=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #256
—October 23, 1991—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
==========
The Back issues and Index
are available
here.
The official RACHEL archive is here.
It’s updated constantly.
To subscribe, send E-mail to rachel-
weekly-
request@world.std.com
with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It’s free.
===Previous Issue==========================================Next Issue===
POVERTY IS AN ENVIRONMENTAL
ISSUE–CONFRONTING REAL LIMITS TO GROWTH
Pick up the NEW YORK TIMES, the WALL STREET JOURNAL or the
WASHINGTON POST. Select any article on the U.S. economy and
you’ll read something like, “The problem is slow growth.” The
very definition of an economic recession is slow growth. When the
rate of economic growth diminishes, America finds itself in
trouble.
The expectation of growth, the assumption of growth, is
fundamental to our way of life. We expect our children will be
better off than we are because a continuously-growing economy
creates more of everything to go around. Our children’s
proportion of the pie may be no larger than ours, but the total
pie will be larger so their slice will contain more benefits and
they will be better off.
We expect growth to solve the problems of poverty in our own
country, and to solve the problems of impoverished developing
countries. Growth saves us from having to make hard political
choices about who deserves what benefits. Even a poor person who
gets only a small proportion of the economic pie will have more
next year if the total pie grows larger. Likewise, even a poor
country will be able to pull itself out of poverty if the global
economy grows to make the total pie larger.
If growth disappears, the only other approaches require either
(a) declaring that some people simply don’t deserve to have their
needs met; or (b) divvying up the present-size pie more evenly
(redistributing income and wealth). Obviously, each of these
approaches has serious drawbacks, so continued growth is
considered the only acceptable way to proceed. For many, belief
in growth has taken on the dimensions of a religion. Those who
question growth are viewed as heretics.
In 1987 the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and
Development (nicknamed the Brundtland Commission for its
chairwoman, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway)
published OUR COMMON FUTURE arguing that what the world needed
was SUSTAINABLE growth and development.[1] What is sustainable
development? It is development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs. Human activities should be judged by
whether they are SUSTAINABLE or not. This was an important new
idea and it spread quickly. It has now been widely adopted as a
goal by nearly every nation–even by the wealthiest, which are
living least sustainably.
However, like all new ideas, this one is subject to various
interpretations. For example, some members of the Brundtland
Commission argue that solving global poverty will require
continuous economic growth until the total world economy is 5 to
10 times larger than it is today. This is the old, familiar idea
that the pie must grow until each tiny slice becomes large enough
to meet a human’s basic needs.
Thus the newly-recognized need for “sustainable development”
collapses back into the old argument for continuous economic
growth.
The debate about “sustainable growth” has caused scientists and
economists to ask some fundamental questions about which human
activities are sustainable, and how much growth the planet can
sustain before it is irreparably damaged as a place suitable for
human habitation.
A group of researchers at the World Bank in Washington, DC are
now arguing that the limits to growth were reached some time ago
and that economic growth in the future will impoverish us all by
depleting the basic stock of goods that humans need for a
satisfying life.[2] They argue that the Earth probably cannot
sustain a doubling of the total economy, much less an increase of
5-to 10-fold. Their argument goes like this:
The global ecosystem is the source of all material inputs feeding
the economy, and it is the sink for all the economy’s wastes.
Population times per-capita resource consumption is the total
flow–throughput–of resources from the ecosystem to the economy,
then back to the ecosystem as waste.
Limits–particularly limits on the Earth’s capacity to assimilate
wastes–are now becoming visible everywhere. For example, every
drop of ocean water contains evidence of the 20 billion tons of
wastes added annually by the human economy. Wastes from human
energy systems have changed the chemical composition of the
entire atmosphere. Sites for garbage dumps are getting harder to
find–wastes are now being shipped thousands of miles to
developing countries in search of unfilled sinks. Waste disposal
has become a problem that will not go away.
Humans now use–directly or indirectly–about 40% of the net
primary productivity of the entire land-surface of the planet.[3]
Net primary productivity is the mass of plant material produced
each year by photosynthesis using energy from sunlight (on land
and in the oceans). Net primary productivity is the total food
resource on the earth. Humans, directly or indirectly, now use
about 40% of the products of photosynthesis on land, and the rate
of increase in human use is about 2% per year, which means within
35 years we could be using 80% of terrestrial net primary
productivity. There are between 5 million and 30 million species
on earth, and for a single species to be co-opting even 50% of
terrestrial net primary productivity for its own uses is a clear
indication that real limits to growth are closer than we have
imagined. In short, the world is full. Fifty years ago, it
looked nearly empty. Today it is full.
Global warming is another indication of a limit reached; 1990 was
the warmest year in more than a century of record-keeping. The
1980s were 1 degree Fahrenheit (F) warmer than the 1880s while
1990 was 1.25 degrees F warmer. A few scientists still doubt that
global warming has begun but even the doubters don’t dispute that
it will eventually occur if we continue to load the atmosphere
with carbon dioxide. Today the dispute is more about proper
responses to global warming than about its eventual occurrence.
Depletion of the Earth’s ozone shield, discovered in 1985, is
further evidence that we have already exceeded the planet’s
limits. U.S. government scientists today estimate that
already-existing damage to the ozone layer will cause a billion
human cancers worldwide, will depress the human immune system
with unforeseen consequences (none of them good), and will
diminish yields of crops and of marine fisheries.
Land degradation is further evidence of limits reached and
exceeded. Thirty-five percent of the Earth’s land has already
been irreparably degraded by human activities. In agricultural
areas, soil loss exceeds the rate of soil regeneration by at
least 10-fold at a time when a billion people are malnourished.
As marginal lands are cultivated, soil loss worsens.
Extinction of species offers more evidence that limits have been
reached. Low estimates put present-day extinction rates at more
than 5000 species lost per year–a rate 10,000 times faster than
occurred before humans walked the Earth. Our genetic library is
disappearing; with its loss, future inventions and developments
are being foregone.
The regenerative and assimilative capacities of the earth are
already exceeded. Therefore growth on the scale envisioned by
Brundtland is simply not possible.
If the earth is full, or nearly so, then throughput (defined as
population times per-capita consumption) must be reduced. Poor
countries cannot cut per-capita resource use; indeed they must
increase it to reach sufficiency, so their focus must be on
population control. Rich countries can cut both, to make
resources available for transfer to help bring the poor up to
sufficiency. Rich nations have achieved wealth using
technologies that have accumulated global toxins to a degree that
makes it impossible for developing countries to employ those same
technologies. Therefore rich countries should be prepared to
compensate poor countries for these closed options. It’s a matter
of simple justice.
Economic development (as distinct from economic growth) is an
improvement in quality of life without necessarily causing an
increase in resources consumed. Sustainable growth is not
possible; sustainable development probably is.
As we make the transition in our thinking, from an empty-world
view to a full-world view, we lose the convenient fiction that
growth alone can solve poverty.[4] Growth in throughput must
cease in the rich nations and, indeed, they must redistribute
some of their wealth to the poor nations. Throughput of the U.S.
economy must cease growing. Under these circumstances, growth is
no longer available to relieve poverty within the U.S. This
leaves only two choices, already mentioned: (1) declare that some
people simply don’t deserve to have their needs met, or (2)
redistribute income and wealth. Events in Louisiana, where an
avowed white supremacist is running for governor, highlight the
fundamental choices we all must face as the economic transition
proceeds. Because the full-world view is based on environmental
considerations, and because the traditional U.S. environmental
movement has not taken the initiative in confronting these
fundamental issues, the grass-roots movement for environmental
justice in the U.S. will likely play a prominent role in the
coming debate.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
===============
[1] Gro Harlem Brundtland and others, OUR COMMON FUTURE (NY and
London: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Descriptor terms: global environmental problems; growth;
sustainable development; brundtland commission; economics; world
bank; resources; global warming; ozone depletion; wealth;
economic development; gro harlem brundtland; norway; poverty;