Notes

Foreword

1.      Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2, 207; J. Donald Hughes, Pans Travail (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 4. Haeckel’s focus on ecology as the study of the economy of nature was directed at Darwin’s view of the competition of species for environmental niches: “All organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964; facsimile of first edition), 102. Darwin used the concept of the “economy of nature” throughout his magnum opus.

2.      Epicurus, The Extant Remains of the Greek Text Translated by Cyril Bailey (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1947), 145, 161, 171. It should be noted that although the ancient Greeks perceived the world dialectically and recognized with some horror the systematic estrangement associated with the money economy, their society was nonetheless rife with contradictions, more so perhaps than other societies in their day, which were related to the development of the property relation. Among these was a more extreme enslavement of women than in the societies surrounding them. At the same time, the polis at its roots was a system of slavery. On the latter see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981). Among the ancient schools of philosophy, only Epicureans admitted women and slaves.

3.      Richard Seaford, Ancient Greece and Global Warming (London: Classical Association, 2009). Coinage is thought to have developed in the West first in Greece’s neighbor Lydia and then was given systematic form in the Greek city-states. Although the indications are that China developed a form of coinage earlier, its systematic character, significance to the society, and pervasiveness remain open questions. Quite apart from this, Seaford argues that the Greek adoption of coinage on a large scale and systematic basis, creating a money economy, was a sui generis development—one that separated the Greek city-states from the Near East and India, where a coinage-based money economy developed later. Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4, 129–136.

4.      Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. and ed. Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2004), 298. The above account of the Erysichthon myth follows Ovid, except with reference to the banquet hall, which is included in Seaford’s account, which also relies on Callimachus’s version of the myth.

5.      Seaford, Ancient Greece and Global Warming.

6.      Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind, 1–20, 125–136, 147–172.

7.      Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 178.

8.      Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 29, 43. On Bacon and the domination of nature, see William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 45–71.

9.      “The Web of Life is woven: & the tender sinews of life created / And the Three Classes of Men regulated by Los’s hammer.” William Blake, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Random House, 1982), 100.

10.    See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 141–177.

11.    Arthur G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (July 1935): 299–300, 304; Joseph Lester, E. Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1995), 185–87; Peer Ayres, Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 41–44. It is worth noting that the word “œcology” first entered English in the 1873 translation under Lankester’s supervision of Haeckel’s History of Creation. See Oxford English Dictionary: Compact Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1975.

12.    Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 152–156.

13.    The rejection of “human exemptionalism” and the promotion in its place of the “new ecological paradigm” constituted the basis on which environmental sociology arose as a field in the United States. See Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton, “Struggling with Human Exemptionalism,” American Sociologist 13 (1978): 41–49.

14.    See J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

15.    Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique,” Monthly Review 59, no. 9 (February 2008): 1–17.

16.    Rachel Carson, Lost Woods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 231.

17.    Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: New Press, 1992), ix; The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971); The Poverty of Power (New York: Knopf, 1976); G. Evelyn Hutchinson, “The Biosphere,” Scientific American 233, no. 3 (1970): 45–53.

18.    David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley, “Introduction,” The Philosophy of Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 1–3.

19.    This connection between materialist dialectics and ecology is best exemplified in Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007).

20.    Carson, Lost Woods, 194.

21.    Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 558–559.

22.    John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Chris Williams, Ecology and Socialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).

23.    See Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 59–60.

24.    Richard Lewontin’s Triple Helix focuses specifically on the complex dialectical relation between gene-organism-environment (seeing each of these as dynamic and variegated), breaking with traditional Darwinian natural selection as a crude adaptationism. Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

25.    Karl Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 21.

26.    Seaford, Ancient Greece and Global Warming.

27.    Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin), 253–254.

28.    Ovid, Metamorphoses, 299–300.

1. The Social and Ecological Planetary Emergency

1.      Quoted in Scott Hammond, Kevin Hardwick, and Howard Lubert (eds.), Classics of American Political and Constitutional Thought, vol. 2, Reconstruction to the Present (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2007), 33.

2.      Suzanne Jeffrey, “Up against the Clock: Climate, Social Movements and Marxism,” ISJ Issue 148 http://isj.org.uk/up-against-the-clock/ ISJ 148 (Winter 2015).

3.      Carl Hulse, “A Giant Tortoise’s Death Gives Extinction a Face,” New York Times, July 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/science/death-of-lonesome-george-the-tortoise-gives-extinction-a-face.html.

4.      Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle: Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 334–35.

5.      Ibid., 336.

6.      Gordon Chancellor and Randal Keynes, “Darwin’s Field Notes on the Galapagos: ‘A Little World Within Itself,’” Darwin Online, October 2006, http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Chancellor_Keynes_Galapagos.html.

7.      Quoted in Ian Angus, “Readings From the Left,” http://isreview.org/issue/65/marx-and-engelsand-darwin.

8.      R. L. Lewison, S. A. Freeman, and L. B. Crowder, “Quantifying the Effects of Fisheries on Threatened Species: The Impact of Pelagic Longlines on Loggerhead and Leatherback Sea Turtles,” Ecology Letters 7 (2004): 221–31.

9.      “Poaching of Costa Rica Sea Turtle Eggs: Turtle Poll,” Tico Times, October 5, 2010, http://ticotimes.com/costa-rica/poaching-sea-turtle-eggs-poll.

10.    For fuller discussion of these boundaries, see Stockholm Resilience Center, “The Nine Planetary Boundaries,” http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/planetary-boundaries/about-the-research/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html.

11.    Planetary Boundaries 2.0, Stockholm Resilience Center, January 15, 2015; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347/ 6223 (February 13, 2015).

12.    Colin Walters et al., “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351/6269 (January 8, 2016): 137.

13.    Ibid.

14.    UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Adoption of the Paris Agreement, Conference of the Parties, Twenty-first Session, Paris, 30 November to 11 December 2015 (Paris: UNFCCC, 2015).

15.    Ibid.

16.    James Hansen et al., “Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions,” October 4, 2016, csas.ei.columbia.edu/2016/10/04/young-peoples-burden/; James Hansen, et al., “Global Temperature in 2016,” January 18, 2017, http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2017/01/18/global-temperature-in-2016/).

17.    John Cook, “Four Hiroshima Bombs Worth of Heat per Second,” Skeptical Science, July 1, 2013, http://www.skepticalscience.com/4-Hiroshima-bombs-worth-of-heat-per-second.html.

18.    S. G. Heaslip et al., “Jellyfish Support High Energy Intake of Leatherback Sea Turtles (Dermochelys coriacea): Video Evidence from Animal-Borne Cameras,” PLoS ONE 7/3 (2012): e33259, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033259.

19.    Linda Lear, ed., Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 135.

20.    Florida State University, “Bachelor’s Paradise: FSU Researcher Finds Female Turtles Outnumbering Males: Climate Change Posing Long-Term Stability Challenges for Turtles,” Science Daily, February 4, 2016, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160204111634.htm.

21.    Tim Wallace, “Oceans Are Absorbing Almost All of the Globe’s Excess Heat,” New York Times, September 12, 2016.

22.    For information and data about Arctic Ocean sea ice see “Arctic Sea Ice & News Analysis,” National Snow & Ice Data Center, http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/; U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, “Sluggish ice growth in the Arctic,” Arctic Sea Ice and News Analysis, http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/, November 2, 2016.

23.    U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center data plotted by blogger Wipneus, https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/sea-ice-extent-area/grf/nsidc_global_area_byyear_b.png.

24.    Bob Berwyn, “Wobbly Jetstream Is Sending the Melting Arctic into ‘Uncharted Territory’,” Inside Climate News, June 9, 2016; Damian Carrington, “Arctic Ice Melt ‘already affecting weather patterns where you live right now’,” The Guardian, December 19, 2016.

25.    Eric Roston, “West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’,” Bloomberg, October 25, 2016.

26.    Jerry Melillo et al., eds., Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, Appendix 5, Scenarios and Models (2014), U.S. Global Change Research Program, at http://s3.amazonaws.com/nca2014/high/NCA3_Full_Report_Appendix_5_Scenarios_Models_HighRes.pdf?download=1.

27.    See “Plastics—The Facts 2013” (and 2014, 2015) at Plastics Europe, www.plasticseurope.org/Document/plastics-the-facts-2013.aspx.

28.    Considering how much plastic is produced with no end in sight and so little of it recycled, the Holy Grail of research has been to find organisms that can be genetically modified or reproduced in large quantities to biodegrade plastic. Though there were reports in the early 2000s of plastic-eating bacteria or fungi, they need very specific conditions to reproduce. Newly identified bacteria found in recycling center sludge living among high concentrations of plastic may represent the first possibility for large-scale biodegradation of plastic—as long as it’s collected rather than dispersed into the watercourses of the world. See Mark Lorch, “New Plastic-Munching Bacteria Could Fuel a Recycling Revolution,” The Conversation, March 10, 2016, http://theconversation.com/new-plastic-munching-bacteria-could-fuel-a-recycling-revolution-55961.

29.    World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and McKinsey & Co., The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics (2016), https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications/the-new-plastics-economy-rethinking-the-future-of-plastics.

30.    Rachel Feltman, “More than Half the World’s Sea Turtles Have Eaten Plastic, New Study Claims,” Washington Post, September 15, 2015.

31.    Philip Hoare, “Whales Are Starving—Their Stomachs Full of Our Plastic Waste,” The Guardian, January 29, 2016.

32.    Rensselaer County, “Plastic Bag Facts,” http://www.rensselaercounty.org/enviroment%20management%20council/plastic%20bag%20facts.htm.

33.    Jane McGrath, “Which Is More Environmentally Friendly: Paper or Plastic?” How Stuff Works, October 1, 2016, http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/paper-plastic1.htm.

34.    J. Zalasiewicz et al., “The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 13 (March 2016): 4–17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002.

35.    World Energy Outlook, Energy and Air Pollution, Special Report, International Energy Agency (2016), https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WorldEnergyOutlookSpecialReport2016EnergyandAirPollution.pdf.

36.    Oliver Milman, “More than Half US Population Lives Amid Dangerous Air Pollution, Report Warns,” The Guardian, April 20, 2016.

37.    Chelsea Harvey, “Staggering Economic Cost of Air Pollution,” Orange County Register, January 30, 2016.

38.    National Research Council, The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010).

39.    World Health Organization, “Air Pollution Costs European Economies US$1.6 Trillion a Year in Diseases and Deaths, New WHO Study Says,” press release, April 28, 2015, http://www.euro.who.int/en/media-centre/sections/press-releases/2015/04/air-pollution-costs-european-economies-us$-1.6-trillion-a-year-in-diseases-and-deaths,-new-who-study-says.

40.    Feargus O’Sullivan, “London Has Already Exceeded Its Pollution Limits for 2016,” Atlantic, January 13, 2016. NO and NO₂ are collectively referred to as NO_x.

41.    John Vidal and Toby Helm, “Shock Figures to Reveal Deadly Toll of Global Air Pollution,” The Guardian, January 16, 2016.

42.    World Energy Outlook, Energy and Air Pollution.

43.    David Jolly, “Despite Push for Cleaner Cars, Sheer Numbers Could Work Against Climate Benefits,” New York Times, December 7, 2015.

44.    John Vidal, “Air Pollution: A Dark Cloud of Filth Poisons the World’s Cities,” The Guardian, January 16, 2016.

45.    Jos Lelieveld et al., “The Contribution of Outdoor Air Pollution Sources to Premature Mortality on a Global Scale,” Nature 525 (September 17, 2015): 367–71, doi:10.1038/nature15371.

46.    Adrian Wilson et al., Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People, NAACP, http://www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CoalBlooded.pdf (2012).

47.    Robert D. Bullard et al., Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987–2007. Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States (Cleveland: United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries, March 2007), http://www.ejnet.org/ej/twart-light.pdf.

48.    Scott Kaufman, “Study: People of Color Breathe Air that Is 38 Percent More Polluted Than White People’s,” Raw Story, April 17, 2014, http://www.rawstory.com/2014/04/study-people-of-color-breathe-air-that-is-38-percent-more-polluted-than-white-peoples/; L. P. Clark, D. B. Millet, and J. D. Marshall, “National Patterns in Environmental Injustice and Inequality: Outdoor NO₂ Air Pollution in the United States,” PLoS One 9/4 (2014): e94431.

49.    For more on the origins of European expansion via ecological imperialism, see Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The huge expansion of biofuels in Europe such as palm oil, sourced from developing countries and leading to deforestation, displacement, extinctions, and wildfires, is just one example of the contemporary nature of ecological imperialism.

50.    Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso Books, 2016), 187.

51.    Sam Jones, “Lack of Toilets Blights the Lives of 2.5 Billion People, UN Chief Warns,” The The Guardian, August 28, 2014.

52.    Eric Holt-Giménez, “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People—And We Still Can’t End Hunger,” Huffington Post, December 18, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html.

53.    Deborah Hardoon, An Economy for the 99%, Oxfam, January 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-99.

54.    Oxfam, “An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped,” Briefing Paper, January 18, 2016, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-en_0.pdf.

55.    Ibid.

56.    Molly Moorhead, “Obama Says New Miles of Pipeline Could Stretch Around the Earth,” Politifact, April 23, 2012, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/apr/23/barack-obama/obama-says-new-miles-pipeline-could-stretch-around/.

57.    Steve Horn, “During Paris Climate Summit, Obama Signed Exxon-, Koch-Backed Bill Expediting Pipeline Permits,” DeSmog Blog, December 31, 2015, http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/12/31/paris-climate-summit-obama-exxon-koch-bill-pipeline-permit.

58.    Mike Ludwig, “Obama Administration Approved Gulf Fracking During Deepwater Horizon spill,” Truthout, June 24, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36556-obama-administration-approved-gulf-fracking-during-deepwater-horizon-disaster.

59.    Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer, “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Climate Change Decades Ago,” Inside Climate News, September 15, 2015, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming.

60.    Neela Banerjee, “Exxon’s Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too,” Inside Climate News, December 22, 2015, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco.

61.    Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Despite Protests, Oil Industry Thrives Under Obama Agenda,” Bloomberg, January 5, 2016.

62.    Brian Bienkowski, “Will Trade Trump Climate Pact?” The Daily Climate, January 7, 2016, http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2016/jan/climate-change-ttp-ttip-international-trade-eu.

63.    Elisabeth Jeffries, “Freeing Fossil Fuels,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016): 125–26.

64.    International Monetary Fund, “IMF Survey: Counting the Cost of Energy Subsidies,” July 17, 2015, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/NEW070215A.htm.

65.    Naomi Larsson, “Foreign Aid: Which Countries Are the Most Generous?,” The Guardian, September 9, 2015.

66.    “Rapid, Affordable Energy Transformation Possible,” NOAA News, January 25, 2016, www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2016/012516-rapid-affordable-energy-transformation-possible.html.

67.    Alex Pashley, “Climate Change Could Dry Up Power Production,” Climate Change News, January 4, 2016, http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/01/04/climate-change-could-dry-up-power-production-study/.

68.    U.S. Energy Information Agency, “Hydropower Supplies More Than Three-Quarters of Brazil’s Electricity,” June 17, 2014, http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16731.

69.    International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, “Worldwide Electricity Production Vulnerable to Climate and Water Resource Change,” January 4, 2016, http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/160104-water-energy.html.

70.    Damien Carrington, “Loss of Monkeys and Birds in Tropical Forests Driving Up Carbon Emissions,” The Guardian, December 18, 2015.

2. The Roots of the Social-Ecological Crisis

1.      Fawzi Ibrahim, Capitalism versus Planet Earth—An Irreconcilable Conflict (London: Muswell Press, 2012), 245.

2.      Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal (New York: Monthly Review, 2010), 12–13.

3.      For example, see World Bank, World Development Indicators 2008, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/587251468176971009/pdf/541670WDI0200810Box345641B01PUBLIC1.pdf; Fred Magdoff, “The Depletion of the World’s Natural Resources: Is Population the Problem?,” Monthly Review 64/8 (January 2013): 13–28; and Oxfam, “Extreme Carbon Inequality: Why the Paris Climate Deal Must Put the Poorest, Lowest Emitting and Most Vulnerable People First,” December 2, 2015, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf.

4.      Nelson Schwartz, “The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World,” New York Times, February 2, 2014.

5.      Neil Roberts, The Holocene: An Environmental History, (Chichester: Wiley, 2014): 261.

6.      Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, “Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire,” in Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, ed. Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–17.

7.      Robert Costanza et al., “Overcoming societal addictions: What can we learn from individual therapies?,” Ecological Economics 131 (2016): 543–550.

8.      Pogo is the anthropomorphic possum who appeared in Walt Kelly’s cartoon strip for many years.

9.      There is a common pattern during the boom-bust cycle of capitalism: once an expansion begins, investments are made in order to take advantage of the increased activity and potential for profit. The building up of inventories in anticipation of increasing sales also helps to stimulate the economy during an expansion. Encouraged by lower interest rates on borrowing, household and commercial spending increases. But not knowing when to stop, or where real expansion turns into speculation and financial bubbles, overproduction of goods and machinery occurs. When overproduction becomes evident, businesses stop investing, struggle to pay bills, begin to lay off workers, and sometimes go bankrupt.

10.    Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Do Drug Companies Make Drugs, or Money?” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2014.

11.    Denise Roland, “Drugmakers Turn Cheap Generics Into Expensive Pills,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2017. Valeant’s outrageous price increases caused a furor and political scrutiny has made it more difficult to continue to raise prices at the same pace. The company also overpaid for a number of other acquisitions, further weakening profits.

12.    Victor Lebow, “Price Competition in 1955,” Journal of Retailing 31/1 (Spring 1955).

13.    Richard Tomkins, “Kotler’s Feast of Ideas,” Financial Times, May 29, 2003.

14.    Christopher Mims, “Why There Are More Consumer Goods than Ever,” Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2016.

15.    Robert McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013), 44.

16.    Ken Brown, “REIT Surprise: How Real Estate Crushed the Stock Pickers,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016.

17.    Karl Marx, “Commodities, Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Capital, vol. 1, chap. 1, http://web.stanford.edu/~davies/Symbsys100-Spring0708/Marx-Commodity-Fetishism.pdf.

18.    Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review 1/1 (May 1949).

19.    For a discussion of the reserve army, see Fred Magdoff and Harry Magdoff, “Disposable Workers: Today’s Reserve Army of Labor,” Monthly Review 55/11 (April 2005): 18–35.

20.    U.S. Government Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, data series JTS10000000LDL, http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv?jt.

21.    Under pressure from unions and growing social unrest, the U.S. government created jobs programs during the massive unemployment of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the largest being the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employing millions of people. The economist John Maynard Keynes is best remembered for articulating the need for public spending to alleviate shortfalls in employment and reinvigorate the economy, a response that held sway among wealthy country governments of all political stripes until the 1970s.

22.    Kathy Jo Wetter and Pat Mooney, “Fast Food: Supporting Farming Innovation in a Changing Climate,” in Proceedings of 2014 Summit on Seeds and Breeds for the 21st Century Agriculture, ed. Bill Tracy and Michael Sligh (Pittsboro, NC: Rural Advancement Foundation International, 2014), 177–89.

23.    COMPUSTAT, “Fundamentals Annual: North America,” Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS).

24.    Paul Krugman, “Challenging the Oligarchy,” review of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert Reich, New York Review of Books, December 17, 2015.

25.    Joseph Stiglitz, “Monopoly’s New Era,” Project Syndicate, May 13, 2016, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/high-monopoly-profits-persist-in-markets-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-2016-05?barrier=true.

26.    Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 43.

27.    Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, March 31, 2011.

28.    Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12/3 (September 2014): 564–81.

29.    Walter Johnson, “King Cotton’s Long Shadow,” New York Times, March 30, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/king-cottons-long-shadow/.

30.    Ibid.

31.    Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2014), 30.

32.    Jason Burke and Philip Oltermann, “Germany moves to atone for ‘forgotten genocide’ in Namibia,” The Guardian, December 25, 2016.

33.    Branko Milanovic, “The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization As We Know It,” World Development 31/4 (2003): 667–83.

34.    Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 35.

35.    Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). See also Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present.

36.    For more on the “new imperialism” see Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace, and Niall Ferguson, Imperialism.

37.    Alan Murray, “Manifesto Warns of Dangers Associated with an Empire,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2003.

38.    Jonathan Marcus, “US Faces Up to Guerrilla War,” BBC, July 17, 2003.

39.    David Vine, “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?” Politico, July–August 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321.

40.    Thomas Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times, April 25, 1999.

41.    FRED Economic Database, “Capacity Utilization: Total Industry (TCU),” St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCU.

42.    Nelson Schwartz, “The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls,” New York Times, December 4, 2015.

43.    Benchmark, “Chinese Companies Are Turning Japanese,” Bloomberg News, July 21, 2016.

44.    Lewis Powell, “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971, http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/.

45.    Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “The Plight of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review 65/8 (January 2014): 1–22.

46.    Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12/3 (September 2014): 564–81.

47.    David Crook and Brian McGill, “Who’s Working in the ‘Gig Economy’,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2016.

48.    Jeanna Smialek and Patricia Laya, “The New Face of American Unemployment,” Bloomberg (undated, 2017), at https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-new-unemployment/.

49.    Liz Alderman, “Feeling ‘Pressure All the Time’ on Europe’s Treadmill of Temporary Work,” New York Times, February 9, 2017.

50.    Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” New York Times, November 26, 2006.

51.    For background on the Great Financial crisis see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).

52.    Fred Magdoff, “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation,” Monthly Review 58/6 (November 2006): 1–23.

53.    Satyajit Das, “QE-Forever Cycle Will Have an Unhappy Ending,” Financial Times, August 1, 2016.

54.    World Bank, “Gross Domestic Product Ranking 2015,” http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/GDP-ranking-table; Richard Kersley and Markus Stierli, “Global Wealth Report 2015,” Credit Suisse AG, Research Institute, October 2014, https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/research-institute/news-and-videos/articles/news-and-expertise/2015/10/en/global-wealth-in-2015-underlying-trends-remain-positive.html.

55.    Credit Suisse, “Table 3-4: Percentage membership of global wealth deciles and top percentiles by country of residence, 2015,” Global Wealth Databook 2015, October 2015, https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/research-institute/publications.html.

56.    Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2015 Preliminary Estimates),” UC Berkeley, June 30, 2016, http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2015.pdf.

57.    Facundo Alvaredo et al., “Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from Wid.World,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 23119 (February 2016), at http://www.nber.org/papers/w23119.

58.    Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies, December 1, 2015, http://www.ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza/.

59.    For conditions in the United States see Magdoff and Foster, “The Plight of the U.S. Working Class.”

3. Capitalism versus the Biosphere

1.      Frederick Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1876), at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/.

2.      Frederick Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.”

3.      Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949.

4.      World Health Organization, Public Health Impacts of Pesticides Used in Agriculture (Geneva 1990), http://apps.who.int/iris/bit-stream/10665/39772/1/9241561394.pdf; “Plastics—The Facts 2013”; Gaelle Gourmelon, “Global Plastic Production Rises, Recycling Lags,” Worldwatch Institute, January 27, 2015, http://vitalsigns.worldwatch.org/sites/default/files/vital_signs_trend_plastic_full_pdf.pdf.

5.      Fund manager and “sustainable investment analyst” Mark Campanale, quoted in Herbert Girardet, Cities, People, Planet: Urban Development and Climate Change (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Academic, 2004), 117.

6.      Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House), 505.

7.      Henry A. Wallace, “Foreword,” in Soils and Men, Yearbook of Agriculture 1938 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture/GPO, 1938), https://archive.org/details/yoa1938.

8.      David Vaccari, “Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply,” Scientific American, June 1, 2009.

9.      U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds, “National Rivers and Streams Assessment 2008–2009: A Collaborative Survey,” EPA/841/R-16/007 (Washington, DC: USEPA, 2016), www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-03/documents/nrsa_0809_march_2_final.pdf.

10.    Calculated from U.S. Geological Survey data, http://nwis.water-data.usgs.gov/ia/nwis/uv?cb_00060=on&cb_99133=on&format=gif_default&site_no=05484500&period=&begin_date=2015-04-01&end_date=2016-03-31.

11.    Christopher Doughty et al., “Global Nutrient Transport in a World of Giants,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences113/23 (January 26, 2016): 6388–96.

12.    David Biello, “CO₂ Levels for February Eclipsed Prehistoric Highs,” Scientific American, March 5, 2015.

13.    Monitoring at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii started in 1958.

14.    Johannes Lehmann and Markus Kleber, “The Contentious Nature of Soil Organic Matter,” Nature 528 (December 3, 2015): 60–68.

15.    Calculated by the authors as follows:

A) The amount of carbon per acre to 6-inch depth for 1 percent organic matter:

6 inches weighs 2 million lbs.

1 percent of 2 million lbs = 20,000 lbs of organic matter per acre (per percent organic matter).

Organic matter is estimated to be 0.5882 percent carbon.

Therefore the weight of carbon in the top 6 inches of soil = 11,764 lbs of C per percent organic matter.

B) The amount of carbon in atmosphere per acre of earth surface area: The surface of the earth is equivalent to 126 billion acres (surface area of earth in acres).

The mass of carbon dioxide in atmosphere = 3 × 10¹⁵ kg = 6.6 × 10¹⁵ lbs of CO₂ (http://igss.wikidot.com/co2mass).

C) Carbon makes up 27 percent of CO₂ by weight (12/44); thus there are 1.78 × 10¹⁵ lbs (27 percent of 6.6 × 10¹⁵) of carbon as CO₂ in the atmosphere.

D) Now divide 1.65 × 10¹⁵ lbs of C in the atmosphere by 126 billion acres (1.26 × 10¹¹ acres) = 1.4 × 10⁴ lbs = 14,127 lbs of C as CO₂ in the atmosphere above each acre of earth compared with 11,764 lbs of C per percent organic matter.

15.    Joseph Fargione et al., “Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” Science 319 (2008): 1235–38.

16.    Ibid.

17.    Joe Cochrane, “Rain in Indonesia Dampens Forest Fires That Spread Toxic Haze,” New York Times, October 29, 2015.

18.    Jeff Masters, “Earth’s Top Ten Weather/Climate Events of 2015,” Weather Underground, January 5, 2016, http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/earths-top-ten-weatherclimate-events-of-2015.

19.    Sara Schonhardt, “Southeast Asia Haze Caused Over 100,000 Deaths, Study Says,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2016.

20.    Damian Carrington, “Indonesian Forest Fires on Track to Emit More CO2 than UK,” The Guardian, October 7, 2015.

21.    As Marxist historian Andreas Malm has convincingly argued, the primary reasons for the turn to coal and steam power that are always given as the causal foundation of the Industrial Revolution was social, not resource-based or technological. The manner and rate of the transition in Britain and then the rest of the world to a fossil economy can only be understood and explained by a focus on social relations:

No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into a fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labour—the power to direct the labour of others—as conditions of their existence…. That is the point of contact between humans and the rest of nature, where biophysical resources pass into the circuits of social metabolism…. That is the sphere where the fossil economy must have originated.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 19.

22.    Tim Crews, “Will Becoming Local Here Get Us There?” Land Report 108 (Spring 2014): 5–11.

23.    Tom Wessels, The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006), 41–42.

24.    Ted Schuur, The Permafrost Prediction,” Scientific American 315/6 (December 2016): 57–61.

25.    Fred Magdoff, “The Political Economy and Ecology of Biofuels,” Monthly Review 60/3 (July-August 2008):34-50; Brian Tokar, “Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis,” in Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, eds., Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 121–138; and Andrew Steer and Craig Hanson, “Biofuels are not a green alternative to fossil fuels,” The Guardian, January 29, 2015.

26.    David Biello, “The Carbon Capture Fallacy,” Scientific American 314/1 (January 2016): 59–65.

27.    Kristen Lyons, Carol Richards, and Peter Westoby, The Darker Side of Green: Plantation Forestry and Carbon Violence in Uganda (Oakland, CA: Oakland Institute, November 2014), www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/Report_DarkerSideofGreen_hirez.pdf.

28.    Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es, Building Soils for Better Crops: Sustainable Soil Management, 3rd ed. (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, 2009). We use the term “pest” in the colloquial sense of an organism that does something that humans don’t want it to do. It is commonly used when referring to farming situations: some species of plants, insects, nematodes, fungi, and bacteria interfere with the specific plants and animals raised by farmers. It is also commonly used in other situations, such as home infestations with ants, cockroaches, or mice.

29.    Joseph Hills, C. Jones, and C. Cutler, “Soil Deterioration and Soil Humus,” Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 135 (1908): 142–77.

30.    Ray Weil and Fred Magdoff, “Significance of Soil Organic Matter to Soil Quality and Health,” 1–43, in Soil Organic Matter in Sustainable Agriculture, ed. Fred Magdoff and Ray Weil (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2004).

31.    Douglas Karlen and Charles Rice, “Soil Degradation: Will Humankind Ever Learn?” Sustainability 7 (2015): 12490–501.

32.    Beth Gardiner, “A Boon for Soil and the Environment,” New York Times, May 17, 2016.

33.    UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture,” 2011, http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/i1688e/i1688e00.pdf.

34.    Bruce Einhorn, “A Waterfight Like No Other May Be Brewing Over Asia’s Rivers,” Bloomberg Buisnessweek, October 31, 2016.

35.    Jerry Melillo, Terese Richmond, and Gary Yohe, eds., Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2014, http://s3.amazonaws.com/nca2014/low/NCA3_Climate_Change_Impacts_in_the_United%20States_LowRes.pdf, 36.

36.    Oliver Milman, “Disasters like Louisiana Floods Will Worsen as Planet Warms, Scientists Warn,” The Guardian, August 16, 2016.

37.    Ibid.

38.    Fred Magdoff, “A Rational Agriculture Is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66/10 (March 2015): 1–18.

39.    Darryl Fears, “Iowa Farmers Ripped Out Prairie; Now Some Hope It Can Save Them,” Washington Post, August 7, 2016.

40.    Eran Ben-Joseph, “When a Parking Lot Is So Much More,” New York Times, March 25, 2012.

41.    Bobby Magill, “Water Use Rises as Fracking Expands,” Scientific American, July 1, 2015.

42.    Michael Wines, “Drilling Is Making Oklahoma as Quake Prone as California,” New York Times, March 28, 2016.

43.    Anna Kuchment, “Drilling-Induced Earthquakes May Endanger Millions in 2016, USGS says,” PBS Newshour, March 28, 2016, at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/drilling-induced-earthquakes-may-endanger-millions-in-2016-usgs-says/.

44.    Ibid.

45.    Ibid.

46.    Felicity Barringer, “World’s Aquifers Losing Replenishment Race, Researchers Say,” New York Times, June 25, 2015.

47.    Suzanne Goldenberg, “The Central Valley Is Sinking: Drought Forces Farmers to Ponder the Abyss,” The Guardian, November 28, 2015.

48.    Wada et al., “Fate of Water Pumped from Underground and Contributions to Sea-level Rise,” Nature Climate Change 7/8 (2016): 777–80.

49.    Abrahm Lustgarten, “End of the Miracle Machines: Inside the Power Plant Fueling America’s Drought,” Pro Publica, June 16, 2015.

50.    Ibid. There is more than one ton of CO₂ emitted per ton of coal burned because coal is mainly composed of carbon (with an atomic weight of 12) and during burning it combines with two atoms of oxygen (with a combined atomic weight of 32). Thus the molecule of CO₂ has a molecular weight of 44 versus 12 for carbon alone.

51.    Ibid.

52.    Mesfin Mekong and Arjen Hoekstra, “Four Billion People Facing Severe Water Scarcity,” Science Advances 2/2 (February 12, 2016): e1500323, doi:10.1126/sciadv.150032.

53.    Dan Baum, “Change of State: The Science of California’s Unprecedented Drought,” Scientific American 313/2 (August 2015): 64–71.

54.    Shahid Naeem, J. Emmett Duffy, and Erika Zavaleta, “The Functions of Biological Diversity in an Age of Extinction,” Science 336 (June 15, 2012): 1401–6.

55.    Gerardo Ceballos et al., “Accelerated Modern Human–Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Science Advances 1/5 (June 19, 2015): e1400253, doi:10.1126/sciadv.1400253.

56.    Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unusual History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).

57.    Pew Environmental Group, “Protecting Life in the Sea,” Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2010/01/01/protecting-life-in-the-sea.

58.    Robin McKie, “How warming seas are forcing fish to seek new waters,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017.

59.    Ibid.

60.    Jonathan Payne et al., “Ecological Selectivity of the Emerging Mass Extinction in the Oceans,” Science 353/6305 (September 14, 2016): 1284–86.

61.    Doughty et al., “Global Nutrient Transport in a World of Giants.”

62.    Damian Carrington, “World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020, major report warns,” The Guardian, October 26, 2016.

63.    John Tully, Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties: How American Indians Were Displaced by White Settlers in the Cuyahoga Valley (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 44.

64.    Sarah Kaplan, “Ancient Tools and Bone Found in Florida Could Help Rewrite the Story of the First Americans,” Washington Post, May 13, 2016.

65.    Sustainable Human, “How Wolves Change Rivers,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q.

66.    Hans ter Steege et al., “Hyperdominance in the Amazonian Tree Flora,” Science 342/6156 (October 18, 2013): 1243092-1–9.

67.    Text of the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act can be found at https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/s3880/text.

68.    Leighton Akio Woodhouse, “Charged with the Crime of Filming a Slaughterhouse,” The Nation, June 31, 2013.

69.    Bill Tracy and Michael Sligh, eds., Proceedings of 2014 Summit on Seeds and Breeds for the 21st Century Agriculture (Pittsboro, NC: Rural Advancement Foundation International, 2014).

70.    Genetic diversity is very low in commercial crop varieties, and the continuing loss of older varieties and wild relatives removes an important potential future source for breeding.

71.    Ian Urbina, “Think Those Chemicals Have Been Tested?” New York Times, April 13, 2013.

72.    Ibid.

73.    Nicholas Kristof, “Are You a Toxic Waste Disposal Site?” New York Times, February 13, 2016.

74.    Ibid.

75.    Suzanne H. Reuben, “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now,” President’s Cancer Panel, 2008–2009 Report, 2010, http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/annualReports/pcp08-09rpt/PCP_Report_08-09_508.pdf.

76.    U.S. National Institutes of Health, “Endocrine Disruptors,” http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine/.

77.    Endocrine Society, press release, “Endocrine Society Releases Scientific Statement on Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals,” September 28, 2015, https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/current-press-releases/chemical-exposure-linked-to-rising-diabetes-obesity-risk.

78.    Carrie Arnold, “A Scourge Returns: Black Lung in Appalachia,” Environmental Health Perspectives 124/1 (January 2016): A13–A18.

79.    Edward Petsonk, Cecile Rose, and Robert Cohen, “Coal Mine Dust Lung Disease: New Lessons from an Old Exposure,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 187/11 (2013): 1178–85.

80.    Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, “Natural Capital Impacts in Agriculture,” UN Food and Agriculture Organization, June 2015, http://www.fao.org/nr/sustainability/natural-capital/en/.

81.    Narina Mnatsakanian and Olivia Watson, “Why Environmental Externalities Matter to Institutional Investors,” UNEP Finance Initiative, 2011, http://www.unepfi.org/fileadmin/documents/universal_ownership_full.pdf; George Monbiot, “The Oil Firms’ Profits Ignore the Real Costs,” The Guardian, June 7, 2010.

82.    Jochen Zeitz, “Puma Completes First Environmental Profit and Loss Account,” The Guardian, November 16, 2011.

83.    Bob Marshall, “Losing Ground: Southeast Louisiana Is Disappearing Quickly,” Scientific American, August 28, 2014.

84.    Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Understanding Katrina, June 11, 2006, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/.

85.    Edward Richards, “Why Was the Louisiana Flood of August 2016 So Severe?,” Louisiana State University Climate Change Law and Policy Project, August 24, 2016, http://sites.law.lsu.edu/coast/2016/08/why-was-the-louisiana-flood-of-august-2016-so-severe/.

86.    What constitutes waste and how materials are treated once classified has changed dramatically over time. Because of government planning and propaganda, domestic resource conservation efforts during wartime were highly successful. As soon as war ended, manufacturing and marketing switched from conservation to profligate production and an emphasis on consumption.

87.    Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 30.

88.    World Bank, 2008 World Development Index, documents.world-bank.org/curated/en/587251468176971009/World-development-indicators-2008.

89.    Nelson Schwartz, “In an Age of Privilege, Not Everyone Is in the Same Boat,” New York Times, April 23, 2016.

90.    Oxfam, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2, 2015, www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf.

91.    Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

92.    For a full discussion of food losses on a global scale, see “Food Losses and Waste in the Context of Sustainable Food Systems. A Report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition,” FAO, June 2014, http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3901e.pdf; see also Suzanne Goldenberg, “Half of All US Food Produce Is Thrown Away, New Research Suggests,” The Guardian, July 13, 2016.

93.    Goldenberg, “Half of All US Food Produce Is Thrown Away.”

94.    Brian Baskin and Jess Kuronen, “Where Are the Warehouses?” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2016.

95.    Matt Richtel, “E-Commerce: Convenience Built on a Mountain of Cardboard,” New York Times, February 16, 2016.

96.    U.S. Energy Information Agency, “International Energy Statistics,” table, http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=44&pid=45&aid=2&cid=regions&syid=2005&eyid=2009&unit=QBTU.

97.    For example, see “Abandoned America: An Autopsy of an American Dream,” http://www.abandonedamerica.us/business-and-industry.

98.    Katy McLaughlin, “Multimillion-Dollar Homes Face the Wrecking Ball,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2015.

99.    Costas Paris, “Economic Slump Sends Big Ships to Scrap Heap,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2016.

100.  Clyde Haberman, “Despite Decades of Stealth, Sticking Points Bedevil F-35 Jet,” New York Times, January 24, 2016.

101.  Peter Van Buren, “Commentary: For $178 Million, the U.S. Could Pay for One Fighter Plane—or 3,358 Years of College,” Reuters, September 21, 2016.

102.  U.S. Energy Information Agency, “Annual Energy Review 2011,” 2012, http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/archive/038411.pdf.

103.  For a roundup of statistics, see “The Elephant in the Room: The U.S. Military Is One of the World’s Largest Sources of CO2,” Washington’s Blog, December 21, 2009, https://concen.org/oldforum/thread-30749-post-180814.html#pid180814. For more detail on the environmental impact of the U.S. war machine, see Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009).

104.  David Vine, “Contractors Raked In $385 Billion on Overseas Bases in 12 Years,” Mother Jones, May 14, 2013.

105.  David Gelles, “Skid in Oil Prices Pulls the Recycling Industry Down With It,” New York Times, February 12, 2016.

106.  John Vidal, “Toxic ‘E-Waste’ Dumped in Poor Nations, Says United Nations,” The Guardian, December 13, 2013.

107.  Ian Angus and Simon Butler, Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), cited in Ian Angus, “Population, Consumer Sovereignty, and the Importance of Class,” Climate and Capitalism website, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2011/10/28/population-consumer-sovereignty-and-the-global-wealth-pyramid/.

108.  EPA, Municipal Solid Waste” (updated March 29, 2016), at https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/html/.

109.  Max Liboiron, “Municipal versus Industrial Waste: Questioning the 3-97 ratio,” Discard Studies (March 2, 2016), at https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-industrial-waste-a-3-97-ratio-or-something-else-entirely/.

110.  Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 87–88.

111.  Werner Antweiler and Kathryn Harrison, “Toxic Release Inventories and Green Consumerism: Empirical Evidence from Canada,” Canadian Journal of Economics 36/2 (May 2003): 495–520.

112.  Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered, 121–122.

113.  Nicholas Kristof, “Contaminating Our Bodies With Everyday Products,” New York Times, November 28, 2015.

114.  Timothy Cama and Lydia Wheeler, “Supreme Court Overturns Landmark EPA Air Pollution Rule,” The Hill, June 29, 2015.

115.  Robert Costanza et al., “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” Nature 387 (May 15, 1997): 253–60.

116.  Robert Costanza et al., “Changes in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services,” Global Environmental Change 26 (2014):152–58.

117.  Food and Water Watch, “Water Quality Trading: Polluting Public Waterways for Private Gain,” 2015, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/water-quality-trading-polluting-public-waterways-private-gain.

118.  Dieter Helm, The State of Natural Capital: Restoring Our Natural Assets, Natural Capital Committee, March 2014, http://nebula.wsimg.com/d512efca930f81a0ebddb54353d9c446?AccessKeyId=68F83A8E994328D64D3D&disposition=0&alloworigin=1.

119.  Andrew Simms, “It’s the Economy that Needs to Be Integrated into the Environment—Not the Other Way Around,” The Guardian, June 14, 2016.

120.  Zoe Williams, “George Lakoff: ‘Conservatives Don’t Follow the Polls, They Want to Change Them … Liberals Do Everything Wrong,’” The Guardian, January 31, 2014.

121.  Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” The New Republic, August 15, 2016.

122.  Douglas Starr, “The Carbon Accountant,” Science 535/6301 (August 25, 2016): 858–61.

123.  Chris Nelder; “Reframing the Transportation Debate;” ZDNet, October 19, 2011.

124.  Brady Dennis, “In Hoboken, a Glimpse of Cities’ Future Fights over Rising Seas,” Washington Post, August 13, 2016; Justin Gillis, “Flooding of Coast Caused by Global Warming Has Already Begun,” New York Times, September 3, 2016.

125.  David Ravensbergen, “At the Limits of the Market: Why Capitalism Won’t Solve Climate Change, Part 1,” DeSmog Blog, August 29, 2013.

126.  Leslie Scism and Anupreeta Das, “The Insurance Industry Has Been Turned Upside Down by Catastrophe Bonds,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2016.

4. Capitalism’s Effect on People

1.      Martin Luther King, “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta Ga. (August 16, 1967), kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/where_do_we_go_from_here_delivered_at_the_11th_annual_sclc_convention/.

2.      Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf.

3.      Alan Roberts, The Self-Managing Environment (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979), 42.

4.      Bernard Condon, “Recession, Technology Have Combined to Kill Middle-Class Jobs,” Associated Press, January 23, 2013.

5.      Sue Halpern, “How Robots and Algorithms Are Taking Over,” New York Review of Books, April 2, 2105.

6.      Alexander Kaufman, “Stephen Hawking says we should be really scared of capitalism, not robots,” Huffington Post, October 10, 2015.

7.      Alan Roberts, The Self-Managing Environment, 174.

8.      See discussion in Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “The Plight of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review 65/8 (January 2014): 1–22.

9.      Carlos Nordt et al., “Modelling Suicide and Unemployment: A Longitudinal Analysis Covering 63 Countries, 2000–11,” Lancet Psychiatry 2/3 (March 2015): 239–45.

10.    Pamela Kruger, “How a Black Woman Ventured into the Heart of Trumplandia,” Fortune, November 11, 2016.

11.    Thomas Fuller, “In a California Valley, Healthy Food Everywhere but on the Table,” New York Times, November 23, 2016.

12.    Pew Charitable Trusts, “What Resources Do Families Have for Financial Emergencies?” November 18, 2015, http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/11/emergencysavingsreportnov2015.pdf.

13.    Maxime Robin, “Where Being Poor Costs Too Much,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 15, 2015.

14.    Matthew Desmond, “The Eviction Economy,” New York Times, March 6, 2016.

15.    Claire Conway, “Poor Health: When Poverty Becomes Disease,” University California San Francisco News Center (January 6, 2016), https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401251/poor-health.

16.    “India: Farmer Suicides Reach Record Levels,” Telesur, July 20, 2015.

17.    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians,” Monthly Review 55/3 (July–August, 2003): 83–92. The author of these sections was Thomas Jefferson.

18.    Text of the Constitution is available at http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html.

19.    Michael Fletcher, “Whites Think Discrimination Against Whites Is a Bigger Problem than Bias Against Blacks,” Washington Post, October 8, 2014.

20.    Isabel Wilkerson, “Our Racial Moment of Truth,” New York Times, July 19, 2015.

21.    Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

22.    James Jiler, “Digging Out from Prison: A Pathway to Rehabilitation,” Solutions 4/3 (June 20, 2013): 16–22; Danielle Kaeble et al., “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2014,” rev. January 21, 2016, U.S. Department of Justice, http://endnewjimcrownj.org/resources/DOJ_Correctional_populations_US_2014.pdf.

23.    Brad Heath, “Racial Disparity in U.S. Arrest Rates: ‘Staggering Disparity,’” USA Today, November 19, 2014.

24.    U.S. Department of Justice, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” March 4, 2015, http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

25.    Terrence McCoy, “Ferguson Shows How a Police Force Can Turn into a Plundering Collection Agency,” Washington Post, March 5, 2015.

26.    Henry Farrell, “Ferguson’s Government Was Run Like a Racket,” Washington Post, March 4, 2015.

27.    Maria Diamond, “The Return of Debtors Prisons: Thousands of Americans Jailed for Not Paying Their Bills,” Think Progress, December 13, 2011.

28.    K. K. Rebecca Lai et al., “Assessing the Legality of Sandra Bland’s Arrest,” New York Times, July 22, 2015; see also Crystal Becerril and Todd St. Hill, “What Did They Do to Sandra Bland?” Socialist Worker, July 23, 2015.

29.    Spencer Ackerman et al., “‘Gestapo’ Tactics at US Police ‘Black Site’ Rings Alarm from Chicago to Washington,” Guardian, February 26, 2015.

30.    Spencer Ackerman, “Inside Chicago’s Police Abuse: Violence ‘As Routine as Traffic Lights,’” Guardian, March 3, 2015.

31.    Carrie Sloan and Johnaé Strong, “Chicago Has Spent Half a Billion Dollars on Police Brutality Cases—And It’s Impoverishing the Victims’ Communities,” The Nation, March 11, 2016.

32.    Raj Chetty, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” Harvard University, May 2015, http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/images/mto_exec_summary.pdf.

33.    Editorial, “How Racism Doomed Baltimore,” New York Times, May 10, 2015.

34.    Editorial, “Housing Apartheid, American Style,” New York Times, May 16, 2015.

35.    Valerie Strauss, “Report: Public Schools More Segregated Now than 40 Years Ago,” Washington Post, August 29, 2013.

36.    Brennan Center for Justice, “Voting Laws Roundup 2013,” August 6, 2012, http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Voting_Laws_Roundup_2013.pdf.

37.    Michael Wines and Alan Blinder, “Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina Voter ID Requirement,” New York Times, July 29, 2016.

38.    Oliver Milman and Ryan Fenton, “Flint Water Crisis: Michigan Officials Ignored EPA Warnings about Toxicity,” The Guardian. February 3, 2016.

39.    Yanan Wang, “Untold Cities across America Have Higher Rates of Lead Poisoning than Flint,” Washington Post, February 4, 2016.

40.    Oliver Milman, “Millions Exposed to Dangerous Lead Levels in US Drinking Water, Report Finds,” The Guardian, June 28, 2016.

41.    Bryce Covert, “Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution,” The Nation, February 18, 2016.

42.    Adrian Wilson et al., “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People,” NAACP, 2012, www.naacp.org/page/-/Climate/CoalBlooded.pdf.

43.    Bryce Covert, “Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution.”

44.    U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Table P-1a. Age-adjusted percent distribution (with standard errors) of respondent-assessed health status, by selected characteristics: United States, 2014,” from the National Health Interview Survey, https://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/NHIS/SHS/2014_SHS_Table_P-1.pdf.

45.    Joe Feagin and Zinobia Bennefield, “Systemic Racism and U.S. Health Care,” Social Science & Medicine 103 (2014): 7–14.

46.    Kevin Kamps, “Environmental Racism, Tribal Sovereignty and Nuclear Waste,” Nuclear Information Research Service, February 15, 2001, http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pfsejfactsheet.htm.

47.    Ibid.

48.    W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm.

49.    Ibid.

50.    W. E. B. Du Bois, Preface to the Jubilee edition of The Souls of Black Folk (Toronto: Blue Heron Press, 1953).

51.    Anti-immigrant sentiment, especially against Irish, southern Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese, was common in the United States, as was anti-Semitism. In 2015 these attitudes have been reignited in Europe as European economies have stagnated and unemployment is high; instability (frequently a direct consequence of Western interference) has induced a huge wave of people on the move; and an anti-immigrant backlash has proved a convenient scapegoat to redirect people’s anger away from those at the top.

52.    UN Development Program, Human Development Report 1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/256/hdr_1995_en_complete_nostats.pdf.

53.    Cordelia Fine has shown that gender imprinting begins before birth, while the fetus is still in the womb. See Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

54.    John Lichfield, “At Last, Women of Paris Can Wear the Trousers (Legally) After 200-Year-Old Law Is Declared Null and Void,” Independent, February 4, 2013.

55.    Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18/2 (Summer 1966): 151–74.

56.    Dan Bilefsky, “Sent Home for Not Wearing Heels She Ignited a British Rebellion,” New York Times, January 25, 2017.

57.    Mike Allen and Jonathan Swain, “Trump 101: The producer of his own epic film,” Axios (February 3, 2017) at https://www.axios.com/trump-101-the-producer-of-his-own-epic-film-2230577441.html.

58.    Julia Wong, “Women Considered Better Coders—But Only If They Hide Their Gender,” The Guardian, February 12, 2016.

59.    Inter-Parliamentary Union, “Women in National Parliaments,” February 1, 2013, http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/arc/classif010213.htm.

60.    OECD Development Centre’s Social Cohesion Unit, Social Institutions and Gender Index, Synthesis Report (2014).

61.    V. Miranda, “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work Around the World,” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2011), doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5kghrjm8s142-en.

62.    Richard Pérez Peña, “1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus,” New York Times, September 21, 2015.

63.    World Health Organization, “Violence Against Women,” Fact Sheet number 239, September 2016, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs239/en/.

64.    World Health Organization, “Violence Against Women: Definition and scope of the problem,” July 1997, http://www.who.int/gender/violence/v4.pdf.

65.    Trymaine Lee, “No Man’s Land: The Last Tribes of the Plains,” September 21, 2015, http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/no-mans-land-last-tribes-plains.

66.    Ibid.

67.    David Archambault II, “Taking a Stand at Standing Rock,” New York Times, August 24, 2016.

68.    Transcript of Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), https://ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=42&page=transcript.

69.    Fred Magdoff, “Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs: Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession,” Monthly Review 55/6 (November 2013):1–18.

70.    Global Witness, “On Dangerous Ground,” June 20, 2016.

71.    Joshua Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer Won’t Go Back to Indonesia,” interview by Adam Shatz, New York Times Magazine, June 12, 2015.

72.    Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “Kerry, Kissinger and the Other Sept. 11,” Democracy Now!, September 12, 2013.

73.    William Shawcross, “Afterword,” Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 393.

74.    Andrew Cockburn, “Acceptable Losses: Aiding and Abetting the Saudi Slaughter in Yemen,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2016.

75.    U.S. State Department, “388. Memorandum of a Conversation with the President, White House, Washington, September 7, 1957, 10:07 a.m.,” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v13/d388.

76.    Samir Amin, “Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism,” Monthly Review 59/7 (December 2007): 1–19.

77.    Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Delivered at Riverside Church, New York City (April 4, 1967), http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html.

5. Humans as Part of Nature

1.      Frederick Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.”

2.      See www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/nature.

3.      Christine Lane, Ben Chorn, and Thomas Johnson, “Ash from the Toba supereruption in Lake Malawi Shows No Volcanic Winter in East Africa at 75 ka,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110/20 (May 14, 2013): 8025–29.

4.      Serena Tucci and Joshua Akey, “A Map of Human Wanderlust,” Nature 538 (October 13, 2016): 179–180.

5.      For example, see Eirini Flouri, Emily Midouhas, and Heather Joshi, “The Role of Urban Neighbourhood Green Space in Children’s Emotional and Behavioural Resilience,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 40 (2014): 179–86; Liisa Tyrväinen et al., “The Influence of Urban Green Environments on Stress Relief Measures: A Field Experiment,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 38 (2014): 1–9; and Jia Wei Zhang, Ryan Howell, and Ravi Iyerc, “Engagement with Natural Beauty Moderates the Positive Relation between Connectedness with Nature and Psychological Well-Being,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 38 (2014): 55–63.

6.      For more on how flocking birds behave as “active matter,” see Gabriel Popkin, “The Physics of Life,” Nature 529/7584 (January 7, 2016): 16–18.

7.      Florence Williams, “This Is Your Brain on Nature,” National Geographic 229/1 (January 2015): 49–67.

8.      Kate Baggeley, “Cities Are Brimming with Wildlife Worth Studying,” Science News 187/1 (January 10, 2015): 18.

9.      E. Youngsteadt et al., “Habitat and Species Identity, Not Diversity, Predict the Extent of Refuse Consumption by Urban Arthropods,” Global Change Biology 21/3 (March 2015): 1103–15.

10.    Carl Zimmer, “Disappearing Seagrass Protects Against Pathogens, Even Climate Change, Scientists Find,” New York Times, February 17, 2017.

11.    Joleah Lamb et al., “Seagrass ecosystems reduce exposure to bacterial pathogens of humans, fishes, and invertebrates,” Science 335 (February 17, 2017); 731–733.

12.    Charles Siebert, “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?” New York Times, April 27, 2014.

13.    Frans de Waal, “Who Apes Whom?” New York Times, September 15, 2015.

14.    Barbara King, “When Animals Mourn,” Scientific American 309/1 (July 2013): 62–67.

15.    Ibid.

16.    Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

17.    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 16.

18.    William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 12.

19.    Ibid., 13.

20.    Ibid., 13.

21.    For example, see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

22.    Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, “Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire,” in Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, ed. Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

23.    John Vidal, “People in the West Live Squeezed Together, Frenzied as Wasps in the Nest,” The Guardian, December 30, 2014.

6. Does Human Nature Prevent System Change?

1.      Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, at http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays.

2.      Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, Summer 1989.

3.      CNN, at www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/02/01/nancy-pelosi-town-hall-capitalism-sot.cnn.

4.      John Dewey, “Human Nature,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 536.

5.      Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, “Evolution of Responses to (Un) fairness,” Science 346/6207 (October 17, 2014): 314.

6.      Blake Edgar, “Powers of Two,” Scientific American 311(3):62–67 (September, 2014).

7.      Stefan Klein, Survival of the Nicest: How Altruism Made Us Human and Why It Pays to Get Along (New York: The Experiment, 2010), 115.

8.      Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 213–14.

9.      M. Dyble et al., “Sex Equality Can Explain the Unique Social Structure of Hunter-Gatherer Bands,” Science 348/6236 (May 15, 2015): 796–98.

10.    Quoted in Eleanor Burke-Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 50.

11.    Elizabeth Pennisi, “Our Egalitarian Eden,” Science 344/6186 (May 23, 2014): 824–25.

12.    Ibid.

13.    Ibid.

14.    Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 48.

15.    Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015).

16.    William Brandon, The Last Americans: The Indians in American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 6.

17.    Ibid., 4.

18.    Ibid., 292.

19.    Benjamin Franklin, cited in Bruce Johansen, Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution (Ipswich, MA: Gambit, 1982), http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.pdf.

20.    James Hagerty, “ADM Chief Andreas Wielded Power in Washington and Abroad,” Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2016.

21.    Tim Kasser et al., “Some Costs of American Corporate Capitalism: A Psychological Exploration of Value and Goal Conflicts,” Psychological Inquiry 18/1 (2007): 1–22.

22.    Bradford Richardson, “Trump: ‘I’m very greedy’,” The Hill, January 9, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/265335-trump-im-very-greedy.

23.    Paul K. Piff et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased, Unethical Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109/11 (March 13, 2012): 4086–91.

24.    Michael Lewis, “Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy.”

25.    George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 2, 165.

26.    Michael Lewis, “Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy.”

27.    Jonas Miller, Sarah Kahle, and Paul Hastings, “Roots and Benefits of Costly Giving: Children Who Are More Altruistic Have Greater Autonomic Flexibility and Less Family Wealth,” Psychological Science 26/7 (2015): 1038–45.

28.    Krugman, “Privilege, Pathology and Power,” New York Times, January 1, 2016.

29.    PFOA is one of a class of widely used chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances or (PFASs). They are linked to high cholesterol, obesity, hormone suppression—and even cancer—and are present at or above EPA recommended limits in sixty-six U.S. public water supplies, servicing 6 million people. See Susan Scutti, “Millions of Americans Drink Unsafe Water, Study Says,” CNN, August 9, 2016.

30.    Harriet Agerholm, “One in Five CEOs Are Psychopaths, New Study Finds,” Independent, September 14, 2016; also see Jeff Bercovici, “Why (Some) Psychopaths Make Great CEOs,” Forbes, June 14, 2011.

31.    E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 64.

32.    Ibid., 72.

33.    John Horgan, “10,000-Year-Old Massacre Does Not Bolster Claim that War Is Innate,” Scientific American, January 24, 2016.

34.    Luke Glowacki, “How the Tribal Warfare of Our Ancestors Explains the Islamic State,” Washington Post, March 24, 2016.

35.    Robert Sussman and Joshua Marshack, “Are Humans Inherently Killers?” Center for Global Nonkilling, 2010, http://nonkilling.org/pdf/wp1.pdf.

36.    Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 140–141.

37.    John Horgan, “10,000-year-old massacre.”

38.    Ibid.

39.    Hisashi Nakao, Kohei Tamura, Yui Arimatsu, Tomomi Nakagawa, Naoko Matsumoto, and Takehiko Matsugi, “Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period,” Biology Letters (Royal Society) 12/3 (March 2016): 2016–28.

40.    Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize,” Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway (December 10, 2009), at www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-lecture_en.html.

41.    Ibid.

42.    Robert Hepach and Amrisha Vaish, “A New Look at Children’s Prosocial Motivation,” Infancy 18(1): 67–90 (2013).

43.    Elizabeth Dunn and Ashley Williams, “Give, If You Know What’s Good for You,” New York Times, December 24, 2015.

44.    Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 305–6.

45.    Karl Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon,” 1848, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Poverty-Philosophy.pdf.

7. Equality as Biological Fact

1.      Stephen Jay Gould, “Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History,” Natural History, 93/11 (November 1984): 26–32.

2.      Lynn Jorde and Stephen Wooding, “Genetic Variation, Classification and ‘Race,’” Nature Genetics 36 (2004): S28–S33.

3.      David Spiro, review of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy Robert, New York Journal of Books, July 4, 2011, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/search-site/Fatal%20Invention.

4.      Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011), 4.

5.      Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012) 17.

6.      Charles Murray, “Why the SAT Isn’t a ‘Student Affluence Test’,” Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2015.

7.      Kate Turetsky and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, “What Science Has to Say about Affirmative Action,” Scientific American, December 17, 2015.

8.      Gregory Walton and Steven Spencer, “Grades and Test Scores Systematically Underestimate the Intellectual Ability of Negatively Stereotyped Students,” Psychological Science 20/9 (2009): 1132–39.

9.      Roger Highfield, “Raise Your IQ Instantly—By No Longer Believing in It,” Wired, February 16, 2013.

10.    For a good review on Wade’s book and the surrounding issues, see Jonathan Marks, “The Genes Made Us Do It,” In These Times, May 12, 2014.

11.    Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (New York: Random House, 2006), 3.

12.    Ibid., 55.

13.    Ian Sample, “Male and Female Brains Wired Differently, Scans Reveal,” The Guardian, December 2, 2103.

14.    Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 239.

15.    Robin McKie, “Why It’s Time for Brain Science to Ditch the ‘Venus and Mars’ Cliché,” Observer, December 7, 2013.

16.    Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 7.

17.    Ibid., 20.

18.    Peter Dorman, “Face It: Boys Can’t Do Words,” December 6, 2014, econospeak.blogspot.com.

19.    Larry Summers, “Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce,” Cambridge, MA, January 14, 2005, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php.

20.    Rebecca Ratcliffe, “Nobel Scientist Tim Hunt: Female Scientists Cause Trouble for Men in Labs,” The Guardian, June 10, 2015.

21.    Summers lost his job as president of Harvard University but retained his tenured faculty appointment. He later became an economic adviser to President Obama.

22.    Kenneth Chang, “Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds,” New York Times, September 24, 2012.

23.    Sandeep Ravindran, “Barbara McClintock and the Discovery of Jumping Genes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109/50 (December 12, 2012): 20198–99.

24.    Ibid.

25.    Adam Rutherford. “He May Have Unraveled DNA, but James Watson Deserves to Be Shunned,” The Guardian, December 1, 2014.

26.    David Gutman, “West Virginian of the Year: Katherine G. Johnson,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, December 26, 2015.

27.    “Gendered Innovations in Science, Health and Medicine, Engineering and Environment,” report, Stanford University, http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/institutions/bias.html.

28.    Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian, “Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests,” Science 355 (January 27, 2017): 389–391.

29.    Randy Jirtle, “Epigenome: The Program for Human Health and Disease,” Epigenomics 1/1 (2009): 13–16.

30.    Tafari Mbadiwe and Richard Millis, “Epigenetics and Autism,” Autism Research and Treatment (2013), doi.org/10.1155/2013/826156; Susan Murphy and John Hollingsworth, “Stress: A Possible Link Between Genetics, Epigenetics, and Childhood Asthma,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 187/6 (March 15, 2013): 563–71; Shuk-mei Ho, “Epigenetics: The Interface Between Environment and the Genome,” lecture given at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA, Canada), Distinguished Lecture Series: Advance in Toxicology and Risk Assessment, http://oehha.ca.gov/media/downloads/risk-assessment/presentation/oehhafeb20ho.pdf; M. Ngollo et al., “Epigenetic modifications in prostate cancer,” Epigenomics 6/4 (August 2014): 415–26; Mark Hoenerhoff and James Hartke, “Overview of the ‘Epigenetic End Points in Toxicologic Pathology and Relevance to Human Health’ Session of the 2014 Society of Toxicologic Pathology Annual Symposium,” Toxicologic Pathology 20/1–3 (2014).

31.    Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Getting Personal,” Boston Review, March-April 2015, 12.

32.    For more detail on the dynamic interaction between gene, organism, and environment, a good place to start is Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

8. The Biosphere: Cycles of Life

1.      Frederick Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/.

2.      PBS, “Earth from Space,” Nova, aired June 26, 2013, available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/earth-from-space.html.

3.      Quoted in Jeremy Adam Smith and Alex Dixon, “Birds Do It. Bats Do It,” Greater Good, November 1, 2009, http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/birds_do_it_bats_do_it.

4.      Carl Zimmer, “A Weakness in Bacteria’s Fortress,” Scientific American 312/1 (January 2015): 41–45.

5.      Tamir Klein, Rolf Siegwolf, Christian Körner, “Belowground carbon trade among tall trees in a temperate forest,” Science 352/6283 (April 15, 2016): 342–44.

6.      Quoted in Charles Leadbeater, “No, We Are Not All Selfish—Cooperation Is at the Heart of Our Existence,” The Guardian, March 7, 2012.

7.      Frederick Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.”

8.      I. Stewart and I. R. Falconer, “Cyanobacteria and Cyanobacterial Toxins,” in Oceans and Human Health: Risks and Remedies from the Seas, ed. P. J. Walsh, S. L. Smith, and L. E. Fleming (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2008), 271–96.

9.      There are also certain groups of bacteria that obtain energy from simple inorganic compounds such as sulfur, iron, and ammonium.

10.    Datablog, “How Much Water Is Needed to Produce Food and How Much Do We Waste?” The Guardian, January 10, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water-food-production-waste.

11.    The remaining water inside the plant will be returned to the atmosphere as the plant dies, cells rupture, and the residue dries out.

12.    Brent Christner et al., “Ubiquity of Biological Ice Nucleators in Snowfall,” Science 319/5867 (February 29, 2008): 1214; U. Pöschl et al., “Rainforest Aerosols as Biogenic Nuclei of Clouds and Precipitation in the Amazon,” Science 329/5998 (September 17, 2010): 1513–16.

13.    Ferris Jabr, “It’s Buggy Out There,” New York Times, February 15, 2015.

14.    Douglas Sheil, “How Plants Water Our Planet: Advances and Imperatives,” Trends in Plant Science 19/4 (April 2014): 209–11.

15.    In modern translations, the Hebrew word is commonly rendered as ground, earth, or soil instead of “dust,” which is used in the King James translation.

16.    Hongbin Yu et al., “The Fertilizing Role of African Dust in the Amazon Rainforest: A First Multiyear Assessment Based on Cloud-aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations,” Geophysical Research Letters (March 2015): 1984–1991.

17.    Christopher Doughty et al., “Global Nutrient Transport in a World of Giants,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113/23 (January 26, 2016): 6388–96.

18.    Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 134.

19.    Crops that do not form associations with mycorrhizal fungi are beets and cruciferous plants such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and rapeseed; a few, such as buckwheat, form only weak associations.

20.    Mark Mattson, “What Doesn’t Kill You….,” Scientific American 213/1 (July 2015): 41–44.

21.    Ed Yong, “Gut Reaction: The Surprising Power of Microbes,” The Guardian, August 25, 2016.

22.    Nicholas Bakalar, “40 Trillion Bacteria on and in Us? Fewer than We Thought,” New York Times, February 15, 2016; Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (New York: Ecco Press, 2016).

23.    Nicholas Bakalar, “40 Trillion Bacteria on and in Us? Fewer Than We Thought.”

24.    Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “Among Trillions of Microbes in the Gut, a Few Are Special,” Scientific American 312/3 (March 2015): S4–S11.

25.    Monique Brouillette, “U.S. Bans Common Chemicals Found in Antibacterial Soaps,” Scientific American, September 2, 2016.

26.    Martin J. Blaser, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).

27.    C. S. Holling, “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems,” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 390–405.

28.    Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.”

29.    Stephen Mulkey, “The Integrity of Ecosystems,” Environmental Century, August 3, 2016.

30.    For a discussion of the circular economy see the special issue of Nature, March 23, 2016, www.nature.com/news/circular-economy-1.19546.

9. Developing Resilient Social-Ecological Systems

1.      Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 262.

2.      Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1894; repr. New York: Vintage, 1981), 911.

3.      Becky Oskin, “Sahara Went from Green to Desert in a Flash,” Live Science, April 5, 2013, www.livescience.com/28493-when-sahara-desert-formed.html.

4.      Donovan Jackson, “Airmen Learn to ‘Bounce Back’ at Resiliency Training,” Inside Maxwell AFB, July 23, 2013, http://www.maxwell.af.mil/News/Display/tabid/10067/Article/704562/airmen-learn-to-bounce-back-at-resilency-training.aspx.

5.      Donald Trump (January 14, 2012), at http://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump; The academic and political emphasis on resilience has been strongly criticized as focusing on how to deal with a variety of crises, accepting that they are inevitable and we just need to learn how to adapt. For example, see Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously by Brad Evans and Julian Reid (2014). Our approach to resilience is in keeping with such critiques in that we do not accept the inevitability of the social and ecological crises we now face. Rather, we emphasize the need to develop systems that by their nature attempt to avoid the crises from developing. But when problems arise in the future (for example, a powerful hurricane), the ecological and social systems would be resilient—they would possess the ability to bounce back or self-correct.

6.      “Vultures Nearing Extinction in Africa,” The Guardian, October 29, 2015.

7.      Frederick Engels, “Morality and Law. Freedom and Necessity,” Anti-Dühring, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm.

8.      Scott Turner, “Termite Research,” SUNY College of Environment and State Forestry, http://www.esf.edu/efb/turner/termitepages/termite-Main.html.

9.      Scott Turner and Rupert Soar, “Beyond Biomimicry: What Termites Can Tell Us about Realizing the Living Building,” First International Conference on Industrialized, Integrated, Intelligent Construction (I3CON), Loughborough University, May14–16, 2008.

10.    Janine Benyus, “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature” (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 2.

11.    Researchers have found that “in diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.” See Sheen Levine and David Stark, “Diversity Makes You Brighter,” New York Times, December 9, 2015.

12.    A more detailed description of plant defense mechanisms can be found in Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es, Building Soils for Better Crops, 3rd ed., 77–81, available online without cost at Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, http://sare.org/publications/bsbc/bsbc.pdf.

13.    Nancy Beckage, “The Parasitic Wasp’s Secret Weapon,” Scientific American 277/5 (November 1997): 82–87.

14.    Lindsay Turnbull and Andy Hector, “Applied Ecology: How to Get Even with Pests,” Nature 466 (July 1, 2010): 36–37.

15.    Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review 62/8 (January 2011): 1–25. The original citation is Peter Miller, “Swarm Behavior,” National Geographic, July 2007; Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

16.    Jason Goldman, “Ballots for Bison,” Scientific American 314/1 (January 2016): 18.

17.    NOAA National Climate Data Center, “Mitch: The Deadliest Atlantic Hurricane Since 1780,” n.d., https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/mitch/mitch.html.

18.    Eric Holt-Giménez, “Measuring Farmers’ Agroecological Resistance after Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua: A Case Study in Participatory, Sustainable Land Management Impact Monitoring,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 93/1 (2002): 87–105.

10. Ecological Approaches to Fulfilling Human Needs

1.      Wendell Berry, “Solving for Pattern,” chapter 9 in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural (New York: North Point Press, 1981), at www.seedbed.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Berry_Solving_for_Pattern.pdf.

2.      Magdoff, “A Rational Agriculture Is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66/10 (March 2015): 1–18.

3.      Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 262.

4.      The discussion in the section on agriculture is based on W. Lewis, J. van Lenteren, Sharad Phatak, and J. Tumlinson, “A Total System Approach to Sustainable Pest Management,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (November 1997): 12243–48; Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Agriculture: Principles, Practices and Constraints,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22/2 (2007): 109–17; and Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es, Building Soils for Better Crops, 3rd ed., available online without cost at Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, http://sare.org/publications/bsbc/bsbc.pdf.

5.      John Reganold and Jerry Glover, “A Cure for Africa’s Soil,” Scientific American 314/5 (May 2016): 66–69. The first domesticated perennial grain (Kernza, related to wheat) is being commercialized and work is continuing to develop other perennial grains. This offers the possibility to have longterm wide strips of grain crops alternating with strips of annual vegetables.

6.      Ibid.

7.      Eric Brennan, “Agronomic Aspects of Strip Intercropping Lettuce with Alyssum for Biological Control of Aphids,” Biological Control 65/3 (2013): 302–11.

8.      Cover crops, also called green manure crops, are normally planted to grow during the period of the year when there is no food crop growing. They can then be incorporated into the soil by tillage or suppressed by mechanical or other means before the next food crop is grown.

9.      U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks:1990–2014,” https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-2016-main-text.pdf.

10.    For more details on the ecological benefits of sustainable meat farming, see Simon Fairlie, Meat: A Benign Extravagance (Hampshire, UK: Permanent Publications, 2010); and Nocolette Hahn Niman, Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).

11.    Wendell Berry, “Solving for Pattern,” chap. 9 in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural (New York: North Point Press, 1981).

12.    Haitao Liu et al., “Mitigating Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Replacement of Chemical Fertilizer with Organic Manure in a Temperate Farmland,” Science Bulletin 60/6 (2015): 598–606.

13.    Tong Wang et al., “GHG Mitigation Potential of Different Grazing Strategies in the United States Southern Great Plains,” Sustainability 7/10 (2015): 13500–521.

14.    Anna Hirtenstein, “Solar-Panel Roads to Be Built across Four Continents Next Year,” Bloomberg News, November 23, 2016.

15.    Jessica Shankleman and Chris Martin, “Solar Could Beat Coal to Become the Cheapest Power on Earth,” The Guardian, January 3, 2017.

16.    Frederika Whitehead, “Lessons from Denmark: How District Heating Could Improve Energy Security,” The Guardian, August 20, 2014.

17.    Tim Radford, “Air Conditioning Turns Up City Heat,” Climate News Network, June 9, 2014.

18.    Geothermal power is not actually renewable. However, for all practical purposes its supply is so plentiful as to be considered as such.

19.    Almuth Ernsting, “Abundant Clean Renewables? Think Again!” Truthout, November 16, 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27392-abundant-clean-renewables-think-again.

20.    Terry Slavin, “From Oregon to Johannesburg, Micro-Hydropower Offers a Solution for Drought Hit Cities,” The Guardian, September 18, 2015.

21.    Although the efficiency of conversion of solar energy to electricity by photovoltaic panels has been increasing, in 2015 the best silicon cells converted only about 25 percent into electricity. Research is progressing on using another mineral for photovoltaic use, called perovskite. It does not require the high-temperature processing of silicon and can be made into flexible film, in contrast to silicon’s more rigid structure. It also may be used in layers with silicon to increase efficiency of conversion. It’s not clear that perovskite will pan out and greatly increase the efficiency of solar energy, but it may do just that. See Varun Sivaram, Samuel Stranks, and Henry Snaith, “Outshining Silicon,” Scientific American 313/1 (July 2015): 55–59. It’s also important to note that fossil fuel–powered thermal power stations are only around 30 percent efficient and come with a lot of built-in redundancy to cope with peak demand.

22.    Private electric companies in Texas, a state with a significant number of wind turbines, have offered customers the option of paying slightly more for daytime use of energy and, in return, receive free electricity every night from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.

23.    Cassandra Sweet, “To Trim Electricity Bills, Companies Draw on Batteries,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2016.

24.    Henry Fountain, “Liquid Batteries for Solar and Wind Power,” New York Times, April 23, 2015.

25.    Harry Wirth, “Recent Facts about Photovoltaics in Germany,” Fraunhofer ISE, December 2015, www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien-en/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/recent-facts-about-photovoltaics-in-germany.pdf.

26.    U.S. Energy Information Administration, “What Are Petroleum Products, and What Is Petroleum Used For?,” http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=41&t=6.

27.    World Economic Forum, “Towards the Circular Economy: Accelerating the Scale-Up across Global Supply Chains,” Geneva, January 2014, 33.

28.    Stephen Lacey, “Look at How Much Waste America Puts Into Landfills Compared to Europe,” Greentech Media, June 3, 2013.

29.    William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

30.    Fred Magdoff, “Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs: Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession,” Monthly Review 65/6 (November 2103): 1–18.

31.    Brian McKenzie, “Out-of-State and Long Commutes: 2011,” U.S. Department of Commerce, February 2013, https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/ACS-20.pdf.

32.    Rachel Baum, Jeanne Luh, and Jamie Bartram, “Sanitation: A Global Estimate of Sewerage Connections Without Treatment and the Resulting Impact on MDG Progress,” Environmental Science and Technology 47/4 (2013): 1994–2000.

33.    There are a number of types of toilets that do not use water for flushing, thus not adding to the liquid sewage stream. These might in the future be adapted for widespread use.

34.    Thames Water Factsheet, “The Sewage Treatment Process,” http://www.thameswater.co.uk/cycles/accessible/sewage_treatment.html.

35.    Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010).

36.    Philip Braso and Masako Tsubuku, “How the Shinkansen Bullet Train Made Tokyo into the Monster It Is Today,” The Guardian, September 30, 2014.

37.    Ibid.

38.    Lester Brown, “Pavement Is Replacing the World’s Croplands,” Grist, March 1, 2001.

39.    Natalie Angier, “Ever Green,” New York Times, April 21, 2015.

40.    Krista McGuire et al., “Digging the New York City Skyline: Soil Fungal Communities in Green Roofs and City Parks,” PLoS ONE 8/3 (2013): e58020, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058020.

41.    John Todd, “Lessons from the Sea,” Annals of the Earth 33/1 (2015): 9–12.

11. Living in an Ecological Society

1.      Daniel Singer, “In Defence of Utopia,” in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panich, eds., Real Problems, False Solutions, Socialist Register 1993 (London: Merlin Press, 1993), 249.

2.      Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow,” Development 54/4 (2011): 441–447. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/development/journal/v54/n4/full/dev201186a.html.

3.      Karl Marx, “Outlines of the Critique to Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–8),” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 28 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 109.

4.      Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm.

5.      For a discussion of the problems of planning in the Soviet Union, see Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff, “Approaching Socialism,” Monthly Review 57/3 (July–August 2005): 19–61.

6.      Planning occurs, of course, within capitalist enterprises and by individual states and collections of states. But it’s done with the purpose of generating more exchange value, or taking advantage of another region, not to satisfy the needs of all people. Corporations and states also cooperate, and they expect workers to cooperate with one another and the rules imposed by their bosses. Governments intervene continually in the operation of the market through trade deals and other laws, the construction of infrastructure, and subsidies favoring different sectors of the economy depending on economic, political, and military needs. If there is too much unrest within the workforce, the state will intervene on the side of the corporations, using the courts and, if need be, its police and military, to ensure the uninterrupted flow of profit. The nation-state is essential to the functioning of capitalism because it creates the conditions for markets to operate.

7.      Harry Magdoff, “A Note on Market Socialism,” Monthly Review 47/1 (May 1995): 12–18.

8.      It is important to note that “the market” in capitalist economies is a rationing system—rationing according to individual and family resources. In our capitalist economies and societies, commodities are theoretically available for anyone to purchase, but most of these are out of reach for most people. The consequence of a small minority having ownership of so much private property is, as Marx famously noted, its non-ownership by the vast majority. Often even the most basic needs such as adequate food are also beyond the reach of the poor, even in wealthy countries. Close to 50 million people in the United States are “food insecure.” This is clearly food rationing. But instead of rationing so that everyone has equal access in the face of limited supply, this is rationing according to ability to pay, occurring in the presence of surplus food supplies—with the better quality and quantity going to those able to afford the cost.

9.      See, for example, McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

10.    For example, in 2015 approximately 14 million workers were employed in sales and retail, 7 million in management occupations, another 7 million in business and financial operations, 2 million in law enforcement and legal professions, 3 million as fast-food counter workers, 21 million in office and administrative support, 3 million by the Department of Defense (including the National Guard), another estimated 3 million in defense industries and their support industries, not to mention the government bureaucracy. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment Statistics, http://data.bls.gov/oes/; and Jennifer Rizzo, “Defense Cuts: The jobs numbers,” CNN (September 23, 2011), http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/22/defense-cuts-the-jobs-numbers-game/.

11.    Radio al Revés, “Cooperatives in Venezuela Promote Solidarity, Equality and Dignity,” Upside Down World, April 6, 2011, upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/2988-cooperatives-in-venezuela-promote-solidarity-equality-and-dignity.

12.    Ibid.

13.    Rod Nordland, “Crackdown in Turkey Threatens a Haven of Gender Equality Built by Kurds,” New York Times, December 7, 2016.

14.    Prabhat Patnaik, “The Spectre of Social Counter-Revolution,” MR Online, November 21, 2014, mronline.org/2014/11/21/patnaik211114-html-2/.

15.    There are a number of ongoing worldwide restorative justice efforts. See “About Restorative Justice,” Center for Justice and Reconciliation, http://restorativejustice.org/restorative-justice/about-restorative-justice/.

16.    Harry Magdoff, “The Meaning of Work: A Marxist Perspective,” Monthly Review 34/5 (October 1982): 1–15.

17.    Dan Frosch and Alexandra Berzon, “GAO Finds Incomplete Inventory of Potentially Toxic Abandoned Mines,” Wall Street Journal, September 12–13, 2015.

18.    TodayOnline, “Funding Issue Bogs Down China’s 2020 Soil Clean-up Plan,” Today (Singapore), June 14, 2016, www.todayonline.com/china-india/china/funding-issue-bogs-down-chinas-2020-soil-clean-plan.

19.    It is no coincidence that Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia—countries trying in their different ways, and with varying levels of success, to create more equitable societies and economies—have used the resources at their disposal to drastically lessen the number of people living in extreme poverty. When the goal is to achieve full equality outside of the logic of capitalism rather than a return to government-directed social reforms of the Keynesian era, they have a long way to go. However, many people in those countries understand that a new morality is needed and that relief for the most destitute is part of that effort as well as a simple humane response to obvious human needs.

12. Revolution: Creating an Ecological Society

1.      James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” The Saturday Review (December 21, 1963): 42–44.

2.      Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation,” Speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York (August 4, 1857), in Two Speeches of Frederick Douglass (C. P. Dewey: Rochester, N.Y., 1857), 22.

3.      For a short description of the class war against workers, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “The Plight of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review 65/8 (2014): 1–22.

4.      Josh Zumbrun and Carolyn Cui, “Glut of Capital and Labor Challenge Policy Makers,” Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2015.

5.      David Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition,” MR Online, December 15, 2009, https://mronline.org/2009/12/15/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition/.

6.      Oliver Milman, “‘A Tipping Point’: Record Number of Americans See Global Warming as Threat,” The Guardian, March 18, 2016.

7.      Rana Foroohar, “American Capitalism’s Great Crisis,” Time, May 23, 2016; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “Class War and Labor’s Declining Share,” Monthly Review 64/10 (March 2013): 1–11; and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED database, series LES1252881600Q.

8.      Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 158.

9.      Mark Bittman, “Is It Bad Enough Yet?” New York Times, December 14, 2014.

10.    “Black Lives Matter Endorses BDS: Israel Is ‘Apartheid State,’” Haaretz, August 4, 2016.

11.    Joe Hill organized for the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies) and wrote the lyrics to “There is Power in a Union” in 1913. He was tried for killing a former police officer in Salt Lake City, Utah, and executed there by firing squad in 1915.

12.    Collin Binkley, “Campus Activists Unite on Key Issues,” Associated Press, December 29, 2015.

13.    Yamiche Alcindor, “Seeing Strength in Mass Action, Left-Wing Protestors Move to Broaden Their Reach,” New York Times, February 15, 2017.

14.    David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (New York: Verso, 2014), 211.

15.    Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 10.

16.    Karl Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, 1845, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/.

17.    Oscar Olivera, interview by Chris Williams, Cochabamba, May 2014.

18.    Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”

19.    Samir Amin, “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative,” Monthly Review 63/5 (October 2011): 29–45.

20.    Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.