Environmental Problems and Society...Environmental Problems and Society Without self-understanding we cannot hope for enduring solutions to environmental problems, which are fundamentally

EnvironmentalProblems and Society

Without self-understanding we cannot hope for enduring solutions toenvironmental problems, which are fundamentally human problems.

—Yi-Fu Tuan, 1974

CHAPTER 1

01-Bell (Environment)-45611:01-Bell (Environment) 5/17/2008 5:02 PM Page 1

“Pass the hominy please.”It was a lovely brunch, with fruit salad, homemade coffee cake, a great pan of

scrambled eggs, bread, butter, jam, coffee, tea—and hominy grits. Our friends Dan and Sarahhad invited my wife and me and our son overthat morning to meet some friends of theirs. Thegrown-ups sat around the dining room table, andthe kids (four in all) careened from their owntable in the kitchen to the pile of toys in the livingroom, and often into each other. Each family hadcontributed something to the feast before us. Itwas all good food, but for some reason thehominy grits (which I had never had before) wasthe most popular.

There was a pleasant mix of personalities, andthe adults soon got into one of those excited chatsthat leads in an irreproducible way from one topicto another, as unfamiliar people seek to get to knoweach other a bit better. Eventually, the inevitablequestion came my way: “So what do you do?”

“I’m an environmental sociologist.”“Environmental sociology. That’s interesting.

I’ve never heard of it. What does sociology haveto do with the environment?”

I used to think, during the first two editions,that the point of this book was to answer thatquestion—a question I often used to get, as inthis breakfast conversation from 10 years ago.Today I sense a change in general attitudes. NowI don’t get so many blank looks when I say I’m anenvironmental sociologist. Most people I meethave still never heard of the field, but more andmore of them immediately get the basic ideabehind it: that society and environment areinterrelated.

And more and more, the people I meetrecognize that this interrelation has to confrontsome significant problems, perhaps the mostfundamental problems facing the future of life,human and otherwise. They readily understandthat environmental problems are not onlyproblems of technology and industry, of ecologyand biology, of pollution control and pollutionprevention. Environmental problems are alsosocial problems. Environmental problems are

problems for society—problems that threaten ourexisting patterns of social organization and socialthought. Environmental problems are as wellproblems of society—problems that challenge usto change those patterns of organization andthought. Increasingly, we appreciate that it ispeople who create environmental problems and itis people who must resolve them.

That recognition is good news. But we’ve sure got a lot to do, and in this work we’ll need the insights of all the disciplines—the biophysicalsciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.There is an environmental dimension to allknowledge. The way I now understand the pointof this book is to bring the sociologicalimagination to this necessarily pan-disciplinaryconversation.

A good place to begin, I think, is to offer adefinition of environmental sociology. Here goes:Environmental sociology is the study of communityin the largest possible sense. People, other animals,land, water, air—all of these are closely inter -connected. Together they form a kind of solidarity,what we have come to call ecology. As in anycommunity, there are also conflicts in the midst ofthe interconnections. Environmental sociologystudies this largest of communities with an eye to understanding the origins of, and proposingsolutions to, these all-too-real social and bio -physical conflicts.

One of sociology’s most basic contributions tostudying the conflicts behind environmentalproblems is to point out the pivotal role of socialinequality. Not only are the effects of environ mentalproblems distributed unequally across the humancommunity, social inequality is deeply involved incausing those problems. Social inequality is both aproduct and a producer of global warming,pollution, overconsumption, resource depletion,habitat loss, risky technology, and rapid populationgrowth. As well, social inequality influences how weenvision what our environmental problems are.And most fundamentally, it can influence how weenvision nature itself, for inequality shapes oursocial experiences, and our social experiences shapeall our knowledge.

2——AN INVITATION TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY


Which returns us to the question of commu-nity. Social inequality cannot be understoodapart from the communities in which it takesplace. We need, then, to make the study of com-munity the central task of environmental sociol-ogy. Ecology is often described as the studyof natural communities. Sociology is oftendescribed as the study of human communities.Environmental sociology is the study of bothtogether, the single commons of the Earth wehumans share, sometimes grudgingly, with oth-ers—other people, other forms of life, andthe rocks and water and soil and air that supportall life. Environmental sociology is the study ofthis, the biggest community of all.

Joining the Dialogue

The biggest community of all: Then clearly, thetopic of environmental sociology is vast. Not evena book the length of this one can cover all of it, atleast not in any detail. In the pages to come, I willtake up the main sociological conversations aboutthe state of relations within this vast community.I won’t take up all the side conversations, butI will invite the reader into a good many of them,in order to trace how the larger debates play outin particular neighborhoods of discussion andinvestigation. Continually, though, the book willreturn to the front pages of debate, the better tobring the local and the global, the particular andthe general, into better communication.

For the most part, this first chapter considersthe front pages—of environmental sociology, ofthe environmental predicament, and, in this sec-tion, quite literally of the book itself. (These arethe front pages of the book, after all.) After thisintroduction, the book falls into three parts:

The Material: How consumption, the econ-omy, technology, development, population,and the health of our bodies shape our envi-ronmental conditions

The Ideal: How culture, ideology, moral val-ues, risk, and social experience influence the

way we think about and act toward theenvironment

The Practical: How we can bring about a moreecological society, taking both the materialand the ideal into account

Of course, it is not possible to fully separatethese three topics. The deep union of the mater-ial, the ideal, and the practical is one of the mostimportant truths that environmental sociologyhas to offer. The parts of the book represent onlya sequence of emphases, not rigid conceptualboundaries. A number of themes running through-out the book help unite the parts:

• The dialogic, or interactive and unfinished,character of causality in environmentalsociology

• The interplay of material and ideal factorswith each other, constituting the practicalconditions of lived experience

• The central role of social inequality inenvironmental conflict

• The connections between the local and theglobal

• The power of the metaphor of communityfor understanding these social and ecolog-ical dynamics

• The important influence of political insti-tutions and commitments in our environ-mental practices

The Ecology of Dialogue

By approaching environmental sociology inthis way, I hope to bridge a long-standing disputeamong scholars about the relationship betweenenvironment and society. Realists argue thatenvironmental problems cannot be understoodapart from the threats posed by the way we haveorganized our societies, including the organiza-tion of ecologic relations. They believe that wecan ill afford to ignore the material truth of orga-nizational problems and their ecologic conse-quences. Constructionists do not necessarily

Environmental Problems and Society——3


disagree, but they emphasize the influence of sociallife in how we conceptualize those problems, or thelack of those problems. Constructionists focuson the ideological origins of environmentalproblems—including their very definition asproblems (or as nonproblems). A realist mightsay, for example, that global warming is a dan-gerous consequence of how we currently orga-nize the economic side of social life. Aconstructionist might say that in order to recog-nize the danger—or even the existence—ofglobal warming, we must wear the appropriateconceptual and ideological eyeglasses. Althoughthe debate sometimes gets quite abstract, it hasimportant consequences. Realists argue that thepractical thing to do is to solve the social organi-zational issues behind environmental problems,like the way land use laws and current tech-nologies encourage the overuse of cars.Constructionists argue that the first step must beto understand environmental “problems,” lestour solutions lead to still other conflicts.1

Fundamentally, the realist-constructionistdebate is over materialist versus idealist explana-tions of social life. I mean “materialist” here inthe philosophical sense of emphasizing thematerial conditions of life, not in the sense ofmaterial acquisitiveness. And I similarly mean“idealist” in the philosophical sense of emphasiz-ing the role of ideas, not in the sense of what isthe best or highest. The tension between materi-alist and idealist explanations is itself a centuries-old philosophical dispute, one that perhaps allcultural traditions have grappled with in one wayor another. An ancient fable from India expressesthe tension well. A group of blind peopleencounters an elephant for the first time. Onegrabs the elephant’s tail and says, “An elephant islike a snake!” Another grabs a leg and says, “Anelephant is like a tree!” A third grabs an ear andsays, “An elephant is like a big leaf!” To the mate-rialist, the fable shows how misinformed all threeblind people are, for a sighted person can plainlysee how the “snake,” “tree,” and “big leaf” connecttogether into what an elephant really is. To the ide-alist, the fable says that we all have our ideological

blindnesses and there is no fully sighted personwho can see the whole elephant—that we are allblind people wildly grasping at the elusive truthof the world.

The approach I take to this ancient debate isthat the material and the ideal dimensions of theenvironment depend upon and interact witheach other and together constitute the practicalconditions of our lives. What we believe dependson what we see and feel, and what we see and feeldepends on what we believe. It is not a matter ofeither/or; rather, it is a matter of both-together.Each side helps constitute and reconstitute theother, in a process that will never, we must hope,finish. I term this mutual and unfinalizable inter-dependence ecological dialogue.2 Throughout thebook, I consider the interplay, the constant con-versation, between the material and ideal dimen-sions of this never-ending dialogue of life andhow our environmental practices emerge from it.

Ecological dialogue is also a way to conceptu-alize power—to conceptualize the environmentalrelations that shape our scope for action: ourability to do, to think, to be. These relations ofpower include both the organizational factors ofmateriality and the knowledge factors of ourideas—which, in turn, shape each other. So bydialogue, I don’t mean that everything is smoothand trouble-free in this interrelationship, or eventhat it always should be. Dialogue is not a victoryover power; it only happens because of power.There is often conflict involved, which is a mainway that the material and the ideal continuallyreshape each other and express themselves in ourpractices of living. And conflict is not necessarilya bad thing. Sometimes it is exactly what isneeded to get us to pay attention. But neither ispower all kicking and yelling. There is muchcooperative and complementary action in thedialogue of ecology, much conviviality that werelish and that constantly changes us. We experi-ence power in cooperative and complementaryaction, too. Nor is power necessarily a bad thing.(Imagine for a moment having no power at all inyour life and what an awful circumstance thatwould be.) It’s a matter of what power does and



how and why, and the legitimacy of its balancesand imbalances. These are moral questions thatwe need to continually ask and re-ask.

Maybe a diagram will help. Have a look atFigure 1.1, a kind of environmental sociologicalupdating of the Taijitu, the ancient Chinese yin-yang icon. The Taijitu suggests that the world isconstituted through the interaction of yin andyang, which together create a unity of earth andheaven—or in more Western terms, of the mate-rial and the ideal. Often the Taijitu is interpretedto mean that yin and yang are opposites, but theblack dot in the white side and the white dot inthe black side are supposed to indicate that eachis the seed of the other. Also, the Taijitu indicatesthe interactiveness of yin and yang throughcurved inter-nesting of the two sides, instead of astraight line dividing yin and yang into opposi-tional hemispheres. It’s one of history’s greatimages.

But from the perspective of ecological dia-logue, the Taijitu represents the world as overlyunified, static, and finished. Figure 1.1 suggeststhe changing, unfinished, and sometimesconflictual character of the world through show-ing the material and the ideal as two partial

moon-faces in dialogue with each other.Together, the moons of the “material” and the“ideal,” which tuck together in a basket weave attheir edges, make a circle and a kind of ecologicalholism. That holism is always unfinished,though, and thus never fully whole, which thediagram represents through the open spacebetween the partial moons. But the open space isnot empty. Rather, it is an active space of inter-change and interaction through the “practical”—the ideas and materialisms we put into jointpractice. Some of that practice may be conflict-ual, and some may be cooperative and comple-mentary, and through it the ideal and materialshape each other and change each other, shapingand changing the practical at the same time. Tofurther represent this mutual constitution of thematerial and the ideal, through the practical,Figure 1.1 takes the seed imagery of the Taijitu andconverts it to eyes, one of the central organs ofcommunication, with a black eye on the white sideand a white eye on the black side. Plus, the imageryof the moon-faces is meant to suggest the motionof light and shadow across the ever-unfinishedholism, like phases of a moon, as white becomesblack and black becomes white over time.


Figure 1.1 Ecological dialogue.

Source: Matthew Robinson and the author.


I’m not completely satisfied with the diagramand have had it redrafted for this edition. Itmight well be redrafted for the next. At the veryleast, I hope Figure 1.1 in its current form isthought-provoking. There are also many reso-nances between Figure 1.1 and the cover illustra-tion of the book, Marc Chagall’s great paintingI and the Village. I’ll leave it to each reader to puz-zle those connections out in his or her own way.

But the most important connection to puzzleout is simply that we are connected, although byno means completely so. Like power and conflict,this incompleteness of connection can also beOK, for it provides the crucial open space forchange. It also provides for difference, and that isOK, too. If everything were connected up intoone great sameness, there would be no connec-tions to make—no need, and no possibility, fordialogue and its endless creativity. I mean this,too, by the phrase “ecological dialogue”: that weshould see ourselves as part of a creative commu-nity of the Earth and all its inhabitants, everworking out our ever-changing samenesses anddifferences, connections and disconnections, inthe practical art of living.3 The biggest commu-nity of all is thus the biggest dialogue of all.

The Dialogue of Scholarship

Let me also make it clear that this book takesan activist position with regard to environmentalproblems and the way we think about them. Weoften look to scholars to provide an unbiasedperspective on issues that concern us, and wesometimes regard an active commitment to apolitical position as cause for suspicion aboutjust how scientific that perspective is. Yet, asmany have argued, it is not possible to escapepolitical implications.4 Everyone has concerns forand interests in the condition of our world andour society. Such concerns and interests are whatguide us all every day, and scholars are no differ-ent from anyone else in this regard. Nor shouldthey be any different. Such concerns and interestsare not necessarily a problem for scholarship.

On the contrary, they are the whole reason forscholarship.

This does not mean that anything goes—thatany perspective is just as academically valid asany other because all knowledge is only opinionand we are all entitled to our own opinions.Scholarship is opinion, of course, but it is a spe-cial kind of opinion. What scholarship means isbeing critical, careful, honest, open, straightfor-ward, and responsible in one’s opinions—inwhat one claims is valid knowledge. One needs toreason critically and carefully, to be honest aboutthe reasons one suggests to others, to be open tothe reasons others suggest, to be straightforwardabout one’s political reasons, and to be responsi-ble in the kinds of reasons one promotes. Beinghonest, open, and straightforward with eachother about our careful, critical reasons is theonly academically responsible thing to do.5

Therefore, it is best for me to be straightfor-ward about why I think environmental sociologyis an important topic of study: I believe there areserious environmental problems that need con-certed attention—now, not later. And I believeenvironmental issues are closely intertwined witha host of social issues, most of them at leastin part manifestations of social inequality andthe challenges inequality poses for community.Addressing these intertwinings, manifestations,and challenges is in everyone’s interests. We willall benefit, I believe, by reconsidering the presentstate of ecological dialogue.

My perspective, particularly the focus onsocial inequality, coincides more closely with thecurrent politics of the Left than the Right. Yetissues of the environment and inequality cutacross traditional political boundaries, as laterchapters discuss. The evidence and argumentsthat I offer in this book should be of interest toanyone committed to careful, critical reasoning.In any event, we should not let political differ-ences stop us from engaging in dialogue aboutecological dialogue.

Nevertheless, you, the reader, should be awarethat I indeed have a moral and political perspec-tive and that it unavoidably informs what I have



written here. Keep that in mind as you carefullyand critically evaluate what is in this book. But itis also your scholarly responsibility to be open tothe reasoning I present and to have honest rea-sons for disagreeing.

Sustainability

Let us now turn to some of the reasons that leadmany people to believe there is cause for consid-erable concern about the current condition ofecological dialogue: the challenges to sustainabil-ity, environmental justice, and the rights andbeauty of habitat. These, the three central envi-ronmental issues, will already be well-known tosome readers. Still, as these considerationsunderlie the rest of the book, it is appropriate topause and review them here, beginning first withsustainability.

How long can we keep doing what we’redoing? This is the essential question of sustain-ability. The length of the list of threats toenvironmental sustainability is, at the veryleast, unnerving. True, much is unknown, andsome have exaggerated the dangers we face.Consequently, there is considerable controversyabout the long-term consequences of humanity’scontinuing transformation of the Earth, as theheadlines and blogs and podcasts of every weekdemonstrate. But much relevant evidence hasbeen gathered, and some have underestimatedthe dangers involved. It is therefore prudent thatwe all pay close attention to the potential chal-lenges to sustainability.

Global Warming

Perhaps the greatest controversy surroundswhat is perhaps the greatest environmental threat:global warming. The debate is pretty much overabout whether it is happening. The main contro-versy now is about what we should do about it. As the 2007 4th Assessment Report of the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC) concludes, global warm-ing is now “unequivocally” here.6 Moreover, theIPCC states that it has “very high confidence”—meaning the IPCC thinks there is a 9-in-10chance—that human activities have contributedto the warming. The release of carbon dioxidefrom the burning of fossil fuels is the biggest andbest-known culprit, leading to the “greenhouseeffect” through the ability of carbon dioxide totrap heat that would otherwise radiate out intospace. But it accounts for only about half ofhuman-induced climate “forcing,” as climatolo-gists say. Other greenhouse gasses like methane,nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), andozone, as well as the soot or “black carbon”released by the myriad combustion processes ofhuman activity, together amount to roughly asmuch forcing as carbon dioxide.7 However, mostof these forcings also come about through theburning of fossil fuels, directly or indirectly.Here’s where the controversy comes, of course.The great engine of modern life is currentlyutterly dependent on fossil fuels, a recognitionthat every country’s domestic and foreign policyincreasingly revolves around.

For a couple of decades, this was a sleeper ofan issue, ho-hummed by the uncertainties somescientists and most politicians found in the over-all evidence. Environmentalists shouted and theworld snored. There is nothing like long techni-cal reports, with their tables and passive prose, toweigh down the eyelids. But now we have wake-me-up evidence that everyone can see and expe-rience. Broiling hot summers. Drought alerts.Floods. Rising sea levels. Record hurricanes.Melting glaciers. Decreased snow cover. Open-water fishing at the North Pole. Palm trees andpeaches where they never grew before. Diseasesand insects our grandparents’ generation neverhad to contend with in our own regions.

Here it is in numbers. When averages are cal-culated for the entire globe, the 5 warmest yearson record (through 2007) have all occurred since1998.8 Eleven of the last 12 years are among the12 hottest ever recorded.9 Plus, the trend isupward: The 1970s were hotter than the 1960s,



the 1980s were hotter than the 1970s, the 1990swere still hotter, and the 2000s thus far have beenhotter yet. (See Figure 1.2.) At this writing, thehottest 5 years on record are, in descending order,2005, 2007, 1998 (tied with 2007), 2002, and2006.10 In every year since 1977, the annual aver-age world temperature has been at least 14 degreesCelsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit), a level hardly everreached in the past 200 years.11 People notice suchthings in their own lives, and that makes a differ-ence. Plus, the tireless work of another NobelPeace Prize winner, Al Gore, has helped peoplefocus on what they can experience for themselves.

Longer-term weather records also show thatthere was a grain of truth to an earlier genera-tion’s fireside stories about having to walk toschool through three feet of chilling snow, bare-foot and uphill both ways. Eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century images of the whole town out fora skating party or of Hans Brinker and his silverskates on the frozen canals of the Netherlands aremore than merely romantic. It really was colderback then. Winters were longer, blizzards werestronger, and glaciers used to come down fartherout of the mountains. 1963 was the last yearDutch canals froze enough that the “Tour ofEleven Towns,” once an annual event with thou-sands of participants, could be skated—until it

was moved to the northern coast of Finland in1977.12 There are reports that Long Island Sound,the body of salt water between Long Island andthe Connecticut coast, used to freeze over somewinters and people would drive 15 miles acrossthe ice with a team and wagon. That hasn’t hap-pened in 150 years.13

It’s not warming up everywhere. Differentplaces are experiencing different changes, whichis why the issue is often called “global climatechange” rather than “global warming.” But over-all the heat is on, globally. It’s not a matter of pro-jections anymore. Global warming is here now. Ifthis warming trend continues over the next 100years, say almost all climatologists and oceanog-raphers, we will see some major environmentalchanges. Climatic zones will shift, rainfallpatterns will change, weather conditions willbecome more variable, sea level will rise, andmore.

Consider the disruptions sea level rise willbring to the settlement patterns of humanity. Sealevel has risen significantly as the climate haswarmed. (See Figure 1.3). The IPCC projectsthat average sea level will rise another 0.18 to0.59 meters—half a foot to two feet—by thebeginning of the twenty-second century, as glac-iers and the ice caps melt and as ocean water


1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 −.4

−.2

.0

.2

.4

.6

Global Temperature Change (°C)

Annual Mean 5-year Mean

Figure 1.2 A warming world: average global temperature, 1880–2007.

Source: Used by permission of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA.


heats up and expands.14 That may not seem likeall that much, unless you happen to live in aplace like New Orleans, Amsterdam, or the low-lying Pacific Island nations of Tuvalu andKiribati. Extensive regions of low-lying coastalland (where much of the world’s human popula-tion lives) would be in grave danger of floodingduring storm surges—or even being submergedunder water. It is not inconceivable that Tuvaluand Kiribati could be washed away. In view ofthe threat, the New Zealand government hasalready made plans for accepting immigrantsdisplaced from Tuvalu.15

Or consider the ecological disruptions globalwarming will bring. Coral reef dieback.16

Increased wildfires.17 Increased risk of extinctionfor up to 30 percent of species.18 Gradual replace-ment of tropical forests with savanna in easternAmazonia.19 Humans will suffer directly frommany of these ecological changes. Increased drink-ing-water shortages and heat waves. Increaseddrought stress.20 Increased incidence of disease, asthe new conditions would likely be more hos-pitable to mosquitoes, ticks, rodents, bacteria, andviruses.21 Increased incidence of damaging storms,

with consequences for shoreline ecologies,including human ones.22

The consequences for agriculture would becomplex. Some farming areas will likely bestricken with drier conditions. For example, theIPCC projects that rain-fed agriculture in Africacould be down as much as 50 percent in yields by2020.23 Farmers in Iowa, the leading corn-producing region in the United States, might haveto switch over to wheat and drought-tolerantcorn varieties, which would mean overalldeclines in food production per acre.24 On theother hand, some regions will likely receive morerain. Yet many of these regions do not have thesame quality of soil as, say, Iowa. To add to thecomplexity, carbon dioxide can stimulate growthin some crop plants; one study has found a 17percent yield boost in soybeans.25 However, thisstimulation may not result in actual increasedcrop yields because of other limiting factors, suchas low rainfall, poor soil conditions, and the exis-tence of other pollutants in the air.26

Indeed, the predictions are coming truealready. We are seeing an increase in heat waves,and resulting fatalities and property loss are on


100

50

Sea

leve

l (m

m)

−50

−100

−150

−2001880 1900 1920 1940

Year

1960 1980 2000

0

Figure 1.3 Oceans on the rise: Global mean sea level, 1870–2005, based on field evidence,tide gauges, and satellite data.

Source: IPCC (2007b).


the rise. The spell of four days that peaked ataround 100 degrees Fahrenheit between July 12and 15, 1995, blamed for 739 deaths in Chicago.27

The 2002 heat wave from April to May in India,which killed 1,000 people.28 The even more hor-rific 2003 heat wave in Europe, estimated to havekilled an astounding 14,802 people in Franceplus many dozens in other European countries.29

The July 2007 Western North American heatwave and drought that eventually led to the dev-astating wildfires of Southern California inOctober of 2007, which burned 1,500 houses and400 million acres and forced 1 million people toevacuate their homes.30

The occurrence of devastating storms andfloods is also way up. The Great Storm of 1987 inBritain. Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Katrina in2005. The Mumbai floods of 2005. The Britishfloods of 2007. From the too wet to the too windyto the too hot to the too dry, the global rate ofsevere weather events now is 4 times what it wasin the 1960s.31 The insurance industry is quiteworried about the upsurge in claims that hasresulted.32 From 2000 to 2006, worldwide eco-nomic losses from catastrophic weather eventshave averaged $78 billion each year, which isroughly double the 1990s rate, 6 times the 1980srate, 10 times the 1970s rate, and 16 times the

1960s rate, measured in 2006 constant dollars.33

In 2005, the worst year yet, worldwide losses were$220 billion.34 (See Figure 1.4.) Despite betterforecasting, some 800 million people wereaffected by weather-related disasters in the five-year period from 2002 to 2006, as compared withless than 200 million between 1982 and 1986.35

There’s more. Meteorologists are becomingincreasingly alarmed about the successive break-offs of ever-larger chunks of high-latitude iceshelves, such as the Rhode Island–sized patch ofthe Larsen B Ice Shelf that disintegrated duringFebruary 2002 and the 41 square mile Ayles IceShelf that broke free of Canada’s Ellesmere Islandin the summer of 2005.36 At the North Pole, thereisn’t as much ice to begin with, but we’re showingworrisome signs of losing what there is. By 2006,the winter extent of the Arctic ice cap haddeclined nearly 8 percent since 1953, and itsthickness in summer had dropped 42 percentsince the 1950s, from 10.2 feet to 5.9 feet.37 Thereare now commonly sizable stretches of openwater in the Arctic ice cap during the summer,including a 10-mile by 3-mile-wide stretch quiteclose to the North Pole itself in 2001, althoughscientists say this open water may have beengoing on for some time.38 But the northernice cap is clearly retreating and thinning.


250

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01980 1985 1990 1995

Economic loss

Insured loss

Bill

ion

200

6 D

olla

rs

2000 2005 2010

Figure 1.4 The price of global warming: Economic losses from weather-related naturaldisasters worldwide, 1980–2006.

Source: Worldwatch Institute (2007, p. 45).


Researchers from National Aeronautics andSpace Administration (NASA) predict that by2040, we will have no Arctic ice cap at all at theheight of the Northern Hemisphere summer; theBritish Antarctic Survey thinks it will happeneven earlier than that.39

Then there are the implications for disease.Warmer world weather has been implicated inthe resurgence of cholera in Latin America in1991 and pneumonic plague in India in 1994,and in the outbreak of a hantavirus epidemic inthe U.S. Southwest in 1994. Scientists are won-dering if global warming is a factor in about 10other diseases that resurged or reemerged in the1990s.40 Increased allergy complaints may be dueto global warming, one study suggests.41 A 2004Journal of the American Medical Associationreport notes potential climate change implica-tions for increased malaria, dengue, and somerodent-borne diseases.42 In areas where a popula-tion’s disease resistance is already weakened bythe AIDS virus, these increases will be particu-larly problematic.43

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions con-tinue to rise. Carbon dioxide, as measured at thefamous Mauna Loa Observatory in November2007, is up to 384 parts per million in the atmos-phere.44 In the mid-eighteenth century, the num-ber was about 277 parts per million, according todata from ice cores drilled in Anarctica.45 Butgrowth still hasn’t leveled out, despite the initialefforts of many nations around the world.Recently, the concentration has been going upabout 2 parts per million per year, as we continueto force the climate, and push our luck.46

You could think of human-induced climateforcings as acting like extra blankets on a warmnight, gradually stifling the planet. I say “on awarm night” because solar radiation is also onthe rise, adding a climate forcing about a tenth asstrong as human-induced forcings.47 This is, atthe very least, bad timing. Consequently, takingtogether all the forcings warming as well as cool-ing the planet—and there are indeed a few work-ing in the direction of cooling, such as increasedreflectivity back into outer space from increased

cloudiness—the IPCC estimates that averagetemperatures will rise 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsiusin the twenty-first century, depending on the sce-nario and model.48 These are enormous increaseswhen you consider that an average drop of 6degrees Celsius caused the ice ages, coveringmuch of the northern latitudes with a mile-thicksheet of ice.49 Climate is a touchy thing. A fewdegrees average change one way or the other canmake quite a difference. In this case, we could beon the verge of many centuries of generally lousysleeping weather—and circumstances muchmore ominous than that.

Think about it the next hot summer eveningas you ponder whether you should crank the air-conditioner up another notch, causing your localutility to burn just that much more carbon-basedfuel, and to release that much more smog andsoot to generate the necessary electricity.50 Morecooling will also mean more heating.

The Two Ozone Problems

There are several other threats to our atmos-phere. While perhaps not quite as drastic in theirpotential consequences as global warming, theyare plenty drastic enough for considerableconcern. Two of these threats involve ozone,although in quite different ways.

Ozone forms when groups of three oxygenatoms bond together into single molecules, whichchemists signify as O3. Most atmospheric oxygen isin the form of two bonded oxygen atoms, or O2,but a vital layer of O3 in the upper atmospherehelps protect life on the Earth’s surface from theeffects of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Ultravioletlight can cause skin cancer, promote cataracts,damage immune systems, and disrupt ecosystems.Were there no ozone layer in the upper atmos-phere, life on Earth would have evolved in quitedifferent ways—if indeed it had begun at all. In anyevent, current life forms are not equipped to toler-ate much more ultraviolet radiation than the sur-face of the Earth currently receives. We badly needthe upper-atmosphere ozone layer.



In 1974, two chemists, Mario Molina andSherwood Rowland, proposed that CFCs—which, as we have seen, are also a potent global-warming forcing—could be reacting with theozone layer and breaking it down. Molina andRowland predicted that CFCs could ultimatelymake their way into the upper atmosphere andattack the integrity of the ozone layer. In 1985,scientists poring over satellite imagery of theatmosphere over Antarctica discovered (almostaccidentally) that the ozone layer over the SouthPole had, in fact, grown dangerously depleted.

Many studies later, we now know that this“ozone hole,” as it has come to be called, is grow-ing in overall size. We also know that it changesin size with the seasons, has a much smaller mateover the North Pole, and stretches to some degreeeverywhere on the planet except the tropics. Infact, it’s really not a hole. It is more accurate tosay that, outside the tropics, the ozone layer isdepleted, particularly over the South Pole. (SeeChapter 8 for an extensive discussion about themetaphor of an ozone “hole.”) At times, the layerdepletes to as low as 25 percent of the levelsobserved in the 1970s.51 Most worrisome is thatthe area of high depletion might spread to heav-ily populated areas. In 2000, the high-depletionarea passed over the tip of South America fornine days, including the Chilean city of PuntaArenas. The perimeter of the hole skirts PuntaArenas most years now.52 Australians and NewZealanders have yet to experience this, butthey’re plenty worried. Levels of depletion thereare already worse than in other populatedregions, skin cancer rates are the highest in theworld, and classes in “sun health” have becomean essential feature of the school curriculum.53

And in Punta Arenas, the world’s most southerlycity, skin cancer rates shot up 66 percent between1994 and 2001.54

This is scary stuff. Skin cancer is no fun. But ithas galvanized a truculent world into unusuallycooperative action.55 In 1987, the major indus-trial countries signed the first of a series of agree-ments, known as the Montreal Protocol, toreduce the production of CFCs. As a result ofthese agreements, CFC production for use in

these countries ended on December 31, 1995,and will end throughout the world after 2010. By1996, annual CFC production had already fallento about 150,000 tons—down from more than1,000,000 tons in late 1980s—although it hasdeclined only slightly since then.56

It will be many decades until the depletion isrepaired, however. The ozone-damaging chlorinethat CFCs contain remains resident in the atmos-phere for some time, and the HCFCs (hydrochlo-rofluorocarbons) industrial countries first turnedto as a substitute also damage the ozone layer tosome extent. Plus, like CFCs, HCFCs are a potentgreenhouse gas. Chlorine-free “greenfreeze”refrigerants do not damage the upper atmos-phere ozone layer and don’t contribute to globalwarming. Greenfreeze technology now domi-nates the refrigerator market in Europe and istaking hold in South America, Japan, China, andelsewhere. But greenfreeze is just now reachingthe North American market and, at this writing,is not yet available in its refrigerators—for rea-sons of protectionism, argue some.57 Meanwhile,an extensive black market in CFCs has arisen inNorth America.58 Thus, the current expert view isthat ozone depletion will be with us until themiddle of the century at least, and likely longerthan that.59

The reduction of CFC production is neverthe-less one of the great success stories of the envi-ronmental movement, and perhaps the greatest.Despite our differences, sometimes we canachieve the international cooperation necessaryto make major progress on big problems. Weknow we can, because in the case of CFCs wehave done it.

Much less progress, however, has been madeon the other ozone problem: ozone at groundlevel. Hardly a city in the world is free of a fre-quent brown haze above which only the tallestbuildings rise. (See Figure 1.5.) Ozone is theprincipal component of this brown smog thathas become an unpleasantly familiar feature ofmodern urban life.

Ground-level ozone forms when sunlight glaresdown on a city’s dirty air. As a result of fossil fuelcombustion, cars and factories discharge large



volumes of a whole array of nitrogen oxide com-pounds. NOX (pronounced “knocks”) is the usualterm for this varied nitrous mixture. In sunlight,NOX reacts with volatile organic compounds (orVOCs) to produce ozone. (The VOCs themselvesare also produced during fossil fuel combustion, aswell as by off-gassing from drying paint and by var-ious industrial processes.) If the day is warm andstill, this ozone will hug the ground. Because itneeds sunlight to form, scientists often call theresulting haze “photochemical smog.”

Although we need ozone up high to protect usfrom the sun, down low, in the inhabited part ofthe atmosphere, ozone burns the lung tissue ofanimals and the leaf tissue of plants. This can kill.A 2006 study estimated that over 100,000Americans suffer premature death each yearbecause of photochemical smog.60 Stop for amoment: That’s a huge number of prematuredeaths. A 2004 study found that even small dif-ferences in ozone concentration have measurableeffects on mortality.61 Smog alerts have become

an everyday feature of big-city life in all indus-trial countries. Walking and bicycling are increas-ingly unhealthful and unpleasant—drivingpeople even more into their cars and causingeven more smog. Mexico City is the worst;unhealthy levels of ozone, as defined by theWorld Health Organization, continue to occurthere more than 200 days each year.62 When itdrifts out of the city into the countryside, smogalso reduces crop production and damagesforests. For example, soybeans suffer a 20 percentyield loss due to ozone—not an insignificantamount in a hungry world.63

To put the matter simply, there’s too muchozone down low, not enough up high, and noway to pump ozone from down here to up there.

Particulates and Acid Rain

Big cities and their surrounding suburbs alsoface the hazard of fine particulates in the air.


Figure 1.5 Montreal’s skyscrapers push through an afternoon smog layer, as seen from Parcdu Mont-Royal, July, 2006.

Source: Author.


These particles are microscopic—the definitionof “fine particulates” is particles 2.5 microns orsmaller in size, way smaller than the diameter of ahuman hair—and they penetrate deeply into lungtissue. In contrast to the brownish color of photo-chemical smog, fine particulates envelop citieswith a whitish smog. About half of these particu-lates are basically dust, mainly released becauseof poor fuel combustion in cars, trucks, powerplants, wood stoves, and outdoor burning orkicked up by traffic, construction, and wind ero-sion from farms. Most of the rest are tiny piecesand droplets of sulfates, nitrates, and VOCsformed in the atmosphere following the burningof fossil fuels, such as the coal used for electricgeneration; together, these are called “secondary”particulates.64 Ammonium and ammonium com-pounds also contribute significantly to secondaryfine-particulate pollution, mainly due to emis-sions from livestock and fertilizers.

According to a 2006 study, over 160,000Americans die prematurely each year due to fineparticulates.65 Stop again: That’s 160,000 prema-ture deaths. Another study found that inAmerican cities with the most fine particulates,residents are 15-to-17 percent more likely to dieprematurely.66 Children in Los Angeles who livecloser to roads have decreased lung capacity,largely because of fine particulates.67 Fine partic-ulates also increase heart attack rates, accordingto a 2006 study, which, along with studies of lungcapacity and asthma effects, helps explain thehigher death rates associated with areas that havehigher levels of fine particulates.68 This is seriousstuff, even worse than the much better-knownproblem of photochemical smog.

And then there’s acid rain. This is an issue thathas largely dropped from sight, after a flurry ofconcern in the 1970s and early 1980s over sharpdeclines in the populations of some fish andfrogs and extensive signs of stress and dieback inmany forests. But acid rain is still falling from thesky, despite substantial efforts to reduce acidify-ing emissions of sulfur dioxide and NOx (whichalso have other dangerous impacts, as we haveseen). These pollutants combine with water in

the atmosphere to acidify rain, resulting in directdamage to plant tissues, as well the leaching ofnutrients from soil and the acidification of lakewaters, which, in turn, affect most wildlife—particularly in areas with normally acidic condi-tions, where ecosystems have less capacity tobuffer the effects of acid fallout. When things getbad enough, lakes die and trees refuse to grow,like the miles of blasted heath in the acid deposi-tion zone surrounding the old nickel smelters inSudbury, Ontario. The situation is especiallysevere in northern Europe, where more than 90percent of natural ecosystems have been dam-aged by acid rain; a year 2000 survey by theEuropean Union found that 22 percent of alltrees in Europe have lost 25 percent or more oftheir leaves.69 Conditions are also quite worri-some in much of Canada and in China. One 2007study found defoliation rates as high as 40 per-cent in some Chinese forests.70

Efforts to reduce acidifying emissions of sulfurdioxide and NOx have made a difference in someregions. There does seem to be some slightimprovement in the condition of Canadian lakesand forests—but only slight.71 Deposition rates forsulphate from rain are down considerably inmuch of the United States. But there are areas ofthe United States, mostly in the Northeast, thatstill receive more than 25 kilograms per hectare ofsulphate from the sky each year—10 times morethan falls in the West.72 A 2000 review of the sci-entific literature by the federal government’sGeneral Accounting Office found that the condi-tion of lakes in New England and the AdirondackMountains of New York was either stable or get-ting worse, but none seemed to be improving.73

Some 43 percent of Adirondack lakes are expectedto be acidic by 2040—up from the 19 percentobserved to be acidic in 1984.74 Between 1992 and1999, the condition of trees in Europe did improvein 15 percent of the test sites, but deteriorated in afurther 30 percent of sites.75 In Taiwan, the CentralWeather Bureau has registered increasingly severeacid rain events in recent years.76

In other words, the situation is at best amixed bag. Why after so many years of effort



does acid rain still threaten? Technologicalimprovements, international treaties, anddomestic legislation have all contributed to asharp decline in sulfur emissions in most coun-tries. But we have made little overall progress inreducing nitrogen emissions. Industry’s nitrogenemissions have been reduced, but these advanceshave been overwhelmed by increased emissionsfrom automobiles and trucks as the world comesto rely ever more on these highly polluting formsof transportation.77 Plus, there is evidence thatthe ability of sensitive ecosystems to handle acidrain has been damaged such that slight improve-ment in the acidity of rain often does not resultin any improvement in the condition of lakesand forests.78

Acid rain is still a big problem.

Threats to Land and Water

There’s a well-known saying about land: Theyaren’t making any more of it. The same is true ofwater. And in a way, there is less of both each yearas the expansion of industry, agriculture, anddevelopment erodes and pollutes what we have,reducing the world’s capacity to sustain life.

Consider soil erosion in the United States. Soilerodes from farmland at least 10 times faster thanit can be replaced by ecological processes, accord-ing to a 2006 study.79 Despite decades of work inreducing soil erosion, largely in response to thelessons of the Dust Bowl, it still takes a bushel ofsoil erosion to grow a bushel of corn.80 TheConservation Reserve Program, implemented bythe U.S. Congress in 1985, has resulted in signifi-cant improvements by offering farmers 10-yearcontracts to take the most erodable land out ofproduction. Many farmers have also switchedto much less erosive cropping practices.Consequently, soil erosion dropped 43 percentfrom 1982 to 2003, water erosion dropped from4.0 to 2.6 tons per acre, and wind erosiondropped from 3.3 to 2.1 tons per acre.81 But thosenumbers are still way too high, most observers inand out of agriculture agree.

Elsewhere, the situation is equally grim. Soilerosion exceeds replacement rates on a third ofthe world’s agricultural land.82 Worldwide,almost a quarter—23 percent—of the world’scropland, pasture lands, forests, and woodlandshave been become degraded.83 True, fertilizerscan make up for some of the production lossesthat come from eroded soils, at least in the shortterm, but only at increased cost to farmers andwith increased energy use from the productionof fertilizer and the application of it to fields—and increased water pollution as the fertilizerwashes off into streams, rivers, and groundwater.

Soil erosion is only one of many seriousthreats to farmland. Much of the twentieth-century’s gains in crop production was due toirrigation. But irrigation can also salinize soils.Because most irrigation occurs in parchedregions, the abundant sunlight of dry climatesevaporates much of the water away, leaving saltsbehind. In China, nearly half of the cropland isirrigated, and 15 percent of the irrigated land isaffected by salinization. In the United States, onlyabout 10 percent of cropland is irrigated, butalmost a quarter of that 10 percent has experi-enced salinization. In Egypt, virtually 100 percentof cropland is irrigated, and almost a third of it isaffected by salinization.84

Irrigation can also waterlog poorly drainedsoils. Clearing of land is doing the same thing inAustralia. Once the land is cleared of its nativewoodland and bush, rates of transpiration—thepumping of water through the leaves of plants,enabling plants to “breathe”—slow down. Watertables in the dry wheat belt of western Australiaare rising by up to one meter a year, waterloggingthese poorly drained soils. This, in turn, can leadto salinization as waterlogged soils bake in thesun. A 2006 estimate found that 16 percent ofAustralia’s agricultural land has been degradedby salinization.85 Thus, overirrigation can turnsoils both swampy and salty at the same time.

Irrigation of cropland, combined with thegrowing thirst of cities, is leading to an evenmore fundamental problem: a lack of water. Onestudy has categorized 36 nations around the



world as “water-stressed”—that is, they do nothave sufficient water resources to provide fortheir population’s agricultural, industrial, andresidential needs.86 Some 15 nations, mainly inthe Middle East, now use more water than theirclimates can replenish it.87 How do they survive?Mainly by importing food, a strategy that leavesthem dependent on world markets. Even incountries not classified as water-stressed, the sit-uation is increasingly dire. Take the United Statesand Mexico. By the time it reaches the ocean inthe Gulf of California, the Colorado is probablythe world’s most famous “non-river,” for not arunning drop remains after the farms and citiesof the United States and Mexico have drunk theirfill. Further development in the regions depen-dent on the Colorado River will require waterfrom other sources—and it is not obvious wherethose generally dry territories can easily findother sources—or greatly improved efficiency incurrent water use.

In the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia, thecountry’s richest agricultural region, the story ismuch the same. Now only one-fifth of the waterthat enters the basin’s rivers is still there by thetime the Murray reaches the sea, and the com-parative trickle of water that remains is salty andprone to bacterial blooms and fish kills.88 Perhapsthe most dramatic example of overuse of watersources is the Aral Sea in central Asia—once theworld’s fourth-largest lake. Diversion for irriga-tion reduced the Aral’s surface area by 60 percentand its water volume by nearly 80 percent, as wellas dividing it into two separate bodies of water:what are now called the North Aral Sea (alsoknown as the Small Aral Sea) and the South AralSea. Salinity has quadrupled, former fishingports lie miles inland, thousands of square milesof lake bottom have turned to desert, the 24species of native fish are all gone because of thesalinity, as are half the bird and mammal species,and the region’s economy has collapsed.89 Somegood news is that a dike funded by the WorldBank has begun restoring some of the lake area inthe North Aral Sea.90 But the overall situationremains grim in the much larger South Aral Sea.

Not only surface water, but groundwater too isbeing rapidly depleted. Overirrigation can lead torising water tables and the waterlogging of soilsin some regions, but the more general problemis falling water tables from the depletion ofgroundwater stocks. Around the world, extrac-tion of groundwater for cities and farms isexceeding replenishment rates. Recent produc-tion gains in agriculture in India have reliedheavily on irrigation from groundwater, but now,because of what one observer has called a “race tothe bottom of the aquifer,” local villagers arebeing forced to pump from as deep as 700 feet.91

Water levels are dropping in some 90 percent ofwells in the Indian state of Gujarat.92 In the dryGreat Plains of the United States, farmers pumpthe famous Ogallala Aquifer eight times fasterthan it recharges from precipitation, endangering15 percent of U.S. corn and wheat productionand 25 percent of U.S. cotton production. Nearlyone-fifth of the Ogallala’s water reserves havealready been pumped out, and the taps have hadto be turned off in many places.93 In the NorthChina Plain, a major grain-producing area, watertables have been dropping at the rate of three tofive feet each year, due to overdraw for irriga-tion.94 In some regions, the lowering of watertables is causing major land subsidence.Downtown Mexico City has dropped nearly 25feet.95 Some parts of the Central Valley ofCalifornia and the Hebei Province surroundingBeijing have dropped as much.96 Venice hasdropped 10 centimeters because of pumping thefreshwater aquifer beneath it—which may notsound like a lot, but for a city at the water line,that is an alarming figure.97

Overextraction can degrade the quality of thegroundwater that remains. The main threat hereagain is salinization, either through the overap-plication of irrigated water to the land’s surfaceor through the invasion of seawater into shrink-ing groundwater aquifers. Ten percent of wells inIsrael have already been abandoned because ofseawater invasion, and many more will soon haveto be given up.98 In the Indian state of Gujarat,half the hand-pumped wells are now salty.99



When irrigated water is overapplied, the saliniza-tion of the soil can be carried down into theaquifer, as the water percolates down past croproots. In many areas, only some 30 to 40 percentof irrigated water actually reaches crops, with therest being lost through evaporation and percola-tion, promoting salinization of groundwater. Inthe lower Indus River Valley of India andPakistan, the situation is so bad that engineershave installed an expensive system of pumps andsurface drains to carry some of the salinizedgroundwater away to the sea.100

Much of the freshwater that remains is badlypolluted. “The amount of water made unusableby pollution,” Donella Meadows, Denis Meadows,and Jorgen Randers have noted, “is almost asgreat as the amount actually used by the humaneconomy.”101 In fact, we are very close to using, ormaking unusable, all the easily accessible fresh-water—freshwater that is close to where peoplelive (as opposed to rivers in the Arctic, say) andthat can be stored in rivers, lakes, and aquifers (asopposed to the huge amounts of freshwater lostto the sea during seasonal floods, which cannotbe easily stored).102 The remaining marginfor growth in freshwater use is disturbinglynarrow.

Cleaning up water pollution is one way toincrease that vital margin, and industrial waterpollution has diminished in many areas, particu-larly in the wealthier countries. We have alsomade progress in controlling agricultural waterpollution. But we still have a long way to go. Since1950, farmers across the world have upped theiruse of commercial fertilizers eightfold and theiruse of pesticides thirty-two-fold.103 In the UnitedStates, the development of stronger pesticides fora number of years led to substantial drops in thenumber of pounds of pesticides farmers applied.But since the late 1980s, the U.S. trend has beenup once again, with about a 10 percent increasesince that time.104 The resulting runoff continuesto threaten the safety of many drinking watersupplies. As Chapter 5 discusses in detail, manypesticides are quite hazardous for human health.Excess nitrogen fertilizer in the water is, too. We

all need something to eat and something todrink, but our efforts at maintaining food pro-duction through the use of agricultural chemi-cals are putting us in the untenable position oftrading one for the other: food to eat for water todrink.

Or are we trading them both away? In addi-tion to the threats to agricultural productioncaused by soil erosion, salinization, waterlogging,and water shortages, we are losing considerableamounts of productive farmland to the expan-sion of roads and suburbs, particularly in thewealthiest nations. Cities need food; thus, thesensible place to build a city is in the midst ofproductive agricultural land. And that is justwhat people have done for centuries. But thecoming of the automobile has made possible(although not inevitable) the sprawling forms oflow-density development so characteristic of themodern city. The result is that cities now gobbleup not only food but also the best land for grow-ing it. The problem is worst in the United States,which has both a large proportion of the world’sbest agricultural land and also some of theworld’s most land-consuming patterns of devel-opment. Some 86 percent of fruit and vegetableproduction and 63 percent of dairy productioncome from urban counties or from countiesadjacent to urban counties. A 2002 study foundthat the United States loses about 2 acres of farm-land every minute, or about 1.2 million acres peryear, an area the size of Delaware.105 Given thatthe United States has almost a billion acres ofagricultural land, this may not seem worth wor-rying about. But in most cases, we are losing ourbest land, and in the places where we most needit: close to where people live.

Then factor into the calculation the effects ofglobal warming, photochemical smog, and acidrain on crop production. And then add somemajor issues I have not even mentioned:increased resistance of pests to pesticides, declin-ing response of crops to fertilizer increases, thetremendous energy inputs of modern agricul-ture, loss of genetic diversity, desertification dueto overgrazing, and pesticide residues in food.



It is no wonder that increases in agricultural pro-duction have been falling behind increases inhuman population. The result is that afterdecades of steady increases, world grain produc-tion per person per year declined from the his-torical high of 343 kilograms in 1985 to 297kilograms in 2002, the first year below 300 kilo-grams since 1970.106 The world record harvest of2004 brought grain back to 324 kilograms perperson, but by 2006, the world harvest had fallenback below 310 kilograms per person. Plus, thegrowth of biofuels threatens to divert a sizableproportion of grain away from food, as manyhave tried to point out.107

Let’s face it. We’re simply eating the world up.An increasingly popular way to represent ouroverconsumption on an ecological scale is ecolog-ical footprint analysis, which converts all the var-ious demands we make on the earth’s ecosystemsto area. (See Figure 1.6.) Since about 1985, ourcollective footprint has been larger than theEarth itself. We are now demanding about 1.4

Earths. We are provided with only one. You can’teat your Earth and have it too.

Environmental Justice

On the morning of January 4, 1993, 300,000Ogoni rallied together. The protesters wavedgreen twigs as they listened to speeches by KenSaro-Wiwa, a famous Ogoni writer, and others.With such a huge turnout, the Ogoni—a smallAfrican ethnic group, numbering only a half mil-lion in all—hoped that finally someone wouldpay attention to the mess that Shell Oil Companyhad made of their section of Nigeria. Leakingpipelines. Oil blowouts that showered on nearbyvillages. Disrupted field drainage systems. (Muchof Ogoniland has to be drained to be farmed.)Fish kills. Gas flares that fouled the air. Water sopolluted that just wearing clothes washed in itcaused rashes. Acid rain from the gas flares sobad that the zinc roofs people in the area favor


1.5

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Global ecological footprint

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Figure 1.6 Living beyond our means: Global ecological footprint, 1961 to 2003.

Source: Global Footprint Network (2007).


for their houses corroded away after a year.Meanwhile, the profits flowed overseas to Shelland to the notoriously corrupt Nigerian govern-ment. The Ogoni got only the pollution.108

Such open protest by the relatively powerlessis a courageous act. And for the Ogoni, the con-sequences were swift and severe. During the nexttwo years, Nigerian soldiers oversaw the ransack-ing of Ogoni villages, the killing of about 2,000Ogoni people, and the torture and displacementof thousands more.109 Much of the terror wascarried out by people from neighboring regionswhom the soldiers forced or otherwise enticedinto violence so that the government could por-tray the repression as ethnic rivalry.110 The armyalso sealed the borders of Ogoniland, and no onewas let in or out without government permis-sion. Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaderswere repeatedly arrested and interrogated.Finally, the government trumped up a murdercharge against Saro-Wiwa and eight others and,despite a storm of objection from the rest of theworld, executed them on November 10, 1995.111

The torture and killing of protestors continuedfor some years. For example, on June 15, 2001,police shot Friday Nwiido, a few weeks afterNwiido had led a peaceful protest against theApril 29, 2001, oil blowout that rained Shell’scrude onto the surrounding countryside for ninedays.112 Recently, there have been efforts to bro-ker a peace process for the region between Shell,the Nigerian government, the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP), and theOgoni people. But as of this writing, the situationremains chaotic, with a recent death threatagainst Ledum Mitee, the current president ofthe Movement for the Survival of the OgoniPeople (MOSOP), as well as continued oil firesand oil spills.113

The Ogoni experience is a vivid example of acommon worldwide pattern: Those with the leastpower get the most pollution.

The Ogoni experience is also an outrage, asvirtually the entire world agrees.114 This outrageis a reminder of another of the three centralissues of environmentalism: the frequent and

tragic challenges to environmental justice. Thereis a striking unevenness in the distributionof environmental benefits and environmentalcosts—in the distribution of what might betermed environmental goods and environmentalbads.115 Global warming, sea level rises, ozonedepletion, photochemical smog, fine-particulatesmog, acid rain, soil erosion, salinization, water-logging, desertification, loss of genetic diversity,loss of farmland to development, water short-ages, and water pollution: These have a potentialimpact on everyone’s lives. But the well-to-doand well connected are generally in a betterposition to avoid the worst consequences ofenvironmental problems, and often to avoid theconsequences entirely.

Who Gets the Bads?

Take the hazardous waste crisis, for instance.Wealthy countries are now finding that there ismore to disposing of garbage than simply puttingit in a can on the curb. One response has been topay others to take it. We now have a lively inter-national trade, much of it illegal, in waste too haz-ardous for rich countries to dispose of at home.

There has been considerable protest aboutthis practice. In 1988, Nigeria even went so far asto commandeer an Italian freighter with theintent of loading it up with thousands of barrelsof toxics that had arrived from Italy under suspi-cious circumstances and shipping it back toEurope. After a heated diplomatic dispute, thewaste—which turned out to originate in 10European countries and the United States—wasloaded on board the Karin B., a West Germanship, and sent back to Italy. But harbor officials inRavenna, Italy, where the waste was supposed togo, refused the load because of vigorous localopposition to it. The Karin B. was later refusedentry in Cadiz, Spain, and banned from Frenchand British ports, where it also tried to land.Months later it was finally accepted into Italy.116

In 1989, in response to diplomatic crises likethese, 105 countries signed the Basel Convention,



which is supposed to control international toxicshipments. Yet loopholes are large enough andenforcement lax enough that these shipmentsstill go on. Nor do international conventionscontrol domestic companies like COINTERN ofMexico, which dumped 20,000 tons of illegalwaste near the Mexican town of Guadalcazarbetween 1989 and 1993. Nor do internationalconventions stop foreign companies from merelyrelocating their most hazardous productionpractices to poorer countries—like Metalclad,Inc., of Illinois, which purchased the Guadalcazarsite, promising to clean up the dump but only ifthe Mexican government would allow Metalcladto reopen the dump afterward.117 When localpeople and government officials tried to stopthem, Metalclad filed a successful suit in interna-tional court, using a provision of the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement. They were evenawarded $16.7 million in damages.118

Toxic wastes are typically local in their effects,and typically the local communities that are theleast politically empowered—whether because ofclass, heritage, nationality, or rural location—receive the bulk of them.119 So too for the sitingof hazardous industrial facilities. These arerealities painfully well-known to the peopleof Bhopal, India; Minamata, Japan; Toulouse,France; Diamond, Louisiana; Love Canal, NewYork; and the thousands of communities sub-jected to lesser-known local toxic disasters.Although individually smaller, these disasters arecollectively just as significant as the better-knownones, and perhaps more significant.120

Toxic wastes have an impact not only wherepeople live but also where they work. Considerthe cumulative effects of pesticides and toxicchemicals on those who work with them everyday. Many of our industrial practices exposeworkers—generally those on the production line,as opposed to those in the head office—to envi-ronmental hazards. Increasingly, the wealthycountries are exporting these kinds of jobs over-seas, where workers have less choice over theirconditions of employment, and then importingthe goods back home (but still scooping up the

profit in between). Exporting hazardous jobs doesnot lessen the degree of environmental inequalityinvolved, however. Indeed, the inequality oftenincreases because of lax environmental regula-tion in poorer countries.

All this seems to take place faraway—until atoxic disaster happens in your own community.The growing placelessness of the marketplacemakes it easy to overlook the devastating impactuntempered industrialism can have on the dailylives of the farmworker applying alachlor in thefield and the factory worker running a noisymachine on a dirty and dangerous assembly line.When we shop, we meet a product’s retailers,usually not the people who made it, and theproduct itself tells no tales.

Who Gets the Goods?

Environmental justice also concerns patternsof inequality in the distribution of environmen-tal goods. These patterns are usually closely asso-ciated with inequality in the distribution ofwealth. Thus, those who are concerned aboutenvironmental justice often point to the hugeinequalities in average income between coun-tries. Here are the numbers, based on grossnational income (GNI) per capita in 2005 in U.S.dollars.121

The average annual income in the world is$6,987. In contrast, the average income in theworld’s 57 wealthiest countries is $35,131. In theUnited States, it is $43,740—and the UnitedStates is not the world’s richest country. That dis-tinction goes to Luxembourg, at $65,630 percapita, and $65,340 in per capita buying powerwhen we take into account the higher cost of liv-ing there.122 (The United States ranks as thesecond-richest country in the world in per capitabuying power at $41,950 annual income.)

With all that income flowing to the top, hardlyany is left for those on the bottom. The 2.4 billionpeople of the 54 poorest nations average just$580 per capita per year—hardly more than adollar a day. The 8 million people of Burundi



have the lowest average: just $100 per capita peryear. The situation is hardly better for the peopleof the Democratic Republic of the Congo: just$120. In Malawi, it’s $160. True, the cost of livingis unusually low in those countries. That $100annual income in Burundi buys about what $640buys in the United States. But even $640 is notvery much. Imagine living on so little.

Moreover, despite the many advances in tech-nology and the change to a more market-oriented world economy—and some say becauseof these advances and this change, as Chapter 3discusses—income inequality has dramaticallyincreased in recent decades. In 1960, the fifth ofthe world’s people living in its richest countriescommanded 30 times as much of the world’sincome as the fifth of people living in the poorestcountries—a figure that, in most people’s view,was bad enough.123 Roughly 100 years earlier, in1879, it was 7 to 1.124 But today, that richest fifthcommands 66 times as much of the world’sincome as the poorest fifth.125

These figures are all based on the populationsof whole countries. But there are also substantiallevels of inequality within countries. Typically,the income differential between the richest 20percent and poorest 20 percent within a countryis 7 to 1 or less.126 In many poor and middle-income countries, however, the numbers are farhigher. The situation is most extreme in SierraLeone, where the richest fifth command 57.6times the income of the poorest fifth. In anotherhalf-dozen countries, such as Brazil and SouthAfrica, the ratio is 30 to 1 or higher.127 In 13 othercountries, it is 15 to 1 or higher.

Although there is usually less inequality inwealthy countries, some do exceed the worldnorm of 7 to 1. In Germany, the ratio of richest topoorest 20 percent is 8 to 1. In the United States,it is 9 to 1. Interestingly, the situation in theUnited States represents a historical reversal. Inthe 1920s (the first decade for which these figuresare available), the United States was one of themost economically egalitarian countries, givingAmerica the image of the land of opportunity. Incomparison, most European countries, such as

Britain, were more wealth stratified at the time.128

Today, European countries are all less stratified, inmost cases much less so—such as the 4-to-1 fig-ures for the Scandinavian countries and the5-to-1 and 6-to-1 figures for France, Belgium,Switzerland, Spain, and the Netherlands. Thelowest figure in the world is for Japan, 3.4 to 1.129

Many countries with a majority of Muslims alsohave quite egalitarian income ratios.130

Inequality within countries means that the66-to-1 ratio of income between the fifth ofpeople living in the richest countries and the fifthliving in the poorest understates the level ofglobal inequality. If the richest fifth of the worldpopulation from all countries, rich and poor,were put together, their income would likely total150 times that of the poorest fifth of the world’spopulation.131 (See Figure 1.7.)

Consequently, taking the world’s populationas a whole, the number of very poor people isstaggering. As of 2004, some 969 million—nearlya billion—were living on less than $1 a day.132

Some 2.5 billion were living on less than $2a day.133 The good news is that there have beensubstantial improvements. In 1981, 1.5 billionwere living on less than $1 a day, half a billionmore than today.134 Plus, world population hasrisen quite a bit since then, so the proportion ofthe poor has fallen even further. So there havebeen some encouraging changes. But there arealso significant regional differences, with thenumbers of the very poor on the rise in India,Latin America, and Africa over this time period.Almost all of the worldwide gains in poverty alle-viation have been in just one country, albeit avery large one: China. And most of those whoused to be on the very bottom haven’t moved upvery far. In fact, the overall number of those liv-ing on $2 a day or less has actually gone up a bitsince 1981—by about 100 million.135

The wealth of the world’s richest people isequally staggering. As of 2007, the world had 946billionaires worth a combined $3.5 trillion dol-lars, or an average of a tad over $3.5 billioneach.136 Now consider the wealth of the 2.4 billionpeople living in the world’s 54 poorest countries.



As their assets are so minimal, we can, roughlyspeaking, consider their annual income to be thesame as their wealth. Pretty much all they’ve got iswhat they make. Their annual income togetheramounts to $1.4 trillion, less than half of thewealth of the 946 richest people.137 Now let’s guessthat they do usually have a few assets—someclothes, tools, housing of some sort, perhaps aradio and some other saleable possessions—andestimate the value of those as equal to theirincome. That brings their wealth up to $2.8 tril-lion, still less than the wealth of the 946 richestindividuals. Think of it: 946 people are wealthierthan 2.4 billion people put together.

That’s a rough calculation, of course. So let’snarrow it down to one person, Bill Gates, worth

$56 billion in early 2007. And let’s make the com-parison straight on annual income this time.Gates’s assets increased by 6 billion during2006.138 The national incomes of 31 countries—Cambodia (population, 14 million), Madagascar(population, 19 million), Nicaragua (population,5 million), Zimbabwe (population, 13 million)and 27 others—are currently less than that.139 Inother words, Bill Gates is a modest national econ-omy all on his own.

The wealth of the average person in the richcountries leads to a substantial global consump-tion gap. The average person in the rich countriesconsumes 3 times as much grain, fish, and freshwater; 6 times as much meat; 10 times as muchenergy and timber; 13 times as much iron and


Poorest fifth

Distribution of world income based on persons:Richest fifth receives 150 times the poorest fifth

Distribution of world incomebased on countries:Richest fifth receives

66 times the poorest fifth

Richest fifth

Figure 1.7 The champagne glass of world wealth distribution. The fifth of world populationfrom the world’s riches countries receives about 66 times the income of the fifthof world population from the poorest countries. When calculated on the basis ofthe richest fifth of persons from all countries versus the poorest fifth from allcountries, the ratio of income disparity likely rises to 150 to 1.

Source: Based on Korten (1995) and World Bank (2007a).


steel; and 14 times as much paper as the averageresident of a developing country. And that aver-age person from a rich country uses 18 times asmuch in chemicals along the way.140 These con-sumption figures are lower than the 66-to-1income differential because the comparison hereis between the roughly 20 percent of the world’speople who live in industrial countries and theroughly 80 percent who don’t—not the richestfifth and poorest fifth of countries. If the 60 per-cent in the middle were removed from the calcu-lations, the consumption gap for many ofthese items would probably reach or exceed the66-to-1 ratio of income. (For some items, how-ever, it would not—even a very wealthy personcan eat only so much grain, fish, and meat.)141

Along with the consumption gap comes anequally significant pollution gap. The wealthy ofthe world create far more pollution per capitathan do the poor. For example, in the rich coun-tries, per capita emissions of carbon dioxide are12 times higher than in poor countries.142

Moreover, the rich countries are also more ableto arrange their circumstances such that effectsof the pollution they cause are not as signifi-cantly felt locally, as with the export of toxicwastes and dirty forms of manufacturing.

The consequences of these differentials areserious indeed. As of 2003, some 854 millionpeople in the world are undernourished, a figurethat is virtually unchanged from 10 years previ-ously.143 Twenty-five percent of the world’schildren under age five are malnourished.144 Inthe 54 poorest countries, 39 percent of thechildren under five years old are malnourished—a figure that reaches as high as 48 percent inBangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations.145

Hunger and malnutrition annually cause thedeath of almost 6 million children before theyreach the age of five.146 Because of rampant mal-nourishment, adults face a reduced capacity towork and children grow up smaller, have troublelearning, and experience lifelong damage to theirmental capacities.147

Many of the world’s poor find it difficult toprotect themselves from environmental bads. Asof 2001, 924 million people live in slums, generally

in shelter that does not adequately protect themfrom such environmental hazards as rain, snow,heat, cold, filth, and rats and other pests.148 Andthe number is rising fast; by 2030, it could be 2billion, the United Nations Human SettlementsAgency projects.149 Moreover, the world’s poor aremore likely to live on steep slopes and in low-lying areas that are prone to landslides and floods.More than 1 billion lack access to safe drinkingwater.150 Two and a half billion do not have ade-quate sanitation.151 The poor also typically findthemselves relegated to the least productivefarmland, undermining their capacity to providethemselves with sufficient food (as well asincome). Compounding the situation are thecommon associations between poor communitiesand increased levels of pollution and betweenpoverty and environmentally hazardous workingconditions.

It is also possible to have too much of thegood things in life. In the United Kingdom, two-thirds of men and half of women are now eitheroverweight or obese.152 From 1993 to 2005, theprevalence of obesity in the United Kingdomshot up from 16 to 24 percent of women and13 to 24 percent of men.153 The situation in theUnited States is even worse, with some 66 percentof all adults overweight or obese in 2004. Obesityin the United States has more than doubled since1980, to 33 percent.154 Other wealthy countrieshave also experienced rapid rises as lifestyles havebecome more sedentary and calorie intake hasincreased. The diseases associated with too muchfood are increasing as well: diabetes (especiallytype II), hypertension, heart disease, stroke, andmany forms of cancer.

But the problem of overweight is not limitedto the wealthy nations. Weight problems areincreasing dramatically in poorer nations, aspeople increasingly take up more sedentary livesthere, too, and as food consumption shifts moreinto the marketplace and away from home pro-duction, making healthier foods less readilyavailable for the poor. The World HealthOrganization (WHO) estimates that, worldwide,1.6 billion adults were overweight and 400million were obese, as of 2005.155 More than



30 percent of adults in Egypt and Kuwait areobese.156 The problem is particularly pronouncedin urban areas. In China, the obesity rate as of2002 was 7 percent, double what it was in 1992.But the rate was double in the cities in compari-son with the countryside.157 In some cities inChina, 20 percent or more are obese.158 In urbanSamoa, as many as 75 percent of adults areobese—not just overweight, but obese.159 Withexcess weight comes its many deleterious effectson health. Yet the world’s wealthy are generallybetter able to protect themselves from the conse-quences of high weight. Medical treatments fordiabetes, circulation problems, and cancer are farless accessible for the poor.

Considering these stark facts, it comes as nosurprise that people in the wealthy countries live anaverage of almost 28 years longer than those in thepoor countries—78.1 years versus 50.4 years—despite great advances in the availability of medicalcare.160 In 14 very poor countries, the average per-son has no better than a 50 percent chance ofreaching age 40.161 In the least developed countries,24 percent won’t even make it to age 5.162

Within-country differences in income have asubstantial impact on the quality of life for thepoor, even in rich countries. In the United States,some 3.5 million Americans experience a periodof homelessness during the year, about one-thirdof them children, according to a 2000 study.163

Although conditions have substantially improvedin the European Union since the mid-1990s,some 270,000 people in Germany, 80,000 inFrance, and 107,000 in the United Kingdom areliving in accommodations for the homeless atany one time, according to a 2006 study.164 Some5,000 in France, 20,000 in Germany, and 8,000 inSpain are sleeping rough, with no roof at all.165

Hunger can also exist in conditions of pros-perity. Take the United States, for example.Thirty million Americans—about 11 percent ofthe U.S. population—live in conditions of “foodinsecurity,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture’sterm for households that face difficulty meetingbasic food needs for all its members. About one-third of these households reported experiencing

involuntary hunger at some point during theyear. Rates of food insecurity are twice as high forblack and Hispanic households as they are forwhite households. A 2001 study found that 7 mil-lion Americans receive food assistance fromemergency food pantries and other sources inany given week.166 The USDA reports that in2004, 38 million Americans were eligible for foodstamps in any given month and that in 2006,states provided 359.5 million pounds of emer-gency free food.167

Food, shelter, longevity—these are the mostbasic of benefits we can expect from our envi-ronment. And yet people’s capabilities to attainthem are highly unequal. As Tom Anthanasiouhas observed, ours is a “divided planet.”168

The Rights and Beauty of Habitat

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve theintegrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic com-munity. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”169

These are probably the most famous lines everwritten by Aldo Leopold, one of the most impor-tant figures in the history of the environmentalmovement. His words direct our attention to abroader sense of the sustainability of our commu-nity and, in a way, to a broader sense of equalityand inequality. Understood in this way, sustain-ability and environmental justice concern not onlythe conditions of human life but also the condi-tions of the lives of nonhumans. Leopold alsodirects our attention to a word that is certainly oneof the hardest of all to define but is no less signifi-cant for that difficulty: beauty. (Indeed, the diffi-culty of defining beauty may be much of whatmakes it so significant.) Plus it is all about home—about ecos and habitat—and every living thing’sright to one that is sustainably beautiful and beau-tifully sustainable. As the eco-bard Bill Oliversings, “You have to have a habitat to carry on.”

Threats to the integrity, stability, and beautyof habitat are manifold. Take the loss of species.For example, of the 9,956 known species of birds,




Figure 1.8 A leaking gene pool: The IUCN “Red List” of threatened species, an annuallyupdated inventory.

Source: IUCN (2007).

Number Number Number of Number of threatened in threatened in

Number of species threatened 2007, as % of 2007, as % of described evaluated species in species speciesspecies by 2007 2007 described evaluated

Vertebrates

Mammals 5,416 4,863 1,094 20% 22%

Birds 9,956 9,956 1,217 12% 12%

Reptiles 8,240 1,385 422 5% 30%

Amphibians 6,199 5,915 1,808 29% 31%

Fishes 30,000 3,119 1,201 4% 39%

Subtotal 59,811 25,238 5,742 10% 23%

Invertebrates

Insects 950,000 1,255 623 0.07% 50%

Molluscs 81,000 2,212 978 1.21% 44%

Crustaceans 40,000 553 460 1.15% 83%

Corals 2,175 13 5 0.23% 38%

Others 130,200 83 42 0.03% 51%

Subtotal 1,203,375 4,116 2,108 0.18% 51%

Plants

Mosses 15,000 92 79 0.53 86%

Ferns and allies 13,025 211 139 1% 66%

Gymnosperms 980 909 321 33% 35%

Dicotyledons 199,350 9,622 7,121 4% 74%

Monocotyledons 59,300 1,149 778 1% 68%

Green Algae 3,715 2 0 0.00% 0%

Red Algae 5,956 58 9 0.15% 16%

Sub total 297,326 12,043 8,447 3% 70%

Others

Lichens 10,000 2 2 0.02% 100%

Mushrooms 16,000 1 1 0.01% 100%

Brown Algae 2,849 15 6 0.21% 40%

Subtotal 28,849 18 9 0.03% 50%

TOTAL 1,589,361 41,415 16,306 1% 39%


some 12 percent were threatened with extinctionas of 2007.170 Many have already gone; thepassenger pigeon, the dodo, the ivory-billedwoodpecker, and the 11 species of moa are onlysome of the best known. Since 1800, 103 havegone extinct.171 With its moa and other speciesthat developed without pressure from mam-malian predators, New Zealand has perhaps beenthe hardest hit; about half the bird species of theNorth and South Islands have disappeared in thepast 800 years.172

Estimates of extinction rates for all speciesvary widely because we still do not have a goodcount of how many there are, or ever were. Manyspecies are still unknown or survive in such lownumbers that they are hard to study. But even thelow estimates are staggering. Perhaps the mostwidely regarded account, based entirely on indi-vidual assessments for each species, is the “RedList” of the World Conservation Union, knownby the acronym IUCN, a 140-nation organiza-tion. (See Figure 1.8.) As of 2007, the Red Listregistered 16,306 species of plants and animals asthreatened with extinction. In addition to the 12percent of bird species, extinction is now a realand present possibility for 20 percent of mammalspecies, 4 percent of fish, 5 percent of reptiles,and 29 percent of amphibians, according to the2007 Red List.173 But while the IUCN hasreviewed the status of all bird species and about42 percent of all vertebrate species, very little isyet known about the status of invertebrates andplants. All told, as of 2007, the IUCN had evalu-ated the status of less than 3 percent of knownspecies.174 Most have been barely studied.

The overall extinction rate is thus in the realmof educated guesswork, given the spotty data wehave. Richard Leakey, the famous paleontologist,is one who has made a try. He suggests that wecould lose as many as 50 percent of all species onEarth in the next 100 years, largely because ofvery high rates of extinction among inverte-brates, the group we know the least about. (Forexample, nearly half of the insect species that theIUCN has assessed are threatened. However,evaluations often focus on species at risk.) IfLeakey is anywhere near right, that would put the

current period of extinction on the same scale asthe one that did in most dinosaurs and much ofeverything else 65 million years ago, and fourearlier periods that had a similar effect on theEarth’s biota. That’s why Leakey and Roger Lewincall the current period the “sixth extinction.”175

Some biologists have placed the current rate ofextinction for all species at between 5,000 and100,000 each year, somewhere between 1 speciesevery 10 minutes and 1 every 30 minutes,depending on how many species actually exist inthe world.176 If so, that means it is likely thatanother species, probably an insect, went extinctsince you began reading this chapter. When weadd in the extinction of subspecies and varieties,the decreasing diversity of planetary life is evenmore dramatic.

Of course, species have always come and gone,as Charles Darwin famously observed in his the-ory of natural selection. But the rate of theselosses has greatly increased since the beginningof the Industrial Revolution. Some have disap-peared because of habitat loss, as forestlands havebeen cleared, grasslands plowed, and wetlandsdrained and filled. Some have suffered frompollution of their habitat. Some have foundthemselves with no defenses against animals,plants, and diseases that humans have brought,often unintentionally, from other regions of theworld into their habitat. The Earth is a single,gigantic preserve for life, and we have not beenhonoring its boundaries and protecting itsinhabitants.

The loss of species is an instrumental issue ofsustainability. The leaking global gene pool meansa declining genetic resource base for the develop-ment of new crops, drugs, and chemicals. In addi-tion, most ecologists suspect that decreaseddiversity destabilizes ecosystems—ecosystemsthat we, too, need to survive. But the ethical andaesthetic impact of the loss of so many forms oflife may be as great, if not greater.

The loss is not only one of forms of life butalso forms of landscape. Take deforestation. Theworld has lost about half of its original area offorestland.177 Between 2000 and 2005, the losscontinued as another 1 percent of the world’s



forested landscapes disappeared, some 36.6 mil-lion hectares—an area about the size ofGermany.178 Africa lost 3.2 percent, and SouthAmerica lost 2.5 percent, just in those fiveyears.179 In Brazil, home to most of the Amazonrainforest, we lost another 3.2 percent, despitemany efforts to slow deforestation there.180 Aboutone-third of the world’s remaining forestlandsare what ecologists call primary forests, little dis-turbed by human use. Alarmingly, most of thecontinuing loss—some 30 million hectaresduring the period from 2000 to 2005—is of theseprimary forests, with their richness of speciesand habitat.181 The good news is that the rate offorest loss is now slowing somewhat, due largelyto replanting efforts.182 But replanted forests arepoor substitutes for the woods they replace, atleast in terms of biodiversity—the ecologicalequivalent of exchanging the paintings in theLouvre for a permanent display of engineeringblueprints.

There’s another loss, too—the disappearanceof a kind of quiet intimacy with the Earth, thesense of being connected to the land and to eachother through land. It is a common complaintthat modern technology removes us from contactwith a greater, wilder, and somehow realer reality.This removal, it should be said, has been thewhole point of modern technology, but somehave come to wonder whether our lives are emp-tier because of it. A romantic concern, perhaps.But do we want a world without romance?

Moreover, the loss of quiet intimacy is notmerely a philosophical matter. It is physical, too.We in the industrialized world are seldom awayfrom the sound of machines, and we generallyinteract with the world by means of machines.Got something to do? Get a machine. Try toescape from the constant sound of machines?Good luck. Saturday morning in the suburbs, andthe lawn mowers and leaf blowers are at it, andlate into the summer night, the air-conditioners


Figure 1.9 The beauty of habitat: Sunrise over Grenadier Island, St. Lawrence River, 2007.

Source: Author.


hum and the highways growl. Out in the country-side, the situation is often no better: tractors,snowmobiles, Jet Skis, motorcycles, passing air-planes, chain saws, all manner of power tools, andthe nearly inescapable sound of the highwayexcept in the remotest locations. Back at theoffice, the lights buzz, the computer whines, theair-handling equipment rushes with a constantDarth Vader exhale, and the traffic—always thetraffic—invades the sanctum of the ear with anever-present tinnitus of technology. And wehardly seem to notice. We have lost our hearing,our hearing for habitat.

And finally, there’s the question of our right tomake such great transformations in the world.Nothing lasts forever, of course. Over millions ofyears, even a mountain is worn away by erosion.Wind, rain, ice, and changes in temperature con-stantly sculpt the land, and the shape of Earth’ssurface constantly changes as a result. But geolo-gists now recognize humans to be the mostsignificant erosive force on the planet.183

Agriculture, forest cutting, road building, min-ing, construction, landscaping, and the weather-ing effects of acid rain—all these have resulted inenormous increases in the amount of sedimentthat rivers carry into the oceans. We wield thebiggest sculptor’s chisel now. Perhaps it is ourright. If so, then it is also our responsibility.

Although I have not covered the question ofthe rights and beauty of habitat in much detail,let me conclude here. After all these pages on ourenvironmental problems, I’m exhausted. Maybethat’s the most difficult environmental problemof all. There are so many of them.

The Social Constitution ofEnvironmental Problems

These matters seemed quite remote at that lovelybrunch as we loaded up our plates with fruitsalad, coffee cake, scrambled eggs, bread, butter,and those great hominy grits. Remote but ironic.Here I was amid a group of three families whoseincomes, although not unusually high by

Western standards, were sufficient to command abrunch that two centuries ago would have beenseen as lavish even by royalty. And what was Idoing? Once I had finished explaining environ-mental sociology, I was reaching for seconds.

My point is not that there is something wrongwith pigging out every once in a while. Nor is itthat consumption is necessarily a bad thing. (Toconsume is to live.) Rather, I tell this storyto highlight how social circumstances can lead tothe sidelining of concern and action about envi-ronmental consequences.

Everything we do has environmental implica-tions, as responsible citizens recognize today.Although at the time sociology’s relevance for theenvironment was less widely recognized, the adultsat that brunch 10 years ago were genuinely inter-ested in my explanation of environmental sociol-ogy. They listened avidly for the two minutes thedynamics of politeness grant in such a setting. Butthe currents of social life quickly washed over themomentary island of recognition and concern thatmy explanation had created. Soon we were allreaching for more of the eggs from chicken-factoryhens; the fruit salad with its bananas raised ondeforested land and picked by laborers poorly pro-tected from pesticides; the coffee cake made withbutter and milk from a dairy herd likely hundredsof energy-consuming miles away; the grits madefrom corn grown at the price of one bushel of soilerosion for one bushel of grain. Meanwhile, theconversation moved on to other matters. Andshortly, we guests got into our cars and drovehome, spewing greenhouse gases, smog, and fineparticulates all along the way.

A completely ordinary brunch. But do yourefuse to invite friends over because you cannoteasily get environmentally friendly ingredientsfor the dishes you know how to prepare? Do yourefuse a host’s food because it was produced in adamaging and unjust manner? And do you refusean invitation to brunch because the buses don’trun very regularly on a Sunday morning, becausea 20-minute ride in the bike trailer in below-freezing weather seems too harsh and long foryour 5-year-old, and because no one nearby



enough to carpool with is coming to the party?Do you refuse, especially when you have yourown car sitting in the driveway, as is almost cer-tainly the case in the United States?

Likely not.What leads to this sidelining of environmental

concern and action is the same thing that manu-factures environmental problems to begin with:the social constitution of daily life—how we as ahuman community institute the many structuresand motivations that pattern our days, makingsome actions convenient and immediately sensi-ble and other actions not.184 Caught in the flowof society, we carry on and carry on and carry on,perhaps pausing when we can to get a view ofwhere we’re eventually headed, but in the mainjust trying to keep afloat, to be sociable, and toget to where we want to go on time. Our lives areguided by the possibilities our social situationpresents to us and by our vision of what thosepossibilities are—that vision itself being guided inparticular directions by our social situation. Thatis to say, it is a matter of the social organization ofour material conditions, the ideas we bring tobear upon them, and the practices we thereforeenact. Yet the environmental implications ofthose conditions, ideas, and practices are seldoma prominent part of how we socially constitute

our situation. Instead, that constitution typicallydepends most on a more immediate presence inour lives: other people.

We need, I believe, to consider the environmentas an equally immediate (and more social) pres-ence in our lives. That does not mean we need tobe always thinking about the environmental con-sequences of what we do. As an environmentalsociologist, I cannot expect this—especially whenI don’t always think about environmental conse-quences myself. People have lots and lots of otherconcerns. Nor should it be necessary to thinkconstantly about environmental consequences.Rather, what is necessary is to think carefullyabout how we as a community constitute the cir-cumstances in which people make environmen-tally significant decisions. What is necessary is tocreate social situations in which people take theenvironmentally appropriate action, even when, aswill often be the case, they are not at that momentconsciously considering the environmental conse-quences of those actions. What is necessary is toreconstitute our situations so what we daily findourselves doing compromises neither our socialnor our environmental lives.

The challenge of environmental sociology isto illuminate the issues such a reconstitutionmust consider.




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Environmental Problems and Society...Environmental Problems and Society Without self-understanding we cannot hope for enduring solutions to environmental problems, which are fundamentally