Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of Environment

169 Pages·1999·3.45 MB·English

by  Foster

the
v u l n e r a b l e
pl anet
a short economic history of the environment
John Bellamy Foster
THE VULNERABLE
PLANET

THE VULNERABLE
PLANET
A Short Economic History of
the Environment
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
¿CORNERSTONE
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
NEW YORK
Copyright © 1999 by John Bellamy Foster
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Foster, John Bellamy.
The vulnerable planet: a short economic history
of the environment / by John Bellamy Foster. — [Rev. ed.]
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58367-019-X (paper)
1. Environmental degradation. 2. Environmental policy. I. Title.
GE140.F68 1999
363.7—dc21 99-38834
CIP
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street Suite 6W
New York, NY 10001
Manufactured in Canada
10 9
CONTENTS
PREFACE 7
1. THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS II
2. ECOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 34
3. THE ENVIRONMENT AT THE TIME
OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION SO
4. EXPANSION AND CONSERVATION 69
5. IMPERIALISM AND ECOLOGY 85
6. THE VULNERABLE PLANET 108
6 CONTENTS
7. THE SOCIALIZATION OF NATURE 125
AFTERWORD 143
NOTES 151
INDEX 165
PREFACE
I was slow in committing myself fully to the environmental
cause. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the Pacific Northwest
of the United States, an area known for the quality of its environ­
ment. During the first Earth Day in April 1970 I was a fairly
complacent participant. It was natural, I thought, that those
living in L.A. or along the Great Lakes should be disturbed by the
destruction of the environment. But in the Northwest we were as
yet comparatively free from such worries. My chief concern at
that time was the Vietnam War. As long as napalm was being used
on the people of Indochina, the issue of the health of the envi­
ronment seemed an unaffordable luxury.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s the most important
questions seemed to me to be those of economic crisis and third
world underdevelopment. As a public intellectual in the Reagan
era, my efforts were devoted primarily to resisting the attempt by
the powers that be to shift the burden of economic stagnation
7
8 THE VULNERABLE PLANET
onto the backs of workers, the unemployed, women, people of
color, and the majority of the world’s population in the third
world. For me, as for Raymond Williams, “resistance to capi­
talism” had become the “the decisive form of the necessary
human defense.” But unlike Williams I did not yet fully appre­
ciate the connection between this and the fate of the earth
itself.1
It was my return to the Pacific Northwest in 1985, after almost
a decade’s absence, that finally forced me to open my eyes to the
full global dimensions of the ecological crisis. “Every middle-
aged man who revisits his birthplace after a few years of absence,”
New England environmentalist George Perkins Marsh observed
in 1847, “looks upon another landscape.” Marsh, then in his
mid-forties, was alarmed by the cycles of destruction that he had
witnessed over his own lifetime in his native Vermont. The
devastation of hillsides, the burning of the woods, the damming
of streams represented changes “too striking,” he wrote, “to have
escaped the attention of any observing person.”2
In returning to the Northwest in the mid-1980s, I discovered
that a region that had been known for the pristine character of
much of its environment was now facing the prospect of massive,
irreversible ecological destruction—of global, not simply re­
gional, proportions. The old-growth coniferous forest, contain­
ing many of the world’s oldest and tallest trees, was being cut
down at a record rate; the Columbia-Snake River system had
become one of the most threatened river systems in the country;
and numerous species, from the northern spotted owl to the
Snake River salmon, were endangered. The Hanford nuclear
facility in the state of Washington was revealed to be one of the
world’s worst sources of radioactive contamination. Everywhere
a war was raging between environmentalists and the forces of
economic expansion.
The late 1980s were also years in which world awareness of the
threats posed by global warming, destruction of the ozone layer,
tropical deforestation, and the extinction of species rose dramat-
PRÉFACE 9
Unbeatable oil waste stored in barrels at an oil-waste treatment
center in Bahia, Brazil. [Katherine McGlynn/lmpact Visuals]
ically. The combined effect of these influences compelled me to
face up to the growing dangers to the planet.
Yet for all of this new ecological awareness, the social concerns
of my youth were by no means lessened. There is a very real sense
in which those who have devoted their energies to overcoming
social inequality have always been involved in the battle for
environmental justice. War, economic inequality, and third
world underdevelopment—the three phenomena that drew
most of my attention in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s—are
inextricably bound to the larger question of the systematic deg­
radation of the planet and of the conditions of life for a majority