Red and green
By Francesca Davis
The warning signals feature on the news each night: fires in Indonesia, chunks of the Antarctic ice sheet breaking off, global soil erosion of 74 billion tonnes per year, the El Niño event and climate change, deforestation. The words are so familiar they no longer seem urgent. Yet the cumulative effects of the environmental crisis threaten our very existence. Some 60,000 people in the United States die each year from air pollution alone; 41 million live within 10 kilometres of a toxic waste dump.
Awareness of the crisis has not dissipated. Activists continue to campaign around Jabiluka, toxic waste dumps, Hinchinbrook and for public transport and alternative energies. But over the past few years, the question of how to win the war against environmental destruction, not just how to win this or that battle, has taken a back seat.
Solutions to environmental destruction exist. The technology exists to stop much of the contamination of our air, water and soil by dirty industries. Alternative energies could replace fossil fuels. Planned development of the Third World would begin to turn around population pressures and environmental degradation.
But solutions are not being implemented. In fact, they are being actively campaigned against. A coalition of oil companies spent $13 million advertising against necessary changes before the climate summit in Kyoto last December. There is the crux of the problem. Solutions are not implemented because they are not in the interest of those who control the economy.
Around one-sixth of all economic assets in the world are owned by only 100 multinational companies. Economic decisions about what to produce and how are made by a tiny minority, based on what is most profitable. Rarely does what is profitable coincide with what is good for the environment.
Competition is the driving force of the market. If you don't keep cutting costs, you don't survive, and you certainly don't make profits. Cleaner technology is not installed by industries because it is cheaper for them to pay the pollution fines — even in the rare cases where regulations are enforced. The fossil fuel industries find it profitable to spend money to sabotage the Kyoto Climate Protocol. Multinationals take advantage of poverty to buy logging and mining rights in the Amazon cheaply or to dump toxic waste in Africa.
The majority of the world's people may think ecological sustainability is more important than profits. But most of us don't own industries, so we're not in the position to make that decision.
Those who do wield enormous social and political power. Governments act in their interests: 80% of Australians oppose uranium mining in national parks, yet the Coalition government is backing ERA in its Jabiluka project. In 1994 the ALP government extended woodchipping licences against the will of 80% of the population it was supposed to represent. While governments internationally grant huge subsidies to the car industry, public transport is cut back.
Integral to solving the environment crisis is breaking the power of the multinationals and the big corporations. Decision making must be moved into the hands of the majority.
The economy must come under social control, because we will need an overall economic plan to ensure that the Third World gets the resources it needs, that production is carried out cleanly and that waste is eliminated. For example, society needs to control its wealth in order to subsidise branches of industry that would operate at a loss while converting to cleaner forms of production. If we want to create an ecologically sustainable society, we will need to invest according to social need, not private profit. So the key elements of the economy must be publicly owned.
But public ownership of the economy is meaningless without democratic, accountable government: the host of environmental disasters in the Soviet Union are testament to that. Small constituencies that can discuss issues, representatives recallable at any time, policy makers who are elected and politicians' salaries in line with the average worker's wage would be a good start. If Warwick Parer knew he could be recalled at any time, would he be so confident in going against the wishes of 80% of the population?
The fight for ecological sustainability is also the fight for democratic control over economic life. Neither is compatible with capitalism. In every environmental struggle — to stop greenhouse gas pollution, to protect our forests, to stop Jabiluka and the Hinchinbrook resort — we come up against the profit system, against the owners of the economy and the governments that serve their interests.
Accountable government, participatory democracy and social control over resources and production are goals of socialism. Environmentalists have to be as radical as reality requires us to be. In today's world that means acting on the understanding that green is red and red is green.