On Eco-Socialism

The version of environmentalism I kept encountering didn’t satisfy me. Switch to renewables, change your consumption habits, wait for the right technology. It treated the crisis like a problem of insufficient effort or insufficient innovation rather than asking why we got here. And we got here through a specific mode of production, with specific incentives, that selects against internalising the costs of harm. That’s not a fixable detail. That’s the mechanism.

Green capitalism’s last line of defence is technology — carbon capture, geoengineering, some breakthrough that lets us continue as we are. I’m sceptical, and Buddhism has actually sharpened that scepticism for me in a way I didn’t expect. One of the things I keep returning to in Buddhist ethics is the weight placed on intention — not just what you do but what you’re reaching for when you do it. A solar panel deployed to open a new market is not the same thing as one deployed because we owe the planet less harm. The technology is identical. The intention shapes everything downstream: who owns it, who benefits, what gets built next. If the intention behind our tools is accumulation — and under capitalism, structurally, it is — then better tools don’t change much.

I want to be honest that the left doesn’t have a clean record here. Soviet industrialism wasn’t ecologically careful. Maoist development wasn’t either. Techno-productivism, growth as the measure of progress, wasn’t unique to capitalism — it was the shared assumption across most of the twentieth century left as well. That’s worth sitting with. Changing who owns the factories isn’t enough if the factories are still the point.

What eco-socialism actually argues is simpler than it sometimes gets presented: common ownership is the only structural basis for making “do we need this?” a question that can be answered honestly. Under private ownership that question loses to the incentive structure almost every time. Under common ownership, production oriented toward need rather than accumulation becomes possible — not as a constant uphill fight, but as the default. Technology developed inside that structure gets reached for differently. Not to sustain growth. Not to let us keep causing harm more efficiently. Because it’s genuinely useful, and because we owe each other and the planet less damage than we’re currently doing.

I hold this alongside Buddhism without feeling like they contradict. They’re both asking something similar — what is the intention behind this, and is it honest? I’m still working out what that looks like in practice. But the direction feels right.