Preface to "The Enemy of Nature"

Click here to read this preface to a new book by Joel Kovel (by the above title), and posted on The Greanville Post.

I wrote The Enemy of Nature according to the principle that the truth – a sufficiently generous and expansive truth, it may be added – can make us free. If truth gives clarity and definition to our world, if it weans us from dependency on alienating forces that sap our will and delude our mind, and if it can bring us together with others in a common empowering project – a project that gives us hope that we can become the makers of our own history – why, then, then it makes us free even if what it reveals is terrible to behold. Better this than the unrevealed terror in the dark, unenvisioned, without opening to hope, better than what inertly weighs on us under the aegis of the capitalist order.

The Enemy of Nature was written in service of such an ideal. It tries to give expression to an emerging and still incomplete realization that our all-conquering capitalist system of production, the greatest and proudest of all the modalities of transforming nature which the human species has yet devised, the defining influence in modern culture and the organizer of the modern state, is at heart the enemy of nature and therefore humanity’s executioner as well.

I think to clarify this issue, I would assert that nature in general will not be threatened or assaulted by the activities of capitalists; but that part of nature--our habitat on this planet--is being, and will be, destroyed by them. The planet will hardly blink at the disappearance of humans and so many other species that they will have destroyed. New species will thrive without us.