I just read an interesting letter from Marx to Engels, particularly this fragment was notable
Climate and the Vegetable World throughout the Ages, a History of Both, by Fraas (1847) is very interesting, especially as proving that climate and flora have changed in historic times. He is a Darwinist before Darwin and makes even the species arise in historic times. But he is also an agricultural expert. He maintains that as a result of cultivation and in proportion to its degree, the “damp” so much beloved by the peasant is lost (hence too plants emigrate from south to north) and eventually the formation of steppes begins. The first effects of cultivation are useful, later devastating owing to deforestation, etc. This man is both a thoroughly learned philologist (he has written books in Greek) and a chemist, agricultural expert, etc. The whole conclusion is that cultivation when it progresses in a primitive way and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois of course he does not arrive at this), leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. Here again another unconscious socialist tendency!
It’s about fertility of fields, but then again the entire ecology pretty much started there, and as we can see, when entire thing was not even born yet, in 1868, it is abolutely obvious to Marx that only socialism can have any successes in maintaining the environment.
I thought i would share this since it’s interesting how it is now being clearly proven, and maybe it would be of use against the ecofash.
The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water — to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.
(Source.)
John Bellamy Foster writes quite a bit on the topic in Marx’s Ecology.
Mike Davis’ book “Old Gods, New Enigmas” has a whole chapter on this - “The coming desert - Kropotkin, Mars & the pulse of Asia”. I’m only half way through it now.
