"The Left is in a serious crisis of ideas." Those are the simple and somewhat damning words with which our guest, Joel Wainwright, opened this interview with our Editor Adrienne Buller. In a wide-ranging conversation, Adrienne and Joel discuss the ideas he thinks we need, as well as Joel's work making sense of the relationship between capitalism and ecological crisis—drawing this connection not in some general sense, but with careful attention to the very specific logics, institutions and processes through which capitalism wreaks havoc on the planet. They cover Marx, Darwin, the nuclear age, what "The Anthropocene" really means and, critically, where we might go from here.
Joel Wainwright is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University, where he teaches about political economy, environmental change, and social theory. He is the author of Climate Leviathan (with Geoff Mann, 2018), Decolonizing Development (2008), and, most recently, The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis (2025).