Any notion of public service is foreign to them. And yet, they are responsible for water, a public good. But ecological demands also confront specific capitalists, often the most powerful. Private interests which systematically intervene to prevent the implementation of public policies which threaten to reduce their profits and power. In other words, political ecology is not something which intervenes on the edge of capitalism, or in an undetermined zone of consensus and reasonable compromise.
Ecological demands touch the very heart of the system.
This is why they encounter such deep resistance. And why they can and should be integrated into our project for an global alternative society. In the countryside, there are two clearly opposed projects for the society of the future. The development of the agro-foodstuffs industry implies the standardisation of the countryside, and increasingly artificial methods of production. The creation of giant production units, and the exponential increase of chemical intervention in farming.