Capitalism and the environment

[Ostrinski]

Can you all point me toward some articles or essays written on the topic that outline the destructive effects that capitalism has on the environment? Thanks in advance.

[Skyhilist]

Can you all point me toward some articles or essays written on the topic that outline the destructive effects that capitalism has on the environment? Thanks in advance.

There's a book recently that I heard about called "Green Gone Wrong" which is about the oxymoron of "green capitalism", which seems to have gotten at least mostly positive reviews.

Here's a link to it on AK press: http://www.akpress.org/green-gone-wrong.html

I'm not entirely sure if it's available online though in pdf form.

Also, here's a pretty good paper written by Richard Smith called "Green Capitalism: The God that Failed": http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue56/Smith56.pdf

I believe Murray Bookchin also wrote quite a bit about the inherent environmental destructiveness of capitalism, although I don't remember any specific essays.

Also, I know that these mainly just discuss the failures of "green capitalism", rather than the the environmental destructiveness of capitalism in general, so forgive me, but they're the best I could think of off the top of my head. I've actually been trying to find time to read into this more a bit myself, so I'd be interested to see what writings other people recommend on this as well.

[Ostrinski]

Those kinds of things are useful, thanks. I'm writing a paper on the subject and a big thing I want to address is the progressive failure on the amelioration of environmental destruction.

[cyu]

Some excerpts from http://cjyu.wordpress.com/article/unlimited-wants-and-limited-resources-gcybcajus7dp-14/

once capitalism had set property ownership in stone, then other people are forced to produce more and more useless things in order to make a living.

say some agribusiness owns vast amounts of farmland and is already producing more than enough food for everybody. Maybe there isn’t enough farmland left for anybody else to use, or maybe the agribusiness can simply outcompete any other small-scale farmer trying to enter the market. What’s left?

Well, there is no other recourse than to find a non-farming related occupation. Maybe it’s entering a factory producing plastic toys for people’s dashboards. However, as you can see, this job is really pretty useless – nobody really needs plastic toys on their dashboards. So how is the entire sector of useless industries sustained? Advertising.

All the major media in some societies are funded by product advertising. What kind of people are those kind of messages likely to raise? Most people don’t want to admit you’ve been brainwashed by consumerism – just as the followers of the world’s religions won’t say they’ve been brainwashed by the religious messages their societies give them.

It’s not even like people have an intrinsic need to advertise products – they are only forced to do so because if they don’t, their company may go bankrupt and they’ll be forced into economic hardship – which is only a problem in capitalist society.

So you’ve got overworked plastic toy makers and you’ve got overworked agribusiness employees. This is measured as an increased GDP and considered “increasing prosperity” by some idiots.

[Klaatu]

Can you all point me toward some articles or essays written on the topic that outline the destructive effects that capitalism has on the environment? Thanks in advance.

This video helps explain why Capitalism is destroying the planet

The Story of Stuff
http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-stuff/