Socialist States and the Environment
A fascinating account. For too long we have tended to demonise socialist states, this book shows that to overcome the climate crisis, there are positive lessons to be learnt, from Lenins promotion of conservation to Cubas achievements in promoting ecological policymaking.
Derek Wall, former International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, and Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London
Many people have realised that ecological sustainability cannot be achieved under capitalism. But how about (eco-) socialism? For everyone who is interested in a sustainable future and a new society without oppression, I strongly recommend this book.
Minqi Li, Professor of Economics, University of Utah and author of China and the Twenty-First-Century Crisis
In our current moment of a near total co-optation of environmentalism where billionaires and military forces are looked to for solutions to the problems they create, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro provides a serious, data-driven, and sober look at what socialist states have been able to do for the environment.
Justin Podur, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University
Sharply erudite takes us on a brilliant guided tour of the environmental programs of socialist states and a variety of community-led initiatives. Among them, Thomas Sankaras Burkina Faso, Cuba and its agroecology, the PRC up to 1978, the USSR and many of the Eastern European countries up to 1990, various African peoples republics through 1992, and, despite their largely privatised economies, the Bolivias, Venezuelas and Vietnams of today.
Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu
Socialist States and the Environment
Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
First published 2021 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro 2021
The right of Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4041 8 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4040 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 1 78680 789 2 PDF
ISBN 978 1 78680 790 8 EPUB
ISBN 978 1 78680 791 5 Kindle
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Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Figures
Tables
Preface
Down from Mars mountain, in the Biellese Alps of the north-western Italian peninsula, there runs an intermittent stream, the Elv (Elvo in Italian). It is swollen by the Olobbia, Oremo, Viona and Ingagna creeks along its way to become a tributary of the river Cervo, among the many feeders of the Po. Long ago, through multiple phases of glacial erosion in the Early Pleistocene (one to two million years ago), these and other now bygone streams carried and dumped auriferous pebbles, gravel and sand along their courses to form a bulging, oblong strip of land, a couple of river terraces layered on top of each other.
This is the Bessa highland, a natural preserve since 1985. With what turns out to be an exiguous amount of that shimmering metal, the Bessa is part of a much larger gold-bearing area dotted with tiny ancient mines. It rises between 300 and 450 metres above sea level, an infinitesimal altitude next to the nearby towering Alps. More than a couple of millennia ago, this was Salassi domain before a Roman contingent led by Consul Appius Claudius Pulcher had the better of them (143140 bce) and secured the gold-bearing land for the Roman Empire. Barely a century later the gold-bearing deposits of the region were deemed unworthy of more mining efforts.
To this day, assortments of mainly hobbyists and fortune seekers converge on the Bessa, sifting through sediment, looking for miracles, though of different sorts. It is said that the Victimuli (presumably, in part, the descendants of the Salassi) melted much of the gold to form the statue of a horse, which they interred in the higher portion of the Bessa to conceal it from the Romans. Centuries later, fairies allegedly visited this stretch of once gold-bearing land and promised to share their talent for finding gold. The locals could not have been happier with such a revelation, but during a feast they made the unpardonable error of ridiculing the fairies for their anserine feet. Deeply offended, the fairies left, never to return.
The magical Mars mountain, the quick and lively interlocking montane streams, the glacial refashioning of land yielding concentrations of gold, ancient land struggles, the skilled fairies, the modern breakthrough-seekers and the best means to get that elusive gold. This is the long, rocky, slippery, shining, trap-riddled path of recovering and rebuilding socialism, including anarchism and communism, the precious substance that is within our grasp and made elusive by both malicious and well-meaning forces. Recalling and rediscovering bits of history and legend from ones land of birth can be a salutary method to recover what seems to be lost, but is in reality far from it.
Shorn of petty parochialism and nostalgia, this is itself a challenge of overcoming. It is a process of mixing the grounding in a place familiar yet, for someone like me, alienated with the ethereal flight necessary to reach beyond the concreteness of the present and the restraints of the past, including the place of origin, which allows, if all hinges well, for a return to the same place, even if not physically, with renewed vision and reinvigorated determination.
The endeavour implies the opposite of seeking fortunes or collectible relics in a debris of prematurely discarded history. In other words, the sifting process is one of looking for clues for what to do in what we know well or thought we did, and in the revisiting process find out we did not know as well as we thought or appreciate as well as we ought. Whether such renewal makes for any improvement in perspective and political struggle is another matter. The reader must decide that, ultimately.
At least, for what it is worth, it is how I would like to conceive of my political journey thus far and what I want to share with you, though henceforth not in such an allegorical way. One could start such a journey from a much benighted present and work backwards. But working forwards from the past is an essential complement to comprehend the current state of affairs. This is where the importance of various historical socialist experiences becomes evident, especially as they are treated like dirt from both right and left, even as gold cannot exist as such without the dirt that bears it.
It could be that clue seared in the back of my head from the permanent strained look and buried frustrations on the faces of some gimnzium colleagues I saw in the early 1990s while living on teachers wages on Balaton Lake, contrasted by the verdant countryside and plentiful woods I enjoyed, along with their stores of delightful mushrooms and tea herbs.
