It is commonplace to observe that the current pattern of material consumption is environmentally unsustainable. We hear statements along the lines that if everyone in the world were to consume as much as the average consumer in the rich countries we would require four planets the size of Earth. For the most part, the general public’s reaction to declarations by scientists and environmental activists that the expansion of the economy cannot be sustained physically is one of short-lived alarm followed by passivity, as if the problems are too overwhelming to dwell on. The implication of the unsustainability of material consumption levels—that we may need to transform our ways of living—challenges some of the most fundamental beliefs about how we live and how the future will unfold, a world view in which continued growth is assumed. The political aspirations of environmentalism are hamstrung by growth fetishism: however much people may agree that we need to change our lifestyles so that we tread more lightly on Earth, when put to the test most people go cold. The attachments appear too strong. In contrast, socialist revolutionaries had an easier task because they promised better material living standards for the mass of ordinary people.
Economists and business representatives respond to the claim that economic growth is unsustainable with the claim that technology will save the day. This is an appealing argument because it permits a reconciliation of the conflict between our altruistic desire to see a more healthy environment and our self-centred desire to consume more. It is true that technological change has in some instances sharply reduced the volume of resources needed to produce certain goods and services. Silicon fibres substitute for copper wires; compared with 30 years ago, much less aluminium is now used to make a can; and recycling has had a major impact on the use of virgin materials in paper making. But the fact remains that the growth of the world’s economies each year calls for greater volumes of natural resources and results in ever-growing volumes of waste. Whenever growth in the use of a resource (such as water, land or fertilisers) or the volume of a waste generated (such as greenhouse gases or toxic wastes) is examined, it becomes apparent that the future depends on the extent to which technological change and, in some cases, changing patterns of consumption can counter the effects of relentless economic growth. Economic growth is voracious, constantly eroding the temporary economies in resource use and waste generation that technological advance allows. According to one study of the United States, Japan and three European countries, the total output of wastes and pollutants increased by 28 per cent between 1975 and 1996, despite substantial efficiency gains in the use of materials.1 Barring a prolonged world depression, global GDP will increase nearly threefold over the next 50 years. This means that resource consumption will increase nearly threefold unless technological change can offset it or consumption patterns change markedly so that they are less intensive in terms of the use of raw materials. But even to keep the impact of economic activity on Earth at its current destructive level, technological advance will have to reduce resource use per unit of output to but a quarter of the current levels.
The scale of the human impact on Earth is immense. Herman Daly has pointed out that humans currently appropriate 40 per cent of the net product of Earth’s land-based photosynthesis. 2 In other words, humans use up 40 per cent of Earth’s plant growth. Seventy years ago we used up only 10 per cent and, if current rates of conversion of land continue, in 35 years we will consume 80 per cent. Daly observes that this represents a transition from a world that was relatively empty of human activity to one that is full—overfull. We exploit half the usable fresh water in the world, and we have even disturbed the great chemical cycles that define Earth as a system, those of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.3 For example, Earth’s stocks of carbon have over the millennia been cycled through the atmosphere (in the form of carbon dioxide), the surface of the land (in vegetation), underground (as fossil fuels), and in the oceans (as life forms and carbon dioxide). By burning fossil fuels mined from carbon stored safely underground for aeons, thereby putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we have disrupted the entire climate system of Earth, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Researchers have compared humans’ annual demand for resources with the area of land needed to generate the required resources and absorb the wastes, including the total area globally available for growing crops, grazing animals, harvesting timber, accommodating infrastructure, marine fishing, and absorption of carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.4 They calculated that in 1961 human demand for resources was about 70 per cent of Earth’s ability to regenerate; by the 1980s demand had grown to equal the annual supply of resources, and by the end of the 1990s it exceeded by 20 per cent Earth’s capacity to sustain consumption. ‘It takes the biosphere, therefore, at least a year and three months to renew what humanity uses in a single year’, so that humanity is now eating its capital, Earth’s natural capital.5 Every economics student knows that to maintain living standards over time a person must live off the interest on their capital and that to improve living standards they must accumulate more capital. Whether or not the figures are precise, the trend is unquestionable.
Economic growth—the product of population growth and growth in consumption per person—is insistently propelling this process of environmental decline. Building on a mass of scientific analysis, the modern environment movement has posed the most fundamental challenge, not just to our management of Earth’s resources but to the growth project itself. It has forced us to ask whether we can have continued economic growth while protecting the resource base of human life and the ecological systems that sustain us. Alarming as this may appear, the evidence shows that the economic losses associated with even the more far-reaching measures are generally small and transitory. The reason for this is simple. Investment propels growth. Market economies work by allocating the volume of capital to the investment opportunities available, and an environmental restriction that reduces the profitability of one type of investment will result in the investment flowing to another area where an economic return, while perhaps a little lower, is still achievable. Even if whole industries are shut down, the economy-wide effects are usually small: capital finds new areas to invest in. Of course, significant structural adjustment costs can be incurred if fixed investments (in buildings, machinery, and so on) cannot be adapted to new uses. The greatest costs are imposed on the workers who find themselves redundant and unable to find similar work in the area where they live. At times, society has quite rightly felt an obligation to provide the support needed for retraining, relocation, and development of new industries.
The cost of protecting the environment is low. Studies consistently demonstrate that countries with tighter environmental regulations do not show any signs of economic losses. In a comprehensive review the OECD concluded, ‘There is no evidence that high or relatively high environmental standards have had a systematic negative impact on competitiveness of firms, industries or economies’.6 Indeed, there is good evidence that those who move first on environmental regulation can enjoy significant economic advantages. It is well known that in the 1970s Germany managed to capture the lion’s share of the huge world market in pollution-control equipment because it adopted much tougher restrictions on domestic pollution than the rest of the world. When the German government adopted these aggressive controls, industry was outraged, and any number of economists and financial journalists were wheeled out to predict economic ruin. Today, British officials publicly express regret that they bowed to industry and allowed Germany to take the lead, because it is now difficult to dislodge German pollution-control firms from markets throughout the world.
A celebrated example of how, after predictions of ruin, industry can adapt quickly and effectively to tight environmental standards is provided by US power stations when they were confronted with limits imposed on their sulphur emissions. A unique system of ‘cap and trade’ restricted the amount of sulphur dioxide the industry could emit but allowed the participating electricity utilities to trade emission permits with each other. The price of permits in the marketplace reflects the cost to industry of meeting the environmental regulation. At the start of the scheme in 1990, industry predicted that the cost of a permit to pollute would be crippling, reaching up to $1000 for each ton of sulphur dioxide. The government was more sanguine but still estimated high prices for permits. Once the system got under way, however, prices peaked at $212 a ton and since then have mostly hovered around $120.7 Business had simply found better ways of cutting their sulphur dioxide emissions, thereby sharply reducing demand for permits and driving down the ‘marginal cost of abatement’. As for aggregate costs, when the legislation came into force in 1990, industry lobbyists claimed the costs would be between $3 billion and $7 billion a year, rising to between $7 billion and $25 billion by the year 2000. But as the data came in the estimates of the long-term costs fell from $1.8 billion initially to $1 billion a year. Not only were the costs of meeting the regulation one-fifth to one-tenth of those predicted, the electricity utilities actually reduced their sulphur emissions by 30 per cent below the level required by law.
The point here is that, while there is often a trade-off between growth and the environment, the costs to the economy are generally of little significance and often end up producing benefits in the longer term. But our business and political leaders are so fearful of anything with the potential to affect the growth rate that even a very small price is too much to pay—even as an insurance policy for the long-term survival of capitalist expansion. It is an irony that environmentalists generally have more faith in the market system’s ability to find a way to accommodate environmental restrictions than the upholders of free markets in the business press and conservative parties. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming evidence of the minimal economic costs of environmental protection and the obvious longer term economic advantages, claims that environmental laws will reduce growth continue to have almost magical power over political decision makers.
Nowhere is the political and ideological force of growth fetishism more apparent that in the long, tortuous debate over how to tackle global warming. Here we are confronted by the most frightening threat to the future of the world, set out with chilling understatement in the various reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By the end of the century we could see Earth’s mean temperature rise by 6 degrees centigrade. (At the height of the last Ice Age, when New York was several metres under ice, Earth’s mean temperature was only 5 degrees cooler than it is now.) Sea-level rise of nearly 1 metre by the end of the century (the upper estimate of the IPCC), due mainly to thermal expansion of the oceans, would see Bangladesh lose 14 per cent of its entire land area, causing a flood of environmental refugees. Tens of millions more people, mostly in poor countries, will be exposed to vector-borne diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis and dengue fever.
As if this were not daunting enough, in 2002 the US National Academies of Science not only endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions but produced a new report entitled Abrupt Climate Change: inevitable surprises, which argued that global warming may trigger ‘large, abrupt and unwelcome regional or global climatic events’ such as severe droughts and floods. The smooth curves of the climate models may hide the climate system’s propensity to switch suddenly to new states, with barely imaginable results. Even the authors of the National Academies report were concerned that their discussion may curdle the blood of the public:
It is important not to be fatalistic about the threats posed by abrupt climate change. Societies have faced both gradual and abrupt climate changes for millennia and have learned to adapt through various mechanisms, such as moving indoors, developing irrigation for crops, and migrating away from inhospitable regions.8
There is only one answer to the terrible problems that are expected to befall Earth if nothing is done: immediately begin reducing combustion of fossil fuels and keep reducing it until fossil fuels are largely phased out. In 1997, after ten years of hard-fought negotiations, the rich countries of the world agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, which would see those countries reduce their emissions by around 5 per cent over ten to fifteen years. This would have been a significant first step, yet the agreement instantly came under attack from the fossil-fuel lobby in the United States, and the recalcitrant parties managed to insert so many loopholes in the protocol that, after several international meetings culminating in a conference in Marrakech in 2001, it would, if implemented, result in minimal reductions in the rich countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this emasculation of the protocol, soon after his election in 2001 President Bush (whose victory was widely believed to have been financed by fossil-fuel giants such as Exxon and Enron) declared that even minimal emission cuts would be too costly and repudiated the protocol completely. Australia followed the US lead.
There has been one, and only one, reason for the reluctance of the rich countries of the world to reduce their emissions and so help to stave off environmental catastrophe—the perceived impact of reducing emissions on the rate of economic growth and especially the growth of a handful of powerful industries. This has been enough to jeopardise the future of the world. But on inspection the feared large economic costs of moving to a low-carbon economy prove illusory. Complicated economic models have been used to estimate the effects of cutting emissions on growth rates. These models systematically overestimate the negative effects on growth by making a series of assumptions that constrain how businesses can respond to the need to cut emissions. For example, they underestimate the opportunities for costless energy savings; they underestimate the rate of technological progress that would be stimulated by restrictions on the use of fossil fuels; and they wholly ignore the damage to the economy and human life that climate change itself will cause.
Yet, despite the fact that the models systematically overstate the costs of cutting emissions, they consistently produce estimates of reductions in growth rates that are, by any standard, minuscule. They typically conclude that cutting emissions as mandated in the Kyoto Protocol would see the GNP of the United States reduced by 1 per cent by 2012.9 What does this figure mean? It means that with the required emission reductions GNP in 2012 is expected to be 1 per cent lower than it would otherwise have been. One per cent is a tiny amount. If nothing is done and the economy grows at 3 per cent a year over the period, GNP will be about 40 per cent higher by 2012. According to the models, if policies to reduce emissions as specified in the Kyoto Protocol were implemented, GNP would be 39 per cent higher by 2012. Put another way, instead of GNP reaching a level 40 per cent higher by, say, 1 June 2012, it will not reach that level until 1 October 2012. Yet in the face of these minute effects on economic growth, the United States has refused to play a part in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. This is the growth fetish taken to an absurd degree. Confronted with a high probability of environmental catastrophe on Earth, the richest people on the planet—people who systematically overeat and who air-condition the outdoor forecourts of gas stations—are unwilling to wait an extra four months to increase their incomes by 40 per cent.10 Understood this way, the growth fetish appears to be a form of madness.
The development mentality is the daily manifestation of growth fetishism. Every day governments and local authorities approve housing developments, shopping malls and roadway projects that despoil the remaining natural areas. The momentum of development seems to mesmerise decision makers. In a political environment where higher growth is regarded as a sacred duty of elected leaders, blocking a new shopping mall or a housing development is akin to taking a stance against progress itself, a challenge to one of history’s immutable laws that few mayors or planning ministers are willing to embrace. As a result, cities around the world have expanded well beyond their optimum size, and new towns creep across the countryside, eating up remnants of the natural environment and diminishing the pleasantness of life for residents old and new.
Cities with millions of high-consumption residents act like huge vacuum cleaners, sucking in resources and then blowing out huge volumes of wastes that must be buried, dumped into the oceans, or vented into the atmosphere. Analysts have attempted to capture this process with the concept of the ecological footprint, which for each person is defined as ‘the biologically productive areas necessary to continuously provide their resource supplies and absorb their wastes, using prevailing technology’. Each person in the United States requires 10.3 hectares of land to meet their consumption needs and absorb their waste products.11 For the United Kingdom the figure is 5.2 hectares; for Japan, 4.3 hectares; for Germany, 5.3 hectares. This compares with an availability of land across the globe of 1.7 hectares per person, and ‘footprints’ of 1.2 hectares in China and 0.8 hectares in India. The cities of the West have been described as ‘entropic black holes’, a reference to the process by which materials and energy are transformed through use from a concentrated or organised form (for example, fossil fuels and phosphates to be used as fertilisers) into a dissipated and less useful form (carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and phosphoric chemicals in the waterways).
There must be something deeper to the growth imperative that explains why apparently rational people cannot accept that small sacrifices made now to protect the environment will produce long-term benefits for the economic system they so desperately want to preserve, quite apart from the wider goal of protecting ecological systems for their own sake. Indeed, protecting economic growth, and the system of private property on which it is based, has become one of our most powerful impulses, one that neoliberal political leaders trade on relentlessly. It is a religious urge. For the purest defenders of capitalism—the acolytes of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, collected together in conservative parties and right-wing think tanks—environmentalists have displaced communists as the devil incarnate. Although they are not generally conscious of it, the radical Right are the intellectual keepers of the Old Testament canon according to which God created Nature for the benefit of man. Calls by environmentalists to respect the integrity of the natural world, and on this basis to stop certain commercial activities, are met with incomprehension and rage. The right to exploit the land is, after all, God-given. This toxic mix of divine endorsement and private property rights is most apparent in the ideology and political activity of the mining and agricultural industries.
Today almost the entire surface of Earth is managed by humans; very few wild and impenetrable areas remain. Wilderness must now be ‘managed’ in an attempt to prevent these last refuges from being overrun by human activity. But, of course, management itself is a method of human intervention. Expeditions now venture to Mount Everest to clean up the empty cans left by climbing parties. Dumps filled with domestic waste and leaking oil drums blight Antarctica. Park rangers in the wilderness of Southwest Tasmania complain of the litter left by tourists. Western environmentalism has produced many excellent utilitarian reasons for repairing the damage and being more responsible about the natural environment. But something deeper has been missed in the public debate—the psychological impact of the urge to conquer.
When the world was relatively empty—that is, for the first 2 million years of human history—people lived in communities that were islands of domestication in a sea of wilderness. Beyond the bounds of village or town, the world was full of mystery. The impact of the great explorers who mapped out new trading routes was as much psychological as economic, for they began to link all parts of the world and to destroy the idea that the world ‘outside’ was unknown. The maps could no longer be drawn with dragons at the edges of the seas. The work of the explorers was not just to turn Earth into a known entity, but to domesticate the globe and thus lay the foundations of a system that now links the fate of Colombian coffee farmers to the vagaries of European stock exchanges.
Restlessly searching for new places to conquer, the growth obsession has now turned its attention to outer space, and in the race to exploit space we find the very attitudes that have been the bane of environmentalism on Earth. Space is seen as an infinite exploitable resource and a limitless waste dump. Even more disquieting, it is seen by some as providing a refuge for humans should Earth become uninhabitable as a result of ecological catastrophe. If, unable to tame our appetite for more growth, we destroy the world we can move on to other worlds. In fact, we are now seeing the gamut of human exploitative activity played out in space, as if everything we have learnt on Earth has no bearing on our activities off it. For decades space agencies have been using the cosmos as a junkyard. Some debris is deliberately dumped there; redundant rocket stages, defunct satellites, wayward lens caps and dead batteries are simply abandoned. In 1990 the space shuttle recovered an old satellite and brought it back to Earth. Careful analysis by NASA scientists showed that it was speckled with urine and faecal matter that had been jettisoned by previous US and Russian space missions.
NASA now has a sophisticated monitoring program just to keep track of space debris. It can see around 400 000 pieces of space debris among more than a million smaller pieces, the detritus from dead satellites and discarded rocket stages—from large lumps of metal down to flecks of paint. Space agencies are now concerned because an object as small as 1 centimetre across travelling at an orbital velocity of 28 000 kilometres an hour has enough kinetic energy to knock out an average-sized spacecraft. US Air Force Space Command now catalogues and tracks 8000 larger fragments, so that it will not mistake the re-entry of a piece of orbital debris for an incoming ballistic missile and trigger a nuclear response.
The first answer of the authorities to the proliferation of space junk is not to stop making waste but to build barriers between the rubbish and us. The International Space Station—a multi-country venture due for completion in 2004—now incorporates a special space shield, known as the Whipple Bumper, which is expected to reduce the chances of a serious collision to one in ten. The space shuttle now flies backwards once it is in orbit because the engines at the rear are no longer needed once the shuttle is in space and can be used to absorb the impact of debris hitting the craft. Various schemes have been proposed for dealing with the problem of space junk, including construction of a garbage-collecting spacecraft, building lasers to vaporise debris, and pushing dying spacecraft further out into so-called graveyard orbits.
In addition, as space-based activities expand, there is a growing danger to Earth’s biosphere arising from activities aimed at sending objects into orbit. In one of the worst affected areas, spent booster stages from the Russian Tyrantum Space Centre crash back to Earth in Siberia. Many of the chemicals used in rockets are extremely dangerous to humans. For example, heptyl, one of the most toxic chemicals known and several times deadlier than phosgene gas (a banned chemical weapon), is used in rocketry and is spread over large areas. More than 20 million hectares in Russia, and 81 million hectares in Kazakhstan, are believed to be polluted by chemical fallout from rockets launched from Russian cosmodromes. One of the results is the phenomenon of ‘yellow children’—children suffering from pathological jaundice, anaemia and disorders of the central nervous system. Although several kinds of US and European rockets use the same types of hazardous fuels as the Russian rockets, they are launched over the ocean in order to limit the effects on humans.
Of greater concern perhaps is the proliferation of nuclear material in orbit around Earth. In August 1998 NASA executed a fly-by manoeuvre by the Cassini space probe, which carries 33 kilograms of plutonium. Cassini approached Earth at a speed of more than 133 000 kilometres an hour and passed a little more than 1000 kilometres above the southern Pacific Ocean. According to NASA’s own environmental impact statement, a collision with Earth’s atmosphere would have seen Cassini release 400 000 curies of plutonium as fine particles, which would in one fell swoop more than double the amount of human-made plutonium in the atmosphere. The global health effects would have been severe.
Commercial opportunity is the handmaiden of the conquering spirit latterly expressed in the invasion of space. Private sector investment in space-related activities is expanding enormously and is already giving rise to intense pressure for unfettered access to space for commercial purposes. At present most interest is centred on the use of orbital space for communications since satellites now play a crucial role in television, telecommunications, remote sensing, and global positioning systems. There is little doubt that in a decade or two space tourism will became a must for the trendy rich, bored with private tropical islands and Antarctic flights. People are already booking seats to the Moon.
The commercial opportunities provided by the exploitation of space are changing attitudes to it. Segments of the space-development lobby believe that early UN treaties governing space should be jettisoned so that private property in extraterrestrial resources can be established through homestead rights, or squatting. They argue that whoever gets there first and establishes a base should be able to claim ownership of the territory. According to some activists, the United States should simply pass a law directing its courts to recognise any extraterrestrial land claim by any private entity that has established a settlement. One space entrepreneur, Jim Benson, believes it should be easier still: rather than having to establish a human settlement, if someone can put a robot on a celestial body such as an asteroid and bring back mineral resources, they should be able to claim title to it. Benson is planning to do just that and has declared: ‘If the UN doesn’t like it, they can send a tank up to my asteroid . . .’.12
Human settlement of space is high on the agenda of some groups. The National Space Society—a surprisingly influential organisation dedicated to furthering the exploration and development of space—is committed to the colonisation of space by humans. It has declared that, when human settlement was first proposed, ‘the idea that people could have an interesting life in a space station was seen as unlikely. “Who”, we were asked, “would want to live in such a controlled environment?”’ Without any apparent irony, it answered its own question: ‘Nowadays, of course, the proliferation of integrated shopping/entertainment/ residential malls answers that question: lots of people do’.
Through this exploration and commercial activity humanity’s attitudes towards and relationship with outer space are being transformed, and the transformation is along predictable lines. Instead of being a place of mystery and awe, space is becoming, like Earth, a repository of new resources that can serve the voracious growth machine. Instead of the age-old respect deriving from its inherent distance and vastness, space must earn ‘respect’ by providing obstacles to its own exploitation. Thus near-Earth orbits will in all probability be cleaned up because the proliferation of orbital junk threatens the profitability of space-based economic activities. We lack an ethics of space,13 and the exploitation of outer space reflects the dominant philosophy of value, one that environmentalism has challenged at its very core.
Although its more obtuse adherents are prone to deny it, neoliberalism is based on a particular philosophy of value. Instrumental value theory maintains that, while humans are valuable in and of themselves, the non-human world is valuable only insofar as it contributes to the wellbeing of humans. Thus the natural world has only instrumental value. Neoliberalism is therefore properly described as an anthropocentric, or human-centred, philosophy. A number of arguments have been advanced to sustain the belief that humans have intrinsic value—their rationality, their ability to communicate symbolically, the possession of a soul, and the belief that they are ‘God’s chosen creatures’.14 But the intrinsic value of humans is not at issue. The philosophical question that has been posed by environmentalists relates to the value of the natural world, and the deep political influence of the modern environment movement arises from the fact that the answer it gives resonates strongly with sections of the public.
Three types of instrumentalist attitude to Nature can be identified in neoliberal writings. The first is the belief that the environment is valuable to humans because physical resources provide economic value, so that the value of Nature is measured by its value in the market. Since multiplying the volume of goods in the marketplace improves human life, and human life has intrinsic value, unrestrained economic expansion and exploitation of the environment are justified. Clearly, this belief radically separates humans from the natural world and subordinates the latter to the former, both philosophically and in practice. Separation of the two carries the attribution of various qualities to each, qualities that often form pairs of opposites. Ecofeminists have pointed out the dualistic character of the radical separation of the human world and the natural world—the implicit distinctions between culture and Nature, reason and emotion, male and female. In these dualisms Nature is seen as female, subordinate, chaotic and tribal, while ‘culture’ is seen as masculine, superior, rational and ordered. This view of ‘man and Nature’ is, therefore, not just anthropocentric but androcentric, or male-centred.
The second instrumentalist view of Nature remains preoccupied with the physical transformation of resources but recognises the physical limits to material growth. The lessons of ecology have been learnt, at least at a superficial level. Although this view is less inclined to favour unfettered exploitation, it takes a longer term perspective, acknowledging the importance of intergenerational equity and the idea of maximum sustainable yield. Like the crude instrumentalist view, it remains thoroughly anthropocentric and based on self-interest, but it is enlightened self-interest. It forms the philosophical basis for ‘environmental economics’, an extension of neoliberalism to accommodate resource limits. The books by David Pearce, such as Blueprint for a Green Economy,15 are typical of this world view, and the fact that the ideas could be so readily adopted by Margaret Thatcher suggests that it poses no challenge to growth fetishism but seeks only to rescue growth from its self-destructive impulses.
The third instrumentalist view, softer still, argues that instrumental value can be had from preserving rather than exploiting some aspects of the natural environment. For example, preserving tropical forests rather than allowing them to be logged may provide more value to humans compared with the market value of the lumber. Environmental philosopher Warwick Fox suggests that there are four principal arguments for the preservationist view: preservation of genetic resources for future use, for scientific study, for recreation, and for aesthetic inspiration.16 These ‘values’ of the environment have been annexed by environmental economists and described as new types of economic value with names such as ‘existence value’, ‘option value’ and ‘bequest value’. New techniques have been developed to put a price on these attributes of the natural world, including surveys to determine potential consumers’ ‘willingness to pay’ to protect rather than exploit (the so-called contingent valuation method). As in conventional economics texts, this way of thinking begins by imagining the natural environment as a set of commodities with alternative uses, uses that may have more or less instrumental value arising from protection or exploitation, depending on how the numbers turn out.
Environmentalism begins from an intuitive rejection of all instrumentalist approaches. It accepts that the natural world has intrinsic value rather than instrumental value. In other words, the value of the environment is not dependent on humans attaching value to it, and certainly not on humans deciding whether it contributes to their economic welfare. A number of reasons have been advanced in favour of the intrinsic value of nature, including the idea that organisms strive for life or to reproduce, which are ends in themselves, and the ethic of animal liberation, in which all sentient beings qualify for moral considerability.17 One of the most influential arguments is the ‘land ethic’ of Aldo Leopold, summarised in the following statement: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of a biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.18
In contrast, the stance of ‘transpersonal ecology’ is centred on the notion that only the ego-involved, contracted self can imagine itself to be distinct from the natural world and that expansion of the self beyond the boundaries of the personal necessarily means that one’s awareness, and ground of concern, extends to the natural world. Mere moralising is not enough and can in fact be alienating to the public; the real task is to build not so much an environmental ethic but an ecological consciousness.19 Transpersonal ecology is a philosophical reassertion of ‘participating consciousness’ and therefore goes beyond mere rational appreciation of our relationship with the natural world. It holds promise of a transformation of personal identity as well as understanding because it poses the question: With what do I identify? Put as starkly as possible: Do I identify with the natural world in which I find myself or with a pair of Diesel jeans? Do I work for Saatchi and Saatchi or Greenpeace? These questions are being confronted by growing numbers of young citizens in post-scarcity societies.
It is precisely at this point that we comprehend the moral function of growth fetishism and its personal counterpart, consumerism. For the preoccupation with growth and material acquisition inevitably causes consciousness to shrink. The mind that ‘meditates’ at the shopping mall can never expand to encompass the intrinsic values of the natural world; it can only look upon it as a mine that provides the resources to make the goods that are consumed or as a dump into which can be discarded the goods we have tired of. The rationality of the market constantly impels us to see the world in this way. Despite its claims to universalism, the rationality of the market is in no sense timeless and universal. As the early sociologist Max Weber argued, the essence of modern capitalism lies in its peculiar form of rationality.20 Market exchange and wage labour are the pillars of capitalism; market exchange is fundamentally rational in the sense that all commitments other than pure economic self-interest are irrelevant. Moreover, all moral claims, family and clan loyalties, rites, obligations and social traditions are stripped away. In previous eras, the act of exchange was filled with social as well as economic significance, and the economics of traditional societies lay largely in systems of gift exchange. As Rogers Brubaker has written, ‘The market is the paradigm of rationality in this double sense, for market exchange, more than any other type of activity, is determined by the deliberate and calculating pursuit of self-interest and is free from the multifarious fetters of tradition and the capricious influence of feelings’.21
In other words, the marketplace is intensely impersonal, a place where actions are motivated by self-interested calculation between distinct individuals. It allows the full expression of instrumentalist desire. Advanced forms of monetary measurement and monetary exchange permit the depersonalisation of market transactions and the dominance of instrumental calculation. Not only is the natural world transformed into a set of more or less valuable resources, but other humans are objectified as rational calculating machines devoid of social value. Rather than weighing up a range of consequences from an exchange—financial implications, social obligations, considerations of caste and class—free individuals in the market can measure the consequences of their actions by one parameter alone, the monetary balance to be had from the exchange. Weber wrote, ‘From a purely technical point of view, money is the most “perfect” means of economic calculation. That is, it is formally the most rational means of orienting economic activity. Calculation in terms of money is thus the specific means of rational economic provision’.22
The material progress of the industrial revolution was thus built on the idea of calculability. Weber stressed the importance of calculability as the basis for efficient capital accounting and thus profit making. Rational decision making depends wholly on the ability to evaluate outcomes. There can be no place for intuition, let alone the expanded awareness of transpersonal ecology and environmentalism. The rationality of our economic world, therefore, is peculiar to the economic system that emerged with the industrial revolution. The dominance of instrumental rationality has seen a psychological shift of historic importance, one with no precedent in the history of humankind. This is not to decry the value of rationality as such; rather, it is to recognise rationality’s specific form in Western society and, above all, to point to its crippling effects when it is allowed to dominate all else.
Of course, this is precisely the error of modern economics, sometimes characterised as‘autistic’. The sharp distinction between the observer and the observed is expressed in economics by the archetypal situation in which the economic agent, known as ‘rational economic man’, confronts the material world of commodities. The agent acts on the physical world, which now consists of ‘resources’, in order to satisfy human desires. In no sense does rational economic man participate in the world. In contrast with other modes of self-awareness in which the world is fraught with meaning, the world is essentially dead.
In the end, it is possible that as a result of prodigious efforts and great technological leaps resource use and waste emissions will be reduced to very low levels. That might defer the physical problems of sustainability, perhaps for a long time; but the real environmental issue is what our misuse of the natural world does to the psychology of humans rather than the economy. The task is to bring the natural world ‘back to life’ and for this we need to go beyond philosophies rooted in the market.
Environmentalism and social democracy
The growth fetish is sustained by one or other of the first two instrumentalist views described in the previous section—unrestrained exploitation of the environment or the more enlightened approach in which self-interest is preserved by taking a longer term perspective. The only difference is that one view looks to short-term GDP growth while the other considers what is needed to maximise the growth rate over time. The third instrumentalist view accepts that improvements in human welfare can be had if some economic growth is traded for preservation of some environmental benefits that would otherwise be destroyed. It is the basis for alternative measures to GDP that attempt to capture some of the non-market costs and benefits of the environment, notably the Genuine Progress Indicator discussed in Chapter 2. Yet this view remains a prisoner of the commodity view of the world, only now the natural world is considered to supply an additional set of commodities for human consumption. In the parlance of neoclassical economics, the utility function is augmented by non-consumptive values. It happens that many of the ‘goods’ in question are not produced and sold in the marketplace, although there is no shortage of proposals to privatise lands, rivers and seas so that commodities such as recreation and genetic stocks can be brought into the economic calculus.
The third of the instrumentalist philosophies is as far as even the most progressive thinkers of the Third Way go. Steeped in the philosophical legacy of social democracy, they find no comfortable place in their intellectual framework or everyday thoughts for the natural environment. In his seminal book The Third Way, Anthony Giddens makes a series of observations on ‘ecology’ and social democracy, but he struggles with the terminology of environmentalism, committing one solecism after another. At no point does he seem to recognise that environmentalism represents a fundamental challenge to the philosophical infrastructure of both social democracy and neoliberalism. It is as if in writing The Third Way he decided that a chapter on the environment was needed because, after all, along with the women’s movement, it is the most important social movement of the last half of the 20th century. Deferentially, he set about to fill some pages, but it turns out to be one section of one chapter that quickly segues into an extraneous discussion of ‘risk’ that ends with social democracy and ‘ecology’ as far apart as ever.
The question of the political alignment of social democracy and environmentalism remains unanswered by thinkers and politicians of the Third Way. Because policies to protect the environment sometimes involve structural adjustment that means job losses for low-income workers, opponents of environmentalism have often characterised the movement as a middle-class indulgence. This has led to an uneasy coexistence of the environment movement and the welfare sector for two decades or more. While both are placed on the ‘progressive’ side of politics, welfare groups tend to see environmentalists as preoccupied with fashionable concerns at the expense of the real concerns of the poor, while environmentalists are often frustrated that welfare groups define wellbeing too narrowly and cannot see that environmental degradation affects the poor more than the rich. These differing views have spilled over into public disagreements about petrol taxes and carbon taxes in particular, with welfare groups accusing environmentalists of failing to recognise that higher fuel prices unduly disadvantage the poor.
The effects of a carbon tax—a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels—are complicated and the equity implications are not at all straightforward. The effects will tend to fall more heavily on poorer households, but they are in general not as large as imagined. In the United States, the poorest 10 per cent of households (who receive substantial transfer payments and non-monetary benefits) spend less than 4 per cent of total outlays on petrol, while middle-income households commit 4–6 per cent of total spending.23 Although the industries that are negatively affected by a carbon tax tend to have a greater preponderance of blue-collar workers, effective use of the tax revenue—in reducing taxes on payrolls or employers’ pension payments, for example—can produce a net benefit for employment.
As a general rule, inequality is affected much more by decisions about how to use the revenue from a new tax than by the tax itself. Proposals that would see higher taxes on environmentally damaging activities, with the revenue used to reduce taxes on employment and investment, are known under the rubric of ecological tax reform. Europe has taken this idea further than other OECD countries, and there is little doubt that it will be a key plank of tax policy in the future. The general lesson of work in this area is that a properly developed set of policies can induce in an economy structural change that both is beneficial for the environment and leads to an improvement in social equity. The ‘double dividend’ of reduced emissions and increased employment is simultaneously a contribution to sustainability and equity, so that much of the disagreement between environmentalists and welfare groups can be resolved.
But the equity implications of environment protection go much further. In public debate the emphasis has been on the immediate distributional impacts of measures to preserve the environment: the distributional aspects of failing to prevent degradation of the environment have been almost wholly ignored. The simple fact is that in almost every case the poor suffer far more than the rich from degradation of the natural environment, an observation that applies to both today’s poor and the poor of the future. In the important case of air pollution, in general wealthier people can more easily afford to live in areas with low pollution while poorer people tend to live closer to busy roads and industrial estates.24 On the face of it, we would expect high levels of atmospheric lead to have a greater impact on poorer people than on wealthier people. An Australian study of lead levels in children showed that children from families with annual incomes below $20 000 had substantially higher lead levels than children from families with incomes above $20 000.25 Thus, the failure to discourage lead use will mean that the IQs of children from poorer families will be reduced by more than the IQs of children from wealthier families. The World Bank reports that children in Bangkok lose an average of four or more IQ points by the age of seven because of exposure to high levels of lead in the air.26
The international equity implications are particularly acute in the case of climate change, since people in developing countries are expected to suffer more severe impacts. They are also in a weaker position to defend themselves against changes in the climate, including the effects of more frequent and intense heat waves, floods and droughts and rising sea levels. Poorer households are more likely to live in flood-prone areas and will bear a disproportionately high burden of the increased flood damage arising from climate change. It is perverse for social welfare groups in rich countries to object to rises in fuel prices when the most impoverished people in developing countries will suffer severely from rich countries’ failure to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, in the rich countries themselves the children and grandchildren of the poor will be least able to escape the effects of climate change.
Neoclassical economists and conservative commentators have traditionally characterised environmental preservation as a ‘luxury good’—that is, a good for which demand increases with increasing income. In the case of nations, it has been suggested that as poor countries industrialise environmental quality will initially deteriorate but as they become richer they will express a greater ‘preference’ for environmental quality and things will improve. This relationship is known as the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’. Of course, environmental standards are political decisions. There is nothing ineluctable about the quality of the environment, and it is perfectly feasible for two nations on the same growth trajectory to have radically different standards. In the case of forest preservation, such a view suggests that wealthier people derive more benefit from preserving forests than poorer people. For most people, however, preserving forests is an ethical rather than an economic concern; they consider it strange to characterise the forests as a ‘good’ to be traded off among others, like so many sausages. Nevertheless, the question is an important social and political one. Are the rich more concerned about preserving the forests than the poor? If they are, they might be thought to enjoy greater non-utilitarian benefits than the poor. This is an empirical matter, but survey evidence indicates that there is no significant difference between more and less wealthy households in attitudes to preservation.27
If our focus shifts from class differences to the condition in which people find themselves under consumer capitalism, environmentalism has a great deal to tell us about modern alienation. Marx, preoccupied with the transition from an agricultural economy to capitalist industry dominated by wage labour, located alienation in the separation of workers from their products. It is argued here that alienation in consumer capitalism is intimately associated with how we relate to consumption in a society dominated by acquisitiveness and the ideology of marketing. We have also seen that the instrumentalist philosophy that characterises production under capitalism follows from the radical separation of humans from the natural world and the treatment of Nature as a catalogue of resources that exist to be exploited. Whether resources are finite or not is irrelevant from this point of view: an infinity of resources would serve only to extend the period over which we delude ourselves with the belief that the path to contentment lies in the accumulation of goods. This is perhaps the core difference between environmental economics and the nascent discipline known as ecological economics. Environmental economics is an unapologetic extension of the old economics, incorporating some new elements in the individual consumer’s set of preferences. In this there is nothing new. In contrast, the approach of ecological economics abandons the imperialism of the old economics and begins from an understanding of ecological processes and the essential role of humans in them. Whether based on ecological science or philosophical intuition, ecological economics affirms humans’ unity with the natural world, rather than their separation from it. Closely associated with the idea of a stationary state (a subject discussed in the next chapter), the new discipline is helping to lay the intellectual and philosophical foundations for a post-growth society.