John Bellamy Foster is altering the way people think about the environmental crisis. As an outspoken Marxist environmental sociologist, he looks to combat the varying effects of climate change by fundamentally changing what he refers to as “business-as-usual,” our day-to-day socioeconomic interactions.
In his new book “The Ecological Rift,” co-written with professors Brett Clark (North Carolina State) and Richard York (University of Oregon), the University sociology professor explores what he calls ecological rifts, or essentially disparities between humans and their surrounding environment that lead to various types of environmental degradation.  The book explores means of combating these rifts and the failed attempts by which others have tried to harness capitalism as a method for environmental repair.
Oregon Daily Emerald: How significant are personal consumption habits in the scheme of the environmental crisis?
John Bellamy Foster: Well, its significance is more indirect than direct. We’re not going to be able to create a more environmental culture, a more sustainable culture, unless people make that part of their very lives.  They need to decide to alter their lives and the way they relate to production and consumption, their basic culture in this area. So, we really do have to have a cultural revolution, an environmental cultural evolution to carry out change. But it can’t really start at or be limited to the personal level. Most of the decisions are being made in the realm of production and by corporations, so it really requires political action and some kind of democratic social-environmental planning with people engaged on a very widespread level to alter this. These are political issues; they aren’t simply things that people can do on their own — but it has to be connected with individual rebellion.
ODE: Going off that and the whole marketing scheme, I’d like to talk about green marketing and corporate greenwashing. You talk a little bit about it at the end of “The Ecological Rift” with the case of Wal-Mart.  
Foster: There’s a chapter called the “Ecology of Consumption” in “The Ecological Rift” that cites the latest “State of the World” report by the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, which is all about sustainable consumption, where they actually promote Wal-Mart as a green company. They argue that Wal-Mart has moved towards having “green” standards in its stores and in its trucks and that it carries more green products in its stores. But of course if you look realistically about what Wal-Mart is and its expansion and its effects on the culture, it’s completely opposite. It’s an enormous force for environmental destruction.
ODE: I look at that as an example and then also things like a USA-certified organic label. Obviously not using pesticides is very good, but at the same time you look at the transportation aspect and that has a huge environmental impact. Is this a form of green marketing and how do you combat that, or at least make people aware of something that has this paradox to it?
Foster: I tend to be more favorable to the organic labeling. I think at least we have some kind of labeling. It’s better if it’s labeled by the government, and there’s some political controls over it than if you have the corporations striving to create their own labels with no control whatsoever. I think we need to have even more information about the products we consume, but there is a lot of greenwashing and there’s a lot of false green labeling. Things are called green and they have nothing to do with sustainability at all. Every oil company on earth is presenting themselves as green. BP had a very, very big profile as a green corporation, and it’s dangerous if we fall for this. We lose sight of the fact that oftentimes the corporations that are presenting themselves as green behind the label have the highest environmental destruction rate.
ODE: What do you think about cap and trade? It’s kind of where Obama is pushing us, among other legislation? Do you see that as a legitimate possibility for an out?
Foster: No, I don’t think so. James Hansen, the world’s leading climatologist and a director of the Goddard Institute for NASA, says that cap and trade is worse than nothing. It gives you the idea that you’re maybe doing something about carbon emissions, but you’re not; in fact, you’re setting things up for disaster. It has been tried in Europe and is a proven failure. And there are very definite reasons for that. One of them is that cap and trade actually tends to put a floor under carbon emissions so that they aren’t actually going to be reduced. Another is that it is institutionally linked to various “offsets” or corporate escape hatches that negate its purported purpose. Hansen proposes as an alternative what he calls a “fee and dividend system” where you put a fee on carbon as it comes into the country or a wellhead or the mine shaft and you redistribute all the money, 100 percent, immediately to the population on a per capita basis. I think that that is realistic, if it could get past the powerful interests.
Ultimately, however, we have to change our society, our social relations, our priorities, our economic forms, because we’re not going to get out of this any other way. And that means actually facing up to the beast itself, capitalism itself, the structure of the socio-economic system that we live in — a system that’s given over to the accumulation of capital.  It’s true that capitalism has done a lot of good things (as well as bad) for the world, but we have to move on and create a system that’s more sustainable, and that’s aimed at fulfilling genuine human needs.  

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