Ecological unsustainability and environmental ‘catastrophe’ are current dilemmas leading to polarised political positions. Karl Polanyi was one of the first writers to recognise that, if unchecked, ‘leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them’. While political movements can be organised to resist the actions of the market for labour, there is no comparable movement which can resist the exploitation of nature. The supremacy of human beings, enabled by the capitalist mode of production, has led to human domination over nature. Various environmental groups acting, as it were, on behalf of nature, seek to redress the balance between human beings and nature. Their objectives vary: some oppose the assumption that economic development is positive and question whether economic growth promotes human well-being; others seek to limit the harmful effects of industrialism in the exploitation of nature. The Marxist position is that the capitalist form taken by industrialisation is at fault. Environmentalists address the problem of how global capitalism can resolve the problem, or whether it should be replaced by some other form of production that would recreate a harmonious balance between mankind and nature.

The political problem is that economic and commercial activities in one country have unintended, uncontrollable and deleterious effects on a global scale. Some are confident that changes within the existing economic framework can reduce carbon emissions and thus significantly reduce the threat; others seek a more fundamental change in the basis of industrial globalisation. Ways to resolve the environmental threat depend on what activists and politicians believe to be the causes. An environmentalist approach seeks to curb the effects of the industrial revolution, which have led to the use and misuse of the Earth's resources; others attribute unsustainability not to the industrialisation process but to the rapacious nature of the capitalist form of production.

The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been coined to describe the ways that lead to breakdown of the ecological system. It refers to the impact of human activity on the planet and includes all the interacting ‘physical, chemical, biological and human processes which affect the environment’. The consequences of this rift in the Earth system threaten ‘the entire realm of human civilisation, in the sense of an advanced, ordered society, it could potentially undermine the conditions of human life itself, as well as that of innumerable other species’.