by Exploring the Environmental Dimensions of Capitalism’s Violent Expansion
By Joselyn Peña
An olive tree in Gaza is burned alive in a forest of its species. It has fed Palestinians and its ecosystem for generations, just to be engulfed in flames by an IDF soldier. The scorched bark bears the same wounds as an American bison skinned by a settler, its corpse left to rot on the same land upon which it was once valued for the warmth and food its species brought to multiple Indigenous groups of the Great Plains. An olive tree forest burnt to a crisp, bison skulls piled high, 150 years apart but connected by the violence of war, colonialism. Whether in the form of Zionism or Manifest Destiny, colonialism has destroyed our environment.
As a Marxist studying environmental science and working as an educator at a large wilderness preserve on Florida’s Gulf Coast, I cannot separate my field from my anti-war politics. Yet, the popular environmentalist movement has become far less radical and less connected to the anti-war movement since its peak in the 1970s. Many socialist organizers, including in DSA, also fail to center the environmental concerns that should be a part of our campaigns and demands. The ecological crisis caused by capitalism needs to be confronted. This means bridging the gap between environmental movements, anti-colonialism and the class struggle. Exploring what is happening to life in Gaza can help guide us as we build an intersectional and international socialist movement.
Genocide is Ecocide
Military intervention and war have increasingly brought about environmental destruction. The major battles in wars throughout history are usually fought in open and remote locations, harming biodiverse prairies, meadows, and savannahs. The US military has been hard at work building a mass surveillance system of bases around the world, becoming a larger emitter of carbon dioxide alone than over 70% of all countries. The pollution of bombs and missile strikes is widely known, and the immediate destruction of the environment and air is increasingly visible. However, other environmental impacts of war aren’t as easily seen with the naked eye, or without an understanding of ecological systems and their metabolic processes.
We can expect the long-term impacts of such environmental devastation amidst genocide in Palestine to be similar to the post-war conditions in countries like Iraq. The ecosystems have been burdened with the toxic chemicals of war and polluted its soil and waterways. This greatly impacts the people of Iraq. Even years after the most visibly destructive attacks, many living in the region have reported an increase in miscarriages, birth defects, and cancers. The soil in bombed areas is now too contaminated to produce viable crops. Removing the toxins will take many years of restorative agriculture, and even that is not a guarantee. This solution is an experimental investment not accessible to many farmers, especially those in a post-war society.
The oppression of human beings across generations degrades not only life itself but the conditions for life. For as long as imperialist wars and settler colonialism continue, humanity and the thousands of species will face annihilation.
Using Nature Against Her People
The balance of ecosystems has fallen together through millions of years of evolution. One change to the system and it is at risk of becoming unbalanced, which could result in a cascade of environmental consequences. As seen with the impacts of climate change on agriculture, migration and health, human communities can be deeply affected by such imbalances. This is often taken advantage of in times of war.
An example of the violence latent in Israeli settler colonialism is the strategic placement of settlements on hills, allowing waste and polluted runoff to flow down to Palestinian villages. Most immediately, the destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure cuts off all access to food and even local resources, ensuring that the land will be a blank slate if and when Israeli settlers begin moving in. Damage done to the environment is also injustice done through it.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a non-profit founded in 1901 to buy land in Ottoman Syria that now focuses on planting trees in Israel, has systematically removed native plants and established crops, replacing them with European pine trees. Replacing native plants with non-native ones reduces native biodiversity, impacting the ecosystem and populations of organisms across a food web. European pine trees are highly flammable, and some pine species rely on fire to reproduce. The trees in Palestine, however, are not fire dependent, so frequent burns will further damage the native biodiversity, further depriving Palestinians of the fruits of their native land.
The cultivation of European pine forests on top of destroyed Palestinian villages, which the JNF calls their ‘Green Lungs’, are publicized with classic greenwashing techniques. An example of greenwashing is when the US military proposed a plan to be carbon neutral by 2050 – a destructive war machine powered by renewable energy. It is also greenwashing when Israel establishes “green areas”, blocking the land off from Palestinians in the name of land conservation, just for them to knock it down for Israeli settlement five years later. Nature is being used against her people by colonialism, imperialism, and the capitalist system which grounds them to further oppress Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized populations.
An Anti-Imperialist Environmentalism
Youth environmental activists like Greta Thunberg have become increasingly radical and have begun to connect their work to other struggles, including the fight for a free Palestine. Still, this is a small minority of the movement, and it lacks a Marxist theory of change. The depoliticization of environmentalism is prominent in the United States, where historic organizations such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club lost their more radical tendencies after the Earth Day demonstrations in 1970. Most of their current political work is lobbying and petitioning, which encompasses much of what environmental activism entails today. Other sections of the environmental movement, including Extinction Rebellion and Earth Liberation Front, draw on the direct action of the 1960s, but in a decentralized and anarchistic way by failing to connect demonstrations to a broader vision. Both reformers and radicals often share the same flaw of lacking a class-struggle approach that recognizes the capitalist system as the cause of Earth’s degradation.
Even at its peak, the environmental movement of the 1960s struggled to have a steady relationship with the New Left and other left currents. Some radical social activists thought environmentalism distracted from revolution and liberation. On matters such as labor rights for workers in unsustainable industries and immigration that warrants more development under capitalism, environmentalists and social justice activists who lack a Marxist vision can find themselves at odds with each other.
There must be an internationalist, Marxist core within the environmental movement. Without this, the tension between and separation from anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles will go unresolved, even as the Earth becomes uninhabitable. While fighting for immediate reforms like the Green New Deal, which helps give environmentalists a program to fight for, we also need to push beyond the framework of capitalism and infinite growth, recognizing that they make responsible industry impossible. Top-down interventions from the United Nations, like the 2015 Paris Agreement and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, have failed to manage – let alone stop – rising temperatures. Only a socialist program for democratic central planning and reduced global waste can provide an alternative.
The ecological crisis is always looming, present in big and small ways. This needs to be urgently confronted, but it also makes it hard to organize around any specific moment of rupture, especially when so many other critical issues must be responded to quickly.
The long-term threat of climate change and the fight for ecosocialism may be more difficult to target and organize around alone, but it is a major opportunity for raising popular transitional demands and a positive vision to adapt to the changes ahead. Climate change is an issue that disproportionately impacts the working class, particularly in the global south but also in the US. These impacts include health issues, viruses, lack of thriving ecosystems and green space, food shortages, and property damage. There are many steps we can take and demands we can raise to build a transformative, anti-imperialist environmentalism, including:
- We require a democratic socialist party which can bring environmental and anti-imperialist struggles together.
- Begin articulating popular demands, such as a four-day work week and the mass retrofitting of homes, which would cut energy use and reduce waste while improving the lives of working class people.
- Union members should advocate for their locals to cut ties with the US military and weapons manufacturers, while demanding a just transition for workers in those industries.
- Take up the need to reallocate government funding from the military to fund sustainable measures and green infrastructure.
- Link every battle for environmental justice to the fight for a socialist world and a class-struggle approach.
With these steps, we can build a true ecosocialism that is anti-imperialist and ready to fight the global struggles ahead.
There is a future where the environmental destruction described here no longer happens, where our society is once again living harmoniously with nature and is no longer massacred by bombs filled with poisons of capitalists’ creation. We can have a democratic, centrally planned economy that can improve the condition of humanity as a whole. Not only do I believe the international working class can achieve such an ecosocialism, but our future depends on it.
Art by Earth Liberation Studio (IG: @earthliberationstudio)
Joselyn Peña
Joselyn Peña (they/them) is the President of the YDSA chapter at Florida International University and Communications Co-chair for DSA's Reform & Revolution caucus.
