Chapter 3 - Causes of Environmental Destruction

Introduction

● The steps taken at the Earth Summit and the International Conference on Population
and Development were real steps forward in bringing the world's attention to how
environmental problems affect each other.
● But they didn't do much to find out what was really causing the problems, and they didn't
do much to stop the environmental problems they were supposed to stop.
● This chapter looks at the causes of global environmental threats and how those threats
are defined for the purposes of making policy. A qualitative model of environmental
driving forces helps it do this.
● The goal of the model is to find the human values, consumer behaviours, growth factors,
and institutional structures that damage the environment and to show how they work
together to shape environmental policy issues.
● The goal is to look into different points of view and theories of cause and effect that have
an impact on how environmental policy is made and changed.
● Stepping back from the chaos of international negotiations described in the last chapter,
this chapter draws attention to the hidden but powerful assumptions and predispositions
that shape international agreements like those reached in Rio and Cairo.
● By making an analytical framework for tracing the human causes of environmental
destruction, we can learn more about how attitudes and beliefs about nature, the future,
consumption, reproduction, technology, and wealth have guided and shaped global
environmental thought.
● Instead of blaming environmental destruction on the actions of a small number of
thoughtless and careless people or on a temporary phase of industrial irresponsibility
that comes with an otherwise positive process of economic development, the destruction
described here is caused by forces that are pervasive, persistent, and deeply ingrained
in our values, lifestyles, and institutions.
 Framing The Problem

● When scientists, policymakers, and regular people decide that a condition in the
environment is a problem, they usually base their diagnoses or definitions on
preconceived notions and biases that lead them to focus on certain factors of cause,
change, and response.
● Emerson said that we see what our experiences have taught us to see. Thomas Kuhn
(1962) might say that in environmental science, we see what our books have taught us
to see. So, environmental problems don't just happen; they are made by society, just like
ideas about wealth, knowledge, and politics.
● For policymakers, the building is often a rough way to translate ecology into economics.
For "deep ecologists," this may mean that the language of ecology is changing into the
language of bioethics and philosophy. People's biases affect this process of defining just
as much as when English words are translated into Japanese and gain or lose meaning.
● The way environmental problems are defined is based on conceptual frameworks that
focus on some parts and ignore or leave out others.
● The nature and causes of environmental destruction are often defined in a way that
gives one idea or group a political edge over another. This is similar to how premises are
chosen to lead to a desired conclusion.
● When this is done on purpose, we can call it strategic definition or selective
interpretation. This is especially true for people who have a favourite or "pet" solution
and just need to find the right kind of environmental problem to attach it to.
● Economists who like market-based solutions to environmental problems, for example,
usually think that environmental damage is caused by externalities (pollution that isn't
priced) and other things that mess up the market. Engineers, on the other hand, see
damage as a result of bad planning and design of systems. They tend to define
environmental problems in ways that call for technological solutions.
● Other points of view, like those of some religions, see the destruction of the environment
as a sign of moral failings or as a sign of a spiritual malaise that keeps people from
feeling connected to the rest of nature.
● Even though the economist, engineer, and religious leader may all notice the same
thing, when it comes to defining it as a problem, each of them tends to take a different
approach and find a different root cause.
● In each group, people have come to a shared understanding of something that gives
them direction and a goal.
● Group consensus is much more than just agreeing on basic facts or principles by which
the world can be understood. It is a shared set of core values that affect what counts as
facts and what are valid conclusions from those facts (or from faith, in the case of
religious leaders).
● So, when looking at the future of global environmental protection, it is helpful to start by
looking at the different ways that major environmental actors and institutions define
problems and figure out what caused them.
● In this way, the differences between important people in the policy-making process will
become clearer, and the reasons why they disagree will be easier to understand.
● We'll start by looking at three definitions or points of view that overlap and each focus on
a different part of the problem: contamination (pollution), simplification (loss of
complexity), and depletion of natural resources (consumption).
● Then, each definition will be looked at in terms of what it says about what causes what.
Even though it is easy to stretch each of the definitions to include major parts of the
other two, the main points of each definition are still different. Each interpretation or point
of view is based on a different idea of how much humans are to blame for changes in the
environment.
 The Contamination Perspective

● Many people think that problems with the environment are just problems with pollution.
Pollution, on the other hand, is usually thought of as a biochemical process.
● John Rodman pointed out in 1983 that people tend to put actions that affect nature into
two groups: clean and dirty. Pollution is bad because it makes things "dirty" and
disrespects nature.
● In fact, people from Judeo-Christian backgrounds who base their environmental
knowledge on this definition often see history as a sad process in which the Garden of
Eden is systematically ruined.
● People's actions have slowly turned forests, lakes, and wetlands that used to be clean
into places where toxic chemicals can build up. From contaminated water, air, and soil to
traces of DDT in mother's milk, agriculture and industry have changed nature in a lot of
ways.
● Because most people think of pollution when they think of the environment getting
worse, the most common way to improve the environment is to set up "poison-control"
centres to deal with the waste products and invisible impurities of modern society.
● People think that protecting the environment is just about stopping pollution because of
problems like acid rain, radiation from nuclear waste, toxic chemicals in groundwater,
urban smog, and pesticide residues in food. However, protecting the environment is
much more complicated than that.
● When pollution has already happened, the solution is to clean it up. Pollution control is
pretty much the end of human responsibility.
● In real life, the main reason to stop and reduce pollution is to protect people's health.
Most programmes to control pollution don't put much thought into protecting the health of
ecosystems.
● Habitat protection can't compete with health and safety issues because the political
legitimacy of programmes to fight pollution is heavily based on how people think they
prevent cancer and birth defects.
● Even though human health depends on the health of ecological systems in the long run,
the pollution-fighter mentality focuses on how pollution in human communities is
self-destructive.
● People often use the metaphor "fouling the nest" to describe this process, but they don't
seem to realise that the metaphor implies concern for animals.
● When ecosystems are the focus of pollution-control efforts, it's usually because they can
be used as early-warning systems for pollution that could hurt people's health or make
them look bad. Similar to the coal miner's canary, they are mostly useful.
 The Eco-Simplification Perspective

● The second attempt to define "environmental destruction" focuses on the process of

ecosystems becoming more uniform and simpler.
● From this point of view, most environmental damage comes from the loss of biological
diversity caused by the growth of human settlements and development activities.
● So, the level of complexity, not contamination, should be used as the main sign of
damage.
● Those who base their environmental policies on this definition would not deny that
environmental contamination is a problem. However, they argue that the public's focus
on environmental contamination distracts us from a more important problem: the loss of
diversity in ecosystems that have to be complicated because of food webs and energy
flows.
● According to them, the focus on clean vs. dirty hides what may be an even more
important way to think about environmental problems: simple vs. complex.
● They say that a combination of technological, demographic, and economic forces are
quickly destroying the world's natural diversity. These forces are destroying complex
forms of social and biological community and replacing them with relatively simple,
homogenised ways of living.
● Ecologists see the loss of natural diversity as a process of biological erosion and
poverty. Many anthropologists see the loss of cultural diversity as a loss of social wealth
and the human race's collective imagination.
● Scientists can tell that biological erosion is happening because the number of threatened
and endangered species is going up. Five hundred thousand to two million species may
go extinct because of people by the end of this century (U.S. Council on Environmental
Quality, 1980:37). Most of the time, the biggest threat to the planet's biological wealth
comes from the growth of people and large-scale development.
● Even when development goes hand in hand with a lot of environmental protections, like
when the ecotourism industry grows, the results can be bad for biodiversity.
● The "biodiversity" problem, as it has become known, might be better understood as the
"habitat" problem.
● Even though the trade in endangered species, sport hunting, overfishing and harvesting,
and toxic pollution have all contributed to the natural extinction rates of many species,
the biggest reason for the loss of biodiversity is the destruction of species' habitats by
human development, especially agriculture that cuts into forests.
● Only tropical deforestation is responsible for the loss of up to 6,000 species per year,
which is 10,000 times more than the rate of natural extinction at the beginning of human
history. Globally, about 50,000 species will probably go extinct every year for the next 20
years.
● Pollution in the sense of "dirty vs. clean" is not the main cause of habitat destruction.
However, it may be a major cause of the loss of some wetlands and aquatic
environments, as well as the damage to forest areas caused by acid deposition.
 The Natural Resources Consumption Perspective

● Damage to the environment can also be seen as an economics problem involving the
availability, accessibility, and renewability of a valuable natural resource. In this case, the
amount of environmental protection that is needed depends on the availability,
accessibility, and renewability of the resource.
● In this case, the focus is on the usefulness of the environment as a source of natural
resources for people to use.
● Externalities, unsustainable consumption, and not being able to tell the difference
between man-made and natural capital are at the heart of how this perspective defines
damage.
● People who stress this definition aren't blind to the contributions of the contamination
and eco-simplification perspectives of environmental change, but they prefer to relate to
nature as consumers and reduce damage to the environment by controlling how scarce
natural resources are used.
● Pollution or loss of complexity are only one of the indirect negative effects of
consumption. The most important factor is the instrumental value put on nonrenewable
or slowly regenerating natural resources that can be mined, milked, pumped, sawed or
uprooted, hunted, fished, collected, or otherwise used for human benefit.
● In most cases, environmental pollution and the loss of biological diversity are unintended
side effects of growth and development. In the consumption case, however, natural
resources are used or exploited on purpose.
● They are the ones who get hurt when forests are cut down for wood, oceans are
overfished for food, and many other things that hurt the environment are done because
people want or need them.
● Even though the end results of all three types of environmental destruction may look the
same, it is important to tell them apart in order to understand the different motivations
and actions that lead to them.
● According to the consumption perspective, protecting the environment means figuring
out how to get the most out of renewable resources and how to keep non-renewable
resources in good shape for the long term.
● In recent years, it has also included proposals for something called "natural resource
accounting." In this system, ecological services that can't be priced are included in
national income accounts based on how much it would cost to replace them with artificial
substitutes or fix or reclaim them for long-term use. If this change isn't made, economic
growth indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) often go up because natural
resources are being used up.
● The idea that economic well-being is getting better at the expense of future generations
is a cruel illusion.
● For a new group of eco-economists, this mistake was made because people didn't know
how to tell the difference between man-made capital, like machines and buildings, and
natural capital, like topsoil.
● In their opinion, the best way to use natural resources is to expand our economic
philosophy to include the products of earth, wind, and fire in a way that shows how
valuable they are even before or apart from human use.
● For people who don't believe that nature's gifts are for human use—that is, that they are
not property and can't be taken for human use in a moral way—the consumption
perspective is not only wrong, but also dangerous.
● People don't like it when redwood trees or great blue whales that are 2,000 years old are
used as natural resources. They argue against people like Gifford Pinchot who think that
protecting natural resources is a good way to find a balance between the ideal of
preserving things and people's insatiable need for things.
● Some critics have even said that the human population will have to be cut by a lot for
scientific management of nature to keep up the illusion of endless material development.
The most extreme people think that AIDS and other medical problems are the answer.
● Others worry that the growing focus on the lack of resources will lead to more conflicts
and wars over things like water, fertile land, fisheries, and so on.
 Environmental Driving Forces

● Because environmental damage is defined in different ways, it is hard to find a single

model or set of causes that can explain all of the major types of damage.
● The only way to get a good understanding is to use more than one method and focus on
the most important factors and how they are linked.
● To reach this synthesis, you need to look closely at the environmental driving forces and
theories of cause and effect that are used to build models.
● Then, each of these forces and theories can be looked at on its own to see how well it
explains pollution, the loss of biodiversity, and the use up of natural resources.
● In previous models or explanations of how the world's environment is being destroyed, a
number of factors or variables have been named as the main causes.
● Meadows and his colleagues, who wrote the best-selling book Limits to Growth in 1972,
made a model of global environmental threats based on how population growth,
industrial technology output, food production, and the use of nonrenewable resources
interact.
● In Beyond the Limits, a book that came out in 1992 and was a follow-up to their first
book, the authors say that the same driving forces are still at work, but now they can be
measured and have a bigger effect on the planet's ecology.
● Other authors have made models of environmental driving forces that are even easier to
understand. Paul and Anne Erhlich (1991) think of the effects on the environment as the
sum of three variables. The simplest way to explain their model is with the equation I = P
x A x T, where I is the effect on the environment, P is population growth, A is wealth, and
T is technology.
● The Erhlichs' study shows that population is by far the most important variable. In his
1972 book The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner wrote about a similar framework. He
says that technology is the most important variable for explaining things.
● Using the equation I = P x A x T as an example, we need to know what kind of values
the population has, how it spends its money, and how safe its technology is for the
environment.
● David Durham (1992) says that the I = PAT formula should be changed to I = PACT,
where C stands for cultural value choices, to include normative issues like these. Others
have said that the technology variable should be indexed and signed (+ or —) based on
the size, purpose, or management needs of the technology in question.
● Imagine a wealthy world with six billion environmentalists who rely heavily on solar
energy and hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and mass transit systems, vegetarian diets,
contrasting and complex technologies for reducing waste and recycling.
example
● Then, imagine a less wealthy population of, say, one billion industrial workers. They all
for
I = PACT love gas-guzzling cars and would rather have an economy based on cheap oil, an
endless supply of consumer goods, heavy beef diets, and subsidised landfills.
● Which situation would hurt the environment more? Clearly, models like those based on
the I = PAT formula aren't very useful unless they can specify variables that take into
account values, lifestyle choices, and different technological goals or cultures.
● Critics might say that the thought experiment is misleading in the real world because it is
based on a set of circumstances or conditions that don't match.
● Aside from the obvious problem of assuming that everyone has the same wants and
values, critics might also raise questions about how realistic the idea is. For example,
they might question the idea that six billion environmentalists could stay rich after
choosing what are, by today's standards, very expensive alternative energy systems like
solar hydrogen.
● From their point of view, a plausible scenario would have to involve trade-offs between
economic wealth and environmental quality. It would have to deal with political economy
issues that often make the goals of wealth and the goals of the ecology movement
conflict with each other.
● Other critics would probably focus on the population assumptions and say that six billion
well-meaning environmentalists wouldn't stop the inevitable process of nonhuman
species being pushed off the planet. Instead, they would just slow it down.
● Their criticism would stress that the size of the population matters, no matter what the
values of the people in the population are.
 Adding Complexity

● We will try to make our own model that includes all of the major factors that lead to the
three types of environmental destruction we've already talked about.
● The building blocks for this model are independent variables that can be used to explain
why environmental damage is happening and why it is getting worse around the world.
When these factors work together, they cause a lot of damage to the environment.
● At least eight of these variables or forces seem to be very important to this task of
building a model: (1) anthropocentrism, (2) contemporary centrism, (3) technological
progress, (4) the growth of the human population, (5) poverty, (6) wealth, (7) market
failure, and (8) the lack of markets.
● Anthropocentrism is the idea that the progress and dominance of humans are more
important than those of other species. It comes from the Greek word for "man,"
"anthropos," and also includes the fact that men almost always have more power over
women and the environmental effects of this.
● Contempocentrism is when people are too focused on the present, often at the expense
of future humans and animals.
● The technology factor shows how much technological progress has an effect on the
environment, both for good and for bad.
● The population factor, which is probably the most controversial, is based on the
neo-Malthusian argument that there are too many people for the environment to support.
● Poverty is linked to the number of people in the world. It is a major cause of ecological
poverty, which is when more than a billion people who live at or near the level of
subsistence use up habitat and natural resources to get food, water, energy, and other
things they need to live.
● Affluence, on the other hand, is a driving force whose "throw-away" consumer lifestyle
encourages environmental destruction through overconsumption and a lack of concern
for natural resource depletion.
● The market-based explanations of environmental destruction, finally, look at how
economic incentives are set up. These problems can be broken down into market
failures, like environmental externalities and unpriced opportunity costs, and failure to
have markets, like when there are no property rights or when the economic value of
important ecological resources and services is not recognised.
● Each of the above variables is linked to one of the other variables in a certain way.
● Anthropocentrism and Contempocentrism provide a lot of the normative basis for actions
that are bad for the environment. They are the basic beliefs that most people have about
nature, so they can be thought of as core values.
● The growth of the human population and technology makes the destructive effects of the
other six driving forces worse or last longer. This is why they can be thought of as
amplifiers, or the tools that are used to extend or expand human values, behaviours, and
possessions.
● Rich and poor are measures of how people spend their money on basic needs. So, we
can call them variables about how people use things. Consumption shows the tension
 between what people need and what they want. The effects it has on the environment
are seen as ways to share out material wealth.
● The last two factors, market failure and the lack of markets, show that the way people
are encouraged to buy things isn't right. They are discussed in this section under the
heading of "political economy," and they will be used to show how the connection
between economics and political ideology is a cause of environmental problems.
● By putting together what we know about human values, consumer behaviour, the
amplifying factors that lead to rapid growth, and the political economy that controls it, we
can not only make a list of the main driving forces but also a model of how they interact.
● In the hope that a more complicated model will show more than it hides, we will try to
come up with a framework that makes the relationships between the eight driving forces
and the three types of environmental damage they cause more clear.
● The goal will be to combine all of these factors and develop them in a systematic way
into a single, all-encompassing model that is at least useful from a heuristic point of view,
if not also useful in practise.
● Population growth and technology are the main things that make all three types of
environmental destruction worse. They do this by putting more pressure on development
and making it easier for people to get what they want with the help of organised
knowledge and machines.
● The last four factors—poverty, wealth, market failure, and the lack of markets—show
how the North and South, as well as the East and West, have very different
environments.
● Poverty is a major cause of the rapid use up of natural resources and eco-simplification
in the South or "Third World," just as overconsumption is a major cause of pollution
damage in the more industrialised parts of the world.
● In the exchange economies of the West, environmental problems are often seen as
market failures. In the failing command economies of the East, however, many people
say that the lack of market forces is to blame for much of the damage to the
environment.
● Even though it would be silly to say that these neat dichotomies accurately represent all
of the environmental factors that shape international relations today, the categories
themselves are useful as a first step toward conceptual orientation.
● As shown in figure 3-2, a more advanced way to model would be to turn the dichotomies
into continuous lines and place each country or region somewhere along each line.
● Even though superimposing the "affluence-poverty" and "market failure-failure to have
market" lines on the North-South and West-East axes of figure 3-2 suggests a much
stronger relationship between geography and economic conditions than actually exists, it
may be useful to describe part of the world in this way for model-building purposes.
● These kinds of explanations won't work, though, for the other four causes:
anthropocentrism, contemporary centrism, population growth, and technology. There is
no one-to-one or one-to-many relationship between these things.
● There's no reason to treat them both the same way, since they each belong to different
groups. With the possible exception of technology, their opposites or absences are not to
blame for the destruction of the global environment.
● The main benefit of the causal model used here is that it shows how major
environmental factors interact across four key areas of analysis: human values,
consumer behaviours, their effect on the structure of the political economy, and how they
are amplified by human fertility and technology.
● As an alternative to the popular J = PAT formula, a rough conceptual equation for the
model can be made: I=(V+C+M)XA, where I is impact, V is value orientation, C is
consumptive behavior—an expression of unmet needs and wants, M is market structure
(or lack thereof), and A stands for amplifying agents, mostly growth factors for population
and technology.
● Even though the conceptual equation is important for what it says about the basic
normative and behavioural causes of environmental degradation, it would be more
useful if it named the eight key driving forces and made a distinction between "green"
(healthy for the environment) and "brown" (harmful to the environment) values,
behaviours, and technologies.
● A more precise equation like this could look like this:
● Impact = "brown" values (anthropocentrism and contemporary centrism) plus "brown"
needs (poverty) and "brown" wants (affluence). + [MARKET STRUCTURE (Market
Failure + No Markets)] x [AMPLIFIERS ("brown" Technology x Number of People)]
● Running this equation backwards, it's clear that a major and long-term improvement in
the quality of life for both humans and nonhumans will require some combination of
"green" technologies, stabilisation of human population, design of efficient markets to
allocate resources, full social cost pricing, limits on material consumption, elimination of
absolute poverty, and widespread adoption of ecologically based values and ecologically
compatible lifestyles.
● Changes like these make it clear that local, regional, and global political institutions and
policies need to be redesigned and made stronger.
 Core Values

● Even though anthropocentrism and contemporary centrism are the main beliefs that
affect how people think about nonhuman nature and ecological sustainability, they are by
no means the only ones that matter to people who care about protecting the
environment.
● Beliefs about race, religion, and ethnicity also play a big role. Their impact, on the other
hand, is harder to measure.
● White, Christian, patriarchal societies have had a huge impact on the way the world's
economic and political systems are set up, which has had a hugely negative effect on
the environment.
● The dominant beliefs of Westernized societies seem to have made anthropocentrism
and contemporaryism stronger and more widespread. However, one could argue that
Christian theology tries to get people to focus less on themselves and the present and
more on the eternal future.
● Still, it's important to remember that anthropocentrism and contemporarycentrism are
based on a lot of other ideas and values, including greed and narcissism.
● Selfish behaviour, both as individuals and as a species, can be seen as the biggest
threat to our planet to the extent that it hurts nonhuman nature and future generations in
order to make people feel better in the here and now. In a strange way, being
self-centered may have helped our species evolve and stay alive.
● What makes it such a serious threat today is how fast population growth and new
technologies make it worse.
 Anthropocentrism

● In its most common form, anthropocentrism is like the Greek mythological idea of hubris.
When people think of man as the centre of everything, they become overconfident in
their ability to control things, which leads to tragic overreaching.
● Every once in a while, a big volcano, earthquake, hurricane, or other natural disaster
shows us how little control we have over the world around us. Accidents like the one at
Chernobyl or the one with the Challenger space shuttle can show how fragile modern
technology is and have the same effect.
● Most of the time, though, most people in the world are thinking about how to control
nature more.
● Their success, which can be seen in things like modern farming, changing the weather,
genetic engineering, and damming wild rivers, has not come cheap. Today, it's hard to
do or see anything that isn't in some way a result or artefact of what people did in the
past.
● The result of this "anthropocentric" problem is that people today feel nostalgic for places
that don't just have human-made things or artefacts.
● It is rarely shown, though, in a desire to get back to nature.
● People don't usually give non-human nature the same status they give computers, cars,
and other pervasive products of advanced technology. One sign of this is the fact that
products are sometimes tested on live animals to see how safe they are or how well they
hold up in a crash.
● It may be the biggest fallacy of anthropocentrism to think that up to 10,000 species may
have died out in the last ten years because of human development, and that only a small
percentage of people will know about this or find it sad.
● It needs to be said that anthropocentric views are not always in conflict with the goals of
protecting the environment. Stopping pollution and depletion of resources can go hand in
hand with anthropocentric goals when it's clear that a healthy environment is good for
people.
● Even species that don't seem to have any economic value are often worth protecting
because they might be useful in the future for medical research or, like the canary in the
coal mine, as an early warning system for threats to human health or comfort.
● Still, anthropocentrism does allow for the extinction of whole species once people are
sure that a certain species won't be useful for medicine, biotechnology, or other ways to
make money.
● Also, when people get immediate benefits from actions that pollute or use up resources,
environmental constraints are usually not taken into account.
● A second meaning of anthropocentrism, which was already mentioned, has to do with
the role that men play compared to women in making environmental problems. It has to
do with the way nature, or "She," is defined and treated, which shows how men and
women are different.
● More specifically, it looks at how gender discrimination affects the environment in terms
of women's roles in family planning, how children are raised, how work is divided, who
owns property, and who can go to school.
● The role of gender in the problem of skyrocketing population growth has become so
clear that even the World Bank, which is run by men, has started to say that giving
women more power is one of the best ways to lower birth rates and protect the
environment.
● Andrew Steer, who was the deputy director of the Bank's environmental division at the
time, told people at the 1992 Earth Summit that educating girls in developing countries,
even just to the same level as boys, would lead to a big drop in birth rates.
● In Africa, where the population is expected to double in the next twenty years, for
example, the average family size drops from about 7.5 children to 4.5 when women are
allowed to go to primary school. When other things are taken into account, the average
family size drops to about 3.5 for those who finish high school.
● If female literacy programmes were combined with changes to the law that made it
easier for women to own and inherit property, get credit, and work outside of raising
children, birth rates would probably go down even more.
● One of the most important things that may have come out of the U.N. meetings in Rio
and Cairo is how important it is for women to help protect the environment.
● At the 1992 Earth Summit, less than 3% of the national leaders who were there were
women. However, their voices were much louder than the official numbers show.
● Nearly 40% of the official delegations at the Cairo Conference on Population and
Development were made up of women.
● At the nongovernmental forums that went along with the official meetings, there were
even more women than at the official meetings.
● In 1992 and 1994, women from all over the world got together to talk about how to make
the world a better place.
● There, in the middle of heated debates about abortion, forced sterilisation, and
discrimination based on gender, people started to realise that almost all business and
environmental negotiations are made by men, but women, especially women from
developing countries, hold most of the keys to future environmental progress.
● Without fundamental changes in how women are treated in society and without their full
participation in environmental reforms, none of the agreements made in a policy arena
dominated by men may do more than temporarily delay ecological losses that can't be
fixed.
 Contempo Centrism

● Contrary to anthropocentrism, which focuses on "self" at the level of the species,

contemporary-centrism looks at the self-centered individual or generation.
● It is made worse and made to make sense by a widespread economic ideology that
gives value based on things like time that seem reasonable and necessary in other
ways.
● Contempocentrism is the idea that the individual is more important than the human
community, just like anthropocentrism is the idea that the human community is more
important than the rest of nature. Even though a community is in some ways immortal, it
is clear that its members are not.
● A lot of Contempo-centric thinking is based on the fact that each member will die, along
with other kinds of uncertainty about the future.
● Net present value maximisation is just the most popular reason for putting an individual's
own interests ahead of those of the whole human and biospheric community.
● The irony of contemporary-centrism is that what was once socially and evolutionarily
useful is now proving to be very harmful.
● Once, the survival of human gene pools required daily attention to basic needs. Now, it
may require long-term foresight about events and trends in the environment that don't
seem important at the moment.
● In this way, versions of anthropocentrism that focus on the long-term survival of the
human species are in conflict with the short-term thinking that is a part of
contemporaryism.
● The narrow focus on the immediate well-being of people may end up putting both the
long-term well-being of people and nature as a whole at risk.

Amplifiers

● Population growth and technological progress are the main ways that environmental
effects become important on a global scale. Population growth and technological
progress help anthropocentrism and contemporary centrism reach more people and
strengthen their hold on human nature.
● As more and more of the world's land is occupied by people, it's hard to avoid the
anthropocentric idea that the world was made by and for people.
● As technology like microwaves and credit cards make it easier for us to get what we
want right away, it becomes easier to believe that the needs of the present moment are
the most important.
● In the end, it is the exponential growth of human populations and technological abilities
that makes the environmental problems caused by modern man much more dangerous
than those caused by early man.
 Population

● Most people who write about the environment think that rapid population growth is the
most powerful and far-reaching cause of environmental damage. Since the late 1960s, it
has been mentioned more than any other factor as the main cause of stress on the
environment around the world.
● Many environmentalists don't look any further than the population history of Homo
sapiens, with its well-known "J" curves and times when the population doubled, to
explain almost all pollution, Eco simplification, and overuse of natural resources.
● Today, there are about 5.6 billion people on the planet, which is a thousand times more
than there were ten thousand years ago. Nearly three billion of these people were born
in the last forty years, mostly because death rates have gone down. In the next eleven
years, another billion people will be born, which is about three people per second. This is
the fastest growth in human history.
● Today, 34 developing countries, most of which are in Africa, have annual population
growth rates of 3% or more, while the average annual growth rate in developed and
overdeveloped countries is only about 0.5%. Kenya, for example, has a rate of almost 4
percent per year, which means that its population could double in as little as eighteen
years, which could cause environmental and economic disasters.
● Lester Brown has pointed out that these growth rates were easier to deal with when the
world economy was growing at 4 percent or more per year. However, population growth
now leads economic growth in many countries, which increases resource consumption
and widens the gap between the world's rich and poor.
● Most people explain the main environmental effects of overpopulation in terms of
carrying capacities that have been exceeded for too long.
● Overusing natural resources, reducing the amount of land available, cutting down trees,
causing smog and traffic in cities, and destroying habitats are all problems that are
caused or made worse by the fact that people aren't living within the carrying capacities
and assimilative limits of natural systems.
● Some writers have said that Malthus may not have been wrong, but that he was just too
early. Late in the 20th century, the most important thing was the exponential rate of
growth. Each decade, more people are added to the world than lived on it for the first
400 000 years.
 Technology

● Population growth may be the ultimate test of human carrying capacity, but science and
technology, which are getting closer together, will decide how much that capacity can
grow. In this way, the growth of technology and science may be the ultimate test of how
well people can predict the future.
● Technology, which can both save and destroy, is the most unpredictable of all the driving
forces that affect the quality of the environment in the future.
● As an amplifier, it lives in a black box that turns values (like contemporary centrism) and
behaviours (like affluent consumption) into anything from heart pacemakers to hydrogen
bombs.
● Even though the number of people has grown by a factor of a thousand in the last one
thousand years, the rate of technological development has been even faster—much
faster.
● Just in the last century, technological advances have made people more aware of what
is possible. This is true whether you look at agricultural productivity, the destructive
power of weapons, or the healing power of modern medicine. As a result, population
growth is almost forgotten.
● Both the number of people and the number of new technologies are growing very
quickly. Technology advances are both a powerful cause of population growth and an
indirect way to deal with it.
● Population growth shows that agricultural and medical technology have so far won out
over technology used for war.
● As long as agriculture and medicine do a better job of making people live longer than
high-tech weapons, which kill more people, it is reasonable to say that technology makes
people live longer.
● On the other hand, population growth can be seen as a driver of technological and
scientific progress insofar as it increases the need for new technologies and the number
of people with creative ideas.
● So, population and technology not only help the other six driving forces grow and
develop, but they also help each other grow and develop to a certain point through
positive feedback loops.
● The fast growth of technology can be traced to a number of things, such as the rise of
technical education, the availability of artificially cheap energy, the beginning of the
industrial organisation of labour in the 1800s, and the rise of economic competition and
economies of scale that were made possible by earlier technological revolutions.
● One thing that shows how quickly this growth has happened is that the number of cars
made in the world reached one billion in only about fifty years. The growth curve for
televisions is even bigger and faster. Pollution control technologies, like catalytic
converters for cars that reduce pollution, have had one of the fastest growth rates over
the past 20 years.
● The effects of technology on the environment are hard to describe because they are so
widespread and, in some cases, not clear. The same innovations that make it possible
 for uranium to replace dirty coal as a source of energy also tend to make people worry
about radiation or nuclear proliferation instead of air quality.
● Even though a lot of writers have said that technology is neutral and that its effects on
the environment are just as likely to be good or bad, the overall effect of modern
technology on the world's environment has been massive destruction.
● People who defend technology say that we shouldn't blame the "tool" for how careless
its users are about the environment. Lynn White says, "Technology just opens doors; it
doesn't force us to walk through them."
● But these ideas of technological neutrality don't take into account what Jerome Ravetz
calls the "intoxicating possibilities" of new technologies or the conceptual problems that
come up when technology is just seen as a tool.
● Silent Spring (1962), a book by Rachel Carson that is often credited with starting the
modern environmental movement, was mostly about how bad technology can hurt the
environment. Carson said that the chemical barrage on the environment caused by DDT
showed that the unintended side effects of modern science and technology were
becoming more important than their intended benefits.
● Clearly, both people and technology play a big role in the environmental changes that
are happening all over the world. What we still don't know is if their roles as amplifiers
are very different from each other.
● For example, technology might be able to solve or lessen some of the problems caused
by population growth. It is hard to imagine, though, how a growing population will help
solve problems caused by modern technology that hurt the environment.
 Consumptive Behaviour

● The gap between the rich and the poor is growing quickly around the world. This is
causing damage to the environment, conflicts between people with different levels of
wealth, and migration that is caused by the economy.
● In a world with more than 200 billionaires and more than 1 billion poor people making
less than $200 a month, it's hard to say which end of the economic spectrum poses the
biggest threat to the planet's ecological wealth.
● Even though middle-class consumers may be the biggest cause of "drawdown" damage
to the environment as a whole, it is the tension between poverty and wealth that is the
most important factor in why they buy so much.
● Also, this tension is a major cause of the political paralysis that makes it hard to govern
the environment.
 Poverty

● Poverty is a factor in all three major types of damage to the environment. For example,
when there aren't enough sewage treatment facilities, it can make water supplies very
dirty. It encourages people to use too much of natural resources like fisheries and
forests.
● It also makes eco-simplification more likely because poor people looking for land, food,
and fuel destroy habitats and hurt species that are already in trouble.
● Most of the world's 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty can be found in
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. They are stuck in a downward spiral of poverty and
environmental destruction that is made worse by rapid population growth, migration
between cities and the countryside, and unethical development practises.
● The main effect on the environment is that these people are forced to use marginal
agricultural lands and forest resources for food and fuelwood, which is bad for the
environment.
● When a growing rural population outgrows its land base or is denied access to
productive lands because of geography, economics, and politics, people often try to grow
crops on steep hillsides, graze livestock on land that is becoming desert, or clear forests
so that shifting cultivators can use them.
● Other examples can be seen in cities, where the number of people living in slums and
being homeless is growing, making the environment dirty with untreated sewage and
diseases.
● People with low incomes have shorter lives on average by twenty years because they
don't have access to good health care, clean water, and good sanitation. This is true
both in cities and in rural areas.
● There is an inverse relationship between how much money someone has and how much
untreated human waste they make. In this case, poverty makes it impossible to stop
pollution.
● With a growing population, the flow of untreated human waste is becoming too much for
rivers, lakes, estuaries, and the oceans to handle. These "waste sinks" used to be able
to safely absorb or break down pollution a century or two ago.
● There are other ways to show how poverty and pollution are linked. There is more and
more evidence that some relationships between income and pollution are biradial, which
means that they can be shown graphically by a bell curve. There may be thresholds or
saturation points where the relationship between poverty and some types of
environmental damage changes direction.
● For example, the relationship between sulphur dioxide emissions and income shows that
the amount of sulphur dioxide in cities goes up quickly when the annual income per
person reaches about $2,000, but then goes down just as quickly as income keeps
going up.
● The standard explanation for this behaviour is that people don't invest in protecting the
environment if they don't have enough money to meet their basic needs. However, once
their basic needs are met and they have more money to spend on other things, they start
 to invest in reducing their emissions until the amount of sulphur dioxide they emit per
person is almost the same for both the rich and the poor.
● The poorest people don't have any other way to pollute than by putting their own waste
in local water systems.
● Once the tide of development starts to raise their incomes and increase their
consumption, some types of pollution may go up sharply, only to go down later when
worries about quality of life start to replace worries about just getting by.
● In the end, developing societies focus more on high-value goods and services that use
fewer natural resources, except maybe for energy.
 Affluence

● Rich people don't always destroy the environment. One could imagine a wealthy society
where money is used to protect and improve the environment. A different definition of
wealth than the one used here could lead to this result, though.
● In an industrial society, getting rich means attacking nature in a way that can't be
stopped.
● In the traditional sense, to be rich means to have inherited or earned through hard work
and investments the fruits of a century-long binge of taking from nature and ruling over it.
● People often downplay the link between wealth and environmental damage by focusing
on the signs of conspicuous consumption, like disposable diapers, plastic litter, and
aluminium containers that can't be used again.
● Even though these are important signs of wealth and how it affects the environment,
they are not the best way to understand the link between wealth and the environment.
● They take attention away from more harmful ways to spend money. Even though
disposable containers are bad for the environment, they aren't as bad as the effects of
wealth on the use of non-renewable energy, beef, cars, land, and building materials.
● Rich people in all countries use a lot more natural resources per person than their poorer
fellow citizens. And they make a lot more pollution, except for sewage that hasn't been
cleaned.
● In poor countries, there are often pockets of wealth that are kept going at the cost of a
strong middle class. Many times, a small number of people or families own or control a
huge amount of a country's economic resources. Even by the standards of an industrial
country, they may be very wasteful.
● In a way, a lot of the world's overconsumption is either grown or forced by laws. For
example, mass advertising makes people want status and positional goods more than
they should.
● Some government actions have the same effect. In wealthy countries, you have to follow
planning and zoning rules, building codes, and local health and safety laws in order to
build a house. This makes it almost impossible to build simple structures that use the
fewest resources possible to provide shelter.
● To make a home as safe, big, and comfortable as possible, ecological sacrifice zones
are made elsewhere to provide the wood, plastics, metals, and places to put trash.
● A barrage of seductive images of fame and wealth are used to reinforce the process.
These images are meant to make people want more things and then turn those wants
into needs. In a lot of places in the world, people still mix up quality and quantity. More is
better.
● So, the desired square footage (per occupant) of new homes keeps growing, even
though its usefulness is decreasing and its energy, environmental, and material costs are
going up. The same is true for the perceived need for more appliances, home
entertainment technology, and other things.
● Alan Durning of the Worldwatch Institute said in 1992 that it takes more than 1200 miles
to get from a typical American bite of food to the farm where it came from. Many wealthy
people in the United States drink water that comes all the way from France.
● As Durning points out, it is very ironic to compare the huge financial success of Perrier,
which sells most of America's 45 million gallons of imported drinking water, to the UN's
inability to get enough money for local water supply improvements that would help the
one billion children and adults who don't have safe drinking water right now.
● It turns out that these shaky links between wealth and poverty are the key to
understanding what causes environmental damage. The growing income and wealth gap
between rich and poor around the world creates perverse incentives to close the gap by
hurting the environment.
● People in the Third World want to consume at levels in the West that are now almost
universally seen as signs of personal importance and success. This is because global
communications technology and mass media advertising have made them want status
goods and services more.
● Third World countries use the fact that a lot of the wealth of industrialised countries came
at the cost of nature to justify the rapid use of their own natural resources and to explain
away as "temporary" the tendency to ignore the environmental costs of conventional
development.
● An African observer at the 1992 Earth Summit said, "We'll never catch up to America if
we really worry about trees, elephants, and greenhouse gases." This shows how
self-destructive the situation is. "Catching up to America" could be the main reason why
the world's environment will be destroyed in the future.
● The modernization of agriculture, which is made possible by wealth, ends up using a lot
of water, fertiliser, and pesticides, which are bad for the environment, and displacing
millions of rural farmers, who then often go to ecologically sensitive frontier areas to find
marginally productive land.
● Some studies say that the world's soil could support 15 billion vegetarians, but they
would probably have to be vegetarians who didn't own cars, big houses, or TVs that
showed ads that encouraged people to buy more stuff.
 Political Economy

● When analysing environmental policy, it is standard to point out the effects of

externalities, inefficiencies, and unassigned property rights.
● From the problems of urban smog to the loss of wilderness, discussions about how to
protect the environment are often boiled down to discussions about how markets work or
don't work.
● Creating and expanding market incentives to protect the environment is usually seen as
the key to good environmental governance, and fewer government interventions in the
market are thought to be necessary for these incentives to work.
 Market Failure

● Human actions that hurt the environment almost always have something to do with the
economy. The fact that the environment is getting worse because of money has become
a self-evident truth.
● At the same time, though, the fact that self-correcting markets haven't been able to stop
or significantly slow this kind of deterioration has become a source of doubt for those
who want to bring political economy and political ecology closer together.
● The main reason why a market fails is easy to say and understand: The price we pay for
goods and services rarely reflects how bad they are for the environment. Using energy,
water, food, clothes, and building materials almost always hurts the environment at some
point during their production, transportation, use, and disposal.
● Students of economics say that the best way to fix the problem is to include the costs of
environmental damage in the prices of consumer goods and services.
● Then, the market will change on its own to bring the marginal demand and marginal
supply curves into a better alignment with environmental needs.
● In general, economists only care about the definitions of environmental harm that have
to do with pollution and running out of resources. Eco-simplification is important only if
the loss of diversity and complexity causes humans to miss out on a lot of other
opportunities in the near future.
● Since future generations can't vote in the market, the main problem for an economist is
to find the best way to use resources for the people living now, while also fixing price
distortions that lead to harmful rates of resource depletion and exhaustion that can't be
replaced, or harmful production of "residuals" (such as pollution) that must be reduced,
treated, or recycled to keep the environment clean.
● Most economists think that a free market is the best way to make sure that resources are
used efficiently and to get rid of or make up for negative residuals.
● In market economies, environmental problems tend to stick around for a long time. This
is often blamed on the way the market works, which is often blamed on the way the
government messes up when it tries to help the market.
● Most economists agree that major failures and the bad effects they have on the
environment would happen less often in a truly free market.
● Most people agree that some government regulation is necessary—for example, to
enforce contracts, stop monopolies, and promote a more fair distribution of wealth—but
those who really believe in market sovereignty say that almost all problems with how the
market works can be fixed with incentives and inducements that the market itself
provides.
● But they don't say that all damage to the environment can or should be fixed this way.
They think that some damage to the environment is a normal and healthy trade-off
between making goods and services for people and protecting the environment.
● Using terms like "optimal pollution," they explain that some damage to the environment
isn't caused by a market that isn't working right, but by a market that is working right.
● They think that "acceptable" amounts of damage to the environment should be decided
by a free market that is self-correcting so that damage to the environment, while not
eliminated, is cut down.
● Some critics of the environment have come to the conclusion that the real economic
force behind the damage to the environment is not a market that doesn't work or the lack
of markets, but rather markets that work too well.
 Failure To Have Markets

● In his story "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garret Hardin gave a famous explanation of
the "missing market" problem (1968).
● Hardin says that a group of herders who raise sheep on a common pasture can
rationally figure out that adding another sheep without property or grazing rights will
always make them richer.
● The problem, of course, is that what makes sense for one person is bad for the group as
a whole because the extra sheep overgraze and destroy the commons.
● The point of Hardin's lesson is that individual and group rationality are not the same
when it comes to using shared resources like the oceans, the air, groundwater, and even
oil pools deep underground. According to this point of view, most of the major
environmental threats come from the fact that markets don't have clear property rights
and responsibilities.
● The "tragedy of the commons," like the other seven driving forces, makes us think
deeply about the kind of world we are making for our children and grandchildren.
● Hardin's widely accepted thesis is backed up by contradictory facts, which is surprising.
Studies in anthropology, human ecology, and political economy show that communal
property has often been managed in a sustainable way for hundreds of years through
cultural practises and complex community institutions for self-regulation.
● Even the mediaeval commons in England, which Hardin uses as an example, have been
found to be much more stable from an ecological point of view than the gap between
individual and group rationality would suggest.
● Indigenous people who were left to their own devices came up with many good ways to
control who can use a commons and protect the environment and other services it
provides. In the growing literature on common property resources, there are a lot of
examples from fisheries, forests, grazing lands, water resources, and wildlife.
● But it's also clear that the cultural practises and community-based institutions that used
to help protect these resources are now falling apart because of cultural homogenization
and development pressures from the outside.
● More and more, common property is managed by distant bureaucracies of nation-states
or, even worse, is left open to everyone. So, Hardin's argument, like Malthus's about
population, might turn out to be wrong in the short term but right in the long run.
● Another part of the missing market problem is that market-based problems are not being
fixed by market-based solutions.
● African elephants are killed for their ivory, for example, which is a sad example of how
the laws of supply and demand work too well to protect wildlife. Even though there is a
thriving black market for ivory, elephants are treated as common property. As a result,
their numbers have dropped by more than 50 percent in just the last ten years.
● In many parts of Africa, it is clear that the government's rules about poaching have not
worked to protect the elephant population.
● A poacher can make in one night what a new wildlife ranger makes in a year, which
helps explain why some rangers turn to poaching to make a living.
● As a solution to the problem, some economists have suggested making a special market
where local African villagers could share ownership rights over elephants.
● Based on conservation management principles, the villagers would be able to cut down
the herd up to a certain harvest limit. Their harvest rights could only go up if the number
of animals in the herd went up. So, the local people would have a financial interest in
keeping elephants alive.
● One economist said, "It would be easier to stop poaching because poachers would
become a threat to the local community, not just a threat to a faraway national
government that doesn't inspire much loyalty."
● Both the failure of markets and the lack of markets have become powerful explanations
for many of the problems our planet is facing, especially among economists and people
who practise Western capitalism.
● The only people who don't agree with these explanations are economists and people
who know about cultures and traditions outside of the West.
● For many people who don't like how much emphasis is put on market structures or the
lack of them, the failure of modern political institutions and policies to show ecological
wisdom and foresight, which is a failure of human governance, is a preferred cause of
environmental destruction.
● Critics of market ideology tend to agree that markets and technology should mostly be
used as tools to reach goals that are mostly decided by democratic processes. This point
of view deserves careful thought.
● But we won't treat failures of governance as another driving force in our model. Instead,
we'll treat them as a result or sign of the values and behaviours that the model already
captures.
 Conclusion

● Together, the eight driving forces in this chapter are responsible for most of the damage
and decline in the environment that can be traced back to people.
● Some generalisations can be made about how key factors affect each other.
● First, it's important to stress how important population growth is as a major cause of
environmental problems.
● No matter what happens to reduce or reverse the effects of anthropocentrism,
contempocentrism, technology, poverty, wealth, market failure, or the lack of markets,
population growth seems to be the biggest threat to the planet's ecology.
● "No matter what your cause is, it's a lost cause without population control," Paul Ehrlich
and others have said.
● About 260,000 people are being born into the world every day, and more than 200,000 of
them are in developing countries. Mathematically, there is no way to argue against the
need to stop exponential growth in the number of people.
● But there are good reasons to wonder if policies to control the number of people should
be our top priority.
● Rapid population growth is mostly caused by poverty, bad education, women's low
status, and changes in technology.
● Even more fundamentally, it has to do with how people use their basic human-centered
and cultural values to figure out where they belong in nature.
● The best way to deal with the population problem depends a lot on how you see people.
● Deep ecologists think that the best way to stop population growth is for people to change
their values or adopt new "paradigms" that make people feel more connected to nature
and to future generations.
● For the economist, the only real solution is to come up with incentive structures that
appeal to each person's own self-interest while also influencing family planning decisions
that are in the best interest of the group as a whole.
● For the modern technologist, the answer lies in cheap, effective, and easy-to-distribute
birth control technology, along with education programmes to implement population
control and the right technologies for energy, food production, and transportation to keep
its benefits going.
● For many humanists, the answer is to work to reduce poverty and get rid of the bad
effects that racism, sexism, and illiteracy have on world birth rates.
● The main way that the humanists are very different from the deep ecologists is that the
value changes they support rarely include an end to anthropocentrism in its
species-defined (as opposed to gender-defined) context.
● Deep ecologists, economists, technologists, and humanists have different ideas about
how to respond to environmental threats. However, they might be able to agree that
solving global environmental problems will require action on many different fronts, using
a variety of strategies and approaches.
● Education must be at the top of this list. Education is important for the environment in
and of itself, but it has been largely ignored when it comes to "ecological literacy" (Orr,
1992).
● Unfortunately, a lot of what passes for institutionalised education is focused on forms of
rationality that strengthen and keep alive anthropocentrism, contempocentrism, and
other values that are at the root of our looming environmental crisis.
● We need education that starts with young children and teaches them about the
environment in a real way.
● One of the most important things that ecological education teaches is that knowledge
based on understanding how things are connected and how they affect each other is
better than knowledge based on reductionism.
● Classifying the things that hurt the environment is not nearly as helpful as understanding
how they work together as a system.
● Since each of the driving forces listed in this chapter is both a cause and an effect of one
or more of the other driving forces, there is no one point of view or single-cause theory
that can be used to solve problems.
● If policymakers try to put driving forces in order of how important they are to the
environment, they may make bad decisions.
● To model how the environment is being destroyed in a way that is both dynamic and
multidimensional, you need circular paths and feedback mechanisms.
● A good modeller will know, for example, that poverty can be both a cause and a result of
rapid population growth, which can be both a cause and a result of environmental
decline and the new poverty it causes.
● In other words, a driving force can cause changes that affect how it acts in the future.
● Policymakers need to understand how the parts of the model work together, not just how
each part works on its own, if they want to protect the environment around the world.
● If we really want to understand how these interactions work, we will have to bring the
model down from the clouds and use it to solve current problems in international
environmental management.
● By testing the model's ability to explain a certain environmental problem, we can learn
more about its strengths and weaknesses.
● In the next chapter, the model is used to talk about greenhouse warming, which is one of
the most important and controversial environmental issues right now.
● As we'll see, this is a debate that takes place in a strange place where science and
politics meet.
● Even though our conceptual model does a good job of explaining climate change, we will
see that it needs more frameworks to explain how the mixing of science and politics
affects how environmental knowledge is turned into power.