Capitalism, or Ecocide

For the past two decades or so, environmental scientists have been referring to the present age as the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which, starting in the early 1800s, world ecological systems and environments have been continually shaped and reshaped by human activity. Where previously we were just another species on the planet, if a relatively successful and populous one, today we dominate the planet.

Perhaps ‘capitalocene’ would be the better term. A good number of critical ecologists, economists, and political theorists have come to the conclusion that our present way of organizing society is fundamentally unsustainable in ecological terms. We can’t keep going on the way we have for the past two hundred years or so. In particular, it seems that our basic mode of production, capitalism, is in conflict with the demands of environmental sustainability. They suggest that the contradictions of modern capitalism are expressing themselves in a fundamental disparity between how we organize society, and the ecological basis of life here on earth. What kinds of problems are we dealing with here?