---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@csf.colorado.edu> Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 08:07:44 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Virtual Book Seminar on MARX'S ECOLOGY FYI 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).
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