This Device Pulls Water Out of Desert Air: A New Water Harvester Can Extract Water From Extremely Dry Air Using Only Solar Energy

Installing the water harvester (UC Berkeley)

by Emily Matchar, Smithsonian.com: 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-device-pulls-water-out-of-desert-air-180969398/

Droughts have been making headlines across the world in recent years, from the California water crisis to Cape Town’s severe water shortage, and research suggests 25 percent of the globe could eventually be left in permanent drought due to climate change. But what if you could simply pull water from the air?

That’s the premise of a new technology developed by University of California, Berkeley researchers. It’s a water harvester that can extract water from the air, even in extremely dry climates, using no energy other than ambient sunlight.

The key to the water harvester is a new class of materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These MOFs are solid but porous materials with enormous surface areas—an MOF the size of sugar cube can have the internal surface area as big as many football fields. This means they can absorb gases and liquids, and then release them quickly when heat is added.

“Certain MOFs as we showed here have an extraordinary ability to suck in water vapor from the atmosphere, but then at the same time do not hold on to the water molecules inside their pores too tightly so that it is easy to get the water out,” says Omar Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley, who led the research.

The researchers tested the harvester in Scottsdale, Arizona, a desert town with a high of 40 percent humidity at night and 8 percent humidity during the day. Based on the trials using a zironium-based MOF, the researchers believe that the harvester could ultimately extract about 3 ounces of water per pound of MOF per day.

The harvester itself is a box inside a box. The inner box contains a bed of MOFs. The outer box is a two-foot transparent plastic cube. At night, the researchers left the top off the outer box to let air flow past the MOFs. In the day, they put the top back on so the box would be heated by the sun. The heat would pull the water out of the MOFs, where it would condense on the inner walls of the plastic cube before dripping to the bottom, where it could be collected.

“The most important aspect of this technology is that it is completely energy-passive,” says Eugene Kapustin, a Berkeley graduate student who worked on the research.

That is to say, it needs no energy besides the sun, making it environmentally friendly and accessible to people in places with limited electricity. The results of the trials were published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances.

The team needs to conduct more trials on the current models to figure out which factors, such as device size and where the MOF is placed within the device, most affect how much water can be harvested. They also hope to learn more about how specific climate conditions affect water yield. The next trial is planned for late summer in Death Valley, where the nighttime humidity can be as low as 25 percent.

image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/MQZyGQ7RZ_sZqpjHgdZsu9zGJyk=/1024x596/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/1e/e9/1ee9eabf-f492-4102-a593-6fde846e9d41/mof303crystals750.jpg

Microscope image of crystals of an MOF (UC Berkeley)

Yaghi has also developed a new aluminum-based MOF he says is 150 times cheaper and can capture twice as much water as the current MOFs. He and his team are designing a new water harvester that actively pulls air into the MOFs at high speed, thus delivering a much larger volume of water.

The team is now partnering with industry to test harvesters on an industrial scale. They also continue to search for newer, better and cheaper MOFs.

“I am very happy to see that more and more researchers around the world are joining our efforts in this regard,” Yaghi says.

The idea of sucking water out of the atmosphere is not new, says Eric Hoek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and editor of the journal npj Clean Water. It’s long been noted that when you run an air conditioner, water drips out—this is because the machine is cooling the air to the dew point, the temperature at which the air is saturated with water vapor and condensation occurs.

But creating water harvesters based on cooling technology is incredibly energy intense. In very dry climates, the dew point is below zero. Cooling the air to that temperature at any large scale is unfeasible.

“The real innovation [of Yaghi’s research] is a materials innovation,” Hoek says. “These materials [the MOFs] pull water out and more easily give it up.”

But the concept is challenging to scale, Hoek cautions, as the amount of water produced per square inch of harvester is relatively low, and thus a large harvester would potentially take up a huge amount of land.

“But maybe for a household or village scale it could be a very interesting way for someone off the grid to get fresh water,” Hoek says.

Yaghi imagines exactly that: a future where everyone without easy access to fresh water has a harvester in their yard.

“My vision is to achieve ‘personalized water,’ where people in water stressed regions have a device at home running on ambient solar, delivering the water that satisfies the basic needs of the individuals,” he says. “More than one third of the population in the world lives in water-stressed regions or is suffering from lack of clean water. The potential implications of this technology in transforming people’s lives and improving the global public health conditions are tremendous.”



Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-device-pulls-water-out-of-desert-air-180969398/#wcAVi3rVISdBXEqJ.99

Eight Lessons From Climate Organizing for Today’s Youth-Led Movements

by Nick Engelfried, Open Democracy - Transformation:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/nick-engelfried/eight-lessons-from-climate-organizing-for-today-s-youth-led-movements

As a young person, there’s nothing less empowering than listening to an older person tell you how real activism was done in the 1960s. 

This article was first published on Waging Nonviolence.

Climate justice activists protest the Dakota Access pipeline outside the White House in February 2017. Credit: Flickr/Stephen Melkisethian. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

On March 24 2018 I stood in the rain in front of City Hall in Bellingham, Washington with some 3,000 people for the local March for Our Lives demonstration. It was one of 800 similar events happening nationwide that day, with about two million people participating coast to coast.

The March for Our Lives against gun violence is one example of the wave of massive demonstrations that have swept the country since the Trump administration took office. From the Women’s March, to responses to Trump’s attacks on Muslims and immigrants, to protests against police violence, rallies for healthcare, and uprisings against pipelines, the last two years have been characterized by mass movements unparalleled in the United States in decades. Many, like the March for Our Lives, involve young people in leading roles. As someone who spent most of the past decade as a “youth activist”—in my case, a climate activist—I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.

I became an activist while attending Portland Community College at age 17 in 2005. Inspired by a political science professor who discussed social movements in class, I researched projects like the Campus Climate Challenge, a campaign to pressure school administrations to curb campus carbon emissions. I got involved in pushing for recycling at my college.

Fast forward a couple years to when Energy Action Coalition organized Power Shift 2007, a gathering of about 5,000 students in Washington, D.C. that included a multi-day organizing conference and a rally at the Capitol. At the time, it was the largest-ever demonstration for climate action in the United States. For many of us, this stands out as the moment the “youth climate movement” became a distinct force in progressive politics.

I didn’t make it to Power Shift 2007. But I was in D.C. in 2009 for the next Power Shift, an even larger gathering of some 12,000 youth. Then a senior at Oregon’s Pacific University, I convinced three classmates to fly across the country with me.

A lot has changed since those early years of youth climate activism. For one thing, many of us who got involved then are no longer “youth”—I recently turned 30. More importantly, the movement has grown in remarkable, unexpected ways, overlapping with other progressive organizing efforts. Indeed, my sense is that there’s no longer a distinct “youth climate movement” the way there was in 2009. It’s become several movements—for fossil fuel divestment, opposition to pipelines and solidarity with indigenous nations. Another way of looking at it is youth climate activists are just one part of a much larger coalition of progressive movements that simply didn’t exist on this scale 10 years ago.

For almost exactly a decade, I identified as a youth climate activist. After graduating from Pacific University in 2009 I volunteered for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, focusing on involving college students in the effort to close Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant. In 2011 I moved to Missoula, Montana and spent four years rallying students and others to oppose coal export and mining projects. These last few years I’ve made a transition to supporting the growth and leadership of a new generation of young activists working on climate change or other issues.

Like all large movements, youth climate activism has had its successes and setbacks, its enormously inspiring moments and others when it failed to live up to its ideals. What follows are some reflections on lessons from the movement, necessarily limited by my own experience and position as a white male organizer from a middle-class background. Despite this bias, I hope these reflections may be of use to people involved in today’s fast-growing youth-led movements.

1. Trust in students’ abilities. 

One of the best things the youth climate movement did early was stop telling young people they were apathetic—as media figures like Thomas Friedman were doing—and start saying they were powerful and inspiring. Events like Power Shift promoted positive messages about the abilities of youth. This inspired many young people, including me, to think we could make a difference and try to do so.

Still, some national groups have not fully realized this lesson, limiting their work with youth to voter turnout drives, trainings and large rallies. With some exceptions, large national groups have been more reluctant to trust students’ ability and willingness to engage in tactics like civil disobedience.

I first got arrested at a protest when I was 23, at a sit-in I helped coordinate in the Montana State Capitol. I had studied the philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience and concluded that this was a step I was ready to take. I was less sure my slightly younger peers, who possibly lacked this background, would be willing to do the same. Yet, over the next few years, I was pleasantly surprised to see students who’d only recently gotten involved in activism step forward and risk arrest blocking the paths of coal trains and sitting in at lawmakers’ offices.

We tend to underestimate the ability of young people to intuitively grasp the significance of nonviolent direct action as a strategy. Of course, the opportunity to engage in this kind of activism must be presented in a way that feels accessible and meaningful—but when this is done, youth will step up. Have faith in their abilities.

2. Follow-up is hugely important. 

Building a sustained movement means following up with those who participate to ensure they stay involved. A campaign that failed to do this well was Power Vote in 2008, a national multi-organization effort focused on getting students to pledge to vote ahead of the election. I was the campus lead for Power Vote at Pacific University and only later realized the flaws in how the national campaign was structured. We gathered hundreds of pledge cards with students’ contact information—but this valuable data wasn’t collated in a timely manner that would have allowed it to be used for following-up.

Follow-up is important in all campaigns, not just those with students. But it can be especially important for young people who are mostly new to political engagement. Following up and reminding students to fill out their ballots, show up to the next rally, and contact their elected officials helps build habits that will likely keep for years—but it requires mechanisms to ensure their data is preserved and used.

3. Teach transferrable skills. 

The best activism serves two purposes: It accomplishes a campaign objective while helping participants master skills they can put to use in other contexts. This is especially important with young people, who often have little formal activist training but can take what they learn and apply it again and again.

Many activist skills—setting up meetings with public officials, testifying at hearings, holding nonviolence trainings—aren’t actually that complicated but can seem vastly mysterious to someone who has never done them before. Once armed with the right knowledge, young people become empowered to transfer skills to new campaigns and situations. Accomplishing this means structuring movements in such a way that youth have leadership roles and get hands-on experience building campaigns from the ground up.

4. Be specific about movement goals. 

When I got involved in climate activism, we talked a lot about “comprehensive climate legislation” and “creating green jobs.” This sounded great, but it was sometimes unclear exactly what these words meant. This came back to bite the movement in 2009-2010, during the fight over national climate legislation that eventually went down in flames.

The problem with vague terms like “comprehensive legislation” is they mean many things to many people. As it turned out, to lawmakers—like then-Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Lindsay Graham—they meant a cap-and-trade plan riddled with loopholes and giveaways to polluters. This truly terrible piece of legislation split the climate movement—including youth activists—between those who saw it as a small step forward, and those who believed it was worse than nothing.

On the other hand, the campaigns that have done most to strengthen the climate movement have very specific goals tied to clearly defined strategies. These include efforts to stop oil pipelines, close coal plants and divest universities from fossil fuels. These campaigns have accomplished concrete wins while building coalitions that leave the movement stronger—whereas the push for national legislation left climate groups fragmented and demoralized. Fossil fuel divestment is a particularly good example of a student-focused campaign with an easily understood goal and clear framework for building power.

5. Partner with frontline communities. 

Not only is this the right thing to do, but it’s strategic, fun and empowering. Some of the most inspiring moments I can think of from youth climate campaigns involved students interacting with people on the frontlines of extraction and polluting industries. I’ve seen student activists collaborate with farmers impacted by natural gas pipelines, residents of working-class rail line neighborhoods affected by coal trains and indigenous groups fighting oil infrastructure. In each case, the partnerships that developed were (I believe) mutually rewarding for both groups.

That said, building effective, lasting partnerships with frontline communities takes work. It’s not just about saying the words “people of color” and “climate justice” in every press release. This kind of work requires commitment to lasting relationships built on good faith and the belief in a shared stake in a better future. It requires learning form the people most affected by pollution so as to challenge fossil fuel industries effectively.

6. Partner with older activists. 

Another of the most empowering experiences youth activists can have is the opportunity to work with no-longer-quite-so-young individuals who have a whole different set of life experiences. For students, it can be heartening to see that their generation isn’t the only one concerned about the status quo. Similarly, non-youth activists tend to find it encouraging to see young people rising to build a movement.

This doesn’t mean student and older activist groups should merge. There’s real value in youth-specific organizations that let young people bond and learn from their peers in a familiar setting. Different activist generations also tend to have different organizational cultures, which don’t always mesh well in the meeting room. However, none of this prevents youth and non-youth from collaborating on campaigns, attending each other’s events and building strong alliances. I’ve seen college freshmen and retirees sit down for campaign conversations that were eye-opening for both parties.

7. Have hard conversations about equity and inclusion. 

From the movement’s early days, national youth climate organizations have used a lot of language about racial and economic justice. This positive language hasn’t always been supported by the kind of on-the-ground organizing needed to truly combat environmental injustice and oppressive hierarchies embedded in the movement itself.

The mainstream climate movement and environmentalism generally continue to be overwhelmingly white middle-class affairs. But today’s students seem more ready than ever to have tough conversations about dismantling racism and deconstructing environmentalism’s Euro-centric dominant narratives. As a white teenager, I wasn’t asking the kinds of questions that I should have been about these subjects—and I’m continually impressed by how much more aware today’s students, including white students, tend to be.

This isn’t to say white students don’t have a lot of hard work to do to address the implications of their privilege—and some will do it clumsily, especially at first. However, while the hard work remains to be done, I see a willingness to begin it that seems more widespread than it was 10 years ago. To do this work effectively, students need support from mentors and organizations that are committed to equity and inclusion as much more than catchphrases or boxes to be checked.

8. Youth need mentors, not sages. 

As a young person, there’s nothing less empowering than listening to an older person tell you how real activism was done in the good old ‘60s (or the ‘90s, ‘00s, etc.). Young people don’t need sages telling them what to do. What they can use are mentors—people who’ve left their 20s behind and have experience and knowledge they’re willing to share, but do so humbly and with the realization that youth also have their own knowledge and skills to share.

As a student, I was never particularly motivated by the argument that because the generation before mine screwed up, it was my generation’s job to fix things. I wanted to know, since that older generation was still around, why they couldn’t pitch in and help. I’ve also known many, many older activists who have tried to help in just this way, and taught me things I never could have learned by myself.

The “youth climate movement” of today looks very different from the one of 2007. To become more effective it has both narrowed and broadened its focus. The narrowing is a result of it zeroing in on winnable campaigns like divestment and stopping pipelines, while the broadening is due to a growing focus on building bridges with other movements. Done effectively, both of these approaches may succeed in generating the kinds of incremental wins that could cascade into a national wave of climate and progressive victories.

I’m deeply humbled by campaigns like the March for Our Lives, which succeeded in building a truly massive youth-led movement in a way climate activists of my generation never quite managed to do. Yet, when 5,000 students came together for the first Power Shift in 2007, few movements were prioritizing youth leadership the way climate organizers were. The story of youth activism these last 10-plus years has been one of gradually building power, learning hard lessons and setting examples of what dedicated organizing looks like. The climate movement made a significant contribution to this process. Without the work of climate and other youth activists over the last decade, some of the larger mass movements of today might not have come into being.

What will youth climate activism, and young people’s organizing more generally, look like over the next 10 years? I don’t know, but I look forward to finding out.

The Three Most Dangerous Narratives in Conservation

differencebetween.net

by csandbrook, Thinking Like a Human: https://thinkinglikeahuman.com/2018/06/12/the-three-most-dangerous-narratives-in-conservation/

Emery Roe, an American policy scholar, first developed the idea that ‘narratives’ – stories about the world and how it works – are used in policy making processes to cut through complexity and justify a particular course of action. We are a storytelling species, and people find it easy to understand and get behind a compelling story with strong internal logic and a beginning, middle and end. Once a narrative has taken hold they can be very difficult to shake off, at least until an even more compelling ‘counter-narrative’ arrives on the scene. A classic example from resource governance is the ‘resources will be over-exploited unless they are in private ownership’ narrative, based on Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Tragedy of the Common’s article. It took decades of careful scholarship, and ultimately a nobel prize for Elinor Ostrom, to demonstrate that this narrative was compelling, influential, and wrong.

There are numerous narratives circulating within the conservation sector. Some are inspiring, some are innovative, some are misleading. However, there are some that are, in my view, potentially dangerous. These narratives sound convincing – that’s why they have become established – and they are significantly shaping conservation research and practice in the world today. They are not entirely false, but their ‘truth’ has become accepted as orthodoxy to the extent that they slip by almost unnoticed, without proper scrutiny. This leads whole areas of conservation activity down particular paths that I fear will not lead to a desirable destination.

The first dangerous narrative holds that “decision makers only care about money”. This belief underpins the tremendous lengths that (most of) the conservation sector has gone to over the last few decades to repackage and represent the value of nature in monetary terms. Alternative plausible arguments about the value of nature are set aside because they are thought to have no currency with those whose opinions matter (note the double-meanings of value and currency in this sentence and you can see how embedded monetary language is in English!). Some have argued that initial efforts to estimate the economic value of nature’s contribution to humans, such as Costanza et al’s 1997 paper in Nature, were intended only as a metaphor to grab the attention of money-obsessed decision makers. However, over time the metaphor has taken over the world. It has metamorphosed into a whole suite of instruments that seek to bring this notional value into being in the real economy – payments for ecosystem services, carbon taxes, biodiversity offset markets, and all the rest.

Of course these market-based approaches can have a positive impact, in some places and some of the time. However, there is plenty of evidence that decision makers, at all scales, are motivated by lots of different things. The monetary value of nature is one, especially in calculating costs and benefits of development. But it is not always the most important. Decision makers, like other people, can be motivated by beauty, rarity, risk, sentiment, ethics or principles.  Interestingly, I have heard a number of talks by senior conservation leaders over the last few years who have spoken of the power of taking politicians or captains of industry out to the field to learn about conservation (and sometimes poverty) issues. These speakers have emphasised the power of personal and emotional connection that comes from such visits, and the importance these leaders place on things like securing the future of the world their own children will inherit. Assuming that decisions always boil down to money is over simplistic and potentially counter-productive, particularly given the risks of monetary arguments for conservation actively crowding out alternative perspectives.

The second dangerous narrative holds that “X bad thing would have happened anyway, so anything to minimise the damage is a win for conservation.” This line of argument is particularly prevalent in the field of offsetting – both for biodiversity and carbon. From this perspective, losses of biodiversity caused by development, or carbon emissions caused by human activity, are a fact of life that cannot be altered. Once this is established it becomes logical to seek to minimise the harm of these activities, rather than to reverse them completely. In their brilliant paper on how offsetting reframes conservation, Elia Apostolopoulou and Bill Adams explain how by deploying this argument “offsetting ties conservation to land development and economic growth”, recasting conservation as an ally of development rather than its opponent. This shift seems subtle at first glance, but actually “implies acceptance of the inevitability of biodiversity loss”. As a result, the narrative normalizes biodiversity loss and supports strategies that adapt to this loss, instead of opposing it. There may be a strong case to say that this is the best we can do, but anyone promoting the “it would have happened anyway” narrative needs to understand where it leads.

Finally, the third narrative holds that “we can’t possibly change X, so we’ll have to change Y”. This narrative is a close relative of “it would have happened anyway”, in that it also encourages us to accept profoundly undesirable human activities as inevitable and off limits for intervention. A good example of how this narrative is deployed comes from thinking about human diets and sustainable farming. In various articles (e.g. this one), we are asked to accept as a given that ongoing increases in things like human meat consumption are fixed and certain. From that starting point, a chain of logic is presented to arrive at the conclusion that the only way to provide this meat without losing biodiversity is through the radical reshaping of global landuse and the agricultural system to create giant feedlots that can intensively produce meat on limited land while sparing more for agriculture. This logic may be sound given the assumptions (however unpleasant the consequences), but with the radical change that such articles call for, wouldn’t it make sense to at least take a look at those assumptions once again? Yes, tackling rising meat consumption will be difficult, but would it really be any more difficult than reorganising the entire global food and land allocation systems so that enough meat can be produced without losing biodiversity? I can’t help imagining a parallel (and equally plausible) study that starts with the opposite set of assumptions – i.e. ‘we can’t change global land use so we’ll have to change meat consumption’. It’s all a question of which hypothetical levers are to be pulled by the researcher, and which are considered to be locked in place. I would prefer to see all such levers placed into the “maybe we should think about pulling this?” category rather than accepted as fixed, as well as a lot more clarity from researchers about how they choose which policies are up for grabs (choices by which they wield considerable power).

So there you have it – my three personal conservation narrative bugbears. There may well be even worse narratives out there (please share yours below the line!), but these are the ones that I hear time and again and that most frustrate me. Each forecloses alternative ways of thinking, and in a sense each limits conservation’s potential to bring about truly transformational change. If we can’t see beyond money, and we can’t imagine alternatives to what seems fixed in place, how will conservation ever make more than a trivial difference for, and to, life on Earth?

Ecosocialism and the Recovery of Marx’s Ecological Legacy

An ecology that truly seeks to confront today’s challenges requires Marx’s remarkable analysis of the destructive logic inherent in the unlimited accumulation of capital.

Michael Löwy was a co-author of both An Ecosocialist Manifesto (2001) and The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration (2009). His most recent book in English is Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe (Haymarket Books, 2015). This article, which appears in the May-June 2018 issue of Against the Current, is published here with his permission.

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by Michael Löwy, Climate and Capitalism: http://climateandcapitalism.com/2018/05/17/marxs-ecology-legacy/

While mainstream ecological theory has been dismissive of Karl Marx, serious research in recent decades has recovered some of his very important insights on ecological issues. The pioneers have been James O’Connor and the journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism — a tradition continued by Joel Kovel — but the most systematic and thorough investigations on Marx’s ecological views are those of John Bellamy Foster and his friends from Monthly Review.

Many ecologists accuse Marx of “productivism.” Is this accusation justified? No, insofar as nobody denounced as much as Marx the capitalist logic of production for production: the accumulation of capital, wealth and commodities as an aim in itself.

The fundamental idea of a socialist economy — contrary to its miserable bureaucratic caricatures — is one of producing use-values, goods which are necessary for the satisfaction of human needs. Moreover, the main importance of technical progress for Marx was not the infinite growth of goods (“having”) but the reduction of the labour journey and the increase of free time (“being”).

The opposition between “having” and “being” is often discussed in the Manuscripts of 1844. In Capital, vol. III, Marx emphasizes free time as the foundation of the socialist “Kingdom of Freedom” (Marx 1968, III, 828)

As Paul Burkett has perceptively shown, Marx’s emphasis on communist self-development, on free time for artistic, erotic or intellectual activities — in contrast to the capitalist obsession with the consumption of more and more material goods — leads to a decisive reduction of the pressure of production on the natural environment. (Burkett 2009, 329)

However, it is true that one can find in Marx — and even more in the dominant Marxist currents that followed — a rather uncritical stance toward the productive forces created by capital, and a tendency to see in the “development of productive forces” the main factor of human progress.

The supposedly canonical text in this respect is the famous Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), one of Marx’s writings most loaded with a certain evolutionism, a belief in inevitable historical progress, and an unproblematic view of the existing productive forces:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces enter in contradiction with the existing relations of production …. From being forms of development of the productive forces, these relations become fetters [Fesseln]. Then opens an epoch of social revolution. … A social formation never disappears before all productive forces for which it is broad enough are developed ….” (Marx 1964, 9)

In this well-known passage, productive forces created by capital appear as if neutral, and revolution has only the task of suppressing the relations of production which have become “fetters,” “shackles,” for a larger (unlimited?) development of the productive forces.

The Metabolic Rift

In several other writings, however, and in particular those concerning agriculture in the three volumes of Capital, one can perceive key elements for a truly ecological approach, through a radical criticism of the disastrous results of capitalist productivism.

As John Bellamy Foster has shown with great acumen, we can find in Marx’s writings a theory of the metabolic rift between human societies and nature, as a consequence of the destructive logic of capital (Foster 2001, 155-167). The expression Riss des Stoffwechsels, metabolic rift — a break in the material exchanges between humanity and the environment — appears for instance in chapter 47, “Genesis of the Capitalist Ground Rent” in Capital, Volume III:

“Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever-increasing minimum and confronts it with an ever-growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” (Marx 1981, 949)

The issue of the metabolic rift can be found also in another well-known passage of Capital, Volume 1, the conclusion of the chapter on great industry and agriculture. This is one of the most important writings of Marx, because it has a dialectical vision of the contradictions of “progress,” and of its destructive consequences, under capitalist rule, for the natural environment:

“Capitalist production … disturbs the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and the earth, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural conditions for the lasting fertility of the soil. … All progress in capitalist agriculture is progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing fertility of the soil for a given time is progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of fertility. The more a country, the United States of North America, for instance, develops itself on the basis of great industry, the more this process of destruction takes place quickly. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.” (Marx 1970, 637-638)

Several elements are significant in this important passage. First of all is the idea that progress can be destructive, a “progress” in the degradation and deterioration of the natural environment. The example chosen by Marx is limited — the loss of fertility by the soil — but leads him to raise the larger issue of the attacks on nature, on the “eternal natural conditions,” by capitalist production.

Secondly, the exploitation and debasement of the workers and of nature are presented from a similar viewpoint, as results of the same predatory logic, the logic of capitalist great industry and industrial agriculture. This topic often appears in Capital, for instance, in some sections of the chapter on the labor journey:

“The limitation of industrial labour was dictated by the same necessity which led to the spreading of guano over England’s fields. The same predatory greed [Raubgier] which on one side exhausts the soil, on the other attacks the roots of the nation’s vital force … In its blind and boundless avidity, in its werewolf hunger [Werwolfs-Heisshunger] for surplus labour, capital overrides not only the moral but also the physiological limits of the labour journey .… It achieves its aim by reducing the life of the labourer, as a greedy landowner obtains greater rentability by exhausting the fertility of the soil.” (Marx 1968, I, 280-281)

This direct association between the brutal capitalist exploitation of the proletariat, and of the earth, lays the theoretical ground for a strategy articulating class struggle and ecological struggle, in a common fight against the domination of capital.

Preservation of Nature

Marx considered the preservation of natural conditions as an essential task of socialism. In Volume III of Capital, he opposes to the capitalist logic in agriculture, based on brutal exploitation and exhaustion of the soil, a different logic, a socialist one grounded on “the conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property” — a treatment that considers the soil not as the source for short-sighted profit, but as “the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.”

A few pages above, we find a very significant statement, which again directly associates the overcoming of private property with the preservation of nature:

“From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth appears just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].” (Marx 1970, III, 911, 948-49).

In conclusion: 21st-century ecosocialists cannot satisfy themselves only with the 19th century Marxian ecological heritage, and need a critical distance towards some of its limitations. Yet on the other side an ecology able to confront the contemporary challenges cannot exist without the Marxist critique of political economy, and its remarkable analysis of the destructive logic inherent in the unlimited accumulation of capital.

An ecology that ignores or despises Marx, his theory of value or his critique of commodity fetishism and reification, is doomed to become merely a “correction” of the “excesses” of capitalist productivism. Today’s ecosocialists can build on the more advanced and coherent arguments of Marx and Engels, in order to

• achieve a real materialist understanding of the perverse dynamics of the system;
• develop a radical critique of the capitalist destruction of the environment; and,
• project the perspective of a socialist society respecting the “inalienable conditions” of life on Earth.

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References

Burkett, Paul, 2009. Ecological Economics. Toward a Red and Green Political Economy, Chicago, Haymarket Books.

Foster, John Bellamy, 2001. Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature, New York, Monthly Review Press.

Kovel, Joel, 2007. The Enemy of Nature, New York, Zed Books.

Marx, Karl, 1964. “Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie,” Vorwort, Marx Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 13, Berlin, Dietz Verlag.

Marx, Karl, 1968. Das Kapital, Volume I, MEW Volume 23.

Marx, Karl, 1968. Das Kapital, Volume III, MEW Volume 25.

Marx, Karl, 1970. Capital, Volume I, New York, Vintage.

Marx, Karl, 1981. Capital, Volume III, New York, Vintage.