Climate change has inspired new forms of misanthropy. The moderate complaint that humans should “reduce, reuse, and recycle,” has given way to a supposedly radical critique that “it's already too late.” The environment, this new story goes, is beyond repair in terms of human habitability; Mother Earth is rejecting us as we slide into the “post-Anthropocene.” This is what we deserve, after all, for our centuries of ecological degradation. Humanity is either doomed, or at least, needs to be “right-sized” through massive depopulation efforts. Humility and resignation are the order of the day.

Many on the ecological Left, while not always going this far, nonetheless stress the virtue of humility. In particular, John Bellamy Foster from Monthly Review diagnoses our current predicament as having deep roots in Enlightenment thinking. The seventeenth-century idea of a “lawful” nature, à la Francis Bacon, is criticized as just a prelude to the arrogant domination of the environment through science and technology.

At the same time, Foster equivocates: Modern capitalism is responsible for opening a violent “ecological rift” precisely by imagining that there are no stable, intelligible limits to nature—that with enough technical know-how, we can reorder existence to our liking. For similar reasons, he derides the eco-modernism of other figures on the Left as promoting a “New Promethean Socialism.” Their love of centralized technocracy and titanic projects of geo-engineering are anathema to Foster's degrowth politics. The solution, it seems, is to reject the values of endless growth and innovation, in favor of a slowed-down society. Of course, opines Foster, capitalism is constitutionally incapable of this kind of value-shift.

In the end, however, it's not just capitalism that is the culprit, but the very ideas of human exceptionalism, autonomy, and control. We should reject any project of humanity becoming the “collective sovereign of [the] Earth” outright.

While not having an identical perspective on these questions, Andreas Malm likewise derides “techno-utopian perspectives” as “completely juvenile and out of touch with material realities.” His own brand of ecological Marxism invokes the spirit of “War Communism” as necessary for tackling today's environmental questions. That is, the austerity, sacrifice, and enforced regimentation which marked the Russian Civil War is needed to meet contemporary crises. It is this idea of war and “catastrophe” that inspires Malm's pessimism about any easy technological solutions; sacrifices must be made.