Creating an Ecological Society. Chris Williams
could further reduce these impacts.
Race, Class, and the Environment
Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel. It is responsible for giant quantities of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide production in addition to highly toxic heavy metals such as mercury. Studies have shown that the extent of exposure to those pollutants varies with income and race. For example the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People documents this disparity in its report “Coal Blooded”: the average per capita income for people living within three miles of a coal plant is $18,400, significantly less than the national average of $21,587; and those who live near these coal plants are disproportionately people of color.46 People of color and the poor are much more likely to live next to toxic waste sites than white or middle-class populations, in numbers out of all proportion to their percentage in the local population.47 A study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that in the United States people of color typically breathe air that is 38 percent more polluted than the air breathed by whites. The study’s lead researcher, Julian Marshall commented:
We were quite surprised to find such a large disparity between whites and nonwhites related to air pollution…. Especially the fact that this difference is throughout the U.S., even in cities and states in the Midwest…. The health impacts from the difference in levels between whites and nonwhites found in the study are substantial…. For example, researchers estimate that if nonwhites breathed the lower NO2 levels experienced by whites, it would prevent 7,000 deaths from heart disease alone among nonwhites each year.48
This disparity is not particular to the U.S.; it is a global phenomenon. Since colonial times European countries have outsourced their own pollution, devastating the environments of their colonies. As a result, richer countries make only limited efforts to clean up their local environments of the most egregious and obvious pollutants. Not only do richer countries relocate the most polluting industries to countries in the Global South, they export waste materials to poorer countries and extract large quantities of resources, frequently leaving ecologically devastated zones in their wake. Such practices, along with promotion of changes in land use to provide the wealthy countries with products like palm oil, are forms of ecological imperialism.49
About 3.9 million square miles (10 million square kilometers) of forests have been cut down since the last ice age—half since 1945. Yet in this period Europe and the United States have gained forest cover, indicating that virtually all of the deforestation in the last seventy years—an area more than twenty times the size of Great Britain—represents deforestation in the Global South, mostly to serve markets for industry and agriculture in the North. Soil chemist Justus Liebig made exactly this point as long ago as 1840, when the leading global colonial power was Great Britain, which “seizes from other countries their conditions of their own fertility…. Vampire-like, it clings to the throat of Europe, one could even say the whole world, sucking its best blood.”50
Over 90 percent of those dying or displaced due to climate-related disasters are people from the Global South. When climate disasters hit a wealthy country, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas, it is the poor and people of color who suffer most.
In 2015 it was revealed that the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was contaminated with lead. The citizens of Flint were being systematically poisoned because state-appointed officials changed to an unsafe water source to save money in 2014. When President Obama boasted of laying enough pipeline for oil and gas production to encircle the Earth yet none is laid along the sixty miles that would get get clean water to Flint, the priorities of our current social system are brought into stark relief.
The Social Crisis
The effect of air pollution and lead contamination of water are only part of the huge environmental impacts on people. A wide variety of chemicals cause millions of deaths worldwide from life-threatening and chronic diseases; they also disrupt hormone activity, leading to an array of mental and physical disorders.
Aside from the many environmental impacts, a host of other critical problems face humanity. Approximately one billion people are either routinely hungry or malnourished. Over one billion people across the world, mostly in rural areas, are forced to defecate in the open because they lack sanitation and toilets. Aside from the problems of human health and loss of dignity, the lack of toilets is particularly dangerous for women, who are left vulnerable to attack. Some 2.5 billion people—about one-third of the Earth’s population—have little or no sanitation.51 Close to 700 million have no access to “improved” drinking water. A further two billion people live on less than $2 a day. Billions lack access to needed medicines or regular health care because they cannot afford them. In the United States, tens of millions of people do not have adequate access to good or affordable health care. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa have little to no regular access to electricity.
The extent of hunger and malnourishment makes it appear that there isn’t enough food to go around for the seven billion people on the planet, and the media constantly tell us that we have already, or are about to, run short. But, says Eric Holt-Gimenez, executive director of Food First and the Institute for Food and Development Policy,
“Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—can’t afford to buy this food.”52
Profit Over Planet: The Priorities of a Sick System
At the same time that huge amounts of poverty, deprivation, and environmental degradation exist, a staggering amount of wealth has been concentrated at the top of society. A mere 8 people have accumulated as much wealth as the combined wealth of the poorest half of the world, some 3.2 billion people and the richest 1% had more wealth than the remaining 99%.53 The wealthy go to great lengths to hide their riches from sight—and tax. A 2016 Oxfam report estimates that the money stashed away in offshore tax havens is around $7.6 trillion. Hiding that amount from government tax collection agencies annually deprives the public of an extra $190 billion that could be spent on cleaning up the environment as well as health care, education, or other urgently needed public services.54 “As much as 30 percent of all African financial wealth is estimated to be held offshore, costing an estimated $14 billion in lost tax revenues every year,” notes the Oxfam report. “This is enough money to pay for healthcare for mothers and children that could save four million children’s lives a year and employ enough teachers to get every African child into school.”55
In 2012, President Obama boasted, “There are politicians who say that if we just drilled more, then gas prices would come down right away. What they don’t say is that … America is producing more oil than at any time in the last eight years. We’ve opened up new areas for exploration. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”56
Even as the United States was supposedly part of saving the world during the Paris climate talks in December 2015, Obama signed a bill backed by Exxon and the Koch brothers to expedite pipeline construction permits.57 Similarly, the Obama administration approved over 1,500 offshore fracking permits in the Gulf of Mexico; some were approved even as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill raged out of control in 2010.58
The routine immorality of how for-profit corporations operate is topped by Exxon, which knew from its own research as far back as the 1980s that its products were the primary cause of climate change. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” senior company scientist James F. Black reported to Exxon’s management committee at corporate headquarters in 1977. This spurred Exxon