Poverty and Climate Change

Restoring a Global Biogeochemical Equilibrium (Open Access)

Fitzroy B. Beckford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429795404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Most, if not all of the global biogeochemical cycles on the earth have been broken or are at dangerous tipping points. These broken cycles have expressed themselves in various forms as soil degradation and depletion, ocean acidification, global warming and climate change. The best proposal for an organic solution to fixing the myriad broken cycles is a deliberate investment in solutions that first acknowledge the historic roles played by both the subjugated peoples, and the economic beneficiaries of the environmental exploitations of the past.

Ever since Europeans made contact with the West, a series of global circumstances including the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas, the enslavement and global subjugation of Africans, and the emergence of Western concepts of trade dominance and capitalism, have led to deleterious impacts on the global biogeochemical cycles. Addressing the broken biogeochemical cycles should be done with a clear understanding that it was not only human subjects which were subjugated, but also land, water, and air. These three global stores must be replenished from the ideological position that poverty is not simply the absence of money, but is also the lack of access to non-polluting energy sources, to clean air devoid of runaway greenhouse gasses, and to local conditions devoid of climate change instabilities. With this in mind, the global powerbrokers can enter into a new deal with developing nations, shifting the paradigm toward a new ecological approach that rewards good behavior and sets new standards of worldwide relations based on ecologic inclusivity rather than the exclusive economic arrangements currently in order.

Harnessing a forward thinking approach to analyzing the current global environmental crisis, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, political ecology, sustainable agriculture, climate change and environmental justice.

Part I
How global environmental democracy died

The neo-pollution phenomenon: a problem statement

On a quiet Sunday morning in the summer of 1969, a fire erupted on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio. In contemporary times, the people who were within easy distance from the burning river would have been aghast at the sight, but on this quiet Sunday morning there was hardly a reaction. The sad reality of the times was that the people of Cleveland, through which the Cuyahoga cuts its sinuous, oil slick-covered path toward Lake Erie, had seen similar fires before, so this one was hardly a novelty. In fact, no one even took pictures of the river fire that morning, not even Time Magazine which reported the story using a 17-year-old picture taken in 1952 of an even more serious river fire on the Cuyahoga. The Time magazine story, however, caused the world to take notice of the industrialized pollution plaguing the city of Cleveland and other places around the United States (U.S.), where rivers and coastal waters were considered the ideal places in which to pour the billions of gallons of chemical and toxic wastes generated from industry.

The August 1, 1969 Time Magazine report on the burning Cuyahoga, however, was well timed. Only a few years before in September 1962, Rachel Carson had published her blockbuster report – ‘Silent Spring’ – on the effects of pesticides on the environment. The message in Carson’s book delivered a world-changing viewpoint on agro-industrial pollution’s deleterious effects on birds and other animal species, leading to a wave of positive reactions which ended in the restriction of certain pesticides considered too hazardous. By 1972, in response to growing awareness and concern for water pollution, the U.S. Federal Government radically amended the Federal Water Pollution Act of 1948, naming the revised law the Clean Water Act (CWA). The amendments in the CWA were very bold at the time, providing specific rules for cleaning up and protecting water resources. The amendments included the following specific provisions:

• Establishment of the basic structures for regulating pollutant discharges into the waters of the United States.
• Providing the EPA with the authority to implement pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry.
• Maintaining existing requirements to set water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters.
• Making it unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained under its provisions.
• Making funds available for the construction of sewage treatment plants under the construction grants program.
• Recognizing the need for planning to address the critical problems posed by nonpoint source pollution.

(EPA, 2017)

In 1982, yet another environmental domain – beyond those reported on by Time and by Rachel Carson – was observably in a state of demise, and this time it threatened to affect the entire world. Scientists had discovered a massive hole in the Ozone Layer of the atmosphere, the damage caused by the accumulation of chlorofluorocarbon gasses (CFCs). Driven into action by a near global cancer scare, environmentalists banded their efforts through the Montreal Protocol which was ratified by 196 countries as well as the European Union, the goal being to reduce the production and use of ozone depleting substances, in order to reduce their abundance in the atmosphere, and thereby protect the earth’s fragile ozone Layer (UNDP Ozone Secretariat). The Montreal Protocol, the first universally ratified treaty in the history of the United Nations, was unprecedented in its scope, in the level of collaboration, and in its global impact.

The fear that galvanized collective global action was not unsubstantiated. Acting as a protective shield that blocks high-frequency ultraviolet rays from the sun, the ozone layer screens against skin cancers and cataracts in humans, and mitigates against reproductive problems in aquatic life including amphibians, reptiles, and phytoplankton. The worldwide reaction to the hole in the ozone was so swift and so effective that by the end of the year 2000, more than 98 percent of CFCs – about 2.5 million metric tons as estimated by the United Nations Environment Program – had been phased out globally, the ozone hole over the Antarctic had significantly reduced in size and was expected to return to pre-1980 levels by the year 2050.

Despite the gravity of each situation, the three scenarios shared here (the burning Cuyahoga, the petrochemical problems unearthed by Carson, and the hole in the ozone layer) were the good stories because they each ended with positive response to the shared problem of pollution. However, an examination of current trends determines that the bad behavior of indiscriminate waste disposal and overuse of nutrients has continued, and may even be worse than the situations previously discovered and solved. Three significant contemporary problems elucidate this argument, and are italicized below to show stark comparison to problems which are purported to have been previously solved. When elucidated in this way, it brings into question whether lessons have been learned, or whether progress has been made.

• • The petrochemical loads that damaged natural environments and systems, and described by Rachel Carson in 1962 (Nutrient runoff from agricultural and residential sources continue to upset the natural balance of aquatic systems, polluting major water bodies across the U.S., and destabilizing biogeochemical cycles. The EPA (April 2012) reports that 15,000 major water bodies, 101,000 miles of rivers and streams, and 3,500,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs in the U.S. are impaired by nutrients).
• (b) The issues which caused the Cuyahoga River Fires as elucidated by Time Magazine in 1969 (Islands of floating trash have appeared on all of Earth’s oceans. The National Geographic Magazine reported in 2015 that an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris are in the oceans, and of that mass of trash, 269,000 tons float on the water’s surface. An additional 4 billion microfibers per square kilometer litter the Earth’s seas).
• (c) The releases of gasses which resulted in the ozone hole, as discovered by British Antarctic survey scientists in 1982 (Greenhouses gasses have pushed the atmosphere to its highest post-Carboniferous warming limits. Since the start of the new millennium, and despite the forewarnings of the ozone layer crisis, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere has increased annually, totaling an enormous 3.8 gigatons of CO₂ in 2016. One gigaton [unit of mass] is equal to a billion metric tons).

The neo-pollution issues described in the preceding statements are well known; their causes widely defined and fully understood to be mainly first world vices with third world consequences. For clarity, many of the people who live in third world conditions do not necessarily live in developing countries, but they are subjects of deprived wealth even in developed states, the lack of access to resources denying them upward social and economic mobility. Too often, social injustice dictates the environmental conditions in their communities.

It is becoming increasingly more understood in the context of development that an egalitarian global system can only be built when there is recognition that the global poor are not only landless, but are distant from those pivotal ecosystems services provided through proximity to land, and to environmental resources essential to their livelihoods. At the same time, the global poor continue to be too closely connected to the wastes and polluting discharges created when raw natural resources are used up and then dumped – often where they live. Sadly, with respects to the impact of global pollution on the un-owned spheres of the Earth, particularly the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and lithosphere not owned by countries or corporations, we have moved to the tipping point at which the impact of human actions are about to plummet mankind into the abyss of irreparable damage. Hallucinations about an escape to Mars where a few elite Earth survivors will rebuild humanity inside glass greenhouses is simply laughable, mainly because it is so much easier and so much more rational to fix the Earth’s environments rather than to engineer livable habitats on a planet that’s already dead.

The Noah’s Flood Inertia Syndrome

Unlike the reaction to the hole in the ozone, many corporations as well as governments have been operating under the illogical premise (or deliberate denial) that if you can’t see global warming then it’s probably not there. As a result they do little or nothing in the face of growing concerns and amidst the resounding denial of scientific data, choosing to continue along established paths toward certain calamity. Yet they hope, paradoxically, that as a last resort, the science of geo-engineering will save humanity if both apathy and ignorance prove consequential. In light of the apathetic response to rising greenhouse gas emissions and to global warming, it is difficult to understand how humans have banded together in the recent past, how they heeded the warnings provided by the science of the day, and how they stemmed or even reversed those critical problems encountered in 1962, 1969, and 1982.

So how did we get to this point of political apathy where ignorance, intolerance, and even extremism seem to abound? How did we get to the point where polarized politics has dominated the debate, where right-wing climate-deniers shout disagreements at left wing vaccination-skeptics, while the poor get further marginalized as their children die of preventable childhood diseases, and their young people become environmental refugees as their coastal lands flood from rising seas? All of this while primary tropical forests get increasingly farmed out after carbon sequestrating trees are harvested to make room for methane belching cattle, this while the climate gets warmer and the northern tundra burns. Using the biblical story of Noah’s Flood as analogy (with no acknowledgment of the veracity of the event), it becomes easier to comprehend how people shrugged off the warnings of danger amidst swelling rainclouds, even while Noah’s Ark loomed ready to save humanity from certain apocalypse. The harsh reality of global climate change is that it is having a ‘Noah’s Flood Inertia Syndrome’ upon modern humans, where despite the scientific evidence for an apocalypse, the human response is paltry.

The gravest challenge of twenty-first-century humanity in the face of these growing complexities is how to accommodate a paradigm shift in attitudes, in behaviors, and in those actions that engage poor and marginalized peoples as equal contributors to the global public good? How do we band together collectively to save the Earth again, this time from runaway greenhouse gas emissions? These questions require a review of the past and present, but must also proffer simple and useful ideas about how to reconfigure human relationships with nature through the neo-economics of environmental democracy. The basic quest of this book is therefore to render an understanding of past actions along with their crippling consequences, discuss the means by which changes in present attitudes can be influenced, thus elucidating a clearer trajectory toward practical solutions through the experiential engagement of the global native.

1
The American native and the European invader – the nexus

European exploration beyond the borders of the continent began long before the 1400s, but the latter part of that century ushered in a period of events spear-headed by Christopher Columbus. Columbus’s inadvertent discoveries led to the occupation of the lands of the ‘Americas’, and the overexploitation of the vast resources of this ‘New World’ began in earnest after 1492. While largely seen as a period of success from the vantage point of the old world (Europe), the natural resources of the Americas, as well as Oceana (Australia, New Zealand and surrounding islands) and the human resources of Africa, experienced a period of human and environmental exploitation that was unprecedented in human history. This clash of worldviews between the old world and the newly subjugated land and peoples thus heralded the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the ‘Native’ versus the ‘Invasive’.

Perhaps the best way this unfortunate meeting between the old and new worlds can be described from the viewpoint of the Indian (a name which while now stuck to the natives of the entire Americas, owes its origins in Columbus’s error in believing he had actually reached the eastern-most regions of India) is summarized in the poem ‘There was an Indian’ by the British author and satirist John Squire.

There was an Indian

There was an Indian, who had known no change,

Who strayed content along a sunlit beach

Gathering shells. He heard a sudden strange

Commingled noise: looked up; and gasped for speech.

For in the bay, where nothing was before,

Moved on the sea, by magic, huge canoes

With bellying cloths on poles, and not one oar,

And fluttering colored signs and clambering crews.

And he, in fear, this naked man alone,

His fallen hands forgetting all their shells,

His lips gone pale, knelt low behind a stone,

And stared, and saw, and did not understand,

Columbus’s doom-burdened caravels

Slant to the shore, and all their seaman land.

– By Sir John Squire (Stabroek News, 2016)

How the western world was won

It is not difficult to imagine that Native Americans did not like the new type of mankind that they encountered disembarking from the ships of Christopher Columbus. Historian David Abulafia (2008) offers an account from Bartolme Las Casas who despaired about what the conquest of America revealed about the true character of his Spanish compatriots. Las Casas tells the story of Hatuey, a cacique (Chief) from Hispaniola who fled to Cuba in the aftermath of the desperation experienced on the island of Hispaniola after Columbus established the first Spanish settlement there. After being captured by European conquistadores, Hatuey was tied to the stake and told that if he did not convert to Christianity he would go to Hell and eternal torment. Hatuey enquired where the Spanish went after death. When he learned that the Spanish went to a place called heaven, Hatuey replied he would gladly prefer to go to Hell, and so, according...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• PART I How global environmental democracy died
• PART II Applying practical solutions: reconnecting Earth and sky
• Index