Doug Henwood: >There's a very interesting article by J. Donald Hughes on the Mayan >collapse in the March 1999 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism. (For a >journal edited by a "confused old man," CNS is pretty damn sharp.) Well >before the arrival of the Europeans, the Mayans were living in cities and >massively altering the landscape with irrigation, quarrying, and the >manufacture of ceramics. J. Donald Hughes is the author of "Pan's Travails: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans." He argues that past civilizations may have had a pantheistic love of nature, but polluted and exploited the environment much like modern societies do. He discovered that the city-building Greeks and Romans cut down surrounding forests and fouled the air by smelting lead. Hunter-gatherer groups did not deplete their resources because the land had to sustain them from year to year. But migrating societies often overhunted and let their herds overgraze. None of this is particularly new, nor unique. Simon Schama, the right-wing professor here at Columbia University wrote a book titled "Landscape and Memory" that makes many of the same points, while also making some that Cronon has made. What Hughes, Schama and Cronon all lack is an understanding of the particular nature of the capitalist system, whose logic dictates a completely different set of environmental consequences. As Marxist such as Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster--and Marx himself--have taken great pains to point out, commodity production requires a totally different relationship to nature. By effacing the all-important question of M-C-M, Hughes and company create universals out of "mankind", "nature" and "progress" that effectively militate against socialist politics. Perhaps CNS provides a space for Hughes to publish his sort of scholarship for the very reason that it rejects mine. As far as O'Connor's confusion is concerned, I want to retract what I said. He appears very clear about his goals. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
