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Theories in Environmental Sociology
Justin Sean Myers
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f you are not reading this lesson on it, it is probably on the table or chair next to you or maybe it is in your bag or on your body. Yes, I am talking about your cell phone, and odds are it is an iPhone. Officially launched in June 2007, Apple sold over 2.2 billion of them by the end of 2018. It is a product that has revolutionized how people communicate, obtain informa- tion, and consume media content. We listen to music, watch movies, and take photos through it. With FaceTime, we can video chat with friends and family all over the world and even do a job interview in our living room (hopefully fully dressed). We can use it to track our finances, diets, and workout rou- tines. Through apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Venmo, we can share our lives and money with the world as well (sometimes we share too much). Let’s be honest, without a cell phone and Google Maps, we wouldn’t know how to get anywhere. And with cloud computing, streaming services, and unlimited data plans, we can watch Netflix and live TV almost wherever and whenever we want. The iPhone is no longer a luxury for most people: it is a Discarded television on shore of Hudson River, Staatsburg, New York. Post your photo on theory to #TLEStheory. Photo by Ken Gould
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 29 necessity for modern living, it has become part of us. We’re constantly on it, and if we forget it at home or leave it in the car, we feel like we’re missing a part of us; and more importantly, we feel like we’re missing out. This ubiquitous object, which is so integral to everyday life, is also a rich example to use to introduce social theory. The analysis of the cell phone can illuminate the similarities and differences through which environmental sociol- ogists study and explain socioenvironmental relations. While environmental sociologists seek to answer fundamental questions about why socioenviron- mental problems and inequities exist, what produces them, and what needs to change to address them, not all theories approach these questions in the same way. Ecological modernization Ecological modernization theorists might look at Apple’s efforts to reduce the use of toxic materials and increase the use of recycled materials in the iPhone as an example of how socioenvironmental relations are improving and how capitalism is capable of greening itself. In contrast, treadmill of production theorists might look at the growth impera- tives of Apple and its need to sell more iPhones every year as a prime example of how capitalism and its technological innovations are incapable of greening themselves and will continue to produce ecological destruction at an ever- escalating scale. Ecological Marxists might inquire into whether the energy consumption and carbon production needed to power the cloud is fueling a rift in the carbon cycle that amplifies climate destabilization. World system theorists might research which countries receive the most and the least profit from the production and sale of the iPhone and how this is connected to their position in the global capitalist economy. Risk society theorists might investi- gate how and why people are using the iPhone to monitor their air quality, find mercury free fish, and eat GMO free foods. Ecofeminists might focus on the gendered inequities that emerge from the mining of aluminum for the iPhone, the working conditions in factories making it, and the e-waste dumps where many broken cell phones go after we are done using them. There is no one way to be an environmental sociologist, and there is no one way to study socioenvironmental relations. That is the task before this lesson, to explore the theoretical toolbox of an environmental sociologist and guide you through the frameworks you have at your disposal to investigate socioenvironmental relations. What links all these different frameworks to- gether is that each is shaped by environmental sociology being a social sci- ence, which entails a commitment to linking theory to data and ensuring that the explanatory power of theory stands up to empirical verification over time. Thus, a theory is not just a theory of what could be going on but utilizes data to support the claims that the theory asserts about how the social world works and why it works that way. Very basic questions guiding theoretical frameworks include the following: What is happening? Who is it happening to? Who is directing what is happening? How it is happening? Why is it happening? How is this connected to what has already happened and what might happen in the future? At the same time, these frameworks also differ because each has particu- lar philosophical assumptions built into them that shape what is perceived
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 31 Theories can shine light onto certain issues while being unable to explain other problems or relations. Thus, we need to be aware of the strengths and limits of the theories we are using, of what the theory can make visible but also what may still remain invisible, what the theory can explain and what it cannot explain. We now turn toward our first theory, ecological modern- ization theory. ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION THEORY “Truly innovative products leave their mark on the world instead of the planet.” This is the tag line on Apple’s website asserting their environmen- tal bona fides, an assertion followed by a wealth of information about how the company is working toward reducing their products’ ecological foot- print , the impact of the item on the environment based on its withdrawal of resources and addition of pollution and waste. Here is a short list for the iPhone X series: it is free of mercury, brominated flame retardant, PVC, be- ryllium, and has a glass display that is free of arsenic; its battery is free of cadmium and lead; the solder in the main logic board is assembled with 100 percent recycled tin; and 40 of its components contain recycled plastic, in- cluding the glass frame that is made with 32 percent bio-based plastic and the speaker enclosure that is made with 35 percent postconsumer recycled plastic. Plus, when you are done with your iPhone, there is the Apple Trade In program where it can be recycled free of charge, or you can exchange it for credit to be reused by another person. These claims appear to be a win-win for us and Apple. We can continue to buy high-tech products, Apple can continue to make a profit, and we can consume less of the planet in the process. From these statistics, it looks like Apple is indeed shrinking our ecological footprints and dematerializing the economy (using less materials to produce the same or greater quantity of goods). If you approach the iPhone and Apple through ecological modern- ization theory, then you would come away with a fairly rosy picture. This is because ecological modernization theory is essentially a theory of envi- ronmental reform. It investigates how corporations and the state, the major economic and political institutions of today, are responding to the environ- mental crises that emerged in the 1970s by restructuring commodity chains (extraction, production, consumption, postconsumption) to make them more ecologically sustainable. Central to such efforts are efforts by companies to increase energy efficiency and restructure their production processes to incorporate more recycled materials and minimize the production of pol- lutants and waste. Through such efforts, ecological modernization theory proposes that the economic growth needs of capitalism can be reconciled with ecological principles in a win-win situation where future growth can be increasingly decoupled from resource extraction and the production of waste and pollutants.
32 / TWENTY LESSONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY By analyzing how the leading companies and industries are improving their ecological footprint, advocates for this theory contend that the pro- cesses of modernization and industrialization do not have to be abandoned. Instead they argue for the creation of more ecologically friendly technolo- gies. By way of new technologies, destructive production practices can be re- structured around cradle-to-cradle design. This is a process where products are designed with a closed-loop system in mind to minimize the extraction of raw materials, avoid toxic materials, and minimize the production of waste. This would occur through utilizing synthetic materials that can be reused without degradation and organic materials that when they degrade can be consumed (decomposed) by other lifeforms. The hope is that by having design processes and commodity chains mirror ecological processes—a concept known as biomimicry —environmental problems caused by mod- ernization, including air and water pollution, deforestation, and climate de- stabilization will be addressed. Thus, technology, which was once the driver of ecological degradation, would now be harnessed toward environmental reform. Central to this technological greening of capitalism, according to ecolog- ical modernization theorists, is the modernization of the economic as well as the political systems shaping capitalism. First, ecological modernization claims that the market structures are flexible enough to reconcile the exist- ing tension between growth and the environment in ways that corporations center ecological values and practices within their operating procedures. Second, ecological modernization claims that government can also incor- porate ecological values alongside of economic values within its operations and that it can and needs to push markets toward addressing environmental problems. Yet, if the state is going to realize this goal, ecological moderniza- tion theorists propose that it will have to jettison its top-down command and control model reliant on lawsuits, fines, and national-level regulations (e.g., Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act). Instead, the state needs to adopt financial incentives, such as ecotaxes, and embrace public-private partner- ships where the state works with companies to develop new technologies through publicly funding privately led research. Through adopting these more flexible and conciliatory pro-market practices, the state can fuel tech- nological innovation within industry that facilitates growth but also reduces withdrawals and additions, thereby bringing together economic and ecolog- ical values. Such a process, it is claimed, can sustain both capitalism and the envi- ronment in a mutually beneficial relationship. Examples of this would be the adoption by companies of environmental management systems (EMS), which lays out a series of processes to document and calculate the firm’s impact on the environment and then what steps could by taken to reduce the firm’s impact on the environment. Many of the leading technology compa- nies have EMS’s, including Apple, Panasonic, LG, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Samsung. The incorporation of environmental agreements within mul- tilateral trade agreements that historically focus only on economic matters,
34 / TWENTY LESSONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY TREADMILL OF PRODUCTION While ecological modernization theorists might see Apple as an example of a company at the forefront of green capitalism, treadmill theorists would see Apple in a very different light because of their different conceptual ap- proach. In 2008, the first full year it was available, iPhone sales were a mere 13.7 million; yet by 2018, Apple was selling 217.7 million iPhones a year. Even if each unit is less toxic, made of more recyclable components, and is itself more recyclable, the total environmental impact of its production, consumption, and postconsumption is still far greater in 2018 than what it was in 2008. And this process is bound to continue for the company, accord- ing to treadmill theorists, because if it wants to maintain its high stock price (around $220 per share in September 2019), as well as its status as a darling of Wall Street, it will have to sell more iPhones every year moving forward than it has in the preceding year. If Apple is unable to do so, then its stock price will decline, investors will seek out other more lucrative investments, and another company might step up to dominate the cell phone market. Additionally, with a lifespan of an iPhone being less than three years, tread- mill theorists would ask how much waste is being produced with such a high rate of turnover? Given that Apple does not release statistics on its Trade In program, we do not know how many iPhone users trade in their phone nor how many are reused versus recycled; therefore, it is hard to know for cer- tain whether Apple is successfully moving toward a closed-loop system that minimizes e-waste. Then there is the issue that the 200 million plus iPhones, and the more than 2.5 billion smartphones globally, are a massive consumer of data as we use them to access digital music, movies, TV, maps, and social media. And while the iPhone might have combined a cell phone with digital cameras and digital music players, so we don’t have to lug all three around with us anymore, we do not just have an iPhone but probably a laptop and possibly a tablet, a smart watch, a smart TV, and a smart car too—all of which are continually sucking down data from the sky. But this data, your data, doesn’t merely float in a puffy cloud. It is materially rooted in some data center on the planet that is consuming a lot of energy and producing quite a bit of carbon to keep that data accessible to you 24/7. With ever wider swaths of the globe becoming hooked up to the cloud, global data traffic is doubling every four years and turning these data centers into the “factories of the digital age”; factories that produce as much CO 2 as the airline industry. For example, in 2010, global data center traffic was only 1.1 zettabytes (one billion terabytes); and cloud traffic accounted for under 12 percent of this data amount (Cisco 2011). By 2021, global data center traffic will have increased over twentyfold to 20.6 zettabytes, and cloud traffic will account for 95 percent of this data (Cisco 2018). In looking at these numbers, it appears all is not that green with Apple. At the per unit level, each Apple product is greener than the previous model. But by volume, the environmental impact is far greater, and the cloud
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 35 infrastructure that it is connected to consumes more and more resources every year. Apple is therefore a clear example of the anti-ecological structure of capitalism. This would be the take from a treadmill theorist. Treadmill of production theory aims to explain how the relations between capitalism, the state, labor, and the environment produces environmental degradation as a normal part of its operations with little hope for correction without structural transformation (Schnaiberg 1980). This framework has been popularized by Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Alan Schnaiberg and is influenced by both neo-Weberian sociology and Marxist political economy. Treadmill theory is a conflict theory that explains the social and ecological problems facing society as an outcome of how industrial capitalism privileges the needs of an economic system organized around profit maximization and continual economic growth. It focuses attention on the power that corporations and the economic and political elite wield within this system (see Lesson 5). While ecological modernization theory sees liberal capitalist democracy as having the capacity to reform itself, treadmill theory sees its structural configuration as preventing environmental reform and the substantive re- structuring of society around ecological principles. This is because the state generally privileges the profit needs of corporations over and against the social and environmental needs of people and the planet (see Lessons 3, 9, and 13). On top of this, when the state does attempt to balance these often competing needs, it does so in ways that further degrades the social and en- vironmental needs of people and the planet (see Lesson 17). Treadmill theory refers to this conflict within the political system as one between exchange values and use values. For instance, the state tries to balance the demands of corporations and investors for economic growth and conditions that facilitate the private accumulation of socially produced wealth (exchange values) with the demands from the public for social amenities, services, and goods—such as public parks, public education, public transportation, affordable housing, and clean air and water (use values). Given that the public’s demands often require regulations and taxes on corporations and the elite to fund such pro- grams, policies, and projects, regulations and taxes that diminish profit rates, the state is constantly trying to juggle the provision of social amenities and environmental protection with capital accumulation, a scenario that often pits it against one of these core constituencies. The state often tries to meet both demands by facilitating economic growth to grow the economic pie and create the tax revenue to meet the public’s needs; however, this often works at cross purposes since the economic growth generated to fund such public desires often degrades the social and environmental amenities of the public desires. A prime example of this scenario is when efforts to improve the wages and benefits of automobile workers combine with attempts to reduce air pollu- tion through new environmental regulations on the fuel economy and emis- sions output of automobiles. Both of these initiatives impose new costs onto automobile companies. Auto companies may try and reduce the costs of new greener technology in their cars through selling more cars overall, since each
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 37 trucks (Eisenstein 2019). In 2012, the Obama administration announced that CAFE standards would require an average of 54.5 mpg by 2025. The Trump administration has not only sought to reduce these requirements to 37 mpg, but to stop requirements on the production of hybrid and electric cars, and to eliminate the legal waiver enabling California to have stricter standards than those at the federal level given the state’s long history of horrible air quality. Although the Obama administration’s standards would have saved US consumers billions of dollars on gasoline and healthcare costs as well as reduced deaths linked to air pollution, the Trump administration has pri- marily pushed for these changes to protect the profits of oil, gasoline, and automobile companies. I live in California’s San Joaquin Valley, which has the worst air quality in the country. Lowering the CAFE standards, eliminat- ing requirements for electrification of the automotive fleet, and eliminating California’s ability to set stricter air quality regulations will only intensify environmental inequities and increase air pollution and health inequities for the more than 4 million people who call it home, a region with some of the highest poverty rates in the country. From a treadmill perspective, the fed- eral government is clearly choosing Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Auto over the lives of San Joaquin Valley residents and the region’s carrying capacity , pre- cisely because this is how the TOP operates. Since a main problem with the treadmill is how it organizes political and economic structures in an anti-environmental manner, treadmill theorists have long critiqued reform efforts such as recycling as a pathway to challenge overconsumption and endless economic growth. From the TOP perspective, the option of recycling within the treadmill enables us to go about our regu- lar consumeristic ways, rather than reducing our level of consumption, be- cause as long as we recycle, we can feel better about our impact on the planet. Such feel-good behaviors effectively keep the treadmill humming along even though the majority of recyclable items are either thrown directly into waste bins or are unrecyclable because they are either contaminated (by mixed ma- terials and food and liquids), existing municipal streams are unable to recy- cle them, or there is no profitable market for their resale—which means the potentially recyclable item ends up in the landfill too. The central problem here is that the treadmill’s push toward endless eco- nomic growth leads to single-use products, planned obsolescence , and the prioritization of disposability that fuels escalating levels of ecological deg- radation (see Lesson 7). Planned obsolescence is a design process where the product is created to have an “artificially” short lifespan to ensure that con- sumers will have to buy a new product in the future. Utilizing this design process, companies are able to increase demand for their newest products even through the older models are still functional. For instance, the recharge- able batteries in Apple’s AirPods or AirPods Pro earbuds have a lifespan of around two years; after that, most people will throw them out and buy new ones even though all that needs to be replaced is the battery. This process will unfold precisely because the AirPods were not designed in a way to replace the battery, that is, they were designed to be obsolete. Sure, Apple might
38 / TWENTY LESSONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY recycle the AirPods for you, but with 70 percent of the US economy tied to consumer spending, such processes are not going to change anytime soon. For these theorists, recycling our technological gadgets presents the illusion that we can have our cake and eat it too. Consequently, treadmill theorists deny that the best hope for solving en- vironmental problems is to embrace new technologies since technological development is driven by capitalist profit motives not ecological values, which means that new technologies often intensify ecological withdrawals (resource extraction) and additions (waste and pollution). This can be ex- plained through the Jevons paradox in which increases in efficiency of re- source consumption actually increases rather than decreases the demand for that resource (see Lessons 6 and 9). This can happen in two ways. First, given that newer commodities are more energy efficient, people tend to use them more and thus consume more of the resource that powers it. Second, while each commodity is more efficient than its predecessor, the total consump- tion of those items increases as more people buy them since they become more affordable; this increases overall consumption of that resource and the energy that powers it. For instance, the average gas mileage of cars and light trucks in 1975 was under 13 mpg; but in 2017, it was 25.2 mpg. However, vehicle miles per vehicle nearly tripled (from 1.2 trillion to over 3.2 trillion), and there are millions and millions of additional cars on the road today com- pared to the 1970s; as a result, overall gasoline consumption is much higher today than decades ago. This process is interconnected with and fueled by the structural processes of the TOP. Returning to the previous example of how the automobile in- dustry responded to labor organizing and environmental regulations, the improvement in the average mpg of cars and light trucks was undone at the national level for a number of reasons. One, the pursuit of growth by the au- tomobile industry fueled the shift toward sport utility vehicles (SUVs) over cars because their profit margins are higher even though their gas mileage and emissions output are far worse than cars. Additionally, if we scale out beyond gas consumption and tailpipe emissions to the automobile industry’s adoption of production technology that replaced workers (with good wages and benefits) with fossil fuels and chemicals (robotics), we see that the auto- mobile industry consumes far more resources than it did in previous decades. Not to mention that the subsequent growth of an automobile-centric envi- ronment created growth and resource-consuming opportunities in industries that catered to the automobile, those that maintain and repair cars as well as those that supply fuel, parts, and insurance for cars. If we then include the housing industry, which has built an extremely resource intensive form of existence around the automobile—that of the suburban single-family home with its multicar garages, irrigated green lawns, and swimming pools—the ecological impacts are far worse. These impacts have been exacerbated by the shift in federal transportation dollars from public transportation toward roads, highways, and freeways for private automobiles. Factoring in the eco- logical withdrawals and additions of these transformations, the stand-alone
40 / TWENTY LESSONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY classed, and gendered. It has also driven treadmill theorists to study how marginalized communities are organizing and building power to contest the TOP and what strategies are successful or not in doing so, all in the hope of strengthening environmental justice movements and their attempts to halt the treadmill or at least force it to more equitably distribute the “goods” and “bads” it produces (see Lessons 10 and 18). Next, we turn toward another theory influenced by Marxist political economy, that of Ecological Marxism. ECOLOGICAL MARXISM Let us return to Apple’s AirPods. There are indeed perks to having wire- less headphones. No more time spent untangling cords, having to carry your phone with you or having your cord pulled out of your phone, not to men- tion your cord shredding or falling apart. With AirPods, not only is there no cord failure to worry about but your phone will never be damaged again through your headphone cord knocking over a drink of water or dragging your phone off the table and onto the floor. However, if ecological modern- ization theory contends that capitalism is greening itself and moving toward incorporating biomimicry within its production processes to reduce with- drawals and additions, then why has Apple long resisted efforts to create more cradle-to-cradle practices within its product design? The planned ob- solescence of the AirPods is by design after all: they were created to become waste. And this design process occurred even though Apple has received a lot of criticism for having non-replaceable batteries in their iPhones, and most recently, for slowing down iPhones with older batteries. In fact, while in the 1990s many cell phones had replaceable batteries, today almost none do. And the iPhone battery has always been sealed within the product. The only way to replace it is to either do it yourself, which would void the warranty on the iPhone, or bring it to Apple and pay them to do it for you. Why is this occurring? Why are technological innovations moving toward more and more of a linear waste stream and creating ever higher levels of pollution and waste? Ecological Marxism contends that it has an answer. Ecological Marxism, which is associated with theorists John Bellamy Foster, Richard York, Brett Clark, and Rebecca Clausen, among others, builds on the work of conflict theorist Karl Marx by linking the socially destruc- tive tendencies of capitalism with the ecologically destructive tendencies of capitalism, emphasizing how they are interconnected. Capitalism’s inherent need to expand (or suffer economic recessions and depressions) and increase its rate of profit (generally through increasing the productivity of labor) means that capitalism will expand and intensify its ecological degradation (see Lessons 4 and 9). From this perspective, capitalism alienates both hu- manity from itself but also from nonhuman nature. To theorize the ecological degradation of capitalism on people and the planet and why this happens, ecological Marxism uses the concept of
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 41 metabolic rift. Karl Marx theorized that capitalism produces a rift in the met- abolic relations between human and nonhuman nature based on capitalism’s continual drive for endless accumulation of wealth. This happens because capitalism breaks up the ecological flow of nutrients within a circular loop of reuse (extraction, production, distribution, consumption, reuse) and shifts it toward a linear production line of waste (extraction, production, distribu- tion, consumption, waste) with disastrous social, economic, and ecological consequences. Marx’s example of this process focused on how the capitaliza- tion of agriculture degraded soil fertility because food waste and “nightsoil” (manure) was not being recycled back to the farm and the rural country from which it came but treated merely as a waste product to be dumped anywhere and everywhere within the city and broader urban environment. This shift from circularity to linearity robbed the soil of the nutrients it needed while making urban life toxic for communities and workers through food, human, and animal waste being dumped in the streets, waterways, and landfills. Thus, for Marx, “all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil” (Marx 1976: 637–638). Moreover, with the growing division between town and country producing a metabolic rift, capitalist-led science and technology was called on to create synthetic, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers to ensure capitalist agriculture could continue growing food in spite of the loss of soil fertility. This invention, rather than solving the ecological crisis, actually intensified it by creating new ecological problems such as polluted waterways, eutrophication, and carbon dioxide emissions. Akin to treadmill theorists, ecological Marxists contend that capitalism’s attempt to solve a metabolic rift through technolog- ical innovation, rather than reducing that metabolic rift, generally produces newer and ever larger metabolic rifts that threaten humanity, the planet, and capitalism. Recent research has explored how this metabolic rift may be moving from industrial agriculture to certified organic farming too, as it turns toward re- lying on more off-farm agro-inputs (organic fertilizers and pesticides) with negative effects on water quality. The concept has also been applied to other social-ecological relations, including the carbon cycle, where the overproduc- tion of carbon due to the burning of fossil fuels combined with deforestation has disrupted the carbon cycle. As a result, more carbon is produced with fewer places for this carbon to be absorbed, which generates carbon or bio- spheric rift that leads to climate and oceanic destabilization (see Lesson 15). Ecological Marxists have also applied the concept to the disruption of the oceanic ecosystem due to the capitalization of fishing, which has either fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted over 75 percent of global fisheries. The collapse of fish stocks globally has led to declines in predator fish and fish-eating birds, both of which also eat sea urchins. Consequently, sea urchin populations have exploded and devastated kelp forests, coral reefs, and sea- grass beds that are vital to the healthy functioning of oceanic ecosystems. To address this metabolic crisis, capitalism has produced the technofix of aquaculture, aka fish farming, a solution that has actually intensified and
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 43 due to sea-level rise and coastal flooding attributable to climate destabiliza- tion. And public and private insurers will face billions in losses for commod- ity crops destroyed through shifting climates and extreme weather events (droughts, floods, hurricanes), also attributable to climate destabilization. Apart from these costs, a growing problem will be the need to expend more and more money to ensure the work force is healthy enough to be productive for capitalists. With more and more pollution comes higher rates of respira- tory issues, cancers, blood disorders, sterility, birth defects, and abnormalities in liver and kidney function, all of which increase healthcare costs for indi- viduals, employers, insurance companies, healthcare providers, and the state. Overall, while ecological Marxism is a conflict theory like treadmill of pro- duction, its focus is on theorizing how the economic conditions and struc- tures within capitalism drive ecological degradation in ways that threaten the reproduction of capitalism. Although they agree with treadmill theorists that capitalism cannot be reformed to save the planet and that technological innovation within capitalism tends to exacerbate rather than address ecolog- ical problems, their analytical focus is primarily on studying the processes of capitalism and not the social movements emerging to oppose capitalism and restore the metabolic rifts destabilizing the planet. We now turn to the final theory influenced by Marxist political economy, world systems theory , which shifts focus from metabolic rifts and the contradictions of capitalism toward how power relations between nations structure international trade relations to favor certain countries over others. WORLD SYSTEMS THEORY When you wake up in the morning and check the news app on your cell phone, you might see headlines reading “Avocado Demand Threatens Mating Grounds for Monarch Butterflies”; “Coffee and Chocolate Consump- tion Driving Deforestation in Africa”; “Another Shipment of E-waste Arrives in India”; “Polluted Air from China Settles in Los Angeles.” After reading such headlines, do you wonder why this is occurring? Do you stop and think, why are the things I am consuming both coming from and ending up back in low-income countries? World systems theory seeks to explain this relation- ship through looking at capitalism as a global economic system linking all countries into the pursuit of profit and a competition-based logic prioritizing economic growth as an end in itself. For these theorists, the world economy is one of unequal economic and ecological exchange affixed to a global division of labor that emerged from Western European colonialism beginning in the 1400s. In this global economy, a small number of “core” countries have po- litical and economic power to dictate the division of labor and terms of trade to be favorable to themselves, specialize in high-value commodities, and re- ceive a large share of global wealth. These countries now include Western Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Then there
44 / TWENTY LESSONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY are the “periphery” countries that were often either directly or indirectly col- onies of Western Europe and the United States and specialize in low-value, raw material commodities and receive a small share of global wealth. These countries include many countries in Africa, Central and Southern America, and Southeastern Asia. Then there are “semiperiphery” countries that spe- cialize in the export of both raw materials and manufactured goods and receive a medium sized share of global wealth and aspire to become a core country specializing in high-value services and goods. These countries in- clude Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, South Korea, India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and South Africa. This global division of labor, and its winners and losers, becomes clear when looking at which countries benefit the most from the production of an iPhone. If I asked you who benefited the most from the iPhone, besides Apple, would you say China? Many Americans do, but this is not true. Raw materials for components, a low-value activity, comes from China, Chile, Rwanda, Congo, Turkey, and Peru, among others; while most of the technol- ogy, a higher-value activity, comes from Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and the United States. China’s largest role is in supplying the raw materials, the battery, and the labor that assembles all these components together in factories owned and run by companies like Foxconn, which is actually a Taiwanese company. As a result, the majority of profit goes to the designer of the iPhone, Apple, while the core countries of the United States and Japan come in second, fol- lowed by the semiperipheries of Taiwan, South Korea, and China. The pe- riphery countries that supply only the raw materials for the iPhone do not even show up on this list of the top five. For world systems theorists, this global division of labor between core, semiperiphery, and periphery often go back to the origin of capitalism that has permanently affected who benefits and who bears the burden from global trade. Given that many peripheral and semiperipheral countries were colo- nies or subordinate to the core countries, global trade has long been shaped to exploit the ecological wealth of these countries. This enabled the core coun- tries to become very wealthy and invest in their own industrialization and urbanization while periphery countries became poorer and poorer through this export-led development model. This occurred because their economies were organized around meeting the needs of core countries rather than their own. In short, they were extraction zones (see Lesson 19). This meant that pe- riphery countries were drained of their ecological wealth through the export of raw materials, and profits from such activities were not reinvested in the periphery country but traveled to Europe with the raw materials. Periphery countries were unable to create robust public infrastructures or investment in their people like Europe and the United States were able to, nor were the profits accumulated as nest egg for future national investment. Furthermore, export-led resource extraction meant less and less ecological wealth to tap into to jumpstart domestic-led development in the future and produced a range of ecological problems for the periphery, including deforestation, bio- diversity loss, and air and water pollution.
46 / TWENTY LESSONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY RISK SOCIETY Are you worried about pesticides on your produce, pollutants in your tap water, toxins in the air you breathe? Do you use apps on your iPhone to avoid produce that contains the most pesticide residue, to find filtered water refill stations, to check the air quality outside? If so, you are not alone. Millions of people in the United States do the same to try and insulate themselves from these manufactured risks. But why do we engage in such practices and what are the psychological, social, and political effects of such prac- tices? Ulrich Beck’s (1995) theory of the risk society is helpful here, which claims that high-income Western countries are no longer industrial societies but risk societies; and that this change entails significant transformations in how societies are organized, particularly the anxieties and worries of its res- idents, how they are to be addressed, and by whom. In industrial societies, like the United States in the 1950s, there is an emphasis on class inequities and class solidarities, with the pivot of social relations and social struggle being around the politics of wealth distribution and how social movements within working-class and middle-class communities try to challenge how the state distributes wealth. This is very different compared to risk societies, like the United States today, where there is a focus on individualization and political consumerism, which shifts social struggle to the politics of risk dis- tribution and how individuals need to buy products to protect themselves from toxins. In such a society, according to Beck, we are no longer worried about acquiring “social goods” but avoiding “social bads.” This societal shift from a “logic of goods” to a “logic of bads” manifests in people being less worried about hunger or scarcity, the concerns of industrial society, and more worried about protecting themselves from unhealthy food and its associated problems of diet-related disease, being seen as lazy or gluttonous, or being seen as a failed body. This fear emerges because risk is much more equally distributed across the population in a risk society than goods distribution was in an industrial society. According to Beck, “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic (Beck 1992: 36).” Why is this so? First, the risks that haunt people today are clearly not “natural risks” that are temporary, locally spe- cific, and outside of human control, for example, drought, plagues, or forest fires attributable to supernatural forces (nature, gods, or demons). Instead they are “manufactured risks” produced by human society continuously as a part of everyday life, often at a regional and global scale, and can last thou- sands of years. A chemical spill in one location at one point in time has the potential to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles away and can affect the communities depending on these ecosystems for generations. For instance, the testing of nuclear bombs by the United States in the Marshall Islands archipelago poisoned Marshallese residents hundreds of miles away and produced “jellyfish” babies born without skeletal structures and translucent skin. Another example is how millions of gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, were sprayed by the United States over 4 million acres during the Vietnam War to eradicate tree cover and agricultural crops for the North
Theories in Environmental Sociology / 47 Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. The toxicity of such defoliants has pro- duced hundreds of thousands of birth defects, cancers, rare illnesses, and deaths for the people of Vietnam, issues that are ongoing to this day. A key aspect of risk society is that manufactured risks take on a scale and a threat that far outpaces the ability and willingness of contemporary politi- cal institutions to reduce or eliminate such risks. For instance, governments and regulatory agencies do not debate how to eliminate risk or prevent risk from being produced in the first place (the precautionary principle ) but on how much risk (pollution) is allowed and how to distribute this risk across the population. Given this approach to risk management, what occurs is the slow and steady poisoning of people and the planet, a toxification that occurs alongside the shift from group membership (classes) to processes of individ- ualization. This process of individualization forgoes collective solidarities in favor of prioritizing individual choice and creating your own unique life path unmoored by tradition, culture, class, and family. This is potentially freeing, as your biography is now yours to make and remake as you see fit; but it also involves a lot of risk management, as we now have to make endless decisions about our life. This “reflexive modernity” engulfs our entire existence: who am I, what high school sport defines me, what friends do I want, what part- ner(s) should I choose, what college should I go to, what major should I pick, where should I vacation? We have even named this anxiety: fear of missing out (FOMO). Risk management has even impacted our food practices, with people micromanaging each food purchase, scanning the list of ingredients for additives, chemicals, toxins, and allergens. This constant need to choose everything, and choose well, produces a lot of anxiety and stress for people, and they have turned toward the market to try and protect themselves from these manufactured risks. In such a society, people engage in what Andrew Szasz (2007) calls “inverted quarantine” where people buy products on the market to try and protect themselves from an increasingly toxic environment, such as the organic produce, bottled water, and air purifiers I mentioned earlier. However, none of these products addresses the structural relations creating toxicity in the first place; and, in fact, they can exacerbate pollution and waste through their production, consumption, and postconsumption. Szasz claims that such practices operate as a form of “political anesthesia” that pushes people away from the collective mobilization necessary to take on the actors creating the problems in the first place. Bottled water means not fighting for better funded municipal water systems. Purchasing organic food means not challenging the pesticide usage of industrial agriculture. Air purifiers can reduce attempts to pass stricter air quality regulations on auto- mobiles, factory farms, and fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. These three market-based options all hold out the hope that they can provide a solution to the problem that they cannot. They offer the illusion of risk reduc- tion when in fact they actually magnify risk production. For instance, in 1975, the average US resident consumed a gallon of bottled water per year; now it is over 30 gallons, a thirtyfold increase. A whole infrastructure is needed to extract the water from the ground, process it, and get it into your body.
