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On Jason W. Moore’s “Capitalism in the Web of Life”

by Kamran Nayeri
Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism
July 18, 2016
Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015) offers a new perspective on capitalism and its current systemic crisis by developing an ecologically centered theory of capital accumulation. This essay first presents a concise account of Moore’s theory. (see, endnote 1)  Then, I turn my attention to Moore’s methodology which he believes is “revitalizing” and “reworking” Marx’s and Engels’ historical materialism.  In section 2 and 3, I examine this claim and find it wanting. In fact, as I will show Moore’s methodology and theory are entirely different from those of Marx and Engels.  The fact that Moore’s methodology and theory are different from Marx does not mean that they are “wrong” or lack explanatory power.  In section 4, I examine the inner logic of Moore’s methodology and theory and find them incoherent on their own basis. In Section 5, I outline a way forward that shares Moore’s concern with situating humanity in nature and shares with Ecological Marxism of Foster and others their focus on the concepts of metabolic rift and alienation from nature.
1. Moore’s theory of capitalism and present-day crisis 
The organizing principle of Moore’s book is a critique of what Moore calls Green Arithmetic or Green Thought, which he says divides the world into two separate categories, Society and Nature. He calls this Cartesian dualism to denote its origin in the work of René Descartes. The aim of the book is to replace such dualism with a theory that views humanity, hence human social organization, as an organic part of nature, and then develop an ecologically centered theory of capitalism and its dynamics.
The book has four parts. Part I is an overarching statement of Moore’s critique and his positive contribution. Parts II-IV deal with specific aspects of Part I in greater detail. They are Part II: Historical Capitalism, Historical Nature; Part III: Historical Nature and the Origins of Capital; and Part IV: The Rise and Demise of Cheap Nature. While all deserve critical attention, for brevity’s sake I will focus on Part I. As we will see, Moore’s methodology, theory, and analysis are heavily influenced by world systems theory as developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi: “Capitalism is … best understood as world-ecology of capital, power, and re-production in the web of life.” (p. 14; hereafter all emphases are Moore’s own unless noted otherwise)
Moore argues that it is necessary to develop “a language, a method, and a narrative strategy that put the oikeios at the center”; that is, “the creative, generative, and multi- layered relation of species and environment. The oikeios names the relations through which humans act—and are acted upon by the whole nature.” (p. 4)
By “web of life”, Moore means “nature as us, as inside us, as around us.” (p. 3) Moore’s alternative to Green Thought “begins neither with ‘humans’ nor with ‘nature’ but with the relations that co-produce manifold configurations of humanity-in-nature, organisms, and environments, life and land, water and air.” (p. 5) To tackle these infinitely complex sets or “bundles” of relations, Moore uses a number of hyphenated terms to denote abstraction; in his view, “’History’ … is the history of a ‘double internality’: humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity.” (ibid.)
“Humanity-in-nature” is “[h]uman engagement with the rest of nature.” It is ecology from the standpoint of human agency. “Capitalism-in-nature” is rather different, since Moore develops a more expansive definition of capitalism, “not an economic system … not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature”:

“Capitalism’s governing conceit is that it may do with Nature as it pleases, that Nature is external and may be coded, quantified, and rationalized to serve economic growth, social development, or some other higher good. … [But meanwhile] the web of life is busy shuffling about the biological and geological conditions of capitalism’s process. The ‘web of life’ is nature as a whole: nature with an emphatically lowercase n.” (pp. 2-3)

Moore further defines “world-ecology” as “the process through which civilizations, themselves forces of nature, are caught up in the co-production of life.” (p. 3) World- ecology draws attention to the “rich mosaic of relational thinking about capitalism, nature, power and history.” (ibid.) It also “says the relationality of nature implies a new method that grasps humanity-in-nature as a world historical process.” (ibid.)
Thus, the current crisis is “singular and manifold. It is not a crisis of capitalism and nature but of modernity-in-nature. That modernity is a capitalist world-ecology.” (p. 4)
Moore argues that this oikeios-centered theory inverts the key questions of Green Thought that seek answers to how humanity was separated from nature and causes ecological damage. Instead, he argues, the key questions become “how is humanity unified with the rest of nature within the web of life,” and “how is human history a co- produced history, through which humans have put nature to work—including other humans—in accumulating wealth and power?” (p. 9) “[T]he oikeios presumes that “humanity has always been unified with the rest of nature in a flow of flows. What changes are the ways in which specific aspects of humanity, such as civilizations, ‘fit’ within nature.” (p. 12.)
Further:

“In this book, nature assumes three major forms: human organization; extra- human flows, relations, and substances; and the web of life. These are not independent; rather, they are interdependent, and their boundaries and configurations shift in successive historical-geographical eras. This last is pivotal: nature is not ‘just there.’ It is historical. This way of seeing leads us to a second inversion. Instead of asking what capitalism does to nature, we may begin to ask how nature works for capitalism? If the former question implies separation, the latter implicates unification.” (pp. 12-13)

But while laws of nature obey those that govern matter and energy, capitalism operates on the basis of capital accumulation as self-expanding value which obeys the “law of value.” Moore is aware of this incongruence in his theorizing. Thus he writes: “The concept of work/energy looms large in this argument. … Work/energy helps us to rethink capitalism as a set of relations through which the ‘capacity to do work’—by human and extra-human natures—is transformed into value, understood as socially necessary labor-time (abstract social labor).” (p. 14) (endnote 2)
However, this way of overcoming theoretical/analytical incongruency forces Moore to suggest that not only humans or other animals, but rivers, waterfalls, or forests also “work.”
In addition, although Moore acknowledges the essential role of exploitation – the production of surplus-value in the labor process – he makes a key part of his argument the centrality to capitalism of appropriation, defined as

“those extra-economic processes that identify, secure, and channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital. … So important is the appropriation of unpaid work that the rising rate of exploitation depends upon the fruits of appropriation derived from Cheap Natures, understood primarily as the ‘Four Cheaps’ of labor power, food, energy, and raw materials.” (p. 17, emphasis added).

Thus he reinterprets the law of value as “a ‘law’ of Cheap Nature” that is operative from the inception of capitalism in the long sixteenth century (1450-2650). “At the core of this law is the ongoing, rapidly expansive, and relentlessly  innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in- motion).” (pp. 13-14) In Moore’s reconceptualization,

“Capital must not only ceaselessly accumulate and revolutionize commodity production; it must ceaselessly search for, and find ways to produce, Cheap Natures; a rising stream of low-cost food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials…. These are the Four Cheaps…The law of value in capitalism is a law of Cheap Nature.” (p. 53, my emphasis).

“Cheap Nature” operates “by reducing the value composition—but increasing the technical composition—of capital as a whole; by opening new opportunities for investment; and, in its qualitative dimension, by allowing technologies and new kinds of nature to transform extant structures of capital accumulation and world power. In all this, commodity frontiers—frontiers of appropriation—are central.” (ibid., emphasis added)
Moore gives this process of appropriation on a world scale a name, “world-ecological surplus,” and suggests a tendency for it to fall over the course of historical time. “The ecological surplus is the ratio of the system-wide mass of capital to the system-wide appropriation of unpaid work/energy.” (p. 95) He borrows the idea from the EROI ratio (energy returned on energy invested), a measure for energy efficiency. Moore amends this notion to EROCI – “energy returned on capital invested.” He acknowledges that, like EROI, EROCI cannot be quantified because it is impossible to calculate unpaid work/energy (ibid., footnote 16)
From this follows Moore’s view of the current systemic crisis:

“The crises of capitalism-in-nature are crises of what nature does for capitalism, rather more than what capitalism does to nature. This point of entry offers not only a fresh perspective—one that includes, centrally, the work of human natures—but also provides an opportunity for synthesizing two great streams of radical thought since the 1970s: the theory of accumulation crisis and the study of environmental crisis.” (p. 17)

2. Moore’s revision of historical materialism
Moore posits that Paul Burkett (1999) and John Bellamy Foster (2000) offer the potential for “a revitalized and reworked historical materialism in line with Marx’s system of thought” and a “renewal of value-relational thinking—the law of value as co-produced by humans and the rest of nature.”  He clearly views his own work as at least a significant step in such revitalization and renewal.  Let’s first outline what Moore believes are the key contributions of Foster and Burkett that enable him to rework historical materialism and develop his own theory of capitalism and crisis.
Foster has argued that Marx’s central concern with human emancipation included overcoming bourgeois estrangement from nature, as seen in capitalist production and the growing division between town and country that has adversely affected the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature.  Following Marx’s own use of the concept (Foster, 2000, chapter 5), he and his colleagues have used the concept of “metabolic rift” for their own theoretical development of the relationship between capitalism and nature.
Moore argues that “Foster’s original formulation of metabolic rift opens the possibility for thinking through a singular metabolism of power, nature, and capital.”(endnote 3)  He enumerates three “registers” in Foster’s formulation of the “rift.” First, there is a “rift between human production and its natural conditions.” Second, there is a “material estrangement [alienation] of human beings in capitalist society from conditions of their existence.” Finally, the rift finds geographical expression in a new town-country antagonism.

“Foster took the rift in metabolic rift to signify the rechanneling of food and resources produced in agrarian zones into urban-industrial spaces.  Although metabolic rift today is almost universally understood as a metaphor of separation, the original argument suggested something different: rift as reconfiguration and shift.” (p. 83).

Thus, the idea of “rift as reconfiguration and shift” which he credits to Foster became Moore’s own point of departure. (ibid.) (endnote 4)
Moore’s interpretation of and preference for “rift” as “shift” – as opposed to Foster’s use “irreparable rift” (Foster, 2000, p. 141) – becomes a defining characteristic of his methodology and the basis of his assertion that environmentalist and Marxists methodologies often suffer from “Cartesian dualism.”

“Metabolism, liberated from dualisms, acts a solvent. For if metabolism as a whole is a flow of flows in which life and matter enter into specific, historical-geographical arrangements, we are called to construct a much more supple and historically sensitive family of concepts, unified by a dialectical method that transcends all manner of dualisms—not least, not only, Nature/Society.” (ibid.)

Thus, Moore’s focus turns to Cheap Nature as the key source of capitalist accumulation: “Foster’s insight was to posit capitalism as an open-flow metabolism, one that requires more and more Cheap Nature just to stay in place…” (ibid.)  Cheap Nature as appropriated from human and extra-human nature becomes central to Moore’s theory, a concept that he asserts is from Burkett’s discussion of Marx’s historical materialism and the law of value and nature. (endnote 5)
Thus, modern history is characterized as “the voracious consumption of, and relentless quest for, Cheap Natures – ‘cheap’ in relation to the accumulation of capital and its curious privileging of wage-work as the only thing worth valuing.” (p. 85) Thus, Moore’s emphasis on non-wage worker sources for capitalist accumulation, in particular on the unpaid work/energy of human and extra-human nature.
A key problem that Moore overlooks is this: if Burkett’s and Foster’s contributions that Moore takes as his own point of departure are salient features of Marx’s historical materialism and its specific application to the capitalist mode of production, that is, Marx’s labor theory of value, then why didn’t Marx himself develop a theory of capitalism and crisis along the lines that Moore now proposes? Put another way, why is Moore’s theory of capitalism and crisis differ so radically from that of Marx?
3. Contrasting Marx and Moore
Let’s recall Marx’s own theoretical development and the methodological reasons for it. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels argued that  

“…[W]e must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’  But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things. The first historical act is thus the production of material life itself.” (Marx and Engels, 1845, p. 43-44, emphasis added).

All living organisms “appropriate” from their environment their means of subsistence in order to live and to reproduce.  For 190,000 years or 95% of our existence, modern humans lived as hunter-gatherers who – like other animals – appropriated their livelihood. When a combination of factors forced some hunter-gatherer bands to take up farming about 12,000 years ago, production for subsistence began.  First farmers “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization…” (ibid., p. 31, emphasis in original) (endnote 6).  (In thinking through Marx’s concept of metabolic rift this is an insightful passage to which I will return in Section 5 below).
Because of the world-historic significance of production, Marx and Engels viewed “mode of production” not simply as“the reproduction of physical existence of individuals” but also as “a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part….What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produced and with how they produce it.”  (ibid. pp. 31-32, emphases in original)
It is important to note topics Marx and Engels quite explicitly set aside:  “Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geographical, oro-hydrographical, climate and so on.” (ibid. p. 31)  The point is that they were fully aware that “human nature,” and our natural context, environment and what is now called ecological niche matter and can be woven into their analysis. But they still insisted that a focus on “mode of production” is the proper methodological focus for historical studies.
Thus, it is not surprising that Marx devoted decades of his life to developing his critique of political economy and of the capitalist mode of production.  Nor it is surprising that he critically appraised and appropriated as much as possible of classical political economists’ labor theories of value, in particular, those developed by Ricardo and Smith.  These clearly follow from his historical materialism.
It is equally clear that Marx and Engels were always aware of the role of appropriation in human history and prehistory (See, Burkett, 1999; chapter 2). For Marx, the capitalist mode of production originated in primitive accumulation, a historical process of appropriation (Marx, 1867, chapter 26; Nayeri, 1991, Appendix 1). This process was necessary to develop the four pillars of the capitalist mode of production: 1) the existence of a class of wage workers that is “free” of their means of subsistence and of bondage to land, that is, a labor market; 2) the concentration of means of social production in the hands of a class of industrial capitalists, that is, a capital market; 3) a commodities market; and 4) production for profit.  For Marx, in England, this process coincided with the “manufacturing stage,” roughly 1550-1750 (Marx, 1867, p. 455).
The contrast with Moore is considerable. Following Wallerstein who identified capitalism with “production for sale in a market which the objective is to realize a profit” (Wallerstein, 1974, p. 398), Moore holds that capitalism came into existence in the long sixteenth century (1460-1650). (endnote 7)  For Marx capitalism in England took at least a century more to emerge. Moore does not distinguish between “capitalism” and “capitalist mode of production.”  For Marx, the former is a social formation and the latter a historical mode of production. A nation-state typically is a social formation including a number of modes of production. A nation-state is called capitalist when the capitalist mode of production is dominant.  This requires the formation of the general (average ) rate of profit. (Marx, 1894, Part Two; also see, Shaikh, 2016, Pat II, especially, 7. IV) To my knowledge, neither Wallerstein nor Moore have argued that this was the case in the long sixteenth century.
Moore’s revisions to Marx’s and Engels’ historical materialism are extensive. First, he insists that capitalism is “not an economic system … not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature.”  A charitable interpretation of this assertion is that for Moore capitalism is first and foremost “a way of organizing nature.” But in doing so, Moore is focusing attention on what is shared with all other modes of production, the exact opposite of Marx’s method that focused attention on what is unique to capitalist production. Second, in his theory of accumulation, Moore de-emphasizes capitalist production, hence wage-labor, and emphasizes appropriation of “unpaid human and extra-human nature.” That is, Moore privileges “appropriation” instead of “production.” Third, he sets aside Marx’s labor theory of value, his historical materialism applied to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, in favor of a “law of value” that combines “work/energy” from appropriation and surplus value from capitalist production to explain the history of the capitalist system and its crisis.
Historical materialism has been both a methodology used by some of the best historians and theorists of capitalism and contested by others including some Marxist theorists who have tried to refine or extend it.  However, fruitful revision of any methodology or theory requires specific criticism of its deficiencies and ensuring that the proposed improvements would not debase it entirely. Unfortunately, Moore’s “revitalization” and “reworking” of historical materialism does not explicitly discuss any of its deficiencies.  Instead, he simply declares an alternative methodology and a theory of capitalism and crisis that is at odds with Marx’s own methodology and theory (which Moore claims to adhere to and wishes to extend).
Moore’s sharp break with Marx aside, we must now ask: How well do Moore’s methodology and theory hold up on their own basis?
4. Tensions in Moore’s methodology and theory
Moore’s methodology and theory have serious internal tensions. Moore himself acknowledges some of them. For instance, he admits that his proposed EROCI ratio (energy returned on capital invested) to measure “world ecological surplus” cannot be operationalized: “This is an imperfect formulation, precisely because the condition for quantification within the commodity system (units of labor-time) is a world of unpaid work that cannot be quantified.”  (P. 96, footnote 16)  However, Moore does not seem to recognize that this same lack of congruency and incoherence runs through his entire theory of capitalist accumulation which centrally depends on the appropriation of “unpaid work by human and extra-human nature.” If Moore cannot quantify unpaid work, then how can we assess how central its contribution is to capitalist accumulation
However, Moore seems impervious to such considerations. Thus, He uses EROCI ratio to introduce yet another concept: “Peak appropriation.”

“EROCI puts the relative contributions of paid and unpaid work/energy at the center. The peak in question is not, then, a peak in output—of energy, or some other primary commodity. It is, rather, the work/energy embodied in the commodity: dollars per bushel, or ton, or barrel, or horse, or hours of labor-power.” (p. 106)

But he immediately adds:

“Even here the language is imprecise. Quantification can illuminate but not adequately capture these specifics. Energy and material flows can be measured; but within capitalism, they cannot be counted—for the secret of capital’s dynamism is that it counts only what it values (labor productivity).” (ibid.)

It seems to this me that this not really a problem of language but of the murkiness of Moore’s own concepts.  If Moore cannot establish a way to verify conceptual categories that are derived from his methodology and are the stuff of his theory, then how can he believe they are valid?
Moore’s concept of work/energy is similarly incoherent. What does it mean to say, as he does, that rivers, oceans, and forests “work”? When a beaver puts up a dam on a river does the river “work” for her?  If Moore answers in the affirmative, then he is speaking the language of physics: Work is done when a force that is applied to an object moves that object.  But if Moore denies that the river works for the beaver, then why, when humans put up a dam on the same river, does Moore argue that the river is providing unpaid work to humans (be they hunter-gatherers or capitalists)?
The same methodological problem crops up in Moore’s notion that capitalism is “co-produced by human and extra-human nature” (e.g., see, p. 14).  If appropriated unpaid work is centrally important to capitalist accumulation and by appropriation, we understand the dictionary definition (“The action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission”) then how can we view those who have been subjected to appropriation as “co-producers?” In 2011, more than 58 billion chickens, nearly 3 billion ducks, and some 1.38 billion pigs were slaughtered worldwide to be sold as food. Other farm animals slaughtered for food numbered in the hundreds of millions (turkeys, geese and guinea fowl, sheep, goats, and cattle). (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2014, p. 15; for a discussion of this, see, Nayeri, 2014) It is clear that the meat industry quite consciously “worked through” nature by enslaving, torturing and mass murdering these billions of non-human animals.  Should we call their victims “co-producers” of the capitalist meat industry? To what end?
The notion of “co-production” is problematic because of the relation between social production and the rest of nature in not symmetrical.  In Marx’s view, in class societies, external nature (extra-human nature) is mediated through forces of production, knowledge/science and technology. These create a partial separation from external nature.  Interpreting Darwin’s work as showing “the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life,” Marx asks rhetorically: “Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?” In his view human history differs from natural history in that humans have made the former, but not that the latter.  “Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of production of his life.” (Marx, 1867, p. 493, footnote 4).
In the Grundrisse, in the “Chapter on Capital,” Book VII, Marx writes:

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.” (Marx, 1973, p. 706; emphases in original)

Hence, the need for a theory of society that requires its own methodology apart from the methodology of natural science. Thus, Moore’s methodology and theory that aim at combining social and natural categories by privileging contributions to capitalist accumulation from “unpaid work of human and extra-human nature” is incoherent. There is no way to reconcile the labor theory of value (or indeed any “theory of value”) and appropriated flows of work/energy because the former is about the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production and the latter obey the laws of physics.  An analogous error can be found in E.O. Wilson’s attempt to apply evolutionary biology to problems in the domains of humanities and social sciences, for which he has been aptly criticized by dialectical biologist Richard Levins (e.g., see, Levins, 2012) (for my own view, see, Nayeri, 2015).
The problem here is not dualism but the recognition that to understand humanity we must understand humans not simply as biological beings but also as social beings who have unique powers to manipulate nature, including human nature, and to try to understand why in class societies, in particular, industrial capitalism, these powers have come to debase life as we know it.   In the short history of capitalism, these powers have produced conditions that threaten not only humanity but the Earth system itself.
5. An alternative road forward

In Chapter 7, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Moore dismisses a number of competing views of the causes and timing for the Anthropocene to argue for his own notion of the Capitalocene. Included in his criticism are their supposed treatment of humanity as a homogenous whole and their dualism.  Unsurprisingly, the Capitalocene began with “[t]he rise of capitalism after 1450” which “was made possible by an epochal shift in the scale, speed, and scope of landscape transformation in the Atlantic world and beyond.” (p. 182)

The literature on the Anthropocene (Epoch of Man) was born out of the recognition of the intensifying planetary crisis that poses an existential threat to humanity and the search for its causes and policy response to it. The aquatic biologist Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term in the 1980s and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen who popularized it in 2000 have suggested that the Anthropocene could have begun with the introduction of the steam engine in the English Industrial Revolution.  This idea resonated with the Green movement, which holds industrialization as the cause for the ecological crisis and with the (eco)socialist movement that holds capitalism responsible.  There are very good reasons to believe that the fossil fuel-powered industrial capitalist world economy is responsible for the planetary crisis—just take a look at the list of the nine “planetary boundaries” (thresholds for safe human societies) presented by the Stockholm Resilience Center (Rockström, et.al., 2009) that Moore himself cites on the first page of his book. They nine thresholds are:

•climate change
•stratospheric ozone
•land use change
•freshwater use
•biological diversity
•ocean acidity
•nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans
•aerosol loading
•chemical pollution
Even if we accept the world-systems view that capitalism emerged in the long sixteenth century with significant negative impact on the landscape and labor, it is hard to deny that capitalist industrialization has had a world-historic disastrous impact on the biosphere creating existential threats to humanity and much of life on Earth.
Between 1804 and 2012 the world human population increased exponentially seven-folds from 1 billion to 7 billion and it is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. “The human species is now using about 12,000 times as much energy per day as was the case when farming started; 90 per cent of this is a result of industrialization, 10 per cent to our huge growth in numbers.” (Vitousek, et al, 1986)  The ratio of real GDP in 1995 to 1950 was 3.1 in the “more developed areas” with 20% of the world population and 2.9 in the “less developed areas” with 80% of the world population. (Easterlin, 2000, Table 3) Taking Moore’s own interest in the appropriation of work/energy, in the 1980s about 40% of the net primary production in terrestrial ecosystems was being coopted by human beings each year. (endnote 9)  People and the associated organisms used this organic material largely, but not entirely, at the human direction, and the vast majority of other species had to subsist on the remainder.  “An equivalent concentration of resources into one species and its satellites has probably not occurred since land plants first diversified.” (Vitousek, et al, 1986) .  They also note that humans affected much of the remaining 60% of terrestrial NNP.  This study used conservative estimates and we are now 25 years further down the path of expansion of production and population.  Just one statistics makes the point: in 2011-2013 China used more concrete than the United States did in the entire 20th century.(Beiser, 2016)
Further, Moore’s double criticism of proponents of the notion of the Anthropocene certainly does not apply to at least some ecological socialists.  To simply paint the entire literature on the Anthropocene as indifferent to social stratification and as dualist is to dismiss a key thesis in the understanding of what has gone wrong and how to intervene in history to address the existential crisis we face today.
Even so, the literature on the Anthropocene and its competing hypotheses such as the Capitalocene ignore a central question: How and when humanity or at least a decisive part of it set off to forge a malignant relation with nature?
The origin of alienation from nature
Ecological Marxists like Foster identify alienation, in particular, alienation from nature, as the ultimate cause of the ecological crisis. In this, they follow Marx’s labor theory of alienation, closely tied to the rise and dominance of the capitalist mode of production. However, we know of many pre-capitalist civilizations that collapsed in part because of ecological crisis.  Clearly, the problem of alienation from nature precedes capitalism.
To locate the origins of alienation from nature and appreciate its world-historic significance for human emancipation, it is helpful to recall key elements of Marx’s and Engels’ historical materialism that I cited in Section 3 above.  Marx and Engels argued that as they engaged in organized production for the first time in history early farmers began to distinguish themselves from other animals. What they produced and how they produced it also contributed to who the early farmers became.  Modern anthropology and archeology confirm this view expressed over a century and a half earlier.
Taking this cue from Marx and Engels, I have drawn upon the most recent “stylized facts” of archeology and anthropology to outline a theory of the origin of human alienation and how it served as the basis for social alienation: stratification, oppression, and exploitation (Nayeri, 2013).  I urge the reader to review my argument which I cannot repeat in detail here. But for our present purpose it instructive to outline what hunter-gatherers’ worldview might have looked like, based on anthropologists’ accounts of the worldviews of forager societies still surviving in tiny pockets around the world:

“…[M]ost foragers are characterized by ‘animistic’ or (less commonly) ‘totemic’ belief systems. In the former, non-human animals are not just like humans, they are persons.  Their environment is a treasure house of ‘personage’, each with language, reason, intellect, moral conscience, and knowledge, regardless of whether the outer shape is human, animal, reptile, or plant. Thus the Jivaro people of eastern Ecuador and Peru consider humans, animals, and plant as ‘persons’ (aents), linked by blood ties and common ancestry (Descola, 1996). Foragers with animistic belief systems commonly do not have words for distinguishing between people, animals, and plants as separate categories, using instead classification systems based on terms of equality rather than the hierarchies of our own Linnaean taxonomies (Howell, 1996).  The totemic systems of Australian Aborigines are ceremonies and rituals that stress an abstract linear continuity between the human and non-human communities.  Animals are the most common totems, signifying a person’s or group’s identity or distinctiveness, but though they may be good to eat or food for thought, they are not considered social partners as in the animistic belief systems.

“The forager world is animated with moral, mystical, and mythical significance (Carmichael et al., 1994). It is constructed and reconstructed through the telling of myths, which commonly include all kinds of animals as humans, changing shape between one and the other.  In addition to the present world inhabited by humans and non-human-beings, there is a supernatural world. In many forager societies, shamans mediate between the lived and supernatural worlds, entering and conceptualizing the latter, commonly through ecstatic experiences… As the whole world is self, killing a plant or animal is not murder but transformation. Finding food is taken for granted, reinforced by myths telling the hunter to be the animal before presuming to kill and eat it.  ‘They are being heard by a sentient conscious universe–a gallery of intelligent beings who, if offended by injudicious words (ridicule, bragging, undue familiarity, profanity, etc.) can take reprisal, usually by a steadfast refusal to be taken as food or by inflicting disease or doing other violence’ (C.L. Martin, 1993, p. 14).”  (Barker, 2006, p. 59).

I call foragers worldviews ecocentric because their frame of reference is their natural setting.  It should be easy to agree that our ecocentric hunter-gatherer ancestors had no dualist view of the natural world in the sense Moore is concerned with.  However, as Marx and Engels suggested to us and modern anthropology and archeology has documented it the perception of humanity rising above the natural world, which we may call anthropocentrism, originated with the Agricultural Revolution some 10,000 years ago. Anthropocentrism (human-centered worldview), also known as homo-centrism, human supremacism, and speciesism, is the view that holds human beings as the central or most significant species on Earth in the sense that they are considered to have a moral standing above other beings.  Current consensus is that anthropocentrism perhaps contributed to the transition to farming. But there is little doubt that it emerged and consolidated with the Agricultural Revolution and institutionalized by the class societies that followed.
Let’s recall that farming presupposes domestication of some plants and animals. While early domestications were coincidental (how some wolves began to track humans for leftovers from hunting and in return provided the hunter-gather bands with advance warning and some protection), when farming finally consolidated it has been characterized throughout history with systematic attempts to dominate and control nature including by breeding “desirable” plants and animals and control or elimination of “undesirable” species and more recently by attempts to control against natural cycles.  These contributed to the development of science and technology and it was served in turn by them.
Once the early subsistence farmers began to produce an economic surplus, social stratification emerged giving rise to social alienation, paving the way for the institutionalization of subordination, oppression, and exploitation.  Thus, alienation from nature and social alienation are inter-related and the former was necessary for the latter.
If my overall argument is correct in broad outlines, then we have a unified (non-dualist) theory of society and nature and their systemic crisis throughout history has brought down a number of civilizations.  The systemic crisis we face today is different only because of its global reach and scale, speed and intensity of forces unleashed by the industrial capitalist civilization that threatens humanity and much besides.  The metabolic rift did not originate with the rise of capitalism but, to use Richard Levins’ terminology, with the rise of Homo productivore  (Levins, 2012).  Anthropocentric class societies have been all about “ways of organizing nature” for the benefit of the ruling elites and have presupposed domination and control over nature, including human nature.
An advantage of this theory of metabolic rift and dualism is that it includes the added dimension of an environmental ethics not integral to Moore’s theory or those of Ecological Marxists. This environmental ethic squarely is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution and science of ecology that is both ecocentric (even though Darwin himself like others of his time was anthropocentric). The solution to the anthropocentric industrial capitalist crisis is an ecocentric ecological socialist revolution in which we retreat from more than 10,000 years of trying to dominate and control nature only to create more devastating social and natural crises.  The challenge of our time is to make such a revolution before the systemic crisis undermines life-support systems of the biosphere.
Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Fred Murphy for his expert copy-editing of this essay and his critical comments that helped me improve the text, and to Robin Chang for his generous help with the literature search.  Neither bears any responsibility for the views expressed here or any remaining errors and shortcomings.
Dedication: The writing of this essay was delayed for months when my beloved companion Lulu (the cat) was battling serious and eventually terminal illness. He died at 5 in the morning of February 13, 2016.  The Humane Society of Sonoma County, California, where I live, offers material incentives to people who adopt black cats because of the superstition that black cats are evil or at least bring bad luck. My experience has been the exact opposite. I have been fortunate to have had two companion black cats both far sweeter than all but a handful of humans I have come to know in my long life. This essay is dedicated to the loving memory of Lulu.

References:

Anievas, Alex, and Kerem Nisancioglu. How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. 2015.
Ashton, T. H. and C. H. E. Philpin (eds.). The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. 1985.
Banaji, Jairus. “Reconstructing Historical Materialism” in Chakravarty, Prasanta, ed., Shrapnel Minima: Writings from Humanities Underground. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Beiser, Vince. “The World’s Disappearing Sand.” The New York Times, June 23, 2016
Barker, Graeme.  The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory.  2006.
Blaut, James. “Robert Brenner in the Tunnel of Time.” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 351-76, 1994.
Brenner, Robert. The Origins of Capitalist Development:A Critique of Neo-SmithianMarxism. New Left Review, no. 104: 25-92. 1977.
Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. 1999.
Carmichael, D. L., Hubert, J., Reeves, B., and Schanche A. (eds.). Sacred Sites, Sacred Places. London: Rougtledge, 1994.
Denemark, Thomas, and Kenneth P. Thomas. “The Brenner-Wallerstein Debate.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 47-65, March 1988.
Descola, P. “Constructing Nature: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice,” in P. Descola and G. Palsson (eds.) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives: 82-102. London: Rougtledge, 1996.
Easterlin, Richard E. “The Worldwide Standard of Living Since 1800.” Journal of Economic Perspective, volume 14, no. 1, Winter 2000—pp. 7–26.
Harootunian, Harry. Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. 2015.
Heller, Harry. The Birth of Capitalism A 21st Century Perspective. 2011.
Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology. 2000.
Heinrich Böll Foundation. Meat Atlas: Facts and Figures About Animals We Eat. January, 2014.
Howell, S. “Nature in Culture or Culture in Nature?” Chewong Idea of ‘Humans’ and Other Species,” n P. Descola and G. Palsson (eds.) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives: 127-144. London: Rougtledge, 1996.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Volume 5. 1845 (1976).
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse.: An Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. 1857-8 (1973) Translated by Martin Nicolaus.
—————-. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, 1867 (translated by Ben Fowkes, Vintage, 1977)
—————-. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, 1894 (translated by Ben Fowkes, Vintage, 1981)
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. 2015.
Nayeri, Kamran. The Role of Competition in Theories of Late Capitalist Development.  Ph.D. dissertation. 1991.
————————. “Economics, Socialism, and Ecology: A Critical Outline, Part 2,” Philosophers for Change, 2013
————————. “How Veganism Can Help Save the World.”  Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism, June 12, 2014.
————————. “An Ecological Socialist’s Reflection on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. October 16, 2015.
Post, Charlie. The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620—1877. 2012.
—————-. “The Debate on Marxism and History: What Is at Stake?”, International Socialist Review, Fall 2014.
Shaikh, Anwar. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. 2016.
Vitousek, P., Ehrlich, A., and Matson, P.  “Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis,” BioScience, vol. 277, pp. 494-499, 1986.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. 1974.
Watson, Judith, Ted Benton, Kathryn Dean, Pat Devine, Jane Hindley, Richard Kuper, Gordon Peters, Graham Sharp & Peter Dickens (2016) “Disentangling Capital’s Web,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 27:2, 103-121, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2016.1178952. Wood, Ellen Meiksins.  The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. 1999.
Endnotes:
1.  The American Sociological Association has granted Capitalism in the Web of Life the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System Book Award.  Still, I found reading “Capitalism in the Web of Life” challenging. It is poorly edited and rife with repetitions. Moore liberally uses a language whose terminology is not properly explained (for example, “bundles” is first defined on page 46 but used earlier a number of times). The editorial group of Capitalism Nature Socialism in Britain similarly found it hard to summarize and understand Capitalism in the Web of Life (Watson, et. al., 2016).
2. Moore borrows this idea from George Caffenztis (In Letters of Blood and Fire, 2013): ”My use of work/energy extends it to capitalism’s unified logic of appropriation of human and extra-human ‘work’ that is transformed into value.” (p. 14, footnote 24).
3. Of course, the idea of metabolic rift originated with Marx; Foster should be credited for reintroducing it and expanding on it with others in the current surge of interest in ecological socialism.
4. Due to concern for brevity I have set aside a number of important methodological issues, including the meaning and uses of “dialectics.”  “Rift” is a break from an existing pattern of relations setting up a new relationship. Once established, the new pattern of relations changes over time making for another rift, setting up new relationships.  Thus, a rift happens as quantitative changes resulting in a qualitative change, or thesis and anti-thesis making for a new synthesis. This is the sense I understand Moore’s emphasis on “rift” as “shift” and Foster’s use of “rift irreparable.”   Moore emphasizes continuity while Foster emphasizes change.
5. In Marx, labor power is itself “a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing” and through the labor process the worker “appropriates Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants.”  (Burkett, 1999, p. 26, emphases in original)
6. Clearly, in retrospect Marx and Engels must have said, instead of “distinguish themselves from animals,” “distinguished themselves from other animals.”  I will get back to this distinction in Section 5.
7. Brenner (1977) deftly criticizes this notion. Also, see, Denemark and Thomas (1988) and Ashton and Philpin (1985). There is a renewed interest in the problem of origins of capitalism and the debate on transition from feudalism to capitalism. Writing in the same vein as Brenner, Wood (1999) criticizes the literature for its logical circularity.  While Brenner’s thesis is largely accepted among economic historians and others interested in the question of origins of capitalism,  in recent years a number of writers have contributed views that are different from or critical of Brenner’s, including  Anievas and Nisancioglu (2015),  Banaji (2014), Blaut (1994), Harootunian (2015) and Heller (2011). Others, such as Post who writes in the Brenner tradition (Post, 2012), have argued in his defense (2014). As Post observes there is nothing less than the status of Marx’s and Engels’ historical materialism that is at stake.
8. What distinguishes Moore’s method and theory is the emphasis on appropriation of “unpaid work of human and extra-human nature.” “So important is the appropriation of unpaid work that the rising rate of exploitation depends upon the fruits of appropriation derived from Cheap Natures, understood primarily as the ‘Four Cheaps’ of labor power, food, energy, and raw materials.” (p. 17)
9. Ultimately, all species live off energy that arrives on Earth via sunshine.  Through photosynthesis green plants (primary producers) convert solar energy into sugars. They consume about half of it for their own livelihood. What remains is called Net Primary Productivity (NPP).  The NPP is the basis for all animal life. Herbivores eat plants to gain energy for their livelihood (primary consumers). Finally, some carnivores live off herbivores (secondary consumers).  Some omnivores eat secondary consumers (tertiary consumers).  The final link in the food chain is the decomposers that live off the organic matter of plants, herbivores and carnivores.  In each step in the food chain about 90% of the energy is lost.

How to Stop the Sixth Extinction: A Critical Assessment of E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth

by Kamran Nayeri

Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism

May 14, 2017

“The only solution to the ‘Sixth Extinction’ is to increase the area of inviolable natural reserves to half the surface of the Earth or greater.  This expansion is favored by unplanned consequences of ongoing human population growth and movement and evolution of the economy now driven by the digital revolution. But it also requires a fundamental shift in moral reasoning concerning our relation to the living environment.” (Wilson, 2016, p.167)

 Introduction

The anthropogenic Sixth Extinction is an existential threat to much of life on Earth, including the human species.  In this essay, I critically examine the renowned entomologist, naturalist, and conservationist E. O. Wilson’s proposal in his recent book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016), to stop and reverse it.  In section I, I will outline what is meant by biodiversity and why it matters, and provide the basic facts about the Sixth Extinction and its salient causes.  In section II, I will outline Wilson’s proposal identifying tensions in his arguments for its efficacy.  In particular, I will show the tension between Wilson’s love for the natural world and his knowledge of biology and ecology on one hand and his inadequate understanding of human history, in particular, the capitalist civilization, which results in wishful thinking.  The Half-Earth proposal is necessary but not sufficient for stopping and reversing the Sixth Extinction. Finally, I conclude with a brief outline of what I consider to be necessary in order to make Wilson’s proposal effective.

I

Biodiversity and why it matters

In 2011, Boris Worm and his fellow researchers at Dalhousie University devised a new way to estimate the number of species, both known and undiscovered.  By this method, the number of species in the animal kingdom that exists today was estimated to be “at a quite reasonable 7.7 million” and the total number in the Eukarya, which include plants, algae, fungi, and many kinds of eukaryotic microorganisms, came “to approximately 8.7 million, give or take a million.” (Wilson, 2016, pp. 22-23)  Still, Wilson adds that the “Dalhousie method might undershoot the mark.” (ibid. p. 23)  On May 24, 2016, Kenneth Locey and Jay Lennon reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that using a global-scale compilation of microbial and macrobial data, they have uncovered relationships of commonness and rarity that scale with abundance at similar rates for microorganisms and macroscopic plants and animals. They then use other techniques to show that the world is home to about 1 trillion microbial species.  (Locey and Lennon, 2016, for a discussion, see, Pedrós-Alió and Manrubia, 2016)  To appreciate this biodiversity, we must recall how life originated on Earth and has evolved, and to remember that despite many possible planets that could harbor life we still know of no other that actually do. Life on Earth is still a unique experience in the universe as far as we can tell today.  Homo sapiens who possess the amazing power of contemplation and reasoning that has enabled us to understand and appreciate the emergence and development of life on Earth could not have evolved without the expansion of biodiversity of life following The Age of Reptiles that ended 65 million years ago.  We still depend and will continue to depend on the flourishing diversity of life that provide us with life support (Wilson, 2016, pp. 11-18, Washington, 2013). 

Mass extinctions of species: a rare phenomenon

It would be no surprise that some of these species go extinct as species extinction is a natural evolutionary phenomenon. In fact, ninety-nine percent of species that existed in 3.8 billion years of life on Earth have disappeared.  However, as Wilson points out (ibid. p. 63), the great majority of these didn’t simply die-off. They evolved into multiple new species each fit to a niche in the changing environment. What is more relevant to our concern is the truly apocalyptic extinction event in which 50–90% of species were eliminated relatively quickly.  These are the Ordovician, 490–443 million years ago (mya), Devonian (417–354 mya), Permian (299–250 mya), Triassic (251–200 mya), and Cretaceous (146–64 mya) periods. The last of these ended the Age of Reptiles and began the Age of Mammals.   On average, the five apocalyptic extinction events have been spaced out by some 100 million years and it has taken about 10 million years for biodiversity to recover after such apocalyptic extinction events.  

How do we know that the biosphere is experiencing an anthropogenic Sixth Extinction?   By comparing the extinction rate before the rise of humans and its rate after their spread across the globe.  Paleontologists and biodiversity experts have estimated that before the emergence of humanity about two hundred thousand years ago, the rate of species extinction was one to ten species per one million per year (E/MSY).  This is called “the background extinction rate.” In contrast, since the spread of humanity extinction rate has accelerated up to 100 to 1,000 E/MSY today. Thus, scientists conclude that we are in the process of the Sixth Extinction.  However, the situation may be even direr: one recent study concludes  “that typical rates of background extinction may be closer to 0.1 E/MSY. Thus, current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than natural background rates of extinction and future rates are likely to be 10,000 times higher.” (De Vos, et. al., 2015)

Causes of the Sixth Extinction

Paleontologists and biodiversity experts associate the acceleration of the rate of species extinction with the spread of humans and our increasingly larger “ecological footprint.” The “ecological footprint” is a murky concept colored by the context of its use.  For our purpose, let’s define it as ecological impact due to Our Way of Life.(see, endnote 1)  I will come back to this a little later. 

Evidence for anthropogenic extinction events goes back 50,000 years to the time when humans were migrating out of Africa and spread across the planet.  Extinction rates increase as the number of people and our “ecological footprint” increase and greatly accelerate in the past two centuries with the spread of industrial capitalism and exponential population growth (Sodhi, et. al. 2009). 

As I will explain in a moment, humans, still few in numbers, began to hunt megafauna into extinction in prehistory soon after migration out of Africa that began 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.  But when our ancestors became producers with the advent of agriculture, the mode of production also became the mode of articulation of Our Way of Life and how it degraded and destroyed ecosystems accelerating the global extinction rate.  

Hunter-gatherers 

Although hunter-gatherers hunted and fished for a million years, there are no indication that they contributed to the extinction of species.  That is, until about 50,000 years ago when humans were established on every continent except Antartica.  Then the big games start to go missing: 

“Australia lost most of its large animals first, about 46,000 years ago. North and South America saw a similar extinction wave 13,000 years ago. New Zealand, meanwhile, kept hold of its big-bodied animals until a mere 700 years ago…What links these points in time is simple: They mark the moment when humans arrived.” (Lynas, 2011, p. 33)

Not all experts agree that the hunter-gatherers were solely responsible.  They also blame climate change as the Ice Age began to come to a close. The larger species had a harder time to adapt. But in the last and best-documented mass extinction of the flightless birds and other animals in the Pacific in the Old Stone Age there is no doubt that humans were solely responsible.  Wright puts it this way: 

“The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game.  Most of the human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.” (Wright, 2004, p. 39)

Wilson describes the extinction of land birds of the Pacific Islands in more detail:

“The land birds of the Pacific Islands have been the victims of another kind of apocalyptic force.  In sheer numbers of species lost, they have been the hardest hit of all vertebrate animals. The wave of extinction that began thirty-five hundred years ago with the arrival of humans in the western archipelagos—Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fuji, and the Mariana—continued to nine to seven centuries ago through the colonization of the most remote islands of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island.  A few of the surviving species teeter on the brink of extinction today. Two-thirds of the non-passerine pacific birds, however, close to one thousand species, were extinguished. Thus some 10 percent of the birds species on Earth were wiped out during a single episode of colonization by relatively few groups of people.” (Wilson, 2016, pp. 38-39)

The first farmers and agrarian societies

The Agricultural Revolution that laid the foundation for civilization was based on a radically different attitude towards nature. While hunter-gatherers saw themselves as part of the ecosphere and largely co-existed with their natural surrounding, the early farmers gave up the hunter-gatherers’ ecocentric worldview for an anthropocentric worldview which justified a growing need for domination and control of nature.  On one hand, the early farmers and pastoralists domesticated plants and animals for exploitation, and on the other hand, they drove off or destroyed species that posed any potential danger to their way of life.  At the same time, they began replacing existing ecosystems with human-made landscapes on ever-larger scale and scope.  

While the transition to farming was driven largely by external factors (e.g. climate change) and early farmers were worse off than hunter-gatherers for an extended period, eventually, some succeeded to improve their lot by producing an economic surplus through the exploitation of animals and plants using improved techniques. This economic surplus made population growth possible and it laid the foundation for social stratification, subordination, and exploitation.  Thus, the Agrarian Revolution that was based on alienation from nature as manifested in the rise of anthropocentrism, laid the basis for social alienation.  In a most remarkable historical irony, anthropocentrism laid the basis for class societies where the ruling elites lived off the exploitation of nature facilitated by the exploitation of subordinated social classes and groups. 

Domination and control of nature (including subordination of classes and groups of humans) required the development of forces of production: technologies and know-how that gradually developed in the modern era into sciences (Bunch and Hellemans, 2004).  However, until the rise of capitalist modernity, agrarian societies remained largely depended on the exploitation of animals and plants and the pace of change was slow.  Thus, the population grew slowly and their way of life was less destructive of biodiversity, or when it was disastrous and some civilizations collapsed due to the ecological crisis, like the first agrarian civilization in Sumer, the scope of the disaster was limited. Moreover, it should be recalled that even in 1,400 much of the world was still not incorporated in regions of agrarian civilizations (Wolf, 1982).  The elites of the civilized parts of the world called people who lived outside their realm barbarians. They included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and small-scale farmers who often used semi-nomadic forms of swidden agriculture and still hunted and gathered some of their produce.

Capitalist modernity

The English Industrial Revolution (1760-1820), revolutionized forces of production and unleashed the powers that made the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization global.  In 1800 when the world population was about 0.9 billion, only 3 percent lived in urban areas. By 1900 the world population had increased to 1.65 billion of whom almost 14 percent were urbanites, although only 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. In 1950, world population had reached 2.67 billion and 30 percent of them resided in urban centers. The number of cities with over 1 million people had grown to 83.  The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades. In 2008, the world population was 6.7 billion evenly split between urban and rural areas and the number of cities with 1 million or more was 400. As of this writing in 2017, it has reached 7.5 billion and is expected to reach close to 10 billion by 2050.  Human population growth has become exponential due to three factors: 1) increases in food production and distribution, 2) improvement in public health (water and sanitation), and 3) medical technology (vaccines and antibiotics), along with gains in education and standards of living in many developing nations. 

If we use population growth and per capita income as proxies for “ecological footprint” (as Wilson does, see below), Angus Maddison’s calculations shed some light on how it has increased between the years 1,000 and 2,000: 

“[W]orld population rose 22-fold. Per capita income increased 13-fold, world GDP nearly 300-fold. This contrasts sharply with the preceding millennium when world population grew by only a sixth, and there was no advance in per capita income.

“From the year 1,000 to 1,820 the advance in per capita income was a slow crawl—the world average rose about 50 percent. Most of the growth went to accommodate a fourfold increase in population.

“Since 1820, world development has been much more dynamic. Per capita income rose more than eightfold, population more than fivefold.”  (Maddison, 2006, p. 19)

To understand how this progress of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization has accelerated the Sixth Extinction let’s consider Haydn Washington’s (2013) discussion of energy flow and the food chain. Ultimately, all species live off energy that arrives on Earth via sunshine.  Through photosynthesis green plants (primary producers) convert solar energy into sugars. They consume about half of it for their own livelihood. What remains is called Net Primary Productivity (NPP).  The NPP is the basis for all animal life. Herbivores eat plants to gain energy for their livelihood (primary consumers). Some carnivores live off herbivores (secondary consumers).  Still, other omnivores eat secondary consumers (tertiary consumers).  The final link in the food chain is the decomposers that live off the organic matter of plants, herbivores, and carnivores.  In each step in the food chain, about 90% of the energy is lost. 

Washington citing Boyden (2004) writes: 

“The human species is now using about 12,000 times more as much energy per day as was the case when farming started; 90 per cent of this is a result of industrialization, 10 per cent to our huge growth in numbers…. The NPP of the land amounts to about 132 billion tonnes dry weight of organic matter in 1986. (Vitousek et al, 1986) Of these the then human population of 5.7 billion humans consumed directly just over 1 billion tonnes as food. In addition humans co-opted 43 billion tonnes (32 per cent) of total NPP in the form of wasted food, forest products, crop and forestry residues, pastures and so on.  Vitiusek et al. (1986) conclude:

“‘We estimate that organic material equivalent to about 40% of the present net primary product in terrestrial ecosystems is being coopted by human beings each year.  People use this material directly or indirectly, it flows to different consumers and decomposers than it otherwise would, or it is lost because of human-caused changes in land use.  People and the associated organisms use this organic material largely, but not entirely, at human direction, and the vast majority of other species must subsist on the reminder.  An equivalent concentration of resources into one species and its satellites has probably not occurred since land plants first diversified.’

“They also note that ‘humans also affect much of the other 60% of terrestrial NPP, often heavily’, thus our impact is not just limited to the 40 per cent of NPP we co-opt directly. The estimates in this classic 1986 study are conservative, and we are now 25 years further down the path of expanding population and impacts. However, other scholars use different methodologies and come up with different figures…. Whichever figure one uses, this remains a huge percentage of the net primary productivity of the planet that humans are appropriating.  Of course this appropriation is also increasing as population, and possibly more importantly per capita consumption , continues to increase. The high and increasing appropriation of NPP by humanity is clearly a fundamental stress on ecosystem health. NPP is the foundation of all ecosystems, so if we pull out too many blocks from the foundation to put on the ‘human pile’ eventually other structures (natural ecosystems) collapse.  And indeed they are…” (Washington 2013, p. 12-13).

Of course, there are multiple anthropogenic causes of the Sixth Extinction. Conservation biologists often use the acronym HIPPO for a quick recall of the most ruinous.  In the order of importance, these are habitat destruction, invasive species (introduced by humans), pollution, population growth and overhunting. (Wilson, 2016, pp. 57-58)

How can this assault on the world ecosystems have gone largely unnoticed by the public until the recent decades?  The answer lies in the anthropocentrism of capitalist modernity.  Sociologists Catton and Dunlap (1980, p. 34, Table 1, column 1) summarize the “dominant western worldview,” that is, the modernity as an ideology, as follows:

    • People are fundamentally different from, and superior to, all other creatures.
    • People are masters of their destiny and can use the rest of nature in any way they choose. (see, endnote 2)
    • The world is an endless resource and thus provides unlimited opportunities.
    • Human ingenuity will solve all problems, and progress needs never cease.

II

Wilson’s proposal to stop and reverse the Sixth Extinction

Wilson predicates that by the end of the century the Sixth Extinction becomes unstoppable. In the past mass extinction events, anywhere between 50 to 90 percent of existing species went extinct.  Thus, humanity faces an existential crisis: How can we stop and reverse the Sixth Extinction?  

Wilson’s proposal begins from his critique of the conservation movement which has won many battles but will lose the war against the Sixth Extinction because, as he notes, it lacks a comprehensive plan of action. Wilson argues that what needed to set aside at least half of the Earth’s land and sea as wildness reserves that cannot be disturbed by human activity.  (Wilson, 2016, pp. 185-188)  Earlier in the book, Wilson actually identifies the precise regions of the Earth that must be included in such Half-Earth wildness reserves. (ibid. pp. 133-154) These regions are selected because they are already least disturbed parts of the planet and they contain at least 85 percent of the world’s known species.  

However, while Wilson’s case for the necessity of setting aside at least half of the planet for wildness is based on the best available knowledge in conservation biology and ecology, he fails to show its sufficiency. As I explained in part I, the extinction rate has accelerated since the rise and spread of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Can we hope to return to the pre-human background extinction rate of one to ten species per million per year while keeping the present capitalist civilization intact?  Wilson simply dodges this crucial question. Instead, he attempts to make the case for the efficacy of his proposal focusing on prospects for a reduction of the “ecological footprint” in the rest of the century, the immediate cause for the acceleration of the rate of extinction.  To simplify, Wilson focuses on the two major contributing factors to the rapid increase in the “ecological footprint”: population growth and per capita consumption. (see, endnote 3)  

Although the human population has grown exponentially since 1800 contributing to the acceleration of the extinction rate, it has stabilized in the more economically advanced regions where “women have gained some degree of social and financial independence.” (Wilson, 2016, p. 190)  Still, world population continues to grow rapidly in some regions “including Patagonia, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, plus all of sub-Saharan Africa exclusive of South Africa” due to high fertility (on average three surviving children for each woman).  The 2015 revised UN population report estimates that by 2100, the world population would be 11.213 billion and it may then stabilize.  Wilson realizes that forecasted population growth may be contributing to the acceleration of the extinction rate, especially since the bulk of this increase in population would be in the Global South where people need a higher standard of living.  He tries to get around this problem by arguing that the “ecological footprint” will shrink because of “the evolution of the free market system, and the way it is increasingly shaped by high technology.” (ibid. p. 191)

“The products that win competition today, and will continue to do so indefinitely, are those that cost less to manufacture and advertise, need less frequent repair and replacement, and give highest performance with a minimum amount of energy. Just as natural selection drives organic evolution by competition among genes to produce more copies of themselves per unit cost in the next generation, raising benefit-to-cost of production drives the evolution of the economy.  Almost all of the competition in a free market economy, other than in military technology, raises the average quality of life.” (ibid.)

Of course, in the conservation and ecology movement, Wilson is by no means alone in placing his hope for saving the world in technology and the magic of the capitalist market.  As Foster and Clark note in “The Planetary Emergency”:

“Faced with such intractable problems, the response of the dominant interests has always been that technology, supplemented by market magic and population control, can solve all problems, allowing for unending capital accumulation and economic growth without undue ecological effects by means of an absolute decoupling of growth from environmental throughput.” (Foster and Clark, 2012) 

Wilson naturalizes the “free market economy” by comparing it with the evolutionary natural selection. He argues capitalism is on the verge of transition to “intensive economic growth” using natural resource-saving technologies thereby reducing the “ecological footprint” despite increases in the population and the likely increases in per capita consumption.  

What is the specific basis for Wilson’s optimism? He cites the so-called Moore’s Law, the observation by Gordon Moore in a paper published in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, as evidence for the new economy he envisions.  It is true that given lower costs and improved performance of integrated circuits widely used in electronics, some economists had argued that the “information economy” would herald a new and improved phase of economic growth.  However, leading macroeconomists and scholars of productivity growth (like Robert Gordon, 2000) disagreed and they have been vindicated by the subsequent course of the U.S. and the world economy. 

Wilson also quotes a passage from The Royal Society’s People and the Planet report (2012) about “decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.” He points to synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and robotics as the drivers of the new economy and the supposed decoupling.  But The Royal Society report merely aspires for such decoupling, not that it is an impending fact: “Decoupling economic activity from material and environmental throughputs is needed urgently for example by reusing equipment and recycling materials, reducing waste, obtaining energy from renewable sources, and by consumers paying for the wider costs of their consumption.” (The Royal Society, 2012, p. 8).   Finally, Wilson’s enthusiasm for synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and robotics as the pioneer of decoupling may be misguided as well.  It is true that there are technology enthusiasts who argue for never ending economic progress (it is anthropocentric capitalist modernity after all. See, for example, the report by Roco and Bainbridge, 2002, commissioned by the National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce).  But then again, other experts neither envision a new wave of economic growth nor a decoupling of growth from intensive natural resource use. (e.g., see, Gordon, 2016; Krugman, 2016). (see, endnote 4) In fact, there are good reasons to believe capitalism will continue increasing the “ecological footprint” because it is driven by the requirement of ever more accumulation of capital, hence ever more quest for growth through the commodification of society and nature.  Thus, efficiencies gained by improvement in science and technology may end up increasing consumption not reducing it as first noted by William Stanley Jevons in the case of the British coal industry in the nineteenth century (for a discussion, see, Foster, Clark, and York,  2010) 

So, it is fair to conclude that Wilson’s case for shrinking the “ecological footprint” by relying on the workings of the capitalist economy is spurious.  

Thus, Wilson must rely on a change in ethics. Preservation of biodiversity, he tells us, “also requires a fundamental shift in moral reasoning concerning our relation to the living environment.” (ibid., p.167) But what is the basis for this “moral reasoning?” and how does it fit with the anthropocentric capitalist modernity that Wilson embraces? He does not say.  Let us now turn to issues that Wilson needed to tackle but did not. 

III

How to save biodiversity and the world

Returning to wildness

As I outlined earlier, civilization has been built on the basis of domestication which is the subject of the two-volume book Darwin published in 1868, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Volume 1, Volume 2).  Domestication can be defined as “the evolutionary process whereby humans, modify, either intentionally or unintentionally, the genetic makeup of a population of plants or animals to the extent that individuals within the population lose their ability to survive and produce offsprings in the wild” (Blumler and Byrne 1991, p.24, cited in Barker 2006, p. 2). Wilson’s discussion of biodiversity loss focuses on how humans have marginalized or eradicated wild species.  But he fails to discuss the role of domestication in increases in the rate of extinction. Driscoll and his co-authors note the foundational role of domestication in the rise and spread of civilization which is responsible for the Sixth Extinction:

“Domesticating animals and plants brought surpluses of calories and nutrients and ushered in the Neolithic Revolution. However, the Neolithic Revolution involved more than simple food production; it was also the growth of an agricultural economy encompassing a package of plant and animal utilization that allowed for the development of urban life and a suite of innovations encompassing most of what we today think of as culture. Much of modernity is an indirect consequence of artificial selection. The plow has come to symbolize the Neolithic Revolution, but viewing history in the light of evolution we see that it was intelligently designed changes to the genetic composition of natural biota that made the real tools. In some sense, Neolithic farmers were the first geneticists and domestic agriculture was the lever with which they moved the world.” (Driscoll, et. al., 2011). 

Clearly, artificial selection competes with and undermines natural selection in many ways. Gray wolf population in the lower 48 states in the United States stands at 5178 in 2017 due to hunting, largely to protect ranchers interests.  Gray wolf is a keystone species for its unique and crucial role in how the ecosystem functions.  Without the gray wolf, the ecosystem is degraded and other species are lost as well.


This process of artificial selection has led to the prominence of relatively few species of plants and animals in the world today: only a dozen crops (banana, barley, maize, manioc, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane, sweet potato, and wheat) make up more than 80 percent of the world’s annual crop production (Diamond, 1997, p. 132) and only five farm animals, cow, sheep, goat, pig, and the horse, make up the bulk of the large domesticated species. (Barker, 2006, p. 1)

While wild megafauna, often keystone species, are rapidly going extinct humans are raising, slaughtering and consuming many billions of farm animals each year at a huge cost to the biosphere.  In 2011, for example, the capitalist meat industry dominated by a handful transnational firms slaughtered more than 58 billion chicken (more precisely, 58,110,000,000), nearly 3 billion ducks (2,917,000,000), more than billion pigs (1,383,000,000) worldwide. Other farm animals slaughtered for food numbered in hundreds of millions each: 654,000,000 turkeys, 649,000,000 geese and guinea fowl, 517,000,000 sheep, 430,000,000 goats and 296,000,000 cattle (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2014, p. 15; for a discussion see, Nayeri, 2014). (See, endnote 5)

There are other domesticated animals whose population have exploded and their range expanded globally at the expense of wildlife.  There are at least 525 million dogs in the world (Coren, 2012) and the house cats population is estimated to be between 220 million and 600 million. Feral cats population is estimated to be about the same, prompting some to estimate the world total cat population at 1 billion.  Cats and dogs are known invasive species.  One recent study estimates that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. (Loss, et. al., 2013)   

Thus, to preserve biodiversity we must stop and reverse domestication (see, Singer, 1975/2002, for thoughtful suggestions).  But domestication also entails ethical dilemmas. 

Ethics of Biodiversity

As I noted earlier, Wilson calls for a new environmental ethics but does not elaborate. In another essay devoted to Wilson’s sociobiology theory, I had characterized Wilson as “an ecologically sensitive modernist” thinker whose view of the future of the humanity is colored by what he learns from evolution but not informed by any explicit theory of history and society (Nayeri, 2015b).  For Wilson “overcoming religious and non-scientific view of the world in favor of a scientific one, of rational mind over irrational mind, is the road to human fulfillment. He calls this the New Enlightenment which is an extension of his humanism.”  But despite its historically progressive role humanism is a modern variety of anthropocentrism.  Thus, the naturalist evolutionary biologist Wilson writes: 

“[H]umanity is far and away life’s greatest achievement. We are the mind of the biosphere, the solar system, and—who can say?—perhaps the galaxy….We will soon create simple organisms in the laboratory. We have learned the history of the universe and look almost to its edge.” (Wilson, 2012, p. 288)  

As if responding to Wilson’s high praise for human intellectual achievements, Darwin writes: 

“[T]he difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. (Darwin, 1871/1981, p. 105, emphasis added)

Today, we know far more about the narrowing of supposed differences that are supposed to set humans morally above other animals, and we have begun learning about self-awareness, communication, even intelligence in non-animal species (see, for example, Pollan, 2013, about the current research on intelligence in plans). 
The point is that evolutionary theory like life itself is ecocentric but anthropocentrism is a cultural point of view associated with the rise of agriculture and the spread of class societies which is deeply embedded in civilization. 


But even Darwin fell victim to anthropocentrism. Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin’s daughter, writes that while slavery and cruelty to animals moved her father the most, he was firmly opposed to “the anti-vivisection agitation.” (Rachels, 1990, pp. 212-14)

With the growth of our knowledge of the lives of non-human animals, the field of ethics in our relations with them has also advanced. Rachels (1990) has used Darwin’s theory to argue for moral consideration for all animals.  He recalls that before Darwin the doctrine of “dignity of man” (or his superiority over the rest of nature) was defended either by the claim that “man is made in the image of God” or by the notion that “man is a uniquely rational being.”  Rachels painstakingly debunks both of these arguments in light of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. To replace the “dignity of man” doctrine, Rachels proposes the concept of “moral individualism.”  “How an individual should be treated depends on his or her own particular characteristics, rather than on whether he or she is a member of some preferred group–even the ‘group’ of human beings…This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased.”  (Rachels 1990:5)  By “devaluation” of human life, Rachels means the process of dethroning human beings as the apex of creation. It should be understood in the sense of leveling of hierarchical value systems as in the case of the fall of Apartheid in South Africa.  It was not so much “devaluing” the lives of white South Africans as it was for equality of all regardless of the color of their skin (race is not a biological category but a social construct).

Gary L. Francione, a philosopher and ethicist at Rutgers University, has made a persuasive for the abolition of animal exploitation by arguing that animals are “persons” not “things.” The key to his argument is the right to the principle of equal consideration for animals: the ethical rule that we ought to treat like cases alike unless there is a good reason not to do so.  According to this principle, any moral theory that allows similar cases to be treated in a dissimilar way would fail to qualify as an acceptable theory.  (Francione, 2008, pp. 44-45) Criticizing the utilitarian animal rights position of Bentham that is the basis of Peter Singer’s well known work, Animal Liberation (1975), Francione notes that Bentham never questioned the property status of non-human animals under consideration: “Bentham’s error was perpetuated through laws that purported to balance the interest of property owners and their property.” (ibid., pp. 45-46).  As in slavery, where it was impossible to balance the rights of the slave with those of the slaveowner, there is no way to balance the right of non-human animals with those of their human owners (for an application of the principle of equal consideration, see, Nayeri, 2015a). Thus, commodification and ownership of non-human animals inherently preclude the principle of equal consideration, hence it precludes the possibility of sound moral judgment in our relationship with them.  therefore, Francione calls for the abolition of animal exploitation in the same sense that abolitionists called for an end to slavery: by ending the possibility of them being property.

Of course, Francione’s argument while radical with respect to the horrific treatment of non-human animals owned by humans excludes ethical consideration of animals that are not owned by those who commit acts of cruelty against them as in commercial and “recreational” hunting and fishing. And it does not extend the principle of equal consideration to non-animal species.  Yet, the evolutionary theory makes it clear that every species evolve not to excel others but to fit a particular niche in the ecosystem it inhabits. It is anthropocentric and anti-Darwinian to expect other species to excel in capacities acquired by one species, namely the Homo sapiens. In the Darwinian theory, there are simpler and more complex species. There are no superior or inferior species. In particular, being a more complex species does not make one superior. As the Wilson points out, from the perspective of life on Earth humans are unimportant whereas insects are crucial (Wilson, 2006, pp. 26-36). 

A recent movement that is pertinent to this discussion is Deep Ecology that has been identified with the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.  Naess’s philosophy builds on Spinoza’s that held that God and Nature are one and the same thing (Naess,  2008, pp. 230-251). On this basis, Naess adopts an ecocentric approach that he calls Ecosophy T close to the worldview of foragers.  He argues that every living being, human or not, has an equal right to live and blossom (Naess, 1989, pp. 164-65), a right that is not conditional on how humans perceive it. According to Naess, each person has her own ecosophy (philosophy of nature) that can become ecocentric based on experience and contemplation. To suggest just one example of such ethical approach to nature he and Sessions proposed an Eight Point Platform for the Deep Ecology movement that seeks to address the planetary crisis. They are as follows:

  • The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value, inherent worth).
  • These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
  • Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
  • The flourishing of human life and culture is compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population.
  • Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
  • Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
  • The ideological change will be mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasing standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between bigness and greatness.
  • Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

Naess and Sessions invited others to draft their own platform or adopt theirs with revisions as they like. There could be and there are many ecocentric views of the world and all can contribute to the healing of the 10,000 old humanity’s rift with the rest of nature.  

Transcending anthropocentric industrial capitalism

Despite noting the Anthropocene (The Age of Man) early in Half-Earth and criticizing the Anthropocene ideology in the conservation establishment (extreme versions of ecomodernism), Wilson fails to place his proposal to stop the Sixth Extinction in the context of the planetary crisis (for a discussion of the planetary crisis, see, Rockström, et.al., 2009; Steffen, et. al., 2015)  This reveals a fatal flaw for Wilson’s proposal.  Even if it is adopted, runaway global warming will surely increase extinction rates even in wildness reserves of the world.  The same argument is valid for the climate justice movement: if the Sixth Extinction is allowed to become unstoppable then humanity may face extinction even if the greenhouse gasses are brought under control.  Thus, it is the Anthropocene that must be stopped and undone.  

But would there be the Anthropocene without anthropocentrism and a succession of class societies built on its basis to extract wealth from nature through the exploitation of labor using ever more powerful forces of production?  

The current discussion about the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch is motivated by our belated recognition of humanity’s impact on the planet. Although the matter is still under consideration by the geologists and other scientists, there is an emerging consensus that the year 1950 can be the marker for the onset of the Anthropocene epoch because of the radioactive particles scattered throughout the planet after the explosion of two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But other markers such as plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken are also under consideration.  The modern day driver of the Anthropocene is worldwide capitalist accumulation which over the past 250 years has employed science and technology to unleash forces of production never imagined before.  To undo the Anthropocene we must transcend the anthropocentric capitalist civilization.  

To illustrate this argument in relation to Wilson’s proposal let’s reconsider the “ecological footprint.” One problem with the use of per capita consumption is that it masks how much of the world “ecological footprint”  is due to the tiny minority who constitute the core of the world capitalist class. According to the latest Credit Suisse report (2016), the richest 3.5 million people worldwide (o.7% of world population) control $116 trillion, or 45.6% of the world’s wealth, or more than $1 million each (of course, even in this group a tiny minority control much of the world capitalist wealth).  The poorest 3.5 billion people (73% of the world population) control only $6.1 trillion of wealth, or less than $10,000 in wealth each (Of course, a majority in this group have no wealth and even negative wealth, debt).  Thus, 0.7% of the world population is responsible for about 47% of the world “ecological footprint.” To reduce the “ecological footprint” we must end the capitalist drive for accumulation of wealth, hence a profit-driven economy and economic growth. Only by transcending the anthropocentric capitalist civilization can we stop and reverse the Sixth Extinction.  

Also, a recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that 71% of the world’s population remain low-income or poor, living off $10 or less a day (Kochhar, 2015).  Clearly, the living standards of the bulk of humanity, mostly living in the Global South, must be lifted to meet their basic needs.  The point is that to stop the Sixth Extinction and ensure human development, we must transcend the anthropocentric capitalist civilization in the direction of econometric ecological socialism.

Ecological socialism and nature

Wilson’s proposal would set aside half of the planet as wildness reserves but will maintain an anthropocentric capitalist civilization in the rest of the planet which he hopes would become good stewards of nature.  But the notion of human stewardship of nature is problematic because the Sixth Extinction is not caused by our mismanagement of our relationship with nature but because of the drive to dominate and control it to enrich successive anthropocentric class-based civilizations.  

Thus, a key challenge in the transition to an ecocentric ecological socialism would be to arrive at a de-alienated, non-malignant relationship with the rest of nature. Instead of being “good stewards” of nature we must become a significant part of the biosphere that understands and appreciate every other part of it with love and respect. This is not a manager and managed, a subject and object, relationship. It is a relationship with the rest of nature based on environmental ethics consistent with a culture being instead of a culture of having the characteristic of the anthropocentric capitalist civilization.  Without such a cultural revolution, any socioeconomic transition to an ecological socialism is bound to fail.  This cultural revolution is already part of the resistance to the anthropocentric capitalist civilization as reflected in the struggle of indigenous peoples of Bolivia who cherish the rights of Mother Nature to the Native Americans in the Standing Rock struggle against the North Dakota Access Pipeline who rely on their still heavily ecocentric-influenced culture. In their prayers, they convey the wisdom of their ancestors (see, for example, the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois, Thanksgiving Address).  I cite these cases because they are not based on science-driven ethical principles as discussed earlier but on ecocentrist wisdom of indigenous peoples of the world. In fact, in an ecocentric ecological societies science would be a source of wisdom not of satisfaction of human curiosity and the anthropocentric drive to dominate and control nature. 

To undo the Anthropocene, hence the Sixth Extinction, climate crisis, and other planetary crises, a transition to a world with a significantly lower human population is needed. The maximum human population worldwide and in each bioregion must be based on the principle of do-no-harm to the ecosystems while ensuring adequate resources for human development. This radical lowering human population will require empowering women and democratic family planning.  Simultaneously, a radical economic restructuring must be undertaken to reduce the “ecological footprint” drastically in the Global North but increasing standard of living in the Global South and for the in-need-population in the Global North. Taking the case of the U.S. economy for illustration, in the sphere of production huge sections of manufacturing like the military-industrial complex, chemical, and petrochemical industries (fossil fuels), and industrial agriculture will be phased out as quickly as possible.  Finance, insurance, and real estate industries will be drastically downsized and what is left as necessary would be run by workers and consumer councils. This will eliminate management services industry. Wholesale and retail trade and international and national transportation will be eliminated or minimized as the economy become local and regional. Health care, education, culture, housing, and art and culture will expand but becomes decentralized as much as possible. Agriculture will be replaced by non-animal using permaculture and agroecology.  Technology will be cut back, leaving only what is needed for human development that is not harmful to nature.  Free time will increase for everyone. Work will be joyous as labor becomes de-alienated and creative. The social agency for ecocentric ecological socialist revolution, a worldwide movement, would be the youth and working people.  They alone can decide how quickly the transition can and should happen while remembering that we are racing against time! 

Of course, these suggested radical and massive changes are too general to anticipate all the challenges.  It will take much more to undo 10,000 years of anthropocentric class civilizations in favor of an ecocentric ecological socialist one.  Could this happen? 

If my argument in this essay is broadly correct, there is no other way out of the crisis of civilization.  It is entirely possible that a transition to an ecocentric ecological socialism in short order is beyond the capabilities of our species. Just one example to remind us of it: 56 years after Fidel Castro declared that the Cuban revolution is embarking on the road to socialism “A Dog Is Set on Fire in Manzanillo, Cuba” in early May.  What is worse, Cuba has no laws to prosecute those who set the dog on fire. Clearly, Cuban socialism is anthropocentric despite many advances in its “stewardship of nature.”  Despite 56 years of struggle for socialism, Cuba still has not yet joined the effort for an ecocentric ecological socialism.  

Time is the most scarce resource we face.  Global warming and catastrophic climate change may become self-sustaining within a couple of decades and if Wilson is correct the Sixth Extinction will become unstoppable by the end of the century—both are the existential threat to much of life on Earth, including our own species. But an ecocentrist will take solace in knowing that in the past five mass extinction events on average biodiversity returned after 10 million years. There is no reason to doubt that the same can happen again if Homo sapiens, the God Species, fail to act wisely in due time. The magic of life will go on until the sun burns out in about a billion year. 


Endnotes: 

1. Wilson defines it as “the amount of space required to meet all of the needs of an average person” in society.  “It comprises the land used for habitation, fresh water, food production and delivery, personal transportation, communication, governance, other public functions, medical support, burial, and entertainment.” (Wilson, 2016, p. 189)  For Rees and Wackernagel who originated the Ecological Footprint Analysis, it was a method “to estimate the resource consumption and waste assimilation requirements of a defined human population or economy in terms of a corresponding productive land area.” (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996,  p. 9).  Despite its popularity in the environmental studies fields and ecology movement, it suffers from definitional, theoretical, and methodological problems (se, e.g. Venetoulis and Talberth, 2008).”  

2. See, also, Plumb, 1964, p. 264; in relation to humanism, see, Abbognano, 1967, p. 70; in relation to science, see, Christian (2003, p. 350)

3. In this essay, I sometimes cite per capita income and sometimes discuss per capita consumption.  In reality, the two are slightly different measures because of savings.  But the difference is small in relative magnitude and for our purpose here unimportant. 

4. With some justification, one can characterize Wilson’s proposal to preserve biodiversity as ecomodernist (for ecomodernist statements see, An Ecomodernist Manifesto, 2015; Blomqvist, 2015; Shellenberger and Nordhaus, 2015; for their critique see, Angus, 2015; Trainer, 2016A, 2016B).  However, Wilson himself is most worried about the extreme versions of ecomodernist views propagated by those he calls Anthropocene enthusiasts (Wilson, 2016, pp. 47-52, pp. 71-82, pp. 95-100).  He summarizes their view as follows:  “Those who see the world through the lens of the Anthropocene enthusiasts work off an entirely different worldview from that of traditional conservationists. Extremists among them believe that what is left of nature should be treated as a commodity to justify saving it.  The surviving biodiversity is better judged by its service to humanity. Let history run its seemingly predetermined course. Above all, recognize that Earth’s destiny is to be humanized.” (ibid. p. 74).

5. There is also the “exotic meat” marketplace that in the United States includes alligator, alpaca, armadillo, bear, beaver, bobcat, caiman, crocodile, camel, coyote, capon, dove, frog, iguana, kudu, lion, llama, monkey, muskrat, opossum, otter, ostrich, pale, quail, turtle, venison and zebra meat. (see, for example, this online meat marketplace menu) 

Dedication: This essay is dedicated to Nuppy, my first cat friend and one of my most influential teachers. I lost Nuppy exactly nine years ago on the midnight of May 14, 2008.  He was fifteen and half years old. Aside from being an extraordinary cat, Nuppy taught me that cats are people too. Whenever I stand in the garden in awe in the presence of billions of other living beings surrounding me, I salute Nuppy who taught me that I am/we are only a tiny piece of a much greater existence.

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