“The capitalist system is necessarily built on creating ecological crises.”

Bertie speaks to Ståle Holgersen about his new book Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World, in which he argues that, contrary to popular economic thought, economic crises are not triggered by ecological ones but instead the capitalist economy benefits from ecological crises. 

Bertie and Ståle discuss the ways in which crises are defined, the drawbacks to arguments for degrowth and the potential solutions to the climate emergency. 

Ståle Holgersen is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Stockholm University and a member of the Zetkin Collective, an ecosocialist group of scholars and activists primarily working on the political ecologies of the far right.

Against the Crisis was published last month and is available to buy from Verso here.

Further reading:

• Read an extract from Against the Crisis on Land and Climate Review. 
• White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, The Zetkin Collective, 2021
• Searching for “Solutions” to Crisis: A Critique of Urban Austerity and Keynesianism, Uppsala University, 2018
• Destroy what destroys the planet: Steering creative destruction in the dual crisis, Uppsala University, 2016

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.