Theory and Praxis
The Eco Update #25
What’s In This Issue
Letter from the Editor
Developing a Proletarian Ecology
Defining the “anthro” in Anthropocene
Nature Photo of the Month: Jonathan Marchant
Notes From A Radical Ecologist: The Green Schools to Public Power Pipeline
Eco Fiction Review: Ancestors
Letter from the Editor
Ecology is, simultaneously, a thing we know and a thing we do. It is science and action. Thought and movement. It must be both, not fully reducible into either category.
In this time of ecological crisis, simply knowing about the problem is not enough. Knowing is necessary, but insufficient. We must also act. This means that theory must be accompanied by praxis, and praxis must then inform theory. In this issue, you’ll find examples of both.
Mathew Huber, the author of Climate Change as Class War, offers a new perspective of a proletarian, working class ecology. In our second focus piece, we cover a philosophical examination of what anthropocentrism means in the era of eco-crisis in the Anthropocene. Our Nature Photo of the Month encourages us to shift our orientations and to consider nature from new angles. In our Notes From a Radical Ecologist, ecosocialist Jonathon Schaff tells about NYC-DSA’s ecological work in the city. And lastly, our ecofiction reviews the eco anarchism of adrienne marie brown’s Ancestors, from AK Press.
We hope this issue is both informative and inspiring.
In Solidarity,
Ben
Developing a Proletarian Ecology
by Matthew Huber
It’s been 65 years since the first Earth Day in 1970. Around that same time the environmental movement was instrumental in a wave of legislation and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (under Richard Nixon, no less). So, it was understandable that many on the Left in general were optimistic about the environmental movement and other social movements (like the civil rights and antiwar struggles).
Marxists, in particular–many of which had fled political organizations for academia–were also looking for new agents of change, given the decline of more traditional socialist and labor movements. Ecological Marxism was a variant of this shift. James O’Connor famously developed an “ecological Marxism” that could speak to the “new social movements” of the day (and hopefully push them to align with labor and socialist movements). Michael Löwy argued that a kind of red-green alliance or “movement of movements” would be the foundation for ecosocialist politics. Others (more committed to classical Marxism) like John Bellamy Foster or Kohei Saito, dug deep into the volumes of Capital or even Marx’s unpublished letters and manuscripts to discover an “ecological” Marx focused on a concept of the “metabolic rift” (in reality Marx only mentioned this rift once in passing).
But all these theories raise a question: Do we need exclusively new theories to explain capitalism’s ecological crisis? These traditions of ecological Marxism avoid a willingness to examine Marxism’s more basic theories – of exploitation, surplus value, class struggle, and the contradiction between the forces and relations of production – from an ecological perspective.
My recent article, in the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, attempts to do so by focusing on what might be considered the core of Marxist politics: what Mike Davis called Marx’s “lost theory” of “proletarian agency” or what others call the “self-emancipation of the working class.” For Marx, and Marxists, the proletariat, or the working class, was the core agent of social change (and, of course, revolutionary supersession of capitalism itself). But traditions of ecological Marxism have almost nothing to say about this core political strategy of proletarian agency.
Their approach is at best ambivalently summed up by the ecosocialist Joel Kovel’s statement, “The proletariat may not be privileged in red-green discourses, but it remains a full partner.” Moreover, even if ecological Marxism has a lot to say about labor–as the core metabolic connection between society and nature–it has almost nothing to say about labor-based political organizations like trade unions and working-class parties.
The concept of “proletarian ecology” argues that Marx’s theory of proletarian agency can be seen as inherently ecological in two fundamental ways. First, Marx always defined the proletariat as a class that is torn from the ecological conditions of subsistence (most notably the land) and forced to survive via the market. This insecure, market-based survival creates a literal ecology where the working class struggles to access the means to life (as the yellow vest movement put it, “politicians care about the end of the world, but we’re trying to get to the end of the month.”) But a crisis like climate change requires restructuring (decarbonizing) the sectors that provide those basic working-class needs (energy, housing, transport, etc.)
Second, Marx’s theory of proletarian agency was always global in scope (i.e. workers of the world) and aimed for species emancipation (he claimed the proletariat was the “last class”, or the class to abolish class itself for all). Therefore, this theory is equally relevant to the planetary crises around climate, biodiversity and more.
Since Earth Day, the balance of power in capitalism has only shifted one way–toward capital. This article suggests if we want to solve our ecological predicament or solve just about any of the crises we face, there’s one basic solution: to build the power of the working class, and the labor movement. It is only these forces in society with the potential power to take on capital, but beyond this, the article also recognizes that there are many barriers and problems with organizing that power.
Matthew T. Huber is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Climate (Verso Books, 2022).
Defining the “anthro” in Anthropocene
by Ben Lockwood
Environmentalists often argue that in order to address our planetary crises we need to move beyond anthropocentric views that prioritize the demands of humanity over the needs of nonhuman species. But reconciling this view with the fact that humans do rely on the nonhuman world to survive requires a thorough examination of many definitions that the term “anthropocentrism” actually includes.
A new paper published in Environmental Humanities does just this, exploring the philosophical claims, arguments, and critiques against anthropocentrism in order to clarify definitions and present a more flexible definition of humanism that reconciles some contradictions.
The authors of the paper identify two types of anthropocentrism that they find in both academic and contemporary discourse. The first is what they refer to as “ontological anthropocentrism”, which can be summarized as the view that humans are separated from nonhuman species by the abilities (i.g. complex, abstract thought) that they posses.
The second type of anthropocentrism the authors define is “normative anthropocentrism”. This can be summarized as “the claim that human beings have a unique moral status compared to nonhuman beings”.
For each type of anthropocentrism, the authors further delineate into subcategories, and present the most cogent arguments against each. They also point out a pervasive contradiction in the critiques of anthropocentrism. This is that in the common claims that humans are not unique, distinct, nor separable from nonhuman entities-and should therefore confer moral and ethical status to nonhuman nature-critics are actually attributing a specific moral status and ability to humans as the intended addressee of these arguments.
Lastly, the authors present what they call an “ostensive humanism”, which does not uniformly define humanity based on presumed abilities while also recognizing that some humans do posses abilities that gives relevancy to the ethical demands of the Anthropocene. Although this manuscript does not settle the debates around anthropocentrism, it nonetheless provides avenues to advance our discourse and clarify our arguments at a time when redefining our relationships to nature is critical.
Nature Photo of the Month
by Jonathon Marchant
Notes from a Radical Ecologist
The green schools to public power pipeline
by Jonathan Schaff
After six years of fighting tooth and nail to get our supposedly liberal state to build more publicly owned renewable energy projects, the Ecosocialist Working Group of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (Ecosoc, for short) is getting back to our (grass)roots.
In 2023 we hit a high watermark for the ecosocialist movement by passing the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), arguably the strongest climate law ever passed in the U.S. The BPRA authorizes a state-owned utility, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), to build, own, and operate all the renewable generation New York could ever need.
But three years later, NYPA has yet to break ground on a single solar project. In fact, they recently walked back their plans for 7 gigawatts of public renewables to less than 5.5 GW, citing headwinds and IRA cuts—just one-third of the bare-minimum 15 GW New York needs.
Strategically, we’re up against the wall. The CEO of NYPA, Justin Driscoll, is a Republican, appointed by Governor Kathy Hochul. Her State Energy Plan, approved in December 2025, opens the door to new gas plants, deepens long-term dependence on fossil fuels, and gambles our future on notoriously difficult-to-build nuclear plants.
Yet for all her failures of leadership as energy bills keep rising, Hochul, who just got Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement and whom fossil fuel and utility interests have spent $16 million lobbying for, looks poised to waltz into re-election later this year.
In a new era full of rising contradictions, the Ecosoc strategy needed a refresh. After many long hours in a drafty co-op basement, we think we have it: organizing a bottom-up movement of teachers, parents, and students to fight, win, and implement a policy that Ecosoc members wrote for Zohran’s campaign.
Many of New York’s public schools are over 100 years old and long neglected. We’ve spoken with teachers who report mold and asbestos in the walls and lead in the water. One in five NYC public schools has no air conditioning. Zohran’s platform, Green Schools for a Healthier New York City, calls for retrofitting 500 public schools in disadvantaged communities with rooftop solar, heat pumps, repairs, and green schoolyards.
We believe there’s a path to public power that begins with organizing public schools to improve conditions and decarbonize, and ends with a powerful coalition of young leaders across the city united in demanding a transition to a clean, publicly owned grid within our lifetimes.
We’re about to put our theory to the test. Our newly launched field team is gearing up to knock on doors and speak to neighbors about the material benefits green schools and schoolyards can bring to their lives. We’re collaborating with frontline communities. We’re propagandizing the scandalous conditions of our schools, and making the connection between for-profit utility companies and climate inaction.
It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for how we’ve failed to lead on climate change than the sorry state of our once beautiful public schools. If we can deliver this transformation, it will be hard to imagine a better metaphor for the kind of future ecosocialism promises.
More to come.
Jonathon Schaff is a cochair of the NYC-DSA Ecosocialists Working Group and the writer of Green Juice (greenjuice.wtf), an ecosocialist's guide to the clean energy transition. Follow him on Instagram at Jon Schaff
Ecofiction Review | Ancestors by adrienne maree brown
Ancestors, by adrienne maree brown, is a messy book. By “messy”, I do not mean that the book is unorganized or careless. This is a book written by an author who knows exactly what she’s doing. By “messy”, I mean that Ancestors is not a book with a neat and tidy plot. It’s a story about the messiness of life, and to accurately convey this messiness brown merges form with function.
Ancestors follows Dune, the main character from her previous installments of the Grievers series from AK Press, as she navigates a post-plague Detroit and the collective trauma of its inhabitants. But Ancestors also introduces a larger collection of POV characters, and throughout the narrative we people with flaws, contradictions, doubts, anxieties, desires, and deaths. In other words, we meet humans in all the messiness of our love, sex, and relationships.
But there’s also magic to be found here. brown grounds humanity in nature through magic, through relations, and through networks. While retaining the spatial framework of the previous novels, Ancestors also reinforces that time and space are as inseparable as nature and society. It may not be the most traditional example of genre fiction, but Ancestors does something important, and for that reason is worth a read.
Love this edition! The notes on anthropocentricism really struck a chord with me! Had never realized until now that "anthropocene" stems from "anthropocentric." Poses a lot of interesting questions about how to separate a grounded understanding of the impacts of human development on the land from the desire to center human activities as the most important environmental process at play! Parallel questions often come up in the context of decolonization (how do we highlight and understand the processes of colonization in Turtle Island without centering them in a way that minimizes or diminishes the continued existence of indigenous ways of knowing and being), and they're always super insightful to dig into. Looking forward to reading the study more thoroughly!
This is a confusing cover for me. Praxis is defined as theory-action-reflection. So theory and praxis is a tautology