The sixth Transform!Danmark Conference, focusing on the development of left economic and ecological alternatives, took place in Copenhagen on 18 March. Once again, it focused on sustainable and fair transformation, as well as a changing society in Europe and around the world.
Growing concerns about climate change and other environmental trends have set off the next round of old Malthusian diagnoses and solutions.
As a case in point, ecological economist William E. Rees recently wrote in the Canadian alternative magazine The Tyee (“Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse” July 17, 2017):
This new collection of essays from one of the world's leading Marxist environmentalists is an important contribution to discussions about how we can fight for a sustainable world, one where, as Ian Angus says quoting Marx, we live as "a society of good ancestors".
“In order to replace capitalism with an ecological society we need a revolution.” That modest sentence is how Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, the authors of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, begin the last chapter of their new book. Although the chapter is the end of the book, it is also an opening to a new direction, a new movement. It is also the essence of the entire text.
Aug 7, 2017, NEW HAVEN — Atop a granite cliff in Siberia this past winter, I stood gazing at what became, 100 years ago, the first in the world’s largest system of most protected nature reserves. To my west glistened mile-deep Lake Baikal. To the east rose snowy mountains, including one that reminded me of sharp-cut Half Dome, an icon of America’s Yosemite National Park. I was looking across Barguzinsky Zapovednik, a conservation area protecting more than 600,000 acres so free from human impact that visitors may not enter.
A friend of mine from India tells a story about driving an old Volkswagen beetle from California to Virginia during his first year in the United States.
Climate change is out of control. It is already too late to avoid soaring temperatures, scarce water, and extreme weather. But the financial structure of capitalism is tied to fossil fuels. Market-based solutions are ineffectual. John Bellamy Foster, a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and the editor of Monthly Review, speaks about the kind of program necessary to stop this catastrophe.
“A unique collection of articles explaining highly consequential debates in the natural and social sciences, as well as in environmental politics and theory. In a wonderfully accessible way, Angus clarifies the real-world implications of these debates and their importance in the struggle for a better world.”
—Hannah Holleman, author, activist, and professor of sociology, Amherst College
Fred Magdoff is Professor Emeritus of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont. Among his recent books are Agriculture and Food in Crisis (edited with Brian Tokar) and What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (with John Bellamy Foster).
Chris Williams is an environmental activist, teacher, journalist, and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis.]
