MURRAY BOOKCHIN
DEATH OF A SMALL PLANET: It's growth that's killing us
We tend to think of environmental catastrophes -such as the recent
Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska-as "accidents":
isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when
does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such
occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a
consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated
crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?
President Bush was content
to blame the spill of more than ten million gallons of crude
petroleum off Valdez Harbor on negligence by a soused sea captain.
In fact, however, it was the consequence of social circumstances far
more compelling than the usual "human" or "technological" factors
Murray Bookchin lives in Burlington, Vermont, and is director
emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology at Plainfield, Vermont
He is a contribu- tor to many publications and the author of more
than a dozen books, including "The Ecology of Freedom " and, more
recently, "Remaking Society," published by South End Press.
cited in mass-media reporting. Since the pipeline at Valdez Harbor
went into service a dozen years ago, there have been no fewer than
400 oil spills in the Bay of Alaska. In 1987, the tanker Stuyvesant
dumped almost a million gallons into the gulf after leaving Valdez,
presumably because of mechanical failures attributed to severe
weather. The environmental - protection organization Greenpeace
recorded seven spills in Alaskan waters this year even before the
Exxon Valdez ran aground.
Oil spills ranging from a few thousand gallons to a million or
more-as well as the oil routinely flushed out of tankers to make
room for return-trip cargoes have polluted vast areas of the world's
ocean surface and coastline. The appalling effects of oil spills
that occurred many years ago are still apparent today, and new
incidents keep adding to the damage. The widely publicized
10,000-gallon spill that "mysteriously polluted the coastal areas of
two Hawaiian islands a week after the Exxon Valdez ran aground was
more than matched by the little-publicized 117,000 gallons that the
Exxon Houston dumped off another Hawaiian coastal area some three
weeks before the Valdez spill.
On a single day, June 23, 1989, three major spills--off Newport,
Rhode Island, in the Delaware River, and on the Texas Gulf
Coast--dumped a total of well over one million gallons of oil into
U.S. waters
Many find it difficult to see these incidents as part of a continuum
that has a common source. To trace a chain of events from its cause
to its consequence is an unfamiliar task for people who have been
conditioned to see life as a television sit-com or talk show
composed of discrete self-contained, anecdotal segments. We live, in
effect, on a diet of short takes, devoid of logic or long-range
effect. Our problems to the extent that we recognize
The Exxon Valdez disaster was not an unforeseen
accident or a random mishap but a dead certainty.
It was predictable-and predicted-decades ago.
them as problems at all-are episodic rather than systemic; the scene
dissolves, the camera moves on.
But the present crisis will not disappear with a switch of channels.
It was predictable-and predicted-decades ago. There is an
all-but-forgotten history of dire portents, urgent warnings, and
unsuccessful efforts by an earlier generation of environmentalists
to deal with the social factors that underpin environmental
problems. In many instances, they predicted with uncanny accuracy
the results of ecologically insane policies pursued by the corporate
establishment in the West and the bureaucratic establishment in the
East.
The earliest disputes around the dangers posed by the oil industry's
expansion into oceanic drilling occurred even before the Arctic
regions were opened to oil exploitation. They go back well into the
1950s, when larger vessels started being used to transport Middle
Eastern oil. Long before spills came to public attention,
environmentalists were voicing fears over hazards posed by growing
tanker capacity.
No less serious than the possibility of "human error" in the
operation of these huge vessels was the well-known fact that even
the sturdiest ships have a way of being buffeted by storms, drifting
off course, foundering on reefs in treacherous waters, and sinking.
In lectures I gave decades ago on the Pacifica Radio network, I
emphasized the sheer certainty of disastrous oil spills that would
surely follow upon the growing size of tankers. The Exxon Valdez
spill was, therefore, not an unforeseen accident but a dead
certainty-and one that may yet be beggared by others to come. It was
as predictable as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
No less predictable was the global warming trend. Forecasts that
carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels
could raise planetary temperatures go back to the Nineteenth Century
and have been repeated from time to time since then, though more
often as atmospheric curiosities than as serious ecological
warnings. I wrote as early as 1964 that increases in the "blanket of
carbon dioxide" from fossil-fuel combustion "will lead to more
destructive storm patterns and eventually to melting of polar ice
caps, rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas."
The possibility of acid rain and the systematic deforestation of the
equatorial rain-forest belt, not to speak of the impact of
chlorofluorocarbons on the Earth's ozone layer, could not have been
foreseen in technical detail. But the larger issue of environmental
destruction on a global scale and the disruptions of basic natural
cycles was already on the radical agenda in the late 1960s, long
before Earth Day was proclaimed and ecological issues were reduced
to ridding city streets of cans, bottles, and garbage.
Predictions of disaster come cheap when they are not derived from
reasoned analysis of the sort that has become unpopular in this era
of New Age mysticism. But we have no reason to re-joice in the fact
that Margaret Thatcher often sounds like an environmentally oriented
"Green" in her public warnings about the Greenhouse Effect, if we
bear in mind that Thatcherism in Britain can often be equated with a
transition to high-technology and nucleonics.
Nor would it be particularly encouraging to learn that Mikhail
Gorbachev is prepared to follow Thatcher in phasing out the older
"rust-belt" industries and their fossil-fuel energy in the aftermath
of Chernobyl and earlier, possibly worse nuclear "events" we haven't
yet heard much about. If solutions to the Greenhouse Effect create
potentially more disastrous problems like the proliferation of
"clean," nuclear power and its long-lived radioactive debris, the
world may be worse off as a result of this new kind of environmental
thinking
Attempts by President Bush to join this chorus by revising the Clean
Air Act to reduce high ozone levels, cancer-causing pollutants, and
other toxic substances have earned almost as much criticism as
praise. The effects of Bush's proposals which are modest enough if
we bear in mind the appalling magnitude of the enviro nmental
casts-will not be fully felt until the first decade of the next
century. Understandably, that has aroused the ire of
environmentalists. Moreover, for Bush to leave the execution of his
plan to industry is to guarantee that the costs of pollution-control
technology will be passed on, with some extras, to the consumer and
that many of the proposals will be honored in the breach.
What environmentalists must emphasize is that the global ecological
crisis is systemic not simply the product of random mishaps. If the
Exxon Valdez disaster is treated merely as an "accident" as were
Chernobyl and Three Mile Is
Unlimited growth is pushing back the evolutionary clock.
Soil is being turned into sand; forests into moonscapes;
rivers, lakes, and oceans into sewers.
land-we will have deflected public attention from a social crisis of
historic proportions: We do not simp1y live in a world of problems
but in a highly problematical world, an inherently anti-ecological
society. This anti-ecological world will not be healed by acts of
statesmanship or passage of piecemeal legislation. It is a world
that is direly in need of far-reaching structural change.
Perhaps the most obvious of our systemic problems is uncontrollable
growth. I use the word "uncontrollable" advisedly, in preference to
"uncontrolled." The growth of which I speak is not humanity's
colonization of the planet over millennia of history. It is rather
an inexorable material reality that is unique to our era: namely,
that unlimited economic growth is assumed to be evidence of human
progress. We have taken this notion so much for granted over the
past few generations that it is as immutably fixed in our
consciousness as the sanctity of property itself.
Growth is, in fact, almost synonymous with the market economy that
prevails today. That fact finds its clearest expression in the
marketplace maxim, "Grow or ...
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