Over the next few decades we are facing the possibility, indeed the probability, of global catastrophe on a level unprecedented in human history. The message of science is clear. As James Hansen, the foremost climate scientist in the United States, has warned, this may be “our last chance to save humanity.”1 In order to understand the full nature of this threat and how it needs to be addressed, it is essential to get a historical perspective on how we got where we are, and how this is related to the current socioeconomic system, namely capitalism.

Fundamental to the ecological critique of capitalism, I believe, is what world-historian William McNeill called the law of “the conservation of catastrophe.” For McNeill, who applied his “law” to environmental crisis in particular, “catastrophe is the underside of the human condition—a price we pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the earth through collective effort and the use of tools.” The better we become at altering and supposedly controlling nature, he wrote, the more vulnerable human society becomes to catastrophes that “recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.”2 The potential for catastrophe is thus not only conserved, but it can be said to be cumulative, and reappears in an evermore colossal form in response to our growing transformation of the world around us.

In the age of climate change and other global planetary threats McNeill’s thesis on the conservation of catastrophe deserves close consideration. Rather than treating it as a universal aspect of the human condition, however, this dynamic needs to be understood in historically specific terms, focusing on the tendency toward the conservation of catastrophe under historical capitalism. The issue then becomes one of understanding how the exploitation of nature under the regime of capital has led over time to the accumulation of catastrophe. As Marx explained, it is necessary, in any critique of capitalism, to understand not only the enormous productive force generated by capital, but also “the negative, i.e. destructive side” of its interaction with the environment, “from the point of view of natural science.”3

The Revenge of Nature

In analyzing the causes of the conservation of catastrophe, McNeill explained: “Human purposes are extraordinarily fragile because they never take full account of the circumstances on which they impinge, and every so often act as triggers, provoking results that were not imagined by those who precipitated them. It follows…that the more skillful human beings become at making over natural balances to suit themselves, the greater the potential for catastrophe.”4

If we were to look for an historical antecedent for this argument, we could not do better than to turn to Frederick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, written in the 1870s. In Engels’s words: “Every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these [nature’s] laws and getting to perceive both the immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature.” As a result of the development of science, we are “more than ever in a position to realize, and hence to control…the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities.” Consequently, human beings increasingly “not only feel but also know their oneness with nature.”

Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe

http://monthlyreview.org