A Study Of Jonathan Hughes’ Marxist Ecological Thought

With the economic development and the continuous improvement of the urbanization level of various countries,the earth’s ecological environment is constantly deteriorating.Various extreme weather and natural disasters occur frequently.Novel corona-virus rages in Wuhan and spreads around the world.How to position society in nature and how to seek ecological balance between humans and nature are issues of great theoretical and practical significance that urgently need human attention.On the issue of ecological environment,many environmentalists believe that Marx’s historical materialism is anti-ecological.In view of this,Jonathan Hughes published the book Ecology and Historical Materialism to defend the ecological view of historical materialism.This paper is based on Hughes’ Ecology and Historical Materialism,especially the "positioning society in nature" idea,and analyzes its Marxist ecological thought from three aspects.The first part explores the historical background and theoretical origin of Hughes’ Marxist ecological thought.The second part analyzes the main content of Hughes’ s ecological thoughts.Firstly,it describes the main contents of Hughes’ s ecological thoughts from three aspects: ecological limit,ecological dependence principle,and broadly-defined anthropocentrism.It analyzes how he defends Marx’s ecological thought of historical materialism in four aspects,including the ecological understanding of historical materialism.The third part evaluates Hughes’ s Marxist ecological thought from two aspects: contribution and limitation.It enriches the marxist view of natural ecology in theory and provides an important reference for China’s ecological civilization construction in practice.Its deficiencies mainly lies in that it only interprets the ecological thought around man’s dependence on nature and over-interprets Marx’s historical materialism.