"How can we build a sustainable society?" was the title of a panel at the International Green Left Conference in April. The panel addressed the questions of how best to work towards achieving a sustainable society, of long-term goals and strategies.
Presented here are edited excerpts of three of the presentations. Peter Camejo is a board member of the Environmental Federation of America. Ted Trainer is an environmental author and academic. Graham Matthews is a member of the DSP National Executive.
Peter Camejo
The term sustainable development has become very popular. When it was originally used, I think it had a very important purpose in getting people to realise that any sort of economics had to be tied into the question of sustainability. Now it is being debated as to whether you could even use this term: does it have real meaning, because of the fact that in the world today the number of humans is really beyond the capacity of the world.
There's one way to take care of that; we can lower the population in the world. I think we have to consciously begin to advocate that. Societies have to be in favour of not just lowering the growth of population but reversing the growth of population, so that our species can live in harmony with the ecology.
How to do that is a very difficult and complex question, and we have to be very careful of simplistic answers. We definitely do not want governmental repression as the way it's to be done; it has to be done on the level of education. The main thing is to get across the nature of this crisis.
The work that Ted Trainer has been doing on this is very very valuable, putting aside any judgment on any specific proposals that Ted or anybody else may be making. That information is very important. I don't see much hope right now in the world because the governments, the political power, the people who really control the economy, are not only blind to the issue but are driven by the logic of the profit system to go against this.
We shouldn't exaggerate it: obviously there are discussions and things are being done and there are proposals, especially where you can make a profit by being somewhat pro-environmental. One book I recommend everybody to read is [US Vice President] Al Gore's book, especially the first 150 pages, because the first 150 pages is very well-written and very easy to understand description.
Gore's whole thesis was: we were all anti-communist and because we were anti-communist we mobilised the whole world around this issue; we won and now the next one is the environment. Obviously, in this room we would have quite some differences over that way of presenting it, but the concept that the world should mobilise, that there should be an enormous plan, enormous effort, like a massive world Marshall Plan — that's a good idea.
What would the plan do? What it has to do is so dramatic that it cannot be done unless you change the framework of the economy. That's why I think the socialist movement — I'm talking about the original movement and the movement that is today like the Workers' Party of Brazil, like the FMLN in El Salvador — and the green current have to put their heads together and start working on practical plans: not just the ultimate picture, but the next steps.
Part of the biggest effort to get sustainable development right now is education. We're still at the level of getting people to begin to understand it. I think we've got to fight for that in secondary education: that the environment be a required course for four years.
The traditional left approach has been: there's poverty — we've got to solve it; what we have to do is change the government, change the values and begin creating more homes and more schools and so forth. Now it's beginning to understand this can not be done unless it fits in with the environment and the ecology. This greening of the left and lefting of the greens is going to be a long process, and there's going to be a lot of conflict in it, and all of that's very positive.
The debate has to keep going for a long time but I do not see us solving the environmental problem without solving the social, political and economic problem. We should not act in a manner as though nothing can be done until there is some solution. On the contrary, a lot of things can be done and everything that is done is good.
It is very good that there are divisions in the people who run society on this issue, because their division makes it very difficult for them to simply exclude or repress the green movement.
I've had discussions with presidents of major corporations, and I can tell you that they don't have the faintest idea what's happening in the world. There's no solution going to come from them. Even if they come to agree, the momentum in the culture of the corporate world makes it impossible for them to begin to make this transition, because there has to be sacrifice to make it.
You cannot change the world to a way in which humanity can live in concert with the environment, without taking away a lot of privileges that certain people have and changing the whole way decisions are made on the use of capital. That's why, to me, the green mission and the socialist mission are now intertwined. The socialist mission includes creating social justice, environmental justice, making it possible for all humans to participate and live and have democracy; and the green mission to save the earth and save the ecology, in the end moves in that direction.
I sit on the board of the Environmental Federation of America, which is the coalition of all the major environmental groups in the United States. I have recently been elected unanimously to head the diversity commission, because the environmental movement in the United States is almost all white. People of colour all over the United States are working on the environment, and I'm working right now to unify all those groups into a new organisation. We're going to call it something like United Environmental Justice Organisation and participate with the other environmental groups.
There's a continuous process, and I see this as the battle for sustainable economy: taking the wealth and distributing it in a more just way that also is functional with the ecology.
Ted Trainer
I don't think we can talk about the transition to a sustainable society until we're very clear about what a sustainable society is. My own position is a limits to growth one; it says that the present society is totally unsustainable essentially for reasons to do with overproduction and over-consumption.
We have a per capita resource use rate and an environmental impact rate that is far beyond any levels that all peoples in the world could ever share. It's just impossible to imagine, I think, how you find the energy, the resources and especially the biological resources to provide this way of life to all the people we have now, let alone the twice as many people we're expected to have within the next 70 years or so.
Our supreme goal in this society is growth; it's raising the levels of production and consumption per capita. If you very briefly look at some of the figures to do with all that, you see that the whole game is nonsensical. That's the most important theme to focus on if you're interested in talking about what our goals should be: what sort of society do we want? I think people from the left in general tend not to be as clear as they should be about the limits to growth argument and about the form that a sustainable society has to take if that argument is at all valid.
We now have an extensive literature pointing to the implications of [the limits] position. Its chief consequences, I think, are that a good society, a sustainable society, would have to be one in which our per capita rate of resource use was a small fraction of what it is now. That includes a notion of living more simply and not pursuing affluence and not pursuing ever rising material living standards.
The second characteristic is to do with self-sufficiency. The key is the notion of building highly self-sufficient small-scale economies and settlements. This is not an option that I'm recommending because I think it's nice; it's an option that I think we have no choice but to go for, to cut the transporting of goods and trade and things like that so that small settlements are producing most of the things they need locally.
Another major implication of course is that we cannot have a growth economy. We have to have, as Herman Daly says, a steady state economy, and one which operates at a much lower level of GNP per capita than we have now; I'm thinking of something like a tenth of the present level.
All of that is to say that we have to be clear about our goals first, and given my confidence about that, let me say a little bit about the process of transition. It's very much a problem of education, spreading ideas, getting behind whatever movements and initiatives will increase the understanding of those goals and the understanding of the nature of a sustainable society.
The second major theme is the notion of helping to save country towns. Eventually we have to build highly self-sufficient villages within cities too, and thought is going into that. But that is a much more difficult option. What is more do-able in the short run is trying to help country towns save themselves from the death that is their fate at present.
It must be made clear, though, that this is not a way to achieve conventional prosperity and affluent living standards. It must be clearly conceived as an alternative path to an alternative goal in which you will never be rich, your town will never have a booming export industry and you will never have lots of cars and video cassette recorders. What you can have is security and a high quality of life. You must also be very very concerned to support the town; we must be willing to support local firms and turn up to working bees and rosters and things like that.
That is a very quick and inadequate sketch of the sort of path that I am keen about. It's pretty different from the mainstream Marxist path. It is indeed an anarchist path which you can put into a Marxist framework, because it's obviously about getting rid of capitalism, but it's not a strategy which is about confronting capital head on nor indeed working to take state power. We have very great suspicion about power and about what you can achieve by grabbing it and thinking that you can then push everyone in the right direction.
To me this is a revolution for sure, but it's a very slow and possibly a very peaceful one. If we are very lucky, I am thinking about the possibility that within 20 years we have quietly built these alternative systems to the level where enough people see the sense of them and are starting to take control of their local economies and neighbourhoods so that we have got people who will not buy the glittering junk and don't go for sports cars and see the sense of living more simply and running our own neighbourhood affairs so that we perhaps gradually replace the old system from within by building more self-sufficient communities despite the fact that the mainstream is chugging down the wrong path.
I am hoping that those are the sorts of goals that inspire you and that will help you to be clear about the sorts of goals that we are going to work for in our day-to-day activities. Many of us here, perhaps most of us, are involved in organisations which are not predominantly on this track. One would hope that one of the things that you try to scrape up some energy to do is to try to convert, divert some of the energy in the organisation that you are in to taking these sorts of goals seriously.
Graham Matthews
What do we mean when we talk about an environmentally sustainable society? Fundamentally, I think we mean an environmentally just society. A system of production and distribution where the environment is not systematically destroyed, where there is an equitable division of resources on an international and a national basis.
What we have now is a system in which environment and the majority of the world's inhabitants are considered simply to be part of the profit and loss equation of those who own and control production.
We're seeing the beginning of an environmental breakdown, and the development of a social crisis involving massive and growing social inequality.
The environmental crisis is global phenomenon. Greenhouse, ozone depletion, rainforest destruction are international problems. They can be tackled only with international solutions.
Experience of the social and environmental crisis is not uniform, however. The rich, no matter where they are, manage to mitigate the full effects of the crisis, using their wealth. It is the poor, who live in the most deprived conditions, who are also affected most sharply by environmental problems.
What has caused the environmental crisis?
Is it over-population? This was a popular explanation in the 1960s. While, as Peter Camejo points out, the level of population places enormous strain on the world's resources, drawing the conclusion that population growth itself is to blame for the environmental crisis is to blame the victim, offering no positive social solutions.
Is it affluence? Ted Trainer's argument is that the First World consumes too much in an unsustainable way, that this is placing too much pressure on the world's environment. The solution, according to this argument, is to advocate a conserver society — a society which is based on small communities which are largely self-sufficient and environmentally benevolent.
In his 1971 book The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner surveyed the development of North American industry from the close of World War II to 1970. His fundamental findings were that the growth of affluence of North American society could not explain the enormous growth in pollution and subsequent environmental degradation.
Commoner determined that over the period of study, US GNP had grown by 126%, and US population by 43%. Per capita consumption of the individual North American had grown only by 6%. Yet over the same period, the total volume of pollution produced by North American capital had grown by 1000%, or six times for every inhabitant.
What is the cause? If it is not consumption that is leading to environmental disaster, it is certainly production. One thing most of us would agree on, is that many of the things which modern industrial society produces are having an enormously detrimental impact on the environment.
Specifically, Commoner argues that the problem is one of industry systematically substituting more polluting technologies for more environmentally benign ones. He cites a range of examples to illustrate this.
The result of this fundamental switch in production was not an enormous growth in affluence. It did not raise the standard of living at all. What it did do was increase the rate of profit, and dramatically.
The motive force of capitalism is not growth. The motive force of the economic system that wantonly generates pollution is the search for profit.
Profit does not necessarily equal growth. In many cases, profit is actually to be gained from simply doing the same thing more profitably, with a greater productivity of labour.
For modern industry, this has meant the systematic substitution of polluting technologies for environmentally better ones. This substitution has not led to a dramatic improvement in living standards, nor to remarkable growth. What it has led to is soaring profits.
The culprit is not population, affluence or growth, but the profit motive. It is this that has led to the substitutions and growth of less environmentally benign industries that have been destroying the environment of the north.
The same struggle to maximise profit has led to the destruction of the south's environment also. Crippled by technological dependence, debt and unequal exchange, the south isn't given much option. Domination of the world market by a decreasing number of transnational corporations based in the north has ensured the systematic environmental pillage of the south.
It's not primarily population pressures, and certainly not the affluence of the south that causes the destruction of rainforest, soil degradation and starvation. It's the fact that the south is chained to the millstone of northern capital and its demand for profit.
The problem is the misplaced priorities of those who control production. The only complete solution must be to completely overturn this system of control by the minority and establish an economic system controlled directly and democratically by the majority.
In this sense, Ted Trainer is right when he says there are no part solutions. A sustainable, environmentally just society can't be won by partial reforms. This is not to say that we shouldn't struggle for reforms, however. Building movements for immediate change is a fundamental starting point.
A strategy for complete social change that takes the power away from the owners and gives it to the community is the only solution. This must involve a radical political dimension.
As a broad movement for environmental justice, greens and socialists together can make ground only by maintaining political independence — independence from the state and from the two mainstream political parties, but not from each other. In fact, the need to combine the efforts of the environmental and social justice movements has never been more marked than now. If we are to achieve our goal, a unity based on understanding has to be forged.