Carl Boggs, Facing Catastrophe: Food, Politics, and the Ecological Crisis. (Toronto: Political Animal Press, 2020), 289 pp., $19.99.
By the time this review appears in print, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have issued its updated report. According to a February 14, 2022 Associated Press wire story, the IPCC updates its three huge reports on climate change every five to seven years, and the article states the IPCC’s most recent edition will be issued near the end of that month. Anticipating the findings of this latest study, journalists Seth Borenstein and Frank Jordans forewarn readers of its terrible predictions. “Don’t expect a flowery valentine to the planet,” they state. Instead, we terrestrial inhabitants should expect “a nightmare painted in the dry language of science” (Borenstein and Jordans 13).
The extant as well as forthcoming science already indicate a gloomy climate forecast. Researchers cited in the AP story note, for example, that ecosystems have limits to what they can endure, and in some places, we’ve already passed them (13). In similar reporting, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s “Fourth National Climate Assessment” identifies how human actions already have accelerated this devastating process, adding, “Future climate change is expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality” (“Fourth”). The IPCC’s message to world leaders, then, is expected to be a stark one: “You need not just incremental change,” stresses panel co-chair Debra Roberts. “You need systemic change” (Borenstein and Jordans 13).
While scientists, environmentalists, activists, and others have been sounding this urgent alarm for years now, an even greater urgency appears in Carl Boggs’s latest book, Facing Catastrophe: Food, Politics, and the Ecological Crisis. If it’s possible to surpass the IPCC’s report, Boggs’s alarm sounds even louder, as the words “catastrophe” and “crisis” in his title signal. While Boggs writes about the climate change crisis in general, he focuses specifically on how it will impact the world’s food supply, linking systems of food production, climate concerns, and capitalist economic systems. Boggs’s cri de coeur is for the kind of radical, holistic change that Roberts mentions but which he articulates more thoroughly.
Boggs holds nothing back, implicating both sides of the political aisle, international governments, even activist movements that, while well-intended, seemingly have become “deradicalized” (4). And make no mistake: radical change to our current course is what Boggs argues every person, institution, and global government must engage in so we can save us from ourselves. He notes, “Entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, the planet humans have inhabited for so many thousands of years now seems on the verge of a Tipping Point – an historical juncture where reversal of the ecological crisis might soon be impossible” (4). He adds, somberly, “With no significant change of course – even with adoption of modest reforms and new technologies – the future hardly elicits much optimism” (5).
The klaxon Boggs sounds is understandable – necessary, even – but it makes it difficult to read this book without succumbing to despondency. Addressing the looming climate crisis seems to be too insurmountable and requires the buy-in of too many entities, entities so systemically inherent in a global power nexus that one understands how the “modest reforms” Boggs mentions would hardly make a difference. A metaphor that comes to mind is a giant Jenga game structure; removing a piece here or a piece there – like, taking one’s household recyclables weekly to the bin – is not likely to topple the towering edifice. Boggs elaborates on these systemic linkages, for example connecting U.S. and other nations’ military spending with the climate crisis. It’s not only that each nation’s military spending will increase so disproportionately to their other expenses—hence, for example, removing funding from needed social support structures—or that environmental destruction comes “not only from deployments but the especially savage legacy…in the form of bombs, missiles, vehicles, toxic wastes, and pollution across the habitat (11, 286). Instead, the greater concern is that “War zones will break out virtually anywhere that resources are abundant – and where other conflicts surface” (11). Boggs notes that this form of the “corporate-state apparatus continues to assault the global habitat” while at the same time it “works to undermine democratic politics” – the very site where any sustained challenge to nexuses of power would be possible (11).
While Boggs is good at providing the larger context of the climate crisis, its causes, and its current trajectory, his central concern is food production and what he calls “the McDonaldized Society” (94). In explaining this terminology, Boggs notes the “massive shift over the past century from agriculture based primarily on small farms to a network of giant corporations” such as McDonald’s, Nestle, Con Agra, and others (96). When Boggs talks about a radical shift in our current lifestyle, he implicates along with these corporations the overlapping industries that undergird and abet them: corporate managers, lobbyists, government agencies, marketers, advertisers and – yes – even academics who “all do[ ] everything possible to ensure high levels of consumption,” including meat consumption (95). Yet such continued rates of consumption, expansion, and resource use are not sustainable. Overworked land, depleted water, fossil-fuel-based technology, and other factors mean the planet cannot continue to feed a global population that increases by millions annually. Hence, Boggs says, our modern food system and its supply turns out to be a great “mirage,” and he argues this issue “rarely enters thought processes of most environmentalists and progressives” (94, 20). He states that even “Marxist ecologists” have been “indifferent” to concerns around food production, not to mention other notablries as Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Naomi Klein, to list but a few (20). He acknowledges that challenging powerful interests “from Tyson to McDonalds, from Pfizer to Wal-Mart and Monsanto” means taking on some of “the most impregnable fortresses of wealth and power across the global scene,” but adds that while mobilizing for change against such massive power is daunting, it’s a most necessary task. After all, Boggs states, “Overturning those interests is … a matter of life and death” (137).
In his concluding chapter, Boggs offers us his ideas of what form that challenge must take: ecosocialism, or a convergence of ecology, politics, natural relations, and social transformation (253). This new paradigm represents “transformative ideology, dynamic leadership and organization, resources for mass mobilization, cohesive strategy, [and] a goal of winning governmental power” (253) – an overhaul of just about everything. Radical opposition to the current status quo will have to grow, confronting current agendas and even those we might have esteemed to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Boggs argues, for example, that “the major parties in the U.S. … are beholden to the same economic interests while supporting identical military and imperial objectives,” adding that while “Republicans are more likely to downplay or ignore environmental problems [and] while Democrats usually promise reforms, differences shrink when it comes to actual policy” (12-13). Worse, Boggs notes the cozy relationship some of our Democratic leaders have enjoyed with massive agribusinesses, explaining, e.g., the close ties the Clintons had with Tyson Foods and Wal-Mart. Thus, when Boggs states “There will be no rapid or easy departure, much less ‘exit’, from modern capitalist society or the world system it has built,” we get it. He reminds us we have “only the potential to socialize, democratize, and ecologically restructure the global order, and soon” (252).
Yet it seems we in the U.S. must first get our own house in order. One place we have started to make a breakthrough is with the Green New Deal propounded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. Boggs notes these ideals and similar proposals “could end up bringing significant change, but that assumes federal legislative consensus is within reach – currently a utopian ideal” (279). Moreover, Boggs argues that even the Green New Deal must take into account aspects such as the “specter of sharply declining natural resources…endemic to an ever-expanding growth apparatus,” which it currently doesn’t seem to factor (286). Nonetheless, it seems this sort of radical, progressive thinking is the first stride we must take in this most urgent race against time. Sadly, as Boggs notes in his concluding remarks, in the meanwhile “no international Green New Deal appears on the horizon” (289).
Instead, as of this writing, we are faced with a lessened prospect of global unity on these matters. We were tentatively beginning to be grateful to hear that the CDC was loosening masks mandates, two years into a devastating pandemic – a conditional relaxation of protocols provided, in part, by Pfizer, whom Boggs implicates earlier. More devastatingly, Russia has invaded Ukraine, instigating a war that likely will draw upon those massive international militaries already in place and encouraging the build-up of others. The environmental devastation that will result from this latest hostility has just begun. Meanwhile, the IPCC’updated climate change report.
University of New Mexico-Gallup
Works Cited
Borenstein, Seth and Frank Jordans. “UN to Finalize Science Report on How Warming Hits
Home Hard.” Gallup Independent, 14 Feb. 2022, p. 13.
U.S. Global Change Research Program. “Fourth National Climate Assessement.” Accessed 20 Feb. 2022.
