Facing Catastrophe: Food, Politics, and the Ecological Crisis

Description

The familiar and overused vocabulary of “crisis” has been endowed with so many applications and meanings – most famously Karl Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis – that it has nowadays lost much of its power to convince, much less shock. If indeed “crisis” is perpetual, then what can be so urgent, so menacing – and where do we look for “solutions”? Does anybody need to pay much attention? Could the worsening global crisis or time-honored “crisis of democracy” or familiar economic crisis instill fear among mass populations largely immersed in their own, more immediate problems? Even threat of nuclear catastrophe, once a source of mass psychological dread in the United States and Europe, seems to have dissipated. At present we face an entirely different sort of crisis – the steady descent toward ecological collapse that threatens planetary life as we have known it. That crisis could eventually be more catastrophic than any of the others – yet as of this writing the political response in the U.S. and elsewhere has fallen woefully short of the challenge.

The central motif of Facing Catastrophe is that the modern ecological crisis, now visible in many symptoms across the world landscape, reveals more clearly with each passing moment the utterly destructive character of globalized corporate power. Revisiting the famous Marxist injunction “socialism or barbarism”, it is clear to see how the ecological crisis threatens the natural habitat more severely than even most environmentalists seem prepared to recognize. This seemingly new challenge (one actually a century or more in the making) has inspired, or more accurately forced, new ways of viewing not only economic development but political action, cultural behavior, natural relations, and perhaps most crucially social change.