Thinking to myself, daydreaming as I watch
Golden bliss slip into my tea, the thought comes,
“How would I describe honey for those
Who will never see honey?”

Just that suddenly, visions of a world bereft
Of honey, of songbirds, of ancient groves
Take me and I see:

We have poisoned our children
Intent on neater lawns and fewer bugs.
We are excusing ourselves as if
We have no choices, as if
Ecocide is common sense.

While we kill our land’s soil,
Oceans die of our glut.
Our guts growl for meat —
Our guts growl and rivers die for miles
All that we may consume death —
Death to our waters, death to our land
Death to our air, our skies.

Such death spreads like a nacreous cloud
Across our illusions of business
As usual.

Well? Will there be honey?
Will there be flowers?
Will butterflies grow stingers to feed on
livelier fare?
And — will frogs and bats all die, all gone?

What are these visions I cannot stop?
How can you tell me the solution is
To be blind and deaf and numb?

“Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself.” — William Blake

I became an “environmentalist” because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places and the other-than-human world. From that reaction came a series of thoughts: that such things are precious for their own sake; that they are food for the human soul; that they need people to speak for them to and defend them from other people because they cannot speak our language and we have forgotten how to speak theirs, and because we are killing them to feed ourselves and we know it and we care about it — sometimes — but we do it anyway because we are hungry, or we have persuaded ourselves that we are.

But these are not, I think, very common views today. Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. In this country, most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability.”

What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the non-human world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world’s rich people — us — feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so.

It is, in other words, an entirely human-centred piece of politicking, disguised as concern for “the planet.” In a very short time, just over a decade, this worldview has become all-pervasive. It is voiced by the president of the USA and the president of Anglo-Dutch Shell and many people in between. The success of environmentalism has been total — at the price of its soul.

All about carbon

Let me offer up just one example of how this pact has worked. If “sustainability” is about anything, it is about carbon and climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only things in the world worth talking about. The business of “sustainability” is the business of preventing carbon-emissions. Carbon-emissions threaten a potentially massive downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species. They threaten to unacceptably erode our resource-base and put at risk our vital hoards of natural capital.

If we cannot sort this out quickly, the environmentalists tell us, we are going to end up darning our socks again and growing our own carrots and holidaying in Weston-Super-Mare and other such unthinkable things. All of the horrors our grandparents left behind will return like deathless legends. Carbon-emissions must be “tackled” like a drunk with a broken bottle: quickly, and with maximum force.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t doubt the potency of climate change to undermine the human machine. It looks to me as if it is already beginning to do so, and that it is too late to do anything but attempt to mitigate the worst effects. But what I am also convinced of is that the fear of losing both the comfort and the meaning that our civilisation gifts us has gone to the heads of environmentalists to such a degree that they have forgotten everything else. The carbon must be stopped, like the Umayyad at Tours, or all will be lost.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then “zero-carbon” is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. It needs to do this quickly, and by any means necessary. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we “need” without producing greenhouse-gases and there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places which environmentalism came into being to protect. And so:

• The deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonised by vast “solar arrays”, glass and steel and aluminium, the size of small countries;
• The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of 500-foot wind-turbines and associated access-roads, masts, pylons and wires;
• The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbines and wave-machines strung around the coastlines like a necklace;
• The river estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages;
• The croplands and rainforests, the richest habitats on Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car-fuel to motion-hungry Europe and America.

Business-as-usual

What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonising, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted and the non-human. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”

A while back I wrote an article in a newspaper highlighting the impact of industrial wind-power stations (which are usually referred to, in a nice Orwellian touch, as wind “farms”) on the uplands of Britain. I was emailed the next day by an environmentalist friend who told me he hoped I was feeling ashamed of myself. I was wrong; worse, I was dangerous. What was I doing giving succour to the fossil-fuel industry? Didn’t I know that climate change would do far more damage to upland landscapes than turbines? Didn’t I know that this was the only way to meet our urgent carbon targets? Didn’t I see how beautiful turbines were? So much more beautiful than nuclear-power stations. I might think that a “view” was more important than the future of the entire world, but this was because I was a middle-class escapist who needed to get real.

It became apparent at that point that what I saw as the next phase of the human attack on the non-human world, a lot of my environmentalist friends saw as “progressive”, “sustainable” and “green.” What I called destruction they called “large-scale solutions.” This stuff was realistic, necessarily urgent. It went with the grain of human nature and the market, which as we now know are the same thing. We didn’t have time to “romanticise” the woods and the hills. There were emissions to reduce, and the end justified the means.

It took me a while to realise that this desperate scrabble for “sustainable development” in reality was the same aggressive argument for the industrialising of wild places in the name of human desire. Only now there seemed to be some kind of crude equation at work that allowed people to believe that this was something entirely different. Motorway through downland: bad. Wind-power station on downland: good. Container-port wiping out estuary mudflats: bad. Renewable hydro-power barrage wiping out estuary mudflats: good. Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.

I found myself labelled as a Luddite, a NIMBY, a reactionary, a romantic; standing in the way of progress. I realised that I was dealing with environmentalists with no attachment to any actual environment. Their talk was of parts-per-million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers, sustainable technologies, renewable supergrids, green growth and the fifteenth conference of the parties. There were campaigns about “the planet” and “the Earth”, but there was no specificity: no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.

The place of Nature

Back at university, in love with my newfound radicalism as students tend to be, I started to read green political thought. I discovered wild ideas I had never come across before — I could literally feel my mind levering itself open. Most exciting to me were the implications of a new word I stumbled across: ecocentrism. This word crystallized everything I had been thinking and feeling. I had no idea there were words for it or that other people felt it too, or had written intimidating books about it.

The nearest I had come to such a realisation thus far was reading Wordsworth in the sixth form and feeling an excited tingling sensation as I began to understand what he was getting at amongst all those poems about shepherds and girls called Lucy. Here was a kindred spirit! Here was a man moved to love and fear by mountains, who believed rocks had souls, that “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” (though even then that sounded a little optimistic to me). Pantheism was my new word that year.

Now I declared, to myself if no one else, that I was “ecocentric” too. This was not the same as being egocentric, though some disagreed, and though it sounded a bit too much like “eccentric” this was also a distraction. I was ecocentric because I did not believe — had never believed, I didn’t think — that humans were the centre of the world, that the Earth was their playground, that they had the right to do what they liked or even that what they did was that important. I thought we were part of something bigger, which had as much to right to the world as we did and which we were stomping on for our own benefit.

I had always been haunted by shameful thoughts like this. It had always seemed to me that the beauty to be found on the trunk of a birch tree was worth any number of Mona Lisas, and that a Saturday-night sunset was better than Saturday-night telly. It had always seemed that most of what mattered to me could not be counted or corralled by the kind of people who thought, and still think, that I just needed to grow up.

It had been made clear to me for a long time that these feelings were at best charmingly naïve and at worst backwards and dangerous. Later, the dismissals became encrusted with familiar words, designed to keep the ship of human destiny afloat: Romantic, Luddite, NIMBY and the like. For now, though, I had found my place. I was a young, fiery, radical, ecocentric environmentalist and I was going to save the world.

Genuine environmentalism

When I look back on the road protests of the mid-1990s, which I often do, it is with nostalgia and fondness and a sense of gratitude that I was able to be there, to see what I saw and do what I did. But I realise now that it is more than this that makes me think and talk and write about my early environmentalism to an extent that bores even my most patient friends. This, I think, was the last time I was part of an environmental movement that was genuinely environmental. The people involved were, like me, ecocentric: they didn’t see “the environment” as something “out there”; separate from people, to be utilised or destroyed or protected according to human whim. They saw themselves as part of it, within it, of it.

There was a Wordsworthian feel to the whole thing: the defence of the trees simply because they were trees. Living under the stars and in the rain, in the oaks and in the chaotic, miraculous tunnels beneath them, in the soil itself like the rabbits and the badgers. We were connected to a place; a real place that we loved and had made a choice to belong to, if only for a short time. There was little theory, much action but even more simple being. Being in a place, knowing it, standing up for it. It was environmentalism at its rawest, and the people who came to be part of it were those who loved the land, in their hearts as well as their heads.

In years to come, this was worn away. It took a while before I started to notice what was happening, but when I did it was all around me. The ecocentrism — in simple language, the love of place, the humility, the sense of belonging, the feelings — was absent from most of the “environmentalist” talk I heard around me. Replacing it were two other kinds of talk. One was the save-the-world-with-windfarms narrative; the same old face in new makeup. The other was a distant, sombre sound: the marching boots and rattling swords of an approaching fifth-column.

Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, offering instead a worldview which saw the growth economy and the industrialist mentality beloved by both as the problem in itself, was being sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the “progressive” left. Suddenly people like me, talking about birch trees and hilltops and sunsets, were politely, or less politely, elbowed to one side by people who were bringing a “class analysis” to green politics.

All this talk of nature, it turned out, was bourgeois, western and unproductive. It was a middle-class conceit, and there was nothing worse than a middle-class conceit. The workers had no time for thoughts like this (though no one bothered to notify the workers themselves that they were simply clodhopping, nature-loathing cannon-fodder in a political flame-war). It was terribly, objectively rightwing. Hitler liked nature after all. He was a vegetarian too. It was all deeply “problematic.”

Refuge for disillusioned Socialists

More problematic for me was what this kind of talk represented. With the near global failure of the leftwing project over the past few decades, green politics was fast becoming a refuge for disillusioned socialists, Trots, Marxists and a ragbag of fellow-travellers who could no longer believe in communism or the Labour Party or even George Galloway, and who saw in green politics a promising bolthole. In they all trooped, with their Stop-the-War banners and their Palestinian-solidarity scarves, and with them they brought a new sensibility.

Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it. Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and (human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realised without degrading the (human) resource-base which we used to call nature back when we were being naïve and problematic. Suddenly, never-ending economic growth was a good thing after all: the poor needed it to get rich, which was their right. To square the circle, for those who still realised there was a circle, we were told that “(human) social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand” — a suggestion of such bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be wishful thinking.

Suddenly, sustaining a global human population of 10 billion people was not a problem at all, and anyone who suggested otherwise was not highlighting any obvious ecological crunch points but was giving succour to fascism or racism or gender discrimination or orientalism or essentialism or some other such hip and largely unexamined concept. The “real issue”, it seemed, was not the human relationship with the non-human world; it was fat cats and bankers and cap’lism. These things must be destroyed, by way of marches, protests and votes for fringe political parties, to make way for something known as “eco-socialism”: a conflation of concepts that pretty much guarantees the instant hostility of 95% of the population.

I didn’t object to this because I thought that environmentalism should occupy the right rather than the left wing, or because I was rightwing myself, which I wasn’t (these days I tend to consider the entire bird with a kind of frustrated detachment). And I understood that there was at least a partial reason for the success of this colonisation of the greens by the reds. Modern environmentalism sprung partly from the early 20th-century conservation movement, and that movement had often been about preserving supposedly pristine landscapes at the expense of people.

Forcing tribal people from their ancestral lands which had been newly designated as national parks, for example, in order to create a fictional “untouched nature” had once been fairly common, from Africa to the USA. And actually, Hitler had been something of an environmentalist, and the wellsprings which nourished some green thought nourished the thought of some other unsavoury characters too (a fact which some ideologues love to point to when witch-hunting the greens, as if it wouldn’t be just as easy to point out that ideas of equality and justice fuelled Stalin and Pol Pot).

In this context it was fair enough to make it clear that environmentalism allied itself with ideas of justice and decency, and that it was about people as well as everything else on the planet. Of course it was, for “Nature” as something separate from people has never existed. We are Nature, and the environmentalist project was always supposed to be about how we are to be part of it, to live well as part of it, to understand and respect it, to understand our place within it and to feel it as part of ourselves.

“Saving the planet”

So there was a reason for environmentalism’s shift to the left, just as there was a reason for its blinding obsession with carbon. The fact of what humans are doing to the world had become so obvious, even to those who were doing very well out of it, that it became hard not to listen to the greens. Success duly arrived. You can’t open a newspaper now or visit a corporate website or listen to a politician or read the label on a packet of biscuits without being bombarded with propaganda about the importance of “saving the planet.” But there is a terrible hollowness to it all; a sense that society is going through the motions without understanding why. The shift, the pact, has come at a probably fatal price.

Now that price is being paid. The weird and unintentional pincer-movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-über-alles brigade has infiltrated, ironed out and reworked environmentalism for its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral, the mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It is not about reforging a connection between over-civilised people and the world outside their windows. It is not about living close to the land or valuing the world for the sake of the world. It is not about attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our civilisation has become.

Today’s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and at the same time, with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hyper-capitalism; the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy. It is an engineering challenge; a problem-solving device for people to whom the sight of a wild Pennine hilltop on a clear winter day brings not feelings of transcendence but thoughts about the wasted potential for renewable energy. It is about saving civilisation from the results of its own actions; a desperate attempt to prevent Gaia from hiccupping and wiping out our coffee shops and broadband connections. It is our last hope.

I generalise, of course. Environmentalism’s chancel is as accommodating as that of socialism, anarchism or conservatism, and just as capable of generating poisonous internal bickering that will last until the death of the sun. Many who call themselves green have little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it is the mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today, even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to be seen. These are the arguments and the positions that popular environmentalism — now a global force — offers up in its quest for redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But whatever they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn dead end street, where the bins overflow, the lightbulbs have blown and the stray dogs are very hungry indeed.

What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was perhaps inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers. But for me, now — well, this is no longer mine, that’s all. I can’t make my peace with people who cannibalise the land in the name of saving it. I can’t speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry. I can’t speak with a straight face about saving the planet when what I really mean is saving myself from what is coming.

Foot-soldier of Empire

Like all of us, I am a foot-soldier of empire. It is the empire of Homo sapiens sapiens and it stretches from Tasmania to Baffin Island. Like all empires it is built on expropriation and exploitation, and like all empires it dresses these things up in the language of morality and duty. When we turn wilderness over to agriculture we speak of our duty to feed the poor. When we industrialise the wild places we speak of our duty to stop the climate from changing. When we spear whales we speak of our duty to science. When we raze forests we speak of our duty to develop. We alter the atmospheric makeup of the entire world: half of us pretends it’s not happening, the other half immediately starts looking for new machines that will reverse it. This is how empires work, particularly when they have started to decay. Denial, displacement, anger, fear.

The environment is the victim of this empire. But “the environment” — that distancing word, that empty concept — does not exist. It is the air, the waters, the creatures we make homeless or lifeless in flocks and legions, and it is us too. We are it; we are in it and of it, we make it and live it, we are fruit and soil and tree, and the things done to the roots and the leaves come back to us. We make ourselves slaves to make ourselves free, and when the shackles start to rub we confidently predict the emergence of new, more comfortable designs.

I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo — that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out and if outside the dining-room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans.

What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of Lughnasadh. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

But this is fine; the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.

I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry continent.

[Editor’s note:] This is an abridged version of a longer article, which can be found online at Open Democracy.

About The Author ↑

Paul Kingsnorth is a professional writer and editor based in the UK. He has worked at The Independent newspaper; as commissioning editor for opendemocracy.net; and as deputy editor of The Ecologist. He is also an award-winning poet and an honorary member of the Lani tribe of New Guinea. Paul’s first book, One No, Many Yeses (Simon and Schuster, 2003), an investigative journey through the anti-globalisation movement, was published in six languages in thirteen countries. His second book, Real England, was published by Portobello Books in 2008. He co-founded the Dark Mountain Project in 2009.

The Great Eastern Forest is gone.
Chopped down,
chopped up,
ground to a pulp
so we can read about the global economy while
we wipe our asses on the Great Eastern Forest.
Flushing it down the toilet bowl watersheds of our setting sun civilization,
we barely give a shit;
just call for more from the exhausted forest.

Damn the obstructionist environmentalists.
Damn the smaller-footprint freaks.
Damn the social justice junkies.
I need a new car
and a bigger house
and cheap convenient shopping at Superstore and Walmart.
I want my share.
I deserve it.
I work for it.
It isn’t my fault if I exacerbate a few problems in the forest.
It’s the government’s business
to control those nasty forestry companies…
but I need their products and
the job that spins off from what they do.
They are contributing to the economy.

I’m caught.
Too bad if it’s all going,
but what can I do about it?
I have to have what I have to have.
I have a family to feed,
kids to take to hockey practice,
shopping to do at the mall.
I’m working my heart out.
Weekends are the only time I have for golf…
maybe one ski trip at Christmas.
Don’t talk to me about disappearing forests.
Besides, they’re into sustainable forestry these days;
they’re doing lots of replanting;
the trees will grow back;
it’s a renewable resource, you know.

What do you want me to wipe my ass on, comfrey leaves?
And what do bananas have to do with the Great Eastern Forest?
You try to make everything connect.
Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme?

Next time you’re up in an airplane,
on one of those necessary business trips,
take a window seat,
hold your head against the window plastic,
peer down over the beauty strip
into the devastation that was the Great Eastern Forest.
Tilt your head;
take a broad and long view.
Imagine the forest that covered this land only a short time ago.

Next time you find your feet on the earth,
walk into one of those clearcuts,
taste the intimacy of destruction.
Now remember the vast landscape you witnessed from the air.

Make the connections.
Don’t die in denial.
Wake Up!
It may be possible to restore the Great Eastern Forest.
It will take all our gentle effort.
No more weekends of golf,
no more consumption sprees,
no more ski holidays,
only genuine and effective caring for other beings.
Is the Great Eastern Forest worth the cost of our personal comfort,
and that of our family and friends?

Waking up is not pleasurable.
Encouraging others to wake up is not always well received.
On the other hand,
Committing our lives to avoiding controversy,
to warding off death,
is futile.

Forest restoration is opening the heart,
honing one’s discriminating awareness, and
moving into a smaller seat.
The earth’s touch is painless only to the insensitive.

Flying Northwest Air
over the Great Eastern Forest
5 May 1997

Jim Drescher is a forester and a Buddhist. His is a major voice in opposing industrial forestry in Nova Scotia, Canada.

By Tim Murray
February 5, 2010
http://candobetter.org/

The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

Despite our best efforts, there are persistent and common misunderstandings about the rudiments of overshoot and sustainability. Four come to mind:

1. The exponential function — Albert Bartlett is right about that. I can’t get people alarmed by lets say, a 2-3% annual growth rate. Like the magic of compound interest, your town can double in population in a mere generation at this deceptively incremental pace.

2. Efficiency paradoxes — People don’t understand that efficiencies, outside the context of a steady state economy, by making things cheaper only provoke more consumption and growth. (eg. Jevons Paradox, Khazzoom-Brooks postulate).

3. Social justice doesn’t solve resource shortages — The integrity of the lifeboat is more important than how the passengers treat each other. Food can be shared equitably between passengers, but if there are too many passengers, the boat will sink. The law of gravity doesn’t care about social justice, human rights or human political arrangements. Moral laws, whether handed down by Stephen Lewis, Dr. William Rees or Moses, are trumped by bio-physical laws. Socialists, liberals, federal Greens, clergymen and humanitarians simply don’t get it. There ain’t enough to go around, however justly and efficiently things are managed or distributed. And economists of course, are equally delusional, if not mad for believing that with some technological ’fix’ we can ’grow’ the limits.

4. Limiting factors — The weakest link in the chain can bring a society to its knees. It can have everything in abundance, but a shortage in just one critical area can prove its undoing. This to me is the source of this current fashion of assigning “sustainability” to a series of sectors thought to enjoy some independence from others. It is this misconception which I find most pernicious.

Buzzwords

Like the word “green,” “sustainable” or “sustainability” has become the buzzword of the millennia. Corporations and governments of the left or right feel compelled to dress up the most ecologically invasive development proposal or economic activity with assurances that it is “sustainable.” Employed as an adjective it coats the unpalatable with the sweet syrup of delectability rendering the bitter pill of upheaval and damage neutral in flavour. Growth not couched in green psychobabble went down like Buckley’s Mixture, but “sustainable growth,” “sustainable tourism” and “sustainable agriculture” on the other hand tastes like sugary cough syrup. Such is the Newspeak of contemporary growthism, the vocabulary of deceit that promises a new kind of capitalism, capitalism in a green velvet glove, business as usual with apparent sensitivity to environmental concerns that will nevertheless satisfy the shareholders.

Trade-offs or the Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

But even the compromise suggested by oxymoronic terminology does not apparently suffice to satisfy the corporate agenda. As can be witnessed in the tourist industry, economic considerations have achieved a delusional parity in a “holistic” paradigm that sees “environmental” sustainability balanced off against “economic” and “cultural” sustainability. In this three-legged stool model of viability, environmental issues must compete with other “sustainability” concerns on a level playing field with other equally valid objectives so as to achieve the optimal “trade-offs.” This misconception may be termed “The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns.” It is the assumption that would, if applied to the human physiognomy, rate the heart as an organ of equal importance to every other organ of the body when in fact, as we know, a patient can survive with one lung, or one kidney , or a colonoscopy, or brain impairment, but when his heart stops all of these important but ancillary parts die with the patient. The economy is a subsidiary part of society. It is, as former World Bank economist Herman Daly described it, “a fully owned branch plant of the environment. “ We make our living in an economy, but we live in a biosphere.

Environmental externalization doesn’t change Mother Nature’s rules

Case in point. Newfoundland politicians were warned that the cod fishery was not sustainable, but they replied that without the cod fishery, Newfoundland’s economy was not sustainable, so the fishermen of Newfoundland continued to fish. Nature replied that what the economy of Newfoundland required was irrelevant, and so refused to yield more cod. In any such contest, nature’s agenda prevails. Similarly politicians and developers want the city of Phoenix, already at 3 million people, to grow even further. Mother Nature’s City Council, however, has set limits to the volume of water available in aquifers. One day folks in Phoenix, together with 15 million other refugees in America’s south west, will discover that any economy without water is not sustainable. The needs and wants of an economy cannot trespass carrying capacity. Nature imposes boundaries. Without clean air, productive soils, replenished aquifers — without biodiversity services — any economy will collapse. And once the environment is trashed, try milking your “robust” economy for tax revenues to buy another one. Yet that is what corporate and government green wash implies. Former social democratic Premier of British Columbia, Mike Harcourt, crystallized this confusion with a classic line of obsolete reasoning, “To have a healthy environment we need a healthy economy.” He does not seem to understand that the environment was doing quite well before human activity arrived to “manage” it. His underlying assumption seems to be that the environment is an externality, a desirable luxury that we can only “afford” once we have achieved economic “prosperity.” This reasoning is equivalent to saying that yes, while it is desirable that I have a triple bypass operation, I must postpone the operation until I can afford it by continuing to work overtime at my strenuous job.

Environmental passengers

Imagine if the officers on board the sinking Titanic claimed that the cabins on the third deck were sustainable because each had a barrel of water, ten sacks of beans, a compost, renewable energy and a water-tight door. Trouble is, they would not be sustainable 5 miles underwater. Every cabin was rendered unsustainable when the Titanic itself was unsustainable after the collision. Similarly, the space shuttle Challenger could have been said to have a sustainable oxygen supply, a sustainable food supply, a sustainable waste disposal system, and a sustainable crew compartment. But one “O” ring was the limiting factor that made the Challenger unsustainable. All the other “sustainable” aspects on that space ship were rendered unsustainable by the explosion that blew the crew compartment away, eventually crashing it into the sea. Until it hit the water, apart from the loss of air pressure, the crew survived in a ’sustainable’ compartment. Our economy and our culture are like that crew compartment. They are completely dependent on the health of the environment. Without the estimated $33 trillion in free biodiversity services, we’re toast. Trash the environment if you like but the so-called ’prosperity’ you achieve won’t buy you a new one.

Misunderstanding the structure of the real world

We still believe that we can negotiate with nature on our own terms. We can pursue business-as-usual just by genuflecting to trendy green shibboleths. Government and corporate communiqués are now laced with green-growthist double-talk. Try this from a discussion paper from the Planning Department of a typical Canadian city. Note how it attempts to appease environmental concerns with trendyisms while remaining faithful to the political mandate to keep growing as usual: “Several growth allocation/land use scenarios will…be developed and tested for impacts on various sustainability criteria (financial, environmental, social and cultural).” In other words, there are several criteria for sustainability, and the environment is just one of them. So Mother Nature, stand back. Get to the back of the line and wait your turn until cultural and economic needs have been satisfied.

Hair splitting

Of course, what exactly constitutes “sustainability” is a matter of some debate among ecologists. As one wildlife biologist commented in response to this critique, “Because natural systems are always changing or ’dynamic’ there seems to be some disturbing latitude in what we consider a sustained ecosystem. What degree of impairment can a system tolerate before it loses the very characteristics that ’define’ it? The term ’integrity’ often emerges in these discussions with predictable results. It is much easier to define what constitutes unsustainable or an irreversible change in the system. A boreal forest without fire disturbance is no longer “sustainable”? Or, can forestry be made to replace this disturbance? At what point do we no longer have a boreal forest? This does not at all detract from your argument that clearly shows that without a sustainable natural environment, all other constructs of “sustainability” are meaningless.” A dead planet indeed can achieve an equilibrium, but it cannot sustain life. And this may come as a shock to economists and nationalists alike, but human economic activity, culture, language and customs cannot exist without living human beings.

Sustainability doesn’t come in different brands

Even those organizations committed to imposing limits have succumbed to this flawed understanding. An emerging immigration reform organization declares, as one of its aims, “To promote the creation of a sustainable Canada through urgently needed reform of immigration policies that are in the national interest.” Well and good. But then one opinion has it that this proposal “has some merit because it implies sustainability across a number of areas — cultural and institutional as well as environmental.” But mass immigration is not, as Samuel Gompers characterized it, fundamentally a labor issue, nor is it a cultural one. It is not about how many people our economy requires or how many people our culture can assimilate but how many people our environment can sustain. Contemporary culture as we know it cannot survive an ecological meltdown. The nation itself would not endure. When the water you drink is polluted or inaccessible, when the farmland needed to provide food to Canadians after international trade collapses with stratospheric fuel costs, when our exhausted soils starved of fossil-fuel based fertilizers cannot yield crops, when our forests are mowed down and the air unfit to breath, the fact that a lot people in the neighbourhood are wearing strange clothing or speaking in foreign tongues will be of little importance. Cultural “sustainability” in this context will be a mirage. There is ultimately only one “sustainability.” The sustainability of the whole, not its constituent parts.

Tim Murray is an environmental activist and Vice President of Biodiversity First, Quathiaski Cove, BC Canada V0P 1N0

My altar is a meadow
Thick carpeted with grass;
Its roof the vault of heaven,
Each day a sacred mass.
And I hear the feathered choir,
Bees and crickets thrum the time,
There ’s no hymn can take me higher
And no ritual more sublime.

I care nothing for religion,
Nor require a builded hall
To sing paeans to creation
And give praises to the ALL.
When I die I’ll make no journey
To another place above,
But my bones will rot in glory,
And my cells return to Love.

In my temple there’s no worship
To a goddess or a god;
Trees are one, both male and female,
There’s no gender in the sod;
While the symphony of seedling
Brings about all living things,
And the music of creation
In every atom sings.

I look about in wonder
As I walk those pillared aisles,
At the dapple-down of sunbeams
That light leaf-litter tiles.
I’m in awe of the mosaics,
Of the plush and verdant green,
And the thought of its destruction
Strikes as nothing but profane.

But we’re ruining the temple,
Carving up its living flesh;
Its walls are torn asunder
In the name of corporate cash.
I beg you please rebuild it,
Let the forest stand up tall;
It was put on earth for living,
For the good of one and ALL.

— Jeremy Frith

Jeremy Frith died suddenly at age 64
of a heart attack on Dec. 8, 2009, at
Mountain Meadow Farm, Nova Scotia, Canada.

The failure of capitalism as an economic system is becoming obvious, write leading European eco-socialists Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern. Mass unemployment is becoming commonplace in almost all countries, and where the economy is growing, mostly it is jobless growth. Welfare states are being dismantled , and almost everywhere one hears of crises of one or the other kind. In large parts of the world abject poverty prevails, and even establishment economists are at a loss. These two authors outline the core of their analysis and vision of eco-socialism.

• Part One: Capitalism is Failing
• Part Two: The most urgent social issue
• Part Three: The illusion of sustainable capitalist development and the necessity of eco-socialism

Part One: Capitalism is Failing

In 1989, in Europe, something broke down which many leftists had, despite some doubts, called socialism (after all, capitalism had been abolished in the so-called socialist countries). In China, of course, formally still the Communist Party is ruling. But in the economy, since the beginning of the 1980s, it appears that capitalism is being restored. In the beginning of the 1990s, one could hear all over the world the triumphal shouts of capitalism. The philosopher Francis Fukuyama even grandiosely proclaimed “the end of history” — in the sense of final world-wide victory of liberal democratic capitalism over all other system-ideals. Many people could not imagine any reason why the era of world peace, which, they thought, had just begun, could ever come to an end.

But these triumphal shouts did not last long. Since about the middle of the 1990s we are experiencing the beginning of a new phase of world history.

Already in the first half of the 1990s came, instead of the hoped-for “peace dividends” after the end of the Cold War, the immense horrors of the hot “new wars” — the unending series of small wars of the warlords, ethnic groups, nationalities and states (Somalia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Chechenia etc.). Since 2001, we are again experiencing old-style full-scale imperialist wars (Afghanistan, Iraq).

Today, also in the economic and social sphere, the failure of capitalism as an economic system is becoming obvious. In almost all countries mass unemployment prevails. Where the economy is growing, mostly it is jobless growth. The welfare state is being dismantled everywhere. Almost everywhere one hears of crisis of one or the other kind. In large parts of the world abject poverty prevails. Establishment economists are at a loss. Keynesianism had failed already in the 1970s, although some economists still unwaveringly adhere to the old recipes. Today we are experiencing the bankruptcy of the latest economic doctrine, namely of neo-liberalism. Economic globalisation has become a curse. Economic cold wars are going on everywhere. A large part of humanity is living under the constant fear that tomorrow one may lose the material basis of survival. Crime is growing rapidly, the suicide rate is rising, and more and more people are suffering from some or other kind of mental illness. That cannot be the picture of a victorious world system. In retrospect one finds it true what one could hear already in 1989: capitalism is not victorious, it has only survived.

Whereas until a few years ago the ideologues of capitalism could say in a tone of utter conviction that they were already working on reconciling capitalism with the requirements of a healthy environment, today they are fighting bitterly against the slightest concession demanded of them in the name of ecology, for example, against the very modest targets of reduction in CO2-emission laid down in the Kyoto-protocol. Ecology is totally out. One hears only of economic growth. Many established Green parties have long ago given up the goal of trying to implement what is ecologically necessary. One by one, they are now giving up even the rest of the remaining goals. For example, in Germany, they have recently dropped the goal of changing the transportation system. What matters is only economic growth, and nothing else.

But nature is “taking revenge” (Frederick Engels). Even scientists of the Pentagon (see appendix I.) are warning us of an apocalyptic future scenario: The dramatic climate changes will put people and governments in dire straits; oil will become ever scarcer; bloody conflicts will increase; wars for raw materials, water and food will devastate continents; within a few years, the world will be on the verge of total anarchy.

There is no doubt any more: capitalism as a world system is failing. All over the world, also in the rich industrial countries, the manifold crisis of capitalism has become acute. Its ideologues cannot see any way out of it. Some of them apparently recognise that there is a fundamental contradiction between ecology and their kind of economy and that it cannot be resolved within their system. Already since the mid-1990s, we are observing how under the burden of different kinds of crisis many parts of the world are getting drowned in wars, chaos and, yes, barbarism. The number of “failed states” is growing.

What is to be done?

Against the background of this world situation, and while millions of human beings are crying out for an alternative, everywhere the Left appears to be paralyzed. And it is totally fragmented. Actually, just now, we should all be saying loudly and offensively that there are no solutions in capitalism to the various crises the world is suffering from and that solutions are possible only in a newly conceived socialism. But apparently we are still paralyzed by the shock of 1989.

It is understandable that most frustrated and angry people in the rich Western countries still cherish the illusion that they can defend their welfare state and their jobs and wages through demonstrations, strikes and other kinds of protest without having to call capitalism itself into question. Or they cherish the illusion, which is promoted by trade unionists, Social Democrats and economists close to them, but also by activists in the various social movements against neoliberal politics– that Keynesian economic policies could generate more growth, new jobs and more prosperity. Attac, the international organisation critical of globalization, for instance, speaks in its central motto of “a different world.” However, when they speak more concretely, they speak only of “making” globalised capitalism “just.” There are also many who, of course, cherish no illusions, but have resigned in view of the collapse of “socialism.” In spite of all that, the time is now ripe for a new offensive campaign for a new socialism. In 2004, in Germany, a large opinion poll showed that most people there think that socialism is a very good idea, but that its implementation is a problem. If we socialists do not take the initiative, if we do not fill the intellectual-ideological vacuum that is arising because capitalism is failing, then that would be done by the Neo-Nazis. Against the backdrop of the progressive dismantling of the welfare state and large-scale unemployment they are now emphatically posing as national socialists.

Of course, we are today miles away from raising the question of power. At present the more important task is something else, namely to achieve the intellectual-ideological hegemony in the sense of Antonio Gramsci. Leszek Kolakowski summarised Gramsci‘s position in the following words:

“Every class tries to occupy a leading position not only in the institutions of power, but also in the actually expressed opinions, values and norms in the majority of society. The privileged classes have occupied a leading position and subjugated the exploited people not only politically but also intellectually. What is more, the intellectual hegemony is a precondition of political hegemony” — (Kolakowski, Vol.3, 1979: 266).

The question as to the agents of the project of a new socialism need not be discussed at this point of time. The first task is to delegitimate capitalism. Millions of people must realise that overcoming the crises and, in the end, ensuring the survival of mankind are not possible as long as capitalism continues to exist. People have to be convinced of the necessity of a newly conceived socialism. The practical question as to how capitalism could be overcome should be put last. It is also not so easy to answer this question. First the intellectual-ideological foundation for this work must be laid.

We know that among us leftists serious differences exist on a number of questions of detail. But in the matter of critique of capitalism there exists extensive agreement. That can be a common starting point. Also the question as to how our alternative to capitalism, namely a new socialism, would look like in detail cannot be answered in advance. Especially in terms of our understanding of politics, the concrete details would not be designed on a writing table, but would develop in the course of concrete developments in the material world, in the course of the movement and on the basis of reflections on both. For this reason we have here consciously desisted from presenting concrete details of our alternative and our strategy for change, although they are taking shape in our mind. We want to give here only the impulse for a lively discussion process and for possible actions. We have therefore limited ourselves to presenting only the basics of our analysis and our vision eco-socialism, which we consider to be not only desirable but also necessary. For a detailed and scientific argumentation for and presentation of this conception of eco-socialism (there are also others) we refer to Saral Sarkar‘s book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism — a Critical Analysis of Humanity‘s Fundamental Choices (1999).

We hope that many people, who are worried about the state of humanity and nature as a whole, will take up these thoughts and, together with others, seek opportunities to become active for the ideal of eco-socialism. We also call on you to get in touch with us for further discussions and for developing concrete activities.

© Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern
Cologne and Mainz, March 2008

Part Two: The most urgent social issue

• Part One: Capitalism is Failing
• Part Three: The illusion of sustainable capitalist development and the necessity of eco-socialism

The capitalistic and large-scale-industrial economic model and way of life, which have got the upper hand in the whole world, have accelerated a two-fold destruction process: the process of destruction of our natural basis of life and, simultaneously, the process of exclusion of ever larger sections of humanity from the economic and social bases of living. The two processes reinforce each other.

The ecological crisis is qualitatively different from all hitherto experienced crises in world history. For the first time in the history of mankind it seems probable that the human species will nearly wife itself out within a few decades. That means that the ecological crisis is not limited to certain regions, but has a global dimension. The continuous degradation of the natural basis of life impairs the material basis of livelihood of a large part of humanity. A growing number of climate related catastrophes are generating frequent emergency situations. They negatively affect all spheres of politics and social life, limit the leeway for undertaking necessary changes in society as a whole, and so they become the main cause of manifold other crises and of violence within societies and between states. Under such circumstances also the continued maintenance of a minimum of democratic structures would not be possible any more.

The possibilities of existence of the greater part of the present generations of humanity and that of the future generations are connected in many ways:

1. The main cause of the destruction of nature on the one hand and that of the world-wide process of impoverishment or economic-social exclusion on the other are the same: the capitalist economic system — especially in its present-day escalation under the neo-liberal paradigm — which is now prevailing all over the world and which is subject to a growth compulsion.
2. The ineluctable survival strategies of those who have been made poor often necessarily lead to environmental destruction.
3. The growing world-wide chasm between the rich and the poor finds direct and the most evident expression in an extremely unequal proportion of consumption of natural resources. The rich 20 percent of the world population, those living in the OECD-states, consume more than 80 percent of the non-renewable energy and other resources, and they (therefore) dump 80 percent of the polluting substances in the biosphere. (However, in the case of many non-renewable resources China and India are at present racing to catch up with the OECD states.)
4. The environmental costs resulting from the consumption of natural resources in the rich industrial countries and climate change are for the most part saddled upon the impoverished majority of the Third World people. A 1992 study of the Fraunhofer Institute estimates that if the present course is not radically changed, an additional 900 Million to 1.8 billion starvation deaths will take place till 2030 due to shifts in the vegetation zones. That means, a starvation catastrophe of hitherto unknown dimensions would result not from any distribution injustices, but as a direct consequence of climate change (cf. Wohlmeyer 1994: 221f.). Not included in the figure are would-be victims of rapidly spreading diseases like malaria or catastrophes like floods, hurricanes etc.. Already today, apart from economic and political power relations, ecological devastation is a direct cause of growing impoverishment in the Third World. For instance, since the mid-1970s, due to global warming the amount of precipitation in the sub-Saharan Sahel-zone has gone down by ca. 40 percent. The ravages of hurricane „Mitch” (1998) in large parts of Central America and the intensification of the climate phenomenon „El Nino“, which inter alia caused drought catastrophes in South East Asia, are probably directly connected with global warming. In South China, today, the livelihood of 300 Million people is endangered through the rapid melting of the Himalaya glaciers. According to the International Red Cross there are already over 50 Million environmental refugees in the world. Undoubtedly, seen globally, the most urgent social question is the ecology question.

The concept that is central to calculating the eco-balance of our economic activities is that of environmental space. It can be defined as the amount and quality of economic activities that can be undertaken within the limits of nature‘s capacity to regenerate itself. Thereby we grant every citizen of the world the right to an equal share of nature‘s resources and sinks. The concept was originally developed by the Dutch economist Hans Opschoor. The study Sustainable Germany (in German: Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland) of the Wuppertal Institute, which was commissioned by BUND (Friends of the Earth, Germany) and Misereor (the Catholic Charity Organisation in Germany), developed the concept further and stressed thereby the aspect of global justice. According to this study, environmental space should be determined by four criteria: (a) ecological carrying capacity, (b) ability of nature to regenerate itself, (c) availability of resources and (d) global equality of opportunity, i.e. equal right of every human being to use nature, no matter whether he lives in the Netherlands or in Burkina Faso (cf. Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland , pp. 133–138). So here the criterion of global justice is already integrated in the very method of calculating eco-balance. We therefore think that this concept should absolutely be taken over by the leftists, no matter what political consequences the Wuppertal Institute, for example, draws from it.

With regard to the emission of carbon dioxide, the most important of the greenhouse gases (it is responsible for 50% of the greenhouse effect), it means in concrete terms the following: Globally, roughly more than two times as much CO2 is being emitted as the earth can absorb through its CO2-sinks (the oceans, large forest areas etc.). That means, in order to stop the greenhouse effect, the global CO2 emission must be halved immediately. It is clear that that is not possible. Therefore we can only try to weaken the greenhouse effect to such an extent that civilisation and vegetation can adapt themselves quickly enough, that it, above all in the interest of its victims in the Third World, remains controllable. One generally assumes that that is still possible if the rise in the average global temperature remains limited to 0.1 degree Celsius per decade. On this basis, renowned scientists set the global reduction goal at 50 to 60 percent of the 1990 level by the year 2050. But since the rich industrial countries are responsible for a much higher CO2 emission than the world average, the reduction in these countries must be correspondingly drastic. In terms of these criteria, in Germany, for example, the CO2 emission must be reduced by 90% by the year 2050. It must be stressed here that these reduction goals state just the minimum that is ecologically necessary; the factual reductions should not fall below this.

We must also consider the possibility that a positive feedback takes place in the course of global warming. That means, the negative effects of global warming may reinforce each other, leading to an uncontrollable dynamics. An example thereof is the possible release of large amounts of methane through the eventual thawing of permafrost in Siberia (the greenhouse potential of methane is many times higher than that of carbon dioxide.)

The ecological U-turn is therefore directly a question of global justice. The production and consumption level of the industrial countries cannot be universalised. For example, in North-Rhine-Westphalia ( a province of Germany) alone, more cars are registered than in the whole continent of Africa; and merely 6% of the world population can afford the luxury of flying (Air traffic makes a considerable contribution to climate change). Then there are also the problems directly resulting from production and consumption in the industrial countries, problems with which the majority of the people of the Third World are saddled. We can mention, for instance, the negative effects of uranium mining in Niger or the soil erosion resulting from export-oriented agriculture.

If we do not want to disregard this global horizon, then we cannot avoid the insight that the people of the industrial countries, but also the rich and the middle class of the Third World, with their ecologically unsustainable mode of production and way of life, are participating in a worldwide chauvinistic selection process, which robs others of their chances of survival. For leftists, the ecological U-turn must therefore stand at the top of their political agenda. The acceptance of drastic changes in the way of life and consumption patterns, which would necessarily result from such a U-turn (especially in the rich industrial countries), can however be best achieved through an egalitarian reorganisation of society.

Part Three: The illusion of sustainable capitalist development and the necessity of eco-socialism

• Part One: Capitalism is Failing
• Part Two: The most urgent social issue

Development, or economic growth, has since long been seen as the key element in the resolution of two old conflicts: that between the rich and the poor in every society and that between the nations of the North and the South. In the late 1960s, however, some doubts arose. The contradiction between industrial economy and ecology could no longer be overlooked. Nevertheless, even after Meadows et al. (1972) and some others had pointed out the limits to growth, governments throughout the world continued with the same economic policies as before, while establishment economists brought forward many arguments to deny both the existence of any limits to growth and any contradiction between economy and ecology. But since about the mid-1980s, most establishment economists, politicians and political thinkers have been compelled to concede that there is a problem; it has become impossible for them to ignore global ecological degradation any longer. Some among them have realized that they cannot carry on as before, but they are not prepared to change course substantially, and they cannot, for reasons I shall elaborate below. So they invented a new term; they are no longer preaching development and growth, pure and simple. They are now preaching “sustainable development” or “sustainable growth.”

But not only the establishment, also many of those who are fundamentally critical of the neoliberal world economic system and denounce its various negative effects on people and environment — e.g. critics of globalization, trade unionists etc. — do not in principle question the growth paradigm of capitalism. They make many detailed proposals for improvement of individual aspects of the economy, e.g. abolition of the tax havens, introducing a Tobin tax (a tax on international financial transactions to curb destructive speculation), remission of external debts of the poorest countries etc. etc.. But they basically remain rooted in Keynesianism, which cannot resolve the contradiction between the growth compulsions of capitalism and the imperative of conservation of our natural basis of life. On the contrary, Keynesians hope that state-sponsored boosting of the economy by means of enhancing mass purchasing power would lead to more consumption of goods and services and to more employment, which in turn would increase the tax revenue of the state, which is allegedly necessary for solving the ecological problems. They do not realize that increasing consumption of goods and services leads to increasing depletion of scarce resources and causes increasing environmental pollution.

In the 1950s and 1960s the overwhelming majority of economists and economic policy makers were adherents of Keynesianism. Nonetheless, let us remember, for the majority of human beings the world was then still not a good place. Only in a few countries of the North there was less poverty and less unemployment, perhaps also a little less exploitation. As to the underdeveloped countries of the South, most of them were left to the dynamics of capitalist development financed largely through foreign debt –very often with devastating social and ecological consequences. But in the developed countries of the North, the growth dynamics of the capitalist world economy did not tolerate Keynesianism for long.

The majority of the critics of globalisation think that most evils of the present-day world are caused by bad policies dictated by multinational corporations. From this simplistic analysis follow false concepts and ideas for solution of problems. They think, if the dominance of the multinational corporations and neoliberal economic policies could be overcome, then it would be possible to create prosperity for all people of the world. A fundamental error of these good people is to ignore the question of the natural resource base of an economy and the limited capacity of nature to absorb or neutralize the pollution generated by industry. In contrast to such critics of globalisation, the International Forum on Globalisation, which is also an organisation that rejects globalisation, writes:

“…globalization is inherently destructive to the natural world because it requires that products travel thousands of miles around the planet, resulting in staggering environmental costs such as unprecedented levels of ocean and air pollution from transport, increased energy consumption and fossil fuel emissions (furthering climate change), increased use of packaging materials, and devastating new infrastructure developments — new roads, ports, airports, pipelines, power grids — often constructed in formerly pristine places.” (IFG 1999: 19)

This principled opposition to economic globalization is a necessary consequence of the recognition of limits to growth. For continuing globalization tends to accelerate economic growth, which progressively degrades the natural environment.

Three Illusions

It doesn‘t make any difference whether the protagonists of further economic growth are consciously deceiving people or are only suffering from delusions. The result is the same. Three illusions form the basis of the thinking that ignores or covers up the fundamental limits to growth:

First, in the early phase of the controversy, some economists denied that there was any resource problem, even in respect to non-renewable resources. Prof. Wilfred Beckerman (1972), then head of the department of economics at the University of Oxford, very confidently asserted that there were enough resources in the world to sustain continued economic growth for the next 100 million years (see in this connection also Simon and Kahn 1984). Others believed that all scarce raw materials could be substituted by more abundantly available materials such as iron and aluminium. Some even believed that we could produce plastics by processing carbon dioxide in the air (Daublebski 1973). As recently as 1993, the president of the Japanese Council of Sciences, Prof. Jero Kondo, suggested that, in order to solve the problem of global warming, both the undesirable excess of carbon dioxide in the air and that escaping through the chimneys should be captured by using solar energy and converted into useful industrial chemicals (cf. Schmidt-Bleek 1993: 80). Such is the degree of delusion that has infected the discourse on sustainable development/growth.

This primitive form of illusion is no longer popular. Since about the mid1980s, some protagonists of sustainable development believe that, thanks to developments in science and technology, economic growth can continue in spite of drastic reductions in resource consumption (WCED 1987) or that at least the present-day standard of living in the industrial societies can be more or less maintained through “a new model of prosperity” (cf. Weizsäcker 1994; Schmidt-Bleek 1993; Friends of the Earth Netherlands 1992).

Second, again on the basis of naive faith in the development of science and technology, most of them believe that the pollution problem can be solved if only we devote sufficient resources to this task; and third, all of them believe that their goal can be achieved within the framework of a capitalist market economy.

The Reality

Here one has to be sceptical. In the following we shall examine the above assertions and hopes and explain why we think that they, and also their more sophisticated variants, are illusions.

The issue of resources

Let us ignore people like Beckerman, Simon and Kahn, who do not even consider it necessary to advocate sustainable development. But even some of those who demand that resource consumption should be drastically reduced think that the main problem is not that of resource scarcity, at least not in the foreseeable future, but that of environmental degradation (e.g. Schmidt-Bleek 1993: 48). For instance, some assert that shortage of energy is not the problem; the real problem is global warming. In the 1990s, there was indeed no resource scarcity. Prices of raw materials including oil were low and falling. Even today, when these prices are rising rapidly, Western Europeans and North Americans can afford them. But simply because they can afford all the resources, they should not think that there is no resource problem at all. That would be a gross error. In many countries of the South, resource shortage is already a big problem — e.g. in respect of availability of arable land and fresh water. In Nigeria, an oilexporting country, petrol is such a scarce commodity that many Nigerians bore holes in pipelines to steal a few buckets of the fuel and risk their life in the process. Because the poor of the world do not have the money to go to the world resources markets as purchasers, most economists are not aware of the problem.

Nevertheless, the proponents of sustainable development have realized that general environmental degradation is directly proportional to overall resource consumption. So they think, to protect the environment, it is necessary to reduce resource consumption drastically. And they think that is possible without having to sacrifice economic growth or the western standard of living. In 1987, the authors of the so-called Brundtland Report claimed to have noted “favourable trends” that allegedly proved that “future patterns of agriculture and forestry development, energy use, industrialization, and human settlements can be made far less materialintensive, and hence both more economically and environmentally efficient” (WCED 1987: 89f.). In chapter 8, entitled Industry: Producing More With Less, it cites some supporting data from the 1960s to the middle of the 1980s. Since the beginning of the 1980s, we have been hearing of an “efficiency revolution” that is expected to increase the resource productivity of industrial economies through technological progress. More recently, in their book entitled Factor Four — Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use, Weizsäcker et al. (1997) gave many examples of particular products to show that such an efficiency revolution had already begun.

Other researchers, however, focused on macro-economic data instead and noted a contrary trend. F. E. Trainer (1985: 211) cites comparative data from the post-war period till the end of the 1970s to prove just the opposite, namely that returns to technology in the form of resource productivity are in general going down. Dennis Meadows, author of the 1972 study Limits to Growth, corroborated this in 1998 when he said in an interview:

“We already have to spend more and more on capital investment to get access to the raw materials” (Die Zeit, 19 February 1998). For example, between 1963 and 1977, annual investment in the US mining industry increased by 130 per cent (in constant dollars), but output measured by tonnage increased only by 38 per cent (Trainer 1985: 51). In industrialized agriculture, more and more chemical fertilizer and non-renewable energy have to be used to produce the same quantity of grain. In 1950, the use of one additional tonne of fertilizer yielded an average of 14.8 additional tonnes of grain, but in 1980 this additional grain yield figure fell to only 5.8 tonnes (Brown 1984: 179). More recently, Fred Luks (1997) calculated that if, in the industrial countries, resource consumption in the next fifty years is to go down by a factor of 10, as demanded by Schmidt-Bleek (1993) and many others (e.g. Loske et al. 1998), and the economy is to grow simultaneously at the rate of 2 per cent annually, then resource productivity in this period must rise by a factor of 27. How realistic is that?

Explaining the economic difficulties of the former Soviet Union, Abel Aganbegyan, then chief economic adviser to Gorbachev, wrote in 1988:

“In the 1971–75 period, the volume of output of the mining industry increased by 25% but only by 8% in 1981–85. This decline in growth …was mainly connected with the worsening of the geological and economic conditions of mining.… The Soviet Union is fairly rapidly exhausting the most accessible of its natural resources . To maintain levels of extraction it is necessary to dig deeper, to discover new deposits and to transfer [move] to less favourable fields. The fuel and raw materials base in the inhabited regions …is already unable to meet our requirements… It is necessary therefore… to construct transport links, to create new towns and develop territories and attract population there. All this, naturally, does not come cheap.” (Aganbegyan 1988 p8)

Actually, common sense is enough to understand this. No doubt, stopping wastage alone increases resource productivity. And occasional ingenious inventions and innovations can also raise it in some particular technologies. But normally, sooner or later, all technologies attain their optimum. Thereafter, the law of diminishing returns comes into operation. We may invest as much as we want in research and development, but we will never be able to produce a car engine that does not need any fuel. We cannot wish away the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. In short, also in the matter of resource productivity there are limits to growth.

In the past, technological progress was driven by two “motors“: the intellect and abundant use of resources, especially of fossil fuels. A pneumatic hammer, for example, which is far superior to an ordinary hammer in terms of performance, embodies not only many high-class inventions, it also requires many more resources for its production and operation than the latter. But the idea of sustainable development stipulates that total resource consumption in the advanced industrial countries be drastically reduced — that one forgoes , so to speak, the use of the second “motor.” Of course, much can be achieved with only the first “motor.” Mainly through the work of intellect has the computer become smaller and more efficient. Yet, to produce a small personal computer, 15–19 tons of material have to be processed (Malley 1996). Moreover, one cannot live in a computer and eat data.

A few isolated successes can delude us about the overall situation. A motorcar today needs less petrol per kilometre than it did, say twenty years ago. But the US oil industry today must consume more energy and materials to extract oil in Alaska and transport it to the consumers than it had to do for Pennsylvanian oil. As a result, its energy input–output ratio is worsening.

Let us look at the so-called energy-efficient cars. They require for their manufacture much more energy than ordinary cars. Volkswagen Corporation has developed a car that consumes only 3 litres of petrol per 100 km. It has been made lighter by using aluminium and magnesium. For producing these light metals, much more energy and materials have to be consumed than for producing steel. “All people are only staring at the fuel consumption and are not noticing at all how they are causing the gigantic merry-go-round of raw materials consumption to rotate ever faster.… That simply will not work” (Schmidt-Bleek quoted in Wille 1999). This statement on the 3-litre car applies all the more to the promised 1-litre car.

As regards biofuels and liquid hydrogen as substitutes for petrol, diesel or compressed natural gas, one ought to consider first how much more energy and other resources have to be consumed to produce these substitute fuels for cars before one bursts into euphoria.

Limits to Recycling

There are also limits to recycling. Of course, metals can, in many cases, be recycled easily, but they are often used in such a dissipative way (e.g. zinc in paint) that no recycling is possible. In many other cases, recycling is in principle possible but would require too much energy and materials consumption to be economic. On average, according to a report to the Club of Rome, about 70 per cent of the annual production of metals are lost after one use only. Of the rest 30 per cent that are recycled, only 0.1 per cent remains in use after ten “life cycles” (Gabor et al. 1976: 144f.). Of course, the recycling rate can be improved through technological development, and rising prices can certainly help. But recycling can only postpone the problem, not solve it.

The Myth of Information Society and Service Society

We often hear researchers say that in the advanced industrial societies economic growth has been decoupled from growth in resource consumption. Indeed, in the early 1980s it was pointed out in support of the above view that in the USA 60 per cent of all employed people only processed information in some form or other (Naisbitt 1982: 14). All such statistics are supposed to prove that sustainable growth is possible. But, firstly, the concept “gross domestic product” (GDP) is highly problematic because fictitious transactions, even disasters, and money spent on repairing damages are included in it. Secondly, we should not overlook the fact that the old branches of the economy that require high energy and raw materials consumption can be and are in fact being transferred away from the advanced industrial countries to developing and East European countries.

The advanced industrial countries can then grow more through sectors such as banking, insurance, data-processing, research and development, selling and licensing of patents etc. than, say, through mining and steel production. But it is a zero-sum game. This way, of course, their balance — namely the ratio of energy and raw materials input to GDP — may look better, but the balance of the world economy remains unchanged. The same applies to environmental degradation. Improvements in the environment of the rich industrial countries are more than cancelled through increase in environmental degradation in, say, China, which has now become the biggest factory of the world.

What is more important, if we cease to stare only at the production side and also consider the consumption side, the balance of the highly developed economies would appear very bad. For one unit of need-satisfaction (say, quenching thirst), a data-processing US-citizen consumes many times more resources (Coca-Cola in a can) than an average citizen of India (a glass of water from the tap). This has also been realized by the authors of the Brundtland Report. They write: “… even the most industrially advanced economies still depend on a continued supply of basic manufactured goods. Whether made domestically or imported, their production will continue to require large amounts of raw materials and energy”

(WCED 1987: 217).

Environmental Protection Through Technological Fixes

The realization that resource consumption must be drastically cut in order to protect the environment and to conserve the natural basis of life is quite recent and not very widespread. Most people, even many environmentalists, do not see the connection. They believe, what is needed to protect the environment is simply to devote a larger portion of the expected, and normally growing, GDP to this task, i.e. to invest more in conventional environmental technologies. The more modern among them demand that the state and industry invest large amounts of money in research on and promotion of renewable resources, which are held to be absolutely clean. They believe that renewable resources can fully replace all the non-renewables we consume today. We shall examine the latter belief in the next section. Here we point out the fallacies of the former.

It is conceivable that in the initial phase of a new technology (or a new branch of industry), negative environmental impact per unit of production can be reduced through its further development — through new ideas and without requiring more resource consumption. But as in the case of resource consumption per unit of production, so also in the matter of negative environmental impact, at some point the optimum will be reached, and the technology will attain maturity. After that, increases in production will be accompanied by proportional or even over-proportional increases in environmental degradation. The conventional technological environmental protection policy is not oriented towards the overall ecological context. It is limited to selective and peripheral measures, which can provide only shortor middle-term relief in respect of particular problems. In most cases, they only shift the problem. Pollutants are shifted from the medium air into the medium water or ground, or the other way round. Or they are thinly distributed over a large area, e.g. through very high chimneys. Or they are diluted by adding fresh air or water. Or they are only intercepted, collected and dumped somewhere, often in Third World and Eastern European countries. In the long run, and from a global standpoint, such “successes” are of no use. This is common knowledge among those who are in charge of executing this policy. For example, in 1976, the then president of the West German Federal Bureau of Environment, Heinrich von Lersner, characterized his job as “a Sisyphean task.” He said: “By the time we have brought one pollutant under control, another one has become a problem” (Der Spiegel, No. 40, 1976, p. 62).

Filters and other equipment used in technological fixes for environmental protection are all industrial goods. Their manufacture and operation require, as with all industrial products, considerable expenditure of energy and other resources. That also causes pollution (and resource depletion), only somewhere else and of some other kind. For example, sulphur dioxide emissions (cause of acid rain) from a thermal power plant can be largely eliminated, but that requires a chemical plant that consumes 3 per cent of the electricity production of the power plant. That would mean that more coal would have to be burnt, which would entail more carbon dioxide emission. Someone who has understood this would also realize that the recent fashionable talk about an emission-free car driven by hydrogen fuel cells is just a bluff. The production of both hydrogen and fuel cells generates a lot of pollution, only somewhere else. Moreover, filters and similar other equipment have a limited lifespan. They must be replaced every ten, fifteen or twenty years. Technological environmental protection thus becomes a regular industry, causing more resource depletion and more pollution.

The Search for Renewable Resources

Many environmentalists believe that renewable resources are potentially so abundant that all the current consumption needs of all humanity could be easily met. Hermann Scheer, president of Eurosolar, and a famous apostle of a “solar world economy” writes: “For an unimaginable length of time the sun will be bestowing its energy on humans, animals, and plants. And that in such a prodigal quantity that it would be able to meet the most sumptuous energy needs of even drastically growing populations of humans, animals, and plants (Scheer 1999: 66).

Scheer and thousands of solar energy enthusiasts derive this hope from the fact that every day the sun supplies the earth with 15,000 times as much energy as the total daily commercial energy consumption of the human population at present. Under the term “solar energy” they nowadays subsume all sources of energy except the fossil, nuclear, and geothermic ones: the energy of sunshine, wind energy, energy of flowing water, energy from biomass etc. Some of them believe that from biomass we could also get raw materials for almost everything: houses cars, every kind of chemical, and so on. And all such materials could finally be composted (Alt 1993: 6–8).

Now, if all this is true, why have we not yet been able to solve all the resource and environmental problems of humanity? Why are the prices of all conventional non-renewable resources — oil, gas, coal, electricity, metals, wheat, rice etc. — rising rapidly for the last few years? (see appendix II & III). After all, generating electricity by means of photovoltaic technology was invented as early as in 1954, biomass energy is being used since time immemorial, wind energy for a few thousand years, and the energy of flowing water for many centuries. It is therefore necessary to examine the above beliefs.

For the conversion of sunshine, wind, biomass etc. into electricity and liquid fuel we need industrial equipment and a whole infrastructure, the production and operation of which require consumption of large quantities of non-renewable energy and non-renewable resources. And they cause a lot of environmental degradation too.

Let us take the case of sunshine. It is, of course, quantitatively a rich source of energy. The point, however, is to make it available in the desired forms at desired places, namely as electricity and liquid fuel in the inhabited regions of the earth. So far, despite great efforts in research and development, solar electricity is not cheap enough to replace electricity from fossil fuels and uranium. The production cost of electricity from coal in Central Europe is about 0.04 Euro per kilowatt-hour. Statements on the production cost of photovoltaic electricity in Central Europe vary from study to study. But all studies agree that it is still much too high to be competitive, roughly 10 to 15 times as high as that of coal-based electricity.

Moreover, to be available round the clock, both solar and wind-electricity have to be stored in some form or other, because the sun does not shine in the night and on cloudy days, and wind does not blow always. The most advocated storage technology is to produce liquid hydrogen from water with the help of solar and wind electricity. But if the exorbitantly costly solar electricity (or even the not so exorbitant wind electricity) is used to produce and liquefy hydrogen, which would be reconverted to electricity, how much would the latter electricity cost? Liquid hydrogen has also been suggested as fuel for cars and aeroplanes but has not been marketed because of its high cost.

But it is not just a question of price. People may be willing to pay a higher price to protect the environment. If we produce only energy (electricity) by using energy (electricity), then it only makes sense if the output is more than the input, in other words, if the energy balance is sufficiently positive. It is very doubtful that it is so in the case of photovoltaic technology. (see appendix V). The reasons for this scepticism are as follows:

At present the lifespan of a photovoltaic module is at the most 20 years. Statements on the energy pay-back time of this technology — that is the time a photovoltaic module needs to produce the amount of energy that was needed to manufacture and install it — in Central Europe range between 1.2 and 10 years. This incredibly wide range alone gives rise to doubts about the seriousness of the calculations (for details see Sarkar 1999: 103–110). There are reasons to doubt that the photovoltaic enthusiasts have really added up all the energy that goes into the production of a photovoltaic module at different stages. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1978) was the first to raise this doubt. In order to determine the correct and complete energy-input figure, Georgescu-Roegen wrote, one should add up all proportionate expenditures of energy, beginning with the energy that was needed to build the factory that produced the excavator that was used to dig up sand that was used to produce silicon, and so on. This is standard procedure for calculating the money cost of production of anything. But this is obviously not done when calculating the energy cost of production of 1 kWh of photovoltaic electricity (which is admittedly much more difficult to do). That explains the astonishing discrepancy between the high money cost of production of photovoltaic electricity and its alleged low energy cost of production (energy pay-back time). If we accept Georgesu-Roegen‘s method, then we would likely come to the conclusion that the energy balance of photovoltaic or any other technology for converting sunshine into electricity is negative. And that perhaps is the reason why not even in a pilot project has it been tried yet to produce all the components of photovoltaic modules, from A to Z, by using photovoltaic electricity instead of conventional electricity.

Georgescu-Roegen differentiates between “feasible” and “viable” technologies. Technologies for converting sunshine into electricity are feasible, but not viable, because they cannot reproduce themselves. They can only exist as long as conventional energy can be used for producing the necessary equipment. That means they are parasites. Georgescu-Roegen illustrates the point with the following example: The first bronze hammer was made by using stone hammers. Thereafter, all bronze hammers were hammered by bronze hammers. He thinks, the problem might be beyond solution. Because the energy intensity of sunshine on the surface of the earth is very low — and that is a cosmological constant beyond our control — a large area must be covered with collectors (photovoltaic modules or aluminium mirrors) to gather and concentrate this energy. That requires a large expenditure of energy (and materials) and makes the energy balance of such technologies negative. In contrast, fossil fuels are solar energy that has already been collected and concentrated by nature over millions of years, which is the explanation for their high energy intensity and highly positive energy balance.

Suppose we accept the claim of some enthusiasts that the energy payback time of photovoltaic technology is seven to ten years. Will that — after meeting all or a part of our other energy needs — leave us with enough surplus energy for running all the industries necessary to reproduce the photovoltaic power plants every twenty years? We doubt very much that it will. The expected technological breakthroughs may or may not come. In any case, we cannot place our hopes at present on an elaborate vision of “a solar world economy” (Scheer 1999) on the basis of that expectation.

Wind-, water-, and biomass-energy have proved their worth in the past centuries. Of course, an industrial society needs electricity and liquid fuel, not just mechanical and heat energy. But the fact that the cost of production of windand biomass-electricity in Central Europe is on average roughly 0.085 and 0.10 Euro respectively indicates that their energy balance is very likely to be positive. But it may not be positive enough to enable these technologies to be viable (to reproduce themselves) in the sense elaborated above — i.e. without the aid of fossil fuels (see appendix V).

Since a few years ago, biofuels — bioethanol and biodiesel from maize, sugarcane, palm-oil, rape-seed-oil etc. — are being advocated and produced on a large scale in the name of stopping global warming. But much doubt exists about their energy balance, because cultivation of the said crops requires a lot of fossil fuels for driving the agricultural machines and producing fertilizers and other chemicals. In the case of ethanol produced from maize and biodiesel from rape-seed-oil, many researchers are of the opinion that their energy balance is negative. The cultivation of oil-palm in erstwhile rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia has wreaked ecological havoc in the region. The most serious objection to biofuels is, however, that land needed for food production is thereby diverted to fuel production for motor vehicles. As a result of large-scale ethanol production from maize, tortilla, the maize-bread of the Mexicans, has become exorbitantly costly. This fact alone, if not also the others, will limit the production of biofuels (see appendix II). Moreover, also the other species of the planet need land for their survival.

Taking all these things into consideration (for a detailed discussion see Sarkar 1999: ch. 4), it seems safe to predict that in a future sustainable economy neither energy nor raw materials will be as cheap as today, nor will their availability be as great as the sum total of all the non-renewable and renewable resources available today. The need to reduce resource consumption drastically will be compelling, not only for protecting the environment but also because there simply will not be enough to maintain today‘s average standard of living for a world population of 8–10 billion, the figure forecast for the year 2050. The world economy as a whole must therefore shrink. Resource consumption of the advanced industrial countries must, as Schmidt-Bleek (1993) demands, go down by a factor of ten if the people of the whole world are to get a chance to satisfy their basic needs.

Sustainability

The conclusion that must be drawn from the above exposition of reality is that sustainable development (growth) is not possible, unless we understand by the term “development” something other than industrialization, economic growth and industrial society. Herman Daly and John B. Cobb Jr. (1990: 71) differentiate between growth and development: “

“ ‘Growth’ should refer to quantitative expansion in the scale of the physical dimensions of the economic system, while ‘development’should refer to the qualitative change of a physically non-growing economic system in dynamic equilibrium with the environment.”

In other words, “growth” means using up more and more resources, whereas “development” means to increase the benefits derived from the use of the same quantity of resources. Of course, we can say that the economy should grow, like a tree, up to a certain point and not beyond that. Daly and Cobb Jr. (ibid: 72) write: “Any physical subsystem of a finite and non-growing earth must itself also eventually become non-growing. Therefore growth will become unsustainable eventually and the term ‘sustainable growth’would then be self-contradictory. But sustainable development does not become self-contradictory.” This is all correct. But isn‘t it then better and clearer to speak of a “steady-state economy,” as Daly does in an earlier book (1977), rather than of sustainable development? Or we may also speak of a sustainable economy or a sustainable society. Actually, in the whole of economic thought, a paradigm shift is necessary — a shift from the hitherto dominating growth paradigm to what we call “the limits-to-growth paradigm.”

A sustainable society is, by definition, “one that can persist over generations” (Meadows et al. 1992: 209). Consequently, it cannot have as its foundation an industrial economy as we know it, because such an economy is for the most part dependent on the use of vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, which will be exhausted sooner or later. Logically therefore, the economy of a sustainable society must be based, — if not wholly, then at least for the most part — on the use of renewable resources. Non-renewable resources would then be used very frugally or, better, only when absolutely necessary.

It goes without saying that a sustainable society would cease to be sustainable if its population continues to grow. Since there is no empty country left any more in the world, it cannot send its excess population as colonists to other continents. Consequently, a sustainable society would also require that its population remains steady at the optimum level. Since the present-day world population has already far exceeded the population that can live sustainably on the earth, it is imperative that the world population as a whole be reduced, in the long run. The work for stopping population growth must begin today.

The consumption level in such an economy would be very modest in comparison to that of an average citizen in the First World of today. Such an economy would prefer labour-intensive technologies. That would, firstly, be necessary because the quantity of sustainably available renewable resources would not allow us to maintain the present level of mechanisation and automation. Secondly, that would also be desirable, because this way meaningful employment can be created for all. For ecological reasons and because of scarcity of resources, long-distance trade would also be drastically curtailed (see IFG-quotation above). That would entail the creation of regional, largely self-provisioning, and ecological-cyclical economies.

A steady-state economy not subject to any growth compulsion should not be misunderstood as leading to stagnation in respect of human development:

“It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human development. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress, as much room for improving the Art of Living and much more likelihood of its being improved ….”

(John Stuart Mill, quoted in Daly 1980: 15)

All the conditions of sustainability discussed until now mean that at least the economies of the industrial societies must shrink in order to become sustainable. They must become steady-state economies at a much lower level than today. As for the countries of the South, including also the rapidly industrializing countries like India, Mexico, Egypt etc., the most important condition of sustainability there is to stop population growth. That is also an important condition for ensuring that enough space remains for habitats of the other species. The question whether or not further growth of the economies of these countries is acceptable, should be answered carefully and in a very differentiated manner.

Will all that be possible within the framework of capitalism? All protagonists of sustainable development believe it will be. But that is a misconception. We think it is impossible.

Eco-Capitalism Cannot Help Us

One of the articles of faith of capitalism is that the welfare of society will result automatically if everybody cares for his/her interest only (Adam Smith). It is of course true that in the last 200 years, capitalism has, in most capitalist countries, steadily increased wealth. But, as everybody knows, that has not always led to prosperity for all, nor to welfare of society as a whole. Particularly in respect of conservation of the natural basis of life and social peace, it has had the opposite effect. Moreover, capitalism limits the time horizon of the participants in the economy to their own short lifespan. At the most, it allows them to think of the interests of their own children. But the project of creating a sustainable human society demands of us that we care for the welfare of all coming generations and of all peoples of the world. This is incompatible with the spirit and functioning of capitalism. The aphorism “What has posterity done for me that I should do something for it?” is not a joke, but corresponds exactly to the mode of operation of capitalism.

The most serious defect of capitalism that is the cause of its unresolvable contradiction to sustainability is its growth dynamics. It is not just that the greedy capitalists want to have more and more. Brutal competition also compels them to try to earn and accumulate/invest more and more. “Expand or perish” is an inexorable law of capitalism. Since no entrepreneur wants to perish, it generates a growth compulsion. Because of the ever larger investments that they are compelled to make to remain competitive, they must search for and create ever larger markets. In capitalism, all firms can make a profit only if the economy as a whole grows. The satisfactory functioning of a capitalist economy is so strongly dependent on continuous growth that even a growth rate below 2% is perceived as a crisis. But sustainability, as we have argued above, requires economic shrinking. Capitalists are willing to contribute to environmental protection by producing more and more filters, sewage treatment plants and so on, but they can never be interested in any kind of shrinking of the economy.

It is astonishing that many theorists of sustainable development, e.g. Schmidt-Bleek (cf. Wille 1999), believe that economic growth will be possible in spite of a drastic reduction in resource consumption. With a favourable interpretation, one might say that they are confusing increase in benefits with economic growth. Daly and Cobb‘s differentiation between growth and development quoted above comes close to what I mean. If, for example, the quality of the air improves because fewer resources are being consumed, then, of course, people would benefit from that. They would enjoy the better air and would no longer fall sick as often as before. But capitalists as capitalists are not interested in such growth in benefits to society; they are only interested in increasing their sales so that they can make more profit. Increase in sales can result either from selling more goods and services or from charging higher prices for less goods and services sold. But competition generally makes it very difficult for any entrepreneur to make more profit by selling less at a higher price. Long-lived and easily repairable products are therefore, generally, of little interest to entrepreneurs. Built-in obsolescence is therefore rational policy in capitalism.

Any policy of drastically reducing resource consumption, which is ecologically necessary and inevitable in the long run, would, firstly, entail a massive redundancy of plants and equipment and destruction of financial capital (share value) in the mining industry. That would then, secondly, lead through a chain reaction to a general crisis in the economy. What factories, machines and workers in all other branches of the economy actually do is to transform raw materials and energy into goods and services, which are sold at a profit. If they are now allowed to process only one-fourth or one-tenth of the hitherto processed quantities of raw materials and energy, as some protagonists of sustainable development demand (Weizsäcker et al. 1995; Schmidt-Bleek 1993), then a proportional quantity of factory and machine capacity and a corresponding part of the labour force would become superfluous. The end result of all that would be a great depression.

Competition also results in the compulsion to increasingly automate and rationalize production. A firm that does not do this will perish. That is why it is not possible to solve the problem of unemployment within the framework of a capitalist economy — not even if it is growing, let alone if it is compelled to stop growing or shrink.

Also the on-going dismantling of the welfare state is the result of a particular kind of competition: In the context of globalization, industrial locations compete with those in other countries to woo transnational capital.

Without questioning this system, we cannot halt or even credibly protest against this “race to the bottom.” Also societal sustainability is impossible within the capitalist system.

Conclusion: Eco-Socialism for a Sustainable Society

Eco-capitalism is, therefore, a misnomer, a self-contradictory term. We cannot have both ecological sustainability and the growth dynamics of capitalism. Whatever fiscal, financial or direct regulatory tools governments might choose to use — green taxes or tradable pollution certificates or depletion quotas — a shrinking capitalist economy would mean a catastrophe for the whole society, a never-ending great depression. Moreover, no capitalist can willingly accept a low-level steady-state economy. Therefore, the state must take up the task of organizing the retreat. It must be a planned retreat, otherwise there will be terrible chaos and calamity. The state must overrule the primacy of profit and growth compulsion.

That means, an economic framework-plan must take the place of the chaos of a free market economy. Society must consciously reach an agreement on what, how much and how to produce, how much energy and how many resources are to be allocated to what. All that is also necessary to ensure that nobody who is fit for work is unemployed and must therefore live off the labour of others. In addition, a large degree of equality in respect of distribution of the products of social labour as well as in respect of the necessary sacrifices in consumption would be necessary, so that the process of economic shrinking is accepted by the majority of the people. All that would necessitate the nationalisation or socialisation of all large enterprises. In principle, a multiplicity of forms of socialisation and ownership of the means of production is conceivable — state ownership, co-operatives, even private ownership of small business. However, finance capital (banks and insurance companies) and the greater part of the means of production must no longer remain under private control.

In order to ensure that an eco-socialist society does not become an authoritarian one, suitable forms of active popular participation at all levels must be created. Since the economic regions would be small — or of a manageable dimension — and largely self-provisioning, the political units would also be small or of a manageable dimension. So it can be made possible that the concerned people are included in the decision-making process.

A socialist society is not only a necessity that arises from the growing scarcity of resources and the imperative of conservation of the natural basis of life, it is also desirable if we consider equality, justice, co-operation, solidarity and freedom to be highly important values. Solidarityy and peaceful coexistence of individuals and the peoples of the world requires an eco-socialist society, in all countries of the world.

• Part One: Capitalism is Failing
• Part Two: The most urgent social issue
• Part Three: The illusion of sustainable capitalist development and the necessity of eco-socialism

This article was originally published by Initiative Eco-Socialism (PDF) as a revised translation of the German original, which was first published in 2004.

© Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern
Cologne and Mainz, March 2008

Rebellion or adaptation?
From these two ways that creatures earnestly beseech
the former is sheer madness
(for Nature never yields);
Yet who can stop a madman from his craze?
Some’ve chosen adaptation — thus
they’s hushed forever at a trodden step.
The beast is fit for Nature’s bends
But Man rows stubbornly to ancient chaos:
He worships war,
Creates through doubt,
And gains a firm hold through negation.
He is an architect,
But chisel he employs is death,
His clay-capricious mind inside him.

Once, in the dark of ages,
shaggy beast went out of mind
and turned into a Man
— Most evil and perilous beast on Earth —
Insane with logic,
and obsessed by faith;
Intelligence became a cursing of Creation;
Man left his stains across the way:
Dissected life and put in into numbers,
He muzzled nature s roots
and probed its substance;
Like a parasite,
He sucked the earth
until it suffered inextinguishable pain;
He sought the keys for sacred truths,
Released the titans, dressed them into iron,
He harnessed them for an exhaustive work;
He changed the world but could not change himself;
He’s gotten lost in his own caves,
He turned into a slave of his own servants.

— Maximilian Voloshin
25 January 1923

(Trans. by Victor Postnikov)

“The ‘development’ ideologues do not hear the screaming of the buttressed trees or the wailing of the rivers or the weeping of the soils. They do not hear the sentiment agony and the anguish of the non-human multitudes — torn, shredded, crushed, incinerated, choked, dispossessed.”
( John Livingston, Rogue Primate, p. 60)

“The overwhelming thrust of the ‘environmental’ movement is dedicated not to the interest of Nature, but to the security and sustainability of the advancement of the human enterprise.” (Rogue Primate, p. 214)

(Note: This is an edited version of a Green Web discussion paper. The full version is available online as Green Web Bulletin #79)

Introduction

John Livingston (1923-2006) should be better known in the deep green activist ecological community. What he taught is extremely important for today’s rapidly disintegrating ecological and social world, and his work deserves to be more widely read. Many deep ecologists have been influenced by the writings of this important Canadian thinker, whose books include The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation and Rogue Primate. Others were taught by him, or encountered radio and other media on which he left his imprint. Livingston was an eloquent writer whose work still has the power to force us to face up to what is required for the survival of life on Earth. As early as 1981, Livingston exposed the empty ritualism of the Canadian government’s environmental assessment panels and their destructive legacy for wildlife and the Earth:

“Environmental Impact Assessment is a grandiloquent fraud, a hoax, and a con.” (The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 33)

Livingston can be considered to be of the stature of the late Arne Naess (1912-2009), who first developed the philosophy of deep ecology. We examine here the relationship between their respective ideas, our aim being to see whether Livingston was influenced by Naess, and explore any disagreements that may have existed between them. From a Canadian perspective, Livingston is of a comparable stature to Stan Rowe (1918-2004), also a naturalist and co-author of the 2004 A Manifesto for Earth, for which Livingston wrote a comment. Both their writings have influenced many of those on the path of deep ecology. However, while we are clearly admirers of the ideas of John Livingston, this is not a eulogy. Where appropriate, we offer some critical commentary. For your convenience, the books and major articles by John Livingston are listed by date of publication at the end of this article, along with other related books and articles.

Livingston’s background

Livingston was an active naturalist and his depth of knowledge about the natural world inspires awe. He wrote that there were two Canadas, one of wild creatures and one of the people. He believed that inter-species relationships were special. This is how he expressed it in a 1990 interview conducted by Farley Mowat:

“I am absolutely convinced that inter-species relationships are the ultimate relationships. We start with individual selfishness, then our relationship sphere begins to expand. There’s mother; there’s family; there’s the tribal self, and that eventually transcends to an inter-species self. At that stage, the essence of the feeling one has for nature is selflessness. The individual self dissolves in the overall relationship. A participatory relationship with nature.” (Rescue The Earth, p. 273)

Livingston expressed his views on natural history throughout all his books and essays. In the Author’s Foreword of One Cosmic Instant, he described his writings as “a reasonably civilized form of sabotage.” He was very active in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with nature radio programs like Audubon Outdoors and on television with Explorations and The Nature of Things. He led a CBC expedition to the Galapagos. He gave public lectures and taught for many years in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. He was president of the Audubon Society of Canada and edited that Society’s magazine. He was also president of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists.

Dominant Themes

Reading Livingston’s nature writings one is struck by several dominant impressions. The dominant themes of his writing and teaching we discuss include the following:

• Deep knowledge of natural history
• Non-human-centric view
• Defence of wildlife habitat
• Active, eco-political stance
• Conservative political approach
• Support of hunting and hunters
• Opposition to industrial logging
• Supporter of indigenous animism
• Opposition to resourcism
• Elevation of the naturalist
• Opposition to industrialism
• Ecological naturalism

Natural History Knowledge: Livingston had an enormous and detailed practical knowledge about the flora and fauna of Canada and about the land and marine geography. He had a talent in conveying this to others which combined his “hands on” knowledge of the natural world with a riveting writing style, free of platitudes. This natural history awareness gives the depth to Livingston’s wisdom.

Non Human-Centred: This is the major theme running through all of Livingston’s writings, as it is for fellow Canadian eco-philosopher and naturalist Stan Rowe, cited approvingly in Rogue Primate. This ancient yet contemporary theme, of humans seeing themselves as separate from the natural world — what Peter Singer called speciesism — is seen as the dominant ‘received truth’ of contemporary culture. Livingston made a conscious effort to write from a non human- centred perspective and continually tried to explain historically how the human-centred attitude (anthropocentrism), came into being:

“Ours is the species that treats the land as though it owned it.” (Canada: A Natural History, p. 193)

“A man should no more be allowed to own the living soil than he now owns the air he breathes.”
(One Cosmic Instant, p. 223)

Such statements are similar in sentiment to views held by Arne Naess: “The earth does not belong to humans.” (Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. 74) One overall theme of Livingston’s writings about the natural world was to explore when the sense of dominance of humans over nature historically came about and to try to comprehend why this happened. (He uses “man” in his writings to refer to both genders.) Separation from nature leads to a doctrine of thinking that the non human is subject to absolute human domination and power. The ecocentric ethic advocated by Livingston goes against existing cultural traditions and assumptions. He thus opposed that marketplace concepts like competition, dominance, aggression, proprietorship, etc. be applied to nature and stressed “interspecies compliance” as sustaining the natural world. For Livingston, supposed cultural objectivity was actually riddled with cultural subjectivity.

Wildlife cannot be defended or preserved within industrial culture: As Livingston stated in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, “There can be no ‘rational’ argument for wildlife preservation…” (p. 116) He believed that the defence of wildlife arises from an individual’s emotional attachment and experience with wild nature and saw this as a personal feeling — a “selfish individual experience” (Ibid, p. 98) — which could not be communicated in a rational sense to others. This experience appears to be a kind of “Self-Realization,” as expressed by Arne Naess, where the individual connects in consciousness to the natural world, becomes part of this world, and acts from this perspective. Livingston conveyed it as:

“Nature as one’s ‘extended self’ might serve to bridge the gap between the self-and-other, between the human-and-non-human. If, for example, I am able to see and identify the coyote or the red-tailed hawk as an extension of myself, perhaps I will act somewhat differently in view of that perception.” (Endangered Spaces, pp. 244-245)

Livingston argued that “human management” would not save wildlife, what was required was a fundamental shift in the way humans perceive and receive the natural world that surrounds them:

“All that is in my universe is not merely mine, it is me.” (The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 113)

The thinking in this wildlife paragraph has been embodied in the Nature-bonding work carried out by Billy MacDonald at Red Tail Nature Awareness in Scotsburn, Nova Scotia.

Eco-political: Livingston’s natural history was also eco-political because many of the ideas which were more fully present in his later theoretical or philosophical books first appeared or were suggested in his nature writings. Livingston not only uniquely conceptualized and described natural history but, most importantly, agitated through his readers to bring about intellectual and social change, to rectify ecological injustice and abuse. Like Stan Rowe, Livingston’s eco-politics was grounded in biological knowledge. Both were scientists in the best sense of the term. (Livingston’s only earned academic degree was a B.A. in English.) Both can be described in Rowe’s characterization as “Earthlings first, humans second.” (Earth Alive, p. 21)

No alternative political model: Livingston had a revolutionary attitude towards Nature, in the sense of the changes he wanted to happen within industrial culture, but he seemed to oppose political radicalism within this society. In The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation he wrote against forming a new political party dedicated to environmental awareness, i.e., a green party as, “this, however, would only serve to alienate the rank and file of other political parties, and would be self-defeating.” (p. 55) Yet in his last major theoretical work, the 1994 Rogue Primate, Livingston was more positive towards the Greens, exempting them from the pursuit of resourcism and industrialization associated with other political parties. (pp. 186-187) I think he was quite mistaken in this, if we look at some of the practices of the federal and provincial Green parties in Canada.

In The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, Livingston bemoaned the negative image, in his eyes, of environmentalism:

“To this day in the seats of power, which means in the corporate boardrooms and the highest echelons of government, ‘conservation’ has too often meant ‘environmentalism’ which has too often been interpreted as hippies and radicals intent on the indiscriminate overthrow of all things.” (pp. 59-60)

Livingston made it very clear throughout his writings that he opposed the industrial growth and consumer society and human-centredness. Yet he seemed to be appealing here to this very society for the survival of plants, animals and their habitats. This seems a puzzling contradiction for someone so radical in his thinking, of seeking conservation within the system, when his writings show this system is otherwise hostile to wildlife. In a telling observation, Graeme Gibson, a friend for many years, says in his Appreciation in The John A. Livingston Reader, published in 2007, that Livingston as a thinker was “closest to George Grant” the Conservative philosopher. (p. xii)

Natural history and general comments

“Anyone who has spent the greater part of a lifetime enjoying and attempting to understand and preserve wild nature will have had the experience of witnessing his own species drift lower and lower on his personal scale of perfection.” (One Cosmic Instant, p. 188)

“The entire career of homo sapiens has taken place in a period so brief as to be invisible on the geological time scale. Long before our ancestors emerged, today’s land forms were well in place. Even though as a species, we have experienced only a fleeting moment of the planet’s history, we tend to see today’s world as complete – as though the ages of mountain-building and flooding and up heaving were now concluded. We also tend to believe that geological phenomena occurred for the purpose of producing the landscape we see today. We often hear of the final retreat of the ice, or the ultimate form of the Rocky Mountains, or the eventual shape of the continents. This is a human conceit only. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, contemporary blips on the geological record, remind us that all is not over, and that earth processes continue.” (Canada: A Natural History, p. 17)

Hunting: Livingston was not anti-hunting. He mentioned in the Acknowledgments to One Cosmic Instant that he received a “special grant” from the Canadian National Sportsmen’s Show. In the same book he made the comment:

“Hunters are the first naturalists and ecologists. Their lives depend on their knowing and anticipating the cycles of the seasons and the corresponding requirements of the animals they themselves depend upon.” (p. 139)

In a 1990 interview with Farley Mowat, Livingston made it clear that he was against sport hunting and fashion fur. A strange observation in the 1966 Birds of the Northern Forest, referring to the killing of prairie waterfowl, was the comment about hunters only taking a portion of the annual natural “surplus”. (Plate 17) Perhaps this explains why he could receive funding from hunter organizations. In 1981, Livingston repudiated this surplus position in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation and put forward a view more in keeping with his overall eco-philosophy:

“In the biosphere there is no harvestable surplus of anything.” (The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 30)

Forestry is not farming: Livingston wrote against forest spraying and clear cutting. He warned about climate change, the doctrine of sustainable development, and against the idea that Canada had “surplus” water. He strongly argued in his writings that excess human population was a key problem. Livingston spoke out against comparing nature to farming and hence the misleading use of the term “harvest” by exploiters as in industrial forestry. The following quotation very movingly makes this point:

“How can you harvest a stand of trees you did not plant, or a shoal of fish you did not propagate, or a trophy moose you did not raise?…The unfortunate legacy of the harvest idea is that it perpetuates and reinforces the perceived status of nature as a resource, a commodity in the human service.” (Canada: A Natural History, p. 182)

Aboriginals, the arctic, social justice, and fur trapping: In his nature writings Livingston wrote about the aboriginal kill-off of wildlife, as aboriginals entered new lands. Indigenous people in various countries, which became New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas, did wipe out wildlife. He wrote that, about 12,000 or so years ago:

“A long list of the very largest mammals became extinct, according to the evidence, at about the same time as man was establishing himself in the ‘New World.’”
(One Cosmic Instant, p. 122)

Livingston was a supporter of indigenous animism and understood its role in spiritually enveloping humans in the natural world and thus restraining their exploitation of this world. This seems to have occurred after the initial kill-off by aboriginals. He noted that:

“The loss of animism and the substitution of theism was one of the most critical turning points in history”
(One Cosmic Instant, p. 142),

resulting in a further alienation from Nature. Livingston was not unconcerned about social injustice towards aboriginals:

“We could not have had Renaissance cathedrals without the slaughter of Aztec and Inca innocents; both were in celebration of the European church.” (Ibid, p. 182)

He was very positive about indigenous cultures, for example the Inuit, as shown in Arctic Oil, in which he also pointed to the extreme precariousness of the Arctic ecosystem and its birds, mammals and plants. By showing this in concrete terms, Livingston tried to outline how an oil spill could have disastrous consequences, revealing also a detailed knowledge of the practicalities of Arctic oil and gas politics. As he noted:

“No major conservation group or organization has yet identified itself as being flatly opposed to any and all industrial penetration of the far north.”
(Arctic Oil, p. 101)

“Peak oil” although not used as a term in this 1981 book, was close to this author’s consciousness:

“Today, the slowly but inexorably diminishing, finite world supply of oil is a threat that is closing in on the industrial monoculture.” (Ibid, p. 112)

For John Livingston, Inuit culture was environmentally appropriate, and not, as in industrial cultures, based on production and consumption. His general position towards aboriginals, in Canada and elsewhere, reflects that adopted by Left Biocentrism. Thus he showed both support for traditional aboriginal cultures in opposition to industrial monoculture, but also a willingness to point out historically the negative role of such traditional cultures, as they entered virgin wildlife habitats for the first time. In Arctic Oil he pointed out that indigenous groups, in opposing industrial culture, are forced to adopt European notions of “property rights.” This has nothing in common with Inuit traditions. This point was also made in his essay The Dilemma of the Deep Ecologist.

Livingston was very much against the fur trade and any attempts to link this to aboriginal culture. His ideas were brought out in the interview conducted by Farley Mowat:

“There’s no ecological, anthropological or economic basis for saying that the fur trade is part of the traditional aboriginal culture. None. It was the fur trade and the trade in animals of all kinds that destroyed the aboriginal cultures of North America. And to hear people today, including natives, claim the anti-trappers are going to bring down the native culture is bizarre.

“I think the great change to the aboriginal cultures came when the native no longer saw the animal as part of himself, part of his environment, but as a source of cash. The animal was transformed into a cash symbol. The moment that happened, the aboriginal culture was gone.” (Rescue The Earth, p. 272)

Livingston opposed multiculturalism, which he termed “international industrial monoculturalism,” as not being able to accommodate indigenous cultures which are outside of industrial society. (Arctic Oil, pp. 93-94) This is an interesting position and a direct challenge to the official view in Canada, that it is and should strive to be a multicultural society.

Resourcism: Livingston introduced the striking concept of “resource” in Arctic Oil. This term (and its corollary “resourcism”) is forever associated in my mind with his thinking. It was further discussed in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation and Rogue Primate:

“A ‘resource’ is anything that can be put to human use …It is the concept of ‘resource’ that allows us to perceive nature as our subsidiary.” (Arctic Oil, p. 119)

“Once a thing is perceived as having some utility — any utility — and is thus perceived as a ‘resource,’ its depletion is only a matter of time.” (The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 43)

So “resource” becomes associated with human-centredness. After reading Livingston, I could never consciously use this term in my own writing to refer to trees, fish or other animals. I came to see that the language we use, embodies a taken-for-granted world view of human dominance.

Elevation of the naturalist: Livingston privileged the naturalist as the person who best makes the case for the defence of the natural world, based on individual experience, where “nature is not an object, but a subject.” (Endangered Spaces, p. 247) His assumption, that those who defend wildlife are basically naturalists, was a position also expressed by York University colleague Neil Evernden in a companion essay in The Paradox of Environmentalism. However, this defence of wildlife cannot be conducted within the rules governing accepted human-dominated debates.

Livingston’s ecological activism as a life-long naturalist can be contrasted with the general attitude towards active environmentalism among naturalist club members. Too often they seem to remain content with merely observing and recording wildlife and plant life, but don’t oppose environmental destruction. For many, naturalizing does not seem to change human consciousness away from anthropocentrism and towards ecocentrism but is a vehicle for “getting away” from society. The general hesitancy among naturalists about speaking out on environmental issues (which is not Livingston’s position) seems at odds with a basic premise of deep ecology, that embracing and involvement in understanding the natural world through naturalizing work — Nature bonding — is a necessary path to a deeper ecological consciousness for Earth defenders, which can overcome human-centredness.

Industrialization, not capitalism, is the problem

“Both ‘right’ and ‘left’ subscribe to and are subsumed by the greater ideology of the industrial-growth ethos.” (Rogue Primate, p. 59)

This was a theme introduced in the 1973 book One Cosmic Instant and pursued in Livingston’s later books. For many years, and prior to studying the material for this paper, I had written in various articles about the origins of the left biocentric tendency, how Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology, had shown industrialism to be the main problem in destroying nature. (ibid. p. 172) McLaughlin argued that capitalism and socialism were both variants of such industrial social practices. This position was basically incorporated into the left biocentric theoretical tendency, with attribution to McLaughlin. Clearly Livingston was advocating such a position some 20 years earlier:

“From the conservationist’s point of view, there is no shred of difference between capitalist and socialist societies so long as both stand for inordinate industrial growth and productivity. Industrialization at an increasing rate is the goal of all the super-powers and their satellites today, and industrialization (including growth in both production and consumption) is the grail of all forms of government in the ‘developed’ world.”
(One Cosmic Instant, p. 206)

I agree with his position, made in several of his writings. Yet the appropriate social arrangements for the future ecocentric society, where humans are no longer lords and masters over the natural world, will, I believe, draw more from a socialist, collectivist, cooperative base rooted in social justice for humankind, rather than from capitalism. Stan Rowe, who shared Livingston’s views of our relationship to the Earth, but perhaps unlike Livingston considered himself a person of the Left, put it this way:

“Socialism has the virtue of extending the circle of care beyond the selfish individual, at least turning our vision outward in the right direction.” (Home Place, p.193)

Future ecological social formations we can organize for, could be diversely unique, and not built on the human arrogance towards nature common to both existing capitalist and, unfortunately, past socialist/communist societies.

From Livingston’s perspective then, environmental carnage today is seated in the Western industrial person shaped by this very social formation. This carnage can only be overcome if basic cultural beliefs of dominance over nature are changed. Most cultural systems make distinctions between humans and other animals as absolute as possible. We have to cease from interpreting nature only through ourselves, and thereby restricting ‘meaning’ to humans.

Ecological nationalization: A very interesting comment by Livingston, which deeper environmentalists in Canada need to consider, was made about the necessity to differentiate between ideological and environmental approaches to nationalization. One thinks here of the enormously polluting Alberta tar sands, and the appropriate strategy for ending their ‘development.’ Livingston wrote:

“When nationalization of primary resources comes, as it inevitably must, it will be on grounds which are ecologically oriented. The grounds will not be ideological.” (One Cosmic Instant, p. 207)

Environmentalists, he argued, need to understand that environmental forces are eating away at what can be considered “traditional rights,” like the right to reproduce. The end of human dominance over nature requires a major value shift, a change in the dominant culture. If people come to believe that change is necessary, then value shifts could occur quite rapidly. This is why theoretical work, that is, changing cultural mind sets, is necessary and vitally important.

Some dissenting considerations

“The establishment of a green society presupposes the implementation of the necessary changes suggested in the deep ecology formulation.” (The Selected Works of Arne Naess, Volume Ten, p. 574)

John Livingston was far less political than Arne Naess. I found out through an obituary when Naess died in January of 2009, that he had been a candidate on the Norwegian Green Party’s lists. Although Green parties worldwide fall in the shallow eco-capitalist ecology camp, as noted early on by Rudolf Bahro when he exited the German Green party in 1985 — and as we see today in the Canadian federal Green Party — the concern for a political vehicle to express Earth-centred ideas and the various problems which this entails, does not seem to have been a priority of Livingston’s thinking.

Clearly Naess differed from Livingston on this. Naess argued for ecological justice plus social justice; also that the green movement must be involved in peace problems and must combine reformist and revolutionary work. Green politics, said Naess, meant the elimination of class politics globally, nationally, and locally. However it must present itself so that it cannot be placed on the red/blue or left/right continuum, and make this clear in its public face. Naess had a movement built around his ideas. This was not the situation for Livingston’s work. As mentioned earlier, Livingston seemed to have moved from outright rejection of the idea of an independent green political formation in 1981, to a tepid approval of the Greens in his last major work, the 1994 Rogue Primate.

The writings of Livingston show that for him culture was key in trying to understand the relationship between man and nature, not industry or government. He was not engaged or interested in Green politics. He seems to have missed out on the educational or propaganda function of Green politics, if conducted from a principled, non-shallow position. In his 1973 book One Cosmic Instant, Livingston made a defining statement about his politics, and a recurrent theme in his writings:

“Inordinate productivity is what present environmental issues are concerned with — not capitalism or socialism. Environmental issues must not be confused with ideological issues.” (One Cosmic Instant, p. 206)

Thus ecological politics must focus on how humankind will relate to the natural world and not whether an economy and society is capitalist or socialist. Livingston saw the industrial social formation with its perpetual growth economy as the enemy of life on Earth. Both capitalism and socialism/communism have historically been faces of this formation. But Livingston did not articulate that, while a permanent growth economy and expanding consumerism are intrinsic to capitalism, it does not follow that this is how a socialist or communist economy has to define itself, notwithstanding what has occurred in the past. Rudolf Bahro, an ecocentric Left Green thinker in Germany, advanced the view in the 1980s that:

“We must lower the basic load which our civilisation is imposing on the earth, by a factor of ten to one.” (Avoiding Social & Ecological Disaster, p. 324)

“…communitarian societies, planning their everyday working and living around an undogmatic spiritual vision and practice…and allow room for animals, plants, earth, water, air and fire to resume once more their own evolutionary direction.” (ibid. p. 269)

The socialist/communist promise of social justice through economic redistribution remains valid and necessary for true social justice. One could envision an ecologically-oriented socialist or communist economy that respects ecological limits and frugal lifestyles; respects other life forms, which would include human population reductions; is not based on permanent economic growth and consumerism; is decentralized or small scale; upholds democracy and individual human rights — providing such rights are not Earth-unfriendly.

A second related point would be that in order to mobilize humans to conceive of themselves culturally as Earthlings, respecting and upholding the intrinsic interests of non-human life forms and the Earth itself, and to succeed politically, social justice for humankind must be part of this mobilization. The socialist or communist political side has more to contribute on this than the capitalist side. Livingston seems to have had capitalism and socialism equally in his ecological gun sights and offered no path forward out of the capitalist economy. It is necessary to say that the Left has generally been in opposition to the kind of Earth-centred politics for which John Livingston and others so resolutely stood. The Left has opposed calls for human population reductions and making human politics subordinate to preserving the health of the Earth. Livingston pointed out that supporters of social ecology accuse those who defend Nature and raise population issues of being ecofascists. (Rogue Primate, pp. 189-190). The political task for environmental and Green activists is to combine biocentrism/ecocentrism with the social justice tradition of the Left, which is what left biocentrism is trying to do.

Livingston’s view of the vanguard role of the naturalist in Nature preservation and wildlife defence is a puzzle. While it applied to his own situation as a naturalist and perhaps to a few of his friends, generally naturalists are not prominent in the environmental and Green movements. Those of us who consider ourselves biocentric or ecocentric and supporters of deep ecology do place Nature preservation and wildlife concerns at the center of our political work. But “naturalists” who are members of natural history clubs are not normally the Earth-warriors Livingston’s writings imply.

Livingston did not adequately conceptualize for others the bonding to the natural world and the defence of wildlife so central to his ecological world view. In contrast, Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been an important movement-rallying slogan:

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (A Sand County Almanac, p. 239)

There is no such equivalent in Livingston’s work. Instead there is almost a glorification of the individual “mystery” in relating to wild nature, which is not capable of explication. Graeme Gibson seems to support this position in his posthumous Appreciation of Livingston’s work, when he writes:

“That some form of mysticism, or intuitive experience — call it what you will — is close to the centre of the ethos Livingston shares with most naturalists and preservationists is indisputable.” (The John A. Livingston Reader, p. xix)

Livingston showed very successfully that the human-centred Western industrial cosmology has no place for other species. For him, the fundamental problem was ontological — that is, the nature of existence, the need for a different ground-of-being to industrial society. Yet we do need a shared language and common slogans to mobilize the forces of opposition to industrial capitalism — this was not, unfortunately, provided by Livingston. Like Livingston, Arne Naess also believed that the main problem was ontological. But he, with George Sessions, did develop the eight-point Deep Ecology Platform to rally the ecocentric troops and provide them a capsule of this world view. Ecological thinkers can also be organizers. As Ed Abbey so famously said, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

Livingston and Deep Ecology

“Clearly the deep ecologist who does not ‘go public’ is irrelevant. I say this because the destruction of nature is not going to ‘go on hold’ while the body of deep ecological insight permeates the public consciousness and the public conscience. Something has to be done now. If the paradigm is the problem, and most of us believe it to be, then we might as well have at it.” (The Paradox of Environmentalism, p. 71)

“The philosophic basis for environmental management and control is the same basis as that for environmental destruction.” (ibid. p. 71)

“We believe that the preservation of birds — all birds — is a legitimate aim that does not need justification on economic or any other grounds. Birds should be preserved because they are there — because they happened. That, to us, is reason enough.” (Birds of the Northern Forest, p. 11)

“The utter objectivity of nature, which is to say that no organism is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but merely is…” (Canada: The Wonders of Nature, p. 137)

Most lists of deep ecology thinkers on the internet cite John Livingston. So it is not original for this essay to claim him as a member of this persuasion. My own claim for Livingston in this regard is based on the thrust of his Earth-centred thinking, as shown in his writings, and that Livingston explicitly claims sympathy with deep ecology. He said that as a result of his earlier book publishing, he came in contact with others thinking along similar lines and then realized he was not alone. The 1988 letter from Livingston to the environmental group North Shore Environmental Web in Nova Scotia (quoted below), is one example of him making his deep ecology interests apparent and reaching out to others:

“I have read your March 1988 paper with the greatest of interest and admiration. I read it also with gratitude for your clarity of expression and argument — qualities not always easy to come by in the “deep ecology” literature… It is my personal view that capitalist and socialist persuasions are equally unecological so long as they share the ethos of industrial growth. Human social organization is irrelevant to the destruction of Nature. The industrial growth society remains just that, its colour notwithstanding. Congratulations on your splendid document. Sincerely, John Livingston, Professor.” (Letter dated March 22, 1988, to the North Shore Environmental Web, New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, responding to a discussion paper The Green Movement And Our Place In It.)

Of course Livingston brought his own independent thinking and contribution to deep ecology. He investigated, with a natural-history overlay, why humans have become the “rogue” self-domesticated, placeless, primates; why wildlife conservation can only be a “fallacy” in our existing society; why humankind has come to view the natural world not as intrinsically worthy in its own terms, but merely as a collection of “resources” for exploitation; and why human-derived environmental impact assessments are basically fraudulent and provide a fig-leaf cover for continuing environmental destruction. These are all ideas which are associated in my own mind with John Livingston. There is a legacy of original ideas, which Greens and environmentalists who seek to go deeper in their thinking can draw upon.

I believe John Livingston’s ideas have contributed in a significant way to my personal theoretical evolution and viewpoint. They have also contributed to the theoretical foundations of the left-biocentric tendency within deep ecology. He most fully explored his relationship to deep ecology in the essay The Dilemma of the Deep Ecologist and in his final major work Rogue Primate. One comes to the conclusion, after going through the various texts, that Livingston saw his own thinking as aligned with the philosophy of deep ecology and the thinking of Arne Naess. This alliance is seen by him as cosmological in nature. Some features of this are:

• Livingston accepted the basic idea of all entities in nature as having equal intrinsic value, not dependent upon humans for legitimation.
• Like Naess, he repudiated the concept of private property in Nature by humans.
• He accepted the distinction Naess made between “shallow” and “deep” ecology, and that the environmental movement is overwhelmingly human-centred, dedicated to advancing the interests of industry-centred humans, not the interest of Nature and other species.
• He placed the environmental movement as basically in the shallow camp, while wildlife advocates or naturalists were seen as in the deep camp and as a leading voice.
• Finally, both Livingston and Naess, most importantly, saw the crucial importance of childhood Nature-bonding in the development of the “ecological self” so that it could be liberated from the cultural prison of human chauvinism and the taken-for-granted goal of the humanization of the planet. Naess has described how, as a small child, he spent hours studying small marine intertidal life forms, it seems, partly because his mother lacked empathy with him. Livingston expressed his views on childhood Nature-bonding thus:

  “For the child who has bonded with and thus become non-human Nature, and who retains the capacity to retrieve that self-identity through adulthood, the wilful, deliberate, and conscious
  wounding of Nature is impossible, because that would be self-mutilation.” (Rogue Primate, p. 134)

For Livingston, the wildlife naturalist activist acquires a “biospheric self,” which leads to “the dissolution of the ego-centred self,” (ibid, p. 196) whereas human chauvinism “requires ‘selfhood’ to be kept in the human family.” (Ibid, p. 98) The concept of Self-Realization from Naess, which for him is not philosophically or logically derived and which is key for transforming a person’s consciousness, is quite similar to Livingston’s view of how the wildlife activist relates to the natural world.

Conclusion

John Livingston was an original thinker who made a significant contribution to the theoretical growth of the environmental and green movements. He must be included in the deep ecology camp. I started the research for this paper with some predisposition that John Livingston could be regarded as Canada’s Arne Naess. However, as we saw in the section Some Dissenting Considerations, (above) this is no longer my position. Naess was very involved in Green eco-politics and in trying to outline a path forward for others out of the ecological and social morass of industrial capitalist society. Clearly this was not Livingston’s interest. It is quite possible, given the depth of his pessimism, that he thought such a path was impossible.

An ecological prophet and essentially a mystic, politically Livingston was on the deeper conservative side, with someone like his friend Graeme Gibson comparing him to conservative philosopher George Grant, author of Lament For A Nation. His thinking was quite rooted in his work as a naturalist, as an inter-species voice, which drew upon to present a savage and profound critique of the anthropocentrism of the worldwide industrial growth culture. This was his major focus. Livingston believed that this culture is destroying the Earth. In his interview with Livingston in Rescue The Earth, Farley Mowat calls him “the prime philosopher of the environmental movement in this country.” I would not disagree with the exuberance of such a classification.

Bibliography of John Livingston’s Writings

Darwin and the Galapagos, by John Livingston and Lister Sinclair, CBC Publications, Toronto, Canada, 1966, no pagination, hard cover.

Birds of the Northern Forest, by J. F. Lansdowne with John Livingston, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1966, 247 pages, hard cover.

One Cosmic Instant: A Natural History of Human Arrogance, by John Livingston, McClelland
and Stewart Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1973, 243 pages, hard cover.

Canada: The Wonders of Nature, by John Livingston, Mono Lino Typesetting Co. Limited, Canada, 1979, 150 pages, hard cover.

Arctic Oil: The Destruction Of The North? by John Livingston, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto, Canada, 1981, 160 pages, hard cover, ISBN 0-88794-092-7.

The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, by John Livingston, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1981, 117 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-7710-5336-3.

The Dilemma of the Deep Ecologist, by John Livingston, in The Paradox of Environmentalism, Symposium Proceedings, York University, 1984, 72 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-919762-70-0.

Canada: A Natural History, by John Livingston with Tim Fitzharris, Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1988, 199 pages, hard cover, ISBN 0-670-82186-1.

Letter to the North Shore Environmental Web, by John Livingston, York University Faculty of Environmental Studies, March 22, 1988.

Nature for the Sake of Nature, by John Livingston, in Endangered Spaces: The Future For Canada’s Wilderness, edited by Monte Hummel, Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1989, 288 pages, hard cover, ISBN 1-55013-101-X.

The Prophetic View of John Livingston, in Rescue The Earth: Conversations With The Green Crusaders, by Farley Mowat, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1990, 282 pages, hard cover, ISBN 0-7710-6684-8.

Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication, by John Livingston, Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1994, 229 pages, soft cover, ISBN: 1-55013-508-2.

An Earth-centred (Ecocentric) Manifesto, Comment by John Livingston, Biodiversity 5 (1), January-March, 2004.

Appreciation by Graeme Gibson, in The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Canada, 2007, 388 pages, soft cover, ISBN 978-0-7710-5326-6.

Other books

Avoiding Social & Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation, by Rudolf Bahro, Gateway Books, Bath, England, 1994, 355 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-9446551-71-5.

The Environmentalists’ Dilemma, by Neil Evernden, in The Paradox of Environmentalism, edited by Neil Evernden, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Canada, 1984, 72 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-919762-70-0.

A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River, by Aldo Leopold, Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, New York, 1949, 295 pages, soft cover, ISBN 345-24489-3-150.

Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology, by Andrew McLaughlin, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993, 262 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-7914-1384-5.

Aboriginal Tradition or Commercial Trapping? Fur Industry Masquerades as Politically Progressive, by David Orton, Earth First! Journal, August 1, 1995, Volume XV, No. VII.

A Manifesto for Earth by Ted Mosquin and Stan Rowe, in Biodiversity, 5(1): 3-9, January/March 2004.

The Selected Works of Arne Naess, Volume X, by Arne Naess, Springer, The Netherlands, 2005, 688 pages, hard cover, ISBN-10 1-4020-3727-9.

Home Place: Essays on Ecology, by Stan Rowe, NeWest Publishers Limited, Edmonton, Alberta, 1990, 253 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-920897-78-9.

Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology, by Stan Rowe, NeWest Press, Edmonton, Alberta, 2006, 274 pages, soft cover, ISBN 13 978-1-897126-03-5.

Deep Ecology For The 21st Century: Readings On The Philosophy And Practice Of The New Environmentalism, edited by George Sessions, Shambhala, Boston & London, 1995, 488 pages, soft cover, ISBN 1- 57062-049-0.

Green Web
A Taste of Green Web Writings and Left Biocentrism
R.R. #3, Saltsprings,
Nova Scotia, Canada, BOK 1PO
E-mail: greenweb@ca.inter.net

Direct link to this article (PDF)

If I
Could feed you air,
Set you free
At mountain peak
Mouth blue with berries–
Wind —

If I
Could feed you fire,
Set you free
To warm a night
Of deep woods and stars,
Peace –

If I
Could feed you rain
Set you free
Open-armed
At the end of drought,
Naked —

If I
Could feed you bread,
Set you free
Before grain
Sprouting dark and eager
From Earth —

If I
Could feed you life
Set you free
Winging and wild
Rooted and strong
Gloriously burning
Fountaining
Flowering
Wet as birth
Deep as death

If I
Could set you free
I would.

—Penny Novak,
November 2009