I thought we all knew long ago about their materialism. Passages like
the one cited below - and I know there are a few others - are in no way
sufficient to ground a theory that would be called "Marxist Ecology".
And we all know what the Soviets did to their environment with their
megalomaniacal ventures.
"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on
us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results
we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who,
in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to
obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying
the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the
Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so
carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by
doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their
region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their
mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it
possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during
the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware
that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading
scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in
the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able
to learn its laws and apply them correctly."
Louis Proyect
(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
