Capitalism and the environment

The recent turmoil on financial markets has put the spotlight on a certain kind of capitalism, which is driven by the so-called “free” market, and judging by government responses from the US to Europe and Britain, there seems to be an emerging consensus that this greed-driven sector is unlikely to be left to its own devices again in the near future. Instead, there will be some degree of government regulation.

In other words, Friedman has taken a knock; Keynes is being looked at with renewed interest. And not a moment too soon. It is one of the conceits of humans that, conventionally within market capitalism, the natural environment has been regarded as comprising at most a subsystem within the economic system, as the kind of company accounting shows which, in addition to showing assets and liabilities, reports on the relation between a company and the environment. The truth is, however, that human economic systems are merely subsystems within the environmental system. In other words, the blind infatuation with economic growth has conceived of “growth” as if it happens in a vacuum, and not within a more encompassing ecosystem.

Nor does economic growth leave the environment unaffected. One unfortunate side-effect of the preoccupation with the financial “crisis” that seems to be rippling across the globe, is that it has diverted attention from a more serious crisis, to wit, the deepening environmental disaster. I realise that many people believe this to be vastly exaggerated, but there are several studies that argue that humanity is not taking it seriously enough. And invariably it is human economic activity that is identified as the main culprit as far as environmental degradation goes.

In one such study, The Enemy of Nature -– The end of Capitalism or the end of the World? (2002 & 2007), Joel Kovel sets out to unmask capitalism as the single greatest threat to the integrity of the natural environment and therefore also of humanity, which is kind of ironic when one considers the veritable ideological attachment to capitalism displayed by most people in the world today. It is easy to tell when something has unquestioned, ideological status, after all. As Catherine Belsey has shrewdly pointed out in her book on “critical practice”, as soon as something is regarded as being “commonsensical”, one’s critical antennae should start working; it is highly probable that it appears to be common sense because it disguises its own self-justifying ideological status, the way that water is probably invisible to a fish because it is the medium of its existence.

This is not to say that the historical relation between socialism (or communism) and the environment has been any better than that of capitalism; on the contrary, it has been just as much part of the nature-destructive logic of modernity (keenly sensed by the artist, Wright of Derby, in his paintings, for example Satanic Mills) as capitalism. It is the latter, however, with its indispensable promotion of economic growth at all costs – without growth, it would die – which has proved to be the most inimical to natural bionetworks. This is why Kovel brands it “the culprit”.

This is no idle speculation. Kovel adduces plenty of evidence to substantiate the claim that capitalism has proved to be the enemy of nature. To begin with, he lists the following signs (among others) that, contrary to what the so-called Club of Rome had hoped for in their 1972 manifesto, The Limits to Growth, “growth” had in fact burgeoned during the period from the early 1970s to the beginning of the new millennium:

“-The human population had increased from 3.7-billion to 6-billion (62%).
– Oil consumption had increased from 46-million barrels a day to 73-million.
– Natural gas extraction had increased from 34-trillion cubic feet per year to 95- trillion.
– Coal extraction had gone from 2.2-billion metric tons to 3.8-billion.
– The global motor vehicle population had almost tripled, from 246-million to 730- million.
– Air traffic had increased by a factor of six.
– The rate at which trees are consumed to make paper had doubled, to 200-million metric tons per year.
– Human carbon emissions had increased from 3.9-million metric tons annually to an estimated 6.4-million – this despite the additional impetus to cut back caused by an awareness of global warming, which was not perceived to be a factor in 1970 …
– Species were vanishing at a rate that has not occurred in 65-million years.
– Fish were being taken at twice the rate as in 1970.
– Forty percent of agricultural soils had been degraded.
– Half of the forests had disappeared.
– Half of the wetlands had been filled or drained.
– One-half of US coastal waters were unfit for fishing or swimming …
– 7.3-billion tons of pollutants were released in the United States [alone] during 1999…
– By 2000 1.2-million women under the age of eighteen were entering the global sex trade each year.
– 100-million children were homeless and slept on the streets.”

Although each of these phenomena has its specific causes, Kovel points out, there is a larger, more encompassing force behind the rapid deterioration of the conditions referred to above – a force that most people remain blind to, and therefore fail to address, instead resorting to mere symptom-treating, such as developing “better” technologies, promoting “green politics”, and so on. He does not deny that measures such as these have some merit, but argues that they have to become part of a comprehensive approach that recognises capitalism as that larger force behind the rapid deterioration of natural and social ecosystems.

In the rest of the book – too complex to do justice to here – Kovel outlines the ecological crisis, indicts capital (via a case study of the infamous Bhopal disaster), elaborates on what capital is, how it affects ecosystems “intensively” and “extensively” and what kind of society (“capitalism”) is built for the production and expansion of capital. He also investigates the connection between “human nature” and nature in the more encompassing sense, and proposes a path towards a political and economic system that holds out hope for the survival of nature as well as humanity.

In the final analysis, he argues that (much as he wishes he were wrong), regardless of the ways in which capital restructures and reforms itself to ensure further growth and accumulation of profit, it is fundamentally incapable of resolving the ecological crisis that it is in the process of causing. Only a drastic, radical restructuring of society holds out any hope that this crisis – one of unimaginable proportions, only dimly adumbrated by natural disasters like Katrina – can be averted. But that is a subject for another post.