Ecology

The ability to endure the externalities arising out of environmental disruptions is crucial in understanding environment-related inequalities. This ability is what separates the community that can fare well in undergoing major structural changes, namely, the “haves,” from those that cannot, the “have-nots.” Taking into consideration the extractive industries, this article ventures through the various aspects of inequalities faced by the communities as a result of resource extraction in terms of displacement and externalities in terms of health hazards, livelihood, and issues of agricultural productivity, mining closure, accidents, and gender. Through this process, the relevance of the Marxian arguments of exploitation is examined in the domain of metabolic rift.

Modern cities in India such as Delhi are a cesspool of inequalities and disparities that are deeply tied to the class-caste nexus. These aspects manifest themselves starkly on its roads, made apparent by identifying those who utilise its infrastructure, while dictating its design, and those who are systematically left out. The automobile owning classes of Delhi have a monopoly over the city’s land, water and air, extracting and exploiting for their needs and comforts, while the poor are left to bear the brunt of the ecological degradation that comes with it. The bourgeois class’s systematic collusion with the state is also visible in its environmentalism, through which it controls the narrative of legitimacy. The social and ecological consequences of these processes stand as evidence of the crisis that neoliberal India is facing at present.

The paper strives to explore some fundamental debates concerning the question of ecology, nature and culture in Marxian corpus. First, it attempts to explicate the differences and commonalities between the philosophical conception of nature in Marxism and contemporary and old ecological thoughts like Dark ecology of Timothy Morton and Deep ecology of Arne Naess. Second, the paper is also an attempt to revisit some of the larger philosophical and ontological questions pertaining to nature and ecology; especially the questions related to ontological position of mind and matter in relation to nature and how these fundamental questions have a bearing on the current and future trajectory of ecological thought and movements globally in the Anthropocene epoch.