Quotes from "Environmentalism and the Politics of Technology"

"However, because [Paul] Ehrlich has always considered population control to be the key environmental issue, his politics have been curiously ambiguous. He has identified himself with diverse and seemingly conflicting causes: no-growth economics, Chinese population policy, counter-cultural anti-consumerism, opposition to Mexican immigration and high minority birthrates" (45).

"The specific substance of the debate between these two spokesmen for the environment concerns the causes of and the solution to the environmental crisis. The cause: experts are divided, some [like Paul Ehrlich] asserting that the principle source of the crisis is overpopulation, others [like Barry Commoner] blaming it on polluting technologies" (46).

"Not surprisingly, the prosperous nations and social strata that consume such disproportionate quantities of resources are most worried about running short. Accordingly, environmentalists representing them tend to advocate controls over population and economic growth. On the other side, it is to be expected that the poor, who hope to gain from economic growth but who in the meantime cannot easily escape the health hazards and pollution with which it is now associated, should be most attracted to theories that criticize not growth per se but its unintended consequences. Their representatives in the environmental movement therefore worry most about polluting technologies and the exhaustion of 'garbage dumps' which they too claim is upon us" (46).

"At the core of the disagreement are very different views on the nature of technology. Fundamentalist environmentalism emphasizes control of growth because it can conceive of no change in the industrial order that would render it ecologically compatible (Ullrich, 1979). Technological determinism thus leads straight to a Malthusian position for which environmental and economic values must be traded off against each other. This is Ehrlich's position" (47).

"Commoner's contrary view depends on a non-determinist philosophy of technology which admits the possibility of radical technical transformation. Only on this condition can growth and the environment be reconciled" (47).

"The original scientists' movement arose from the anguished realization that the creation of the atomic bomb contradicted the supposedly humanitarian mission of research. Yet the very fact that science had proved itself capable of such a feat promised scientists a larger voice in the disposition of the forces they had unleashed than they had ever enjoyed as benefactors of humankind" (48).

"Accordingly, the environmental movement began as a politics of species survival, frightening people on to the common ground of a 'no deposit, no return' earth" (48-9).

"blacks rejected Zero Population Growth, which many of them saw as a racist attack on their survival" (50).

"Ehrlich denied that his was a movement of prosperous, well educated whites anxious to shift the ecological burden to poor blacks, He proposed, for example, that a 'baby tax' to discourage reproduction be accompanied by special exemptions for minorities. 'The best way to avoid any hint of genocide is to control the population of the dominant group' (Ehrlich and Harriman, 1971: 23)" (50).

"World government in the interests of population control is fraught with dangers anticipated in the earlier disappointing experience with the concept. This is because mutual coercion is the prerogative of approximately equal powers. But only the developed countries have the capacity to enforce their will. Furthermore, it is primarily in these countries that there is significant popular support for coercing poor nations into population control programs. The kind of world government which would use force to impose demographic controls would be a government of the developing countries by the developed ones" (53).

"Finally, the industrial base will collapse along with services and agriculture, causing a drastic drop in population as the human race returns to barbarism. Could it be that the modern industrial system is destined to be a brief--and tragically flawed--experiment rather than the triumphant apotheosis of the species?" (53).

"For Commoner, environmental problems of all sorts, including over-population, are effects of social causes inherent in capitalism and colonialism" (55).

"If social factors influence reproductive behavior, we need to create conditions in which those factors favor slower population growth in the poorer countries. This will require, not 'coercion in a good cause' but massive economic aid. Since the population problem is primarily social rather than biological, a social solution is appropriate" (55).

"Ehrlich's definition of overpopulation and the diminishing returns hypothesis work together to depoliticize environmental issues. He wants to argue for a politics of survival beyond all historic considerations of class and national interest, but in fact he presupposes a specific constellation of interests, that of modern capitalism and neo-imperialism with their technology: 'the animals that occupy the turf, behaving as they naturally behave.' This is why he ends up seeking a biological solution" (59).

"An approach to environmental problems which treats technology as a thing of nature, fixed and unalterable, ends up by treating nature as a social object wherever it is subject to technical control. In the case of population politics, the locus of control is human reproduction, which individuals and governments can manipulate through voluntary contraception and involuntary sterilization" (59).

"By contrast, an approach which emphasizes the social sources of the problems will prefer to act on the biological mediations indirectly, through the social mechanisms governing institutional and mass behavior" (59).

"In a society based on economic inequality, one cannot hope to organize a strong political movement around voluntary self-deprivation. The alternative, invoking the power of the state to lower living standards, has usually served not higher moral ends but the interests of economic and political elites" (61).

• Actually, I disagree here. I think in a society based on economic inequality, encouraging people to live below their economic means is a productive thing. Allowing the proletariat to build up a nest egg that eventually allows them to become more than a cog in the capitalist machine may prove problematic for the ruling elite though. No worker bees = no material ends. Our society seems to be happy when we have enough money to meet our needs and then have some left over to buy a couple toys, and it seems corporations know this, play into this, to keep us tethered.
  

"The social theorist must explain the specific political and cultural factors that might, in any given case, distinguish the real consciousness of classes from the rational model constructed in theory" (64).

"What is needed then is a theory not of individual lifestyle, nor only of social control over production, but also of cultural change" (67).

"The contemporary political sensibility must be informed by the nuclear--now also environmental--age, from which we learn the threat to survival contained in the very nature of our civilization. A society that can destroy life on earth by the careless application of fluorocarbon deodorant sprays is indeed beyond the pale of any rational calculation of survival chances. History is over in principle in the sense that the old conflicts and ambitions must give way to a radically new type of human adventure, or else the species will surely die" (69).

"Action to end history is still action in history for historical objectives. Humanity is not yet the subject of the struggle to survive, and so this struggle too becomes a facet of the very class and national struggles the ultimate obsolescence of which it demonstrates. From this dialectic there is no escape" (70).