Pandemics, capitalism, and an ecosocialist pedagogy

Abstract

Environmental education has historically been largely silent about the effects of capitalism on the planet, limiting the effectiveness of the transformative pedagogical potential of EE. This article argues that to understand the rise, spread, and consequences of pandemics, we must analyze the role played by capitalism as a world-ecology system through the simultaneous mechanisms of unlimited profit, unlimited growth, and unlimited commodification. Widespread deforestation, unregulated wildlife trade, and the industrial confinement of animals are believed to be at the origin of modern pandemics, and capitalism has exacerbated each one of these problems. As a counteractive measure, this article advocates for an ecosocialist world-ecology, and calls on EE theoreticians and practitioners to embrace a pedagogy grounded in ecosocialism. As a starting point, it imbues expanded meanings to vital words—justice, solidarity, consumption, and technology—to assist the field of EE in its response to the current pandemic.

Keywords:

• anthropocene
• capitalism
• capitalocene
• COVID-19
• deforestation
• ecosocialism
• pandemics
• wildlife trade

Notes

1 The historical emergence of capitalism has generally been dated to the rise of English industrialization at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. However, scholars such as Quijano (2000), Broswimmer (2003), Moore (2003), and Mignolo (2011), place the beginning of capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries, with Europe’s conquest and colonization of societies around the world, and aided by technological developments at the time (e.g., advances in cartography, the printing press, plantation monocultures) and epistemological changes (e.g., the rise of Protestantism). This historical interpretation is important because it places modernity, coloniality, and modern slavery as developing simultaneously with, and as a result of, capitalism.

2 Since COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 there has been a great deal of speculation as to the exact origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In March 2021, the World Health Organization released a report claiming that a wildlife farm, rather than a wet market or biological laboratory in Wuhan, was the most likely source (Doucleff & Lohmeyer, 2021). Some studies point in a different direction, claiming that the virus was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Leonhardt, 2021). In July 2021, a global team of scientists concluded that while the lab origin theory cannot be entirely discarded, current evidence supports the view that the virus most likely spread from animals to humans in a natural setting (Zimmer & Gorman, 2021). In any case, documentation from previous viruses is conclusive in determining that most modern infectious diseases have resulted from a combination of deforestation, wildlife trade, and industrial farming, all of which are directly tied to modern capitalism (Wallace, 2020).

3 When the pandemic forced national economies into lockdown and greatly reduced global economic output, the overshoot date for 2020 was delayed to August 22. This improvement was short lived, however: In 2021, the overshoot date went back to July 29.

4 The official discourse of the Soviet Union on environmental protection was far removed from actual reality. The seven decades of communist rule in the Soviet Union and its satellites caused severe ecological devastation (Peterson, 1993), in great part because communist leaders had internalized the same modern ethos of capitalism that strictly separated humans from nature and sanctioned the despotic and cruel treatment of healthy ecosystems.

5 For a case in point, see the articles published in the two leading EE journals, the Journal of Environmental Education (founded 1969) and Environmental Education Research (founded 1995). Together, these two journals have published close to 5,000 articles since their founding, yet the word “capitalism” has been mentioned only in about 270 articles (a little more than 5%) and only a handful of articles have addressed capitalism in any systematic manner.

6 The original French version of Camus’s La peste (1947) uses the word honnêteté, which translates as “honesty,” not “decency,” which is the term used in many English translations. Given the relational aspect inherent in the term “decency,” I rather enjoy this loose translation given its connections with ecology.