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 Levins¹

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. One critical innovation, to which he devoted much of his life work, was the development of a method called “loop analysis, a mathematical technique that uses some basic qualitative understanding of the dynamics of differential equations to formulate…how variables effectively act to loop back on themselves (a predator that overeats a prey, for example, creates a negative loop on itself by reducing its own key resources).” Through this research, “Levins showed how loop analysis could be applied in all sorts of ecological situations, effectively creating a new mode of analysis of ecological systems.”² 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.³ 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.

It was thus materialist dialectics, as it had been developed by numerous thinkers in the Marxist tradition, particularly in the natural sciences, that was the foundation and the focal point for all of Levins’s intellectual endeavors from the very beginning, constituting the fundamental method and logic governing his thought. “Dialectical thinking,” he wrote, “with its emphasis on complexity, context, change, discontinuity, interpenetration, and contradictions was, and has remained a thing of beauty for me and the guiding theme in my scientific research and my political teaching in Party study groups, popular lectures, and writings.… I loved asymmetry and complexity, threshold effects, contradiction.”⁵

Although Levins’s work grew out of historical materialism, he found himself in deep conflict with much of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, which had systematically sought to separate itself, and dialectical thought, from the ecological world as a whole and along with it the world of science, through the rejection of the notion of the dialectics of nature, fundamental to generations of Marxist thinkers.⁶ While critical of the Soviet dogmatism that arose in the late 1930s, Levins remained convinced that dialectical materialism was the key to understanding the complexity of both nature and society and their interactions.⁷ Writing in “A Science of Our Own” in Monthly Review in 1986, he stated:

In the quest for respectability, many Western European Marxists, especially among the Eurocommunists, are attempting to confine the scope of Marxism to the formulation of a progressive economic program. They therefore reject as “Stalinism” the notion that dialectical materialism has anything to say about natural science beyond a critique of its misuse and monopolization.… Both the Eurocommunist critics of dialectical materialism and the dogmatists [those who reduce dialectical materialism to mere formalism] accept an idealized description of science.⁸

Western Marxism, while drawing its inspiration from the first foundation of Marxist thought, often referred to as historical materialism, rejected its second foundation, or dialectical naturalism, associated with the dialectics of nature in both science and art. If the first foundation had its primary source in Marx’s thought, the second foundation is often associated with Engels, but also encompassed a vast array of thinkers, some of them purged in the Soviet Union, or subject to red baiting in the West. This included leading scientists and philosophers of science of the late twentieth century.⁹ Levins, along with his close associates Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould—all three of whom were based at Harvard—derived their inspiration to a considerable extent from dialectical materialism/dialectical naturalism, as evidenced by such works as Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist and Biology Under the Influence and Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.¹⁰

“The truth is the whole,” G. W. F. Hegel wrote in the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind, and therefore cannot be understood except in the process of its becoming, its development.¹¹ To comprehend the nature and significance of Levins’s holistic ecological thought, it is necessary to see it genetically, that is, in terms of its formation and development. In this way, we can trace the revolutionary insights into theory and practice that his analysis provided, helping us to address the planetary emergency of the present century. The current “eco-social distress syndrome” behind today’s habitability crisis, Lewontin and Levins argued, “is more profound than previous crises, reaching higher into the atmosphere, deeper into the earth, more widespread in space, and more long lasting, penetrating more corners of our lives.”¹² Thus, as Levins contended, it was absolutely necessary to grasp the roots of the socioecological crisis via an approach that allowed for comprehending the complexity of the whole, dynamic interactions, the uncertain, and the possible.

The Making of a Dialectical Ecologist

Levins was a “red diaper baby,” growing up in a communist household, and thus was imbued with a radical heritage. Interested at an early age in science, he was originally fascinated with the work of Trofim Lysenko, who sought to carry out a scientific revolution in the USSR to address the short growing season, the product of geography, in order to increase agricultural production. Lysenkoism, which rejected Mendelian genetics and drew on Lamarckian notions of inheritance of acquired characteristics, sought to promote agricultural development through altering the metabolism of organisms and environment by various treatments such as vernalization (cooling the seed during germination in order to accelerate its later development) and grafting. It assumed, in Lamarckian fashion, that induced environmental factors could directly alter organisms, resulting in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lysenkoism proved to be a complete failure scientifically and put Soviet genetics back a generation. However, it stimulated in many scientists an interest in the complex, dialectical relations between gene, organism, and environment.

Among the figures who took up the challenges raised by Lysenkoism in a more positive way, seeking more dialectical answers with respect to the relations of organism to environment that were nonetheless consistent with modern genetics, were the leading Soviet biologist and opponent of Lysenko, Schmalhausen, and the British red geneticist Waddington, both of whom were to have an immense influence on Levins. Schmalhausen’s great work Factors of Evolution: The Theory of Stabilizing Selection was first published in the USSR in 1947 and quickly translated into English in 1949. Theodosius Dobzhansky, whose research in evolutionary biology helped contribute to the “modern synthesis,” called Schmalhausen “perhaps the most distinguished among the living biologists in the USSR.”¹³

Schmalhausen, like Waddington, developed a theory of the triple helix of gene, organism, and environment providing a dialectical evolutionary and ecological view that constituted a sophisticated alternative to Lysenkoism with its antigeneticist (or anti-Mendelian genetics) basis. Schmalhausen’s dialectical approach was particularly evident in his notion of hierarchies or integrative levels structuring biological evolution, and in his explanation that latent, assimilated genetic traits that were accumulated during long periods of stabilizing selection would come to the surface only when organisms faced severe environmental stress or certain thresholds were crossed, resulting in a process of rapid change.¹⁴ What came to be known as “Schmalhausen’s Law” of stabilizing selection, according to dialectical biologists Lewontin and Levins, was the notion that “when organisms are living within their normal range of environment, perturbations in the conditions of life and most genetic differences between individuals have little or no effect on their manifest physiology and development, but under severe or unusual general stress conditions even small environmental and genetic differences produce major effects.” The result is that the normal evolution of species is characterized by stabilization punctuated by periods of rapid change, in which latent traits are mobilized in relation to environmental stress.¹⁵

As Waddington explained, the real issues concerning evolution had to do with qualitative change. While mathematics could serve to elucidate some aspects of this process, he pointed out that “the whole real guts of evolution—which is, how do you come to have horses and tigers, and things—is outside the mathematical theory.”¹⁶ The key rather lay in understanding the world as governed by dynamic processes of contingency, change, interconnection, contradiction, and negation, as well as integrative levels, or emergent organizational forms. Nevertheless, dialectics was not to be seen as offering a ready-made solution to problems, but rather an approach that opened up analyses and defied closure. Seeking to capture this, Hegel had boldly written: “Contradiction is the criterion of truth, the lack of contradiction—the criterion of error.”¹⁷ As Levins and Lewontin observed: “Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought.”¹⁸ It was the realization of this openness of the dialectical view on Levins’s part that guided his entire intellectual career, as well as his radical conception of theory and practice.

Levins studied agriculture and mathematics as an undergraduate at Cornell University. Facing the McCarthyite Anti-Communist blacklist on his graduation, he and his wife, Puerto Rican writer Rosario Morales, moved to Puerto Rico where he worked as a farmer and rural organizer, learning firsthand about conditions of underdevelopment and dependency. He received a PhD at Columbia in 1956 and taught at the University of Puerto Rico from 1961 to 1967. He visited Cuba for the first time in 1964, in what was to be a lifelong collaboration with Cuban biologists and ecologists. In 1967, he moved to teach at the University of Chicago. There he and Lewontin became close colleagues and collaborators.¹⁹ In 1975, Levins took a position at Harvard, where he was John Rock Professor of Population Sciences in the Department of Population and International Health and head of the Human Ecology Program. Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, he declined in protest over the National Academy’s position on the Vietnam War. He became a leading figure in Science for the People (both the publication and the movement).

In his research on population genetics. Levins decided to explore the heredity, variation, and evolution of Drosophila (fruit flies) in nature and not just in the laboratory, beginning in his neighborhood and the surrounding countryside in Puerto Rico at the time. His findings led him to “the concepts of co-gradient selection, where the direct impact of the environment enhances genetic differences among populations, and counter-gradient selection where genetic differences offset the direct impact of the environment.” He

proposed that “environmental variation” must be an answer to many questions of evolutionary ecology and that organisms adapt not only to specific environmental features such as high temperature or alkaline soils but also to the pattern of the environment—its variability, its uncertainty, the grain of its patchiness, the correlations among different aspects of the environment. Moreover, these patterns of environment are not simply given, external to the organism: organisms select, transform, and define their own environments.²⁰

Ecological Dialectics

Levins dealt with ecological dialectics throughout his work. However, it is his essay on “Dialectics and Systems Theory,” written in 2008, which constitutes the best entry point into the unity of his thought in this respect. He detailed the partial integration of dialectical conceptions into systems theory including Earth System modeling, and the distinction between that and a full dialectical perspective, highlighting how the latter provided a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamic, open, integrative, contradictory, and transitory constitution of nature. Marxism had played a significant role in the development of systems theory. As emphasized by Levins, “In a sense, Marx’s Capital was the first attempt to treat a whole system.… His initial objects of investigation in volume 1, commodities, are not autonomous building blocks or atoms of economic life that are then inserted into capitalism, but rather they are ‘cells’ of capitalism chosen for study precisely because they reveal the workings of the whole.”²¹ It is important to understand that this is not conceived as a crude, mechanical relation. Rather, the commodity as the cell of capitalism “was not,” for Marx, “a fixed and unchanging object that determines the whole,” as in more mechanistic and reductionist versions of systems theory. Rather, the commodity in this sense was seen “as a point of convergence of all economic phenomena, at the same time determined by the whole and determining it.”²² The clear dialectical nature of Marx’s analysis allowed him to shift back and forth easily between labor/production and capital/valorization in a complex dynamic system of production and reproduction.

Yet, Marx’s Capital is notable not only for its economic systems theory, as Levins pointed out, but also, as has been recognized more fully in recent years, for its early ecological systems theory. Both economic and ecological contradictions, Levins noted, are present in capitalism, with the latter constituting a “second contradiction.”²³ As Yrjö Haila and Levins wrote in Humanity and Nature, “systems models in ecology usually concentrate on energy flow and nutrient (mineral) recycling.”²⁴ Insightfully, nutrient cycling and energy transfers through metabolism were integrated into Marx’s Capital and into early socialist ecological economics, based on the earlier work of figures such as Roland Daniels and Justus von Liebig, forming the basis of Marx’s concept of social metabolism and his theory of metabolic rift.²⁵ These and related developments in materialist science influenced the ecological crisis conceptions of the legendary British biologist E. Ray Lankester, who was Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s protégé, as well as Marx’s close friend.²⁶

Lankester’s student Arthur Tansley introduced the concept of ecosystem, based on the understanding of nutrient cycling, metabolism, and energy transfers in the interconnections between inorganic and organic systems. Tansley’s ecosystem theory was influenced by the early systems theory of the Marxist mathematician and scientist Hyman Levy, who incorporated into his work the notion of “phase change” to describe how quantitative change at certain thresholds leads to qualitative transformation, an analysis deeply embedded in Engels’s Dialectics of Nature.²⁷

Needham, one of the leading socialist scientists in Britain, introduced the notion of “integrative levels,” as a way of describing emergence and the reality that the material world consists of various organizational levels, qualitatively separated from each other, with each level having their own laws of nature, but nonetheless interdependent.²⁸ Marxist scientists in the Soviet Union and Britain in the 1930s, building particularly on the work of Engels, played a crucial role in explaining how the dialectics of qualitative transformation led to the formation of new integrative levels and emergent powers. This understanding generated a materialism that transcended both the vitalist attempt to attribute life and consciousness to vital life forces that were irreducible additions to matter/energy, and the mechanistic effort to reduce all higher organizational forms to lower ones.²⁹ Bernal explained how the residuals of past developmental processes, seemingly absent or latent, frequently reemerge in the present, entering into new combinations in contingent ways, to affect future evolution.³⁰

Many of these insights of materialist dialectics were absorbed into modern systems theory. Reflecting on this, the esteemed mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist John Maynard Smith wrote in a review of The Dialectical Biologist that dialectics was now “obsolete” due to the development of mathematical systems theory. According to Smith, Engels’s “transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa” is replaced with “phase change” (or “threshold effects”). Both of these concepts were embraced early on by red scientists and incorporated into dialectical-materialist analysis. Engels’s interchange of cause and effect could be seen as captured by the concept of feedback within systems theory. As Levins said, Smith might have added that “integrated levels” is now widely accepted in organizational hierarchy theory, in which Marxist dialecticians also played pioneering roles. Smith indicated his continuing skepticism with regard to notions of the interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation. Overall, his argument was that mathematical systems modeling is now more dynamic and able to capture hierarchical relations, so dialectics as such was not necessary.³¹

With a broader historical and deeper philosophical understanding, Levins responded that, as in the case of Engels before him, he was pleased to see science becoming more dialectical.³² Nevertheless, he insisted that standard scientific modeling fell short of the critical range of dialectics. Systems theory arose partly from a critique of reductionism and from the engineering study of self-regulating systems. Most systems theory scholarship still moves between mechanistic reduction and an unmoored idealist focus, falling short of the emphasis of a materialist dialectics focusing “on wholeness and interpenetration, the structure of process more than things, integrated levels, historicity, and contradiction.”³³ In relation to contradiction, which arises out of the interpenetration of opposites, Levins once exclaimed: “What’s so bad about contradictions—they’re just oscillations in the state of the network!” That is, they arise from the mere fact of process and the fact that entities and their relations are never static.³⁴ As Bernal had written:

It is possible to state this part of the dialectic in a more or less physical and mathematical way.… Any process, once set going by an initial impulse, continues in the absence of external forces until, passing its equilibrium position as the result of its own momentum, it is brought to a stop and reversed. But in more complicated cases, instead of mere oscillatory back-and-forth movement as the type of cyclic change everywhere, we get as the result of the opposition and the stopping of the primary activity a new qualitatively different one.… Transformations of this type are found throughout the inorganic and organic world.³⁵

“The highest achievement [of mathematical systems theory],” Levins observed, “is the algorithm, the rule of procedure that can be applied automatically by anyone to a whole class of situations, untouched by human minds,” history, and contingency. “Marxists,” however, “argue for a more complex and nonhierarchical relation between quantitative and qualitative approaches to the world.”³⁶ While organizational hierarchies exist, they are not one way or unidirectional, in that not only can the lower levels affect the higher levels (even if the higher cannot be reduced to the lower), but so can the higher ones affect the lower. Systems theory is geared to modeling. “Dialectics emphasizes [both] the provisional nature of the system and the transitory nature of the systems model.”³⁷ Hence, materialist dialectics is not aimed primarily at static, equilibrium states, any more than it accepts dualism, monism, reductionism, or idealism, but rather at questions of origin, opposition, contradiction, change, and transformation, within a reality that is “internally heterogenous” at every level.³⁸

Abstractions have often proven crucial in the development of a dialectical worldview, and as a way of approaching what Levins and Lewontin called the “alienated world.” Prior to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, evolutionary theory had taken a directly simple “transformational” form represented by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, where organisms by striving against the environment took on new characteristics that were then inherited by their progeny. Darwin’s genius, according to Levins and Lewontin, was to break with this “transformational” model by separating innate variation in individual organisms, on the one hand, and natural selection, involving relations to populations and the environment, on the other. By “alienating” these two aspects of the evolutionary process from each other, the entire process of evolution was clarified. Emphasis was thus placed on the slow process of adaptation of species to their environment through natural selection via innate variation. However, this created both a dualism between the inherited genetic traits of organisms, on the one hand, and their environments, on the other—together with a one-sided adaptationist position—that was to prove ultimately untenable. Little emphasis was placed on the mediating role of organisms themselves in changing their environments.

The rise of modern genetics led initially to the famous “modern synthesis,” in which Haldane played a major part, involving the fusion of Mendelian genetics with Darwin’s notion of innate variation and natural selection. The original modern synthesis was relatively holistic in orientation, encompassing genes, organism, and environment. However, rapid growth of genetics meant that a greater and greater emphasis was placed in biology on variation based on “immutable genes,” fostering a one-sided genetic determinism that was increasingly reductionist in form, downplaying interactions, and displacing the level of the organism mediating between genes and environment. As Levins and Lewontin famously stated at the end of The Dialectical Biologist:

As against the reductionist view, which sees wholes as reducible to collections of fundamental parts, we see the various levels of organization as partly autonomous and reciprocally interacting. We must reject the molecular euphoria that has led many universities to shift biology to the study of the smallest units, dismissing population, organismic, evolutionary, and ecological studies as forms of “stamp collecting” and allowing museum collections to be neglected. But once the legitimacy of these studies is recognized, we also urge the study of the vertical relations among levels, which operate in both directions [with the higher levels also influencing the lower].³⁹

In their argument, the organism was both “the subject and the object of evolution.” Here, the organism was part of and dependent on its environment, but neither of them “completely determine each other.”⁴⁰ Instead, they were codeterminant. The daily activities of organisms, such as obtaining sustenance, required them to be constantly interacting with and even constructing their environments, transforming the external world both for themselves and other species. Living species were historically shaping nature, altering the material conditions of life.⁴¹ The levels of gene, organism, and environment formed a “triple helix,” in which the organism played an active mediating role. “It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that organisms construct every aspect of their environment themselves. They are not the passive objects of external forces, but the creators and modulators of these forces.” Adaptation as a metaphor should thus be replaced by construction.⁴² Such a viewpoint, Levins and Lewontin argued, was not in conflict with Darwinian evolution. Rather, “Darwinism cannot be carried to completion unless the organism is reintegrated with the inner and outer forces, of which it is both the subject and the object.”⁴³

This understanding of the complexity in the relation between organism and environment, revealed, for example, in Levin’s contributions to niche theory, fed into a deep ecological perspective, including an acute recognition of the present-day ecological crisis.⁴⁴ Homo sapiens, a particularly successful organism, evolving and developing through its social organization (modes of production and “ecohistorical periods”), and actively disturbing and changing the world around it, was now undermining its own existence, as well as that of many other species, through its creation of an alienated world.⁴⁵ The answer, therefore, lay in qualitatively transforming the organizational basis of the human-social relation to the world.

For Levins, the dual struggles for “the survival and liberation of the human species” were themselves codeterminant, and could only be addressed fully, as in Marx’s fundamental conception, through a society of the associated producers rationally “planning” their metabolism with nature through production. “The goal of a rising standard of living,” Haila and Levins wrote, “cannot be identified with increasing consumption of energy and raw materials. Rather, after the meeting of some basic needs which people will have to decide on, further progress will have to emphasize the improvement of the quality of life.” This would “entail increasing the effort and thought devoted to caring for people, for our health, education, cultural life, opportunities for creative and healthful work and recreation,” as well as to “the richness of the natural world” that must be “recognized as an important element in that quality of life, not only as resource but also as the medium within which our lives take place.”⁴⁶

Capitalism as a Disease

Levins recognized that transcending the capitalist system was necessary to improve human health and to establish a nonalienated relation with nature. In his essay, “Is Capitalism a Disease?: The Crisis in U.S. Public Health,” he put forward a dialectical-ecological analysis of how the historical development of capitalism, in particular, was contributing to “the return of malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, dengue, and other classical diseases” and “the appearance of apparently new infectious diseases” such as “Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola virus, toxic shock syndrome, multiple drug resistant tuberculosis, and many others,” which now includes H1N1, H5N1, MERS, SARS, and COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2).⁴⁷ This problem, he explained, was part of the “general crisis” of “world capitalism,” manifesting as an “eco-social distress syndrome.” Levins indicated that this syndrome was due to “the pervasive multilevel crisis of dysfunctional relations within our species and between it and the rest of nature,” which “includes in one network of actions and reactions patterns of disease, relations of production and reproduction, demography, our depletion and wanton destruction of natural resources, changing land use and settlement, and planetary climate change.”⁴⁸ In this, he was building on and extending the radical social epidemiology tradition, to which Marx and Engels had classically contributed.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx praised the work of Bernardino Ramazzini, an Italian physician who wrote Diseases of Workers, which was first published in 1700, for his detailed investigation in “industrial pathology,” exploring a wide range of occupational diseases.⁴⁹ Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, drawing on firsthand accounts and public health reports, detailed the degradation of the environment and human health, as industrial capitalism was leading to extensive land-use changes, air and water pollution, dangerous working conditions, and impoverished living circumstances. Influenced by Engels’s book, Rudolf Virchow, a German doctor and pathologist, helped pioneer social epidemiological work, highlighting how changing social conditions influenced the emergence and spread of cholera and typhus. Marx and Engels incorporated the investigative findings from radical physicians, such as Peter Gaskell, Henry Julian Hunter, James Phillips Kay, Thomas Percival, John Simon, and Southwood Smith, who were documenting the spread of infectious diseases and the lack of nutrition in the population, especially among the poor, given the lack of sanitary conditions and the class inequalities that were being generated by capitalist development. In Capital, Marx detailed how capitalism was generating a corporeal rift in human morbidity and mortality, as part of the broader metabolic rift in the alienated relationship between humanity and nature.⁵⁰

As part of his research, Lankester studied parasitic pathogens and the human role in the spread of epidemics. He pointed to how epidemics arose from the ecological transformations associated with the large concentration of human beings and domesticated animals in one place, the expansion of monoculture, the creation of large feedlots, deforestation, and the imperialist integration of the global economy. Biodiversity loss further facilitated the spread of diseases. This collective work helped establish the foundations for what has become known as the ecosocial approach to epidemiology.⁵¹

Unfortunately, as Levins explained, this dialectical approach that considered the complex relationships and conditions of disease and public health was put aside. In its place, a reductionist biomedical model, with a largely static conception of nature, rose to prominence, whereby it was assumed that new technologies, medicines, and speedy diagnoses could effectively combat disease. This led to the “epidemiological transition” theory that contended that infectious diseases were essentially a thing of the past in the developed countries. Furthermore, it was proposed that ongoing capitalist development would serve as the means to “eliminate poverty and produce affluence, making all the new technologies universally available” to all countries triumphing over disease worldwide.⁵²

While the epidemiological transition theory persists, the failures of this approach are readily apparent, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Levins explained, this position neglected to account for evolution. As antibiotics were employed within human bodies (and in domesticated animals within agribusiness production), the targeted microbes responded to the challenge, evolving and mutating, eventually becoming resistant to the antibiotics. Paradoxically, some of the microbes were found to be “resistant to [new] antibiotics,” even prior to their introduction. This was due to the use of earlier antibiotics that, despite differences in their trade names, were “hardly different” from their predecessors.⁵³ The epidemiological transition approach also did not account for how global capitalism was increasing health inequalities, leading to massive ecological transformations, and contributing to the spread of diseases that were no longer limited to the tropical regions of the world. It paid little to no “attention to diseases of wildlife or of domestic animals and plants,” which was a major error, given that “all organisms carry diseases” and the increasing contact between species breaks down previous natural barriers.⁵⁴

Levins advocated for an ecological approach that had a long historical understanding of socioecological relations. He pointed out that “diseases come and go when there are major changes in social relations, population, the kinds of food we eat, and land use. When we change our relations with nature, we also change epidemiology and the opportunities for infection.”⁵⁵ As an example, he explained how the clearing of forests to increase grain production in South America promoted contact between rodents and humans. The seeds and grasses attracted rodents. Various predators, such as coyotes, owls, and snakes were decreased by these same processes. This in turn encouraged the expansion of rodent populations. As the rodent community expanded, they sought out places to nest, including warehouses, sheds, and “people’s homes, facilitating the transmission of diseases.”⁵⁶ Similar dynamics can be seen arising with the construction of dams and irrigation, which create habitats that enhance the “breeding of snails, who transmit liver fluke disease, and mosquitoes, who spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever.” As far as demographics are concerned, a high population density, such as can be found in global megacities and the accompanying slums, created “new opportunities for diseases” and enhanced their ability to spread. A similar dynamic emerges in large-scale feedlots and poultry factories, where the overcrowding of animals living under exceptionally poor conditions, facilitates the emergence of “superbugs” that are resistant to antibiotics.

A critique of capital was central to Levins’s dialectical-ecosocial approach, whereby he highlighted the contradictions of contemporary public health. Under capitalism, where health care is focused on maximization of profit, the actual care provided is not necessarily good on its own terms, since here as elsewhere this economic system is not primarily interested in use value but exchange value. The increasing dominance of health care by monopoly corporations, and their ability to economically squeeze patients, whose demand for health care tends to be inelastic, allows for an enormous inflation of prices, making it one of the most profitable sectors in the economy.

Capitalism inherently creates and feeds on social inequalities; it actively produces a sick society. Its day-to-day operations result in unnecessary and increasing pollution, stress, and illness. Within the class-stratified society, “the rate of death or other harmful outcomes increases with the level of poverty in illnesses like coronary heart disease, cancer of all forms, obesity, growth retardation in children, unplanned pregnancies, and maternal mortality.”⁵⁷ This sick society demands “ever greater expenditure to repair the damage to public health that it has itself inflicted.”⁵⁸

Levins illuminated how things could be different, insisting that a comprehensive overhaul involved focusing on: (1) ecosystem health to account for multiple causes of stress and problems; (2) environmental justice; (3) the social determination of health; (4) health care for all; and (5) alternative medicine as part of a comprehensive approach to health.⁵⁹ Improvements in the environment and health, he argued, “are aspects of class struggle, not an alternative to it.”⁶⁰

Red and Green

For Levins, the struggle against class domination and the struggle against the heedless domination of nature each necessitated the other, and could not be played off against each other, as in capitalism, without leading to total disaster. His role as an ecological scientist was not divorced from his ecological practice. Indeed, his deep insights as a scientist were informed by his time as a farmer growing vegetables in Puerto Rico and his work in support of the Cuban Revolution, with its efforts to establish “ecological agriculture and an ecological pathway of economic development that was just, egalitarian, and sustainable.”⁶¹ When farming in Puerto Rico, Morales and Levins wrote the “agrarian program,” highlighting the potential for agroecological and collective production.⁶² Levins developed an incisive critique of modern capitalist agriculture and its socioecological consequences. Just as important, he also detailed how socialist planning and agroecological practices served as the means to transform the human relationship with nature.

In the essay, “Science and Progress,” originally published in Monthly Review in 1986, Levins outlined a “dialectical, political, and ecologically based approach” to agricultural practices and technology in contrast to the modern developmentalist logic that was employed to justify the structure of capitalist agriculture.⁶³ He advocated for an agroecology rooted in “detailed knowledge of the processes affecting social fertility, the population dynamics of insects (both pests and useful), and microclimatology.”⁶⁴ This included determining effective ways to reduce tillage and to loosen the soil structure. The objective was to employ knowledge-intensive strategies that influence the combination of labor and technology employed in growing food. Levins explained that “monoculture inevitably creates new and serious pest problems, prevents us from using the variability of soils and climate to our advantage, depletes the soil, and makes necessary the heavy use of costly inputs.” Instead, it is necessary to work within the patterns of diversity. A belt of trees along agricultural fields holds back cooler air, facilitating the growth of crops that need warm air. A diversity of crops—such as fruits that are picked when ripe versus tubers that can be left in the ground until needed—provides more options and possibilities given the uncertainties of nature. It also helps control pests. Levins promoted social planning to determine the “optimum size of plot,” which is “large enough to make use of the necessary mechanization” and “small enough to permit the use of edge effects.”⁶⁵

Agroecological planning must consider issues associated with “hydrology, pest migrations, labor supply, and consumption needs.” Here the unit of production is likely to be smaller than the unit of planning in order to enhance collective coordination and ensure sustainable practices. Given inevitable environmental variabilities, it is important to account for temperature and moisture trends over the course of decades. Growing plants with different requirements together is useful to ensure food production, in case there is failure in a particular variety.⁶⁶

Hence, for Levins, planning played a critical role in establishing a just and sustainable system of food production. It was a crucial part of creating “a different kind of science” that “requires the combination of the detailed, intimate, local, and particular understanding that people have of their own circumstances with the more general, theoretical, but abstract knowledge that science acquires only by distancing itself from the particular.”⁶⁷ This required appreciation and coordination between folk and scientific knowledge. Here knowledge was social and to be shared, rather than privatized for profits. Such an approach demanded asking bigger questions and analyzing the complexity of all systems in order to avoid hyperspecialization and reductionism. This form of planning was open, collective, and necessary in order to reorganize the social metabolic relations of humans to the earth.

Given his firsthand experience working and collaborating with comrades in Cuba, Levins saw these nascent ecological developments take root and emerge as part of a full-scale blossoming of coordinated social planning as the country pursued “an ecological pathway of development that combines sustainability, equity, and quality-of-life goals.”⁶⁸ Levins celebrated the remarkable achievements of Cuban science. He noted that science in Cuba is publicly owned, allowing for a coordination within and across fields of study and the development of national plans and goals. Knowledge is directed to service humanity, rather than a commodity. The conception of science itself is broader, allowing for the integration of knowledge from society as a whole. This has played a crucial role in regard to the development of organic agriculture, given the local knowledge of microclimates, soil, plants, and pests.⁶⁹

“Each kind of society,” Levins recognized, “develops its own relations with the rest of nature.” He contended “that an ecological pathway of development is at least latent in socialist development, coequal with equity and participation. Despite all the zigzags, vacillations and disputes, it emerges as an increasingly central characteristic. And this is imperative, for socialism cannot succeed without committing to an ecological pathway.”⁷⁰ Following the revolution, Cuban leaders had to address an array of social concerns, such as poverty, sanitation, access to water, housing shortages, and illiteracy. But they also directed attention to tackling the consequences of deforestation, erosion, and monoculture that were associated with the sugarcane economy. These efforts included creating botanical gardens, reforestation programs, micro-ponds, and rotational grazing. Levins indicated that the shift away from colonial science was a crucial part of establishing a new relationship with nature. Development was differentiated from growth, helping establish “a goal of harmonious development of the economy and social relations with nature.”⁷¹

Agricultural production as a whole was progressively reorganized to establish restorative nutrient cycles and processes, enhance biodiversity, minimize use of pesticides, provide nutritious food, and protect farmworkers. Diversified plant and animal production “permits recycling within the farm.” “Soil fertility is maintained by composting, crop rotation, the use of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, fungi that mobilize potassium, and phosphorus and other minerals, as well as the cultivation of earthworms.”⁷² In regard to earthworms, vermiculture has become common, whereby worms turn organic plant matter into nutrient-rich compost to be used in the fields. Organic urban agriculture has become common throughout Cuba. The revolutionary transformation of the human relationship with nature in Cuba involves implementing what Fred Magdoff has called “an ecologically sound and socially just economy” that can help repair “the soil carbon rift.”⁷³

As a dialectical ecologist, Levins proposed that we ask the big questions, as part of understanding why the world came to be organized in a particular way, and how it might be different. Together with Lewontin, he insisted that we “must join the struggle to affect what happens.”⁷⁴ Haila and Levins’s Humanity and Nature concluded: “Our science should identify the contradictory processes that move society-nature on its course or displace it from its course, and project possible alternatives from which we can make informed choices. A future which is not determined is a call to the exercise of freedom.”⁷⁵

Notes

1. ↩ Yrjö Haila and Richard Levins, Humanity and Nature (London: Pluto, 1992), 11.
2. ↩ John Vandermeer, “Objects of Intellectual Interest Have Real Life Impacts: The Ecology (and More) of Richard Levins,” in The Truth Is the Whole: Essays in Honor of Richard Levins, Tamara Awerbuch, Maynard S. Clark, and Peter J. Taylor, eds. (Arlington, Massachusetts: The Pumping Station, 2018), 1–7.
3. ↩ Richard Levins, “Touch Red,” in Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 264; Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 367.
4. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 185. This book includes essays that Lewontin and Levins wrote together, as well as individually.
5. ↩ Levins, “Touch Red,” 264.
6. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024).
7. ↩ As Levins explained, “the term ‘dialectical materialism’ is often associated with the particular rigid exposition of it by Stalin and its dogmatic applications in Soviet apologetics, while ‘dialectical’ by itself is a respectable academic term. At a time when the retreat from materialism has reached epidemic proportions it is worthwhile to insist on the unity of materialism and dialectics, and to recapture the full vibrancy of this approach to understanding and acting upon the world. Here I use materialist dialectics and dialectical materialism interchangeably” (Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 377).
8. ↩ Richard Levins, “A Science of Our Own: Marxism and Nature,” Monthly Review 38, no. 3 (July–August 1986): 5–6.
9. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism,” Monthly Review 75, no. 2 (June 2023): 1–18.
10. ↩ Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985); Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence; Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002). As Sahotra Sarkar has written, “With Engels they [Levins, Lewontin, and Gould] implicitly suggested that they were also committed dialectical materialists almost in the old-fashioned Soviet doctrinaire sense. But close examination of their work reveals more subtlety.… All three figures were explicit in their debt to Engels” (Sahotra Sarkar, “Lewontin’s Legacy and the Influence of Engels,” Marxism and Sciences 1, no. 1 [Winter 2022]: 10). Also see Brett Clark and Richard York, “Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist,” Monthly Review 57, no. 1 (May 2005): 13–22.
11. ↩ W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 80–81; Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 186–87.
12. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 370.
13. ↩ Theodosius Dobzhansky, Foreword (1949), in I. I. Schmalhausen, Factors of Evolution: The Theory of Stabilizing Selection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), xv–xvii.
14. ↩ David B. Wade, Foreword (1986), in Schmalhausen, Factors of Evolution, v–xii; Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 75–80. The term “triple helix” is taken from Lewontin’s famous book, Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000).
15. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 77; “Macroevolution,” New World Encyclopedia; Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 169.
16. ↩ Waddington quoted in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 584.
17. ↩ Hegel quoted in Evald Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), 26.
18. ↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 191.
19. ↩ So close were they that upon Levins’s death, Lewontin told one of us that he had always viewed Levins as his “brother.”
20. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 368–69.
21. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 110.
22. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 185–86.
23. ↩ Levins took the term “second contradiction” from James O’Connor. But in Levins’s own analysis, this referred straightforwardly to an ecological, as opposed to economic, contradiction of capitalism. It thus did not refer, as in O’Connor, to a supply-side, as opposed to demand-side, economic crisis brought on by high resource and pollution costs (the undermining of the conditions of production). In O’Connor’s notion of the “second contradiction,” there was no ecological crisis as such but simply a different form of economic crisis. Richard Levins, “Rearming the Revolution,” Socialism and Democracy 12, no. 1 (1998): 65; John Bellamy Foster, “ Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction,” Monthly Review 54, no. 4 (September 2002): 6–16.
24. ↩ Haila and Levins, Humanity and Nature, 48.
25. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 18–23, 206–11.
26. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 24–72.
27. ↩ Foster, The Return of Nature, 348–57, 390, 475.
28. ↩ Foster, The Return of Nature, 405–9.
29. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 103.
30. ↩ D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, Hyman Levy et al., eds. (London: Watts and Co., 1934), 103–6, 112; Foster, The Return of Nature, 378–79; Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 121.
31. ↩ John Maynard Smith, “Molecules Are Not Enough,” London Review of Books 8, no. 2 (February 6, 1986); Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 101–2; Richard Lewontin, “In Memory of John Maynard Smith (1920–2004),” Science 304 (May 14, 2004): 979. On phase changes and emergence, see Hyman Levy, A Philosophy for a Modern Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 88–125; Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts and Co., 1932), 75.
32. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 102.
33. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 103.
34. ↩ Levins quoted in William Wimsatt, “Richard Levins as a Philosophical Revolutionary,” Biology and Philosophy 16 (January 2001): 107.
35. ↩ Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” 103–6.
36. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 115.
37. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 110, 120.
38. ↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 278. Levins and Lewontin not only argued that “objects are internally heterogenous” at every level, but also that there was “no basement,” that is, there were no discernible fundamental units at the base of material existence from which everything else could be derived.
39. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, The Dialectical Biologist, 288.
40. ↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 136.
41. ↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 89–106.
42. ↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 85, 89, 104–5; Lewontin, The Triple Helix.
43. ↩ Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 105–6. Lewontin was critical of Gould initially for stretching his concept of Darwinism too far beyond Darwin himself. He later decided that he had done that himself. He was increasingly critical of Darwin’s theory as focusing too strongly on mere adaptation. Nevertheless, while seeking to make evolutionary theory more dialectical, Lewontin, Levins, and Gould all continued to see themselves as building on Darwin. See Rasmus Grøndfeldt Winther, “Richard Lewontin as Master Dialectician,” Science for the People, November 23, 2021.
44. ↩ Levins regarded his pioneering approach to niche theory to be an exercise in the application of the interpenetration of opposites. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 372; Richard Levins, Evolution in Changing Environments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 39–65.
45. ↩ Haila and Levins, Humanity and Nature, 190–99; Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 269.
46. ↩ Haila and Levins, Humanity and Nature, 248–50; Richard Levins, “Eulogy Beside an Empty Grave,” in Socialist Register 1990 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 330.
47. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 298.
48. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 370.
49. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 484–85; Bernardino Ramazzini, Diseases of Workers (Thunder Bay, Ontario: OH&S Press, 1993).
50. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease,” Monthly Review 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 1–23; Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness (New York: Free Press, 1983); Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Frederick Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” Organization & Environment 19, no. 3 (September 2006): 375—88.
51. ↩ Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911), 31–33, 185–87; E. Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair: Second Series (London: Methuen and Co., 2015); Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease”; Nancy Krieger, Epidemiology and the People’s Health (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
52. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 298.
53. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 302–3.
54. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 301.
55. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 299.
56. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 300–2.
57. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 307.
58. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 305–6.
59. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 306–10.
60. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 319.
61. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 306–7.
62. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 366.
63. ↩ In his essay, Levins offered an insightful critique of developmentalism. Generally, developmentalism, which underpins capitalist economic development programs, assumes that less-developed countries will “progress” along a single axis following developed countries. He warned that too often “revolutionary” societies follow the same logic, assuming that they must proceed along this same axis to catch up and eventually surpass capitalist nations. This logic contributed to the pursuit of alienated agricultural practices that served capital accumulation and resulted in environmental degradation.
64. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 322.
65. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 323.
66. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 323–24.
67. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 325–27.
68. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 343.
69. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 346–53.
70. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 344.
71. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 356.
72. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 358–62; Mauricio Betancourt, “The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift,” Global Environmental Change 63 (July 2020): 1–10; Rebecca Clausen, Brett Clark, and Stefano B. Longo, “Metabolic Rifts and Restoration: Agricultural Crises and the Potential of Cuba’s Organic, Socialist Approach to Food Production,” World Review of Political Economy 6, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 4–32; Christina Ergas, Surviving Collapse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Sinan Koont, “The Urban Agriculture of Havana,” Monthly Review 60, no. 8 (January 2009): 44–63; Sinan Koont, Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2011); Peter Rosset, “Cuba: A Successful Case Study of Sustainable Agriculture,” in Hungry for Profit, Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick Buttel, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 203–13; Peter Rosset, “Fixing Our Global Food System: Food Sovereignty and Redistributive Land Reform,” Monthly Review 61, no. 3 (July–August 2009): 114–28; Miguel A. Altieri, “The Principles and Strategies of Agroecology in Cuba,” in Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance, F. Funes, L. Garcia, M. Bourque, N. Perez, and P. Rosset, eds. (Oakland: Food First Books, 2002), xi–xiii.
73. ↩ Fred Magdoff, “An Ecologically Sound and Socially Just Economy,” Monthly Review 66, no. 4 (September 2014): 23–34; Fred Magdoff, “Repairing the Soil Carbon Rift,” Monthly Review 72, no. 11 (May 2021): 1–19.
74. ↩ Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 217.
75. ↩ Haila and Levins, Humanity and Nature, 252, emphasis added.