Dialectical approaches, variously interpreted, have been advocated for by geographers for several decades. At the same time, critical environmental geography has recently become dominated by vital materialist strands of thought, the advocates of which have sometimes framed their own work in opposition to dialectics. Critics perceive two major problems with a dialectical framework; that it cements a nature–society dualism and that it insufficiently accounts for the agency or vitality of non‐human life. This paper seeks to address these criticisms by engaging with work by biologists who have been influenced by dialectical ideas. I outline two examples, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins’ understanding of the way organism and environment mutually construct each other and research by Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer that offers a non‐dualist approach to wildlife conservation in agricultural ecosystems. The article discusses some of the ways in which these understandings might inform contemporary debates in political ecology.
The human relationship to the natural environment is among the most pressing political issues of the twenty-first century. The planet has already warmed by 1°C above pre-industrial levels and the temperature rise shows little signs of staying below the 1.5°C limit taken up as an aspiration within the 2015 Paris Agreement. Indeed, even present rates of warming are leading to an increase in extreme weather events, with ferocious bushfires across Australia and flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia, after unusually heavy rainfall among the most recent examples. Air pollution has become a major health hazard, with pollution levels in Delhi in 2019 reaching 50 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organisation. According to the Lancet, air pollution was responsible for 9 million premature deaths in 2015. 1 As epidemiologist Rob Wallace and others have argued, the current global COVID-19 pandemic and similar zoonotic diseases have their roots in the drive toward deforestation for
The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated worldwide lockdown measures have several implications for geographical understandings of society–nature relations and of animal life. For some, the temporary lowering of carbon dioxide emissions during the lockdown has been cause for hope for a silver lining to the pandemic. Some commentators have even adopted the misanthropic diagnosis that humanity is the virus, a stance that invokes racialised assumptions about which parts of the global population should be reduced in order for ‘nature’ to survive. Animal geography has a tradition of addressing the ways in which supposedly improper relationships with non-human animals can serve to racialise specific groups of people. This has been useful in criticising the media fascination with wet markets and Chinese eating habits. However, when pointing to spectacular examples of the ways in which wild animals have responded to lockdown conditions, some geographical commentators have too readily accepted the notion that humans have ‘abandoned’ urban areas. They have been less attentive to the fact that the lockdown was experienced in very different ways by different social groups. This opinion piece concludes by setting out what an approach rooted in ecological Marxism might offer these debates and how it points to the more systemic changes needed to forge a more socially just relationship with the rest of nature.
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) was Marx’s closest collaborator. He was influential in promoting Marxism both during Marx’s lifetime and after it. However, he is mentioned less often than Marx in geography. This editorial introduces a special issue of Human Geography on Friedrich Engels and Geography. It gives a brief overview of the key events in his life, discusses some of the geographical themes in Engels’ work – especially his relevance for work in political ecology, urbanism and geopolitics – and outlines the contents of the special issue.
In this essay, I address the question of how Marxism influences our thought and action as radical intellectuals by focusing on Friedrich Engels’ work, Dialectics of Nature, the way it has been taken up in critical environmental studies and how Engels’ thinking has influenced me. In later life, Engels made important contributions on topics that are distinct from Marx's economic work. He attempted to apply dialectical methods to the “natural sciences” and he also used his knowledge of anthropology to produce a study of the historical origins of private property and women's oppression. In both cases he has been accused of adopting a positivist approach that lacks the emphasis on human agency found in Marx. Here, I challenge this view by showing how Engels’ work has been of use to practicing scientists – particularly to Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in their book The Dialectical Biologist. I further argue that this understanding of dialectics is fully commensurable and actually advances an approach to Marxism that is based on human self-emancipation. As an undergraduate biology student these scientists inspired me with their approach to their subject as well as their activism. The essay concludes with some brief thoughts on the importance and limitations of adopting a Marxist method when considering socio-environmental change.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.