Louis was kind enough to post Boucher's article. After reading it, I was a
little confused about Louis' argument w/ Boucher. Although the piece has
its problems, Boucher ends on what seems to me to be a respectable position
for a Marxist:
>[snip]
>If it is possible that modern capitalism can continue to grow without
>causing the end of either the planet or itself, then we would be faced with
>a different kind of disaster: one of the gradual impoverishment of both the
>world's peoples and its biological diversity.
>The most dangerous error for
>the left would be to continue waiting for an historic global environmental
>catastrophe that would cause revolutionary change. For the left, the
>strategic error we need to guard against is awaiting a disaster that never
>comes. Rather than expect environmental degradation to build up to the
>breaking point, we should be recognizing the terrible damage it has done
>already, and continues to do as "civilization" continues to "develop." The
>principal reason to stop pollution, deforestation, overexploitation and the
>impoverishment of the biosphere is not the danger of future catastrophe,
>but the immense ongoing suffering they are causing, especially to the
>world's poor, right now. The economic and spiritual costs of environmental
>destruction need to be confronted and stopped, precisely because no
>ecological collapse is likely to come along and halt them otherwise. Things
>will simply get worse little by little, with a diminishing quality of life
>for succeeding generations. The ultimate danger, ironically, is that no
>global catastrophe will ever come -- that the health of both the planet and
> human society will simply decay, world without end. The task of preventing
>this by transforming society is not nature's, but our own.
This doesn't sound to me like someone who, as Louis was complaining, is
dismissing the importance of the environment. It sounds more like someone
saying, we're in deep ecological shit right now, but that scaring people
about an impending end of the world as a means to catalyze them into
radical action is a bad strategy. I can see arguments either way; as
someone who became a leftie during the anti-nuke campaign, I'm pretty
skeptical about trying to change people by scaring them with
end-of-the-world visions, even if (especially if?) those visions are true.
But even if you disagree w/ Boucher's point, it's hardly the stance of
someone who doesn't take the environment seriously.
One more comment. In another post, Louis said:
----------------
Harvey's position is rather interesting
and I plan to discuss it at length when I get the chance. He works with
black activists in the Baltimore area--to his credit--and he has absorbed
their hostility to middle-class environmentalism of the Sierra Club
variety. Harvey bitterly comments that such people cared more about chicken
exrement run-off in poultry plants in the south than the horrible working
conditions of the black employees. This is classic sectarianism. Socialists
do not belittle one form of oppression against another. Sneering at the
concerns that some people have over polluted water is not what builds a
socialist movement. Socialists have to figure out ways to tie these
struggles together and not apply such litmus tests.
---------------------
I'd be interested to hear your analysis of Harvey's position. Again, from
what you cite here, it hardly seems like a sectarian sin. Isn't Harvey's
complaint about exactly the kind of problem that led to the Environmental
Justice movement?
Anders Schneiderman
