Copyright 1997 Guardian Newspapers Limited: The Observer

February 9, 1997, Sunday

SECTION: THE OBSERVER REVIEW PAGE ; Pg. 7

HEADLINE: WE'VE GOT 12,000 DAYS TO SAVE THE PLANET. CAN WE HANG ON THAT LONG?

BYLINE: Tom Athanasiou

HIGHLIGHT: Apocalypse when?

In 1990, not so very long ago, Washington's Worldwatch unit gave us 40 years; not 40 years until `the end', but 40 years to make the transition to an `environmentally stable society'. Worldwatch's president, Lester Brown, spelled out the consequences of failure in cool, unambiguous terms: `If we have not succeeded by then, environmental deterioration and economic decline are likely to be feeding on each other, pulling us into a downward spiral of social disintegration.'

An odd, precise figure, 40 years. Just the sort usually discounted as apocalyptic excess. Brown, in fact, is high on the list of greens whom cornucopians, those right-wing thinkers who put their trust for progress in market forces, love to deride as professional pessimists. Nevertheless, Brown's warning warrants serious consideration. It is first, a subtle, modern one, for he attends closely to the feedback between ecological deterioration and economic inflexibility. The elements of his projected catastrophe: desertification, rising human population, political instability, famine, deforestation, pollution, just for starters have become depressingly familiar, as has the weight and inertia of the global economy.

Worldwatch is no millenarian cult. Its State of the World reports like that which issued the 40-year warning have become the planet's semi-official environmental annual statements. Further, its 40-year figure was based in large degree on precise quantitative measures of the earth's `vital signs' continued loss of topsoils and forests, rising population and carbon dioxide levels, falling per capita agricultural productivity, eroding genetic diversity, dying lakes, reefs, and rivers. There is almost no end to the grim data.

It gets worse. More recently, Beyond the Limits, by the authors of 1972's eco- blockbuster The Limits to Growth, argues in precise numerical detail that in the two decades since Limits was published, and `in spite of the world's improved technologies, the greater awareness, the stronger environmental policies, many resource and pollution flows had grown beyond their sustainable limits'.

What are we to make of such rhetoric? Have greens, as even sympathetic critics now charge, come to fetishise doomsaying? Is environmentalism simply an apocalyptic cult?

My experiences are, I think, typical of those who travel in both environmental and mainstream circles. I have long been a green activist and yet my day job is in the systems industry in Silicon Valley. I have often been asked `what psychological needs' I thought lay behind `end-time thinking' in the environmental movement, and I had to force a smile when a friend, a physician and medical researcher, told me he feared the existence of a fin-de -siecle virus. Another friend, a bright, sarcastic software engineer, found the nub of the green movement's public relations problem. He listened as I argued that `ecological crisis' is not too strong a term, then retorted that `environmental catastrophists' were like `gloom and doom economists, always predicting a crash'. All, he said, had `a professional relationship' to `their predictions of apocalypse'.

This is a good point, but it is not decisive. Maurice Strong, secretary- general of 1992's Earth Summit, certainly did have a professional relationship to his prediction, delivered during the summit's opening speeches, that `if we continue along this path of development and destruction, we will destroy our civilisation', that if we do not act decisively and soon `nature will, and in a much more brutal manner'. Who will altogether discount this as mere professional exhortation?

Forty years, or 50, or 100, is a technical matter. Any specific prediction is likely to be proven wrong. Even weak half- measures have unpredictable effects. Randy Hayes, director of the Rainforest Action Network, makes sense when he says, with typical pragmatism, that `things drag', and `if Worldwatch says 40 years we probably have 70'. It's a reasonable hedge, one that expects the unexpected and respects the power of adaptation and denial. The difference between 40 and 100 years is, of course, no real difference at all.

According to the environmental historian William Cronon, we use prophecies to tell ourselves stories about what we both do and do not wish to become. If this is so, then how shall we understand the bias of so many greens toward prophecies of collapse, of crisis and impossibility?

Optimism, it seems to me, is a greater danger than apocalyptic fear. Consider the world of the right-wing cornucopians, of Ayn Rand and her imitators. What if they are right? What if there are no limits, and we can indefinitely keep adding people, dams, chemicals, power plants, roads and the rest? What if the earth can be made to support a human population of 50 billion?

Few people today would think this a pretty thought. It has been a long road from the Fifties, when science fiction told childish tales of hi-tech happiness and PRs could hope to argue plausibly that `atomic' energy would be `too cheap to meter'. These days, we have lost the deeper confidence that came so easily then. Suspicion abounds, and technology is generally regarded with ambivalence.

Today dystopia, not utopia, sets the tone, and green radicals are hardly alone in imagining a sterile, brutal future. It is expressed in the terror that comes to children when they learn that the animals in their books and toy worlds are being stalked by extinction. But optimism and pessimism are deeply political standpoints, and fear is anything but simple. Do chlorine compounds in general, and not just CFCs, destroy the ozone layer? Are the clouds changing in strange and mysterious ways? Only the scientists can say, but there are many reasons to distrust the judgments of science, especially corporate science.

Ecological fear is heavy with the decay products of impotence: frustration, anger, and paranoia and with the contingencies of class and social position. Often, where we stand depends on where we sit. If you happen to be an officer of a waste-management corporation and community activists are preventing you from laying in a profitable and, to your mind, entirely reasonable new dump, you can be expected to have a certain sympathy for pundits who dismiss the activists' anxieties as `ecophobic'. Those anxieties may seem less strange, and certainly less absurd, if you are a householder and that dump is to be in your neighbourhood.

To take another example, green activists have been campaigning for years to phase out all chlorinated hydrocarbons, especially DDT. Does this seem crazy? The chance to judge for yourself seems likely to arrive soon, for the evidence against the organochlorines is growing, and the once derided view that even tiny doses can disrupt biological processes by mimicking reproductive hormones is fast becoming the mainstream scientific opinion. It has been firmly established, for example, that specific organochlorines are linked to breast cancer. The American Journal of the National Cancer Institute has published studies indicating that women with higher concentrations of DDT in their blood have up to four times the chance of developing breast cancer as those with lower levels. Unfortunately, this knowledge has not led to meaningful DDT restrictions, except in the US and Europe. In fact, DDT plants are still being built in the South, sometimes even with World Bank funding. Science is one thing, it seems, business is another. In practical terms, it may seem absurd to even imagine phasing out an industry as gigantic as that erected on chlorine chemistry. But would it still seem absurd if the chlorines were in fact the force behind today's rapidly rising rates of breast and testicular cancer, if reports of plummeting sperm counts were borne out by further research, if chlorines were implicated in a vast number of other reproductive and carcinogenic disorders across the animal kingdom? Would it still seem absurd if you, or your mother, or a dear, still-young friend were being consumed by breast cancer?

Environmentalists live double lives. As activists and politicians, even as technicians and entrepreneurs, they must think their efforts worthwhile, must believe they will win. In these roles, energy and initiative are essential, and it is optimism, not depressive realism, that opens paths to profit and advantage. Yet greens are lost without their darker suspicions.

As a result, environmentalism is trapped in a tense, sometimes panicked oscillation between liberal optimism and radical despair, a false choice that has hobbled the movement for decades, if not from its beginnings. The big picture was long easy to ignore. The world's political structures were frozen in place and, viewed from the North, life in the peripheries appeared exotic and inconsequential. Besides, in the early glory days of modern environmentalism, faith in liberal reformism was easy to justify. In the US, the Sixties ended with a spate of almost visionary legislation the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act etc. and with the first Earth Day. In Europe, the Green parties began their rise less than a decade later. It was easy to imagine a future in which rationality would prevail.

In the Eighties, with the Cold War at an end, the anti-environmental backlash began in earnest with the election of President Reagan. By the late Eighties, a new round of economic globalisation embodied in burgeoning cross- border capital flows and trade deals revealed economy, ecology, and human rights as a single inextricable tangle. The illusion of `the environment' as a politically distinct area, one that could be saved alone, passed away.

By 1992, anxiety set the political tone. Despite `success stories' such as South Korea and Taiwan, the South as a whole continued its decline. In the North, the middle classes imagined themselves among the poor, and realised that their future held no certain comfort, security, or even opportunity.

Today, it is easy to believe that matters will worsen in both North and South. And further, that northern democracies are likely to be besieged by anxiety, anger, and a terrifying turn to the strange and volatile mix of fear and nationalism that pundits call nativism. Add a long ecological decline, and it's easy to finally imagine a kind of ecofascism. Here, pessimism would rule, and ideology would teach that only monumental, centralised initiatives are worthy of support at the expense of the world's poor.

Ecofascism is perhaps not a groundless fear. Despair is everywhere in the green movement, and despair has its own crazy logic. A few more decades of decline could themselves seem to justify a functionally (if not explicitly) ecofascist regime. Recently, and anxiously, German Green leader Birgit Laubach has warned that the failure to control the ecological crisis within the `democratic constitutional state' may lead to a time when an `ecological emergency state' will appear as the only real alternative.

In the end, greens fall easily into the apocalyptic narrative because it is difficult to imagine social changes large and rapid enough to avert such a catastrophe. Things look particularly bad in the South, where the grounds for pessimism are all too manifest. Martin Khor, a tired and dignified Malay activist who emerged during the run-up to the Rio summit as a spokesman for the South, drew his conclusions even before the summit began. Khor though, expected nothing. `The fading of the Cold War has left the South much more vulnerable to the power of the North,' he wrote, and it was `likely that the governments will keep on haggling for years to come, while the global environment continues to be degraded and destroyed'. He concluded, with an honesty rare among politicians of any stripe, that `the problems of humanity appear too complex and deeply entrenched for Earth to be saved'.

Such pessimism is not lightly held. In researching my book, Slow Reckoning, I found that many of the best- informed green activists have decided not to have children. I also found that optimism was often, as the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci remarked long ago, a matter not of intellect but of will. One person I spoke with comes particularly to mind, a thoughtful economist, Lyuba Zarsky, who spent a long hour extolling the virtues of a strategy aimed at `greening' markets through a flexible, adaptive politics. Then, in reply to a question about her deepest feelings, she burst out: "I'm afraid it's too late, that we won't be able to turn things around, that the world will be so ugly that we won't feel any joy in living in it, that the things I love most will be gone, that my daughter will never know them. When I say an ugly world, I don't just mean a paved-over and polluted world. Even maintaining compassion will be difficult."


Read Tom Athanasiou's earlier ('91) and longer (56k) paper.


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