ACFM - ACFM Trip 57: Ecology

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

Are humans distinct from nature? Are there natural limits to inequality? Can you have action without effort? Do bacteria have agency? Jem, Nadia and Keir find themselves dwarfed by the concept of ecology in this planetary-scale episode, which touches on cybernetics, systems thinking, ecofeminism and actor-network theory. Their ACFM guide to ecological thinking includes ideas […]

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Keir Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And in today's episode we will be talking about ecology. So guys, why are we discussing ecology at this moment in time? This is part of our long-running series about the different political formations that the UK left is

has taken up over the last six months or so, or the changes that have taken place in the UK left. So we did one, an episode on parties, and then talked about your party, the new left formation, includes Jeremy Corbyn and Sarah Sultana. Then we talked about the concept of the mainstream, and then the new faction within the Labour Party called Mainstream.

And we're continuing that theme by talking about ecology, and then we'll do a microdose and talk about the Green Party, which is led by Zach Polanski. As a nice added bonus to that, I think that the idea of thinking ecologically or thinking about the left ecologically or thinking about the left as an ecosystem is actually a really useful way

of talking about this situation, the reason that we wanted to do all of this series on political formations, because perhaps thinking about the left as an ecosystem is a way to piece these things together or the way to think our way through this problem in which the UK left is split between different organisations

and we need to think about how they relate to each other. That's a nice reason to talk about ecology. There's also like we'd probably go into the history of ecological thinking and where it comes from. Are there any dangers involved, etc., etc.? It's obviously a really important concept. And it's an idea that has repeatedly over the course of my lifetime been put forward as a sort of master idea

or, you know, maybe Master's not the right term, but that kind of key central idea that might replace, like, revolution or class struggle or any other key concept for radical politics. I don't think anyone's actually proposing that at the moment, but it's interesting to think about why that occasionally happens. Yeah, I think what both of you guys said is really interesting and kind of frames what we're going to talk about.

I think what I would add on to that is, I think there's something about the kind of cyclical, nature or, you know, the return to and the kind of rounded, both metaphor and frame in which for viewing how human beings and how nature, you know, and we would be making the argument, you know, I hope, well, I definitely will be that, you know, human beings are not apart from nature, but we are part and intrinsic to nature. And that's part of the, the arguments that have, will be made by a lot of people who are going to discuss in this episode of, you know, why the environment is intrinsic to, you know, our survival or like understanding the world and where

we place ourselves. So I think there's something there's something there's something there in the imaginary as well of understanding networks, people, relationships, processes through this prism of ecology that's really useful, apart from the fact that also, you know, talking about like the environment and the natural world and how important or sideline that has been in terms of understanding other things like, you know, progress, development, left-wing politics, etc., over history has been. So those are some of the reasons why I think that's important. I'm sure that relates very closely to all of the stuff that you guys said, and I'm really excited to be talking about this topic today. But before we get

into this episode, we should mention that. You can go even we're there and left here by subscribing to our newsletter, which we now send with every new trip, so it's no more than once a month. and it's always got some fun bonus content from one of us and updates from the ACFM crew. So if you're not a subscriber, please do subscribe and sign up at Navarra.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. And for more music and less chat, follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM. Also, it makes a huge difference to us listeners and helps us beat the algorithmic lords. If you give us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on, we love to read your

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If we're talking about ecology, we should play some songs about ecology. So the first one that comes to mind is Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell. Johnny Mitchell is a Canadian singer-songwriter. It's a song from 1970. famously has the chorus. You don't know what you've got till it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. The song was written when she was,

I think it was her first visit to Hawaii, and she got there in the middle of the night to a hotel, got there, woke up in the morning, flipped the curtains open, expecting to see beautiful nature. In the distance, there's some beautiful hills, and then it's a huge parking lot spread as far as she could see. They paid paradise, put up a parking lot.

With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paid paradise, put up a parking lot. Shall we start with a little bit of history, so what this concept of ecology even is? Well, I mean, the term, as far as we know, the term ecologies first coined in the 18. 60s by Ernst Tykle and it supposedly means the science of the relationship of the

organism to the environment. The information I've got is it comes from Oikos, the Greek for household, that's also where economy comes from, economics comes from. So I guess technically economics is to do with counting things in the household and ecology is just to do with

studying things. But obviously there's a sort of conceptual tension between the ideas of economy and ecology from quite early on. When we talk about ecology now, we probably, what immediately comes to mind is environmental, ecological crises. But like the sort of conception of what ecological thinking might be, we could probably trace back to the invention of this idea of ecosystems, which is proposed in 1935 by this guy, Arthur Tansley. His sort of innovation is to start to think about, look at life as though, from the point of view of like a flow of energy, basically, a flow of energy across networks. And so from that we start to think about things such as like the web of life, that sort of idea.

One of the other innovations of Tansley is to think about this flow of energy as tending towards some sort of form of homeostasis, basically. You know, from that you get ideas which become much more prominent, actually, after the Second World War around system series and cybernetics, this idea of like there are feedback loops, basically. there are feedback loops which keep these flows of energies across ecosystems, some sort of idea of balance, basically. So you can already start to see that there's some sort of, some of the more familiar concepts of the idea of natural balance, the web of life, etc, etc. Already we can start to see that that's the root of them, basically.

We could relate that to much older ideas around cosmic balance, etc., these sorts of things. You're probably a better place to talk about those, gem with your Buddhist tendencies, etc. So, I mean, the idea that there is some sort of a, there's a sort of natural cosmic order which can be disturbed, and disturbance of which is undesirable. That's a really old idea goes back in lots of traditions.

I think it's quite a spontaneous idea for people in a lot of ways. So you can think about in European ideas of health and medicine, like before the Renaissance, going back to the ancient Greeks as this idea of the balancing of the humors and that basically your internal energies have to be in balance with each other and if you're ill it's because they're out of balance.

That gets replaced actually by the idea that we still have today the idea that illness is mainly caused by viral and bacterial infection. Interestingly, I mean if you think about it, that is also a kind of ecological idea. It's the idea of the human as an ecology for all these organisms.

I think it's sometimes remarked in a way I think it's quite interesting that it's not actually like a total break with the idea of the humours, the way it's usually presented in the history of medicine. It's more that it's just much more complicated. It's just a much more complicated model. I mean, it is still the case that basically you want your body to maintain a kind of state of functionality because the different inputs and outputs are working properly and its internal systems, reproducing each other well.

It's just much more complicated than the idea that there's like basically four, qualities that you have to balance with each other. And also obviously in, well, not obviously, but also in Asian traditions, I would say particularly in the Chinese tradition of Taoism, for example, there's this idea that there is a kind of natural order to the world. There's a natural way in which the world should be ordered and this extends somehow from the social order right down to the way in which bodies should be looked after and that what it means to be a successful human is to learn to successfully work with these natural states and processes.

Of course, that's also within the framework of a philosophical tradition which really emphasizes like constant processes of transformation as being what defines that natural order or that natural way of things. The Tao is normally translated as the way. So there's this idea that you should be sort of, what it means to be a successful person is to be sensitive to kind of natural processes and a kind of natural order, but it's also an order which is defined by constant change. He is sort of open to change. You're kind of flowing like water. You're going with the flow. I think that's where the phrase goes with the flow. It comes from kind of 1960s attempts to translate some of those ideas. And then obviously those are all ideas. which of course historically can be really easily associated with certain kinds of of conservatism. I mean, I think in the, like in the Taoist tradition, they're mostly, it is

mostly associated with kind of anti-political ideas. Although the argument you can make is that's in the context of a really long history of like imperial China within which, you know, the chances of any form of sort of political organization or involvement actually improving. things for most people seem to be like zero. So the advice of the sages was just like, don't, don't try to get involved. The sphere of politics is just, you know, it's just a sphere of kind of power struggles between violent men. And then, of course, also in, like in medieval and Renaissance Europe, there was this idea that there was a sort of cosmic order, which was reflected in the social order, the social hierarchy, kind of organically working well. And this was reflected,

is supposed to be reflected in the harmony of the heavens, the stars were supposed to map out our destinies in some way because they reflected the cosmic order, which was represented by the well-functioning society, which was imagined like an organic body with the different parts or necessarily supporting each other. And, you know, those sort of ideas are all, they're really ingrained in lots of traditions.

have a kind of inherent conservatism, although they also, of course, they're also, they end up becoming the basis for like early critiques of capitalism as well, when people start to say, well, actually, the emerging agricultural bourgeoisie, just want to take all the land for themselves without any thought, what the peasants are going to do if they're thrown off the land, and they're creating all these theoretical justifications for doing that to their, to peasants in places like England and doing the same thing to indigenous people and the places are starting to colonise the first recourse people have for philosophical frameworks which can critique all that is this idea well what these people are doing is actually disturbing and the natural

balance that they're they're overstepping the bounds of the amount of power and greed which people in their position are supposed to exercise and you know they're abdicating their responsibilities to play a functional role in the social organism by looking after the poor and the peasants. So there are always ways of thinking about the world that can sort of go either way in terms of whether they have some critical or emancipatory potential or whether they're just inherently conservative and like hierarchy hierarchy reproducing. Just to illustrate that, I rewatch that Adam Curtis documentary.

So it's in a series of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. And there's an episode of that called On the Misuse's Uses of, of vegetal concepts, which is a great concept. And he gets that actually from a dispute between Arthur Tansley. So this conception of ecosystems, what that adds to like these older ideas of natural balance, etc, etc, is that we see that as a flow of energy, basically. So the energy comes from the sun, the solar anus, as Batali would put it, giving out this energy and, you know, sort of phytosynthesis, etc. You know, animals eating plants, animals eating, animals, plants eating animals every now and then as well. Basically, that allows a sort of flow of concepts

into things such as social systems, but also into things such as electronic systems, etc., which is you get that flow of ideas into cybernetics, etc. We'll come back to that a little bit later on. Tansley gets into this argument with a guy called Field Marshal Jean Smuts. And Smuts is invented in sort of like late 30s. He's invented this philosophy called Holism, which he associates with Tansley's conception of like ecology, etc. Because he thinks there's a natural order that he models on the British Empire. So everything has got its own place in a way. You know, a natural order managed by the white race, obviously, because it's modeled on the British Empire.

And it's that that Tansley calls an abuse of vegetal. concepts, basically. He says that he smuts has got it all wrong. It's not a conservative thing at all. But that's just the tension that runs right the way through ecological thinking, basically. Because if there is some sort of idea of homeostasis and a natural order, then what is the natural order that's being preserved, basically?

And, you know, that in Adam Curtis's documentary, in a perfect Curtis way, he links all that. through to this whole field of cybernetics, etc. Which is this idea of feedback loops and then and system series which comes just before cybernetics and originates with this guy of Ludwig von Bertha Lenthe, is a naturalist and so he's creating this incredibly reductive model of an animal interacting with its environment.

That model looks like a black box with a series of inputs and outputs and then a feedback loop which turned those outputs into inputs. that's an incredibly reductive model and it's so reductive it can be applied to all sorts of things can be applied to social systems, it can be applied to mental systems, etc.

There's a big line through 20th century philosophy which is trying to come to terms with this, basically. Partly it's time to come to terms with the thing that Jim mentioned earlier is that we can see ourselves as ecological systems. We talked about this and we talked about the gut. We contain multitudes, not just in terms, potential, not just virtual multitudes, actual multitudes, you know, we've got all this bacteria in our

stomach, and that can have real impact on our mental states, for instance, right? It's not just that we contain these things, we're in an ecosystem with them. This is one of those concepts that descends human agency to some degree. We have to think about, well, how does human agency exist when we are, you know, we're an ecology within a whole sort of subset of other ecologies, do you know what mean, and particularly when you move it to thinking about social ecologies and mental ecologies, etc. You know, they're trying to work out what the room for human agency is, is a really big question that runs through 20th century philosophy, and we should probably get into that a little bit. There is a way of, you know, using these concepts of ecology, which take you to a place, which

lead you to effectively, like, quite a conservative understanding, especially with this idea of homeostasis and that there is a natural order of things. At the same time, you know, there's a way of using it as a critique of a sort of linearity where resources are there to be exploited for, you know, the quote unquote, you know, human progress. And so like, I think, I think thinking about that and for ourselves, I guess, coming to some sort of like balance with that in itself will be a thread that I'll be thinking about as we talk about not only the historical concepts, but also like how those are applied in actual kind of activism and understanding of the world. I mean, I would say that, you know, obviously, being female, that kind of,

there's something about the circularity of, you know, the ecological prisms, which is, you know, rings true with me, you know, women have internally to our bodies have cycles on top of, of course, the ecologies that you mentioned, Keir, in terms of, you know, gut, etc., which are interesting to think about in terms of also bodies and how bodies exist in space. So there's something about the kind of cyclical versus kind of linear understandings of time scale and also kind of how things change in society, which is interesting. But I think also just on a much more basic level, understand. Ecology also helps us, I think, and I'm sure we'll unpack a lot of this,

come to the point which any Marxian perspective, which I think would take, we're just this idea of going back to structures of like it's not just about individuals it's structures so if we're thinking about you know interconnected webs of relationships um you know it's not just about relationships in in in nature or in the gut or between humans and animals or whatever it's also in terms of like how power interfaces and how it interacts with each other and you know as this is a subject that is quite top of mind and top of top of heart for myself and a lot of other people you know, definitely women at this point in history. You know, it would be crazy not to mention, you know, the ecology of power, money,

relationships, you know, that have become very clear under this current story about, you know, Epstein and, you know, his pitophile ring, which is, it's kind of insane, I think, to a lot of us. You know, we recorded this whole episode on the cosmic rights a few years ago. And, you know, we were talking about all these conspiracy theorists. And, you know, it turns out that, that the, the, the conspiracy that there is an ecology of men who are using their power to abuse children is correct. And that is kind of blowing my mind at the moment. So that's one of the ways that I'm thinking about ecology.

There are two articles which I think I'll put in the show notes that I think show a perspective on this. One is by the amazing journalist whose name I'm going to mispronounce because I've never had to say it before. Carol Cadweller, I believe, who's the person. who exposed the Cambridge Analytica stuff, where she's making that argument. It's called, we all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world, and I'll put a link to it. But she's making the argument of like,

this is not just about individuals. This is an ecology. Even though she uses the terminology, broligarchy, which I think as in bro oligarchy, which brings about this idea of hierarchy, and I think actually what we're talking about here is ecology. So that's something that I've been thinking about. And the other one is kind of like the amazing,

Marina Hyde on this subject in The Guardian, who's obviously very funny, but she's making the argument of like, this is not about individual men, right? There is effectively like an ecology, which is, I think, what's most scary about this? So I've been thinking about that, and I've been thinking about, okay, what are the aspects of ecology that help us understand either specific incidents or kind of realities or how we organize ourselves in politics, which are helpful and useful and bring about, you know, a positive affect, but also how is the concept of ecology useful, but actually helps understand some kind of some kind of dark things, I think, about how structures and powers interface. I would probably trace contemporary ecological thinking, really, not just through the specific

instances of emergence of types of systems theory that we've talked about already, but really back to the reactions to the industrial revolution that start in the late 18th century with the emergence of romanticism, the beginnings of what you might call proto-conservationist ideas, as well as certain strands of conservatism, because up to that point, people haven't really worried that much about the relationship between human civilization and the natural world, which is even despite the fact that there has been, I mean, there's been really, like in Britain, and there's been really serious deforestation going on for like thousands of years, that really serious levels of deforestation.

And people had started to worry about it. They'd started to worry in the 18th century, actually, even before the effects of industrialisation had really begun to make themselves felt. They'd started to worry because the British economy and British naval dominance was really dependent on the supply of oak in particular for building ships. And people had started to worry, oh, if we chopped down like all the trees, people in Britain have been chopping down the oak trees we've sort of covered primeval Britain for like thousands of years

and people have started to worry what if they all run out, what we're going to do? And I guess you could argue there had always been ideas of like ecological management and land management and in medieval and pre-medieval agriculture and the way in which like hunting areas were protected or maintained. So there had always been some idea that you couldn't you couldn't just have everyone do whatever they want and expect natural systems to maintain themselves the way they need to be maintained. But obviously people start to become really concerned about this

when it becomes apparent that once you start getting whole towns devoted to industrial processes that produce loads and loads of pollution, then it can have a really devastating effect on the natural area around them. And at the same time, obviously, in the, in the, the spheres of cultural production like poetry and the visual arts, people start to get really interested in ideas like nature and landscape. But to some extent, the whole idea of nature, the idea of life as a kind of distinct thing from the world of the inorganic, the world of machinery and the worlds of industry and city life.

All these are ideas which take on a really distinctive form of the early 19th century. And so those are ideas which are around over the course, in the 19th century, this idea that there is something you can call nature, which is different from the world which humans are creating, and which humans are sort of distanting themselves from or exploiting in new ways, really with the exploitation of fossil fuels in order to produce modern industry. Another key impetus to thinking in ecological ways is obviously the development of the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution as a kind of systems theory,

as a theory of complex organic systems, in which many different components affect each other, it is really a huge factor shaping the emergence of all kinds of different ideas. Like, it definitely has a big impact on Marx, it has a big impact on the whole emergence of sociology, has an impact on various political traditions. And as I think we've referred to on the show before, there's obviously significant political contestation over what,

what is the implication of Darwin's theory of natural selection as driving the transformation of organic forms over millennia? One contribution to that discussion, which I'm sure we've talked about before, it's a very ACFM sort of contribution to mention, is Peter Kropotkin's great late 19th century anarchist work, mutual aid. I don't think we have talked about that before. We should have done. Peter Kropotkin, Russian anarchist, he's writing against the sort of bourgeois social Darwinists who are interpreting. Herbert Spencer, etc. Yeah, the people who interpret Darwin's theory of natural selection are somehow justifying existing social hierarchies

and also justifying the idea of like a highly competitive society as being somehow natural. and Kropokin just goes through all these different instances in the natural world of ways in which different species have evolved forms of interspecies cooperate, intra-species cooperation in order to advance the species and advance their health and well-being, etc. Symbiotic relationships, etc. Yeah, well symbiosis is to do with relationships

between different species, isn't it? And mutual aid is mostly about how within a given species, like it's natural for members of the species to cooperate with each other rather than compete with each other. Because the overall argument is, well, it's wrong to say humans have evolved to compete with each other rather than cooperate with each other. That's his primary concern. So you can not see all these as kind of early ecological ideas.

And then, indeed, as you were saying here, over the course of the 20th century, there's a lot of interest in various ways of understanding the ways in which social systems or mechanical systems, all natural systems can be models and can understand each other. There's a sort of process which involves at least three different trajectories. There's a trajectory which you could call sociological, which people are trying to figure out what it means to understand societies themselves as operating according to some kind of systemic dynamics that you can understand. rather than just thinking that what happens in history is it happens because various kings and queens have decided it

or because it's the will of God or just because of changing religious ideas. And obviously Marxism and historical materialism are part of that process. But so is the development of Dirk Heimian sociology and other strands of sociology. Then there's also the fascination with mechanical systems and thermodynamics and that sort of thing that obviously comes out of the industrial revolution. It comes out of people realizing that if you can understand the way which matter works and material things can work and industrial processes work, then you can understand a lot.

And then there's the study of natural systems themselves, the study of biology, if you like, which gets going quite late. Fouca, for example, says that, you know, you don't really have an idea of life as a specific object of study until the epistemological break at the end of the 18th century that he says produces the concept of life,

the concept of labour, can't even remember which is the other one. The three sort of abstract concepts he thinks emerged at the end of the 18th century. And then that study of kind of organic systems, it's often tied to a real interest in and a concern with complexity. Because one of the things you get happening,

lot of the time in that history is, well, people are all, people are looking at a really messy, complex set of phenomena, like whether it's, you know, the evolution of human, or the transformation of human societies, or the way in which human minds work, and people are always tempted to try and find, like, simple ways of understanding them, like, oh, it's all, it all works according to the logic of the dialectic, like, the, the kind of simple dialectical materialist idea, there's, there's one inherent contradiction that defines every social formation. It's the playing out of that contradiction which will take you to the next stage. Or the tendency of people to always think that you can understand the human mind in terms of whatever the key technology of the time is. So

in exactly the same way, like right now, the AI people want to claim that they figured out how brains work because they work like computers. Like, you know, 50 years ago, it was like, oh, brains work like, brains work like electrical circuits. And 50 years before that, it was like, oh, human minds, they work like, you know, steam engines or something. So people are always doing that. But the thing that's really striking is when you, if you just go to look at how natural systems work and try and figure it out, they're just super complex. So there's always this interesting association, I think, between people being interested in, like,

natural models of how things work and a recognition of just how common. complex, all other kinds of systems, including social systems. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there's something else that's at play that I was thinking about as you were like going through kind of the chronology of this, Jeremy, which is, you know, we like talking about consciousness a lot on ACFM. And I was thinking about, you know, at what point does there become? And I'm thinking about, you know, the Western world here and specifically, you know,

Britain and the Industrial Revolution, et cetera. At what point does there become this conscious? Like basically, when do we go from, are we going to run out of oaks bad because we need them for the ships to, are we going to run out of oaks bad because maybe it's intrinsically bad, or maybe at the very least, it's bad for us. So it's not particularly, you know, that I'm thinking about this from a moral perspective, but that this kind of consciousness that there are grave, grave consequences. Well, so it's already implicit in romanticism, and like the romantic appreciation of landscape and stuff.

Actually, there's something that makes us human about the relationship to nature, and if you get cut off from that, you're suffering in some way. And then in the states, for example, you get the transcendentalist movement. You get people like Walt Whitman and Ralforda Emerson who are really doing a sort of later version of that romanticism

and elevating it in a slightly more work how a philosophical sense. And they're, again, they're really, they're both reacting against, like, the rapid industrialisation of the American cities. And, but also they're kind of able to react against it imaginatively because they've got access to the American wilderness, which is just on a completely different scale to anything in Europe. There's nowhere in Europe where you can point to where, like, nobody has ever really lived. Like, there's loads of parts of the States that, like that. I don't know enough. I don't know as much as we probably should about what kind of conservationism there is in Britain or Europe.

I mean, maybe there's not much, I think there's just, there's not much in Britain, really. And the idea of conservation as a kind of social political project, the idea that you should preserve some of this natural space in order to, indeed, as you say, not so that you can keep exploiting it for whatever industrial or military purpose, but just because it's a good thing to have. I mean, that really gets going in the states. It gets going in the states with the, and it gets organized around the national parks movement, like the program of defending these huge tracts of wilderness and maintaining them.

And that partly does draw on transcendentalist ideas, which as I say, you can trace back to romantic ideas. I mean, it is also based on partly people seeing what's happened to Britain, which is Britain is fucked. You know, Britain has fucked its landscape by the end of the 19th century, frankly, because, you know, the United States is going through this intense program of industrialization in many different places. They don't want that to happen there. So I think that's how I would answer that as far as I know. I think it's really, it's really in the conservation movement that really

gets going in the States that you really have the idea that preserving that natural world for the good of everybody, not just because there's some economic reason to do so, really takes hold. It's really interesting history in the States where all that gets going. We should play mercy, mercy me, brackets, Ecology Brackets by Marvin Gaye, 1971. It's from the album What's Going On? And it's quite an early use of the word ecology in pop music, I think. Whoa.

Oh, mercy, mercy, me. Oh, things ain't what they used to be now. Where did all the blue skies go? Poison is the wind that blows from the Lord. Maybe something's Mainly ever since Of a source of knowledge for that is from farming, etc. So like Marx talks about like, you know, the depletion of the soil, etc., in capital.

Because he's drawing on like, you know, the latest, theories about soil depletion, etc. In capital, and he sort of talks about how capital undermines the original source of all wealth, he says, the soil and the worker. So it's not just a labour theory of value in a sort of crude way, you know, I mean, that leads us to the question of whether whether there is a theory of ecology in Marxism. I think there's pretty good evidence that there is, basically. And, you know, Marx talks about this idea of a metabolic rift.

You know, we metabolise food, we metabolise oxygen. etc you know we have bodies which take in the outside and metabolize them into energy these sorts of things like one way to think about what's humanity all about basically is that there's always this sort of mediation between humans and nature you know this metabolizing of natural systems etc this this sort of like the sort of enlisting of material energy flows most of which you know come from nature etc you know that's a transhistorical thing that all forms human society have to address this. How do we mediate this,

this metabolizing of nature, basically? That obviously puts humans and nature outside each other, but, you know, human and non-human nature, then, the metabolism of those sorts of relationships. And then, you know, Marx then talks about, you know, there's a primary mediation,

which is trans-historical. All human societies have to address this in some way, he says, but, you know, the big problem is, you know, capital is, is the way in which we mediate that. He talks about that as a secondary metabolism or a social metabolism, basically. And that causes what he calls this metabolic rift, basically,

this depletion of undermining of the basis upon which human civilization can continue. And so like Marx is writing that, you know, when's you writing that, late 80s, late 80s, into the 1870s, etc. So those ideas of soil depletion are obviously relatively widespread, I think, which is a form of the need to maintain some sort of natural balance, basically, or the idea that human interaction depletes the natural environment. Yeah, I actually think bringing up that term depletion is really helpful and also thinking about the soil.

I mean, I guess what I was thinking there is in the sense that, you know, historically, if you just even take Britain as an example, in terms of, like, people's culture and relationship to the land and herbalism and all of like the myths and kind of, like, the myths and kind of, of historical cultural understandings of the natural world and humans' interaction with them. And then at some point, you know, capitalism starts to extract so heavily and becomes the system on which all of that kind of thought or belief systems become secondary to the reality of extracting value, right? So regardless of whether theoretically, even if there were loads of

people who would object and say, you can't do this to the land, it's part of us, like it will kill us, like our ancestors know this. Like there becomes no. point because they're no longer in control, right? And so I guess I'm interested in that, and specifically what you're saying about this metabolic rift to this kind of Marxist idea, because in a way, my understanding of it anyway, with Marx, there still is this very strong linearity. It's like this is how social change happens. And while there might be kind of this incorporation of like the metabolism, there is still kind of an A to B to C to D in terms of what progress is. And this is, you know, and this is interestingly how I think when we were talking about

in the top of the show, like one of you guys mentioned this idea of like whether a concept like revolution can become usurped. And in itself, revolution, if taken literally, is also like to go round and round and round, but our understanding of it in a very crude sense when we think about it politically is like, well, you have a revolution, you know, for thinking about it. And then it leads to something else. And that's something else. It's like there isn't a cyclical sense. that, you know, but at the same time, when we think about a lot of these things in terms of like the different phases of capitalism, we often do think, and we've said it on the show, like we have been here before. Like this is just another iteration of or, you know, we can think about it in terms of the 20th century and about the post post-war kind of consensus and this idea of bringing in the welfare state as, you know, in a way, that's a kind of metabolic imbalance in capitalism. Like where we are now is kind of a more kind of thinking of. about everything in short-termism, like the high level of exploitation, because everything has to fit into the capitalist profit-making quarter, that seems to be more, quote, unquote, natural to

capitalism. So I'm trying to think about all of these things in terms of how we put the theories against the reality of capitalism, and also the understanding of ecology and those different frameworks. I'm going to thinking about this, all very interesting stuff as you guys are speaking. I'd say in Marx, arguably, there's a kind of tension between, there's, there's one. one version of the theory of history which says it's really about the unfolding of the relations of production which do undergo a kind of imminent process of evolution. I mean the forces of production I'd say the productive forces and once the productive forces reach a certain level of development then almost naturally there will be revolution because the class most associated with the leading

edge will be able to will will overthrow the one before so there is almost there is a sort of semi-cyclical process being imagined. And then it's often said that that idea is in tension with the idea of history as class struggle because that has a much more implies a much more unpredictable set of outcomes. But I think, I mean, I mean, my own view is the reality is, look, Marx is is quite consciously trying to describe a really complex set of processes and he's just, he emphasises different bits at different times, and he's often writing polemically. So I think any time you go to Marx thinking you've grasped some way in which he's being really simplistic or stupid. I think usually the people reading him that way are just not making any allowances for the fact that he's

writing polemically at a certain moment. You can have a version of ecological thinking and a version of Marxian thinking which would say that which would put those things like really in tension with each other. But I think you can also say look at like a properly complex ecological thinking doesn't actually think that natural systems are ever in a completely steady state. Like it tries to understand the ways in which there will be tipping points, there will be transformations, like evolution results in whole new species emerging, etc. And similarly, historical materialism is really about trying to understand the ways in which a whole range of complex factors will produce the context within which all kinds of actors

will exercise some kind of agency, but it'll never be like perfect agency, and it will produce all kinds of outcomes that are unpredictable, and in some cases, more or less predictable. So I think you can make Marxism completely compatible with a kind of ecological thinking. As I keep saying, I don't even like the term Marxism. I'd rather say historical materialism. Of course, that will have the advocates for dialectical materialism, like jumping up and down. And Engels, of course, wrote a whole book, The Dialectics of Nature, which is arguably the sort of basis for dialectical materialism, as codified later by people like Stalin and as distinct from historical materialism, which tries to understand the natural world itself as operating according to this

sort of law of contradiction. Like one force will be contradicted by countervailing force, and that will produce the final outcome. That is a kind of Marxian or post-Marxian theory of ecology quite explicitly, isn't it? It's a little bit like theories of evolution, which sort of descent... That's one of the theories that first sort of like decented human agency. And it's, you know, with evolution,

it's like, the most important thing is like what's the level of scale you're thinking about, basically. So are we thinking in terms of the individual? I were thinking in terms of the species. I'm thinking in terms of the gene, which is, you know, the sort of selfish gene sort of proposal a bit later. There's a certain thrill that comes with de-centering the human perspective, basically. And it's a little bit like that, if we think about it in terms of Marxism, right?

So there's a sort of Promethean sort of driving in some Marxism, which is, you know, we need to remodel the whole world to best accommodate human well-being or something like that. And by Promethean here, I mean the idea that we can ignore limits because we'll just be able to overcome them through sheer human will and effort. But then you have to resolve that with the idea, yeah, but like, you know, that Prometheism has basically proved to be in the 20th century, you know, a real dead end, basically, because it undermined the basis upon which continued human civilization could emerge. And then later on, you have even more of a sort of decentering of the human things such as actor network theory, such as Bruno Latour, these sorts of things in which, you know, agency is sort of given to everything. You know, we need to think of the chair I'm sat on now as an agent that I'm in. interacting with, etc., etc., etc.

Today's episode is about ecology and multiple uses of that concept. So let's hear a track with a title that alludes to one very interesting use of that concept in the annals of radical analysis. Mike Davis quite recently died in the past few years, very important American leftist, thinker, theorist, commentator. Maybe you wouldn't really call himself a theorist, certainly a strategist. He published a book, I think in the late 80s called Ecology of Fear, which is really about various aspects of kind of environmental and social politics in his native Southern California. And just a couple of years ago,

I think it's 2024. The British electronic music artist Ben Chatwin released, this track on one of his albums, and this track is called Ecology of Fear. Let's hear a bit of that. We should play Nothing But Flowers by Talking Heads from 1988. It is a sort of reverse Big Yellow Taxi, because in the song, David Byrne is imagining, sort of like a world that's been rewilded, basically.

It's got this chorus in it. No, actually, it's a verse in it which says, once they were parking lots, Now it's a peaceful oasis. You've got it, you've got it. This was a pizza hat, now it's all covered in daisies. It's sort of done tongue in cheek as though, from the perspective of somebody who now lives in an ecological paradise, but misses his Big Macs and pizzas. I mean, I think it's worth mentioning in the early 20th century, the contribution then made

of Henri Bergson, like in some ways, like the most acid, canonical, continental philosopher of the 20th century, mainly because of his 1911 book Creative Evolution, which he basically tries to say, like Darwin's wrong that evolution happens because of natural selection. It actually happens because of a kind of imminent will to evolve in all living things. It is pretty interesting. It's, it's one of the quirks of history, in my opinion, that Bergson didn't get like a massive revival in the 60s as a sort of psychedelic thinker. Like, he really, he should have done. Like, if you read Bergson today, you think, if you didn't know when he was from, you think this is, this is some acid head. Yeah. Even, even the whole durational time thing is like, really.

Yeah, yeah. I think he, I mean, well, I'm saying he wasn't. We, we don't know, like, he was mates with William James, who was like into mescaline. So we don't even know, actually. So we should explain durational time is more of like the subjective experience of time rather than like clock time or something like that. Yeah. That is interesting and it's kind of indicative of the way people are trying to think in the early 20th century, that people are really trying to work out how all this stuff works.

And people are trying to work through the philosophical implications of the fact that like Darwin is really understood as like the guy who has, convinced everyone there isn't a gods. Like much more than Marx, much more than any earlier physicists. People generally think Darwin is the guy because everyone up to Darwin the most widely held view among

a lot of philosophers as to the what is the argument for God is that it looks like the world has been intelligently designed. I'd say that's true to a certain extent. I mean I think like Emmanuel Cun in the late 18th century is already saying no, that's the only, actually the only argument for God is religious experience. You know, there isn't, all the

other arguments break down. But in terms of a kind of wider, less specialized understanding of what the philosophical consensus was, the idea that the world, the world is full of all these incredibly complex things that seem like they must have been designed by some kind of super intelligence really has a lot of purchase on people. With evolution, you know, what it's saying is that like more complex things can emerge from more simple things. So intelligent design is, well, a complex thing must imply a more complex thing in order to invent the simpler thing, basically. Yeah, this is the idea.

It's an idea going back to Aristotle and Plato. Like, how could a simpler thing, how could a thing, imagine a thing more complex than itself? It couldn't. Or how could a thing produce a thing more complex than itself? It couldn't, obviously, they think. And so, and Darwin has shown how logically as simple things can produce complexity in the, in and of themselves, like more simple things can give, otherwise. complexity and this really has blown people's minds and it's made people think there isn't a good argument anymore for believing in gods which has really freaks people out and berkson is kind of one of the responses to that there are i guess there are lots of responses to that and then but i would say in terms of modern ideas of ecology i think things really get going in the post-war period for a number of different reasons and one is

just the growing awareness of the implications of hyper-industrialisation and the development of the military-industrial complex and this sense that pollution is really becoming a problem. And it's true, it's true, it's really in the post-war period that, for example, the idea that really something has to be done about air pollution in places like Britain becomes a big political issue. I mean, it's easy to forget now because none of us have lived through it, but there was a really serious issue with air pollution, air quality, in places like London.

Like it was understood to be responsible for like hundreds of unnecessary deaths every year, the amount of smoke and fumes. Smog. Yeah, the mixture of smoke and fumes with fog, which went by the name of smog, was seen as being really bad for people's health. At the same time, the kind of the development of systems thinking into cybernetics, which is connected to the emergence of computers, computer technologies and the idea of cybernetics as maybe being a complete system, a complete

theory of all systems. I mean, really cybernetics, I think we talked about this before, I can't remember now, but so I think, I mean, technically, what's distinctive about cybernetics is, is it's a theory of self-regulating systems. It's a theory of systems within which outputs become inputs again, such that you get a kind of, you get some kind of a self-organized system. Well, that's the feedback loop. Yeah, the feedback loop.

And that is an idea which is being used mainly in the development of computer technologies, electronic communications, but it's an idea which has come from the study of natural systems, organic systems. I think that does give us another sort of historical grounding of why that sort of thinking, which does correlate quite well of ecological thinking. One of the drives for that was a search within, well, it's social sciences anyway, for like a value-free perspective, basically, because they didn't want to get into something which would lead you to Marxism, basically. And you're in a, you're in the, it's the period of the Cold War, etc.

And so you wanted to have to, like, we want some perspective, which puts us above this competition of resources between classes, etc, etc, etc., something that sits above it. Yeah, I would go further, even further along the same lines. And I would say the 40s, 50s through to the mid-60s, is the golden age of functionalist sociology, especially in the United States. under the tutelage of the great guru of functionalist sociology, the American sociologist Talcott Parsons,

who sees himself as the direct descendant of one of the founders of sociology, the French social theorist Emil Dirkheim. And he is committed to the idea that you can understand a society as a kind of self-regulating organism within which all the social classes perform particular roles. And the division of labour basically works in largely in everybody's interest. which, I mean, you can understand why if your main model is New Deal era American welfare capitalism, then, yeah, you can see why you would draw that conclusion.

You can see why you would say, yeah, modern societies basically work to everybody's benefit to a large extent. You can see why you would say that. But what I would also say, my view, my take on this is that that kind of functionalist idea, it becomes really predominant. It's partly, it's predominant in strands of, um, both European and American social theory, which draw on Max Weber and his idea of, like, his more negative idea,

but it's a powerful idea, the idea of the growth of bureaucracy and bureaucratic institutions is really the defining feature of modernity. And it's there in lots of strands of Marxism, I think. I think, like I think American, like Marxist social theory and German Marxist social theory in those decades, themselves become kind of overly influenced by,

so functionalism actually. So you end up with this idea that basically you have to be, even if you're a Marxist who's against capitalism, you have to explain everything that happens in society with reference to it supposedly being somehow functional for capitalism. It must be good for

capitalism. So you come to under, you theorise the emergence of the welfare state in these terms. People come to theorise the emergence of the welfare state as something that capitalists have been in favour of because it's better for the capitalists have a, a healthy workforce, like tended to by the state. And it's a really problematic perspective

because it ignores the extent to which the welfare state had to be struggled for and the extent to which, if it isn't defended, like violently, it will be taken away. Which is why eventually in the 70s and 80s, like people are turning back to pre-war figures like Antonio Gramsci for their understanding of the way of the complex nature of capitalist society, because a lot of academic Marxism had really lost sight of the centrality of class struggle and the idea that all social and historical outcomes are dependent upon the balance of forces within struggles rather than rather than understanding capitalism itself as this sort of self-regulating system. And so I would say there's a kind of, there's a sort of bad ecology that even infects

Marxist thinking, I think, in the mid-20th century through to the 60s. Just to emphasize how dominant this mode of thinking is those, like, you know, one of the more dominant theories in political science at this time is the black blocks theory of the political system by Robert Easton, who gets his model. It's that very simple model from von Burtle-Lanthi, again, of an animal interacting with its environment, you know, a black box of inputs and outputs in a feedback loop from which inputs become, which outputs become inputs, basically. And from that, you know, that's the basis upon which Dahl creates this theory of pluralism. You know, pluralism is this concept of like, no one part of that feedback loop, not one part of that system is dominant. In fact, you know, I think it's kept in a nice homeostasis because everybody has access to the political system and all this sort of stuff.

And from there, you know, even theories, US theories about trying to attempts to try to theorize social movements, you know, they take off, they depart from that very same model, you know, that social movements are part of this feedback loop, etc, etc, etc. It just becomes this incredibly dominant and very conservative model for which to interpret all sorts of social systems, basically. But I think it's also fair to say it's not just a good, you know, there are other theorists who depart in a much more radical way. So it's important to mention Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, okay, this book that comes out in 1962, which is all about basically the effect of

pesticides on, you know, the various different crops that I think mostly in the United States. And it's an important book to mention, I mean, not just because of the content of it, but it's one of those examples of how in the 20th century, like a piece of research or, you know, a popularly read a piece of work, eventually, you know, within a decade kind of leads to a policy change. because I think it's one of the first, definitely, you know, in the U.S., in the English language, like books, in that period that basically talks about the effect of pesticides in such a way where you create this kind of public consciousness. And that's, I think, one of the interesting themes that will be interesting to start thinking about, especially now as we kind of move through the 20th century in terms of, you know, talking about all of these concepts, about, you know, going back to the point that I made earlier, about how a change in understanding. of how things work or like new knowledge leads to this kind of consciousness. And, and, and, and this is one of the books that basically, uh, really affects how people think about

this and how they understand, you know, a product, uh, or a set of chemicals like DDT, what, which was, you know, becomes banned in, in, in, in, in 172 in the US, I think, whereas, you know, these sort of chemicals were, you know, used all over the world. And to be, to an extent, you know, definitely into the late 20th century, if not, you know, currently are still, you know, stuff that is now very much banned in the West and the scene is dangerous, not just to human health, but to the environment more largely, you know, a lot of these chemicals are still used in in a way that's kind of one of the things that capitalism is outsourced. It's like, we ban it in the West, so we push it on, you know, the rest of the world, etc. But going back to the West, you know,

this is quite a similar time scale to the creation of the first, like the first idea of the first Earth Day, which is 1970. And then you have, you start to have a lot of environmental movements as we understand them today in terms of like the self-organization and also like where it sits within the kind of activism and social movement milieu is around that same time. So I thought it's important to kind of mention that book because, you know, the focus on pesticides, I don't believe from my knowledge was kind of top of mind or top of policy before that time in the US at least and the UK.

Yeah, that's right, yeah. I mean, certainly in the States, like the publication of Silent Spring is remembered is this like earthquake that sort of initiated the modern conservation movement. Whether that's like overstated or not, I don't know, but that's definitely how it's remembered. And it was about how pesticides were polluting mainly kind of fisheries and, the birds. There were birds like ospreys. Remember there was a lot of concern about because they were eating the fish. And this was seen as having this kind of terrible effect on the environment. This starts to become like an emerging element of radical politics and culture in the 60s,

in 70s. I mean, obviously the 60s is reviving to some extent, romantic and early 20th century ideas about rejecting technology, rejecting industrialization, in some cases, rejecting urbanization, associating all of these things with an oppressive state and with hierarchical capitalism. At the same time, I think the idea of ecology as such, it takes on a particular life, he takes on a particular life in branches of cybernetics the British cyberneticist Gregory Bateson

starts to talk about the idea of an ecology of mind which then gets taken up in the 80s really by Felix Guattari himself with his book, the three ecologies, this idea that the best way to understand

like the self and the economy and politics are all in terms of kind of ecological logic. Can I just talk about a little bit more about Guatari? Because the three ecologies he's talking about there is sort of like an environmental ecology, a social ecology and then a mental ecology. And that sort of picks up on Bateson's idea that we can think about the mind in ecological terms. And like, you know, for Guattari. And Guatari is actually, he's engaged in green politics at this time in the 80s.

Yeah, he stands as a candidate in one of the regional lists for one of the regional lists for one of the green parties in the late 80s, which is something I used to point out to like Delusian cyber Goths in the late 90s. They really made them hate me, but they still hate me for that reason. They would get really, really angry when I point out that Guatari had in fact been literally been a green candidate in elections. Not very Nick Land thing to do. No. No, not really exaggeration, is it? And it goes back to that, like, how complex this gets, because he's talking about, like, this metamodalising of, or trying to get some sort of diagram of how these three ecologies

overlap and work together. We've still, I think, this search for, like, well, how do you locate agency within this? If my stomach biome is influencing my mood, is that a diminution of my, of my agency? Do I just have to try to nurture the right form of get biome in order to get myself? You know what I mean? I have to take that into account. the ways in which we are influenced by things, even though we're not aware of those influences,

perhaps something like that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, this is the key question. It's a key question for us, and it is a central question that runs through all of this thinking. I would say going right back to ancient Taoism, right through to Marxian engagements with ecology and the thinking of people like Deliz and Guittari.

That is the question. But what ecological thinking really challenges, our idea that we are these autonomous, separate, individual agents, making decisions about how we want to behave in the world and seeking outcomes on the basis of our personal actions. I mean, this is part of the point, isn't it? One reason the ecologies seems to be such a powerful idea in many ways is it's the implication of a complete rejection of any form of individualism.

You can't have any kind of individualism. And in some ways, it's a more comprehensive rejection of individualism, than you get in, like, in classical marks, even though I think it is, I think, I would say his rejection of individualism is already implies a kind of ecological thinking, actually. And the question then is, well, where is agency? Like, what is agency? Like, can you actually do anything? And, of course, the key thought within Anglophone conservatism, going back to the early

20th century, is precisely this, precisely the answer is, no, you can't. anything you try and do is going to just be messed up by the law of unintended consequences. I mean, this is my really crude summary of the thinking of, you know, somebody like Oakshot, the great kind of conservative philosopher of the 20th century, which is sort of descended a bit from Edmund Burke, who's Edmund Burke's rejection of the French Revolution is based on this idea that were the only successful social institutions are ones that have sort of evolved organically. Like you can't just have a revolution and create a load of new institutions. institutions, everyone will hate it, you'll just end up having to kill them all. It's still there,

it still is there today in the thinking of the very annoying English thinker, John Gray, for example, this idea of basically the law of unintended consequences means no one, you can't really have political agency, either individually or collectively, all projects fail, all careers end in failure, all projects turn into something completely different from what their originators intended. Therefore, you shouldn't really try and do anything. And if you do, you'll just make a mess of it and make things worse. I mean, this is a crude summary, but that is pretty much where it goes to. And I would say that's one way in which you can definitely interpret the tradition of things of both Buddhism and Taoism, and Taoism often has been interpreted as basically the first ever

iteration of exactly that kind of philosophy and as recommending, like, inaction. But there's also, there's these other interpretation, actually, of Taoism. I mean, there's this There's this really interesting concept in Taoism, the concept of a Wu Wei, which is supposed to be like action without action is how it's sometimes translated. But contemporary interpreters will tell us, well, it's a kind of exercise of agency, which is thought in these sort of ecological terms, is thought of as always being undertaken with the knowledge that, well, you know, whenever you kind of, whatever you do now will have a kind of ripple effect out into the world, which you can't. can't really predict, but you can try and be sort of sensitive and attuned to all that complexity, and you're more likely to have positive outcomes if you do that. And the fact that it will have consequences you can't really anticipate doesn't mean you don't do it. It means that it just means you're kind of aware that every time you move, you're creating ripples in a pond,

which you can't fully anticipate the later effect of. But that doesn't necessarily mean you don't do anything. And in fact, what you're supposed to do is try to cold. a kind of sensitivity to the full complexity of the relationships you're caught up in, which is in fact the thing we're always saying on ACFM is the thing we want to do. The thing we want to do is cultivate a consciousness of the complexity of the world and of our situation in it and of our own historicity. And so from that point of view, like ecological thinking, I think, you know, it is really powerful. I think it can be really, really interesting.

But you have to sort of learn to accept that a certain, fantasy of agency is unachievable, but also then go past that acceptance to realizing, well, that's not an excuse for just quietism and passivity either. I think there's another version of that conservatism, which is this, you know, that concept, our saying, sorry, not concept, everything is connected, you know, and as though just recognizing that is enough, do you know what I mean? But the problem is if everything is connected and we don't think about how they are connected and what might happen And if we experiment with pushing this bit a little bit, that just means that, you know,

the only attitude to take is some sort of like wonder at the sublime, etc. Do you know what I mean? They're basically all agency is impossible. And if everything is connected, well, you know, that doesn't get you anywhere. That's just a nice sort of thought, do you know what I mean? But it does also make me think about the connection between psychedelia, psychedelic experiences and this idea of ecology.

Because that insight that, like, everything is connected. is one of the places you get to through psychedelic experiences. Do you know what I mean? Again, it's important to think about when we think about this agency, like what the site of agency is, because under patriarchy for women, for much of history in many places, like the only space you're allowed to have some agency by patriarchy

is like the home and motherhood rather than like as an agent of change in the world or of your own life, right? And that's why I think when we come onto the economy, with feminism stuff, like there is a lot of that that have been, that's, you know, appeal to women who have kind of consciousness that's come through about, like, the role of patriarchy in their lives. Like, some of it is very problematic, like, of course, and can point towards conservatism and, you know, all sorts of other things. But I think, you know, that question, if we're going to talk about agency, like, I don't think that's applied similarly for 50% of

the population over history, you know. Yeah, and the other thing that happens is, that women, they're placed into the category of nature, basically. Exactly, which is part of the problem, right? Which is part of the problem. Yeah, I think that's completely right. Well, I would say with reference to psychedelic experience, I think, yeah, one of the problems, the great problems of psychedelic culture is the problem,

well, what do you do, if anything, with the insight that everything is connected? Because it might be revelatory and revolutionary, or it might just be quite banal and not really have any implications. or it can just lead you in, I mean, quite demonstrably, actually, if you survey psychedelic culture and history and contemporary psychedelic culture, it can lead you towards a radical conclusion, it can lead you to extremely conservative conclusions,

and it can lead you into the most banal forms of liberalism. Which is why, in my opinion, you know, everyone who's interested in psychedelics and psychedelic experience, you should be forced to study Marxism for the three years before you're allowed to take psychedelics. Nice. I like that. This is the tanky Gilbert version, which we are going to, get. No, it's a solid, it's a solid policy proposal. We've been solely lacking in knowledge

wish you, washing talk. I am, I am absolutely, I'm absolutely in agreement of that. I am all, I am all for that. Great. Let's get to Andy Burnham's stat. Yeah. This is we want. It's like, it should be legalised. There should be a licensing system. You should have to have at least, at least an undergraduate level qualification in social theory. You should be a at Marxism before you can dabble. Yes. I think what the correct, if we're allowed to be prescriptive about this, I think what the correct outcome is of understanding that everything is connected, is that relationships are paramount. That would be my argument.

As in relationships between people, relationships between people and structures, relationships between people and other beings and things that exist in nature, Like that is more important and instructive in terms of you understanding your life and your place in the world than your particular individual trajectory and hopes and dreams as if you don't exist in discourse with all of these things. Like that would be, that might be an argument. On today's episode about ecology and we're going to be doing a microdose to go along with this about green politics and the Green Party. Of course, we have to play Brian Eno. Ambient Pioneer, one of the most influential producers ever to come out of the UK, Brian Eno. His instrumental ecological pastoral anthem from 1975, Another Green World.

I was listening to producer Charles' podcast, No Tags, an excellent music podcast, no tags. Recently, I heard someone on that show expressing some skepticism. about the sainted Brian Eno. It's a very unusual position to hold that anything by Eno wasn't like complete genius, but an intriguing one. I've got this track in particular, I could take it or leave it,

but it's a classic of sort of ambient or really pro, really proto-ambian, sort of quasi-minimalist instrumental music of the mid-70s, sort of a bit like a Penguin Cafe Orchestra. as well, I'd say. But I think it's nice. It's another green world, Brian Eno. One thing we wanted to talk about is the fact that, well, there are versions of that just relational thinking, which end up being quite apolitical and quite banal. And there are

versions which don't. So in some ways, the most influential thinker of relationality, as theorists and philosophers like to call it in the past few, years, or at least the most influential in the social sciences, has been the French philosopher and social theorist Bruno Littor, who only died. Was it last year or the year before? Died in the last couple of years, Bruno Littor. And Bruno Littor is understood as being the key figure, the founding figure in what's come to be known as actor network theory. And I would say, I think we would both say, wouldn't we care, he's really one of a number of thinkers, mainly in the 90s, who borrow concepts from Deleuze and Guittari while removing the Marxism from them. The same move is

sort of made by Manuel Delander, the American thinker, and then it becomes really influential on, you know, those cybernetic culture people at Warwick. It's Deleuze and Guittari somehow without Marxism. And the most sort of respectable version of it is the Bruno de Torvo. And it becomes particularly influential in science and technology studies, where it becomes a kind of corrective to what is seen as the excesses of social determinism in theories of technology. So arguably the dominant paradigm in the sociology of science and technology. So in the 70s and 80s is one which would draw on various sources, including people like Raymond Williams, his book on television, things like that, which are very sort of. social determinists. In other words, they tend to lean very heavily into the idea that technologies emerge almost entirely as an effect of power relationships. So basically,

technologies emerge when powerful groups want them and because powerful groups want them. You know, there's these classic stories about how supposedly Roman inventors came up with the idea for the steam pump, like thousands of years ago. But this is supposed to have happened even during the reign of Alexander the Great, I think, and the stories are, well, the authorities didn't have any use for steam pumps because they had loads of slaves. So it was only hundreds of years later when this technology, which could have been developed much earlier, actually gets developed because capitalists have a use for it. I mean, that's the idea. And actor network theory sort of evolves as it partly as a kind of counter to

that because it's the idea is that that way of thinking about things just attribute, doesn't attribute enough specificity to the ways in which the emergence of particular technologies has all kinds of effects that nobody's really intended or that nobody really planned, that nobody really can necessarily predict.

Like I remember, this is just by way of illustration because we like to talk about drugs on this show. I remember years ago, the first book I wrote, I co-authored with Ewan Pearson, it was a book about rave culture, and we had a section in there about drugs, and we took a very social determinist, which is based on the observation,

which is a correct observation, that MDMA had been understood in really different terms by different communities, like just since the early 80s, particularly around its kind of erotic potential. It had been understood in some context as like a sex drug,

like the sex drug, and in other social contexts as almost like an anti-sex drug, a drug that promoted like forms of tactility and emotional engagement that were sort of de-sexualized. And so it was this very social constructionist, non-deterministic idea of drugs.

And I was at some conference, and I didn't go to this session, but somebody came out of this session I hadn't been in and said, oh, yeah, this person was doing an act-to-network critique of your book. And I was like, and I never even knew what they actually said to I had to try and figure out for myself, like, what would be an act-to-network critique about book? And I asked somebody what they've been talking about. They said they'd be talking about the stuff about drugs.

And then I thought, well, what would be an act-to-network? critique of that, but analysis, and I thought, well, actually, an act to network critique of that analysis would be, would say, okay, yeah, like MDMA, it can have a range of different meanings and uses, but like no one's ever going to use it as a sleep aid, like no one's ever going to think it's a cure for insomnia. Like, it has some physical properties which actually do things to the body and the brain chemistry, which you can measure, which you could give a range of possible meanings to, but it's not a completely elastic set of meanings. And as such, you have to understand that in a way, MDMA, is a sort of technology which actually plays a kind of active or a

semi-active role in the whole assemblage of forces that includes like music and clubs and dance floors and bodies and laws and people and DJs, which produce the experience that people will have on a dance floor or whatever. And like it is quite a powerful idea and it is an idea which you can perfectly well use in an analytical framework. that does have, for example, a broader critique of capitalism, a broader understanding of forces like capitalism and patriarchy, but it often isn't. The way in which that network theory developed in the English-speaking world

and to a certain extent in France as well, the way in which Luthor's thinking developed, it tends to present itself as an alternative to, and in opposition to, what it thinks of as these big, abstract theories like feminism and Marxism, with their boring old obsession with supposedly deep power structures and really long histories. And it thinks of itself as having this much more flexible, looser, but also more realistic understanding of the world because they're not interested in making assumptions about whether

a corporation is going to exploit workers or not. You can't really know that until you've gone and studied the exact relationship between every single person in the corporation and all their customers. only then could you even begin to determine whether they've actually been engaged in any form of exploitation or not. Maybe that kind of moralism would just be kind of meaningless anyway. So that's my sort of crude summary of you had the network theory. Kiddi, can you add anything to it? I can actually.

I can make it even cruder. No, I mean, my experience of actor network theory, quite a lot of people. When I used to teach at the business school in Leicester, quite a lot of people who were into science and technology studies and brewers. or Latour, et cetera. And it was a way of engaging with the sort of ideas that you might find in Delisical Otari, but removing any sort of political implication from it, basically. There's very little political implication involved in an actor network theory. You know, and for me, a lot of it didn't get very far beyond, you know, everything is connected, man. The most recent sort of example of like a resort to actor network theory, Latour,

in order to escape certain political implications is from, there's this very well-known, an historian of contemporary political economy, Adam Toos, really, really big figure. You know, there are people who are called Toos. I may even be one myself, I read quite a lot of him. And he got a critique in the new Left Review from Perry Anderson, which was pretty aggressive, but like, you know,

a really serious critique, basically, of Adam Toose's inability to sort of take into account the idea of capital, in a sort of Marxist way. And Adam Tooz says this notoriously refused to write a reply. And instead, he resorted to act a network theory and sort of said, you know, all theory must be, must be written, media res, in the middle of things, basically. You know, you're in the middle of things. You're just trying to, you know, work out, work out things from there, basically. And there's no way you can get back to sort of like original structures or structures that might give you some sort of implication that we have to act in a certain way. There is politics involved.

in Adam Tews. And he's sort of an interesting character. He's a left liberal, basically, and he's as seemed to being pushed again towards the left. But it was just a refusal to deal with Perry Anderson's critique because he basically might have to become a Marxist, is what I think, you know, was my interpretation of that. And I think quite a lot of other people's interpretation of that. And where do you go if you want a place to hide? You go to Bruno Luton. I mean, I think that's right. It's also, it comes back to the comments we were making earlier about psychedelic culture. I mean, the dominant strand of psychedelic culture, especially in Britain, I would say it is a kind of Latourian hippie liberalism,

which, in which, I mean, it's really connected to new age culture. So it really kind of, it really plays down what Eric Davis would call the weirdness of psychedelics in favor of making psychedelics, just like one other thing you might do alongside like Kiegong and Gong baths and Massard and aromatherapy, and the objective of all of it is entirely to sort of put yourself in a state of, you know, sort of compliant relaxation amid the horror of late capitalism, rather than confronting it and fighting it and kind of really raising consciousness. Because it descends agency, we don't know quite where agency sits. It removes questions of strategy, basically.

Exactly. Well, you can't have a strategy. I mean, Latorianism, it is a kind of philosophical, or analogue to that sort of anarchism that became so frustrating in the late 19, 30, 20th, 20th, 21st century, which really literally associated any demand for strategy with Stalinism. And just said, well, if the only kind of politics you can do is like the short-term action, you know, anything more than that, even to ask, is this actually achieving anything, is to be a sort of, you know, a sort of bureaucrat, an agent of the,

state. And let me just do this little bit, right, because with this decentering of agency and all this sort of stuff, you know, one of the drives towards the prominence of like ecological thinking at the moment is our absolute catastrophic ecological crises. Do you know what I mean? And, you know, basically it probably is because we have separated humanity away from an understanding of our embeddedness in ecological networks that, you know, is part of the reason. and what we're here, and that allows social systems to build up such as capitalism, etc., and other sorts of forms of oppression. But, like, there's an implication in this, the fact that we've moved from, like, the Holocene to the Anthropocene, where there is human action, which is,

you know, which is dominating the sort of natural environment, etc. It's human agency that is moving all this matter around the world, etc. We're the ones who can, who, who, if there's any future archaeologists look in and trying to name this era in, a sort of geological terms, it would be the Anthropocene, the era of human agency. That has an implication, like, you know, that means that human agency totally embedded within our understanding of ecological thinking, but human agency nonetheless is the thing that has to put it right. Because who else is going to? A load of bacteria, you're going to take the perspective of bacteria and expect it to solve climate change, though you're fucking not.

You're really hating on the bacteria. You are so... I'm not hanging on the bacteria. I've already admitted that part of the reason I'm against... That flora are really important for serotonin, and we care about serotonin. Yeah, no, no, but I did say we have to understand that. You have to understand that and work, you know, be attuned to that, their embeddedness in all of these networks, etc, and try to understand how to act in that way. You know, there's somewhere to go for that.

You can go to places like Dillismuattari, etc., who harm all this theory. But, like, in Dillismuatari, there's all sorts of strategies. jicic and tactical thinking. Do you know what I mean? You know, yeah, we need to experiment, but we need a safe place to go back to retreat, all of this sort of stuff, do you know what I mean? And that is exactly what's removed from actor network theory and Latour. Yes, I would quote a friend of the show, Jason Reed, who said, Bruno Latour supplied liberalism with an ontology it never needed, which I think is about right. But of course, that's not to say that, like, thinking or actor network theory are necessarily reactionary.

Like you can make really good use of that Latourian analytical methodology. Whether you're talking about technology or you're just talking about sets of social relationships, it can be really useful. Like actor network theory can be really useful for thinking about questions like, well, how do particular government departments end up producing particular policies? Like it is because these very complex sets of relationships between different actors, different agencies. Like that is a potentially really useful perspective.

But it's only really politically or analytically useful. in a comprehensive way, if it's tied into some wider critical perspective, some wider critical perspective on the ways in which networks of action, to use their own terms, can become highly solidified on a really grand scale and can have consequences over long historical phases, which is exactly what kind of critical understandings of social relations try to get us to pay attention to. And so I think you can only really do that if you do have an understanding

that the relations in which we're caught, up all the time. They're not only the kind of immediately and relatively spontaneous like relations of everyday social complexity. They're also the relations constituted by big, big structures and patterns of power. And I think, so now I think we want to talk about some approaches to ecological thinking which do pay close attention to those big structures of power and those big histories of power. And obviously the most, well not obviously, but in my opinion, the most, well, actually, I think it is pretty obvious. I think the people you say it's not a perverse, but the oldest and the biggest of those structures of power is

patriarchy. So I think we should come back to this topic which Nadia already alluded to early, the topic of eco-feminism. Yeah, yeah, I think it's important to introduce it to, you know, listeners who might not necessarily know what the basic tenements of this are before we talk about specific theorists or arguments kind of form and against from within that tradition. Okay, So the basic thing here is that overall eco-feminism is arguing that effectively the domination of nature, like in the extractivism that we've been talking about, and the oppression of women effectively are historically and structurally linked, right? And this is because patriarchy and capitalism are like intrinsic to each other, right? And basically one of the top line arguments that are being made is sort of the kind of thing like, that there's something around the logic. I think the logic is an interesting thing to think about here, or interesting prism.

That's the logic that is used to justify the exploitation of the environment and resources, etc. And that part of that extractivism and the understanding of a hierarchy within that, like man's domination over nature, etc., are kind of the same logics that are used to justify gender inequality. Right?

But then also there is the argument. that's been said that, you know, women are often disproportionately affected by ecological degradation. I don't think everyone's making the argument. That is one of the arguments that is made. And then this idea that, you know, the role of women within environmental care and resistance is kind of like part of what eco-feminism kind of is trying to make the argument for. Then, of course, you can be looking at it from the perspective, okay, like, what is one of the general arguments of how it should be changed. This idea, which of course can take you down a kind of essentialist route.

I don't think that's necessary that it does, but it can. We'll talk about the critiques in a minute. This idea of a more relational, care-centered and cooperative way of organizing society. Obviously, it's not only women or eco-feminists that have been calling for this. But again, as we mentioned earlier, the importance of interdependence, right? So interdependence between humans and the so-called natural world, even here that kind of juxtapose, I think, I think, classically, obviously some eco-fivanism would say we are nature, we are from nature.

So I think this idea of like gender injustice and kind of ecological extractivism, like making that explicit connection, I think, is effectively like the central point here. I guess there's also something around where we can't solve environmental crises, you know, and climate change, etc., without also transforming the unequal social power relations, right? Okay, so it says something about power relations between humans and nature and between, you know, men and women and sustainability overall. So I think that's kind of a kind of encapsulation, but obviously over history, especially 20th century to 21st century and with the climate crisis, there are different theories around this stuff, which I think we can touch on a few of those now.

There's also that thing we mentioned earlier about how women are associated with nature. You know, the division between man and nature, it was between man and nature. Do you know what I mean? That division between man and nature is being flexible, who's included in humankind versus nature. I think you can also apply that to the other great consolidations of power, basically, which is colonialism or imperialism. One of the justifications for imperialism in the 19th century,

somebody like John Locke, for instance, says it's absolutely fine to take the land off Native Americans and to massacre them, perhaps he wouldn't quite say that. Because, you know, they were there before we were, but they're not turning that land into productive land, basically. And it's because they just live with nature or live, you know, they live in tune with nature, we'd probably say now to some degree,

obviously cultivating nature to a certain degree, but like not wiping out, you know, the buffalo populations of North America or something like that. You know, it's precisely because that they're not prepared to maximize the productivity of land that they don't deserve to keep it, basically. And they're not in any fundamental way separate from nature. they are part of nature. Yeah, I mean, you can trace some of these ideas back a long way, arguably, I would say. I don't think the reason they're so old is just because they're venerable

and everybody respected Aristotle so much. They kept thinking the same way. I think the reason they survived for so long is because they support elite ideologies like going all the way back to ancient Greece. But, you know, it's there in Plato and Aristotle, this idea that there's basically a kind of hierarchy of being, which has God or the gods at the top. and then just below it are elite men who are understood to be better than everyone else and rightly in charge of everyone else because below them in the hierarchy are women and then

children and animals and slaves who are all understood as being inferior to them partly because they are in some sense closer to nature they're more defined by their bodies and they don't do the things which the most important kinds of humans do And in Aristotle's time, the most important kind of humans don't really have to do anything they own slaves to do all their work and they just sit around thinking. And by Locke's time, the thing that the most important humans do is they do, they basically do farming. They basically do intensive, proto-capitalist agricultural farming. And anyone who isn't doing that sort of deserves whatever they get, really. And plantations as well.

Yeah, yeah. With slaves. Exactly, yeah. My favorite thing about that Aristotle argument is that, like, it's like, again, it's that classic feminist argument of like, yeah, you want to sit around in the new. the thinking like who's cooking your clothes you know so who's cooking your food and making your clothes you idiot like do you know what I mean like well they get precisely proof that I mean he would think that well that's proof that women are inferior because they're doing that that's not I'm not saying he's right of course no no I'm not saying I wasn't suggesting that you were but it's just it's just it's

it's really interesting for me from a female perspective to be like well how is everything else that you I think your point about like not doing much like thinking not being doing I think is really important one here, right? Because it's part of it. So then it changes when it comes to being like, okay, well, around this idea of productivity, because I think there is a difference there. Because women are always doing, always doing. I think that's true. Well, there is a sort of continuity in the way in which capitalist ideology has to end up basically saying, well, the guy who comes up with the idea and comes up with the capital for the factory is obviously deserves to have like nearly all the money and the people who are actually working in the factory deserve to get

basically none of it. Only what's required to keep their bodies alive so that he can keep getting more profit. So there is a continuity, I think, going all the way back to Aristotle, even though these things take on different modulations at different times. But I think it's because of that history as well.

I think eco-feminism and eco-feminism, also in relation to kind of anti-colonial thinking, I think it is really powerful, isn't it? I mean, the critique of eco-feminism in the 80s end up being the basis for the sort of cyber feminism of people like Donna Harroway and you know Donna Harroway writes

her famous essay, I'd rather be a cyborg and a goddess in indirect relation to or just the manifesto for cyborgs which she explicitly describes as a socialist feminist document when she writes in the mid-80s she's reacting against particular

kind of Californian eco-feminism which have got very mixed up with New Age ideas that they've got mixed up with goddess worship ideas and this idea that you know what it means to be an eco-feminist is to have a very kind of essentialist understanding of the inherent difference between femininity and masculinity and men and women and this inherent like unbreakable link between women and the earth which can never really be you know can't really be challenged into any sort of political project other than a kind of ecological primitivism and because that's all happening in the

historical context of something, I think we'll talk about more in the microdata about green parties. It's also happening in the context of particular kinds of ecological politics in America in the 80s, taking on this very kind of anti-humanist and primitivist stance. You know, Harroway is really, she's reacting against these very negative, or these very kind of essentialist and conservative and politically pretty useless iterations of eco-feminism. And she's still often thought of now as having been this sort of enemy. of eco-feminism. But I think in a way you can understand here is actually just trying to do a more complicated sort of eco-feminism, actually. It's a more complicated eco-feminism which

recognises that, for example, like women's relationships to technologies have been just as important as men's relationship to technologies and have been part of the process through which, you know, they've been able to exercise any kind of agency a lot of the time. Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's lots of valuable stuff there. I think it's difficult. I can obviously see the different between the theory and the aesthetic. But, you know, like, I think that's the problem there, is that there's also an attraction to a particular kind of aesthetic for different historical reasons.

And, you know, while I think the, you know, the cyborg argument is like a very good provocation, like, you know, aesthetically, I'd much rather be a goddess than a cyborg, definitely 100%, you know. But I get why that's really important as provocation. Okay, a great hero of black radical spirit, ritual jazz from the United States, still alive today, 85, Gary Bartz. This is from 1973, a fantastic piece of music with an ecological theme.

This is I've known rivers. Rivers I have seen and rivers I have known ancient than the world and older than the blood. I've known rivers. I've known rivers. all through Africa and North America South America I've known river I've known rivers I've known rivers in the north and the south

I've known rivers in the east and the west I've known rivers all over this This is a really nice track from a recent British album This was released in 2023 Actually, I came across this because I was researching an episode of one of my other podcasts. Some listeners might be interested to know. We might not know. I've got two other podcasts as well as the fantastic ACFM.

One is the sort of music, culture and history podcast called Love is the Message. The other is sort of general politics and cultural studies. That's called Culture, Power Politics. And it was for an episode of the podcast, Love is the Message, which is produced by producer Matt, who also helps produce ACFM. I did a special episode with a friend of the show, Alex Niven, about music from the northeast of England. And I ended up listening to a lot of music

by one of the North East's sort of seminar artists about time that is the sort of folk and other genres, singer and musician, an instrumentalist, Catherine Tickal. And this track from 2023, from the album she recorded with her band, Catherine Tican and The Darkening, which has a very kind of nature-themed lyric and a really kind of rousing arrangement. This is called Bowies.

So in the context of eco-feminism, I think it's really important to mention Wangari, Mathai here, who developed a kind of grassroots environmental philosophy, I guess, which is kind of linking ecological or environmental restoration with democracy. and human rights directly, right? And she's most famous for her kind of what's known as the Green Belt movement. So this, so Angari Maffai is from Kenya and was like born around the, I think, the 1940s. And she's the founder of the Green Belt movement, I should have mentioned.

And she's the first actually African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 and something, I think. 2004. There we go. So her big thing is that environmental degradation and poverty, like I said, are interconnected and that the restoration of local ecosystems and her big thing is tree planting and that directly supports livelihoods and community stability, right? And women's leadership here in kind of, I guess, a classic kind of women, like women's

empowerment in kind of development and, you know, the kind of mainstreaming of gender if we think about it here in terms of how these policies have developed on a global scale through the beginning of the 20th century. So her thing around women's leadership and empowerment here is really big, right? As in women seeing themselves as agents of a kind of restoration and preservation of the local environment is kind of really central to kind of her theory and practice. But also like in a more kind of classic sense in terms of, you know, speaking truth to power, like political accountability is one of her big things, okay?

And she's talking about that in relation to kind of resource management, etc, but also like democratic governments. So I'm not surprised that within that length, a democratic governance, sorry, I should say. So within that lens, like she's the kind of person who would kind of get a Nobel Nobel Prize, because she's not exactly coming from kind of the radical left, I guess, in this sense. In summary, this idea, again, that it's, ecology and social justice are kind of intertwined, but also I think she's got this piece on, like I said, what we could possibly call maybe civic participation and theories around peace as well. So that's Wangari Maathai.

Another person I think that we have to mention in a sense was Van Daneh Shiva, who is like a famous Indian eco-feminist scholar and activist. And she does a lot on seeds and seed sovereignty. and small-scale agroecology as a form of kind of resisting corporate control and extractivism. So her theory is from my memory. I studied her a lot when I was doing a political economy of development, about a million years ago now, is that very much about this kind of like return to kind of the small

and going to retreat from, you know, big farming, etc. I think, I think from memory, like that's one of her thing. She's also kind of an important figure, like those very much. various different critiques of her ideas and policies as well. Yeah, but we have to mention her because she's been so influential, especially on the seeds, sovereignty stuff. Well, that's really interesting. I mean, I think one of the influences on that is this,

the book by the, it was a German-born but British by citizenship, economist Schumacher in the early 70s. E.F. Schumacher's book, Small is beautiful. A study of economics as if people mattered. which is really tied to things like the Back to the Land movement. It was connected to things like the resurgence of, well, kind of the invention, really, of organic farming, which has been a really important part of like green and ecological thinking for the past few decades. This idea, it's really based on a general critique of industrial society as being necessarily alienating

and alienating not just because of capitalist social relations, but because there is something about having, an overly industrialised agriculture and overly technologised relationship to the world, which is alienating and unhealthy for people. And people like Shiva, they do kind of tie this to a certain kind of

feminist politics and an anti-colonial politics, which of course, in the latter case isn't new, actually. You can see the relationship between that kind of critique of industrial society and anti-colonialism. You can see that as an important part of Gandhi's politics, for example.

in the early 20th century. So I think all those connections are really important. I think you also, in more recently, there's people like Amitav Ghosh have made really important connections between critiques of imperialism and ecology just because it's a really obvious thing to point out the extent to which the colonial project

from day one is a project of disloining the natural environment for the people who live there. So you have to understand the ecological crisis, is globally as partly a symptom of colonialism. That has been one of its consequences, and colonialism is one of its causes. And it's one reason why, you know, a critique of colonialism is so important to all this thinking. These are all themes that got taken up by a number of thinkers in the 70s and 80s,

in ways which I think, personally I think tend to get a bit overlooked now. So there's very deep thinking on the relationship between Marxism, socialism and the ecology. in certainly amongst British and American thinkers that I know about in the 70s and 80s. Raymond Williams famously wrote his book, The Country and the City, which is as much as anything as a kind of literary study of kind of representations of pastoral life and city life. But it's based on this whole idea that the clear demarcation between urban life and country life is a negative feature of capitalism, which in fact is there in the Communist Manifesto. It's a thing in the Communist manifesto that one of the aims of the communists should be

to actually erase this distinction, that you shouldn't have, like, one lot of people living off in the countryside and one lot of people stuck in the cities because both groups are kind of missing out somehow. That isn't really healthy. And then there is this wave of, like, British and American, Marxist thinkers and philosophers,

people like John Bellamy in the States, and Ted Benton in Britain, developing quite sophisticated forms of eco-socialist thought. I do quite often find myself saying to people, you should go, if you want to think about the relationship between Marxism and socialism and ecology, like go read Ted Benton, go read Ben at me because they were doing this stuff decades ago. But for my money, like one of the most interesting thinkers of that generation, the American, like Alicist thinker, Marie Butching,

who develops a philosophy of what he calls at times, social ecology, I think his most important book from the early 80s. It's called The Dialectic of Freedom. And he sees himself as very critical of the Marxist and communist tradition. So Buchin ends up being a big influence on the Kurdish kind of radicals in Rahava a few years ago. And they became very influenced by his kind of organizational ideas about how to have a completely democratic and completely federated. completely federated kind of organization without any sort of state structures. And Butching, his argument in that book, is that there's this, the conception of the world

which divides humans from nature. He thinks it still runs through Marxism in a problematic way and he thinks it's just wrong. And he thinks it's wrong not just in a sort of spiritual sense, but in a basic materialist sense. It's just, I mean, in a way, it's a really simple argument. He says, look, humans are obviously part of nature. Like, everything we do is part of nature. But what you shouldn't do is infer from that. What some people do want to infer from that is that, well, therefore, we shouldn't care.

Everything we do is nature anyway, so we shouldn't care about wrecking the planet because we are part of nature, so we can't be destroying nature. He says, no, that's also wrong. And he comes up with this very nuanced, I think, and quite really interesting kind of politics, which is very explicitly anti-authoritarian, very explicitly feminist, it's anti-patriarchal, it's anti-colonial, it's like in sympathy with indigenous traditions without sort of elevating them to models, which could be replicated by industrial or post-industrial societies, which again is a problem, I think, with a certain kind of anti-colonial and indigenous ecology a lot of the time.

I mean, people just get really excited about how some indigenous people are living and think you could get people in Camden living that way too, which you just can't. That, of course, is one of just the basic observations of original Marxism, is the fact that you just can't do that, even if you'd want to. So you've got to do something else. Abutton, I think, is a really interesting thinker, and I think he's a bit neglected these days, I have to say. But then in more recent years, obviously because of the ecological crisis,

has been a lot of interest, hasn't there? There's been a lot of interest in relationships between Marxism, Partly because of the revival of Marxism as a kind of political vernacular for the left, in the English-speaking world, in particular, after the financial crisis. And because of that intersecting with the very widespread sense, especially within activist cultures, that the great social, historical emergency facing us is clearly the global environmental crisis. Like the convergence of those phenomena has produced quite a current of people

trying to think about the relationship between Marxism, socialism and ecological ideas. So there's people like the American think Jason Moore with his book, Capitalism and the Web of Life. I mean, it is basically just pointing out that capitalism has really negative effects on all of the complex ecological relationships that we're all caught up in. Part of what people are trying to think through is what is the relationship between capitalism and nature, or it's outside in some sort of way. So one of the things that Jason Moore brings for, he talks about the four cheaps, doesn't he?

Like four things that capital, which is sort of on the outside that capital appropriates, basically. One of them is like raw materials, energy, food, and then there's unpaid labour, which brings us to social reproductive labour that Nadia was talking about earlier, you know, that, like, oh yeah, well, women are very productive, but it's not counted,

because it's just something capitalists can use as a sort of like a well of free resources to some degree because they're not going to pay for it. And it's the same with like, you know, the ability to dump carbon into the atmosphere, etc., these sorts of things. Once again, though, you know, you could sort of say, Rosa Luxembourg's analysis of imperialism was that capitalism always needs an outside, basically. So I was searching for its outside in order to incorporate it, basically, and to use it and to use it for cheap, etc. Yeah, I think a contemporary theorist that we should mention here is Alisa Battistone. She's just done a really good, interesting interview in the Jacobin, actually, which we should link to in the show notes.

She's just got a book out end of last year called Free Gifts, Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. I mean, she can be defined as someone who's trying to think around exactly the stuff that we were talking about. So, like, what's the relationship between Marx's ideas, kind of nature and ecology? And I think one of her central arguments is going back to one of the points that Jeremy made earlier, which is like where does Marx sit on, you know, this kind of like linearity versus like, you know, understanding of ecology. And one of our questions is, like, can we find a kind of progressive ecology within Marx? And she's basically saying, like, yes, there are overlooked resources from within kind of Marx's ideas that will help us respond to climate change and the ecological crisis.

So she is one of these contemporary theorists who is one of those contemporary theorists who is one of of the people who was challenging the idea that Marxism is purely productivist, I guess, or in a way like anti-environmental. And she's saying there are all these different strands that can help us understand how capitalism exploits not just labor, but also kind of nature, right? And she's bringing back this idea, you know, well, pressing this idea that we, of course, would understand, which is that ecological breakdown is completely political and, you know, economic and rooted from kind of within the logic of capitalism. I mean, people do you see. seem to have been quite exercised about the question of whether Marx is an ecological thinker or not,

don't they? And there's its long-held idea. I guess Bookching, for example, who doesn't identify as a Marxist, but as an anarchist, is sort of one of the people they're writing against, because Butching does think that, well, Marxism is sort of productivist. And it was a very commonly held view, both by people who were in favour of that view and were critical of it. It's a very commonly held view like in the 80s and 90s that Marxism didn't really have a conception of natural limits to the world, that it assumed that the productive forces would just keep developing and developing, and then eventually you would get socialism, which would develop them even more. But it's also the example of actually existing socialism, isn't it? Which, you know, if you take the Soviet Union, for instance, it just said, right, we have to develop, we have to follow the capitalist mode of production. you know, are the capitalist, that's probably the wrong way to put it,

we have to produce as much as physically possible as quickly as we can, basically, with no regard to ecological thinking, and like a really Promethean sort of idea that we'll just build these canals which will stretch from, you know, here to here, you know, the huge, huge movements of land, etc., these sorts of things, which also include lots of deaths, etc., there are some reasons behind that, you know, those socialist countries were, were threatened with not just being taken over,

but their populations being enslaved and wiped out. You know, the Nazis were coming up that were on their way, basically. They had 10 years to do this industrialization, etc. But there was huge ecological degradation across many of those countries during the 20th century. So it was that idea as well, I think. They need to escape that legacy, basically, or to rethink things to escape repeating that legacy

is one of the drives for this re-engagement with ecological thinking, Marxists. It's always seemed like a bit of a pointless argument, because I think, well, it doesn't really matter. Firstly, I don't care what Marx thought about every single thing. It doesn't matter. Like, Marx himself would have thought it was absurd. The people were, like, worrying, like, 250 years later, did Marx agree about ecology?

He just said, well, I was writing at a different time. Like, if I haven't thought about that, just add it in, you know? I don't think it's necessarily the same thing to say, like, it's worrying about whether Marx was thinking about this, but more about, like, theoretically, within Marxist ideas or Marxian thinking, how can we understand, like, do we have some ideas or, like, logics that help us understand ecology and exploitation? For example, I think that's more what Alisa Battistone is thinking, for example. Yeah, I'm sure that's right. I'm sure that's fair enough. But, I mean, when I was first learning, like, reading Marx as a teenager, it just seemed to me self-evident. Well, obviously, the implication would be that if the productive forces have reached the appropriate level, then there'll be clean technologies that are good for the planet.

To me, it didn't really seem like you needed to even make that and make the argument. there are more political stakes in some of the other debates but we talked about a lot of the most contentious arguments around ecology and Marxism when we talked about growth and degrowth in the episode on growth we should play Feels Like Summer by Charles Gambino from 2018

it's a song about how summer is getting hotter and hotter it's got a verse that says every day gets hotter than a one before running out of water. It's about to go down. Air that kills bees that we depend on, birds with us singing, waking up to no sound.

The video is really interesting because it's a video of just of Charlie Gambino or Donald Glover. It's the actual. The person behind Charlie Gambino, Charles Gambino is his musical character. It's a cartoon if you're walking down the street. And it just keeps passing

loads and loads of famous rappers, basically. We're just sort of like playing basketball. or, you know, barbecuing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just like loads of, like, cartoon cameos or famous rappers. Because it's just nothing to do with the actual lyrics of the song, all of these celebrities, et cetera. And it's almost like he's making a point in the video

that our obsession with celebrities in their lives is distracting us, distracting us from, like, the real problems in the world, like climate change. Why don't we sort of like return to where we sort of started this, this episode. When we started it, I said, you know, this is one of a series of episodes we're doing because the left is split between different movements and we'd be doing these about the mainstream and about parties, etc., now about ecology. And I sort of mentioned that perhaps thinking in ecological terms, thinking about the left as an ecosystem, might be one way into trying to grapple with the situation that left finds it in or try to find some strategies and tactics for how

the left relates to itself basically and to relates to its outside etc. An obvious place to start with that would be Rodrigo Nunes' book, neither vertical nor horizontal. We've talked about before. We've interviewed Rodrigo, et cetera, et cetera. One of the big provocations that book is to try to say, let's think about how do you have agency, how do you have strategy? when we think about, you know, the left,

not as a series of discrete organisations, discrete unified organisations, basically, which enter only formal relationships with each other, but instead we think about each political organisation of the Labour Party as an ecology of, like, of different actors, different factions, etc., etc., etc., you know. And there are certain implications about that. There's a certain implications about how you might think about that, basically.

One of those is this idea that we have to think about the way that we influence other organizations, even though they're not formal or even though they might not even be recognized. That's one of the things in an ecology. You know, we may not be aware of the lion, which is eating up all of the antelopes, but all of a sudden there's lots and lots of grass, etc., you know, even if we're not actually involved in that relationship, we're still impacted. buy it. You know, it's not a great analogy, but you know what I mean. It's good. I liked it. I liked it.

Good, good, good. Yeah, so it's that sort of idea of, you know, we have to increase the amount of the way, well, it's just alter the way in which, you know, agency, it takes place within that. Do you know what I mean? Do you want to talk about that, Jim? Well, I just say, I agree with your formulation. I've always thought the idea of movement ecology was useful. You know, it's something, like I've concluded a whole book, I think, before now saying, you know, what we need, we need to think of politics as a radical politics in terms of an ecology of mutually supportive relationships being different elements.

I think it is a really useful way of thinking about it. It's an idea, it's a phrase, and it's a way of thinking about it that keeps recurring in different books, in different writings, and different contexts, because it is so useful. Once you start to think about the necessity for different kinds of organizations to relate to each other productively rather than competitively. And also once you start to think about, try to think about the fact that, well, politics in the 21st century is obviously really, really complicated. Like getting anything done is quite difficult and it's quite complicated. You need a suitably complex range of initiatives and interventions to really get anywhere. So like I think I said before in the show, I keep saying.

at the moment. I think one of my worries at the moment is people are a bit too hung up now on the idea of the party. We have this period when activeist politics was almost completely detached from parties in the party form for like decades. And then everybody went into the Labour Party and got all excited about the idea of having parties again. And now I sort of feel like people a bit too fixated. I mean, I keep, you know, I keep saying this to people at the moment. I keep a look at what people in your party seem to be trying to do. And I get a sense that whether people are conscious of this or not, quite clearly what a lot of people want is a kind of organisation that isn't really a party, actually. It'll be some other kind of organisation that would have a clear socialist and

anti-imperialist identity and provide a kind of organising vehicle and forum. But, yeah, like a lot of votes that were taken at the Your Party founding conference seem to be in the direction of like, you know, it's in the direction of not having a leader, not being exclusive so you can be in other parties. It doesn't really look like it's going to be an organisation, which anybody can realistically expect to fight elections in a meaningful way. But none of that's to say it's not a necessary kind of organisation. But I think part of the problem with your party is a lack of ecological thinking, basically. Yeah, exactly.

I agree. Because there's lots of people in it who are desperate to fight elections and they just think that's what they're there for. basically. But if you look at it in a wider sense of the left as an ecology, that space, that niche, that ecological niche has been occupied by the Green Party. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the point I'm trying to get at. So your party should do something else. It should fulfil a different function. It's fulfil a different niche, basically. But we know, and again, this is where the ecological metaphor continues to be useful. When resources are tight,

there is competition. And this is what we're seeing played at. out between, you know, all of the various different factions and parties. And I mean that in the greater sense. So I mean that in terms of like how capitalism is affecting people's lives at this very point in history where people feel like the stakes are so high that they become more and more and more myopic when actually what you need is that everyone is connected. What you need is an understanding of movement life cycles. What you need is here is a sense of history. What you need is coalition. You need all of these things, but it requires people to make that gamble, that working with other people that don't exactly believe everything that you think is good

for the greater benefit. But when you're coming from a mentality of resource depletion, that doesn't allow for that, right? And I think that's part of why this ecology concept is really useful for us. Is it forces that kind of like openness, like Keir said, like there are elements here which you're not entirely aware of, and it forces a kind of curiosity, right? And so that's why I think it's important. Yeah, I think that's a really useful way thinking about it, because obviously ecologies are always, to some extent,

they're systems within which resources are reproduced and deployed in some sense, aren't they? That is a useful way of thinking about it. I mean, it's useful with reference to that example of your party. I mean, part of the problem is your party has a set of resources that is disposable, which is the energy and enthusiasm of a highly committed core of activists, which is quite big, and the relatively high media profile of like of a couple of politicians. The thing is, if you're going to try and spend that particular set of resources on winning elections, that that's a useless way of spending those resources because they're not very good for it.

And the cost of winning any elections in the context, Keir described, where the Green Party is already occupying that niche really successfully would be, really high, it would be a waste of those resources, like in my view. Those resources could be better deployed, you know, engaging in various kinds of community organizing and consciousness raising, like in a really different way. And that, if you were to think about things in the way we're recommending, like a fully ecological way, that's how you would think about it. And the problem is, it's a bit like, you know, it's a bit like if you fulfill a function, if you're fulfilling a niche and fulfilling a function within a niche in an ecosystem, different animals evolve.

to look quite similar to each other, even though they're coming from different starting points. Do you know what I mean? And so if you're going to be contesting in elections, you'll force yourself into this shape that you need to compete in elections, which will not be the shape that you need to actually fulfill the function, which is the niches there for, which is this community organising, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And you can say that already with, like, you know, releasing statements which are hostile to the Greens, etc, and all these sorts of things, when in fact, you know, you don't need to be engaging in that competition. You know, that niche is filled. You're not going to be overtaking the Greens in left populism, basically. Zach Palance is doing that and he's doing it much, much better than Corbyn ever did or ever will do,

basically. Just recognize that the changed environment and adapt to it, work out what's not being fulfilled, you know, what is needed in order for not homeostasis, but for change. one of the implications of this is it's really important for kind of organisations and initiatives to think about where they fit in a wider ecology and to think about what contributions they can make, which is, of course, is why we basically a sort of a leftist philosophy and lifestyle podcast decided to do a series of episodes covering the minutiae of left organisational politics in a 2025-26. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a small niche, Jeremy. It's a small niche, Jeremy. It's a small.

small leash that we're filling, but we're perfectly adapted to that environment. That is the point. This is aftime.