Introduction: Capitalism and the Environment (original) (raw)

2012, Environment and Society: Advances in Research

Capitalism is the dominant global form of political economy. From business-as-usual resource extraction in the Global South to the full-scale takeover of the United Nations 2012 conference on Sustainable Development in Rio, Brazil by corporations advocating the so-called green economy, capitalism is also one of the two dominant modes of thinking about, experiencing, and apprehending the natural world. Th e other dominant mode is environmentalism. Th ere are many varieties of environmentalism, but the dominant mode we refer to is "mainstream environmentalism. " It is represented by powerful nongovernmental organizations and is characterized by its closeness to power, and its comfort with that position. Th is form of environmentalism is a well-meaning, bolstered by science, view of the world that sees the past as a glorious unbroken landscape of biological diversity. It continuously works to separate people and nature, at the same time as its rhetoric and intent is to unite them. It achieves that separation physically, through protected areas; conceptually, by seeking to value nature and by converting it to decidedly concepts such as money; and ideologically, through massive media campaigns that focus on blaming individuals for global environmental destruction. Contemporary capitalism and contemporary environmentalism came of age at the same time. Th e extensive global decolonization movements in the 1960s and early 1970s altered the ease by which capitalists and corporations could access new sites for natural resources, land, and labor; the three key ingredients for keeping capitalism growing. Th is, coupled with the oil crisis, and the realization that access to cheap and easy oil-the commodity that drives capitalist expansion-could no longer be taken for granted, ushered in the age of fl exible, highly mobile capital that we have today. Th e next decade gave rise to corporations that were lean and seeking deregulated environments from which to draw resources. If they could not have open and free access to natural resources, land, and labor through collusion with colonial oppressors, they would seek to infl uence new, and old, nation-states, to deregulate access to everything. Th e global environmental movement, while having roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century preservationist writings of Henry David Th oreau and John Muir and conservationist writings of Giff ord Pinchot, also came to maturity in the 1960s and early 1970s. Silent Spring was published in 1962, Th e Limits to Growth was published in 1972, and that same year the crew of the Apollo 17 spaceship took the fi rst clear picture of an illuminated earth from space. Also in 1972, the United Nations held its fi rst conference on the environment, bringing together governments from both the so-called "developed" world and the newly decolonized states. Th ese events ushered in the decade when the United States and other global powers passed environmental legislation at an unprecedented scale (e.g., the clean water act, the endangered species act, and the clean air act in the United States).