ABSTRACT
Following the Second World War, the scale and rate of human disruption of the planetary system dramatically increased, contributing to what is now called the "Great Acceleration" in the modern ecological crisis. In response, a global environmental movement protested the proliferation of pollution, the intensification of demands placed on natural resources, the degradation of ecosystems and the risks associated with atomic and nuclear weapons. This chapter outlines three distinct, yet overlapping, approaches in ecological Marxism. Influenced by Karl Marx and writing during the Second World War, Karl Polanyi—in The Great Transformation—describes how the emergence of market-based societies transformed social and ecological relationships. The treadmill of production is a political-economic perspective that was developed to better understand why environmental degradation had increased so quickly following the Second World War. The second contradiction of capitalism perspective also recognizes that capitalism is a growth-dependent economic system, predicated on constant expansion.
