[Fwd: Virtual Book Seminar on MARX'S ECOLOGY (fwd)]

Martha Gimenez wrote:

> Dear Chris,
>
> Could you forward this announcement to WSN?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Martha
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 16:10:04 -0600
> From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@csf.colorado.edu>
> To: SOCIAL-CLASS@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
> Subject: Virtual Book Seminar on MARX'S ECOLOGY
>
> 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:
> psn-seminars-subscribe@csf.colorado.edu
>
> 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).