The Enemy of Nature
A brief review of Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature
After having read and greatly appreciated Professor Joel Kovel's previous book, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, I was somewhat surprised to see his entry into the ecological debate with The Enemy of Nature. [i] (An excerpt from the book is available here). But skepticism soon gave way to great insight about the fundamentals of our current ecological situation, an impending catastrophe threatening survival itself as Kovel makes clear.
Whereas other writers have examined ecological crises and misdeeds as isolated and independent manifestations of similarly discrete abuses by global and regional players, Kovel shows that the root cause of ecological ills is the capitalistic system itself, in effect the very nature of capital or “money-in-motion.” What follows from this accusation is the even more unsettling demonstration that no amount of “corrections” of given abuses nor mere simple “reforms” and “controls” applied to the basic rules of the game will suffice to reverse the dangerous nature- and life-threatening trends now evident world-wide. The (Acutal) Enemy of Nature is the capitalistic system itself, and if readers of such a statement should be tempted to dismiss the claim as mere Marxian doomsday-saying and thus forego a reading of it on the basis of our current celebrations that capitalism is the sole surviving economic system and therefore MUST be the best, such potential readers will be ignoring not only essential information, but be contributing to the continuation of processes which must surely end in never-seen-before suffering, chaos and anarchy.
For anyone who even pretends to have a passing interest in the future of Western civilization and the questions concerning its health and survival now discussed with every passing ecological abuse and catastrophe, this book is a must. Ignoring it may well constitute a breach of morality. [ii] However, there is a great probability that the book may well be ignored because its arguments and conclusions are fairly well unanswerable and would require outright revolution in all spheres of human activity were it to be taken seriously. As such, it is hard to conclude anything else but that we are indeed approaching global meltdown and the end of history, not for the reasons that Francis Fukuyama laid out in his famous tome, but because the Panglossian continuation of our current ecological mania must soon end not only history but the means even to write it, and possibly even the species which writes.
The climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today's political and economic systems. That isn't an opinion. That's a fact.
- Greta Thunberg
i Red Hunting In The Promised Land: Anticommunism And The Making Of America, Basic Books (February 15, 1994) ; The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Zed Books; 2nd edition (September 1, 2007)
ii Errors of Knowledge vs. Breaches of Morality: “Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they “just feel it”—or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: “It’s only logic,” which means: “It’s only reality.” The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.”