[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
movement (Harvey, 1993, p. 48). This it will never do, suggests Weston,
unless it breaks out of its middle-class laager and recognizes that
rather than conserving the environment in which most people now
live, the inner city and the shanty town need destroying (Weston, 1986,
pp. 14 15).
A third faultline between socialists and political ecologists may be
found in disputes over the issue of limits to growth . Indeed, the most
instructive test to carry out on would-be green socialists is to see how
far they have accepted the fundamental green position that there are
material limits to productive growth. Some have done so completely,
and in the process would appear significantly to have reassessed the
content of their socialism. Rudolf Bahro, for example, commented
when he was still a socialist that he found it quite atrocious that there
are Marxists who contest the finite scope of the earth s exploitable
crust (1982, p. 60). We now know that Bahro s dwelling on thoughts
like this led him to abandon socialism entirely. Not so Joe Weston and
Raymond Williams, but they would probably nevertheless agree with
the following remarks:
I do not believe that anyone can read the extensive literature on the
ecology crisis without concluding that its impact will oblige us to
make changes in production and consumption of a kind, and on a
scale, which will entail a break with the lifestyles and expectations
that have become habitual in industrialized countries.
(Ryle, 1988, p. 6)
Joe Weston certainly agrees, up to a point: it must be stressed that
this rejection of green politics does not mean that we now believe that
natural resources are infinite (Weston, 1986, p. 4), and adds that the left
can learn from the greens to call the project of perpetual industrial
expansion into question (ibid., p. 5). Raymond Williams, too, accepts
the ecological position with respect to the central problem of this
whole mode and version of production: an effective infinity of expan-
sion in a physically finite world (Williams, 1986, p. 214), and suggests
Ecologism and other ideologies 173
that the orthodox abstraction of indefinitely expanded production its
version of growth has to be considered again, from the beginning
(ibid., p. 215).
Others, though, such as David Pepper, find this sort of thing hard to
swallow: Pepper is concerned not to abandon humanism by over-
pandering to green assumptions about the natural limits to the trans-
formation of nature (Pepper, 1993a, p. 434). While Saral Sarkar, in his
extended defence of eco-socialism, calls these old illusions (Sarkar,
1999, p. 197), David Harvey agrees with Pepper that the idea of natural
limits is too simplistic and insufficiently dialectical. He suggests that:
if we view natural resources in the rather traditional geographical
manner, as cultural, technological and economic appraisals of
elements residing in nature and mobilised for particular social ends
. . . then ecoscarcity means that we have not the will, wit or cap-
acity to change our social goals, cultural modes, our technological
mixes, or our form of economy and that we are powerless to modify
nature according to human requirements.
(Harvey, 1993, p. 39)
Harvey s intention here is to damn political ecologists for their
(imputed) belief that human beings are powerless in the face of a hostile
natural world characterized by scarcity. Yet the intention is subverted
upon the realization that political ecology is actually all about doing
what Harvey claims political ecologists think is impossible. Political
ecologists do think we have the will, wit and capacity to change our
social goals, cultural modes and so on. They even think that we have
the power to modify nature according to human requirements the
question is really over How much? , and a significant part of the
answer is given, for political ecologists, by the fact that our actions take
place under the sign of scarcity. This, in the end, is the brute fact
(for political ecologists) which Marxist critics seek to defuse through
deployment of the sense of a dialectical relationship between human
beings and the natural world. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl szkicerysunki.xlx.pl
movement (Harvey, 1993, p. 48). This it will never do, suggests Weston,
unless it breaks out of its middle-class laager and recognizes that
rather than conserving the environment in which most people now
live, the inner city and the shanty town need destroying (Weston, 1986,
pp. 14 15).
A third faultline between socialists and political ecologists may be
found in disputes over the issue of limits to growth . Indeed, the most
instructive test to carry out on would-be green socialists is to see how
far they have accepted the fundamental green position that there are
material limits to productive growth. Some have done so completely,
and in the process would appear significantly to have reassessed the
content of their socialism. Rudolf Bahro, for example, commented
when he was still a socialist that he found it quite atrocious that there
are Marxists who contest the finite scope of the earth s exploitable
crust (1982, p. 60). We now know that Bahro s dwelling on thoughts
like this led him to abandon socialism entirely. Not so Joe Weston and
Raymond Williams, but they would probably nevertheless agree with
the following remarks:
I do not believe that anyone can read the extensive literature on the
ecology crisis without concluding that its impact will oblige us to
make changes in production and consumption of a kind, and on a
scale, which will entail a break with the lifestyles and expectations
that have become habitual in industrialized countries.
(Ryle, 1988, p. 6)
Joe Weston certainly agrees, up to a point: it must be stressed that
this rejection of green politics does not mean that we now believe that
natural resources are infinite (Weston, 1986, p. 4), and adds that the left
can learn from the greens to call the project of perpetual industrial
expansion into question (ibid., p. 5). Raymond Williams, too, accepts
the ecological position with respect to the central problem of this
whole mode and version of production: an effective infinity of expan-
sion in a physically finite world (Williams, 1986, p. 214), and suggests
Ecologism and other ideologies 173
that the orthodox abstraction of indefinitely expanded production its
version of growth has to be considered again, from the beginning
(ibid., p. 215).
Others, though, such as David Pepper, find this sort of thing hard to
swallow: Pepper is concerned not to abandon humanism by over-
pandering to green assumptions about the natural limits to the trans-
formation of nature (Pepper, 1993a, p. 434). While Saral Sarkar, in his
extended defence of eco-socialism, calls these old illusions (Sarkar,
1999, p. 197), David Harvey agrees with Pepper that the idea of natural
limits is too simplistic and insufficiently dialectical. He suggests that:
if we view natural resources in the rather traditional geographical
manner, as cultural, technological and economic appraisals of
elements residing in nature and mobilised for particular social ends
. . . then ecoscarcity means that we have not the will, wit or cap-
acity to change our social goals, cultural modes, our technological
mixes, or our form of economy and that we are powerless to modify
nature according to human requirements.
(Harvey, 1993, p. 39)
Harvey s intention here is to damn political ecologists for their
(imputed) belief that human beings are powerless in the face of a hostile
natural world characterized by scarcity. Yet the intention is subverted
upon the realization that political ecology is actually all about doing
what Harvey claims political ecologists think is impossible. Political
ecologists do think we have the will, wit and capacity to change our
social goals, cultural modes and so on. They even think that we have
the power to modify nature according to human requirements the
question is really over How much? , and a significant part of the
answer is given, for political ecologists, by the fact that our actions take
place under the sign of scarcity. This, in the end, is the brute fact
(for political ecologists) which Marxist critics seek to defuse through
deployment of the sense of a dialectical relationship between human
beings and the natural world. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]