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  • From: Nicholas Roberts <nicholas@themediasociety.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, Jack Heimsoth <djspiritsoul@gmail.com>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Beyond Green Capitalism Stan Cox's "Sick Planet" By CARMELO RUIZ-MARRERO
  • Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 18:36:15 +1100

Stan Cox's "Sick Planet"
Beyond Green Capitalism

By CARMELO RUIZ-MARRERO

Plant geneticist Stan Cox, senior research scientist at the
Kansas-based Land Institute, explains in his brilliant book "Sick
Planet" how two industries that are supposed to give life,
agribusiness and the health sector, are doing the exact opposite: they
destroy the environment, poison our bodies and turn disasters of their
own making into opportunities for profit and growth to boot.

Cox shows numerous specific instances of the social and ecological
wreckage inflicted all over the world by corporations like
GlaxoSmithkline, Tyson, Walmart and Monsanto: the toxic pollution
spewed by pharmaceutical factories in India, the horrors of industrial
cattle and poultry operations, and how the health industry afflicts us
not only with unaffordable health care but also with an endless stream
of unnecessary drugs and treatments, among many other wrongs.

The author is not the first to warn of the dangers and threats
presented by these two industries (Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan and
Michael Moore, among others, preceded him). "Sick Planet"'s main merit
is its profound and serious contribution to the debate and reflection
on solutions.

Cox does not dedicate the bulk of his outrage to the depredations of
capitalists but to the false solutions proposed by certain
environmentalist sectors which he views as naive and delusional, and
are doing more harm than good. Parting from a solid Marxist base, he
establishes that the political and economic changes necessary to get
us out of the ecological debacle will have to be much more radical
than the technocratic, eco-capitalist proposals that are bandied about
in these days.

"The planet's current predicament is not necessarily the work of evil,
scheming tycoons bent on personal enrichment", says Cox. "It is the
natural product of a system that rewards the industrious capitalist...
Just as we can't blame the current global predicament on 'bad'
corporate executives, we can't expect the 'good' ones to come to the
rescue. When corporate owners and managers claim they can't operate in
greener ways without sacrificing essential profits, they aren't just
being stubborn and greedy; they are acknowledging material reality."
(From the preface)

The author sees no merit in green capitalism proposals, which advocate
"win-win" scenarios, as he considers that these part from an awesome
and outrageous naivete. But neither does he take refuge in the
triumphalistic vanity of some leftist sectors that hold that
capitalism will self destruct due to its own internal contradictions.
He warns, quoting James Bellamy Foster, that capitalism has a
practically unlimited ability to transform itself when facing crises,
and even profit from them.

Cox also advises us to reject another triumphalist notion treasured by
some left-leaning enviros: that the ravages of global warming will
make the citizenry conscious of the evils of capitalism. If the
horrendous things that capitalism has done in the last few centuries
have not "created awareness", neither will global warming, argues the
author.

Apart from Marx, Cox also draws from the observations of other- less
well known- thinkers. One is the Romanian economist Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994), author of "The Entropy Law and the
Economic Process" (1971). Combining physics and biology with classical
economic theory, Georgescu-Roegen applied the second law of
thermodynamics (entropy) to economic activities and he arrived at a
terrifying conclusion: no matter what we do, the world is headed to
the depletion of all its natural resources, meaning total entropy. The
sum total of all economic activity only accelerates this inevitable
decline. All economic activity, no matter how abstract and electronic,
is founded ultimately on physical exploitation of natural resources.
Therefore, the more economic growth there is, the faster we are headed
to the fateful day of oblivion.

Based on the ideas of Georgescu Roegen, Cox reasons that, "provided
our species survives, there lies somewhere in its future another Stone
Age, and the faster our economic growth, the steeper the decline will
be. The next Stone Age will be more resource-poor and probably more
toxic than the last, and there will be no shot at a comeback." (p.
159-160)

Not surprisingly, the ideas of this prophet of doom were relegated to
the Orwellian memory hole, but throughout the 1970's several visionary
ecological thinkers welcomed his thesis. Two of these were Jeremy
Rifkin and Ted Howard, who in 1980 co-wrote "Entropy: A New World
View", whose afterword is written by Georgescu-Roegen himself. Rifkin
and Howard hold that an understanding of the law of entropy is a
fundamental requisite for a profound and revolutionary ecological
wisdom.

Cox makes reference to another ahead-of-the-curve scholar that gave
serious consideration to Georgescu-Roegen's ideas: economist Herman
Daly. From being a World Bank economist he went on to become one of
the leading lights in the budding field of ecological economics, and
has dedicated a good part of his intellectual energy to finding ways
to postone the next Stone Age to the unforeseeably far future. The
alternative that Daly proposes includes among its main elements a
reduction in the use of natural resources down to sustainable levels
and reducing the income gap between social classes. Daly presents this
thesis in his books "Steady State Economics" (1977) and "For the
Common Good" (1989), the latter co-authored with John Cobb. In 2004 he
published, with co-author Joshua Farley,"Ecological Economics:
Principles and Applications", an economics tex book in which they
propose the modification of existing institutions to rescue the
environment.

"While recognizing that inequality breeds insupportable growth, most
ecological economists reject direct expropriation of wealth and
property from those who have the most, preferring instead to put a
limit on the human economy's overall physical 'throughput' and have
the capitalist class pay the costs of its resource use and ecological
destruction", says Cox (p. 160). "But is capitalism the kind of
creature that can survive in captivity? The small, powerful class of
people who today reap its economic benefits can be counted upon to
rush headlong into ecological catastrophe rather than to permit the
creation of institutions like those proposed by Daly and Farley...
Manufacturers would simply refuse to slash their use of resources,
production of goods, and discard of wastes. And, most crucially, the
investing class would never agree to limit its accumulation of wealth
in favor of the world's impoverished majority." (p. 161)

No wonder then that so many entrepreneurs and politicians, even the
ones who fancy themselves green, support economic growth. Advocating
growth is more simpatico and "kumba-ya" and less controversial and
taking up the unpleasant subject of wealth redistribution.

Faced with this ineludible dilemma, advocates of green capitalism and
technological optimism seek refuge in the efficiency mantra. On first
sight, efficiency is universally good and devoid of controversy. ¿Who
can object to efficiency? Both business people and environmentalists
agree on this point. The idea of using technological innovation so
that economic activity uses less materials and energy and generates
less waste is an apolitical proposal that gives the impression that we
can save the planet without stopping economic growth and without
acknowledging the conflict between social classes.

But Cox cuts off our escape to that easy exit, using as a reference
another little-known thinker: British economist William Stanley
Jevons. In his book "The Coal Question" (1865), Jevons presents the
results of his thourough study of mid-nineteenth century coal mining,
which took a particularly close look at technological innovations that
made it possible to extract more coal at a lesser cost. His study's
conclusions were unsettling, as unsettling as Georgescu-Roegen's
thesis: the increase in efficiency does not lead to conservation of
the resource in question, BUT RATHER THE OPPOSITE. Increases in
efficiency lead to increases in consumption, thus accelerating the
resource's depletion, concluded Jevons.

>From the point of view of capitalist economics this makes plenty of
sense. If a capitalist finds a way to reduce costs, the savings will
not result in a reduction in the exploitation of labor and natural
resources. No way, what a capitalist would do is take those savings
and reinvest them in his operation in order to increase his profit
margin (You really think a capitalist would do otherwise?). In other
words, production will increase. And in ecological terms this means
more plunder and exploitation of natural resources.

But Cox does not end there. For him it is not enough to smash any
illusion that the reader might have about reconciling capitalism with
ecological sustainability. He delivers his coup de grace with his
refusal to end the book with a hopeful chapter filled with solutions
to the crisis. It is very premature, presumptuous and frivolous to do
such a thing at this moment, argues Cox.

The author concludes that one cannot conceive- much less build- an
ecological society without there being a broad consensus that the
current economic system, founded on never ending growth, cannot be
part of a new society. We must understand that all economic growth is
destructive and that therefore we cannot have both capitalism and a
habitable planet, says Cox. He goes on to warn that if we do not
achieve such an understanding, any proposal or solution to the
ecological crisis will be a pretentious and futile exercise, with a
high entertainment value but with absolutely no usefulness in the real
world.

In conclusion, "Sick Planet" is a very modest book, for it simply
invites the reader to question the inevitability and desirability of
capitalism in a sick and shrinking planet.

(This review was originally published in Spanish in the Puerto Rican
weekly Claridad on November 28 2008)

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, a self-described renaissance hack and
impractical humanist, is a Puerto Rican journalist, environmental
educator and author. He is as Senior Fellow of the Environmental
Leadership Program, a Fellow of the Oakland Institute, and directs the
Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety (http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/).
Whenever he is not writing or working at a call center, he distributes
farm produce for something that resembles a CSA. Ruiz-Marrero, a
compulsive blogger, blogs away at: http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/
--
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor



  • [permaculture] Beyond Green Capitalism Stan Cox's "Sick Planet" By CARMELO RUIZ-MARRERO, Nicholas Roberts, 02/06/2009

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