Derek Wall discusses Marx’s contribution to ecological thought, where current socialist governments are acting regarding the environment, and how EcoMarxists interact with electoral politics.
The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the…
For most Americans the terms “environmentalist” and “liberal” are more or less synonymous. For many historians the set of ideas called environmentalism and the set of ideas called liberalism are similarly and for similar reasons connected. But it is not at all clear why these associations make sense. The environmental historian Roderick Nash provides one explanation for the pairing of environmentalism and liberalism in
The Rights of Nature, where he argues that “one can regard environmental ethics as marking out the farthest limits of American liberalism.”
1 For Nash, the association is a direct one: environmentalism and liberalism are related because the one is an expression of the other. Liberalism, in Nash’s view, centers on granting rights based on intrinsic worth to the previously marginalized and defenseless. As liberal thinkers have argued for the moral consideration of more and more subjects a process that Nash calls the “ethical extension of liberali