> James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> "James, it's not just about farming. It's about other resource use, too -
>> like energy, water, air, and waste disposal. Cars, airplanes, computers,
>> loads of laundry, paper towels, etc. etc. "
>>
>
> I don't construe the "global footprint" as primarily about land use. It's
> about the finite resources that Doug highlighted.... SNIP... The planet has
> a relatively limited amount of nonrenewable, crucial raw materials, so it is
> not possible for the entire world population to live like the privileged few
> in industrialized nations. That's why improving the living conditions in
> developing nations requires a significant shift in energy and resource use
> in industrialized nations. --To put it bluntly: if nations like the U. S.
> didn't exploit a disproportionate amount of the world's nonrenewable
> resources, more resources would be available to improve basic infrastructure
> in poor nations.
>
Oddly enough, perhaps, I'm with James on the particulars here even if I'm not with him in general on this issue. Ecological footprint analysis drives me up a tree because of its absolute refusal of class/power analysis and environmental in/justice... put another way, even if accurate for/as a statistically average individual, the analysis is all what and completely eschews why, causation and unevenness. The folks I know who do it tend to do it in a manner which stresses comparisons of national footprints - they call their method STIRPAT (see www.stirpat.org if you are interested) and its a stochastic attempt to advance the old neo-Malthusian I=PAT formula... as if Population, Affluence and Technology could be straightforwardly and quantitatively operationalized in any historically-informed, socially-meaningful and viable policy-relevant way...
The problem I have with this discussion is that James used the ecological footprint as a way of wiggling out of addressing the real issues some of the rest of you have tried to raise. The ecological footprint issue arose in the context of his arguing that environmentalism is crap because of the way powerful institutions and conservative agencies operationalize the sciences they use to undergird environmental policies... policies which are also unequivocally intended to maintain western domination of the planet. What this veils, however, is all the of the left-wing scholarship which takes environmental problems seriously but on radically different terms than the Club of Rome or the World Bank. If James can tar all environmental concerns - from Malthus to Harvey, Marx to Escobar - as bourgeois then he can continue to embrace an only ever-so partially materialist take on the materialist conception of history.
Rather than actually deal with the fact that Marx directly addressed issues like the robbery of the soil by capitalist agriculture, that he tied the rise of capitalist agriculture to the explosion of cities and that he described the built environments of those cities in the most unequivocally negative terms, James would rather say everyone should have more stuff. In this vein, he can unambiguously raise Gompers, Connelly and, especially in this case, Pankhurst without any sense of irony since *we have at this very moment a system that is producing more than the whole working class can consume and its obviously failing to provide for much of the working class*.
Furthermore, not only is capital producing way more crap -- and I mean crap... we may have a legitimate need for many of the categories of things we have but surely we could use them to be infinitely better than they are and to do far less damage to our ecologies, our bodies and our communities, worldwide, in the process -- than we are able, under present conditions, to consume but it is doing so in a manner that simultaneously puts our capacity to produce - much less distribute - even similar quality stuff at such levels in the future.
The key, of course, and this James gets quite right, is that the concentration of wealth among an increasing minority of folks in the north that generated the need for more and more markets for abstract value - euphemistically called Wall Street by those with populist anger - is simultaneously the concentration of wealth that is destructively recreating natures, bodies, and communities the world... the very material conditions necessary for the expanded reproduction of capital, despite the ever greater penetration of capital into every recess of our lives, every aspect of our daily and generational reproduction and every nook and cranny of the globe.
What James can do by insisting on the bought and bourgeois nature of environmentalism is accept environmentalists at their word... that they are about Nature. In fact, environmentalism has hardly ever been about nature, per se, why would any Marxist take bourgeois movements at their ideological word unless the Marxist doesn't want to have to think in complex ways about the Marxist's relationship to the material foundation of such movements?
I know I've written this on the list before and had it generate absolute silence in response, but here it is again:
- The 19th C form of environmentalism called, in the US, preservationism
was primarily about finding God in ecologies already made pretty safe by the
consequences of colonialism and settlement and only secondarily about a
"nature" unpolluted by sinful social activities like those in the city. All
you have to do is read Thoreau... or Leo Marx.
- The early 20th C form of environmentalism called, in the US,
conservationism was primarily about scientific management of the residual
natural resources needed by capital and the state... resources made
increasingly valuable by the "irresponsible and unscientific" actions of
both small and corporate extractors. The flip side of the
natural-resource-as-capitalist-input side of conservationism lies in the
celebration of Red-blooded American manhood. Roosevelt, and many others,
were afraid we were becoming a nation of sissified and overmannered
metrosexuals and that Red-blooded American manhood depended on the
opportunity to directly engage big dangerous things- national parks where
land was conserved so that charismatic megafauna might survive, to be
hunted, were the result (the flip side of this was TR's adventures with the
Rough Riders, Buffalo Soldiers and San Juan Hill).
- The mid-20th C form of environmentalism, called environmentalism in the
US (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, there's no 'splaining), recapitulates
preservationist romanticism and the conservationist progressivism of the
past while focusing, for the first time, on pollution and public health.
It's not about Nature, its about built environments and suburban
aesthetics... and eventually, twenty years later, its successes displace
pollution and lead to the illegal disposal of new, even more toxic stuff,
onto the backs of oppressed minorities and the poor.
Now,
- if Marxism has nothing to do with the ecological, personal and communal
patrimonies we hand down to our kids and theirs - much less the kids of
others,
- if it has nothing to do with the management of and access to the
natural resources and the kinds of people we want to be,
- if it has nothing to do with the stratified nature of public health and
the oppressive character of our built environments,
then I guess Marxism has and can legitimately want nothing to do with enviromentalism... and that seems to be James' perspective.
It's much easier to critique what are in fact truly lousy bourgeois approaches to environmental issues - from science to policy - than it is to actually engage in trying to understand, much less theorize, the material contradictions of contemporary life as they relate - with apologies to Raymond Williams - the surprising amount of human history contained within the idea of nature. And it is much easier to do so in a cranky and negative way when you don't have a clear understanding of your own collaborative and positive approach... or at least it was for me when I knew the formal-and-real-subsumption-of-nature-to-capital-by-science folks and the nature-including-humanity-is-at-root-mutualistic-folks were both dead wrong but didn't have a clear sense of what was right and lively.
Damn, that went on for quite a while, didn't it?! Sorry.