=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #296
—July 29, 1992—
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
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WHAT WORKS–PART 1: THE WAY OUT OF OUR PREDICAMENT
All of us are participating in a great transition, whether we
recognize it or not. For more than 150 years, we have developed
machines and organizations aimed at producing an ever-increasing
stream of physical products. In the old language we called these
“goods,” and many of them satisfied basic human needs and in that
sense were genuinely good.
But in 1987 a remarkable change occurred. In that year a few
world leaders began to ask whether the industrial system is
sustainable.[1] And the answer came back from many quarters, “No,
definitely not.”
It is not that we are running out of resources; when shortages
develop, we have a remarkable capacity to substitute new
materials for those that are scarce. For example, when we start
to run out of copper for making wires cheaply, we substitute
glass fibers. By substitution, it seems, we can keep the wolf
from the door for some time.
It is waste disposal that is doing us in. As the economists like
to say, we have run out of “sinks” for our wastes.[2] Everything
has to go somewhere, and we have run out of places to hide our
poisonous wastes. It used to be that we could send them to rural
Alabama or to El Salvador, or to Africa, but instant worldwide
communication has closed off those options. People everywhere
know what’s going on and are refusing to accept boatloads of our
wastes.
Furthermore, ocean currents and the wind have brought the wastes
themselves back from Africa and El Salvador. We are finding them
now in our air and water, and in our morning coffee. Toxics are
literally everywhere. Furthermore, every time we examine them, we
find new ways in which they are harming us. To any thoughtful
person, it seems clear that if we continue to dump “bads” into
the environment as we make more “goods,” we will do ourselves in.
That process is already well along.
Nevertheless, improving the situation is not easy because we have
so little experience to draw upon. The United States is one of
the toughest nations on earth when it comes to pollution control.
I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. There are few
countries as strict as the U.S. But even the U.S. had no
pollution control laws before 1948 when Congress passed a weak
Water Pollution Control Act. Real pollution control laws didn’t
begin until 1969. Therefore, our human organizations
(corporations and government) have less than 50 years’ experience
with ANY pollution controls and only about 20 years’ experience
with real laws. On top of that, it has only been since 1985
(seven years ago) that the public could really comprehend the
urgency of our situation. It was 1985 when the public was told
for the first time that the Earth’s protective ozone layer was
being destroyed by CFCs (chemicals used in refrigeration systems).
So we find ourselves VERY SUDDENLY faced with a situation we have
almost no experience handling: we have learned VERY SUDDENLY that
our technology is destroying our life-support system, and we have
almost no experience curbing our technological desires. The rule
has always been, if we CAN do it, we SHOULD do it. Now suddenly
the rule is, if we CAN do it, we must ask WILL IT COME BACK LATER
TO KILL US? In other words, IS IT SUSTAINABLE? This is a new
ballgame indeed.
Since 1965, industry has developed one basic response to all new
regulations: delay the inevitable. Look at tobacco. Here is a
product which, when used as directed, kills roughly 390,000
Americans each year. Sooner or later tobacco will be outlawed by
governments, or lawsuits brought by tobacco victims will force
tobacco company executives to get real jobs. Indeed, the tobacco
companies began branching into other lines of work a decade ago,
preparing for the inevitable while stalling for time. They merely
wanted elbow room to make the transition. Now they manufacture
artificial cookies and synthetic frozen pizzas so they don’t need
to sell tobacco, though of course they’re not going to abandon
tobacco entirely without another decade of fussing. They’ll buy
as much time as they can. It’s the tobacco strategy, and it’s all
they know to do. The basic idea is: whenever your back is to the
wall, delay three decades.
The tobacco strategy has been adopted by all large organizations,
corporate and governmental. Faced with a rising demand for
tighter regulations, they seek delay. They fudge and waffle, or
they paw the ground and snort fiercely. They hire scientists to
reinterpret the data. When absolutely necessary, they fabricate
data; they lie. They hire publicists to control spin. Then, when
they’ve bought themselves sufficient time to make the required
changes, they shrug and go along. (Eventually they pretend they
invented the idea of change in the first place and give
themselves awards for good citizenship.)
But now the situation is quite different. At this juncture in
history, the tobacco strategy will bring great harm. Thirty
years’ delay will severely damage the world environment.
The need for rapid change to “sustainable development” is widely
understood among the rich and powerful. In July, 1989, the “G7
Summit” of the world’s seven richest industrial nations called
for “the early adoption, worldwide, of policies based on
sustainable development.” This was an explicit recognition, at
the highest levels of political power, that present development
policies are not sustainable.
A group of business leaders, including the presidents of Chevron,
Dow and DuPont–published a book recently, in which they told us
that the industrial system is not sustainable:
WHEN THE ENVIRONMENT REEMERGED ON THE POLITICAL AGENDA IN THE
1980S, THE MAIN CONCERNS HAD BECOME INTERNATIONAL: ACID RAIN,
DEPLETION OF THE OZONE LAYER, AND GLOBAL WARMING. ANALYSTS SOUGHT
CAUSES NOT IN PIPES AND STACKS BUT IN THE NATURE OF HUMAN
ACTIVITIES. ONE REPORT AFTER ANOTHER CONCLUDED THAT MUCH OF WHAT
WE DO, MANY OF OUR ATTEMPTS TO ‘MAKE PROGRESS,’ ARE SIMPLY
UNSUSTAINABLE. WE CANNOT CONTINUE IN OUR PRESENT METHODS OF USING
ENERGY, MANAGING FORESTS, FARMING, PROTECTING PLANT AND ANIMAL
SPECIES, MANAGING URBAN GROWTH, AND PRODUCING INDUSTRIAL GOODS.
WE CERTAINLY CANNOT CONTINUE TO REPRODUCE OUR OWN SPECIES AT THE
PRESENT RATE.
ENERGY PROVIDES A STRIKING EXAMPLE, OF PRESENT
UNSUSTAINABILITY….
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WILL OBVIOUSLY REQUIRE MORE THAN
POLLUTION PREVENTION AND TINKERING WITH ENVIRONMENTAL
REGULATIONS. GIVEN THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE–CONSUMERS, BUSINESS
PEOPLE, FARMERS–ARE THE REAL DAY-TO-DAY ENVIRONMENTAL
DECISION-MAKERS, IT REQUIRES POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS BASED
ON THE EFFECTIVE PARTICIPATION OF ALL MEMBERS OF SOCIETY IN
DECISION MAKING. IT REQUIRES THAT ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS
BECOME A PART OF THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES OF ALL GOVERNMENT
AGENCIES, ALL BUSINESS ENTERPRISES, AND IN FACT ALL PEOPLE.[3]
Who said this? Kenneth T. Derr, chairman of the board of Chevron
Oil; Shinroku Morohashi, president of Mitsubishi; Alex Krauer,
president of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Ciga-Geigy; Frank
Popoff, president of Dow Chemical; William Ruckelshaus, president
of Browning-Ferris Industries; Edgar S. Woolard, president of
DuPont. The list goes on.
So we have a situation in which the people at the top recognize
that they’ve built their house on sand, and that a radically
different set of priorities must be brought to bear fairly
quickly.
So we must ask ourselves, where is the engine of change? Does it
lie with the rich and powerful? They say not. They say,
THE PAINFUL TRUTH IS THAT THE PRESENT IS A RELATIVELY COMFORTABLE
PLACE FOR THOSE WHO HAVE REACHED POSITIONS OF MAINSTREAM
POLITICAL OR BUSINESS LEADERSHIP. THAT IS THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM
OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, AND PERHAPS THE MAIN REASON WHY THERE
HAS BEEN GREAT ACCEPTANCE OF IT IN PRINCIPLE, BUT LESS CONCRETE
ACTIONS TO PUT IT INTO PRACTICE: MANY OF THOSE WITH THE POWERS TO
EFFECT THE NECESSARY CHANGES HAVE THE LEAST MOTIVATION TO ALTER
THE STATUS QUO THAT GAVE THEM THAT POWER.[4]
Where then?
Worldwide, the engine for change is ordinary people. This is
particularly true in the U.S., where Constitutional freedoms
allow people to speak out, and to organize their communities.
A new report from a new organization has begun to catalog the
ways in which ordinary people are provoking change at the local
level in the U.S. The organization is called Environmental
Exchange, and their first report is called WHAT WORKS; AIR
POLLUTION SOLUTIONS.[5]
Here we read, “[The environmental movement’s] impetus rests in
people who are angry about the contamination of their
communities, people who don’t want their children to get cancer
from a local factory’s wastes, people who value the richness of
animal and plant life, people who demand clean air and clean
water and are willing to fight for it.” (pg. 3)
Next week we’ll look into this report, to learn what works.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
===============
[1] Gro Harlem Brundtland and others, OUR COMMON FUTURE (NY and
London: Oxford University Press, 1987).
[4] Schmidheiny, cited above, pg. 11.
Descriptor terms: tobacco strategy; sustainable development; g7
summit; environmental exchange; tobacco industry; corporations;