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This brief essay is about one of the most twisted, and most crucial, of all
political notions -- realism. I bring it up because any system of "alternative
security" must -- of necessity, and even more than a system of traditional
security -- take first account of the world as it is, and only then concern
itself with the world as it might be wished to be. This, at least to my inexpert
ear, is what the term "realism" is intended to imply.
And, amid the "creative destruction" of the Asian boom, a great deal
of realism is called for. The conference proposal tells us that the "ideal
status quo" would be one in which "state security" and "the
security of communities and peoples" are merged, and indeed, we may already
have reached the point where this isn't a particularly controversial statement.
At least in conclaves like this one. But note that states, on the one side,
and "communities and people," on the other, are not the only actors
on this stage. There are, too, the elites, particularly the economic elites.
And given the frenzied nature of the capitalist revolution now sweeping Asia,
they cannot realistically be excluded from any talk of true security.
Money makes the world go round, or so we are told. And if we hope for an "alternative
system" of security in Asia, one with ties strong enough to bind the region,
despite all, into peace, we had best hope that the tides of money circulating
in Asia are creating, as they sweep, the preconditions for peace. For these
tides are -- obviously -- prominent among the forces acting upon Asia. We have
heard that the pattern emerging here today echos that in Europe before WWI.
You will forgive me, then, if I make an obvious point -- in Europe, before WWI,
the rich, like the Asian rich today, did not, for the most part, want war. Better
to say that they just wanted to make pots of money, and didn't particularly
care to see anything that troubled this desire.
Unfortunately, and in sharp contrast to the reassurances of free-trade ideology,
it's not at all obvious that the tides of economic globalization are on the
side of peace. The arms race, picking up speed in Asia as regional manufacturers
break into the business, is just one key, frightening, example. The larger point
is competition itself, which must be said to exhibit a certain historical tendency
to get, well, out of control... If we're looking for the logic a likely post-Cold
War war, we should look first not to the "clash of civilizations,"
or even to ethnic conflict, but to "the economy."
This point, by the way, exposes a serious problem with environmental security
studies, at least as we now know it. With rare exceptions, eco-security studies
accepts the terms of today's economic transformations as both given and positive.
Trade, we are forever being told, ties us together, but don't look to the green
security literature to be told, clearly and with an eye to the implications,
that it also tears us apart.
This will no longer do. There is, at this point, too much handwriting on the
wall. The roots of war are too well understood, and "globalization"
-- or whatever we may wish to call the emergence of the new economy -- is too
obvious, to allow an gloss to be easily laid over their linkages. Indeed, even
the new economy is no longer new. The tiger economies, long the totems of capitalist
vigor, no longer find expansion to be easy. On another front, it's now widely
acknowledged that ecology must somehow be made central to the world economy.
Indeed, it's now widely acknowledged that "development" is a problematic
pursuit, and that if it cannot be made "sustainable," the likely result
is what the Worldwatch Institute's Lester Brown described as "the self-reinforcing
internal dynamic of the deterioration-and-decline scenario" [1]. In other
words, war.
Allow me, then, to make a claim that I here lack the time to prove, or even
to adequately defend -- without a profound increase in the overall level of
social justice, and particularly economic justice, there can be and will be
no effective response to the ecological crisis. This, today, is the core of
realism.
RESOURCES
Let me quote, for you, as a historical footnote, the father of realism as usual,
George Kennan, the American State Department anti-Communist "wise man"
whose policy of "containment" virtually defined the Cold War. It's
a long quote, but it's relevant. The date, incidentally, was 1948, and Kennan,
of course, was talking to Americans...
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In
this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the
coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to
maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national
security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming;
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national
objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury
of altruism and world-benefaction... We should cease to talk about vague and...
unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal with
straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better. [2]
The reason I quote this bit is that, in it, Kennan reveals the deeper underpinnings
of "classical" realism. And because it gives me a chance to make my
own central point. To wit -- if if we would reject Kennan's realism in favor
of some new variety, it must not be solely because his is vile, colonialist,
and sodden with the logic of domination. We must also reject it because, 50
years on, we can see that it is deluded. Because we can see that the logic of
classical realism is the logic of unbounded war.
All of which is notable, for in this passage, Kennan reveals that he was quite
clear about the true structure of the world order -- 6.3% of the population
enjoyed "about 50% of the world's wealth." He did not, however, think
this was a problem, not in the strategic sense. Today, such stats are no longer
news, and it is difficult to imagine that they don't have serious, and intractable,
implications for global stability. Indeed, it's numbers like these that led
the modern ecology movement to its primal perception -- that the rich societies
of the North use, and waste, far more than their share of the Earth's resources.
Even today, particularly if you intend, as I do, to attack "development,"
the statistics bear repetition. The people of "the North" -- a forth
of the total human population -- consume about 70 percent of the world's energy,
75 percent of its metals, 85 percent of its wood, and 60 percent of its food.
The numbers, really, are quite astonishing, though they have, tellingly, lost
much of their power to astonish. And they must finally underlie any honest discussion
of real human/ecological security.
This is complex ground. Resources are crucial, but they're not everything. Likewise
inequity. Certainly war, when it comes, will come first by way of cynical alliances,
military posturing, and the logic of unbounded competition. It will come only
secondarily by way of social-ecological pressure and the dynamics of the planetary
divide. And yet, always, there is the fact of that divide, and of the pressure
it generates. The 57 million children born in the North during the 1990s will
consume, and pollute, more than the 911 million Southern children, [3] and it's
just not plausible to claim that this is not the paramount fact of any honest
security dialog. It is not plausible to claim that we can talk honestly of security
and ecology without talking, too, of massive social changes.
Yet, at least in the United States, the notion that ecology must imply change,
and that justice is in some true and not merely rhetorical sense a precondition
of sustainability, is most often dismissed as a left-green apocalyptic fantasy.
On the other hand, there is also the view -- it may even be in slow ascendance
-- which prefers a firm nod to the dangers of injustice, particularly if it
can be turned into a brief for a greener, more humane, efficient and responsible
capitalism. And sometimes, though still rarely, there is a third response to
the rising pressure -- real fear.
I'm no more able than anyone else to foretell the future, but I would be surprised
if the fear did not tend to increase in the years ahead. Ecological limits are
real. Even if they take a long time to manifest themselves, even if they do
not come as suddenly as they were announced as coming, even if the are not what
they seem. Just now, it is easy to dismiss them as doomster fantasies, but this
will not forever be the case.
A bit of detail? Well, watch for rising pressure on what we optimistically call
"renewable" resources. In the past, most talk of "resources"
referred to the non-renewables -- oil, minerals, and so on. Increasingly, it
seems the real serious problems will turn on genetic erosion, ecosystemic fragmentation,
lost ecological services, and -- of course -- on shortages of good land and
water. There are even, with clear, unpleasant implications for the future of
war, practical limits on the amount of meat and fish and beer that can be coerced
out of bounded ecosystems. [4]
Recall Kennan. Recall that the rich consume vastly more than their share, and
that this is and has always been a security problem. The difference, now, is
that the population is larger, the pressure higher, the air warming, the forests
smaller, the oceans being vacuumed of fish. And that we've lived to see the
globalization of everything from underwear manufacture to the American sitcom
to the fear of a new plague.
And unlike 1948, when the U.S. was the ruling hegemon, and ALSO the strongest
player in the global economy, we live today in a "multipolar" world.
Moreover, there is an explosion of capitalist development taking place here
in what was once the Asian periphery, and it is no longer absolutely clear that
the future will be one of Western ascendancy. Yet is this unambiguously good
news? Communism is gone, but what is there in its place? Market Leninism? 500
TV channels? A coming global trade war? Military budgets that barely drop? A
doubling of global inequality between 1960 and 1990? The universalization of
an unsustainable consumerist dream? The redefinition of freedom as cars and
hamburgers?
In the past, it was easy to blame the United States for the culture of overconsumption.
It was, obviously, the United States, and its allies, and its few privileged
servants, that took more than their share. Today, it is clear that this was,
at most, a transient truth. Indeed, if the current Asian boom continues, the
21st century will quite certainly not be another American century. The suffering
will continue, but the blame will be substantially reapportioned.
Forgive me, then, if I, an American, tell you that Asia's boom -- and this despite
the fact that Asia is only continuing down a road pioneered by the West -- is
shaping up as a major new chapter in the story of ecological catastrophe. Taiwan,
a prime example of the modern capitalist miracle, will illustrate the point.
One of the world's poorest countries only 40 years ago, Taiwan is now "modern."
It's people consume more or less as do Europeans. Indeed, it is the thirteenth
largest trading nation in the world. With the other tigers, it grounds the myth
of the "newly industrialized countries" -- that any newcomer can develop
a booming export economy, providing only that it's people "work hard and
work smart." By the early 1990s, Taiwan's average per capita income was
twenty times as high as that on the Chinese mainland.
The trend here is well known. Less often noted are the ecological costs of the
miracle. In some parts of Taiwan, only 1 percent of waste water and sewage is
treated -- as a result, the lower reaches of virtually all rivers are biologically
dead. About three million metric tons of hazardous wastes are dumped each year.
Emissions from 12 million cars and motorbikes choke the air of the cities. Cancer
rates doubled between 1960 and 1990. Not long ago, a government report even
warned that parts of the island could be uninhabitable by the year 2000. [5]
And that's just the start of the story. Today, as Taiwan begins a weak and belated
cleanup campaign [6], its more viciously regulation-resistant firms are moving
on, usually to the latest last frontier of primitive capitalism, the "People's
Republic" of China? [7] China, of course, is the country to watch, and
we all know why. Its croplands, though copious, are going fast -- estimates
of loss range from 50 to 100 million acres since the 1950s, out of a total of
272 to 346 million acres! Its roads are clotting with traffic. Its air, land,
and water are heavy with pollution [8], and it is quickly entering what will
certainly be a catastrophic water shortage. Most of its energy is generated
by burning high-sulfur coal. Millions of internal refugees, many of them "environmental
refugees," wander the country in search of a chance, or at least a job.
A green movement is desperately needed, and as strongly discouraged.
Logging is perhaps the clearest lens upon the larger trends. In logging, the
connections come together. The demand for the "natural resources"
that underpins our economy, the destruction of both ecosystems and indigenous
cultures, the destabilization of the global carbon cycle, the rapine and corruption
of the extractive industries, these are the realities of industrial logging.
I cannot hope to improve on the summary given by Angela Gennino, a veteran activist
and the co-editor of a valuable guide to deforestation in South East Asia:
Logging is a metaphor for everything that is happening in South East Asia. The
South is eating itself, turning on itself. Thailand is eating Burma. The Philippines,
which has destroyed its own forests and is now being overcome by floods, is
going after wood from other countries. While we're sitting here talking about
the North and the South, the countries that have already used up their forests
are attacking weaker countries, and the countries that are just opening up are
sitting ducks. And soon, China is coming down from the North. And NOTHING can
stop China. The South East Asian forests are GONE. There is no country in South
East Asia that can realistically stop logging. It is over. [9]
The relevance of all this to "security" is obvious. Global, regional,
and local environmental trends -- and with rare exceptions these trends are
negative -- have major impacts on social stability (not to mention the quality
of life), and threaten catastrophic synergies with political and military situations
that are quite bad enough already. In booming Asia, these developments are perhaps
even more pressing than anywhere else.
One other thing. Lest anyone suspect that, by making these points, I am simply
offering more sad evidence that environmentalism is an eco-imperialist plot
against the "developing world," I must be clear. The point is that
the loosers become part of the problem as soon as they begin to win. Logging
is, again, a fine example, and a fine opportunity to point out that Asian eco-security
issues do not concern Asia alone. Even as you read these words, Asian logging
companies are clear-cutting in the forests surrounding Zaire, and in so doing
are helping to ensure that the chaos spreading through Central Africa will continue
and spread. Indeed, it is worth noting that the only reason that large-scale
clear-cutting is not taking place in Zaire proper is that, just now, it is too
dangerous. A rare case of political chaos protecting biodiversity. [10]
DEVELOPMENT
When I was asked to write this paper, I was also asked not to be apocalyptic.
I was to give the big picture, as I saw it, but to please not invoke a future
dark beyond recourse. It was good advice, and pessimists like me should probably
hear it more often. The future is not dark beyond redemption, and, always, this
must be made absolutely clear. Indeed, recent studies show that it is already
possible to reduce energy and materials use in the developed countries by a
factor a four, and to do so while actually improving the standard of living!
In the rich countries! [11] Energy and materials -- "non-renewable resources"
-- are not the problem, and neither is technology. There is a path forward,
and we must be clear about this if, paradoxically, we are to see just how bad
the situation really is.
For the obstacles to green technological revolution are difficult to overstate.
Witness the squandered opportunity of the Soviet collapse, which could -- at
least theoretically -- have been followed by reconstruction based on green technological
transfer and even leapfrogging. [12] Or witness the dismal failure of the Earth-
Summit process. Or witness the utter inability of the diplomats to parlay the
collapse of the Cold War system into meaningful levels of disarmament.
Or witness the fact that each year seems just a bit more unstable than the last,
and that the alternatives to "development" remain enshrouded in rhetoric
and cheap optimism. Which is just the point. For what else can we be talking
about, if we hope to face the prospects for lasting security? What else but
development, and the sense, with "Communism" gone, that there can
be no alternative to "growth," or indeed to neoliberalism, and free
trade, and, in general, unfettered capitalist development?
My claim, of course, is that "development" cannot go on. This must
seem, today, in 1997, ten years after the publication of the Brundtland report,
to be a tremendous banality, but in truth, even after these ten years, we know
sustainable development only as rhetoric and potentiality. And the rhetoric
means little, save for its power to confuse intellectuals. And development-as-usual,
and in particular the model of development which turns, first of all, on mechanized
mass-production for increasingly integrated global markets, still sets the agenda.
There's lots of talk, these days, about "human security," and "real"
security." We should, then, notice that we mean little by these terms that
we did not, and quite recently, intend when we said "sustainable development."
We should also notice that, in this shift of rhetoric, there is encoded a notable
shift of mood. Many people want alternatives to the term "sustainable development,"
and not simply because it has been corrupted by overuse and generality. It has,
more than that, been colonized by the greenwashers. It belongs, now, to James
Wolfenson and his new "green" World Bank, at least as much as it belongs
to the people.
Years ago, Robert MacNamara, the man who created the World Bank as we know it
today, did so, in large part, by appealing to those who wished to "help"
the poor and downtrodden -- particularly if they could make a sweet profit doing
so. Big dams and roads and power plants were predictably (or so at least it
seems today) the preferred "solution" to the problem of poverty --
they cost plenty, and they carried, too, the Promethean aura of progress. Today,
of course, things has changed. Today, the question before the Bank's senior
managers is if a public that has lost faith with dreams of progress can somehow
be finessed into nevertheless supporting capital-intensive development projects,
and by extension, a modernized but essentially unchanged world system.
Their answer, or so it seems, is perhaps, but only by new names. Today, the
Bank's public-relations apparatus pushes poverty alleviation as heavily as ever
-- by a recent slew of high-profile but operationally marginal initiatives like
microcredit, and, closer to the mainline of its portfolio, by selling the Bank's
ability to "build tomorrow's markets and prevent tomorrow's wars."
[13] It is, and we should take this as a warning, a rhetorical turn similar
to the one we indulge when we talk of "human security." As the German
green critic Wolfgang Sachs told me, "No one really believes in development
anymore." Appeals to progress and technological optimism are only ritual
nods to past beliefs, and ..
As far as the Third World is concerned, sustainable development is seen as a
security matter, a form of risk prevention, not as progress. In the best of
cases, you will try to preserve livelihoods -- but you are NOT trying to effect
a takeoff. There is more and more a sense of a drift towards a global apartheid.
Somalia and Yugoslavia are widely interpreted as signs of the future. The bi-polarism
of the Cold War is looked on, with nostalgia, as an ordering force. Ecology
is being redefined within the context of "security." [14]
The subject here is no longer "sustainable development," but "ecological
security," the term being auditioned to replace it. And what a peculiar
term it is. Darker than its fellow, it is similarly contested, with a similarly
uncertain future. Some writers imagine that, in "ecological security,"
they have found the watchword of a hard-headed new green internationalism. Sachs,
for his part, thinks ecological pressure has already brought social instability,
and will bring much more, and that "security" could draw environmentalists
back from the edge of radicalism and into the conservative realism typical of
the logic and history of "military security."
In 1994, in the United States, something happened to strongly support Sach's
pessimism about the ultimately conservative political impact of "environmental
security studies." It was the publication, by THE ATLANTIC, of an essay
by one Robert Kaplan called "The Coming Anarchy." [15] More specifically,
it was the immediate energetic transformation of that essay into the endlessly-faxed
and -xeroxed, hottest talk of U.S. environmentalism.
In "The Coming Anarchy," Kaplan imagined a future in which shortages
of food and safe water, overpopulation, and soil loss feed and ultimately control
a cycle of violence and deterioration that overwhelms the Third World and defeats
all efforts at aid or comfort or remediation. The only question that remained,
in his scenario, was how to contain the chaos. How to keep anarchy from overwhelming
not only the poor but the rich as well. How, ultimately, to avoid war. It was
a compelling narrative, but there was also a problem -- Kaplan somehow managed
to overlook the links between the "coming anarchy" in the South and
the institutions of the North.
In a recurrent image, Kaplan presented the people of the North as passengers
in an isolated stretch limousine, wandering the dark and sinister streets of
the Third World. Clearly, he meant, by this image, to stress the fragility of
Northern luxury. But there was a problem, one few environmentalists noticed
-- he never even implied that the limo's passengers might have even a small
measure of responsibility for the cruel conditions on those streets. The transnational
corporations, the global trading system, "free trade," the World Bank,
the IMF -- none were mentioned. And though he made a great deal of the easy
availability of small arms and the spread of warlord culture, he somehow never
mentioned the fact that the arms flooding the South are still mostly manufactured
by the permanent members of the Security Council, or that, by 1994, the U.S.
share had risen to an amazing 73 percent. [16]
None of this, I hasten to add, is intended to suggest that "ecological
security," or any other honest approach to a building or conceiving alternative
security regimes, is doomed to collapse into conservativism and victim blaming.
But it is an example of a real danger, a challenge to be taken dead seriously.
What we must do is factor ecology into the security debate, and grant its inevitable,
fundamental role, but at the same time avoid the illusion that, by simply doing
so --for this Kaplan certainly did -- we have moved the debate to new and emancipatory
ground. Ecology must be an aspect of security, but it cannot explain the still
increasing polarization between the rich and the poor, the predicament of the
liberal state, the future of the labor market, or the logic of regional arms
races. It is fundamental, for it tells us that "growth" cannot continue
indefinitely, and thus that, say, the Asian boom, as it is so often imagined,
as a vast and happy expansion into the Chinese century, will not likely come
to pass. That there is not enough grain, and not enough fish, for everyone to
be rich. That there will be tremendous, crushing, friction.
Ecology tells us a great deal, but it does not tell us who will be blamed. And
thus, environmental security, like sustainable development, is a flawed but
redeemable project. It has promise, but only if its architects face the facts
of a world split between rich and poor. This is not only because the division
saddles us with an angry, inequitable society that, facing a dark future, only
promises to become more cynical and fatalistic in its cruelties, but also because
the split society is disfunctional and inflexible, its dynamics coarse and clumsy,
its visions small, and safe, and late. "Sustainable development" has
often meant using concern for the poor to promote the interests of the rich,
and ecological security could easily come to name a managerial approach to instability
that takes account of the dismal situation of the poor, but only, in the end,
to justify "development," this time as the price of stasis and predictability.
"Security," after all, is as vague a noun as "development."
It allows us to say everything, as long as we are abstract enough, as long as
we optimistic, as long as we are polite. It has not yet been captured by the
greenwashers -- which is more than can be said for "sustainable development"
-- but it is quite abstract, and can be used to say, or not say, almost anything.
Thus it is a problem, for our situation compels us to be specific, and to speak
of difficult matters.
The first and last of them is simply that this path we are on, this path of
wild boom and bust, unregulated trade, export-led growth and markets glorified
above all else, this path is not and cannot be "sustainable," and
the threat of war is only the proof of the problem. We must admit this, if only
privately, if only because the alternative is exhaustion. It is not that, by
Clausewitzian cliche, war is the continuation of politics by other means. It
is rarely so conscious and planned. War, at least for the present, is and must
be the continuation of a disorderly and mercantile history, and particularly
of its most intractable aspects. It is a bad solution to the riddle of history,
the one we finally come to when we cannot do better. Politics, for its part,
seems to have become the art of telling the poor that their sole recourse is
the pursuit of riches, that never can they have mere dignity and a modicum of
equality. Thus do we set the stage for war.
FREE TRADE
By this point, you may wonder just how I propose to avoid an apocalyptic conclusion.
My answer, and it cannot be a particularly satisfactory one, is that things
change when they have to, and that for just this reason there is hope. I insist
on explaining that we are on the road to a blasted and impossible future because
I want to prove the necessity of change, to quote the price of optimism. Thus
I tell you that about 5,100 languages are spoken on our planet, and that by
current projections, all but perhaps a hundred will perish in the next few generations.
[17] I do so to remind you of what you already know -- that these are cultures
dying, and communities, and forests and grasslands, and birds and beasts. I
do so to prove that ecology is not merely a plaything of the rich, and this
no matter how inconvenient its implications. I do so to prove necessity. To
explain the cost of what we call peace.
The problem, of course, is that such a necessity does not register on the scales
of this civilization. So, then, what? What can we say when there are already
too many many rich people, and millions more are staining to join them, or at
least to get a piece of the pie? Unless we accept the solace of the old faith,
and manage somehow to believe that such staining will itself yield the greater
benefit of all, we must admit that millions of additional rich people will not
much help, that there cannot be hamburgers for them all. And then there is the
last question. How, in the face of the planet's division, and all the pain and
jealousy it engenders, can such an impossibility come to carry a real, and positive,
historical force?
The answer, perhaps, is specificity, that it is not simply "development"
that cannot continue forever, but that the particular shape of the emerging
economy is dangerous beyond toleration. The evidence is already surfacing in
recent Asian trade statistics, which show an increasing fraction of China's
booming export growth coming at the expense of the existing tigers. And it is
surfacing in the anxiety of the Japanese, who are coming to take the threat
posed by China's low wages, rising industrial capacity, and export-led development
model seriously indeed. [18]
The problem is not China, but it's scale. Or, rather, the problem is that China's
increasingly competent embrace of "market socialism," leveraged by
the sheer size of its population and thus by the impact it will soon have in
the global economy, forces an issue that has long been latent in the neo-liberal
notion of free trade. Already, the United States runs a $40 billion trade deficit
with China, whose boom has barely begun. China is planning to be the biggest
tiger of them all, and there is not the habitat to support it.
Mainstream economics, of course, tells us that there is no issue here, that
supply and demand will even of their own accord. The problem, again, is scale.
Chinese planners envision a car industry as large as North America's within
15 years, but in only three, in the big year 2000, the global auto industry
will have a capacity of 78 million vehicles. Forget the fact that car use, on
this scale, is an unmitigated ecological disaster. The point here is that the
market will be 58 million cars, tops. [19] Someone is going to close auto factories,
lots of them.
And, of course, China is not alone. There is India too, and Malaysia, and Indonesia,
and Brazil, and Mexico. So we can be sure that a rude surprise will come at
last. In time, no doubt, supply and demand will balance. In time. But there
will be huge ecological pressures, and the question is what the political mood
will be like in the meantime. A bright new age of multilateral co-operation
does not seem the most likely possibility. A wave of increasingly frenzied nationalism
is a better bet.
What, finally, is my claim? That "sustainable development" means nothing
while it remains so vague a notion that it can even cover for unregulated capitalist
modernization. That, further, and despite the threat of terrible new wars, the
language of security does not offer an easy alternative. That we cannot, in
embracing it, avoid the need to contrive a genuine alternative to development
as usual. Bright futures are possible, but only when the global economy is restructured,
and regulated, in a manner that is quite unthinkable within the neo-liberal
mindset.
We have the technology to do better. And if only the vast hemorrhage of the
global military budget could be quashed, we would have the money as well. [20]
The question is what might force the issue, and the answer may be the Asian
boom. The alternative -- an easy global realignment by an endless happy expansion
-- is simply not plausible.
Tom Athanasiou is the author of DIVIDED PLANET: THE ECOLOGY OF RICH AND POOR
(New York: Little/Brown, 1996). Published as SLOW RECKONING: THE ECOLOGY OF
A DIVIDED PLANET (London: Secker & Warberg, 1997)
***
1) Lester R. Brown, "Launching the Environmental Revolution," STATE
OF THE WORLD: 1992, (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 174.
2) George Kennan, "Policy Planning Study No. 23," written for the
U.S. State Department in February on 1948, cited in Noam Chomsky, WHAT UNCLE
SAM REALLY WANTS, (Berkeley: Ordunian Press, 1993), p. 9.
3) Walden Bello, POPULATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT: THE FOOD FIRST PERSPECTIVE,
Food First Action Alert, Winter 1992-1993, p. 2. See also Christopher Flavin,
"The Legacy of Rio," STATE OF THE WORLD: 1997, (New York: Norton,
1997), p. 19.
4) See Lester R. Brown, TOUGH CHOICES: FACING THE CHALLENGE OF FOOD SCARCITY
(Norton: New York, 1996). See also my review of TOUGH CHOICES. Tom Athanasiou,
"The Second Time as Tragedy, THE NATION, March 3, 1997).
5) Kjell Fornander, "Taiwan: The Grimy Side of the Boom," TOMORROW
MAGAZINE, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1991, p. 67.
6) Gong Dan Lee, "Cleaning Up South Korea," EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL,
Summer 1993, p. 28.
7) Nicholas D. Kristof, "China Sees `Market-Leninism' as Way to Future,"
THE NEW YORK TIMES, September 6, 1993.
8) Patrick E. Tyler, "The Dynamic New China Still Races Against Time,"
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Jan 2, 1994. Patrick E. Tyler, "Nature and Economic
Boom Devouring China's Farmland," THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 27, 1994. Patrick
E. Tyler, "China Planning People's Car To Put Masses Behind Wheel,"
THE NEW YORK TIMES, September 22, 1994. Patrick E. Tyler, "A Tide of Pollution
Threatens China's Prosperity," THE NEW YORK TIMES, September 25, 1994.
9) Angela Gennino, author's interview. Martha Bechler and Angela Gennino, SOUTHEAST
ASIA RAINFORESTS, Rainforest Action Network, (450 Sansome Street, Suite 700,
San Francisco, CA, 94111).
10) Jeffrey Goldberg, "Our Africa," THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, March
2, 1997, p. 39.
11) Ernst U. von Weizsacher, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, "Factor
Four: Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use," a Report to the Club of
Rome, unpublished draft, 1996. Cited in Christopher Flavin, "The Legacy
of Rio, op. cit.
12) On this and related points, see "After the Cold War," chapter
3 of my own book -- DIVIDED PLANET: THE ECOLOGY OF RICH AND POOR (New York:
Little/Brown, 1996). Also published as SLOW RECKONING: THE ECOLOGY OF A DIVIDED
PLANET (London: Secker & Warberg, 1997)
13) World Bank Press Release No. B95/S93, p. 2.
14) Wolfgang Sachs, author's interview, May 1993. See as well GLOBAL ECOLOGY:
A NEW ARENA OF POLITICAL CONFLICT, Wolfgang Sachs, ed. (London: Zed Books, 1993).
15) Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY,
February, 1994.
16) William D. Hartung, AND WEAPONS FOR ALL, (New York: Harper Collins, 1994),
p. 291. See the most recent SIPRI yearbook for the situation, as it evolves.
(Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Oxford University Press).
17) Wolfgang Sachs, "One World Against Many Worlds," NEW INTERNATIONALIST,
No. 232, June 1992, p. 23.
18) William Greider, "The Real Chinese Threat," THE NEW YORK TIMES,
March 5, 1997. See also William Greider, ONE WORLD READY OR NOT: THE MANIC LOGIC
OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997)
19) Greider, "The Real Chinese Threat," Op. cit.
20) Michael Renner, FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL: ENVIRONMENTAL DECLINE, SOCIAL CONFLICT,
AND THE NEW AGE OF INSECURITY, (New York: Norton, 1996)
This article is based on the conclusion of Mr. Athanasiou’s first book,
Divided Planet.
It was originally published by focusweb.org (http://www.focusweb.org/focus/pd/sec/Athanasiou.html)
and appears here with the author’s permission. Mr. Athanasiou has published
a second book, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming and has founded
EcoEquity (www.ecoequity.org) to promote equitable solutions to climate change.
EcoEquity also publishes an online magazine called Climate Equity Observer or
CEO. Mr. Athanasiou can be contacted at toma@ecoequity.org.
Reprinted by GlobalAware with kind permission of the author. info@globalaware.org
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