ROOTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
[Note: Most of the following is for Wednesday's class; click here for the section germane to our last session (Friday, Dec. 7)]
Introduction
Most informed observers agree that humanity currently faces serious environmental problems: resource depletion, extensive air & water pollution with major public-health consequences, massive deforestation, a huge spike in species extinctions, global warming (anthropogenic climate change), and so on
Main disagreements concern 1) causes of these problems, and 2) what should be done about them
This lecture focuses on the first question, although the second one will be addressed in the final section
In particular, I want to elaborate on the possible relationships between general ecological principles surveyed earlier in this course and the causes of the contemporary environmental crisis (hereafter, "CEC")
Western Cultural Values
First argument I want to consider is that the CEC is best understood as a consequence of Western cultural values
There are several variants of this argument, differing primarily by which specific values are charged as guilty, and why:
1) Judeo-Christian religion (Lynn White 1967): for placing humans apart from (and superior to) nature, giving humans "dominion over nature" and reduced motivation to take care of the planet given expectation of an eternal afterlife and coming Armageddon
2) Cartesian dualism (after 17th century philosopher Descartes) and/or scientific rationalism: for robbing nature of spiritual significance, and conceiving of humans (or at least human thought or culture) as separate from nature
3) Patriarchal or phallocentric ideology: for identifying nature with the feminine, and seeking to subjugate both to a masculine "will to power"
This is of course a very brief and simplistic summary of some rather complicated arguments
They could each be debated at length (and I expect we'll do some of that in class), but let me just mention a few critiques of such views
First, it can be argued that most of these "western values" arguments paint with too broad a brush; thus, Judeo-Christian religion has been around for several thousand years, so if the CEC is an inevitable product of it, it's sure been a long time coming
On other hand, it may assign blame too narrowly, since non-Western cultures do not have perfect environmental records (e.g., extensive deforestation in China goes back several thousand years, and coexists with refined art, poetry, and philosophy celebrating transcendent beauty of nature; extensive deforestation in the circum-Mediterranean preceded the spread of Christianity)
This suggests that these explanations are at best partial; perhaps it takes a certain set of values (not necessarily Western) plus something else to produce widespread environmental damage
A deeper or more subtle criticism is that any explanation of CEC in terms of "values" is inherently incomplete; in particular, it fails to explain where the values come from: What forces created them and made them so central to modern culture?
This criticism is an example of the general debate between "mentalist" (or "culturalist") and "materialist" explanations of social change, with mentalists/culturalists deriving values from other values, while materialists derive the values from the influence of material factors (such as resource scarcity, technology, population growth, natural selection, etc.) and incentives on human thought and action
Thus, a "materialist" would argue that values promoting destructive behavior toward nature are merely symptoms (or intermediate links in a causal chain or causal network), and that a satisfactory analysis should delineate the material causes favoring the cultural evolution and persistence of these values over others
For example, while an idealist would attribute the decreased sharing and increased individualism seen in modernizing economies as reflecting a change in values governing generosity and identity, a materialist analysis looks for underlying material causes (e.g., increased mobility and decreased need for localized cooperation in production, leading to declining payoffs to reciprocity)
(More on materialist views below)
Human Nature
At the other extreme from values-based explanations of CEC are those that point to one or another fundamental feature of human nature as root causes
In crudest form, this kind of explanation argues that it is "human nature" to be greedy, to act in self-interest, to convert resources into offspring as rapidly as possible, and to be short-sighted and selfish enough to ignore long-term or broader consequences of our actions
Taken at face value, this view suggests there is little hope for reforming our behavior and avoiding environmental crises
One logical problem with such a view is that it uses a constant (human nature) to explain a variable (degree of environmental damage)
An empirical critique might point to evidence that many human populations have persisted in reasonable balance with their environments over long periods of time
A more sophisticated version of the "human nature" view would thus have to argue that elements of human nature plus additional variables produce (or prevent) environmental problems
A logical corollary of this latter view is that environmental problems are a recurrent possibility in any cultural tradition, not just Western or industrial ones
This is in direct contrast with "values" explanations, as well as widely held view that non-Western non-urbanized cultures live in harmony with their environment regardless of the adaptive payoffs for doing so (a topic we have just been considering in this course)
Materialist Causes
Intermediate between "cultural value" and "human nature" explanations of CEC lie analyses that point to materialist determinants -- i.e., aspects of demography, economics, and environment that appear to be causally related to environmental problems
Main material causes relevant to CEC = population growth, technology, and economic growth
Population growth if unchecked must lead eventually to some forms of resource depletion and environmental degradation -- that much seems certain in a finite world
But asserting what must eventually happen is not same as showing what has in fact happened (just as saying that anyone who lives long enough must die of old age is not same as showing that people mostly die of old age rather than malaria, cancer, or AIDS)
More specific criticisms of population-growth paradigm are:
1) It is not sufficient in itself (e.g., much of Asia has been densely populated for centuries without destroying ecosystem; U.S. = major contributor to CEC, but not densely populated nor growing all that fast)
2) Malthusian account blames society in aggregate, rather than looking at how environmental problems may be due to some subset of society which benefits from the activities causing an environmental problem, and imposes its costs on less powerful segments
While I agree (up to a point) with the anti-Malthusians, I think they are sometimes as one-sided as Malthusians; they're right in pointing to sociopolitical inequalities as important contributors to environmental problems (e.g., famine), but incorrect in presuming or implying that things would be no different if population were stable or declining
To the contrary, if inequalities exist, then population growth can only exacerbate their effects in face of competition over increasingly scarce resources, even if this scarcity is (at least in part) a product of unequal access
On the other hand, blaming population alone while ignoring other causes is obviously incorrect, and morally and politically suspect
Technology is another prime nominee for chief environmental villain
It is clear that certain kinds of industrial technology are major causes of CEC, particularly for such impacts as chemical pollution, ozone depletion, and global warming
We can also hold technology (in the form of fossil fuel extraction and industrial processes of various sorts) responsible for producing tremendous impacts on soils, fisheries, and other environmental factors
As Rappaport (1971, "The flow of energy in an agricultural society," Scientific American 225(3):132) notes,
When such energy sources are available, the pressures that can be brought to bear on specific ecosystems are no longer limited to the energy that the ecosystem itself can generate, and alterations become feasible that were formerly out of reach.
On the other hand, it is not technology per se that is directly to blame for deforestation in Nepal or Amazonia, since the technology being used there is often no more complicated than fire and axes -- thousands of years old
Economic Growth is another factor that many people hold responsible (in whole or part) for CEC
Some see this as specifically a problem of capitalism, because of its competitive dynamic and resultant tendency for continual economic expansion
But economic logic based on competition, on extracting surplus from one locale or class to benefit those in another locale or class, and on economic growth, is characteristic of other economic systems besides capitalist ones, including mercantilism, tributary empires, as well as industrial "socialism" (e.g., USSR, PRC)
In any intensely competitive socioeconomic system, long-term sustainability is likely to be sacrificed to short-term gains in an attempt to best one's opponent
Thus, perhaps the root problem here is not economic growth per se, but the fact that competition rewards short-term gains (even if this leads to resource depletion and political collapse in the long run)
Among economic systems, capitalism pre-eminently rewards quick profits, and the elites who make the major economic decisions are often able to escape the negative consequences of environmental degradation by pulling up stakes ("take the money and run"), by sucking one area dry and moving on to the next, squeezing the goose who lays golden eggs dry and using one of the golden eggs to buy another goose (e.g., cattle ranch, copper mine, factory) in another region, country, or continent ("reinvesting profits")
Quoting again from Rappaport (1971: 132)
As man forces the ecosystems he dominates to be increasingly simple, however, their already limited autonomy is further diminished. They are subject not only to local environmental stress, but also to extraneous economic and political vicissitudes. They come to rely more and more on imported materials; the men who manipulate them become more and more subject to distant events, interests and processes they may not even grasp and certainly do not control. National and international concerns replace local considerations, and with the regulation of the local ecosystems coming from outside, the system's normal self-corrective capacity is diminished and eventually destroyed.
The roots of this system lie in the origins of stratified societies several thousand years ago (just yesterday in terms of the full span of human existence, but long before the rise of capitalism), and have been unleashed in full force by colonial expansion of European mercantilism (and then capitalism) over the whole globe in last 500 years
Given the massive historical inertia at work here, and the ever-expanding power and worldwide spread of capitalist production, is there any obvious way out of the CEC?
Our assigned readings provide some contrasting views on these issues
Low & Heinen propose that people will only avoid environmental destruction if it is in their short-term self-interest to do so, implying that this is nothing new in human history (though perhaps intensified)
Alcorn takes a more conventional environmentalist position, arguing that major env. destruction is a novel problem which must be corrected by changing our environmental values or ethics
Norgaard takes a middle ground of sorts, locating the primary source of our contemporary envir. crisis in an economic system (market capitalism) that profits disproportionately from overconsumption, and fosters it worldwide; hence he implies that effective change must be socioeconomic in form (and will be difficult to achieve), but also argues that we need to "derive a viable image of the future, to change the vocabulary of our political discourse" (p 180), and abandon a worldview based on progress--a rather mentalist prescription of how to combat the CEC
Clay provides summaries of various cases which could be used to support each of the above positions to varying degrees, though his views seem closer to Low & Heinen than to the others
Where the various views perhaps converge is in viewing communal management by indigenous or local communities as often better at conserving resources than are market forces or bureaucracies
Alcorn argues that "traditional conservation systems maintain biodiversity for subsistence and survival purposes" (323) but also that "the subsistence needs of the burgeoning global human population" is undermining conservation (324)
There is some tension between Alcorn's statement that traditional subsistence cultures conserved resources via rules limiting exploitation (p. 326) and her statement that "Biodiversity has persisted up to present time partly because of limited human population size and limited human technological abilities" (p. 325)
In any case, the era in which small, localized, communally-organized peoples with long-term familiarity with their homelands held sole control over a significant portion of the inhabited biosphere has ended, and everywhere we find nation states, multinational corporations, and NGOs vying for the upper hand in setting and enforcing land-use policy
This does not mean that locally-adapted populations are doomed or irrelevant, just that they are no longer masters of the political or environmental arena in their homelands, and must work out some sort of partnership with the more powerful actors just listed if they hope to survive and retain any measure of control
Towards Sustainability
So what can we do about the accelerating crises of habitat degradation and biodiversity loss that appear to be driven both by "the subsistence needs of the burgeoning global human population" (Alcorn) and by "the rise of the global exchange economy" (Norgaard)?
One possible resolution to the CEC is a catastrophic one: the global industrial economy implodes, human population plummets, and subsistence once again becomes local affair for the survivors, with the result that decision-makers once more have to live with the local or regional consequences of their resource utilization and environmental use decisions
But is there a less apocalyptic way out? In particular, given the great material attractions of economic growth, and the poverty in which most people in the world live, is it possible to pursue so-called "sustainable development"?
From the materialist perspective, this would require three things:
1) zero or negative population growth: maybe possible, given the tendency for more developed economies to undergo "demographic transition" to low (even zero or negative) population growth
2) thorough substitution of non-destructive technology: arguably technically possible, though counter to some strong special interests in current system
3) steady-state economy: not just recycling, but zero net growth in material cycles and energy flows
My feeling is that this last goal would be the hardest to achieve, not only because it would reverse some 5,000 (or perhaps 50,000) years of cultural evolution, but because it is so unstable in the face of free-riders who seek competitive sociopolitical advantage (no matter how temporary) through short-term economic growth
It also flies in the face of the aspirations of the "developing" (less-industrialized) world to achieve the levels of material prosperity characteristic of the "north" and seems to unfairly say "Well, it was a great party while it lasted, but it's over now and you can't have your own party"
So though I would rather not be, I am at least partly convinced by those who argue that "sustainable development" on a large scale is an oxymoron, a utopian delusion
I would be pleased to hear cogent arguments to the contrary, however; see you in class....
References cited
Alcorn, Janis B. (1991) Epilogue: Ethics, economies, and conservation. In Biodiversity: Culture, Conservation, and Ecodevelopment, ed. M. L. Oldfield and J. B. Alcorn, pp 317-349. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Brooks, Jeremy S., et al. (2006) Testing hypotheses for the success of different conservation strategies. Conservation Biology 20(5):1528-1538.
Cashdan, Elizabeth (1992) Spatial organization and habitat use. In Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior, ed. E. A. Smith and B. Winterhalder, pp 237-266. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
Clay, Jason (2004) Borrowed from the future: Challenges and guidelines for community-based natural resource management. NY: Ford Foundation [Environment and Development Affinity Group].
Low, Bobbi S. and Joel T. Heinen (1993) Population, resources, and environment: Implications of human behavioral ecology for conservation. Population and Environment 15:7-41.
Norgaard, Richard B. (1994) Development Betrayed: The End Of Progress And A Co-Evolutionary Revisioning Of The Future, pp. 173-190. NY: Routledge.