Environmentalism and the Domination of Nature Michelle Yates INTRODUCTION Domination over nature has been a persistent theme in Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The work of scholars, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Schmidt, among others, are key in recogniz- ing the way that capitalism has led to unpar- alleled domination over nature. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno assert that domination over and estrangement from nature is a central component of enlight- enment. Horkheimer and Adorno situate domination over nature in social mediation, specifically that the logic of equivalence gen- erated by the dominance of the commodity form, mediates and determines the human relationship to nature. In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt revitalizes Karl Marx’s notion of metabolism, specifi- cally that there is a metabolic interaction between humans and nature mediated by labor. Thus, in Schmidt’s work, social media- tion via labor takes center stage. More recently, green critical theorists, such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, have extended the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Schmidt by examining domination over nature via conceptualizations of metabolic rift and alienation from nature, respectively. In Foster and Burkett’s narratives, the role of labor is also central as a mediator between humans and nature. Each of these scholars’ work is important in its treatment of the notion of capitalist domi- nation over nature. Yet, as I will argue in the course of this chapter, they also do not provide an adequate critical account. In particular, each of these scholars roots domination over nature in an anthropological notion of labor, a notion of labor per se. In doing so, these schol- ars examine labor in capitalism one-dimen- sionally. However, as Karl Marx points out, what makes capitalism historically unique as a social formation is its dual-dimensionality, that labor in capitalism is not merely con- crete, but also abstract. In order to fully capture capitalism’s unparalleled domination 91 BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp91.indd 1503 11/05/18 8:43 AM