Communism, ecology and ecologists

Acid rain, oil spills, deforestation, reduction of the ozone layer,

greenhouse effect, the list of problems related to damage, real or
perceived, of the environment of men on earth that news periodically
updates the agenda is very long. This is not always of disasters such as
Bhopal, India in 1984 and Chernobyl in 1986. But it comes to issues that
concern the future of the planet and the future of humanity, even if these
problems, what on - brings together commonly known as ecological
problems, obviously not all have the same scale nor the same seriousness.
Because we do not put on the same plane, for us, the disappearance of
the owls for example, and the worsening floods due to the degradation of
soils in a number of regions of the world, especially in poor countries, with
the procession of dead and miseries that result in these disasters.
Damage caused to the environment by human activities, the nuisance,
pollution of air or water courses, do not date yesterday. But the constitution
of the great capitalist industry has represented, from this point of view also,
an important date in the history of humanity. And, on this basis, since a
century, with accelerated the last half-century, aggravating phenomena
have arisen since, with the nuclear industry for example, the development of
chemical industries or even admission to large-scale agriculture in the
capitalist system.
The purpose of this presentation is not to discuss the technical aspect of
these problems, the reality of the 'hole' of the ozone layer, or of the real risk
of the average global temperature rise a few degrees in the coming period,
but in the way, as revolutionary Communists, we're asking these
environmental problems, the problem of the relationship of humans with the
rest of nature.
So, since thirty years, have emerged in response to these problems, in
industrialized countries, currents proclaiming themselves often apolitical
and claiming "ecology".
The first thing to clarify is that ecology, in the proper sense of the term,
is a branch of science, specifically biology, whose objective is to understand
the functioning of the community of human beings living of a given
environment, with all of its interactions and dynamics. But in the 1960s, this
word has taken a quite different meaning. It means also, since that date, a
current of thought that wondered about the place and the role of the man in
the living world, and which alarmed happy at the prospect of disasters
affecting the environment that could lead to the worst consequences for the
human species. A current of thought that gave birth to various institutions,
as well as various and varied political groupings that the habit together
under the heading "environmentalists".
But all this does not all environmentalists, following this expanded
definition, scientists so far.

The revolutionary Marxists we are no specialists in the natural sciences.

But we have a conception of the history of human societies, including their
impact on their natural environment, which makes us think that the real
problem is above all in the nature of economic and social relationships that
govern these human societies, in particular at the time of the capitalist
system.
These so-called "environmental problems", reports of man with all of what
makes its environment, are not more "neutral" than other issues, not more
independent of the structure of our society. Because, as Friedrich Engels
wrote already a century ago " whether it is nature or society, the current
mode of production holds only account of the immediate and obvious result
", i.e. of capitalist profit.
For us, it is this mode of capitalist production which is involved including
how to manage, or rather squander, pollute, damage perhaps irreversibly it's true - the environment in which live human beings human.
This sets us apart from the currents and political movements claiming
ecology who, if they accuse sometimes and in the best of cases different
aspects of the functioning of the capitalist system, did not go further in
searching of the substantive responsibilities.

Man and nature

Since it is the relationship between human beings humans and the
environment in which they live, the planet Earth with its seas, its soil and its
atmosphere, animals and plants that live there - their 'natural' environment it is probably necessary to start by defining what we can reasonably put
behind this word from nature.
Indeed abundantly invoke the 'laws of nature' means the need to 'defend'
or ' protect ' nature, that human activities would be undermined. But we
must agree.
Behind the ideology taken ecologist overall indeed returns regularly the
idea that it would have existed, before man, an entity Nature perfect and
stable - a species of earthly paradise - that man would disrupt. Many
botanists and geographers have reasoned thus, by setting an ideal state of
relations between human beings living and the environment, in the absence
of human intervention.
And thinkers claiming ecology went further, including naturalist Jean
Dorst, former Director of the Museum of natural history, in a book that made
some noise in 1964, ' until the nature to die ': ' man, he wrote, did not yet
exist and that during millions of years, and already a world similar to or
different from ours spread out its splendor (...).The man appeared like a
worm in the fruit, like a moth in a ball of wool, and has gnawed its habitat,
by secreting theories to justify its action .
This kind of design, which leads to consider the human species as parasite,
if not enemy of the planet, is found implicitly in a number of

environmentalists. The same often see the demographic development of

humanity as a calamity.
However, the idea of the stability of nature is a myth. If nature may
appear stable, it is at the level of a few generations, and yet. But, the time
scale geological, natural environments are changing, they have a history.
The continents drifted, climates fluctuated, life forms have changed, areas
of forests have experienced phases of expansion and reduction, and there
was a time when the Sahara was staked by swamps and lakes... The earth
did not wait the man for disturbances.
The so-called natural balances are not stable and stationary equilibria.
These are dynamic processes, to the breast which species are disappearing
and others appear. Renewal is constant. This is one of the great laws of
living phenomena, and there is no reason to mourn the disappearance of any
species under these conditions. It is through more or less mass extinctions
multiple living forms, through crises, that life has evolved.
But, obviously, these disturbances extended in general on several million
years, while the human species, it has upset the planet in a few millennia or
even in 50 years.
All living species certainly modify their environment by their mere
presence; but they are unable to pull of nature something other than what
nature produces. Engels explained already: if animals have an effect on their
environment, it is without knowing what they are doing, making that use
nature, while man, from the moment he started to produce, pursues an aim.
He seeks to subjugate nature to dominate.
Thus, when approximately 10 000 years ago, the man began to practice
agriculture and livestock, he began to destroy natural vegetation in some
areas, in order to sow the seeds of cereals or planting fruit trees. It was not
therefore late trying to Acclimate the plants and animals that it considered
useful outside their natural habitat. To make them multiply. And it changed
the flora and fauna across larger regions. These ancestors of the Neolithic,
harnessing certain plant and animal species, have transformed this time by
the artificial selection of wildlife in a way useful to humans. Should have
been that they just the few edible plants 'natural' that they could gather
around them? Or continue to search their intake of animal protein that in
engaging in hunting (as long as it was 'green'), rather than resorting to the
livestock?
These questions have no sense. And yet, these activities, while giving
birth to the first civilizations, have indeed corrupt, if not sometimes
devastated the environment! Sheep and goat breeding for example played
likely a large role in desertification in the Mediterranean basin.
This makes the millennia that the natural balance was thus repeatedly
shocked by the man. Its efforts to control its relationships with nature have
marked its history. The conquest of forests, to escape the food addiction, in
has been an important part throughout the world. In Europe, major
deforestation experienced their heyday between the 11th and 13th

centuries. Agriculture was developing rapidly, with the progress of the

tooling, and also wood was the main fuel. In the 14th century, it was
apparently less forests that today ' hui in the territory which became the
France.
The long and in any case from the 16th century, Europe and in the first
place England has experienced a "crisis of wood", which had the effect that
the use of coal as a fuel has become more profitable...
Of course, men were not able, then, to judge the more or less distant
consequences of such actions. But it does that the clearing made for the
benefit of agriculture constituted a considerable historical progress, without
which our civilization would not exist.
Today, there is hardly a corner of the globe, inhabited areas, which has
been transformed by human. The European citizen who says go admire the
'nature' campaign is actually contemplate landscapes that are the result of a
whole history passed, in particular these major clearing of the middle ages.
In this sense, much of the 'nature' was gradually artificialised: cultivated
plants have little connection with yesteryear wild plants; the forests are
mostly that selected tree plantings. pastures can be made of imported
herbs, as in some countries in Central America (imported from Africa, in this
case)...
And what many people see as their "end of nature", their garden, can be
quite enjoyable, but isn't all 'natural' - style 'natural' or 'wild' to also to the
artifice of the gardens with statues and fountains complicated.
Then, we can say that when the current environmentalist speaks of the
need to "respect" the nature, not the "sacrifice", there is in these
expressions... to drink and eat. Talk of 'natural' environment is most often a
misnomer, because what we commonly call natural is almost always already
"humanized", within the meaning of amended by man.
Certainly, human action can implement the dangerous process for itself
through its environment, but seek to escape by a any 'back to nature' is even
less a solution that has no significance.

Rise of the bourgeoisie and advancement of

knowledge
During the period that saw the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe, from the
end of the Middle Ages until the 18th century, the dominant ideology in the
new rising class, thus also that in certain sectors of the aristocracy, was
marked by an appetite for progress, knowledge, at the same time as wealth.
Explorers, adventurers and intellectuals discovered the world: the world
of the other continents such as knowledge from the fledgling science data.
The idea of the power of human nature was accompanied this conquering
approach.

Mastering the relationship between man and nature, is first know and
understand it. With the great travel, detailed descriptions, natural history,
botany and zoology boards have mushroomed. From Marco Polo to Leo
Africanus, many naturalistic travellers have drawn up a kind of inventory of
landscapes and climates, species of animals and new plants for them.
The first herbaria of the Renaissance contained at most hundreds of
plants; at the end of the 16th century, french botanists had already
described some 6 000 species. In the middle of the 18th century, the Swedish
Linnaeus were some 40 000 species of plants and animals (today is
approximately 1 700 000, and it is not finished).
The age of enlightenment was a craze for the Census of living species, and
the need was felt to a classification system, in which Linnaeus distinguished
himself. But it always conceived as immutable species since their creation by
God. If you ranked them in kinds of catalogs, certainly more provided that at
the time of Noah's Ark, this was to group them by similarities one alongside
the other, as fixed species, no idea of evolution. Nature didn't have its
history in time.
This is not only a platonic "worship" of nature that motivated the
intellectuals, and even less of course, merchants thriving. The trade had its
prickles, for example the international fur trade that grew to hunt down and
kill the wild beasts of the Canada. With the blessing of the official religion of
the time, for which God had given all creatures to man for his benefit...
The General mentality, in these beginnings of the modern era that
preceded the era of big industry, harbored no particular enthusiasm for
nature and the natural. On the contrary, non-cultivated areas, such as Moors
and mountains, were considered hostile, wild and even ugly. What was
considered as a civilized, and beautiful, it was cultivated and productive
landscapes.
But times were changing. At the beginning of the 19th century, the English
poet Wordsworth lamented before this mentality in these terms: " in the
eyes of thousands, and tens of thousands of men, a rich prairie, with fat
livestock pasturing, or the sight of what they would call a big wheat crop,
has as much value as all (...).the Alps and the Pyrenees in their size and
their extreme beauty .
The aesthetic feeling, it also has its history...

The revolution of capitalist industrialization

Indeed, the revolution introduced by big industry changed things, and it
has transformed the scale of the problem of the relationship between man
and nature. Because it allowed the expansion of the capitalist system, that
within a century, the 19th, has made this problem more acute than the
history of humanity had done previously.
Man had, admittedly, razed forests, returned the ground, drained
marshes, to the measurement of the progress of its tools. And ancient

techniques were not necessarily 'clean', environmentally speaking, even if

they were more primitive!
The cities of the middle ages had experienced their share of pollution with
their streets that resembled the cloacas and their rivers where is discharged
waste from tanneries and slaughterhouses. It complained, in London, from
the pollution of the air, from the 13th century. And the English industrial
towns, because of the use of coal in the emerging factories in particular,
were already embedded in unhealthy fumes in the 18th century.
But now, with the development of the industry, a lever without common
measure was placed into the hands of the dominant class, holder of
technical means on a scale never seen before. And capitalist industrialization
led to widespread pollution and nuisances of all kinds.
As an aside, there is that toxic effects being felt first in the entourage of
plants, it is as early as 1810 that in France an imperial decree proclaimed
the need (while of course respecting previously private property,
profitability and freedom of work...) do no harm to the security and safety
of the neighbourhood.
It's that burghers were also affected by the fumes... 1810, was in any case
well before any protective legislation for workers, not only children.
Now, with the expansion of energy - using coal and later oil - air, water
and soil pollution took a whole different magnitude. New pollution sources
were added to the previous ones, with the development of the chemical
industry in particular. And the accelerated urbanization of European
countries in the process of industrialization has leveraged the consequences.

A new branch of biology

At the same time, however, the science and technology were spectacular
progress.
The branch of science which has received the name of ecology is formed
at the confluence of several disciplines in the second half of the 19th
century.
Various kinds of work and research have contributed. For example, the
conquest and exploitation of countries into colonies by capitalist countries
were accompanied by some scientific interest, particularly with regard to
knowledge on tropical diseases, therefore on germ-carrying insects, and also
the tropical flora.
Biology - the science of living organisms - was a decisive step between
1855 and 1865. But segregation that still exists between the various branches
of natural sciences - Botany, zoology, etc. resulted in the fragmentation of
knowledge, and it was a brake to the knowledge of the general laws. It was
the need for intellectual syntheses, the need to study the nature of a more
global perspective.
Evolutionary ideas were starting to be in tune with the times. Darwin had
various precursors, but his treatise of the origin of species, published in

1859, announced the victory of the transformist ideas. He appeared fairly

quickly that the theory of evolution was "more than a hypothesis", even
though the Pope of Rome comes only to admit, over a century after...
It is a staunch propagator of the ideas of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, who
created from two Greek roots meaning House and science, the term
"ecology", which means science of habitat, or the living environment if we
want to.
From the moment where Darwin posed the problem of the evolution of
species through the struggle for existence and natural selection, this indeed
opened the doors to this new branch of biology. As we wondered about the
chances of survival of such species of herbivore, for example, this leads to
wonder about the plants which it feeds, the nature of the soil and climate
conditions that have allowed these plants to grow, like on the predators who
feed, or its parasites. This means consider a study of the community of life
with its multiple interactions.
Haeckel brought together under the name of ecology such a study,
ambitious. Ambitious, because studying humans living in their overall
performance and the nature is not something easy or quick.
This is why scientific ecology has not experienced a great flowering at the
time, although several scientists and ecologists led some research work with
applied goals, such as improving the performance of fisheries and oyster
aquaculture development.
It was until the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s that scientific ecology, global and
dynamic design, began to develop really, and indeed especially in the young
Soviet Union.

Industrial and nature society are not incompatible

The capitalists had other cats whipping to get down to a better knowledge
of the functioning of nature. Yet, in the second half of the 19th century, the
capitalist industry had already damaged the environment in several European
countries, and also began to do so in the United States of America.
The awareness of the phenomenon was due in part to the comments made
in the English colonies, particularly under the influence of the work of
Darwin, on the disappearance of certain animal species for example. British
physicians of the East India Company alarmed already, in 1852, the
consequences of the destruction of tropical forests due to colonization. They
bound the flooding problems they encountered in India, including.
And the most striking perhaps is that some in the scientific community of
the time, debated in the 1860s, the question of the risks of global climate
change, or even a possible alteration of the constitution of the Earth's
atmosphere due to industrial releases of carbon dioxide, and threats as a
result for the survival of the human species...
In the face of these problems which, as seen, are not entirely new, the
question was raised: the massacre of nature is a fatality that is inherent in

the modern industry - which, to his admirers, should accommodate as

inevitable payable to 'progress' tribute, or which would, conversely, for its
critics, a reason to reject the big industry as such.
Against the bourgeoisie inclined to wash their hands of the consequences
and interested in the defence of its operating system, would it be so other
possible solution that the refusal of the progress brought by industrialization
- i.e. a stalemate?
Basically, the problem is the same today, and the possible responses are
similar in nature.
He found activists for refusing to immediately to be locked into this false
dilemma, before any Marx and Engels.

What is at issue: the law of capitalist profit

What marked the 19th century, it was not the triumph of the "industry" as
such, but that of the capitalist industry. Marx Engels as broadly denounced
the fundamental contradiction between the interests of the capitalist system
and the interests of humanity, general interests which included expressly for
them the condition of their environment on Earth. Focusing particularly on
the consequences that capitalism works only in the short term and for the
benefit, they also had in view the damage this was inevitably causing nature.
Thus, Marx, who was strongly interested in the developments in progress
in agriculture, i.e. the beginnings of chemistry applications, pointed out that
' the spirit of capitalist production, focusing on the immediate money gain,
is in contradiction with agriculture, which must serve the ongoing needs of
human generations all that is chevauchentbi0strike0caps0 '.He stated:
b0istrike0caps0 each progress of capitalist agriculture represents progress
not only in the art of stripping the worker, but in that of depleting the Earth;
any temporary improvement of soil fertility approaches a ruin of sustainable
sources of this fertility conditions.
More generally, Engels, in his book ' dialectic of nature ", written between
1875 and 1885, described nature as a set of processes in continuous
interaction, developing under constantly changing conditions. " Let's ", he
wrote, " we congratulate victories on the nature (...)". Clearing forests for
farmland, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, of Greece, of Asia minor and
elsewhere were far from imagining that they laid the foundations of the
devastation of the country's current . He gave other examples of the same
kind, to add ' we do not dominate nature like the Conqueror of a foreign
people, as if we were placed outside the nature (...). all the sovereignty
that we put on it boils down to the knowledge of its laws and their fair
application, which are our only superiority over all other creatures.
Indeed, every day, we learn to better penetrate its laws and recognize
the more or less distant effects of our interventions(...) .
And yet knowledge is not sufficient, and Engels identified himself a little
more away. Reach to dominate and settle the distant consequences of our

productive activities, he said, " requires us to something other than mere

knowledge ", and " requires the current overall upheaval of total of our
production, including the social order ". .
Because, ' so far, modes of production were never intended to purely
utilitarian, direct and immediate work performance. '' Their multiple
consequences, appearing only in the long run (...) were totally neglected .
The benefit obtained by the sale is the one and only mobile "the
capitalist, (...) what happens subsequently of the goods and the purchaser
is the last of its worries. The same applies when it comes to the natural
effects of these actions .
As known, the assessments of Marx and Engels on the maintenance of '
sustainable soil fertility sources ' - concept that appears modern in many
environmentalists of today - not did militant environmentalists, hostile to
the industrial society in itself... On the contrary, they demonstrated that
industrial and nature society are not incompatible, but, at the same time,
that a conscious organization of production requires the upheaval of ' the
present in its social order together . .
It were of the Communist revolutionaries, and their approach remains the
only truly fruitful for the future, unlike activists who remain in the narrow
field of ecology.

Anti-industrialistes currents
There was also at this time a current which was the ancestor of the
current environmental. In fact, he had even appeared in England early in the
industrial revolution. At the end of the 18th century, privileged disrespected
the cities, their pollution, complained of their overpopulation, the ugliness
of the destitute, and so forth. They were sometimes the same rich burghers
who could if offer the beauty of properties in the countryside, with trees,
Park and lakes, through the profit from their forges which had denuded
landscapes a little further.
And fashion of the allegedly ' wilderness ' replaced the taste for nature
fertile, cultivated, controlled by humans.
This attitude has been before any people living in affluence. The
bourgeoisie, ruthless towards workers, scrtait also, also, a movement for
the protection of animals (as their role in the new industrial society had
become more marginal than before).
Several decades later, in the time of Queen Victoria, with mass production
of big industry and the domination of the values associated with the capital,
anti-industrialistes currents have taken proportions. Moral or aesthetic
reactions, they advocated particular return to traditions and crafts of the
past values.
Less marked in England, this type of movement has also existed at the
time in other industrial countries, and the themes of the "friends of nature",
"back to nature", "protection of nature", flourished in various associations as

in literature. The French law on the protection of the "sites and natural
monuments of artistic character" dates back to 1906. Meanwhile, a Russian
geographer developed the same themes, in 1901 to exalt a rural economy
based particularly on solar energy... There is really not much new under the
Sun!
These currents that some might call ecologists before the letter came
from the petty bourgeoisie who cared about the quality of his life. For
proletarians, the quality of their lives collided directly to capitalist
exploitation, the petty bourgeoisie profited on the contrary, while suffering
from some of its side effects. The opulent capitalist society digra easily
this anti-establishment movement which remained limited. But with its
nostalgia for an idealized medieval and pre-industrial societies in general, he
had a strong reactionary component.

The 1970s environmental movement

The 20th century has not experienced for decades of great movements of
protest against the destruction of the environment, and it took until the
1970s so that appears what has been called the environmental movement,
across all of the industrialized countries.
However, the first half of the century, marked in particular by two world
wars, has not gone without damage nor from the point of view "green."
These wars were destructive as many of the "balance of nature"; they have
devastated entire territories.
But bourgeois society is offer the luxury of worrying about the nature that
surrounds us in rare periods of time. It secretes this order concerns, among
his youth in particular, that in times where it seems to provide some comfort
to large sections of the small and medium bourgeoisie. It is no coincidence
that this phenomenon occurred thirty years after the end of World War II, at
the end of these so-called 'glorious' which are so proud the singers of the
capitalist economy.
The first party in the world was founded in 1972 in New Zealand. 1971 was
the year of the first Ministry of environment in the french government.
The multiple mobilization of the period - demonstrations in defense of the
Larzac plateau against plans to extend the military camp in anti-nuclear
protest - have been characterized by their heterogeneity.
Different trends have contributed to the movement: movements of users,
often very local, against the nuisance brought to their living environment by
projects of expansion of motorways for example; former aware of
associations for the defence of nature, who knew a resurgence of activity.
The publication of several books of intellectuals on the uncertain future of
the planet, often holders of alarming predictions, played its role.
Well 'apolitical' bourgeois currents is found. Meanwhile, the May 1968
student protest brought a lot of activists.

On the merits, the environmental movement was a protest movement of a

part of the petite bourgeoisie in the cities against the evils of industrial
society. And it is no coincidence if it comporta a wide critical aspect of city
life.
In 1972, the newspaper the mouth open, created by a journalist of
Charlie-Hebdo, issued a call to "change his life". The "back to the Earth"
became fashionable. A modest urban merchants went to experience
allegedly 'authentic', related values according to them to traditional kinds of
life, those of artisans and the shepherds, of rural life in general. Cook
yourself its bread, wear clothing woven by hand and especially not in
synthetic textiles, eat 'bio', became the ideal life of a fraction of youth. It
had an air of renewal, but it was overall a return back completed backwardlooking bias movement.
Because if the 'green' movement is adorned with the name of a science,
there is often a significant margin between scientists of ecology and that
advocate "environmentalists" in general, who often refuse science, accusing
it of all evil.
In the field of agriculture, this attitude has been to deny the applications
of chemistry. Starting from the fact real pollution caused by the misuse of
pesticides and herbicides, it consisted in advocating so-called "organic"
contrasting it with the term "chemical" become synonymous with poison,
opposition which makes no sense, because all nature is formed of
"chemicals", and damage caused by manure (i.e. 'natural' droppings) of the
Breton pig farms are there to prove that"natural" or "chemical", nitrates are
the same qualities and the same dangers, according to their concentration in
soil.
The application of chemistry to agriculture has been a source of
considerable progress and it is still. Isn't it that need to be involved, but its
irrational under capitalism, linked use looking for the benefit by the Sandoz,
Ciba-Geigy and other Rhne-Poulenc.
Similarly, a number of groups ecologists refused also on behalf of
individual freedom, " mandatory vaccination ", on the grounds of accidents
they cause. They certainly exist. But it is equally obvious that vaccinations
have pushed many diseases, and that overall the benefit to society was
indisputable. The idea of refuse that they are mandatory, i.e. to deny it for
itself, is perfectly shocking because it does not vaccinate only to protect his
little person. By being vaccinated, it also avoids becoming a vector for the
disease to others, which may not benefit themselves from vaccination. And
this refusal is significant characteristic individualism of the petty bourgeoisie
which largely pervades some of the steps of the "green" movement
The solutions proposed by some of its militants may be suitable for
marginal communities, but are in no way solutions for society as a whole. If
the environmental movement has sometimes conveyed friendly aspirations to
social change, it also inspired quasi-mystical designs in the genus 'fusion'

with nature. And, finally, overall, it was marked by an ideology hostile to

progress.

In a specific ideological context

The 'green' wave in France was part of a general framework. It is the
United States that were parties first inspiration environmentalist protests.
The period that followed the second world war had been marked by the
development of nuclear - bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - who had
created distrust toward the idea of scientific progress. The American
scientific community was particularly sensitive else where, in 1953, the
nuclear tests in Nevada resulted in radioactive fallout on New York.
The intensive development of the chemical and petroleum industries
resulted in his side of the increasingly massive pollution. In 1952, London fog
thick mixed with industrial smoke ("smog") had caused the death of 4 000
people in five days. In the USA, a city like Los Angeles knew a similar
atmospheric pollution.
Another form of pollution, driven by massive and uncontrolled use of
pesticides and industrial insecticides, was particularly denounced by Rachel
Carson in a book, " Silent Spring ", published in 1962. She described how the
struggles against a beetle in the Midwest, or a species of Ant in the southern
States, had been the occasion of massive splashes of new products, without
obvious justification but with great propaganda. These products proved
harmful to birds, fish and all kinds of animals, and sources of headaches for
humans.
Disinsectisation large-scale campaigns were a bonanza for manufacturers,
and a source of government subsidies. Between 1957 and 1959, conducted
campaigns of aircraft spread, according to Rachel Carson, millions of
hectares, and it came to pass that the airmen were paid, treated per
hectare, but per litre spilled...
She was treated by "old crazy in the pay of the KGB . A decade later,
however, the environmental problems had found another resonance even in
official spheres. It is the first World Conference on the environment in 1972
took place in Stockholm.
A few years before, a so-called 'Club of Rome' association was founded,
with members belonging to more than 30 countries, scientists, government
officials, economists, etc. in the purpose to study the interdependence of
the problems across the world. It is a publication entitled ' limits to growth '
which assured him wide publicity. For these ideologues of the bourgeoisie,
the company was going to an inevitable disaster if it did not stop the
economic and demographic growth. If so many men were starving to death,
they said, it is because there are too many for too few resources, resources
that should be not more exhausting.
During his campaign for the presidential election of 1974, candidate
ecologist Ren Dumont took over part of the positions of the Club of Rome:

he advocated the increase in the price of gasoline to prevent suffocation of

the cities by car, and demanded the removal of family allowances beyond
the second child to combat alleged overcrowding. Like Brice Lalonde at the
same time, it considered that everyone is polluter - exploiters and exploited
are all co-responsible.

The protection of natural resources was used to justify

the austerity plans
And that should not surprise. Criticism of the so-called consumer society,
cherished theme of most environmental groups, was in harmony with the
ideology of austerity that advocated the bourgeoisie, in particular from
1973-74.
Experts from the Club of Rome had, no doubt and in part anyway, wanted
to warn their class of the real problems created by growing environmental
degradation and increasing disaster risk, which could possibly affect
bourgeois themselves. But their cry of alarm was also and above all a
propaganda objective: it has contributed in the 1970s to use natural
resources protection to justify the austerity plans. This was the turning point
of the situation of the capitalist economy, for which profits were beginning
to no longer pass through productive investments.
So the environmentalist ideology was a sort of counterpart to the idea of
"zero growth". When environmentalists claimed it is better 'be' that 'have', it
remained somewhat obscure, but when they said " the challenge to the
living environment will be more revolutionary than that of the standard of
living ", that they began to advocate the sharing of labour and wages (not
income in general, salaries!) as a means to combat unemployment, the
ideological convergence is better appeared.
Moreover, the unknown ecologist to the counsel of the official bodies, or
even the Minister well trajectories were fast.

Environmentalism and the myth of

overpopulation
If there is a theme, which recurs with regularity about environmental
problems, once they exceed local issues, it is population growth, the alleged
overcrowding. There would be too many beings humans on Earth (and it will
be even worse tomorrow, we are told) over its energy reserves, compared
with food resources, and taking into account the growing infringement by
everyone of the natural environment.
This thesis has been linked, so to speak of at the outset, to the birth of
the movement of our time. The American biologist Paul Ehrlich, host large
institutions environmentalists and known in particular for his book " The
bomb P " (P as population), exhibited in 1968 this thesis that overcrowding is
the primary cause of the evils that overwhelm the environment: " it is easy

to trace the origin of the sequence of causes of its deterioration. Too many
cars, too many plants, too many detergents, too many insecticides, too
many analgesics, treatment plants of inadequate waste, too little water and
too much oxide of carbon - the cause of these headaches, it can be found
easily in excess of population .
The theses of Ehrlich may represent an extreme case, but ecologist world
overpopulation theory has gone through the years. Captain Cousteau, for
example, told the " Nouvel Observateur " in 1992: " all ecologists today are
convinced that overpopulation is the root of all problems. In the coming 40
years, the population will double. By the year 2030, it is sure to have 10
billion people. 2030, is tomorrow, and with 10 billion people, it is not
known how. In a world where one third of the population becomes more and
more rich without increasing, while two-thirds of the population become
increasingly poor by increasing, this situation can not last. It creates a
mutual hatred of the poor against the rich which ends in blood .
Cousteau, the population that the Earth could feed, on the basis of the
consumption of Americans, would be 600 or 700 million people, figure that it
would have obtained from a mathematical calculation.
Demographics is not the specialty of Cousteau. But we also read in a
specialist book which has only a few years, devoted to "ecological disasters":
" at the end of the century, the environmental disaster XXieistrike0caps0
major affecting humanity and whose stem most of the ills from which it
suffers already, or threatens the, (...)comes from its anarchic reproduction
with result an exponential growth in the number of men , (...) this
population explosion compromises now any possibility of development in the
third world ', or ' apart from the consequences of a nuclear war, population
growth is the environmental problem which human civilization has ever
faced the most serious . .
The WorldWatch Institute in Washington is an international centre of
demographic and ecological research. Its president, Lester Brown, a
personality of environmentalism, prefaced the 1996-1997 edition of " The
State of the planet ". His thesis is that "the carrying capacity of the Earth
(is) b0istrike0caps0 determined by the amount of available food' - ' load
capacity ', i.e. the number of beings human she can wear.

Back to Malthus
It is returned to the theories of Malthus with another vocabulary.
The fear of overpopulation is, indeed, a waning moon. It was theorized by
English Economist Malthus at the end of the 18th century, in 1798. For him,
the population growth following a geometric progression while resources
does that follow a linear progression, you eventually necessarily reach a '
limit of subsistence ', so a crisis, normally resulting in the elimination of
excess... He summed up this vividly: " a man who is born into a world
already occupied, if it is not possible to obtain her parents keeps it can just

ask them, and if the company has no need of his work, has no right to claim
any share of food and, in reality, it is too much. .
In other words, any man who is not born kid of rich and which is not
deemed useful to the profits of employers on the market of the work of the
moment, is just... too much on Earth. Malthus concluded himself: " to the
great banquet of nature, there is point of cover available for him; She
orders him to go (...) .
Nature has good back. This man, who, incidentally, was Anglican, speaking
with the brutality of the prophets of nascent capitalism, and he was not
alone in thinking so, at a time when many English bourgeois frightened the
number of destitute concentrated in industrial cities.
But when a Lester Brown writes today that ' carrying capacity ' of the
Earth is limited by the amount of food available, it has the same brutality.
And its 'solution' has the same smell of death. Has indicated it in an
interview with the newspaper ' Le Monde ': ' where can no longer increase
the offer, we need to act on the request, to the control and the lowering ...
The capitalist economy is too much interested in increasing productive
investment (the offer) to increase its profits, but on the other hand she is
interested in imposing austerity to the masses, including those who are
already the most deprived. Lower demand food for the starving!
In this Malthusian spirit, ecologists use the term of ' population limit ' limit on the basis of livelihoods opportunities. To calculate, they depart from
the present data, in a given time and a given place. One may wonder how
they can use such data to make predictions in the long term? It is all the
more absurd when they define their ' population limit ' country-by-country
basis, ignoring trade with the rest of the world.
It is a way to see fundamentally conservative. All things being equal, say,
the population of Africa will the disaster and famine widespread given its
current growth rate. They are not a change of the existing social order.
The United Nations agencies, such as FAO, which has just held Congress in
Rome, have a way to calculate ' population limit ' that deserves the
attention: cutting across the globe in homogeneous areas, squares of
approximately 100 km of coastline in this case. For each of the squares,
depending on the climate, soil, etc., is calculated the agricultural yield for
three levels of technology. Which turned into calories, leads to quantify the
number of men that can live on each square!
This kind of exercise should occupy a number of bureaucrats and
computer scientists, but it has something crazy. Anyway, the men lived not
isolated, in isolation, in squares of 100 km of coastline!
In addition, a number of demographers admit themselves that their
methods are sometimes questionable and their... questionable forecasts.
One of them among a few others, Herv Le Bras, provides an example that
relates to the first card that was established to show the growth of the
population across the world, in 1925. The population was expected to grow

more quickly in the USA, in Central and Eastern Europe, in Russia, while all
black Africa and Asia, including China and India, was supposed to stagnate.
However, in 1990, on cards rates of population growth, the distribution is
almost exactly opposite. Populations in Asia, Africa and Latin America are
spent a billion and a half in 1945 to four billion in 1990.
Map of 1925 was so grossly inaccurate, but it reflected the thinking of its
author, British which envisaged the settlement of the planet by the
colonization of the white man.
In fact, demographic predictions in the long term are often largely
arbitrary projections, biased by the dominant ideology or propaganda
concerns. And when environmentalists contend support their neomalthusiennes designs by this kind of numbers, it is more the prejudices of
class they express environmental concerns.
They cannot receive serious and effective solutions within a system
without a future. And the environmental movement has not known in France
development that with no waiting. The growing problems of the crisis and
unemployment tend to marginalize these types of concerns, including among
young people petty-bourgeois itself.

Capitalism and the wild destruction of the

environment
However, then the crisis of the capitalist system creates a more
frightening human mess, we at the same time witnessing a destruction of the
environment in more wild. Peoples are looted and forced, the planet is
sacked: this goes hand in hand.
Because we need to come to this finding: environmentalism is deadlocked,
at a time when environmental damage are catastrophic proportions.
Especially in the third world.
This is, indeed, that capitalism shows more starkly how to protect nature
is foreign to its operation. In rich countries, few measures are taken that
mitigate the effects, including polluters. Because there are democratic
forms and more means, and because the bourgeois themselves want to
protect themselves, States have given birth to a number of laws and decrees
of prefectural commissions, design offices, which play a limiting role.
But in poor countries, the power of nuisance of the functioning of
capitalism for the whole of society and its environment knows no brake, or
almost.

"Disasters"?
When we are informed of cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions,
prolonged droughts, floods, in Latin America, Africa or Asia, and they talked
about on the subject of 'natural disasters', that is, to a large extent, a lie. In
the sense that cyclones are of natural origin, but that the disasters resulting

men are not due to the only nature. The population of poor countries is
much more vulnerable to such disasters than rich countries, its vulnerability
is directly linked to poverty and inequality.
The consequences of an earthquake are not the same for Californians, for
example, for the inhabitants of Mexico or Agadir, all exposed to high seismic
risk, but with material and financial means unequal to prevent and cope.
And if the sea level were to climb rapidly, as a result of a warming climate,
as some predict, the consequences are not identical to the Netherlands and
Bangladesh...
In third world countries, most miserable are also the most exposed to the
point that in many cases they live more or less permanently in a disaster
setting, because they have no choice, forced to settle on unhealthy, sloping
land prone to landslides as the "favelas" of South America.
In the floods in Bangladesh, this is not rain regime that is at issue.
Deforestation of the slopes of the Himalayas causes the filling by the alluvial
deposits of the rivers in the Plains, while nothing more opposed to the runoff
on the slopes of the mountains, and this is the cause of the increased
frequency of these floods.

Capitalism and the destruction of forests

At the present time, the destruction of tropical forests is particularly
criticised by defenders of the environment, mainly because of the potential
impact on the global climate. The Decade of 1980, 17 million hectares were
lost each year. In Cte d'Ivoire, 75% of the forest area have disappeared in
30 years.
This phenomenon even cause official alarm shouting, the countries of the
G7, the United Nations, speak of "global issue. They did not so much, talked
in, while the army destroyed, with its defoliants, 42% of the forests of the
Viet Nam south of the 17th parallel!
And they pretend to ignore that forests in Africa, Asia and Latin America
have been largely destroyed first for the needs of monoculture imposed by
colonizers then imperialism and to be exported, such as tea, cocoa and
hevea. If the Brazil for example lost half of its forest area prior to European
settlement, it is largely because it has extended the cultivation of coffee on
vast plantations in the 19th century.
As they pretend to ignore that today ' today the timber trade in the hands
of large capitalist companies occupies the 5th position of international
trade, the consumption of wood from tropical forests being much expanded
since the last war, because it is apparently much less expensive than that of
temperate forests.
The forests are exploited on an intensive mode, with only in view the
benefit in the short term, and it is devastating: cutting trees faster that it is
possible for others grow to replace them.

The best-known case of destruction of tropical forests is the Amazon

rainforest: what is it due?
In the 1960s, under the guise of promoting colonization of the forest by
small peasants without land, Brazilian Governments have made drill roads. In
reality, only a small part of the soil of the Amazon can be used for
agriculture. And it was a failure. A waste? Certainly, but it depends for
whom. Very quickly, the authorities decided to transform the forest, treated
by air with defoliants, to pasture, sowing artificial grasslands and installing
of cattle ranches. The major profiteers of these ranches have had to pay
only derisory prices for large surfaces. The meat produced is exported to
markets in North America...
It is not surprising that money of the work has been "loaned" by the World
Bank, the U.S. Department of State, etc., which has helped increase the
public debt of the Brazil, all enriching large agri-business firms and bankers.
This "enhancement" of the Amazon claimed the lives of almost all of the
Indians who lived there, murdered as the environmental activist Chico
Mendes by the hired assassins in the pay of big interests in land or decimated
by diseases brought by this upheaval.
The destruction of the Amazon rainforest was a deliberately organized
company. In Central America, one quarter of the forest was destroyed in 20
years to produce beef for export.

Consequences of the race for profit

That the capitalist system is directly involved in the sometimes
catastrophic degradation of the Earth's environment of men, other examples
attest to this around the world, from Haiti to the India.
In India in Bhopal in 1984, an explosion in a the American trust Union
Carbide pesticide plant killed officially 6495, 25 000 according to
humanitarian organizations. Hundreds of thousands of people have been
victims of toxic gases. It was a factory in rundown workshops, surrounded by
a sprawling slum.
The case has not moved to the Indian authorities, or one might expect,
the capitalists to Union Carbide. But plants such as Bhopal are numerous in
India and elsewhere.
It has become common as the capitalists of the rich countries where antipollution standards are more stringent that elsewhere, as States United or
Japan, "relocate" their polluting or dangerous industries in South Asia or
Latin America.
Thus, zones of Mexico, famous "maquiladoras," close to the border with
the USA, where half a million people more are overexploited, are at the
same time a paradise for polluters: the pollution of air, water, soil is
reached a catastrophic level.
Water pollution is particularly dramatic in most of the countries of the
third world. In India, two-thirds of the water resources are polluted. Most of

the observed diseases are in relation to the water-borne agents. The Ganges
is a sewer, because the insecticides, fertilizer factories, tanneries, etc., is
dump all their waste, often toxic, and there is no sewage treatment. To give
an idea of this pollution, in the place where a Bata Shoe factory releases its
effluent, the fish in this water there survive two days - record beaten by a
McDowell Distillery, which leaves them only five hours to live.
And despite everything, the official thesis in India, as in a large number of
international organizations, as in many workplaces environmentalists, means
that the population in general and the poor in particular, are responsible of
accelerated environmental degradation!
Even if they result in the West in less brutally catastrophic than in poor
countries, environmental problems not save it either. For the same basic
reason, which is the law of profit.
If air pollution reached alarming levels, it is because manufacturers have
cure to incorporate into their production costs the damage they may cause in
the environment and even less to incorporate the cost of facilities that could
prevent them or at least limit them; It is also because the interests of
manufacturers of automotive and oil trusts led to the indiscriminate
extension of road transport and individual traffic.
The cost to society is only weakly into account in the choice of policies
implemented by Governments. Otherwise, another policy, based on the
development of public transport, on better use of rail transport, would be
possible. Then, we can well imagine that, where capitalism works in the wild
to Calcutta or Bombay, Lagos, Bangkok or Mexico City air pollution levels are
incommensurate with those that are accepted in the metropolises of the rich
countries.
In a general way, the capitalist industry has a problem with its waste. At
least, it is society as a whole that it rejects this problem. Seen well in the
case of storage of radioactive waste, which remains the main risk associated
with (aside from accidents such as Chernobyl) nuclear industry, including for
generations to come.
But, if these wastes exist such problems, it is because the capitalist of the
Framatome and other interests GEC-Alsthom presided over the development
of the nuclear industry, that it is they who dictated the pace accelerated,
without worrying about an assessment of the risks according to the interests
of the population.
The movement of these wastes and hazardous wastes from industry all is
surrounded by a thick veil of silence. And for good reason. Well trades
settled on it, between the European Union, Central Europe and the countries
of the former Soviet Union, for example, or between the industrialized
countries and the third world. Even, the States of the European Union are
unable to agree on the definition of the word 'waste' from the free goods.
Meanwhile, it was announced in early November on the industrial site in
Salsigne, in the Aude, 80 000 tons of toxic waste of all kinds, including
arsenic, are stored, abandoned in deserted facilities...

The degradation of the environment around the world therefore takes

more or less serious forms, but they have one feature in common: all are the
direct product of the irresponsible and irrational way the capitalist world
works.

The environment, a market value

Patrons know get to the green when they see their interest. They knew
often "recycle" fashion green for their benefit.
Rhone-Poulenc made its advertising around the ecology while being among
the big polluters worldwide. Its CEO, Jean-Ren Fourtou, himself said: " a
necessary, load the environment has become a 'business' for us . .
The treatment of waste has become an industry on which the Gnrale
and the Lyonnaise des eaux occupy a monopoly position. If the asbestos has
reported in its time, the asbestos market is today coveted. 'Green' or 'ecoproducts' products have proliferated - there was even a 'green' SICAV
launched on the financial market a few years ago: this is part of the
competition.
Strongest: in the United States, "rights to pollute" have been established.
Companies can choose to equip anti-pollution or pay for the right to emit a
certain amount of harmful substances. They can transfer their rights to other
companies that are more advantageous to pollute by paying. Trade through a
brokerage firm. With a real stock market of "pollution rights", a peak is
reached!

A reactionary development
If in his idealistic youth, the environmental movement has sometimes
expressed altruistic aspirations, inspired by the interests of humanity and its
future, he then contributed - and all the more easily as it did not really
dispute the order established - to feed during the 1980s, the official Western
ideology.
Internationally, of bodies, US more often, as the WorldWatch Institute,
quite settled and are authoritative in scientific, economic, media, and also
environmentalists in a broad sense. Associations such as the 'World Wildlife
Fund' (WWF, by its English initials), or like Greenpeace, which some
journalists have described as of "multinational green, are financially
powerful institutions. Greenpeace has the status of observer at the United
Nations.
In France, where the green movement still was more modest, since its
first electoral success in 1977, the current political ecologist has
experienced many vicissitudes, which were as much the personal ambitions
of some as to the political choices of others. A green political party itself
was created in 1982, which subsequently practiced a policy of alliances with
variable geometry on the electoral map. Fluctuating successfully
"environmentalists" are nevertheless passed the stage of 'pressure group'

partnership with the traditional political parties in the management of public

affairs.
Ecology 'policy' was 'recycled' by the system it also. All the bourgeois
political parties can find in this current ambiguous ideas and prejudices
material to "greening" according to their pre-election concerns.
The fraction of environmentalism that is instead of left speak of solidarity
and democracy, joined the humanitarian movement "without borders";
current It has a humanistic and progressive, while staining moving beyond a
vague Manager reformism. While another component vehicle ideas of
attachment to the Earth that recall the old french Ptain Fund and its theme
"the Earth, it does not lie.
The notions of order and stability are at the centre of the concerns of this
current conservative, like the cult of a mythical nature that is already gone
hand in hand in the past with movements and extreme-right plans. Today,
we see the national Front advocating a kind of "national-environmentalism",
and Bruno Mgret, one of its leaders, declaring that " the eco-leftists parties
are an endangered species ", and advocate a return " to an ethics and
aesthetics of life that revive the sense of the sacred and the duration, and
allow the man to regain consciousness from its roots and identity .,
advocating to put ' the human science in the service of the natural laws and
nature ', because for these individuals, " defend the fauna, flora, sites,
heritage is defend what we are, it is to defend its identity ", against "
cosmopolitan environmentalism '... It " poses as essential the preservation of
the environment ethnic, cultural and natural of our people ". .
Obviously, the National Front a main feature of turning everything he
touches in rot, and all his words feel very bad.
But it remains that, therefore we refused to lie on the ground of the
working class to arise in defenders 'nature', in the current reactionary
context, this can be big many derivatives.
Therefore, for example, international associations in Africa have come to
prevent the Tuareg access to their traditional nomadism areas necessary for
their survival, under pretext of protecting an endangered antelope species...
There are worse. An approach to the ecology called "deep ecology"
appeared in American academia, and also in Germany and in Scandinavia,
denouncing a "human chauvinism" and wants to be pure and hard. The
followers of "deep ecology" do not just ask for animals rights equivalent to
those of men, they speak also of the 'right of the trees' for example, and
generally give priority to the survival of nature on the well-being of men.
Some even have not hesitated to raise, in 1984, during the famine in
Ethiopia, against sending relief to allow " the laws of nature take their
course ". ...
This kind of mystical-totalitarian delusion is today, in the field of
environmentalism, the expression of a current limited and extremist.

'Green' coverage of imperialism

The dominant environmentalist theme is 'global pollution', of 'global

change', "global ecology", including in international bodies where it needs to
make during to the theme of "globalization of the economy. Suffice to say
that it is a 'green' coverage for the domination of imperialism.
The threat of "global pollution" appeared about ten years after the
spectrum of the shortage of oil resources.
Cries of alarm are high the mid of 1980s, coming more or less scientific
circles, on the ozone layer, deforestation, the spread of deserts, global
warming climates... Since then, the Green talk willingly 'environmental crisis'
global, crisis which would be expected to explain the ills afflicting us.
These threats may well have an objective basis. But in this society, even
those growing cries of alarm are not necessarily disinterested!
There was for example a media campaign about the famous 'hole' of the
ozone layer above the Antarctic, which it is not certain that this is a recent
phenomenon. But what is certain is that there was in this case of issues for
specific capitalist trusts.
Makers of the famous 'hole' were first and foremost, we were told then, in
1985 and subsequent years, the gas used in the refrigeration industry,
chloro-fluoro-carbons or CFC. However, it was that patents relating to CFCS
were falling into the public domain, and that the world leader in their
production, Du Pont de Nemours, had - prepared, for a decade, substitutes,
and made corresponding patents. In 1986, Du Pont rallied so spectacularly to
the idea of regulating the production of CFCS, but the integrity of
atmospheric ozone had nothing to do!
An international Protocol was signed in Montreal in 1987, limiting, in
several stages, the production of CFCS. It was an arrangement between
trusts (the french group Atochem was very concerned, too), for the benefit
of the most powerful, in the usual strings of the capitalist system. Its
application is funded and controlled mostly by the World Bank and directly
associated with chemical industry officials. But it was presented as a great
success ecologist, an event, because he was supposed to manage a
presumption of risk globally for the first time!
But, of course, talking about 'global pollution' and 'global' responsibility of
humanity is a way to evacuate the responsibility of capitalists, or even to
charge poor countries.
These poor are repeats, so many that they destroy the tropical forest
heritage and that they pollute the atmosphere of the whole earth with their
consumption of dirty coal. They accused not explicitly 'poor countries', in
fact, we prefer to hide behind geographical designations such as 'the North'
and 'South', is more sanitized, but the idea is still there. And how to explain
that world overpopulation theory maintains even today?
However, recently published population estimates belie much earlier:
while the United Nations demographers predicted, there's not yet so long a
world population of at least 12 billion for the next century, or doubling the
current number, they believe today that it will be 8 billion, before falling

from 2050 or even before. Birth rates are falling, they say, quickly almost
anywhere in the world.
But there is nothing to prevent the threat of a "food shortage", a "food
crisis" out periodically. One can be for the less skeptical, and remember the
famous "shortage" of oil used in 1973 to blaze prices. Twenty years later, in
1993, estimates of oil and gas reserves were higher than ever. Anyway, this
kind of estimates is relative, because it is a function of the level of
techniques in a given time, and the conditions of capitalist profitability of
the moment.
As for the "oil crisis" which was not one, when we talk about 'food crisis',
this cache business maneuvers and operation policy.

A new "yellow peril"?

Today, if any 'the South' is set to dock, makes China a return of prominent
among the perils of the time.
The reasoning is as follows, according to " the State of the planet " of this
year: China " must feed 14 million extra per year individuals '... " If the
country continued to squander its agricultural land and its water in its race
to industrialization ", ' China will have to find 400 million tonnes of grain on
the world market '. It's huge, and " ultimately, when China will seek regular
global markets, its own shortage situation will become the world. '' Its
shortage of agricultural land and water will become a global shortage. His
failure against the population explosion will soon affect the world .
The authors of this prose stress also that " at the same time where the
industrialized countries renounce produce chloro-fluoro-carbons in order to
protect the ozone layer, China has doubled its production (between 1986
and 1992). Thus, the pace at which it will abandon these industrial
chemicals will weigh on global rates of skin cancer in the decades to
come .
The new variant of the old "yellow peril" is not more sympathetic than the
former. All this looks like an attempt to exorcise fear feels the minority of
the haves against the non-ecological threat of humans reduced to a life of
misery.

The "Earth Summit" - Rio de Janeiro, 1992

In June 1992, an Earth Summit convened in Rio de Janeiro, where street
children were brutally driven out, and even necessary, murdered for the
occasion. More than 100 heads of State and Government were present, as
well as industrialists and hundreds of organizations non-governmental,
thousands of journalists and various participants. The goal was to make a
great consensus operation under the banner of the defence of the planet,
given that, despite everything, 20% of the world population consume only
80% of the wealth - which remains an embarrassing reality.

The Rio Summit therefore marked the official interest in a policy of

"global environment". Mentioned global threats, there was that plane on
biodiversity, i.e. the diversity of living species, because of the increased risk
of disappearance of animal and plant species. The convention which was
signed on this subject, after a long bargaining, gives States to
underdeveloped countries the right to claim royalties to industrialists that
would point a product derived from the natural resources of their countries.
They "entrust" to large private companies, by contract, the right to exploit
their resource animal and plant, about as they "told" - we dare to say - the
imperialist corporations the exploitation of their mineral raw materials, their
oil for example.
Costa Rica has transformed a quarter of its territory nature reserves,
where the large American pharmaceutical firm Merck explores and analyzes
samples of plants, microbes and insects (subject to financial compensation).
Similar contracts exist between European industrialists and some African
countries.
Always on behalf of respect for biodiversity, several non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) 'green' made proposals converging with those of the
industry. Thus, the existence of the debt well forced poor countries to sell
off their natural resources to repay. Environmental NGOs redeem a portion
of the debt at a reduced price. Creditor banks find their interest, because it
allows them to minimize their "losses" on debts anyway, and they tax benefit
from the operation.
Called cela exchanges 'debts-nature', and it is a form of barter practiced
in the middle of the finance which is applied to environmentalism. At a time
where the exploitation by imperialism from the underdeveloped world took a
form largely financial, the natural environment of these countries is
currently entering a stock type circuit...
Obviously, the countries of Latin America, Africa or Asia do not have the
same means to impose on industrialized countries, major polluters of the
world, conditions for the protection of biodiversity... And the environment
has become a new kind of alibi for another form of interference on the part
of rich countries, "ecological interference" (the expression is, apparently,
Michel Rocard).
Environmentalism and "global ecology" today are part of the panoply of
instruments of economic domination of imperialism on the world.

The future of humanity as that of the planet, to

overthrow imperialism
It is necessary to overthrow imperialism. For the future of humanity, for
that of our planet - the two are linked.
Indictment of poor countries in the degradation of the environment is
particularly heinous. Of course that poverty leads to overexploitation of
certain natural resources, impoverishing including soils, which in turn

aggravates poverty. but, who did extensive regions African, Asian, etc. full
of natural resources, today poor countries, otherwise imperialism that has
looted them to become the holder of the global wealth, and that them,
today is still bleeding, more than ever?
What right claim imperialism defenders require countries reduced
economic underdevelopment to a policy of environmental protection that
Europe or the United States themselves have totally ignored for centuries
where they have accumulated wealth on the backs of the rest of the world?
It is a real scandal in addition to see authorities, including ecologists, the
rural poor in question because they burn vegetation to practise their
agriculture. Admittedly, this type of slash does not help the State of soils in
the long run, but the poor peasants who have have no choice. And if they
involve the forest, it is because the system does not allow them to fend that
to not die of hunger, and that the wood is essential to cook food and heat.
While the capitalists need wood for their profits.
The same economic system resulted in a considerable increase of wealth
at one end, concentrated in a minority of countries and underdevelopment
to the other, for the majority. On behalf of the capitalist profit, and the
quick profit, he has accumulated disasters, crises, a huge mess, two world
wars and countless wars 'local '. It has devastated the nature on the whole
earth... and today, its hacks allow themselves to accuse the main victims,
the poor of the third world, do not see further than their hollow bellies!
They dare to accuse them of ecological irresponsibility!
Respiratory diseases are one of the leading causes of mortality among
women in the India. Because poor stoves on which they cook work with fuel poor quality coal, cow dung, agricultural waste which are highly polluting
for the ambient air and harmful. And the 'expert' Western, institutional
ecologist, said that these hundreds of millions of poor who inhabit the India
and China are well irresponsible, because given their number they increase
the content of the atmosphere carbon dioxide for all mankind...
Of course, it would be better for mankind that tropical forests are
preserved, that the composition of the Earth's atmosphere is respected, that
the diversity of living, plant and animal species, be maintained that the
resources offered by nature are managed in the interests of their renewal
and the future. It would be infinitely better, even. But, today, under the
current system, how peoples could reconcile these demands with the basic
necessities of survival, they are reduced? It is clear that in countries rich
themselves, respect for the environment is facing the dominant capitalist
profitability research.
It is the economic system itself that is at issue.
Unlike this that pretends to believe part of the environmental movement,
who merely denounce the "excesses of liberalism", these problems are, for
the most part, without a solution in the context of capitalist society.

For a land without borders...

Not to begin with, because that virtually all environmental issues require
to abolish this anachronism that represents the maintenance of national
States and national borders (with greater reason micro-nationales!). In the
assessment of resources, this leads to foolish absurdities such as calculations
based on human groups partioned between them, or even this map of Africa
charcute in several areas, side by side, depending on the possibilities of
local food production: the grey areas " that can feed more than 100
inhabitants in the kmi2 " and black areas " where the population exceeds the
possibilities of food production . .
When human society is this! On the France map drawn up with such
criteria, what black more black that black should be invented to represent,
for example, the Paris metropolitan area, whose local food production is
unable to feed its population!
It is the set of environmental problems which has a clear cross-border
dimension: rivers, currents, winds, clouds are unaware the Passport... The
process of concentration of pollutants following laws that are beyond
national legislation... Migratory birds that come to nest in Europe in the
summer, then return to Africa in winter, that are otherwise "illegal
immigrants"?
The need for global cooperation is blinding way through such problems,
more so still when they affect our atmosphere without borders.

... stripped of private property...

Environmental problems show, then, how private ownership of the means
of production, soil for example, is inconsistent with the requirements of
sound management of natural resources.
Such management is conceivable only in the long term. Seen well in the
case of forests: trees do not grow on command! Whenever one wants to
manage healthy, it must predict, anticipate, book the possibilities of the
future. This requires skills and means. But the private owner did, him,
mostly prominently the quick profit that he expects to pull sections that
interest him. Especially, as is often the case, when it comes to a financial
institution that aims to put this money, or to speculate with.
In France, the forest is three quarters privately owned, the rest belonging
to the State and local communities. It has been calculated that to highlight
the forest resources of the France in the correct manner taking into account
all aspects, should be a worker for 200 hectares of forest (by European
standards). However, they are currently less than one for 2000 hectares.
As regards the part managed by the national Office of forests, the NFB,
public industrial and commercial, we see what happened when one calls one
of the Ministers who was responsible for shortly after its creation: for him,
the forest ' must be managed as a field of peas or tomatoes from this
certainty that.If one invests in the forest, you can gain money .

Should the contrary to develop forest plans balanced in the long term, the
long term.
The obstacle that is by itself the private property is so obvious, more
generally, a President of the Paris Bar Association, prefacing a work devoted
to the " contentious environment ", can point out that ecology involves " the
justification for the limits to the right of property ". .

... and of the law of profit

Finally, the industrial development in the capitalist framework does not
Tames nature, the rampage. Not only because that it doesn't care about the
possible consequences of his actions, because he sees no more further than
the wholesale accounts Bank, but also directly as soon as it can bring natural
resources in the category of market values.
This is seen especially in the field of industrial fishing.
For small-scale fishermen on the sides of the India, a new kind of shark is
menacing: the big industrial trawlers, which are massive catches of fish for
export. For these small fishermen and residents of these areas, the fish, food
base, became rarer and more expensive, because their coastal fishing areas
are depopulated, even defiance of legally, by these trawlers that pick up
everything in their path.
Similarly, in off the coast of West Africa, about half of the fish is captured
by fleets from industrialized countries, especially the countries of the
European Union. This fish is intended for consumers in rich countries, who
can afford to pay more expensive, for themselves, and also feed their pets.
The Chile national fish consumption decreased by half because the market
for the export of fish meal is more lucrative than the poor sale.
And, at the same time, industrial fishing increasingly concentrated under
capitalist control has destroyed a good part of the reserves of fish, which
indiscriminately and massively captured, cannot longer recover normally.
When the importance of the levies outweighs the natural capacity of
renewal, it's scarcity, and sometimes even the depopulation of a whole sea.
What is at issue, it is intensive to make boats and expensive materials. It
endangers the reproduction of species in several regions of the world especially in cases where fishing areas have become a ferocious economic
war zones.
However, a farm healthy, balanced and far-sighted of the resources of the
seas by the community could avoid this kind of risk. The principles are
known, but few applied, in particular in the waters bathing the poor
countries. An illustration of most of the conflict between the capitalist
private interests and those of society as a whole.
That said, the State control of the economy cannot be sufficient alone to
address the problem. Well seen in the case of the former Soviet Union: the
bureaucratic management by a caste privileged to power led to a disregard
of the natural environment and the risks to the community which was

illustrated by the Chernobyl catastrophe, but also, for example, by that of

the Aral Sea.
Here also, no prospect in the long term, but rather a short-sighted
management, resulted in dramatic consequences.
In the 1960s, to develop irrigated cultivation of cotton in the Kazakhstan
desert, it turned away the greater part of the waters of two major rivers
supplying the sea of Aral, and all this without precautions but using
excessively fertilizers and pesticides. Results: this sea level fell by some 15
metres, its surface is reduced, wildlife disappeared, and, at the same time,
almost one-third of irrigated land is experienced, and was rendered unfit for
cultivation. All these consequences includes a dramatic increase in human
mortality in the region.
The existence of official "plans" may not be sufficient by itself, as if it
were mere technical instruments. It all depends on what objectives they are
designed: the interests selfish and myopic bureaucrats the power holders, or
those of the human, present and future community.
And everything also depends on the degree of democracy in the
functioning of society, because the development as the application of
medium and long term plans for the benefit of the human community, in the
environmental field as in production, require conscious and informed of all
participation and all.
In any case, the collective dimension of environmental problems calls
emergency reorganization on a collective basis of society across the world.

The Communist society, or the mastery of man

with nature and the biosphere reports
The power coming out of the proletarian revolution under the banner of
communism will put its priority in this area where the application of the
criterion of the benefit is particularly unacceptable: that of food of all
human beings human. It will give is tasked with immediate, essential, to
restore to the populations of the countries looted by imperialism around the
world practical opportunities for a dignified and human life.
No offense to all critics of alleged overcrowding in these countries, the
resources pooled humanity would properly feed billions of humans that they
regard with contempt and fear both.
That their system is down and its leaders apart from the power to harm,
and tremendous resources would be released.
Stop the wars and expenditure on armaments, the conversion of this
industry's death in manufacture of goods to the population, that already is a
major step forward that would be made possible. According to a UN report
which dates from a few years, emergency in the world for drinking water
necessary expenses would be over ten years that three months of military
spending. Alternatively, the price paid for two warships by the Malaysia in

1992 would have been enough to provide drinking water for a quarter
century to the five million inhabitants of this country that lack.
Another mess that it would be possible to remove very quickly: one who
accompanies the farming and ranching in the current conditions. After
Fallows, milk quotas, the destruction of fruit or vegetables deemed surplus
by report number of creditworthy buyers, that is it begins to shoot down with incentives to support - all young calves almost new-born by the
thousands on channels specially upgraded for this. Indeed, if their birth was
essential so that mothers produce milk, they then become unnecessary under
this incredible reason that, if raised, they could "dangerously increasing"
market beef already saturated and in crisis... in Europe.
A common agricultural policy, but this time common to men and women
of the Earth, and no longer subject to the interests of the multinationals of
the food industry, would now be in the realm of the possible. Karl Marx said:
" agriculture, as it progresses (...). without be dominated consciously,
leaves deserts behind it .
This is why we are fighting so that time of conscious domination come!
Because, again, this is not industrialization itself which is necessarily
involved. Between 1950 and 1985, the world production of grains could be
multiplied by 2.6 - largely through the applications of chemistry. Famine was
prevented. Not all, but it has been undeniable progress, even if it was very
poorly distributed. The decline showed that the consideration of ecological
status of soil and water is heavy, but this is due largely to the fact that this
policy was carried out under the direction of the multinationals of the food
industry, whose profits in this case were also massive use of pesticides and
fertilizers in Asian campaigns. And use rational these products, which would
allow an effective and far-sighted agriculture at the same time, is
conceivable.
In another company, research is now more subject to the competing
interests of trusts, which lead him to focus more to industrial problems only
to those consumers, agriculture, chemistry, biology sciences, may give their
measure.
Only on the basis of the industries and current techniques, humanity has
potentially knowledge and means making it all the more scandalous to this
whole mess caused by capitalism.
Satellites to gather a wealth of information on the land, on the evolution
of its vegetation, etc. Today, organizations such as CNES do pay rights on
access to these images, private companies amounted to market them, and as
it costs the multinational agri-food or forest can easily have them.
But this mass of images and data could, in another company, constitute a
valuable tool for an inventory of the common natural resources of the Earth.
Ecological science as a whole, with considerable means, there would any
other development and could offer the company opportunities to master its
relationship with nature in the collective interest, and in the long term. This

is more utopia - at least on the condition that humanity will be able to get
rid of the shackles of the capitalist economic system.
In today's society, scientific knowledge being reserved to a small
environment, type environmentalist concerns are often quite nebulous, or
well are more parochial than to the general interest. They can also be, seen,
manipulated by the profiteers of the economic system in their interests. It is
only in a socialist society, that such concerns about the place of the man in
the living world and its terrestrial environment, would be part of the main
general concerns.
At the moment the mortgage of the race for profit and especially the
political, commercial and industrial confidentiality, would be lifted
confidence may be established totally dependent on information sources.
Unlike what happens today where, as soon as a media campaign is launched
on any environmental issue, suspicions are legitimate as the issues it may
well cover up.
Communist society is the only company that can make its choice in the
General transparency. The only one that will allow that it debated publicly
of small and large projects, for example locations and the proportions to
give to such industrial investment projects that will be only social and
technical criteria and their possible consequences, at least the foreseeable
consequences on the entire biosphere as appropriate.
When he came to conduct the Gulf war, US imperialism has proved to be
able to manage all logistical aspects from extremely efficient data centers,
located in the heart of the United States. So, why couldn't a society without
competition to use such means to rationally consider its regional, even
global projects, technique coming provide men with the maximum
information? The goal would be that exciting, including engineers and
scientists involved...
Any human activity entails risks. No technique is neither good nor bad in
itself.
Without any doubt, all technological risks, all the ecological perils will be
not excluded by enchantment. But at least they could be consciously
assumed by a social organization which would be truly democratic.
In saying that, we are not dreamers. We do not serve that the fixing of
priorities of the company will go without conflict. Preferences individual,
local, etc., will not automatically with coincide social priorities at any time
and in any place. There is no reason to think that social life lose its
animation, on the contrary even...
Because in a socialist society, all will not be paid from a central
computer. Decentralization will be much larger than today ' hui. But the
decisions to be taken at the local or regional, escape parochialism, because
they will be the fact of beings fully informed people, and catches on the
basis of a social conscience that class societies cannot imagine.
We do not say that errors and damage will be impossible. However, to the
extent where the impact of the race for profit will be eliminated, and wider

and more direct democracy, even these errors are more easily identifiable in
a timely manner.
Yes, such a society truly and for the first time to the extent of human
capabilities is possible.
Progress can and must be organized to make the life of man less and less
precarious, and increasingly rich at all levels. It can and should be used to
control by man, not nature, but its relationship with nature; It can and must
be used for the safeguarding of the heritage that represents for us all the
great diversity of life forms; It can and must serve to respect for all human
beings live.
As one can imagine the biosphere without man, but not the man without
the biosphere.
And if human change the nature, he can perfectly do without degrading its
environment.
So, even though we are sometimes on the side of environmentalists in
some occasional fights, we campaigning as for us to attack evil at its root. If
the irrationality of the capitalist economy threatens perhaps, indeed, the
very survival of humanity, we campaigning for crucial social revolution which
is before us, which will pave the way for the establishment of a classless
society, i.e. of a society which can only be fully human.
It will be possible to ask to try and recreate the primitive forest in
Beauce, to make the polders of the Netherlands to the sea, to create new
industrial zones in Africa or transform large parts of this continent in natural
reserves, if it is better to save the Amazon forest than to transform it into
new pampa. And we can then do so honestly, without hypocrisy, because all
the economic resources of the planet will be put at the disposal of all the
peoples of the Earth, of native American and Europeans, inhabitants of today
developed countries like those in regions where imperialism has sterilized all
economic development.
Communists and internationalists: there is no other way to defend this
common heritage of humanity that is the Earth.