WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
A naturally radical symbiosis
HELEN MERCER recommends a challenging account of the interaction between ecological science and dialectical materialism
EARLY WARNINGS: (Right) caricature of Edwin Ray Lankester by Leslie ‘Spy’ Ward in Vanity Fair 1905
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
by John Bellamy Foster
(Monthly Review Press, £30)
TWENTY years ago, Marx’s Ecology by John Bellamy Foster mined Marx’s writings for what he calls his “ecological materialism,” rehabilitating him as a major ecological thinker. Marx pointed out how capitalism disrupts the interactions between humans and the earth, creating what Foster calls a “metabolic rift,” leading to pollution and environmental degradation.
The central concern of his new book, which traces the work of scientist-philosophers whose ideas anticipated the modern ecological movement from Marx’s day to the 1970s, explores the evolution of ecological science simultaneously with the development of dialectical materialism.
This philosophy is not a dogma but, in the words of JD Bernal, it is a method of discovery — “an approach which sees interconnections between and within the human and the natural world, all elements constantly acting on and reacting to each other in the process of which they are transformed.” As JBS Haldane had it, the natural world consists of “processes, not things.”
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