Eco Socialism Quotes

“The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities...”
― Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

“We can rebuild our architecture and infrastructure – the kind, unlike under capitalism, that can largely withstand extreme weather – (largely) out of hemp; we can build a high-speed fully automated system of production from durable, lightweight bioplastic and graphene, out of hemp and other plants, powered by biofuel and hemp batteries, while – because of hemp’s ability to revive soil and absorb CO2 – healing the soil and stabilising the climate in the process. This reconstruction of society, which would raise living standards exponentially for everyone, is not an ideal or a fantasy, it is a necessity both historically and ecologically. But it can only be realised through socialism.”
― Ted Reese

“But we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has been a disaster for the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. And Venezuela's petro-populism is a reminder that there is nothing inherently green about self-defined socialism.
Let's acknowledge this fact, while also pointing out that countries with strong democratic-socialist traditions (like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay) have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialism isn't necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the Interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity's best shot at collective survival.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal