larger conflict of interest between capitalist profits and people’s health is created by the massive use of antibiotics to keep livestock healthy (around 70-80% of the antibiotics used in the United States are used in animal agriculture).12 The entire population is at risk of developing dangerous antibiotic-resistant infections, which is quickly becoming an issue. At least two million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics every single year in the US, and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Furthermore, the close proximity of animals is a breeding ground for viral infections. The Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus of 2012 can be directly linked to an industrializing camel sector, as can the avian flu outbreaks of 2005. This is not to mention the increasing commercialization of wild species and forced urbanization of formerly rural populations, to which the SARS and the Covid-19 outbreaks are related.
As socialists, we must center food production and consumption in our programs. Food sovereignty is an urgent step for a budding socialist project. The recent COVID-19 crisis has highlighted that many things are superfluous, but we simply cannot live without food. Commercial drivers and transportation workers are deemed essential, as the supply chains must be kept going so that society survives. For now, the grocery stores remain stocked. But consistently in history, the shock of sudden changes led to famines. As food production networks are extended and globalized, COVID-19 has the potential to generate food insecurity.
On a more local scale, many groups are attracted to food distribution at first, and later to the establishment of community gardens. In an age of insecurity, the importance of food in political programs is rising. People do not forget who fed them. A promising horizon is Cuba’s turn: despite the suffering of the special period after the USSR’s collapse, Cuba used the chance to fully redesign their agriculture to become the only country in the world with sustainable cultivation.13
Food sovereignty is essential, but it cannot come from just any food.14 Socialists must center healthy and sustainable food production. As food is progressively decommodified, we will see a sharp decline in the production of highly processed foods, as the incentive to process food to extract surplus value will be greatly reduced under socialism. Socialists must seriously consider that decommodification of meat is a necessary plank of a program, both due to environmental and health issues. We must also recognize how deeply-embedded images of “sexism” and “the hunt” are used when selling us meat.15 Under more rational planning, meat production will have to see major downsizing to cast fewer externalities onto taxpayers, and perverse incentives will be of the question. Global farmland could be freed or converted into natural spaces, and the use of harmful pesticides or antibiotics must be heavily slashed as the economy is run for the benefit of all.
An internationalist platform must include the immediate abolition of food patents, as well as recognition and empowerment of indigenous communities. Indeed, the pre-Columbian populations were the world’s greatest agricultural engineers. But now the situation is grim: Mexico has become the second-largest importer of corn after the implementation of NAFTA, and has seen the infiltration of patented crop varieties, even when the indigenous communities there are responsible for domesticating and developing corn. The Zapatista resistance through corn seed exchange, is an example of the shapes resistance to monoculture patented agriculture can take.
With imperialist profit flows out of the equation, countries in the Global South would not be forced to mass-produce cash crops for exportation. Their agriculture could return to sustainable operations, and their forests could be grown back. A counter-example to ecosystem destruction is again provided by Cuba, which was 90% forest when Columbus arrived, reduced to 10% before the Revolution, and is now up to 30%.
In the present, organized labor can demand higher safety standards, which would come with a reduction of the use of monocultures, pesticides and herbicides. Many success stories in organizing farmworkers exist, most notably the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez. The meat industry is also ripe for organizing and is not beholden to seasonality.
Socialists recognize housing and healthcare as a human right, but it is time we start demanding healthy food as a human right as well. A healthy and well balanced, highly nutritious, and varied diet will not only make our people healthier and save resources and lives further down the line, but will also improve our relationship with the environment and the rest of the world. Food is a working-class issue, and a system that perpetuates hunger while overproducing food at the expense of workers and the environment must be done away with at once, which is why we as socialists have an obligation to stand up and fight for food justice for all.
The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John Bellamy Foster’s seminal book Marx’s Ecology on its twentieth anniversary. Join Niko, Ian, Matthew, and Remi as they discuss the context of this work, and how it started a rediscovery of Marx’s ecological politics. They discuss how ecology informed Marx’s understanding of the world since his doctoral thesis, the relationship between Marx, Darwin, and Malthus and the concept of metabolic rift.
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Latest from Cold and Dark Stars. Economic laws are sold to us by those in power as natural laws beyond our own control rather than forms of class power that can be challenged and overcome.
The whole conversation is rigged.
Now that climate change has turned up on the radar of economists and policymakers, they are pretending we had it too good, that we lived in a utopia of cheap consumer goods, long lifespans, automobiles, and gadgets, and that our own self-indulgence brought us the trouble.1 The economists and industry captains were selling us what we wanted since their product was good: economic growth and cheese sticks. They just didn’t know about the caveat: the perturbation of the earth into a new thermodynamic equilibrium, one that could have extreme consequences in our fragile human systems.
They say everyone shares the blame since we were too happy indulging in their products. That is how it’s sold to us: salvation is to be inconvenienced by not using that straw, that grocery bag, and walking to the corner store instead of driving.2 These meaningless inconveniences are merely psychological pressure points to suggest the greater unpleasantries of a radical solution. They are training us to imagine the greater sacrifice, which inevitably means austerity. Reversing some of this utopia is the panacea of the illness of civilization. If we have grown too fat the solution inevitably means austerity.
They know this story is awful, that it is a hard sell. But it does a couple of things. First, it sells the decisions done by power brokers in the last two centuries or so as overall good, the unsustainability an unfortunate caveat. Whatever comes next must look like the present social order, because it is good. Having a tiny percentage of the world population controlling the resource distribution and the rest having to fight for certain “jobs”3 that decision-makers, asset holders, and professionals have decided are useful in order to warrant access to nourishment and shelter is seen as a good and realistic model. The second thing it does is quite magical. Because this story is a hard sell, and normal people are not willing to sacrifice their lifestyle, the elite can pretend they are not pushing for change for the demos does not want it.4 The poor democratic souls!
Finally, the culmination of this story is an argument for human nature. They say humans are naturally greedy convenience seekers and have short attention spans. According to the educated, cable tv consumers, and anxious mortgage and index fundholders, the majority won’t buy the story because human nature is diseased.5 There are two corollaries to this story: that the present social order is perfected for the human soul, and there is nothing to be done because any “better world” is incompatible with the human soul.
This story is such a monstrous, self-serving con that it should infuriate any person that dares to use their brain.
The above story can only begin to be questioned by reassembling many of the concepts we inherited from many smart, intellectual types.
Perhaps this reassembling must start within me. Many of my past writings have been about solutions to the ills of something called capitalism. One identifies this discrete epoch of “capitalism” and then describes the force that will destroy it. This capitalism, a logic that permeates the world, manipulates all living things for the purpose of profit/capital growth. This includes the destruction of many beings and worlds for some venal abstraction. The way it goes is that there is no agency behind these structures, the economy, the market, or “capital” are autonomous machines with their own inner programming, the businessman, workers, and politicians merely its puppets.
Usually the expositors of this story are proud that it counters ordinary common sense. Much of the uneducated instincts you can follow in youtube, or eavesdrop at the bar, blame the problems of the world on a group of people with inordinate influence, hence the prevalence of conspiracy theories. The instinctual story gives a large agency to the “puppet-masters” that are made of flesh and blood. The intellectual, such as a certain breed of Marxist, will say that deposing the flesh and blood “puppet-masters” would not do much since the only puppet master is capital.6 How do you overthrow Capital, which is G-d?
This argument is structurally the same as the neoliberal argument. It claims that there is something called the Economy that follows certain laws of motion, and these laws of motion say that the Economy would become crippled the moment the State is used as a tool against the elite, for devaluation and capital strikes would appear.7 This “Economy”, which is based on reification of certain limited, mathematical models in textbooks, has become a favorite sword of the right-wing to defend congealed interests.
I am not claiming the scenario exposed by the neoliberals and the Marxists that parallel them is unrealistic. Instead, I would argue that what they refer to as the “Economy” or “value” is merely a power relation, imposed by a class upon the other, in other words, a human relation. The economic problems we tend to talk about, such as capital flight and devaluation, are merely questions of power and therefore freedom. By reframing this dialectic in terms of power, freedom of is injected ontologically; the scaffolding is made of humans deliberating.
One could counter my argument by saying that there is a certain impartiality of the economy. Industry captains can’t merely price their commodities at any value they wish. Establishing more humane labor laws in their industries abroad, or socializing certain industries, would make the United States less competitive in the global market, which would deny the state important revenues that could be used to build schools or hospitals.8 Yes, in some futures, some very realistic ones, this could happen. But it’s not because of some objective “Economy” that favors certain rules over others. It’s merely a question of power.
Instead, powerful agents today are embedded in a network of power nodes, and they must compete and maneuver against other power brokers. This creates emergent tidal waves, that may sweep across the network of nodes, creating the notion of an impartial earthquake. But at the end of the day, this turbulence cannot just be categorically tamed with “laws”, and the ripples still are shaped by the hierarchy of sovereigns. This is the reason why some countries can run higher debt tallies than others, or why sometimes counterintuitive policies such as quantitative easing do not cause catastrophic inflation. And it is in this picture that one may find the answer to politics in this warming world.
Let’s come back to the “uneducated” instinct, the vector that points to conspiracy theories. The instinct is partly right but also flawed. It is a healthier instinct than the intellectualized, anthropomorphization of the “economy” and capital since it at least offers the possibility of freedom. But the flaw of this instinct is that there is no discrete entity called the elite that controls the world.
Rather, it is a continuous distribution, a gradient across a fluid of power. This gradient radiates from the billionaires at the top but also includes the professionals that monopolize certain technocratic jobs, the white families that own assets and index funds (which usually are represented in the mainstream, think of the GOP and the DNC), and the meritocratic elites that structure the job and educational pipelines so that certain people are destined to lord over others. But even these “little” bourgeoisies are an approximation, as class power isn’t a discrete stratification but a continuous gradient. This is the problem of the slogan “against the one percent”. A social system cannot be sustained by the support of only a tiny elite. And a political project that does not bring reckoning with the current power gradient will fail in changing the story.
The solution then is to somehow nudge this class power vector into another direction, which is ultimately what Marx wanted.
The question of power is very deep. Nietzche thought everything was power all the way down, the immanent substance of the Universe. Hobbes referred to value as power, and Adam Smith, the father of classical political economy, approvingly cited Hobbes’ quote.
It’s a banal question as well. We identify that the state ultimately has the right to kill us, throw us into a cage, and force us to act in ways we don’t agree with. We remember the bully at school, the authoritarian father. Power has scarred all of us, and we secretly desire it. Some of us play with these roles in the bedroom, perhaps trying to exorcize the immanence of power through the most primeval combination of sweat and blood.
Power is interwoven with freedom. Power cannot be understood as merely inertial, the violence of blind laws. This is not because power is an endeavor of humans only; in the same way Nietzche thought power was immanent to the Universe, so is freedom, and ultimately they are both the faces of the same Ultimate. Power is arbitrariness which is freedom.
Let’s analyze how an ontology of power and freedom enriches the original story. Global warming is often explained as a straightforward process of quasi-deterministic laws. In the last two centuries, humanity has experienced unprecedented economic growth, which economists have tied as being coupled with carbon emissions. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts as a powerful greenhouse gas that traps the radiation from the sun, preventing the escape of heat into space. As the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, less radiation is released into space, increasing the temperature of the Earth. This increase in temperature will feed into dangerous feedback loops, such as the reduction of ice cover, or the enhancing of other powerful greenhouse gases such as water vapor and methane.
The economists then argue that global warming would cause GDP losses. Extreme events such as floods and droughts would negatively affect agriculture, livestock, infrastructure, and health. These damages, in turn, could cause teleconnections into other sectors such as finance.9
However, this above account is impoverished in so far it occludes the role of humans deliberation, and therefore power. It does not reveal the malleability and contingency of the coupling of economic growth to carbon emissions, or our understanding of GDP. Furthermore, the entities of the Earth-system are considered inert, subject to deterministic laws.
A better and richer account could be the following. The current sovereigns of the Earth thought they could control it to do their bidding, as if the earth system, with its water vapor, oceans, ice-sheets, and cyclones, was a submissive object that will lay bare to our manipulations. The power of these sovereigns is distributed but stratified, so there is not only one king, and the emergent processes of these networks of deliberations give rise to the apparent “impartiality” and the illusion of law-like behavior. This complex distribution of power is often referred to as the “economy” or the “market”, but this conceptualization often hides the element of deliberation and freedom of its actors, subsuming them under scientific regularities. The lack of absolute monopoly over the commodities from some of the players gives the appearance of laws that exist outside the deliberation of States, notwithstanding the violent and colonial monopolies (e.g. East Indian Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, Dutch East India Company) that emerged from the birth pangs of the current world system.
The market becomes an illusory category, a mystification of the fluid of nodes that embeds together power brokers like the state, the creatures and objects that form the Earth, and other sovereigns, human formations such as insurgent parties, activist groups, and clandestine paramilitaries, etc. Ultimately, this ensemble forms an immanent, turbulent fluid, full of vortexes, tidal waves, and shocks, horizontally wide but stratified. One of the stratifications of this fluid is class power. Class power can be represented as a multidimensional vector along the stratification of this power-fluid. This vector not only encodes 19th-century factory bosses, or the top 0.1 percent but includes all sorts of asset holders such as mortgage holding, white families in select zip codes that concentrate the means of intergenerational wealth.
This power-fluid is alive with freedom. I stretch the term life here, for it does not only include what is referred as life by biologists, creatures with a chemically defined genetic code but also includes the turbulent ocean and atmosphere, the chemical and hydrological cycles that enshroud the Earth with clouds, the cyclones caused by the interaction of the earth’s spin with temperature gradients. Sure, some aspects of this system appear fairly predictable and therefore give the appearance of determinism and lifelessness. For example the orbit of the Earth, the trajectory of an individual electron, the weather within one day, the job market within a month, the average lifespan of a dog. However, these systems are tractable until they aren’t, as many of them may become subject to shocks in the same way the behavior of a friend might be familiar until they fall into a deep depression. The emergence of determinism and stochasticity is often seen as noise, as an effect of not having enough information about the system. But this view is just a theology. Regardless of whether we find this noise as ontologically superfluous, the indeterminism still slaps us with full force. The Earth system is not behaving as it “should”, as the economy experiences shocks, love sometimes withers, and flying cars haven’t appeared but the internet has. A more interesting and useful ontology is acknowledging the freedom and agency of matter, not falling into the Christian trap of considering only humans free.
The structural determinists, such as the economists and their laws, and the Marxists and their “value” are merely tweaking the Christian theology, for the old philosophers of Christendom considered matter dead while the human being was ensouled. These economists/Marxists merely take this incorrect ontology of dead matter and include the human being (and the world system) as made of billiard balls with positions and momentum vectors assigned to them.
Against the “price distortion” and “law of value types” that think of themselves so clever because they wield vague regularities as absolute laws, power, the real immanent substance, is made of agents consciously deliberating, albeit lacking complete omnipotence, and surrounded by a fog of war. It is in the game of power where the class struggle becomes intelligible.
Class power could be summarized as the strategic capture of resources of one class (Colin Drumm) over the other. Class here is a demographic description, that only becomes intelligible in the sense that it is hierarchical: a class captures resources at the expense of others. Class power should not be thought of as a discrete distribution of a couple of classes. Instead, it is a continuous distribution.
The most important theorist of class power was Karl Marx. His life’s project was to show that the economic and political stories were cons validating the most powerful class during his era: the bourgeoisie. The law, religion, ideology, and even some “science” were merely justifications of the bourgeoisie’s class power, narratives that made the strategic capture of resources of a tiny elite seem “natural”.
Those who are privileged reflect the cosmic, static order. The Chinese emperors came from Heaven, God gave the right to kings to rule, and today the elite rule because they reflect human nature. The elite embodies democratic nature to accumulate property and assets which inevitably leads to the optimal hierarchy.
Here is where the con within the stories about global warming is revealed. The current narrative of climate change is sheer class power. Yes, the elite must acknowledge the power of the earth system to destroy the civilization they rule. But at the same time, they must remind their subjects that right now they have the highest possible standard of living, and that nudging the system too much would destabilize this standard.
In fact, it is the projection of their power that makes us addicted to their world. For it is not only chemical or sexual dependency that their products offer, such as processed sugar, or digital porn. More importantly, they sell us the illusion that through their products we can become like them, socially recognized by the rest. The search for social recognition is ancient. Amongst certain small, indigenous egalitarian societies, “big men” try to outdo each other with gifts and potlatches to become honored. In modernity this impulse is channeled into owning larger houses, better cars, having a degree from a good University. They rob the children from their childhood so that someday they can become accomplished professionals that can be paraded in the deranged pageantry of the technocratic castes. Meanwhile, we all end up playing, touching, and caring less, for we are conned into keeping up with the Joneses.
This is not human nature, it is the product of a certain group of people trying to maintain their privileges at all costs, and the historical directionality imposed by the phenotype of that modern elite (capitalists, bankers, professionals, asset holders). It doesn’t matter that some of them may suffer in the process – their kids may kill themselves because of the pressures of grad school, or professionals may develop mental illnesses by stuffing their skull with information concerning their assets, debts, and career moves. What matters is that they are not the worst off, that people below them are more miserable.
This world that serves the elite was manufactured through deliberative actions, even if decision-makers could not be aware of all the outcomes. The stamp of the asset holders’ freedom scars every planetary entity. Therefore, It is only through the deliberative actions of the non-asset holding classes that this world can change.
The structures of the world are not absolute and can be nudged into a direction through the imposition of power
There is no autonomous capital that is subject to its own internal desires. There are no “objective” economic laws that the neoliberals love to hark on about. The spurious regularities of innovation, stable currency, and debt are place holders for embedded power dynamics that are linked to imperialism and the quasi-monopolies of financial systems (American and English banks), technology (intellectual property law and corporate secrets), and monetary inertia triggered by the sheer violence of world wars (the death of the gold standard, the creation of the Breton-Woods regime). It is power all the way down. When someone talks about “innovation”, “entrepreneurship”, GDP, and inflation, chances are that they are interpreting noise (e.g. random initial conditions that gave access to important resources and tools), or mislabelling the spurious regularities of the powerful (quasi-monopolies over the financial system like the US and the U.K own).
However, the freedom of the powerful opens our own possibility of freedom. There are no blind laws that oppose the stability of the earth system, the creation of a softer and brighter world of more play and touch. The streamlines in the power-fluid that carry the world into warming are imposed by certain, powerful entities. Yet we can impose our own cyclones, jet-streams, and eddies by building channels that change the course of the fluid.
The change of conversation always implies the imposition of class power. And class power is not merely words, but institutions, resources, an army – in other words, the state.
Perhaps we can find an interesting example in the Russian Revolution, as Andreas Malm noted.10 In 1917, famine scourged Russia, probably due to a climate fluctuation. The tzarist regime was too incompetent and married to the interests of landlords to be able to use the machinery of the state to solve the food distribution problem. Instead, Lenin posed the question of the workers and peasants taking power, organized through a political party, to solve the food allocation problem, since the interests of the non-propertied classes aligned with the solution. There is a pedagogic parallel to our current predicament here. The Earth-system is becoming dangerously unstable, to the point where food price variability may nudge civilization towards collapse. The state’s scaffold is too married to asset wealthy classes to be able to enact the radical changes required for a flourishing society that responsibly stewards the Earth system. Only a Party that is not subject to these interests, that is, a Party of workers, farmers, the indigenous and racialized, could realistically steward the Earth system and therefore save civilization.
If a Party of this type does not emerge, reactionary formations may occupy the vacuum left behind by environmental instability. The far-right is excited about the incoming climate refugee crisis to help them gain support for a xenophobic ethnostate.
The question of power is intimately linked not only to the access to resources but also to how we ethically and spiritually interface with those resources. The response to climate change cannot merely be some imposed austerity in consumer goods while the power structures that interface humans between themselves and the Earth remains intact. The question of climate change can’t be resolved through the technocratic administration of resources while human relationships and the associated conceptual universe stays the same.
Throughout the last century, the ruling classes have rewired our serotonin pathways to become addicted to what they offer: cheap porn, diplomas, credit, status, SUVs, and plane tickets. Meanwhile, touch, community, healthcare and permanent and secure homes are becoming more scarce. What couldn’t be more damning evidence of our screwed-up serotonin pathways than the declining rates of sexual intercourse and the ballooning debts and mortgages? The society of the spectacle that erodes our power over our own lives is linked to the diffuse sovereignty of corporations, asset holders and real estate moguls. Meanwhile, this turbulent society is coupled with the increased instability of the earth system, leading to a warming world.
Therefore, only by building a movement armed with a political program that visualizes the totality that binds together the earth system, resource allocation (or stewardship), and the ethical dialectic between humans and the Earth can we begin to reckon with this warming world. Right now, we get caught by loose threads of the unstable system – we grasp in a piece-meal fashion at automobile culture, air travel, the meat industry, or “consumerism” in isolation; this can only generate confusion and solidify the supremacy of the elite. Meanwhile, such a political movement must instead strike into the center of this class structure, the engine that weaves many of the false narratives of climate change. Modern class power has eroded human relationships, replacing play, sexual freedom, and the dissolution of the ego into the Universe itself. Only a life-affirming politics can replace the destructive power of asset holders.
Translation and Introduction by Rida Vaquas.
This speech was delivered in 1912 to the Prussian House of Deputies in response to a proposal by the Free People’s Party. Environmental destruction was not as far-reaching then as it is now, yet Liebknecht was keenly aware of the disappearance of butterflies and insects, of the small changes that bode ill.
For Liebknecht, protecting nature was inextricable from putting nature in the hands of the people. In his day, Berlin had seen many conflicts between its working-class inhabitants and the Prussian government in particular regarding access to the Grunewald, the forests around Berlin. By the turn of the century, the people of Berlin had successfully driven the Kaiser from hosting the Saint Hubertus hunt there, using it for their own recreation and abusing the participants in the hunt. While the populace made it their spot for picnics and trips, the state government made numerous attempts at selling it off to real estate developers. Time and time again, Berliners mobilized themselves to resist this privatization of green space, and repeatedly won.
In our time, the garden city movement has largely been associated with well-meaning middle-class liberalism. Yet while those elements were certainly present in Wilhelmine Germany, when Liebknecht calls for cities to be transformed into garden cities, he is speaking for working-class communities who organized themselves for the right to live in flourishing environments. In 1909 social-democratic metalworkers founded Gartenstadt Kolonie-Reform, a project to build social housing in green surroundings in Magdeburg. These colorful buildings, designed by Bruno Taut, the ‘worker’s architect’, are a reminder that class struggle is concerned with aesthetic values, with the way that the light falls on a blue house.
We are at the point that capitalism is threatening our continued existence. Two million people in London are living with illegal air pollution. Millions of songbirds are vacuumed to death every year in the course of industrial olive harvesting. Across the world, millions of people are already living with climate-related disease, displacement, and desertification. The exploitation of natural resources by capital has not been in our interests. As the wealthy flee Phoenix for Flagstaff to escape the rising temperatures, the poor risk their lives to migrate only to be detained. Capitalist organization of industry and agriculture has led to the devastation of entire communities, resource depletion on a mass scale and the sixth mass extinction. Protecting our natural environment can only be accomplished by overcoming the alienation from nature that is synonymous with the alienation of labour that capitalism has wrought upon us.
Absent from this speech is hope in a technological deus ex machina that can save us at the 11th hour. As he argues nature ‘once destroyed cannot easily be replaced again’. This rings even truer today. Recycling has been revealed to be only another administrative step on the way to landfills, ‘clean’ energy can be just as dirty as fossil fuels. The Left today needs to reckon with this reality: there is no way out of the coming catastrophe other than totally transforming how we live.
This does not mean regressing into a dreary austerity, of inflicting punishment upon ourselves. Quite clearly, the blithe statement ‘happiness is not found in things’ does not help the people who are deprived of the essential material conditions for life, overwhelmingly the international working class. However, the individualized, lonely, consumption of an ever-increasing pile of ‘things’ in the West is a punishment that capitalism has inflicted upon us: a planetary death sentence. We have been robbed of the time and resources to live in a real community: to share our meals with friends, to develop hobbies, to walk through the woods together. Instead of clinging to a sordid loneliness, we must bring forward a vision of a good life that contests that this loneliness is all there is.
Karl Liebknecht’s chief insight was that overcoming the alienation of humanity from nature will be joyous! Our programme is to bring nature to the people. We shall transform the ‘stone deserts’ into the people’s gardens.
It would have been more desirable for us if the Commission had taken a somewhat more vigorous decision because the trend from which this proposal emerges, which the commission has only adopted in a watered-down form, is so appealing and worthy of credit that we can only express our agreement with great emphasis. It is truly extraordinarily important that we recognize more and more what irreplaceable value nature has in her beauty, and that her glories, once destroyed, cannot easily be replaced again. Unfortunately, that’s why we have every reason, in order to sharpen our conscience, to remind the government: it is easy to clear a forest, to dry out a lake, it is easy to devastate a landscape and to disfigure it – for example the Löcknitztal. But it is tremendously difficult to make amends. When we consider the centuries, the millennia of work that nature has needed in order to create the natural monuments that generations have enjoyed, it can easily be understood that all means of modern technology cannot do anything other than fail in settling the destruction that has already taken place. We cannot – and in Goethe’s phrase, we want to call for levers and screws – force nature to restore to us what a foolish thirst for destruction, a dangerous egoism mixed with short-sighted greed for profits, has ripped away from us in our time.
We are seeing how an appreciation for the value of the treasures of nature has only recently re-emerged amongst broader circles, after the wild period of development of our industry, of our commerce, in which all other interests took a back seat to the interest of “Get rich! Enrichissez vous!” This was the time when people mocked those who sought to appreciate and protect aesthetic values as fools who had not sufficiently understood the spirit of the times. Now, after a while, there has been a certain retreat, substantially because of the immeasurable importance of nature and as its value for the health of the population is increasingly recognized, as well as in the moral, spiritual and physical aspects. When we look at what the landscapes look like when we travel by train, especially close to big cities, we are often filled with seething resentment over the recklessness with which the most beautiful landscapes have been sacrificed for the advertising needs of our capitalist circles. This is a brutality without limits and all attempts to limit this tendency have not been of any use as of yet. This is taught us by simple observation: whether we go out of Berlin to the east, west, north or south, everywhere we see these disgusting billboards, which deface the landscape in the most outrageous manner.
It is undoubtedly true that amongst the population itself the necessary respect for national treasures is not frequently prevalent. If the previous speaker has pointed out that the schools and the press should be a lot more effective in providing this orientation, we can only agree. But we must also consider the following: our metropolitan population, in comparison to the population of a small rural community or town, represents a much larger amplitude of need to be in a closer communion with nature. If the entirety of the metropolitan population was as reckless towards nature as is customary and natural in every village and rural community, the complete devastation of nature would follow as a logical consequence. The harm caused as a result of the destruction of natural resources in the vicinity of metropolises therefore cannot be traced back to some kind of brutalizing influence of the metropolises, but is simply a result of the tremendous accumulation of masses of people, who only have a much smaller area of nature available to them in comparison to the rural population, an area to which naturally many more people come than in villages and small cities. Hence, we have every reason to reject the accusations against the metropolitan population. The danger that our natural resources are threatened by big cities is far more simply the logical consequence of the entirely unhealthy amassment of people in the great stone deserts that we called cities.
There is another aspect. The population in the countryside is in a natural communion with nature, nature has not been estranged from them. The rural population is outside every day, almost every hour, and knows how to interact with nature. The population of a city, which has been abruptly detached from nature by the extraordinarily harmful system of colonisation, have been brutally torn from the natural mother soil on which mankind flourished – one can almost say they have been uprooted. This population, when they have the opportunity to go out into nature on holidays or Sundays, will obviously not have the complete understanding for interacting with it, but they will also have an absolute need, such a curiosity, such an intense compulsion to get in touch with nature, to get to know nature that has been wholly estranged from them. They have a requirement for the most diverse orientation, intellectually and viscerally, to do this. This explains a lot and this is why you will not find such a need in the countryside. It is wholly natural and not an expression of some kind of vandalism when city children come outside and tear off a few leaves, or branches or flowers. It is a natural need and can only be tackled by providing a proper fulfillment of this need.
This is why, gentlemen, I think it is necessary to point out once more that every measure that aims to protect nature against human intervention and destruction, must necessarily have corresponding measures which bring nature closer to the people and gives people the opportunity to build the kind of relationship with nature that is necessary for intellectual, moral and physical flourishing. And gentlemen, this includes building great people’s parks and playgrounds. It means that children in the big cities are frequently brought out into nature, that even cities themselves are developed into garden cities, and the type of development that is unfortunately still common in big cities is removed and in this way the dangerous character of the big city as a phenomenon which cuts off the people from nature is gradually remedied. This is a tremendous piece of social welfare which concerns the roots of human, physical and psychological needs. The issue is sufficiently grave. If the human race, particularly in the cities, is not to be further crippled, intellectually, morally and physically, it is urgent to take the direction I have just laid out, at least. This direction means abolishing the separation between human beings and nature once more, to bring people and nature closer to each other, so that people can once more approach the nourishing soil of nature and once more be in a position where they can absorb all of the strength nature alone can provide to man.
Gentlemen, I am firmly convinced that the Persian king who whipped the sea to calm it down performed no less futile work than the previous speakers in their invocations against fashions in ladies’ hats.
I have no doubt that some of you who vociferously clamor against fashions in hats in public must learn at home that fashions pertaining to forces that the male world absolutely cannot match.
I would like to point this out once more: Protection of natural monuments is not enough for us, most importantly, natural monuments must be made accessible to all of us, only then can they be protected because it is only then that the necessary feeling, the necessary appreciation of these natural monuments can be produced and maintained in humanity. As all sorts of nonsense has been mentioned here about what the populace does against nature and its monuments, I would like to take the opportunity after the deputy Ramdohr’s statements to point out how repeatedly the most serious grievances are raised in the press and in every national circles against the activities of the Jungdeutschlandbund and Jugendwehr in nature. Through these events, which serve exclusively militarist and chauvinist purposes, the youth are absolutely not raised to respect nature, to gain a finer appreciation for nature. On the contrary, a contempt of nature is cultivated in them because through these events, they become accustomed to regarding open nature in the fields and forests as merely a plain country for field duty exercises, and not as one of the greatest wonders that humble humanity. In any case, the appreciation for engaging yourself in the details of the beauties of nature is only destroyed by such a militarist violation of nature, but never enlarged.
Gentlemen, I am not alone in expressing these perspectives but rather, I repeat, they have been expressed frequently by the press of thoroughly national circles.
Gentlemen, I must point out yet again: if birds and other species have been spoken about a lot here, it is particularly important to protect them. But when we consider the youth again, the protection of the insect world comes quite eminently into our view. I hope that those amongst us who were butterfly or beetle collectors [in our youth] made it their concern not only to catch the animals but also to nurture them. It is entirely beyond doubt that such an encounter with nature is of overwhelming significance for the moral and intellectual development of the youth. For example, we see in the vicinity of Berlin how the world of insects has been nearly brought to a state of extinction. I remember how at the start of the 1890s, I could still find butterflies, beetles as well as plants around Berlin that you absolutely cannot find anymore these days. These are the regrettable consequences that result from the conditions in the big cities and many other harmful things that are related to each other. I would like attention to be directed particularly towards the protection of the world of insects, butterflies, beetles, etc.
Gentlemen, I have taken the initiative to speak again owing to the statements of the gentleman Schnepp, who spoke of red flyers that had been pasted somewhere obtrusively. I don’t know if the honorable gentleman Dr. Schnepp spoke from his own experience. I am certain he has never seen such a flyer in his life. If such flyers have been stuck up where nature is spoiled by them, then we would be the most remorseful of all, of course.
There is no doubt that such things aren’t approved by us. However I would like to claim that this has never happened. And if one from our side has sinned once, then I am sure that the other side has sinned in this regard three times more.
