Is advanced industrial capitalism capable of finding solutions to the environmental devastation that it causes?
The undeniable socio -economic achievements of the middle past
century: feed and dress a world population that is
has doubled since 1970, greatly reducing the
malnutrition, improve living standards and increase
longevity, have been obtained at the price of poisoned rivers, asphyxiated oceans in plastics, the
Introduction of monocultures, the destruction of forests,
the accelerated extraction of resources and? For many,
more alarming? The apparent alteration of patterns
climatic
In this context, global environmental strategies inevitably acquire a political and economic dimension. Ecological thought has also historically oscillated among various objects of interest. At the end of the 19th century, the main theme in the United States were natural parks; in the United Kingdom, sanitation; In Germany, pollution; In Japan, forest protection; Movements related to lifestyle often attracted more interest than legislation. In the interwar period, water scarcity promoted large -scale ecotechnological solutions. Population control became an important issue for American developmentalists with environmental awareness at the time of the cold war, and the antinuclear movements and the destiny of tropical forests on the subject of greens in the 1980s. Environmentalism: A Global History, Ramachandra Guha detected an "ecologism of the poor": local protests against toxic spills or against the extractivism of multinationals, from the Niger Delta to the Dakota hills. In contrast, this changes everything, by Naomi Klein, highlights the cosmetic function of corporate support to a greener neoliberalism, refuted by the production chains that globalization has extended throughout the world and the industrialization of China. From river to Kyoto or Copenhagen, climate change and carbon emissions hid everything else and intergovernmental conversations became the main forum. When the negotiations failed, during the presidency of Obama, the field opened again. What strategies of equal environmentalism could the international left propose and how could the epistemological foundations of such ecologism be strengthened?