ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the possibilities for the rational use of natural resources within the framework of the dominant economic system and argues that capitalism tends to be incompatible with environmental sustainability. It examines the environmental debates in Latin America and suggests that the radical ecologists' critique of industrialization may be too sweeping. The chapter demonstrates that conflicts over the environment can best be understood as class struggles over the use of natural resources. The expansion of agroexport production after World War II profoundly altered the social and natural fabric of Central America. With the collapse of the Soviet Union emerged an international consensus that socialism was dead and capitalism triumphant. Whereas a critique of the property relations that govern control over natural resources should be at the heart of environmental action and research, with socialism discredited and capitalism ascendant in the 1990s, few ecologists focused on the class politics of environmental change.
