John Bellamy Foster is the scholar whose name attaches, more than any other, to the claim that Marx’s materialism was ecological from its beginnings and that the founder of historical materialism needs no green supplement because the ecology was always there to be read. Foster is the leading figure of what is usually called the second wave of ecological Marxism, the wave that returned to Marx’s own texts after an earlier generation had built ecological arguments at a distance from them. His argument is therefore a claim about reading before it is a claim about theory. He holds that the ecological content of Marxism is recovered from the documentary record, from the dissertation of 1841 through the notebooks of the final decades, and not added to that record by sympathetic interpreters. That single distinction, recovery rather than addition, explains both the strength of his work and the shape of the objections it attracts, because an argument that rests on evidence can be defeated on evidence, and his critics have tried to defeat it on exactly that ground.

The scale of the claim deserves emphasis at the outset. Foster does not argue that Marx occasionally noticed polluted rivers or worried about exhausted soil, although Marx did both. He argues that a materialist conception of nature stands at the foundation of Marx’s thought, that it precedes the materialist conception of history rather than following from it, and that the mature critique of political economy expresses it in the analysis of the material exchange between human labour and the rest of nature. Everything in his career follows from that ordering. The book that made his reputation, Marx’s Ecology of 2000, is organised as a descent to the foundations and a re-ascent through the mature work. His later scholarship extended the same method sideways, recovering a forgotten company of socialist scientists who had carried the ecological materialism forward, and downward, into the unpublished notebooks where Marx’s reading in the natural sciences can be inspected entry by entry. Readers who know only the phrase metabolic rift, which attaches to his name in textbooks and summaries, know the middle of the argument and neither its beginning nor its end.

A sociologist at an editor’s desk: the formation of Foster

Foster’s institutional position matters to his work because it gave him both a discipline and a platform. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, trained as a political economist of monopoly capitalism, and his earliest books belong to that field rather than to environmental thought. The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, published in 1986, worked inside the tradition of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and it announced the habits that would later define the ecological writing: a respect for the classical texts, a preference for reconstructing an argument from its foundations, and a suspicion of interpretations that treat a thinker’s mature system as an embarrassment to be apologised for. A scholar formed in that school does not approach Marx as a museum piece. He approaches him as the author of an unfinished research programme whose parts have to be reassembled before they can be judged.

The platform was Monthly Review, the independent socialist journal founded in 1949, which Foster came to edit at the opening of the new century after a long apprenticeship in its circle. The editorship is not a biographical decoration. Monthly Review gave the ecological argument a monthly home in which it could be developed in essays, exchanges and replies to critics over many years, and it gave Foster a publisher, Monthly Review Press, willing to issue long works of historical recovery that commercial academic publishing would have trimmed. The journal also placed him inside a living tradition of Marxian political economy rather than inside a university subfield alone, and the double location shows in the writing. His books address scholars, and his essays address a movement readership, and the same argument often exists in both registers, stated once with full apparatus and once as polemic. Readers who want to understand why the ecological work took the form it did should hold the two locations together: a sociologist’s training in the classical tradition, and an editor’s desk from which that tradition speaks every month.

The ecological turn in his work came through the political economy rather than around it. The Vulnerable Planet, his short history of the global environmental crisis published in 1994, already treated ecological destruction as a product of the same accumulation process he had studied as an economist, although its Marx was the Marx of the textbooks and not yet the Marx of the dissertation and the notebooks. What changed across the nineteen nineties was the depth of the textual work. Foster began the investigation that produced Marx’s Ecology by asking a precise question about Capital: how did Marx arrive at the analysis of soil exhaustion and the antagonism of town and country that occupies some of the most striking pages of the first and third volumes? The encounter with the agricultural chemistry of Justus von Liebig explains part of the answer, and Foster says so. It did not explain the philosophical confidence with which Marx handled the material, and that residue of unexplained confidence sent the inquiry backwards, past the writings of 1844, to the very early manuscripts and to the dissertation on ancient atomism. The trajectory of the career is therefore the trajectory of a single question pursued to progressively earlier documents, and a profile of Foster that begins with the rift rather than with the question reverses his own order of discovery.

His output since the ecological turn has been large and collaborative as well as single authored, and the collaborations are part of the profile. With Brett Clark and Richard York he extended the rift framework into a general account of capitalism’s war on the earth, and with Clark and others he wrote extensively on the philosophy of materialism and its enemies. Students of his work sometimes treat the collaborative books as applications of a finished theory. They are better read as the argument’s second life, in which a thesis about texts becomes a framework for analysing fisheries, forests, climate and empire, and in which the original textual claims are tested by being put to work. Whether the framework survives that work intact is a question the critics have pressed, and it belongs to the dispute sections of this profile. The prior question, who Foster is and what exactly he claimed, has a deceptively simple answer that the next sections unpack. He claimed that the ecology was in Marx from the start, that a book by another scholar had already established the value theoretic core of that claim a year before his own appeared, and that the proof begins in Athens rather than in Manchester.

The argument before Foster: Burkett and the value question

Accuracy about Foster begins with an act of credit that Foster himself performs and that summaries of his work routinely omit. The value theoretic argument for an ecological Marx was made in a book published in 1999, a year before Marx’s Ecology, by the economist Paul Burkett. Its title was Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, and its argument was the harder and more technical of the two. Burkett addressed the objection that had seemed most damaging to any ecological reading of Marx, the objection from value theory. Critics had long held that a theory in which labour alone creates value must treat nature as worthless, and that Marxism was therefore constitutionally blind to the natural world. Burkett inverted the charge. He showed that the distinction between value and wealth does the ecological work. Nature, for Marx, is a source of wealth and of use values, the material side of production, while value is a purely social form that registers abstract labour and nothing else. The fact that capitalist accounting recognises the second and not the first is not a defect in Marx’s theory that an ecologist must repair. It is Marx’s explanation of why capitalism systematically degrades the material conditions it depends on, because what the accounts cannot see, the system treats as free.

What did Burkett establish about value and nature?

Burkett showed that in Marx’s technical sense nature contributes wealth and use values but no value, since value registers labour alone. Capitalist accounting therefore counts the labour embodied in a commodity while treating the natural material it transforms as a free gift, and that asymmetry, Burkett argued, is an ecological critique built into the theory.

The free gift formulation runs through Burkett’s book like a ground bass. Capital appropriates natural conditions, fertile soil, water power, mineral deposits, the assimilative capacities of air and water, without paying for their reproduction, because they enter production as use values and exit the accounts as nothing. A system driven by value accumulation must therefore expand its throughput of uncounted material without limit, since the uncounted costs never appear as a brake. Burkett drew the consequence carefully. The blindness is not a moral failure of individual capitalists and not a correctable pricing error. It is inscribed in the form of value itself, which is why he described his project as recovering the ecological significance of the value form rather than supplementing Marx with environmental ethics imported from outside. The book also engaged the critics of Marx within the green tradition directly, answering writers who had charged Marx with a Promethean hostility to natural limits, and it did so by quotation and close reading rather than by assertion.

Foster’s own article on the metabolic rift appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in the same year, 1999, and the near simultaneity is part of the record. Two scholars working in overlapping circles reached print within months of each other with complementary halves of a single case: Burkett with the value form, Foster with the material exchange and its disruption. When Foster’s book followed in 2000 it cited Burkett’s precedence on the value question openly, and Burkett later wrote the foreword to new editions of his own book locating it in the debates the two of them had opened. The scholarly literature that compresses this history into a single name, crediting Foster with the ecological reading entire, commits an error that Foster’s own texts correct. The error matters beyond courtesy. It misdescribes the structure of the case, in which the value argument and the historical argument are distinguishable supports, and an attack on one leaves the other standing. Critics who believe they have damaged the ecological Marx by damaging the dissertation reading have not touched Burkett at all, since Burkett’s argument barely needs the dissertation and proceeds from Capital and the manuscripts of political economy.

How should the precedence between the two books be stated?

State it as a division of labour between two arguments published a year apart. Burkett’s book of 1999 established the value theoretic core, Foster’s article of the same year named the metabolic rift, and his book of 2000 supplied the historical and philosophical depth, and neither man presents the sequence as a rivalry.

There is a further reason to state the precedence exactly. That second wave defined itself against a first wave, associated with writers such as André Gorz, Ted Benton in his earlier work, and the tradition of eco-socialist synthesis, which had accepted that Marx required correction or supplementation on nature and had set about supplying it. Benton’s influential early argument held that Marx’s concept of the labour process carried an intentionalist structure that marginalised natural conditions, and that Marxism needed ecological reconstruction. The wave that Burkett and Foster led rejected the premise. On their reading the correction model concedes the very point at issue, namely that the founding texts are ecologically empty, and it builds its ecology on ground the texts supposedly lack. The recovery model claims the opposite: the founding texts contain a developed ecological analysis, obscured by the tradition’s own productivist century and by interpreters who read Marx through that century’s spectacles. Burkett’s priority on the value question is the clearest documentary proof that the recovery was a collective scholarly event and not one man’s rebranding exercise, since two independent lines of argument converged on the same conclusion from different doors of the same building in the same year.

A reader meeting the field through Foster should therefore keep the two books in their order and their distinctness. Marx and Nature is the proof that the critique of political economy contains an ecological logic in its central categories. Marx’s Ecology is the proof, or the attempted proof, that the ecological logic has a philosophical biography reaching back to Marx’s youth and forward through his scientific reading. The second claim is larger, more vulnerable, and more original, and it is Foster’s. The first claim is narrower, harder to refute, and Burkett’s. Conflating them flatters Foster and misleads the reader about where the argument is strong and where it is exposed, and the exposure begins precisely where Foster goes beyond Burkett, at the dissertation of 1841. Before reaching the dissertation, however, the architecture of the book that contains it needs stating, because Marx’s Ecology is organised as an argument about the history of materialism and not as a commentary on isolated passages, and its organisation is itself a claim.

Marx’s Ecology and the recovery not addition thesis

The book of 2000 is built like a funnel. It opens with the long history of materialism from antiquity, passes through the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, lingers over Darwin, and only then arrives at the soil chemistry and the political economy where the rift analysis lives. The order enacts the thesis. Foster is not extracting green passages from Capital and arranging them for admiration; he is reconstructing the intellectual formation that made those passages possible, and claiming that the formation was materialist and ecological in a connected way from its first document. The recovery not addition thesis, the name this series gives his central claim, states exactly that: ecological Marxism, on his account, is a matter of reading Marx accurately rather than supplementing him, which is why the argument turns on textual and historical evidence rather than on theoretical innovation, and which is also why its weakest point is the charge of over-reading. A supplement can be as inventive as it likes. A recovery must show its documents.

What does the recovery not addition thesis claim?

The thesis claims that Foster’s ecological Marx is found in the texts rather than built onto them, so the argument stands or falls on documentary evidence. It follows that his method is historical and philological before it is theoretical, and that over-reading, not innovation, is the charge his case has to fear.

The book’s middle chapters do the unglamorous work on which the thesis depends. Foster traces Marx’s engagement with the science of his period: the agricultural chemistry associated with Liebig and the debate over soil exhaustion, the geological and evolutionary literatures, the writings on climate and deforestation by Karl Fraas that Marx read with excitement in the eighteen sixties, and the ethnological and communal material of the final years. The point of the survey is cumulative rather than decorative. A thinker whose reading in the natural sciences was this wide, sustained and critical cannot plausibly be described as indifferent to nature, and the descriptions of Marx as a prophet of limitless productive expansion have to survive contact with a documentary record that shows him, decade after decade, studying the material conditions of production and worrying at their degradation. Foster also recruits Engels, whose writings on the natural sciences were long treated within the tradition as an embarrassment, and argues that the contempt for Engels’s dialectics of nature rests on a mechanistic standard that the philosophy of science has itself abandoned. The defence of Engels is a load-bearing part of the structure, because the recovered tradition of the next century descends through the junior partner as much as through the senior.

Four stages compose the whole argument, and the table below states them as the field now debates them. It is the findable artifact of this profile, and readers who keep it in view can locate every dispute that follows. The argument in four steps moves from a dissertation to a set of intermediate writings, from those writings to the mature rift analysis, and from the rift to a recovered tradition of successors, and each stage carries its own evidence and its own characteristic objection.

Stage	Claim	Evidence	Objection	How it has fared
The dissertation	Marx’s materialism begins as a philosophy of nature admitting contingency	The 1841 dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus and its notebooks	A student work cannot ground a system	Contested; the modest version widely granted, the strong version disputed
The intermediate writings	The early and middle Marx criticise the alienation of humanity from nature	The manuscripts of 1844, the journalism, the correspondence on science	Selection flatters the ecological passages	Partly granted; the counter passages remain in dispute
The metabolic rift	The mature critique names an irreparable break in the material exchange	Capital on soil, town and country, and large scale industry	The concept presupposes a dualism of society and nature	The textual core broadly accepted; the framework disputed by world-ecology
The recovered tradition	Socialist scientists carried the ecological materialism forward	The writings of Lankester, Morris, Tansley, Bernal, Haldane, Needham and others	A constructed lineage reads coherence into scattered work	The recovery itself praised as scholarship; the lineage claim debated

The table also exposes the argument’s asymmetry, which Foster’s critics have been quick to note. The stages are not equally strong, and their strength does not increase with their importance to the thesis. The rift stage rests on famous passages in a canonical book, and even scholars who reject Foster’s framework generally concede that Marx wrote those passages and meant something serious by them. The dissertation stage rests on a short academic exercise by a very young man, and it carries the largest philosophical weight in the entire construction, since it is supposed to supply the foundation that makes the rest a development rather than a series of episodes. A profile that failed to mark that asymmetry would mislead its readers about the state of the question. The recovery thesis is at its most secure in the middle of Marx’s career and at its most venturesome at the career’s beginning and end, at the dissertation where the foundation is laid and in the notebooks where the deepening is alleged, and the disputes map onto the insecurity with some precision.

One more feature of the book deserves record before the dissertation gets its own section. Marx’s Ecology is also a polemic against strands of green theory, which Foster accuses of idealism, of treating nature as a spiritual category, and of a Malthusian inheritance that blames population where it should blame production relations. Some reviewers found the polemic the weakest part of the book, a charge examined in the criticisms section, where the symposium literature is given its say. The polemic matters here for a structural reason. Foster’s Marx is not offered as one green ancestor among others, to be combined eclectically with deep ecology or ecofeminism or bioregionalism. He is offered as the founder of the only materialist ecology that Foster considers coherent, and the exclusiveness of the offer explains the warmth of some of the replies. A recovery that claims sole legitimate descent invites a contest over the inheritance, and the contest duly arrived.

The dissertation on Epicurus and the weight it is asked to bear

Every account of Foster must slow down at 1841, because his most distinctive and most contested move is made there. Marx’s doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Jena when its author was twenty two years old and turning twenty three, compares the philosophies of nature of Democritus and Epicurus, the two atomists of the ancient world. The standard reading of the dissertation within Marx scholarship treated it as a document of the young Hegelian milieu, an exercise in the idiom of the philosophy of self consciousness, interesting chiefly as a signpost on the road to the later work and superseded by it. Foster reads the same document as a foundation. His Marx emerges from the dissertation already in possession of a materialist conception of nature, formed in argument with the greatest materialist of antiquity, and the rest of the career unfolds from that possession. Readers who want the young Marx in his intellectual setting should consult the Karl Marx intellectual biography in this series, which treats the dissertation among the other early writings. The question here is narrower: what Foster finds in the text, and whether the text can carry it.

Why does Foster start with Epicurus?

because Marx’s doctoral dissertation was on ancient atomism, and Foster reads it as establishing a materialism that admits contingency and rejects both mechanical determinism and design. He treats that as the philosophical foundation of the later analysis of society’s material exchange with nature.

The hinge of the reading is the swerve. Democritus, on Marx’s account, left his atoms falling in straight lines under necessity, a materialism of mechanism in which everything that happens had to happen. Epicurus introduced a declination, the famous clinamen, in which the atom swerves from the straight line without external cause. Marx seized on the difference, and Foster seizes on Marx’s seizure. In the swerve Marx found, already in 1841, the conceptual means to refuse two enemies at once: the mechanical determinism that makes freedom an illusion, and the theological design that makes nature a artefact of spirit. A materialism that contains contingency at its root can think of nature as a realm of emergence and interaction rather than as a machine or a temple, and Foster argues that this is the materialism Marx never abandoned. The dissertation’s notebooks and preparatory materials, which show Marx excerpting and arguing with the ancient sources at length, are Foster’s evidence that the engagement was serious and philosophical rather than a degree exercise performed for the fee.

What does the swerve establish in Foster’s reading?

In Foster’s reading the swerve establishes that matter is not condemned to mechanical necessity, since the atom’s declination breaks the chain of fate at the origin of things. A materialism built on that break can admit novelty, freedom and emergence without importing spirit, and so can think nature historically rather than as a machine.

From the dissertation Foster builds a bridge across the whole career, and the bridge has named spans. The critique of religion in the early eighteen forties extends the Epicurean refusal of design into social criticism. The manuscripts of 1844 describe the alienation of the human being from nature in terms that presuppose a naturalism learned in the ancient material. The mature work inherits the conception and gives it economic form: the labour process as a material exchange between humanity and nature, governed by natural laws that capital’s drive for accumulation disrupts. Foster returned to the Epicurus material at book length in a later study, Breaking the Bonds of Fate, which deepens the dissertation reading and answers the Althusserian alternative, on which Marx’s development contains a rupture rather than a continuity and the early philosophy belongs to a discarded problematic. The existence of the later book testifies to how central the grounding claim is to its author. He has staked more on the dissertation than on any other single text, and he knows that the stake is visible.

The objection writes itself, and it has been written, repeatedly, by critics whose names and works belong in the criticisms section of this profile. Stated here in miniature, the charge is that a student exercise in ancient philosophy, completed at twenty three, is being asked to found a systematic ecology it cannot contain, and that the foundation becomes visible only to a reading which starts from the mature rift passages and works backwards, composing an unbroken growth out of documents that record a mind in motion. Foster’s reply, also stated here briefly and weighed later, is that the claim is about what the dissertation establishes philosophically, the rejection of mechanism and design, and not about the young Marx possessing an ecology in any modern sense. The distinction between the modest claim and the strong claim runs through the entire debate. The modest claim, that the dissertation shows Marx forming a non mechanical materialism in dialogue with Epicurus, commands wide assent. The strong claim, that this formation is the foundation of the later ecological analysis in a sense that makes the career a single unfolding, is the contested one, and honest exposition should keep the two apart even when Foster’s own rhetoric joins them.

The rift years: Foster and the metabolic argument

The centre of the mature case is a single German word and the analysis built around it. Marx used the term Stoffwechsel, metabolism, for the interchange of matter through which labour binds society to the rest of nature, and in the third volume of Capital he described the capitalist organisation of agriculture and industry as producing an irreparable rift in that exchange: nutrients taken from the soil as food and fibre are shipped to distant towns and never returned, so the soil is depleted at one pole while waste accumulates at the other. The passage is one sentence long in its famous form, and Foster’s 1999 journal article, Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift, made it the organising concept of the ecological reading. The concept itself belongs to a separate article in this series, metabolic rift explained, which sets out the mechanism in full; the profile concerns Foster’s use of it, and the use has a shape worth noticing. He did not invent the term, discover the passage, or first translate it. His contribution was architectural. He took a concept that commentators had treated as a suggestive metaphor in an agricultural context and rebuilt it as the mature form of the materialism whose foundations the dissertation had laid, generalisable from soil to every material exchange that capital organises at a distance.

Whose word is metabolism in the rift argument?

Metabolism is Marx’s own word, the German Stoffwechsel, used across Capital for the material exchange between labour and nature that every society must organise. Foster’s contribution was retrieval and emphasis, the placing of the term at the centre of the ecological reading, not invention, and summaries that credit him with the concept misstate the record.

The generalisation proceeded by stages in Foster’s own essays. From the soil nutrient cycle the argument extended to the carbon cycle and the climate, since a rift in the exchange between society and the atmosphere follows the same logical form as a rift in the exchange between town and country. It extended to the oceans, in collaborative work on fisheries and the nitrogen cycle, and to the forests. Each extension was presented as an application of Marx’s category rather than as a new theory, in keeping with the recovery thesis: the category was in the text, and the work consisted in showing how much of the modern ecological agenda it could organise. Foster also gave the framework a forward edge. Where a rift is irreparable under the existing relations, the associated producers of a future society would have to govern the metabolism rationally, a phrase Marx himself used, and the ecological argument thereby rejoins the political argument of the tradition rather than floating free of it as a counsel of technical management. The phrase matters to Foster because it shows the ecology terminating in the same place as the rest of Marx’s thought, in the question of who controls production and for what ends.

Institutionally, the rift years were also the years in which the argument acquired a school. Monthly Review carried the essays and the exchanges; a generation of doctoral students in environmental sociology took the framework into empirical research; and Clark and York, Foster’s collaborators, developed distinct contributions on the philosophy of science and the treadmill of production that are sometimes folded into his name and should not be. The profile of a thinker whose work is this collaborative must keep the attributions sorted, as the precedence discussion sorted Burkett from Foster. Brett Clark’s work on the ecological rift in the oceans and on the philosophy of materialism, and Richard York’s work on energy and on the structural drivers of emissions, extend the framework in directions Foster did not originate, and the collaborative book of 2010, to which this profile turns next, is a joint construction whose chapters bear the marks of three hands. The habit of crediting the senior figure with the whole school is the same error, at one remove, as crediting Foster with Burkett’s value argument, and this profile declines it in both directions.

The collaborative extension: The Ecological Rift

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, published in 2010 by Foster with Brett Clark and Richard York, is the book in which the textual argument becomes a general theory of ecological crisis under capitalism. Its structure announces the ambition. Where Marx’s Ecology had moved from foundations to the mature text, the collaborative volume moves from the mature text outward, through the major material exchanges of the planetary system, arguing that the rift form recurs in each: in the soil, in the forests, in the oceans and their fisheries, in the carbon cycle, and in the relations between the wealthy economies and the ecologically unequal exchanges that supply them. The subtitle does polemical work that the earlier book’s subtitle did not, and the shift of register is deliberate. A decade after the recovery argument had been made and contested, its authors were writing as the proprietors of a framework with applications, addressing readers who might never open the dissertation literature and who needed the ecology of the present organised by the categories of the past.

Two features of the collaborative book matter for a profile of Foster. The first is the treatment of limits. The authors argue against the version of environmental thought that locates the crisis in aggregate human pressure on a passive planet, the arithmetic of population and consumption that Foster had been criticising since the nineteen nineties, and they relocate the driver in the accumulation process and its specific organisation of each material exchange. The argument is Burkett’s value point generalised: what the accounts cannot register, the system cannot respect, and each rift is the material signature of a social form. The second feature is the book’s handling of attempted technical fixes, from efficiency improvements that rebound into greater throughput to schemes for engineering the climate, which the authors treat as the system’s characteristic response to rifts it cannot close, namely their displacement in space, in time, or into another medium. Displacement becomes, in the collaborative work, almost as important a category as the rift itself, and it gives the framework an answer to the obvious objection that some particular rift, in soil fertility for instance, was mitigated by fertiliser: the mitigation exported the problem to the energy system and the nitrogen cycle, where it reappears in altered form.

Reception of the collaborative book divided along a line that this profile will meet again in the disputes. Admirers took it as proof that the recovery had yielded a working theory, the strongest available Marxist account of the planetary crisis. Detractors took the same applications as evidence of overextension, a single category stretched across unlike phenomena until the stretching, rather than the phenomena, did the explanatory work. Both responses confirm the architectural character of Foster’s contribution. Nobody disputes that the soil passages exist, and nobody credits him with inventing them. What is disputed, at every stage, is the legitimacy of the structure he built on them, and the dispute about the collaborative applications is the dissertation dispute repeated at the other end of the career: in each case the question is how much weight a genuine textual foundation can bear. The later historical work, to which this profile now turns, changed the terms of that question by changing the evidence. Instead of asking the foundation to bear more, Foster went looking for the successors who had borne it already.

The Return of Nature and the recovered tradition

The most substantial work of Foster’s later career is a work of historical recovery on a scale that surprised even sympathetic readers. The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, published in 2020 and awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in that year, reconstructs a tradition of British socialist and materialist scientists and writers who carried an ecological materialism through the first half of the twentieth century, and who had been so thoroughly forgotten that their existence revises the standard history of ecological thought. The standard history ran from the conservationists and the early ecologists to the environmental movement of the nineteen sixties, with the socialist tradition appearing, if at all, as a productivist antagonist. Foster’s recovered company does not fit that history. It contains working scientists of the first rank, artists and critics, and a network of influence running from the circle of Marx and Engels themselves into the scientific culture of interwar Britain, where the tradition’s heirs described themselves, without embarrassment, as dialectical materialists working in the sciences. The recovery is the fourth stage of the argument in four steps, and it changes the character of the whole. An interpretation of Marx that might have been one scholar’s construction becomes, if the recovery holds, the rediscovery of a lineage that had adherents, institutions and achievements before it was buried.

Who were the recovered socialist scientists?

The recovered company includes the zoologist E. Ray Lankester, the artist and socialist William Morris, the ecologist Arthur Tansley, who coined the ecosystem concept, and the interwar group Foster calls the red scientists, among them J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, Hyman Levy and Lancelot Hogben, with the critic Christopher Caudwell.

The lineage begins inside the founding circle. E. Ray Lankester, a zoologist of Darwin’s school and a friend of Marx in the London years, developed an ecological analysis of the human degradation of nature, arguing in his period that the parasitic relation of commercial society to the natural world produced degeneration in both, and he carried a materialist conception of nature learned partly in that circle into the heart of British zoology. William Morris, whose socialism was formed in the same decades and in contact with the same tradition, gave the critique its literary and moral form: a vision of work, craft and landscape in which the ugliness of the industrial towns figured as evidence against the system that built them, and in which a free society was imagined, concretely, as a garden civilisation. Foster’s treatment insists on the scientific standing of the first figure and the theoretical standing of the second, against a reception that had filed Lankester as a mere Darwinian populariser and Morris as a mere romancer. The insistence follows the method of the whole project: the tradition is recovered by rereading its members at the level of their strongest work rather than at the level of their reputation.

The interwar generation is the recovery’s centrepiece, and the generation most completely forgotten. In the nineteen thirties a remarkable group of British scientists, the crystallographer J. D. Bernal, the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, the biochemist and historian of science Joseph Needham, the mathematician Hyman Levy and the zoologist and popular educator Lancelot Hogben among them, together with classicists such as Benjamin Farrington and George Thomson and the young critic Christopher Caudwell, professed a dialectical materialism in public and attempted to practise science under its guidance. Foster’s narrative gives the group its institutional settings: the famous intervention of a Soviet delegation at the London congress on the history of science in 1931, which electrified the younger British scientists; the movement for the social relations of science; the best selling works of scientific humanism that carried the outlook to a mass readership. The scientific content of their work is described in this profile as Foster describes it, historically, as what these scientists argued in their period. On his account, Lankester had already advanced the thesis that the great epidemics afflicting human and animal populations were products of human production and of the commercial order. Haldane, working in parallel with the Soviet biochemist A. I. Oparin, proposed a materialist account of the origin of life, and connected it with the recognition, drawn from V. I. Vernadsky, that life itself had manufactured the atmosphere of the earth. Bernal sought to render the dialectical categories operational in a theory of how new levels of organisation emerge from the residues of older ones. Needham developed a theory of integrative levels spanning natural and social history. Tansley, whom Foster treats as a protagonist in his own right rather than as a footnote to the group, introduced the concept of the ecosystem in 1935, in a paper whose polemical targets included the quasi spiritual organicism of some rival ecologists, and Foster argues that the concept bears the impress of the dialectical and materialist milieu, including the systems thinking of Levy. Hogben and Haldane devoted substantial scientific labour to refuting the claimed genetic basis of race. These were the positions the recovered scientists took and the work they published, and this profile reports them as historical arguments of their period, without pronouncing on their standing in the sciences that inherited and revised them.

What did the recovered scientists argue in their period?

In their period these writers argued, in their different disciplines, that nature develops through interconnection and emergence rather than mechanical aggregation, and several of them held that the sciences of their day were being deformed by the commercial and imperial order that funded them. Foster presents those arguments as their positions in their time, not as findings endorsed here.

Why was the tradition forgotten? Foster’s answer is itself a piece of historical argument, and it assigns the forgetting to the middle decades of the century: to the cold war’s policing of scientific culture, in which an avowed dialectical materialism became a professional liability in the West; to the association of that philosophy with the state doctrine of the Soviet Union, which discredited it among scientists who might otherwise have inherited it; and to the internal history of ecology as a discipline, which wrote its own genealogy around other founders. The forgetting was so complete that Tansley’s ecosystem, the single most successful concept the tradition produced, entered the textbooks detached from its author’s politics, and Bernal and Haldane entered the popular memory as brilliant eccentrics whose Marxism was a hobby rather than the stated framework of their science. The recovery therefore performs the same operation on the twentieth century that Marx’s Ecology performed on the nineteenth: it takes figures whose ecological significance had been filed away and shows the filing to have been an artefact of reception. The series pattern is worth naming, since this cluster shares it with the recovery of Marx’s notebooks and with the recovery of the socialist women’s movement elsewhere in the series. A body of material that always existed becomes visible when someone reads it with the question in mind, and the recovery changes a tradition’s self understanding without any new argument needing to be made. Whether The Return of Nature is best classed as an argument or as an archive with a thesis, its scholarly substance is not in serious dispute; reviewers who resist Foster’s larger claims have generally conceded the recovery itself, and several have called it the most important of his books for that reason.

One thread inside the recovered tradition ties the fourth stage of the argument back to the first, and Foster draws attention to it with evident satisfaction. The British materialists, on his account, were readers of Epicurus. Lankester, Farrington, Thomson, Bernal, Needham, Hogben and Caudwell each treated the ancient atomist as a founder of the materialist conception of nature, and the swerve, the clinamen by which the atom declines from the straight line, served them as it had served Marx, as the emblem of a materialism open to contingency and emergence, set against mechanism. Farrington’s scholarship on Greek science and Thomson’s on the first philosophers made the connection a matter of classical learning rather than of slogan. The detail matters because it answers, in part, the objection that the Epicurus grounding is Foster’s private construction imposed on the record. Whatever one concludes about the dissertation’s weight in Marx’s own development, the Epicurean reference demonstrably operated inside the tradition that claimed descent from him, in texts written by scientists who believed they were continuing his materialism. The broader question of how dialectical thinking functioned inside the sciences of the period is treated in this series at dialectics in social science, and readers who want the recovered tradition’s philosophy rather than its personnel should go there next.

The recovery also redrew the map of Foster’s own project. Before 2020, his case could be summarised as a claim about one author, Marx, supported by one philosophical document and one canonical book. After 2020, the case includes a claim about a tradition, supported by an archive of scientific and literary work that any historian can inspect, and the centre of evidential gravity shifts accordingly. A critic who grants the archive but doubts the dissertation reading has not disposed of the project; a critic who doubts both must now explain how an ecological materialism came to flourish, in avowed form, among scientists who traced it to the founders. Foster is explicit that the recovered figures were no mere epigones repeating formulas. They extended the materialism into genetics, crystallography, biochemistry and ecology itself, disciplines Marx could not have foreseen, and their doing so is his evidence that the philosophy of nature recovered from the dissertation was a living research orientation rather than a textual curiosity. The claim is, once again, stronger than the archive strictly requires, and the criticisms section of this profile will state the corresponding objection, that lineage is being read into proximity. The archive, however, is not an objection’s to give away. It exists, it was recovered by Foster’s labour, and any future history of ecological thought that omits it will be incomplete in a way that earlier histories, written in ignorance, were not.

The notebooks and the late Marx

The final body of evidence entered the debate from the archive of Marx’s own reading. Across his career Marx filled notebooks with excerpts from his reading, and the notebooks devoted to the natural sciences, excerpting works of geology, chemistry, physiology, agriculture and anthropology, were published in the fourth section of the historical critical edition of the complete works, the MEGA. The edition’s slow appearance meant that the scale of the late scientific reading registered with scholarship only gradually, and a distinct line of work grew up around the notebooks in which Foster is a participant and populariser rather than the sole or first figure. The guide to that edition in this series, MEGA2: the Marx manuscripts guide, sets out the editorial history; the profile’s concern is what the notebooks did to the argument about Foster. What they did was supply the career’s far end. The dissertation shows a young man forming a materialism; the notebooks show an old one, in the years after the late eighteen sixties, deepening his engagement with the sciences of nature at exactly the period when the standard image has him narrowing into political economy and politics. The recovery thesis predicts such a pattern, a lifelong and developing ecological attention, and the notebooks are the prediction’s most concrete confirmation, which is why Foster cites them so insistently.

How do the notebooks change the picture of the late Marx?

The notebooks show Marx, after the late eighteen sixties, excerpting and annotating natural science at a scale earlier scholarship had not registered, and they show the reading feeding his revisions and his sense of natural limits. For the recovery they supply the career’s far end, evidence that the ecological attention deepened rather than faded with age.

The most discussed development of the notebook scholarship is associated with Kohei Saito, whose Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism of 2017 reconstructed the late reading in detail and whose subsequent work states the strongest version of the conclusion: that Marx’s position in his final years amounts to a form of degrowth communism, a communism of sufficiency and limits rather than of expanding productive forces. The claim is the field’s most contested, and it must be stated precisely in a profile of Foster, because the two positions are routinely conflated and are not the same. Foster’s Marx is ecological in his method and his categories from the beginning, and his communism is the associated producers’ rational government of the metabolism; the framework is one of rift and repair under transformed relations, not a doctrine of aggregate contraction, and Foster has kept his distance from readings that make the late Marx a theorist of degrowth as such, while welcoming the notebook scholarship that both projects share. The conflation flatters neither. Saito’s claim depends on the late notebooks carrying a change of position; Foster’s depends on continuity from the dissertation; and the same archive is thus made to testify for development and for constancy by the two leading readers of the recovery, a fact that tells a careful student more about the state of the field than any summary verdict could. The degrowth question in its own right belongs to its own article in this series and is not adjudicated here.

For Foster’s profile the notebooks have a second use, quieter than the Saito debate. They discipline the recovery thesis by giving it a documentary test it could fail. Had the late notebooks shown a Marx indifferent to natural science, excerpting only economics and history in his final decades, the claim of a deepening ecological attention would have collapsed at its far end, and the dissertation reading would have been left carrying a career it could not carry. The notebooks show the opposite, and Foster is entitled to the point. Entitlement, however, is where the criticisms begin, because a pattern confirmed at both ends of a career can still be a pattern selected from a larger and messier record, and the charge of selection, of reading for the ecology and reporting the ecology found, is the methodological form of the over-reading objection. That objection, with its companions, now gets the full statement the brief for this profile requires.

The criticisms at full strength

The recovery project’s critics are not a chorus of the hostile, and a profile that treated them as one would fail its subject, since Foster’s own practice is to answer objections in print and at length. The objections fall into three families. The first attacks the foundation, the dissertation reading. The second attacks the construction, the seamless ecological Marx assembled across the career. The third attacks the polemic, Foster’s handling of rival green traditions. Each family has named representatives and identified works, and each deserves statement in the strongest form its proponents have given it.

The foundation objection has been put with care by scholars inside the broad Marxist conversation. Xu Yanmei, in a critique relayed and answered by Foster himself in his published response to Chinese scholars on ecology and Marxism, contends that his work makes the mistake of placing Marx’s dissertation on a par with his mature work, and that an ecological critique did not consciously enter into Marx’s critique of capitalism in the way the parity requires. The objection generalises. A doctoral dissertation on ancient philosophy, written when its author was twenty three, cannot bear the weight of grounding a systematic ecological materialism. The dissertation belongs to the world of the Young Hegelians, breathes that circle’s idiom of self consciousness, and was written by a student who needed a degree and whose materialism, such as it was, sat inside an idealist vocabulary he would spend years escaping. To find in it the foundation of the mature ecology is to read backwards from the metabolic passages of Capital, selecting the ancient material for the light it seems to cast forward, and reading backwards of that kind is precisely the retrospective coherence that intellectual history exists to avoid. A discipline that explains how thinkers change cannot license a method that dissolves the change into an unfolding essence, present at twenty three and merely elaborated at fifty.

What is the over-reading objection in its strongest form?

The objection holds that a dissertation on ancient philosophy by a twenty three year old cannot ground a systematic ecological materialism, and that finding the mature theory’s foundation in it manufactures retrospective coherence. Its force is methodological: intellectual history should explain change, and a reading that dissolves change into unfolding has explained the career away.

Foster’s answer distinguishes the claims. He does not hold that the young Marx possessed an ecology, a science that did not yet exist under that name; he holds that the dissertation establishes a philosophical orientation, a materialism that refuses mechanism and design together, without which the later ecological analysis would lack its distinctive character. On the modest claim, he notes, the evidence is textual and specific: the dissertation’s argument about the swerve, the notebooks of excerpts that surround it, the explicit preference for Epicurus over Democritus on the question of necessity. On the strong claim of continuity, his answer is that continuity of orientation is not identity of doctrine, and that a foundation is not a building. The answer is genuinely responsive to the modest version of the objection, and honest exposition should record where it leaves the strong version. It leaves it not demonstrated. That the orientation persisted can be shown passage by passage only if the passages are there, and at several joints of the career the ecological thread runs thin enough that its presence is a matter of interpretation rather than of quotation. Foster’s defenders reply that thin is not absent, and that the notebooks thicken the thread at the far end. The exchange is a real one, conducted in good faith on both sides, and it is not closed.

The construction objection widens the target from the dissertation to the whole recovery. In the symposium on Marx’s Ecology published by the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism under the pointed title Failed Promise, Maarten de Kadt and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro charged that Foster, despite his stated intention, imposes modern ecological concepts back into the thinking of the nineteenth century; that he neglects the actual historical development of ecological science, so that the book contributes to the history of ideas while failing both ecology and ecological Marxist theory; and that its treatment of green theory homogenises a diverse field into a straw opponent. Alan Rudy’s contribution to the same critical literature pressed related complaints about the book’s handling of sociology and of the sciences it recruits. The construction objection, in its general form, is the selection charge: the recovery reports the passages that confirm it and understates what Marx did not say. Marx celebrated the development of the productive forces in language no ecologist would choose. Marx mocked the romantic critics of industry. Marx left whole domains of the natural world, its intrinsic value, the standing of other species, the ethics of the human relation to them, almost entirely unaddressed, and a tradition that presents him as a systematic ecological thinker must explain why the system’s silences do not count against the system. Foster’s reply is that the recovery never claimed Marx answered every question a later ecology would ask, and that the silences mark the limits of a nineteenth century thinker working before the science of ecology had a name. The reply concedes the fact while contesting its weight, and the contest, like the dissertation contest, remains open by the standards both sides profess.

What does the seamless Marx criticism leave out?

It leaves out whatever resists the reading: the praise of expanding productive forces, the mockery of romantic anti industrialism, the long silences about whole domains of natural life. The charge is not forgery. It is that a recovery reporting only confirmations understates what its subject never said, and the understatement compounds at every stage.

The polemic objection is the least philosophical and in some ways the most damaging, because it concerns fairness rather than interpretation. Foster’s books arraign green theory in bloc: idealist, dualist, Malthusian, spiritualist. Reviewers across the ecological left objected that the bloc does not exist, that ecofeminists, social ecologists, environmental historians and green political theorists hold positions as various as those inside Marxism, and that a writer who demands close reading for Marx owes rival traditions something better than caricature. The objection gained force from Foster’s own standard. A project whose entire authority rests on the ethics of recovery, on reading neglected texts whole and in context, exposes itself when it reads its contemporaries in extract and at their weakest. Foster has moderated the polemic across his later work and entered into more discriminating exchanges, including a notably careful published dialogue with Chinese scholars in which criticisms of the dissertation reading are reproduced and answered point by point. The moderation is part of the record, and so is the original offence; a profile reports both, and readers weighing the recovery project should know that its author’s practice as a controversialist has been criticised by some of the same scholars who praise his practice as an historian. The three families of objection converge on a single demand, which the next section’s dispute sharpens: that the framework built on the recovered texts must justify its categories, and not merely its quotations. The world-ecology challenge is that demand in its most developed form.

The dispute with world-ecology

The field’s principal live disagreement about Foster’s framework is not with its critics inside the recovery debate but with a rival framework that shares its Marxist allegiance and rejects its central category. World-ecology, the approach developed by the environmental historian Jason W. Moore and stated in his Capitalism in the Web of Life of 2015, holds that the metabolic rift is the wrong master concept for an ecological Marxism, because the concept presupposes the dualism it ought to overcome. The objection deserves slow statement, since it is the strongest theoretical challenge the rift framework faces and since the two camps address overlapping audiences with overlapping texts.

Moore’s charge begins from the grammar of the rift idea. A rift is a break between things. To speak of a rift between society and nature is therefore, on his account, to have already performed the separation that Cartesian thought bequeathed to the modern world, the separation of a human realm from a natural realm conceived as external to it, and then to deplore the consequences of a split one’s own categories enacted. He calls the habit Green Arithmetic, the adding of Society and Nature as though they were independent quantities, and he argues that the habit is not an innocent shorthand. It reproduces, inside ecological theory, the founding gesture of the system being criticised, which could only treat nature as an external storehouse because it had first conceived it as external. Against the dualism Moore sets a monism of relations. Capitalism, in his formulation, does not act on nature from outside; it is a way of organising nature, a world-ecology in which human and extra human life are made together through what he calls the double internality of capitalism in nature and nature in capitalism, within a relational field he names with the Greek term oikeios. His associated concept of cheap nature describes the strategy by which capital secures its inputs, food, energy, raw materials and labour power itself, at prices below their cost of reproduction, periodically exhausting each frontier of cheapness and moving to the next.

What does the dualism objection claim?

The objection claims that the rift concept presupposes the very dualism it should refuse, since a break can only open between two things already conceived as separate, namely society and nature. Its proponent concludes that ecological Marxism needs a monist vocabulary of relations within a single web of life rather than a vocabulary of exchanges across a divide.

Foster’s reply defends the distinction as a distinction within a unity, and the reply has been developed across essays and exchanges with Moore and with Moore’s co-thinkers. Metabolism, on the rift account, is precisely the concept of a unity that contains differentiation: the human being is a part of nature that has become distinguishable within it through labour, and the exchange between society and the rest of nature is an internal relation of a single material world, not a commerce between two worlds. A rift, correspondingly, is a disruption inside the unity, the breaking of cycles that bind the differentiated poles, and to name the disruption is not to reify the poles. Foster adds a methodological charge of his own. A monism that refuses analytical distinction, he argues, dissolves the specific causal questions an ecological theory must answer, about which processes degrade which cycles and under what social relations, into a general affirmation that everything is connected, and the affirmation explains nothing in particular. The exchanges have not been gentle. Moore’s camp regards the rift school as having conceded the conceptual field to the dualism of the society that produced the crisis; Foster’s regards world-ecology as a verbal radicalism that abandons the material specificity of Marx’s categories, including the value analysis that Burkett recovered, in favour of a philosophy of relations. Each side accuses the other of the characteristic failure it most fears, dualism on one flank and vacuity on the other.

A profile’s duty in a live dispute is cartography, not verdict, and the map has three features a reader should carry away. First, the dispute is internal to an ecological Marxism both sides claim, and turns on the interpretation of shared texts, Marx’s metabolism passages above all, so that it cannot be settled by any evidence external to the interpretive question. Second, the two frameworks have proved differently fertile: the rift in empirical studies of particular material cycles and their disruption, world-ecology in the long run history of capitalism’s frontiers and in the associated notion of the Capitalocene, and scholars outside both camps increasingly treat the choice between them as a choice of research question rather than of allegiance. Third, the dispute is ongoing, conducted in journals and conference exchanges without sign of exhaustion, and any account that presents either framework as having disposed of the other misreports the state of the field. Foster’s position in the dispute is also his position in the field at large: the senior figure of the recovery, defending the categories the recovery produced, against a challenger whose work he helped make possible and whose success is one measure of the recovery’s own.

The science question: Engels and the philosophy of nature

A thread runs through Foster’s work that profiles centred on the rift often miss, although it connects the dissertation to the recovered tradition and explains his lifelong quarrel with mechanistic philosophies of science. The thread is the defence of Engels. Within the Marxist tradition of the twentieth century, and especially within its Western branch, Engels’s writings on the natural sciences, the unfinished Dialectics of Nature and the scientific chapters of Anti-Dühring, were widely treated as a liability: an amateur’s attempt to legislate for sciences he had not mastered, stained by association with the official doctrine of the Soviet state. Foster’s recovery refuses the verdict, and the refusal is not filial piety. His argument is that the contempt for Engels measures Engels against a mechanistic and reductionist standard of science, the standard of a philosophy that treats nature as an aggregate of externally related parts governed by reversible laws, and that the sciences themselves, in their own development, have moved toward the relational and historical conception that Engels, and Marx behind him, took from the Epicurean and dialectical line. The defence of Engels is therefore the same argument as the dissertation reading, conducted on different documents: in both cases a materialism admitting contingency, emergence and levels of organisation is set against a materialism of mechanism, and in both cases Foster claims the first for the founders and the second for their detractors.

Why does the defence of Engels matter to the argument?

Because the recovered tradition descends through Engels as much as through Marx, and the standing dismissal of his writings on nature as amateur dialectics would break the line of descent at its second link. Foster’s defence argues that the dismissal rests on a mechanistic philosophy of science that the philosophy of science has itself moved beyond.

The recovered tradition vindicates the defence in Foster’s telling, because the British scientists were, many of them, explicit Engelsians in their philosophy of science. Bernal’s scientific humanism, Needham’s theory of integrative levels, Haldane’s integration of evolutionary biology with a dialectical account of emergence: on Foster’s presentation these were attempts, by practitioners of the first rank, to do inside their disciplines what Engels had sketched from outside them, and their existence converts the question about Engels from a question about one Victorian amateur into a question about the philosophy under which a remarkable body of science was actually practised. The scientific content of that body of work is described in this profile, as the cluster’s policy requires, as the arguments those scientists made in their period: that organisation in nature is levelled and emergent, that the boundaries between disciplines mark integrations rather than walls, that life and its planetary conditions codetermine one another. Foster presents the record as evidence that a dialectical philosophy of nature was compatible with, and at times generative of, serious science. Critics of the defence answer that compatibility is a weak relation, that scientists of the period also practised under other philosophies and none, and that the subsequent development of the sciences proceeded without the dialectical framework, which suggests the framework was scaffolding rather than structure. The exchange reproduces, at the level of the philosophy of science, the same division between the modest and the strong claim that governs the dissertation debate: that the tradition existed and worked is granted on all sides; that its philosophy explains its achievements is the contested surplus.

For a profile of Foster the science question has a biographical point as well. It explains his otherwise puzzling range. The same writer who edits a journal of political economy writes books on the philosophy of materialism from antiquity, defends the scientific reputation of a Victorian journalist philosopher, and reconstructs the laboratory politics of interwar Cambridge and London. The range is not eclecticism. It is the recovery thesis pursued through every archive where the materialist conception of nature left traces, on the premise that the conception is a single inheritance, philosophical, scientific and political at once, whose fragments must be gathered before the whole can be judged. Gatherers of fragments are judged by two standards, the fidelity of the fragments and the honesty of the joins, and this profile has now stated the objections under both heads. What remains is to place the gatherer in his field, and to separate, cleanly, what the gathering settled from what it did not.

What the recovery settles and what it leaves open

It is time to separate the questions that Foster’s work answers from the questions it merely sharpens, because the recovery project’s rhetorical momentum tends to run them together, and readers deserve the separation performed explicitly. The recovery settles, first, a question of attribution: the metabolic rift is Marx’s concept, elaborated from his category of metabolism, and credit for it belongs to the nineteenth century text and not to its twentieth century retriever. It settles, second, a question of existence: a self conscious tradition of socialist and materialist ecological thought existed in Britain across the first half of the twentieth century, staffed by scientists of standing, and its erasure from the histories was a fact of reception rather than a judgement of quality. It settles, third, a question of the record: Marx’s engagement with the natural sciences, in his reading and notebooks as in his published arguments, was wide, sustained and consequential for his critique of political economy, and accounts of him as indifferent to nature or as a simple celebrant of industrial expansion cannot survive the documentary survey that Burkett and Foster between them assembled. These are considerable settlements. A field that began, within living memory of the scholarship, by debating whether Marx had anything to say about nature at all now debates the architecture of what he said, and the change of question is the recovery’s achievement.

What the recovery does not settle is the question that gives the next article in this cluster its title: was Marx an ecological thinker? That question is not answered by accumulating ecological passages, because it asks about the character of the whole thought, its centres and its silences, its celebrations of the productive forces and its unexamined inheritances, and it must weigh the counter evidence with the same care the recovery weighs the evidence in its favour. Foster’s project, by its nature, amasses the affirmative archive; the negative archive exists, is quoted by his critics, and belongs in any verdict. Nor does the recovery settle the theoretical contest with world-ecology, which concerns the categories through which the settled record should be organised, and which no archive can decide because the disputants read the same passages. Nor, finally, does it settle the standing of the scientific philosophies it recovers, which is a question for the sciences and their historians and not for this series. A profile that allowed the recovery’s genuine successes to bleed into these open questions would commit the offence the brief for this article most warns against, and the warning is Foster’s own standard turned back on his summarists: the argument stands on documents, and documents settle what they settle and no more.

How should a reader grade the four steps separately?

Grade them as four distinct claims with four distinct evidential bases, because the argument’s stages do not stand or fall together. A reader may accept the rift passages and the recovered archive while doubting the dissertation foundation, and the field’s actual distribution of opinion is exactly that uneven pattern rather than a verdict on the whole.

The fairest summary of Foster’s position in the field is therefore a double one. As a scholar of the record he has permanently enlarged it, twice over: once for Marx, whose ecological writings can no longer be treated as asides, and once for the tradition, whose forgotten scientists now stand in the histories where they belong. As a theorist of the framework he remains a party to disputes he did not win outright, the continuity of the dissertation grounding, the dualism of the rift, the shape of the late Marx, and his critics include scholars who use his recoveries while rejecting his constructions, which is perhaps the surest sign that the recoveries are real. The field as a whole, its waves and schools and journals, is mapped in the ecological Marxism complete guide that opens this cluster, and readers who have followed the profile this far have the equipment to use that map critically: to know which claims are Burkett’s and which are Foster’s, which stage of the argument they are standing on, and what kind of objection applies at that stage. Equipment of that kind, rather than a verdict, is what a thinker profile owes its readers, and it is what the remaining sections, on reading him and on using him in teaching and research, set out to supply.

Reading Marx’s Ecology closely: the book’s inner architecture

Because the argument of 2000 is so often cited and so seldom described, a profile owes its readers a slower walk through its construction than summaries usually give. The book falls into two great movements. The first reconstructs a tradition of materialism, asking what a materialist conception of nature is and how it developed from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The second reads Marx inside that tradition, asking what his ecology consists in, where it came from, and what became of it in the hands of his successors. The movements are interdependent in Foster’s design. Without the first, the second looks like the extraction of green passages from an economist. Without the second, the first is a history of philosophy with a missing protagonist. The design also explains the book’s characteristic risk, since a frame built before the protagonist enters can be accused of dictating what the protagonist will be found to say, and the accusation, which is the construction objection in architectural form, was duly made.

The opening movement begins, as Foster’s later book on Epicurus would begin again, with the ancient materialists and with the doctrine of the swerve, and it treats the history of materialism as a long contest between two conceptions of nature: nature as mechanism, an aggregate of atoms in necessitated motion, knowable by reduction and exhaustible by law; and nature as emergence, a realm of levels and interactions in which novelty is real and history runs through the natural world and not only through the human one. Bacon and the scientific revolution appear in the story as ambiguous founders, liberating inquiry from theology while arming the conception of nature as a storehouse to be commanded. The Enlightenment materialists divide along the same seam. Darwin then enters as the thinker who made nature historical in the decisive modern form, and Foster’s chapters on Darwin do double duty: they establish that a materialist conception of nature of the emergent kind was available, in the best science of the century, to the generation of Marx, and they argue that Marx understood his own project as extending that historicisation from species to society. The famous courtesies between the two men, the presentation copy of Capital, the letter of praise for the Origin, are read by Foster not as biographical garnish but as evidence of a perceived kinship of method, and the reading, like every load bearing reading in the book, is offered with its evidence displayed so that a sceptic can weigh the letters against the construction placed on them.

The treatment of the pre Marxian socialists and of the utopian tradition in these chapters deserves notice, because it shows the recovery method operating impartially. Foster does not spare the tradition’s own ancestors. The early socialists are credited with ecological insight where he finds it, in their attention to the degradation of town life and the rational organisation of agriculture, and criticised where he finds its opposite, in fantasies of abundance that assume nature’s inexhaustibility. The impartiality matters to the book’s credibility. A recovery that finds only confirmation in its favoured texts and only error in its opponents invites the selection charge; a recovery that grades its own side’s documents, conceding their limits in detail, purchases the right to be believed when it grades the other side’s. Whether the purchase succeeds is the question the critics pressed, but the attempt is visible in the text and profiles should record it.

The second movement opens with the dissertation, in the position this profile has already examined, and proceeds through the writings of the eighteen forties with the ecological thread held firmly in view: the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right with its naturalistic underpinnings, the manuscripts of 1844 with their account of nature as the inorganic body of the human being and of alienated labour as the estrangement of that relation, the journalism on the theft of wood and the condition of the rural poor. Foster’s reading of the 1844 manuscripts is among the most careful in the book, because the texts are famous and the readings contestable; he insists that their naturalism is neither a youthful romanticism to be outgrown nor a humanism that absorbs nature into spirit, but a materialism of practice in which the human being’s dependence on an independent nature is the premise of the whole analysis. From the forties the book moves to the scientific deepening of the fifties and sixties, the excerpting and the correspondence, and so to the soil question and Liebig, where the ecological thread joins the critique of political economy in the open. The robbery system of modern agriculture, the exhaustion of the soil by a agriculture organised for distant markets, the antagonism of town and country: these Foster treats as the point at which the materialist conception of nature becomes an economic analysis, and the rift concept is introduced, late in the book and with deliberate ceremony, as the name for what the whole development has produced.

A structural observation completes the walk. The book’s final chapters turn from Marx to the degeneration, as Foster sees it, of the ecological inheritance inside the Marxist tradition itself: its burial under the productivism of the Second International’s orthodoxy and of the Soviet state doctrine, its survival in dissident and marginal figures, and its eventual re-emergence in the ecological crisis of the later twentieth century. The narrative shape is a fall and a recovery, and Foster is candid that his own book belongs to the recovery it describes. Candour about shape does not disarm the objection that shapes of that kind arrange their evidence, but it locates the book honestly within its genre. Marx’s Ecology is a work of partisan scholarship in the strict sense: scholarship, with the evidence on the table, in the service of a tradition it wishes to restore. The reader who knows that can use the book at full value. The reader who mistakes it for a neutral survey will be misled, although less by the author than by the shelving.

Before the second wave: Schmidt, the first wave, and the field Foster entered

Foster’s claim to have recovered an ecological Marx is qualified, in his own texts, by an acknowledgement that the recovery had a distinguished precursor, and the acknowledgement is part of the precedence story this profile has been telling. Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx, published in German in 1962 and in English in 1971, had argued a generation earlier that Marx’s materialism contained a distinctive conception of nature as socially mediated yet independent, irreducible to either mechanism or romantic holism. Schmidt’s book, written under the shadow of the Frankfurt School, was austere, philosophical and largely without influence on the environmental debates of its time, and Foster treats it the way he treats Burkett: as prior work to be credited, built on, and distinguished from his own. Where Schmidt read the conception of nature philosophically, Foster reads it historically and scientifically, and where Schmidt left the rift undeveloped, the later work made it the centre. The sequence Schmidt, Burkett, Foster is the honest genealogy of the recovery, and it shows the recovery as a cumulative scholarly enterprise rather than an invention ex nihilo, which is, again, exactly what the recovery not addition thesis would predict about itself.

The field the second wave entered was dominated by two alternatives, and the profile of Foster is incomplete without them, because his polemics take their targets from this landscape. The first alternative was the first wave of ecological Marxism itself, the eco-socialist syntheses of the nineteen seventies and eighties associated with André Gorz, with the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism founded by James O’Connor in 1988, and with O’Connor’s own theory of the second contradiction of capitalism, the contradiction between capital and the conditions of production, including nature, which capital degrades and thereby raises its own costs. O’Connor’s framework was the most influential Marxist ecology in the English speaking world before Foster, and the two projects differ instructively. O’Connor built his ecology as an amendment to Marx, arguing that the first contradiction, between capital and labour, needed supplementing by the second; the whole architecture presupposes that Marx’s own theory lacks the ecological dimension and must receive it from the theorist. Foster’s recovery is a direct refusal of that presupposition, and his criticisms of the second contradiction literature, respectful in tone and fundamental in substance, amount to the claim that the amendment was unnecessary because the dimension was present from the start. Readers who grasp that single difference grasp the fault line of the field in the nineteen nineties: supplement or recovery, amendment or rereading, with Burkett’s value argument demonstrating that even the core categories of the critique of political economy, the very place where the lack was supposed to be most obvious, contained the ecological logic the supplementers proposed to import.

The second alternative was the green tradition outside Marxism, the deep ecologists, ecofeminists, bioregionalists and green political theorists whose work Foster’s polemic addressed at its least discriminating. The polemic objection has been recorded in the criticisms section, and balance requires the context to be recorded too. The green tradition of the period frequently reciprocated the hostility, treating Marxism as the ideology of productivism and pointing, not without evidence, to the environmental record of the states that ruled in its name. Foster’s counter, that the record of those states measures a tradition’s bureaucratic degeneration and not its founding texts, is the standard move of every recovery project, and its legitimacy is the legitimacy of the project itself; one cannot both permit the move for the texts one favours and forbid it for the texts one opposes. What can be demanded, and what the critics demanded, is that the move be made with the evidence displayed and the counter evidence answered rather than waived. The measure of Foster’s work, this profile has argued throughout, is that he usually meets that demand in his scholarship and intermittently fails it in his polemics, and that the failures and the successes belong to the same writer and should be reported in the same breath.

By the time The Return of Nature appeared in 2020, the field Foster had entered as an insurgent had reorganised itself around his recovery to a degree that would have been improbable to predict in 2000. The metabolic rift became a standard category in environmental sociology, taught in textbooks and operationalised in empirical studies of nutrient flows, land use and emissions. The phrase ecological Marxism came to denote, in most syllabuses, the Foster and Burkett line before it denoted the supplementing traditions against which that line defined itself. And the challenger that arose to contest the reorganised field, Moore’s world-ecology, arose from inside its premises, accepting that Marx is an ecological thinker while disputing the categories of the acceptance, which is a form of victory that disputants rarely acknowledge. A historian of the field in some future decade will likely treat the period from 1999 to the notebook debates as the recovery era, and will treat Foster, with Burkett, as its central figure, while recording that the era’s master claim, the seamless ecological Marx descending from the dissertation, remained contested at the era’s height exactly as it had been at its beginning. Both halves of that sentence are the profile’s verdict, insofar as a profile is permitted one.

The Return of Nature as historiography: method, sources, reception

A second look at the book of 2020 is warranted, from the angle of its method rather than its contents, because the method is where its contribution to Foster’s standing lies and where the remaining objections lodge. The book is a collective biography built from an unusual evidentiary base. Foster works from the published science and the scientific journalism of his subjects, from their correspondence and memoirs, from institutional histories of the congresses and movements that connected them, and from the polemics in which the tradition argued with its opponents and itself. The narrative discipline is chronological and prosopographical: figures enter as their connections form, and the tradition is shown assembling itself, in the London of Lankester and Morris, in the Engels circle’s scientific enthusiasms, in the Cambridge and London of the interwar scientists, and dispersing under the pressures of war, cold war and professionalisation. The claim of lineage is therefore not asserted in the abstract; it is cashed out in documented contacts, shared references and common philosophical vocabulary, of which the Epicurean thread traced earlier in this profile is the most striking. Farrington’s classical scholarship, Thomson’s studies of the first Greek philosophers, the scientists’ shared reading of Engels on nature: these are joins in the construction that a sceptical historian can inspect one by one, and several reviewers did, reporting the joins sound while reserving judgement on the edifice.

The reservation, stated generally, is the construction objection applied to a tradition rather than to a man. Proximity is not descent, and shared vocabulary is not shared doctrine. The interwar scientists borrowed from many sources, pragmatism, positivism, the Cambridge of Russell and Whitehead among them, and a narrative that organises their work around the dialectical materialist thread may be performing for the tradition the same retrospective coherence that the dissertation reading performed for Marx: selecting the strand that leads to the desired conclusion and writing the history as its unfolding. Foster’s defence is available and partly persuasive. The thread was not selected in ignorance of the others, which the book documents in their place; the scientists themselves announced the allegiance, in print and in controversy, at professional cost; and a history organised around a self declared affiliation is not an imposition but a following of the actors’ own categories, the first rule of the historiography Foster practises elsewhere. The dispute then narrows to weight. How central was the declared philosophy to the science that made these figures eminent, the ecosystem concept, the genetics, the crystallography? On that question the book argues centrality, reviewers have argued everything from centrality to ornament, and the question remains, fittingly, a question about evidence that the recovery itself assembled. No earlier historian had put the evidence in one place. That is the sense in which the book changed the field regardless of its thesis: it made a previously unaskable question into the field’s working agenda.

The reception completed the profile of Foster’s career in a way worth recording. The Deutscher Memorial Prize, awarded for the book in 2020, is the Marxist tradition’s own honour for historical scholarship, and its award to a work of ecological recovery signalled the tradition’s internal ratification of the project’s scholarly standing, whatever remained disputed in its theory. Foster’s Deutscher lecture, on the return of the dialectics of nature, used the occasion to restate the whole arc from Epicurus to the interwar scientists as a single inheritance, freedom as the recognition of necessity, and to present the recovery as the tradition recovering its own suppressed half. Reviewers outside the tradition, in journals of the history of science and of ecology, treated the book with a respect notably warmer than the reception of Marx’s Ecology twenty years earlier, praising the archival labour while continuing to bracket the lineage claim. The pattern of the two receptions, twenty years apart, is the pattern of Foster’s standing in miniature: the scholarship increasingly undeniable, the construction increasingly influential, the strongest form of the thesis still, and perhaps permanently, a matter of dispute among competent readers of the same documents.

The programmatic books: from recovery to platform

Between the two great works of recovery, Foster published a shelf of shorter books that translate the scholarship into a platform, and a profile should account for them, because for many readers they are the Foster they know. Ecology Against Capitalism, in 2002, collected the essays of the first ecological years, moving from the critique of the environmentalism of the market, the faith that pricing and property rights will discipline the throughput, to the positive claim that the ecological crisis is a crisis of the mode of production and admits no solution inside its logic. The Ecological Revolution, in 2009, organised the essays of the following years around the distinction its title announces, between an environmental reform that manages the system’s impacts and an ecological revolution that transforms the system producing them, and it contains some of his most careful engagements with rival strategies, including the ecological modernisation programme examined elsewhere in this cluster, which it treats as the reform position in its most sophisticated form. What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, written with Fred Magdoff in 2011, is the platform at its most accessible, a short book addressed to the environmental movement’s rank and file, arguing in plain chapters that the movement’s aims require an account of the economy that generates the crisis, and that the account is available.

The programmatic books clarify the recovery by showing its intended use. Foster did not reconstruct an ecological Marx as an antiquarian service to Marxology. The recovery was always meant to arm a politics, by removing the objection that had most weakened the socialist case in environmental argument, the objection that socialism’s founding theory was blind to nature and its historical regimes demonstrably destructive of it. With the objection answered at the level of the texts, the socialist case could be made on the merits of the present: a system whose accounting cannot register the material world will degrade that world as a by product of its normal functioning, and the degradation is therefore not a policy failure to be corrected by better policy but a structural outcome to be ended by structural change. Whether the textual answer disposes of the historical objection, the record of the states, is a further question, and Foster’s writings on it distinguish, in the manner this series has required throughout the cluster, between the theory recovered from the texts and the record of the regimes that claimed the theory, treating the second as a history of defeat and deformation rather than as the theory’s application. Readers may accept or refuse the distinction; the profile’s task is to report that his system depends on it, and that he states the dependence openly rather than hiding it.

A second feature of the programmatic work deserves record: its internationalism. The essays insist that the rifts are global in structure, that the wealthy economies displace their material costs onto poorer ones through trade in which ecological burdens are exchanged unequally, and that an ecological politics confined to the rich countries would reproduce the displacement it condemns. The collaborative work with Clark developed the point through the oceans and the trade in waste and in embodied soil and energy, arguing that the apparent dematerialisation of wealthy economies is substantially an accounting illusion produced by importing the material throughput and exporting the rift. The argument connects the ecological work to the oldest themes of Foster’s formation, the monopoly capital tradition’s analysis of empire, and it gives the platform its characteristic note: the crisis is one system, planetary in reach, and its analysis must be as unified as its object. The note also marks the distance from the degrowth literature with which Foster is sometimes shelved, since his platform’s centre of gravity is the transformation of production relations and the producers’ collective government of the metabolism, on a world scale, rather than a programme of aggregate contraction administered within existing relations. The distinction, introduced earlier in this profile through the notebooks debate, is one he has maintained consistently, and exam answers that blur it misrepresent both positions.

The dissertation debate in detail: the Young Hegelian context

Since the foundation claim bears so much weight, its context deserves a fuller statement than the earlier section gave it, and the context cuts both ways, supplying material to Foster’s defenders and to his critics in the same documents. Marx wrote the dissertation inside the circle of the Young Hegelians, the radical disciples who were turning Hegel’s philosophy against the Prussian state and its church. His closest associate in those years, Bruno Bauer, held a chair at Bonn and expected one for Marx beside him, and the dissertation was composed as the credential for an academic career in that milieu. Its idiom is the idiom of the circle: the philosophy of self consciousness, the reading of post Aristotelian philosophy as the drama of consciousness freeing itself from dogma. Its heroes are the schools that followed Aristotle, the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics, whom Hegel had treated briefly and dismissed, and whom the young Marx proposed to restore as the key to an age. The dissertation’s surviving text is incomplete, its notebooks fuller than its chapters, and its argument, that Epicurus’s swerve breaks the bonds of fate and founds the freedom of self consciousness, is made through an intricate comparison of the two atomisms at the level of their principles.

Foster’s reading works with all of this rather than despite it. His claim is that the Young Hegelian idiom is the vessel and the Epicurean materialism the content, and that the content outlasted the vessel: when the idiom was discarded across the eighteen forties, what Marx carried forward from the dissertation years was the allegiance to a materialism that refuses both mechanism and providence, together with the habit, formed on the ancient texts, of treating nature as a realm of interaction and emergence. The notebooks are his key evidence, showing the student excerpting Epicurus and Lucretius alongside the moderns, arguing in the margins, and drafting the preface’s famous posture toward the philosophy that becomes worldly by criticising the world. Against the reading stands the contextualist case, which the critics in the earlier section represent: that the vessel and the content cannot be separated so cleanly, that a philosophy of self consciousness is an idealism however materialist its hero, and that Marx’s own later judgements on his Hegelian apprenticeship were dismissive in terms that a continuity thesis must explain away. The contextualists add a methodological rider with real force. The dissertation scholarship Foster relies on is genuinely fine grained, but fine grain can serve selection as easily as it serves recovery, and the more completely a young author’s every marginalium is made to point forward, the more the historian should suspect that the destination has organised the journey.

What can be said without partisanship is that the debate has raised the scholarly level of dissertation studies themselves. Foster’s intervention, and the book length return to Epicurus that followed it, forced a generation of readers back to a text that the standard narratives had summarised in a paragraph, and the text has proved richer than its summaries, whichever construction prevails. Marx’s treatment of the swerve is philosophically serious by any standard. His insistence that the difference between Democritus and Epicurus is a difference of principle and not of detail anticipates the best later scholarship on the two systems. And his eye for the political meaning of ancient materialism, its enmity to superstition and priestcraft, connects the dissertation to the journalism and the critique of religion in ways no party to the debate denies. The disagreement is over the inference from a serious beginning to a foundational one, and inferences of that size are not settled by evidence alone, because they depend on what a foundation is taken to be. Readers who define a foundation as a set of problems and orientations that organise later work will find Foster’s claim strong. Readers who define it as a doctrine present in embryo will find the claim false by definition, since no ecology is present in a dissertation on atomism. Much of the debate’s longevity is explained by that unexamined difference of definition, and the most useful service a profile can perform is to make the difference visible, so that the disputants’ agreement about the documents and disagreement about the word can be seen for what they are.

The editor as controversialist: essays, exchanges and replies

No profile of Foster is complete without the monthly rhythm that structured his working life, because Monthly Review under his editorship functioned as the recovery project’s engine room. The books appeared at intervals of years; the argument was maintained, month by month, in editorials, review essays and exchanges that most academic careers have no equivalent for. Foster used the journal to publish the early forms of arguments that later entered the books, to carry the work of collaborators and students, to reprint and introduce neglected texts from the tradition he was recovering, and to reply to critics with a promptness that kept the disputes warm and the record public. The reply to the Chinese scholars, in which Xu Yanmei’s dissertation objection is set out and answered point by point, is a characteristic product of the engine room: a controversy that in a purely academic career would have waited years for a journal symposium was conducted in the movement’s own pages, in the open, within a short cycle. The practice has costs that his critics name and benefits that his defenders name, and both are real. The cost is the polemical register, the editorial habit of verdict, which sharpened the green polemic objection. The benefit is accountability: a writer who answers his critics in print, promptly and at length, leaves an unusually complete record by which his project can be judged, and the record shows him conceding points, refining formulations and distinguishing his claims in ways that the caricature of the dogmatic system builder does not predict.

The exchanges also document the school’s internal life, which was never a monolith. Foster’s disagreements with Burkett over emphasis, with the treadmill of production theorists over the drivers of ecological harm, with degrowth advocates over strategy, and with Moore over the foundations, were conducted in the same pages as his defences against external critics, and the spectacle of a tradition arguing with itself in public is itself evidence about the recovery’s character. Dead orthodoxies do not argue; they repeat. The Foster corpus, taken whole, is argumentative to a fault, and the fault and the virtue are one quality seen from two sides, a quality his formation explains. He is an editor before he is a system builder, a controversialist formed by a journal that survived by taking positions, and the books must be read with that formation in mind. It explains their strengths, the documentary energy, the refusal to leave an objection unanswered, and their weaknesses, the overstatement of the bloc against the bloc, the rhetoric of the verdict where the scholarship has earned only a leaning. A reader equipped with that explanation can discount correctly in both directions, which is the most a profile can do for any controversialist, and more than most profiles attempt.

Influence and the shape of a field

Measuring a scholar’s influence is a speculative exercise, and this profile confines itself to the documentary traces. The metabolic rift entered the working vocabulary of environmental sociology, the subfield in which Foster’s professorial career was spent, and it did so traceably: through the 1999 journal article that a discipline’s flagship published, through the doctoral students trained at Oregon and elsewhere, through the empirical literature that adopted the rift as an organising category for studies of land, nutrients, oceans and atmosphere, and through the textbooks that now present the concept with its attribution to Marx and its retrieval credited to Foster. The Return of Nature altered the reference lists of the history of ecology, a field remote from his own, which is the rarer achievement. And the recovery as a whole shifted the burden of proof in the interpretation of Marx: the scholar who denies the ecological dimension must now answer an archive, where a generation earlier the scholar who asserted it had to excuse the assertion. Burden shifting of that kind is the least visible and most consequential form of influence a work of scholarship can have, because it changes what every subsequent participant must do, including the participants who reject the thesis that produced the shift.

His standing has its limits, and they are the limits this profile has marked throughout. The strongest forms of his claims command minorities even among sympathetic readers. The dissertation grounding is a position, not a consensus. The rift framework shares its field with a rival whose criticisms are unanswered in the sense that matters, the sense of converting the other camp. The late Marx of the notebooks is claimed by a degrowth reading that Foster resists. None of this diminishes the recoveries, and all of it belongs in a profile that aims to be used rather than merely read. Foster himself, in the interviews and prefaces where he takes stock, presents the work in the same double register, as a restoration accomplished and an argument continuing, and the congruence between the subject’s self assessment and this profile’s is not flattery. It is what happens when a scholar’s own standard, evidence before verdict, is applied to the scholar.

Foster and Darwin: the kinship of two materialisms

One of the most distinctive strands in Foster’s recovery, and one a rift centred summary routinely omits, is his treatment of Darwin. Marx’s Ecology devotes substantial chapters to the argument that Marx and Darwin belong to a single intellectual event, the nineteenth century’s materialist revolution in the understanding of nature, and that the kinship between them is methodological before it is personal. Both thinkers, on Foster’s account, replaced a static and designed world with a historical one, in which forms arise through material processes extended in time and in which explanation proceeds by uncovering those processes rather than by assigning purposes. Darwin’s achievement was to make species historical; Marx’s was to make society historical; and each recognised the other’s work as belonging to the same transformation, a recognition documented in their exchange of books and letters and in Marx’s celebrated judgement that Darwin’s work supplied a basis in natural history for the historical view. Foster is careful with the courtesies, neither inflating them into an alliance nor dismissing them as politeness, and his care is characteristic of the recovery method at its best: the letters establish a perceived kinship, the texts establish whether the perception was justified, and the argument keeps the two kinds of evidence distinct.

The Darwin chapters also perform a rescue inside the rescue. A long tradition of commentary, inside and outside Marxism, had paired Darwin with the crude mechanism of the survival of the fittest and with the social Darwinist politics built on it, making Darwinism and Marxism natural enemies and Marx’s admiration an embarrassment. Foster’s Darwin is the other Darwin: the patient naturalist of the earthworms and the soil, whose late work on the formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms is an ecology of slow material transformation, and whose theory, precisely in its reliance on contingent variation sifted by circumstance, descends from the Epicurean line that refuses necessity and design together. The swerve reappears, philosophically, as variation; selection does the work that mechanism could not, explaining adaptation without a designer and order without a plan. Whether Darwin himself would have accepted the Epicurean genealogy is doubtful and, for Foster’s argument, beside the point. The claim is about the structure of the theories, not about the self understanding of their authors, and it gives the recovery one of its most elegant symmetries: the materialism Marx formed on Epicurus in 1841 and the materialism Darwin reached through the Galápagos and the pigeon loft are, structurally, the same refusal, arrived at from opposite ends of the century’s intellectual world. Critics have treated the symmetry as too elegant, another instance of the pattern finding its pattern, and the objection is the construction objection in a new costume. Defenders reply that structural kinships between theories are the ordinary currency of the history of ideas and that Foster’s is supported by the documentary courtesies as well as by the parallel. The exchange stands where the dissertation exchange stands, and a profile records the parallel without pretending to close it.

The Darwin strand matters beyond elegance because it locates Foster’s ecology in the history of science rather than in the history of doctrine alone. A Marx whose ecology consists of a few soil passages might be an economist with a hobby. A Marx situated by his best modern interpreter inside the century’s transformation of natural knowledge, reading its chemistry, its geology and its evolutionary biology as they appeared and arguing with them in his notebooks, is a thinker for whom nature was a central theoretical object across fifty years. The notebooks scholarship, encountered earlier, extends exactly this picture into the final decades, and the two bodies of work, Foster’s on the published record and the edition based scholarship on the unpublished one, reinforce each other in the manner of the Schmidt and Burkett precedences: independently, from different archives, toward the same conclusion about the record. Convergence of that kind is the strongest currency the recovery deals in, and its limits should be noted with the same precision. Convergence establishes the record: the reading, the engagement, the categories. It does not establish the superstructure Foster builds on the record, the continuity thesis and the framework, which remain, as this profile has insisted at each stage, matters of construction on which competent readers of the convergent record continue to divide.

The road through Liebig: how the rift argument was actually made

The genesis of the rift argument, as Foster tells it and as the documents support, is worth a section of its own, because it shows the recovery method working on a small scale where its operations can be watched. Marx’s attention to the soil was not a philosopher’s metaphor in search of an application. It was driven by the agricultural science of his period, above all by the work of Justus von Liebig, the great chemist whose writings on agricultural chemistry argued, across successive editions that grew steadily more alarmed, that modern farming of the British and American type was a robbery system: it exported the soil’s mineral constituents to distant consumers and returned nothing, mining the land’s fertility as surely as a pit is mined, and it would end in exhaustion unless the cycle of nutrients was restored. Marx excerpted Liebig, cited him in Capital’s analysis of large scale industry and agriculture, and generalised the chemist’s alarm into a category of his critique: the same system that separated the worker from the means of production separated the town from the country and the eater from the soil, breaking the metabolic cycle at the level of the society’s whole organisation. Foster’s scholarly act was to follow the footnotes. By reconstructing Marx’s reading of Liebig, and of the wider literature on soil, guano, sewage and the recycling schemes of the sanitary reformers, he showed that the famous rift passage is not an isolated flash but the summary of an investigation, documented in the notebooks and the correspondence, into the material basis of the society he was analysing.

The Liebig road also explains the rift’s subsequent career better than the dissertation does. A concept born in agricultural chemistry could travel, by the logic of material cycles, to the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the oceans, and Foster’s extensions of it follow the chemistry with a fidelity his philosophical critics sometimes miss. The framework’s empirical students inherited the habit: rift analysis in practice means tracing a material flow, identifying where the social organisation breaks its cycle, and naming the break’s costs and their distribution. That is why the framework found a home in environmental sociology, a discipline of material flows and institutions, rather than in philosophy, and why its textbook life is a life among case studies. The dissertation grounding explains what Foster believes the rift ultimately rests on; the Liebig road explains what the rift actually does in the hands of its users; and the difference between the two explanations is the difference between the strong and the modest claims that this profile has kept separate throughout. A reader may travel the Liebig road with Foster, accept the rift as a well founded category of Marx’s mature work with a documented scientific genesis, and still decline the further journey back to Epicurus. Many of the framework’s working users do exactly that, and their doing so is not inconsistency but the field’s actual settlement, more nuanced than either the recovery’s champions or its detractors usually report.

A reader’s route through the books

New readers regularly ask where to start with Foster, and the question is one of the seeded enquiries this profile is built to answer, so it deserves a considered answer in the body rather than a bare list. The route depends on the reader’s purpose, and the books differ enough in kind that the order matters. A reader who wants the argument in its most concentrated and consequential form should begin with the 1999 article on the metabolic rift, which states the mature thesis in a single journal essay and can be read in an evening, and pass from there to Marx’s Ecology itself, reading it whole rather than in extracts, since the book’s meaning is in its architecture and extracts are precisely how the misunderstandings this profile has catalogued are manufactured. A reader whose interest is the history of science should invert the order and begin with The Return of Nature, which is the most self sufficient of the books, the least dependent on prior commitment to the framework, and the one whose archival pleasures are available to a reader who grants none of the larger claims. A reader who wants the platform rather than the scholarship should begin with the short book written with Fred Magdoff, and use it as a map of the positions the scholarship underwrites, returning to the larger works for the evidence. The collaborative volume of 2010 belongs in the middle of any route, after the rift is understood and before the recovered tradition, since it shows the framework at work on the material cycles and presupposes the category it applies.

Two warnings accompany the route. The first concerns Foster’s essays, which are numerous, overlapping and uneven in the way of essays written for a monthly journal across decades; new readers should treat the books as the canonical statements and the essays as the workshop, valuable for the replies to critics and for the development of positions, treacherous as first encounters because an essay assumes the books it argues from. The second concerns the secondary literature, which should be read in the adversarial pairs this profile has modelled: Burkett beside Foster on precedence, the Capitalism Nature Socialism symposium beside the book it indicts, Moore beside the rift essays he opposes, Saito beside both on the late Marx. Read in pairs, the literature teaches the disputes; read in single file, it teaches only allegiances. That discipline, finally, is what the persona sections that follow are designed to serve, since students, teachers and researchers use Foster for different purposes and are misled by him in different ways.

Foster and the naming of an age

The recovery’s success created a stage on which a further dispute could be played, the dispute over the name of the present geological moment, and Foster’s part in it rounds out the profile’s account of his standing. The proposal to name the epoch the Anthropocene, the age of humanity, was resisted across the Marxist ecological literature on a common ground: that humanity in general did not make the crisis, and a name that says it did conceals the specific social relations that did. Moore’s alternative, the Capitalocene, the age of capital, grew from the world-ecology framework and carries its monism with it, naming not a substance but a way of organising nature. Foster’s position in the naming dispute is characteristic of his framework’s logic. He has defended the analysis that the Capitalocene label gestures toward, the indictment of a system rather than a species, while resisting the theoretical reconstruction Moore builds into the label, and his own writing continues to work with the rift vocabulary and with the older language of ecological imperialism and planetary crisis rather than adopting the rival coinage. The dispute is conducted without measurements being in contention between the parties, since it is a dispute about categories and their implications: what the name of an age should identify as its agent, and what follows politically from the identification. Its interest for this profile is diagnostic. Twenty years after the recovery, the argument among ecological Marxists is no longer whether the tradition has an ecology but what its categories shall be, and Foster, the recovery’s central figure, is a party to that argument rather than its arbiter, defending the rift against the web with the same documentary tenacity he brought to the dissertation. The field’s disputes, as the brief for this profile instructs, are described here as ongoing arguments, and none of them is reported in this article as settled.

The Promethean charge and the question of limits

No objection to the ecological Marx has a longer pedigree than the charge of Prometheanism, and Foster’s handling of it deserves examination in its own right, because the charge is the one the recovery was built to answer and the one on which its success is most often conceded even by critics. The charge, in its classic form, holds that Marx worshipped the productive forces, that the Communist Manifesto’s praise of the bourgeoisie’s subjugation of nature expresses the theory’s deepest commitment, and that a doctrine dreaming of unfettered industrial expansion cannot be an ecology whatever passages are gathered in its defence. Foster’s answer proceeds in three layers, and their separation is instructive. The first layer is textual discrimination: the Manifesto’s praise is a judgement about a historical class’s revolutionary role, delivered in a pamphlet of 1848 whose rhetoric its authors themselves later qualified, and it cannot be read as the mature theory’s doctrine of nature without ignoring everything the mature theory says. The second layer is the positive doctrine of the mature work, where Foster assembles the passages on limits: the analysis of the soil, the insistence that the free development of production under capital is purchased by the robbery of the worker and the earth together, and the remarkable passage of the third volume in which Marx writes that society is not the owner of the earth but its usufructuary, bound to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as good heads of household must. A theorist who writes that passage, Foster argues, has a concept of intergenerational obligation to the natural world that the Promethean reading cannot accommodate, and the accommodation problem is the critics’ to solve. The third layer concedes what must be conceded: that Marx shared his century’s confidence in the human capacity to transform nature, that he had no concept of several limits that later science would establish, and that the recovery claims a materialism capable of housing an ecology, not an ecology ready made for a later century’s problems.

The exchange over Prometheus is the recovery debate in its purest form, because both sides work from famous passages and the question is one of weight and context rather than of discovery. Its interest for the assessment of Foster is that here, unusually, the burden has visibly shifted. Defenders of the Promethean reading now write as respondents, explaining away the usufruct passage and the soil analysis, where a generation ago the ecological reading was the one making excuses. Burden shifts of that kind, as this profile noted in discussing his influence, are the real victories of scholarship, and they are won by accumulation rather than by any single argument. The accumulation is Foster’s and Burkett’s joint work, and the Promethean debate is where their division of labour shows most clearly: Burkett demonstrating that the value form itself encodes the disregard of nature, Foster demonstrating that the texts, from the dissertation to the final volumes, keep returning to the material relation the value form disregards. A theory whose accounts blind it to nature and whose author spent fifty years studying the blindness is not a Promethean theory in any sense that survives the evidence, and the residual Prometheanism, the nineteenth century confidence in transformation, is a limit of the man and his period that the recovery has never needed to deny.

The early manuscripts in Foster’s hands

Between the dissertation and Capital stand the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the texts on which the humanist Marx of the post war decades was built, and Foster’s reading of them is a useful test of his method because the material is so familiar and the rival readings so entrenched. The humanist reading treated the manuscripts as a philosophy of alienation in which nature figures as the scene of the human essence’s loss and recovery, a reading in which the natural world threatens to become a mirror for spirit. The Althusserian reading dismissed the manuscripts as ideology, the last flare of the Hegelian problematic before the break. Foster’s reading refuses both. He takes the manuscripts’ most famous formulation, that nature is man’s inorganic body, with which man must remain in continual interchange if he is not to die, and reads it with literal seriousness: as a statement of material dependence, of the human being as a natural being among natural beings whose life is a metabolism with a world it did not make. On this reading the alienation of labour is simultaneously, and not metaphorically, the alienation of the human being from nature, since the labour that is estranged is precisely the interchange itself, and the private property that organises the estrangement organises the metabolism’s disorder at the same time. The manuscripts thus supply the recovery with its middle term, the place where the dissertation’s philosophy of nature becomes a social theory, and Foster’s exposition of them is the place where his continuity thesis is most plausible, because the concepts genuinely persist: metabolism, interchange, the inorganic body, reappear transformed in the mature work’s vocabulary of Stoffwechsel.

The critics’ counter on the manuscripts is the contextualist one in its local form: that the Feuerbachian vocabulary of species being and essence, in which the manuscripts are written, cannot be laundered into the scientific materialism of the later work by emphasising its naturalistic sentences, and that Foster’s literal reading is literal only where literalness helps. The counter has force against any claim that the manuscripts contain the mature theory, and Foster’s considered claim is, once more, the more modest one of orientation and persistence of problem. What the manuscripts establish, beyond reasonable dispute, is that the human relation to nature stood at the centre of Marx’s thinking in 1844 in a form no interpreter had to import, and that the picture of a young Marx concerned exclusively with spirit and a mature Marx concerned exclusively with economics is a convenience of the textbooks. The recovery’s architecture needs the manuscripts to be a bridge, and bridges are the parts of a structure most exposed to attack from both banks. That the span still carries traffic, in the syllabuses and in the literature, is a fact about the traffic as much as about the engineering, and the profile records it as such.

Engels as the second founder of the ecological line

The recovery’s treatment of Engels, introduced earlier through the philosophy of science, has a second face that belongs to social history, and it strengthens the lineage claim in a way the dissertation cannot. Engels was the partnership’s field worker. The Condition of the Working Class in England, written from the Manchester years of the early eighteen forties, is among other things an urban ecology before the discipline existed: an account of how the organisation of production by capital arranged air, water, housing and disease into a single environment whose costs were assigned, street by street, to the class that could not refuse them. Foster reads the book as the ecological method in its first application, the analysis of a human environment as the product of social relations working through material processes, and he pairs it with Engels’s later scientific writings to construct the partner as the tradition’s second founder in natural questions, the one who kept the materialist conception of nature in print through the decades when Marx’s own scientific work lay in notebooks. The construction matters to the recovery because it doubles the lineage’s sources. A tradition descending from Marx alone might be a reader’s artefact; a tradition descending from the partnership, argued in the open by its junior member and taken up by scientists who cite both, has the documentary density of a real inheritance.

The Engels question also displays the recovery’s opponents at their most confident, and balance requires their confidence a hearing. The case against the ecological Engels rests on the same texts the case for him uses. The dialectics of nature manuscripts contain passages of genuine speculative overreach, analogies pressed past their evidence, and the later career of the dialectical laws as state doctrine gave sceptics a standing invitation to treat the whole enterprise as metaphysics in laboratory dress. Foster’s defence, developed across several essays, distinguishes the method’s core, the insistence on interconnection, levels and emergence against mechanical reduction, from its period costume, and argues that the philosophy of science’s own development, toward systems and complexity, has been kinder to the core than the mid century dismissal supposed. The critics answer that kindness is not vindication and that a method compatible with everything explains nothing in particular, which is the vacuity charge met earlier in the world-ecology dispute, now aimed at the recovery’s philosophy rather than its rivals. The symmetry is worth a reader’s pause. Foster deploys against Moore’s monism the charge that an all embracing relation explains nothing; his critics deploy against his dialectics the charge that an all embracing method explains nothing; and the two charges, identical in form, mark the boundary at which the field’s arguments stop being about Marx and start being about what an explanation is. Profiles can map that boundary. They cannot move it, and this one does not pretend to.

The recovery as a method: what this profile has been describing

It may help the reader to gather, near the end, the methodological threads that the profile has followed separately, since Foster’s significance lies as much in the method he exemplifies as in the conclusions he reaches. Recovery, as he practises it, is a discipline with rules. It begins by refusing the received summary of a thinker and returning to the whole documentary record, including the documents the summary was built by ignoring: student dissertations, journalism, correspondence, notebooks, the works of forgotten successors. It credits prior recoverers by name and dates its debts, as this profile has done with Schmidt and Burkett, because a recovery that conceals its own genealogy commits the offence it exists to correct. It states its claims in grades of strength and keeps the grades separate, the modest claim of orientation from the strong claim of system, so that a critic’s success against one grade is not mistaken for success against the other. It displays its counter evidence in the same exposition as its evidence, or fails honourably in the attempt, knowing that the selection charge is the occupational disease of the genre. And it accepts that recovery is not verdict: to show that a tradition possessed an ecological materialism is to change what must be explained, not to conclude the argument about whether Marx, all in all, was an ecological thinker, which is a weighing and not a finding.

Measured against its own rules, Foster’s practice is exemplary in its documentary energy and its crediting of predecessors, strong in the grading of claims in his careful moments and weaker in his polemical ones, and genuinely exposed at exactly the point the rules identify, the selection of the record’s centre. That a single scholar should have enlarged the record three times, for Marx’s philosophy, for his science and for his successors, is the durable fact beneath the disputes, and it is why the field’s arguments now run through his work whether they run with it or against it. The remaining sections of this profile put the equipment to work for the three readerships the series serves, and the questions that follow answer, in compressed form, the enquiries with which readers arrive.

The associated producers: the future inside the argument

A recovery of a thinker’s ecology would remain an antiquarian exercise if it said nothing about the social form that is supposed to succeed the one producing the rifts, and Foster’s work is explicit at exactly this point, drawing on the passages where Marx himself projects the rational regulation of the metabolism. The locus is the third volume of Capital, where the realm of freedom is said to begin beyond the sphere of material production proper, while within that sphere freedom can consist only in the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with nature and bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by a blind power. Foster builds the positive pole of his ecology on that sentence. The ecological problem, in his construction, is not that human beings transform nature, which every society must do to live, but that under capital the transformation is governed by a logic indifferent to the cycles it disrupts, since the value form registers none of them. The remedy is therefore not less transformation but a different governor: producers associated freely enough to take the metabolism itself as an object of collective decision, subordinating the volume and direction of production to the maintenance of the natural conditions on which production depends. The ecology and the communism are, in the recovered reading, one argument and not two, which is the deepest sense of the recovery not addition thesis: Foster does not add an environmental programme to a socialist one, because he reads the socialist programme, in its classical statement, as already containing the metabolic criterion by which an environmental programme would judge.

This construction carries consequences that distinguish Foster’s platform from several neighbours with which it is confused. Against ecological modernisation, which proposes to govern the metabolism better by pricing its disruptions and engineering around them, the recovered argument holds that the governor itself, accumulation for accumulation’s sake, defeats every instrument placed in its hands, since each efficiency is converted by competition into expanded throughput. Against the primitivist and deep green strands, it holds that the human transformation of nature is not the offence and that a society of associated producers would transform nature extensively, under the discipline of the cycles rather than in ignorance of them. Against the degrowth programme, with which the notebooks debate has entangled him, Foster’s position maintains the distinction drawn earlier in this profile: the criterion is the rational regulation of the interchange under transformed relations, judged by the reproduction of natural conditions and the free development of human capacities together, and not a mandated contraction of aggregate output within relations left intact. Each distinction is arguable, and all three are argued, in a literature the interested reader can pursue through the exchanges. The profile’s point is architectural. Foster’s ecology has a positive pole with a textual address, and critics who treat the recovery as merely a defence of Marx’s reputation have not reckoned with the use to which the recovered texts are put in the platform the recovery serves.

The positive pole also completes the answer to the question with which the profile began, who Foster is. He is the scholar who made the ecological Marx usable by making him legible: legible in his foundations, where the dissertation supplies the philosophy; in his maturity, where the rift supplies the analysis; in his posterity, where the recovered tradition supplies the proof of concept; and in his futurity, where the associated producers supply the point. Each element of the construction has been contested in the sections above, and the contests stand. But the construction’s completeness as a construction is itself a fact about its author, and it explains why his name, among the second wave’s several distinguished names, became the field’s shorthand. Burkett supplied the harder argument about value and kept the lower profile; the shorthand is unfair in the way shorthands are, and this profile has spent much of its length correcting it, but the correction should not obscure the reason the shorthand chose Foster. He built the whole edifice, foundations to futurity, and an edifice can be entered, inhabited and attacked in a way that a demonstration, however rigorous, cannot.

Three Marxes: the interpretive contest behind the recovery

The recovery can be placed, finally, inside the longer contest over Marx’s image that has run since his death, because Foster’s ecological Marx is the third great construction to compete for the inheritance, and its fortunes illuminate the other two. The first construction was the orthodox Marx of the Second International and its Soviet successor: a scientist of history whose doctrine centred on the development of the productive forces, in whose texts the ecological passages sat unread because the construction had no place for them, and whose state heirs governed accordingly. The second construction was the humanist Marx built, after their publication, on the manuscripts of 1844, for whom the centre was alienation and the recovery of the human essence, a construction that restored the young Marx at the price of the scientist and treated nature largely as the essence’s mirror. Foster’s Marx contests both inheritances simultaneously, which is why his work draws fire from both directions: from the orthodox remnant, for whom the ecology is a distraction from the economics, and from the humanists, for whom the materialism of nature threatens to dissolve the philosophy of praxis into naturalism. His construction claims the young Marx for materialism against the humanists and the mature Marx for ecology against the orthodox, and it pays for the double claim with the double exposure this profile has documented at the dissertation and in the silences.

The contest of constructions is not a defect of Marx scholarship but its normal condition, since the corpus is vast, unfinished and internally various enough to sustain several coherent portraits, each true to the documents it centres and partial in the documents it marginalises. What distinguishes a construction’s quality is not its completeness, which none achieves, but its candour about its centre and its conduct toward the marginalised evidence. By that standard the ecological construction has improved the whole field’s practice, because its centre, the material interchange of society and nature, turned out to be documented across the corpus at a density its rivals had not suspected, and its pressure forced the rival constructions to go and look at documents, the notebooks above all, that their own centres had left in the archive. The humanist Marx did not disappear under the pressure; the orthodox Marx survives in the syllabuses of economics; but both now coexist with a third portrait whose documentary base neither can ignore. A reader who understands the profile’s subject as the author of that portrait, built over four decades from a question about a soil passage, has the measure of the man that the title of the standard summaries, the metabolic rift man, only gestures toward.

Why the recovery happened when it did

A profile concerned with evidence should ask, of its own subject’s emergence, the historical question it asks of everything else: why then? The ecological recovery of Marx was not possible at any arbitrary moment, and its timing, at the end of the nineteen nineties, has determinate causes that a reader should know, because they bear on how the recovery should be weighed. The first cause is the state of the world the recovery addressed. By the nineteen nineties the environmental crisis had acquired its planetary form in public consciousness, and the search for a social theory adequate to it had become urgent across the human sciences; a Marxism that could not speak to the crisis faced irrelevance in the one arena where the century’s end was being argued. The second cause is the collapse of the Soviet order, which dissolved, at a stroke, the identification of Marx interpretation with the doctrine of a state. Readings of Marx that the old orthodoxy would have policed as deviations, ecological readings among them, became possible in the space the collapse opened, and the recovery’s insistence on separating the founding texts from the record of the states is a direct product of that moment: the separation was not only an argument but a historical opportunity. The third cause is editorial. The historical critical edition’s progress, above all the appearance of the natural science notebooks in its fourth section, put new documentary masses into circulation at exactly the moment when interpreters were free to use them unconventionally, and the edition based scholarship that culminated in the notebooks debate is unthinkable a generation earlier. The fourth cause is disciplinary: environmental sociology had matured into a field with journals, chairs and a flagship willing to publish a long article on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, giving the recovery an institutional home outside the Marxological journals where it might have remained a sectarian curiosity.

None of these causes diminishes the recovery, and Foster’s own historical sense, displayed in his account of the recovered tradition’s burial, would be the first to insist on them. Ideas of this scale are not produced by solitary insight; they are produced when a question, an archive, a readership and a freedom coincide. What the timing explains is the recovery’s character, in particular its double aspect as scholarship and as intervention. It was scholarship because the archive permitted it; it was an intervention because the crisis demanded it and the collapse permitted the demanding to be heard. Readers weighing its strongest claims should hold the double aspect in view, since a work produced under the pressure of a present need will reach for the present’s categories more eagerly than its author intends, which is the substance of the anachronism charge that de Kadt and Engel-Di Mauro pressed, and will also see things in the archive that indifferent ages walked past, which is the recovery’s standing reply. Both are true of every consequential recovery, from the Renaissance’s antiquity onward, and the Foster case is a late and self aware instance of the type: an age recovering from a thinker the part of him it has learned to need, and finding, to its credit and its discomfort, that the part was really there.

Checking Foster: a note on the primary sources

Because this profile has insisted throughout that the argument is a claim about evidence, it owes its readers a short guide to inspecting the evidence independently, and the inspection is easier than the controversy’s heat suggests. The dissertation exists in the collected works and in the edition’s first section, and its central chapters on the difference between the two atomisms can be read in an hour; a reader who does so will find the swerve argument exactly where Foster says it is, surrounded by the Hegelian idiom his critics emphasise, and can judge the ratio of content to vessel without intermediaries. The soil and rift passages stand in the first volume of Capital, in the chapter on machinery and large scale industry, and in the third volume’s chapters on ground rent and on the revenues, where the usufruct passage also stands; the 1844 manuscripts are available in every edition of the early writings, and the inorganic body formulation is in the first manuscript. Liebig’s agricultural chemistry, in the later editions where the alarm sounds, is the recovery’s key contextual document and repays the same hour. For the notebooks, the reader depends on the critical edition’s fourth section and on the secondary reconstructions, Saito’s above all, that report its contents; here the inspection is necessarily at one remove, and the profile has marked the disputes that the remove makes possible. For the recovered tradition, the primary texts are the scientists’ own: Lankester’s writings on degeneration and on man’s relation to nature, Morris’s lectures and his utopian romance, Tansley’s 1935 paper introducing the ecosystem, Bernal’s The Social Function of Science of 1939, which stated the interwar movement’s programme in its canonical form, and Caudwell’s posthumous studies. A reader who samples even two of these will grasp what Foster recovered more vividly than any summary can convey, and will also grasp the critics’ question, whether the line drawn through the samples is the line the samples draw through themselves. That question, unanswered at the end of this long profile exactly as it is unanswered in the field, is the right place for the reading to begin.

The inheritance at Monthly Review: from monopoly capital to the soil

Foster’s formation inside the Monthly Review tradition explains more of his ecology than any influence from the environmental movement, and the tradition contained, though few noticed, a thread of soil. The journal’s founding economists, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, built the theory of monopoly capitalism that Foster’s first book extended, and the school’s habits, its insistence on the classical texts, its long historical arcs, its suspicion of equilibrium economics, became his habits entire. Harry Magdoff, Sweezy’s co-editor for three decades, brought to the journal a formation unusual in Marxist economics: a background in agriculture and a lifelong attention to the land, and his son Fred Magdoff became a professor of plant and soil science whose work on soil health and ecological agriculture is standard in its field. When Foster’s ecological turn came, the collaboration that embodied it most concretely was with Fred Magdoff, the soil scientist inside the tradition’s own extended family, and their joint writings move without strain between the chemistry of the soil and the political economy of the system that mines it, because in that house the two subjects had never been strangers. The short book they wrote together for environmentalists is the platform text of Foster’s middle career, and its authority on the movement’s doorstep derived precisely from the double credential: the editor of Monthly Review and a working soil scientist, arguing one case.

The inheritance also explains the recovery’s distinctive patience. A scholar formed by a journal that had kept a heterodox political economy alive through decades of professional exile learns to work on long timescales, to treat a unfashionable text as a deposit rather than an embarrassment, and to expect vindication, if it comes, to arrive posthumously to most of the participants. Foster’s recoveries have that temporality throughout. He writes about Marx’s dissertation, about Lankester and Caudwell, about the interwar scientists, in the same tone of unhurried restitution, as though the archive were a court in permanent session where a well prepared brief eventually gets its hearing. The tone is the tradition’s gift to him, and it distinguishes his work from the breathlessness of much ecological writing in the period of the recovery, which announced emergencies in a vocabulary of years. Foster’s vocabulary is of decades and centuries, of formations and their slow material consequences, and the longue durée is not a stylistic preference but the methodological signature of the school that formed him: monopoly capital taught its students to think in the time of systems, and the ecology inherited the clock.

There is a final inheritance to record, the tradition’s internationalism in its concrete, editorial form. Monthly Review survived by attending to the world beyond the United States, to the revolutions and the development debates of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and Foster’s ecology is internationalist in structure and not merely in sentiment for the reason given earlier: the rifts are planetary, the displacements systematic, and the recovered tradition itself, British in the book of 2020, is presented as one province of a materialism that had provinces everywhere. The exchanges with scholars in China, the translations of the books, the attention the work has received in the literatures of the global South, belong to this inheritance and are taken up in the reception section below. A profile that presented Foster as an American academic with an unusual hobby would miss the formation entirely. He is the editor of a tradition, and the ecology is what that tradition produced when it turned, with its habits intact, toward the material crisis of the age.

The guano trade: the rift framework’s showcase case

The rift literature’s most celebrated historical case, developed by Foster with Brett Clark, earns extended treatment here, because it shows the framework performing the labour its philosophical critics sometimes doubt it can perform, explaining a concrete episode better than the accounts that preceded it. The episode is the nineteenth century trade in guano and nitrates. European agriculture, its soils depleted by the robbery system Liebig had diagnosed, developed an enormous appetite for imported fertility, and the appetite fastened on the guano deposits of the islands off Peru, accumulated bird droppings of extraordinary richness, and then on the nitrate fields of the Atacama. The trade that followed was an ecological event as much as a commercial one. Fertility accumulated over millennia in one place was stripped, shipped across oceans and spread on the fields of another, postponing the soil crisis of the importing countries by exporting its costs: to the islands stripped bare, to the labourers, many of them coerced or indentured, who dug the deposits under murderous conditions, and eventually to the states that fought a war, the War of the Pacific, in which control of the nitrate fields was a central prize. Clark and Foster’s account reads the episode through the rift: a break in the nutrient cycle of the importing agriculture, temporarily bridged by a transfer that created new rifts at the point of extraction, in the soil of the islands, in the bodies of the labourers and in the politics of the exporting region.

The case’s value to the framework is methodological. Every element the category predicts is present and documented: the material flow, the social relations organising it, the displacement of the break across space, the illusion of solution in the importing country, the reappearance of the problem in displaced forms, from the politics of fertiliser to the eventual turn to synthetic fixation. And every element is established from the historical record, from the trade statistics and the diplomatic history and the testimony about the islands, without recourse to the dissertation or to any contested philosophy. Critics of the framework’s foundations can grant the guano case entire, and many do, which is why it functions in the literature as the rift’s passport: the demonstration, addressed to historians and sociologists rather than to philosophers, that the category earns its keep on evidence all parties accept. Foster’s own role in the case is characteristic. He did not discover the guano trade, which economic historians had long studied. He read it whole, connected its ends, the depleted field and the stripped island, into a single process with a name, and the naming is the architectural act his work performs at every scale, from the dissertation’s swerve to the planet’s cycles. Whether the name illuminates or merely labels is, in the end, the question every reader of Foster must decide case by case, and the guano literature is the case where the illumination is hardest to deny.

The treadmill and the rift: a debate inside environmental sociology

Foster’s home discipline received the rift argument into a field that already possessed a Marxist framework of its own, and the negotiation between the two is a chapter of his profile that summaries omit. Allan Schnaiberg’s treadmill of production, stated in 1980, had given environmental sociology its founding synthesis: a political economy in which the alliance of capital, labour and the state is locked into expanding production, withdrawing ever more from ecosystems and adding ever more pollution to them, regardless of the preferences of the citizens caught on the treadmill. The treadmill explained the structural indifference of the growth economy to its material consequences with great economy, and it did so without needing Marx’s texts at all, which was, from the recovery’s standpoint, both its strength and its provocation. When Foster’s article appeared in the discipline’s flagship journal in 1999, it proposed a different foundation for the same structural insight: not a coalition model of the post war growth economy but Marx’s own category of metabolism and its rift, reaching back to the nineteenth century’s soil and forward to the planetary cycles. The ensuing literature, in which Richard York and others figure prominently, worked the two frameworks against and through each other. The treadmill’s defenders asked what the textual recovery added to a structural sociology that already explained the harm; the rift’s defenders answered that the category of metabolism supplied what the treadmill lacked, an account of the specific material cycles and their breaking points, and a grounding in the critique of the value form that explained why the treadmill’s coalition cannot vote itself off its own machine.

The debate is instructive beyond its discipline because it replicates, in sociological dress, the profile’s master distinction. One side held the equivalent of the supplement position: the structural theory works, the texts are optional. The other held the recovery position: the texts contain the deeper theory, and working from them yields categories the structural model misses. Environmental sociology, to its credit, refused to choose in the manner of a tribunal and instead absorbed both, so that the mature subfield speaks of treadmills and rifts in adjacent paragraphs and its textbooks present the pair as the twin foundations of its Marxist wing. Foster’s standing inside his own discipline is therefore secure in a way his standing in Marxology is not, and the difference is diagnostic of where his work is strongest. Where the question is the organisation of research into material flows and their social drivers, the recovery’s categories have proved themselves in use. Where the question is the architecture of Marx’s development, the verdicts remain divided. A thinker can be, simultaneously, a discipline’s founder and a controversy’s party, and Foster is both, in different rooms of the same house.

The international reception and the Chinese dialogue

The recovery’s reception outside the English speaking academy forms the last panel of this profile’s survey, and it is dominated by one fact: the work travelled. Marx’s Ecology was translated widely, and nowhere was its reception more organised, or more critical in the productive sense, than in China, where a substantial scholarly literature on Marxism and ecology engaged Foster’s books as the reference point for the field. The published dialogue from which this profile drew Xu Yanmei’s dissertation objection shows the reception’s character. The Chinese scholars’ questions, as Foster reproduces and answers them, are not the questions of devotees. They probe the depiction of Marx’s materialism, the relation of the ecological critique to the critique of religion, the standing of the dissertation against the mature work, and the compatibility of the recovery with the classical conceptions of practice and dialectics: the questions, that is, of a scholarly culture with its own deep investment in the texts, testing an imported interpretation against its own reading. Foster’s answers, given in the same spirit and printed for his home readership, are among the most careful statements of his positions anywhere in the corpus, precisely because the questions permitted no polemical shortcuts. The episode deserves its place in the profile for what it reveals about the recovery’s international life. An interpretation of Marx that began as an American sociologist’s argument with his own tradition became, within two decades, a position that the world’s largest Marxist scholarly culture felt obliged to interrogate at length, and the interrogation improved the position’s statements even where it did not alter them.

The broader international picture repeats the pattern of the home reception at lower resolution. In the European literatures the recovery was absorbed into existing debates about Marx and nature that had their own Schmidtian and first wave lineages, and Foster figures there as the American systematiser of a recovery with continental roots, a description he would accept. Among scholars of the global South the rift framework found users in the study of land, mining and export agriculture, for whom the displacement analysis and the guano case spoke directly to their materials, and the framework’s centre of empirical gravity has drifted accordingly toward the extractive frontiers where its categories bite hardest. A profile should end its survey there, with the work in other hands, since the final measure of a recovery is not the applause of its author’s peers but the uses of strangers. By that measure the recovery succeeded. The argument about whether it should have, in its strong form, continues, and is the field’s business now rather than its author’s alone.

A balance sheet: four audiences, four verdicts

The reception of Foster’s work divides by audience with unusual neatness, and a profile can use the division as its balance sheet, since each audience has judged the part of the work addressed to it and the pattern of the judgements is more informative than any aggregate. The first audience is his own discipline. Environmental sociology has delivered the warmest verdict, adopting the rift as a working category, building an empirical literature on it, and treating the 1999 article as a founding document; its reservations concern application and measurement, the ordinary reservations of a science toward a framework it uses. The second audience is Marx scholarship proper, the philologists and historians of the corpus, whose verdict is the split one this profile has documented at length: the record enlarged beyond argument, the construction contested at its foundations and its silences, the author respected as an interlocutor whose citations must be checked because they usually survive the checking. The third audience is the history and philosophy of science, which received The Return of Nature as a contribution to its own field, reviewed the recovery of the interwar scientists with professional interest, and reserved its judgement on the lineage claim in the professional manner, by citing the archive and bracketing the thesis. The fourth audience is the ecological movement and the broader green left, whose verdict is the most divided of all, split between gratitude for a Marxism that can finally speak to the crisis without embarrassment and resentment at a polemic that spent years misdescribing the movement’s own traditions to its face. Both halves of the fourth verdict are earned, and Foster’s later practice, more discriminating in its engagements, reads as an implicit acknowledgement of the second.

The pattern across the four verdicts has a logic that a balance sheet should state plainly. The closer an audience stands to the documents, the more it credits the recovery and debates the construction; the closer it stands to the politics, the more it judges the construction and the conduct. Foster’s work is thus in the interesting position of being strongest where it is most scholarly and most vulnerable where it is most engaged, and since the engagement was the scholarship’s purpose, the vulnerability is not accidental but structural, the price of the double register in which an editor scholar must work. A purely academic recovery would have drawn milder objections and changed less. A purely polemical one would have changed nothing in the record. The actual work did the archive first and the arguing throughout, and its reception, audience by audience, is the map of that choice. Readers of this profile now hold the map, and the remaining task of the profile is the practical one: to convert the map into guidance for the three kinds of reader the series serves, after a final word on what the recovery leaves undone.

What the recovery leaves undone

Every research programme is known by its open problems, and honesty about Foster’s requires listing the ones his own work acknowledges and the ones it creates. The first open problem is the dissertation itself, which will remain open as long as the definition of a foundation is contested, although the scholarship the debate provoked has permanently raised the text’s standing. The second is the silences: the recovery has yet to produce, from within its own method, a full accounting of the passages and domains that resist it, and until a Foster or a successor writes the chapter on what Marx did not say with the same documentary energy as the chapters on what he did, the selection charge will retain a target. The third is the framework’s reach: the rift’s generalisation from soil to every material cycle is the programme’s working hypothesis rather than its demonstrated result, and the case literature, strong on nutrients and land, thinner elsewhere, will decide the matter over time in the manner of empirical programmes. The fourth is the relation to the sciences as they now stand, where the recovery’s philosophy of nature, levelled and emergent and historical, must make its peace with disciplines that have developed their own accounts of emergence and systems without reference to the dialectical tradition; the peace is possible, and Foster’s later work gestures toward it, but it has not been concluded. The fifth is the open problem of the whole cluster: whether the ecological thinker recovered from the texts can bear the political weight the platform loads onto him, in a century whose ecological emergencies will test every inherited doctrine against events no doctrine foresaw.

A profile is not required to solve its subject’s problems, and this one has been careful, under its brief, to settle nothing that the evidence leaves open. What it can do, in closing the survey, is register the unusual fact that the open problems are now the field’s problems, posed in the recovery’s vocabulary, on evidence the recovery assembled. Programmes are not refuted by having open problems; they are refuted by ceasing to generate them. By that standard the recovery is alive, and its author’s place in the history of his tradition is secure in the only sense scholarship can make secure: the subsequent argument cannot proceed without passing through his work, agreeing or disagreeing, in the dissertation’s shadow and the rift’s light.

A note on the word ecology and the charge of anachronism

One precision governs the whole debate and is worth isolating, because careless statements of it fuel the anachronism charge beyond its legitimate scope. Marx never used the word ecology as the name of a science of his own, for the sufficient reason that the word was coined by Ernst Haeckel only in 1866, late in Marx’s working life, to name a branch of biology that was not Marx’s subject. The recovery does not claim otherwise. Its claim is that Marx developed, inside political economy and natural philosophy, an analysis of the material interchange between society and nature that later ecological thought can recognise as a forerunner and a resource, and that the analysis was systematic in its own terms: metabolism, rift, robbery, rational regulation. Anachronism in the strict sense would be the attribution to Marx of concepts that depend on the later science, on ecosystems and energy flows and the biosphere as technical objects, and Foster’s careful statements avoid the attribution, speaking of ecological values, ecological critique and an ecological worldview in Marx while reserving the science’s name for the science. The critics’ charge, to retain its force, must therefore be aimed not at vocabulary but at structure: at the claim that the later problematic can be found organised in the earlier texts. That is the retrospective coherence objection once more, and it is not answered by pointing to careful vocabulary, any more than it is established by pointing to careless popularisations. The distinction matters for readers of the secondary literature, where the anachronism charge circulates in a vulgar form, as though Foster had dressed Marx in a Greenpeace shirt, which no one who has read the book can believe, and in its strong form, as a methodological objection to continuity theses in the history of ideas, which deserves the answer this profile has recorded: the modest claim survives it, the strong claim is its legitimate target, and the line between them is where the serious argument lives.

The Benton exchange: where the value argument was fought

The precedence section of this profile introduced Burkett’s book as the value argument, and the argument had an opponent whose role completes the story, because it was against Ted Benton that the second wave defined the hardness of its core. Benton, a British sociologist and philosopher, had made the most respected Marxist case for the prosecution a decade earlier, arguing in essays from the end of the nineteen eighties that the labour process, as Marx conceives it, is structured so as to background natural conditions systematically: in the transhistorical account it figures as the purposeful transformation of a given material by instruments, an intentional structure in which nature appears as the passive occasion of human projects rather than as an active and limiting party. On that basis Benton concluded that Marxism required ecological reconstruction, the supplement position in its most philosophically serious form, and he undertook the reconstruction himself with learning and candour. The second wave’s founding gesture was the refusal of Benton’s premise on Benton’s chosen ground. Burkett’s book is, in long stretches, a reply to Benton and to the critics Benton had marshalled, demonstrating passage by passage that Marx’s labour process is saturated with natural conditionality, that the value and wealth distinction performs precisely the ecological labour Benton had judged absent, and that the appearance of a Promethean intentionality dissolves when the whole corpus, including the manuscripts and the notebooks of the economic manuscripts, is admitted as evidence.

Foster’s relation to Benton is the complement of Burkett’s, and it shows the recovery’s two halves working as one machine. Where Burkett fought on the categories, Foster fought on the biography, arguing that a thinker whose philosophical formation was a materialism of nature, and whose scientific reading never ceased, was unlikely to have built his central concept on the abstraction Benton diagnosed, and that the diagnosis reads the labour process chapter in isolation from the corpus that surrounds it. Benton, to his credit, engaged the replies, conceded ground on the value question in later work, and continued to press the points he judged unanswered, and the exchange stands in the literature as the recovery debate conducted at its highest level: named scholars, identified texts, concessions recorded, residues specified. A reader who masters the Benton exchange possesses the whole controversy in miniature, the supplement and the recovery, the category argument and the biographical one, and the precise points, the labour process’s intentional structure and the weight of the silences, at which the argument remains open. It is the exchange this profile would assign first to any reader who wants to move from knowing Foster’s position to being able to defend or attack it in company.

Sewage, soil and the sanitary imagination of the nineteenth century

The rift argument’s nineteenth century context includes a material culture that Foster’s exposition recovers with evident relish, and a section of this profile should preserve some of it, because it explains why the soil question burned as it did in the period’s imagination. The great towns of the industrial revolution were, among their other novelties, machines for concentrating nutrients and dispersing them irrecoverably. The water closet and the sewer, celebrated as sanitary progress, flushed the fertility of the countryside, embodied in the food the towns consumed, into the rivers and the sea, while the fields that had supplied the food were mined of the same elements and the town’s own filth poisoned its water. The period knew it. Sanitary reformers, agricultural chemists and engineers debated the recycling of urban sewage to the land as the obvious closure of the cycle, schemes were built and pamphleteered, and the failure to close the cycle at scale stood in the period’s literature as an emblem of a civilisation wasting its own basis. Marx read this literature as he read Liebig, and the third volume’s rift passage generalises exactly it: the same social order that concentrated the population in towns made the return of the consumed elements technically imaginable and economically irrational, since the return could not be made to pay under the relations that had broken the cycle. Foster’s use of the sanitary material is among the recovery’s most persuasive local demonstrations, because here the chain from the period’s science and engineering, through Marx’s reading and excerpting, to the mature category, is documented at every link, and the category’s content is unmistakably material: a broken flow, a social cause, a technical remedy blocked by a social form. Students sometimes ask why a theory of capitalism should care about sewage. The nineteenth century, and Foster after it, answer that a civilisation announces its relation to nature nowhere more honestly than in what it does with its own waste, and that a political economy unable to think the cycle will reproduce the blockage in every element it touches, soil, climate and ocean alike.

The dissertation’s afterlife: the return to Epicurus

Foster’s book length return to Epicurus, Breaking the Bonds of Fate, completes the arc of his career in a way the profile should register before it closes, because it revises the balance of the whole project. Where Marx’s Ecology had treated the dissertation as the foundation of an argument whose centre lay in Capital, the later book treats the Epicurus material as a subject in its own right, reconstructing the ancient philosophy, its Roman transmission through Lucretius, its suppression and its returns in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and Marx’s place in that long history as its decisive modern reader. The effect on the earlier argument is double. On one side, the deepening answers the standing complaint that the dissertation reading was a scaffolding erected for the ecology and discarded once the building stood; a scholar does not devote a late book to his scaffolding. The Epicurus interpretation is presented, in the later work, as the philosophical core of Foster’s Marxism entire, the point at which its materialism is distinguished from every mechanism and every design, and the ecology becomes one consequence among others of a general philosophy. On the other side, the deepening sharpens the original exposure, since the later book’s stakes are explicitly philosophical and its critics can now contest it on philosophy’s ground, the interpretation of Epicurus and of the young Marx’s relation to Hegel, without the distraction of soil and cycles. The exchanges the book provoked in the journals of Marxian philosophy show the debate continuing on that ground, with the Althusserian alternative, an epistemological break dividing the ideological young Marx from the scientific mature one, as the standing counter construction. Foster’s counter, that the dissertation itself performs the break with idealism from inside the Hegelian idiom, is the boldest form of his continuity thesis and the one on which, more than on any soil passage, his reputation as an interpreter will ultimately be judged. The profile records the escalation without pretending to a competence it has not claimed: the documents are open, the constructions are stated, and the judgement belongs to the readers of both.

The population question: Foster against the Malthusian inheritance

No reader can understand Foster’s polemical register without the population question, because it is the ground on which his quarrel with mainstream environmentalism was first fought and the ground on which he believes the difference between a materialist ecology and its rivals is decided. The Malthusian tradition, descending from the Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798, explains environmental pressure by the arithmetic of human numbers against subsistence, and its modern heirs explain the planetary crisis by the aggregate impact of the species, its population multiplied by its consumption. Foster’s counter argument, developed from his earliest ecological writing and rooted in the recovered texts, is that the arithmetic conceals the relations. Marx had answered Malthus in advance by insisting that every mode of production has its own law of population, that surplus population is relative to the requirements of accumulation and not to the means of subsistence, and that the appearance of a natural excess is the social order’s way of blaming its victims for its organisation. Foster generalises the answer into the recovery’s sharpest political edge. A crisis attributed to humanity in general indicts the subsistence farmer with the frequent flyer in a single sum, dissolves the historically specific system that organises production and consumption into a fate of the species, and issues, as the Malthusian tradition has issued since its founder opposed the poor laws, in prescriptions aimed at the fertility of the poor. Against the arithmetic he sets the framework’s categories: throughput driven by accumulation, rifts opened by the value form’s blindness, displacements arranged by empire, and a population question that is real only as a question about the relations under which people reproduce their lives.

The population argument is also where the critics’ fairness objection, recorded earlier in this profile, has its strongest exhibit, and balance requires the point to be made in this section rather than only in theirs. Foster’s characterisation of the green mainstream as Malthusian flattens a field in which many writers reject the population frame as firmly as he does, and in which the aggregate impact formula is often a prelude to an analysis of radically unequal contributions rather than a substitute for one. His defenders answer that the polemic targets the formula’s logic and its institutional uses, in the reports and campaigns where the aggregate does the political work, and not every writer who has ever multiplied population by affluence. The exchange is unresolved and, in the nature of polemics about a moving field, unresolvable by citation. What a profile can certify is the argument’s centrality to its author. The refusal of the species frame is not an ornament of Foster’s ecology but its load bearing political claim, the point at which the recovery of Marx ceases to be antiquarian and becomes a contest over the explanation of the crisis itself, and readers who grasp why he fights on this ground grasp the unity of the scholarship and the platform that this profile has been at pains to exhibit.

The question of agency: who repairs the rift

A framework that locates the crisis in a system’s logic owes its readers an account of the agent capable of changing the logic, and Foster’s work addresses the debt in the manner of his tradition, through the working class and its allies conceived as the associated producers in formation. The argument deserves statement because it distinguishes his platform from the two agencies most often proposed in ecological debate. Against the agency of the enlightened state, regulating the system that sustains it, the recovered framework objects that the state’s dependence on accumulation reproduces the treadmill’s coalition from inside the regulator. Against the agency of the consumer, whose choices are to discipline the market, it objects that consumption is organised by production and that the arithmetic of footprints returns, by the back door, to the species frame the population argument refuses. The agency the framework proposes is collective and productive: the class that operates the metabolism, organised to govern it, in alliance with the communities on whom the rifts’ costs are displaced, the farmers of the mined soils, the peoples of the extractive frontiers, the inhabitants of the sacrificed districts of the wealthy countries themselves. Foster’s writings on the environmental proletariat and on the struggles of indigenous and peasant movements develop the alliance as the ecological form of the tradition’s older internationalism, and the recovered history supports the development in his telling, since the tradition he recovered, from Morris’s socialism to the interwar scientists’ public campaigns, always imagined the repair of the human relation to nature as the work of a transformed society and not of a ministry.

The agency argument is the least scholarly and most exposed part of the platform, and the profile should say so with the same plainness it has used elsewhere. The textual recovery can show that Marx projected associated producers regulating the metabolism; it cannot show that such an agency exists in the required form or that its historical attempts, which the record of the twentieth century states in full, govern the projection’s credibility. Foster’s handling of the record, distinguishing the theory from the regimes that claimed it, has been noted in this profile and remains, as there, a distinction the reader must weigh rather than a fact the profile can certify. What can be certified is the argument’s coherence within the construction. A recovery that began by refusing to supplement Marx ends by refusing to supplement his politics either: the agent of the ecological transformation is the agent of the social transformation, the crisis of nature and the crisis of society are one crisis with one resolution, and the unity of the claim, whether it persuades or repels, is the unity of the whole Foster project in a single sentence. Profiles end, as this one now approaches its end, not by resolving such unities but by having made them visible, with their evidence, their objections and their price.

Technology and the fix: the framework on the system’s favourite remedy

Every ecological framework is tested by its account of technology, since the promise of a technical remedy is the governing culture’s standing answer to the crisis, and Foster’s account, developed with his collaborators, is among the framework’s most distinctive products. Its core is a refusal to treat technology as an exogenous force, arriving from outside the social order with its effects inscribed in its design. Technologies, in the recovered framework, are developed and selected inside the relations they then appear to govern, and their ecological effects bear the relations’ signature. The canonical demonstration in the Foster circle’s work is the efficiency paradox, the rebound by which improvements in the efficiency of a resource’s use, under a system driven to expand, increase rather than decrease the resource’s total consumption, a pattern named for the nineteenth century economist William Stanley Jevons, who observed it in the coal consumption of more efficient steam engines. Richard York’s empirical work on the paradox within the school gave the argument its quantitative literature, and Foster’s theoretical statements draw the moral: a system that converts every saving into growth cannot be saved by savings, and the engineering of efficiency, however genuine its local gains, functions at the level of the whole as an accelerant wearing the costume of a remedy. The same structure governs the school’s treatment of the grander fixes, the proposals to engineer the planetary climate directly, which the collaborative writings treat as the displacement logic raised to the scale of the earth system: a rift in the atmosphere answered by an intervention in the atmosphere, under the same relations that opened the rift, with the intervention’s own disruptions assigned, as displacements always are, to those without the power to refuse them.

The technology argument matters to the profile because it completes the platform’s coherence and because it is the point at which the recovery’s categories do independent work in debates where Marx’s name carries no authority. The rebound literature, the critique of geoengineering, the analysis of apparent dematerialisation as displacement through trade: these arguments travel in policy and scientific company on their merits, citing the rift school as one source among others, and their travel is a form of influence the balance sheet did not record, the influence of categories that have escaped their author’s name. Foster’s own statements of the technology position also exhibit, in concentrated form, the double register this profile has tracked throughout. At its careful best, the position is a genuine contribution to the theory of socio technical change, continuous with the best sociology of technology. At its polemical edge, it can harden into a presumption that every technical remedy is a displacement in disguise, a presumption the historical record, which contains remedies that remedied, does not uniformly support. The school’s own guano case contains the nuance its polemics sometimes lose: the synthetic fixation of nitrogen genuinely relieved the soil rift it addressed, and the framework’s honest statement is that it did so by opening the energy and nitrogen rifts wider elsewhere, a statement about the system’s accounting and not a denial of the chemistry. Readers who hold the honest statement and discount the presumption have the technology argument at its proper strength, which is considerable.

Into the syllabus: how the recovery became curriculum

The last measure of the recovery’s success is curricular, and it can be taken concretely. A generation of students now meets Marx’s ecology not as a controversy but as a unit: a week in the environmental sociology course, a chapter in the reader on social theory and the environment, a set text in the geography and development syllabuses, where the rift is presented alongside the treadmill as the Marxist inheritance the student is expected to command. The canonisation has the usual double effect. It secures the recovery’s findings, the passages, the precedence, the recovered names, as the common property of the educated, which is what recoveries are for. And it flattens the recovery’s argument into the textbook paragraph against which this profile opened, the paragraph in which Foster invented the metabolic rift and Marx was an ecologist all along, the paragraph whose errors the whole preceding exposition has existed to correct. The curriculum thus reproduces, at the level of the syllabus, the exact condition that made the recovery necessary at the level of the archive: a thinker’s work known through a summary that the work itself refutes. Foster’s books will be read, in the coming decades, largely by those whom the paragraph fails, who go from the syllabus to the texts and find the texts stranger, richer and more contested than the paragraph promised. That journey, repeated reader by reader, is the afterlife of every serious scholarship, and the materials for it, the four steps, the objections with their authors’ names, the precedences and the open problems, are what this profile has attempted to place in the traveller’s hands.

The agrarian dimension: soil, peasants and the country

The rift was born in the countryside, and Foster’s work has never let the framework forget its birthplace, a fidelity that distinguishes the school within an ecological literature increasingly preoccupied with the atmosphere. The agrarian argument runs as follows in his exposition. Capital’s penetration of agriculture separates the producer from the land’s stewardship in a double movement: the land becomes an asset whose fertility is a cost to be minimised across an accounting horizon, and the food it yields travels ever further to its eaters, so that the cycle of nutrients that every durable agriculture must close is broken by the geography of the market itself. The consequences the framework names are the ones Liebig named, exhaustion and the search for imported fertility, updated by the school’s case literature to the age of synthetic inputs, contract farming and the global trade in feed and food, in which the apparent independence of agriculture from the soil is purchased by dependence on the energy system and the mined phosphate and potash of a handful of territories. Against the productivist celebration of that independence, and equally against the romantic celebration of a peasant past that no serious history can recover intact, Foster’s recovered Marx holds the usufruct criterion: the land is held in trust, and the question put to any agriculture is whether its organisation can reproduce the conditions of its own continuation and hand them on improved. The criterion judges the collective farm and the agribusiness with the same instrument, which is the recovery’s method applied as ethics, and it explains the school’s persistent attention to the agrarian struggles of the global South, where the criterion’s violation is most legible and its defence most organised. A profile of the framework’s author should record the agrarian fidelity as a matter of intellectual character. Foster came to ecology through the soil, in the company of a soil scientist, inside a tradition whose co-editor farmed his attention on the land, and the soil’s patience, its refusal to be hurried by the news cycle of the atmosphere, is the tempo of the whole project.

The name of the field: ecological Marxism and its career

The phrase ecological Marxism, under which this cluster of the series is organised and under which Foster’s work is shelved, has a career of its own that a profile may usefully sketch, because the name’s fortunes track the argument’s. In its early uses the phrase named an aspiration rather than a literature: the hope, among the first wave’s writers, of a synthesis between a Marxism felt to be incomplete and an ecology felt to be rootless, a marriage of two doctrines each supplying the other’s lack. The supplement model was built into the name’s first career, and the Chinese literature, which adopted the phrase with enthusiasm and made it the title of a flourishing sub discipline, inherited some of that architecture even while engaging Foster’s very different claim. The second wave’s achievement can be stated as a change in the name’s meaning. After Burkett and Foster, ecological Marxism could denote not a synthesis of two doctrines but a finding about one: that the ecology was internal to the Marxism, requiring recovery rather than importation. The name survived the change of meaning because names do, and the ambiguity is now permanent, so that the same phrase denotes, in different mouths, the supplement the second wave refuted and the recovery the second wave performed. Readers of the field’s literature must therefore interrogate every use of its title, asking which of the two architectures the writer inhabits, and the interrogation is a reliable first question for any seminar on the subject. Foster’s own usage is consistent with his thesis: the phrase names, for him, the ecological dimension of historical materialism itself, recovered and developed, and his occasional preference for speaking of Marx’s ecology, or of a Marxian ecology, over the compound label is the preference of a writer who wants the genitive to do the work, possession rather than partnership. The series that contains this profile uses the compound as the field’s flag of convenience, and the flag is convenient precisely because both architectures sail under it, which is why the profiles in this cluster, this one included, have been careful to mark, at every stage, which of the two a given writer built.

The second generation: collaborators, students and popularisers

A recovery becomes a school when its problems are taken up by hands other than its author’s, and Foster’s work crossed that threshold early enough that the profile must distinguish the generations or mislead. The inner circle is the Oregon and Monthly Review collaboration documented throughout this profile: Brett Clark, whose sociological work carried the rift into the oceans and the world food system and whose philosophical work defended the materialism behind it; Richard York, whose studies of energy, emissions drivers and the efficiency paradox gave the framework its empirical spine; and, at one remove, Fred Magdoff, the soil scientist whose presence in the story this profile has already marked. Around the inner circle stands a generation of students and associates who took the categories into fields Foster never entered, land change science, public health, the sociology of food, the study of the world system’s material flows, and whose work is the framework’s best evidence of fertility, since categories that only their author can operate are not yet a school. Beyond them stands the popularising ring, of which the Canadian ecosocialist writer Ian Angus, whose Facing the Anthropocene of 2016 carried the rift framework to a movement readership with Foster’s encouragement, is the clearest example: a writer of the first wave’s formation converted by the recovery’s evidence into its advocate, and thereby a small proof of the recovery’s power to change minds formed against it.

The generational picture completes the profile’s long argument about attribution. Foster’s name became the field’s shorthand partly because the school needed a flag and his was the one on the founding books, and the shorthand now conceals a collective enterprise three generations deep, counting Schmidt and Burkett as its unacknowledged elders. The enterprise’s centre of gravity has already shifted in the manner this profile recorded for the notebooks debate, where the most discussed claim in the field, the degrowth communism of the late Marx, belongs to a scholar, Saito, who is the recovery’s heir and its internal critic at once, accepting its archive and disputing its continuity thesis from inside the evidence. Schools prove themselves by surviving their heirs’ disagreements, and on the evidence of the exchanges surveyed here, the public arguments with Moore, the private architecture of precedence with Burkett, the new front opened by Saito, the recovery is surviving in the only way available to scholarship: by being argued with, in its own vocabulary, on its own documents, by readers it taught to read them. It is time to let the questions readers actually ask have the final word.

The rift and the town: the urban half of the argument

The town country antagonism at the rift’s origin gives the framework an urban dimension that the school’s later work developed and that a profile should register, since most of the framework’s readers now live the urban half of the break. Marx’s formulation joined the two poles in one sentence of analysis: the concentration of population in the towns, which the accumulation of capital produces and requires, simultaneously disturbs the metabolic interaction between human beings and the earth and creates the conditions, in the towns’ own filth and disease, under which the disturbance becomes a crisis of public health. Foster’s exposition treats the urban environment of the nineteenth century, the Manchester of Engels’s Condition as much as the London of the sanitary reports, as the rift’s first laboratory, where the break in the nutrient cycle and the poisoning of air and water were a single process with a single cause, and where the remedies debated, the return of sewage to the land above all, already posed the framework’s question: whether a cycle broken by a social form can be closed by technique while the form persists. The school’s urban literature extends the question to the built environment of the succeeding century, the city organised around the motor car and the dispersed suburb, whose material throughput dwarfs the Victorian town’s and whose rifts, in energy, in land conversion and in the export of waste to its own peripheries and to poorer countries, follow the same grammar at larger scale. The continuity matters to Foster’s case because it is the continuity of the category, not of the conditions: the rift names a form of disorder that recurs wherever accumulation organises a material cycle at a distance from its consequences, in the factory farm’s watershed as in the sewer outfall of 1844. A category that can be recognised across such different materials has earned its generality, and a category whose recognition requires the social relation to be named each time has kept its critical edge, which is the combination the school claims for it and the combination its critics, who see the recurrence as the category’s elasticity rather than its reach, dispute in the manner this profile has made familiar.

What Foster means by materialism: a compact restatement

Because every dispute in this profile returns, at the last remove, to the meaning of one word, the profile owes its readers a compact restatement of Foster’s materialism before the questions begin, stated as neutrally as the contested ground allows. Materialism, for Foster, names first a claim about what exists: a world of matter in motion, independent of the minds that know it, organised in levels, atoms, organisms, ecosystems, societies, each level real and none reducible without remainder to the one below. It names second a claim about how that world changes: through interconnection and emergence, the arising of genuinely new properties at higher levels of organisation, so that history is a feature of nature and not only of society, and contingency, the Epicurean inheritance, is written into the world’s constitution rather than pasted over it. It names third a claim about knowledge: that science is the progressive, corrigible disclosure of that world’s processes, against both the idealism that makes nature a construction of spirit and the mechanism that makes it a machine whose future is a computation. And it names fourth, in the Marxian specification that distinguishes Foster’s version from a general philosophy of nature, a claim about society’s place in the whole: that human production is a material interchange with the rest of nature, organised by social relations that can maintain the interchange’s conditions or disrupt them, and that the disruption, the rift, is therefore a social fact with natural consequences and not a natural fate with social ones. Every stage of the argument in four steps presupposes this restatement: the dissertation as its first formation, the intermediate writings as its socialisation, the rift as its economic application, the recovered tradition as its scientific career. A reader who holds the restatement can locate any passage of Foster, and any objection to him, on the map it draws, including the deepest objection of all, that the map is a philosophy in search of a pedigree. The pedigree is the dissertation; the search is the recovery; the judgement, as this profile has said at every stage and says finally here, belongs to the evidence and to the reader who inspects it.

The Soviet shadow: Lysenko and the burden on the recovered tradition

The recovered tradition’s burial, as Foster reconstructs it, cannot be understood without the shadow that fell across every avowed dialectical materialism in science after the nineteen forties, and his handling of the shadow is a test of the recovery’s honesty that this profile should examine. The shadow has a name: Lysenko. The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, whose doctrines on heredity were imposed as orthodoxy in Soviet biology with catastrophic consequences for Soviet genetics and agriculture, claimed the mantle of dialectical materialism for his campaign, and the Western scientific culture drew the conclusion that the mantle itself was the problem: that a philosophy which could be conscripted to settle a question of genetics by decree stood condemned as an instrument of dogma. The British scientists of Foster’s recovery were caught in the blast. Haldane, the most eminent geneticist among them, endured a public agony over the Lysenko affair, torn between his science, which told him the doctrines were false, and his allegiances, which made the admission a weapon for his enemies; others of the circle defended the indefensible longer than they should have, or fell silent, and the tradition’s scientific reputation never recovered its interwar brightness. Foster’s account does not flinch from the episode. The recovery presents it as the tradition’s tragedy and its partial self destruction: a philosophy of science that prized the unity of theory and practice was weaponised by a bureaucracy against the practice of science itself, and the scientists who had professed the philosophy in freedom were damaged by the spectacle of its profession under compulsion.

The episode matters to the assessment of the recovery for two reasons. The first is that it supplies the strongest available version of the argument against the tradition’s philosophy, and Foster’s willingness to carry the episode in his own narrative, rather than leaving it to his critics, is the recovery method’s candour operating on the hardest material it owns. A lineage that runs through the interwar scientists runs through Lysenko’s shadow, and the historian who draws the line must draw it through the shadow too. The second reason is analytical. The burial of the tradition now has a political mechanism adequate to it: not the quiet verdict of scientific progress, which leaves unexplained why figures of this eminence vanished from the histories their own disciplines wrote, but a cold war settlement in which an entire philosophy of science became unmentionable in the West at exactly the moment when the disciplines were writing their post war genealogies. Foster’s explanation can be contested, and historians of science will contest its weights, but it has the recovery’s characteristic virtue: it explains the forgetting as an event with causes, rather than treating the forgetting as the archive’s natural state. The tradition did not fade. On the account given in The Return of Nature, it was buried, by identifiable hands, for identifiable reasons, and what was buried can be dug up, which states the founding premise of the entire enterprise in its starkest form.

Ground rent and the land: the category the summaries skip

One corner of the mature theory deserves rescue from the summaries in this profile’s final survey, because it shows the ecological reading operating inside the most technical machinery of Capital and not only in its famous passages. The theory of ground rent, developed in the third volume, analyses the income that flows to the owners of land and of natural agents generally, and Foster’s exposition, following Burkett’s lead on the value form, treats the rent theory as ecological political economy in its strictest form. Land, for Marx, is not produced by labour and has no value, yet it commands a price and a revenue because its ownership permits the appropriation of a surplus generated elsewhere: in the fertility differences between soils, in the advantages of location, in the command of waterfalls, mines and fisheries. The category thus formalises, inside the critique’s own machinery, the free gift structure that Burkett placed at the argument’s centre. Nature enters capital’s accounts only through the tollbooth of property, priced not by its contribution to wealth, which is immense and unmeasured, but by the scarcity that ownership can enforce. Foster draws the conclusion the recovery exists to draw: that a theory containing this analysis cannot be charged with treating nature as a nullity, since the nullity is the theory’s explicit object, the form under which a system that lives on nature’s contributions renders those contributions invisible to itself except as costs of access. The rent chapters also house the usufruct passage quoted earlier in this profile, and their conjunction is not accidental: the same volume that anatomises the tollbooth states the trusteeship that indicts it. Readers who want the ecological Marx at his most rigorous, rather than at his most quotable, will find him there, in the rent theory’s dry and magnificent machinery, and Foster’s guidance to that machinery is among the recovery’s least celebrated and most solid services.

Two Fosters: the sociologist’s and the philosopher’s

A peculiarity of Foster’s reception, visible only when the literatures are read side by side, is that his audiences are frequently not reading the same author. The sociologists’ Foster is the theorist of the metabolic rift, a maker of categories for the study of material flows, whose philosophical writings are respected as background and rarely examined. The philosophers’ Foster is the interpreter of Epicurus and Engels, a controversialist about the foundations of materialism, whose sociological applications are noted as consequences and rarely examined. The historians’ Foster is the archivist of The Return of Nature, whose framework is bracketed while his footnotes are mined. Each literature cites the others’ Foster politely and proceeds with its own, and the result is a reputation that is broad and shallow in a way the work itself is not, since the work’s whole contention is that the three Fosters are one: that the philosophy of the dissertation, the category of the rift and the history of the tradition stand or fall as a single construction. The fragmentation of the reception is thus itself evidence in the case the critics make, for if the construction were as unified as its author claims, its readers might be expected to receive it whole; and it is evidence in the case the defenders make, since a construction whose parts are independently useful to three disciplines has passed a test that merely systematic works, admired entire and used by no one, conspicuously fail. This profile has attempted the unfragmented reading throughout, at the cost of its length, because the unfragmented reading is the only one under which the disputes make sense: the dissertation debate matters to the sociologist because the rift’s warrant runs through it, the Lysenko shadow matters to the philosopher because the tradition’s philosophy was tried in it, and the guano islands matter to everyone because a category is worth what its cases are worth. Readers who have followed the argument entire are now in a position to answer, from the evidence assembled, the questions with which the enquiries to this series usually begin, and it is to those questions, in their set form, that the article finally turns.

There is a biographical corollary to the fragmented reception that deserves recording before the survey closes, because it explains the fragmentation better than any failing of the readers. Foster never held the kind of chair, at the kind of institution, from which a unified school is usually administered, and he never sought the Festschriften and handbooks through which reputations are standardised. His base was a movement journal and a state university sociology department, his instruments the essay and the big documentary book, his public the overlapping readerships this profile has enumerated. A reputation assembled from such materials will always be several reputations, and the severality has a virtue the standardised kind lacks: each audience keeps the part of the work it can use honest, by using it, and discards the rest without ceremony. The sociologists’ rift is leaner than its author’s; the philosophers’ Epicurus is narrower; the historians’ archive is quieter. What survives the three discardings, the documentary core that no audience found it could drop, is the closest thing to a settled residue that the reception affords, and this profile has treated that residue, the passages, the precedences and the recovered names, as the solid ground from which the contested constructions rise. Constructions will be rebuilt by other hands on the same ground, in vocabularies not yet coined, for crises not yet named. Ground, once cleared and surveyed, tends to stay cleared, and the clearing, more than any single building on it, is the achievement the name Foster will denote when the disputes of the present field have become the footnotes of its successor.

The mirror of Lucretius: recovery as a genre

Foster’s enterprise belongs to a genre with a famous ancestor, and setting the two side by side clarifies what kind of act a recovery is. In the winter of 1417 the Florentine book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, travelling with the entourage of a deposed pope, found in a German monastery a manuscript of Lucretius, the Roman poet whose De rerum natura had carried Epicurus’s philosophy into Latin verse and had then been lost to the Latin world for the better part of a millennium. The poem Poggio rescued contains, in magnificent hexameters, the whole atomist vision: a universe of atoms and void, worlds without number forming and dissolving, gods indifferent in their bliss, the soul mortal, and at the argument’s hinge the swerve, the slight uncaused declination of the falling atoms, without which, Lucretius insists, there would be no collisions, no world, and no free will torn from the fates. The manuscript Poggio sent to Florence was copied, and copied again; Machiavelli transcribed the poem with his own hand; within two generations it was in print, and the long underground career of Epicurean ideas in a Christian civilisation, through Gassendi’s baptised atomism and the natural philosophy of the revolutionary centuries, had acquired its source text. Historians of the Renaissance argue about how much of modernity that one recovered poem can be made to explain, and the argument has the exact shape of the argument this profile has been conducting at a smaller scale. Nobody disputes the manuscript, the transcription, the printings. What is disputed is the weight a recovered text can bear in an explanation of everything that followed, and whether the line drawn from the monastery shelf to the modern world is a descent or a construction laid over scattered survivals.

The parallel is not decorative, because the poem in the monastery is the poem behind the dissertation. When Marx chose the difference between Democritus and Epicurus for his doctorate, he was working a seam of the tradition that existed for him only because Poggio’s century had recovered it, and the scholarly apparatus of his day, the editions and the doxographies, were the Renaissance recovery’s grandchildren. Foster, who knows this transmission intimately and traces it in his Epicurus book, is therefore a recoverer working on a twice recovered thinker, and his method reproduces the genre’s moves at each level: the return to a document the custodians had shelved, the demonstration that the document was central rather than marginal, the redrawing of the map so that the recovered piece becomes a source from which lines run forward. The genre has known triumphs and known frauds, and its practitioners are judged, across the centuries, by a single criterion that Poggio’s case makes vivid. The triumphs are the recoveries whose documents survive the inspection of enemies: the Lucretius text was real, its Epicureanism was real, and sceptics could diminish its influence but not dissolve its existence. The frauds are the recoveries whose documents dissolve under the same inspection. Foster’s documents, this profile has argued throughout, belong with the triumphs in point of existence and with the open questions in point of weight. His dissertation exists and argues what he says it argues. His scientists existed and professed what he says they professed. His notebooks bulge as he says they bulge. What remains genuinely undecided, in his case as in Poggio’s, is the cartography: how much of what followed flows from the recovered spring, and how much is the recoverer’s art in joining springs into a river. Rivers drawn on maps have a way of becoming real for the travellers who navigate by them, and the field’s traffic now runs along Foster’s channels whether or not every channel marks a watercourse of nature. That is as much success as the genre affords, and it is a great deal.

One further turn of the mirror deserves a sentence, because it converts the parallel into a warning that Foster’s own practice honours. Poggio’s recovery did not restore Epicurus to a throne; it released a text into a world that used it for purposes the poet never imagined, in arguments he would not have recognised, some of them arguments against each other. Recovered texts escape their recoverers. Marx’s ecology, whatever its founder’s intentions and whatever Foster’s, is now in the hands of readers who will build on it constructions its recoverer may deplore, degrowth communisms and world-ecologies and syntheses unnamed, and the escapes are not betrayals but the ordinary fate of anything genuinely recovered. A profile can end its survey on that thought without regret. The measure of the man is not whether his construction prevails in every seminar. It is whether the seminar, after him, argues over better documents than it did before. By that measure the verdict is already in, and it is the one verdict in this long exposition that the evidence permits to be stated without a qualifying clause.

The Epicurean seam has one more modern claimant whose rivalry with Foster illuminates the whole construction, and a survey of the dissertation’s afterlife should not close without him. Louis Althusser, in writings published after his death, proposed an underground current within materialism, a materialism of the encounter, whose heroes are precisely Epicurus and Lucretius and whose emblem is the rain of atoms broken by the swerve into collisions that may or may not take hold. Althusser recruited the young Marx to that current, only to insist that the mature Marx abandoned its terrain for science, so that the dissertation figures in his telling as the last flare of a philosophy the science had to escape. Foster’s Epicurus book takes up the challenge on the shared ground and reverses the valuation: the encounter materialism is not a temptation Marx outgrew but the matrix he retained, and the alleged escape is the myth that a certain Marxism needed in order to police its own boundaries. The spectacle is instructive beyond its parties. Two of the most formidable readers Marx has had agree about the dissertation’s philosophical contents to a degree their polemics conceal, agree that the swerve is its centre and that the centre matters enormously, and divide only over whether the centre held or was deserted. A student who grasps that structure of agreement inside disagreement possesses the dissertation debate in its mature form, and can read either champion as a witness for the document’s importance, which is the one conclusion neither disputes.

A word, finally, on the practical ethics of citing this literature, since the profile has made attribution its recurring theme and should practise at the end what it has preached throughout. Cite Burkett for value, Foster for the architecture and the rift’s retrieval, Clark and York for their own extensions, Saito for the notebooks’ degrowth reading and Schmidt for the philosophical anticipation, and Moore for the rival framework in its maker’s words rather than in its opponents’ paraphrase. The habit sounds like pedantry and is in fact the substance of the field’s civility, the mechanism by which a literature built on recoveries avoids becoming a pile of unattributed echoes. Foster’s work, whatever its polemical lapses, models the habit in its scholarly core, and the readers who learn the habit from him will write about him, and about everyone else, more accurately than the summaries from which this profile set out to rescue its readers.

One implication of the mirror has been left unstated, and it is the implication Foster’s own later career embodies most completely. Poggio did not write a commentary on Lucretius, found a school in his name, or spend four decades defending the poem’s centrality against the custodians of Virgil. He copied the text, sent it to Florence, and let it go. The recoverer of the dissertation did the opposite at every point, and the difference is not a judgement on either man but a fact about their materials. A poem can survive unguarded once the copies multiply. An interpretation cannot, because it competes, in every generation, against the summaries that would shelve it again, and its author must therefore become its standing advocate, answering the objections as they renew themselves in new idioms. Foster’s longevity in the argument, the monthly replies, the returns to Epicurus across forty years, is the price of recovering an interpretation rather than a text, and his willingness to pay it, in full view of the record, is the last trait this profile records. The advocacy is now part of the evidence, and future historians of the recovery will read the replies as they read the books, as the documents of a mind that understood exactly what kind of act it had performed and what the act required of the performer.

For students and exam candidates

Students meet Foster most often as a name attached to the metabolic rift in a textbook paragraph, and the first service this profile can do them is to break the attachment. The rift is Marx’s concept; Foster is its retriever and its architect, and an answer that credits him with the concept announces, to any examiner who knows the literature, that the candidate has read summaries rather than the scholarship. Learn the four steps as a structure and you hold the whole profile in your hand: the dissertation grounding, the intermediate writings, the mature rift analysis, and the recovered tradition, each with its evidence and its standing objection. Keep Burkett’s precedence in the same hand, since the value argument of 1999 is the easiest mark of a candidate who knows the field rather than its shorthand, and keep the grades of the claims separate, the modest continuity from the strong one, because examiners reward the separation and punish its absence. From this profile the natural next step is the concept itself, in the article on the metabolic rift earlier in this cluster, and the four steps are worth fixing in a study record of your own, in the Marxism study notes companion this series maintains, with one line for each stage, its key text and its objection, exactly as the artifact table in this article lays them out.

For teachers and seminar leaders

Foster offers the classroom two gifts, and the second is the better. The first is a teachable controversy with clean sides and rich documents: the dissertation debate, in which a short text completed at twenty three is asked to found a system, lets students practise the weighing of evidence, the grading of claims and the detection of retrospective coherence on material small enough to master and large enough to matter. The second gift is the recovered tradition of The Return of Nature, which gives a class an unexpected and vivid entry into the history of science. Students who expect the history of ecology to run from naturalists to the environmental movement encounter instead a zoologist friend of Marx, a socialist artist, the coiner of the ecosystem concept and a company of interwar scientists professing dialectical materialism in the heart of British science, and the encounter rearranges their assumptions about how science and politics have actually interacted. Teach the recovery alongside its critics, the Failed Promise symposium against the book it indicts and Moore against the rift, and the seminar becomes an exercise in the ethics of reading: what a recovery owes its texts, what a critic owes a recovery, and where the burdens of proof should sit. The material rewards the effort because every party to it argues from documents the students can open.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

Researchers will find the live problems where this profile left them: the definition of a foundation in the dissertation debate, the unrecovered counter archive of Marx’s silences, the empirical reach of the rift beyond its nutrient heartland, and the unfinished peace between the dialectical philosophy of nature and the sciences that inherited the territory. The documentary frontier remains the notebooks, where the critical edition’s fourth section continues to feed every side of the argument, and the guide to the Marx manuscripts linked in the notebooks discussion above is the series’ map of that terrain. Historians of science have in The Return of Nature an archive whose lineage claim they can test figure by figure, and the testing has barely begun. Journalists, finally, should take from this profile three correctives for the copy they will otherwise file. Foster did not invent the metabolic rift; he retrieved Marx’s concept and built a framework on it. He did not originate the ecological reading alone; Burkett’s value argument preceded his book by a year and Schmidt’s recovery by a generation. And his strongest claims are contested by named scholars in identified works, so that any report presenting the ecological Marx as either established fact or exposed fraud is a report about the reporter’s reading, not about where the scholarship stands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who is John Bellamy Foster?

John Bellamy Foster is an American sociologist at the University of Oregon and the editor of Monthly Review, and he is the leading figure of the second wave of ecological Marxism. His reputation rests on the argument, made in Marx’s Ecology of 2000 and developed across a shelf of later work, that Marx’s materialism was ecological from its origins and needs recovery rather than supplementation. His earliest books worked on monopoly capitalism’s political economy, and the ecological scholarship grows directly out of that training. His name attaches in summaries to the metabolic rift, which is Marx’s concept, retrieved and architecturally developed by Foster rather than invented by him. His work is best approached, as this profile argues throughout, as a single construction in four steps, from the dissertation of 1841 to the recovered tradition of the twentieth century, whose stages carry separate evidence and must be graded separately before any of them is believed.

Q: What is Marx’s Ecology about?

Published in 2000, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature contends that the founder of historical materialism thought ecologically from the beginning of his career rather than arriving at nature late or leaving it to his followers. Foster reconstructs the materialist philosophy of nature from the atomists onward, locates Marx’s formation inside it by way of the Jena dissertation, and then reads the mature critique of political economy as the philosophy’s economic expression, centred on the disrupted metabolism between society and the earth. Along the way the book rehabilitates Engels as a serious thinker about the sciences and attacks green theories it judges idealist. Both the rehabilitation and the attacks drew the replies examined in this profile.

Q: Why does Foster start with Epicurus?

Because the trail Foster follows starts there. Marx took his doctorate with a comparison of Democritus and Epicurus, preferring the philosopher whose atoms decline from their path and thereby loosen necessity’s grip. Foster treats that youthful preference as the seed of everything later: a way of thinking about matter that leaves room for chance, emergence and freedom while denying both the machine and the creator. If the seed reading holds, the soil analysis of Capital is the growth of a philosophy planted at the career’s outset, and the ecological Marx is a development rather than a discovery imposed by interpreters. If it fails, as the over-reading critics maintain, the later work must be explained without its supposed foundation, and the book’s boldest span collapses.

Q: Did Paul Burkett make the argument first?

For the argument from value, precedence belongs to Burkett, and Foster’s own pages acknowledge the debt. Marx and Nature, issued in 1999, demonstrated that the celebrated distinction between what labour produces as wealth and what it produces as value carries an ecological charge: since only labour registers in value, the natural world enters the capitalist ledger unpriced, to be used as though it cost nothing and renewed itself without limit. Foster’s journal article naming the metabolic rift belongs to that same year; the volume that followed in 2000 widened the case into history and philosophy. State the order honestly and the founding moment appears as it was, a near simultaneous arrival by two routes, with Schmidt’s philosophical recovery of 1962 standing behind both.

Q: What is The Return of Nature about?

Issued in 2020, when it received the Deutscher Memorial Prize, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology excavates a stratum of British intellectual life that the standard histories of ecology had passed over. Working from Lankester and Morris in the founders’ own circle, through Tansley and the coining of the ecosystem, to the interwar generation of Bernal, Haldane, Needham, Levy and Hogben and the critic Caudwell, Foster assembles the record of a self conscious socialist science with ecological concerns at its centre. The volume explains the stratum’s disappearance by the pressures of the cold war and the disgrace that Soviet doctrine brought upon dialectical materialism in the laboratory. Reviewers praised the excavation widely while reserving judgement on the lineage drawn through it.

Q: What hidden tradition does Foster recover?

What Foster brings back is a company rather than a doctrine: working scientists, and the writers in their orbit, who between the eighteen eighties and the nineteen fifties pursued their researches inside an avowed materialism and treated the human relation to nature as one of their science’s central problems. Zoology, genetics, biochemistry, crystallography and the young science of ecology all figure, as do the classicists who supplied the company’s ancient pedigree and the campaigners who carried its outlook to a mass public through the movement organised around science’s social relations. The company had institutions, bestsellers and controversies, and then it vanished from the genealogies its disciplines wrote about themselves. The recovery’s first service is simply to make the vanishing visible as a fact requiring explanation.

Q: What did the natural science notebooks add?

They supplied the career’s closing evidence. The excerpt books Marx kept on geology, agricultural chemistry, physiology and kindred sciences, printed in the critical edition’s fourth section, register a reader whose attention to nature widened in his last decades precisely when legend had him narrowing to politics alone. Foster wields them as the continuity argument’s far anchor: the same mind that began with Epicurus ended elbow deep in the scientific literature of the soil and the species. The same boxes of excerpts also armed the rival conclusion drawn by Kohei Saito, whose reconstruction of the late reading finds Marx abandoning the productivism of his middle years for something approaching a communism of degrowth. One archive, two verdicts: the notebooks enlarged what any interpretation must explain without dictating the explanation.

Q: What are the criticisms of Foster’s reading?

Three charges recur, and this profile gives each with its authors. The dissertation is over-read, say the critics Foster himself quotes, Xu Yanmei among them: a degree exercise in the Hegelian idiom is promoted into a foundation it cannot support, and the promotion reads the ending into the beginning. The portrait is too seamless, say the contributors to the Capitalism Nature Socialism symposium on the book, Engel-Di Mauro and de Kadt prominent among them: modern ecological preoccupations are projected backward, the unecological Marx is edited out, and the sciences of the period are conscripted rather than studied. The rivals are caricatured, say reviewers across the green spectrum: diverse traditions are melted into a single idealist opponent. Foster has answered each charge in print; none of the three exchanges is closed.

Q: What is the dispute with world-ecology?

It is the quarrel over the discipline’s master category. Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life, published in 2015, argues that speaking of a break between society and nature concedes the separation that made the crisis thinkable, since two realms must first be sundered in thought before their commerce can be described as ruptured. His remedy is a vocabulary of mutual making, capital organising nature from within a single web of life and drawing its profits from natures kept cheap. Foster answers that metabolism names a oneness with internal difference, that labour is nature distinguishing itself within itself, and that a rhetoric of universal interconnection forfeits the ability to say which cycle broke, where, and under whose relations. The quarrel continues in the journals, and students should learn it as a live fork in the field rather than as a settled result.

Q: Where should you start with Foster?

Take the books in the order of their making and the route explains itself. The journal article of 1999 compresses the central claim about the rift into a few dozen pages and can be tested in an evening. The volume of 2000 then deserves an unhurried reading from its ancient opening to its soil bound conclusion, because excerpting it reproduces the textbook errors this profile exists to correct. The collaborative volume of 2010 shows the machinery working on oceans, forests and the atmosphere. The history of 2020, the prize winning Return of Nature, can be read last or first according to taste, being the most independent of the set. Beside all of them place Burkett’s Marx and Nature, the founding argument’s other half, without which Foster’s originality cannot be accurately weighed.

Q: How does the recovery not addition thesis grade Foster’s reading?

The thesis is the standard by which Foster asks to be judged, and it grades him unevenly, which is its usefulness. Because the claim is that the ecological Marx is recovered from the texts rather than added to them, every stage is an evidential claim that can be marked on its documents. The rift stage grades highest, resting on famous passages and a documented scientific genesis in the reading of Liebig. The recovered tradition grades high as scholarship whatever is concluded about lineage. The value stage belongs largely to Burkett and grades him rather than Foster. The dissertation stage grades lowest against its own standard, since the foundation asked of a student text is the largest claim resting on the thinnest document, and the strong continuity thesis remains, by the thesis’s own evidential rule, not demonstrated. Graded by that rule throughout, Foster emerges as a scholar whose enlargements of the record outrun, at the foundations and at the silences, the constructions he builds upon it, which is this profile’s verdict compressed into a single sentence.

Q: What should a student separate between recovering a tradition and settling its truth?

A student should separate the two operations that Foster’s project joins. Recovering a tradition is a documentary act: it establishes that texts exist, that a thinker read certain books, that scientists professed a philosophy, that a lineage can be traced through contacts and citations. Settling the truth of what the tradition claimed is a different act, requiring the weighing of the whole record, including its silences and counter passages, and the judgement of the recovered positions against everything else that is known. Success at the first act does not transfer to the second. Foster’s recoveries are, on the evidence assembled in this profile, substantial documentary achievements. Whether Marx was, all in all, an ecological thinker is the weighing that follows from them, and it has its own article in this series because the two acts must not be collapsed. The distinction is the one this profile applies to Foster himself at every stage, crediting the excavation while reserving the judgement, and students who internalise it will read every recovery in the field, friendly or hostile, with better questions formed.

Q: Why does the argument begin with ancient materialism?

The argument begins with ancient materialism because its thesis is about foundations, and the foundation Foster claims for Marx’s ecology is a philosophy of nature rather than a set of opinions about pollution or soil. Ancient atomism is where that philosophy was first formed, in the contest between Democritus, whose atoms fall under necessity, and Epicurus, whose swerve admits contingency. Marx’s dissertation placed him inside that contest at the start of his career, and Foster’s reconstruction follows the formation where the documents put it. The beginning also does polemical work: a materialism with a two thousand year pedigree, running through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to Darwin and the interwar scientists, cannot be dismissed as a fashion imposed on the texts from outside, which is the dismissal the recovery was written to answer. Burkett’s value argument, by contrast, begins inside the mature critique and needs no ancient pedigree at all, and the contrast between the two beginnings is the contrast between the founding tempers of the second wave.

Q: How does the argument in four steps order the recovery?

The four steps order the recovery as a descent to foundations and a re-ascent through the evidence. The first step is the dissertation of 1841, where the materialist conception of nature is formed on Epicurus. The second is the intermediate writings, the manuscripts of 1844 and the journalism and correspondence, where the conception becomes a social theory of the human interchange with nature. The third is the mature analysis of Capital, where the interchange is named metabolism and its capitalist disruption named an irreparable rift. The fourth is the posterity, the tradition of socialist scientists who carried the conception into the sciences of the twentieth century before it was buried. The stages arrive with separate proofs and separate vulnerabilities, and the table in this article sets them side by side for use in study and revision.

Q: What separates a recovery of Marx’s ecology from a proof that Marx was an ecologist?

The distance between the two achievements is the distance between an archive and a judgement. To recover is to dig out what was buried and prove it genuine: that Marx read Liebig with care, that his notebooks swarm with natural science, that eminent scientists once called themselves dialectical materialists and meant it. All of that Foster has done, and the doing is checkable page by page. To prove the larger proposition is another labour entirely, since the same corpus that yields the soil passages yields the hymns to industry’s transformative power and keeps silence where a systematic ecologist would speak, and a verdict must hold both ledgers open at once. This profile credits the excavation without smuggling in the verdict, and sends the reader to the weighing itself, which the following article of this cluster performs.