Ecology

Submitted by Juan Conatz on February 21, 2015

To achieve a sustainable and healthy relationship between humanity and the rest of the living world, we must create a society which, while based on the satisfaction of social needs such as food, shelter, water, and community, balances and reintegrates human desires and needs with the ecological imperatives of the rest of the biosphere.

Our view on the environment is biocentrism – the idea that the nonhuman world is more than just itemized resource extraction and that it has a necessity to exist on its own. Furthermore, the survival and well-being of humanity is dependent on the health and well-being of the Earth and its ecosystems of interconnected nonhuman life.

Humanity should not attempt to dominate the environment, as the industrial capitalist mode of production has demonstrated the massive folly of this orientation. Capitalism alienates us from the natural world and how our institutions are actively destroying it. This remains a crisis of capitalism,where its principles of perpetual growth cannot be in line with sustainability and a connection to the Earth. Just as with poverty and war, capitalism requires environmental devastation to function.

Within this system of environmental attack, indigenous groups, people of color and working class populations experience a greater immediate impact from this catastrophe because of their forced marginalization. We support the struggles within these communities for environmental and climate justice, including the need for urban and rural ecological policies to adapt to and mitigate climate change; to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities; and to provide fair access for all to the full range of resources

What’s more, the ecological outcomes of capitalist development have now precipitated multiple global environmental crises seen by the broad scientific community as so massive that they potentially threaten the prospects for long-term human survival as well as the survival of the majority of biological life as we currently know it. This reality makes all the more important the global solidarity which we seek to nurture and advance among working, peasant and popular classes.

We recognize that social transformation is the first step towards ecological balance, not individual lifestyle changes, social democratic/state socialist intervention, technological innovations, nor broad attacks on technology or civilization. A crucial part of this social transformation is the control over resources. By replacing private ownership over natural resource with social ownership we are all accountable to its use, to its impact on the communities around it.

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