At present it is difficult to be anything but pessimistic
about the future. Environmental calamities are now facts of life. The drive for
profit leading to the neglect of everything that stands in the way of this has
created ecological havoc in every part of the world. The history of
environmental degradation is a history of greed, poverty and ignorance. By
greed we do not mean the individual idiosyncratic greed that might yearn for
three yachts where two would do. Rather it refers to the institutionalised
greed of business that has to expand to survive, that is always looking for new
products, ways to create new needs, ways to cut costs by reducing environmental
safeguards or evading the enforcement of existing ones.
While ecological necessity seeks sustainability, the
commodified economy needs growth. This growth can be achieved by producing more
of the same things, or by making familiar commodities bigger, more complicated
or with more elaborate packaging. Growth can also be achieved by inventing new
ways of turning natural conditions into resources for exploitation, by finding
technical means for making more and more of our lives marketable, and by
investing great effort into creating new needs for consumption.
Ecology values the uniqueness of materials, places and
living things, but the economy sees them all as interchangeable commodities
measured on the single scale of economic values. Therefore there is no special
virtue in preserving a resource, only in making profit. It may be economically
rational to use up a resource totally and then move to the next investment.
While ecology values diversity, economic rationality favours going for the
single most profitable crop, and great quantities of a single commodity, to
benefit from economies of scale.
Poverty allows environmental degradation as a lesser evil
when there is the urgent need to have food or money for food. It shortens the
time horizon to the immediate urgencies. It forces people to use up their
capacity to produce – forests, water reserves, soil quality, rare species –
even when they know the new problems they are creating. It encourages
governments, and local authorities of poor communities in rich countries, to
tolerate violations of ecological standards and even to invite the dumping of
toxic materials on their land in order to gain income. Poverty is usually
accompanied by a lack of control by the poor over what will happen to them.
Greed creates and maintains poverty and promotes ignorance. Ignorance
justifies greed as natural and inevitable while rejecting all criticism of
greed, thus guaranteeing poverty.
Over the last few centuries average agricultural yields
increased as a result of mechanisation, the use of chemicalisation (including
fertilisers and pesticides), plant and animal breeding, and scientific
management. Although problems arose, it was widely believed that such problems
were the price of progress and would be solved by the same means that created
them.
The ‘Green
Revolution’
1. Modern high-tech agriculture has not eliminated hunger.
2. It undermines its own productive base through erosion,
soil compaction and salinisation, depletion of water resources and depletion of
genotypic diversity.
3. It changes land use patterns, encouraging deforestation,
draining of wetlands and planting crops according to market criteria even in
unsuitable climates. It promotes a loss of crop diversity by specialisation and
commercial seed production and reduces overall biodiversity through its
chemical inputs and extensive monocultures.
4. It increases vulnerability to nature, especially to
climate and microclimate change, pest outbreaks and atmospheric and water
pollutants. This is because of large scale monoculture, the selection of
varieties for maximum yield under optimal conditions and the loss of beneficial
fauna and flora.
5. It makes farming increasingly dependent on inputs from
off the farm. This means that cash flow becomes increasingly important as
fertilisers replace natural nitrogen fixers, irrigation replaces the broken
hydrological flows and storages of water, and also because pesticides replace
natural enemies of pests and hybrid seeds must be bought. Dependence on
external inputs increases the vulnerability to price instability and
politically motivated trade policies.
6. It debases food quality as regional specialisation
increases storage and transport time and crops and techniques are chosen for
quantitative yield. Specialisation makes even farmers dependent on buying food.
7. It increases the gap between rich and poor. The rich are
able to buy, or get credit to buy, the new inputs, establish the marketing
connections and average their returns across years. The poor, however, need to
be successful every year. Modern agriculture especially undermines the economic
independence of women. The new technologies are usually given to men, even in
places where women traditionally did most of the farming. The new technologies
make the domestic chores of women, such as gathering firewood and fetching
water, more time consuming. Women’s diverse activities in the home conflict
with the extreme seasonality of commercial monoculture.
8. It poisons people, first the farm workers who handle
pesticides, then their family members who handle the pesticide soaked clothing
and drink water where pesticides and fertilisers have run into ground water.
Finally it reaches those who eat the crops produced with pesticides and animals
raised with antibiotics and growth hormones.
9. It also poisons other species, and the environment as a
whole, with eutrophication of our waterways from fertiliser runoff,
accumulation of pesticides in the body tissues of fish and birds, and
nitrification of the air.
The final conclusion, therefore, is that the commercialised,
export oriented, high-tech agriculture is a non-sustainable successional stage
in the ecology of production, like the shrubs that squeeze out the grasses and
herbs of an abandoned field only to create the conditions for their own
replacement by trees.
‘...all creatures have been turned into
property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the
earth; the creatures, too, must become free.’ These are the words of Thomas
Münzer, the leader of the German Peasants’ Revolt in the early sixteenth
century quoted approvingly by Marx in ‘On the Jewish Question’ What attracted Marx was Münzer’s view that under
the dominion of private property and money, nature is treated in such a
contemptuous way that it is debased. For Marx, humanity is always ‘part of
nature’ In the third volume of Capital he speaks of humanity achieving freedom
within the realm of natural necessity, whereby the associated producers govern
the interchange with nature in a rational way under conditions ‘most worthy and
appropriate for their human nature’. Human society must therefore build upon
our natural inclinations in formulating a social order that will bring both
peace and prosperity to our species.
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