By Tom O'Lincoln
Reviews:
- John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000);
- Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2004);
- Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy Order (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
Last year I walked in Sumatran rainforests. It was a delight, and yet … There were almost no birds, because people steal the eggs to scratch a living. Illegal logging is chronic, and before being exported to the West, the logs travel to a plywood factory south of the provincial capital of Padang. The factory employs poor people for paltry wages. It squats menacingly at the top of beautiful Bungus Bay, where fisherfolk say pollution has reduced their catches by 90 percent. Men drag long nets across the bay, but all they catch is bits of wood.
It gets worse. This is one of the places where forest-clearing fires got out of hand in 1997 and blanketed the region with dark haze; the haze blocked the sunlight which in turn killed the coral reefs. So the tourists stay away, leading to more economic desperation, putting more pressure on the forests, the sea, the air. And we are only talking about one region of economically and ecologically miserable Indonesia, which is just one part of a crisis-ridden planet. How can we can survive, and will it mean radical changes in the way we live?
These three titles tell us what we’re up against. Limits to Growth, an update of the Club of Rome forecasts, audits just how badly the planet is damaged, offeirng scenarios for coming decades. The End of Oil is a racy account of the energy business and its social and environmental impacts. Marx’s Ecology has been with us since 2000, an authoritative guide to the old man’s ‘green’ thinking.
Limits to Growth
Some people dismiss the ‘Club of Rome’ as panic merchants. The right wing Cato Institute remembers their 1972 report this way:
The Club of Rome had just released its primal scream, Limits to Growth, which reported that the earth was rapidly running out of everything. The most famous declinist of the era, biologist Paul Ehrlich, had appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to fill Americans with fear of impending world famine and make gloomy prognostications, such as ‘If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.’
Seven years ago, by contrast, energy banker Matthew R Simmons reviewed the same report and remarked that ‘for a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.’
My reaction to the new volume is more like Simmons’. Everything in the new book seems to add up; nothing seems unreasonable. The authors don’t claim to predict the future. But they offer us some credible projections on which to base our own judgements. The outlook is grim:
It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past thirty years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but half-hearted responses to the global ecological challenge. We do not have another thirty years to dither. Much will have to change if the ongoing overshoot is not to be followed by collapse during the twenty-first century. (p. xvi)
The authors begin their main argument with a chapter on ‘exponential growth’. This might suggest a clash with Foster’s book, since Marx cut his theoretical teeth on demolishing Malthus’ theories, which said population must grow exponentially and therefore outstrip food supply. Marx’s reply was that different social contexts create very different population dynamics. Whereas Malthus blamed the poor for their own suffering; Marx blamed capitalist society.
After careful reading, I don’t think Limits to Growth is Malthusian in the strict sense. The authors’ charts do show exponential growth in population and industrial production (which may exhaust resources) and they’re certainly worried about population; but they also emphasize the social context:
… in pre-industrial societies both fertility and mortality are high, and population growth is slow. As nutrition and health services improve, death rates fall. Birthrates lag by a generation or two, opening a gap between fertility and mortality that produces rapid population growth. Finally, as lives and lifestyles evolve into the patterns of a fully industrial society, birthrates fall …(p.31)
So they recognize that ‘population problems’ are social problems. In fact, declining fertility is causing angst in 60-odd countries right now – which is one reason the United Nations expects the global population to plateau at around at 9 billion. The problem, the Limits to Growth team would still insist, is that the demands of 9 billion people may be enough to exhaust the planet.
The book asks just how serious is the depletion of sources of materials, taken together with the destruction or overwhelming of the sinks that absorb pollution. Forests, for example, are both sources and sinks: if you burn them you generate energy and release carbon, and at the same time you lose their ability to absorb the CO2 generated by industry and cars. The book traces demands on sources and sinks, considers the costs to humans, and throws up scenarios. These are complex, yet the lay reader won’t be daunted, because the authors take us through them in easy-to-read installments while beginning to suggest solutions.
Scenario One is the unlikely possibility of ‘business as usual’. If we do nothing differently, human welfare goes downhill fairly sharply in a decade or two. Under Scenario Two, if resources are more plentiful than we think, we may postpone the evil day for 20 years, but then the environmental costs catch up with us.
Later scenarios factor in pollution control technology, land yield enhancement, land erosion protection, resource efficiency technology. None makes the dilemma go away entirely. However, we can still achieve a reasonable lifestyle for all of humanity, if we act now. Along what lines? The headline answers in Limits to Growth are that we need to control population, control industrial production, and change the way we live. I think all three are deeply problematic.
Population control might seem like common sense. If there are less shoppers in Safeway, they will throw away fewer plastic bags; fewer people to keep warm in winter would mean less demand for energy. But when you look deeper, ugly problems arise. Thus the authors invite underdeveloped countries to take the lead in population reduction, because at least it’s an area where they can readily contribute. But impoverished third world people put less pressure on the planet per head than we ‘consumerist’ westerners do. India’s per capita ‘ecological footprint’ is less than 8% of the USA’s, so why is it up to Indians to have fewer babies? It’s not hard to see racist dangers along this path. The spectre of Malthus returns.
Moreover reactionary social policies are linked to reducing fertility, from forced sterilisation in India to China’s repressive one-child limit. To accept these policies legitimises the regimes that use them, yet reactionary regimes are more likely to take a slash-and-burn approach to the environment. In addition to infanticide and gender imbalance, the US National Intelligence Council reports another grim irony of China’s one-child policy: the Chinese are now madly industrialising and polluting ‘in a race to see if they can get rich before they get old. If economic growth cannot provide the capital to support its growing elderly population, China will be hard pressed to support its needs once the "one-child" generation dominates the labour market.’
Talk of reining in industrial production has its dangers too, seeming as it does to threaten workers’ jobs, which only opens up opportunities for the likes of John Howard to divide our side of politics. But there are ways to ensure both prosperity and environmental sustainability, as the authors emphasise: ‘The good news is that current high rates of throughput are not necessary to support a decent standard of living for all the world’s people.’ (p. 9, emphasis in original). How can do we do that? We’ll see a bit later.
The End of Oil?
Limits to Growth is a sober policy document. Paul Roberts’ The End of Oil offers something much racier. He has toured the planet, talking to Azerbaijani managers, Saudi ministers and renewable energy technologists, asking whether the world will run out of petroleum.
It’s not a new topic. In 1956 geophysicist M. King Hubbert predicted American oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Though derided by experts, he was right. Will the world as a whole reach ‘Hubbert’s peak’, and if so when? Harris thinks non-OPEC oil will peak by around 2015, and western rulers are nervous about depending on OPEC, particularly after the 2005 oil price spike.
No wonder Washington moved to seize Iraqi oilfields.. Roberts calls the 1991 Gulf War ‘the first military conflict in history that was entirely about oil,’ noting also that after the 2003 invasion, the Americans quickly secured the Oil Ministry while ‘hospitals, schools, utilities … were left to be burned and looted’. (p.105, 304)
He’s vaguer on the race for oil, gas and pipelines around central Asia and their connection to the 2002 Afghan war; and in fact Roberts doesn’t even come out clearly against these acts of imperial aggression. There’s nothing left wing about his book. It does however provide important facts about the economic and political sides of the environmental crisis.
Take politics. The Bush administration keeps pressing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, with more than the obvious agenda: ‘ANWR can be used as a bargaining chip in an energy debate with far larger political stakes …. strategists have long known that the Arctic wilderness carries a far higher emotional impact among voters than does fuel efficiency …’ (p. 299-300) Congress can only manage one ‘green’ vote each year, and with the reluctant acquiescence of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society they choose to protect ANWR rather than take the much more important step of imposing stricter fuel standards on car-makers.
The book summarises the global warming debate, surveying alternative energy strategies; and it’s convinced me big business won’t invest seriously in solar or wind power until some major shock gets their attention. The ‘renewables’ are too costly for the market to spontaneously embrace. Solar cells and wind farms are too decentralised to fit the dominant industrial paradigm, and neither guarantees power 24 hours a day. Of course there are technical fixes for all these drawbacks, they just need a lot of government-funded R&D of the kind George Bush is not going to sponsor.
But this doesn’t have to be an impasse, Roberts hopes, if governments use market mechanisms cleverly. The energy economy and its environmental consequences are an extreme case of ‘market failure’ -- as documented by researcher Joan Ogden, who calculated the ‘hidden costs’ of oil, petrol and cars ‘from well to wheels’, including health, mortality, and global warming’s consequences such as weather damage to crops. The price tag was $2006 per car. These are real costs, it’s just that society pays them rather than energy companies, car makers or owners.
One solution is to tax petrol so prices reflect total costs. Another is carbon trading. Governments combated acid rain fairly effectively by allowing companies to trade ‘pollution credits’ in sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, so why not trade carbon? The problem, which Roberts skates over, is that it’s easy for our rulers to manipulate these mechanisms. Do we trust governments not to hand credits to cronies? And in the international sphere, market arrangements can turn very ugly.
For example, the Kyoto Protocol allows western governments and corporations to earn credits for investing in projects to cut greenhouse emissions in poor countries. That could mean they dump older technology on China, while the west introduces new, clean equipment. If the old technology is "cleaner" than existing Chinese factories and power plants, the west may get greenhouse credits while the Chinese are stuck with obsolete infrastructure that won’t perform when China’s turn comes to directly reduce emissions. Thus a seemingly benign environmental program can veil an imperialist agenda.
Or consider the Bisasar Road landfill in Durban, South Africa. Under apartheid, this site filled with toxic waste, causing cancer in surrounding areas. Upon coming to power, the African National Congress promised to clean it up. Then in 2002 the World Bank proposed to Durban’s mayor that the site be left alone so that methane could be siphoned off for emissions trading under the Bank’s prototype carbon trading program. The local government would make millions, and it might make a slight dent in global warming, but as what cost to the local people? The October 2004 Durban Conference declaration trenchantly criticised the underlying capitalist logic of pollution trading: ‘History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history. Through this process … the Earth’s abillity and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.’
So we’re talking about capitalism and imperialism, in which case Karl Marx may have something to offer.
Marx’s Ecology
The San people of the Kalahari have no trouble whatever understanding the value of biodiversity. Until fairly recently … all their food, their clothing, their shelter, their medicines, their cosmetics, their playthings, their musical instruments, their hunting weapons, everything came from the productivity of their surroundings, the plants and animals on which they completely depended for a living. Why, then, is it so difficult for most of us in the industrialised nations … to grasp the significance of biodiversity? (Niles Eldridge)
The answer that we’re estranged from nature. A simple yet profound insight, and more central to Karl Marx’s thought than most Marxists have realised. Reading the Communist Manifesto we pass casually over its call for ‘abolition of the distinction between town and country’. John Bellamy Foster explains its importance. He focuses on the issue of alienation, a concept that emerged in Marx’s early polemics. The rising capitalist order denied the poor their traditional right to firewood, an aspect of the wider ‘privatisation’ of common land into the hands of the rich. This was part of turning the working people into a wage-earning proletariat, but at the same time it destroyed all their relationships with nature not mediated by private property. The labourers were estranged from the products of their labour and their environment, with everything commodified, as the Durban Declaration notes.
Just as we lose control over capital (the fruits of our own past labour) which returns as an alien power to exploit us, so we are cut adrift from our relation with nature; the ‘subjection of nature’s forces to man’ becomes the seizure of land by an exploitative minority.
Capitalism drives millions into cities where they labour for capitalist employers; while those who remain on the land are likewise forced to work for capitalist farmers. Either way, people who used to gather and grow their own food, and the materials for their own clothing, begin to purchase these things through intermediaries. Today we buy things in supermarkets, seldom asking whence they came. This threatens a crisis for humanity, because: ‘Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die.’ (p. 72) The emancipation of labour on the economic, political and social fronts becomes inseparable from restoring workers’ organic connection to the earth.
One consequence was a drastic disruption of the cycle of nutrients. In traditional society, these had returned directly to the soil as human excrement. In Marx’s time, harvested food began to be sold to the cities on a massive scale, after which vast amounts of excrement went into urban sewers, leading to one of the great environmental crises of the age. The land, for its part, became increasingly impoverished, to the point where people plundered old battlefields looking for bones to fertilise it.
Marx learned about this from Scottish economist James Anderson, and German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig – two ‘environmental gurus’ of the age. This breakdown had already begun to take on global proportions. Marx discussed how England exploited its neighbours’ land: ‘England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the soil.’ (p. 164). Britain went on to plunder the globe. The search for fertiliser likewise became global: in a bizarre scramble foreshadowing today’s imperialist race for oil, the United States seized 94 guano-rich islands, rocks, and cays around the world between 1856 and 1903. It was natural, therefore, for Marx to combine his concern for the environment not only with support for workers’ struggles, but also with those against imperialism and national oppression.
From his study of environmental and social questions, Marx arrived at what today we call ‘sustainability’:
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]. (p. 164)
A sustainable revolution?
Marx wanted a social revolution, which seems a long way from the concerns of Limits for Growth. Or is it? The latter’s authors call for a ‘sustainability revolution’, and they mean truly radical change.
Their sustainable society would be ‘interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion’ (p. 253) with radically negative growth for some:
‘Some games that amuse and consume people today, such as arms races or the accumulation of unlimited wealth, would probably no longer be feasible, respected or interesting. But there would still be games, challenges, problems to solve, ways for people to prove themselves [and live] perhaps more satisfying lives than any possible today.’ (p. 256)
So we need ‘new feedback loops, new behaviour, new knowledge, and new technology, but also new institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings ... Visioning meaning imagining … what you really want.
That is, what you really want, not what someone has taught you to want, and not what you have learned to be willing to settle for.’ (p. 270)
This seems a good starting point for dialogue between green and red revolutionaries.
Tom O'Lincoln has been active on the left since 1966, in the German SDS, at Berkeley and for many years in Australia. He is the author of Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era, and United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia. He maintains the Marxist Interventions website: http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/
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