I read the communist manifesto, and it said nothing but environmentalism but I know other communist like Stalin Fidel Castro and Xi Jinping are environmentalist but other communist don’t like the environment
If I recall correctly, in some his letters Marx discussed things like Capitalist farming practices leading to erosion of soil and environmental devastation, but I think it’s important to remember that Marx had some pretty heavy critiques of the utopian socialists of his time and should be understood in that context.
What I mean by that, is a lot of the socialists of his time were genuinely horrified of the proletariat. Of course they had every right to be, imagine leaving this feudal society of artisans and farmers and communal living, something many of them had far closer relations to than we do in modernity, and seeing people pressed into these factories billowing smoke—coughing their lungs out, suffering from new diseases, suffering some genuinely horrible deprivations—and so the tenor of many of their critiques was basically “we’ve got to stop this right now”, I think these would be the reactionary socialists Engels would write about. Marx’s position could be abridged as “the only way out is through” and so in this regard, for as horrifying and crushing as industrialization was, Marx saw it as necessary. So in this way you’ll see some environmentalists critique Marxism or Marxism-Leninism for its environmental record, but it should be understood that the drive to industrialize is extremely important for Marxist states. The unfortunate side effect of industrialization is some environmental decline, but this isn’t something Marxists turn a blind eye to like capitalists do. Socialism in general is a very human-centric ideology, and humans like nature, they like greenery, so of course the goal is sustainability in the long term. Problem is in the short term we’re gonna have to develop some wilderness.
Within the environmentalist movement itself, there’s kind of a primitivist streak—like the concern over nuclear power—but I think Marxist environmentalism rejects that in favor of an approach that privileges new technologies as a solution rather than a kind of environmental austerity—eg “well we can’t use nuclear power cause it’s scary, we should just have mandatory blackouts.”