essay
Unit 11: Global Environments and Political Economy
1. What are Environments?
2. History of Development
3. Problems
4. Theoretical Discussion
5. Sources
6. What can we do?
1. Environments
a. Environments are the surface layer and the surrounding atmosphere of the planet.
b. Ecosystems which consist of an interdependence between living organisms and their physical environments
c. Ecology is the study of relationships between living organisms and their environments
d. Earth is 75% water, 25% land; The breakdown of the land area is as follows: 20% is unusable because it is too cold, 20% is unusable because it is too high/rugged, 20% is unusable because it’s too dry, and 40% in habitable
e. The environment is very controversial. Some people say we have a serious problem with degradation, while others say that liberals blow the problem out of proportion.
2. History of Development
a. Social scientists tend to believe that development does not favor the environment
b. The history of development can be broken down into the following modes of production:
i. Foraging
ii. Pastoralism
iii. Agriculture
iv. Technical changes
c. I. and ii. include hunting and gathering and the beginning of domestication. The balance was in favor of nature. Major problems started to develop with agriculture and its intensive use of the land.
d. Problems started with agriculture (iii.) and got out of hand with development and technical changes
i. Agriculture required increased intensification (i.e. using the same piece of land year round, which tends to deplete/degrade the land)
e. Technical changes (iv.)
i. Greco-Roman antiquity
1. Valued architecture, philosophy, art, music, etc.
2. Physical sciences were not encouraged
3. Only had simple technology (e.g. water pumps, water clocks, pit mines, etc.)
4. Not very dangerous to the environment
ii. Middle ages (500 A.D. – 1450 A.D.)
1. Beginning of Christianity and spread of Islam
2. Man is promoted as the most superior of God’s creations. Humans are considered as more important than nature/God provided nature to man for his use
3. Promoted destruction of nature by human beings
4. Simple technology (e.g. animal labor for pulling things, textile looms, some chemical technology)
5. Environment was not in danger
iii. Renaissance (16th century)
1. Rebirth/interest in art, culture, physical sciences
2. Christianity ruled. All answers were in the bible. Challenge to the bible was unheard of
3. This time period brought an interest in physics, biology, engineering, chemistry, etc. These challenged biblical knowledge
4. People started to reject traditional knowledge with an independent mind
iv. Age of Rationalism (18th century)
1. Continued interest in things from Renaissance
v. Industrialization
1. The beginning of serious environmental problems
3. Problems
a. Degradation of land
i. Desertification and erosion
ii. Deforestation (cutting down trees to build things)
iii. Water logging and salinity
iv. In the 1960’s and 70’s there was a dramatic increase in population and a shortage of food. Scientists around the world were trying to do something about this. This started the Green Revolution:
1. New seeds were produced which increased yields per acre to feed growing populations.
2. Problems were created because these seeds required increased inputs of water pumping, pesticides and fertilizer. This produced huge profits for the U.S. companies that made these items.
3. Consequences included water logging (i.e. decrease in the water table as more water was used) and salinity of soil due to huge applications of water (i.e. after it evaporated it left behind salt).
4. GR was heralded as a miracle at first because of huge boost in yields, but then became a bust as problems crept up and yields declined
5. The focus has changed to using genetically modified seeds which do not require as much water
b. Pollution
i. Millions of chemicals (e.g. detergents, plastics, cleaning supplies, etc.) are polluting the environment
ii. Solid wastes (e.g. food, glass, plastic, metal, wood, paper, electronics, etc.) are accumulating quickly as consumption increases
iii. There is tremendous water pollution as air and soil contaminants leach into waterways
c. Endangered species leading to loss of biodiversity (plant species, animal species, fisheries, etc.)
d. Air and Atmosphere (increased levels of carbon dioxide and methane which are leading to global warming, CFC’s leading to ozone depletion, acid rain, etc.)
i. Global warming
1. Thick layer of smoke that does not allow solar energy to escape back into the atmosphere. Instead, it is reflected back to earth and unevenly warms it.
a. Composition of the smoke layer include carbon dioxide and methane gases
2. Gases responsible for GW:
a. Carbon dioxide from burning of coal, natural gas, oil, forests, etc.
b. Methane from decaying of marsh lands and livestock production
c. Nitrous oxide from factories, automobile exhaust, breakdown of fertilizer and other chemicals used for farming, etc.
d. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) from air conditioners and other cooling systems
ii. Ozone depletion
1. The ozone layer filters harmful ultraviolet solar rays. There are now holes in the layer caused by the above mentioned gases
iii. Acid Rain
1. In many large cities like L.A. and Mexico City, you can see a thick layer of smoke above cities
2. When it rains the water depletes sulfur dioxide by pushing it to city surface and cause health problems and deterioration of buildings, etc.
4. Theoretical Discussion
a. Realism, Malthusianism and Liberalism:
i. Realism
1. Resources become more scarce as population increases
2. Governments play an important role in helping populations capture resources. Governments have responsibility for citizens’ welfare. Governments make wars to capture resources in order to achieve this goal
3. War requires weapons, transportation, food, etc. which puts more strain on the environment
ii. Malthusianism
1. Yes, resources are limited, but the real problem is overpopulation
iii. Liberalism
1. Let industries act freely and they will come up with strategies to combat scarce resources.
2. Leave markets along. Competition will solve the problem
b. Cooperative
i. Live in co-op communities with agreeable situations and self-regulating and self-governing models
c. Development
i. Poverty and over consumption are cause of degradation of the environment.
ii. We should not seek to develop and use/consume as many products as we do
d. Anti-domination
i. Capitalism is the main cause of all problems on earth, including the destruction of nature
ii. Men are more destructive to nature than women since men tend to be dominant in most nations so they dominate their environment and women as well. Women do not have as much power
5. Source
a. Culture
i. Cornucopian view says that God created nature for our use
ii. Growth ethics believe that growth in society is a sign of development. In the U.S. everything is oversized (houses, cars, food, etc.). You always want more
iii. Materialism comes about as a result of industrialization. Spiritualism has been replaced by materialism
iv. Individualism says that welfare of the individual is the most important thing (i.e. over nature or the communal good). The concept of sharing disappears
b. Structural determinants
i. Capitalism
1. Cost = A+B+C
a. A = capital and money spent in manufacturing, B = labor, and C = raw material
2. Critics of capitalism say real costs = A+B+C+S+P+I+H
a. Where S = sources, P = pollution, I = intergenerational cost of damage to environment, and H = damage to health of other living organisms
b. The above variables are not calculated within the capitalist mode of production
6. What can we do?
a. Structural changes to economies, politics, cultural patterns of use, technology use, family structures, etc.
i. Economic changes to divert away from capitalist system is very difficult to achieve
ii. Political climate is very corrupt so it is difficult to change
iii. Cultural patterns are hard to change because of their ingrained ways of being (e.g. perhaps its natural to litter, as was the case several years ago in the U.S.)
iv. Changes in technology are difficult because it advances so fast. However, solar energy, bio-fuels, etc. are promising as long as there is the right political climate to implement their use
v. Changes in family size may be feasible considering successes such as the one child policy in China and their significant reduction in population growth rates
b. B. Individual level changes include changes in life style (e.g. reducing your carbon foot print). Collective good of such changes are emphasized as opposed to individual gain
Chapter Seven in Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism: The Environment
If the life-supporting ecosystems of the planet are to survive for future generations, the consumer society will have to dramatically curtail its use of resources-partly by shifting to high-quality, low-input durable goods and partly by seeking fulfillment through leisure, human relationships, and other nonmaterial avenues. -Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone. -Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an English worker was a significant historical event, because it prefigured the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis. We must struggle to understand fully the consequences of that and kindred events, for upon them was erected an entirely different conception of the relationship between producers and consumers, of the meaning of work, of the definition of self, of the nature of things. -Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
All animals alter their environments as a condition of their existence. Human beings, in addition, alter their environments as a condition of their cultures, that is by the way they choose to obtain food, produce tools and products, and construct and arrange shelters. But culture, an essential part of human adaptation, can also threaten human existence when short-term goals lead to long-term consequences that are harmful to human life. Swidden agriculture alters the environment, but not as much as irrigation agriculture, and certainly not as much as modern agriculture with its use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Domesticated animals alter environments, but keeping a few cattle for farm work or cows for dairy products does far less damage than maintaining herds of thousands to supply a meat-centered diet.
The degree to which environments are altered and damaged is determined in part by population and in part by the technology in use. Obviously, the more people in a given area, the more potential there is for environmental disruption. Tractors and bulldozers alter the environment more than hoes or plows. But the greatest factor in environmental alteration-in the use of raw materials, the use of nonhuman energy, and the production of waste-is consumption. Because of our level of consumption, the average American child will do twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Italian child, thirteen times that of a Brazilian child, thirty-five times that of an Indian child, and 280 times that of a Chadian or Haitian child (Kennedy 1993:32).
In per capita production of energy alone, the United States leads other countries by a vast margin (see Table 7.1). (Table 7.1 is a word file attached to the bottom of this post). William Rees, an urban planner at the University of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country. The problem is that in 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land for each person. He concluded that the deficit is made up in core countries by drawing down the natural resources of their own countries and expropriating the resources, through trade, of peripheral countries. In other words, someone has to pay for our consumption levels, and it will either be our children or inhabitants of the periphery of the world system (Korten 1995:34).
Our consumption of goods obviously is a function of our culture. Only by producing and selling things and services does capitalism in its present form work, and the more that is produced and the more that is purchased the more we have progress and prosperity. The single most important measure of economic growth is, after all, the gross national product (GNP), the sum total of goods and services produced by a given society in a given year. It is a measure of the success of a consumer society, obviously, to consume.
However, the production, processing, and consumption of commodities requires the extraction and use of natural resources (wood, ore, fossil fuels, and water); it requires the creation of factories and factory complexes whose operation creates toxic byproducts, while the use of commodities themselves (e.g., automobiles) creates pollutants and waste. Yet of the three factors environmentalists often point to as responsible for environmental pollution-population, technology, and consumption-consumption seems to get the least attention. One reason, no doubt, is that it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocation. A drop in demand for products, as economists note, brings on economic recession or even depression, along with massive unemployment.
The maintenance of perpetual growth and the cycle of production and consumption essential in the culture of capitalism does not bode well for the environment. At the beginning of Chapter 1 we mentioned that the consumer revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was caused in large part by a crisis in production; new technologies had resulted in production of more goods, but there were not enough people or money to buy them. Since production is such an essential part of the culture of capitalism, society quickly adapted to this crisis by convincing people to buy things, by altering basic institutions and even generating a new ideology of pleasure. The economic crisis of the late nineteenth century was solved, but at considerable expense to the environment in the additional waste that was created and resources that were consumed. At that time the world''s population was about 1.6 billion and those caught up in the consumer frenzy was a fraction of that total.
The global economy today faces the same problem it faced one hundred years ago, except that the world population has almost quadrupled. Consequently it is even more important to understand how the interaction between capital, labor, and consumption in the culture of capitalism creates an overproduction of commodities and how this relates to environmental pollution. To illustrate, let''s take a quick look at the present state of the global automobile industry.
In capitalism competition between companies for world markets requires that they constantly develop new and improved ways to produce things and lower costs. In some industries, such as textiles, as we saw in Chapter 2, competition requires seeking cheaper sources of labor; in others, such as the automobile industry, it means creating new technologies that replace people with machines to lower labor costs. Twenty years ago it took hundreds of hours of human labor to produce one automobile. Today a Lexus LS 400 requires only 18.4 hours of human labor, Ford Motor Company produces several cars with 20.0 hours of human labor, and General Motors lags behind at about 24.8 hours per car (Greider 1997:110–112).
In addition to reducing the number of jobs available to people, advanced productive technology creates the potential for producing ever more cars, regardless of whether there are people who want to buy them. In 1995 the automobile industry produced over 50 million automobiles, but there was a market for only 40 million. What can companies do? Obviously they can begin to close plants or cut back on production, which some do. In the 1980s some 180,000 American auto workers lost their jobs because of cutbacks and factory shutdowns. But each producer, of course, hopes the problem of selling this surplus is someone else''s problem, so they continue to produce cars.
From the perspective of the automobile companies and their workers, the preferred solution to overproduction, is to create a greater demand for automobiles. This is difficult in core countries, where the market is already saturated with cars. In the United States, for example, there is one car for every 1.7 persons. However, there are places in the world where there are few cars. In China, for example, there is only one car for every 680 people. Imagine the environmental impact if the consumption rate of automobiles in China, with a population of well over a billion people, even began to approach the consumption rate in the United States.
But that is exactly the goal of automotive manufacturers and the nation–states that operate to help them build and sell their products. Not only would automobile makers in the core like to enter the Chinese market, the Chinese themselves plan to build an automobile industry as large as that of the United States, to produce cars for their own market and compete in other markets as well. If China-or India, Indonesia, Brazil, or most of the rest of the periphery-even approached the consumption rate of automobiles common in the core, the increased environmental pollution would be staggering. There would be not only massive increases in hydrocarbon pollution but also vastly increased demands for raw materials, especially oil. And the overproduction dilemma is not unique to automobiles: the steel, aircraft, chemical, computer, consumer electronics, drug, and tire industries, among others, face the same dilemma.
The environmental problem could be alleviated if consumers simply said "enough is enough" and stopped consuming as much as they do. But, as noted above, any reduction of consumption would likely cause severe economic disruption. Furthermore, few are aware of how large our reduction would have to be to effect a change. A study by Friends of the Earth Netherlands asked what the consumption levels of the average Dutch person would have to be in the year 2010 if consumption levels over the world were equal and if resource consumption was sustainable. They found that consumption levels would have to be reduced dramatically. For example, to reduce global warming by the year 2010, people in the Netherlands would have to reduce carbon emission from the current 12 tons (it is 19.5 in the United States) to 4 tons; to accomplish that a Dutch person would have to limit the use of carbon-based fuel to one liter per day, thus limiting travel to 15.5 miles per day by car, 31 miles per day by bus, 40 miles per day by train, or 6.2 miles per day by plane. A trip from Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro could be made only once every twenty years. (Korten 1995:34).
Thus it is unlikely that we will ever significantly change our consumption patterns. Consumption is as much a part of our culture as horse raiding and buffalo hunting were part of Plains Indian culture; it is a central element. Consequently there is no way to appreciate the problem of environmental destruction without understanding how people are turned into consumers, how luxuries are turned into necessities. That is, why do people choose to consume what they do, how they do, and when they do?
Take sugar, for example. In 1995, each American consumed in his or her soft drinks, tea, coffee, cocoa, pastries, breads, and other foods sixty-six pounds of sugar. Why? Liking the taste might be one answer. In fact, a predilection for sweets may be part of our biological makeup. But that doesn''t explain why we consume it in the form of sugarcane and beet sugar and in the quantities we do. Then there is meat. Modern livestock production is one of the most environmentally damaging and wasteful forms of food production the world has known. Yet Americans eat more meat per capita than all but a few other peoples. Some environmentalists argue that we can change our destructive consumption patterns, if we desire. But is our pattern of consumption only a matter of taste and of choice, or is it so deeply embedded in our culture as to be virtually impervious to change?
To begin to answer this question, we shall examine the history of sugar and beef, commodities that figure largely in our lives, but involve environmental degradation. Sugar and beef is an appropriate combination for a number of reasons: 1. The production and processing of both degrade the environment; furthermore, the history of sugar production parallels that of a number of other things we consume, including coffee, tea, cocoa, and tobacco, that collectively have significant environmental effects. 2. Neither is terribly good for us, at least not in the quantities and form we consume them. 3. Both have histories that closely tie them to the growth and emergence of the capitalist world economy. They are powerful symbols of the rise and economic expansion of capitalism; indeed they are a result and a reason for it. 4. With the rise of the fast-food industry, beef and sugar, fat and sucrose have become the foundations of the American diet; indeed, they are foundation foods of the culture of capitalism symbolized in the hamburger and Coke, hot dog and soda, and topped with a fat and sucrose dessert-ice cream.