Derek J Wilson

We now examine Paul Ekins’ fourth holocaust of “environmental destruction, which is gradually or not so gradually rendering the planet uninhabitable, as witnessed by the growing millions of environmental refugees whose bankrupt ecosystems can no longer support them.” As Sara Parkin recently put it: “20 million people die each year because their locality no longer provides a life-supporting environment.”

The Philistine’s view of this problem was encapsulated by a correspondent in the Dominion, 16 February 1989: “The world is there for humanity’s exploitation, and it will certainly outlive us all.” British economist Wilfred Beckerman expressed this same view earlier that economic growth has gone on “since the time of Pericles” and that there is “no reason to suppose that it cannot continue for another 2500 years.” This idea is unmitigated nonsense. The world may indeed outlive us all — it has already outlived many smaller civilisations — but it will not continue to sustain us if we abuse it as we are doing so rapidly, so knowingly and so unashamedly. And yet this exploitative attitude is still the norm among most politicians, who seem mentally incapable of looking beyond the next election, and among most economists and industry, especially transnational corporations, that are primarily concerned with growth and profit. This, so it seems, has always been so, but in the late twentieth century new and powerful factors emerged to make the eco-environmental crisis we face quantitatively and qualitatively different from any previous period in history. The central fallacy concealed in the idea of industrial progress has been clearly stated by William Greider:

The conviction that limitless industrial expansion would eventually lift everyone to the ranks of material affluence seemed plausible so long as there was no chance that it would actually happen. But once commerce achieved the skills to truly globalize production and many more nations began to participate in advanced forms of consumption, the contradictions began to crystallize as anxiety about the finite limits of the Earth — the preciousness of air, water, land and resources, the resilience of life-giving systems of nature.

In his message for celebration of World Day of Peace in 1990, “The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility,” Pope John Paul II advised:

In the past, it was possible to destroy a village, a town, a region, even a country. Now it is the whole planet that has come under threat. This fact should compel everyone to face a basic moral consideration; from now on, it is only through a conscious choice and then deliberate policy that humanity will survive.

Demographically (refer to Chapter 4), there is a continuing population explosion which is stressing our natural habitat and its finite resources to the limit, if not beyond this point. Meadows, Meadows and Randers, in Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Society, more recently ranged over this whole subject which they had dealt with more than 20 years ago.

In 1962 Rachel Carson wrote her seminal work Silent Spring, which focused attention on our progressive poisoning of ourselves and our ecosystem by synthetic pesticides. Wrote Carson, “…what we have to face is not an occasional dose of poison which has accidentally got into some article of food, but a persistent and continuous poisoning of the whole human environment…” For her pains, she became the subject of a vicious witch-hunt. In a five-page letter to her publishers, the Velsicol Chemical Company, manufacturers of DDT, accused her of being in league with “sinister influences, whose attacks on the chemical industry have a dual purpose: (1) to create a false impression that all business is grasping and immoral, and (2) to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of Western Europe so that our supply of food will be reduced to east-west parity.” How absurd this accusation was is shown by a Worldwatch Institute paper which included the following statement:

Pesticide producers have pursued a similar strategy [to that of other manufacturers] of international expansion, as a means of perpetuating sales of products too dangerous for domestic use. The US General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated in 1989 that 25 percent of the pesticides exported from the United States were unregistered or severely restricted for domestic use, due either to their harmful qualities or to the lack of a domestic market for them. In one of the more egregious cases, in 1991 the Velsicol Chemical Corporation exported — with no restrictions on use — 681 tons of the pesticides chlordane and heptachlor, probably human carcinogens which the US Environmental Protection Agency has prohibited for virtually all purposes. Banned pesticides sometimes return on imported food, a phenomenon known as the ‘circle of poison.’

The Monsanto Chemical Company responded to Silent Spring by distributing to media outlets a parody called The Desolate Year, while thousands of damning book reviews were distributed on behalf of the Agricultural Chemical Association.
Carson’s book, which appeared in serial form in the New Yorker shortly before the story of the thalidomide tragedy broke, remains a classic statement which founded a whole movement. In the introduction, Lord Shackleton quotes the Duke of Edinburgh at a Wildlife Fund dinner: “Miners use canaries to warn them of deadly gases. It might not be a bad idea if we took the same warning from the dead birds in our countryside.” Wrote Rachel Carson: “We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could discover many more if given opportunity.” Her book was and still is prophetic. Why therefore, 40 years later, do we find that the numbers of the “dead birds in our countryside,” concurrently with the destruction of much other fauna and flora all over the world, have multiplied beyond belief? As Carson pointed out:

Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after the night and spring after the winter.

But Rachel Carson was even more prophetic than many imagined. Although she was specifically writing about “a persistent and continuous poisoning of the whole human environment,” the opening to her final chapter can now be read in a much broader context:

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth super-highway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The fork in the road — the one ‘less traveled by’ — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our Earth.

Carson was referring to Frost’s 1916 poem, The Road Not Taken written in 1916, in which he says:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It also made all the difference to energy strategist Amory Lovins when his seminal article “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” was published by Foreign Affairs in October 1976. The main substance of the joint hearings of the two US Senate committees and the storm of protest by the pre-eminent supporters of the hard energy policies was edited into a book by Hugh Nash. Wrote Nash in the foreword:

Nor can a society aspire to be both conspicuously consumptive and elegantly frugal. Lovins says that the hard and the soft paths are culturally and institutionally antagonistic and furthermore, compete for the same limited resources… I can imagine Lovins groaning: ‘What am I supposed to do? Take time out and argue that a society cannot dedicate itself simultaneously to monotheism and polytheism, to vegetarianism and cannibalism? That one cannot mount two horses and ride off in opposite directions: that people ardently consume and equally ardently conserve?…’

Chapter 1: Militarism
Chapter 2: Human Oppression
Chapter 3: Economic Destitution
Chapter 4: Population Explosion
Chapter 5: Environmental Destruction