Environmentalism: it's too late for utopias
Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor
By Tom Athanasiou
Little Brown (USA), 1996. 385 pp., US$24.95 (hb)
Available only by mail order: phone Resistance Bookshop on (02) 9690 1977
Reviewed by Lisa Macdonald
"Environmentalism is changing. It has already shed much of its middle-class veneer, and if it is to succeed, it must lose a good deal more. The 'social issues', justice first among them, figure large in its future." So argues Tom Athanasiou in a provocative and long overdue assessment of the gains, but mostly the limitations, of the world environment movement.
Athanasiou is one of a corps of environment movement veterans who, he says, "have reflected upon their failures and are willing to admit that they were naive to believe that the old questions about justice, power and emancipation could be put off while the earth was saved". Rather, he remarks, the striking thing about the green slogan "neither right nor left but out in front" is how stale and even absurd it seems in the post-Cold War realities of global capitalism.
With the "victory" of the west comes a sense of inevitability: "There will be a global corporate future ... the 'recession', the Gulf War, the portent of Bosnia, periodic disasters in Africa, the sense of a wild economic dynamism untempered by care and safety nets, all dampen the post-Cold War celebration ... the exhaustion that came at last to Soviet communism ... pursues us, the victors, as well."
Athanasiou's point is well made. While the environmental disaster now being revealed in the east is cited as proof of capitalism's superiority, the collapse of "communism" has brought a new and escalating destruction as privatisation, open borders and "reconstruction" push aside all environmental concerns.
Globalisation
Globalisation, says Athanasiou, is a word proper to "this time of global markets and global warming, this time in which, despite rising awareness, occasional victory, and now backlash against environmentalism, not a single major trend in global ecological degradation has been reversed".
"Not all of those who call themselves environmentalists have ... begun to understand the links between ecological crisis and economic globalisation. But a large minority have. There is much talk of 'the South within the North and the North within the South', and a bitter new awareness of class — of the division between rich and poor — as a fundamental ecological issue." With the fogs of the Cold War lifting, he says, "ruin appears everywhere, and everywhere there is the suspicion that nature cannot be saved without saving democracy as well".
Athanasiou details the impact on ecological and social health of global capitalism as directed by the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the myriad of "free trade" treaties. International trade and the restructuring of global markets are, he concludes, the single most important "social-ecological" issue — including in the imperialist countries, where the lexicon of "free trade" is being used to dismantle many of the legislative gains of the environment movement.
"In a world where oil, arms, and cocaine are among the most profitable of all globally traded commodities, where the 'poor' number well over a billion and slavery in all its forms ... is returning, where unemployment has become ... 'the biggest security problem facing the Western world today', it is folly to expect environmentalism ... will not be compelled to take up the unfinished business of the old left movement."
Trotting out the now common (albeit hard-won) knowledge that the Third World poor often have no choice but to strip the trees and bear large families is not enough. Rather, the centrality of the war between rich and poor, with its strong racial and regional (north-south) overtones, he argues, forces the environment movement at last to confront the more difficult questions.
The growing numbers of "terminally impoverished" in the south, he says, render immigration the last green issue. This means tackling honestly the question of population and breaking free of "Malthusian habits of mind" to confront the reality that "the global economic system, in daily, routine operation, gives us billions of poor as automatically as it destroys their environments".
With a refreshing political sharpness, Athanasiou dissects the language, practices and consequences of the liberal reformist "green" responses to globalisation. NGOs ("a bit of UN lingo that has ramifications like fungus in the damp") and development (the "carrot that Cold War liberals held out to the poor as an alternative to socialism"), in particular, are revealed as not simply ineffective, but dangerous diversions from the fundamental causes of and solutions to ecological disaster. There is no "third way", he says.
Greenwashing
Athanasiou saves his sharpest knife for the burgeoning army of corporate environmentalists who, "keen to hold off citizen activists and governmental regulation, pay even closer attention to the orchestration of appearances". He systematically dismantles their central claims that "efficiency" and "greenness" come to the same thing, that "well-run" companies can redesign their production processes and make more profits at the same time, and that "leading companies" have already cleaned up their act, and only bad management and obsolete ideas prevent others from following.
Athanasiou documents the manipulation of statistics in the "greenwashing" propaganda of "leading corporations" and their real record (e.g. the Body Shop's much touted "fair trade" actually accounts for only 1% of its ingredients'). Contrary to the hype, it is only in a few industries, some of the time, that there is money to be made selling green products or greening industrial processes.
Nevertheless, greenwashing allows "corporations in general [to] benefit from the sense that an ecological transition can be made within the unregulated global economy", and it was the green mainstream "with its fervent desire to believe that environmental protection entails no uncomfortable reckoning with power, that originated win-win rhetoric" now being marketed by the "green" corporations.
Of course, says Athanasiou, no corporation is proposing to transfer its best technologies to the lands of the poor, democratise world markets or support strict, uniform and global environmental regulations. But in the supreme example of greenwashing, the World Bank, one of the most powerful, undemocratic and destructive institutions, emerged from the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development as the planet's lead environmental funder through its "green" grant-making arm, the Global Environment Facility.
Athanasiou also takes on the "third wavers", who dream of an environmental revolution in which careful regulation leads the market to properly "internalise ecological costs". The economic realities of advanced capitalism — massive subsidies to private industry, monopolisation of industries and markets, inter-imperialist competition and a world divided into haves and have nots — render this dream an impossibility.
In the end, "markets are rationing systems based simply on wealth". Therefore, significant price changes which incorporate costs to the environment and living conditions "could only follow major political and social changes, and to imagine otherwise is to fatally confuse cause and consequence", he says.
Perhaps the most challenging issue for greens today is where national borders fit into political and campaigning perspectives. Athanasiou advances the right and necessity of nation states to defend and promote higher standards of environmental protection within their borders, but also notes the treacherous ground of "eco-protectionism", where environmentalists in the First World seek to uphold high environmental standards by proscribing the exports of the poor.
In the end, he correctly concludes, the question must be addressed from an internationalist perspective. The ultimate failure of campaigns such as that which banned DDT use in the US in 1972, but did not stop its increasing production and export, must be acknowledged, or we will, under the pressures of globalisation, be caught in a "race to the bottom".
Fundamental change
Athanasiou takes seriously the question of how the fundamental changes needed might be achieved. He rejects both the reformist argument that large change will come exclusively by small degrees, and the idealist argument that change will come easily once necessity is established. He calls for "admitting that there is no easy path to a green transition, and perhaps no path at all — for powerful minorities everywhere do not want change". This, he concludes, means we must think strategically.
However, while clear that "A transition to an ecologically sustainable society must involve a vast increase in justice and democracy", Athanasiou's relatively short view of history ("Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the direction of history ... capitalism is triumphant") means that he leaves unanswered the question of whether capitalism can reform fundamentally. Not quite prepared to say outright that it cannot (despite his own powerful testimony to this fact), Athanasiou fudges the question, saying that if it does, it "will not happen by itself".
This at least leads Athanasiou to a correct assessment of the immediate tasks and demands: "It is long past time to see that the future does not lie with the ... national compromise branch of our movement". Rather, as another activist he quotes put it, "What is needed now is the mobilisation of ever larger and more vocal social movements rather than more conversation for conservation. Mainstream Northern NGOs are happy to speak of such movements when, and only when, the movements are in the South. None of them are building or even supporting true people's movements in the North."
Athanasiou's call to arms is undeniable: "It is too late for purity, too late for simple utopias, too late for the dream of retreating to 'the land', too late for the eco-politician's fantasy of an altogether polite, rationally negotiated global transition. It is not too late to act, or to recall the old imperative to 'educate, agitate, and organise', or to remember that the deepest springs of hope lie in engagement, in making the choice to make a difference."