This piece is obviously written for an academic audience, but it makes some very good points that ordinary readers can understand about ecosocialism.
For ecosocialists, capitalism is an irremediably expansionist, productivist order responsible for the emergence of a fundamental rift in the metabolic relation between human society and the rest of the natural world. Originally parts of a complex whole, the two come to be increasingly separated with the maturing of capitalist relations as the driver of a socio-ecological crisis. By the force of capital, all external boundaries―be it ecological, economic, cultural, geographic, biological, even ontological―are reconfigured as mere barriers to be overcome.... .... Capital is “caught in the cycle of ‘grow or die’ that characterizes accumulation under the terms of relentless competition”. If capital ceased to increase, it would cease to be capital, i.e., money used to make more money.
Commodifying the natural world, capitalist relations reduce the variegated richness of its forms into mere stuff for appropriation and exploitation. [references omitted]
