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Articles : CorporationsDown With the Sickness
Like a liver badly transplanted, the planet is rapidly rejecting the human species. While the global economy seems to be geared towards infinite growth, spewing toxins into the environment with gay abandon and finding ever more harmful means of despoiling ecosystems, it is becoming more and more clear that we, as a complex society, are reaching a point of decision, and not any old decision: stop now, or collapse. Mend your ways, or descend into a somewhat more primal state of affairs. The smart money, is on the latter.
The recognition that we have reached such a juncture has been dawning on us for a long, long time. In a purely aesthetic sense – that capitalism has intolerable effects on the appearance and vitality of living systems, poets, painters, philosophers and assorted dreamers have long asserted the position that our trajectory has been locked into catastrophe. Satanic mills, glimpsed by Blake as a harbinger of the apocalypse, progressed via Walden Pond into the Planet of the Apes and beyond. Yet politicians and the general media have never really assimilated the these insights. At the cusp of total ecological collapse, we still stand in need of a corrective dose of “radical” economics if we are to turn our ship around. As I said, the smart money’s on the iceberg right now.
Stan Cox basically agrees, but his Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine will be useful reading for anyone who seeks to grab the ship’s wheel and to persuade others to join them. His book is a short, readable activists crib which ranges fluently across the environmental costs of bloated corporate health-care (and the human costs of overprescription and phoney medicalization), to the problem of industrial agriculture and “better living through chemistry.”
On health-care, Cox is unequivocal. Focusing on the U.S., he argues that the health-care “industry” is hopelessly bloated, noting that, since the 1960s, the average consumption of health-care products per person has tripled. In a neat turn of phrase, he writes that “for decades, business has been coming up with “solutions” to the problems that result from America’s overconsumption of food and underexertion of bodies.”
To beef up profits, companies have been hyping minor or non-existent maladies such as “shaking leg syndrome” to extract ever more profit from the American consumer. Yet, unsatisfied with gouging American workers, the same companies have also taken to low-cost production and testing of generic drugs in countries like India, with catastrophic environmental and human results. One of Cox’s best sections deals with the region around Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, which will be all but unknown to most readers. Cox finds devastating water pollution from medical factories and massive damage to local agriculture, another hidden holocaust in the annals of neo-liberal globalization.
Yet health-care is not seamlessly integrated into Cox’s wider narrative – that of the capitalist challenge to the planet’s ecology and human society. It remains hard to see how drug production, and the waste resulting from it, could ever have an impact as destructive as nitrate pollution or greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Ditto for the effects of the health industry upon American bodies. If Americans wish to waste vast amounts of money on useless drugs and procedures, it is unlikely that this will be a prime cause of eco-collapse. The sedentary and lazy lifestyles of Americans, detached from the land and dependent on industrially farmed produce, may be more significant, but the hyping of ADHD is not related to the looming collapse of capitalist civilization. Not in my book, anyhow, but the same does not hold for agriculture.
Agriculture receives a detailed treatment in later chapters, and as plant genetics is Cox’s specialist area, his treatment is strong and chilling. Corporate agriculture, he finds, has massacred rural communities, which now number 450 out of the U.S.’ 500 poorest. Converted by the market into factories for processed foods, these rural areas are ironically now often “food deserts” in which fresh produce is harder to find than in urban areas.
Industrial agriculture is hopelessly inefficient – dependent upon continuing injections of natural gas to produce fertilizer, oil for trucks to transport its produce to far away markets while being massively wasteful of the manure that it generates. He calls, not originally, but sensibly, for a more modest, dispersed agriculture in which the 900 million tonnes of manure produced by American farms every year is recycled into the soil. This isn’t framed as a utopian dream, but as an essential survival strategy, but Cox argues that the benefits would be very real. Revisiting Patancheru, he cites examples of community driven agriculture which “have beaten back the individual despair that had developed under the brutal logic of the national and international economy.” Yet the case is identical for many American farming families.
Cox makes it clear that the hierarchical and massively unfair economic system which underlies industrial agriculture must be dismantled if a fairer, ecologically sensible world is to be created. He has short shrift for “sustainable development” though – labeling it “code for perpetual growth,” which is dead on. What is required, for Cox is a radical downshifting of elite consumption in the developed world and something akin to a “back to the land” movement to localize now dispersed economies and to distribute a safe level of economic surplus to now deprived communities. This is basically eco-socialism, and Cox alludes to eco-socialist thinkers like Joel Kovel and, refreshingly, a side of Karl Marx that few will be familiar with (an aficionado of organic manures and localized agriculture).
Echoing comedian Rob Newman, who penned an acerbic piece in the Guardian in 2006 along a similar theme, Cox concludes by arguing that “before [we] can start designing the kinds of local, regional, and world economies that are needed, we have to acknowledge and act on the fact that in the long run…we cannot have both capitalism and a livable planet.” And we can’t have reductions in “emissions intensity” or put our faith in miraculous capitalist efficiency either.
As Cox notes, “using efficiency to make growth less destructive is sort of like playing “whack-a-mole” at the county fair. Knock capital out of circulation here, and it will pop up over there.” Controlling the beast of capital is Cox’s theme, and Sick Planet is an effective call to arms for activists to do just that. Either we do it democratically and rationally, or circumstances will do it for us, bloodily and chaotically:
Provided our species survives, there lies somewhere in its future another stone age, and the faster our economic growth, the steeper the decline will be. The next Stone Age will be more resource poor and probably more toxic than the last, and there will be no shot at a comeback.
Citizens of the United States in particular, should read Sick Planet and then act with conviction and haste if such a situation is to be avoided, but don’t bet on it.
Stan Cox paints a picture of the corporate-dominated world as akin to pre-apocalypse Mad Max, yet another movie parallel springs to mind, while we still have a chance to avert disaster. Noting that the average American consumes as much energy as a 30,000 kg primate, Cox summons up the image – which many people will sympathize with worldwide – of a nation of King Kongs, clinging to their Empire State Building and hopelessly swatting the specters of imperial collapse and ecological crisis.
Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.
great, thanks for this.
awesome article, sam.
..and not any old decision: stop now, or collapse.
i’d say we need to do more than stop – go in reverse. carbon neutral isn’t going to cut it… we need a carbon negative world… like soon. 383 ppm CO2 back to 320ppm or we’re pretty hosed. probably should do somethin’ bout all that land we turned into concrete and them oceans we polluted i reckon.
dude, why does everyone always pick on me? i was jus’ tryin to get next to da hot bitch..
fuck
sweet article, szam
does decentralization of the economic structure (especially agriculture) exist inedependently of or in corollary to the political control necessary to defuse the capitalist mentality?
extremely well written. concise, informative, understandable, accessible. great review. will look into this, if its written anything like this article.
Real good review definitely considering picking that up, Im not an environmentalist by any stretch but its starting to get to the point that ecological disaster is looking more and more like its gonna be the case.
This is basically eco-socialism, and Cox alludes to eco-socialist thinkers like Joel Kovel and, refreshingly, a side of Karl Marx that few will be familiar with (an aficionado of organic manures and localized agriculture).
Kind of like China fifty years ago, an organic agrarian society dependent upon oxen and bicycles.
The bottom line is that almost nobody is interested in life as a peasant or a career of participation in collective farming, not even the rural Chinese that are still living this lifestyle.
Anybody here interested in giving up his computer and comfortable lifestyle “scrounging off the empire” to till the earth behind an oxen or a draft-horse?
Forever?
I come from a family that survived a sustainable, though extremely limited lifestyle off 80 acres of land through the Great Depression.
They later embraced the rebound and growth of industrial society during the economic recovery of WWII and then moved to “town” during the post-war boom of the 1950’s and never looked back or even so much as considered moving back to “the farm” though the property remains in the family.
Fact is even with the purchase of additional adjacent property, the land wouldn’t yield enough to feed, clothe and shelter the family that has sprung from that core group.
This is nearly a universal reality around the globe.
This planet can’t support 7 billion hunter-gatherers any more than it can provide the raw materials and absorb the environmental impact of 7 billion fully vested participants in “developed” economies.
Fact is we like working at Star Bucks as opposed to weeding by hand.
We’ve got a handle on how to control our reproductive capacity without depriving ourselves of sexuality.
The only realistic way out of this mess is to limit and/or drastically downsize our numbers to meet the carrying capacity of the planet voluntarily, or prepare for the next great war, the likes of which the world has never seen. (which is being done)
The Chinese and the Indians are industrializing their societies with leaps and bounds and they aren’t voluntarily going to turn back.
The rest of the “developed” world is going to have to deal with accepting the constraints this growth will place upon their societies in terms of higher prices for energy and raw materials by downsizing their own economies or limit the growth of the developing world by force.
The reality is that both these strategies are in place and being pursued with increasing intensity.
The industrial development genie is out of the bottle.
Sometimes no Peace
Fact is even with the purchase of additional adjacent property, the land wouldn’t yield enough to feed, clothe and shelter the family that has sprung from that core group.
Depends on the soil, the skill of the farmers, what they are willing to eat and the strength of local markets to supplement their diets with what they cannot grow themselves. Small scale agriculture is more productive per acre than industrial agriculture, but more labour intensive. To achieve that productivity you have to cultivate a high diversity of crops/husband animals, so it isn’t suited to growing cash crops for marketing by big box supermarkets.
Something huge would have to change to make such farming worthwhile, although farmers markets are a growing means of making the labour pay.
I don’t agree that no-one wants to head back to the land at all. Many people would leap at the chance (look at all of the farmers who were kicked off their land by rock bottom prices, predatory supermarkets etc…) and there are plenty of young people around who would take the chance of gaining the skills needed to make small farms work.
In places like India small farmers aren’t leaving for the bright lights of Mumbai, they are leaving to escape grinding rural poverty brought on by the global market. Many have been choosing suicide over urban exile. Given a choice I would wager that a large proportion of barrio dwellers would try a rural life if they had secure tenure, training and marketing assistance.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said in the previous post.
You could certainly grow enough potatoes, fruits and vegetables to provide a small group with sufficient calories to survive on the property I’ve described and probably support a cow or two as well. Like I said, a family of 5 didn’t have any problem.
Providing for 50 (there’s more) would require major changes, but might be theoretically feasible.
The problem would be the amount of labor required and the return on that labor as well as the energy required for space heating to survive the winters and providing basic sanitation. They burned wood from the property in the 30’s.
The greatest hurdle would be getting those tied to this land to willingly accept this subsistence lifestyle over the ones they currently enjoy.
The majority of them would rather play a few rounds of Survivor and shed some “unnecessary family” than try to live like the Waltons in relative rural poverty.
Therein lies the universal rub. We had an agrarian society with sustainable living at one time and abandoned it for the material benefits of industrial development and have become accustomed to the lifestyles we live today.
Few will voluntarily give that up to live communally off the land, even with their own relatives, let alone their neighbors.
This is, by design, where the development of the circa 1980’s concept of “social darwinism” has taken us.
The wealthy certainly aren’t going to voluntarily abandon industrialized society to till the earth and would fight the nationalization of “their” assets tooth and nail. (OK, they’d pay somebody else to fight for “their” assets tooth and nail.}
The middle class would rather turn a blind eye to the murder of the citizens of developing nations to obtain needed resources, as they watch their own neighbors being squeezed from the middle class into poverty, than band together to legislate just political and economic solutions.
Democracy is a great form of government in a growing economic environment, but is fundamentally worthless in dealing with the realities of limited growth, recession and depression, when the world view of the majority very quickly becomes “it’s every man for himself.”
Sometimes no Piece
“using efficiency to make growth less destructive is sort of like playing “whack-a-mole” at the county fair. Knock capital out of circulation here, and it will pop up over there.”
~ Stan Cox
As a realist, I’ve little choice but to disagree entirely.
Using efficiency to make economic growth less destructive is the only peaceful way off this path towards further environmental degradation and should be embraced, not rejected out of hand.
The alternative is more “social darwinism” the survival of the wealthiest.
Peace,
“You could certainly grow enough potatoes, fruits and vegetables to provide a small group with sufficient calories to survive on the property I’ve described and probably support a cow or two as well. Like I said, a family of 5 didn’t have any problem. “
Prior to the 1840ies in Ireland a family this size would have been surviving on 1/2 an acre
Well, it isn’t the ONLY peaceful way. We could voluntarily have less children. If every woman only has two kids over the next 45 years, the world population will drop – no war, famine or plague required. My wife’s mom had six kids – she was performing her Irish Catholic duty. Would she have acted differently if she was informed that for every kid beyond two, she was increasing the odds of a future hell for all of them?
I read of an old Chinese man who mocked the “kids” of the new generation that are criticizing the one-child policy. “In the old days, you would have 5 kids and 4 of them would die. Now, you have one child and it lives.”
That comment speaks volumes. Our mammalian instincts were developed in harsher times. We are programmed for producing batches of kids, because in the old days there were two likely possibilities – either the extra kids would die, or they would migrate to nearby vacant lands.
What a difference in lifespan a moderate increase in technology makes. And the nearest vacant land hasn’t been terraformed yet.
My wife and I have vowed to do our part and not have kids. Easy for me – my body is programmed for “sex”, not “birth”. But for my wife… the mid-thirties hormones are playing her. I’ve watched her go from a confident, empowered “modern woman” to someone who has all the aplomb of a 13 year old boy trying to hide his erection while standing at the front of the class. And I can’t but help to notice the fairly clear links between less children and increased risk of breast cancer – it’s as if the tissue itself goes apeshit when it isn’t allowed to carry out its program.
Prior to the 1840ies in Ireland a family this size would have been surviving on 1/2 an acre
You might grow enough potatoes for sufficient food calories on half an acre for a family of five, but it certainly wouldn’t provide the pasture necessary for a cow or two or support any other livestock.
Never mind having enough land for a woodlot to provide the energy for cooking, hot water and space heating.
aganunitsi,
Though I advocate a no child decade, with which humanity drastically cuts back its ecological footprint and totally reforms its attitudes towards reproduction and childrearing, being a husband and father to three sons, it is hard to imagine a women remaining childless throughout her lifespan, though some obviously manage to do it and thrive.
Being a parent is a huge responsibility and burden regarding a situation over which you have very limited control.
It takes a village to raise a child, or selfishly throw them to the wolves.
Sometimes no Peace
Great job, Sam.
“You might grow enough potatoes for sufficient food calories on half an acre for a family of five, but it certainly wouldn’t provide the pasture necessary for a cow or two or support any other livestock.” -True, but fuel was usually provided by turf from the local bog, and they usually kept a pig to pay the rent with as well.
The planet isn’t anywhere near as sick as our global society, which is suffering from a distinct lack of understanding of the priorities of the actual common threats we face.
Peace,
I live in a Michoacan in Northern Cal. The babies are having babies here and they do not get charged for the medical bills. Increase population, increase the consumption of resources. Increase the consumption, increase the pollution, crime, war, etc,.. To the pendejo’s who want to cry racism: There is only one Race! The Human Race and we are all sinking in this boat together.