The Dialectical Ecologist: Richard Levins and the Science and Praxis of the Human-Nature Metabolism

If reason is a natural characteristic of human beings, is it not of nature?

—Yrjö Haila and Richard Levins

Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster

Richard Levins, as noted agroecologist and mathematical ecologist John Vandermeer has observed, “was and remains ‘legendary’ in ecology.” Within ecological science itself, Levins’s contributions are vast and paradigm shifting. At the same time, Levins’s contributions to science and critical thought far transcended his forays into mathematical ecology, as he engaged ecology in its widest dimensions including population ecology, ecological systems analysis, evolutionary processes, the philosophy and history of science, agroecology, ecodevelopment, socioecological planning, environmental history, public health, Marxian ecological theory, and ecosocialism—all of which for him, taken together, constituted the truth as the whole.

At the root of all of Levins’s thinking, from the days of his youth to his work as a mature ecological scientist, was a conception of the dialectics of nature and society drawn from such thinkers as Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, Christopher Caudwell, Marcel Prenant, Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen, and C. H. Waddington. As he cogently observed, “perhaps the first investigation of a complex object as a system was the masterwork of Karl Marx, Das Kapital,” which explored both the economic and ecological bases of capitalism as a system.4 Marx’s materialist dialectics extended to not only the political-economic critique of capitalism and the argument for socialism on that basis, but also contributed to a dialectical naturalism that encompassed the ecological connections/contradictions of humanity and the earth, necessitating social change.

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