Climate change is already here and it is dreadful, as a slew of correlated severe droughts, wildfires, floods, cyclones, and invading species can attest. Yet carbon emissions have to peak in four years and thereafter quickly decline to nil by 2040 if there is to be any chance of containing the catastrophe to a mere two degrees of warming. Even this is an arbitrary unscientific target that would still invite a fair degree of destruction. Moreover, carbon dioxide pollution is but one of a long litany of environmental threats, from the mass death of coral reefs due to industrial agriculture’s nitrogenous runoff, to an empty ocean where all marine life, even krill, have been hunted to remnant maroons.

Already, startlingly, seafaring ships have a greater total mass than all of the world’s fish. The ocean is big, so depleted species rarely disappear entirely, but this is emphatically not the case for terrestrial plants and animals, half of which are expected to be extinguished by the century’s end. Most of them are dying for a much more mundane reason than climate change; humans are conquering ever more habitat, transforming wilderness into suburbs, mines, mono-crop plantations, and pasture. These are the intertwined environmental crises that the Left lacks a framework to understand, let alone offer solutions. On the whole, Marxists have studied nature halfheartedly, producing a smattering of mostly second-rate works.

This is finally starting to change. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital is a weighty tome, sprawling centuries and disciplines to arrive at a unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism.