Business ethics assignment

TOO MANY PEOPLE? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

Ian Angus and Simon Butler

(!) Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

© 2011 Ian and Simon Butler

Published in 2011 by Haymarket Books

PO Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

www.haymarketbooks.org

773-583-7884

ISBN: 978-1-60846-140-0

Trade distribution:

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Cover design by Ragina Johnson. Cover image of rooftops in the Mincira slum in Rio de

Janeiro, Brazil, by Felipe Dana, Associated Press.

Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.

Printed in Canada by union labor on recycled paper containing 100 percent

postconsumer waste in accordance with the guidelines of the Green Press Initiative,

www.greenpressinitiative.org.

Library cataloging-in-publication data is available.

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Foreword by Betsy Hartmann

Foreword by Joel Kove1

Acknowledgments

On Terminology

Introduction

Blaming People 1 Are People the Problem?

Table of Contents

ix

Xlll

XIX

. XXi

1

7 2 Varieties of Population ism Today 23

The Failures of Populationism 3 Dissecting Those "Overpopulation" NUqlbers 35 4 Is the World Full? 55 5 The Bomb That Didn't Explode 63 6 Too Many Mouths to Feed? 71

Control Coercion 7 The Populationist War against the Poor 83 8 Control without Coercion? 97

Greens versus Immigrants? 9 Lifeboat Ethics 109 10 Allies, Not Enemies 123

Production, Consumption, Revolution 11 Too Many Consumers? 135 12 The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 151

12: The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty

market] rarely has anything to do with choice or freedom, since

those are all determined for us in advance, whether we are talking

about new model cars, toys, or television programs: we choose

among those, no doubt, but we can scarcely be said to have a say

in actually choosing any of them. -Fredric Jameson'

Whenever an environmental disaster occurs, someone blames it on consumers. Mter the supertanker Exxon Valdez spilled eleven million gallons

of crude oil in 1989, Greenpeace produced ads that featured a picture

of the captain and the headline "It wasn't his driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours." The ad continued: "It would be easy to blame the Valdez oil spill on one man. Or one company. Or even

one industry. Too easy. Because the truth is, the spill was caused by a

nation drunk on oiL"2

Similarly, during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in

2010, the British Guardian published an article headlined "We're all

to blame for the oil spill."

Moreover, and perhaps most important, we should not only con­ sider responsibility for oil production but also for oil consump­ tion. Business and finance are not isolated from our own choices. Companies such as BP can only do what they do because we want what they sell. We're all too happy with cheap oil ...

151

152 Too Many People?

As consumers, we continue to depend on oil in various ways and therefore maintain the oil-hungry system that makes oil com­

3 panies drill in deep water and undertake other risky activities.

We could cite many more examples, all promoting the same sim­

ple lesson: If only "we" would kick our addiction to oil, then "they"

would stop destroying the environment. If "we" would just use less

oil, then "they" wouldn't have to drill in environmentally sensitive

areas like the Gulf of Mexico. Such views rest on the implicit assumption that corporations-

indeed the capitalist economy as a whole-are driven by consumers'

desires and choices, as displayed in the market. Economist Mark

Perry of t~e right-wing American Enterprise Institute explains:

Consumers are the kings and queens of the market economy, and ultimately they reign supreme over corporations and their employ­ ees ... In a market economy, it is consumers, not businesses, who ultimately make all of the decisions. When they vote in the mar­ ketplace with their dollars, consumers decide which products, busi­ nesses, and industries survive--and which ones fail."4

This view, usually called consumer sovereignty, is widely held not

just by conservative economists but by commentators of many political

stripes. Indeed, it is the core concept of mainstream economic theory.

The concept of consumer sovereignty is of central importance to neo-classical economic theory: it is the cornerstone around which the whole edifice of consumer and production theory is con­ structed. It embodies the main principle of neo-classical econom­ ics, namely, that the satisfaction of consumers' wants directs the purpose of all economic activity. Production is the means, cor-­

sumption is the end ... To be sovereign means to have sole power and the view asso­

ciated with consumer sovereignty sees the consumer as having sole power in the economy to decide what is produced, how much is produced and how the produced goods are allocated. Only those

are produced that consumers want, and the quantity pro­ duced is determined by how much consumers want them.

s

The of Consumer Sovereignty 153

Although it is seldom made explicit, the concept of consumer

sovereignty is a cornerstone of all populationist accounts of the envi­ ronmental crisis. As consumers, we get what we want through the

responsive market. We are destroying the environment because we

want too much of the wrong things. If forests are cut down, it's be­

cause consumers want more wood products, or more of the products

that will grow where forests used to be. If oil companies destroy

ecosystems, it's because more consumers want more gasoline.

That's why corporations are rarely mentioned in populationist

writing: the producers of ever-increasing quantities ofgoods are sim­

ply acting to fulfill consumer demand, which is growing because the

number of consumers is increasing.

If that's true, then the entire super-polluting system results from

consumer decisions, and we have only three options: reduce the num­

ber of consumers, or persuade consumers to consume less, or both.

The manipulated market The concept of consumer sovereignty rests on the absurd idea that

manufacturers and others simply wait for us to declare our desires

and then hasten to do as we demand. In mainstream economic theory,

the essential business functions of marketing and advertising exist

only to inform us about possible choices we might make to satisfY

our independently determined wants.

Ecosocialist Michael Lowy writes: "Contrary to the claim of rree­ market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms

usually create the demand for their products by various marketing

techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising

plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by

inventing false 'needs' and by stimulating the formation ofcompulsive

consumption habits."6

As the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote more

154 Too Many p~ople?

than fifty years ago in his classic book The Affluent Society, the theory

of consumer sovereignty ignores the "central function" of advertising

and marketing, which is "to bring into being wants that did not pre­

viously exist." Far from just responding to consumer desires, market­

ing "creates the wants it seeks to satisfy." This, Galbraith wrote, "would be regarded as elementary by the

most retarded student in the nation's most primitive school of busi­ ness administration." Only economists refuse to understand it: "they'

have closed their eyes (and ears) to the most intrusive of all economic

phenomena, namely, modern want creation."7

Later, in The New Industrial State, Galbraith elaborated on the

vital importance of marketing-which he called the management of

demand-to modern capitalism.

The control or management ofdemand is, in fact, a vast and rapidly growing industry in itselE It embraces a huge network of commu­ nications, a great array of merchandising and selling organizations, nearly the entire advertising industry, numerous anciitary research, training, and other related services and much more. In everyday parlance, this great machine and the demanding and varied talents that it employs are said to be engaged in selling goods. In less am­ biguous language, it means that it is engaged in the management

of those who buy goods.8

To suggest that this effort has no effect on buyers would mean, Gal-<;

braith wrote, that industry was knowingly wasting billions of dollars,!~, increasing prices, and lowering profits, for no purpose at all. He

that idea nonsense. Galbraith argued that even when advertising doesn't

some individuals to buy specific products, it performs a more !!eneraJ'~

function on behalf of the system as a whole:

Along with bringing demand under substantial control, it provides,

in the aggregate, a relendess propaganda on behalf of goods in general. From early morning until late at night, people are informed of the services rendered by goods-of their profound indispensability ...

The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 155

The consequence is that while goods become ever more abun­ dant, they do not seem to be any less important. On the contrary, it requires an act ofwill to imagine that anything else is so important. Morally we agree that the supply ofgoods is not a measure ofhuman achievement; in fact, we take for granted that it will be so regarded.9

In The Consumer Trap, Michael Dawson argues that advertising

has to be understood as part of a much larger marketing process that

aims "to make commoners' off-the-job habits better serve corporate

bottom lines."

Big businesses in the United States now spend well over a trillion dollars a year on marketing. This is double Americans' combined an­ nual spending on all public and private education, from kindergartens through graduate schools. It also works out to around four thousand dollars a year for each man, woman, and child in the country.

Dawson calls this process a form of"class struggle from above."

On our side of such struggles, within broad limits-for example, we must eat, drink, and sleep-we have the power to choose what we do with our free time, and we fight to make that time as fulfill­ ing as possible. Meanwhile, big businesses have the power to im­ plant objects, images, messages, and material infrastructures in our off-the-job behavior settings, and, thereby, to influence the choices we make in our personallives.10

This is not to suggest that we are just helpless victims of all­

powerful marketing monsters. It is always possible for some individ­ uals to refuse to be influenced by the marketing process or even opt

out entirely from the system it serves. As Galbraith argues, such ac­

tions have little effect on the system as such, because demand man­

agement aims to influence not individual buyers but masses of people,

the entire potential market.

Any individual ofwill and determination can contract out from its influence. This being so, no case for individual compulsion in the purchase of any product can be established. To all who object there is a natural answer: You are at liberty to leave! Yet there is slight

156 Too Many People?

danger that enough people will ever assert their individuality to

impair the management of mass behaviorY

Buyers frequently resist being manipulated, and specific adver­

tising campaigns do fail. But by spending a trillion dollars a year on

marketing, corporations don't just promote individual products: they

set the terms under which the market operates, define the range of

permissible choices, and promote the constant expansion of needs

and purchases that their profits depend on. They wouldn't spend the

money if it wasn't working.

Hiding the facts The concept of consumer sovereignty also rests on the assumption

that consumers know everything relevant about the products they

might buy and so can make informed and rational buying decisions.

Of course, that's nonsense. Every part of the capitalist market

is characterized by "information asymmetry"-the sellers have far

more information than the buyers. Indeed, although economists

rarely admit this, sellers routinely conceal important information

from buyers. In the United States during World War II, for example, price

controls created a strong incentive for corporations to reduce the

qualit):' offood products in order to keep their profits up. When con­

sumer groups campaigned for a simple A -B-C quality labeling system

to allow comparisons of canned foods, the National Canners Asso­

ciation accused them of waging a "war" against brand names "in

which our system of private enterprise is at stake." Congress obedi­

ently passed a law forbidding any such mandatory labeling system. 12

More recently, North American agribusiness has successfully

blocked demands for compulsory labeling of genetically modified

foods. No matter what your opinion on GM foods is, it's obvious

The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 157

that shoppers can't vote with their wallets if they don't have the

information.

But even labeling can't guarantee that people know what they are

buying. Consider supposedly green products, the goods that con­

sumers who wish to make ecologically responsible choices might buy.

A study of the North American market, conducted in 2010 by the

environmental consulting company Terrachoice, found 4,744 home

and family products that claimed to be "green." More than 95 percent

of those products made misleading or totally false claims about their

environmental friendliness. Over 30 percent of the packages featured

fake "certified green" labels. The producers of these products were

guilty of "greenwashing," which Terrachoice defines as "the act of

misleading consumers about the environmental practices of a com­

pany or the environmental benefits of a product or service." The

greenwashed products included 100 percent of the toys studied and

over 99 percent of the baby products.13

These are not exceptional cases. The balance ofinformation and

persuasion in the consumer goods marketplace is overwhelmingly

weighted in favor of sellers and against buyers, for corporations and

against consumers.

The throwaway economy Marketing isn't just advertising and labeling; it comprises the entire

ensemble of measures that corporations take to increase their sales,

both absolutely and relative to their competitors. Two particularly de­

structive forms of marketing are planned obsolescence and throwaway

products-the creation of products that are deliberately designed to

have short lives and thus to force "overconsumption."

Capitalist corporations have always tried to introduce products

that would drive competitors' products off the market, but planned ob­

158 Too Many People?

solescence involves manufacturers' deliberately making their own products

obsolete. The technique was brought to perfection in the mid-twentieth

century by the automobile industry, which introduced superficially

changed models every year. A 1962 study by three prominent econo­

mists concluded that since 1949 the US automobile industry had spent

at least $5 billion a year on model changes alone, adding 25 percent to

the average price of a car.14

The automobile industry's success was copied by almost every

other corporation. Noted product designer Brooks Stevens explained

why in a 1958 interview: "Our whole economy is based on planned

obsolescence and everybody who can read without moving his lip~

should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people

to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something

that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete.

We do that for the soundest reason: to make money. "15

What Stevens didn't say is that consumers don't automatically

gravitate to the "new and improved" models. Planned ?bsolescence

works only if coupled with intensive advertising, so it's no accident

that in the United States five of the ten top spenders on advertising

are car companies and that the automotive industry as a whole spends

more than twice as much on ads as any other industry.16

The most extreme form of planned obsolescence is the

away product; it's been estimated that 80 percent of all products sold

in the United States are designed to be used once and then mruwu,

away.17 The most egregious example is packaging, which has

called "garbage waiting to happen." In the United States, about 3

percent of all municipal solid waste is containers and pacI<aging. Ai! third of that by weight is paper or cardboard (made from trees)

12 percent is plastic (made from petroleum). The production of

aging materials uses 3 percent of all US energy consumption. I8

In recent decades electronics industries have become masters

planned obsolescence, designing and selling products that can't

The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 159

upgraded or repaired and that are replaced by new models within

months of introduction. The US Environmental Protection Agency

estimates that in 2006-2007, 20.6 million television sets, 157.3 mil­

lion computers, and 126.3 million cell phones were thrown out. 19 As

the Computer TakeBack Campaign argues, this waste allows the elec­

tronics industry to offload its costs onto society at large.

Discarded electronic equipment is one ofthe fastest growing waste streams in the industrialized world, due to the growing sales and rapid obsolescence of thes,e products. Electronic equipment is also one of the largest known sources of heavy metals and organic pol­ lutants in the waste stream. Without effective phase-outs ofhaz­ ardous chemicals and the development of effective collection, reuse, and recycling systems, highly toxic chemicals found in electronics will continue to contaminate soil and groundwater as well as pol­ lute the air, posing a threat to wildlife and people.

The Computer TakeBack Campaign supports the guiding prin­ ciple called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for post-con­ sumer electronics waste. The objective ofEPR is to make brand name manufacturers and distributors financially responsible ror their prod­ ucts when they become obsolete ...

This creates a powerful incentive for manufacturers of elec­ tronics to reduce such costs by designing products that are clean, safe, durable, reusable, repairable, upgradable, and easy to disas­ semble and recyc1e.20

The corporations that make disposable products are responsible

and should bear the cost: that concept is obviously just and could eas­

be applied to other products than electronics, but populationists

don't see it. All that garbage, they argue, just proves there are too

many people. A college-level biology textbook puts it this way: "Hu­

mans are not only using up limited resources. We are also damaging

air, water, and other renewable resources by polluting them with in­

dustrial waste, garbage, and sewage. The more of us there are, the more pollution we generate."21

The underlying assumption is that industry is just responding

The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 161

particularly appalling demonstration of how indispensable cars are in

America today.

Among the many unpleasant realities exposed by Hurricane Ka­ trina and its aftermath ... [was] our nearly total dependence on automobiles. Nowhere was this clearer than in the exodus from New Orleans itself The difference between those who escaped with their lives and loved ones, and those who did not, often came down to access to a car and enough money for gas. Now, in the recovery stage, many of those who were left behind have been evacuated to trailer-park camps, where they are likely to be worse off than they were before, in part because they cannot get to where the jobs are.26

North America's automobile-intensive society is the product of

a deliberate, decades-long campaign by the oil and automobile in­

dustries, aided by compliant politicians, to close down or restrict pub­

lic transit systems, kill passenger trains, pour billions of public dollars

into building roads and highways, enforce zoning restrictions, and

promote home construction programs that encouraged urban

sprawl-and at the same time market the car as the quintessential

symbol of success, freedom, and modernity.

The very design of modern cities has imposed car dependency

on most people.

While we can choose to buy hybrids or cut down on trips to the grocery store, the hard truth is that, in a suburbanized country, there is only so much Americans can do to reduce their car usage. To make a living, they have to work. And to get to work, the vast majority of Americans have to drive ...

Two-thirds of residents in metropolitan areas live in the sub­ urbs, and two-thirds of new jobs are located there as well. It's no surprise that 88 percent of workers drive their cars to their jobs.27

Focusing on "consumer choice" as the cause of car dependency

trivializes the issue and makes it harder to find real solutions. The few

cities that have reduced automobile use have done so not by lecturing

r 160 Too Many People?

efficiently to consumer demands: garbage is inevitable, so the only

variable is how many people buy and discard it. The authors ignore

the simple fact that between 1960 and 2000, US garbage grew more

than three times as fast as the population.22 Obviously something

other than the birth rate is driving the throwaway economy.

The case of the car In the North, the automobile is usually a family's second most ex­

pensive and least environmentally friendly possession. In 2008, 17

percent of US greenhouse gas emissions came from passenger cars

and light trucks,23 which means that private cars are among the

largest contributors to global warming. And that doesn't include the

environmental damage caused by massively subsidized roads, high­

ways, bridges, and parking lots. As a former counsel to the US Senate

wrote in a 1974 report: "In terms of high energy consumption, acci­

dent rates, contribution to pollution, and displacement ()f urban

amenities ... motor vehicle travel is possibly the most inefficient

method of transportation devised by modern man. "24 It's not hard to conclude that we should all give up our cars, and

books with titles like Divorce Your Car encourage us to do just that.

But for most people, living without a car just isn't an option-not

because they are addicted to automobiles but because there are no

practical alternatives.

Journalists never tire of pointing to the love of the automobile in the United States. But such "love" is more often than not a kind of desperation in the face of extremely narrow options. The ways in which cars, roads, public transport systems (often notable by their absence), urban centers, suburbs, and malls have been constructed mean that people often have virtuallv no choice but to drive if they are to work and live. 25

The hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005 provided

163

hours, to live in cer­

The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 162 Too Many People?

The case of the car illustrates the central problem with the idea

that consumer sovereignty drives the economy. Individuals and families More than advertising can decide which car to buyout of the hundreds of models on sale, but

HAn immense amount of effort, including the formation of a vast ad­ the choice ofequally convenient public transit is rarely ifever available.

vertising industry, has been put into influencing and manipulating the Buyers face a "proffered world of micro-choices, where Ford versus wants, needs and desires of human populations to ensure a potential

market. But something more than just advertising is involved here. Chevy is a live issue, but cars versus trains is most certainly not."28 What is required is formation of conditions of daily life that necessitate If persuasion and education were all it took to change behavior, the absorption of a certain bundle of commodities and services in

the environmental crisis would be easily solved; we have never met order to sustain it. Consider, for example, the development of the

anyone who wants to pollute the earth or generate ever more green­wants, needs and desires associated with the rise of a suburban lifestyle in the United States after the Second World War. Not only are house gases. But the hard fact is this: mostpeople have no real choice. As we talking about the need for cars, gasoline, highways, suburban tract Kim Humphery writes in his critique of anticonsumerism politics: houses and shopping malls, but also lawn mowers, refrigerators, air­

More than a few contemporary commentators equate the need to conditioners, drapes, furniture (interior and exterior), interior enter­ tainment equipment (the TV) and a whole mass of maintenance deal with the realities of overconsumption by being overly censo­

rious; diagnosing, chastising or simply lampooning the apparentlysystems to keep this daily life going. Daily living in the suburbs re­ woeful materialism of the conditioned masses ...quired the consumption of at least all of that. The development of sub­

There is a dire need to re-emphasize within current debates the urbia turned these commodities from wants and desires into absolute degree to which, as consumers and workers living in capitalist needs. The perpetual bringing-forth of new needs is a crucial precon­

dition for the continuity of endlessly expanding capital accumulation. H economies, we are systemically impelled to live, earn, spend, and -David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital overspend in certain ways. In terms of economic and social action,

our options as subjects of capitalism are limited-and these options differ significantly across the categories of class, gender, race, age, sexuality, and physical and mental ability. We are to varying consumers but by investing in improved and affordable public transit compelled to work at certain jobs and for

and by abandoning the automobile-centric policies that dominate tain types of housing and use particular types of transport, to con­

most city planning. Without such changes and more, the automobile sume or overconsume various kinds of products and services, to shop

will continue its environmentally destructive role. in various places, and to map out our life-course in structured ways,29

"Ironically," Murray Bookchin wrote, "most ordinary people and

their families cannot afford to live simply."30 For hundreds of millionsThe limits of choice ofpeople, doing without a car would mean doing without a job, with­We are not saying that individual use of goods and services is n?t im­ out access to shopping and food, without the ability to take children plicated in environmental problems. Of course it is-but those ac­ to recreation and friends. tivities must be understood in their economic, social, and political

The areas in which most individuals can easily switch to ecolog­context. Simply blaming "consumers" or "consumption" leads ically responsible products or behavior have limited impact on their wrong conclusions, and wrong prescriptions for action.

164 Too Many People?

lives and on society. As Tim Jackson writes, the biggest problems re­

quire social solutions.

It's clear that changing the social of consumption cannot sim­ ply be relegated to the realm of individual choice. In spite of a grow-

desire for change, it's almost impossible for people to choose sustainable lifestyles, however much they'd like to. Even highly-motivated individuals experience conflict as they attempt to escape consumerism. And the chances of extending this behavior across society are negligible without changes in the social structure.

31

"In the end," writes environmental policy professor Thomas

Princen, "the idea of consumer sovereignty doesn't add up. It is a myth convenient for those who would locate responsibility for social and

environmental problems on the backs of consumers, absolving those

who truly have market power and who write the rules of the game

and who benefit the most."32

13: The Military-Corporate

Polluter Complex

Blue Planet ... is being held hostage to the tyranny of the bottom

line. It is falling increasingly under the domination of those who rule

from on those who are deciding much of the world's fate from the

sanctuary of their executive suites and board rooms. -Joshua Karliner'

I n 2000, the world's two hundred largest corporations employed less

than 1 percent of the world's population, but their sales equaled

27.5 percent of the world's GDp'2 In 2008, there were 166 entities

in the world with annual sales or GDP of $50 billion or more: only

60 of them were countries; 106 were corporations.3

And yet most books that attribute the environmental crisis to over­

population have little or nothing to say about the role of corporations.

Even the word corporation appears only three times in passing (once in

a footnote) in the Ehrlichs' The Population Explosion; only twice, both

times as part of an organization's name, in Brian O'Neill's Population

and Climate Change; and not at all in James Lovelock's The Ages ofGaia. Focusing on the abstraction of"population" draws attention away

from the social and institutional causes of the global crisis. The impact

of the super-rich on the environment results not primarily from their

individual greedy gluttony but from their ownership and control of

organizations and institutions whose ecocidal activities far exceed

those of any individual or group of individuals.

As an example, consider ...

165

236 Too Many People?

12: The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty 1. Jameson, Postmodernism, 266. 2. Qyoted in Coleman, Ecopolitics, 38. 3. Coeckelbergh, "We're All to Blame." 4. Perry, "Consumer, Not Corporate."

5. Potter, Society and the Social Sciences, 90-91. 6. L6wy, "Advertising Is a 'Serious Health Threat.'"

7. Galbraith, The Essential, 34-35. 8. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 247.

9. Ibid., 259-60. 10. Dawson, The Consumer Trap, 1, 134. 11. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 259-60.

12. Cotton, A Consumers' Republic, 69. 13. Terrachoice, "Terrachoice 2010 Sins"; Terrachoice, The Sins ofGreenwashing, 20. 14. Fisher, Griliches, and Kaysen, "Costs of Automobile Model Changes," 450.

15. Ibid., 153. 16. Nielsen Company, "U.S. Ad Spending."

17. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 6. 18. EPA, "Municipal Solid Waste," 6.

19. EPA, "Statistics on the Management."

20. Computer TakeBack Campaign, "Platform."

21. Tobin and Dusheck,Asking about Lije, 592. 22. According to the US Census Bureau, population grew 50 percent, from 179 mil­

lion to 281 million. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, mu­

nicipal solid waste grew 170 percent, from 88 million to 239 million tons.

23. Environmental Protection "Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emis­

sions," tables ES-2 and 2-15.

24. Snell, "American Ground Transport."

25. Foster, Ecology against Capitalism, 101.

26. Waller, '~uto-mobi1ity," 19.

27. Ibid., 20. 28. Dawson, The Consumer Trap, 144. 29. Humphery, Excess, 7, 133. 30. Bookchin, "On Growth and Consumerism."

31. Jackson, Prosperity without Growth, 153. 32. Princen, "Consumer Sovereignty and Sacrifice," 152.

13: The Military-Corporate Pollution Complex 1. Karliner, The Corporate Planet, 3. 2. Anderson and Cavanaugh, "Top 200."

Notes 237

3. Kothkopt, Superclass, 34. 4. Shnayerson, "Sand Simeon."

5. Thornton, "Ira Rennert's House of Debt"; Hellman, "Rennert Redux." 6. EPA, "Superfund Program"; Allan, "DOT Files Civil Action."

7. Garrison, "Doe Run Lead Smelter." 8. O'Shaughnessy, "Poisoned 9. Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense, "IACHR Will Exam­

ine Case."

10. Blacksmith, 10 Most Polluted Places 2007."

11. Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg, The Treadmill ofProduction, 20, 22. 12. Dawson, The Consumer Trap, 144. 13. Coleman, Ecopolitics, 38. 14. "Environmental "91.

15. 91.

16. Trucost, "Universal Ownership," 2.

17. Ibid., 6.

18. More precisely, EBITDA earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amor­

tization.

19. "Carbon Risks," 22-23.

20. Harman, Zombie Capitalism, 311. 21. Karbuz, "000 Energy Use in 2009." 22. Sanders, The Green Zane. 23. Reisch and Kretzmann, A Climate ofWar. 24. Eisler, "Pollution Cleanups."

25. Schwartz, '~tomic Audit," 2; Durant, The Greening ofthe US Military, 21. 26. Qyoted in McNally,Another World Is Possible, 233.

14: A System of Growth and Waste 1. Bookchin, Remaking 2. Simms, Johnson, and Chowla, Growth Isn't Possible, 5. 3. White, "The Barbaric Heart." 4. Hamilton, Growth Fetish, 2. 5. Nadeau, Wealth ofNature, 113. 6. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 46. 7. Travis, "Sustainable Capitalism?" 99. 8. Smith, "Beyond Growth or beyond Capitalism?" 30-31.

9. Bowles, Roosevelt, and Richards, Understanding Capitalism, 152. 10. Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 28-29. 11. Ecosocialist International Network, "Belem Ecosocialist Declaration."

12. Matthews et al., The Weight ofNations, 2.