In “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” from his Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels declared: “Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.”1 Today, two hundred years after his birth, Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. If Karl Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift is at the heart of historical-materialist ecology today, it nonetheless remains true that Engels’s contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature’s universal metabolism, which reinforced and extended Marx’s analysis. As Paul Blackledge has stated in a recent study of Engels’s thought, “Engels’s conception of a dialectics of nature opens a place through which ecological crises” can be understood as rooted in “the alienated nature of capitalist social relations.”2 It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels’s work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetaryecological crisis.
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