href="#litres_trial_promo">9.4Back to the Front
Chapter 1
Houston, We Have a Problem
The U.S. is the third most populated nation in the world, behind only China and India, and is home to over 300 million people. Immigration from many locations around the globe has sparked the recent increase in U.S. population. The U.S. is behind only Russia and Canada in total land area and still holds substantial natural resources including farmland, timber, metals, coal, and even crude oil. The abundant supply of usable raw materials has greatly contributed to prosperity for hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. for more than two centuries. Although the U.S. still has considerable poverty, crime, and economically depressed areas within its borders, the standard of living enjoyed in most U.S. communities is significantly higher than the day-to-day reality for billions of people throughout the developing world.
Over the past 200 years, our nation has developed an extensive industrial complex to provision food, transportation, shelter, and various industrial products for over 10 generations of Americans. Today the U.S. accounts for approximately 20% of the global natural resource consumption, although it has only 4.5% of the world’s population. In spite of some negative international sentiment toward America, many, often desperate, people from around the world try any means available to enter our nation and start a new life on the U.S. soil, sometimes repeatedly, even though their attempts are sometimes unsuccessful. In contrast, most Americans enjoy a high standard of living, and today few U.S. citizens choose to emigrate in search of more promising lives abroad. The U.S. has always offered exceptional quality-of-life opportunities for its residents that are unavailable in most other nations.
The continued expansion of the U.S. industrial complex over the past century has indeed provided the means for considerable economic prosperity. The unique heritage of capitalism, democracy, natural resource availability, and diverse human spirit has enabled a standard of living envied by many around the world. This heritage includes an immense economy that today is targeted by most major international manufacturers and investors as a lucrative market for products and a reliable location for speculative ventures. But a complete accounting of our economic legacy also includes a dark side. Not only has the U.S. industry provided a dependable stream of goods and services but it has also contributed a laundry list of serious problems for humanity and most biota, including an increase of cancer and other major health threats, loss of domestic jobs, decreasing soil fertility, a variety of compromised natural systems, and global climate change (discussed in detail later). We shall see how these pernicious and seriously regrettable health, environmental, social, and economic realities that have accompanied industrial expansion are for the most part unnecessary.
1.1Our Early Approach to Mounting Problems
By the middle of the 19th century, many American cities had become dirty, noisy, polluted, and congested places to live, work, and raise a family. Rural areas were also fraught with poverty and serious qualityof-life issues. By this time, agricultural soil fertility was decreasing and soil erosion was increasing, and not long after World War II ended, the new petroleum-based pesticides were touted as the linchpin of a productive agricultural system. Extensive air and water pollution was prolific and unfettered. During this period of increasingly apparent environmental troubles, a few ardent advocates organized and supported various causes including wilderness, wildlife, soil, water, forests, prairies, and pollution reduction. These early impassioned advocacy groups mostly acted independently of one another, championing their own single causes and finding only limited success influencing meaningful public policy changes that benefited their agendas.
In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, and it became a lightning rod for the myriad of environmental concerns existing at that time. Her timely message, an indictment of the pesticide industry as a major polluter, fused many independent advocacy factions into a single, cohesive, and identifiable “modern environmental movement,” allowing this new societal cause to quickly develop into a formidable force for change. A new appreciation and respect for nature began appearing in the public mainstream as did an increasing concern for how American industrialization negatively affects the health of humans and of the natural world. New champions of nature called “environmentalists” began to take a respected place within academia, government, and non-profit organizations. Grassroots movements led by these environmentalists flourished, and their ideals were even incorporated into national platforms of political parties. The original Clean Air Act, the Environmental Policy Act, and a new federal bureau called the Environmental Protection Agency were among the tangible political results to surface in the early 1970s in the U.S. as a direct result of this robust environmental movement. The cause for reducing the harmful effects of business upon society and nature had now taken hold, and this commitment was illustrated by a number of regulatory attempts by federal and state government to slow down the industry’s seemingly indiscriminate efforts to increase its profits at the expense of environmental quality.
Historically, these environmentalists generally viewed leaders of the industry as self-serving, dishonest, and dangerous; they lobbied state and federal lawmakers to legislate environmental policies that coerced business to conform to the environmentalist agenda. Business leaders, in turn, viewed environmentalists as impractical extremists, whose unreasonable demands would raise the costs of goods and services, thereby putting many companies out of business, increase the U.S. unemployment rate, and lower the overall standard of living. Over the past 40 years, both sides have dug in their heels, resisted compromise, and operated within an evolving national environmental policy framework that has cost business and consumers billions of dollars per year but has not significantly mitigated the root problems. Despite many earnest attempts by legislators to craft effective U.S. environmental laws since the 1960s, we continue to systematically poison ourselves (albeit at a slower rate), lose domestic jobs, and dismantle many of our once-thriving local communities.
1.2Our Problems Continue
Since the 1960s, concerned U.S. citizens have generally looked to the government to remedy this deteriorating quality-of-life situation, but our public servants have not been up to the task. One endemic but seldom-cited hindrance is that our legislators and executive office holders are held accountable for their public service performance during relatively short terms of office and, not surprisingly, they routinely avoid tackling the core causes of problems that will provide the majority of benefits far into the future. Unfortunately in our political system, reactionary and shortsighted legislative action that generates headlines for name recognition and the next re-election campaign is more common. At the same time, Americans have tolerated this approach to environmental issues by politicians and, for the most part, have not demonstrated a mandate for effective systemic change in this regard. We will discuss more about the government’s role and responsibility in the sustainable business movement in Chapter 6.
In short, this insidious and protracted industrial tyranny shortens the lives of our citizens, undermines our economic stability, and continuously degrades the very natural systems upon which all life depends. Exacerbating the situation is an insufficient understanding and appreciation by most citizens of our reliance upon a healthy natural world and the myriad of vital services that come from it. Most of us still envision a mythical inexhaustible supply of raw materials from nature and her limitless capacity for absorbing all the toxic punches we can throw at her. Unfortunately, today we find most K-through-12 school systems lacking comprehensive and integrated environmental and social-based curricula, and this deficiency fuels our disassociation of human prosperity and natural world health. Most of us simply do not recognize the irreplaceable
