ECOLOGICAL CRISES

In the case of food the effects work both ways: the search to increase food production, e.g., gaining land for cattle raising, or increasing the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides may poison the earth and humans with it, e.g., deforestation with its burning may contribute to the Greenhouse effect, chemical applications and run-off may destroy both plants and animals, including human life. In the oppose direction, environomental destruction, such as desertification, deforestation (by logging), and urban sprawl may undermine the possibilities of increasing people's ability to grow food. In the case of energy, not only may certain approaches to obtaining non-human energy (such as strip mining, uranium mining, nuclear power, coal burning, wood cutting for fuel and so on) cause environmental destruction (destruction of ecosystems, radioactivity poisoning, acid rain, Greenhouse effect, deforestation) but these approaches may in turn result from a strategic withdrawal of human energy (rising entrophy in the labor force leading to the substitution of non-human for human energy).

In other cases, such as monetary or immigration crises the relationship between movements of money or people may no be so obviously tied to environmental problems. Yet, money may flow to build debt that will be repaid through environmental destruction (logging for timber export revenues) and people may move in response to the degradation or collapse of ecosystems (drought, desertification and the movement of nomads in the Sahel, deforestation and rural-urban or urban-rural migration in Mexico and Brazil).

Much more generally, many of the environmental crises of the recent periods are the by-product of the decades of rapid economic growth associated with the Keynesian era in which the mobilization of non-human resources was a vital component of managing human ones and there were few social or political constraints on this process. In the absense of markets, and thus of spontaneous market responses, to the spreading pollution of air, land and water, to all kinds of environmental destruction, to a deteriorating ozone shield, to acid rain, to the poisoning of the oceans and so on, it has only been social and political mass mobilization which has forced recognition of these problems and slammed them onto the political agenda. Many of these "crises", at least in certain of their moments, are quite old -even predating Keynesianism- yet their emergence into public understanding has come only as part of a general questioning and challenging of the nature and priorities of contemporary economic organization (i.e., Western capitalism and Eastern socialism). Thus these crises are not merely physical or biological phenomena but are immanently political ones. There coming into social being, their evolution and the possibilities of the their eventual solution has and will be unavoidably political.

A. MAJOR MOMENTS OF THE CURRENT CRISIS

1. The Destruction of the Land World

A. Deforestation

Robert J.A. Goodland, Amazon Jungle: Green Hell to Red Desert, Oxford: Elsevier Press, 1975.

Marion Clawson, Forests For Whom and For What? Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, for Resources for the Future, 1975.

Technocratic response to growing contestation of forest destruction. Resources for the Future is an elite think tank which thinks about aspects of the Earth as "resources" and plans their management -very much in the spirit of the early T. Roosevelt "conservation" approach.

Radical researchers on American corporate profit making in cahoots with local military and at the expense of both people and land.

About the mouvement in South Asia to fight deforestation and preserve forests and the ways of life associated with them.

J. Donald Huges and J.V. Thirgood, "Deforestation in Ancient Greece and Rome: A Cause of Collapse?" The Ecologist, Vol. 12, No. 5, Sept./Oct. 1982, pp. 196-208.

*Nicholas Guppy, "Tropical Deforestation: A Global View," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1984, pp. 928-965.

Awareness of the accelerating destruction of tropical rainforests pokes its way into the reading consciousness of the policy elite. "The tropical rain forest, today everywhere threatened with accelerating destruction, if conserved could be one of humanity's greatest renewable resources." "More obviously, however, rain forest is a source of raw materials . . . "--there's profit in them thar jungles! Guppy recognizes some of the social and political forces at work but winds up with a naive proposal for a new OPEC called OTEC to raise prices and preserve forests - all in the hands of the those now responsible for the destruction (local governments, the IMF and the World Bank).

"The Struggle Against Logging in Sarawak," Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1987, pp. 20-23.

Sahabat Alam Malaysia, "Malaysia Update: Logging-Post Blockade in Sarawak," Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1988, pp. 64-67.

Jason W. Clay, Indigenous Peoples and Tropical Forests: Models of Land Use and Management from Latin America, Cultural Survival Report 27, 1988. (128p)

This report "summarizes the research undertaken to date on activities used by indigenous peoples to sustain their populations and the environment: gathering forest products, hunting, aquaculture, shifting agriculture, permanent agriculture, and upgrading of the natural resource base."

Brief overview of the conflict between capitalist exploitation and indigenous survival in tropical rainforests and then a more detailed article on colusion between lumber interests and FUNAI, the Brazilian agency which is supposed to protect Indian rights but does not.

Series of articles on trible efforts to counter the intrusion of miners and land grabbers and the systematic destruction of their world.

"In May 1963, a rigged 'Act of Free Choice' condemned the people of West Papua to ne of the most brutal forms of colonialization at the hands of Indonesia. . . . The People of West Papua have suffered sincethat time - both physically and culturally. . . . so far perhaps as many as 300, 000 West Papuans have been killed." Slaughter, deforestation, pollution and transmigration in the land of Freeport-McMoran's mines -the company that wants to develop Barton Springs and on whose board of directors sits Bill Cunningham, UT president and soon-to be Chancellor of the UT system.

"Hydro-Quebec is annihilating one of the last subsistence hunting cultures in North America and poses a threat to the global environment. Thousands of Cree Indians who[se tribe] have lived in the James Bay region for centuries saw their villages, hunting [forests] and fishing territories and sacred burial grounds flooded by the first phase of hydroelectric developmenjt, James Bay Phase I which was completed in 1985." Phase II is following and also being fought by the Cree and many other environmental activists in North America.

B. Desertification

Erik P. Eckholm, Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World Food Prospects, New York: W.W. Norton, 1976.

A World Watch book. See especially chapters 3: "Two Costly Lessons: The Dust Bowl [U.S.] and the Virgins Lands [USSR]" and 4: "Encroaching Deserts".

Lester Brown,Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Earth Policy Institute, 2008, Chapter 5: Natural Systems Under Stress.

The chapter from Brown's book that deals with deforestation, desertification, declining fishing and extinctions around the world.

C. Animal Rights

Peter Singer (ed) In Defense of Animals, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature, Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989.

Rik Scarce, Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Chicago: Noble Press, 1990. Chapter 7: Animal Liberation: From Labs to Hunt Sabs.

PETA News (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).

Animals' Agenda.

2. The Destruction of the Ocean World

Among militant environmental groups concerned with the ecological problems of the oceans are Sea Shepards and Greenpeace. See the material on these groups in the section below about the ecological movement.

Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, New York: New American Library, 1961.

*Jacques Cousteau, "Conversations with Jacques Cousteau," U.S.News & World Report, June 24, 1985.

"Fishing Communities", special isse of Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1987.

A dozen articles explore case studies of the threat to indigenous fishing communities by commerical interests and ecological destruction.

3. The Destruction of the Air and Atmosphere

*Cynthia Pollock Shea, "Mending the Earth's Shield, " World Watch, Vol. 2, No. 1, January-February 1989, pp. 27-34.

Shea is senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute and author of Protecting Life on Earth: Steps to Save the Ozone Layer. Subtitle of article: "Synthetic Chemical Compounds are Erodoing the Ozone Layer that Protects the Earth from Dangerous Solar Rays. Technologies Exist to Slash Their Use, But Does the Political Will?"

*Michael D. Lemonick, "Global Warming: Feeling the Heat," Time, January 2, 1989, pp. 36-39.

4. The Pollution of Outer Space

B. THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

1. Background and History

Ehrlich is best known for his book The Population Bomb and its neo-malthusianism -which we discussed in the section on food crises. Here he aims at the emerging ecological crisis and, not surprisingly, finds overpopulation to be a fundamental cause.

Early radical run-down on the emerging eco-technocracy that emphasizes the usefulness of the environmental movement to business objectives of rationalization. Ex-post the analysis appears as far too pessimistic but still an antidote to the lure of eco-technocratic thinking. Another, less radical but useful overview of the early part of this history is Carl H. Moneyhorn, "The Environmental Crisis and American Politics 1860-1920," The Ecologist, Vol. 12, No. 1, Jan./Feb. 1982.

Commoner, whom we have encountered before in the energy section with his analysis of thermodynamics and waste, here takes on broader issues of human relations with nature and the consequent environmental degradation.

Abbey, one of the patron saints of American radical environmentalists, has written several other books as well: Abbey's Road, Hayduke Lives!, Desert Solitaire, One Life at a Time Please.

Francis Sandbachk, "The Environmental Movement," from Evironment, Ideology and Policy, 1980.

Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd, New York: W.W.Norton, 1982.

Also see Chapter 6: "The Sea Shepards: Bringing Justice to the High Seas," in Rik Scarce, Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, Chicago: Noble Press, 1990.

Also see Muir's own books, e.g., The Yosemite, My First Summer in the Sierra, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf.

Werner Hülsberg, The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile, London: Verso, 1988.

A sympathetic analysis of the environmental movement which has most deeply penetrated the electoral political process in its attempts to bring about change.

The best available overview of the development of radical environmental movement (radical as opposed to the more traditional "conservation" movement that dates back to Teddy Roosevelt. Has chapters on Greenpeace, Earth First!, the Sea Shepards, animal rights activists and particular episodes of struggle.

Daniel Stiles, "Patronage in the Philippines: Enviornmental and Cultural Survival in Palawan Province," Cultural Survival Quarterly, Summer 1991, pp. 71-75.

*Devon Peña, "The Brown and the Green: Chicanos and Environmental Politics in the Upper Rio Grande," Captialism, Nature & Socialism (forthcoming)

2. Ideology: Beyond Anthropomorphism: Deep Ecology

Aldo Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac, New York: Ballantine, (1948) 1966.

Classic text of the deep ecological "biocentric land ethic".

Critique of Western scientific consciousness and argument for a "politics of consciousness."

Bill Duval, "Some Sources of Deep Ecology," from Bill Duval and George Sessions, Deep Ecology, 1985, Chapter 6. Reprinted from Sessions' book Deep Ecology.

*George Sessions, "The Deep Ecology Movement," Environmental Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 105-125. (Also accessible through UT's Library Databases)

Good overview of the deep ecology movement with four pages of useful references to the literature.

Earth First!'s practical how-to-stop-them handbook for eco-warriors out to defend the wilderness against all comers

John Davis (ed) The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991.

3. Ideology: Ecology, Capitalism and Patriarchy

a. The Anarchists and Social Ecology

Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The emergence and Dissolution of HIerarchy, Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982.

Major work by the anarchist founder of "social ecology."

b. The Marxists, Class Struggle and Environmentalism

Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, New York: International Publishers, 1975, Vol. 4, especially the sections on "The Great Towns" and "Results". (Originally published 1845)

A book that gathered together the kind of empirical observations which would provide the grist for Marxist theoretical mill -for analysis and political conclusions. Although the focus is on the working class's living conditions, the observations includes the environmental horrors generated by industrialization. In his descriptions of Manchester we find the following: "Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main steet into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found - especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the ocurt only by apssing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. . . At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul smelling stream, full of débris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. . . .Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neigboring sewers and privies." (pp. 351- 352) In the second passage cited, Engels examines the dire consequences of such toxic pollution for the health of the workers.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15, section 10: "Large-scale Industry and Agriculture". (Originally published 1867).

"Capitalist production . . .disturbs the metabolic intraction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constitutent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker and the intellectual life of the rural worker. . . . Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the orgiinal sources of all wealth - the soil and and worker."

"Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and moreover, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country; and only this fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease."

c. The Anti-developmentalists

Ivan Illich, "Energy and Equity," in Toward a History of Needs, Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1977. (Originally published in Paris in 1973.)

*Wolfgang Sachs, "The Gospel of Global Efficiency: On World Watch and other Reports on the Stte of the World," ifda dossier 68, November/December 1988.

Critique of the world view and approaches of the emerging eco-technocracy.

V. Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books, 1989.

*Wolfgang Sachs, "Environment [On the Archeology of the Development Idea 5]," in Wolfgang Sachs (ed) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, New Jersey: Zed Books, 1992.

A critique of the managerial concept of "environmental" and "ecological science" together with an appeal for alternative approaches to thinking about the human interface with the rest of nature.

d. Ideology: Return of the Earth Mother: Eco-feminism

Karen J. Warren, "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1990.

4. Ecological Crises and Hunger

Harry Cleaver, "The Contradictions of the Green Revolution," Monthly Review, June 1972, especially the section on "Ecological Contradictions", pp. 98-100.

Touches on ecosystem simplifications such as mono-cropping and disease vulnerability, chemical poisonings, and eutrophication -all associated with the unconstrained desire to minimize costs and maximize output.

"As the United Nations prepares for a major conference on desertification in September, Sudan must choose between irrigation boondoggles and action to halt the desert creep which threatens its whole agricultural base."

Lester Brown, "Feeding Six Billion," World Watch, Vol. 2, No. 5, September-October 1989, pp. 32-40.

5. Ecological Crises and Energy

Barry Weisberg, "(The Ecology of Oil) Raping Alaska," in Ramparts (eds) Divided We Stand, San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1970, pp. 63-71.

Julia C. Allen, "Wood Energy and Preservation of Woodlands in Semi-Arid Developing Countries: The Case of Dodoma Region, Tanzania," Journal of Development Economics, 19, 1985, pp. 59-84.

Christopher Flavin, Reassessing Nuclear Power: The Fallout from Chernobyl, Worldwatch Paper, 1987.

Flavin is VP for research at Worldwatch Institute.

Flavin is VP for research at Worldwatch Institute.

Karl Grossman, "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy," EXTRA!, March 1992, pp. 15-16.

EXTRA! is a publication of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). This article reports on the "massive public relations effort backed by both the nuclear industry and state and local governments" to "neutralize" opposition to the first high-level nuclear waste dump and revive the demand for nukes.

6. Ecological Crises and Debt

Philip Shabecoff, "Global Bankers and Ecology: Amazon Rain Forest Tells the Story," New York Times, September 29, 1987, p. 2.

*"Conservation Groups Help to Bail Out the Big Banks," Business & Society Review, #65, Spring, 1988, pp. 34-38.

"Using Red Ink to Keep Tropical Forests Green," U.S. News & World Report, March 6, 1989, pp. 48-49.

Peter T. Kilborn, "Debt Policy Shift on 3rd World," New York Times, March 11, 1989.

7. Ecological Crises and Immigration

Charles Secrett, "The Environmental Impact of Transmigration," The Ecologist: Journal of the Post-Industrial Age, Vol. 16, No. 2/3, 1986, pp. 77-88.

"Eighty percent of the Transmigration sites [created as places into which to move people displaced from Sumatra and Java islands in Indonesia] to be set up during Indonesia's current Five-Year Plan will be hacked out of untouched jungle. The result will be the overall loss of at least 3.3 million hectares of some of the richest rainforest in the world. By supporting such destruction, the World Bank is breaking its own environmental and economic guidelines. Alternatives exist -and the Bank should promote them. Otherwise, it should withdraw funding entirely."

8. Resources

Environmental protest songs, pattern on the Little Red Songbook of the IWW.

Especially sections on Atmosphere, Healing the Earth and Poison and Power.

Journal produced by Cultural Survival, a group of anthopologists-activists concerned with the struggle of indigenous peoples for survival. They have produced a great many reports on various issues of environmental concern in so far as they involve -as they often do- indigenous peoples. A catalogue of their publications can be obtained from Clutral Survival Publications, 53A Church St., Cambridge, MA 02138.

Listing of some 150 activist organizations working on Amazonia issues in Latin America, Europe, North America and in the Asia/Pacific area. Contains partial bibliography of recommended books and films and gives an overview of the present situation. "Highly recomended for anyone interested in the politics behind rainforest deforestation and in the global movement to stop it."

How to do it. How to link into the cyberspacial nerve system of environmental information, discussion and activism to learn, download and contribute to an increasingly global mobilization.

Rich, though incomplete, sourcebook of materials on ecological issues.

Murray Bookchin's institute which teaches courses and programs in the principles and practices of "social ecology" -see the section above on anarchism and ecology.