What Has Changed in Nature and in the Economy?

Abstract

The author begins this article by describing the changed priorities of the present: whereas previously attention was focused on social issues, today it is the environment that has become the focus of human concerns. Although the impact of human actions on nature has been noted in the past, the author argues that today this impact is unprecedented. This can be seen, for example, in the way that contemporary en-gagements with the archive foreground the ecological issue. The author illustrates his disagreement with this practice by glancing at ecologically-minded re-readings of Karl Marx. Turning to American Studies as the disciplinary background of his argument, the author explains the reasons for this focus on Marx. The next step of the paper explores the ecological presence in American Studies before the conclusion, in which the author engages certain works of fiction and shows how he had previously not given sufficient weight to the ecological problematic. long-running claim favoring a regulated productivist been that human ingenuity can find substitutes for all resources and technology can solve all problems allowing humanity to change and adapt to anything. These arguments are made in almost total ignorance of how the economy interacts with ecosystems and impacts their structure and functioning, how dependent economies are on the flow of low entropy materials and energy and what are the basic limits to humans as biological animals. Indeed even ignorance itself is ignored and reduced down to risk and probabilities.