Photo credit: Deivis

During a recent visit to Cuba, we stopped by an agricultural cooperative on the outskirts of Havana. Its farmers and cooperatives across the country are part of what’s widely acknowledged as the world’s largest organic farming experiment. Hundreds of thousands of farmers at the grassroots proudly proclaim themselves part of Cuba’s “environmental movement.”

In 2008 Cuba was devastated by three full force hurricanes that caused some $10 billion in damage, including 400,000 homes destroyed and widespread crop damage. Cubans link the growing destructive power and frequency of the hurricanes with global climate change. Understandably, environmental awareness and the need for radical measures to curb global warming run high.

Remarkably, in 2006 the World Wildlife Federation rated Cuba as the only country that combined high human development standards as defined by high literacy and health indexes with a low ecological footprint including electricity consumed and carbon dioxide emitted per capita.

This got me interested in the path of sustainable socialist development Cuba has chosen and how environmental consciousness developed. How could an underdeveloped country with limited economic resources have an environmental record better than its wealthy neighbor to the north? The story gives one great hope that planet Earth can be saved.

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Ian Angus, founder and coordinating committee member of the Ecosocialist International Network and editor of the web journal Climate and Capitalism, is interviewed here by the Greek newspaper Kokkino (Red), which published a slightly abridged version:

Let’s begin with a large question — what is ecosocialism?

ANGUS: Ecosocialism has grown out of two parallel political trends — the spread of Marxist ideas in the green movement and the spread of ecological ideas in the Marxist left. The result is a set of social and political goals, a growing body of ideas, and a global movement. Ecosocialism’s goal is to replace capitalism with a society in which common ownership of the means of production has replaced capitalist ownership, and in which the preservation and restoration of ecosystems will be central to all activity.

As a body of ideas, ecosocialism argues that ecological destruction is not an accidental feature of capitalism, it is built into the system’s DNA. The system’s insatiable need to increase profits — what’s been called “the ecological tyranny of the bottom line” — cannot be reformed away.

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What is equality and development? And what kind of influence has the environment on both of these relations? For me, environmentalism has always been about caring about the well-state and equality of everyone and everything. Al Gore said, during the annual World Economic Forum Meeting in 2008, that you can’t solve climate change or poverty in the developing world “without dealing with the other”:

“Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other (Gore, 2008)”.

So if we are to solve the equality in the world, our uneven development and environmental problems we just can’t work on one of them. They are all connected and thus we have to deal with all of them at once.

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