Ecology and Historical Materialism. By Jonathan Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 219p. $59.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Extract

What can Marx and Marxian theory teach us about environmental problems and their possible solutions? One view is: not much, except about how not to think about the natural world and human beings' place in it. Marx himself sometimes spoke in the hubristic nineteenth-century idiom of the coming human “mastery” or “conquest” or “pacification” of nature, and most self-described Marxists have assumed that human happiness and social harmony go hand in hand with the human domination of nature. This interpretation of Marxian theory, when put into practice, has produced ecologically disastrous results of the sort described in depressing detail in Judith Shapiro's (2000) Mao's War Against Nature. But there is another way to read Marx that leads to altogether different conclusions, as we see in the work of Alfred Schmidt (The Concept of Nature in Marx, 1971), Howard Parsons (Marx and Engels on Ecology, 1977), Reiner Grundmann (Marxism and Ecology, 1991), and now in Jonathan Hughes's Ecology and Historical Materialism.