Virtual Book Seminar on MARX'S ECOLOGY

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 13:59:48 -0600 (MDT)
>From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez at csf.colorado.edu>
>To: PSN at csf.colorado.edu, m-fem at csf.colorado.edu, matfem at csf.colorado.edu,
>        socy dept faculty <socfac at lists.colorado.edu>,
>        Sociology Graduate Students <socbiz at lists.colorado.edu>,
>        bhaskar at lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Virtual Book Seminar on MARX'S ECOLOGY
>Sender: m-fem-owner at csf.colorado.edu
>
>
>PSN,  Progressive Sociologists Network (http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/)
>and Monthly Review Press are pleased to announce a virtual seminar on:
>
>Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster
>that will run from November 11-18, 2000
>
>To participate, please send an empty message to:
>psn-seminars-subscribe at csf.colorado.edu
>
>For more information on "Marx's Ecology," or how to order, please visit:
>http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/seminars/marx-ecology
>
>Richard Levins on Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature:
>"In the best tradition of Marxist scholarship, John Bellamy Foster uses the
>history of ideas not as a courtesy to the past but as an integral part of
>current issues. He demonstrates the centrality of ecology for a materialist
>conception of history, and of historical materialism for an 
>ecological movement."
>
>Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it?
>In "Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature" author John Bellamy 
>Foster overturns
>conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a 
>more rational
>approach to the current environmental crisis.
>
>Marx it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the 
>development
>of economic forces. In "Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature," John Bellamy
>Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil
>ecology, philosophical naturalism and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx
>was deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature.
>
>"The argument of this book is based on a very simple premise: that in order to
>understand the origins of ecology, it is necessary to comprehend the new views
>of nature that arose with the development of of materialism and 
>science from the
>seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Moreover, rather than simply
>picturing materialism and science as the enemies of earlier and supposedly
>preferable conceptions of nature, as is common in contemporary green 
>theory, the
>emphasis here is on how the development of both materialism and science
>promoted-indeed made possible-ecological ways of thinking...
>
>Although there is a long history of denouncing Marx for a lack of ecological
>concern, it is now abundantly clear, after decades of debate, that 
>this view does
>not at all fit with the evidence. On the contrary, as the Italian geographer
>Massimo Quaini has observed, 'Marx ... denounced the spoilation of 
>nature before
>a modern bourgeois ecological conscience was born.' From the start, 
>Marx's notion
>of the alienation of human labor was connected to an understanding of the
>alienation of human beings from nature. It was this twofold alienation which,
>above all, needed to be explained historically."
>
>--From the Introduction to "Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature"
>
>John Bellamy Foster  is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and
>is co-editor of the journals Monthly Review and Organization and Environment.
>He is the author of The Vulnerable Planet (1999, 2nd Ed.) and 
>co-editor of Hungry
>for Profit (2000), Capitalism and the Information Age (1998), and In 
>Defense of
>History (1996).