Marxism And Ecological Economics ─ Toward a Red And Green Political Economy

Insights from Marxist political economy, argues Burkett (economic, Indiana State U.) can aid ecological economics "better fulfill its commitments to methodological pluralism, interdisciplinarity, and openness to new visions of policy and of structural economic change that confront the current biospheric crisis." For the purposes of his argument, he focuses on four fundamental issues: the relations between nature and economic value, the treatment of nature as capital, the significance of the entropy law for economic systems, and the concept of sustainable development. In addressing the last of these, he employs the Marxist distinction between environmental crises of capital accumulation versus crises in the natural conditions of human development and discusses how Marxism already integrates the sustainable development dimensions of the common pool character of natural resources; the co-evolution of individual human beings, society, and nature; and common property management of natural resources, all concepts dealt with more or less separately by ecological economists. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul Burkett, Ph.D. (1984) in Economics, Syracuse University, is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications on Marxism and ecology includeMarx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (St. Martin's Press, 1999) and many articles in scholarly journals.