The Book
Agriculture and medicine are meant to fill two basic human needs, but in today’s US economy, those industries’ number-one purpose has become profitable growth for their owners. It is ecosystems, and people living and working in the most degraded ecosytems, who pay the price. If capitalist economics can’t even supply people with food or protect human health without enormous waste and destruction, it can’t be relied upon to resuscitate a sick planet.
Table of Contents
Big Medicine’s malignant growth
Since 2000, the US economy has depended heavily on a booming health-care industry to help maintain economic growth. In some high-profile cases, doctors and hospitals have been caught over-testing and over-treating, with benefits going only to their own bottom lines. But in an era of always-evolving technology, medicalization of the human condition goes far beyond those few cases that end up in court – and that medicalization always falls with a heavy ecological footprint. To curb the ecological impact of the health care industry will require more than just banning plastic incineration or using mercury-free products. Big Medicine can become sustainable only by becoming Small Medicine, and that won't happen as long as the goal is profit and not public health.
Feeling OK? Are you sure?
When you’re watching a hospital drama on TV and start to feel a bit unwell yourself, a psychologist might diagnose your reaction as a type of "empathetic identification". When you see a commercial for a prescription drug and start feeling symptoms – a twinge in the leg or maybe a moment of doubt about your emotional stability – that’s called effective advertising. "Ask your doctor" ads and phony statistics have swelled the ranks of medicated Americans, to the point that 90% of adults are now defined as ill in some way. And when advertising doesn’t sell enough product, personal visits by sales reps to doctors’ offices fill the gap. A former rep reveals their tricks.
Side effects may be severe
To keep drugmaking expenses down and profits up, companies turn to heavily polluting bulk-drug suppliers in India that export to Western markets. One result: fourteen rural villages in a district west of Hyderabad have had their agricultural economy devastated. They now must have drinking water trucked or piped in, but illness rates remain high. Ironically, many of the villagers' illnesses are similar to those that the drugs are designed to relieve for patients in the West.
Swallowing the Earth whole
The low-carb fad has passed its peak. But what would have happened to the planet if everyone in the world who wanted to lose weight went on a low-carb diet? An ecological analysis shows that it would have been insupportable. We first look at how capitalist logic suggested that a problem caused by over-eating could be 'solved' by gobbling even more resources. We then turn to the method of judging other healthful, or reputedly healthful, products – other diet schemes, green tea, shark cartilage, hoodia, bottled water -- by the consequences of "universalizing" them.
Agroterrorists can take a vacation
The founder of ecological economics emphasized that farming can never be fully pressed into the industrial mold, because it depends on a flux of dispersed sunlight and seasonal cycles rather than the flow of mineral resources from the mine or pump. But that hasn’t deterred agribusiness from pursuing the goal of industrialization, with consequences far worse than what any so-called "agroterrorist" might dream up. Midwestern farms are ecological sacrifice zones, and in industrial poultry processing, profits are squeezed like blood from workers in Georgia and Arkansas. Genetic engineering is widely feared as a source of "Frankenfoods", but it’s much more dangerous as a tool for corporate hijacking of plant and animal genes that existed long before the first farmer poked the first seed into the ground.
Hunger for natural gas
The eventual peak in natural gas production, country-by country and eventually worldwide, will hit everyone hard, but the rich are much better able to take a hard hit than are the poor. Forty percent of humanity could not exist today without the use of nitrogen fertilizers, most of them produced with natural gas. Increasingly expensive gas promises dire consequences for fertilizer and food production in a global capitalist economy - when, say, air conditioners in wealthy nations (increasingly run on electricity from "cleaner" natural-gas-fueled power plants) are vying for the remaining gas with farmers working depleted soils in the global South. Standard economic theory leads to the most efficient way to satisfy "wants", but it does not distinguish between absolute wants (i.e., needs) and relative wants. As it exists today, the global economy maximizes the ability of the privileged to satisfy their relative wants by out-bidding the poor for scarce resources.
Down-to-a-trickle economics
India’s integration into world markets has meant bigger profits for multinational corporations and cheaper shirts and software for Western consumers. It is also helping brew a dark stew of air pollution that may bring widespread drought and hunger to South Asia. Mile-and-a-half-thick "atmospheric brown clouds" composed of sulfates, nitrates, and old-fashioned soot have come to blanket most of the subcontinent and the northern Indian Ocean from October to May each year. As they shade the land and sea surface, the clouds, say scientists, choke off precipitation in several ways. Most ominously, they may weaken the offshore weather systems that cause monsoon rains over South Asia. That could threaten the food supply for 2 billion people. General Electric, Microsoft, Ford, Monsanto, Pepsi, Whirlpool, and a host of other western corporations that invest in, outsource to, import from, and sell all over India are cheering the country’s growth not from the sidelines but from the playing field. Meanwhile, the farm families of chronically drought-stricken Anantapur District in southern India are struggling to raise crops while staying free of the globalized economy; however, the big brown clouds may undo all of their efforts.
Supernatural food
Whole Foods Market now faces competition from Wal-Mart in the organic-food business. But there's a lot more to ecological soundness than organic vegetables, and neither company gets better than a 'C' grade for economic fairness. The irony of Wal-Mart plunging into the natural food business is obvious, but critics also charge the fast-growing Whole Foods with being more intent on image than content, and remaining out of most people’s economic reach. Can we get beyond "boutique sustainability"? Alternative ways to ensure that everyone, regardless of income, gets access to real "whole" food are exemplified by People's Grocery in Oakland, California.
The world is your kitchen
"Better things for better living -- through chemistry." Until the 1980s, for almost half a century, E.I DuPont de Nemours and Company wooed customers with that slogan, one of the most memorable in American advertising. Today, two groups of DuPont products developed during that era – fluorotelomers (e.g., Stainmaster and microwave popcorn) and fluoropolymers (e.g., Teflon)-- are showing how chemical-dependent "better living" can come at a high price. Chemical properties that make PFCs so useful in the kitchen also make them virtually indestructible in nature. They are not broken down by heat, light, or microbes. They have turned up in wildlife on at least three continents and above the Arctic Circle, in the blood of dolphins, seals, sea lions, minks, polar bears, gulls, albatrosses, bald eagles, and sea turtles. They are widespread in seafood. They've been found in the blood of 90 to 95% of US residents who have been screened. But don't worry – DuPont says they won't hurt you.
Political impossibility vs. biological impossibility
Drawing on dramatically different thinkers – from Karl Marx to the nineteenth-century mainstream economist William Jevons to the twentieth-century ecological economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen – we examine the inevitable ecological degradation that comes with growth and the inevitable growth that comes with capitalism. Efforts to cut personal consumption and waste are to be applauded if they are part of a larger movement to build an economic system that is ecologically sustainable.