(David Harvey teaches in the Department of Geography and Environmental
Engineering at The John Hopkins University. His books include Social
Justice and the City, The Limits to Capital, The Condition of
Postmodernity, and, most recently, Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference).
It has, unfortunately, taken far too long for Marxists to take
environmental issues seriously. There are some good reasons for this,
including the undoubtedly "bourgeois" flavor of many of the issues
politicized under that heading (such as "quality of life" for the
relatively affluent, romanticism of nature, and sentimentality about
animals) and the middle class domination of environmental movements.
Against this, it must also be recognised that communist/socialist
government have often ignored environmental issues to their own detriment
(the pollution of Lake Baikal, the destruction of the Aral Sea,
deforestation in China, being environmental disasters commensurate with
many of those attributable to capitalism). Environmental issues must be
taken seriously. The only interesting question is how to do it.
I criticized John Bellamy Foster's The Vulnerable Planet ("TVP") in my book
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference ("JNGD") because I think he
takes some wrong turns in confronting the problem. While I applaud his
attempts to link the production of many environmental problems to the
dynamics of capitalism (and agree with much of what he has to
say on that topic), he concedes far too much to the rhetoric of the
environmentalists. Like many others on the left who take environmentalism
seriously, he treads on dangerous conceptual ground without recognizing it.
In particular, he am peals to metaphors that create political difficulties
rather than advantages for socialists.
I would like to make two main points in response to his comments. The first
is that the metaphors to which we necessarily appeal in our discourses
about "nature" are dangerous (see JNGD, chapter 7). We cannot do without
them, but we should proceed with caution and select with care. They cannot
be laid aside as Foster does with a casual "they are not to be taken too
literally." Some metaphors can just as easily work as justifications for
ecofascism and sociobiology as for socialism. The second point is that,
while it is important to do a careful and respectful reading of what
environmentalists say (everything from deep ecology and social anarchism,
through the "scientific and managerial" literature, to the environmental
justice movement) we do not have to give up on our own language (Marxism)
in order to translate much of what is important in their arguments into our
own political tradition. I illustrate these two points by taking up two
issues brought up in his book and in his commentary on JNGD.
Metaphors of Crisis, Collapse and "The End of Nature"
The idea of crisis, imminent collapse, or even "the end of nature" plays an
overwhelmingly powerful role in shaping most varieties of environmental
discourse. The appeal of this rhetoric to the left is partly based on
displacing the crisis and collapse rhetoric about capitalism from class
conflict to the environmental issue. Foster (TVP) opens his argument thus:
"the destruction of the planet in the sense of making it unusable for human
purposes has grown to such an extent that it now threatens the continuation
of much of nature, as well as the survival and development of society
itself' (my italics draw attention to a different part of the sentence then
that emphasized in Foster's comment)."
I reemphasize here my view that a socialist politics that rests on the view
that environmental catastrophe is imminent is a sign of weakness. It echoes
that long and not very impressive history of proclaiming "the final
collapse of capitalism" in the Marxist tradition. This does not mean there
are no environmental problems. But we should resist the idea that the very
existence of a "vulnerable planet" (Foster's term) is threatened.
Leaving aside the question (which mainly preoccupies Foster) of whether we
can indeed 'threaten the continuation of much of nature," in the short or
long run, there are short run political difficulties with the idea. If the
collapse does not materialize in the near term or the grounds for such
expectations are seriously disputed, with strong appeals to both scientific
theory and evidence, then environmentalism in general (including its
socialist variant) gets discredited for crying "wolf' too often. There is
now a whole genre of writing along those lines. Not all of it comes form
the right wing and some of the rebuttals, such as that of the Ehrlichs and
the statement of the World Scientists, cited so approvingly by Foster, are
every bit as problematic as the literature they rebut. The Ehrlichs'
position on population control is very hard for socialists to accept and
the language of "humanity on a collision course with the natural world"
reeks of those abstract and ideological conceptions of which Marx
complained "whenever (natural scientists) venture beyond the bounds of
their own specialities." Looking for signs of catastrophe (always popular
with the media) may also divert our attention from some of the longer term
more gradual changes that ought also to command our attention. Besides, I
am by no means as sanguine as many that a rhetoric of crisis and imminent
catastrophe will sharpen our minds in the direction of class politics or
even cooperative, collective, and democratic responses as opposed to a
"lifeboat ethic" in which the powerful pitch the rest overboard.
It is primarily for this reason also that the invocation of "limits" and
"ecoscarcity" as a means to focus our attention upon environmental issues
makes me as politically nervous as
it makes me theoretically suspicious (see JNGD, pp. 139-49). While there
are versions of this argument that accept that "limits and "ecoscarcities"
are socially evaluated and produced (in which case the question of limits
in nature gets so softened as to become almost irrelevant), it is hard to
keep this line of thinking from slipping into some version of naturalism
(the absolutism of fixed limits in nature) or, worse still, Malthusianism
(even to the point where many radical environmentalists now claim that
Malthus was right rather than wrong and I note here that Foster (TVP) heads
his list of environmental difficulties with the politically loaded
Malthusian term "overpopulation," without any qualification, and
approvingly quotes Malthusians like the Ehrlichs at several points in his
book as well as in his comments).
We have, I want to suggest, a choice of background metaphors for our
deliberations. Against the idea that we are headed over the cliff into some
abyss (collapse) or that we are about to run into a solid and immovable
brick wall (limits), I think it far more consistent with both the better
sorts of environmental thinking and Marx's dialectical materialism to
construe ourselves as embedded within an ongoing flow of living processes
that we can individually and collectively affect through our actions, at
the same time as we are profoundly affected by all manner of events (some
self induced) within the world we inhabit. To construe ourselves as active
agents caught within the "web of life" is a much more useful metaphor than
the linear thinking that has us heading off a cliff or crashing into a
brick wall.2
But it is then necessary to find a way to construct socialist
environmentalist perspectives within the "web of life" metaphor. It is
first useful to consider the directly "negative" and "positive"
consequences of diverse human activities, both for ourselves (with
appropriate concern for class, social, and national distinctions) and for
others (including nonhuman species and whole habitats). But, even more
importantly, we need to recognize how our actions filter through the web of
interconnections that make up the living world with all manner of
unintended consequences. Foster is here quite correct
to point out that the question of scale (both temporal and, I also add,
geographical) is vital to how we identify and assess the seriousness of
environmental issues (this point is also made in JNGD, pp. 2034, but needs
much more detailed elaboration). Global issues (warming and loss of
biodiversity) contrast with microlocal issues (radon in the basement) and
short term difficulties intermingle with long term trends. I agree in
principle, however, that we need to focus on the transformations occurring
around us and not try to get ourselves off the hook by invoking, for
example, geological time as opposed to historical time. (Ironically, Foster
tries to deflect the force of my criticism by making it sound as if I may
be correct geologically but incorrect historically!)
How, then, should we assess our contemporary situation? A strong case can
be made that the environmental transformations now underway are larger
scale, riskier, and more far reaching and complex in their implications
(materially, spiritually, aesthetically) than ever before in human history
(cf. the citation from Science given in Foster's comment). The quantitative
shifts that have occurred in the last half of the twentieth century in, for
example, scientific knowledge and engineering capacities, industrial
output, waste generation, urbanization, population growth, international
trade, fossil fuel consumption, resource extraction just to name some of
the most important feature simply a qualitative shift in environmental
impacts and potential unintended consequences that require a comparable
qualitative shift in our responses and our thinking. The web of planetary
life has become heavily permeated with human influences (on this point
Foster and I clearly agree). The environmental movement (broadly
understood) has pioneered in alerting us to some of the risks and
uncertainties entailed. As a result, we now see that there is far more to
the environmental issue than the conventional Malthusian view that
population growth might outstrip resources and generate crises of
subsistence. (Up until as late as the 1970s this was the dominant form
environmentalism took.) Furthermore, the evidence for widespread unintended
consequences (some distinctly harmful to us and others unnecessarily
harmful to other species) of such massive environmental changes, though not
uncontested, is far more persuasive (cf. the case of the disappearing frogs
cited by Foster) than the idea that we are reaching some limit, that
environmental catastrophe is just around the corner or that we are about to
destroy the planet earth.
Prudence in the face of such risks is a perfectly reasonable posture. This
provides a more likely basis for forging some collective sense (and a class
politics) of how to approach environmental issues. There are, however,
several points to be made here. First, the definition of "environmental
issues" has its own particular bias, with those that affect the poor, the
marginalised, and the working classes frequently being ignored
(occupational safety and health, for example) while those that affect the
rich and the affluent get emphasized (for example, poverty is a far more
important cause of shortened life expectations in the United States than
smoking, but it is smoking that gets all the attention). Secondly,
environmental impacts frequently have a social bias (class, racial, gender
discriminations are evident in, say, the location of toxic waste sites and
the global impacts of resource depletion or environmental degradation).
Thirdly, some risks and uncertainties can strike anywhere, even against the
rich and the powerful. The smoke from the fires that raged in Indonesia in
the fall of 1997 did not respect national or class boundaries any more than
did the cholera that swept nineteenth century cities, the latter provoking
a universal rather than specifically class based approach to public health.
The threat of increased hurricane frequencies from global warming terrifies
insurance companies as much as it irritates General Motors and the oil
companies to hear that they should cut back on their global plans for
expansion because of the threat of emissions to the atmosphere. Finally,
the distinction between the production/prevention of risks and the
capitalistic bias towards consumption/commodification of cures has
significance.
Once the environmental issue is conceptualized in part as directly a class
issue, then this configuration of arguments fits into a definite kind of
class politics. We need, in the first instance, to understand the specific
class content and definition of environmental issues and seek alliances
around their resolution (as, for example, in the environmental justice
movement (see JNGD chapter 13). The politics of this kind of environmental
improvement can then replicate that which limited the length of the working
day as "the working class's power of attack grew with the number of its
allies in those social layers not directly interested in the question."3
But there is a more general point. The risk and uncertainty we now
experience acquires its scale, complexity, and far reaching implications by
virtue of processes that have produced the massive industrial,
technological, urban, demographic, lifestyle, and intellectual
transformations that we have witnessed in the latter half of the twentieth
century. In this, a relatively small number of key institutions, such as
the modern state and its adjuncts, multinational firms and finance capital,
and "big" science and technology, have played a dominant and guiding role.
For all the inner diversity, some sort of hegemonic economistic engineering
discourse has also come to dominate discussion of environmental questions,
commodifying everything and subjecting almost all transactions (including
those connected to the production of knowledge) to the singular logic of
commercial profitability and the cost benefit calculus. The production of
our environmental difficulties, both for the working class, the
marginalised and the impoverished (many of whom have had their resource
base stripped from under them by a rapacious commercialism) as well as for
some segments of capital and the rich and the affluent, is broadly the
result of this hegemonic class project (and its reigning neoliberal
philosophy). It invites as response an equally hegemonic class project of
risk prevention and reduction, resource recuperation and control, in which
the working class and the marginalised could take a leading role. In
performing that role the whole question of constructing an alternative mode
of production, exchange and consumption that is risk reducing and
environmentally, as well as socially, just and sensitive can be posed. Such
a politics must rest on the creation of class alliances in which the
environmental issue and a more satisfying "relation to nature" have a
prominent place alongside the reconstruction of social relations and modes
of production and consumption. A political project of this sort does not, I
insist, need a rhetoric of limits or collapse to work effectively and well.
But it does require careful and respectful negotiation with many
environmental movements that clearly see that capitalism is incompatible
with a satisfactory resolution of the environmental questions that bother
them.
(continued with part 2-b)
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