LAW-The Illusions of Environmentalism

The following information is used for educational purposes only.

The Illusions of Environmentalism

Aug 15th, 2011

By Peter Dauvergne

The rising tide of consumption worldwide is swamping many of the gains from stricter environmental laws, higher environmental standards, and the creative energy of environmental activists and philanthropists. Why is this happening?

The ecological shadows of consumption are continually shifting. A rising global population and rising rates of personal consumption are causing these shifts, as are the globalizing pressures of corporations, trade, and financing, the values of new generations of consumers, and the consequences of technological and scientific “advances.” What are the impacts of these shifting shadows on the global environment? Looking at the consumption of products like automobiles and refrigerators over several generations, we find that the global environmental impacts of these—and a wide range of other—consumer goods have intensified even as environmentalism has grown stronger.

Why is this happening? This article argues that environmentalism has failed to slow the ways that producing, using, and replacing consumer goods deflect ecological costs into distant places and future generations. Consumption continues to deflect these costs into ecosystems, and it is doing so at a quickening pace. Moreover, even as the globalization of environmentalism reduces the per unit impacts of consumption and imposes global controls through international agreements, the economic forces of globalization are casting and lengthening ecological shadows. Economic globalization is also diminishing the capacity of activists and states to influence the direction, speed, and intensity of the environmental consequences of consumption which helps explain why so many ecosystems continue to slide into crisis even as so many of us celebrate the progress of environmentalism.

The progress of environmentalism

A strengthening of environmentalism over the last half century has done much to prod the global political economy in new directions. Hundreds of international agreements now aim to protect ecosystems from the consequences of rising consumption, with controls on trading in endangered species, dumping hazardous waste, and emitting pollutants. Governments everywhere are adjusting domestic policies to mitigate the environmental impacts of economic growth.

Governmental capacity in the developing world to implement environmental policies is strengthening as well. Donors like Japan are providing bilateral grants and technical support to assist with training staff. Lenders like the World Bank are giving funds and policy advice, and agencies, as in the case of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), are financing the additional costs of meeting global environmental commitments. Since its founding in 1991, the GEF has supported over 1,950 projects in 160 developing and transitional countries with more than $7 billion in grants and with another $28 billion in cofinancing.

Just about every multinational corporation is also pursuing a sustainability policy, with some now investing considerable sums in environmental research and technologies. A few, such as the Swedish firm Electrolux, are actively working with suppliers, producers, users, and recyclers in developing countries to help them improve their environmental performance.

The capacity of environmental activists continues to increase as well. Hundreds of thousands of diverse groups have formed networks advocating for change, many repeating messages and images to embed new meanings and emotions into the public psyche, recasting for consumers, for example, the “hunting” or “harvesting” of seals as senseless slaughter. Advertisers, scientists, government officials, and business leaders are all contesting this education, and the crisscrossing of truths, word maps, and stories creates various outcomes. In some cases, a word with a positive ecological meaning (wetland) has replaced one with a negative common meaning (swamp). In other cases, corporate phrases like “unleaded gasoline” have become part of the consumer vocabulary, leaving the impression that firms are doing consumers a favor.

Increasingly, organizations like the WWF are partnering with companies as well. WWF-Sweden is working with the multinational food firm Tetra Pak on responsible wood purchases and climate change policies, and WWF-India with the Austrian crystal firm Swarovski to establish a wetlands visitor center in the Keoladeo National Park in northeastern India.

Corporate and consumer responses to the strengthening of environmentalism are opening and expanding many other markets as well. Organic agriculture has expanded to over 30 million hectares (74 million acres) of farmland, up from just 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) in 2005. Sales of more energy-efficient products have risen steadily over the last decade. Consumers are shifting their choices and practices. Some are volunteering to work abroad with World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Others are planting urban gardens on rooftops, composting organic waste, and searching supermarkets for food grown locally. More people in more cities are participating in curbside recycling programs.

What, then, is the net result of the strengthening of environmentalism? Most notably, there have been significant gains in energy and resource efficiency across the globe. Processors and manufacturers are upgrading to conserve energy. Supermarkets and department stores are selling more with less shelf space. Consumers are turning off lights and unplugging appliances to lower electric bills. New product designs are making the recycling stage easier and cheaper. And waste management firms are doing a better job at treating, incinerating, and disposing of garbage.

This is creating a global economy able to produce more consumer goods with less energy and less waste per unit of output. Still, such good news does not mean all is well with the earth as a whole.

The failures of incremental environmentalism

Stepping back to look at our global environment reveals a disturbing picture. The rising tide of consumption worldwide is swamping many of the gains from stricter environmental laws, higher environmental standards, and the creative energy of environmental activists and philanthropists. It’s also swamping the emerging environmental markets and the lower per unit environmental impacts of manufacturing. Because total consumption never falls unless an economy plunges into a depression or a society implodes into civil war or anarchy, the resulting numbers are daunting.

This relentless rise in consumption in a globalizing political economy of rising trade and investment is casting ever longer and deeper ecological shadows alongside—or sometimes within—the progress of global environmentalism. The solutions to problems posed by consumer goods almost always involve producing more of other goods, as in the case of cars: more seat belts, air bags, roads, traffic lights, and parking spaces. The solutions seldom involve producing less of a good and, even then, replacing that good with another almost always leads to consuming more overall.

The pursuit of profits and economic growth tends to supersede calls for precaution. As the globalization of trade and investment extends the distances between producers and consumers, the resulting process of change tends to displace consequences along ever longer trade and corporate chains connecting distant regions, from Africa to Asia to the Antarctic. Effects spill into the future as well, sometimes taking generations to appear. This obscuring and displacing of environmental costs makes it harder for consumers to perceive—and thus care about—the cumulative impact of seemingly inconsequential personal choices on the global environment. Moreover, producer and consumer prices of many traded products, such as timber and beef, do not reflect the full environmental or social costs of harvesting, processing, producing, transporting, marketing, or disposal. As such, they reduce revenues available for environmental management, a particular problem for regions that rely on natural resource exports to generate economic growth. The resulting low prices for consumer goods made from these resources then stimulate wasteful consumption and overconsumption in importing countries— which helps explain why, for example, supersizing is so profitable for fast-food chains and obesity is increasing worldwide.

“Producer and consumer prices of many traded products, such as timber and beef, do not reflect the full environmental or social costs and thus they reduce revenues available for environmental management.”

Over time, as sovereign states and multinational firms pursue their interests and cost-effective solutions, and as international financing props up economies with foreign debt, a disproportionate share of the environmental costs of such consumption tends to be shifted onto poor people and into ecosystems at risk—from the slums of India to the rainforests of Cambodia. Because such people and places tend to have less capacity to adapt to resulting changes, this further intensifies the consequences of consumption.

The conclusion here is deeply troubling. Not only is environmentalism failing to produce sustainable patterns of global consumption, much of what policy makers in high-consuming economies are labeling as “environmental progress” is in reality little more than the wealthy world deflecting consequences and risks into ecosystems and onto people with less power—and thus less influence over global affairs.

This in part explains why support for more economic growth among the ruling elites remains rock-solid even with clear signs of an escalating global environmental crisis. Many assumptions buttress this. It’s an individual’s right to consume. It’s a corporation’s function to offer competitive choices. And it’s the duty of a community to ensure the (increasingly material) well-being of its members, of a government to ensure steady economic growth, and job opportunities for its citizens, and of an international lending institution like the World Bank to stimulate global economic growth. A near consensus exists on the best path forward to enhance human welfare and promote a more sustainable form of development: more free trade, higher per capita incomes (in real terms), independent multinational companies, responsible global financing, competitive markets, and sound scientific research. The widely held belief is that trade and investment in competitive markets ensure the efficient allocation and use of resources. Financial assistance is necessary here to stimulate growth in less-developed economies, which in turn helps to keep the global order stable. At the same time, scientific research ensures both that technological progress will occur, thus improving consumer choices, and that the potential dangers of introducing new products will be accurately assessed.

One effect of this near consensus—or what some call “ideology”—is to empower industry scientists, thus enhancing the capacity of companies to obfuscate, placate, and generate uncertainty about the need to act (as well as to bolster fears about the economic consequences of “unnecessary regulations”). They did just that after independent scientists began to investigate the environmental presence and consequences of lead in the late 1960s and of chlorofluorocarbons in the 1970s. Despite much progress since then, today such corporate tactics continue to delay, block, and even gut many environmental regulations.

The technologies of globalization—planes, phones, computers—allow critics of the global order to communicate, and even organize vocal protests with worldwide media coverage. On the surface, this would seem to enhance the power of critics to induce global change. Yet the process of globalization is embedded in the world economic order—in the production and trade chains of the biggest corporations and most powerful states. For this reason, the net effect of globalization is to reinforce and expand the global culture of capitalism rather than to empower voices critical of consumerism.

Those in power tend to dismiss or ignore critics who argue that the structures of global interactions—free trade, multinational corporations, the United Nations system—give rise to unequal consumption, overconsumption, and wasteful consumption. The policy and corporate worlds label such critics “unrealistic,” and “hypocritical.” A few even label them “racist neocolonialists” for denying the poor of the developing world the right to consume. Thus calls to reverse economic globalization or to localize trade gain little traction even among nonprofit environmental groups. The world community is gravitating toward environmental solutions that fit into—and reinforce—the neoliberal economic order. Many of the buzz phrases of environmentalism embrace a corporate worldview: “business-NGO partnerships,” “ecoefficiency,” “corporate social responsibility,” “voluntary compliance,” “market mechanisms,” “technology transfers.” Most nongovernmental organizations are now focusing on small, achievable steps, on, for example, partnering with firms and states to improve the management of a particular ecosystem.

To reiterate, small, achievable changes are helping to mitigate particular environmental impacts of particular forms of consumption. Yet changes to mitigate the impact of global consumption on the earth’s environment remain too slow to avoid irreparable damage. The conclusion here is inescapable: despite much progress and prosperity over the last half century, if the world hopes to avoid an even greater crisis by the middle of this century, it must transform the processes of environmentalism. This raises a final—and most difficult— question: How?

“If the world hopes to avoid an even greater crisis by the middle of this century, it must transform the processes of environmentalism.”

This article is excerpted from The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment, by Peter Dauvergne (The MIT Press, 2008).

About the Author

Peter Dauvergne is Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Politics at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the award-winning Shadows in the Forest: Japan and the Politics of Timber in Southeast Asia (MIT Press, 1997), The Shadows of Consumption (MIT Press, 2008), and the coauthor of Paths to a Green World, 2nd edition (MIT Press, 2011, with Jennifer Clapp). His latest book is Timber (Polity Press, 2011, with Jane Lister).


Source: www.europeanfinancialreview.com