The Enemy of Nature faces the harsh but increasingly inescapable conclusion that capitalism is the driving force behind the ecological crisis, and draws the radical implications. Joel Kovel noted scholar and author, also public speaker and green campaigner indicts capitalism, with its unrelenting pressure to expand, as both inherently ecodestructive and unreformable. He argues against the reigning orthodoxy that there can be no alternative to the capitalist system, not because this orthodoxy is weak, but because submission to it is suicidal as well as unworthy of human beings. Kovel sees capital as not just an economic system but as the present manifestation of an ancient repture between humanity and nature. This widering of scope is given theoretical weight in the second part of the work, which develops a positive synthesis between Marxism, ecofeminism and the philosophy of nature. Then Kovel turns to ‘what is to be done?’ He criticizes existing ecological politics for their evasioin of capital, advances a vision of ecological production as the successor to capitalist production, and develops the principles for realizing this, as an ‘ecosocialism’, in the context of anti-globalization politics. He sees, prefigured in present struggle, the outline of a society of freely associated producers for whom the earth is no longer an object to be owned and exploited, but the source of intrinsic value. The Enemy of Nature is written in the spirit of the great radical motto: ‘Be realistic – demand the impossible!’ Its author dares to think the unthinkable – we have a choice: capitalist barbarism and ecocatastrophe, or the building of a society worthy of humanity and nature.
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