Scholars and militants: injecting direct action into academia

During the first week of December 2020, I had the pleasure of attending the 60th anniversary conference of the Ecological Society of Australia. This event was attended virtually by hundreds of Australia’s top ecologists and biologists—with a diverse array of topics covered including fire management, drought, ecosystem and species decline and climate change. Many of the presentations touched on the artificial separation between people and nature as a key driver of these ecological crises under capitalism—which has been recognised by Marxist scholars for more than a century(1)(2). I was pleased to find—particularly among young researchers—a growing consensus that capitalism is the underlying cause of ecological crises. As a Marxist-Leninist academic, ESA 2020 felt like the beginning of a real turning point—with the intelligentsia of Australia’s ecological community finally moving away from market-based ecology.