Growing the Red/Green Paradigm: Ecological Socialism in Root and Branch.

• Author: Sheasby, Walt Contreras

Profound turning points in social theory, have always been in response to wrenching crises in society, and the growing threat of global ecological disaster is sweeping together and coalescing critical viewpoints. These are exciting times for the growing number of students and activists who are bringing together "red" and "green." Several new books are making the eco-socialist paradigm a serious contender against the sterile flatlands of capitalist culture and ideology. For the most part this new theory remains unseen by the sated and drowsy academic intellectuals who have feasted, or so they thought, on the end of history.

Yet this new theory deals with an issue at the root of critical thinking, the perennial contradiction that reappears throughout history: Humanity is part of Nature::Humanity is not part of Nature. It is a very old dilemma, but with a new urgency, and all of the books reviewed here confront it by, means of dialectics rather than formal logical absolutes.

This year we have the publication of at least two eagerly awaited books: John Bellamy Foster's book, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, due out in March by Monthly Review Press, will be a powerful and radical intervention into environmental sociology, as well as bringing Marx's ecological roots to the forefront of socialist theory. The University of Oregon sociologist is co-editor of Organization and Environment, a journal from Sage Press, as well a regular contributor to Monthly Review.

Foster has already highlighted "Marx's Theory of Metabololic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology," in the American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 105, No. 2, Sept. 1999: 366-405), and his new book promises to be the most probing analysis yet of the metabolic basis of sustainability, described as "a rising conceptual star" in the International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Edward Elgar, 1997). Until recently, little attention was paid to Marx's use of the concept, adapted from the cell theorist Theodor Schwann and the organic chemist Justus Liebig.

Another book due out later this year is Joel Kovel's manifesto of political ecology, The Enemy of Nature, which attacks the system of capitalism in a way that goes far beyond progressive critiques of corporate excesses. Kovel lays out a consistent call for a radical reconstruction of society and restoration of the environment. For Kovel, the liberation of nature is inseparable from the emancipation of labor, or what...