The perception that we are in an ecological crisis can no longer be dismissed as apocalyptic. In ways that are all too concrete, the accelerating degradation of our environment threatens life on earth. Global warming has already changed climatic patterns, with consequences ranging from unusual and unpredictable weather to an increase in the quantity and severity of storms, droughts, floods, and fires—even as wholesale deforestation, single crop economies, and the expansion of development into flood and fire-prone areas exacerbates these effects. Icecaps melt, the ozone layer thins. Air is polluted with fossil fuel emissions and toxic chemicals; water with pesticides, agricultural and industrial waste, and metals that kill fish or make them inedible; soil with ubiquitous plastics and other synthetic, non-biodegradable materials. The mass-production and distribution practices of corporate agriculture and marketing destroy much of the nutritional value of food while contaminating it with chemicals, hormones, and now genetically modified organisms introduced without regard to the inevitable unforeseen consequences. Animals are raised in unhealthy conditions and given antibiotics to counteract them, resulting in a precipitous rise of resistant microorganisms that threatens our ability to fight infectious disease. Facing a rapidly diminishing supply of fossil fuels we invest not in clean, renewable sources of energy but in nuclear reactors that are vulnerable to accident and terrorism and produce ever-growing piles of radioactive waste with a half-life of thousands of years. Meanwhile cancer rates rise and affect younger and younger people, while asthma is an urban epidemic.
Though the ecological crisis does not affect everyone equally or in the same way, in the end it threatens the human habitat on which we all depend, regardless of economic status, nationality, race, sex, or age. From the presidents of transnational corporations, breathing the carcinogenic air of world capitals, to the workers of Bhopal, India who lost their lives in the Union Carbide explosion, no one is immune to environmental decline. Nor is resistance to an ecological perspective confined to any one segment of society. The basic assumption of the scientific and industrial revolutions, that the key to human well-being is the domination of nature, is deeply resonant for human beings; not only do we crave protection from the dangers of the natural world and the sense of power that comes from manipulating it, we seek to deny our vulnerability and mortality by seeing ourselves as somehow outside and superior to nature. Traditional left movements have mostly ignored ecological concerns. Communist countries devastated the environment even more brutally than the capitalist West.
It would seem, then, that ecology is a universal human issue, transcending the considerations of class and social interest that shape most politics. Indeed, this perception has led to a brand of environmentalism that is largely indifferent to economic issues. But if it’s true in some long-range abstract sense, at this historical and political moment it’s an illusion. The most striking fact about our contemporary ecological crisis is how thoroughly it is bound up with the logic of global capitalism. While the United States and more “enlightened” nations wrangle over a palliative like the Kyoto Treaty, the more salient reality is that no nation will take the drastic actions needed to reverse ecological catastrophe; for to do so would be to attack the underpinnings of the economic and social order.
A basic assumption of capitalism is the doctrine of the market as the only measure of value: a sane ecological policy would mean recognizing an array of social costs and benefits that do not figure in, and often contradict, the market’s calculus of cost, benefit, and efficiency. Equally basic is the embrace of unfettered “technological progress” as the means of creating wealth and furthering human freedom: an ecological perspective requires that all technology be compatible with the maintenance of a complex and interdependent ecosystem. Finally, the very definition of capitalism is unlimited accumulation. The legitimacy of the system depends on its claim that despite the vast inequalities it creates, economic growth, fueled by technological innovation, will provide a high standard of living for all. Yet from an ecological perspective it is obvious that the earth cannot sustain uncontrolled, unlimited growth. It follows that a serious response to the ecological crisis necessarily raises the issue capital seeks to avoid at all costs: the equitable distribution and use of resources. Regulation of the market, regulation of technology, above all regulation of economic growth and development are anathema to capital, essential to ecological recovery.
Ecology, in short, is not a single issue. Our crisis cannot be effectively addressed with incremental reforms; they are necessary but not sufficient. Nor is the solution to be found in the puritanical survivalism espoused by some environmental activists (though some of our present pleasures—like our love affair with the car—have proved too costly, ecologically speaking, to sustain, we had better invent new ones, for survival without pleasure is hardly worth the struggle). Rather, a program of ecological renewal must be linked with a more general vision of transformation in our way of life, one in which the logic of capital is replaced by the logic of democratic, cooperative decision-making. To have a realistic hope of averting disaster, we have no choice but to be utopian.
