Show description

The first phase of the debate focused on material shortages and on food shortfalls in relation to population growth. By the late 1980s, the focus on limits to growth had shifted to such issues as air pollution and water quality. The environmental agenda was largely set by people and agencies in the advanced industrial societies, with the South or ‘Third World’ dominated still by the development agenda. The huge gap between these two great masses of humanity can be highlighted by data from the 1991 World Conservation Strategy (Benton and Redclift, 1994:15) that showed that one-quarter of the world’s population, living in the advanced industrial societies or North, consumed 80 per cent of the commercial energy produced worldwide, whereas threequarters of the world’s population, living in the South, consumed barely 20 per cent of the world’s commercial energy.

As Kolakowski notes: ‘The day seemed close at hand when the unity of nature, hidden behind the chaotic wealth of its diversity, would be laid bare, to human view’ (1978: 376). Marxism as critique can hardly take the same hostile attitude towards the green as Marx took against Malthus, guided by a scientific methodology, which was evolutionist and conservative to its core. If Marx has left us ambiguity, Engels has left us a text dedicated to the Dialectics of Nature usually viewed with embarassment by critical marxists.

1977: 160). There has been an interesting debate recently on Marx’s conception of nature and the heritage it has left progressive forces today. Reiner Grundmann, on the one hand, has sought to defend Marx’s record, arguing that ‘the potential of Marxism … has not been exhausted’ (1991: 52). Marx is seen as maintaining the modern conception of nature, going back to Hegel and Nietzsche and, ultimately Bacon. The idea of an ecocentric approach to nature is seen as inconsistent because it begs the question of who will define an ecological problem as such.