low-density nations confront the demographic factof mega-global population
numbers, the resource factof an end in sight for cheap fossil-fuel and fertilizer
resources, and the discard factof hazardous substances being embodied forever
within a closed-system biosphere.
These realizations, essentially of human society as an inte-
gral part of nature, were attested to by Gilbert White and Gro
Brundtland at either end of the twentieth century. Yet now, more
than ever before, the adverse breaches (flora and fauna blasted
away, stockpiled toxins, altered weather patterns) are dramatic in
impact. These impacts are now being feltgloballyas a reaction to
previous resource plunder (undermining and overfishing), and
toxic discharges (synthetics dumping, nuclear industry discards,
and toxic waste disposal). They are also inflictedlocallythrough
the use of non-assimilable chemicals in agriculture and industry,
the take-up of environmentally abrasive engine-powered tech-
nology, and the human dominance over nature. These outcomes
and impacts led Lopez Portillo (United Nations, September 1982)
to observe that for all countries the root cause is ‘the enormous,
volatile, and speculative mass of capital [which] goes all over the
world in search of high interest rates, tax havens and supposed
political exchange stability’. His prognosis foretells the causes and
instructs the need for sustainability of intent, action and outcome.
The challenge is for nations to be eager, their communities to be
empowered, and for individuals to be committed, to combating
socio-environmental injustices.
Returning to Portillo’s ‘enormous volatile and speculative’
force of capital; by the eve of the recently concluded millennium
there were an estimated 400 billionaires whose aggregate wealth
equalled the combined incomes of half of all the world’s people.^9
The sheer economic impact of that wealth on the earth-bound
resource inheritance generates a counter-force, a counter-logic
and a counter-leverage against the sustainability thesis. To be
sure, the money-go-round is ‘winning’ the short play through
geared profits, although for billionaires and peons alike the
outcome of the end game, and the end result, is in the gift of
nature.The free trade protocols settled upon some nations in the last
decade of the last century fell in with a Ricardian accommodation
of comparative cost advantage. This is logical within a
self-fulfilling context, establishing that just as resources, skills,
climatic environments and capital are distributed unequally,
some nations can provide goods and deliver services more effi-
ciently than others. Along with this ‘manufacturing imperialism’ goes ‘toxic
imperialism’, enabling wealthy nations to import goods from the cheapest sup-
plier, and export their toxin-generating industries and wastes to lower-charging80 Practice
David Harvey’s early
prescience (1973):
‘It is vital, when
encountering a serious
problem, not merely to
try to solve the problem
in itself but to confront
and transform the
processes that gave rise
to the problem in the
first place...Alternative
modes of production,
consumption and
distribution [and
disposal] as well as
alternative modes of
environmental
transformation have to
be explored if the
discursive spaces of the
environmental justice
movement and the
theses of ecological
modernisation are to be
conjoined in a
programme of radical
political action.’Again from David
Harvey: ‘one way to
raise incomes of the
poor is to pay them to
absorb toxins...[but]
since most of the poor
and the disempowered
are people of colour, the
impact is racially
discriminatory...are
we not presuming that
only trashy people can
stomach trash?...
defilement, impurity and
degradation become
part of the political
equation.’
‘The Environment of
Justice’, 1995