Birth of a New Earth

The Radical Politics of Environmentalism

Adrian Parr

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542456
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

In response to unprecedented environmental degradation, activists and popular movements have risen up to fight the crisis of climate change and the ongoing devastation of the earth. The environmental movement has undeniably influenced even its adversaries, as the language of sustainability can be found in corporate mission statements, government policy, and national security agendas. However, the price of success has been compromise, prompting soul-searching and questioning of the politics of environmentalism. Is it a revolutionary movement that opposes the current system? Or is it reformist, changing the system by working within it?

In Birth of a New Earth, Adrian Parr argues that this is a false choice, calling for a shift from an opposition between revolution and incremental change to a renewed collective imagination. Parr insists that environmental destruction is at its core a problem of democratization and decolonization. It requires reckoning with militarism, market fundamentalism, and global inequality and mobilizing an alternative political vision capable of freeing the collective imagination in order to replace an apocalyptic mindset frozen by the spectacle of violence. Birth of a New Earth locates the emancipatory work of environmental politics in solidarities that can bring together different constituencies, fusing opposing political strategies and paradigms by working both inside and outside the prevailing system. She discusses experiments in food sovereignty, collaborative natural-resource management, and public-interest design initiatives that test new models of economic democratization. Ultimately, Parr proclaims, environmental politics is the refusal to surrender life to the violence of global capitalism, corporate governance, and militarism. This defiance can serve as the source for the birth of a new earth.

1

VARYING SHADES OF GREEN

Neoliberal principles of individualism, privatization, consumption, and unconstrained choice underpinning advanced capitalism are rapidly becoming the predominant strategy used in response to widespread environmental degradation and climate change. Whether we are speaking of changing our personal choices to buy green or investing in the growing market in carbon offsets, there is very little difference between the two. Both assume we can leave pollution, species extinction, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, diminishing water quality and quantity, food scarcity, trash, and dirty energy up to the market to solve.

By not challenging the neoliberal principles of individualism, privatization, consumption, and unconstrained choice underpinning advanced capitalism, the environmental movement leaves unquestioned the unsustainable model of growth capitalism relies upon. Conflating environmentalism with neoliberalism displaces the important political issues environmental degradation poses for society. Namely, environmental degradation presents an incredible opportunity to strategically interrupt the violent march of global capitalism and the model of endless economic growth it is premised upon.

The World Bank succinctly clarifies the situation: “World trade has exploded since the early 1960s. World exports have grown just under $1 trillion a year (in 2000 dollars) to nearly $10 trillion a year, annualized growth of some 5.5 percent per year … They are clearly outpacing global output, which increased at some 3.1 percent per year over the same period. Between 1970 and 2004, the share of exports relative to global output has more than doubled and is now greater than 25 percent. Throughout the early part of this period the export elasticity (the rate of growth of exports relative to output) was running at about 1.5, but around 1986 the elasticity picked up substantially, peaking at more than 2.5 a decade later.”1 Economic growth has led to rapid urbanization, industrialized agriculture, dirty energy, and a growing middle class of eager consumers with unsustainable ecological footprints.2 The environmental implications of economic growth at this scale are massive: climate change, loss of habitat, habitat fragmentation, deteriorating ecosystems, diminishing quality and quantity of natural resources, pollution, toxicity, and biodiversity loss.

Since the beginning of industrialization the environment has borne the brunt of the economic development burden providing the raw materials necessary for production and a dumping ground for pollution. Capitalism, as John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York have summed it up, is “incurring an enormous ecological debt” using up “environmental resources and the absorptive capacity of the environment while displacing the costs back on Earth itself.”3 James O’Connor has called this the “second contradiction of capital.”4 That is, capitalism fails to replenish the conditions of production and in so doing underproduction sets in as the well-being of human labor and the vitality of ecological systems degrade. All in all, the direct cost of economic growth to the environment and the often indirect costs to communities living in the vicinity of environmental hazards are not factored into the overall cost of a commodity or service. In other words, environmental degradation is a negative externality of capital.

Let’s take a moment to sketch some of the defining features of capital by returning to that eminent and influential thinker Karl Marx. The linchpin of Marx’s understanding of capital is that it is a process, not a thing.5 Marx explains that the process of capital accumulation consists of production, exchange, circulation, and the generation of wealth (money, assets, rent). Commodities are produced for exchange on the market to generate surplus value. They hold both a use and exchange value. A use value is directly consumed and satisfies a human need, whereas the commodity’s exchange value is actualized when the commodity is sold. Marx used the formula M-C-M to summarize the process of using money to buy a commodity that is then resold for a profit.6 Surplus value isn’t realized until the commodity is sold for money. Prior to money entering the equation, surplus value exists merely as an unrealized speculative value. In this respect money doesn’t just measure value it is also a medium of circulation. It is the movement arising from exchange that facilitates the accumulation of capital, because through exchange, surplus is generated.

Price does not accurately represent the real costs of a commodity. There are a range of social and environmental damages that are part of the production, circulation, and exchange of commodities that are used for free. Neither producers, nor consumers, pay for negative environmental costs such as air and water pollution, aquifer depletion, or deforestation. Some environmental costs, such as the natural resources used in production, do enter the price structure of a commodity as raw materials, but there are many environmental costs, such as emitting carbon into the atmosphere or water contamination and depletion, that come free. Furthermore, the complex environmental costs arising from each stage of a commodity’s global life cycle remain externalized.7 For example, the cost of a car does not honestly represent the environmental damage that comes from mining the coal to produce the energy needed in the production of steel or the chemicals used in plastics or spray paint, which contaminate water supplies, nor does it reflect the social and environmental costs of oil spills from the gas used to power the trucks that transport cars to dealerships. Then there are future environmental costs such as the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) the car will pump into the atmosphere during its lifetime and that are driving climate change or the expanding number of landfills dotted around the globe that the car will eventually be dumped at. Basically producers and consumers are free riding (depleting a public good or service while reaping the advantages without paying for it) the benefits of the environment. Indeed, a report issued by the Corporate Eco Forum in 2013 estimated that nature provides “$72 trillion worth of free goods and services” to the global economy.8 All in all, the direct and indirect costs of production and economic growth are not included in exchange value; as a result, it is the environment and communities that end up absorbing these costs.

Capital engenders numerous negative environmental externalities. Carbon emissions from human activities are causing global climate change. According to ice core records, the earth’s average concentration of carbon dioxide preindustrialization is estimated at 280 ppm.9 In May 2013 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory reported a daily average global concentration of carbon dioxide of 400 ppm.10 To avoid significant changes to the climate, scientists advise global carbon dioxide concentrations do not exceed 350 ppm. One of the spin-off effects of climate change is the disruption of the hydrologic cycle through drought, growing frequency and intensity of storms, rising sea levels, and glacial melt. In addition to climate change, the unsustainable extraction rate of groundwater supplies is placing global water resources under stress.11 Then there is the contamination of water supplies and the havoc this wreaks on the ecosystems that rely on healthy water. Environmental accidents such as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20, 2010, one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history, spewed approximately 170 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, killing eleven workers and injuring sixteen more, with severe effects for flora and fauna and injuring thousands of birds, marine life, and sea turtles.12

The combination of pollution, climate change, and the destruction of natural habitats has caused the planet to experience its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals, with the rate of species extinction estimated as falling between one thousand and ten thousand the natural rate by the beginning of the twenty-first century.13 The extinction figure is an alarming indication of significant biodiversity loss, which threatens to irreparably weaken genetic diversity and in turn trigger extensive ecosystem distress and collapse.

One way to curb negative environmental externalities is through governmental regulation. The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s was an important ingredient in achieving this. It raised the public’s environmental consciousness and placed pressure on governments to introduce environmental legislation and legal frameworks to hold polluters accountable. The environmental movement of those decades harnessed the social energies invested in other political movements—antiwar, antinuclear, labor, civil rights, and feminist—placing them in the service of an environmental agenda. It presented a unified political front traversing the differentiated landscape of identity politics popular at the time.

Celebrated environmental achievements in the United States were the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. In the United Kingdom the Clean Air Act was passed in 1968. In Europe, Norway introduced the Nature Conservation Act (1970), the European Council declared the first five-year Environment Action Programme (1972), and the Environment Protection Act was approved in Switzerland by popular vote (it didn’t come into effect until 1985). In the Southern Hemisphere New Zealand approved its Clean Air Act (1972) and a Marine Reserves Act (1971), while Australia introduced the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act (1975), and the Australian state of New South Wales passed the Environment and Planning Assessment Act (1979). Numerous political parties with environmental agendas popped up: the Popular Movement for the Environment in Switzerland (1972); the United Kingdom’s People Party (1973), which later became the Ecology Party (1975) and then the Green Party (1985); and the German Green Party (1980). The rising popularity of environmental politics ushered in numerous nongovernmental activist organizations. A few notable examples include Greenpeace (1972), which is committed to promoting peace through environmental protection and conservation, and the fund-raising activities of the World Wildlife Fund (1961), aimed at preserving the diversity of life on earth.

Why is it that despite all the achievements of the environmental movement toward the latter part of the twentieth century environmental damage continued at a brisk pace? On environmental issues, regulation and legal frameworks work only if governments serve as arbitrators between public and private interests. With the rise of neoliberalism the public role of government was seriously compromised.

Ronald Reagan may have added thousands of acres to California’s state parks while governor of California, but when his time as the fortieth president of the United States ended in 1989, the environmental legacy he left was horrendous. While in office he issued leases that opened up millions of acres of national land for oil, gas, and coal development. He rolled back many environmental safeguards and set about introducing market mechanisms into environmental regulations.14 Rolling back on government regulations meant downsizing the public sector; in this vein he cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and slowed down its enforcement program such that by 1983 EPA officials resigned en masse. In 1987 Reagan vetoed the reauthorization of the Clean Water Act, only to have this overturned by Congress. Questioning the scientific findings linking pollution to acid rain, Reagan reneged on his promise to Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to honor an agreement his predecessor (President Carter) had negotiated to enforce pollution standards in the United States, pollution that had been linked to acid rain in Canada.

Crossing the oceans to the United Kingdom, another infamous proponent of neoliberalism, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990), also embarked on a series of cavalier deregulatory initiatives. Thatcher refused to commit to the 30% Club of countries dedicated to reducing pollution by 30 percent on 1980 levels by 1993. (After 1988, as the condition of U.K. forests was in steady decline and pressure mounted from her conservative constituency, which had strong conservationist interests, she changed her tune.) With the Big Bang reforms of 1986 Thatcher reorganized the City of London, deregulating financial markets, turning the city into an international financial center. She instituted a private market in land by repealing the Community Land Act, which had achieved “positive planning through public control over development.”15 And she pioneered the introduction of enterprise zones that exempted developers from paying rates in an effort to liberate “land and property markets from the detailed process of development controls.”16 Enterprise zones facilitated the private development of land. Greenbelt areas were opened up for development, greater freedoms were accorded industrial and commercial developers with more “permissive attitudes to the development of large-scale out-of-town retail stores,” and local authorities were “urged to adopt liberal attitudes towards development even in locations hitherto restricted for environmental reasons.”17 Furthermore, large farming interests were given preference over conservation efforts.

Basically, environmental legislation may be one way to force companies to stop the problem of free riding and internalize the costs of negative environmental externalities in capital, but this hinges upon governments’ introducing environmental legislation and regulation to stop environmental harms from occurring and by bringing the full force of the law to bear on dealing with environmental harms. Neoliberal governance exacerbates the tension between advancing the public good and a state that facilitates and promotes the free market economy alongside the interests of the private sector, thereby undermining the regulatory mechanism that forces previously externalized costs to be internalized.

On the international stage, neoliberal governance resulted in financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, imposing structural adjustment policies on “underdeveloped” countries. Policies of the IMF and World Bank boosted the power of the corporate sector and free market. Restructuring involved fiscal austerity measures, opening up the local economy to foreign investors, privatizing state-owned industries, introducing export-driven economic strategies, and deregulating local currencies. Putting the appalling abuse of human rights to one side for a moment, the environmental conseque...