January of 1992 was a strange time to be thinking optimistically about the future prospects of global communism, but the end of the Soviet experiment prompted Howard University professor (and inveterate red) David Schwartzman to wonder what it would take to bring the promise of “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs” into the twenty-first century. A biogeochemist trained at Brown, Schwartzman was faced with prevailing pessimism in both his academic field and the political scene. Influential economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s argument that entropy was the dominant factor for our world—increasing scarcity and environmental degradation were products of a fundamental law of physics, not human mistakes—helped inspire a “degrowth” line that came to dominate ecological economics in the West. All there seemed left to offer was less.
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