On the heels of the ATTAC request, this seems to be the weekend for asking
advice.
Would someone knowledgeable about these things check the following and see
if it is worth our following up?
(Communicate offline to me if you think it's too simple for further
consideration on CRL.)
Thanks,
Tom
>>>>>>>
>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:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>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).
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