Note: In this book the term North is used to refer to the advanced capitalist economies that dominate the world economy, while the term South (sometimes called the Third World) refers to the underdeveloped countries dominated by the imperialist North.
All dollars are US dollars unless otherwise specified.
The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement...They sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side-if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield up to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they're the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.
-Frank Mankievicz, senior executive at transnational public relations firm Hill and Knowlton1
A lot has changed since the first edition of Environment, Capitalism and Socialism, the Australian Democratic Socialist Party's viewpoint on the environment crisis, was published in 1990 under the title Socialism and Human Survival.
Just ten years ago, the main tactic of the big corporations was still to combine public denial about the environment crisis with legal and extra-legal harassment of their critics. The environmental organisations — from mainstream bodies like the Sierra Club or the Australian Conservation Foundation to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth — were still mainly seen as making their contribution to a movement that was gradually advancing against the recalcitrant polluters and their political backers. The green parties still more or less adhered to the four principles of the German Greens — social justice, environmental sustainability, grassroots democracy and peace and nonviolence.
However, over the past decade — which has produced the hottest years and most violent storms since meteorological records began in 1866 — the environment has become so potent a political factor that even US Republicans and multinational polluters have learned to chant "sustainable development" — whatever peculiar meaning they give to the term. Yet, despite this change in rhetoric, the 1990s have overwhelmingly been a decade of massive corporate counterattack that has produced profound shifts and confusion in environmental and green politics.
Powerful sections of big business have shifted ground, abandoning "it-isn't-happening" lobbies like the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) for green umbrellas like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). More farsighted corporates like British Petroleum,2 which in May 1997 became the first — besides the punch-drunk reinsurance corporations — to end denial about global warming, have stepped up their snooping for green profit opportunities and "moved solar energy up to the big table", along with exploration, oil and chemicals.
Notorious ecosystem wreckers like DuPont (chlorofluorocarbons), Asea-Brown Boveri (nuclear power and dams) and Ford have decided that if there's going to be any sustainable development around this planet they won't be kept out of the game. DuPont chairman Edward Woolard says:
The green economies and lifestyles of the 21st century may be conceptualised by environment thinkers, but they can only be actualised by industrial corporations.3
Henry Ford's great-grandson Bill (a "passionate environmentalist") sees his mission in life as getting rid of the internal combustion engine:
There is a rising tide of environmental awareness. Smart companies will get ahead of the wave. Those that don't will be wiped out.4
An entire layer of former environmental activists and leaders are now making their way in the world as environmental executives and consultants. Most sincerely believe that there's no other way of saving the planet. In the words of one woman middle manager:
The corporations have the talent, the resources, the R&D, and the ability to make a difference. If they can't be brought on board, there's no hope of reversing the environmental crisis in time.5
Nearly every prominent environmentalist now agrees, helping spawn over the past decade a torrent of pro-market texts with names like The Ecology of Commerce,6 Green, Inc,7 The Economy of Nature8 and Factor Four: Doubling Wealth — Halving Resource Use.9 David Suzuki and the Worldwatch Institute's Lester R. Brown also embrace this eco-capitalism, championed in Factor Four as "saving the earth for fun and profit through advanced resource efficiency".10
This trend isn't restricted to the old capitalist frontier. Friends of the Earth's Sustainable Europe Campaign, outlined in Sharing the World: Sustainable Living and Global Equity in the 21st Century,11 embraces the market as "the most efficient means for building critical feedback into production and consumption systems".
Over the last decade too, at least one new ecosystem has flourished — that of "global environmental governance". Just three years after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development — UNCED) adopted Agenda 21, 324 international, regional and national environmental action plans and strategies had been produced and 171 were in preparation.12 At the time of writing there are 215 international environment agreements in place.
UNCED and other institutions like the UN's Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) and the World Bank's Global Environment Facility (GEF) provide a framework for closer monitoring of the environment, for turning the spotlight on leader and laggard countries in areas where agreements are in force and for spreading awareness of scientific environmental studies. However, most of the treaties and agreements are inadequate to the problems at hand and are policed by toothless institutions that match ambitious and noble mandates with paltry authority and funding.
For, despite all the effort since Rio, the 1997 UN special General Assembly dedicated to reviewing progress (Earth Summit +5) was able to point to only two global areas in which the spiral of environmental decline had been reversed — emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and acid rain-generating sulphur dioxide. Notwithstanding many partial gains — in cleaning up rivers, stopping the ivory trade, reviving whale populations, reducing smog in the cities of the North — in every other global sphere, and hence for the entire interrelated ecosphere, environmental degeneration continues.
The 1990s have proven to be the opposite of the "turnaround decade" hoped for at Rio. UNCED deputy secretary-general Nitin Desai may well stress that "our present condition is the result of at least two centuries of unsustainable development, which can hardly be corrected in five years"13 but that's hardly the point: we face a global emergency demanding emergency measures.
If anyone is inclined to think that this is doomsaying, let them study the state of the world's icecaps and glaciers. Antarctica is hotter now than at any time in the past 4000 years, already producing the collapse of small ice shelves and threatening that of ice sheets so vast that a six-metre rise in sea levels would result. Arctic sea ice is up to a third thinner than 20 years ago and across the world's mountain ranges glaciers have shrunk by between 22 and 92 per cent this century. These titanic changes could easily produce complex interactions between a warming atmosphere and melting ice capable of triggering calamitous changes in climate and sea level.14
State of the World, the Worldwatch Institute's unofficial medical report on the planet, states in its 1998 edition:
The key environmental indicators are increasingly negative. The signs of stress can be seen in shrinking forests, falling water tables, eroding soils, disappearing wetlands, collapsing fisheries, deteriorating rangelands, rivers running dry, rising carbon dioxide levels, rising temperatures, and disappearing plant and animal species. These environmental indicators make it clear that the western fossil fuel-based, automobile-centred economy is not a viable model for the world.15
Chapter One of Environment, Capitalism and Socialism provides a summary of the state of the environment, which bears out the judgement of the UN's first Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-1):
From a global perspective the environment has continued to degrade during the past decade, and significant environmental problems remain deeply embedded in the socioeconomic fabric of nations in all regions. Progress towards a global sustainable future is just too slow. A sense of urgency is lacking. Internationally and nationally, the funds and political will are insufficient to halt further environmental degradation and to address the most pressing environmental issues — even though technology and knowledge are available to do so … As a result, the gap between what has been done thus far and what is realistically needed is widening.16
In the face of this immensely threatening scenario, the 1990s mainstreaming and institutionalisation of environmentalism has been further deepened by the collapse of Soviet "really existing socialism" and China's rush to embrace capitalism. The revelation of the environmental atrocities in the Soviet Union and the former "planned economies" of Eastern Europe have been a godsend for capitalist elites previously "scared shitless" by the movement. No opportunity is being lost to point out to the young environmentalist that "under Marxism, the environment is `sacrificed' to production goals [whereas] under capitalism, the environment is `balanced' with production goals".17 For most environmentalists Margaret Thatcher was essentially right — There Is No Alternative.
So as we approach the year 2000 the Worldwatch Institute's David Malin Roodman sums up a broad consensus:
What, then, will it take to construct a sustainable, modern society? Governments will need to aggressively demarcate and defend environmental limits, working domestically and cooperating internationally. And they will have to do so in ways that stimulate rather than stifle the creativity of corporations. Businesses will need to anticipate the transition and position themselves to exploit the huge investment opportunities created. Nonprofit organisations ranging from international environmental groups to neighbourhood churches — collectively called "civil society" — will need to press both governments and businesses forward. And undergirding all their efforts will be educated citizens operating in their capacities as voters, consumers, charitable donors, and owners of land and resources.18
But is this all that today's Environmental Revolution (described by Lester Brown as ranking "with the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions as one of the great economic and social transformations in history") amounts to?19 Will such a plan really turn the tide of impending environmental disaster? The contrast between the horrendous tales of impending catastrophe and the paltriness of such mainstream environmental plans for redemption almost seem like a form of denial that recalls the typical fire-and-brimstone sermon. In it "the horror of the predicted catastrophe contrasts sharply with the mildness of the admonition with which we are allowed to escape".20
Doesn't capitalism still have some bearing on the environmental mess? What both sides of the Cold War were happy to call "communism" may be dead, but does this justify forgetting those classic pages in The Closing Circle in which Barry Commoner unfolds with devastating clarity and iron logic how capitalism is anti-environmental to the core?21
Ask many environmentalists the reason for this amnesia and the answer you almost always get is that the need to do something practical now is so great and capitalism so much a fact of life that the only feasible course is to fight to make it work for environmental goals. Many say: "Look, socialism and central planning have failed and we don't have time to have arcane arguments about whether capitalism does or doesn't need consumerism and inequality to survive. We simply have to act by all methods at our disposal to reduce consumerism and force business to install the latest in non-polluting and resource-efficient technologies. Such technologies now abound and there are capitalists who want to make a contribution to solving the environment crisis by using them. They should be supported against the others. And the best anyone can realistically hope for as far as governments go are Social Democrat-Green coalitions. Some at least are imposing eco-taxes."22
Such is the approach of the Sustainable Europe Campaign of Friends of the Earth. Their book Sharing the World sets out plans for how the planet's "environmental space", under rising stress and totally dominated by the industrialised North, can be protected, fairly shared and made the basis of "total quality of life" for all six billion global citizens. The task is gigantic: European resource usage alone has to fall between 50 and 100 per cent by 2050, with interim targets at 2010 set between 3.2 and 50 per cent. Environmental reformism has set itself a massive agenda, which effectively acknowledges that capitalism has to be turned inside out.
Sharing the World doesn't flinch from proposing solutions to what, in classic Marxism, would have been the job of post-revolutionary, socialist society. Conversion of polluting and resource-intensive capital stock to environmentally benign alternatives? Impose green taxes and provide government support for "eco-innovating" entrepreneurs. Entrenched consumerism and individualism? Make community life more attractive than private consumption through community development initiatives, getting people involved in national lobbying campaigns for sustainability, enriching life at work and strengthening the role of "civil society". Closing the North-South divide and lifting the Third World debt burden? Have partial debt write-offs for the South, a whole raft of international taxes which could also be used to fund Rio's Agenda 21 program, with the whole thing reinforced by bottom-up pressure from citizens' groups and NGOs.
All these trends have made necessary this updated version of Environment, Capitalism and Socialism, which was adopted at the 16th DSP Congress in 1995.
In adopting the amended document the congress reaffirmed the DSP's particular place within the "red-green" political spectrum. Firstly, like all red-greens, we hold, to quote John Bellamy Foster that:
The answers to today's ecological problems do not lie in the direction in which the world is rapidly proceeding — toward the ever greater privatisation of nature and the conditions of human existence. Instead they are to be found in the direction of the "socialisation" of nature and production, and the creation of a more democratic, egalitarian world order, one that incorporates into its logic an abiding concern for other species and future generations.23
From this viewpoint the dreams of a "steady state" capitalism beloved of an ecological economist like Herman Daly and environmentalists like Lester Brown and the authors of Sharing the World are simply that — dreams. They accept that the market system is untouchable and look for salvation in changing the behaviour of individual consumers and inducing the corporations to adopt the latest techniques such as the "dematerialisation" of production.
However, since capitalism is hooked on expanding turnover, and devotes vast resources to this effort, there's no reason at all to expect that gains in resource efficiency will go into reduced usage of resources and not into increased throughput and growth rates. This position is argued out in detail in the appendix, "Can green taxes save the environment?", which analyses the latest panacea of environmental reformism — ecotaxation, supposedly capable of inducing business to convert to clean, green production.
However, even as Environment, Capitalism and Socialism reaffirms the basic incompatibility between the capitalist technosphere and the biosphere, it's obvious that the vast majority of fights for the environment are not conducted in this perspective. Rather, the ongoing struggle still takes the form of a chain of battles over specific strategies and programs to clean up existing environmental disasters and prevent new ones, over how to reduce environmental damage through applying new technologies, over sufficient funding to implement them and over who — the ruling elites or the mass of the people — should be paying for it all.
In principle, of course, all agree that "the polluter pays", but if ever there was a principle more honoured in the breach than the observance, this surely is it.
For instance, in 1993 the then-new Clinton administration, with Al Gore (author of the "visionary" Earth in the Balance) as vice-president, tried to pass a very mild tax on non-renewable forms of energy, only to be smashed into line by the fossil-fuel lobby. And as Saul Landau comments on another flagrant example:
We punish sinners like Exxon, whose oiler [the Exxon Valdez] did not have proper safety equipment, by making it pay for the cleanup and fining it. But modern corporations have delay experts, called corporate lawyers, who find loopholes to forestall both the cleanup and the penalty procedures. Indeed, Exxon has barely felt the cruel lash of justice as it offers $80 billion to buy oil giant Mobil.
The tipsy Captain Hazelwood [the Exxon Valdez skipper who was found to have been drunk in command] will make amends by spending his next four summers picking up garbage from city streets and other places. Imagine if he had been caught with some crack or even a marijuana joint. He'd be spending those summers as well as the rest of several years in pokey.24
Such is the present balance of political forces over the environment that to force the implementation of adequate programs for which the polluter really does pay will take an exponential increase in the power of red-green movements and parties. This is made clear in general terms by Spanish ecological Marxist Manuel Sacristán who conceived the central role of the working class in the environmental struggle in these words:
From 1848 Marxism proposed to the industrial working class an understanding of itself (a class self-consciousness) based on its negative social position, on its having nothing to lose … For the industrial societies the necessary revision of the idea of the working class as a revolutionary subject will have to base the self-consciousness of the working class not exclusively on this negative position (which a part of the class has overcome in these countries, through its own struggles and the evolution of the system), but also on its positive condition as sustainer of the species, conserver of life, essential bearer of the metabolism between nature and society. The age of capital has added to this positive position of the working classes of all societies the capacity for scientific understanding and method and, as a consequence, skilful flexibility in work and the potential awareness — at the present time largely clouded over — of global problems, including those of the environment. The working classes, mainly the working class of the industrial countries, have to continue to see themselves as a revolutionary subject … because they are the part of humanity most indispensable for our survival.25
Yet it's precisely here, in politics, that big business today holds nearly all the cards.
In all the major advanced capitalist countries the big corporations own and operate two parties and face weak and divided green parties. These flop in and out of the corporate camp on key issues. Indeed, what better confirmation could there be that the salad days of the green parties are gone than the German Greens' support for the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia?
At the same time in many countries the socialist and communist left still really hasn't grasped the centrality of the environmental struggle to the overall anticapitalist fight (we recall the long-standing support of the French Communist Party for France's nuclear power program). And, while growing, ecosocialist currents remain weak.
The retreat of the trade union movement before the austerity offensive of capital has inevitably reinforced in parts of the working class the conviction that defence of the environment can only come at the expense of jobs and livelihoods. Green party indifference to workers' concerns has also helped drive some workers (especially in rural industries) into the arms of radical right parties, with their vicious baiting of "greenies".
The effects on both camps are pernicious. Symptomatic, if extreme, is Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, which came to prominence in the early 1980s with its direct action defence of the forests of the US Pacific Northwest:
One of my biggest complaints about the [timber] workers up in the Pacific Northwest is that most of them aren't "class conscious". That's a big problem … The loggers are victims of an unjust economic system, yes, but that should not absolve them for everything they do … Indeed, sometimes it is the hardy swain, the sturdy yeoman from the bumpkin proletariat so celebrated in Wobbly lore who holds the most violent and destructive attitudes towards the natural world (and towards those who would defend it).26
No recognition here that the jobs of the patronised timber workers ("bumpkin proletariat") were being threatened by the environmentalists' defence of the forests. Not the faintest inkling that environmentalists' refusal to address workers' concerns must hand them over bound and gagged to the timber companies.27
The equal and opposite vice comes in the person of Kevin Reynolds, the West Australian secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), who is happy to ally his union in protests against "greenies" with the timber companies, which are devastating that state's magnificent old-growth karri forests.
Indeed, what has most weakened the environment movement over the past 10-15 years has been organised labour's retreat before the agenda of capital. In the words of Phil Shannon:
With the labour movement hunkered down in defensive bunkers, resisting with more or less (mostly less) success the assaults of a desperate capitalist class during the 1980s recession, green strategies took on a wistful and ineffective hue. Green self-improvement versions of the Biblical injunction to "change thyself" (half a brick in the toilet cistern, recycling and so on), elitist Greenpeace heroics, green consumerism, and the perennial ballot box came to dominate the outlook of most of those with environmental concerns … The greens are too often fuzzy about power in society and disdainful about class struggle and revolution, naively moving with gastropod-paced progress along "proper (middle class) channels" of institutional and personal tinkerings, continually grounding on the sandbars of capitalist interests and power.28
Reversing the "retreat from class" of environmentalism and green politics is therefore critical if a winning alliance for environmental sustainability is to be built. And as the environmental fight gets tougher the question of which social force can successfully sustain it will come increasingly to the fore. That means that the need for an environment movement allied to and driven by an aware working class movement will come to be much less abstract than it may seem today.
Equally critical will be the program and line of march of such a red-green alliance. For, while it certainly possible to struggle and win gains in the belief that the capitalist leopard can be made to change its spots (and it will even shed a few spots if that's the condition of its survival) the movement will make more headway the more it grasps that it's actually dealing with a predator. Otherwise, whatever gains are made in the short-term are always vulnerable to being devoured by the system.
Such is the real history of US environmentalism, as told by Barry Commoner in Making Peace with the Planet. It has also been possible to force a reduction in the Third World debt burden through anti-debt movements in the North and South. However, the realities that led to the accumulation of the debt in the first place — the widening productivity gap between the South and the advanced capitalist world, the impossibility for most Third World countries of breaking out of the existing global division of labour, the huge power of blackmail the debt gives the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — all cry out that sustainable development in the South requires the eradication of the existing world-system, North and South.
These facts of life all point to a clear conclusion: only a revolutionary, popular government that puts real power in the hands of an environmentally aware majority can make serious inroads against the environmental crisis (the appendix discusses the Cuban and Nicaraguan examples). Moreover, while this effort can begin in one country it will need to secure the "commanding heights" of the North if it is to make lasting gains for planetary sustainability.
That's why the DSP is a revolutionary red-green party of a special type, one which holds that the environmental crisis reconfirms the basic political proposition of Marxism and whose practice is guided by it. This is simply that if capitalism is destroying the ecosphere and rules through its own state institutions, then the social precondition for an ecologically sustainable order is the overthrow of such institutions and their replacement with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" — the rule of society's working majority. Hence the unavoidable need for revolution, the "`act' of taking possession of the means of production in the name of society".29
This was, despite endless attempts to prove otherwise, Marx's own position. In his famous 1852 letter to Josef Weydemeyer he wrote:
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.30
Why do so many red-green currents flinch at this viewpoint? Why has the development of environmental consciousness been accompanied by a revival of pre-Marxist (and anti-Marxist) political conceptions?31 Has green political theory uncovered new strategies to which classic Marxism was blind?32
The revulsion from Marxism (and, even more, from Lenin's contribution) is, of course, partly due to its identification with the horrors of Stalin's rule, but with the passing of time and the diffusion of a truer understanding of Stalinism's specific historical roots and role as massive intellectual travesty of the work of Marx and Lenin, this explanation increasingly loses validity.
Certainly the problem is hardly ever simply verbal. Admittedly, after a century of Hitlers, Mussolinis, Suhartos and Pinochets it has become impossible to use "dictatorship" in its old sense of "class monopoly of power", but the central concept can always be summarised and explained readily enough.
It's essential in tackling this issue honestly, to forestall the usual crop of (often deliberate) misunderstandings. The outlook argued for in Environment, Capitalism and Socialism doesn't mean that any given capitalist state or parliament can't or shouldn't be made more responsive to popular aspirations, nor that any post-capitalist state is more democratic than any capitalist state, nor that environmentalists boycott parliament, nor that they don't make demands of capitalist governments, nor that democracy is a tool to be used until "power is seized" and then discarded, nor any other of the scores of malicious parodies of Marxism that remain in circulation in the environment movement.33
Nor does it mean that the struggle for our environment doesn't begin locally, nor that environmental repair and development can't and shouldn't be advanced at the level of local governments, cooperatives and sometimes entire regions — even while state power is still in the hands of the ruling rich.
Even less does it mean that struggles around urban environmental and working conditions, like those of the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation under Jack Mundey (the "green bans" movement), and eco-production alternatives like those developed by the Lucas Aerospace Combined Unions Committee, aren't essential in pointing the way forward.34 Indeed, initiatives such as the US Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' proposal for an employer- and government-financed Superfund to underpin the conversion or closure of the polluting industries in which OCAW members typically work is an example for the union movement everywhere.
The Marxist viewpoint simply means that, until the working majority sets the rules of the political and economic game, any gains in such battles are provisional and vulnerable to cooption and reversal. After all, the NSW BLF was taken over by its national office — under pressure from the construction industry bosses — and the Lucas plans never reached production stage under the British Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
The hesitation, indeed revulsion, of so many radical greens and environmentalists before Marxism in the advanced capitalist societies derives from a number of political leanings rooted in the typically middle-class formation of most environmental activists — exacerbated by the weakness of radical environmental currents in the trade unions and labour movement more generally.
Combine these trends with the fact that the environmental crisis tends to manifest itself either in the form of local outrages (motorway proposals, polluted rivers) or as impossibly vast global problems (hole in the ozone layer, global warming, fishery depletion, global deforestation), and it's not surprising that environmental activists overwhelmingly get tugged in one of two directions (and away from any revolutionary perspective).
The first is towards case-by-case guerilla warfare against specific environmental outrages, which the crisis will supply to the movement as if on a conveyor belt running at ever greater speed. The second is toward the organisations "that have the power to do something" — government environmental agencies and ministries and increasingly, the greener corporations.
What is at stake in this discussion is not whether governments can't be induced to change their mind on this or that dam or their objection to the very idea of a carbon tax, but whether any capitalist government, representing the "common affairs of the bourgeoisie", can subordinate the overall interests of capital to those of the environment for any length of time.
Once that impossibility is truly grasped then environmentalists have no choice but seriously to measure their present ideas against the basic concepts of revolutionary theory and politics. For many whose motto is "Think globally, act locally" this is not easy, for the slogan's direct implication is that each and every local initiative in recycling, economising on water and energy use and cutting waste can, summed together, make a critical difference. Politics, insofar as it's needed, can be membership of a Green party, sometimes involving serious commitment to campaigns, but almost always involving confusion about strategic goals and vulnerable to drowning in parliamentary tomfoolery.
Yet 20 years of thinking globally and acting locally, while yielding a host of small victories, has not been able to reverse any major trend in environmental degradation. That's because it offers no pathway from the local to the global, no feasible strategy for making local action begin to count globally.
This is all the more true because the local is hardly ever purely local, but linked to national and international webs of production, trade and investment shaped by the national and international division of labour. The "local" is forged by an increasingly global capitalism, which protects its interests through national and international state and semi-state bodies.
Indeed, with the penetration of multinational capital into every last nook and cranny, with its relentless pursuit of new profit-bearing technologies (including "biotechnologies" and "ecotechnologies"), it becomes increasingly difficult to practice denial before these realities. The frontiers are disappearing and environmental movements themselves increasingly contest the expanding circle of exploitation. An ever stronger state is required to drive through "development".
This steadily rising clash between the environment movement and a state acting on behalf of business will see the classic debates over strategy towards the state continue to resurface within green and environmental politics. The concerned environmentalist has to choose between an ecological version of communism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism or social-democracy. For when confronted with the capitalist state, we can try to ignore it, reform or "democratise" it or replace it with something more democratic.
It's true that the environment movement has brought a new vocabulary and "discourse" into political life, and red-green politics has often enough to be conducted in this language. However, this terminology also exudes ambiguity, as typified by every partisan interpretation of important concepts like "sustainable development" and "democracy".
By the same token, much of the language of the traditional revolutionary Marxist movement has, after Stalinism, been rendered politically self-defeating for building a genuinely mass, genuinely radical, red-green movement. Like any political force that wants to be listened to, ecosocialists have to find the language that won't turn people off.
However, these realities notwithstanding, the DSP's central message remains that of the classical revolutionary movement against capitalism. The environmental struggle too has to be organised with the perspective of elevating the majority of society — workers, environmentalists, working farmers, the unemployed and pensioners — to political supremacy.
Any proposal to save the environment that doesn't adopt this approach, like the ultra-utopianism of works like Sharing the World, is doomed to be reduced to a set of "interesting proposals" in speedy transit to irrelevance, or to providing the newest wave of bamboozling eco-chatter, or to supplying the next menu items for a futile gradualism that falls further and further behind in its tasks.
The very fact that Sharing the World has to confront our crisis of civilisation and environment by trying to foist onto the shoulders of a cruel and destructive capitalism the goals that only socialism can achieve, surely confirms the urgency of grasping the truth that sustainability means revolution.
This perspective brings with it two particularly urgent challenges. First, how to build the alliance for sustainability between the working class (organised and unorganised) and environmentalists, especially when business is increasingly using jobs-or-the-environment blackmail. Secondly, how to organise internationally, both against global environmental disasters, but also so any national revolutionary advance is defended and extended.
Consolidating a red-green alliance requires of the "green" side not only that it support the struggles of labour against capitalist restructuring. It should also take the initiative in developing programs of industrial conversion where business pays the price, as well as championing economy-wide solutions for unemployment, like the shorter working week without loss of pay and the expansion of a public sector to take the lead in projects of environmental conversion.
The central issue is that of working class political consciousness, of imparting, through all our struggles for the environment, the true picture of a capitalism whose "werewolf hunger" for profit is not only devouring the working and living conditions of hundreds of millions of working people but the underpinnings of life itself.
No realist will have any illusions about the difficulties involved. There is, however, no other path than persistence. The future of our planet depends on consolidating — through every struggle for social justice and a livable environment — a red-green army powerful enough to displace a poisonous and barbaric capitalism from the command posts of society and civilisation.
August 1999
The crisis is all-pervasive. The atmosphere heats up relentlessly, holes open in the ozone layer, forests are laid waste, waterways become cesspools, the remotest wilderness streams and lakes turn toxic, groundwater becomes contaminated and waste dumps proliferate. The poison reaches deeper into the biosphere as jungles fall to the axe, the sea is littered with toxic and radioactive waste and dwindling aquifers fill with filth. Each year the average air temperature rises, and the atmosphere unleashes more and more energy in tornadoes and cyclones of unprecedented destructiveness.
All life on our planet exists and reproduces itself in a narrow belt known as the biosphere. The biosphere is limited to the surface and soil of the Earth's rocky crust (the lithosphere); its oceans, lakes and rivers (the hydrosphere), and the lower levels of its atmosphere.
Within the biosphere, life is sustained by a series of delicately balanced and interconnected ecosystems, characterised by definite relationships between living organisms and their chemical and mineral environment. The stability of the biosphere is dependent upon a biological cycle in which the waste products of some organisms are essentialfor the life of others.
The process of photosynthesis is the starting point of this biological cycle. Energy in the form of visible light from the Sun is absorbed by photosynthesising plants, which in turn break down atmospheric carbon dioxide, water and mineral substances to form organic compounds and free oxygen. As a result of this process, 160 billion tonnes of organic matter and 300 billion tonnes of free oxygen are generated by green plants each year.
The primary products of green vegetable organisms — their biomass and free oxygen — in turn sustain animal life, which returns carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Volcanoes, animal respiration and plant and animal decomposition release approximately 220 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. About 120 billion tonnes of this is removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesising plants, while the oceans absorb the remaining 100 billion tonnes. Through these processes, carbon dioxide and oxygen levels in the atmosphere have remained relatively stable over the past 600 million years.35
While carbon dioxide makes up only 0.03 per cent of the chemical composition of the atmosphere, this small amount is vital to life on our planet. Together with other trace gases, carbon dioxide plays an important role in the greenhouse effect, which shapes the Earth's climate. While allowing sunlight to reach the Earth's surface, carbon dioxide and other trace gases trap heat in the atmosphere by absorbing infrared radiation. Without the heating effect of these greenhouse gases the Earth's average surface temperature would be about _18°C, 33°C less than it is now, and far too cold to sustain living organisms.
Over the past 100 years, human beings have increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide by 25 per cent by burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) and by clearing forests (an activity that releases carbon dioxide as vegetation decays or is burned). Every year humankind burns what nature long ago took one million years to create and bury. As a result, over six billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's atmosphere every year. The consensus of the most recent studies is that carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, which stood at 280 parts per million when fossil fuel burning began and now (1997) stands at 364 ppm, is unmistakably enhancing the greenhouse effect and leading to an increase of 0.8-3.5°C in the Earth's average surface temperature. Between 1950 and 1997 the global average sea surface temperature rose from 13.86°C to 14.4°C and the 1990s were the hottest decade since record-keeping began in 1866. As a result, European alpine glaciers have lost half their volume since 1850, North Greenland's ice cap is thinning by about 2.5 centimetres a year, and a quarter of Antarctic sea ice has disappeared since 1950. Over the last 100 years sea levels have risen between 10 and 25 centimetres.36
Such changes are unprecedented in human history. During the warmest period of the past 700,000 years, temperatures only 2.5°C warmer than the present gave Europe a climate similar to that of present-day Africa. A 0.8-3.5°C warming would cause a similar alteration in the Earth's climatic patterns, but would take effect between 10 and 100 times faster, causing massive and perhaps catastrophic disruption to world agricultural production and lifting sea levels.
By the late 1990s, fossil fuels burned for heating, electricity generation, automobile transport and industrial activities were releasing 6.3 billion tonnes of carbon, 70.7 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide, 28.2 million tonnes of nitrogen oxides, and more than 250 million tonnes of ash and dust into the atmosphere.37
Carbon monoxide undermines the self-cleansing ability of the atmosphere by removing hydroxyl molecules, without which the concentrations of other trace gases (sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, methane and chlorofluorocarbons) would increase until the atmosphere assumed totally different chemical, physical and climatic properties.
Two-thirds of the sulphur dioxide pumped into the atmosphere each year comes from coal-fueled power stations. The burning of petroleum products in automobiles and heaters is responsible for 70 per cent of the nitrogen oxides.
These emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides dissolve in water vapor to produce acid rain, which damages lakes, soils, vegetation and buildings. Already it is estimated that 14 per cent of Europe's forestland has been damaged by acid precipitation, with 50 per cent of West Germany's forests displaying visible leaf damage. While sulphur dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning are now falling in Europe (from 59 million tonnes in 1980 to 26 million tonnes in 2000) and the United States (from 24 to 15 million tonnes), in Asia they have more than tripled (from 15 million tonnes to 53 million tonnes). As a result acid rain has produced large-scale die-offs in China and Japan's forests. The Chinese National Environment Protection Agency also estimates that 40 per cent of agricultural land is affected, while Japanese government sources believe that if present trends continue the nation's lakes and ponds will become too acidic for freshwater life within 30 years. Vast tracts of soil in Europe may already have been acidified beyond repair. In the eastern United States, corrosion damage due to acid rain is estimated to cost US$7 billion annually.38
Solar radiation acts on nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons from vehicle exhausts to produce surface-level concentrations of ozone gas that are destructive to living organisms. Ground level concentrations of ozone have often been recorded at 10 times their natural level in Western Europe, California, the eastern United States, and Australia. At the same time, the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, and solvent agents has begun to destroy the Earth's stratospheric ozone. In 1995, as the CFCs produced in previous decades made their way into the stratosphere the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer reached its greatest extent — more than 22 million square kilometres. At the same time a springtime ozone hole appeared for the first time over the Arctic. While CFC production under the 1987 Montreal protocol continues to fall (down to 10 per cent of their 1987 level by 1997), the destruction of stratospheric ozone will continue at least until 2060, leading to a rise in the amount of damaging ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth's surface. Moreover, other ozone-depleting compounds such as methyl bromide and hydochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) continue to be produced as an interim substitute for CFCs and the full extent of damage done by ultra-violet radiation to the genetic structure of living things is still to emerge.
Almost half of the forest that once blanketed the Earth — three billion hectares — has gone. Recent UN Food and Agricultural Organisation assessments39 of the world's forests have revealed that:
Deforestation is also a major factor contributing to the desertification of large areas of our planet. Deserts and semi-deserts already account for more than a third of the Earth's land surface, some 4.5 billion hectares. As a result of the clearing of forests and ill-considered agricultural and grazing practices, the area covered by desert increased by a further 120 million hectares between 1970 and 1990, more than the amount of land currently cultivated in China. Since then, the onslaught of sand has been conquering six million hectares of fertile soil a year. An estimated 60 per cent of the 3.3 billion hectares of arable land not found in the world's humid regions is effected by desertification to some degree. Excessively large herds have degraded an estimated 73 per cent of rangelands, most disastrously in Africa, where livestock numbers have more than doubled since 1950.
Deforestation and desertification have reinforced each other. For example, Ethiopia was half covered by forests at the beginning of the 1900s, but today trees cover only three per cent of the land.
Fertile land is also being degraded through soil loss. On average, 3.75 tonnes of fertile soil per hectare is formed around the world each year through natural processes, afforestation and land improvement. But 30 tonnes are irretrievably lost through removal with harvests and through water and wind erosion — 25 billion tonnes a year throughout the world. In the years 1970-90, at least 480 billion tonnes of topsoil were lost, equivalent to India's entire cropland.
As we enter the new millennium the leaps in agricultural productivity that drove the "green revolution" are being exhausted: world grain production per head has stabilised at around 300 kilograms annually; world irrigated area per head has levelled off at 0.044 hectares; annual yield gains have fallen from 2.1 per cent in 1990 to 1.1 per cent by 1997; and crop losses to pesticide-resistant insect species continue to climb (today, farmers in some areas of Asia apply pesticides at up to eight times the dosage originally recommended in order to ensure an effective kill).41 In addition, modern agriculture returns to the soil almost none of the nutrients taken out in the form of food. This loss is compensated by intensive use of inorganic nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers, which in turn run off to pollute water resources. Global fertiliser per person has quadrupled since 1950, from 5.5 to 22.4 kilograms in 1997, producing algal blooms and vast expanses of biologically dead waterway, such as the Mississippi Delta and the Aral Sea.42
Similarly, despite the mass of legislation following on the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the application of chemicals developed for use as pesticides in the US have climbed from 293 million kilograms a year in Carson's day (1964) to 441 million in 1997, one fifth of the world usage by active ingredient.43 According to the World Health Organisation pesticides continue to kill 20,000 agricultural workers each year.44
Humanity's need for food continues to increase pressure on fresh water systems. From 1940 to 1990 withdrawals of fresh water from rivers, lakes and underground acquifers increased fourfold, leading to falling water tables on every continent, with the most dramatic declines in those countries, like China and India, that most depend on irrigation to feed their peoples. The water table under the North China Plain, which produces 40 per cent of China's grain harvest, is falling by roughly 1.5 metres a year while acquifers in India are being pulled down by between one and three metres a year. Around the world rivers are shrinking or drying up completely.45
Fisheries are also being pressed to their limit. The global fish take has increased five times since the 1950s and now exceeds sustainable yield in 11 of the world's 15 most important fishing areas. Seafood catch per person has been falling since 1989, as humans extract 35 per cent of primary productivity from non-tropical continental shelves.46 And industrial acquaculture, the supposed alternative (which absorbs huge amounts of grain) has done nothing to prevent the degradation of oceanic fishing grounds.
More than half the world's coastlines and 60 per cent of coral reefs are now threatened by human activities — 10 per cent of all mangroves in South East Asia were destroyed between 1983 and 1994 alone.47 Meanwhile the oceans are turning into the "last frontier" — prospecting for biological and other resources is completely unregulated.48
In addition, despite some gains in river purity in the advanced capitalist world, industrial plants were discharging 661.8 cubic kilometres of untreated water each year in the late 1980s, forecast to rise to between 962.5 to 993 cubic kilometres by the year 2000.49 An estimated 3.6 million tonnes of oil finds its way into the world's oceans each year, mainly as a result of shipping accidents but also due to oil tanker discharges that the oil industry regards as normal or inevitable.50 This is a quantity of oil sufficient to spread an iridescent film over an area of 90 million square kilometres, or one third of the ocean surface. Fortunately, bacteria break down most of this vast quantity of oil. However, although petroleum is almost entirely biodegradable, it takes the microbes that break it down a long time to accomplish this task. In the meantime, an oil spill's effects are lethal for a variety of birds, marine mammals, fish larvae, and phytoplankton, the microscopic plants that are the basis of the food chain for marine life.
Since the early 1970s the tonnage of oil released into the ocean has nearly trebled. The capacity of oceanic bacteria to degrade this vast amount of oil is being placed under increasing strain, as shown by the dramatic loss of animal life after the Exxon Valdez disaster and the oil released into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Gulf War.
The destruction of forest and marine habitats and the contamination of gene pools via the unwitting introduction of alien species is speeding up the rate of extinction of large numbers of plant and animal species. Of course, the extinction of species is a natural process that has occurred since the emergence of living organisms on our planet some 3.5 billion years ago. However, the natural evolution of the biosphere is a process in which some species disappear and are replaced by new, more complex life forms. The fossil records of marine invertebrates testify that in the past one to three species died out on average every year. At that "background rate" it was possible for new species to replace disappearing species, and for the biosphere to gradually adapt to this change. However, the present rate of extinction of species due to human destruction of forest habitats does not allow for such replacement and adaptation.
Most estimates of the current situation are that at least 1000 plant and animal species are lost a year, an extinction rate 1000 times the background rate.51 For vertebrates, which provide a good indication of the general health of natural communities because of their position at the top of food chains, the proportion of species threatened with extinction ranges from 11 per cent for birds to 34 per cent for fish.52 Sharks, which continue a lineage of vertebrates some 400 million years old, are at their lowest numbers ever and, like other marine predators with low rates of reproduction, are especially vulnerable to overexploitation.53 Bioinvasions, mainly the result of exotic marine species being carried in ships' ballast water to foreign destinations, are wiping out entire marine ecosystems.
If present trends continue, one fifth of all plant and animal species will disappear over the next 20 years and the diversity of the biosphere will be reduced to its lowest level since the destruction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago. This would entail a massive loss of extremely valuable genetic stock and placing at risk the local ecosystems that make life possible.54
At the same time, human-made poisons are penetrating into the remotest reaches of the biosphere, with effects that are only now becoming fully apparent. While US industry officially dumps 2.2 million metric tonnes of toxic chemicals into the environment each year, the real figure for some important toxins, according to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, may be understated by as much as a factor of 10.55 At the same time many toxic substances which are not waste enter human systems through products like PVC wrapping which are not inert, but leach into foodstuffs.
Over 200 industrial chemicals and pesticides are now commonly found in the body tissue of 95 per cent of US citizens tested.56 Recent research reveals an epidemic of birth deformities, breast and testicular cancers and falling sperm counts as well as retarded child brain development — all attributable to the rising concentration of organochlorines and other industrial chemicals that rise in concentration along the food chain.
Other species also concentrate these human-made poisons in their systems: seals in the North Sea are contaminated by organic solvents and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); fish in the Mersey Estuary contain over 300 chemicals; alligators in pesticide-contaminated lakes in Florida are impotent; and it takes only one month's release into the "wild" between the US and Canada for healthy ducks to accumulate dangerous levels of toxic chemicals.57
The demands made by the present system of production on the global environment increasingly exceed the thresholds of sustainability. Humanity now uses an estimated 25 per cent of the ecosystem's net photosynthetic product (plant mass fixed by photosynthesis) as well as 40 per cent of land.58 As human beings claim more of the primary productivity of the Earth for themselves, less is left for other species and the human race in turn faces a prospect of increasing life degradation as natural systems decay further.
Humanity now moves more earth than volcanoes and weather combined and vastly overstress the Earth's capacity to absorb this avalanche of matter.59 US industry alone creates at least 6.9 billion metric tonnes of solid waste from extraction processes as well as 7.7 billion metric tonnes of solid waste from metal and mineral processing.60 In the last century of industrialisation humanity has consumed more energy than in the whole of its previous history.61 World consumption of commercial energy rose over 60 times between 1860 and 1985, with per capita energy consumption in the advanced capitalist countries now running at 80 times that in sub-Saharan Africa.62 Even under the most optimistic scenario of the World Energy Council global energy consumption is set to increase by 30 per cent by 2020 and 58 per cent by 2050, with only a 17 per cent fall in carbon emissions compared to 1990 envisaged in the best case.63
At the same time automobile manufacture shows no sign of stopping, with the world car fleet passing 501 million in 1997 and basic pollution controls like catalytic converters omitted on most models that will sell in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. If the US pattern of automobile use became global by 2050, there would be five billion cars, petrol use would run at 360 million barrels a day (compared with current production of 67 million barrels) and the effects on land use and pollution would be unimaginable.64
The environmental crisis intensifies the injustices of capitalism. The poorer the society, the greater the ambient pollution and environmental degradation. This is true within societies (Hispanic and black areas are the most polluted in the United States) as well as between the richer economies and the rest of the world.
The advanced capitalist countries take up an "environmental space" many times larger than their own territory, using increasingly greater undervalued natural resources from the Third World, creating ever greater waste and incurring an expanding environmental debt. The multinational firms of the advanced capitalist world also extend their "ecological footprint" through such horrors as the export processing zones along the US-Mexican border and in the southern provinces of China — among the most polluted areas on Earth. In the Asian "miracle" economies like Taiwan the lower reaches of nearly all rivers are biologically dead, cancer rates have doubled since 1960 and a government report has warned that parts of the island could be uninhabitable by the year 2000.65
Clearly the capitalist mode of production consistently violates the fundamental principles of environmental sustainability (see Box 1). Indeed, "like an autoimmune disease, in which a body's own defense system attacks healthy tissue, our economy is assaulting the very life-support systems that keep it functioning."66
The five principles of sustainability
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Humanity's future is permanently threatened by the existence of an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons with a destructive potential equivalent to 12,000 million tonnes of TNT (2.2 tonnes of high explosives for every person on the planet). By some estimates there have been 15,000 wars in the past 6000 years, with a death toll of at least 3000 million lives. An all-out nuclear war would directly kill or fatally injure a similar number of people — equivalent to more than half the world's present population.
In addition, the lives of billions more would be threatened by the after effects of such a war, including the collapse of the world's economy as a result of the destruction of the key centres of industrial production, transport and communications, and the release of vast amounts of radioactive material into the world's atmosphere.
A nuclear war would also have a dramatic impact on the Earth's atmosphere and climate. Enormous atmospheric pollution from vaporised dust and smoke would result both from the nuclear explosions themselves and from the inevitable burning of forests, cities and oil and gas fields that would follow the explosions.
Studies by both US and Soviet scientists have predicted that within a few weeks of an all-out nuclear war the aerosol particles injected into the atmosphere would so reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface that the Earth would rapidly be plunged into a year-long global winter in which most animals and plants would be frozen to death.
Moreover, the nuclear explosions would produce large quantities of nitrogen oxide, which would destroy up to 70 per cent of the stratospheric ozone layer that protects all living things on Earth from the Sun's ultraviolet radiation. As a result, when the nuclear night receded and the atmosphere became relatively transparent again, any surviving organisms would be subjected to lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation. While numerous scientific studies predict that all-out nuclear war would turn our planet into a radioactive desert, others suggest that even a limited nuclear war, involving the detonation of only one per cent of existing nuclear stockpiles, would be sufficient to make our planet uninhabitable.
Humanity has thus created two possible roads to its own extinction and the transformation of the Earth into an uninhabitable desert — a radioactive nuclear winter or a suffocating global summer. Moreover, in the process of creating the destructive means to travel down one road we are also squandering the resources that could be used to halt and reverse our journey down the other.
By 1996, the world's nations were producing goods and services with a combined annual value of about $28,000 billion (in 1995 dollars). At the same time, annual world military spending was about $701billion, 2.5 per cent of gross world product.67 Half a million of the world's scientists and engineers are employed worldwide in weapons research. Expenditure on weapons research and development accounts for nearly $100 billion, or half of the world's total expenditure on scientific research and technological development. More than 100 million people — three times the global number of teachers and doctors — are directly or indirectly involved in military activities of no direct economic use to society.
The enormous resources consumed each year by global military activities would be more than sufficient to solve some of the most pressing problems of humanity's mounting ecological disaster. For example, the United Nations' plan for the conservation of the world's tropical forests would require some $1.3 billion a year over five years, and the UN plan to combat desertification would cost an annual $4.5 billion for 20 years. These sums amount to what is spent around the world on military activities every 16 hours and every 53 hours respectively.
US ecologist Dr Barry Commoner estimated in 1974 that it would cost some $600 billion to convert US industry to ecologically pure production processes.68 This was equivalent to what the Pentagon spent every two years. In 1988, the Worldwatch Institute calculated that over the following decade it would cost $32 billion to reforest the Earth to an environmentally sustainable level; $114 billion to protect the world's cropland topsoil from degradation and erosion; $94 billion to develop renewable energy sources, and $118 billion to raise energy efficiency to a level that would assure environmentally sustainable development by the end of this century. In total, these programs would require less than five per cent of what will be spent on military activities over the same period.
The total annual funding for Agenda 21, adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, is $560 billion a year, with $125 billion (0.7 per cent of their GDP) to be paid by the developed countries of the "North". Yet, between 1982 and 1990, in debt service alone, the "South" sent the advanced capitalist world $418 billion more than it received in all forms of northern aid — equivalent to six Marshall Plans.
Accompanying the development of the environmental crisis has been an explosive growth of the world's human population. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 1.6 billion people, by mid-century there were 2.5 billion, in 1987 the world's population passed five billion and by 2000 it will reach six billion. The increase in the past 40 years has equalled the total increase over the four million years from the first appearance of humankind until 1950. According to United Nations projections, the next 40 years (to 2030) will bring a further increase to 10 billion. Of the additional 5 billion, the UN estimates that 4.75 billion — 95 per cent — will be in the world's poorest countries.69
Unsurprisingly, many Western ecologists blame the environmental crisis on this rapid growth in world population, which by placing increasing demands on scarce resources is degrading the global ecosystem. Professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, is a leading advocate of this "too many people" thesis. In his 1972 book Population, Resources, Environment — Issues in Human Ecology Ehrlich argued that:
The explosive growth of the human population is the most significant terrestrial event of the past million millennia. Three and one-half billion people now inhabit the Earth, and every year this number increases by 70 million. Armed with weapons as diverse as thermonuclear bombs and DDT this mass of humanity now threatens to destroy most of the life on the planet … No geological event in a billion years — not the emergence of mighty mountain ranges, nor the submergence of entire subcontinents, nor the occurrence of periodical glacial ages — has posed a threat to terrestrial life comparable to that of human overpopulation.70
Similar arguments have also been used to explain a wide range of other social problems. Back in 1979, Ehrlich joined with other representatives of US academia and big business including Paul Getty, C.W. Cook (Chairman of General Foods Corporation), Burt Goodman (Vice-Chairman of Heinz & Co), Henry Luce (Vice-President of Time Inc), and Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter's National Security Adviser) to place a full-page advertisement in major newspapers and magazines, declaring that: "Exponential population growth is basic to most of our social problems … inflation, unemployment, food and energy shortages, resource scarcities, pollution and social disorder."
This attempt to explain a range of social problems as a result of population growth outstripping limited resources (carrying capacity) has a long tradition within Western thought. The first to formulate such a view was English pastor T. R. Malthus in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. According to Malthus, who summarised his findings with this question:
Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind that in every age and in every state in which man has existed or does now exist;
The increase to population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence;
Population invariably increases when the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by powerful and obvious checks;
These checks, and the checks which keep the population down to the level of the means of subsistence, are moral restraint, vice, and misery?71
Poverty and social inequality were therefore inevitable according to Malthus, and social reforms to produce an egalitarian society were doomed to failure. In a notorious passage removed from later editions Malthus wrote against the radical democrat Tom Paine:
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her guests should have plenty, and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit comers when her table was already full.72
Malthus wrote his Essay in explicit opposition to the egalitarian aspirations of the French Revolution. He went on to confess that the purpose of his writing was the hope that:
If the great truths on these subjects were more generally circulated … the greatest part of the mischievous declamation on the unjust institutions of society would fall powerless to the ground. The poor are by no means inclined to be visionary. Their distresses are always real, though they are not attributed to the real causes. If these causes were properly explained to them, and they were taught to know how small a part of their present distress was attributable to government, and how great a part to causes totally unconnected with it, discontent and irritation among the lower classes of people would show themselves much less frequently than at present; and when they did show themselves, would be much less to be dreaded. The efforts of turbulent and discontented men in the middle classes of society might safely be disregarded, if the poor were so far enlightened respecting the real nature of their situation, as to be aware that, by aiding them in their schemes of renovation, they would probably be promoting the ambitious views of others without in any respect benefitting themselves.73
Thus the Malthusian theory had a direct political motivation: to justify the continued existence of a miserable and underfed working population in the England of his day. Malthus specifically opposed any measures to alleviate suffering among the poor, aged, or sick. Such measures, he argued, merely perpetuated poverty by permitting the poor to survive and breed!
Malthus's ideas found widespread acceptance among the British propertied classes in the early 1830s, the time of industrial capitalism's first major recession. In particular, they provided ideological justification for the infamous Poor Law Act of 1834. This act established the workhouse system for the poor, under which every able-bodied inmate was "subject to such courses of labour and discipline as will repel the indolent and vicious". It was designed to cure poverty by relieving the state and the factory owners of its horrific consequences, and by discouraging and even (through the workhouse system) preventing breeding.
In the industrialised countries, Malthus`s claims that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supplies were discredited by the rapid expansion of agricultural production as result of the scientific and technological advances generated by industrialisation. However, Malthusianism was revived in the 1960s to explain the persistence of poverty and hunger in the Third World, and to argue for population control as the solution to these social problems.
Western governments saw rapid population growth as a threat to political stability in the Third World. Neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich argued that food aid to poor nations should be conditional on their adoption of population control policies, and the US government, which saw population control as a substitute for economic aid, enthusiastically took up such views. US President Lyndon Johnson, said: "Let us act on the fact that less than five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth."
Garret Hardin, a popular spokesperson for the US ecology movement in the late 1960s, went even further, arguing that the rich countries should resist "uninformed" liberal values and stop providing aid to the hungry masses in the Third World:
It is unlikely that civilisation and dignity can survive everywhere; but better in a few places than in none. Fortunate minorities must act as the trustees of a civilisation that is threatened by uninformed good intentions.74
The "population bomb" argument, based on pseudoscientific conceptions of fixed "carrying capacity", has even found support from ecological economist Herman Daly, who has written in support of "current efforts to gain control of our borders and bring an end to illegal immigration".75
Hunger and malnutrition in the Third World today are no more the result of overpopulation than they were in England in Malthus's day. Since 1945 (and, indeed, as far as can be ascertained from the available data, since the time of Malthus) world food production has grown faster than population. There has never been a year when per capita production of protein or calories has fallen below the minimum levels set by the World Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). For example, while India's population grew on average by 2.1 per cent between 1950 and 1990, its food output grew by 2.7 per cent, such that the country is now a food exporter. A 1984 World Bank report suggested that it would be technically possible to feed a world population of 11.4 billion on a diet that provided 6000 calories daily — twice the typical South Asian diet today.76
According to the FAO, the production of 230 kilograms of cereals a year is required to meet the minimum daily calorie requirement for an average person. In 1997, world production of cereals and root crops, the primary sources of food, amounted to 322 kilograms per head of population — well above the minimum requirement set by the FAO.77 Yet in the 1990s each year more than 840 million people go hungry or face food insecurity,78 180 million children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition and 14 million die before reaching that age.79
In the mid-1970s a study by a group of scientists under the guidance of Professor Hans Linnemann at the Institute of Economics and Social Studies of the Free University of Amsterdam concluded that present levels of world food production were high enough to provide everyone with an adequate diet if food were distributed equally among all people. Hunger and starvation occurred because food is distributed by and large on the basis of income or buying power; hence, levels of food consumption differ widely between countries and between people.
In its 1986 report, Our Common Future, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development reached the same conclusion:
Growth in world cereal production has steadily outstripped world population growth. Yet each year there are more people in the world who do not get enough food. Global agriculture has the potential to grow enough food for all, but food is not available where it is needed … Food security requires attention to distribution, since hunger often arises from lack of purchasing power rather than lack of available food.80
The FAO has published a study81 which forecasts that production increases can accommodate rises in effective demand and rising world population, as well as continuing to reduce malnutrition. This is despite a decline in the growth rate of world grain output in the 1990s. Studies by other food research institutes generally support the FAO position, although they are more pessimistic about improving nutrition.82
What is unclear, however, is how high an environmental price will have to be paid to sustain the necessary growth in grain output. Among the negative factors are urban pressure on existing cropland area, declining irrigation water supplies and increased salinisation as water tables fall, continuing soil erosion, the shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology (and hence the difficulty in maintaining growth rates in yields), as well as the loss of biodiversity, increased carbon dioxide emissions and reduced carbon dioxide absorption capacity that comes with converting existing forest to cropland.
These pressures are further intensified as ocean fisheries and rangelands, supplying the world's animal protein, also reach environmental limits. While meat and fish production continues to rise, an increasing proportion of meat is produced in feedlots while chronic overfishing continues to threaten the productivity and viability of entire marine ecosystems.
These pressures increase the urgency of treating the problem of hunger at its roots — unequal access to resources, and the inability of the poor to purchase them, rather than from overpopulation or insufficient production.
Nor is poverty in the Third World a product of overpopulation. If anything, rapid population growth is a consequence rather than a cause of poverty. In conditions in which poor sanitation and lack of medical care greatly reduce a child's chances of survival to maturity, and in which welfare provisions are non-existent, a high birth rate is often a family's only guarantee of a minimum standard of living and a moderate level of security in old age.
Experience in the industrialised countries in which population growth rates are less than 0.5 per cent (implying a doubling time of more than 150 years), shows that lower birth rates and a state of equilibrium between births and deaths are results of urbanisation, adequate nutrition, improved heath, education and social services, and higher social status for women, all of which accompany industrialisation. As the 1974 World Population Conference observed, "development is the best contraceptive".
The inability of most Third World countries to achieve such development is a result of the imposition, through colonialism and postwar neocolonialism, of a pattern of development that treats some countries as sources of cheap labour, material resources (minerals and export crops), markets and profits for monopoly corporations of the industrialised capitalist nations.
To take just one example, in Indonesia the population explosion was set off by the introduction of new living conditions by the Dutch colonialists. The latter fostered a decline in death rates and a deliberate rise in birth rates to secure a growing supply of cheap labour for Dutch-owned rubber plantations. At the same time, the extraction of wealth from Indonesia by Dutch capital depended on holding back and distorting Indonesia's own economic and social development.
After Dutch colonial rule ended in the 1940s, indirect United States military involvement, as well as all sorts of indirect political pressure on the part of foreign capital, were deliberately used to frustrate attempts at fundamental structural change that would permit higher living standards and thus remove the conditions making for rapid population growth.
That overpopulation is not the fundamental cause of hunger and environmental degradation is also shown by the fact that both can occur in thinly populated lands such as the wide tropical forest-steppe belt of the African Sahel, to the south of the Sahara. In the 1960s, transnational companies encouraged the governments of this region — one of the poorest in the world — to promote the cultivation of cotton as a means of earning foreign exchange. As a result, the impoverished nomadic cattle raisers of the region were forced into more arid areas, where they cut down large numbers of trees for firewood.
Between 1968 and 1973 there was hardly any rain in the Sahel and the grasslands began to dry out and shrink. The cattle herds first destroyed the remaining grass cover and then died of starvation. Having lost their herds, the nomads themselves began to starve. This tragedy resulted in the loss of 250,000 human lives and the death of 20 million cattle — nearly two-thirds of the herds in Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Upper Volta and Senegal. An immense area of land — 685 million hectares — stretching from Mauritania to Ethiopia was threatened with transformation into desert by the subsequent erosion of the exposed topsoil.
Rapid population growth is, of course, a serious problem for poor countries, since it undermines their ability to maintain, let alone improve, living standards. In the context of an international economic system that consistently drains wealth from the Third World, deepening poverty and rapid population growth leads many Third World peoples to overexploit their natural resources, resulting in environmental degradation that imperils not only their own survival but that of humanity as a whole.
For example, it is in the poor countries that deforestation is occurring most rapidly — at a rate 80 times greater than in the rich, industrialised countries, where net deforestation has practically stopped. If present trends continue, during the first quarter of the 21st century all the physically accessible forests in the Third World will have disappeared. For Third World countries, the impact of this destruction is felt in the form of uncontrolled flooding and drought, soil erosion, loss of river and underground water resources, declining agricultural production and accelerating desertification. As a result of deforestation in the Third World, an area larger than the African continent and inhabited by more than one billion people is at risk of desertification.
However, if the poor nations and humanity as a whole are being brought to the brink of environmental disaster, the responsibility for this cannot be laid at the door of the peoples of the Third World. Rather, the responsibility rests squarely with the ruling classes of the industrialised capitalist countries. The governments and big corporations of the First World have imposed on the Third World an international economic system that takes more out of these countries than it puts in and that forces the latter to deplete their environmental resources at an alarming rate.
The economic exploitation of Third World countries by transnational capital, and the accompanying military-political intervention by Western governments to maintain this exploitation, is the fundamental obstacle to the social and economic changes required to eliminate poverty in those countries, bring about a decline in their population growth and take pressure off their environment.
The populationist argument, which takes food distribution among and within nations as given, directs attention away from the responsibility of the international capitalist system as the root cause of rapid population growth, poverty and environmental degradation in the Third World. This is why populationism is so popular with the representatives of transnational capital and their apologists. It also infects mainstream environmentalism nationally and internationally: biologic pseudoexplanations enjoy strong support in such organisations as the Sierra Club and the Australian Conservation Foundation; the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, while noting the obvious fact that men and women will, under certain conditions, voluntarily limit their own fertility, still regarded "population" as the core environmental problem. The proposed solution — birth control — merely treats a symptom and leaves the fundamental problem untouched. As Barry Commoner has commented, this is "equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard. One is constrained to ask if there is not something radically wrong with the ship."83
This truth is dramatised by the environmental situation of such developing countries, like China and Thailand, which have practiced successful birth control policies: the achieved decline in population growth rates has had little impact on the burgeoning environmental crisis.
While it is true that the Earth's human population cannot be allowed to continue growing indefinitely at its present rate, and measures must be taken to achieve a stable or even declining population, the populationists skate over the main means of accomplishing this: an environmentally benign economic system that can underpin secure living standards for all.
Under the impact of opposition to the United States war against Vietnam, increasing numbers of people in the industrialised capitalist countries began to recognise that inequitable economic relations between rich and poor nations were the main cause of deepening poverty and rapid population growth in the Third World. Awareness spread of the enormous disparity in the shares of world consumption between the developed and the developing countries. (The former, with only 26 per cent of the world's population, account for 61 per cent of global commercial energy consumption and up to 80 per cent of raw materials use.84)
At the same time, the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s began to increase popular awareness that the rich, industrialised countries were the chief polluters of the world's air, water, and land. (For example, the USA, with less than five per cent of the world's population, accounts for 25 per cent of energy consumption and produces 22 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions from industrial processes.85)
Growing awareness of these facts forced the neo-Malthusians to modify their arguments, attributing the ecological crisis to "overconsumption" of resources by the peoples of the industrialised countries. The most widely promoted version of this line of argument is expounded by Anne and Paul Ehrlich in their book The Population Explosion. The problem as the Ehrlichs see it is summarised in the formula I = PAT. Using this formula, by which environmental impact (I) is equal to a function of population (P), by "affluence" (A), by technology (T), the Ehrlichs come to the conclusion that the average impact of an individual in a technologically advanced country is far greater than that of someone in a poor nation.
According to the AT factor a baby born in the United States represents twice the destructive impact on Earth's ecosystems … as one born in Sweden, three times one born in Italy, 13 times one born in Brazil, 35 times one in India, 140 times one in Bangladesh or Kenya and 280 times one in Chad, Rwanda, Haiti or Nepal.86
Refusing to look at the social relations that determine what technologies are used and how consumption is organised in advanced capitalist societies, the Ehrlichs are unable to isolate the primary cause of environmental harm. The environmental impact of an advanced technology therefore becomes a constant for the Ehrlichs, regardless of social context; regardless of the design or intention, technology is bound inherently to be a multiplier of environmental impact.
A variation on this theme is the basis for the economic Malthusianism espoused in a 1972 book, The Limits to Growth,87 written by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William Behrens — a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their study was part of a larger "Project on the Predicament of Mankind", sponsored by the Club of Rome, a group of prominent business executives and economists from the USA, Western Europe and Japan, brought together by Fiat executive Aurelio Peccei.
The Meadows group argued that increasing consumption produces economic growth, which in turn produces pollution. Their argument rested on the assumption that each unit of economic growth increases pollution by a given amount. Taking current practice in the use of natural resources and extrapolating it automatically into the future, the Meadows group claimed that unless economic growth was halted the world was headed for environmental catastrophe.
The Meadows group bemoaned the fact that the average US citizen consumed seven times the resources used by the average inhabitant of this planet. However, their no-growth proposal would worsen this ratio since almost all industrial production would be concentrated in the already industrialised countries. They argued that the non-industrialised Third World countries should devote their resources to the service of Western industry, maintain their non-industrial methods of agriculture, and halt any further industrialisation of their economies. This would worsen the already unfavorable terms under which these nations trade with the industrialised West, thus setting off a sharp decline in their already backward and distorted economies.
Unlike Malthus, who regarded poverty and starvation as natural methods of population control, the Meadows group drew back from the grim consequences that would flow from ending economic growth. They suggested that their no-growth or "steady state" policy be accompanied by a redistribution of income adequate to "maintain everyone on (at least) a subsistence level". They proposed a world per capita income of US$1800 per year — about half the average income in the United States at that time. Unsurprisingly, they provided no indication as to how this redistribution would be carried out in a world pervaded by economic inequality.
The Meadows group did not envisage any need to change the socioeconomic system in order to achieve their steady state economy. Indeed, in their no-growth economy "corporations could expand or fail," the laws of the market would still reign, and the anarchic capitalist pursuit of private profit would continue.
The no-growth advocates gravely misunderstand the driving forces of the capitalist economic system. Previous economic systems, such as the agrarian economies of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and feudal Europe, existed for long periods without substantial growth. Capitalism, based on industrial (machine) production with its inherent potential for rapid expansion, is forced into its own mode of growth by the competition of different owners of capital for available markets. No corporation dares to remain satisfied with a given share of the market or a static level of industrial technique for fear that its rivals — domestic or international — will improve their technique or expand their sales and drive them out of business. Thus the expansion of production and the introduction of labour-saving machines is not a matter of choice for the capitalist corporation but an elementary law of economic survival. Under capitalism, no-growth periods are produced by the inherent tendency of capitalist production to outstrip the market. During such crises (commonly called recessions) the owners of industry show no inclination to distribute the necessities of life to workers thrown on the scrapheap by production cutbacks. Capitalism is not capable of deliberately freezing production at any particular level. Such a policy would bar profitable reinvestment of capital and would quickly culminate in economic collapse.
Nor is capitalism capable of carrying out the Meadows scheme for equalising incomes. Periods of low growth, such as occurred between the two world wars or such as world capitalism has experienced since the early 1970s, are accompanied by constant intensification of inequality and stagnation and decline in the living conditions of the mass of working people. It is an idle fantasy to believe that the capitalist powers would freely hand out thousands of dollars per head to the world's population and then accept this sum in payment for some fixed portion of the industrial output of the USA, Western Europe, and Japan.
The no-growth proposal rests upon two false assumptions:
The first assumption also ignores the great income disparities within the Western industrialised countries. Large numbers of people in these countries have extremely meagre living standards. In the USA, for example, 40 million people — including one third of the black population — live in poverty, 20 million suffer from malnutrition, and three million are homeless. More than 26 per cent of US housing is regarded as inadequate or unfit for habitation. In Australia, some three million people live in poverty.
Stagnant real wages, cutbacks in education, welfare and health services and growing household consumer debt — these realities, which are the common experience of the great majority of people in the Western countries, belie the image of the supposedly average consumer suffering only from excessive consumption of food, housing, clothing, and conveniences. The elimination of poverty and the provision of adequate diet, medical care, housing and education for all are tasks that remain to be completed in the industrialised capitalist countries as well as in the underdeveloped world.
Consumption does play a part in the destruction of the environment, but this is not due to the supposed affluence of the great majority of consumers in the industrialised capitalist countries. Rather, it is due to the irrational and wasteful ways in which the system forces consumers to meet their needs. Capitalism commodifies social necessities and services, leading to unnecessary packaging, planned obsolescence, use-and-discard products, and other forms of waste.
The rule of the automobile is the prime example of the irrational, wasteful and ecologically destructive consumption patterns capitalism imposes on consumers. As a system capitalism deliberately promotes use of private motor vehicles rather than public transport. Professor Nathan Keyfitz, head of the Population Program at the Austrian-based International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, notes that the ordinary working American
… eats somewhat more than an Asian peasant, owns more clothes and has more varied entertainment, but none of these advantages requires extravagant amounts of resources. From an ecological perspective, it is the amount of and mode of movement that principally distinguishes the American town dweller from the Asian peasant.88
Automobiles lead all other means of transportation in polluting the environment. Automobile exhausts account for 67 per cent of the 78 million tonnes of carbon monoxide released into the atmosphere of OECD countries every year.89 Motor vehicle exhausts are the principal factor in the poisoning of the air basins over the world's major cities. A special commission of the US National Academy of Sciences concluded that air pollution by automobiles is responsible for a quarter of all illnesses in North America's large cities, and directly or indirectly accounts for thousands of deaths each year. In addition, tens of thousands of Americans are killed every year in automobile accidents. A petrol-fueled automobile driven over a distance of 950 kilometres will consume the same amount of oxygen as a person in a year. Already, in the USA some 170 million motor vehicles consume twice as much oxygen as is generated by the country's plant life.
Reliance on private motor vehicles rather than electrically operated public transport systems is also a major drain on the world's energy resources. Today there are over 500 million registered motor vehicles, which consume one third of the world's oil production. The US transportation system alone consumes enough oil to provide for all of Japan's annual energy needs.
A 1971 study by Barry Commoner and two other researchers, Michael Corr and Paul Stamler, refuted the assumption that increased consumption by increasing numbers of average Western consumers is responsible for the growth of pollution. They examined the factors that had led to the growth of pollution in the US in the postwar period. Commoner has summarised the results of this research in his books The Closing Circle and Making Peace with the Planet:
In general, the growth in the United States economy since 1946 has had a surprisingly small effect on the degree to which individual needs for basic consumer goods have been met. That statistical fiction, the average American, now consumes, each year, about as many calories, protein, and other foods (although somewhat less of vitamins); uses about the same of clothes and cleaners; occupies about the same amount of newly constructed housing; requires about as much freight; and drinks about the same amount of beer (twenty-six gallons per capita!) as he did in 1946. However, his food is now grown on less land with much more fertiliser and pesticides than before; his clothes are much more likely to be made of synthetic fibers than of cotton and wool; he launders with synthetic detergents rather than soap; he lives and works in buildings that depend more heavily on aluminium, concrete, and plastic than on steel and lumber; the goods he uses are increasingly shipped by truck rather than rail; he drinks beer out of non-returnable bottles or cans rather than out of returnable bottles or at the tavern bar. He is more likely to live and work in air-conditioned surroundings than before. He also drives about twice as far as he did in 1946, in a heavier car, on synthetic rather than natural rubber tyres, using more gasoline per mile, containing more tetraethyl lead, fed into an engine of increased horsepower and compression ratio.
These primary changes have led to others. To provide the raw materials needed for the new synthetic fibres, pesticides, detergents, plastics, and rubber, the production of synthetic organic chemicals has also grown.90
Commoner, Corr and Stamler found that while US population had grown by 43 per cent and Gross National Product by 126 per cent, per capita consumption had increased only 6 per cent in the period from 1946 to 1970. Yet pollution over the same period had increased about 1000 per cent, or seven times over per person!
Their findings also refute the idea that economic growth as such is responsible for the growing pollution problem. Instead, they found that there was a correlation between pollution and a small number of specific industries and chemical processes. In the period studied, production of plastics increased 1024 per cent; use of mercury in industry increased 2150 per cent; production of synthetic organic chemicals, 495 per cent; production of nitrogen fertiliser, 534 per cent; use of detergents, 300 per cent; production of electric power, 276 per cent.
Presenting their findings in the April 1971 issue of Environment magazine, the three scientists concluded:
The predominant factor in our industrial society's increased environmental degradation is neither population nor affluence, but the increased environmental impact per unit of production due to technological changes … Thus in seeking public policies to alleviate environmental degradation, it must be recognised that a stable population with stable consumption patterns would still face increasing environmental problems if the environmental impact of production continues to increase. Hence, social choices with regard to productive technology are inescapable in resolving the environmental crisis.
All explanations of the ecological crisis contain some reference to technology. This is understandable as humanity interacts with nature through the technical means of production. But it is wrong to regard technological development as the main enemy of the environment. It is true that many technological processes and new types of production have sharply intensified pollution in the industrialised countries. On the other hand, the same technological progress creates many opportunities to prevent environmental pollution through efficient waste treatment processes and more efficient use of inputs.
However, it is equally wrong to believe that technological developments alone can solve the ecological crisis. The use of technology is determined by society. And it is the social system that decides whether resources are allocated to limit the harmful effects of any technological process. Commoner has shown that the rapid increase in pollution in the industrialised countries since the 1940s is due to changes in productive technology, that is, the replacement of low-pollution technologies by ecologically destructive technologies in many industries. He has also demonstrated that the motor force of these changes has been the drive by the big corporations to maximise immediate profits, a blind necessity of the capitalist system that does not take account of the impact of such changes on the environment.
As an example of the ecologically harmful use of new technologies in a major industry, Commoner cites the replacement of soap by synthetic detergents, despite the adequacy of soap for virtually all uses to which detergents are now put. One outcome of this shift is the flow of 120,000 tonnes of phosphate per year into Lake Erie, one of the largest bodies of fresh water in North America. This flow of phosphate has been a prime factor in the exhaustion of the lake's aquatic oxygen to the point that it will no longer support marine life. In 1947, when soap was still the dominant cleaning product, profits represented 30 per cent of sales. By the late 1960s, profits had increased to 52 per cent of sales. This increase was made possible by a 25 per cent reduction in labour costs accomplished by the switchover from soap to detergent production.
Automobiles are the major source of air pollution. It is clear that well-planned, electric, mass urban transit systems would not only eliminate much automobile exhaust pollution, but would cost society as a whole less and would be more efficient than the present proliferation of private cars. But for the motor vehicle companies and a host of other firms that supply them with components and raw materials, the production of millions of cars each year is vastly more profitable than the one-off construction of public transit systems.
Although the internal combustion engine is an important source of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbon emissions, among the most deadly pollutants are sulphur oxides, which have their primary source in coal-fueled electric power plants. In his 1970 book Vanishing Air John Esposito revealed how US electric power companies have maximised profits by using poor quality coal (which produces sulphur oxides during combustion), and had opposed the installation of pollution-control equipment.
Capitalist companies have found it cheaper and therefore more profitable to pollute the air, water and land with industrial wastes than to invest in pollution control technology. Esposito cites a graphic example:
The Monsanto Corporation claims to have an invention that will clean sulphur oxides out of waste gases, and is even willing to guarantee its operation … Monsanto itself, whose sulphur dioxide emissions are considerable, refuses to install its own device … The reason is clear. Despite the fact that it sells control devices, Monsanto has made the calculation that it is cheaper to continue to pollute than to expend money for control.91
The specific purpose of pollution control technology is not primarily to increase the output of saleable goods per unit of labour (the driving force in the introduction of new technology under capitalism) but to protect the natural environment and the health of workers and the community as a whole.
However, as Commoner notes:
The technology required for pollution controls, unlike ordinary technology, does not add to the value of saleable goods … Since continued increase in productivity is closely linked to profitability, it is essential to the health of a private enterprise economy. Therefore, there appears to be a basic conflict between pollution control and what is often regarded as a fundamental requirement of the private enterprise system — the continued maximisation of productivity.92
To prevent the discharge of pollutants into the atmosphere, rivers and ocean, efficient waste-treatment systems have been designed, but because their installation would cut into corporate profits they have not been widely used. For example, for more than two decades highly efficient methods have existed for cleansing air of sulphur dioxide, providing purity levels up to 95 per cent, yet thermal power stations, steel and non-ferrous metal industries continue to release millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the air every year in the developing world, almost offsetting whatever gains have been achieved in the advanced capitalist countries through increased energy efficiency, cleaner technologies and the switch to cleaner fuels, such as natural gas.
Purification is not the only, nor even the most effective means of preventing pollution. Technical progress has long since made it possible to use all substances involved in any technological process, thus mimicking nature's ecosystems in which the waste produced by one organism serves as a source of energy or body-building material for other species. The development of such waste-recycling technologies would not only safeguard the environment, but would increase the efficiency of production. For example, a new method of obtaining sulphuric acid through the trickle-phase oxidation of sulphur dioxide at high temperatures not only stops the emission of this dangerous gas into the atmosphere but is hundreds of times more efficient per unit of volume of the basic reaction equipment than the old method of producing sulphuric acid.
Commoner cites a further example of this kind of technological development, the recycling of human wastes:
Suppose … that the sewage, instead of being introduced into surface waters as it is now, whether directly or following treatment, is instead transported from urban collection systems by pipeline to agricultural areas, where — after appropriate sterilisation procedures — it is incorporated into the soil. Such a pipeline would literally reincorporate the urban population into the soil's ecological cycle. This would restore the integrity of that cycle and incidentally end the need for inorganic fertiliser, which puts a stress on the aquatic cycle. The urban population is then no longer external to the soil cycle and is therefore incapable either of generating a negative biological stress upon it or of exerting a positive biological stress on the aquatic ecosystem. But note that this state of zero environmental impact is not achieved by a return to primitive conditions; it is not the people who are returned to the land but the sewage. This requires a new technological advance: the construction of a sewage pipeline system.
Ecological survival does not mean the abandonment of technology. Rather, it requires that technology be derived from a scientific analysis that is appropriate to the natural world on which technology intrudes.93
In their 1998 book Factor Four: Doubling Wealth — Halving Resource Use, Ernst von Weizsäcker, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins list 50 examples of technologies that would quadruple resource productivity, ranging from "hypercars" that cross the US on one tank of fuel, various forms of super-insulation, low energy refrigeration and air conditioning, drip irrigation and various energy-efficient transport systems. These examples confirm that the technological preconditions for sustainability already exist.94
An experiment at Penn State University by Louis Kardos indicated that piping sewage into agricultural areas would not only produce a qualitative reduction in phosphate and nitrate pollution of the water, but would also produce per hectare yields twice as large as those obtained with chemical fertilisers.
Of course, the introduction of a sewage recycling system would threaten the profits of the chemical and agribusiness monopolies. Indeed, it can be expected that the owners of industry will mount intensive resistance to the adoption of thorough recycling of key resources since they find it less expensive and thus more profitable to utilise primary raw materials and to dump the waste products into the environment. Rather than expending money on ways to prevent pollution, the big corporations, with their profits still overwhelmingly dependent on a massively polluting capital stock, prefer antipollution programs that aim to reverse some of the damage after it has been done. Such programs can be carried out at a pace that protects profits, at taxpayers' expense, and can even become another source of profit for the polluters.
Under capitalism, the very path of scientific research, the eventual application of scientific discoveries in new products and techniques and the methods of mass reproduction of these products is overwhelmingly conditioned by the need for capital to make an adequate return on its investments. This reality alone can explain: the universalisation of the automobile-freeway complex and the enforced destruction of public transport systems; agricultural biotechnology that makes crops increasingly dependent on the application of the products of the agrochemical companies; and the fact that nuclear power continues to receive far larger government subsidies than all renewables.
The power and environmental impact of modern technology is so intense and wide-ranging that its shortsighted application to nature can have, and is having, catastrophic results. This has led some environmentalists to urge the abandonment of industrial technology and a return to a pre-industrial, self-sufficient, agrarian, village-based economy as the only way to preserve the natural equilibrium of the biosphere. Such a proposal is not only reactionary in the most literal sense of the term, but also totally untenable.
Firstly, it would mean the death, through starvation alone, of much of the world's current population. Modern industrialised agriculture produces cereal crop yields of 6000-8000 kilograms per hectare. Using such industrial farming techniques, each hectare of cultivated land can support 25-35 people at the minimum level of 230 kilograms per capita. Non-industrial farming techniques produce only enough to support about one person per hectare.
Using currently cultivated land, pre-industrial methods of cereal production would be sufficient to provide the minimum daily calorie requirements for about 1400 million people, that is, less than one-third of the world's present population. Indeed, prior to industrialisation, the world's population reached a maximum of 600 million, one-eighth its present number.
Secondly, the great majority of the world's population would not voluntarily submit to death by starvation. Nor is it likely that the few hundred millions who would be able to survive would be content to eat just enough to appease their hunger, let alone willingly forego the general quality of life that modern industry, science and technology makes possible. Deindustrialisation would therefore require the global imposition of a permanent totalitarian regime so malevolently inhuman it would make Pol Pot's genocidal tyranny in Cambodia appear benign by comparison. In the face of massive popular resistance, including from the highly skilled and organised workers of the industrialised countries, such a regime could only come to power and maintain itself by using the fiendish weapons and technical instruments of social control that industrial production and technology make possible, thus defeating the very rationale for its own existence.
Lastly, a return to a pre-industrial, agrarian society would not even provide an automatic guarantee against environmental destruction. The advocates of this solution often have a romanticised view of pre-industrial societies as simple, natural and harmoniously integrated with nature. But pre-industrial societies often caused severe environmental problems. For example, hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa, North