70% of all bacteria live deep in the earth, constituting a reserve of carbon and biodiversity that vastly outnumbers and outweighs all humans combined
Earth's metabolism
Archive | Metabolic Rift
1.5 degrees
IPCC report puts global warming crisis in Anthropocene framework
Implicitly challenging the weak 2016 Paris Agreement, scientists say climate change is part of the broader global emergency and any responses must reflect that.
Book Review
The Omega Principle: A vicious circle of fish, cattle and capitalism
How a giant industry that plunders the seas for tiny fish is reinforcing unsustainable industrial agriculture
Red-Green Perspective
Carrying capacity, technology, and ecomodernist confusion
A radical biologist replies to an ecomodernist who ignores the social roots of environmental crises
Review
Climate change in the Anthropocene: An unstoppable drive to Hothouse Earth?
Can the global climate be stabilized before runaway change creates conditions that are too hot for human civilization and deadly for most species?
Crisis deepens
State of the Climate Report: It’s hot and getting hotter
It’s official: 2017 was the third-warmest year on record, and the hottest non-El Niño year. Greenhouse gases hit record highs and sea levels kept on rising
Time is running out
Scientists urge immediate action to prevent global biodiversity collapse
“Fifty years ago biologists expected to be the first to find a species, now they hope not to be the last.”
Metabolic rift
Online now: Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder
Ian Angus examines how the 19th century metabolic rift in agriculture that so concerned Karl Marx triggered a pollution crisis in the world’s largest city
Essential reading for Ecosocialists
Socialist magazine explores capital’s metabolic rifts
Special issue features new articles by John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, Ian Angus, Michael Friedman, Brett Clark, Stefano Longo, and Justus von Liebig
Metabolic rifts
Vladimir Vernadsky and the Disruption of the Biosphere
Virtually unknown in the west, the great Russian geologist and geochemist pioneered scientific study of life’s impact on the Earth.
Metabolic rifts
Earth’s Circular Economy: Recycling as a Law of Life
On every scale, from the smallest cells to the entire planet, the essential elements of life are constantly used and re-used. Biogeochemical cycles are the basis of the biosphere.
Global Environmental Change
Marx, nature, and political morality
Marx saw the rift between people and nature not only as a primary failing of capitalism, but also as a mechanism through which capitalism may be superseded.
Metabolic Rifts
Marx and Metabolism: Lost in translation?
Why wasn’t Marx’s concept of metabolic rift recognized until recently? Changed circumstances, unpublished works, and bad translations all played a role.
Metabolic Rift
The Keeling Curve at 60: A portrait of climate crisis
If you’ve ever wondered what a scientific representation of metabolic rift might look like, check out this graph.
Metabolic rifts
Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis
Metabolic Rifts Today. Beginning a new series by Ian Angus, on how contemporary science illuminates and extends metabolic rift theory in the 21st century.
Book Review
14 Billion Years of Revolutionary Change
‘Quarks to Culture’ is an important but flawed account of emergence in history, of 12 major transitions that created the world we live in, from the Big Bang to the Geopolitical State.
Facing the Anthropocene
‘A contribution to a genuinely materialist ecology’
Éric Pineault’s preface to the French edition of Facing the Anthropocene: “Ian Angus offers a critique of capitalist modernity based on a vision of liberation shaped by the recognition of substantial and real ecological limits”
Jena Experiment
Major study shows species loss destroys essential ecosystems
Long term research by German ecologists proves that loss of biodiversity has “direct, unpleasant consequences for mankind.”
Metabolic rifts
Heatwaves can kill 27 ways, and climate change puts 74% of humanity at risk
Two recent studies show how dangerous heatwaves can be, and how global warming will put three-quarters of humanity at risk by 2100. “We are running out of choices.”
An 1862 eco-critique
Les Misérables: Metabolic rift in the sewers of Paris
Victor Hugo’s masterpiece includes a powerful attack on the urban wastefulness that steals nutrients from the land. Like Marx and Engels, he based his critique on the work of the chemist Justus von Liebig.