Joel Stephen Kovel was an American scholar and author known as a founder of eco-socialism. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985.

Eco-socialism is an ideology merging aspects of socialism with that of green politics, ecology and alter-globalization or anti-globalization. Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.