The Vulnerable Planet

A Short Economic History of the Environment

John Bellamy Foster

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781583673980
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

From reviews of the first edition (1994): "Extraordinarily well written... "
--Contemporary Sociology

"A readable chronicle aimed at a general audience... Graceful and accessible... "
--Dollars and Sense

"Has the potential to be a political bombshell in radical circles around the world."
--Environmental Action

The Vulnerable Planet has won respect as the best single-volume introduction to the global economic crisis.

With impressive historical and economic detail, ranging from the Industrial Revolution to modern imperialism, The Vulnerable Planet explores the reasons why a global economic system geared toward private profit has spelled vulnerability for the earth's fragile natural environment.

Rejecting both individualistic solutions and policies that tinker at the margins, John Bellamy Foster calls for a fundamental reorganization of production on a social basis so as to make possible a sustainable and ecological economy.

This revised edition includes a new afterword by the author.

1
THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

Human society has reached a critical threshold in its relation to its environment. 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. The litany of ecological complaints plaguing the world today encompasses a long list of urgent problems. These include: overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources. According to the prestigious Worldwatch Institute, we have only four decades left in which to gain control over our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible socio-ecological decline, and the 1990s are the critical decade in which the necessary changes must begin to occur.¹

Yet most current prescriptions for solving the planet’s ecological problems are woefully inadequate to meet such ominous threats, since they amount to little more than calls for new international agreements, for personal restraint with regard to the growth of both population and consumption, and the adoption of a handful of so-called environmentally friendly technologies. In what follows I will argue that we must begin by recognizing that the crisis of the earth is not a crisis of nature but a crisis of society. The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policymakers, and the scientific establishment—the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess. In other words, because the crisis has social roots, the solution must involve the transformation of historical relationships on a global scale in order to fashion a sustainable relationship between nature and society.

THE GROWTH OF THE WORLD ECONOMY

History teaches us that societies have long been at war with the environment, treating nature as little more than a resource to be tapped and as a sink into which to dump their wastes. At times such a one-sided exploitation of nature has led to regional environmental catastrophes that have in turn led to the fall of whole civilizations—the Sumerians are one example that will be discussed in detail later. Nevertheless, until the last few centuries human society existed on so small a scale in relation to the global environment that its effects remained fairly negligible.

This situation began to change with the emergence, in stages, of the capitalist world system, which began in Europe in the late 1400s. The great historical transformation initiated by Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic five hundred years ago marked the origins of what was to become the capitalist world system and the simultaneous creation of a world hierarchy of nation states, defined by the relation of colonizer and colonized, more developed and less developed. The European colonization of the greater part of the globe, beginning with the “New World” and extending to the Asian and African continents, led to the extraction of vast quantities of economic surplus—whether in the form of precious metals, such as gold and silver, or agricultural products, such as sugar, spices, coffee, tea, and many more—and therefore to the social and ecological transformation of the colonized regions. “The gold and silver of the New World,” the great French historian Fernand Braudel wrote, “enabled Europe to live above its means, to invest above its savings.”² The rise of modern colonialism was thus a crucial force behind the commercial revolution experienced by European society from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Additional sources of food, such as maize, potatoes, and numerous varieties of beans—all of which originated in the Americas—were taken back to Europe, transforming European agriculture and then the agriculture of the entire world. All of this helped prepare the way for the next great stage of capitalism’s advance, the Industrial Revolution, which took place in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and led to a rapid increase in the scale and intensity of production and to the development of a set of divisions that are at the core of our understanding of the modern world: the division between economy and nature, between capital and labor, and between center and periphery.

The impact of these developments on the planet’s environment becomes clear when we examine changes in four key areas—population, energy, industrialization, and urbanization—over the last four centuries.

Population

At the time of Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 the Americas were the home, according to the most recent estimates, of some 100 million people—compared to a European population of only about 70 million (in 1500). Epidemics and the violence of the conquest led to the rapid decimation of the indigenous Amerindian populations and to the “demographic takeover” of their land by peoples of European origin. “Wherever the European has trod,” Charles Darwin observed, “death seems to pursue the aboriginal.” Within a century after 1492, the indigenous population had dropped by 90 percent.

This demographic takeover of much of the world by people of European origin was facilitated by a population explosion in early capitalist Europe that was the result of a sharp decline in death rates. This decline was in turn mainly due to the beneficial effects of improved nutrition and sanitation, which reduced famines and epidemics. In England and Wales, the home of the Industrial Revolution, the population was 6 million in 1750. It had increased by half, to 9 million, in 1800. In the next fifty years it doubled, to 18 million. After this, the rate of population growth declined, although the population continued to rise—to 33 million in 1900. And the increase took place even though Britain exported 20 million people from the sixteenth century through the early twentieth century (Europe exported 60 million over the same period). As a result of the population explosion at home and expansion abroad, Europeans and their overseas offspring increased their share of world population from about 18 percent in 1650 to more than 30 percent in 1900.³

This European population explosion tapered off in the twentieth century. In Europe, as in all regions that have reached fairly advanced stages of economic development, birth rates—responding to higher levels of affluence—eventually fell, producing population growth rates close to replacement level, in the final phase of what is known as the “demographic transition.” One of the key characteristics of development, the demographic transition is the gradual changeover from a demographic equilibrium of high death rates and high birth rates, characteristic of pre-industrial society, to a demographic equilibrium of low death rates and low birth rates, characteristic of the more developed industrial societies. In the first phase of the transition, associated with early industrialization, there is a decline in the death rate that is not matched by a corresponding decline in the birth rate—and therefore a population explosion. In the second phase, economic development leads to a drop in the birth rate as well, slowing down the rate of population growth. Thus the population of the developed world expanded rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but slowed in the twentieth. By 1985, net population growth in the industrialized countries had dropped to 0.4 percent per year.⁴ Affluence thus resulted in lower population growth rates, which then tended to reinforce the affluence.

In contrast, the countries on the periphery of the world economy were unable to follow the same path—to industrialize and then complete the demographic transition. Instead they found their development hindered by the legacy of colonialism and by the need to compete with the advanced capitalist economies, on terms set by the latter. The “development of underdevelopment,” as this situation came to be called, was marked by a continual outflow of surplus from the peripheral countries to the core countries, rather than the development of the periphery itself. This resulted in a gap in per capita income between core and periphery that increased sevenfold over the course of a little more than two centuries (we will discuss this further below). The “lag” between the decline in the mortality rate (associated with the move toward industrialization) and the fall in the fertility rate (associated with improved living standards) has thus been lengthened for countries at the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. Caught in a demographic trap between an “industrial” death rate and an “agricultural” birth rate, many underdeveloped countries are faced with an unenviable situation: their populations are growing rapidly while their rates of economic growth per capita are stagnant or declining, each of which then reinforces the other. What has happened, according to the renowned environmentalist Barry Commoner, is that a kind of “demographic parasitism” has developed, in which “the second, population-balancing phase of the demographic transition” in the affluent center of the capitalist world economy “is fed by the suppression of the same phase” in the impoverished periphery. “Colonialism,” Commoner writes, “has determined the distribution of both the world’s wealth and of its human population, accumulating most of the wealth north of the equator and most of the people below it.”⁵

The main consequence of the inability of the periphery to develop economically and complete the demographic transition is that the weight of human numbers has become a growing ecological problem. World population increased from around 500 million in 1600 to more than 750 million in 1750, 1.25 billion in 1850, 2.5 billion in 1950, and 5.5 billion today—an increase of 1,000 percent since 1600. It is expected to exceed 8 billion by the year 2020. And 95 percent of the projected increase will occur in the underdeveloped periphery.

To be sure, the rate of population growth is now decreasing because some industrializing countries—such as China, Thailand, and South Korea—have begun to experience the drop in the birth rate that defines the second phase of the demographic transition. Nevertheless, the world’s population continues to rise and the ability to stabilize it will depend more than anything else on the speed with which the underdeveloped nations are able to reach replacement-level fertility. Long-term United Nations projections suggest that such stabilization will happen when population reaches around 10 billion in 2095, but only if fertility in the periphery (particularly South Asia, Africa, and Latin America) drops to replacement-level by 2035. If replacement-level fertility is not reached until 2065, however, the world population would be 14 billion in 2100. And even this could turn out to be optimistic if there is not further substantive economic development in the periphery, and hence the possibility of completing the second phase of demographic transition in those countries now experiencing a population explosion.⁶

Energy

The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by a revolution in the conversion of inanimate energy to meet human needs. As the pathbreaking U.S. environmental philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford observed in his Technics and Civilization (1934), this was part of a more general shift in the “technological complex” of civilization from the “ecotechnic phase,” based on a “water-and-wood complex,” to the “paleotechnic phase,” based on a “coal-and-iron complex.” The growing scarcity of firewood from the sixteenth century on helped spur the demand for coal, and coal production in England rose from 200,000 tons in the mid-sixteenth century to 3 million tons at the end of the seventeenth. This in turn generated the demand for better mine engines, as shafts had to be sunk deeper and deeper below the water table. In the second half of the eighteenth century, James Watt perfected previous innovations and built a steam engine that was widely adopted. It was powered by coal and was at first used primarily in coal mining, but was later used in the textile and metallurgical industries and the railroads. “Coal,” British economist W.S. Jevons wrote in 1865, “stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country, the universal aid, the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.” World coal production in 1800 amounted to about 15 million tons per year. By 1860 it had risen to around 132 million tons and by 1900 to 701 million (a 46-fold increase over the course of the century).

In the last third of the nineteenth century oil and natural gas began to be exploited, electrical generators were introduced, and giant hydroelectric projects were built. World consumption of petroleum grew rapidly, from 10 million tons in 1890 (shortly after the introduction of the first automobiles) to 95 million tons in 1920, 294 million tons in 1940, and 2.5 billion tons a year in the 1970s. Industrialization was thus associated with the consumption of nonrenewable fossil fuels (coal, petroleum and natural gas), supplemented by hydroelectric (and later nuclear) power.

But even as more energy was being produced, more was being sought. World consumption of commercial energy—most of it from nonrenewable sources—rose over 60 times between 1860 and 1985. Moreover, global energy consumption patterns reflected the widening division of the world economy between core and periphery. The average North American today uses 40 times the amount of commercial energy used by the average person in the third world. Energy consumption per person in the advanced capitalist countries is 80 times that in sub-Saharan Africa.⁷

Industrialization

Behind these changes in population and energy use lay the fundamental changes in production that are associated with industrialization and the development of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution was dominated in its initial phase (1760-1840) by the rise of the cotton mill in Britain and in its second phase (1840-1875) by the growing use of the steam engine, particularly in the development of the railroad. The next stage (sometimes known as the scientific-technical revolution) began in the late 1800s and involved the development of the steel, chemical, and electricity industries, followed, as the twentieth century approached, by the rise of the automobile. Finally, the second half of the twentieth century saw the growth of petrochemicals, the development of jet aircraft, and the emergence of computers.

Transformations in the division of labor were closely related to each of these changes, progressing from a system of “simple management” under the competitive capitalism of the first Industrial Revolution, to “scientific management” (called Taylorism after its founder Frederick Taylor) under the monopoly capitalism of the scientific-technical revolution, and finally to growing reliance on what is often called “flexible, interchangeable” manufacture under the increasingly globalized production of the present day.

In the context of these changes in production, world manufacturing output (including handicrafts) rose dramatically, increasing more than 80 times between 1750 and 1980 (an estimate that takes into account the effects of the destruction of third world handicraft production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). As recently as 1950, the world manufactured only one-seventh the goods that it produces today and extracted only one-third the minerals. Although the rate of growth has slowed since the 1970s, the world economy continues to expand exponentially: it took only the two decades from 1970 to 1990, when the growth rate of world industrial production was 3.3 percent, for total industrial output to double. With a 3 percent rate of growth, world production will double every 23 years. With a 4 percent rate of growth, it will double every 18 years.⁸

Such exponential growth has been accompanied by growing problems of distribution, both within countries and between center and periphery. In about 1750, per capita income in what are now the developed countries and what are now the underdeveloped countries was roughly equal: about $ 180 (in 1960 dollars and prices) in the former and between $ 180 and $ 190 in the latter. But by about 1930, per capita income in the developed countries had risen to $780 (again in 1960 dollars and prices), while in the underdeveloped countries it had remained at the 1756 level of $190. In 1980, the gap had widened still further, with the developed countries reaching a per capita income of $3,000 and the underdeve...