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November 19, 2008
The reality is that capitalism has caused the ecological crisis, with its accelerated pace reinforced by feedback loops. Thus we have the “production of nature” by capital thesis that is contested by those known as climate change sceptics.
In his review Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America in the New York Review of Books Bill McKibben observes tha the text works within:
the tenets of the conventional wisdom, American style, which is that fundamental change in direction is essentially impossible. The world is a growth machine and "nobody can turn it off." Everyone wants "an American style of life," and "their governments will not be able to deny" it to them. So the only option is to tinker with the American style of life to make it greener.
He adds that global warming, above all, should give one pause—after all, we are making our mark now in geological, not human, time.
If we do pause then we can see that the human relation to nature lies at the heart of the problems of capitalism and that an ecological perspective is pivotal to our understanding of capitalism’s limits.
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