Making Peace With the Planet. - book reviews

This is an important work which deserves careful reading by progressive people in both the developed and underdeveloped world. Barry Commoner, trained as a biologist and currently the Director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, began laboring in the field of understanding environmental destruction long before it was fashionable. Operating from a radical perspective which enables him to see the problem in its historical economic and political context, he has produced a clearly written and succinct book which manages both to deal with all the important general issues while being chock full of concrete and practical details.

Commoner contrasts approaches to the causes of environmental problems and ways of overcoming them: the conventional-liberal and the radical. I will examine each in turn, in terms of Commoner's assessment.

The conventional/liberal approach sees the present environmental crisis as basically the result of some combination of population growth and economic growth. In the words of Paul Ehrlish in The Population Bomb. "The causal chain of the deterioration [of the environment] is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide--all can be traced easily to too many people." (p. 143) In short, this views is an updated version of the Malthusian view that population is outgrowing our limited natural resources.

The long run solution to the environmental problem in this view is to limit population growth. In the meantime, however, controls on the dissemination of pollugtants are needed. Since this must take place without seriously impeding the workings of the market, the focus is on controlling the spread of pollutants once they have been produced. Thus, in the United States, the principal efforts in the past two decades have come under the regulation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which according to Commoner's estimates, led to a trillion dollars' worth of private and public expenditure to improve the quality of water and air and control the spread of toxic wastes. (p.20) Yet, as Commoner details, the country has little to show for this massive effort. While there has been improvement in some intensively targeted areas, in more places there has been continued deterioration.

The radical appraoch advanced by Commoner sees t6he failure to stem the decline of the environment as perfectly understandable, since it does not strike at the core of the problem. In Chapter 1, "At War with the Planet, "Commonder lays out a fundamental contradiction: that between the ecosphere, ot "natural environment," and the technosphere, the human-created system of production and distribution:

What we call the 'environmental crisis'--the array of critical unsolved problems ranging from local toxic dumps to the disruption of global climate--is a product of the drastic mismatch between the cyclical, conservative, and self-consistent processes of the ecosphere and the linear, innovative, but ecologically disharmonious processes of the technosphere. (p.15)

For example, a stable ecosphere is governed by ecological laws such as "everything is connected to everything else" and "everything has to go somewhere." These ensure that processes are cyclical and do not generate waste. Plants take carbon dioxide from the air and nitrates from the soil, and are eaten by animals, which excrete carbon dioxide into the air and organic compounds to the soil, subsequently converted by microorganisms into nitrates. In the technosphere, in contrast, processes tend to be linear and to generate waste which fouls the ecosystem. Nitrogen fertilizers are increasingly applied to crops to increase yields, even though more and more of the fertilizers drain through the soil as nitrates, which pollute rivers and lakes and water supplies.

More specifically, Commoner sees the present environmental crisis as rooted in relatively recent changes in production technology:

Environmental degradation is built into the technical design of the modern instruments or production ....

In sum, there have been sweeping changes in the technology of production since World War II. Natural products--soap, cotton, wool, wood, paper, and leather--have been displaced by synthetic petrochemical products: detergents, synthetic fibers, and plastics. In agriculture, natural fertilizers--manure and nitrogen-fixing crops--have been displaced by checmical fertilizers; and natural methods of pest control--crop rotation, ladybugs and birds-have been displaced by synthetic pesticides. In transportation, small cars have been replaced by much larger ones, trolley cars by buses, and rail freight by truck freight. In commerce, reusable goods have been replaced by throwaways. These changes have turned the nation's farms, factories, vehicles and shops into seedbeds of pollution. (p.55, emphasis added)

Moreover, as Commoner points out, the particular production technologies developed in this period were not necessary for economic growth and consumer satisfaction. Contrary to the American myth of consumer as king:

In every case, then, the change in production technology, although it interacts with the market and other relevant social factors, is initiated by the producer and is governed by the producer's interests. In the U.S. economy, the motivation that exclusively governs such investment decisions is increased profit and market share. (p. 80).

By way of example, Commoner cites the switch from small to large cars, justified by Henry Ford II because "minicars make miniprofits." This decision was critized even by John DeLorean, former GM executive: "When we should have been planning switches to smaller, more fuel-efficient, lighter cars in the late 1960s in response to a growing demand in the marketplace, GM management refused because 'we make more money on big cars.'" (quotas on pp. 80-81) And since larger cars need high compression engines which emit nitrogen oxides, the upshot, for Commoner, is that "Smog is a consequence of the automobile industry's devotion to the 'bottom line.'" (p. 81).

Commoner is well aware that environmental problems are not limited to the capitalist countries:

By far the worst cases of radioactive contamination, of which the accident at Chernobyl is only the most spectacular, have occurred in the Soviet union; Czechoslovakia and Poland have the highest levels of industrial pollutants in Europe, and perhaps the world; the socialist countries, especially the Soviet Union, have rapidly adopted the same agricultural chemicals that are responsible for polluted water supplies and pesticide-contaminated food in the United States and Europe.... (pp.219-220).

But for those who believe that this disproves the idea that capitalist-driven technology is the main environmental culprit, he has a convincing rejoinder:

One reason is that--as the Soviet government now admits--until recently, advocates of social interests such as environmentalism have not been free to comment on, let alone influence, government decisions. A less obvious--but decisive--reason is that most of the systems of production that the socialist countries have adopted were in fact developed in the capitalist countries after World War II: for example, chemical agriculture, nuclear power plants, and the petrochemical industry. Having been developed with no concern for their environmental impact, these production systems wreak their havoc on the environment equally in capitalist countries and the socialist ones. It is, after all, unreasonable to expect that the automobiles produced in the Soviet Union at Togliattigrad, by a plant imported intact from the Italian company, Fiat, would refrain from emitting the same pollutants in Moscow that they produce in Rome--perhaps out of respect for socialism. (p. 220).

In a very illuminating chapter on "Population and Poverty," Commoner convincingly demonstrates the key role of technology as against the neo-Malthusian "explanation" for the environmental crisis. His basic method is to divide the total amount of pollution generated in producing any commodily into three components: the pollution per unit of the commodity produced (the "technology factor"), multiplied by production of the commodity per capita (the "affluence factor"), multiplied by the size of the population (the "population factor'). Commoner then goes on to show a pattern "typical of the new post-1950 production technologies." For example, in the 195-1967 period, when pesticide use for crop production jumped by 266 percent, population increased by only 30 percent and per capita crop production (the affluence factor) by only 5 percent. The amount of pesticide used per unit of crop production (the technology factor), however, jumped by 165 percent. (p.150)

Unfortunately, the data for Third World countries are not as detailed as these for the United States, but indirect data indicate a similar pattern. In 90 such countries, where use of nitrogen fertilizer, "a proxy for nitrate pollution," increased annually by 8.6 percent, population rose by only 2.5 percent while per capital crop production actually dropped. Here again, fertilizer use per unit of crop production (the technology factor) increased by 6.6 percent. (p. 152)

Since population is nevertheless one of the three factors which does ultimately affect the level of pollution, Commoner goes on to explore the relationship between population and economic growth. From his examination of the data in this complex area, he comes down decisively on the side of those who believe that poverty causes excessive population growth, rather than the other way around. [MR readers will be pleased to note that part of his case is based on a "remarkable book by Mahmood Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control" (Monthly Review Press, 1972). (p. 151)]

As for the other half of the Malthusian argument, that the earth has limited resources, Commoner makes the following profound ecological analysis:

The "limits to growth" approach is based on a serious misconception about the global ecosystem. It depends upon the idea that the Earth is like a spaceship, a closed system isolated from all outside sources of support and necessarily sustained only by its own limited resources. But the ecosphere is not in fact a closed, isolated system, for it is totally dependent on the huge influx of energy from an outside source--the sun. Living things must be provided with energy to sustain their vital processes, in particular growth, development, and reproduction. That energy is derived from the sun ....

In the abstract sense, there is a global "limit to growth," but this is determined not by the persent availability of resources but by a distant limit to the availability of solar energy....since matter is, after all, indestructible, the chemical elements tht comprise the planet's resources can be recycled and reused indefinitely, as long as the energy necessary to collect and refine them is available....

If, let us say, only 10 percent of the total solar energy falling on land could be captured, it would still be possible to expand our present rate of using energy a hundredford before encountering the theoretical limit to growth. Even if this figure should turn out to be somewhat optimistic, it seems clear that we are at present nowhere near the limit that the availability of solar energy will eventually impose on production and economic growth. That distant limit is irrelevant to current policy. (pp. 146-148)

From this vantage point, Commoner's hoped-for solution to the environmental crisis flows logically. The key is to change our production technologies. He believes there is ample reason to feel optimistic about the technical possibilities. Actual and prospective developments in solar power, organic farming and integrated pest management, recycling trash, etc., are sufficiently well established in Commonder's view that "the technological basis for the transformation of the present systems of production to ecologically sound ones is largely in hand." (p. 196)

The fundamental obstacle, of course, is that "such a tranformation of the systems of production conflicts with the short-term profit-maximizing goals that now govern investment decision; and that, accordingly, politically suitable means must be developed that bring the public interest in long-term environmental quality to bear on these decisions." (p. 193)

In his concluding chapter, the author lays out what is needed even more bluntly:

As we have seen, our reigning ideology, capitalism, clashes with the reality of the environmental crisis--not to speak of the reality of our country's shameful levels of poverty, and our inadequacies in the areas of housing, medical care and education. We in America have as much reason as the Soviet Union to engage in a Perestroika of our own--to open to public discussion the serious conflict between our unexamined capitalist ideology and the failed effort to resolve the environmental crisis--as a prelude to radical (in the sence of getting at the root of the problem) remedial action. (p. 226)

Writing in 1988-1989, Commoner was hopeful that various forces which were operating were coming together to bring about the realistic possibility of such unprecedented radical change. The sudded upsurge of the pro-democracy forces in Eastern Europe and China and the growth of the Green vote in West Germany and the European Parliament, combined with the end of the Cold War to create the possibility of a huge peace dividend to fund the necessary changes in the productive forces. The collapse of the socialist alternative and the present, if perhaps temporary, declined of the Green movement, the pell-mell conversion of pro-democracy forces into a euphoric embrace of the unfettered market, and the shift of military conflict to North-South, contribute to a gloomier current outlook. In hindsight, Commoner seems optimistic.

But this is a small and understandable shortcoming. Overall, Commoner has provided a lucid and profound critique of the historical capitalist roots of the environmental crisis, and begun the process of thinking through the necessary changes. In cynical and mean-spirited eras, ideologues of self-interest have often hidden behind pseudoscientific tributes to the "value-free" invisible hand. It is both refreshing and heartwarming to see a distinguished scientist like Commoner not only strip away the veil of "scientific objectivity," but also come down on the side of altruism and internationalism. This comes through clearly in his moving discussion of poverty and population:

My own purely personal conclusion is, like all of these, not scientific but political: the world population crisis, which is the ultimate outcome of the exploitation of poor nations by rich ones, ought to be remedied by returning to the poor countries enough of the wealth taken from them to give their peoples both the reason and the resources voluntarily to limit their own fertility.

In sum, I believe that if the root cause of the world population crisis is poverty, then to end it we must abolish poverty. And if the cause of poverty is the grossly unequal distribution of the world's wealth, then to end poverty, and with it the population crisis, we must redistribute that wealth, among nations and within them. (p. 168)

Michael Tanzer is president of Tanzer Economic Associates, Inc., a New York based consulting firm specializing in energy and environmental issues. His most recent book is Energy Update: Oil in the Late Twentieth Century (Monthly

Review Press, 1985).

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