Where to start with John Bellamy Foster?

[palotin]

I've wanted to read him for years, but his project seems to be pretty large and have profound implications and I don't have the time to delve into an entire literature right now. Anyone know of some representative essays?

[blake 3:17]

Hungry For Profit, a collection he co-edited was my introduction to him: http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb0165/

He has a number of books on the themes of ecology v capitalism. I don't understand the theoretical distinctions between the MR school of political economy and other related schools.

There are a fair number of pieces on the Monthly Review site. He doesn't seem to be included on marxists.org, probably for copyright reasons.

[Mr. Natural]

Hey, Palotin,
John Bellamy Foster is one of those I've "gone to school" on. His Marx's Ecology (2000) definitively establishes Marx's green bonafides and is probably his most representative work.
However, I want to recomment his essay, "The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology," found in Bertell Ollman's and Tony Smith's Dialectics For The New Century (2008). This red-green essay establishes that the Marxist materialist dialectic is in agreement with the new sciences of the patterns, processes, and organization of life (hence society).
For that matter, Bertell Ollman's works (see Dance of the Dialectic 2002) show that Marx's organic perception of life and society and his materialist dialectic were taken from Hegel's philosophy of internal relations and its abstraction process. What all of this amounts to is that Hegel, Marxism and the materialist dialectic, Whiteheadian process philosophy, the new physics, cosmology, and life sciences, are in agreement as to the nature of life and the universe.
So now we must apply these philosophies and sciences that see the world as an internally related whole to our human social systems. Are we not life?

[graymouser]

I would actually say to start with The Ecological Revolution, it's a shorter book that is both very recent and goes into most of the aspects of his ideas. For instance, his Marx's Ecology was before he took on a number of important questions such as the Jevons Paradox. The longer The Ecological Rift is slightly newer, has two co-authors and goes into more depth on the specific problems facing the environment.