href="#fb3_img_img_1f6c4f28-e38b-5587-9304-e06af1e22832.jpg" alt="Source: SERI/Friends of the Earth/Global..."/>
Source: SERI/Friends of the Earth/Global 2000/ REdUSE, Under Pressure, nin.tl/1f5ghgj
This does not mean efficiency improvements are a second-tier priority, as some free market boosters suggest. Critics like the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research (funded by, among others, ExxonMobil Corporation and billionaire Tea Party supporters, the Koch brothers) maintain that the market must be left on its own and that efficiency should not be enforced by government regulation. Directing energy policy through regulation is a ‘folly’, the Institute says. ‘Instead of forcing more energy-efficiency requirements on American consumers, policy-makers and government regulators should allow market prices and disruptive innovations to guide energy use.’8
But it’s not the goal that is wobbly, it’s the context. Efficiency improvements are necessary – but not sufficient. It’s the growth that negates the efficiency savings that is the real issue.
Growth optimists also boast that physical resource limits are irrelevant in our new knowledge-based economy. As economies ‘mature’ and shift from production to finance, insurance and real estate (the so-called FIRE sector), engineering, education and other services, there will be less need for raw materials. As the economy ‘dematerializes’ we will continue to grow as our work-places and homes become greener and cleaner. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of this happening. For the most part advanced industrial economies have simply shifted production overseas where labor costs are cheaper, taxes less burdensome and environmental regulations weak or non-existent. So, as Western countries ‘offload’ production of real goods overseas, the global pollution load actually increases.
High-end service jobs also generally pay more, which inevitably means more consumption. But, while resource-intensive manufacturing has relocated abroad, we in the West are no less addicted to our ‘stuff’ – hi-tech electronic gadgets, sprawling suburbs, new cars and cheap flights to warm places. As our consumption increases, we are merely ‘outsourcing’ the problem. Out of sight, out of mind. We are still chomping through tons of raw materials. It’s just that now the ‘throughput’ is halfway around the globe. All we see are the final results on display in the local mall. As University of British Columbia ecologist William Rees notes: ‘High-income service employees therefore have much larger per-capita ecological footprints than workers in the basic economy; those countries with the largest high-end service sectors have the largest national eco-footprints.’
The overflowing sinks
What goes into the maw of the growth machine must eventually come out the other end as waste. The waste comes in many forms – from household garbage, plastic bottles and construction refuse to slaughterhouse offal, toxic tailings, noxious gases and pesticide residues. All of these find their way into one of Planet Earth’s natural ‘sinks’: the air, the water or the land. Until the last 50 years or so this was not really a problem. Mother Nature could take just about anything we could throw at her. All that has changed. Today the absorptive and assimilative capacities of the Earth can no longer handle the Niagara-like torrents of waste we are disgorging.
The ‘sinks’ are overflowing. The evidence is clear wherever we turn as our rapacious global economy hits the limits. All major ecosystems are being degraded at an astonishing speed. It’s a depressing litany that includes the ransacking of ocean fisheries (12 of the world’s 13 major fisheries are now severely depleted); the continued destruction of tropical rainforests; fertile soils salted with agro-chemicals and converted to industrial agriculture; increasing desertification; the destruction of wilderness; species extinction and the erosion of biodiversity. The list goes on.
Take the case of synthetic chemicals – the hazards of which Rachel Carson, whose pioneering 1962 book, Silent Spring, is credited with launching the environmental movement, first raised over 50 years ago. We continue to pump millions of tons of deadly chemicals into the environment every year and the damage both to humans and nature is no longer in doubt. We are living in a deadly stew of toxins, most of which did not exist before modern chemistry was born in the crucible of World War Two.
There are more than 80,000 chemicals in industrial production today, with hundreds added each year. Few have been tested for their effect on human health or the environment. And, critically, there is almost no knowledge of how chemicals interact with each other. When the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was passed in the US in 1976, more than 62,000 chemicals were ‘grandfathered’ into the market – in other words, no testing, no questions asked. According to investigative journalist Mark Schapiro, these included highly toxic substances such as ethyl benzene, a widely used industrial solvent suspected of being a potent neuro-toxin; whole families of synthetic plastics that are potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters; and thousands of other substances for which there was little or no information. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admits that 95 per cent of all chemicals have not undergone even minimal testing for toxicity. In the European Union it’s estimated that two-thirds of the 30,000 most commonly used chemicals have not been vetted. According to Schapiro, the EPA had banned just five chemicals in the quarter-century prior to 2007.9 All of us live with this toxic burden. But the poor, the marginalized, and the people of color, those who are cheek-by-jowl with industrial plants, suffer the most.
Rachel Carson would have been outraged but not surprised. ‘The chemical war is never won,’ she wrote in Silent Spring, ‘and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.’ It was Carson who first promoted the notion of ecology, the complex web that binds human life to the natural world. ‘The serious student of earth history knows that neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little isolated compartments… harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create problems for mankind [sic]… We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or ecosystem.’10
As humankind pushes every deeper into the most remote areas of the globe, expanding our industrial production and consumer habits, we threaten natural systems and sully the last remnants of wilderness left on our ‘full’ planet. ATVs (all terrain vehicles) thunder across alpine meadows deep in the Rocky Mountains. Seismic lines crisscross the high Arctic. Cattle ranches and industrial-scale soy farms replace dense, tropical forests in the Brazilian Amazon, displacing native peoples and destroying a unique pharmacological treasure trove. Nearly a fifth of Brazil’s tropical forests have been logged over the past four decades – more than in the previous 450 years since European contact. It is estimated than another 20 per cent may be lost in the next decade.
As a result of habitat destruction, hunting, invasion by alien species, disease and climate change, the speed of global extinction is accelerating. There are now more than 17,000 plants and animals at risk, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This Swiss NGO’s Red List of endangered species records that 25 per cent of all invertebrates, 20 per cent of mammals, half of all primates, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and half of all turtles face extinction. When the IUCN first released figures in 2004, it noted that we are losing species 100-1,000 times faster than the normal ‘background’ rate suggested by fossil records before humans were around. Between a third and a half of all terrestrial species are expected to die out over the next 200 years if nothing is done to stop habitat destruction. Scientists generally put the normal extinction rate at about one species every four years. Harvard’s EO Wilson, one of the world’s most eminent biologists, has predicted the rate of species extinction could reach 10,000 times the ‘background’ rate in the next 20 years.
The Anthropocene and nature’s services
The destructive impact of human activity on the Earth has become so pervasive that ecologists now suggest that the previous geological era has ended and
