All animals alter their environments as a condition of their existence.
Human beings, in addition, alter their environments as a condition of their cultures, that
is by the way they choose to obtain food, produce tools and products, and construct and
arrange shelters. But culture, an essential part of human adaptation, can also threaten
human existence when short-term goals lead to long-term consequences that are harmful to
human life. Swidden agriculture alters the environment, but not as much as irrigation
agriculture, and certainly not as much as modern agriculture with its use of chemical
fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Domesticated animals alter environments, but
keeping a few cattle for farm work or cows for dairy products does far less damage than
maintaining herds of thousands to supply a meat-centered diet.
The degree to which environments are altered and
damaged is determined in part by population and in part by the technology in use.
Obviously, the more people in a given area, the more potential there is for environmental
disruption. Tractors and bulldozers alter the environment more than hoes or plows. But the
greatest factor in environmental alteration—in the use of raw materials, the use of
nonhuman energy, and the production of waste—is consumption. Because of our level of
consumption, the average American child will do twice the environmental damage of a
Swedish child, three times that of an Italian child, thirteen times that of a Brazilian
child, thirty-five times that of an Indian child, and 280 times that of a Chadian or
Haitian child (Kennedy 1993:32). In per capita production of energy alone, the United
States leads other countries by a vast margin (see Table 7.1).
Table 7.1 Per Capita Consumption of Energy, Selected Countries,
1989
| COUNTRY |
ENERGY (Kilograms of coal equivalent) |
| United States |
10,127 |
| Soviet Union |
6,546 |
| West Germany |
5,377 |
| Japan |
4,032 |
| Mexico |
1689 |
| Turkey |
958 |
| China |
810 |
| Brazil |
798 |
| India |
307 |
| Indonesia |
274 |
| Nigeria |
192 |
| Bangladesh |
69 |
William Rees, an urban planner at the University
of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain
the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country. The problem
is that in 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land
for each person. He concluded that the deficit is made up in core countries by drawing
down the natural resources of their own countries and expropriating the resources, through
trade, of peripheral countries. In other words, someone has to pay for our consumption
levels, and it will either be our children or inhabitants of the periphery of the world
system (Korten 1995:34).
Our consumption of goods obviously is a function
of our culture. Only by producing and selling things and services does capitalism in its
present form work, and the more that is produced and the more that is purchased the more
we have progress and prosperity. The single most important measure of economic growth is,
after all, the gross national product (GNP), the sum total of goods and services produced
by a given society in a given year. It is a measure of the success of a consumer society,
obviously, to consume.
However, the production, processing, and
consumption of commodities requires the extraction and use of natural resources (wood,
ore, fossil fuels, and water); it requires the creation of factories and factory complexes
whose operation creates toxic byproducts, while the use of commodities themselves (e.g.,
automobiles) creates pollutants and waste. Yet of the three factors environmentalists
often point to as responsible for environmental pollution—population, technology, and
consumption—consumption seems to get the least attention. One reason, no doubt, is
that it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part
of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention
severe economic dislocation. A drop in demand for products, as economists note, brings on
economic recession or even depression, along with massive unemployment.
The maintenance of perpetual growth and the cycle
of production and consumption essential in the culture of capitalism does not bode well
for the environment. At the beginning of Chapter 1 we mentioned that the consumer
revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was caused in large part
by a crisis in production; new technologies had resulted in production of more goods, but
there were not enough people or money to buy them. Since production is such an essential
part of the culture of capitalism, society quickly adapted to this crisis by convincing
people to buy things, by altering basic institutions and even generating a new ideology of
pleasure. The economic crisis of the late nineteenth century was solved, but at
considerable expense to the environment in the additional waste that was created and
resources that were consumed. At that time the world’s population was about 1.6
billion and those caught up in the consumer frenzy was a fraction of that total.
The global economy today faces the same problem
it faced one hundred years ago, except that the world population has almost quadrupled.
Consequently it is even more important to understand how the interaction between capital,
labor, and consumption in the culture of capitalism creates an overproduction of
commodities and how this relates to environmental pollution. To illustrate, let’s
take a quick look at the present state of the global automobile industry.
In capitalism competition between companies for
world markets requires that they constantly develop new and improved ways to produce
things and lower costs. In some industries, such as textiles, as we saw in Chapter 2,
competition requires seeking cheaper sources of labor; in others, such as the automobile
industry, it means creating new technologies that replace people with machines to lower
labor costs. Twenty years ago it took hundreds of hours of human labor to produce one
automobile. Today a Lexus LS 400 requires only 18.4 hours of human labor, Ford Motor
Company produces several cars with 20.0 hours of human labor, and General Motors lags
behind at about 24.8 hours per car (Greider 1997:110–112).
In addition to reducing the number of jobs
available to people, advanced productive technology creates the potential for producing
ever more cars, regardless of whether there are people who want to buy them. In 1995 the
automobile industry produced over 50 million automobiles, but there was a market for only
40 million. What can companies do? Obviously they can begin to close plants or cut back on
production, which some do. In the 1980s some 180,000 American auto workers lost their jobs
because of cutbacks and factory shutdowns. But each producer, of course, hopes the problem
of selling this surplus is someone else’s problem, so they continue to produce cars.
From the perspective of the automobile companies
and their workers, the preferred solution to overproduction, is to create a greater demand
for automobiles. This is difficult in core countries, where the market is already
saturated with cars. In the United States, for example, there is one car for every 1.7
persons. However, there are places in the world where there are few cars. In China, for
example, there is only one car for every 680 people. Imagine the environmental impact if
the consumption rate of automobiles in China, with a population of well over a billion
people, even began to approach the consumption rate in the United States.
But that is exactly the goal of automotive
manufacturers and the nation–states that operate to help them build and sell their
products. Not only would automobile makers in the core like to enter the Chinese market,
the Chinese themselves plan to build an automobile industry as large as that of the United
States, to produce cars for their own market and compete in other markets as well. If
China—or India, Indonesia, Brazil, or most of the rest of the periphery—even
approached the consumption rate of automobiles common in the core, the increased
environmental pollution would be staggering. There would be not only massive increases in
hydrocarbon pollution but also vastly increased demands for raw materials, especially oil.
And the overproduction dilemma is not unique to automobiles: the steel, aircraft,
chemical, computer, consumer electronics, drug, and tire industries, among others, face
the same dilemma.
The environmental problem could be alleviated if
consumers simply said “enough is enough” and stopped consuming as much as they
do. But, as noted above, any reduction of consumption would likely cause severe economic
disruption. Furthermore, few are aware of how large our reduction would have to be to
effect a change. A study by Friends of the Earth Netherlands asked what the consumption
levels of the average Dutch person would have to be in the year 2010 if consumption levels
over the world were equal and if resource consumption was sustainable. They found that
consumption levels would have to be reduced dramatically. For example, to reduce global
warming by the year 2010, people in the Netherlands would have to reduce carbon emission
from the current 12 tons (it is 19.5 in the United States) to 4 tons; to accomplish that a
Dutch person would have to limit the use of carbon-based fuel to one liter per day, thus
limiting travel to 15.5 miles per day by car, 31 miles per day by bus, 40 miles per day by
train, or 6.2 miles per day by plane. A trip from Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro could be
made only once every twenty years. (Korten 1995:34).
Thus it is unlikely that we will ever
significantly change our consumption patterns. Consumption is as much a part of our
culture as horse raiding and buffalo hunting were part of Plains Indian culture; it is a
central element. Consequently there is no way to appreciate the problem of environmental
destruction without understanding how people are turned into consumers, how luxuries are
turned into necessities. That is, why do people choose to consume what they do, how
they do, and when they do?
Take sugar, for example. In 1995, each
American consumed in his or her soft drinks, tea, coffee, cocoa, pastries, breads, and
other foods sixty-six pounds of sugar. Why? Liking the taste might be one answer. In fact,
a predilection for sweets may be part of our biological makeup. But that doesn’t
explain why we consume it in the form of sugarcane and beet sugar and in the quantities we
do. Then there is meat. Modern livestock production is one of the most environmentally
damaging and wasteful forms of food production the world has known. Yet Americans eat more
meat per capita than all but a few other peoples. Some environmentalists argue that we can
change our destructive consumption patterns, if we desire. But is our pattern of
consumption only a matter of taste and of choice, or is it so deeply embedded in our
culture as to be virtually impervious to change?
To begin to answer this question, we shall
examine the history of sugar and beef, commodities that figure largely in our lives, but
involve environmental degradation. Sugar and beef is an appropriate combination for a
number of reasons:
