The choice Joel Kovel offers in the title is stark. He clearly lays out the indicting evidence against capitalism. It was never intended to be a steady-state system. Corporations are established for one purpose – to make money for shareholders by converting nature and labor into capital. Corporate managers are legally required to maximize profit for the investors. If they place the interests of workers, community, or environment ahead of the profit interests of shareholders, they can (and probably will) be sued for breach of fiduciary duty. Trying to graft environmental ethics onto capitalism is like trying to mix oil and water: it takes considerable agitation and then doesn’t hold together very long.

Kovel makes the case that capitalism exhibits a compulsive, unrelenting, grow-or-die expansion and over-consumption of resources at non-sustainable rates. Growth so conceived means the destabilization and destruction of the natural foundation of society. Corporations have major incentives to ‘externalize’ their costs – to dump toxic materials into our air and water, to take inadequate steps to promote the health and dignity of workers and to oppose regulation and policy that enhances social justice or protects the environment, but might interfere with profits. Attempting to halt and repair damage to nature without addressing the ongoing root cause is a no-win situation. Try as we might to work for ecological sanity, the logic of capitalism brings about a deadly set of interlocking assaults on the life-sustaining natural processes and resources all of us depend upon. Depletion of non-renewable resources, disruption of natural cycles, waste and pollution aren’t accidents. They are the result of business as usual under capitalism. Wetlands, for example, provide essential services in flood control and wildlife habitat, yet are filled in to make way for shopping malls and housing developments. Prime agricultural land is paved over by urban sprawl. The logic of growth under capitalism translates into increased wealth for the few, but increasing stress and misery for the majority and mounting violence to the planet. If an individual behaved like a corporation, he would soon be arrested, put on trial, found guilty of crimes against humanity and either locked up or committed to an institution for the criminally insane. Kovel asks, where, in the face of all this mounting evidence, is the rational discussion of this systemic assault on nature? Where is the discussion to address the underlying causes of so much damage and lay out a policy to remedy them? “Each capitalist must constantly search to expand markets and profits,” Kovel says, “or lose his position in the hierarchy. Under such a regime, nature is continually devalued.”

Kovel feels that we need a new system. He challenges the commonly held notion that there is no realistic alternative. If capitalism is inevitable and innate in human nature, he asks, then why has it only occupied the last couple hundred years out of a human history that goes back for hundreds of thousands of years? “Why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination?” Kovel feels that ecosocialism offers a superior analysis: A society that is: Socialist, in that the working class is reunited with (takes control of) the means of production in a robust flowering of democracy, and Ecological, in that the limits to growth are finally respected, and nature is recognized as having intrinsic value and not simply cared for, but allowed to resume its inherently formative path. Kovel emphasizes the crucial importance of overcoming the triple alienation people suffer under capitalism – alienation from nature, alienation from the means and processes of production, and alienation of people from each other – if we are to survive. The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that “We can have a democratic society, or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Kovel’s book inspired me to update this axiom: “We can have an ecologically sustainable society, or we can have labor and natural resources treated as commodities. We cannot have both.”

The End of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? By Joel Kovel Halifax, Fernwood Publishing, 2002.