Written by Michael Parenti and Edited by Tajiel Urioh
In
1876, Marx's collaborator, Frederich Engels, offered a prophetic caveat:
"Let us not… flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest
over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us… At every step we
are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a
foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature--but that we, with
flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst…"
With
its never-ending emphasis on production and profit, and its indifference to
environment, transnational corporate capitalism appears determined to stand
outside nature. The driving goal of the giant investment firms is to convert
natural materials into commodities and commodities into profits, transforming
living nature into vast accumulations of dead capital.
This
capital accumulation process treats the planet's life-sustaining resources
(arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, rivers,
air quality) as dispensable ingredients of limitless supply, to be consumed or
toxified at will. Consequently, the support systems of the entire
ecosphere--the Earth's thin skin of fresh air, water, and top soil--are at
risk, threatened by global warming, massive erosion, and ozone depletion. An
ever-expanding capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous
collision course.
It
is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of
denial about this. Far worse than denial, they have shown utter antagonism
toward those who think the planet is more important than corporate profits. So
they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists", "EPA
Gestapo", "Earth Day alarmists", "tree huggers" and
purveyors of "green hysteria" and "liberal claptrap."
The
plutocracy’s position was summed up by that dangerous fool, erstwhile Senator
Steve Symms (R-Idaho), who once said that if he had to choose between
capitalism and ecology, he would choose capitalism. Symms seemed not to grasp
that, absent a viable ecology, there will be no capitalism or any other ism.
In
July 2005, President Bush finally muttered a grudging acknowledgment: “I
recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer and that an increase in
greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” But this
belated admission of a “problem” hardly makes up for Bush’s many attacks
against the environment.
In
recent years, Bushite reactionaries within the White House and Congress, fueled
by corporate lobbyists, have supported measures to:
allow
unregulated toxic fill into lakes and harbors,
eliminate
most of the wetland acreage that was to be set aside for a reserve,
completely
deregulate the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that deplete the ozone
layer,
eviscerate
clean water and clean air standards,
open
the unspoiled Arctic wildlife refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling,
defund
efforts to keep raw sewage out of rivers and away from beaches,
privatize
and open national parks to commercial development,
give
the remaining ancient forests over to unrestrained logging,
repeal
the Endangered Species Act
and
allow mountain-top removal in mining that has transformed thousands of miles of
streams and vast amounts of natural acreage into toxic wastelands.
Why
do rich and powerful interests take this seemingly suicidal anti-environmental
route? We can understand why they might want to destroy public housing, public
education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They and their children
will not thereby be deprived of a thing, having more than sufficient private
means to procure whatever services they need for themselves.
But
the environment is a different story. Do not wealthy reactionaries and their
corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the
same chemicalized food, and breathe the same toxified air?
In
fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different
class reality, often residing in places where the air is somewhat better than
in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically
raised and specially prepared. The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually
are not situated in or near their swanky neighborhoods. The pesticide sprays
are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clearcutting does not desolate
their ranches, estates, and vacation spots.
The
geographer and author Grey Brechin tells me of a talk he gave a few years ago
to a well heeled group at St. Francis Yacht Club. His appearance was at the
invitation of a scion of two great California-South African mining fortunes.
After Brechin discussed the ecological damage done in California by developers
and industrialists, one of the socialites blurted out: "If things are so
bad, why haven't we noticed?"
They
haven’t noticed because they are so comfortably insulated from the ecological
devastation caused by their very own enterprises. Brechin was taken aback. He
realized that like most other people, the questioner did not have “the memory
to make a comparison with what once was here. All I could do was to point out
the window at the empty sky and ask where the birds went, and to say that if we
could see under the water, we would note a similar absence of what was once a
teeming aquatic ecosystem.”
Even
when the corporate rich or their children succumb to a dread disease like
cancer, they do not link the tragedy to environmental factors---though
scientists now believe that present-day cancer epidemics stem largely from
human-made causes. The plutocrats deny there is a serious problem because they
themselves have created that problem and owe so much of their wealth to it.
But
how can they deny the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by ozone
depletion, global warming, disappearing top soil, and dying oceans? Do the
corporate plutocrats want to see life on Earth - including their own lives -
destroyed?
In
the long run they indeed will be sealing their own doom, along with everyone
else’s. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and
now. What is at stake for them is something more immediate than global ecology.
It is global capital accumulation. The fate of the biosphere seems a far-off
abstraction compared to the fate of one’s immediate investments.
Furthermore,
pollution pays, while ecology costs. Every dollar a company spends on
environmental protections is one less dollar in earnings. It is more profitable
to treat the environment like a septic tank, to externalize corporate
diseconomies by dumping raw industrial effluent into the atmosphere, rivers,
and bays, turning waterways into open sewers.
Moving
away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and tidal energy could help
avert ecological disaster, but six of the world's ten top industrial
corporations are involved primarily in the production of oil, gasoline, and
motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution means billions in profits. Ecologically
sustainable forms of production directly threaten those profits.
Immense
and imminent gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a
diffuse loss shared by the general public. The social cost of turning a forest
into a wasteland weighs little against the personal profit that comes from
harvesting the timber.
This
conflict between immediate personal gain on the one hand and seemingly remote
public benefit on the other operates even at the individual consumer level.
Thus, it is in one's long term interest not to operate an automobile that
contributes more to environmental devastation than any other single consumer
item (even if it’s a hybrid). But again, we don’t live in the long run, we live
in the here and now, and we have an immediate everyday need for transportation,
so most of us have no choice except to own and use automobiles.
Mind
you, we did not choose this “car culture.” Ecologically efficient and less
costly mass transit systems and rail systems were deliberately bought out,
privatized and torn up, beginning in the 1930s in campaigns waged across the
country by the automotive, oil, and tire industries. These industries put
"America on wheels," in order to maximize profits for themselves, and
to hell with the environment.
Sober
business heads refuse to get caught up in doomsayer "hysteria" about
ecology. Besides, there can always be found a few stray experts who will
obligingly argue that the jury is still out, that there is no conclusive proof
to support the alarmists. Conclusive proof in this case would come only when
the eco-apocalypse is upon us.
Ecology
is profoundly subversive of capitalism. It needs planned, environmentally
sustainable production rather than the rapacious unregulated free-market kind.
It requires economical consumption rather than an artificially stimulated,
ever-expanding, wasteful consumerism. It calls for natural, relatively clean
and low cost energy systems rather than high cost, high profit, polluting ones.
Ecology's implications for capitalism are too challenging for the capitalist to
contemplate.
The
plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they
live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of
humanity.
The
struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact
that seems to have escaped many environmentalists. The present ecological
crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many. This time the
plutocratic drive to “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate” may take all of us
down, once and forever.
