"National Geographic" Article Review.....Earth's Fresh WaterUnder Pressure…… ESI Environmental ENV-TSXV
"National Geographic", in it's Sept. 16th edition, gives a great overview of freshwater issues and they say "among the environmental spectres confronting humanity in the 21st century - global warming, the destruction of the rainforests, over-fishing the oceans - a shortage of fresh water is at the top of the list, particularly in the developing world." A World Bank expert calls it the "grim arithmetic of water". Recently, the US stated that 2.7 billion people would face severe water shortages by 2025 if consumption continues at current rates.
The article's author went on a two - month trip to Africa, India and Spain, and met with individual organizations and businesses that are trying to solve water's dismal arithmetic. Some of the examples in the article were reviving ancient techniques such as rainwater harvesting and some were twenty-first century solutions. All solutions emphasized the need to "obtain maximum efficiency from every drop of water." Conservation is a necessity as a fraction of one percent of the earth's water is available for drinking, irrigation and industrial use. All over the globe, municipalities and farmers are pumping water out of the aquifers faster than it can be replenished.
In the article's main example of water, how it is used and how it is wasted, two facts come out; specifically that 10% of water use is for household use and 70% for agricultural use. Of the 70%, one half of that water is wasted due to evaporation or runoff. The article states: "Drip irrigation, uses 30 to 70 percent less water than traditional methods and increases crop yield to boot." This technology was first developed in the 1960's but, even now, it is used on only one percent of irrigated land.
ESI Environmental Sensors of Victoria, British Columbia, designs and manufactures world-class sensors and wireless systems for water management. The first products, Moisture.Point and Gro.Point, have already been sold to clients in over 40 countries. Gail Gabel is the President and CEO of ESI; she was past Chair of the BC Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology and was previously Vice-Chair of the Science Council of B.C.
During the past year, ESI signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Netafim USA. Netafim is the world leader in drip irrigation products. Internationally Netafim has sales of US $220 million, with it's fastest growing market sector being in North America where, in California alone, 25% of the world's mechanized (spray) irrigation is located, and is a target for several ESI products. Netafim has 40 sales staff and a network of approximately 400 dealers located throughout the USA alone. In addition, Netafim has a comprehensive programme well underway to train its sales team throughout North America, in marketing ESI's Gro.Point TM and Intelligent Irrigation TM systems.
ESI's Gro.Point Sensors and Intelligent Irrigation software, will provide Netafim with a major edge over any competition, and take Netafim into high tech control and wireless communication for water management. Savings for users are in water and electricity and at the same time provide growers with a greater yield and significantly enhanced harvest quality. ESI has also begun working with several US utility companies who are offering a cash rebate for agricultural clients who use management systems to save water and power.
A fully integrated Gro.Point-based Intelligent Irrigation System pays for itself in a year or less, depending on the crop. Systems are modular. Average system sales are already reaching $30,000 to $50,000 each. Systems have already been sold for water management and irrigation management applications in vineyards, vegetables, tree fruits such as avocados and citrus, for high value nut crops such as pecans, hops and for tree farms.
The "National Geographic" article describes the success of the Kallie Schoeman farm in South Africa. The Schoeman farm has 500,000 citrus trees that produce 175 million oranges and lemons for export to 32 countries. This family have been innovators in irrigation as water becomes scarcer and more expensive. In the eighties, the family used more efficient sprinklers but they have been "readily replacing these with "super-efficient" drip irrigation which give the trees exactly what they need every day" Mr. Schoeman said, by parcelling small amounts of water to each tree. As Schoeman has used ever-more efficient irrigation systems, the farm has quadrupled the production of fruit per acre while actually using one third of the water.
ESI's various moisture probes are able to relay soil moisture data, via solar-powered wireless communication, to a farm or vineyard's computers. Based on the information sent to the farm's computers, and the time of year, an irrigation manager can adjust the flow rate of water, mixed with fertilizer. Fruit and other crops need varying amounts of water during different stages of growth. Farm operators are now recognizing that they will have to continue to make technological leaps as water becomes more costly.
ESI and partners have invested in excess of $10 million in R & D and their clients have included: US Dept of Agriculture, Federal and Provincial Government Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment, Leading Universities, e.g. University of Georgia, McGill, California, Guelph, Toronto, Vancouver, top vineyards in New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Other applications for the products are in landfill monitoring, site remediation and monitoring leachates from mining tailings. Municipal and city clients in North America already total 28, and include cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson, Glendale, as have several California Counties. Newmont Mines and the US Army Corps of Engineers have also bought systems to track contaminated water seepage. The Norwegian Government bought a system to monitor polluted runoff infiltrating under their new airport runway, which is situated over the City of Oslo's underground water supply. The State of Minnesota and Florida clients have bought several systems to monitor water seepage under roadways. The data gathered from these projects is used to predict road surface breakdown, or when to restrict traffic in certain areas.
The newest ESI product, Flo.Point, uses the same technology and is packaged for the Oil & Gas sector. Flo.Point measures the volume of water in producing oil wells and in nine other related industry applications. Sales have begun through established dealers and OEM's (original equipment manufacturers who integrate Flo.Point into their own systems). This product sells for $9500.00. An independent market study has determined that there are over 40,000 applications in one market sector in Western Canada, alone.
With the new Netafim relationship, and sales of Flo.Point coming online, revenues in the fiscal year (April 02-March 03) are expected to grow significantly over this year's $2.75 million in sales.
Robert A. Young and Associates telephone number is 1-877-626- 2121 or local 604-682-5123. The email address is raya@digital-rain.com. ESI's website is www.esica.com.
Robert A. Young has a position in the company and is responsible for investor relations. The above is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this communication is, nor should be construed to be an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of securities. The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of the above. Counsel from a registered securities representative is recommended. The above information may contain forward-looking statements considered genuine by the author and are based on the author's experience and knowledge. However, the outcome will ultimately be determined by forces of which the author may have little or no ability to affect. Any forward-looking statements should not be considered guarantees of results
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
1- ARTICLE REVIEW
"National Geographic" Article Review.....Earth's Fresh WaterUnder Pressure…… ESI Environmental ENV-TSXV
"National Geographic", in it's Sept. 16th edition, gives a great overview of freshwater issues and they say "among the environmental spectres confronting humanity in the 21st century - global warming, the destruction of the rainforests, over-fishing the oceans - a shortage of fresh water is at the top of the list, particularly in the developing world." A World Bank expert calls it the "grim arithmetic of water". Recently, the US stated that 2.7 billion people would face severe water shortages by 2025 if consumption continues at current rates.
The article's author went on a two - month trip to Africa, India and Spain, and met with individual organizations and businesses that are trying to solve water's dismal arithmetic. Some of the examples in the article were reviving ancient techniques such as rainwater harvesting and some were twenty-first century solutions. All solutions emphasized the need to "obtain maximum efficiency from every drop of water." Conservation is a necessity as a fraction of one percent of the earth's water is available for drinking, irrigation and industrial use. All over the globe, municipalities and farmers are pumping water out of the aquifers faster than it can be replenished.
In the article's main example of water, how it is used and how it is wasted, two facts come out; specifically that 10% of water use is for household use and 70% for agricultural use. Of the 70%, one half of that water is wasted due to evaporation or runoff. The article states: "Drip irrigation, uses 30 to 70 percent less water than traditional methods and increases crop yield to boot." This technology was first developed in the 1960's but, even now, it is used on only one percent of irrigated land.
ESI Environmental Sensors of Victoria, British Columbia, designs and manufactures world-class sensors and wireless systems for water management. The first products, Moisture.Point and Gro.Point, have already been sold to clients in over 40 countries. Gail Gabel is the President and CEO of ESI; she was past Chair of the BC Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology and was previously Vice-Chair of the Science Council of B.C.
During the past year, ESI signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Netafim USA. Netafim is the world leader in drip irrigation products. Internationally Netafim has sales of US $220 million, with it's fastest growing market sector being in North America where, in California alone, 25% of the world's mechanized (spray) irrigation is located, and is a target for several ESI products. Netafim has 40 sales staff and a network of approximately 400 dealers located throughout the USA alone. In addition, Netafim has a comprehensive programme well underway to train its sales team throughout North America, in marketing ESI's Gro.Point TM and Intelligent Irrigation TM systems.
ESI's Gro.Point Sensors and Intelligent Irrigation software, will provide Netafim with a major edge over any competition, and take Netafim into high tech control and wireless communication for water management. Savings for users are in water and electricity and at the same time provide growers with a greater yield and significantly enhanced harvest quality. ESI has also begun working with several US utility companies who are offering a cash rebate for agricultural clients who use management systems to save water and power.
A fully integrated Gro.Point-based Intelligent Irrigation System pays for itself in a year or less, depending on the crop. Systems are modular. Average system sales are already reaching $30,000 to $50,000 each. Systems have already been sold for water management and irrigation management applications in vineyards, vegetables, tree fruits such as avocados and citrus, for high value nut crops such as pecans, hops and for tree farms.
The "National Geographic" article describes the success of the Kallie Schoeman farm in South Africa. The Schoeman farm has 500,000 citrus trees that produce 175 million oranges and lemons for export to 32 countries. This family have been innovators in irrigation as water becomes scarcer and more expensive. In the eighties, the family used more efficient sprinklers but they have been "readily replacing these with "super-efficient" drip irrigation which give the trees exactly what they need every day" Mr. Schoeman said, by parcelling small amounts of water to each tree. As Schoeman has used ever-more efficient irrigation systems, the farm has quadrupled the production of fruit per acre while actually using one third of the water.
ESI's various moisture probes are able to relay soil moisture data, via solar-powered wireless communication, to a farm or vineyard's computers. Based on the information sent to the farm's computers, and the time of year, an irrigation manager can adjust the flow rate of water, mixed with fertilizer. Fruit and other crops need varying amounts of water during different stages of growth. Farm operators are now recognizing that they will have to continue to make technological leaps as water becomes more costly.
ESI and partners have invested in excess of $10 million in R & D and their clients have included: US Dept of Agriculture, Federal and Provincial Government Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment, Leading Universities, e.g. University of Georgia, McGill, California, Guelph, Toronto, Vancouver, top vineyards in New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Other applications for the products are in landfill monitoring, site remediation and monitoring leachates from mining tailings. Municipal and city clients in North America already total 28, and include cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson, Glendale, as have several California Counties. Newmont Mines and the US Army Corps of Engineers have also bought systems to track contaminated water seepage. The Norwegian Government bought a system to monitor polluted runoff infiltrating under their new airport runway, which is situated over the City of Oslo's underground water supply. The State of Minnesota and Florida clients have bought several systems to monitor water seepage under roadways. The data gathered from these projects is used to predict road surface breakdown, or when to restrict traffic in certain areas.
The newest ESI product, Flo.Point, uses the same technology and is packaged for the Oil & Gas sector. Flo.Point measures the volume of water in producing oil wells and in nine other related industry applications. Sales have begun through established dealers and OEM's (original equipment manufacturers who integrate Flo.Point into their own systems). This product sells for $9500.00. An independent market study has determined that there are over 40,000 applications in one market sector in Western Canada, alone.
With the new Netafim relationship, and sales of Flo.Point coming online, revenues in the fiscal year (April 02-March 03) are expected to grow significantly over this year's $2.75 million in sales.
Robert A. Young and Associates telephone number is 1-877-626- 2121 or local 604-682-5123. The email address is raya@digital-rain.com. ESI's website is www.esica.com.
Robert A. Young has a position in the company and is responsible for investor relations. The above is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this communication is, nor should be construed to be an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of securities. The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of the above. Counsel from a registered securities representative is recommended. The above information may contain forward-looking statements considered genuine by the author and are based on the author's experience and knowledge. However, the outcome will ultimately be determined by forces of which the author may have little or no ability to affect. Any forward-looking statements should not be considered guarantees of results
"National Geographic" Article Review.....Earth's Fresh WaterUnder Pressure…… ESI Environmental ENV-TSXV
"National Geographic", in it's Sept. 16th edition, gives a great overview of freshwater issues and they say "among the environmental spectres confronting humanity in the 21st century - global warming, the destruction of the rainforests, over-fishing the oceans - a shortage of fresh water is at the top of the list, particularly in the developing world." A World Bank expert calls it the "grim arithmetic of water". Recently, the US stated that 2.7 billion people would face severe water shortages by 2025 if consumption continues at current rates.
The article's author went on a two - month trip to Africa, India and Spain, and met with individual organizations and businesses that are trying to solve water's dismal arithmetic. Some of the examples in the article were reviving ancient techniques such as rainwater harvesting and some were twenty-first century solutions. All solutions emphasized the need to "obtain maximum efficiency from every drop of water." Conservation is a necessity as a fraction of one percent of the earth's water is available for drinking, irrigation and industrial use. All over the globe, municipalities and farmers are pumping water out of the aquifers faster than it can be replenished.
In the article's main example of water, how it is used and how it is wasted, two facts come out; specifically that 10% of water use is for household use and 70% for agricultural use. Of the 70%, one half of that water is wasted due to evaporation or runoff. The article states: "Drip irrigation, uses 30 to 70 percent less water than traditional methods and increases crop yield to boot." This technology was first developed in the 1960's but, even now, it is used on only one percent of irrigated land.
ESI Environmental Sensors of Victoria, British Columbia, designs and manufactures world-class sensors and wireless systems for water management. The first products, Moisture.Point and Gro.Point, have already been sold to clients in over 40 countries. Gail Gabel is the President and CEO of ESI; she was past Chair of the BC Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology and was previously Vice-Chair of the Science Council of B.C.
During the past year, ESI signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Netafim USA. Netafim is the world leader in drip irrigation products. Internationally Netafim has sales of US $220 million, with it's fastest growing market sector being in North America where, in California alone, 25% of the world's mechanized (spray) irrigation is located, and is a target for several ESI products. Netafim has 40 sales staff and a network of approximately 400 dealers located throughout the USA alone. In addition, Netafim has a comprehensive programme well underway to train its sales team throughout North America, in marketing ESI's Gro.Point TM and Intelligent Irrigation TM systems.
ESI's Gro.Point Sensors and Intelligent Irrigation software, will provide Netafim with a major edge over any competition, and take Netafim into high tech control and wireless communication for water management. Savings for users are in water and electricity and at the same time provide growers with a greater yield and significantly enhanced harvest quality. ESI has also begun working with several US utility companies who are offering a cash rebate for agricultural clients who use management systems to save water and power.
A fully integrated Gro.Point-based Intelligent Irrigation System pays for itself in a year or less, depending on the crop. Systems are modular. Average system sales are already reaching $30,000 to $50,000 each. Systems have already been sold for water management and irrigation management applications in vineyards, vegetables, tree fruits such as avocados and citrus, for high value nut crops such as pecans, hops and for tree farms.
The "National Geographic" article describes the success of the Kallie Schoeman farm in South Africa. The Schoeman farm has 500,000 citrus trees that produce 175 million oranges and lemons for export to 32 countries. This family have been innovators in irrigation as water becomes scarcer and more expensive. In the eighties, the family used more efficient sprinklers but they have been "readily replacing these with "super-efficient" drip irrigation which give the trees exactly what they need every day" Mr. Schoeman said, by parcelling small amounts of water to each tree. As Schoeman has used ever-more efficient irrigation systems, the farm has quadrupled the production of fruit per acre while actually using one third of the water.
ESI's various moisture probes are able to relay soil moisture data, via solar-powered wireless communication, to a farm or vineyard's computers. Based on the information sent to the farm's computers, and the time of year, an irrigation manager can adjust the flow rate of water, mixed with fertilizer. Fruit and other crops need varying amounts of water during different stages of growth. Farm operators are now recognizing that they will have to continue to make technological leaps as water becomes more costly.
ESI and partners have invested in excess of $10 million in R & D and their clients have included: US Dept of Agriculture, Federal and Provincial Government Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment, Leading Universities, e.g. University of Georgia, McGill, California, Guelph, Toronto, Vancouver, top vineyards in New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Other applications for the products are in landfill monitoring, site remediation and monitoring leachates from mining tailings. Municipal and city clients in North America already total 28, and include cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson, Glendale, as have several California Counties. Newmont Mines and the US Army Corps of Engineers have also bought systems to track contaminated water seepage. The Norwegian Government bought a system to monitor polluted runoff infiltrating under their new airport runway, which is situated over the City of Oslo's underground water supply. The State of Minnesota and Florida clients have bought several systems to monitor water seepage under roadways. The data gathered from these projects is used to predict road surface breakdown, or when to restrict traffic in certain areas.
The newest ESI product, Flo.Point, uses the same technology and is packaged for the Oil & Gas sector. Flo.Point measures the volume of water in producing oil wells and in nine other related industry applications. Sales have begun through established dealers and OEM's (original equipment manufacturers who integrate Flo.Point into their own systems). This product sells for $9500.00. An independent market study has determined that there are over 40,000 applications in one market sector in Western Canada, alone.
With the new Netafim relationship, and sales of Flo.Point coming online, revenues in the fiscal year (April 02-March 03) are expected to grow significantly over this year's $2.75 million in sales.
Robert A. Young and Associates telephone number is 1-877-626- 2121 or local 604-682-5123. The email address is raya@digital-rain.com. ESI's website is www.esica.com.
Robert A. Young has a position in the company and is responsible for investor relations. The above is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this communication is, nor should be construed to be an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of securities. The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of the above. Counsel from a registered securities representative is recommended. The above information may contain forward-looking statements considered genuine by the author and are based on the author's experience and knowledge. However, the outcome will ultimately be determined by forces of which the author may have little or no ability to affect. Any forward-looking statements should not be considered guarantees of results
The ecology of destruction
THE ECOLOGY OF DESTRUCTION
I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here “the ecology of destruction” by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!.1 Pontecorvo’s epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called “Burn.” Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar cane.
Sir William Walker (played by Marlon Brando) is a nineteenth-century British agent sent to overthrow the Portuguese rulers of the island. He instigates a revolt amongst the numerous black slaves, and at the same time arranges an uprising by the small white colonial planter class seeking independence from the Portuguese crown. The goal is to use the slave revolt to defeat Portugal, but to turn actual rule of the island over to the white planter class, which will then serve as a comprador class subservient to British imperialists.
Walker succeeds brilliantly at his task, convincing the victorious army of former slaves and their leader José Dolores to lay down their arms after the Portuguese have been defeated. The result is a neocolony dominated by the white planters—but one in which the de facto rulers, in accordance with the laws of international free trade, are the British sugar companies. Walker then departs to carry out other intelligence tasks for the British admiralty—this time in a place called Indochina.
When the film resumes in 1848 ten years have passed. A revolution has again broken out on Burn led by José Dolores. Sir William Walker is brought back from England as a military advisor, but this time as an employee of the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, authorized by Her Majesty’s government. His task is to defeat this new rebellion of the former slaves. He is told by the oligarchy ruling the island that this should not be difficult since only ten years have passed and the situation is the same. He replies that the situation may be the same but the problem is different. In words that seem to echo Karl Marx he declares: “Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century.”
British troops are brought in to fight the insurgents, who are waging a relentless guerrilla war. To defeat them Walker orders the burning down of all the plantations on the island. When the local representative of the British sugar interests objects, Walker explains: “That is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.” This, he reminds his interlocutor, is how the island Burn got its name. Nature on the island has to be destroyed so that labor can be exploited on it for hundreds of additional years.
My intention here is not of course to recount Pontecorvo’s entire extraordinary film, but to draw out some important principles from this allegory that will help us to understand capitalism’s relation to nature. Joseph Schumpeter once famously praised capitalism for its “creative destruction.”2 But this might be better seen as the system’s destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development. There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity would turn into what István Mészáros has called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit would then take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself. Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize the entire capitalist world economy, encompassing the planet as a whole.3
The Earth Summits: 1992 and 2002
It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity. The world has so far convened two major earth summits: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 and Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. These summits took place a mere ten years apart. Yet, they can be seen as lying in the dividing line separating one historical period from another, revealing the contradictions of an entire century—the twenty-first.
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, organized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, represented the boundless hope that humanity could come together to solve its mounting global ecological problems. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a period in which the global ecological crisis penetrated the public consciousness. Suddenly there were grave concerns about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the rising rate of species extinctions resulting from planetary destruction of ecosystems. In June 1988 James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, presenting evidence of global warming due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That same year the United Nations set up a new international organization, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to address global warming.
A new ideology of world unity pervaded the Rio summit. The Gulf War of 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union later in the same year had given rise to the then dominant rhetoric of a “new world order” and of “the end of history.” The world, it was said, was now one. The recent passage of the Montreal Protocol, placing restrictions on the production of ozone-depleting chemicals, seemed to confirm that the world’s economically dominant countries could act in unison in response to global environmental threats. The site chosen for the Earth Summit, Brazil, home to the Amazon, was meant to symbolize the planetary goal of saving the world’s biodiversity. The summit’s principal document, known as Agenda 21, was intended to launch a new age of sustainable development for the twenty-first century.
The mood of the second earth summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, could not have been more different than the first. Rio’s hope had given way to Johannesburg’s dismay. Rather than improving over the decade that had elapsed, the world environment had experienced accelerated decline. The planet was approaching catastrophic conditions, not just with respect to global warming, but in a host of other areas. Sustainable development had turned out to be about sustaining capital accumulation at virtually any ecological cost. All the rhetoric ten years earlier of a “new world order” and the “end of history”—it was now clear to many of the environmentalists attending the Johannesburg summit—had simply disguised the fact that the real nemesis of the global environment was the capitalist world economy.
The site of the Johannesburg summit had been chosen partly to symbolize the end of apartheid, and hence the advent of significant world social progress. Yet, critics at the second earth summit raised the issue of global ecological apartheid, emphasizing the destruction wrought on the environment by the rich nations of the North in ways that disproportionately affected the global South. The ecological imperialism of the center of the capitalist world economy was symbolized by Washington’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions generating global warming. Significantly, U.S. President George W. Bush declined to attend the earth summit. Instead, at the very moment that debates were taking place in Johannesburg on the future of the world ecology, the Bush administration seized the world’s stage by threatening a war on Iraq, ostensibly over weapons of mass destruction—though to the world’s environmentalists assembled in Johannesburg it was clear even then that the real issue was oil.4
In fact, a new historical period had emerged in the ten years since the Rio summit. Economically, the world had witnessed what Paul Sweezy in 1994 called “the triumph of financial capitalism” with the transformation of monopoly capital into what might be called global monopoly-finance capital.5 By the end of the twentieth century capitalism had evolved into a system that was if anything more geared to rapacious accumulation than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots. Global financial expansion was occurring on top of a world economy that was stagnating at the level of production, creating a more unstable and more viciously inegalitarian order, dominated by neoliberal economics and financial bubbles. Declining U.S. hegemony in the world system, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, induced repeated and increasingly naked U.S. attempts to restore its economic and political power by military means.
Meanwhile, global warming and other crucial environmental problems had crossed critical thresholds. The question was no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes awaited but how great these would be. For those (including myself) in Johannesburg in 2002, watching the U.S. president prepare for war in the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf while the planet was heating up from the burning of fossil fuels, the whole world seemed on fire.
The Destruction of the Planet
In the almost five years that have elapsed since the second earth summit it has become increasingly difficult to separate the class and imperial war inherent to capitalism from war on the planet itself. At a time when the United States is battling for imperial control of the richest oil region on earth, the ecology of the planet is experiencing rapid deterioration, marked most dramatically by global warming. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic restructuring emanating from the new regime of monopoly-finance capital is not only undermining the economic welfare of much of humanity, but in some regions is removing such basic ecological conditions of human existence as access to clean air, drinkable water, and adequate food. Ecologists who once warned of the possibility of future apocalypse now insist that global disaster is on our doorstep.
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, declared in his article “The Debate is Over” in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone magazine that we are now entering the “Oh Shit” era of global warming. At first, he wrote, there was the “I wonder what will happen?” era. Then there was the “Can this really be true?” era. Now we are in the Oh Shit era. We now know that it is too late to avert global disaster entirely. All we can do is limit its scope and intensity. Much of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that “the world...has some trapdoors—mechanisms that don’t work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction.”6
In his book, The Revenge of Gaia, influential scientist James Lovelock, best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has issued a grim assessment of the earth’s prospects based on such sudden chain reactions.7 Voicing the concerns of numerous scientists, Lovelock highlights a number of positive feedback mechanisms that could—and in his view almost certainly will—amplify the earth warming tendency. The destructive effect of increasing global temperatures on ocean algae and tropical forests (on top of the direct removal of these forests) will, it is feared, reduce the capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb carbon dioxide, raising the global temperature still further. The freeing up and release into the atmosphere of enormous quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty-four times as potent as carbon dioxide) as the permafrost of the arctic tundra thaws due to global warming, constitutes another such vicious spiral. Just as ominous, the reduction of the earth’s reflectivity as melting white ice at the poles is replaced with blue seawater is threatening to ratchet-up global temperatures.8
In Lovelock’s cataclysmic view, the earth has probably already passed the point of no return and temperatures are destined to rise eventually as much as 8° C (14° F) in temperate regions. The human species will survive in some form, he assures us. Nevertheless he points to “an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”9 He offers as the sole means of partial salvation a massive technical fix: a global program to expand nuclear power facilities throughout the earth as a limited substitute to the carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuel economy. The thought that such a Faustian bargain would pave its own path to hell seems scarcely to have crossed his mind.
Lovelock’s fears are not easily dismissed. James Hansen, who did so much to bring the issue of global warming to world attention, has recently issued his own warning. In an article entitled “The Threat to the Planet” (New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006), Hansen points out that animal and plant species are migrating throughout the earth in response to global warming—though not fast enough in relation to changes in their environments—and that alpine species are being “pushed off the planet.” We are facing, he contends, the possibility of mass extinctions associated with increasing global temperature comparable to earlier periods in the earth’s history in which 50 to 90 percent of living species were lost.
The greatest immediate threat to humanity from climate change, Hansen argues, is associated with the destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. A little more than 1° C (1.8° F) separates the climate of today from the warmest interglacial periods in the last half million years when the sea level was as much as sixteen feet higher. Further, increases in temperature this century by around 2.8° C (5° F) under business as usual could lead to a long term rise in sea level by as much as eighty feet, judging by what happened the last time the earth’s temperature rose this high—three million years ago. “We have,” Hansen says, “at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions”—if we are to prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable. One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from irreversible changes that could produce a very different world. The contradictions of the entire Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization has developed—are suddenly being revealed in our time.10
In the Oh shit era, the debate, McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shaking proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis. The global ecological threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others might now be added:
Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.11
The point is that not just global warming but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.
Transcending Business as Usual
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as “business as usual.” The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe.
Yet, the dominant solutions—those associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant class—emphasize minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. Environmental political scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations. Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all environmental factors into the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological modernization: a whole panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is miraculously lifted as a result of digital “dematerialization” of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all.
Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist economy—an economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement or even appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment. Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital the answer is always to find new ways to exploit/degrade nature more intensively. To quote Pontecorvo’s Burn!, “that is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.”
Ironically, this destructive relation of capitalism to the environment was probably understood better in the nineteenth century—at a time when social analysts were acutely aware of the issue of revolutionary changes taking place in the mode of production and how this was transforming the human relation to nature. As a result, environmental sociologists of the more radical stamp in the United States, where the contradiction between economy and ecology nowadays is especially acute, draw heavily on three interrelated ideas derived from Marx and the critique of capitalist political economy dating back to the nineteenth century: (1) the treadmill of production, (2) the second contradiction of capitalism, and (3) the metabolic rift.
The first of these, the treadmill of production, describes capitalism as an unstoppable, accelerating treadmill that constantly increases the scale of the throughput of energy and raw materials as part of its quest for profit and accumulation, thereby pressing on the earth’s absorptive capacity. “Accumulate, Accumulate!” Marx wrote, “that is Moses and the prophets!” for capital.12
The second of these notions, the second contradiction of capitalism, is the idea that capitalism, in addition to its primary economic contradiction stemming from class inequalities in production and distribution, also undermines the human and natural conditions (i.e, environmental conditions) of production on which its economic advancement ultimately rests. For example, by systematically removing forests we lay the grounds for increasing scarcities in this area—the more so to the extent that globalization makes this contradiction universal. This heightens the overall cost of economic development and creates an economic crisis for capitalism based on supply-side constraints on production.13
The third notion, the metabolic rift, suggests that the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift in the metabolism between society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction. This raises the issue of the ecological sustainability—not simply in relation to the scale of the economy, but also even more importantly in the form and intensity of the interaction between nature and society under capitalism.14
I shall concentrate on the third of these notions, the metabolic rift, since this is the most complex of these three socio-ecological concepts, and the one that has been the focus of my own research in this area, particularly in my book Marx’s Ecology. Marx was greatly influenced by the work of the leading agricultural chemist of his time, Justus von Liebig. Liebig had developed an analysis of the ecological contradictions of industrialized capitalist agriculture. He argued that such industrialized agriculture, as present in its most developed form in England in the nineteenth century, was a robbery system, depleting the soil. Food and fiber were transported hundreds—even in some cases thousands—of miles from the country to the city. This meant that essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, were transported as well. Rather than being returned to the soil these essential nutrients ended up polluting the cities, for example, in the degradation of the Thames in London. The natural conditions for the reproduction of the soil were thus destroyed.
To compensate for the resulting decline in soil fertility the British raided the Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe for bones with which to fertilize the soil of the English countryside. They also resorted to the importation of guano on a vast scale from the islands off the coast of Peru, followed by the importation of Chilean nitrates (after the War of the Pacific in which Chile seized parts of Peru and Bolivia rich in guano and nitrates). The United States sent out ships throughout the oceans searching for guano, and ended up seizing ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys between the passage of the 1856 Guano Islands Act and 1903, sixty-six of which were officially recognized as U.S. appurtenances and nine of which remain U.S. possessions today.15 This reflected a great crisis of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century that was only solved in part with the development of synthetic fertilizer nitrogen early in the twentieth century—and which led eventually to the overuse of fertilizer nitrogen, itself a major environmental problem.
In reflecting on this crisis of capitalist agriculture, Marx adopted the concept of metabolism, which had been introduced by nineteenth-century biologists and chemists, including Liebig, and applied it to socio-ecological relations. All life is based on metabolic processes between organisms and their environment. Organisms carry out an exchange of energy and matter with their environment, which are integrated with their own internal life processes. It is not a stretch to think of the nest of a bird as part of the bird’s metabolic process. Marx explicitly defined the labor process as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature.” In terms of the ecological problem he spoke of “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” whereby the conditions for the necessary reproduction of the soil were continually severed, breaking the metabolic cycle. “Capitalist production,” he wrote, “therefore only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”
Marx saw this rift not simply in national terms but as related to imperialism as well. “England,” he wrote, “has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.”
This principle of metabolic rift obviously has a very wide application and has in fact been applied by environmental sociologists in recent years to problems such as global warming and the ecological degradation of the world’s oceans.16 What is seldom recognized, however, is that Marx went immediately from a conception of the metabolic rift to the necessity of metabolic restoration, arguing that “by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it [capitalist production] compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social reproduction.” The reality of the metabolic rift pointed to the necessity of the restoration of nature, through sustainable production.
It is this dialectical understanding of the socio-ecological problem that led Marx to what is perhaps the most radical conception of socio-ecological sustainability ever developed. Thus he wrote in Capital:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].
For Marx, in other words, the present relation of human beings to the earth under private accumulation could be compared to slavery. Just as “private property of one man in other men” is no longer deemed acceptable, so private ownership of the earth/nature by human beings (even whole countries) must be transcended. The human relation to nature must be regulated so to guarantee its existence “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” His reference to the notion of “good heads of the household” hearkened back to the ancient Greek notion of household or oikos from which we get both “economy” (from oikonomia, or household management) and “ecology “(from oikologia or household study). Marx pointed to the necessity of a more radical, sustainable relation of human beings to production in accord with what we would now view as ecological rather than merely economic notions. “Freedom, in this sphere,” the realm of natural necessity, he insisted, “can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control...accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy.”17
The destructive uncontrollability of capitalism, emanating from its dual character as a system of class/imperial exploitation and of enslaver/destroyer of the earth itself, was thus well understood by Marx. With regard to the film, Burn!, we saw how the exploitation of human beings was tied to the destruction of the earth. Relations of domination changed but the answer remained the same: to burn the island as a means of winning the class/imperial war. Today a few hundred people taken together own more wealth than the income of billions of the world’s population. To maintain this system of global inequality a global system of repression has been developed and is constantly put in motion. And along with it vast new systems of destructive exploitation of the earth, such as modern agribusiness, have evolved.
Social Revolution and Metabolic Restoration
Pontecorvo’s film Burn! about revolution in the Caribbean reaches its climax in the year 1848, a revolutionary year in real-world history. In 1848 Marx famously observed in his speech on free trade: “You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar cane nor coffee trees there.”18 Much of what we take as natural is the product of capitalism. Indeed, we are brought up believing that capitalist market relations are more natural, more incontrovertible, than anything within nature. It is this way of thinking that we have to break with if we are to restore our relation to the earth: if we are to invert the metabolic rift. The only answer to the ecology of destruction of capitalism is to revolutionize our productive relations in ways that allow for a metabolic restoration. But this will require a break with capitalism’s own system of “socio-metabolic reproduction,” i.e. the logic of profit.19
What such a revolutionary break with today’s business as usual offers is of course no guarantee but the mere possibility of social and ecological transformation through the creation of a sustainable, egalitarian (and socialist) society. Lovelock’s “revenge of Gaia”—what Frederick Engels, in the nineteenth century called the “revenge” of nature, now writ large on a planetary scale—will not be automatically overcome simply through a rupture with the logic of the existing system.20 Yet, such a rupture remains the necessary first step in any rational attempt to save and advance human civilization. Burn is no longer an island; it stands for the entire world, which is heating up before our eyes.
At the end of Pontecorvo’s film José Dolores is killed, but his revolutionary spirit lives on. The strategy of destroying nature to enslave humanity, we are led to believe, will not work forever. Today Latin America is reawakening to the revolutionary spirit of Bolivar and Che—a spirit that has never perished. But we now know—what was seldom understood before—that a revolutionary transformation of society must also be a revolutionary restoration of our metabolic relation to nature: equality and sustainability must coevolve if either is to emerge triumphant. And if we are to survive
I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here “the ecology of destruction” by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!.1 Pontecorvo’s epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called “Burn.” Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar cane.
Sir William Walker (played by Marlon Brando) is a nineteenth-century British agent sent to overthrow the Portuguese rulers of the island. He instigates a revolt amongst the numerous black slaves, and at the same time arranges an uprising by the small white colonial planter class seeking independence from the Portuguese crown. The goal is to use the slave revolt to defeat Portugal, but to turn actual rule of the island over to the white planter class, which will then serve as a comprador class subservient to British imperialists.
Walker succeeds brilliantly at his task, convincing the victorious army of former slaves and their leader José Dolores to lay down their arms after the Portuguese have been defeated. The result is a neocolony dominated by the white planters—but one in which the de facto rulers, in accordance with the laws of international free trade, are the British sugar companies. Walker then departs to carry out other intelligence tasks for the British admiralty—this time in a place called Indochina.
When the film resumes in 1848 ten years have passed. A revolution has again broken out on Burn led by José Dolores. Sir William Walker is brought back from England as a military advisor, but this time as an employee of the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, authorized by Her Majesty’s government. His task is to defeat this new rebellion of the former slaves. He is told by the oligarchy ruling the island that this should not be difficult since only ten years have passed and the situation is the same. He replies that the situation may be the same but the problem is different. In words that seem to echo Karl Marx he declares: “Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century.”
British troops are brought in to fight the insurgents, who are waging a relentless guerrilla war. To defeat them Walker orders the burning down of all the plantations on the island. When the local representative of the British sugar interests objects, Walker explains: “That is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.” This, he reminds his interlocutor, is how the island Burn got its name. Nature on the island has to be destroyed so that labor can be exploited on it for hundreds of additional years.
My intention here is not of course to recount Pontecorvo’s entire extraordinary film, but to draw out some important principles from this allegory that will help us to understand capitalism’s relation to nature. Joseph Schumpeter once famously praised capitalism for its “creative destruction.”2 But this might be better seen as the system’s destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development. There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity would turn into what István Mészáros has called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit would then take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself. Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize the entire capitalist world economy, encompassing the planet as a whole.3
The Earth Summits: 1992 and 2002
It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity. The world has so far convened two major earth summits: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 and Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. These summits took place a mere ten years apart. Yet, they can be seen as lying in the dividing line separating one historical period from another, revealing the contradictions of an entire century—the twenty-first.
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, organized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, represented the boundless hope that humanity could come together to solve its mounting global ecological problems. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a period in which the global ecological crisis penetrated the public consciousness. Suddenly there were grave concerns about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the rising rate of species extinctions resulting from planetary destruction of ecosystems. In June 1988 James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, presenting evidence of global warming due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That same year the United Nations set up a new international organization, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to address global warming.
A new ideology of world unity pervaded the Rio summit. The Gulf War of 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union later in the same year had given rise to the then dominant rhetoric of a “new world order” and of “the end of history.” The world, it was said, was now one. The recent passage of the Montreal Protocol, placing restrictions on the production of ozone-depleting chemicals, seemed to confirm that the world’s economically dominant countries could act in unison in response to global environmental threats. The site chosen for the Earth Summit, Brazil, home to the Amazon, was meant to symbolize the planetary goal of saving the world’s biodiversity. The summit’s principal document, known as Agenda 21, was intended to launch a new age of sustainable development for the twenty-first century.
The mood of the second earth summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, could not have been more different than the first. Rio’s hope had given way to Johannesburg’s dismay. Rather than improving over the decade that had elapsed, the world environment had experienced accelerated decline. The planet was approaching catastrophic conditions, not just with respect to global warming, but in a host of other areas. Sustainable development had turned out to be about sustaining capital accumulation at virtually any ecological cost. All the rhetoric ten years earlier of a “new world order” and the “end of history”—it was now clear to many of the environmentalists attending the Johannesburg summit—had simply disguised the fact that the real nemesis of the global environment was the capitalist world economy.
The site of the Johannesburg summit had been chosen partly to symbolize the end of apartheid, and hence the advent of significant world social progress. Yet, critics at the second earth summit raised the issue of global ecological apartheid, emphasizing the destruction wrought on the environment by the rich nations of the North in ways that disproportionately affected the global South. The ecological imperialism of the center of the capitalist world economy was symbolized by Washington’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions generating global warming. Significantly, U.S. President George W. Bush declined to attend the earth summit. Instead, at the very moment that debates were taking place in Johannesburg on the future of the world ecology, the Bush administration seized the world’s stage by threatening a war on Iraq, ostensibly over weapons of mass destruction—though to the world’s environmentalists assembled in Johannesburg it was clear even then that the real issue was oil.4
In fact, a new historical period had emerged in the ten years since the Rio summit. Economically, the world had witnessed what Paul Sweezy in 1994 called “the triumph of financial capitalism” with the transformation of monopoly capital into what might be called global monopoly-finance capital.5 By the end of the twentieth century capitalism had evolved into a system that was if anything more geared to rapacious accumulation than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots. Global financial expansion was occurring on top of a world economy that was stagnating at the level of production, creating a more unstable and more viciously inegalitarian order, dominated by neoliberal economics and financial bubbles. Declining U.S. hegemony in the world system, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, induced repeated and increasingly naked U.S. attempts to restore its economic and political power by military means.
Meanwhile, global warming and other crucial environmental problems had crossed critical thresholds. The question was no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes awaited but how great these would be. For those (including myself) in Johannesburg in 2002, watching the U.S. president prepare for war in the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf while the planet was heating up from the burning of fossil fuels, the whole world seemed on fire.
The Destruction of the Planet
In the almost five years that have elapsed since the second earth summit it has become increasingly difficult to separate the class and imperial war inherent to capitalism from war on the planet itself. At a time when the United States is battling for imperial control of the richest oil region on earth, the ecology of the planet is experiencing rapid deterioration, marked most dramatically by global warming. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic restructuring emanating from the new regime of monopoly-finance capital is not only undermining the economic welfare of much of humanity, but in some regions is removing such basic ecological conditions of human existence as access to clean air, drinkable water, and adequate food. Ecologists who once warned of the possibility of future apocalypse now insist that global disaster is on our doorstep.
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, declared in his article “The Debate is Over” in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone magazine that we are now entering the “Oh Shit” era of global warming. At first, he wrote, there was the “I wonder what will happen?” era. Then there was the “Can this really be true?” era. Now we are in the Oh Shit era. We now know that it is too late to avert global disaster entirely. All we can do is limit its scope and intensity. Much of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that “the world...has some trapdoors—mechanisms that don’t work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction.”6
In his book, The Revenge of Gaia, influential scientist James Lovelock, best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has issued a grim assessment of the earth’s prospects based on such sudden chain reactions.7 Voicing the concerns of numerous scientists, Lovelock highlights a number of positive feedback mechanisms that could—and in his view almost certainly will—amplify the earth warming tendency. The destructive effect of increasing global temperatures on ocean algae and tropical forests (on top of the direct removal of these forests) will, it is feared, reduce the capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb carbon dioxide, raising the global temperature still further. The freeing up and release into the atmosphere of enormous quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty-four times as potent as carbon dioxide) as the permafrost of the arctic tundra thaws due to global warming, constitutes another such vicious spiral. Just as ominous, the reduction of the earth’s reflectivity as melting white ice at the poles is replaced with blue seawater is threatening to ratchet-up global temperatures.8
In Lovelock’s cataclysmic view, the earth has probably already passed the point of no return and temperatures are destined to rise eventually as much as 8° C (14° F) in temperate regions. The human species will survive in some form, he assures us. Nevertheless he points to “an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”9 He offers as the sole means of partial salvation a massive technical fix: a global program to expand nuclear power facilities throughout the earth as a limited substitute to the carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuel economy. The thought that such a Faustian bargain would pave its own path to hell seems scarcely to have crossed his mind.
Lovelock’s fears are not easily dismissed. James Hansen, who did so much to bring the issue of global warming to world attention, has recently issued his own warning. In an article entitled “The Threat to the Planet” (New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006), Hansen points out that animal and plant species are migrating throughout the earth in response to global warming—though not fast enough in relation to changes in their environments—and that alpine species are being “pushed off the planet.” We are facing, he contends, the possibility of mass extinctions associated with increasing global temperature comparable to earlier periods in the earth’s history in which 50 to 90 percent of living species were lost.
The greatest immediate threat to humanity from climate change, Hansen argues, is associated with the destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. A little more than 1° C (1.8° F) separates the climate of today from the warmest interglacial periods in the last half million years when the sea level was as much as sixteen feet higher. Further, increases in temperature this century by around 2.8° C (5° F) under business as usual could lead to a long term rise in sea level by as much as eighty feet, judging by what happened the last time the earth’s temperature rose this high—three million years ago. “We have,” Hansen says, “at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions”—if we are to prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable. One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from irreversible changes that could produce a very different world. The contradictions of the entire Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization has developed—are suddenly being revealed in our time.10
In the Oh shit era, the debate, McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shaking proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis. The global ecological threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others might now be added:
Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.11
The point is that not just global warming but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.
Transcending Business as Usual
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as “business as usual.” The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe.
Yet, the dominant solutions—those associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant class—emphasize minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. Environmental political scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations. Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all environmental factors into the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological modernization: a whole panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is miraculously lifted as a result of digital “dematerialization” of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all.
Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist economy—an economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement or even appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment. Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital the answer is always to find new ways to exploit/degrade nature more intensively. To quote Pontecorvo’s Burn!, “that is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.”
Ironically, this destructive relation of capitalism to the environment was probably understood better in the nineteenth century—at a time when social analysts were acutely aware of the issue of revolutionary changes taking place in the mode of production and how this was transforming the human relation to nature. As a result, environmental sociologists of the more radical stamp in the United States, where the contradiction between economy and ecology nowadays is especially acute, draw heavily on three interrelated ideas derived from Marx and the critique of capitalist political economy dating back to the nineteenth century: (1) the treadmill of production, (2) the second contradiction of capitalism, and (3) the metabolic rift.
The first of these, the treadmill of production, describes capitalism as an unstoppable, accelerating treadmill that constantly increases the scale of the throughput of energy and raw materials as part of its quest for profit and accumulation, thereby pressing on the earth’s absorptive capacity. “Accumulate, Accumulate!” Marx wrote, “that is Moses and the prophets!” for capital.12
The second of these notions, the second contradiction of capitalism, is the idea that capitalism, in addition to its primary economic contradiction stemming from class inequalities in production and distribution, also undermines the human and natural conditions (i.e, environmental conditions) of production on which its economic advancement ultimately rests. For example, by systematically removing forests we lay the grounds for increasing scarcities in this area—the more so to the extent that globalization makes this contradiction universal. This heightens the overall cost of economic development and creates an economic crisis for capitalism based on supply-side constraints on production.13
The third notion, the metabolic rift, suggests that the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift in the metabolism between society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction. This raises the issue of the ecological sustainability—not simply in relation to the scale of the economy, but also even more importantly in the form and intensity of the interaction between nature and society under capitalism.14
I shall concentrate on the third of these notions, the metabolic rift, since this is the most complex of these three socio-ecological concepts, and the one that has been the focus of my own research in this area, particularly in my book Marx’s Ecology. Marx was greatly influenced by the work of the leading agricultural chemist of his time, Justus von Liebig. Liebig had developed an analysis of the ecological contradictions of industrialized capitalist agriculture. He argued that such industrialized agriculture, as present in its most developed form in England in the nineteenth century, was a robbery system, depleting the soil. Food and fiber were transported hundreds—even in some cases thousands—of miles from the country to the city. This meant that essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, were transported as well. Rather than being returned to the soil these essential nutrients ended up polluting the cities, for example, in the degradation of the Thames in London. The natural conditions for the reproduction of the soil were thus destroyed.
To compensate for the resulting decline in soil fertility the British raided the Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe for bones with which to fertilize the soil of the English countryside. They also resorted to the importation of guano on a vast scale from the islands off the coast of Peru, followed by the importation of Chilean nitrates (after the War of the Pacific in which Chile seized parts of Peru and Bolivia rich in guano and nitrates). The United States sent out ships throughout the oceans searching for guano, and ended up seizing ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys between the passage of the 1856 Guano Islands Act and 1903, sixty-six of which were officially recognized as U.S. appurtenances and nine of which remain U.S. possessions today.15 This reflected a great crisis of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century that was only solved in part with the development of synthetic fertilizer nitrogen early in the twentieth century—and which led eventually to the overuse of fertilizer nitrogen, itself a major environmental problem.
In reflecting on this crisis of capitalist agriculture, Marx adopted the concept of metabolism, which had been introduced by nineteenth-century biologists and chemists, including Liebig, and applied it to socio-ecological relations. All life is based on metabolic processes between organisms and their environment. Organisms carry out an exchange of energy and matter with their environment, which are integrated with their own internal life processes. It is not a stretch to think of the nest of a bird as part of the bird’s metabolic process. Marx explicitly defined the labor process as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature.” In terms of the ecological problem he spoke of “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” whereby the conditions for the necessary reproduction of the soil were continually severed, breaking the metabolic cycle. “Capitalist production,” he wrote, “therefore only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”
Marx saw this rift not simply in national terms but as related to imperialism as well. “England,” he wrote, “has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.”
This principle of metabolic rift obviously has a very wide application and has in fact been applied by environmental sociologists in recent years to problems such as global warming and the ecological degradation of the world’s oceans.16 What is seldom recognized, however, is that Marx went immediately from a conception of the metabolic rift to the necessity of metabolic restoration, arguing that “by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it [capitalist production] compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social reproduction.” The reality of the metabolic rift pointed to the necessity of the restoration of nature, through sustainable production.
It is this dialectical understanding of the socio-ecological problem that led Marx to what is perhaps the most radical conception of socio-ecological sustainability ever developed. Thus he wrote in Capital:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].
For Marx, in other words, the present relation of human beings to the earth under private accumulation could be compared to slavery. Just as “private property of one man in other men” is no longer deemed acceptable, so private ownership of the earth/nature by human beings (even whole countries) must be transcended. The human relation to nature must be regulated so to guarantee its existence “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” His reference to the notion of “good heads of the household” hearkened back to the ancient Greek notion of household or oikos from which we get both “economy” (from oikonomia, or household management) and “ecology “(from oikologia or household study). Marx pointed to the necessity of a more radical, sustainable relation of human beings to production in accord with what we would now view as ecological rather than merely economic notions. “Freedom, in this sphere,” the realm of natural necessity, he insisted, “can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control...accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy.”17
The destructive uncontrollability of capitalism, emanating from its dual character as a system of class/imperial exploitation and of enslaver/destroyer of the earth itself, was thus well understood by Marx. With regard to the film, Burn!, we saw how the exploitation of human beings was tied to the destruction of the earth. Relations of domination changed but the answer remained the same: to burn the island as a means of winning the class/imperial war. Today a few hundred people taken together own more wealth than the income of billions of the world’s population. To maintain this system of global inequality a global system of repression has been developed and is constantly put in motion. And along with it vast new systems of destructive exploitation of the earth, such as modern agribusiness, have evolved.
Social Revolution and Metabolic Restoration
Pontecorvo’s film Burn! about revolution in the Caribbean reaches its climax in the year 1848, a revolutionary year in real-world history. In 1848 Marx famously observed in his speech on free trade: “You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar cane nor coffee trees there.”18 Much of what we take as natural is the product of capitalism. Indeed, we are brought up believing that capitalist market relations are more natural, more incontrovertible, than anything within nature. It is this way of thinking that we have to break with if we are to restore our relation to the earth: if we are to invert the metabolic rift. The only answer to the ecology of destruction of capitalism is to revolutionize our productive relations in ways that allow for a metabolic restoration. But this will require a break with capitalism’s own system of “socio-metabolic reproduction,” i.e. the logic of profit.19
What such a revolutionary break with today’s business as usual offers is of course no guarantee but the mere possibility of social and ecological transformation through the creation of a sustainable, egalitarian (and socialist) society. Lovelock’s “revenge of Gaia”—what Frederick Engels, in the nineteenth century called the “revenge” of nature, now writ large on a planetary scale—will not be automatically overcome simply through a rupture with the logic of the existing system.20 Yet, such a rupture remains the necessary first step in any rational attempt to save and advance human civilization. Burn is no longer an island; it stands for the entire world, which is heating up before our eyes.
At the end of Pontecorvo’s film José Dolores is killed, but his revolutionary spirit lives on. The strategy of destroying nature to enslave humanity, we are led to believe, will not work forever. Today Latin America is reawakening to the revolutionary spirit of Bolivar and Che—a spirit that has never perished. But we now know—what was seldom understood before—that a revolutionary transformation of society must also be a revolutionary restoration of our metabolic relation to nature: equality and sustainability must coevolve if either is to emerge triumphant. And if we are to survive
Understanding Environmental Pollution, A Primer
(2nd Edition).
By Marquita K. Hill Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). , 2004, ISBN ISBN
abbr.
International Standard Book Number
Understanding Environmental Pollution is rich in general information about most forms of pollution at the household, local, and global level. It is written for the non-scientist and non-science student, but is also good reading for those who want generic environmental information beyond their level of expertise. The book's 18 chapters discuss methodically, pollution concepts; major pollutants pollutants
see environmental pollution. in air, water and soil; pollution sources; climate change; toxicity and risk assessment, and concepts and efforts to reduce pollution. The concept of pollution is not presented in isolation but rather as a consequence of the integrated actions of society. It is, in this sense, that energy generation and use and its relationship to pollution are presented.
The presentation of material is clear and lively but perhaps, also controversial. Typically, each chapter begins with an appropriate quotation about the right direction forward. This sets the tone for the accuracy about the present situation, which is explained by first presenting the basic concepts about a pollutant e.g., acid deposition acid deposition
The accumulation of acids or acidic compounds on the surface of the Earth, in lakes or streams, or on objects or vegetation near the Earth's surface, as a result of their separation from the atmosphere. , and then by recounting the history of the research and critical debate that have led to our current understanding of the problem--including the skeptics point of view.
The review of each topic spices the reading by adding the human element to what can otherwise be dry material. Also, it goes a long way to explaining the culture of science to the uninformed. For example, in the section on ozone depletion Ozone depletion describes two distinct, but related observations: a slow, steady decline of about 4 percent per decade in the total amount of ozone in Earth's stratosphere since around 1980; and a much larger, but seasonal, decrease in stratospheric ozone over Earth's polar regions , Hill says, "However, as happens with many environmental issues, there are skeptics. And often, as with ozone, researchers respond to skeptics by doing more research."
Another effective feature of the book is its inset boxes. These appear as context-relevant, self-contained "asides" throughout the book and are full of attention grabbing statistics, ideas, quotations, and scientific explanations.
Each section ends with a set of open-ended questions that forces a certain amount of understanding and analysis and allows the reader to evaluate the issues for themselves; this is very good for students and for initiating discussions. The questions range from very basic ones about the science behind pollution to ethical questions about human behaviour and pollution. The ethical questions are thoughtful and provocative. Geoscience ge•o•sci•ence
n.
Any one of the sciences, such as geology or geochemistry, that deals with the earth.
________________________________________
ge educators might Find the latter to be helpful in making their lectures more relevant to students.
On the negative side, the upbeat tone of the book sometimes leads to alarmist a•larm•ist
n.
A person who needlessly alarms or attempts to alarm others, as by inventing or spreading false or exaggerated rumors of impending danger or catastrophe. and melodramatic mel•o•dra•mat•ic
adj.
1. Having the excitement and emotional appeal of melodrama: "a melodramatic account of two perilous days spent among the planters" Frank O. Gatell. statements which diminish the otherwise good writing. An example from chapter 5 on air pollution: "disastrous fires and mammoth dust storms may appear from space as gigantic yellow blobs."
The book claims to be more international than the first edition but remains highly US-centric. Partly, this is unavoidable, simply because so much research has been undertaken in the US, as compared to elsewhere. However, many of the examples provided in the book tend to reinforce the notion that it is in the developing world where the pollution problem lies, and hence the solution, although the contribution to pollution by developed societies and their higher level of consumerism and waste-generation is repeatedly discussed.
In some cases, the description of scientific principles in the introduction has been so oversimplified o•ver•sim•pli•fy
v. o•ver•sim•pli•fied, o•ver•sim•pli•fy•ing, o•ver•sim•pli•fies
v.tr.
To simplify to the point of causing misrepresentation, misconception, or error.
v.intr. that it borders on being incorrect. For example, energy is described as something that cannot be created or destroyed, just "dissipated"--rather than converted from one form to another. And organic versus inorganic chemicals are defined based on whether or not they can be destroyed as follows: "Organic chemicals even those difficult to degrade can be destroyed when conditions are right. However, inorganic substances, although they can be converted into other compounds are not destroyed." I suppose Hill was referring to the 92 elements, although it is not clear, as the box on inorganic chemicals that follows includes sodium bicarbonate sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydrogen carbonate, chemical compound, NaHCO3, a white crystalline or granular powder, commonly known as bicarbonate of soda or baking soda. It is soluble in water and very slightly soluble in alcohol. and sea salts. This is very misleading--particularly as it applies to geochemistry geochemistry, study of the chemical changes on the earth. More specifically, it is the study of the absolute and relative abundances of chemical elements in the minerals, soils, ores, rocks, water, and atmosphere of the earth and the distribution and movement of .
The geoscientist, generally, will find this book lacking in scientific rigour rig•our
n. Chiefly British
Variant of rigor.
rigour or US rigor
Noun
1. , particularly in how it addresses the issues in geoscience; nevertheless, the main attraction is its broad scope and effective teaching format. Most of the material that touches on the geosciences--climate change, metals in the environment, atmospheric chemistry Atmospheric chemistry is a branch of atmospheric science in which the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere and that of other planets is studied. It is a multidisciplinary field of research and draws on environmental chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer modeling, oceanography, , mining, oil and gas, others--just scrapes the surface and is not presented in a quantitative manner. For example, when the book discusses natural sources of metals in the environment, it borders on being negligent and dismissive. In the discussion on lead, there is actually a subtitle called "some lead is natural" which sounds promising, but the ensuing statement is not: "But remember that lead, like all metals, is a natural element. We cannot totally eliminate it." There is another subtitle called "natural sources" that uses only two sentences to describe them: "Natural sources: these include volcanoes, forest fires This is a list of notorious forest fires: North America
Year Size Name Area Notes
1825 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km²) Miramichi Fire New Brunswick Killed 160 people. , and sea-salt sprays. These are significant but it is human activities that are increasing the environmental load of metals". No further information is provided.
Newspaper articles generally give the subject more attention.
Scientists will find the book to be disappointing in its lack of discussion of the methods used to discover the information that is presented, and in its poor referencing. Many points are presented simply as known facts, and worse, these are not referenced. The only references given in the book are provided under the "further reading" section at the end of each chapter. This seems an unnecessary weakness considering the ease of modern citation software. It greatly limits the use of the book as a research tool.
(2nd Edition).
By Marquita K. Hill Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). , 2004, ISBN ISBN
abbr.
International Standard Book Number
Understanding Environmental Pollution is rich in general information about most forms of pollution at the household, local, and global level. It is written for the non-scientist and non-science student, but is also good reading for those who want generic environmental information beyond their level of expertise. The book's 18 chapters discuss methodically, pollution concepts; major pollutants pollutants
see environmental pollution. in air, water and soil; pollution sources; climate change; toxicity and risk assessment, and concepts and efforts to reduce pollution. The concept of pollution is not presented in isolation but rather as a consequence of the integrated actions of society. It is, in this sense, that energy generation and use and its relationship to pollution are presented.
The presentation of material is clear and lively but perhaps, also controversial. Typically, each chapter begins with an appropriate quotation about the right direction forward. This sets the tone for the accuracy about the present situation, which is explained by first presenting the basic concepts about a pollutant e.g., acid deposition acid deposition
The accumulation of acids or acidic compounds on the surface of the Earth, in lakes or streams, or on objects or vegetation near the Earth's surface, as a result of their separation from the atmosphere. , and then by recounting the history of the research and critical debate that have led to our current understanding of the problem--including the skeptics point of view.
The review of each topic spices the reading by adding the human element to what can otherwise be dry material. Also, it goes a long way to explaining the culture of science to the uninformed. For example, in the section on ozone depletion Ozone depletion describes two distinct, but related observations: a slow, steady decline of about 4 percent per decade in the total amount of ozone in Earth's stratosphere since around 1980; and a much larger, but seasonal, decrease in stratospheric ozone over Earth's polar regions , Hill says, "However, as happens with many environmental issues, there are skeptics. And often, as with ozone, researchers respond to skeptics by doing more research."
Another effective feature of the book is its inset boxes. These appear as context-relevant, self-contained "asides" throughout the book and are full of attention grabbing statistics, ideas, quotations, and scientific explanations.
Each section ends with a set of open-ended questions that forces a certain amount of understanding and analysis and allows the reader to evaluate the issues for themselves; this is very good for students and for initiating discussions. The questions range from very basic ones about the science behind pollution to ethical questions about human behaviour and pollution. The ethical questions are thoughtful and provocative. Geoscience ge•o•sci•ence
n.
Any one of the sciences, such as geology or geochemistry, that deals with the earth.
________________________________________
ge educators might Find the latter to be helpful in making their lectures more relevant to students.
On the negative side, the upbeat tone of the book sometimes leads to alarmist a•larm•ist
n.
A person who needlessly alarms or attempts to alarm others, as by inventing or spreading false or exaggerated rumors of impending danger or catastrophe. and melodramatic mel•o•dra•mat•ic
adj.
1. Having the excitement and emotional appeal of melodrama: "a melodramatic account of two perilous days spent among the planters" Frank O. Gatell. statements which diminish the otherwise good writing. An example from chapter 5 on air pollution: "disastrous fires and mammoth dust storms may appear from space as gigantic yellow blobs."
The book claims to be more international than the first edition but remains highly US-centric. Partly, this is unavoidable, simply because so much research has been undertaken in the US, as compared to elsewhere. However, many of the examples provided in the book tend to reinforce the notion that it is in the developing world where the pollution problem lies, and hence the solution, although the contribution to pollution by developed societies and their higher level of consumerism and waste-generation is repeatedly discussed.
In some cases, the description of scientific principles in the introduction has been so oversimplified o•ver•sim•pli•fy
v. o•ver•sim•pli•fied, o•ver•sim•pli•fy•ing, o•ver•sim•pli•fies
v.tr.
To simplify to the point of causing misrepresentation, misconception, or error.
v.intr. that it borders on being incorrect. For example, energy is described as something that cannot be created or destroyed, just "dissipated"--rather than converted from one form to another. And organic versus inorganic chemicals are defined based on whether or not they can be destroyed as follows: "Organic chemicals even those difficult to degrade can be destroyed when conditions are right. However, inorganic substances, although they can be converted into other compounds are not destroyed." I suppose Hill was referring to the 92 elements, although it is not clear, as the box on inorganic chemicals that follows includes sodium bicarbonate sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydrogen carbonate, chemical compound, NaHCO3, a white crystalline or granular powder, commonly known as bicarbonate of soda or baking soda. It is soluble in water and very slightly soluble in alcohol. and sea salts. This is very misleading--particularly as it applies to geochemistry geochemistry, study of the chemical changes on the earth. More specifically, it is the study of the absolute and relative abundances of chemical elements in the minerals, soils, ores, rocks, water, and atmosphere of the earth and the distribution and movement of .
The geoscientist, generally, will find this book lacking in scientific rigour rig•our
n. Chiefly British
Variant of rigor.
rigour or US rigor
Noun
1. , particularly in how it addresses the issues in geoscience; nevertheless, the main attraction is its broad scope and effective teaching format. Most of the material that touches on the geosciences--climate change, metals in the environment, atmospheric chemistry Atmospheric chemistry is a branch of atmospheric science in which the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere and that of other planets is studied. It is a multidisciplinary field of research and draws on environmental chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer modeling, oceanography, , mining, oil and gas, others--just scrapes the surface and is not presented in a quantitative manner. For example, when the book discusses natural sources of metals in the environment, it borders on being negligent and dismissive. In the discussion on lead, there is actually a subtitle called "some lead is natural" which sounds promising, but the ensuing statement is not: "But remember that lead, like all metals, is a natural element. We cannot totally eliminate it." There is another subtitle called "natural sources" that uses only two sentences to describe them: "Natural sources: these include volcanoes, forest fires This is a list of notorious forest fires: North America
Year Size Name Area Notes
1825 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km²) Miramichi Fire New Brunswick Killed 160 people. , and sea-salt sprays. These are significant but it is human activities that are increasing the environmental load of metals". No further information is provided.
Newspaper articles generally give the subject more attention.
Scientists will find the book to be disappointing in its lack of discussion of the methods used to discover the information that is presented, and in its poor referencing. Many points are presented simply as known facts, and worse, these are not referenced. The only references given in the book are provided under the "further reading" section at the end of each chapter. This seems an unnecessary weakness considering the ease of modern citation software. It greatly limits the use of the book as a research tool.
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