Speech by Dr Derek Wall

Small is Beautiful: Green localism.

A few years ago I was eating at a St. Paul, Minnesota, restaurant. After lunch, I picked up a toothpick wrapped in plastic. On the plastic was printed the word Japan. Japan has little wood and no oil; nevertheless, it has become efficient enough in our global economy to bring little pieces of wood and barrels of oil to Japan, to wrap the one in the other, and send the manufactured product to Minnesota. This toothpick may have travelled 50,000 miles. But never fear, we are now retaliating in kind. A Hibbing, Minesota, factory now produces one billion disposable chopsticks a year for sale in Japan. In my mind?s eye, I see two ships passing one another in the northern Pacific. One carries little pieces of Minnesota wood bound for Japan; the other carries little pieces of Japanese wood bound for Minnestoa. Such is the logic of free trade. (Morris 1996: 222)

The economic system proposed by the Green Party of Iran is neither a free market nor command based system since both are based on unlimited economic expansion and consumption. We believe that a new economic system should be created - one that is in harmony with the environment in addition to working for the social well being of people. Since economies grow while ecosystems do not, a growing economy is a threat to the long-term health and well being of a society. In fact, in industrialized countries, large corporations seeking increased revenues are often the main perpetrators of environmental destruction. Although Iranian economic growth is less than growth in industrialized countries, Iran is still faced with difficult problems because of its fundamentalist regime. In fact, in addition to environmental destruction caused by profit seeking corporations, the ineffectiveness and corruption of the reactionary Islamic regime has caused much of the ecological devastation plaguing Iran today. http://www.iran-e-sabz.org/program/program.html

Economics [?] suddenly becomes the most important subject of all. Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off. [Economics] tends to absorb the whole of ethics and take precedence over all other human considerations. Now, quite clearly, this is a pathological development. (Schumacher 1978: 67)

An anti-capitalist placard from Seattle showed a dophin with the slogan, 'I am not a trade barrier'. The WTO has forced countries to accept environmentally damaging products including tuna caught with nets that kill dolphins. Green pressure groups like Greenpeace, green direct action networks and green anarchists oppose unlimited free trade. Green Parties have been very active in opposing gm crops and the worst excesses of the corporations. The British direct action green network Reclaim the Streets helped found Peoples Global Action with the Mexican Zapitastas. The International Forum on Globalisation (IFG), a body established by Edward Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist magazine, helped build up pressure to oppose the WTO before Seattle. Goldsmith, a pioneer of green thought since the late 1960s, has developed a devastating critique of economic growth, free trade and conventional development stratagies. Colin Hines, a former advisor to Greenpeace, has been another important localist. He, in turn, has influenced Caroline Lucas, the charismatic and radical, South East England Green Party member of the European Parliament. Her title Green Alternatives to Globalisation, written with the late Mike Woodin, is both the most sophisticated and left leaning distillation of green localism. U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader has been another important green critic of neo-liberalism. Green Parties from Ireland to South Africa have advocated reduced trade and greater national self-sufficiency. Greens have often been described as a movement of the white middle classes, post-material political luxury of the relatively wealthy. However, many green anti-capitalists are active in peasant and radical farmers movements that claim that neo-liberalism will flood their countries with cheap crops, privitise their land and increase pollution. Jo Bove in France has been a prominent member of a militant anti-capitalist farmers union. Radical farmers in the Indian anti-globalisation movement number millions. At WTO agenda setting talks in Cancun, Mexico in 2003, Kyung-Hae Lee, committed sucide to protest at the damage free trade did to the 120,000 Korean farmers he represented (Guardian, 16 September, 2003). Mr Lee, found that his revenue from beef farming fell by three quarters after Korea imported cheap, agribusiness farmed meat. Globalisation favours huge agribusinesses and threatens every small producer on the planet. The Indian ecofeminist and scientist Vandana Shiva, who has been arrested on more than one WTO action provides a strong link between radical greens and militant peasants. The subsistence perspective she puts forward in books like Staying Alive, argues that the real important economic activity is carried out by peasants, particularly women, whose work is largely unrecognised and unthreat from 'development'. . A minority of environmentalists, as oppose to political greens, are supportive of globalisation with figures like Paul Hawken (et al 1999) suggesting, for example, that Natural Capitalism is a possibility. In Europe, where many Green Parties have had recent experience of participating in government, mild reform rather than ecocentric revolution has been the norm. However many anti-capitalists are greens. Here the economic ideas underpinning a radical green approach from Sismondi and Ruskin through to Schumacher are explored, whilist localist and subsistence perspectives are placed under the microscope.

GREEN MOVEMENTS AND GREEN ECONOMICS

The global environmental pressure groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were born in the late 1960s and the first ecological political parties emerged in the 1970s in Australia, Britain, France and New Zealand (Doherty 2002: 122). Awareness of global environmental problems via television and later the internet has been a trigger for green politics. Increasingly prosperity has been seen as a source of green politics, because it provides individuals with the relative luxury of being able to focus on issues beyond bread and butter (Inglehart 1977). Nonetheless while Green Parties are relatively new, environmental concern is not. Environmental and animal rights pressure groups are some of the oldest in existence. The Vegetarian Society was established in 1824 and the Open Spaces Society can trace its origins back to the 1850s. The US Sierra Club dedicated to conserving wilderness was also created in the 19th century (Wall 1994a). Concern that environmental problems may wreck the economy can be found in ancient Greek society, where Plato drew attention to the effects of soil erosion. The earliest UK anti-pollution laws were put on the statute books in the 13th century and John Evelyn, in the reign of Charles II, wrote a tract against air pollution and a manifesto for tree conservation. Green economics also has deep roots. Greens are critical of the notion of economic growth believing that expansion does not necessarily increase human happiness. Greens see much of conventional economics as a source of alienation. Green economics equally rejects anthroprocentricism, seeing nature and not just the human part as the measure of all things. Greens, in turn, stress cooperation rather than competition (Dobson 1991 and 2000; Doherty 2002). Greens are also localists who believe the decision making should be democratised to the grassroots.

One source of green economics is to be found in the 19th century Romantic critique of industrialization. William Blake famously noted the emergence of ?satanic mills? in England?s green and pleasant land, Wordsworth and Shelley expressed similar sentiments, which were developed by the art critic John Ruskin. Goethe's romanticisim has been influential in Europe. Marx's co-author Engels was fascinated by environmental issues. There is a green strain in socialism, some of Marx?s earliest writings attack pollution from industry. The Paris Manuscripts of 1844 challenge the alienating form that work takes in a capitalist society. Such concerns were incorporated by urban planners such as Geddes and Mumford in the 20th century. Ecosocialism, as discussed in a later chapter, derives from Marx, William Morris and the Frankfurt School amongst other sources. The Marxist mainstream, however, has until recently been hostile to greens.

A holistic philosophy that shows how different parts of society and nature are interrelated, is taken by greens from the science of ecology, which studies relationships, often invisible without careful study, between different organisms. Holism has spiritual roots drawing upon Eastern philosophies and religions particularly Buddhism and Taoism. The novelist Aldous Huxley developed such insights as did F.E. Schumacher, the green economist, who wrote Small is Beautiful. The Beat poets, especially Gary Synder drew upon Zen and feed into the 1960s hippie counter culture, providing a rich soil for the Green Parties of the 1970s. Holism remains very important in contemporary green discourse, yet to argue that Asian spirituality gives rise to ecotopia is slightly misleading. China, India and Japan have devasted their environments just as much as the west. Some Zen monks became war mongers in the Second World War. The simplistic notion of a spiritual revolution will not on its own provide an alternative to capitalism.

There is also a paradoxically conservative strain in some forms of green thought. This is most evident in the work of Edward Goldsmith, who celebrates the stability of tribal societies, the nuclear family and sees functionalism every where. For Goldsmith human society is part of a finally balanced nature. He has even argued that war maintains ecological balance. Ironically the subsistence ecofeminists while critical of male dominance, stress that traditional peasant societies are socially and ecologically sustainable. Like socialism and spirituality, such functionalism is not swallowed whole by modern greens. Indeed the Green Party of England and Wales was created by former members of the Conservative Party including Goldsmith but has since moved to the left (Wall 1994b) By the 1980s ecological political parties had constructed a wider agenda which was well summarised by the four values espoused by the German Greens when they entered parliament in 1983:- ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy and peace (German Green Party 1983). The German, French and Austrian Greens, came out of the social movements against nuclear power and weapons (Poguntke 1993). As Green Parties have grown they have been able to win seats in parliaments and local councils in ever large numbers. One of the reasons for their success, especially in Europe, has been the movement of traditional socialist parties like the German SPD and British Labour Party to the right. The socialist parties have come to adopt variants of a ?Third Way? ideology which has committed them to the market because they perceive globalisation to be an inevitable process demanding ever greater competiveness. The resulting wage cuts, bouts of privitasation and loss of services has meant that some trade union activists have been drawn to the Greens. Clinton?s New Democrat approach led to Ralph Nader running as a high profile Green Presidential candidate. In New Zeland, a Labour Party commitment to neo-liberal economics helped the Greens to grow rapidly. However, where Greens have been most succesful, they have tend to become part of coalitions with the very left parties who have embraced globalisation. In New Zealand the Greens forced a General Election because they refused to condone the Governments support for GM crops coming into the country (Economist 1 August 2002). In contrast in Germany, the Greens have been seen as supportative of some aspects of neo-liberal economics. Green economics, like the other variants of anti-capitalist and indeed capitalist thought, discussed here swims in the sea of history and cannot be seen as a set of pure moral principles or scientific axioms. Social forces have helped shape green ideology and the most radical greens have had to challenge more centre ground members in a series of ideological contests.

AGAINST GROWTH

Perhaps the most subversive and unusual element of green anti-capitalism is opposition to economic growth. In the early 1970s scientists became concerned that ever increasing economic growth would damage the environment. The idea that human societies should produced more goods and services every year is, as we noted in Chapter One, environmentally suspect. Scarce resources such as oil will eventually be exhausted although it is difficult to calculate when. To produce more goods, more energy has to be produced which leads to an increase in greenhouse gases or if the nuclear route is taken to problems of radioactive waste. If we consume more goods this creates jobs and enhances profits but leads to ever larger mountains of rubbish that have to be disposed of by dumping or poisonous incineration. In the search for new resources vital eco systems are disrupted. Greens argue that growth is cancerous (Trainer 1985).

There are many arguments that can be marshalled to suggest that economic exapansion can be ecologically sustainable. Growth can be delinked from energy use and waste. Conservation measures and the application of new technology mean that more goods can be produced per kilowatt. Indeed in recent years Gross Domestic Product, the most common measure of economic output, has been growing more slowly than energy use. As societies become wealthier more services rather than physical goods are consumed, a tendency which also has the potential to reduce pollution. As a result of green and environmental movement pressure, more ecologically sustainable practices are being used to sustain growth. In Germany, in particular, the practice of ecological modernism which uses high technology to try to sustain both the environment and economic expansion has become important (Mol and Spaarrgaren 2000). Solar, wind and other low pollution, low impact renewable energy sources have been advancing. Recycling has become a necessity and there is now a strong zero waste movement. More people in Western Societies eat organic food or are vegetarian, practices that reduce waste because they need less energy input without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Many of the fears that Greens linked to economic growth seem to have been either exaggerated or are non existent. For example, for all their other ill effects supersonic aircraft do not seem to significantly disrupt the ozone layer. Oil did not, as some commentators suggest run out in 1979! The move to a high technology information economy has also been seen as a way of increasing economic value without increasing the output of pollution.

The case for optimism is described, typically, by economists with a diagram the environmental Kuznets curve, which shows that with growth in income environmental degradation eventually slows and is reversed (Woodin and Lucas 2004: 13). Yet as we have noted environmental problems remain severe and remain linked to growth. The burning of fossil fuels seems to be causing a greenhouse effect, which may already to be causing problems in terms of species loss, the migration of diseases and pests to new areas of the world, desertification and extreme weather patterns. The sun may be shinning outside my home as I write with temperatures above those of my childhood in the 1970s. I may be happy to contemplate my vines and consider buying an olive tree, yet I fear damage from the ever stronger storms that hit my home with increasing annual frequency.

The information based economy may seem virtual but as Naomi Klein exhaustively demonstrates branded goods still have to be produced and computers manufactured by suffering workers. Computer manufacture and disposal are sources of pollution and resource use. Some services have little physical impact but the huge global growth in tourism is accelerating air travel which has become the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. Cars are far cleaner but pollution from cars is rising because the number of miles they are used for is rising sharply in many parts of the world. The fundamental problem with globalisation from a green point of view is that it leads to ever greater economic activity. Such activity demands more production, more consumption and ever increasing waste. Edward Goldsmith of the International Forum on Globalization provides an instructive apocryphal story of two friends who both inherit a 10,000 acre tract of forest. Friend one leaves his 10,000 acres in its pristine state, friend two sells the trees to McMillan Bloedel Corporation who cut them all down. He then sells the mineral rights and the topsoil, he fills the resulting dank hole with toxic waste. He then constructs a shopping mall and theme park. Friend one is labelled as a waster, friend two boosts GNP by $1,000,000s runs for office and becomes a senator (Goldsmith and Mander 1996:15).

Woodin and Lucas point out that globalisation by accelerating growth is speeding the greenhouse effect, with parts per million by volume (ppmv) of greenhouse gases, now standing at 370 ppmv, a peak which is 30% higher than the previous high. Consumption of fresh water is doubling every twenty years, 12% of all bird species and a quarter of all mammal species are threatened with extinction (Woodin and Lucas 2004: 33)

ECONOMICS AS ALIENATION

Greens also argue that economic growth creates many ill effect above and beyond ecological damage. As economies expand more and more areas of human life become dominated by the concern for profit. Areas of life that are not directly productive in an economic sense come to be valued less and less. Indeed it is only what can be calculated, bought and sold that truly has worth. The pressure to be competitive individually or collectively driven by globalisation is particularly damaging. Workers are expected to put in ever long hours. Universities must concentrate on promoting skills that lead to further economic growth. Status is measured by wealth that drives even the ?haves? to spend longer working and consuming. Far from maximising utility for individuals, neo--liberalism means that we suffer from higher levels of stress (Toke 2000 ). Economic rationality based on quantitative measure treats anything that cannot easily be measured and sold with contempt. Mulberg notes, ?The very idea of monetary valuation implies tradeability and purchase. If the value of a life is £9000, this carries the clear implication that anyone with £9000 can purchase a life? (Mulberg 1993: 110). Toke has shown how in the UK governments keen to raise economic productivity have forced schools to compete with each other, with demands for growth rather than human need determining the direction that economics takes (2000).

All needs in a capitalist society are transformed into the need for commodities. To be a good parent, one should work long hours to afford more ?things? for the babies. To be fulfilled sexually requires a huge and diverse industry. The body, created by a lifestyle based on unhealthy food and a sedentary car based life style, has become a new focus of capitalist growth with billions spent on new diets (Fromm 1978). Ted Trainer in his book Abandon Affluence! notes, ?Acquiring things is important to many of us today because there is not much else that yields interest and a sense of progress and satisfaction in life? (Trainer cited in Dobson 1991: 85)

Economic growth may not even remove poverty. The richest may see the biggest gains and the poorest may be separated from resources that they previously had access. In the 19th century surveying the chaos created by the Industrial Revolution, Sismondi echoed the green critique of growth and wider economics. In 1819 Sismondi identified England as the home of economics, a nation obsess with competition and territory where wealth paradoxically breed poverty, dissatisfaction and crisis:

England has given birth to the most celebrated Political Economists: the science is cultivated even at this time with increased ardour [?] Universal competition or the effort always to produce more and always cheaper, has long been the system in England, a system which I have attacked as dangerous. This system has used production by manufacture to advance with gigantic steps, but it has from time to time precipated the manufactures into frightful distress [?] In this astonishing country, which seems to be subject to a great experiment for the instruction of the rest of the world, I have seen production increasing, whilst enjoyments were diminishing. The mass of the nation here, no less than philosophers, seems to forget that the increase of wealth is not the end in political economy, but its instrument in procuring the happiness of all. I sought for this happiness in every class and I could nowhere find it. [?] Has not England, by forgetting men for things, sacrificed the end to the means. (Cited in Luxemburg 1971: 175-177)

Economists would argue that England after the disruption of industrialisation benefited from prosperity, yet economists seem to suggest that disruption should constantly occur so as to fuel ever more prosperity. Such a system, as Sismondi observed, turns humanity (and nature) which are ?ends? merely into means for an alien economic system. GNP, competitiveness and production are in the saddle and ride humanity.

Later in the 19th Century the art critic Ruskin, another important source of green thought, noted: [T]he real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction. (Ruskin cited in Boyle 2002: 13).

Like Sismondi and Ruskin, Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, stressed that economics should be a means of making human beings happier and should serve ethical needs. Writing in 1973 he outlined the limits to growth arguments discussed earlier and criticised the dehumanising abstractions of economics. Critical of Adam Smith?s belief in the division of labour, while Schumacher asserted that some tasks should be divided up, the idea that one person should spend their working life pushing a single button or carrying out some other task so specialised as to be mindless, was quite wrong. Once again, economic concepts were raised above human needs:

This standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, a surrender to the forces of evil. (1978: 54)

Many reform minded critics of globalisation such as Soros and Stiglitz and the NGOs fail to challenge economic growth. Socialist anti-capitalists usually welcome economic growth and there is a powerful strain in Marxist thought that holds that capitalism subdues growth, which might be allowed to accelerate in a planned economy. Green anti-capitalism is rather more anti-capitalist than these other strains.

BAD TRADE

Greens have increasingly turned their attention to trade. Economists have argued that trade is benefical because of gains from comparative advantage, economics of scale, technology transfer and competitive pressure. Comparative advantage, a notion developed by Adam Smith and refined by Ricardo, occurs when countries specialize in the goods or services they are best at producing and exchange them for others. Competitive pressure means that by opening a country up to trade, domestic producers lose any monopoly status they had and are forced to become more efficient. economies of scale occur when increased production by a firm leads to lower average costs. A firm with a national market, typically might sell to 30 million consumers, with a continental market of 300 million, with a global market perhaps more than a billion. Increased production allows expensive machinery to be used more efficiently, bulk buying of parts and raw materials can be enhanced and specialised staff recruited. These and a host of other savings lower costs. Trade also should create development via technology transfer from richer skilled nations to the rest of the planet.

Greens are skeptical. Woodin and Lucas note that comparative advantage may lead to the exploitation of producers with less market power. Indeed falling agricultural prices have tended to mean that countries, usually in the south of the globe, become poorer when they specialize and trade. As we have seen competition may lead to a race to the bottom with companies forced to cut wages, working conditions and environmental protection to minimise costs. Extreme competitive pressure makes sense, unlikely comparative advantage, within the framework of conventional economics but is potentially very destructive in social and environmental terms. Korten has noted how competition may ultimately lead to a contradictory state of monopoly as global corporations emerge and eliminated domestic firms (2001: 206-207). They can then raise prices, punish consumers but are less interested in using their margins to benefit workers or the environment.

Technology transfer is yet another argument for trade. Countries will tend to exchange technical expertise when they exchange goods. However, it is interesting to note that new tough WTO rules on patents are aimed at preventing poorer countries from copying products from Europe and North America. Most notoriously patent controls, relaxed only after huge international protest, were used to prevent South Africa developing cheap versions of the anti-AIDS/HIV drugs it needed. Technological transfers can, on the other hand, spread toxic or socially disabling practices from one part of the globe.

As well as economies of scale, diseconomies can also occur. Schumacher felt that production on a huge scale could also lead to a range of problems. Economic assumptions need to be balanced with considerations of human need, indeed Small is Beautiful is subtitled A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. ?I was brought up on the theory of ?economies of scale? ? that with industries and firms, just as with nations, there is an irresistible trend, dictated by modern technology, for units to become ever bigger? (Schumacher 1978: 62). Small scale organisation allows for greater flexibility and human communication, in short decentralised economic activity allows for ?the convenience, humanity, and manageability of smallness? (1978: 63). Schumacher stress the need to be able to hold, ?seemingly opposite necessities of truth?, noting ?we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism [?] For every activity there is a certain appropriate scale? (1978: 64). Trade, when succesful in conventional terms, accelerates economic activity that damages the environment, it tends to create a uniform largely Americanised world culture and through competitive pressure forces countries to lower environmental and social standards. Goldsmith notes with some bitterness:

By now, it should be clear that our environment is becoming ever less capable of sustaining the growing impact of our economic activities. Everywhere our forest are over logged, our agricultural lands over cropped, our grasslands overgrazed, our wetlands over drained, our groundwaters overtapped, our seas over fished, and nearly all our terrestrial and marine environment is over polluted with chemical and radioactive poisons [?] In such conditions, there can only be one way of maintaining the habitability of our planet, and that is to set out to reduce the impact. Unfortunately, the overriding goal of just about every government in the world is to maximise this impact through economic globalization. (Mander and Goldsmith 1996:79)

Dr Derek Wall, July 2004.