7: MODULE THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own need. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power (Marx, Capital Vol 1 (Penguin edition) p.283) Introduction Nature In talking about the transformation of nature and its relation to modernity we focus on what is the most essential relation that we all have. This is our relation to nature. This relationship is conceived not only as one with the soil, the vegetation, water, all those things we typically assign to the environment or indeed to nature; but also to our own nature as organisms. This means that in talking about the transformation of nature we are focusing not just on how people have cut down the forests, drained the land, polluted the air, created cities (Yes, that too!) but also changed their own nature: their own natural capacities. As human beings we have certain biologically given needs and certain biologically given again powers. We need, indeed we have to, engage with the nature that is external to us including other human beings in order to satisfy our needs for food, shelter, clothing, drink. In talking about other human beings, moreover, I am not talking about cannibalism but about cooperation with others in order to appropriate things useful to human beings from those parts of nature that are non-human. As human beings we are necessarily social creatures and cannot work alone, exceptions like Robinson Crusoe proving the rule, since he had already had the necessary practical knowledge imparted to
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him before his shipwreck. Our sociality is part of our nature. We depend on others in myriad ways the socialization process, the division of labor just as they depend on us. This is not say, however, that our needs for food, water, shelter, and the like things that we consume provide an exhaustive listing of our naturally given needs. We are also susceptible to disease some contagious, some congenital, some triggered off as a result of things in our environment, like air pollution, and, on pain of discomfort, even death, we need to take preventive steps and if they do not suffice, curative ones. From the earliest days this has prompted a search of the rest of nature for palliatives, things with curative properties as well as attempts to understand how we can protect ourselves against disease through the various strategies we learn to marshal: the development of an understanding of nutrition, for example, or the values of isolation from the contagious. In satisfying our needs we mobilize certain naturally given powers that are distinctive to human beings. Primary among these we would have to list our capacity for conceptual thought: an ability to conceptualize our experiences, come to conclusions about them and put them to practical purpose. People act in the sense of being purposeful with respect to some understanding of the situation. Other animals, for the most part, at least, behave. As Marx put it: A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. (Marx, Capital Vol 1(Penguin edition) p.284)
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Our abilities to conceptualize and interpret the world we encounter are greatly aided by language. Language provides a means of sharing concepts with others. It also assigns labels to things and we think with those labels or symbols. Again, it is possible that language is not an exclusively human property. There are arguments about the ways in which whales and dolphins communicate among themselves, for example. But nevertheless, it would seem that the ability to develop more complex languages and therefore to arrive at more complex understandings of the world and intervene in it in new ways is an exclusively human trait. Importantly more complex languages facilitate new forms of cooperation between people as any form of cooperation requires communication among the cooperators. It is perhaps significant that of all the species, only the human being has had technical revolutions the palaeolithic, the Neolithic, the industrial. Emphatically, this is not a static listing of naturally given powers and needs on the part of human beings. We also have the quite crucial power to develop ourselves: to develop our powers through specialization, for example and also our needs: none of us was born with a taste for cigarettes, but nevertheless, we can become addicted to them and find it quite natural to be having a smoke and our organic nature reacts negatively to withdrawal. Likewise our digestive systems become accustomed to a certain diet and can rebel when confronted with a radical change.1 We also acquire immunity to the particular pathogens present in new environments, though it will take some time, or a few visits, before we build up that immunity. An important conclusion from these claims: In virtue of these peculiarly human powers, we have the potential to regulate our relation to the rest of nature in ways that other animals cannot. If population outruns resources, for example, we can alter our diet,2 or alter our numbers through intervening in the human reproductive process. Likewise we can extend our lifespans through the discovery and exploitation of hitherto unknown
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People who become vegetarians often find that, subsequently, even the slightest bit of meat in a meal will produce an adverse reaction. 2 Livestock consume more calories than are transferred to the meat they produce, for example. Fewer livestock means that the land otherwise devoted to their foodstuffs can be given over to other crops directly edible by people.
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curative properties of naturally occurring substances, and develop understandings of the human body so that disease can be more effectively mitigated. On the other hand, we have also proven highly adept at making land, livestock more productive, capable of producing more food. A Socially Mediated Relationship That said, nature, that nature which is external to us and our own naturally given limits and capacities, is immensely important to us. We are part of nature and without it we are nothing. We have to regulate our relationship with it: obtain food, maintain our sanity and our health and so forth. But always, inevitably, this relationship has to be examined in a much broader context of relationships: specifically social relationships. Our relationship to nature is always socially-mediated. People are by nature social beings. We relate to nature in the context of cooperation as well as conflict with others. We have to establish rules governing our access to nature in order that that cooperation proceed, things and services be exchanged, and not break down into a war of all against all. We have already discussed these at length in earlier modules. The social nature of the labor process, for example, is apparent in the division of labor: something that has developed immensely since pre-modern times. The division of labor within the work unit as opposed to that between different work units in terms of their products is almost unique to modernity and has been one of the secrets of its immense productivity. It is also apparent in the instruments of production that we operate together or use together: the assembly line, the chemical plant or oil refinery, for example. When we turn and examine the rules through which rights of possession of the various elements of the labor process labor power, the object of labor, which would have been the land for the most part in pre-modern societies, and the instrument of labor the big difference is, again, how the rules in pre-modern societies did not generate a technical dynamism. There were no markets in labor power, the land or the means of production so that there was no threat of dispossession to spur technological innovation as there is with the competition we are familiar with in the contemporary world; nor could there have
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been the threat of unemployment to lend urgency to the application of labor power in the labor process. But under capitalist development the human ability to produce undergoes seemingly boundless leaps. The rules act so as to compel the development of productive capacities. More significantly for our current purpose these developments have important implications for our relation to nature apart, that is, from the development of our natural capacities. We have seen in previous Modules how capitalism, through the development of new, faster, cheaper means of transportation and communication links different places in the world together. At the same time there have been major migratory movements, in particular those from Europe in the direction of what Crosby has called the neo-Europes: Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the southern parts of Brazil, South Africa, the United States, and Uruguay. The connections forged have facilitated the transfer of particular crops, domesticated animals, whole ecological complexes around the world, transforming nature in the reception areas. At the same time those connections have facilitated the spread of disease from areas where people enjoyed an historic immunity to those where immunity was lacking with quite devastating results. The insistent urge to produce more and more that comes from the compulsions of competition and the need to stay in business and which in turn lends impetus to the creation of those linkages across space referred to in the previous paragraph along with the necessity to produce at minimum cost, is also transformative of the environment. This is not necessarily transformative, however, in the benign way in which the transfer of crops has often been. Producing at minimum cost has often had unintended side effects on nature, including people: there have been impacts on the health of workers from working with toxic materials; there have been effects on the health of people living in the vicinity of factories as a result of air pollution; there is the problem of noise pollution around airports; and flooding downstream as a result of agricultural practices further upstream. The sheer scale of production magnifies these unintended consequences producing effects including that one termed the greenhouse effect which threatens global warming and all the consequences of it. Similarly the scale of production threatens the
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resource base on which human beings depend. Oil is being used up at an alarming rate as are the worlds timber resources. In short there are diffusion effects from the spread of biota around the world; and there are environmentally disruptive effects. They are considered in turn. Diffusion Since the so-called voyages of discovery of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the worlds biogeography has been radically altered. Plants and animals have been transferred from one continent to another revolutionizing not just the agriculture there but the visual landscape as (e.g.) Australian gum trees thrive in South Africa or Southern California and Spanish poplars reappear in Argentina. As Crosby has emphasized, with the breakup of the old contiguous landmass of Pangaea, there was some divergence in the animal and plant life characterizing the different continents. Prior to that, evolutionary forces would have brought about convergence. But once separated the competition of species one with another would have occurred in separate arenas, and in response to the need to adapt to what might be called arena-specific conditions. In the last four hundred years or so the crossing of the oceans separating the continents, and the increasing facility of that crossing, has allowed a massive inter-continental transfer. Crosby has emphasized the way in which the European ensemble of crops and domesticated animals wheat, barley, oats, cattle, sheep, goats, the horse in particular was transferred to areas outside of Europe characterized by broadly similar climatic conditions: what he has called the neo-Europes. It is in this way that we can account, for example, for the significance of cattle and wheat on the Argentinian pampas and on the Great Plains of North America; and sheep in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Equally, however, we should draw attention to the movement of other agricultural ensembles from Europe. Climates similar to those of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean sea are found elsewhere in the world, including California and parts of Australia, of South Africa, and of Chile. But the wheat, the barley, the vine and the olive had to be imported from Europe in order to give the agricultures of those areas their distinctively mediterranean character. The convergence that has occurred is apparent in,
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among other ways, the places of origin of the wines in any wine store: not just France, Italy and Spain but also Australia, California, Chile and South Africa. But there are other movements that we should take cognizance of and which transformed ecological complexes in other parts of the world. For a start Europe not only sent, it also received. Among other things we should note the movement of the potato from the Andes of South America. The potato had a revolutionary impact on European agriculture from the sixteenth century onwards. The potato produced between four and five times the carbohydrate per hectare as the wheat, oats, rye and barley which had been the staples hitherto. This meant that a peasant household could survive on less land than would have been true earlier. Alternatively it meant that fewer people were needed to produce the same energy value of food, and this freed labor to work in industry. Where there was limited growth of industry, however, as in Ireland, it simply facilitated a growth of population on the land, a growth that was cruelly nipped in the bud by the potato famine of 1846-47.3 Yet in other cases Europe was neither origin nor destination. Some of the movement was from the tropics of one continent to another. Neither cassava, the sweet potato or maize are indigenous to Africa but they were imported from South America, possibly by returning slaves, and were quickly integrated into farming systems there. On the other hand, the banana is a plant indigenous to Africa and had to spread to Central and South America and the Caribbean in order to give those areas the primacy they now enjoy in its production. The transfer of the rubber tree is particularly interesting since it sheds light on the sorts of reasons why transfer might be deliberately engineered. Rubber grew to prominence as a tropical crop in the late nineteenth century with the invention of the automobile. Initially it was simply collected from wild rubber trees in the Amazon rain forest of Brazil and its gathering and marketing brought huge wealth to the major organizing center, Manaos; a
3
This was an early warning of how monoculture could make a crop highly vulnerable to devastation from disease; one that has yet to be completely heeded by contemporary agricultural practice.
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wealth, however, that was short lived and has yet to return. For Brazil was quickly superseded as rubber producer to the world. What led to its demise was the transfer of some rubber seeds by an English planter to London where they germinated courtesy of the Royal Botanical Gardens. Transferred to Ceylon and Malaya in the early years of the twentieth century, they generated a boom in cultivation under plantation conditions. This was much more efficient than gathering rubber from trees in the wild since the rubber trees would be planted in uniform stands, thus eliminating the labor of searching for widely dispersed ones. The effect was to bring down the price of rubber and the eclipse of Brazil as a producer. From a virtually total monopoly in 1900 Brazils share of production had gone down to 50% by 1910 and by 1918 to 20%: another instance of the inconstant character of capitalisms economic geography! So modernity has been characterized by a huge diffusion of species from one part of the globe to another, transforming economic life as well as regionally dominant ecologies. But this is not to say that such diffusion is unique to these times. There were pre-modern transfers, often un-premeditated, accidental in character, though the particular places of origin and the routes of dispersal have been hotly contested by cultural geographers and archaeologists. Corn, it seems, originated as a domesticated crop in central Mexico at least 7000 years ago. From there it spread into the southwestern part of what is now the United States as well as south into Peru. Still later migrating Indian peoples brought it into the eastern parts of the present United States. Later still there were other movements which paved the way for the great trans-Atlantic transfers of the post-Columbean era. Sugar was transferred in the early years after Columbus from the Islands of Madeira to the Caribbean. But the Portuguese had taken it to Madeira and it had spread to Europe originally from the Middle East having arrived there in the sixth century from the East Indies, more specifically New Guinea, now regarded as the original home. The banana, now originating commercially from Central and South America and from the Caribbean did not arrive there till the early sixteenth century. It came originally from Southeast Asia, but then moved to Africa in the fifth century from where it was transferred to the New World.
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What seems to be different now, however, is the speed with which species spread from one part of the world, and the purposefulness with which the transfers are effected. No longer are crops spread through migrating peoples or as a result of the sorts of trading contacts that led the Romans to bring the cherry from the shores of the Black Sea and eventually to Britain. Rather corporations have ransacked the world for new species whose properties can be turned to useful effect. This is especially apparent at the present time in the activities of pharmaceutical companies as they trawl the world for new plants with curative properties. Once isolated the plant is then subjected to exhaustive laboratory experiments in order to identify just what it is about the plant, what particular chemical compounds, give it its therapeutic qualities. The speed with which organisms diffuse is illustrated especially well by the case of diseases. The spread of diseases has been greatly accelerated. In part this is due to the rapid movement of people around the world. The possibility of exposure to diseases not encountered in the home country has been greatly increased, for example, by tourism. While world population growth has been increasing since the mid-twentieth century at a rate of between 1.5 and 2.5% / annum, the growth in the numbers of passengers crossing international boundaries has increased at a vastly superior rate of between 7.5 and 10.0%. Occasional outbreaks of tropical diseases, like malaria, around mid-latitude airports are evidence of the role that long distance air travel is playing in this matter. The spread of AIDs is another example of the role that increased interaction over longer distances is playing in the speed of diffusion. This is not necessarily because of the impact of sex tourism on the spread of AIDs in, say, Thailand, and its diffusion back to the villages from which the young girls originate. In Southern Africa migrant labor is a major feature of economies. Workers migrate from, say, Malawi or Mozambique in order to work in South African cities. They come alone, without any families, intending to return once they have accumulated some money. And they do return, bringing AIDs with them. The dramatic spread of AIDs within South Africa is also believed to have been
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accelerated by the fact of migrant labor as one of the ways in which firms meet their labor needs. On the other hand, we also need to note the way in which pre-modern conditions paved the way for the modern. Crosby, in his book Ecological Imperialism, makes the case that one of the reasons for the rapid take up of European biota, including the Europeans themselves in what were to be the neo-Europes, were the extraordinarily propitious conditions which they encountered. These were by no means simply climatic, important as those considerations undoubtedly were. Crosby points to two possible ways in which pre-modern peoples in fact created, or were the victim of, conditions which facilitated ecological imperialism. The first was the existence of unfilled ecological niches at the time of the invasions. In contrast to Europe, in the New World and in Australasia biotas had far fewer members. This had not always been the case. At one time the Americas had been as rich in large mammals as the Old World. Australasia was inferior but not greatly so. But subsequent to the arrival of humans over the Bering and New Guinea land bridges respectively, biota were dramatically reduced in number. Crosby hypothesizes that this was because indigenous animals were hunted to extinction and / or their prey were so hunted. Thus carnivores would die off to the degree that their food base in the form of herbivores was subject to competition from humans. The result was that when the Europeans arrived there were no competing browsers for their cattle, sheep, goats and hogs, and no serious carnivores to attack them. The exception was South Africa where the takeover was much slower. Jackals were a major problem for sheep farmers, for example.4 Of course, this raises the question as to why the mammals of the New World and Australasia were so vulnerable to hunting and extinction whereas, say, in Africa that had not been the case. Here Crosby argues the possibility that in the Old World their longer co-existence with humans had resulted in some degree of natural selection the selection
4
See William Beinart, The Night of the Jackal: Sheep, Pastures and Predators in the Cape South Africa. Past and Present Feb 1998 (available online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2279/is_n158/ai_20466714
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in of traits making them wary of human beings. This, moreover, is consistent with the observation that most of the large quadrupeds that survived in North America, the buffalo, the musk ox, the moose, for example, originated in Eurasia where the postulated evolutionary processes would have been possible. There is, however, a second reason for the success of the portmanteau biota in the New World and in Australasia. This is that, at least in the early years of their transfer, they left a lot of natural enemies behind: animal diseases, crop pests, human diseases also. Rinderpest exploded in Europe in the seventeenth century, decimating cattle populations, but, like foot and mouth and rabies, it has never established itself in the New World or in Australasia. Similarly human beings left many of their enemies behind. Significantly the colonies were seen as remarkably healthy and life spans extended over those common in the Old World, though in part this was due to the lower density of the population which inhibited contagion. On the other hand, and likewise paving the way for the settlers and their appropriation of land, forcible or otherwise, native peoples proved themselves extraordinarily vulnerable to the pathogens that the former brought with them. Significantly again, with the acquisition of a degree of immunity as result of exposure to diseases like smallpox and measles, the numbers of indigenous peoples the Maori of New Zealand, the aborigines of Australia have revived and they are now increasing in numbers. Environmental Disruption Transfers of biota are environmentally disruptive but for the most part the necessary ecological adaptations are ultimately made. Even the numbers of native peoples eventually revive as they build up immunity to diseases brought in from outside. But clearly people do disrupt the natural environment in ways which are harmful to them. As economies expand it seems as if the conditions for that continued expansion are continually being threatened through the forces of pollution, soil erosion, the exhaustion of aquifers and the like. One way of thinking about these various forms of disruption is in terms of the various cycles of which humans are a part: nutrient as well as water cycles.
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Here we take each in turn and examine the sorts of disruption, the negating of the conditions on which human life depends with which they are associated. The Hydrological Cycle: Water exists in several different forms. It exists as a solid as ice and snow, as liquid, what we conventionally call water and also as a gas: or water vapor. As such it is stored in various places: in ice sheets, in the atmosphere and as a liquid in lakes, oceans, rivers, subterranean aquifers and organisms: remember that we too are storehouses of water since 59% of our body mass. Then, in virtue of certain mechanisms, it moves between these different storage points. For example: Water evaporates from oceans, lakes, from the surface of peoples skins as they perspire and is converted into its gaseous form. It is converted back from the gaseous form into the liquid form by processes of condensation. The condensed water vapor assumes the form of rainfall, hail, fog, dew,5 and snowfall. Water vapor is released from the leaves of trees in a process known as transpiration. A typical birch tree transpires about 80 gallons of water each day. Water in aquifers reappears at the surface of the earth when it is pumped up through wells, in which case it is used by people for their own drinking purposes, and for irrigation. As such it becomes available once more for processes of evaporation and transpiration and conversion into the gaseous form. Finally, processes of melting convert ice and snow into the liquid form where it can again be used for human purposes as in irrigation in California from the so-called Sierra Nevada snow pack (see Figure 7.1). To say that water is crucial to human life is an obvious point. Water continually moves through us. We take it in as a medium for the biological processes essential for our reproduction from one day to the next6 and we eject it either as excreta or as evaporation from the surface of our skins. We also require it for our crops and animals. Accordingly, from the earliest days people have tapped into the hydrological cycle in order to divert water for human purposes. Water is not always there where it is needed. In some cases there is an excess and in some instances, a deficiency. In East Central Illinois the problem for the early pioneers was too much in the soil and this left plant roots waterlogged and
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Think of the nighttime condensation that occurs on a car in humid weather as the water vapor cools when coming into contact with the car surface which is loosing heat when the sun goes down. 6 A person can live for at most about a week without drinking.
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Figure 7.1: The Hydrological Cycle Source: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/kling/water_nitro/wa ter_and_nitrogen_cycles.htm so subject to decay. Only subsequent to the installation of tile drain in the fields to take the excess away could the area become the major corn growing one that it is today. The history of the English Fenland is very similar: incredibly fertile soils but ones that had to be drained, and on a more intensive scale than in the East Central Illinois case since canals had to be built to evacuate the water. In other instances, however, water is in short supply. It may have to be pumped to the surface if livestock are to thrive in semi-arid climates: one of the reasons for the ubiquity of windmills in the sheep raising area of the South African Karroo. Massive irrigation works, such as those associated with the Colorado river system allow farmers to take advantage of climates in which photosynthesis is maximized so long as water can be made available. The growth of large cities has created a challenge since for the very
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biggest, pumping from aquifers near to or even underneath the urban area rarely suffice. For some cities the solution is fairly easy: draw on water from other forms of natural storage, in particular lakes. This is the solution for many of the Great Lakes cities in the US and Canada, like Chicago. This is also the case for some cities in Western Europe. Glasgow draws from lakes in the nearby Scottish Highlands. Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham in England pull in water from lakes in the English Lake District and Wales respectively. For others, however, the solution has had to be the construction of reservoirs in which the runoff from rain and snow melt can be trapped and the water released as demand occasions. Los Angeles gets much of its water supply in this way, as does New York City and Johannesburg. Usually constructing reservoirs involves building a dam across the valley of a stream with a sufficiently large catchment area. The human use of the hydrological cycle, however, has been a source of considerable environmental disruption. Some of this has to do with using water bodies rivers, lakes, the ocean as, in effect, dumps for waste matter, generating the well known phenomenon of water pollution. A part of this is undoubtedly due to failure to anticipate the effects. Farmers apply nitrates to the land as a fertilizer and the excess gets into runoff from the fields and ends up in nearby water courses and lakes. It is only recently that people have become aware of the effects of this on water quality. We will discuss the effects of this when we take up the nitrogen cycle below. But the dumping of human waste in streams must have been realized as something that could be a problem and with the growth of large cities that is what it became. In more developed countries human waste is now treated in various ways before being released into water courses; what remains, poses no serious pollution problem. But in developing societies sewage treatment plants are often lacking and major rivers such as the Ganges in India or the Yangtse in China are, over much of their courses, thoroughly foul and certainly not potable. There are yet other effects. Aquifers have been drawn on in modern times to a degree that would have been impossible in pre-modern times. This is because of the powerful pumping equipment now available so that as the level of the water in the aquifer sinks, what remains can still be pumped to the surface. But there lies the problem: as the water
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in the aquifer sinks. Without human intervention the level of the water in an aquifer would remain constant, barring, that is, climate change. There would be a balance between the loss of water from springs and the input of water from infiltration from the surface. In other words: Today a major problem is over-pumping. Water is withdrawn at a faster pace than it is being replaced. A major instance of this is the Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer. This stretches from the Texas Panhandle northward through Kansas and Nebraska to South Dakota and is a major source of water for crop irrigation, livestock and municipal water supplies. In some places the pumps now run dry, however, and imminent exhaustion elsewhere raises serious questions about the agricultural future of much of the Great Plains.7 [INSERT / WEB? ; OR http://www.rra.dst.tx.us/gw/Ogallala_1.cfm ] Another problem with aquifer depletion can be that future recharge is simply made impossible. The history of Londons water supply was one of the sinking of wells into the chalk and sands lying on top. Overdrawing has allowed the level of the water to sink but at the same time the colossal weight of the overlying strata and presumably of London itself has caused the interstices of the rocks, formerly kept open by the water when under pressure, to close. As a result, it would seem that London will never be able to pay back the overdraft on her water account with the chalk. Finally, and assuming that water can be procured for irrigation purposes a big if in the case of the Great Plains there are the problems that diverting water for irrigation purposes can do further downstream. As a result of the use of the waters of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers in California, the amount of freshwater flowing into the San Francisco Bay has been reduced by about half. This has allowed sea water to penetrate the deltas of these rivers as they flow into the bay, so creating problems for farmers who draw on the water for irrigation purposes and also for drinking water supplies taken directly from the delta.
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For a good discussion of this issue, see: http://www.rra.dst.tx.us/gw/Ogallala_1.cfm
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Figure 7.2: The Ogallala Aquifer Source: http://www.rra.dst.tx.us/gw/Ogallala_1.cfm Far more dramatic in its effects, however, has been the diversion of river water in Central Asia for purposes of irrigation. Two rivers, the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya which terminate in the Aral Sea have been drawn on for rice and cotton cultivation to such a degree that the rivers now discharge virtually nothing into it. The consequences have
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been both dramatic and devastating. On the one hand the Aral Sea has greatly shrunk in size leaving former fishing communities miles from it (see Figures 7.3 and 7.4). From being the fourth largest lake in the world it is now the eighth largest. Moreover, the sea is saline, so as the water retreats it leaves a salt deposit along its former shoreline. As a result of strong winds from the northeast, this salt is picked up and deposited on the irrigated area with dramatic implications for agricultural productivity.8 The Nitrogen Cycle: Nitrogen, a major constituent of the atmosphere, is important to the human food chain because it is the raw-material for the formation of nitrates. These are critical to the growth of plant proteins. Plants, of course, are eaten directly by human beings or indirectly through the consumption of the flesh of animals which fed on plant life. Atmospheric nitrogen converted into nitrates through processes going on in the soil. It can, for example, be converted by various kinds of bacteria into nitrites which are then worked on by further bacteria and combined with oxygen to create nitrates. The roots of certain plants called legumes, which include clover, peas and beans, are the site of nodules of bacteria which can convert the free oxygen of the air directly into nitrates: which gives these crops a particular significance in agricultural rotations a way of restoring nitrates to the soil. Nitrates are then absorbed by plant roots in a highly dilute form. Once absorbed into plant life, some of which is eaten by animals, nitrogeneous material is returned to the soil in the form of vegetable matter (the wheat stubble, the pea vines, which are ploughed under, the forest floor leaf litter) and in the form of animal excreta. This nitrogeneous material is then once more converted by bacteria into nitrates for reuse by plants. In consequence the nitrate reservoir in the soil is constantly being replenished, unless, that is, the cycle is broken. One of the virtues of the crop rotations used in the English agrarian revolution was that the cycle was, by and large, respected. A field might be used for wheat. Animals would then graze on the stubble returning nitrogeneous
8
For a discussion of this issue see: http://www.dfd.dlr.de/app/land/aralsee/back_info.html
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Figure 7.3: The Aral Sea in 1986 Source: http://www.searchtuna.com/ftlive/1110.html
Figure 7.4: The Aral Sea in 1993 Source: same as for Figure 7.3
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matter to the soil in the form of their excreta. A crop of clover might then be planted partly to feed animals but also to fix more nitrate in the soil. Animals would then graze on the clover returning more nitrogeneous material to the soil. In the course of re-ploughing prior to another crop of wheat human waste from a nearby town might well have been spread on the ground to be ploughed under. Clearly we are no longer living in the age of Turnip Townshend, the great eighteenth century, English advocate of crop rotation. Farmers raise livestock and poultry in small, concentrated areas, sometimes inhumanely small. They are fed prepared feedstuffs manufactured out of grain or soya beans grown elsewhere. Their excreta are a problem rather than a solution, as indeed are human excreta as we saw when discussing the hydrological cycle. At the same time, food chains have become greatly elongated over space. The food we purchase in a supermarket has been produced many, many miles away. The idea of transporting our human waste in order to make up for the loss of nitrogeneous material at the source of the vegetables, fruit or meat that we are buying is obviously ludicrous. But in an age of greater local self-sufficiency it would not have been, and the nitrogen cycle would have preserved a nice equilibrium as a consequence. So there are nitrate deficits. And bingo, they are made up, courtesy of artificial fertilizers. Just as agribusiness comes to the rescue of those farmers who want to specialize purely in livestock by manufacturing feedstuffs for them, so now it steps into the breach with new sources of nitrate. But this is not a completely satisfactory solution. Excess nitrates and for some reason there is always an excess wash off the land. This can create contamination of aquifers and other sources of human water supply. There are medically advisable limits on the nitrate content of water and in consequence the latter has to be carefully monitored. The problem is for babies. Too much nitrate in the drinking water reduces the ability of their blood to carry oxygen; not good for the growth process! Another problem with nitrate runoff is the eutrophication of surface waters. The presence of nitrates in lakes and ponds and rivers promotes an initial explosion of algae. These turn the water bright green blocking off the light needed by plants living on the bottom. These
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then decay and serve as food for other microorganisms which deplete the water of its oxygen creating a dead zone. There are major dead zones off some estuaries in the United States including off the coast of Louisiana; testimony to the excess of nitrates washed into the Mississippi and its tributaries from the American agricultural heartland.9 But these issues aside: Artificial fertilizers are not the answer. This is because naturally nitrogeneous matter in the form of animal wastes, decaying vegetable matter performs other, vital functions for the soil: something we will take up below in a discussion of soil erosion. The Carbon Cycle: Carbon is stored in a variety of different forms and places. Primary among these is the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Other reservoirs include deposits of coal, oil and natural gas derived from once-living beings, dead organic matter such as that present in the soil as humus, and organisms themselves in the form either of carbohydrates (in plant matter) or of the starches and sugars elaborated from carbohydrates by animal life. As with the other cycles discussed here we can envisage various mechanisms which result in the transfer of carbon from one reservoir or storage place to another (see Figure 7.5). In particular: Photosynthesis draws upon the energy of light to convert carbon dioxide into the organic matter of plants, algae, and, in the oceans, of plankton, the small creatures on which fish feed. It is then in the form of plants and plankton that carbon enters into the human food chain. Animals cannot photosynthesize carbon dioxide directly. The burning of fossil fuels returns carbon to the atmosphere as does the decay of organic material rotting tree branches on the forest floor, the decay of plant material and organisms in the topmost layers of the soil and the respiration of animals. Every time you breathe out you are returning carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
9
See the following: http://www.conservationinstitute.org/deadzones.htm
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Figure 7.5: The Carbon Cycle Source: http://www.kernsite.com/uwp/modules/carboncycle/carboncycle.htm The big problem at the present time, of course, is that the uptake of carbon from the atmosphere and the return of carbon to it are not in balance the latter exceeds the former so that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is steadily increasing. Since measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide began late in the nineteenth century, its concentration has risen by over 20%. This is a result of human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels on an enormously greater scale than in pre-modern times, and the clearing and burning of forests, especially those of the tropics. The case of Amazonia is well known. Interestingly, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is about half what would have been expected given the increase in the burning of fossil fuels and of forests. This raises the question of where it has all gone. There is some evidence that it has resulted in increased growth of forests and of plankton in the oceans: i.e., uptake through 21
increased photosynthesis made possible by the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the air. The remainder is what gives cause for worry. This is because carbon dioxide is transparent to light but rather opaque to heat rays. This means that while solar radiation can arrive unimpeded at the earths surface its radiation back into space is hindered creating the so-called greenhouse effect. Whether this is, in fact, going to result in global warming is heavily debated at the present time. Theoretically one might anticipate effects working counter to the greenhouse effect. The burning of forests and fossil fuels, for example deposits dust particles in the atmosphere and these impede the passage of light through the atmosphere so that more is reflected back into space and does not reach the earths surface. Empirically, however, there are worrying signs. Average global temperatures have shown a fairly steady increase over the last twenty years. Many glaciers and ice sheets are now retreating and many species of birds and butterflies are moving further north in the Northern Hemisphere and breeding earlier in the spring. This is worrying partly because of uncertainty of the consequences and partly because some of the consequences could be quite dire. If indeed the ice sheets and glaciers continue to melt, for example, then there could be a quite substantial rise in the level of the ocean. Some islands in the Indian Ocean are only a few feet above sea level at the present time and would certainly disappear. More significantly in terms of the numbers of people affected, of many the worlds major cities, including London, New York, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, for sure, Miami, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Marseilles, Alexandria, Shanghai, to mention but a few, are located on land that would be under increased risk of flooding. Climatically the effects of global warming would be uneven. In some parts of the world temperatures would increase but in others they would decrease and perhaps quite dramatically. As the ice withdrew after the last ice age, for example, so large amounts of very cold water found their way into the Atlantic Ocean disrupting the Gulf Stream that brings relatively warm temperatures from the Caribbean to Western Europe, with important implications for the climate there. One of the effects was to lower the temperature in Ireland considerably below what it had been during the Ice Age, altering
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ecologies there and leading to the near extinction of some such as the Irish elk. The significance of all this is that under conditions of global warming agricultural practice would be severely stressed and major adjustments would have to be made, some farmers finding themselves growing warmer weather crops and others, perhaps, finding that they can no longer grow any crops at all since it has become too cold!10 Soil Erosion: In each of the cases of natural cycles, water and nutrient, that we have surveyed above, the environmental disruptions have taken the form of the creation of some imbalance, a loss of equilibrium due to human intervention: the Aral Sea dries up exposing its salty shoreline to the winds because the loss of water due to evaporation from its surface is no longer made good by the discharge into it of the Amu- and SyrDarya rivers. Soils lose their fertility if the loss of nitrates through the takeup of plants is not made good by the return of organic waste to the soil. Aquifers run dry if the rate at which water is withdrawn for purposes like irrigation exceeds the rate at which they are being recharged. As a physical structure and so far we have confined our discussion to its chemical structure the soil too may be characterized in terms of equilibrium and disequilibrium states. The issue here is soil erosion. To the extent that the loss of those materials that give it structure is not made good by the addition of replacement materials, then it the soil becomes subject to removal by the forces of water and wind: water and wind erosion respectively. What gives the soil structure is what is called humus. Humus is the product of the decomposition of organic matter and is found in the topmost layers of the soil. According to Margaret Anderson: It is a soft, moist, spongy, black or dark brown material, practically odorless; if it smells of manure, decomposition of the plant and animal wastes that went into the heap has not gone far enough (Geography of Living Things, p.158). The presence of humus allows the air to circulate in the soil promoting the nitrite- and
10
For some of the contradictory effects of the global warming that followed the last Ice Age, and in particular the disappearance of the Irish elk, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/plain/A760240
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nitrate-forming activities of bacteria. It also has a huge capacity to hold water, and so ensures that the soil has a moisture content that can also facilitate plant growth. Most importantly from the standpoint of the present discussion, humus holds the soil particles together, and gives the soil coherence. Take the humus away and what remains is highly susceptible to erosion by water and / or wind. And once the soil has gone then ultimately all that remains is bed rock and nothing can be grown. For sure soil is being removed all the time, and inevitably so. But it is also being replaced by the slow weathering of the bedrock beneath; the breakdown of the rock through physical forces like freeze and thawing or its chemical decomposition through the agency of water. So the big question is, whether or not the rate at which it is being formed is exceeded by the rate at which it is being removed. The presence of humus in the soil greatly reduces the rate at which it is exported. With a deteriorated humus content there is little to stop the soil particles being removed by water running over the surface or by the wind. Loss of humus reduces the ability of the soil to hold water, so the fraction of rainfall which immediately runs off increases relative to that which sinks into the soil, and as runoff increases so too does the erosion of the soil. Lack of humus means that the soil dries out more quickly, again making it more vulnerable to erosion, but this time by wind. Some soils should obviously never be cultivated or denuded of their native vegetation. The removal of trees on slopes, worse yet the plowing of those slopes,11 increase the rate at which water runs off, so decreasing the resistance that soil particles can offer to their removal. As this occurs the material removed is deposited further downstream where the gradient decreases and the stream loses its power to transport. Alluvial plains are then covered by soil particles that, devoid of humus, lack fertility. Soil erosion upstream destroys soil fertility downstream, therefore. The same goes for being downwind of serious wind erosion. Alternatively the stream dumps its load in its estuary clogging the
11
Particularly if the furrows run perpendicular to rather than aligned with the contour of the land.
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river and making it useless for transportation: an important consideration in ancient times, as we will shortly see. Soil erosion has been a particular problem in the United States and there have been some major erosional events, most spectacularly the Dust Bowl of the thirties, when the skies over the eastern Midwest darkened as a result of the high dust content of air blown in their direction from the eroding fields of Oklahoma, Texas and parts of Kansas. There was also serious water erosion in parts of the South and its mitigation was part of the purpose of the Tennessee Valley Authority established also in the thirties: promote soil conservation measures and provide employment opportunities alternative to those on soil that probably should not have been farmed to begin with. And since then the construction of ponds to reduce runoff, the institution of contour plowing, have become marks of good agricultural practices. Nevertheless, it remains a problem, both in the US and in Europe. In the US, according to the Food and Agriculture Association of the UN, soil has recently been eroded at about 17 times the rate at which it forms: about 90% of US cropland is currently losing soil above the sustainable rate, though the situation is even worse in South America, Africa and Asia. One of the reasons it has not been given the recognition in the US that it might otherwise is the sheer depth of the soil in many places, particularly in some of the major farmbelt States like Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska. But it is clearly only a matter of time. In Europe too there are problems, particularly in the Mediterranean region where so much of the soil has been removed that some areas, like parts of southeastern Spain and southern Italy, qualify as desertified. What, however, of pre-modern times, one might ask? Was this some Arcadia of careful environmental practice, of balanced water and nutrient cycles? Unfortunately the record, mainly archaeological, but also geo-archaeological, suggests otherwise. The history of Easter Island in the Pacific, if not necessarily representative of that particular phase we know as the pre-modern, is certainly dramatic and speaks eloquently to the disastrous series of events which primitive peoples could trigger off, and to their
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own detriment. Its Polynesian settlers initially flourished, and the stone structures for which the island is famous was an expression of what was clearly a remarkable culture (Figure 7.6). But twelve centuries after their arrival the natural environment of the island was in a sorry state. Native birds, mammals, local seafood, had been hunted virtually to extinction. Forests were cut down and this caused water tables to fall resulting in springs and streams drying up and soil erosion. All these reduced crop harvests. With no more wood to build canoes the inhabitants could no longer fish offshore, let alone consider forays over the sea in search of new islands to colonize. The result was famine, internecine warfare and cannibalism. By the time the Europeans arrived in 1722 the population had shrunk from a maximum of as many as 20,000 to barely 2,000. Easter Islands civilization collapsed. So too did that of the Mayan Empire. Soils. though fertile, were thin and rapidly exposed to erosion once the trees were felled. Ideally, under tropical conditions,12 shifting cultivation should have been the practice: clearing the land for cultivation, cropping it for about five years and then leaving it for ten years so that trees could grow again and organic matter could once more accumulate in the soil. But this didnt happen, presumably because of increasing population, and, as crop yields went down, the Mayan Empire disintegrated. This raises the question of what is different today? How do modern times differ from the pre-modern in terms of the threats to human life resulting from the transformation of nature? How is our relation to nature different from what it was in pre-modern times?
12
See Pierre Gourou, The Tropical World for a discussion of the problems of tropical soils, the rapid rate at which their humus is depleted, and their vulnerability to soil erosion.
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Figure 7.6: The Moai of Easter Island. Note their huge size. How could they have been moved in the absence of a fairly sophisticated culture and understanding of mechanics? Source: http://www.worldisround.com/articles/1301/photo2.html Towards Sustainability At any rate, the contemporary portents are not promising. A central question, therefore is: Can ecological crisis be avoided? In particular: Can we reduce the degradation of those renewable resources the air, the water, the soil, on which we depend? Can we maintain balance in the nutrient and water cycles and in the rates at which soil losses through erosion are made good by the slow conversion of underlying bedrock into new soil? Can we find renewable substitutes for those resources which, over realistic time spans, at least, are not renewable? And turning more to the demand side, what chances are there that we can reduce the pressures we place on the environment by controlling our numbers
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and the seemingly ever-increasing size of the shopping basket of goods that we each come to demand There are of course answers to these dilemmas. One is that the capitalist market, through its incentive framework, can take care of problems of depletion. For example: As the ultimate reduction in the supply of oil and coal occurs, so their prices will increase. This will provide incentives for capitalist firms to develop the technologies through which non-exhaustible forms of energy can be harnessed: tidal power, solar power, wind power, for example. Similarly, as gasoline prices increase so there will be incentives for commuters to shift to mass transit and for developers to shift to higher-density, energyconserving forms of urban development. In other instances, it is argued, recycling will provide the answer. As the price of paper increases as the worlds timber resources are exploited at a rate exceeding their rate of natural replacement, recycling of paper will become economically more attractive. A second answer is in terms of an improved specification of property rights. Problems of air and water pollution exist, it is claimed, because of the status of the air and the oceans as common resources: resources over which there are no private property rights. Rather, since they are common resources they are treated as free goods and, like any free good, this means they are over-used. If, on the other hand, and so the argument goes, the state (e.g.) charged firms for the right to use the atmosphere or a river as a dump for their effluents then they would adjust their technologies, the products they produce from pollution-intensive to pollution-extensive, accordingly. This logic has also been applied to the problem of ocean fisheries and the horrendous problem of over-fishing; some species like the cod off Newfoundland and in the North Sea have been fished virtually to extinction. Again, the problem is one of a common resource. The fish are free for the taking and if you dont take them, someone else will. There is no point in fishermen arguing for restraint in the interests of allowing fish stocks to recover through reproduction since others will take advantage of your absence from the high seas. So some have suggested an approach to privatizing access to the fish of the sea. This would work through a system of licenses to catch a certain number of fish and
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no more. The number of licenses sold and the catches they allowed would be set so as not to exceed the ability of the various fish species to reproduce themselves. But note in all these cases the use of the air or common water bodies, the catching of the fish of the ocean given the fact that both the air and the ocean are global in character, given that the movement of air and of oceanic waters is not controllable by any single national government, the authority charging for the use of the atmosphere or issuing licenses to catch fish would have to be international in character. Also note that, in effect, what is being called for is a commodification of resources; converting them into things that can be bought and sold and so subordinating them to the logic of the market an issue to which we will return below. When we turn to the demand side, the demands imposed on the natural environment in the form of demands for energy, food and the like, one of the things the optimists like to point to is what has been called the demographic transition. Clearly the continuing growth of the worlds population, a growth that has been seemingly exponential since the beginning of modernity, is a major challenge to approaching a situation of balance in our relationship with the environment: the increase of the worlds population places increasing pressure on what are effectively non-replaceable resources like oil and coal assuming that is that they cannot be replaced economically by alternatives like solar, wind or tidal power; likewise it places a growing pressure on the soils of the world that must produce a growing amount of food if everyone is to be fed the loss of organic material that makes the erosion of the soil a reality, in particular. But for some, at least, the demographic transition is encouraging. What it amounts to is an empirical regularity an actually quite extraordinarily repetitive one across virtually all societies with the possible exception of France discovered by demographers and based on the historical experience of the advanced capitalist societies. According to this, pre-industrial societies are characterized by relatively high death rates and birth rates, with the end result that population grows only slowly, if at all. Birth rates are high because death rates are high. Given that life expectancy is shorter, in order to maintain production and reproduce themselves families have to have more children,
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knowing, of course, that many will die before they reach the age at which they can contribute to production or shortly thereafter. Even so, it is worth bearing in mind that birth rates were quite a bit below what is biologically possible. In all pre-modern societies fertility was and is held in check by customs of delayed age at marriage and the proportion ever marrying, long periods of breastfeeding (which reduces the womans fertility for that period) and cultural proscriptions regarding abortion and infanticide which of course European missionaries did their best to eradicate, little realizing their functionality for the societies in question. With the beginnings of industrial development, however, death rates are brought down through (e.g.) improvements in public health and nutrition, while birth rates remain high. The result, as birth rates come to exceed death rates, is a massive population explosion: one which Western Europe experienced in the nineteenth century and which has been apparent, until very recently at least, in India and China. It should be noted, however, that one reason for the failure of birth rates to come down into a more balanced relationship with death rates is the social logic of early industrialization. Wages were low and one means of compensating was to increase the number of workers in the household. Parents viewed children as potential contributors to the household budget. For sure this meant an early period when children were growing up when that same budget would be sorely pressed. But children started going to work much earlier in life child labor was by no means uncommon and would live at home until they got married. These would be the golden years of the working class family. But as societies move into phases of high consumption so birth rates decrease and, as they approach death rates, total populations stabilize. In Western Europe and North America this sustained decline in fertility commenced in the late nineteenth century, leading to small families of about two births per couple by the third decade; i.e. replacement level. Important in this is improvement in the economic security of the working class family so that they no longer need rely so much on the wages of their children.13 Real decline in the cost of living brought about by the falling cost of foodstuffs
13
One of the points often made in this context is that birth control and family limitation starts among the wealthy and diffuses to the poorer strata of society. The implication is that there is a process of imitation. I
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in the latter part of the nineteenth century14 would have contributed to this, but so too would the introduction of old age pensions in the early years of the twentieth century in some Western European societies (though not in the US) and the effects of increasing unionization on wage levels. The meaning of the child was transformed. From little worker and contributor to the family budget s/he became an object of consumption for the parents, someone in the achievements of whom they could take pride and show off to friends and relatives.15 (see Figure 7.7 for a summary). BIRTH RATES DEATH RATES TOTAL POPULATION NO CHANGE INCREASING NO CHANGE
PHASE 1 HIGH HIGH PHASE 2 HIGH LOW PHASE 3 LOW LOW Figure 7.7: The Demographic Transition: A Schematic Summary
So ultimately world population will be stabilized. Growth will cease and replacement, perhaps even a modest decline if parents fail to reproduce themselves, will occur. But one problem is: At what absolute levels will population be stabilized? And given the assumption of transformation into a high consumption society what does that imply for future demands on the worlds ecological base? As incomes increase so, for example, diets change and meat becomes an important food. But animals are wasteful converters of food. To make one pound of meat requires an amount of grain which would make 8 to 15 1-lb loaves of bread. As a result the really dense farming populations that exist in a dominantly subsistence society are almost entirely vegetarian. But the shift away from a vegetarian diet is only part of the problem. Consumption takes the form of automobiles with all that they imply for pressure on fossil fuels, not to mention air pollution and global warming. In addition people want bigger houses, more foreign vacations, more household appliances and home entertainment equipment, and so on. This is a truly
suspect that for the most part this is wrong; that what happens is that as the lower strata approach the degree of economic security enjoyed by the middle classes, so they find that they no longer need to rely on the wages brought in by young children and so can start limiting their families to a greater degree. 14 The supply of food on the world market greatly increased during these years due to the opening up of such areas as the Great Plains of North America and Argentina. Shipping costs also dropped quite precipitously during this period so that the cost of a loaf of bread in European shops went down quite dramatically. 15 See the fascinating book by Viviana Zelizer: Pricing the Priceless Child.
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frightening prospect when one realizes that the populations of those societies which have achieved a level of high consumption and show no signs of being satisfied! are a minority of the worlds population. So perhaps the answer is persuading people to consume less? Unfortunately the incentive framework, the framework within which resource allocation decisions are made, within which innovations occur, does not give cause for optimism. Capitalism is inimical to sustainability because it cannot reproduce itself without constant expansion. Furthermore, to the extent that it is not forced to pay for the environmental costs it imposes, it will continue to degrade the environment. Let me elaborate. i. An Expansionary Logic: One can start out with the historical record. Since the emergence of capitalism approximately three and a half centuries ago, this has been one of unremitting growth: growth of production, growth of worker productivity, growth of consumption and, of course, growth in the demands placed on nature on naturally occurring substances like the soil and minerals and on natural forces like the various cycles discussed earlier. More fundamental than this record, however, is the incentive structure, the socio-historical incentive structure, that explains it; and so long as that incentive structure defined by the production of commodities with commodities continues, then so will increasing production and pressures on nature. We saw earlier, for example, how the competitive pressures set up by producing commodities with commodities results in continued technical innovation, continuing increases in productivity, the introduction of new products, and marketing campaigns designed to ensure the sale of those products. New technologies are introduced with a view to saving on labor enhancing worker productivity. But, and assuming that wages 16 stay constant, costs of production and therefore prices will go down. This means that people have money left over after they have purchased the standard items of consumption and that they can purchase new products. Not only that, the labor forced out through the productivity increases in old lines of production is
16
For the informed: nominal wages as opposed to real wages.
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available for drafting into the production of new lines. And so the cycle repeats itself: more growth begetting still more. True, the picture is not entirely bleak. As exhaustion of fossil fuels sets in, for example, and prices rise, one can anticipate increased concentration on the development of clean, renewable substitutes like solar, wind and tidal energy. At present these are quite expensive alternatives, but rising prices for oil and coal will eventually narrow the difference and give the energy companies an incentive to shift the focus of their research efforts. The same logic applies to the balance between recycling materials and continued extraction from nature: as the prices of (e.g.) wood pulp increase so the (market) attractions of recycling old newspapers will also increase. Likewise the development of new seeds in response to rising food prices when they start to rise, as seems inevitable can facilitate the extension of cropland into areas with shorter, less friendly, growing seasons, as indeed has already occurred to some degree. Still, questions remain. How is the deficit of the soils organic structure to be made good, for example, so that soil erosion will be stemmed and humanitys food base protected? Likewise, at what level will the emission of greenhouse gases be stalled before cleaner energies take over? ii. Cost Shifting: Competition has other effects. Firms want to minimize costs in order to be able to hold prices down and so ensure that they will get back the money they laid out plus a profit. Some of the costs are ones that they internalize: they appear in their balance sheets. Those on whom costs (in the sense of having to endure something they would rather not) are imposed in order to produce get monetary compensation: in particular, workers get wages. But if you think about it there are lots of other costs which people experience as a result of production or, indeed, the consumption of what is produced, that are not compensated.
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Consider, for example, the effects of air pollution from factories on peoples health or cleaning bills. More doctor visits, prescriptions, even stays in hospital may be necessitated as a result of exposure to the pollutants, but those so suffering are not compensated for the costs they incur. Likewise what of the costs of global warming in terms of agricultural adjustments, the building of defenses against rising sea levels? One of the answers mooted has been to, in effect, commodify what have hitherto been common resources: to convert common resources like the oceans, rivers, the air into resources whose use requires a fee. This was mentioned earlier in this Module but requires another look in the context of the present discussion of sustainability. Recall the idea: Government agencies would sell licenses to, in effect, use the air, lakes, rivers, as waste absorbing agents. The number of licenses for sale would be determined democratically: how much air, water, noise pollution were people willing to tolerate given what they know about its health and other effects? Firms wanting to pollute would then bid for licenses. The money raised by the government in this way could then be devoted to public purposes like helping people relocate from the noise created around airports. At the same time the fact that firms had to pay for a license to pollute would encourage them to shift to nonpolluting technologies and / or intens...