War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock
and increased local participation in decentralised enterprises.
One report indicated that in many areas we are breathing air ten times more polluted than recommended by international standards, we are bombarded with potentially lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation strong enough to break down plastic, and ultraviolet-B radiation reached ‘extremely dangerous’ levels in the summer of 1998–99 (Sunday Times, 1999a). According to this report, air pollution in many industrial and residential suburbs within the country’s major metropolitan areas was more than double World Health Organization recommendations. Then there is the problem of landfills, as we produce millions of cubic metres of solid waste annually. Soil erosion is serious, with 11 per cent of our topsoil lost every year, and there is a widespread use of dangerous materials, such as asbestos.
The relation between asbestos and mesothelioma is now well-established, and epidemiologists warn that other forms of cancer are directly related to environmental pollution. The carcinogenic substance dioxin has been found in very high levels in the perfect food for babies, the breast milk of nursing mothers, at the top of the human food chain. Over 60 years ago, Rachel Carson warned that we were poisoning ourselves as well as the planet, and was herself a victim of the rising rates of breast cancer among women. Now testicular cancer among men in industrial countries is also rising. Carson promoted the view of nature as inclusive — as a ‘web of life’ that connects us all. Today that web of life is unravelling. As Wilson writes: ‘As the crisis has deepened, it has spread outward to encompass the entire planet and inward into our very bodies’ (Wilson, 1997: 73).
The environmental crisis is most dramatically evident in global warming, with its devastating pattern of chaotic weather and habitat change. It is estimated that one-third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100 (McCarthy, 2006). Those most affected are the marginalised peoples of the global South, particularly in Africa, where agricultural communities already struggle to cope with changing rainfall patterns and the increasing spread of diseases such as cholera and malaria, which will increase with rising temperatures.
Already the droughts in Ethiopia and different parts of Africa are causing massive hardship linked to the warming of the Indian Ocean. A sad irony is that it is the wealthy 10 per cent of the world’s population living in the global North who are most responsible for the pollution generating climate change. The motor car is a major source of pollution (as well as the cause of thousands of deaths and injuries), and at present there are 500 cars for every 1 000 people in the United States, as against 8 for every 1 000 in India (Elliot, 2006). Motor cars are a major source of carbon emissions, and the number of cars on South African roads is increasing dramatically. According to a recent report by the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa, new vehicle sales will top 700 000 by the end of 2006 (The Sunday Independent, 2006e). As with much of the environmental damage described in this book, that done by cars is hidden. As Sachs writes, ‘the power of the car excites the driver precisely because its prerequisites (pipelines, streets, assembly lines) and its consequences (noise, air pollution, greenhouse effect) remain far beyond the view from behind the windscreen’ (Sachs, 1999: 15).
While only the wealthy can afford the 4x4s that are so polluting, aviation represents the world’s fastest-growing source of the carbon dioxide emissions that lead to climate change, and it is only the wealthy who can afford to fly (Monbiot, 2006a). The ecological economist Richard Douthwaite points out that
the peaks in world oil and gas production are about to be reached and, without rationing, energy prices could go much higher, so that poor people will be unable to cook their food while the better off will still be using their air-conditioning and running big cars (cited in Ecocity Newsletter, 2005).
However, global warming is only one component of a much deeper and more extensive ecological crisis: ‘it is not about any given ecosystem damage such as global warming, species loss, resource depletion, or the widespread intoxication by new chemicals …. It is about the fact that these kinds of things are all happening together’ (Kovel, 2002: 20).
The ways in which the poor will suffer first and worst from climate change illustrate the connections between the crisis of nature and the crisis of justice. The crisis of nature refers to increasing environmental degradation. As Sachs writes, ‘if all countries followed the industrial example, five or six planets would be needed to serve as “sources” for the inputs and “sinks” for the waste of economic progress’ (Sachs, 1999: 75). The crisis of justice refers to increasing social inequality both within and between nations. At present, about 20 per cent of the world’s population consume almost 80 per cent of the world’s resources. It is the rich who consume disproportionate quantities of energy and water, and who produce the most waste. Their lifestyle cannot serve as the standard of justice or the goal of development. Because of resource constraints, we can no longer talk of development as economic growth. The poor are sometimes pushed into destructive activities such as cutting down trees for firewood, but the main culprits of deforestation are the multinational corporations. They are responsible for the destruction of ancient forests, the overfishing of our oceans and the pollution of air. Globalisation is being driven by these corporations, and many people are beginning to say that these corporations, in their drive for profit, are a major environmental threat. Some go further and indict capitalism, with its unrelenting pressure to expand in the search for profits and new markets, as inherently ecodestructive. For example, Kovel terms capitalism a ‘suicidal regime’ (Kovel, 2002: 6).
This global pattern of deprivation and over-consumption is clear in post-apartheid South Africa, now one of the most unequal societies in the world. Almost half of all households live below the estimated poverty datum line. At the same time, the chief executives (mainly white men) of South Africa’s 50 largest and most influential companies are each being paid on average more than ZAR 15 million a year. They make more than 700 times the minimum wage (Crotty and Bonorchis, 2006), and are part of what Canadian political scientist John Saul calls a ‘dominant, transnational capitalist class’ that is surrounded by ‘vast outer circles of less privileged people’ (Saul, 2006: 22).
The notion of sustainable development was supposed to address these two crises — the crisis of nature (whereby we have reached the limits of nature as a source and as a sink) and the crisis of justice (increasing social exclusion and inequality). But the crucial point is that ‘nature’ does not exist outside and totally independent of us. Many environmental disasters are blamed on ‘natural phenomenona’, like El Niño, as a means of downplaying human complicity in such events. But many such disasters are not external events visited upon people by nature, but emerge from natural and social interaction. The damage caused by flooding, for instance, often involves human actions, such as planning regulations being either too lax or ignored, so that building takes place in areas that are liable to flood. References to ‘natural causes’ like the weather presuppose a purified, abstract view of nature and society. There have been many environmental disasters provoked directly by human actions, such as the deadly gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands and left many more blinded and permanently disabled. References to ‘natural disasters’ often obscure the real causes in human action that contribute to the scale of destruction. For example, the 2005 earthquake that struck Kashmir, killing 73 000 in Pakistan and 1 400 in India, exposed shoddy construction standards in homes and schools. In the December 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami, which killed huge numbers of people, the toll was amplified by coastal development that destroyed protective vegetation. This was especially true in Thailand, where hotel complexes were built right on the beach directly in the path of the tsunami, while the mangroves and coral reefs that would have dampened much of its impact had been destroyed. Similarly, the case of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which left a thousand dead, exposed how New Orleans, a delta city built below flood level, once had coastal wetlands that would have been a buffer against storm surge, but they had been destroyed by so-called ‘developers’. These were natural events whose impacts were magnified by human action. As the Washington-based environmental group the Worldwatch Institute said at the time, ‘indiscriminate economic development and ecologically destructive policies have left many communities more vulnerable to disasters than they realise’ (cited in The Herald, 2005).
RESPONDING TO CRISIS
As the crisis of