Schnaiberg and Gould 2. Society as the Enemy of the Environment: Battle Plans for the Assault LIVING WITHIN ECOLOGICAL LIMITS: A HISTORICAL IDEAL When the emergence of the current environmental crisis is discussed, the disregard for ecological limits that typifies modern industrial societies is often contrasted with the alleged respect of preindustrial societies for ecosystems (Burch 197 1). The reverence for nature that runs through the cosmogonies and religions of "native" peoples is often held up as an ideal from which Judeo-Christian and atheistic industrial societies have departed, with dire consequences for the natural world. Many preindustrial or nonindustrial societies have indeed managed their interaction with the environment in less destructive and more sustainable ways. However, this historical sustainability of nations often encompassed a mixture of careful environmental balancing in some communities and significant economic expansion in others. Within these societies, certain areas produced ecological disorganization. On the one hand, therefore, much can be learned from nonindustrial societies' respect for nature, as well as contemporary variations in the ecological and economic behaviors of industrial societies (Stretton 1976). Yet it would be a mistake to romanticize this apparent harmony of society and environment, since all societies eventually face the necessity of deciding on some forms of ecological additions and withdrawals. It is important that we juxtapose the historical differences between places and periods of ecological stability and ecological disorganization. Although the ecological changes made by many ancient societies are difficult to assess accurately, some basic notions as to the destructive potential of premodern economies are discernible. China, one of the world's earliest great civilizations, is still experiencing the negative consequences of some environmental withdrawals made in earlier centuries. Much of the ancient Chinese forests were extracted as much as 900 years ago to provide a variety of fuels, textiles, and building materials, and to clear the way for the expansion of agriculture. China thus remains a nation that suffers from severe levels of deforestation. The Yellow River, which is an extremely important feature of Chinese geography, ecology, history, and folklore, is so named because of the color of the sediments that the river carries away. Massive deforestation resulted in uncontrollable erosion of topsoil (World Resources Institute 1992). That topsoil is essential to a nation that must feed approximately 20 percent of the world's population from only 8 percent of the world's arable land. Modern Chinese efforts to reduce topsoil erosion have, therefore, been quite extensive. Similarly, the fabled cedars of Lebanon were felled, along with most of the ancient forests of North Africa and the Middle East. Although the extent of the Sahara Desert in ancient times remains a mystery, it is clear that the sandy wasteland that now exists supported an abundance of biological diversity in ancient times. Although it may be impossible to determine the extent to which natural climate change caused the desert to expand, it is clear that human utilization of the local environment without regard for long-term sustainability contributed to the expansion of a much simplified and less productive environment. Thus, North Africa, which once served as the granary of the Roman Empire, must now struggle to provide domestic food supplies for its local populations (Brown 1992). The great Mayan civilization of pre-Columbian America is believed to have declined largely as a result of exceeding the threshold of the ecological limits imposed by the natural ecosystems in which they lived and the technologies they had available to manipulate those ecosystems. Again, the extent to which ecological factors contributed to the decline of the Mayas remains unclear. But recent scientific evidence seems to indicate that population expansion, soil erosion, and deforestation increased the vulnerability of that society to disruptions of the status quo (Brown 1992). When societies move toward the edge of ecological limits, even small changes in economic, social, political, or ecological factors can have a major impact on the society's ability to survive. Predating all these examples are the ancient inhabitants of North America who, ten to twenty thousand years ago, migrated with the woolly mammoths to insure a supply of food and textiles. It is argued that these ancients hunted the mammoths to extinction, since their rates of extraction exceeded the capacities of these enormous mammals to reproduce (Schnaiberg 1980: ch. 1). The mammoths may have faced extinction from natural causes at some later date, as climatic conditions shifted (in patterns similar to those theorized about dinosaur extinction). Similarly, the preindustrial human conquest of many island ecosystems, which had developed in isolation from the species of the large continents, resulted in the extinction of a wide variety of relatively defenseless creatures. The giant Moas of New Zealand fell victim to the appetites of nonindustrial Polynesians, long before the arrival of Europeans initiated the extinction of a large number of island species in a worldwide pattern. The noble respect for nature displayed by nonindustrial societies in the past, and in the present, often coexisted with domestic or international pressures to override these principles (Mumford 1963). Modern industrial societies would be well advised to examine and incorporate much of the socioenvironmental ethics espoused by pre- and nonindustrial peoples into their current systems of values. But they must also attend to the important historical disjunctures between ethical words and technical deeds, which were often initially built around military or political ambitions. If we are to achieve long-term socioenvironmental sustainability, all societies will either have to redefine their ethical relationship to the natural world or struggle to live up to the goals established by those cultural constructs. The industrial revolution of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not begin the damaging of fragile natural systems, but it greatly accelerated it both locally and globally. If we are to find viable solutions to current environmental crises, it is important that we not overly idealize some "golden past" in which all human societies lived in a stable, low-tech world in harmony with nature. This propensity to refer to a nonexistent golden past often leads to modern policy proposals that are equally mythic in their own assumptions (e.g., in appealing to selfregulation by a "community"). Certainly, many areas experienced such a social and ecological balance for long periods of time. Yet the conflict between human societies and natural systems is a perennial one, since the average" experiences of citizens even in the premodern world were quite variable. Without question, the industrial revolution exponentially expanded the depth and breadth of this conflict. In effect, as a result this conflict became more central to the question of survival of more societies, and certainly of more people, at the end of the twentieth century than ever before. EXCEEDING ECOLOGICAL LIMITS: FROM PREINDUSTRIAL TO POSTINDUSTRIAL PATTERNS. Despite the numerous examples of preindustrial environmental destruction, for most of history (and prehistory), human societies were forced by their relatively more limited technological capacities to live within the constraints imposed by ecological limits. Preindustrial societies depended on a clearly limited agricultural base for their survival. Ecological additions and withdrawals as well as population growth were kept in check by the fertility of the local ecosystem and its capacity to provide sufficient and reliable supplies of food. Those societies that exceeded the limited capacity of natural systems to provide food for their populations went into decline and ultimately collapsed. History is full of examples of agricultural societies which, through exceeding carrying capacities or experiencing extreme conditions of drought or blight, were destroyed by their inability to adapt to ecological limits (Volti 1992). The Anasazi or "Ancient Ones" of the American Southwest serve as an example of a highly advanced civilization that collapsed under the pressures of the local ecology. Although the exact cause of their decline remains controversial, it is likely that the Anasazi abandoned their sophisticated settlements because the local environment was unable to provide the necessities for human survival. Whether their decline was a result of a shift in human techniques, populations, or ecological factors beyond their control, the ability of their local environment to sustain their system of ecological additions and withdrawals presented Anasazi society with clearly defined limits. The technological capacity to obscure the ecological limits to human activities would not emerge until long after the time of the Anasazi. "OVERCOMING" LIMITS: SUCCESSIVE WAVES OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS Despite the apparent similarities in the potential for preindustrial and industrial societies to overshoot local ecological limits, there are important qualitative and quantitative differences in the ways in which these two types of societies degrade ecosystems. Preindustrial societies, when they did surpass ecological limits, did so primarily by exceeding the carrying capacity of their agricultural bases. Either their populations expanded beyond the capacity of local ecosystems to provide sufficient food crop supplies, or by overharvesting important natural resources such as trees or animal species. While these ecological errors had dramatic negative impacts on affected societies, they tended to produce less drastic long-term consequences for local ecosystemic organization -and have little impact on the global biosphere. In contrast, industrial societies may exceed ecological limits in more numerous and pernicious ways. Industrial societies have the capacity to exceed ecological limits through the introduction of greater quantities of additions-than local (and global) ecosystems can absorb. Mass production of-economic goods necessitates the mass production of environmental bads. And these additions often have a much more devastating impact on ecosystems, due to the synthetic nature of newly introduced toxic chemical compounds. The combination of increasing quantities of increasingly destructive additions allows industrial societies to create more wide-spread and long-lasting ecological disorganization. Also, mass production necessitates the extraction of ever-increasing amounts of natural resources, both renewable and nonrenewable, from increasingly fragile ecosystems. Industrial societies also demand a wider variety of potentially more-dangerous natural resources, such as uranium. The technological capacity emerging from the technological revolution to create greater levels of more pernicious additions and greater levels of more pernicious resource extraction for exponentially expanding populations has meant that industrial societies can and do exceed ecological limits in ways that were and are impossible for pre- or nonindustrial societies. And industrial societies can, in addition, disrupt ecosystems in the old ways as well. The emerging technologies of the industrial revolution freed human societies from the ecological limits that had constrained the expansion of agriculturally based economies. No longer dependent on the fertility of local ecosystems to provide the agricultural products necessary for human survival, industrial cash economies allowed for economic expansion which, at the time, appeared to be limited only by the ability of human ingenuity to take technological advantage of a seemingly infinite supply of natural resources. Once the countryside could effectively feed the cities, a massive expansion of urban industrial centers was possible. The technologists of the industrial revolutions lived in a world with a cornucopia of resources to be extracted and manipulated to produce seemingly endless supplies of manufactured goods and wealth. Both Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, and Karl Marx, the father of modern communism, believed that the problem of production had finally been solved by the emergence of new technological innovations. No longer would human societies have to struggle to meet the basic needs of their populations. The crux of the political and socioeconomic debate in the industrial era would be centered on the distribution of the endless wealth made available to societies through modern technologies, not on the ability of modern technological complexes to provide all the goods that people demanded. No longer forced to live in the relative poverty of subsistence agriculture, and no longer dependent on a finite resource base for the provision of goods, politics in the industrial world turned its attention toward the distribution of infinite wealth and away from the question of human survival in an untamed natural world. However, it would not be long before ecological limits reemerged and reimposed themselves on human societies in the form of crises of resource depletion and environmental pollution. The industrial revolution in Europe largely emerged in response to increased international trade with the societies of the East. New transportation technologies (primarily larger and more navigable ships) made it possible for the otherwise technologically backward societies of Europe to enter into trade with the more advanced societies of Asia. An increased volume of trade required an increase in manufacturing to produce goods that could be traded for the products of the East. In many ways, the socioeconomic and technological changes of the early European industrial revolution emerged from conditions similar to those the United States is experiencing today in regard to trade with a technologically and economically more advanced Asia. In order to gain the goods produced in the East, the West needed to increase the production of products to be traded. Failure to do so would result in a balance-of-trade deficit. Technologies of mass production were developed to expand European economies to keep pace with the importation of goods from the wealthier Asian societies. The new technologies of mass production required reliable and harnessable supplies of energy. Early industrial technologies made use of natural hydrologic systems to provide this energy. Waterwheels were used to convert the energy of the solar-powered hydrologic cycle into a usable form. Thus, the earliest industrial facilities were located on reliable rivers and streams. Later developments would utilize the energy contained in combustible materials to turn water into steam, which would rise to turn turbines and generate power. Despite the assumption of rapid technologi- cal advancement, modern nuclear power plants simply use nuclear reactions to produce steam from water to generate electricity. In the industrial revolution, as today, water meant power, and power meant mass production. The centrality of water in industrial technologies produced locational advantages for towns situated on rivers (and later, lakes), for these towns could insure a steady source of power and a reliable transportation system for shipping raw materials and manufactured goods. Water also provided a reliable industrial sewer to absorb the chemical byproducts of the new technologies. Towns that had such locational advantages became the manufacturing centers of the industrial revolution. Towns situated on natural ocean harbors emerged as the trading centers from which manufactured goods were sent and received. Other towns, which emerged and prospered on the basis of their agricultural fertility or centrality at crossroads of overland trading routes, went into decline. To this day, industry still tends to be located near water for cooling, energy, waste disposal, and transportation advantages. From Gary, Indiana, to Singapore, water is a key resource on which industrialism depends. This is why our dirtiest polluting industries remain located on our primary bodies of fresh water. The Great Lakes, which account for one-fifth of the world's total supply of fresh water, are host to the largest complexes of polluting industrial facilities in North America (Ashworth 1987). In the early industrial revolution, it was believed that the planet could supply endless amounts of fresh water for industry, agriculture, and human consumption, while simultaneously absorbing an endless supply of industrial, agricultural, and human waste. It was not long, however, before the ecological limits of the earth's fresh water resources would once again reimpose themselves on human societies, first in the form of bacteriological epidemics and later in the form of chemical carcinogens. Cholera epidemics killed huge percentages of urban populations until sewage treatment or diversion was applied to reduce the negative health effects of using the same body of water as a toilet and a drinking fountain. Industrialization began to run into ecological limits in other ways as well. As we have seen, mass production requires greater capital investments in the technologies of production. The introduction of new technologies alters the labor to capital ratios. Workers can no longer supply their own manufacturing technologies. Whereas preindustrial manufacturers owned their tools, looms, and mills, industrial workers must use the machines owned by others. Industrialization created a larger and more powerful role for capitalists in investing in centralized technological facilities. Industrial technologies required nonworker ownership of the means of production. Investment in large and expensive centralized technologies resulted in the emergence of factories, where workers were brought together to operate these technological investments. Factory work emerged with many similarities to a military organization of labor. As in the military, a hierarchical chain of command was established. Workers became the foot soldiers of mass production. Capital investors became the captains or generals of industry. Supervisors or middle managers were created to oversee the production process. The geographic centralization of production required workers to "go to work" at the same times and in the same places as other workers. This represented an important social change from production in the home in an unregimented time frame. Limited transportation required that industrial workers live near the factories. As a result, the first company and industrial towns were established. The increasing primacy of industry over agriculture caused a migration from rural to industrial centers. Advances in agriculture allowed fewer and fewer agriculturalists to provide food for greater and greater numbers of urban industrial workers. This was true in Europe in the industrial revolution, just as it is true today in the nations of the South. In this book "South" refers to those less industrialized nations that are more commonly referred to as the Third World; they are located primarily to the south of the industrialized nations, which are referred to as the "North." (A fuller discussion of the South and North is provided in Chapter 8.) This rural to urban migration alters the population distribution of societies and results in the emergence of mass urbanization, with all of the urban problems that are all too familiar to us today. In many ways societies become more complex as factory work takes people out of agriculture and throws them together in industrial cities. Family structures are also altered, as people begin to spend most of their waking hours engaged in work away from their homes and families. All these processes of early industrialization are still being played out in the South, where rural to urban migration in search of factory work draws people out of agriculture and away from their families. Of course, all this centralization around industrial technologies produced intolerable local living environments. While managers did, and still do, live upwind of their factories, the workers live near and downwind from them. With industrialization came urban smog, overcrowding, and negative health consequences that continue to plague industrial cities. Centralized production meant centralized populations, which, in turn, meant the centralization and accumulation of industrial and human waste. In 1800 London reached a population of I million, the first European city to do so since the collapse of the Roman Empire. By 1856 London's population exceeded 2.5 million, and over half of Britain's population lived in cities and towns. Such rapid urban growth exceeded the ability of government and industry to plan for the expansion of urban services. The result was severe housing shortages, which parallel the contemporary housing shortages in the contemporary urban environments of the Southern nations. In 1850, one-third of Liverpool's population lived in unheated crowded cellars (Chambers et al. 1983). It became impossible to provide for adequate sanitation in these industrial centers. There was simply no capacity to deal with the human, municipal, and industrial waste generated in these cities. Narrow alleys quickly filled with rotting garbage, as the infrastructure to move waste from the cities to the countryside was inadequate. Throughout the city of Paris clean water was available only at a few scattered fountains, while in London, water companies allowed it to flow for only a few hours a day. For the vast majority of urban residents, bathing was out of the question. Wealthy residents paid carriers to bring buckets of fresh water to their homes. Water in most cities came from what were already dangerously polluted rivers and lakes. There were simply no sewage treatment systems in place. In the 1830s Manchester had indoor toilets for only one-third of its buildings. In the 1840s the ratio of indoor toilets to population was I for every 212 residents. Today, such ratios for the cities of the South are much worse. In addition to the stench and filth of raw sewage and rotting garbage, industrial and municipal smog was overwhelming. Homes that were heated were heated primarily by burning coal. Industries, too, burned coal and emitted a wide variety of untreated chemical smoke and smog. This smog literally darkened the sky, preventing sunlight from penetrating. Similar conditions exist today in cities such as Shanghai and Mexico City, as the nations of the South experience their own industrial revolutions. Because cities grow up around industries, the factories are at the heart of the urban centers. Workers cluster around these pollution sources, bearing the full brunt of toxic industrial effluent. The ability of local environments to absorb urban industrial additions was, and is, rapidly exceeded, creating nightmares of disease, smog, filth, stench, and squalor. Despite the overwhelmingly oppressive nature of the urban environments produced by the industrial revolution, relatively few saw these conditions as an indictment of the benefits accruing from the emergence of new technological facilities. Although many recognized the problems that came with urbanization and industrialization, for the most part, these problems were (and still are) seen as the price that must be paid for the unquestionable advantages of industrial society. As Lewis Mumford has noted, "The smoking factory chimney, which polluted the air and wasted energy, whose pall of smoke increased the number and thickness of natural fogs and shut off still more sunlight-this emblem of a crude, imperfect technics became the boasted symbol of prosperity" (Mumford 1963:168). In the industrial revolution, environmental destruction and decay were the markers of enormous wealth and power. Whereas environmentally sensitive individuals at the end of the twentieth century may come upon a factory emitting endless streams of choking smoke and decry the foolishness of such ecological imbecility, earlier generations saw jobs, money, consumer goods, and power. Like those earlier generations of industrial Northerners, many of those living in the South today, plagued by landlessness, joblessness, hunger, and disease, see industrialization as a glimmer of hope in an otherwise intolerable situation. While the cities of Europe and North America in the industrial revolution were slowly able to use some of the wealth generated by industrial mass production to create sewage and sanitation systems, industrial pollution control devices, and housing, the situation in the South is quite different. Industrialization comes much later for the South. In addition to the search for industrialjobs, rural to urban migration is fueled by a massive population boom, creating endemic conditions of landlessness for agrarian societies. Since 1950 this migration has overwhelmed the cities of the South. Whereas the total population of Southern urban centers was 257 million in 1950, by 1980 that population had reached 950 million. These populations continue to soar. Mexico City had a population of 2.87 million in 1950; by the year 2000, that population was expected to exceed 31 million (Population Reference Bureau 198 1). As we will see in Chapter 8, global socioeconomic and technological circumstances are much different now than they were during Europe and North America's industrialization. Labor-saving technological innovation in the past century has drastically altered labor to capital ratios. It costs much more money to employ one industrial worker in the late twentieth century than it did in the nineteenth century (Schnaiberg 1980: ch. V). The increased cost of employing industrial workers, together with the decreasing employment capacity of new industrial technologies, has meant that the nations of the South are not currently, and will not in the future, be able to absorb rural to urban migrants as industrialization expands. In addition, the international flow of' capital has resulted in a situation in which capital accumulation in the South, resulting from industrial facilities located in the South, is at a much lower (often negative) rate than was capital accumulation in the North (see Chapter 8). This means that impoverished Southern nations will not be able to provide sewage and sanitation systems, pollution control devices, and housing for their rapidly increasing urban populations. In the South, modern industrial urban development is simply not sustainable (Teitelbaum 1985). However, as Chapter 8 will demonstrate, alternative development trajectories are often difficult, if not impossible, to implement. EMERGENT "ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE" AND THE "RETURN" OF ECOLOGICAL LIMITS If the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century is typified by the apparent obliteration of the constraints of ecological limits on human activities, the late twentieth century is typified by the startling and catastrophic reimposition of those limits. The optimism of industrial enthusiasts like Karl Marx and Adam Smith, as well as the belief that the problem of production had been solved, has come crashing down in the late twentieth century in the realization that the earth simply cannot provide for unlimited resource extraction. Nor can it absorb unlimited chemical additions. In the late 1960s as the peoples of the earth were treated to their first glimpse of their small blue home from space, the limits of that finite mass were being reached, resulting in unprecedented pollution, depletion, extinction, and famine crises. just as humanity seemed to be breaking free from that final ecological limit, our restriction to habitation of the planet of our origin, the natural limits of the earth reimposed themselves forcefully, as if to thwart our scientific and technological arrogance with humility before the forces that had created us. The earth is finite, and we are dependent on it for our survival, no matter how sophisticated our powers of innovation or rationalization become. We have only one planet to live on. If our activities make the continuation of the earth's essential life support systems impossible, we will perish along with the other lifeforms with which we share it. Clearly, there had been earlier warnings of the reimposition of ecological limits. Epidemics in cities resulting from overstressed ecosystems alerted us to the dangers of exceeding the capacity of'our ecosystems to absorb our wastes. In Chicago and elsewhere, the entrance of increasing volumes of human waste into our fresh water supplies at the turn of the century cost the lives of thousands. The extinction of the forests of Europe, and later much of North America, foretold of the hazards of extracting more from the planet than the planet could renew. Famines in Ireland and elsewhere indicated our vulnerability to nature despite, or as a result of, our "modern" and scientific agrarian technologies. But, save for a few lonely souls speaking from a nearly universal blind faith in science and technology who saw danger where others saw only profits, these warnings went unheeded. Human society continued unabated in its headlong rush beyond the limits of nature. By the 1960s and early 1970s a growing number of people in the industrial societies of the North began to see the tip of the ecological iceberg.floating in our course. Rapid extinction resulting from toxic chemical additions was bringing us to the brink of a Silent Spring (Carson 1962). The proliferation of nuclear weapons threatened to destroy us all. Precipitously declining mortality rates due to our modern sanitation methods and medicines resulted in the emergence of a Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968). Spiraling consumption of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources raised the specter of an Energy Crisis (Schnaiberg 1975). And futurists began to rediscover that there might be Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), and that exceeding those limits could lead to a catastrophic Eco-Spasm (Toffler 1975) of environmental collapse. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s scientific evidence of the ecological limits to industrial economic expansion began to surface in political circles. Although most readers have been conditioned to think of scientific research as an objective, free-standing source of information for social policymakers, the roles and relationships that constitute science and our political structure are actually closely intertwined. Environmental science emerged in the public arena in the 1960s as much because of the political concerns expressed by Rachel Carson as because of any new and startling findings. Note that the presence of mechanisms through which environmental and economic interest groups provided alternative sets of often contradictory scientific research findings (e.g., Graham 1970) implies that scientific data are inconclusive; that is, they are imprecise in generating agreement about environmental "impacts" (Schnaiberg 1977, 1980: chs. VI-VII ). Moreover, it also suggests that scientific information is often gathered and presented in a subjective manner in order to promote the specific interests of particular sets of social actors. Although scientists are not unfamiliar with the process of choosing sets of data and theories that best support their scientific arguments, the utilization of these arguments in the decision-making process takes scientific disputes out of the "ivory towers" and into the realm of public politics (Gould 1988). Disputes over appropriate methodology and proper modeling are a fundamental aspect of the unique scientific institution. Environmental policy-making typically places these scientific disputes within a political context, where the objective scientific disagreements are used to promote and/or undermine the arguments of political partisans (Schnaiberg 1980: chs. VI-VII). In such a context, the relative scientific merits of various models and methods are rarely debated extensively. At the center of the debate in public hearings, congressional committees, and lobbying efforts is the acceptability of the various sets of scientific data and conclusions that these different methods and models have produced (Brodeur 1989, 1992). In this context, each data set represents implicit policy recommendations supported by particular interest groups providing the scientific research (Wright 1992). As a result, debate tends to focus on the credibility of the various data sets mainly in terms of the political impact of their exclusive acceptance (Schnaiberg 1977). Sets of scientific data presented in the course of environmental policy conflicts are most often critiqued for their ramifications for decision making rather than on the merits of the methods utilized in the analyses themselves (Wright 1992). This entire process serves to reduce the perception of science as a fact-revealing enterprise and relegates scientific research to being a tool of interest-oriented political persuasion (Gould 1988; Schnaiberg 1975, 1983, 1986). Because decision makers utilize the expertise of the scientists largely to determine appropriate government action, these scientists become de facto policymakers themselves (Mukerji 1989). Scientists find themselves in a position to present policy recommendations based on their own research and then to evaluate those policies from an objective scientific standpoint. In order for an interest group to press and defend its position in the environmental policy-making arena, often they not only have a team of scientists that appears to be qualified and credible, but also scientists who are willing and able to produce scientific data that help the political contender pursue its own interests. An environmental organization, a corporation, or a government agency whose scientific staff is continually producing research that runs contrary to the goals or interests of its employer would rapidly lose political clout (Gould 1988; Schnaiberg 1975, 1986). That is not to imply that all scientific research produced by political contenders is intentionally biased. It is only to say that even the most stringent scientific research ultimately requires significant leaps of intuition, which are likely to be directed by both the objectives of the scientists and the intellectual environment in which they are immersed. If a scientist is working for a corporation that wants to justify the need to construct a huge particle beam accelerator, then that scientist, when finding that research on the potential environmental impacts of the accelerator is partially inconclusive, will be more likely to err on the side of fewer negative impacts rather than greater impacts. The scientific staffs of economic and political actors have substantial incentives to produce research findings that reflect favorably on the positions taken by those actors in specific disputes. Resource development corporations are unlikely to retain scientists who consistently produce results indicating that significant negative environmental impacts are to be expected from resource development schemes (Dietz & Rycroft 1987). In turn, environmental organizations are unlikely to use their funds to sponsor research indicating that environmental im- pacts are minimal. It is reasonable to expect that industry scientists will produce research that is favorable to industry in the political arena and that environmental groups will produce research that indicates the need for environmental protection (Gould 1988; Schnaiberg 1977). The time constraints on research resulting from bureaucratic procedures make it easier for political partisans to utilize the inconclusiveness of scientific research (Schnaiberg 1977). Many of the studies required for optimally informed environmental decision making can ideally require many years of research. Political actors, seeking to appear responsive to environmental concerns, hurry the research processes, thereby making it more likely that the results of such research will be inconclusive and open to a wider range of interpretation. Since interpretation of what specific scientific research implies for political decisions is a central element of environmental policy-making, the time constraints on that research tend to produce findings that are more politically malleable (Gould 1988; Schnaiberg 1986). Such inconclusiveness resulting from time as well as budgetary constraints is quite common in environmental policy research. Such constraints allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), for example, to declare that most drinking water supplies are safe, while conducting research on the health impacts of only a handful of the hundreds of toxic chemicals found in many drinking water supplies. Because conclusive data indicating negative health effects from toxics in water supplies are not yet available, the USEPA finds it expedient to determine that the lack of scientific proof of negative health impacts is sufficient grounds to declare that water supplies are safe (Schnaiberg 1980: ch. VI). Similarly, the Reagan administration failed to act on ameliorating the acid rain problem with the excuse that the scientific data were as yet inconclusive as to the causes of the problem. More recently, the Bush administration's opposition to an international treaty on global warming at the "Earth Summit" in Rio in June 1992 was ostensibly based on the inability of scientists to conclusively demonstrate that the phenomenon was indeed manifest in current climate changes (Newhouse 1992). Therefore, political actors may use inconclusiveness in scientific research to promote a belief that problems do not exist. Ultimately, the most significant problem resulting from the way science is used in environmental policy-making is the fundamental assumption that scientific data can, in most instances, be used to make some objective judgment as to the type of action that is most appropriate, or whether any action is required at all. Despite the way in which interest groups use scientific data to bolster and undermine political arguments, the decisions reached ultimately rest on a subjective assessment of relative values and relative risks (Brodeur 1989, 1992). Given sufficient time and facilities, science may be able to tell us how much radiation a population will be exposed to as a result of a given project and how many cancer deaths per thousand that amount of exposure is likely to result in. Yet the acceptability of that level of risk and the cost-benefit analyses determining the relative merits of various ameliorative actions remains purely subjective and open to political, economic, and social pressures. In this respect, the environmental policy-making process is much more political than it is scientific. Although the process may be perceived as a scientific effort to determine appropriate action, in actuality science merely provides competing foundations for competing political arguments. Therefore, the time, money, and energy expended by environmental organizations to produce compelling scientific evidence paradoxically demonstrates the power of the powerful economic actors in deflecting political conflict away from primary issues (Gould 1988). Despite the long interval between initial public awareness and the prior and subsequent documentation of ecological problems by environmental scientists, there eventually emerged a growing awareness that our socioeco- nomic and technological trajectories were unsustainable in the long run (despite debate over precisely how far ahead the "long run" actually was). The final jolt that pushed this debate about ecological limits into the political forefront came in the early and mid-1970s, as "oil shocks" led people in the North to contemplate the possibility of life without heat, electricity, transportation, orjobs (Schnaiberg 19,75). Ironically, these oil shocks were not a result of ecological scarcity. Although it was clear that unchecked consumption of nonrenewable natural resources would ultimately result in the extinction of fossil fuel supplies, the energy crisis that caused us to contemplate this eventuality was brought on by the efforts of the oil-producing nations of the South. They sought to renegotiate the terms on which their natural resources would be used to fuel the industrial wealth and power of the North. Gas lines in the North resulted from the South's "muscle flexing" (and corporate manipulations), not from a reduction in ecological supply. Nonetheless, the restricted international flow of oil caused many in the North to become aware, for the first time, of their dependency on the natural environment to provide the resources on which the wealth and power of their societies depended. Although the United States in the 1980s was typified by an apparent rejection of this reality (as if the entire nation went to a decade-long movie to escape temporarily from a frustrating and anxiety-inducing reality-e.g., Lash 1984), the decade of the 1970s ended with the harsh realization that, in terms of our ecological base, we were rapidly moving From Surplus to Scarcity (Schnaiberg,1980). A CASE STUDY.......... ENERGY LIMITS: FOSSIL FUEL DEPLETION AND RENEWABLE ALTERNATIVES The technological capacity to utilize fossil fuels was responsible for much of the increase in the material standard of living through the succeeding waves of industrial revolutions. However, the industrial world is becoming increasingly aware of the economic and ecological consequences of dependence on finite energy resources. Although U.S. expenditures for renewable energy research declined during the Reagan and Bush years, the war in the Persian Gulf, coupled with reports of global warming, has led to new calls for a transition to clean, domestic, and renewable energy supplies. The current fossil fuel-based energy systems will probably not be able to meet projected demands throughout the twenty-first century. Constant increases in such demand are hastening the day when these resources will be exhausted. Unfortunately, neither conservation nor increased energy efficiency are complete solutions. And new exploration will generate still more pollution and depletion problems, the solutions to which will themselves raise energy needs (see ecostrations for Chapters 5 and 8). Calls for clean domestic energy sources have renewed interest in nuclear energy. Reliance on nonrenewable uranium will only create new unsolved problems of waste and safety, as well as generate high production costs. In addition, nuclear reactors, with their operational lifetimes of only 25 to 60 years, will require ongoing replacement of decommissioned plants, as well as containment of the radiation hazards posed by the storage of these decommissioned plants for thousands of years. The long-awaited arrival of safer fusion reactors does not seem much closer today than it did 20 years ago. Solar energy is an abundant and clean renewable resource with great application potential. Decentralized passive solar energy installations, which are used to heat homes, water, and greenhouses, will help to decrease demand for other energy sources. However, the cost of constructing solarelectrical plants remains prohibitive. Current estimates indicate that landbased solar electrical systems would have a cost ten times that of an equivalent coal-fired electrical generating station. Photovoltaic cells are even more expensive. While proposals for space-based solar collector satellites have been made, their costs also limit their potential role as replacement for cheaper fossil fuel sources. Similarly, wind power is clean, abundant, and renewable, but its costs are too high to replace fossil fuels in most nations. Even in the wealthiest nations, it could only replace a fraction of fossil fuel applications. Large-scale hydropower and geothermal systems are limited by their low efficiencies and their site-specific geographic limitations. More portable alcohol-based fuels, produced from renewable agricultural products, do have great potential in combustion applications (such as automobile fuels), but even they can only meet a small portion of global energy demand. In addition, reliance on alcohol-based fuels will divert farm land from food to fuel production. Exhaustion of those fossil fuels that have historically expanded consumption cannot, then, be readily transcended by any of these replacement systems. Renewable resources cannot sustain our current levels of energy consumption, nor can conservation and improved energy-efficiency of machines, appliances, and vehicles. Ecological limitations suggest that, after fossil fuels are exhausted, we must get by with using substantially less global energy. RIO AND THE STRUGGLE TO DEFINE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL DISORGANIZATION In the early 1990s, as the United States awoke from the "lost decade" of the 1980s, the earlier awareness of environmental problems began to be conceptualized on a more global scale. Much excitement was generated by the so-called Earth Summit held in Rio dejaneiro, Brazil, in the summer of 1992. The Rio conference was billed as a global conference on environment and development. Although the environmental component of the conference received a tremendous amount of media coverage in the nations of the North, the media largely ignored the development component. The disproportionate attention paid to these two intricately interconnected issues reflects the limited view of many governments, journalists, and environmentalists who saw the primary issue of the conference as protecting the environment. The leaders and citizens of industrialized nations pay much less attention to the socioeconomic implications of such protection, both globally and domestically. For people in the South, devel- opment is the primary issue, with the environment assuming importance primarily as a constraint on the pace, direction, and scope of development objectives (Bidwai 1992; South Commission 1990). Historically, those concerned with protecting the natural world have given strong voice to the need to curtail the destruction of the environment, predicting very real disasters if current patterns of natural resource usage are not abandoned. They have been less successful, however, in their ability to prescribe politically attainable solutions to the problems they have found. Many of the proposed solutions have been utopian in their goals and relatively naive in their conceptualization of the social, economic, and political structures that shape current patterns of environmental utilization. Others have tended to be somewhat elitist, nondemocratic, and regressive in their social implications. The utopian solutions have focused primarily on education and consciousness-raising as mechanisms of social change. Clearly, public education is essential to building the broad base of support needed to promote environmental protection. However, it is equally important to recognize that even environmentally aware citizens must achieve survival within socioeconomic structures that currently offer few ecologically benign occupations (see Chapter 6). Other proposed solutions have demonstrated a limited awareness of the potentially regressive social consequences of specific environmental protection measures, both globally and domestically. We can do much better. A brief analysis of the socioeconomic implications of some of the solutions to global environmental problems presented by governments of industrialized nations would have allowed those governments to predict the resistance of the South to certain environmental proposals. Interestingly, the conference was held in Brazil, a relatively poor nation with a relative abundance of pristine natural resources. While people in the South may have seen the decision to hold the meeting in Brazil as a global recognition of the primacy of their aspirations in a conference on environment and development, those in the North tended to view it as a recognition of the need to preserve the environments of the South, on which we all depend (Goldman 1992). Much attention has been focused on the need to preserve the world's rainforests to prevent global warming and preserve biological diversity. However, the governments of the industrialized nations must recognize that they are the primary producers of greenhouse gases and that they have reaped the majority of the economic benefits from the production of these gases and from deforesting their own nations (Little 1992). If the nations of the South are to be asked to forfeit much of the economic gains experienced by the industrialized world in creating the global climate problem, in order to provide ecological benefits for all, it is only fair that they somehow be compensated for their sacrifice and rewarded for their efforts. Thinking globally in terms of a world environment is essential. However, a failure to think globally in terms of a world economy and the global distribution of the costs and benefits of environmental protection and degradation is to ignore many of the macrostructural processes that have necessitated concern for a global environment. A similar need to be attentive to structural processes can be seen in domestic responses to environmental problems. A common response to the rapid consumption of nonrenewable fossil fuels has been to suggest that taxation be used to inflate the price of gasoline. Such a gas tax is already in place in many industrialized nations. Unfortunately, a tax on gas would necessarily impose an additional economic burden on the working class and poor, while creating little obstacle to consumption by the wealthy. Flat taxes require the less wealthy to sacrifice a larger percentage of their total income for basic necessities or to reduce their consumption in order to make ends meet. For the wealthy, however, a flat tax on necessities neither absorbs a high percentage of their income nor discourages them substantially from their patterns of consumption, for making ends meet is not their primary concern. While regressive taxation of resource consumption would achieve the goal of reducing overall rates of resource depletion, it would also increase the ever widening gap between rich and poor. Environmentalists are well advised to consider the distributional aspects of environmental protection measures, especially since the support of the working class and poor will be essential to ensuring the success of future environmental campaigns (see Chapter 7). Environmental destruction has been linked to a wide variety of'health concerns in the industrialized nations, leading many more people to express concern for increased environmental protection. However, it should be noted that the primary health concerns for most of the world's people are malnutrition and diarrhea, not cancer. For the most part, only people who are lucky enough to live relatively long lives have to worry about dying of cancer from long-term exposure to toxins or ultraviolet radiation. If we want those in the South to act to reduce manmade carcinogens in the environment, we must also take into account their primary health concerns and act in ways that will alleviate those ailments. The globalism of those living in the relative affluence of the industrialized world has, until recently, been somewhat narrow. It recognizes our dependence on global ecosystems. to provide for our own and our children's well-being. However, it has often failed to recognize the distributional elements of environmental protection, which are especially important to those in the developing world who have not had an opportunity to benefit economically from the processes that are. largely responsible for the environmental crisis. The more inclusive globalisni that is now emerging recognizes the relationships between Northern wealth and Southern poverty (South Commission 1990). It recognizes that domestic and global conditions of deepening inequality are a primary threat to ecological sustainability. It recognizes that environmental 'ustice is essential to maintain broad support for environmental protection (Young & Wolf 1992). It recognizes the relationship between levels of resource consumption of individuals and the ability of the planet to provide food for growing populations. 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