BOOKS
FACING CATASTROPHE: FOOD, POLITICS, AND THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS by Carl Boggs
PoliticalAnimal Press, 2000
This book argues that capitalism – with its growth-driven, profit-oriented, nature-destroying logic – is incompatible with an ecologically-sustainable society. This is particularly evident in the food sector where, as societies become more industrialized, they undertake large-scale shifts toward meat and dairy consumption, thus dramatically increasing their carbon footprint. Here Facing Catastrophe offers a powerful analysis of the problem of capitalist agriculture and the power structures that sustain it, revealing a crisis more severe than most environmentalists nowadays seem prepared to recognize. The book outlines a path forward to an ecological radicalism bold enough to move the planet off the path toward catastrophe.
“We owe a great deal of gratitude to Boggs’ important revivification and deepening of ecological rationality, and we must do our best to ensure that it not be compromised – especially by the aerosol intellectualism that has pockmarked academia’s postmodern transgression into identity politics and that foments helplessness in the face of neoliberal assaults on political life – if our attempt to bring about the creation of new life-affirming modes of production and consumption, new relations between humans and the natural habitat that lead to human flourishing within a larger democratization and restoration of nature are to come to fruition. Another masterwork by Carl Boggs.”
Peter McLaren
Distinguished Professor of Critical Studies
Chapman University (USA)
“We owe a great deal of gratitude to Boggs’ important revivification and deepening of ecological rationality, and we must do our best to ensure that it not be compromised – especially by the aerosol intellectualism that has pockmarked academia’s postmodern transgression into identity politics and that foments helplessness in the face of neoliberal assaults on political life – if our attempt to bring about the creation of new life-affirming modes of production and consumption, new relations between humans and the natural habitat that lead to human flourishing within a larger democratization and restoration of nature are to come to fruition. Another masterwork by Carl Boggs.”
Peter McLaren
Distinguished Professor of Critical Studies
Chapman University (USA)