"We are in an emergency situation in the Anthropocene epoch in which the disruption of the Earth system, particularly the climate, is threatening the planet as a place of human habitation. However, our political-economic system, capitalism, is geared primarily to the accumulation of capital, which prevents us from addressing this enormous challenge and accelerates the destruction. have done an excellent and courageous job of sounding the alarm on the enormous dangers of the continuation of business as usual with respect to carbon emissions and other planetary boundaries. But mainstream social science as it exists today has almost completely internalized capitalist ideology; so much so that conventional social scientists are completely unable to address the problem on the scale and in the historical terms that are necessary. They are accustomed to the view that society long ago “conquered” nature and that social science concerns only people-people relations, never people-nature relations. This feeds a where Earth system-scale problems are concerned. Those mainstream social scientists who do address s more often than not do so as if we are dealing with fairly normal conditions, and not a planetary emergency, not a no-analogue situation. There can be no , answer to the dire ecological problems we face, because when looking at the human effect on the planet there is nothing gradual about it; it is a Great Acceleration and a rift in the Earth system. The problem is rising exponentially, while worsening even faster than that would suggest, because we are in the process of crossing all sorts critical thresholds and facing a bewildering number of tipping points."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from the United StatesEditors from the United StatesSociologists from the United StatesPolitical authorsMarxists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Bellamy_Foster
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Bellamy Foster
27 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Bellamy Foster →
Related Quotes
"Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s “full-world economy,” it is necessary to operate within an o…"
"Right now alternative energy is still treated as a supplement rather than a substitute for fossil fuels within the as…"
"We are on a runaway train headed over the climate cliff as we stoke the engine with more coal to increase its speed."
"Unless we change ourselves as individuals and our culture—the way we relate to the earth—we can’t expect to make the …"
"It has been long understood that “” is a myth. To make fundamental changes in the commodity economy it is necessary t…"
"Marx once said that workers (and this would perhaps go for consumers even more) are in their purely economic action i…"
"Socialists have all too often failed to take ecological issues seriously enough. However, this is not a fault of soci…"
"Capitalism imposes its laws of motion on the environment, irrespective of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet and…"
"We are already facing growing catastrophes due to climate change. It is too late to avoid soaring temperatures, scarc…"
"The truth is that, rather than directly challenging capitalism from the Marxist perspective in line with reason and t…"