Creating an Ecological Society reveals an overwhelmingly simple truth: Fighting for reforms is vital, but revolution is essential. We live in and from nature, but the way we have evolved of doing this is about to destroy us.
This book introduces green ideas to students of the social sciences, showing how society affects and is affected by nature and assessing the future of the green movement. Ecology and Socialism makes the case that time still remains to save humanity and the planet, but only it we go beyond the superficial reforms peddled as panaceas by world leaders and corporate elites.
Our only hope lies in building The overpopulation debate often serves as a vehicle for class prejudice and blaming the poor for being poor—arguments that fit perfectly with the goals of capital. Food scarcity and environmental degradation are not caused by population growth. Instead the real cause is the capitalist system itself with its waste production, expansion, and economic development.
Williams goes on to point out that countries with low or declining population rates tend to have greater per capita environmental impacts than do developing countries with increasing popula- tions. Williams shows that the biggest threats to the environment are not poor people, but rich people.
After articulating the climate crisis problem as a social problem, Williams moves to solutions. Williams argues that corporations are interested in short-term profits, which almost always come at the cost of long-term ecological damage.
Corporations employ strategies to make consumers forget about the goals of capital. According to Williams, if capital cannot reverse this devastation, then change will require mobilization against corporations and politicians, a restruc- turing of a green economy, and a redeployment of our workforce in unionized jobs that rebuild a green infrastructure.
Williams also dismisses hope that the state will rescue the situation. After cataloging an encyclopedic entry of failures among politicians to produce meaningful climate change legislation, Williams systematically reviews the failure of international climate confer- ences Kyoto et al. Williams reminds the reader that governments are compelled to sup- port corporate efforts in order maintain a competitive national advantage.
This arrangement, Williams argues, makes an international climate compromise unlikely. Williams stresses that it is true and urgently necessary that we adopt different energy sources. Williams systematically considers each energy source renewable and non-renewable —their promise, problems, and failures. Williams then proceeds to explore the political struggle around each.
Williams exposes false political strategies like cap and trade and the clean coal fantasy. In chapters 6 and 7, Williams engages in an analysis of Marxist thought which grounds the previous analysis in theory. This section will be particularly useful for students in sociological theory or environmental sociology courses who are exploring the links between theory and empirical reality.
What is striking about this theoretical analysis is how prescient Marx and Engels were, and how relevant their work is to us today. This tremendous, well-written, urgent and persuasive book offers the paradigm shift needed to turn the green movement toward real systemic change. The interests of capital will inevitably lead us to environmental degradation.
In spite of the claims that capital can produce green technologies, Williams reiterates that the problem is social, not technological. Williams ultimately argues that a change to our economic system will not entail personal sacrifice, but will instead enrich our standard of living while also cutting carbon emissions.
If the reader gets to the end of the book and still harbors hopes that capitalism can become sustainable, Williams adds the final piece to his argument, which dismisses this possibility. Capitalism, Williams argues, with its need for continual expansion and short-term profit, is inherently anti- ecological.
To survive, capitalism must be antagonistic to nature. But what, then, would a sustainable society look like? Williams concludes the book with a sketch of a rational, ecological, and socialist model. This chapter would pro- vide excellent fodder for discussion among sociology students. Williams does leave the reader with hope. A transition to non-carbon- based fuels is possible. But this transformation will require social change. The inequality and exploitation that lie at the heart of capitalism ravages humans and the planet in the interests of a tiny minority hell-bent on reshaping the planet in the service of profit.
She carefully addresses the connection between racism and resistance, especially when doing research. In her outstanding book, Glover carefully contextualizes the foundation upon which research on racial profiling should be based, and thereby puts research on racial profiling in perspective by critiquing its limitations, especially the race-as-a-variable scholarship.
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