A Global Ecological Revolution?

Abstract

The journey toward an ecological radicalism will bear little fruit until it is translated into a modern, strategic—ultimately worldwide—form of politics. Revisiting the classic injunction “socialism or barbarism,” the global crisis poses the question of human survival in a world order that is unraveling much faster than all but a few seem prepared to recognize. The environmental challenge has inspired, even forced, new ways of viewing not only economic development but political governance, culture, nature, and social change. A deeply ecological outlook invites radical perspectives on the future of production, consumption, agriculture, and technology, raising new questions about modernity itself as a product of Enlightenment rationality grounded in the utopian promises of science, technology, and material growth. The global crisis reveals the extent to which the classical industrial model has run its course, even as ruling elites scramble to mobilize resources in support of the corporate-growth system over which they preside—a system giving rise to rampant material exploitation, vast inequalities of wealth and power, wasteful use of natural resources, militarism, and warfare not to mention escalating habitat destruction on the road to possible ecological collapse. As Joel Kovel writes, “. . . the current stage of history can be characterized by structural forces that systematically degrade and finally exceed the buffering capacity of nature with respect to human production, thereby setting into motion an unpredictable yet interacting and expanding set of ecosystemic breakdowns.”1