Environment: global warming, climate change
www.GlobalAware.org
ELEMENTS OF A NEW REALISM
Tom Athanasiou
Author/Environmentalist, USA
reprinted with kind permission of the author
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 |
