Anna In The Aisles Of Plenty

In the early 1980s I met a young woman from Poland, a member of the Solidarity movement who was touring California as a sort of self-appointed, unofficial ambassador. Given conditions in Eastern Europe at the time, she traveled somewhat furtively, her pride mixed with a certain air of desperation.

I could tell that Anna had no clear idea what she expected to find on her journey to the West. Her visit was something of a pilgrimage, more inspirational than political. I was among a number of writers she sought out requesting books and talk. So we talked, and I gave her books. But all the while we discussed great issues, Anna was saying more with her eyes than her lips. Maybe all she wanted was for the outside world to know that Solidarity existed, that she existed, and would we please remember that in the troubled days ahead.

After she departed, the people she had stayed with told me this story. They had picked Anna up at San Francisco Airport. On the way home, needing groceries, they had stopped at the Safeway. Anna asked to come with them. She had heard of supermarkets but had never seen one. When the automatic door opened and ushered her in, she stood a long while staring in all directions. Then she wept. She walked the aisles of the store and the tears kept coming.

Now, some ten years later, we know there was a political significance to Anna’s tears of amazement. Their meaning has become front-page news. One way to explain the upheavals that are rocking the Communist world might be to say that too many people have been kept waiting too long to get to the supermarket. Does that trivialize the revolutionary ferment we see all about us, and not only in the Marxist societies? Not if one puts the matter in the proper perspective. As Marx himself knew, sheer physical discomfort is not the worst form of suffering. Greater by far is the hardship that results when privation is due to injustice, incompetence, corruption. Then the pain is compounded by the indignity of victimization. There is a kind of material hunger — not for the bare necessities — that transcends the needs of the body. In this sense, access to material goods, even of the most frivolous kind — junk food, blue jeans, transistor radios, T-shirts — can sometimes be an assertion of self-respect and independence. It is not just raw, self-indulgent consumption. Anna reported that she spent a major part of her life each day in Warsaw waiting in line for meager goods. What a crushing social discipline that can be: made to wait, made to waste one’s life trudging forward inch by inch to buy a cake of soap, a few pounds of potatoes. And what if when one reaches the head of the line, there is no soap, no potatoes to be had? Worse, what if one must turn away empty-handed, knowing — from film and television and magazines — that elsewhere people no more deserving than oneself are headed home loaded with merchandise?

The market economies of the world are so riddled with greed and vicious competition that it is easy for critics to overlook the possibility that, after a contorted fashion, they meet significant human needs. We are so used to seeing our economic system exploited by profiteers that we may be tempted to treat the needs that people bring to the marketplace with the same contempt that we heap upon the hucksters who manipulate those needs. But it is the first rule of a humane sociology to distinguish the aspirations of people from the distorted way in which those aspirations may be expressed. An activity as simple, and seemingly purely acquisitive, as shopping may provide the opportunity for making choices, asserting taste. Admittedly it is a low-grade exercise of social power; but clearly it has come to exert a powerful attraction upon millions in the modern world.

Here is another story about supermarkets.

From time to time I give my students an assignment. I ask them to visit their supermarket, not to buy, only to observe. Walk the floor, study the shelves. I ask them to consider how much of what they see there is real food, real goods needed for survival and health. How much is waste, nothing better than expensively packaged garbage in the making? How much floor space could be eliminated if the store limited itself to selling what people really need? How much of what once might have been food has been extravagantly processed into nutritionally vacuous novelties — crisps and chips and flakes, the stuff of dyspepsia and tooth decay?

Then watch, I tell them, what people buy — even those who must pay in food stamps. Stand by the checkout counter and observe the merchandise going by. The cosmetics and tobacco and liquor, the convenience foods, the bottles of colored sugar-water, the paper goods and plastics. What does all this tell you about our standard of living, about the distinction between wants and needs?

This is intended as an object lesson in applied ecology.

But now each time I make the assignment, I think of Anna weeping in the aisles of plenty.

Can The Earth Afford Us?

Currently, our best hope for saving the peace of the world would seem to entail bringing that plenty to more and more people, relieving the discontents, translating the animosities of nations into economic competition or even cooperation. In the former Communist societies, the demand for access to goods has become a force that is shaking long-entrenched regimes to their foundations. In our own society, an underclass locked away in inner-city housing projects or sleeping on the streets makes the same demand, though in practice it may take the form of sporadic crime, the violence of the drug trade, outbursts of racial and ethnic violence.

If things continue on this track, within the next decade or two there may be some thirty nations around the world clamoring to enter the era of high industrial affluence. Governments, whether liberal or dictatorial, are discovering that they cannot long hold power if they do not make good on their promise to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, the mature industrial economies of the European Common Market are readying themselves for a renewed burst of coordinated growth that may surpass the affluence of America and Japan. The best business brains in the world are hastening to get in on the great European boom. By the time the East Europeans, the Chinese, the Indians and Pakistanis, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Brazilians, and a score of other nations reach the standard of living that the American middle class now enjoys, a higher standard will have been set, and a new round in the economic race will have to be run. Upward and onward toward ever higher levels of production and consumption.

Now here is a hard truth:

Nothing like this may be possible, because nothing like this may be even remotely affordable.

Such an endless frontier of abundance may exist only in the delusionary thinking of people who know nothing of the biological foundations of life on our planet. In the United States alone, one study based on figures drawn from the Environmental Protection Agency places the cost of existing environmental programs over the course of the 1990s at $1.6 trillion. This does not include the expense of any new programs dealing with such problems as global warming or ozone depletion, whose costs we cannot even begin to assess.

How much is $1.6 trillion? It is not easy to say. Compared with the Gross National Product of the United States ($5.5 trillion per year), this may still seem to lie within the range of affordability. But numbers like the GNP are really more a part of the problem than of the solution. The GNP indiscriminately lumps together all the productivity that has blighted the environment as well as all the costs of cleaning up the mess. Environmental sanity is therefore certain to require eliminating that sort of “productivity,” hence a much-reduced GNP. We are just coming to realize, as all the environmental chickens come home to roost, that even the affluent are not as rich as they thought they were.

But how rich or poor are we? We have no universally accepted form of economic analysis (certainly none capable of persuading political leaders and their bewildered publics) that can tell us how close we may be to the limit at which what we must do to protect the biosphere will cost more than the wealth our industrial economies can generate. The study mentioned above, for example, was commissioned by the Center for the Study of American Business; it reflects the views of a significant participant in the environmental debate, a corporate community that has come to be deeply skeptical about the seemingly extravagant prescriptions presented by many ecology groups. It fears that existing environmental policies will become “an increasing drain on the American economy,” “an open checkbook with no standards of measurement.” Its warning is clear: “Policies that shrink the economic pie have widespread consequences for citizens’ well-being”; they are “not in line with the wishes of most Americans.”

And this may be true. We may be close to the point at which both business elites and the general public that looks to them for the necessities and amenities of life, as well as for the jobs that will let us buy both, will pay no more to repair the biospheric damage we inherit from the past two centuries of industrial expansion. The private sector of our economy is doing all it can to help us reach that decision. Inspired by their sudden and unexpected triumph in the cold war, the corporations of the Western world and Japan are licensed to feel more aggressively confident than ever about their values, their competence, and their claim upon the public trust. But the pessimistic scenarios of the environmentalists may nonetheless be true. The vox terrae, not the vox populi, may have the last word in this debate. If so, then the current American-Japanese-West European standard of living may be a temporary and tenuous indulgence. The entire industrial experiment may be pressing against an intractable limit from which it will soon be forced to fall back.

Something like this happened before. In the later Middle Ages, after a prolonged period of economic expansion, a young and vigorous Europe all but collapsed into ruins. It was struck down by a sudden shift in the ecological balance it did not understand, could not even see: a virus carried by a flea that rode on the back of a rat. We remember this catastrophe as the Black Death, an eco-spasm that nearly destroyed a civilization. For the next century or more, all the once-promising economic indicators of an expansive Europe sank to rock bottom, including population growth — not simply because of an increase in the numbers dying, but also due to a sharp decrease in the numbers being born to those who survived. So hopeless did life seem that men and women packed off to monasteries in record numbers, giving up on the world. In time, over the next two centuries, Europe recovered. When the threat is no worse than a rampant virus, eventually the immune response can repair the damage. Or at least that was the case in preindustrial times. Now, thanks to advanced means of transportation and an increasingly footloose population, a disease like AIDS can circle the globe in a few years’ time.

Something like this happened before. In the later Middle Ages, after a prolonged period of economic expansion, a young and vigorous Europe all but collapsed into ruins.

The ecological crisis of our time is either another detour along the open highway of economic progress, or it is the warning of a dead end just around the corner, a disaster far worse than the Black Death, from which it may take millennia to recover. The imponderables are so great in making assessments of the global conditions of life that either of these views could be right. In some cases — for example, the planetary warming of the greenhouse effect, the danger of ozone depletion, the long-range effect of acid rain, all of these potentially more irreparable than the medieval plague — even the best minds cannot arrive at a consensus. We count and measure, measure and count again. But do we have the right numbers? Do we have enough numbers? Do the numbers describe a transient fluctuation or the long-term trend? Our fears have been raised; theories and possibilities have been laid out before us. We are left to choose, but many cannot make the choice. There is not enough evidence one way or the other. The risks may run as high as the threat of human extinction, but we do not know where we stand in the matter.

This position of radical uncertainty is even worse than the worst-case scenarios of the gloomiest environmentalists, because it leaves us without the conviction to make the hard decisions that may be demanded of us. Where the argument for apocalyptic pessimism cannot be conclusively proven, it is only reasonable to wonder if there might not after all be a technological fix for every ecological dysfunction. Perhaps then we ought to keep our energy focused exactly where it is: on the limitless expansion of our industrial power. Inertia is the strongest of all social forces; people do not change familiar, long-established ways — especially those that have paid so many benefits in the past — unless they are convinced that they are faced with indisputable necessity.

Even less likely is it that the underdeveloped societies will waive their rights to the industrial plenty of our age. For them — the envious, hungry billions who want their fair share of the wealth — the environmental warnings so familiar to us might as well be written in a secret code. Or, worse still, they increasingly read like a deeply laid conspiracy against the wretched of the earth. Third world leaders have every good reason to display suspicion of the first world’s intentions. What are they to make of a memorandum that was circulated privately through the upper echelons of the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington and leaked to the press in 1991? It cynically encourages the accelerated deployment of polluting industries to poor countries, arguing that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” The author of the memo, a chief economist at the Bank, observes that the most precious resource many “underpolluted” nations have to offer is their “pretty air,” water, and topsoil — just waiting to be used as an international garbage can.

Sad to say, third world distrust of the industrial superpowers has begun to spread beyond governments and corporations to become broadcast hostility toward Western ecologists generally. In 1991, the World Resources Institute along with other environmental groups spoke out against plans by the Chinese government to increase the nation’s use of coal. The director of science at Greenpeace joined in on the condemnation, describing China’s decision as possibly “the final deadly puff of greenhouse gases” that would irreversibly alter the world’s climate. He may have been right, but two Indian economists were quick to respond to the criticism as “environmental colonialism.” Metaphorically referring to the planet’s CO₂ “sinks” (the oceans and the forests) as a sort of global recycling bank, they correctly observed that the rich Western nations (especially the “filthy five” that include the United States) are vastly “overdrawn.” Not so the third world nations; they have “credits” to their carbon dioxide accounts. “These nations should be lauded for keeping the world in balance because of their parsimonious consumption despite the Western rape and pillage of the world’s resources.”

Similarly, Ramachandra Guha, an Indian critic of the Western Deep Ecology movement, believes the goals of “the conservation elite” — biodiversity, steady-state economic policy, wilderness preservation — amount to little more than a new imperialism. Trace out the full economic implications of measures like game preserves for endangered species, and they entail “a direct transfer of resources from the poor to the rich.” In the underdeveloped nations, sheer survival is the paramount order of the day; equity and social justice head the economic agenda. In these conditions of privation, it makes little moral sense to speak of nature having “an intrinsic right to exist.” “Deep Ecology,” Guha charges, “runs parallel to the consumer society without seriously questioning its ecological and socio-political basis.” The best contribution the industrial nations can make to world environmental policy is to attend to their own overconsumption and curtail their military spending. Beyond that, let the third world set its own economic priorities.

As the socialist economies crumble before an irresistible popular demand for affluence and justice, their collapse takes with it into extinction what once stood as the modern world’s only serious historic alternative to unrestrained entrepreneurialism. The nations and cultures that would survive must commit themselves to urban-industrialism in its most maniacally energetic variation. All the forces of enlightened reform in the formerly socialist countries, all the forces of progress in the third world, are gambling their hopes and substance on economic growth. But can the planet afford to pay off on that gamble? Even those who are most sanguine about providing a technological fix for the environmental problems of our society must cringe at the prospect of so many more people joining us in the pursuit of unlimited affluence.

Consider only one contingency. If the Brazilians and the Indonesians continue to burn and cut our (our, not their) rain forests at the present reckless rate, the effects upon the world’s weather patterns are bound to prove massively disruptive. The Amazonian basin as a whole retains some two-thirds of the world’s nonpolar freshwater supply. The biomass of these vast forests contains more than a third of the earth’s living terrestrial carbon pool; some experts believe the rampant burning of the jungle accounts for as much as a quarter of the carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere each year. The jungle canopy of the Amazon — an area larger than the lower United States — plays a major role in governing the albedo, a basic factor in the planet’s heat reflectivity. All these are among the earth’s chief means of balancing the climate. Some “catastrophic” climatologists believe that the slightest shifts in these geophysical variables can precipitate sudden, calamitous results. Even in the best case, brutally revising so critical a parameter as the rain forests cannot help but produce erratic, global fluctuations in the world’s agriculture and demographics. That is as close to a biospheric certainty as we can expect to come.

The rape of the rain forest, especially in Brazil and Central America, serves as a convenient compendium of social and environmental blindness on the widest scale. In return for such short-term benefits as cheap beef and tropical hardwoods, most of which go to absentee corporate owners, the indigenous poor are exploited as part of ill-conceived schemes for development that put the land to disastrously bad uses. Native cultures are annihilated, species are wiped out by the hundreds, reducing the precious biodiversity of the planet, the climate of the world is deranged. The risks we are running have been well publicized, but the attention has produced no serious, long-term reform in the management of the rain forests. The World Bank, the one institution that might persuade the political leaders of these hard-pressed nations to change their ways, has been laggard in the extreme when it comes to mounting the pressure necessary to halt the devastation. Perhaps this is because corporations that are headquartered in some of its richest member nations — Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Nestlé, Swift, Armour — are among the chief beneficiaries of runaway deforestation. This makes it all the easier for third world leaders to argue that they cannot afford to do more.

They might go further, demanding the right to do as we have done: ransack the land, pillage the forests, raise up great cities and fill them with factories and traffic, sweep the garbage into the nearest river or ocean. The Brazilians and Indonesians could easily point out that, in the United States, less than 10 percent of the virgin forest that spanned the continent when the first white settlers arrived still remains standing. Now our ancient forests survive only as tiny enclaves in the Pacific Northwest. And what is the likely fate of the rain forest we have in our own back yard? The forests of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia stand an excellent chance of vanishing long before the Amazon basin has been stripped. If the damage is less publicized, it may be in part because the techniques of devastation are more cunning and better rationalized. Under pressure from environmentalists, industrial loggers in North America resort to such deceptions as “visual management corridors”: shallow strips of forest left standing along major highways to conceal the clear-cutting that takes place just out of sight. For that matter, some loggers make no apologies for their destructive practices. In a network television documentary made in 1990, a leading Northwest timber executive describes the trees he cuts as “stacks of money standing on stumps.” Ancient trees are merely stacks of money standing on “old stumps.”

Scare Tactics And Guilt Trips

As shortsighted, deceptive, and plain vicious as the new antienvironmental counterattack may be, to some degree the ecologists have only themselves to blame for their vulnerability. Their habitual reliance on gloom, apocalyptic panic, and the psychology of blame takes a heavy toll in public confidence.

In part, the problem arises from the way the environmental movement has come to be organized. The pattern resembles the telethon “disease of the month” approach. There are few groups like the Worldwatch Institute, Friends of the Earth, or Earth Island Institute that seek to deal with the planetary habitat as a whole with its myriad problems given some order of priority. Rather, the biosphere has been balkanized into a landscape of disaster areas. Scores of groups compete for the public’s attention and funds, each targeted upon a single horror. Hunger, acid rain, toxic waste, the ozone, the topsoil, the rain forests, the whales, the wolves, the spotted owls. . . .

If one compiles all the warnings and alarms of all the ecological groups, there would seem to be little people in the advanced industrial societies can do that is not either lethal or wicked. From the dioxin-laced coffee filters we use in the morning to the electric blankets we cover ourselves with at night, we are besieged by deadly hazards. Worse still, many of them make us accessories to crimes against the biosphere. It is not that the warnings are necessarily wrong; I take most of them to be correct. It is simply that there are so relentlessly many, and they come at us piecemeal, often from the most unpredictable quarters. How could I ever have guessed that the material from which my eyeglass frames are made comes from an endangered species, the hawksbill turtle, now nearly extinct as hunters slaughter the poor beast to turn its shell into mere trinkets? One again, I learn the central ecological truth: that all things big and small are members one of another in the biospheric web. Now that I know, I feel implicated in a great wrong. Bad enough to be ambushed by such distressing news, but too often the reports are grounded in a new environmental puritanism that almost delights in castigating our sins of self-indulgence.

The biosphere has been balkanized into a landscape of disaster areas. Scores of groups compete for the public’s attention and funds, each targeted upon a single horror.

At a lecture in early 1992, the Australian environmentalist Dr. Helen Caldicott, someone whose service to the cause I deeply admire, informed her audience that every time they turned on an electric light bulb, they were responsible for producing another anencephalic baby. She dilated upon the subject, describing in detail the suffering of these infants that come into the world without a brain. An inordinately large number of such babies have been born in the new, largely American-owned industrial centers along the Mexican border, where environmental controls are practically nonexistent. Dr. Caldicott’s strict advice was for us never to light more than a single bulb in our homes. Her audience cheered; I wondered why. If I thought there was any truth in what she said, I would not want to light any bulbs at all.

Other voices are more precise in their analysis, but no less censorious. The population experts Anne and Paul Ehrlich are two of the most dedicated environmental champions. Once again, I admire their work and accept their demographic analysis of our planetary ills. But I am flattened with guilt when they identify the United States as “the planet’s primary environmental destroyer,” and trace the accusation into every last detail of the American way of life:

Few Laotians drive air-conditioned cars, read newspapers that transform large tracts of forest into overflowing landfills, fly in jet aircraft, eat fast-food hamburgers, or own refrigerators, several TVs, a VCR, or piles of plastic junk. But millions upon millions of Americans do. . . . We are the archetype of a gigantic, overpopulated, overconsuming nation, one that many ill-informed decision-makers in poor nations would like to emulate. Unless we demonstrate by example that we understand the horrible mistakes made on our way to overdevelopment, and that we are intent on reversing them, we see little hope for the persistence of civilization.

Drawing the obvious conclusion from such an indictment, Earth Island Journal tells us it is not enough to find “fifty simple things you can do to save the earth,” as a best-selling environmental manual of the 1980s puts it. We need fifty difficult things. The list begins:

Dismantle your car.
Become a total vegetarian.
Grow your own vegetables.
Have your power lines disconnected.
Don’t have children.

The intention is not entirely humorous.

Nor did another activist have the least humor in mind when, in writing about the Columbian quincentennial, he lamented how “this awful thing called Western culture has now, inevitably, brought the world to the brink of ‘ecocide.’ . . . How sad, how terribly tragic that it should be this culture that needed to go and ‘discover,’ and thereby conquer and destroy the world.”

In the face of jeremiads like these, the English science writer Jeremy Burgess, a stout ecological supporter, is understandably moved to ask, “Is it just me, or does everyone else feel guilty for being alive too? . . . Eventually, and probably soon, we shall all be reduced to creeping about in disgrace, nervous of our simplest pleasures.”

From a very different ideological perspective, the Competitive Enterprise Institute also rankles at the constant “poormouthing” of the environmentalists. The environmentalists, it charges, are “anti-human”; their underlying premise is that “every consumer product and every consumer action is inherently anti-environmental.” Designating this as “the Green equivalent of original sin,” it calls for a return to the proud “Promethean paradigm” that launched the Western world upon its industrial course.

Such words, even when they are the preface to zany and reckless policy recommendations, nonetheless echo the great “gospel of hope” Francis Bacon so proudly announced to the world at the outset of the modern period. That inspiring belief in the future still has its residual appeal. Given the risks we are running in the game of ecological roulette our society has been playing for the past two centuries, prudence may be the proper order of the day — just in case the doomsayers happen to be right. But prudence is such a lackluster virtue. It does not match the exhilaration of the heroic exploits to which the myth of limitless progress summons us. If ecological wisdom cannot be made as engaging as the reshaping of continents, the harvesting of the seas, the exploration of space, if it cannot compete with the material gratifications of industrial growth, it will run a poor second to those who appeal to stronger emotions.

What I say here, I say as one who believes the warnings of the most worried ecologists and endorses the indictments of the angriest among them. I share their outrage and their urgency; I understand why they resort to hyperbole. But we may have reached the point at which the environmental movement must take the time to draw up a psychological-impact statement. Are dread and desperation the only motivations we have to play upon? What are we connecting with in people that is generous, joyous, freely given, and perhaps heroic?

There is a Faustian élan to our industrial adventure that summons up many of the best qualities of our species. Others find simpler but no less valuable gratifications in the sense of personal worth that accompanies a bit of discretionary income. If sound ecology comes to us asking that we stop being the animal we are, even if it is for our own good, it will not win many converts. Like all political activists busy with their mission, environmentalists often work from poor and short-sighted ideas about human motivation; they overlook the unreason, the perversity, the sick desire that lie at the core of the psyche. Their strategy is to shock and shame. But it is one thing to have the Good clearly in view; it is another to find ways to make people want the Good. That must begin with having some idea why people want what they think they want. The zealous tinkerers and technicians who gave us the light bulb, the automobile, the computer were not simply searching for ways to waste the wealth of the earth; the scientists who invented the first atomic bomb were not deliberately doing evil; the highway engineers who tear up rain forests are not sheerly perverse. Even the leaders of the global corporations who seem to operate from simple avarice probably cling to a mystique of progress or an obsession with competitive self-testing that reaches into deep and secret aspirations. All these have seen something defensibly worthy in what they did, in the things they wanted: matters of dignity, excitement, ultimate well-being.

And Anna, who wept so pathetically in the supermarket, was not shedding tears of greed. She, and all the third world poor who want their fair share of the material plenty we enjoy, seek to play a role in building the world they believe will bring them that dignity, excitement, and well-being.

For my part, I would take it to be little short of a counsel of despair if I thought the fate of the living planet depended wholly on the moral fervor of some small number of our species, overworked groups of ecological activists, each focused on a separate environmental horror with nothing more to draw upon in addressing the world around them than ethical denunciation, panic, or even enlightened self-interest. Is there an alternative to scare tactics and guilt trips that will lend ecological necessity both intelligence and passion? There is. It is the concern that arises from shared identity: two lives that become one. Where that identity is experienced deeply, we call it love. More coolly and distantly felt, it is called compassion. This is the link we must find between ourselves and the planet that gives us life.

At some point, environmentalists must decide if they believe that link truly exists. They must ask where it can be found inside themselves as well as in the public whose habits and desires we wish to change as only love can change us.

The Ecopsychology Newsletter, supported by the Goldman Environmental Foundation, is available by writing to Theodore Roszak, History Department, California State University, Hayward, CA 94542.