Though infrequently viewed as an environmental thinker, Karl Marx insisted that production as a social and material process is shaped and constrained by both historically developed relations among producers and natural conditions. Paul Burkett shows that it is Marx's overriding concern with human emancipation that impels him to approach nature from the standpoint of materialist history, sociology, and critical political economy.

Paul Burkett, PhD , who earned his doctorate in economics from Syracuse University, is a professor of economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications include Marxism and Ecological Economics and many articles in scholarly journals.

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and also editor of Monthly Review.