War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock
a process of social recognition. Beck points out that a number of factors make this social recognition difficult. Firstly, the risks are ubiquitous in urban–industrial society. The risks are
‘piggy-back products’ which are inhaled or ingested with other things. They are the stowaways of normal consumption. They travel on the wind and in the water. They can be in anything and everything, and along with the absolute necessities of life — air to breathe, food, clothing, home furnishings — they pass through all the otherwise strictly controlled protective areas of modernity (Beck, 2005: 41).
Secondly, while in the past pollution and environmental hazards were perceptible to the senses, ‘many of the newer risks (nuclear or chemical contaminations, pollutants in foodstuffs, diseases of civilization) completely escape human powers of direct perception. The focus is more and more on hazards which are neither visible nor perceptible to the victims’ (Beck, 2005: 27). The nuclear threat is a particularly good illustration of this social invisibility, because radioactivity completely evades human perception. It is invisible, odourless and tasteless, and its effects do not always have an immediate impact on those they affect.
Thirdly, many of these threats are only detectable and explicable through the application of specialised forms of scientific knowledge. An example is the detection of traces of toxic metals in water. It is only by the application of sophisticated scientific knowledge and technology that these phenomena can be detected, and the connection with ill-health made.
Not only is this damage invisible to direct sensory experience and understanding, but it is sometimes deliberately concealed. Many corporate polluters, aided by uncaring or incompetent state bureaucracies, follow a pattern of deceit and denial to avoid responsibility. In addition, the relation between environment factors and public health is often obscured by reductionist science. Davis points out that ‘the traditional medical focus on individual diagnosis and treatment utterly fails to reveal the pattern individual cases of disease make when matched with environmental conditions’ (Davis, 2002: xvii). In addition, many victims of toxic waste, for example, suffer from ‘latency invisibility’, i.e. ‘the long, unknown period between contamination and disease’ as well as from ‘etiological invisibility’, i.e. ‘the difficulty of determining the causal pathway of disease’ (Brown and Mikkelsen, 1992: 58).
Policy change is usually contested and protracted. It took 50 years of finding unmistakably higher levels of sickness and early death among smokers for the relation between smoking and ill-health to be inscribed in public policies. The tobacco industry funded a successful, well-orchestrated and perfectly legal campaign to undermine any studies showing how dangerous tobacco really was. The car industry mounted a similar disinformation campaign on research that showed the devastating health impacts of lead in gasoline. The pesticide industry fought hard to silence Rachel Carson’s warnings that the use of DDT [Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane] was poisoning people as well as the planet. In his discussion of the ‘denial industry’, Monbiot has described how corporations such as ExxonMobil (one of the world’s most profitable corporations) are undermining popular understanding of a scientific consensus on climate change (Monbiot, 2006b).
So the real scientific difficulties have been complicated by a stream of disinformation fuelled by the short-term economic interests of those who stand to profit from keeping matters unresolved and obscure. Davis suggests that
we know less and less about more and more. The reasons have partly to do with the intricacies of the science, but also result from the skilful ways in which some in the corporate world have effectively blocked research, cancelled studies, pulled funding, and employed sophisticated public relations campaigns to cast doubt on these questions (Davis, 2002: 194).
But we need to study these processes to develop our awareness and appreciation of our everyday interactions with nature, because nature is currently in a crisis that threatens the survival of us all.
NATURE IN CRISIS
Ours is a time of intensified threats to all nature, not only the extinction of species, but the alteration of the climate and the degradation of landscapes. These threats are not ‘natural’ and inevitable. They are social in their causes and consequences in the sense that they are rooted in our behaviour, i.e. in damaging human action.
Through such action, about six million hectares of primary forest are felled each year and about a third of mangrove swamps have been lost since the 1980s. The capacity of ecosystems to perform valuable functions like filtering water, providing food and pollinating crops is being degraded by direct human actions like overfishing and through indirect ones like the production of carbon dioxide, the gas that is primarily responsible for global warming, and the tendency of deforestation to increase the risk of floods.
Climate change is expected to lead to increased disasters, rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies. It also threatens the survival of thousands of species — a threat unparalleled since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago. Scientists warn that there are declining numbers of plants, animals, insects and birds across the globe, and that the current extinction rate is up to a thousand times faster than in the past. About 844 animals and plants are known to have disappeared in the past 500 years. Many people living around the Arctic fear that their children will never know the polar bear, as thinning ice and longer summers are destroying its habitat. The forest habitat of the 650 mountain gorillas left in the world is under increasing threat from logging, as well as climate change. The ice cap is receding on Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. The number of male green turtles is falling because of rising sea temperatures. The migratory patterns of many birds are being disrupted. In sum, scientists have warned that up to 37 per cent of terrestrial species could become extinct by 2050. The direct causes of biodiversity loss — habitat change, over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive species, nutrient loading and climate change — show no sign of abating.
These threats to biodiversity are very real in southern Africa. Climate change is likely to affect the area particularly severely by reducing rainfall and increasing desertification. There are few countries that can boast of three ‘biodiversity hotspots’, based on the diversity of plant species found there. In South Africa they are the Succulent Karoo, which contains the richest succulent flora in the world; Maputa-Pondoland, the second most plant-diverse system in Africa, containing 8 100 species; and the Cape Floral Region or Fynbos Region, which is recognised as one of the six plant kingdoms of the world, with 9 000 species. The last list of threatened plant species was completed in 1997 and contained 3 508 plants, of which 920 were listed as threatened with extinction and 42 were extinct. Under the impact of urbanisation, these numbers have increased dramatically, perhaps by as much as 30 per cent in the past 10 years. Our endangered mammals range from the black rhinoceros to the golden mole, with the list including 10 critically endangered species, 18 endangered species (including the African wild dog) and 29 that are considered vulnerable. Most tourism in South Africa is nature based and several species in the Kruger National Park, such as the sable and roan antelopes, could be threatened as temperatures rise, unless corridors are created to allow them to migrate to the more humid coastline. Of the 950 species of birds recorded as being from southern Africa, only 42 are currently listed as globally threatened, but 2 species, the Egyptian vulture and African skimmer, are already extinct. According to Environmental Affairs Minister Martinus van Schalkwyk, of South Africa’s terrestrial ecosystems, 34 per cent are threatened and 5 per cent critically endangered; of the country’s 120 major rivers, 82 per cent are threatened and 44 per cent critically endangered (cited in The Star, 2006d).
In South Africa, we have to confront not only climate change and the loss of biodiversity, but also air pollution, land degradation, water scarcity and pollution, as well as excessive waste generation and disposal. Most importantly, we are a significant contributor to global warming, as one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters. According to Richard Worthington of Earthlife Africa, South Africa accounts for about half of the carbon emissions on the African continent.1 Government proposals to build 15 more coal-fired power stations to meet our electricity needs ignore this reality. Clearly, renewable energy is a cleaner alternative and points to how the environmental and social crises are linked. Social justice demands that the mass of our people should be given access to clean, safe energy. Environmental justice demands