As their chief causes are to be found in the capitalist profit system, the environmental question today calls for a society-changing struggle. This is why we need a new environmental movement which draws a clear dividing line to imperialist environmentalism and organizes its ranks. Militantly, purposefully and on a global scale it must confront the willful destruction of the natural foundations of life by those in power.

The book‘s polemics are intentional. Taking an unequivocal position it intervenes in the debate over the strategy how to resolve the environmental issue.

Comment on Stefan Engel's book Catastrophe Alert! by Trevor Harrison, Professor of sociology, University of Lethbridge, Canada:

Readers of Stefan Engel’s Catastrophe Alert! will likely be surprised to discover a too-long neglected element of Karl Marx’s original vision of a future, communist society: that economic and social development could not be compartmentalized and alienated from nature. Through a series of cogent quotes, Engel shows that Marx and many of his subsequent followers, while modernist, considered environmental questions as inseparable from economic questions. One may disagree with some of Engel’s arguments, especially regarding the development of Soviet communism after Lenin’s death. Nonetheless, this book is a useful corrective to narrow stereotypes often held about Marx’s concept of material production and economic development. Engel is to be commended for his efforts in resurrecting this lost side of Marxist thought.