[6] He reiterated his argument in a statement posted on his official website that the "termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism".

[5] The college president Leon Botstein responded in a letter sent directly to Kovel by arguing that his termination was not political but part of a larger move by Bard to reduce part-time faculty.

[10] In the eco-socialist manifesto, Kovel and Löwy suggested that capitalist expansion causes both "crises of ecology" through "rampant industrialization" and "societal breakdown" that springs "from the form of imperialism known as globalization", and that capitalism's expansion "exposes ecosystems" to pollutants, habitat destruction, and resource depletion, "reducing the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital", while submerging "the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power", as it penetrates communities through "consumerism and depoliticization".

Union Carbide were experiencing a decrease in sales that led to falling profits which, due to stock market conditions, translated into a drop in share values.

The depreciation of share value made many shareholders sell their stock, weakening the company, and leading to cost-cutting measures that eroded the safety procedures and mechanisms at the Bhopal site.

[10] Kovel believed that state or self-regulation of markets does not solve the crisis "because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation", which is "unacceptable" for a growth-orientated system, and that terrorism and revolutionary impulses cannot be tackled properly "because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire".

[10] Kovel was highly critical of those within the green movement who favour "working within the system"; while he recognized the ability of within-system approaches to raise awareness, and believe that "the struggle for an ecologically rational world must include a struggle for the state", he believed that the mainstream green movement is too easily co-opted by the current powerful socio-political forces as it "passes from citizen-based activism to ponderous bureaucracies scuffling for 'a seat at the table'".

Under capitalism, he suggested that technology "has been the sine qua non of growth", believing that even in a world with hypothetical "free energy" the effect would be to lower the cost of automobile production, leading to the massive overproduction of vehicles, "collapsing infrastructure", chronic resource depletion, and the "paving over" of the "remainder of nature".

The school is represented by thinkers like David Korten who believe in "regulated markets" checked by government and civil society; for Kovel, they do not provide a critique of the expansive nature of capitalism away from localized production and ignore "questions of class, gender, race or any other category of domination".

He highlighted the work of leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly, who exemplifies what eco-socialists see as the good and bad points of ecological economics, while he offered a critique of capitalism and a desire for "workers ownership", saying that he only believes in workers ownership "kept firmly within a capitalist market", ignoring the eco-socialist desire for struggle in the emancipation of labor and hoping that the interests of labor and management today can be improved so that they are "in harmony".

[10] Kovel suggested that in "its effort to decentre humanity within nature", deep ecologists can "go too far" and argue for the "splitting away of unwanted people", as evidenced by their desire to preserve wilderness by removing the groups that have lived there "from time immemorial".

Between 1986 and 1996, Kovel commented that over three million people were displaced by "conservation projects"; in the making of the United States national parks, three hundred Shoshone Indians were killed in the development of Yosemite.

Kovel believed that deep ecology has affected the rest of the Green movement and led to calls from restrictions on immigration, "often allying with reactionaries in a ... cryptically racist quest".

Kovel warned that while ecofascism is confined to a narrow band of far-right intellectuals and disaffected white power skinheads who involved themselves alongside far-left groups in the anti-globalization movement, it may be "imposed as a revolution from above to install an authoritarian regime in order to preserve the main workings of the system" in times of crisis.

Kovel feared that this is political, springing from historic hostility to Marxism among anarchists and sectarianism, which he pointed out as a fault of Murray Bookchin, the "brilliant" but "dogmatic" founder of social ecology.

From this, he commented that the anti-democratic Tsarist heritage meant that the Bolsheviks, who were aided into power by World War One, were a minority who, when faced with a counter-revolution and invading Western powers, continued "the extraordinary needs of 'war communism'", which "put the seal of authoritarianism" on the revolution; for Kovel, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky "resorted to terror", shut down the soviets (workers' councils), and emulated "capitalist efficiency and productivism as a means of survival", setting the stage for Stalinism.

Kovel added that Stalin "would win the gold medal for enmity to nature", and that, in the face of massive environmental degradation, the inflexible Soviet bureaucracy became increasingly inefficient and unable to emulate capitalist accumulation, leading to a "vicious cycle" that led to its collapse.

[10] Kovel advocated the non-violent dismantling of capitalism and the state, focusing on collective ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers and restoration of the Commons.

Kovel justified this by stating that "radical criticism of the given ... can be a material force", even without an alternative, "because it can seize the mind of the masses of people", leading to "dynamic" and "exponential", rather than "incremental" and "linear", victories that spread rapidly.

Such projects include Indymedia ("a democratic rendering of the use-values of new technologies such as the Internet, and a continual involvement in wider struggle"), open-source software, Wikipedia, public libraries, and many other initiatives, especially those developed within the anti-globalisation movement.

He held up the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Gaviotas movement as examples of such communities, which "are produced outside capitalist circuits" and show that "there can be no single way valid for all peoples".

With an ever-expanding party, Kovel hoped that "defections" by capitalists will occur, leading eventually to the armed forces and police who, in joining the revolution, will signify that "the turning point is reached".

The EP would also internalize the costs of current externalities like pollution and "would be set as a function of the distance traded", reducing the effects of long-distance transport like carbon emissions and increased packaging of goods.

[10] In the course on an eco-socialist revolution, Kovel advocated the "rapid conversion to ecosocialist production" for all enterprises, followed by "restoring ecosystemic integrity to the workplace" through steps like workers ownership.

[10] Kovel highlighted the fact that Marx mentioned the idea when he stated that human beings are no more than the planet's "usufructaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition".

[15] Kovel took on this reading, saying that in an eco-socialist society "everyone will have ... rights of use and ownership over those means of production necessary to express the creativity of human nature", namely "a place of one's own" to decorate to personal taste, some personal possessions, the body and its attendant sexual and reproductive rights; however, Kovel saw property as "self-contradictory" because individuals emerge "in a tissue of social relations" and "nested circles", with the self at the centre and extended circles where "issues of sharing arise from early childhood on".

In Kovel's view, it is essential that the revolution "takes place in" or spreads quickly to the United States, which "is capital's gendarme and will crush any serious threat", and that revolutionaries reject the death penalty and retribution against former opponents or counter-revolutionaries.

[17][18][19] The decision came after a series of events tied to the distribution of Kovel's 2007 book Overcoming Zionism, which argued that "the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the "one state" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country, without a Jewish character.

And I join hands with those people who feel that the time has come to basically think of Israel in the same category as South Africa, as a state that just has gone wrong and needs replacement.

[21] The executive board of the University of Michigan Press said in a statement that though it "has deep reservations about Overcoming Zionism, it would be a blow against free speech to remove the book from distribution on that basis.