The Dilemma of Sustainability
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In order to achieve sustainability, development must
occur to bring people out of poverty.
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In order to achieve sustainability, development must be
slowed or halted to protect nonhuman nature.
Green Development: Environment and
Sustainability in a Developing World
•
Chapter 1 “The dilemma of sustainability” is W.M. Adams’ introduction to the issues
of sustainability, development, and sustainable development, and to the book as a
whole.
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Chapters 2-4 are the history of sustainability and development in global
environmental politics.
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Chapter 5 “Mainstream sustainable development” is about working within existing
economic, political, and social arrangements and incrementally reforming these
arrangements to achieve sustainable development.
•
Chapter 6 “Delivering mainstream sustainable development” is a continuation of
Chapter 5.
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Chapter 7 “Countercurrents in sustainable development” is about significantly or
radically changing existing economic, political, and social arrangements to eliminate
or revolutionize how we conceptualize the human-nature relationship and how we live
on planet Earth.
Green Development: Environment and
Sustainability in a Developing World
Chapters 8-12 are political ecology analyses of specific environmental
problems:
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Chapter 8 “Dryland political ecology”
Chapter 9 “Sustainable forests”
Chapter 10 “The politics of preservation”
Chapter 11 “Sustainability and river control”
Chapter 12 “Industrial and urban hazard”
Chapter 13 “Green development: reformism or radicalism?” is Adams’
conclusion to the book.
Political Ecology (PE)
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PE is motivated by a perceived need to go beyond traditional environmentalism and
the limited reformism of mainstream sustainable development.
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PE links natural sciences, social sciences, and economics.
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PE views the interactions between people and the environment in political terms as a
politicized environment of power relationships.
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Environment = product of political and social processes linked at nested scales from
the local to the global.
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PE ties the logics, dynamics, and patterns of economic change to the politics of
environmental action and to actual ecological outcomes.
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Political ecologists typically engage in field-based empirical research, with theoretical
approaches grounded in anthropology, environmental history, geography, political
science, sociology, and other fields.
Subalternity and Subalterns
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Sub = subordinated. Altern = alternative.
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Subalterns are defined as people who are marginalized in social, cultural,
and economic ways.
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Marginalization typically leads to negative identities (feeling despised) that
can contribute to oppression and self-destruction.
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These negative identities can be owned and reconstructed in affirmative
ways.
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Reconstruction involves cultivating shared, collective identities through
interactions and struggles with other groups.
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The new collective identities offer grounds for resistance movements,
including the Environmental Justice Movement.
Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and
Economic Justice (1996)
Subaltern environmentalism (SE) vs. traditional environmentalism (TE):
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Identity:
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TE tends to attract various people who have only a limited personal connection
to TE issues.
SE tends to draw people together who have direct personal connections to SE
issues and who already exist as social or spatial entities.
Issues:
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TE tends to be focused on more broadly construed quality of life issues.
SE tends to be focused on more narrowly construed quality of life or survival
issues within localized peoples’ economic projects and livelihoods.
Subaltern Environmentalism
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Focuses on livelihood issues: A local community’s struggle to gain
access to and control over natural resources to support itself. This
can include community-based conservation to protect nonhuman
nature.
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Provides critiques of modern, capital-intensive developments that
increase export revenues, displace local people and knowledge, and
usurp subsistence production.

Involves oppositional struggles to change the distribution of power
and resources to benefit the less powerful.
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Combats structural forces that marginalize and subordinate people
and that produce environmental degradation.
Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
Slow violence is a form of structural violence that typically:
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Is associated with environmental problems.
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Is gradual and out of sync with narrative and media expectations
and with the swift seasons of electoral change.
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Is low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects.
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Is almost imperceptible and driven by hidden agency.
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Results in human and environmental casualties that typically are not
seen or accurately counted.
Rob Nixon: Temporalities of Place
“Place is a temporal attainment that must be constantly renegotiated in
the face of changes that arrive from without and within, some
benign, others potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal
displacements involved in slow violence against the poor thus
requires that we rethink questions of physical displacement as
well…. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development
include conservation refugees. To often in the global South,
conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature NGOs,
combines an antidevelopment rhetoric with the development of finite
resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for
long-term residents.” (p. 18)
Environmental Justice (EJ)
in the Global South
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Although the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) in the United
States got its strongest push in the 1980s, the US is not necessarily
where the global EJM began. US political hegemony should not be
extended to include EJM hegemony.
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Many groups in the global South that confront environmental
injustice don’t self-identify as EJM groups. Social concerns and
environmental concerns tend to be wrapped together.
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Many global South groups use the language of human rights to
challenge racism, class inequalities, and corporate power.
More EJ in the Global South
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Global “environmental justice” groups and their networks challenge,
disrupt, and transform global norms, global North-South distinctions
and binaries, and accepted common sense about a range of
different issues.
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There is much focus on shared decision-making and leadership
(recognition and participatory justice).
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Environmental inequalities are most immediately seen as the result
of political and economic institutional power. Activists seek to
produce a diagnostic frame of this power to achieve solutions, goals,
and a vision of better world.
Global Environmental Justice:
Some Terminology
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Transnational social movement organization (TSMO): an activist NGO
(non-governmental organization) that operates in more than two nationstates. Most of these are based in the global North.
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Political economic opportunity structure: a way of modeling the intimate
associations between formal political institutions (e.g., states and legislative
bodies), economic institutions (e.g., large corporations and banks), and
TSMOs. These structures create opportunities for TSMOs to address
environmental injustice and to redefine transnational politics and public
spheres.
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Environmental colonialism: when global Northern TSMOs dictate polices,
practices, and strategies to TSMOs and others in the global South about
how to handle environmental problems in the global South.
Some Environmental Justice
Network Groups
1. Basel Action Network (BAN): http://www.ban.org/
2. Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance, Global Alliance for Incinerator
Alternatives (GAIA): http://www.no-burn.org/
3. Global Response (GR): http://www.globalresponse.org/
4. Greenpeace International: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/
5. Health Care Without Harm: http://www.noharm.org/
6. International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN):
http://www.ipen.org/
7. Pesticide Action Network (PAN): http://www.panna.org/
8. Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.splcenter.org/
9. Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University:
http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/
EJ Framework:
Ecological Modernization
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The design, performance, and evaluation of production processes
are increasingly based on ecological criteria rather than on a narrow
economic calculus.
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Industrial society has entered a new period characterized by new
technologies, innovative entrepreneurs, and farsighted financiers
who are bringing about a new generation of industrial innovation.
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The solution to the environmental crisis lies within the structures of
modernity itself—economic development and rising environmental
standards.
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Economic growth and technological innovation will save us from
environmental problems.
EJ Framework:
Environmental Populism
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Aim to fulfill basic human needs.
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Use appropriate and intermediate technology.
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Focus on participatory development by creating grassroots spaces
for local communities to organize, plan, and manage their own
development.
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Reform development through the participation of citizens.
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Environmental populism essentially champions communitarianism
and participatory justice.
EJ Framework: Risk Society
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A modern nation-state is a risk society. This is marked by an exponential
increase in the production and use of hazardous chemical substances that
permeate social institutions, human bodies, and the natural world.
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The new hazards of the risk society:
1.
Are unlimited in time and space.
2.
Potentially put everyone at risk.
3.
May be minimized but not eliminated.
4.
Are often irreversible.
5.
Have diverse sources that make tracking responsibility difficult to impossible.
6.
Are incalculable in ways that exceed the capacities of organizations to provide
insurance against them or compensation.
7.
May be identified and measured only by scientific means.
EJ Framework:
Treadmill of Production (ToP)
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Capitalism is a system ideologically wedded to infinite economic growth in
which market economies have an inherent need for capital investment to
generate goods for sale on the market, income for workers, and legitimacy
for nation-states.
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Capitalist economies behave like a “treadmill of production” that
continuously creates social and ecological harm through a self-reinforcing
mechanism of increasing rates of production and consumption.
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Resources are limited, and ecological systems cannot fully meet both
market value needs and social needs; the ToP prioritizes market value uses
of ecosystems over other biological and social necessities for people.
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Natural resource depletion withdrawals, capital economic growth, pollution
level additions, social welfare, and environmental protection exist in inherent
tension.
Toxics
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There are at least 70,000 to 80,000 synthetic chemicals in use
today.
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Perhaps several thousand have been tested for carcinogenicity.
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Manufacturing facilities release billions of pounds of toxic chemicals
into the environment (air, water, and land) every year.
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The main sources of exposure to these chemicals, however, are the
chemical products themselves and not merely the productive
processes.
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We don’t know the levels of toxics to which we are exposed from
products we use.
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The chemical industry grows at a rate of about 3.5% a year.
The Famous
Lawrence Summers Memo
On December 12, 1991 Lawrence Summers—vice president and chief
economist of the World Bank—wrote the following in an internal
memo for the World Bank:
“Shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty
industries to the LDC? I can think of three reasons…. 1) A given
amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country
with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages.
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in
the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to
that. 2) I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa
are UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently
low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. 3) The concern over
an agent [pollutant] that causes a one in a million change in the
odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a
country where more people survive to get prostate cancer than in a
country [with higher mortality rates].”
Summers was recently the Director of President Obama’s National
Economic Council.
Transnational (Global)
Waste Trading and Dumping
Toxic burdens are being shifted from the global North to the global
South. Why?
1.
Exponential increase in production of hazardous waste and the
emergence of more stringent environmental regulations in global
North.
2.
Need for fiscal relief among nations of the global South.
3.
Power of economic globalization: industries must cut costs and
increase profits or they will fail—it’s more profitable to ship waste
to the global South.
4.
Racist and classist culture ideology within the global North.
Regulating Toxics
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Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of
Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal: drafted in 1989, entered into
force in 1992.
http://www.basel.int/
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Afghanistan, Haiti, United States
Rotterdam Convention on the Prior informed Consent Procedure for
Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade:
drafted in 1998, entered into force in 2004.
http://www.pic.int/
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Only countries that have not ratified:
Only countries that have not ratified:
Angola, Barbados, Indonesia, Saint
Lucia, Seychelles, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, United States
Stockholm Convention for the Elimination of Persistent Organic
Pollutants (POPs): drafted in 2001, entered into force in 2005.
http://chm.pops.int/default.aspx
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Only countries that have not ratified:
Brunei Darussalam, Haiti, Israel, Italy,
Malaysia, Malta, Saudi Arabia, United States
Race to the Bottom Argument
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Free trade makes it easier for industries to locate in different
countries.
Because different countries have different environmental
regulations, companies have incentives to move to countries with
laxer regulatory standards.
Because countries realize this and want to retain or attract
industries, countries have incentives to reduce environmental
regulations.
These incentives lead companies to move to countries that have
laxer regulations and countries to reduce regulations.
Because companies relocate, they emit more pollution than they
would without free trade.
Thus, free trade leads to a “race to the bottom” in which countries race
to lower environmental standards (to the bottom) and companies
race to relocate in these countries.
A Counterargument
Against the Race to the Bottom Argument
1.
2.
3.
4.
As countries become wealthier through free trade, they might be
able to afford stronger environmental standards. Thus free trade
might increase environmental protection. This is known as the
environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis.
To survive in a freely trading economy, companies might have to
move to countries with the lowest labor costs regardless of the
environmental regulations in these countries.
It might be better for companies to invest in environmentally
sound technology at the outset rather than face the possibility of
having to adapt to rising environmental standards in the future
(ecological modernization).
Trade might yield new technologies that reduce environmental
damage (ecological modernization).
Thus, the race to the bottom argument might not be a good argument
A Counterargument to the Counterargument
Against the Race to the Bottom Argument
1.
2.
3.
The EKC hypothesis might be wrong. National carbon dioxide
emissions per capita are almost directly related to average
income in a nation. Since emissions per capita continue to rise
with income, it might be disingenuous to say that there will be
improvement in emissions if nations just grow economically.
Countries that have lower labor costs tend to have less stringent
environmental regulations.
The ecological modernization thesis might be wrong.
Thus, the race to the bottom argument might be a good argument.