Sustainable America: America's Environment, Economy and Society in the 21st Century
Daniel Sitarz ed., foreword by Al Gore
Carbondale, IL: Earthpress, 1998.
312 pp. pb.
review by MC5

Government and corporate officials on the "President's Council on Sustainable Development" put together several reports that found their way into this book edited by an attorney, teacher and Director of the Global Research Institute, Daniel Sitarz. The co- leaders responsible for the effort are Jonathan Lash from the World Resources Institute and David Buzzelli, Vice-President of Dow Chemical.(p. 5)

Vice-President of the United States Al Gore introduces the book and staunch liberal ex-Senator Paul Simon has endorsed the book on the back cover. Officers from Chevron, GM, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, Georgia- Pacific and other corporations contributed and hence, this is the semi-official book of the ruling class on the environment. Its ideas are not necessarily Clinton administration policy, but the Clinton administration sought to put this group of people together and start the process of putting together a program for the environment.

We expected this book to be a consensus position with much watered-down phraseology and no substance. Instead we were shocked to read an ambitious grab-bag of various ideas that could go into an imperialist political program for the environment.

Politics and environmentalism

The study group behind this book decided that it would be best not to "confront" (p. 6) industry with environmental demands and instead to "work with" industry. In any political situation, those supporting education as if in contrast to confrontation are usually the ones saying mealy-mouthed things that add up to nothing.

Since most environmentalists are not worked out in their economic or political thinking, many ideas presented in the book are in contradiction with each other. In a sense, the book is a catalogue of existing private and government efforts on the environment with little disciplined weighing or evaluation of the varied efforts.

Some ideas are clearly socialist ideas, but the word "socialist" is never used. Among other things, the book proposes environmental guidance of production and not just in the consumption stage. Several national goals are proposed, including in relationship to planning of energy production. The use of scientific planning in production for the benefit of the environment of all people is a socialist idea. The very fact that the government sells sulfur emissions rights took an act of scientific planning, not something that spontaneously arose in the free market. The "invisible hand" did not even know what sulfur emissions were not long ago. The sort of half-measures discussed in the book to correct the free market economy are known as "social-democracy." The authors probably do not consider themselves social-democrats, but whether they know it or not, they are.

The Council put forward a number of new policy ideas for the ruling class:

1. An income tax cut to offset new "Green" taxes based on the "polluter pays" principle--e.g. higher volume or weight-based garbage disposal fees, more tolls on highways to penalize driving.

2. Abolition of pollution subsidies such as expansion of highway construction spending: "Below-cost timber sales and timber road building, below-market grazing fees, the treatment of hard-rock mining under the 1872 Mining Law, below-market charges for irrigation water, below-market charges for federal power, below- costs charges for recreational uses, agricultural commodity subsidies, many subsidies for highway construction and water projects, certain energy research and development programs, and federally underwritten flood, crop, and disaster insurance are among the programs that distort the cost of doing resource-related business from the resource-developer or user to the taxpayer."(p. 36)

3. Tighter regulations and standards for green claims in advertising and labeling.(p. 43)

4. A shorter work-week and working from home to save commuting.(p. 44)

5. Placing responsibility for packaging on manufacturers, not consumers.(p. 60) (A clearly socialist idea ruined in implementation under capitalism.)

There are two ways in which we cannot take the book seriously; although overall it is a useful book. One problem is its lack of policy coherence. The other is the impossibility of implementing ideas suggested within capitalism. Many policies will end up creating paper-shuffling bureaucracy without accomplishing anything, because capitalism is in contradiction with the environment.

Our biggest complaint is that yet again we find another advocate of slicing and dicing the environment for sale, in the name of preventing pollution. The argument goes that if the environment had a price it would not be spoiled by capitalists. Hence, to these die-hard defenders of free markets and Anglo-Saxon individualism, the right to pollute should be bought and sold.

While we agree that taxing pollution is better than doing nothing under capitalism and we support it as a reform possible within capitalism, the bottom line is there is no real Green that is not Red. Creating a free market for pollution rights only proves that some people have second-class environmental rights based on their money. The creation of this market for pollution rights which started under the Bush administration is proof that under the free market the environment is either ignored and destroyed or at best, parceled out and destroyed by a minority able to afford it. The market for pollution rights also proves the anti-people nature of the government, which does not rush forward to buy and retire all the pollution rights.

We at MIM do not believe the environment can be sliced and diced as if for packaging on the grocery store shelf. Either the air is clean and safely breathable or it is not. It is not possible to individualize the environment. Centuries of class training of the bourgeois sort will have to be thrown aside, because no one has the so-called right to create a toxic environment for someone else.

When it is possible to farm vegetables, grains and livestock on an individual parcel of land, it might be argued that individualism makes sense despite its many sickening side-effects. Such is the frontier history of Amerika for instance, in which Euro-Amerikans killed indigenous populations and rewarded themselves with land that they worked on individually.

Overall though, the environment is not something that can be treated in an individual way. Since everyone lives on the same planet, Anglo-Saxon individualism simply does not apply to the environment. Pseudo-environmentalism seeks to protect private property, the right of profit above the rights of others to be in a non-toxic environment.

An example of how individualism results in pseudo-environmentalism is the focus on the recycling movement as an individual lifestyle. Few pseudo-environmentalists are willing to admit that their efforts in convincing individuals to recycle usually end up for naught, because people individually recycle and then the city government picks up the newly sorted material to be brought to the garbage dump.

It is easier to blame individuals and their lifestyles when uncomfortable political reality is that there is usually no profit to be made in purchasing, transporting and using recycled materials. The reason there is not enough attention to where allegedly recycled material goes is that reporters and environmentalists are loath to admit that there is concentrated power in this society, not just an agglomeration of individuals. It would be impossible to avoid figuring out who the main producers and government units are in relation to the environment if reporters and environmentalists really did their jobs. Even in this rather thorough grab-bag of a book, there is a mention of the need for purchasing policies by the government ($400 billion, p. 69) and academia($120 billion in purchases a year, p. 210), but no tracing of where most allegedly recycled material ends up.

Some other political objections MIM has include the book's call to cut immigration. MIM supports opening Amerikan borders. Apparently the authors believe that the United $tates is the world's leading environmental problem and they do not believe that will end any time soon, so they call for a cutback in the number of people living the Amerikan lifestyle. To their credit, the authors do not shirk U.$. responsibility for being the number one world polluter and they also recognize that there is "gender and race-based discrimination" including in toxics distribution. (p. 8)

Useful facts

-- "The average annual rate of deforestation worldwide is equivalent to an area the size of the state of Georgia. Worldwide, the ocean's fisheries are in a state of collapse. In the United States, citizens consume 25 percent of the Earth's resources although they constitute only five percent of the planet's population. In the last 20 years, per capita consumption in the United States has increased by 45 percent."(p. 4)

-- "In the 130 years between 1850 and 1980, about 15 percent of the world's forests disappeared. During the next 10 years, another 6 percent--an area larger than California, Texas, New York, and Montana combined --was cut and not replanted."(p. 11) -- "Approximately 20 percent of the world's population in the late 1980s lived in industrialized countries. These countries consumed 85 percent of the aluminum and synthetic chemicals used in the world; 80 percent of paper, iron, and steel; 75 percent of timber and energy; 60 percent of meat, fertilizer, and cement; half the world's fish and grain; and 40 percent of the fresh water. This scale of consumption ranges from three to 19 times the consumption levels of developing countries."(p. 26)

-- "About two billion tons of materials such as pesticides and fuels are dissipated into the environment during use. After consumers use a final product, it joins the 200 million tons of post-consumer waste produced in the United States annually. Americans produce the most municipal waste per capita of any country on earth. The United States is also the leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions (contributing 19 percent of total world emissions in 1991) and is the world's largest producer of toxic wastes."(p. 27)

-- "Between 1960 and 1988, the volume of U.S. municipal solid waste more than doubled, while population multiplied 1.4 times. Today the average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash a day, by far the highest per capita production of municipal waste in the world. Americans could recycle or compost half this volume--yard waste, newspapers, corrugated cardboard, and beverage containers. Americans actually recycle or compost only 13 percent currently."(p. 62)

-- "In the last two centuries, the country has lost 90 percent of its northwestern old-growth forests, 99 percent of its tallgrass prairie, and hundreds of species of native plants and animals."(p. 117)

-- "Economic benefits from wild species make up an estimated 4.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Fisheries contribute about 100 million tons of food worldwide. One-fourth of all prescriptions dispensed in the United States contain active ingredients extracted from plants, and more than 3,000 antibiotics are derived from microorganisms. Further, nature tourism generates an increasing percentage of tourism revenues worldwide. . . . Tropical forests house between 50 and 90 percent of all species on Earth, but because of forest clearing, 5 to 10 percent of the tropical forest species may be faced with extinction within the next 30 years. As with climate change, one nation cannot solve the problem alone, and the potential for economic harm is huge."(p. 264)

Conclusion

The ruling class lives in fear of a communist environmentalist movement. This book is the proof. The Clinton-organized "President's Council on Sustainable Development" is stealing our thunder by talking about the right to clear air, clean water and overall healthy environment.(p. 17) The last page of the book even mentions the right to food, shelter, education and employment.(p. 274)

The last paragraph of the book is a rebuttal of communism: "Ultimately, however, it is individuals who will determine whether the nations of the world will embark on a sustainable path. It is individuals who will decide to whether to act sustainably in their own lives. It is individuals who will influence corporate behavior."(p. 274)

As with most things, the ruling class seeks to blame individual behavior for environmental degradation. By placing the blame at the individual level, the people who make the largest decisions with concentrated economic power get let off the hook. Thanks to pseudo-environmentalists setting up government programs to sell pollution rights, the rich buy and sell the right to kill the rest of us with pollution -- all in the name of Green reform.

MIM supports many of the short-term measures mentioned in this book for reform within capitalism. However, our environmental program goes much further:

-- An end to production for profit to be replaced with fully scientifically planned production that prioritizes humyn needs including the non-negotiable rights to food, shelter, clothing, medicine and a non-toxic environment

-- U.S. reparations to Third World countries making environmentally friendly socialist development more easy

-- Opposition to industrialized country "working-class" economic demands for more consumption under capitalism.

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