(Matthew Paterson) Understanding Global Environmen (BookFi)
(Matthew Paterson) Understanding Global Environmen (BookFi)
Environmental Politics
Domination, Accumulation, Resistance
Matthew Paterson
Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Also by Matthew Paterson
Matthew Paterson
Lecturer in International Relations
Keele University
Staffordshire
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 11
The realist and liberal global environmental change
research agenda 12
The causes of global environmental change in
realist and liberal IR theory 23
Towards a structural account of
global environmental change 29
Conclusion 33
Projects of domination 66
Development and the origins of sea defences 74
Structuring environmental decision-making 77
Conclusions 94
5 Car Trouble 95
Introduction 95
Autohegemony 99
v
vi Contents
Notes 162
Bibliography 175
Index 196
Preface
vii
viii Preface
ix
x Acknowledgements
1
2 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
one of collective action. Specific research questions then flow from this
which abound in the literature: the relative/absolute gains debate; the
role of international institutions; the value of concentrations of power;
the role of various groups (policy entrepreneurs, NGOs, scientists, and
so on) in affecting the possibilities of cooperation. The immediate
focus on UNCED has the effect of narrowing the terms of debate in
ways which, I hope to show, are politically dangerous. As Doran (1993)
quotes Guy Debord in opening his analysis of UNCED: ‘The spectacle
is the guardian of sleep.’ To focus attention on the world’s largest-ever
diplomatic gathering is to focus on the spectacular, thus dulling the
senses of observers to the political problems and dynamics such an
event in name exists to discuss.
The last in this list of research questions, on the role of NGOs, could
be seen to broaden the discussion away from a state-centric perspec-
tive. Certainly, in the work of some, it does (for instance, Princen and
Finger, 1994; Wapner, 1996). But such groups are only usually consid-
ered in relation to the way they affect interstate collaboration (for
example, Conca, 1995). The fundamental (yet largely unacknowledged,
and certainly unexamined) commitments in this understanding of GEP
are of an interstate understanding of global politics, of a liberal under-
standing of political economy, of the neutrality of science. So both
social movements and their transformative potential, and transnational
capital and its structural power, are reduced to ‘NGOs’ and their impacts
on governments in particular contexts. Similarly, science, perhaps the
ultimate rationalising discursive force of modernity, is reduced to the
activities of scientists and research managers, ‘epistemic communities’,
in relation to discrete problems of environmental change.
Not only is this way of framing what GEP is and how we should
understand it very narrow in its construction, it also sets up the ques-
tion in such a way so that only certain answers are permitted. If we ask
how states collaborate to resolve environmental problems, then we are
effectively precluded from answering that states are themselves (or
alternatively, the states system is itself, through generating certain
practices on the part of states) prime environmental destroyers. There
is no space for such a view to be held. There are, however, many work-
ing within this tradition who do suggest that states are environmental
degraders. But the contradiction between this view and the focus on
interstate cooperation to resolve environmental degradation is not
followed through.
Fundamentally, this framing is an attempt to depoliticise GEP. By con-
structing GEP in the language of collective action, it invokes a set of
Introduction 3
debates and literature (that is, rational choice and game theory) which
represent political phenomena as technical ones (Paterson, 1995). It is
depoliticising in the sense that it abstracts from questions of power,
and it attempts (though it fails, as such attempts necessarily do) to
exclude normative questions from the field of study.
From the point of view of the argument I develop in this book, per-
haps the core failing of this way of framing GEP is to exclude the ques-
tion of why global environmental change occurs in the first place.
There is an implicit (and occasionally explicit) answer to this question.
This answer is that global environmental change occurs as a result
either of the ‘tragedy of the commons [sic]’, or of simply a set of dis-
parate and discrete trends (which therefore require no explanation), as
I show in detail in Chapter 2.
Yet an answer to this question is clearly logically prior to the question
of how societies respond to such change. Only if it can be established
that the central dynamic underlying global environmental change is in
fact an interstate version of the tragedy of the commons, does it make
sense to start asking how states attempt to mitigate this tragedy.
I would argue that there are three primary questions which should
be taken as central to the study of GEP.2 These questions concern:
What are the interstate tragedy discrete trends capital systems of domination of
causes of GEC? of the commons (e.g. population, technology) accumulation domination nature
Winners and losers? Ad hoc. No resource conflicts, The poor swamp the highly unequal non-human
systematic pattern depends on power rich – ‘overpopulation’ nature loses
struggle
Due to unequal because elites
exchange/economic are able to shield
exploitation themselves
What responses? Build international Environmental world government overthrow capitalism grassroots resistance to create
institutions security or ‘lifeboat ethics’ decentralised egalitarian self-reliant
communities
Key writers Keohane, Young, Haas Homer-Dixon Ophuls, Hardin, Heilbroner Trainer, Gorz Bookchin, Shiva, Mellor Naess
Introduction
This chapter examines the research agenda of liberal and realist IR the-
orists in studying global environmental change. My first aim here
is simply to outline the analyses they make of, on the one hand, inter-
national environmental regimes and, on the other, environmental
security. I return to the question of political responses in particular
in Chapter 7 where I will revisit these arguments and assess their
value given my argument about the origins of global environmental
change. In this chapter my concerns are more modest: to provide an
account of the questions asked, assumptions made and themes devel-
oped by the majority of writers in IR who investigate global environ-
mental change.
After such an exegesis, I attempt to show how mainstream
approaches within IR to global environmental change exclude ques-
tions concerning the causes of global environmental change. This is
not a huge claim, since most writers in these traditions would perhaps
explicitly suggest that such questions are not part of their domain. But
it remains nevertheless an important part of my task in the book as a
whole. My aim is effectively to show that while they exclude this ques-
tion from their field of enquiry they necessarily have an implicit
assumption about what the causes of global environmental change are.
In later chapters I argue that the implicit assumptions they hold con-
cerning these causes are implausible. Here I merely wish to establish
what their assumptions are. I suggest that they assume that the origins
of global environmental change are in either (a) an interstate ‘tragedy
of the commons’, and/or (b) a set of secular trends which are treated as
exogenous to any conceptual or theoretical enquiry.
11
12 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Liberal institutionalism
The liberal institutionalist research agenda concerning global environ-
mental change has focused primarily on accounting for the emergence
of international environmental regimes. This focus has been the prod-
uct of a shift in liberal thought in International Relations from the end
of the 1970s onwards from the pluralist focus on a multiplicity of
actors in world politics, the decreasing utility of physical force, and so
on, back towards a state-centric analysis of global politics. This vision is
thus much closer to the position of realism, especially given the more
or less simultaneous structural turn taken by some realists, associated
in particular with Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979). As a
consequence of this theoretical shift, the ‘problem’ for liberal institu-
tionalists in terms of transnational problems is almost necessarily a
question of explaining collective action. Since global politics is under-
stood as international relations, as a realm of sovereign states interacting
in an anarchic setting, any social or political problems which transcend
state boundaries are necessarily understood as collective action prob-
lems, or alternatively, as problems concerning the provision of public
goods. Such goods, characterised in technical language by ‘jointness of
supply’ (so that, for example, no country can single-handedly provide
a stable climate globally) and ‘non-excludability of benefits’ (no coun-
try can insulate itself from the impacts of climate change, or make sure
that only it benefits from a stable climate), must be resolved through
collaboration. International regimes have been the descriptive device
on which explanations of such collaboration have been centred.
The literature on international regimes, however, did not emerge pri-
marily in order to explain international environmental politics from a
liberal institutionalist position. Mostly, it emerged to explain patterns
of interstate interaction on the global economy (see, for instance, many
of the chapters in Krasner, 1983). Occasionally it was used to explain
security regimes (for example, Jervis, 1983). Krasner’s definition of an
international regime has become ubiquitous, but is perhaps worth
repeating here. Krasner defines a regime as a ‘set of explicit or implicit
principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which
actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’
(1983a, p. 2). Thus the first point to note about regime analysis is that
regimes are not the same as specific agreements; nor are they synony-
mous with particular organisations. Regimes are usually regarded as a
Realism, Liberalism and the Origins 13
subset of institutions – while the latter are broad in scope and content,
regimes are narrower, confined to particular issues (‘a given area of
international relations’) (Young, 1989, p. 13). Thus it is possible to
have regimes where there are no written agreements through which
they can be defined, yet ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making
procedures’ can be identified which make up the regime. And as insti-
tutions, they are not to be treated as the same thing as organisations
(Young, 1989, p. 32; 1994, p. 2).
Stokke suggests that the focus of regime analysis has been on four
sets of questions (1997, pp. 32–5). The first of these concerns how
regimes are maintained. Struck by the resilience of regimes even after
the conditions which led to their establishment have waned (the clas-
sic example in the literature being the Bretton Woods regime), regimes
scholars have investigated the reasons for such durability. The second
concerns how regimes are formed, the various factors which might
influence the possibility of establishing regimes (such factors as are, for
example, emphasised by Young, or Hahn and Richards: see below). The
third question concerns the consequences of particular regimes. Stokke
is not entirely explicit about what he takes this to mean, but it appears
to be about ‘the ability of states to coordinate behavior in mutually
beneficial ways’ (1997, p. 33). This is perhaps only slightly different
from his fourth question, whether regimes are effective. This final cate-
gory of questions is for Stokke the most complex, as effectiveness
proves rather difficult to define. It can be taken to mean the resolution
of the problem for which the regime was established. Alternatively, it
can be interpreted in terms of its effects on actors’ behaviour, an inter-
pretation which again has a number of ways of being put into practice.
Each of these approaches has problems, primarily of a methodological
nature (for example, how does one judge whether a state’s behaviour
has changed because of the operation of a particular regime?). It also
raises perhaps deeper political questions concerning the way in which
‘effectiveness’ in the literature defers to natural scientists as definers of
environmental quality, and to states as the only institutions capable of
delivering environmental quality (Paterson, 1995, pp. 213–14).1
Stokke also suggests, following a distinction made originally by
Keohane (1989, ch. 7), that each of these questions has been
approached from broadly two perspectives – what Stokke calls ‘individ-
ualist’ and ‘sociological’ respectively, although Keohane referred to
them as ‘rationalist’ and ‘reflectivist’. The first of these suggests that
regimes can best be analysed in terms of the strategic interaction of
instrumentally calculating agents. It is thus amenable to analysis using
14 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Discrete trends
Keohane, Haas and Levy give a set of ‘factors’ which produce environ-
mental degradation. ‘Many environmental threats are caused by such
factors as population pressures, unequal resource demands, and
reliance on fossil fuel and chemical products which degrade the envi-
ronment’ (1993, p. 7). In their conclusion to the same book, they again
give a similar list. ‘Each set of issues has been considered separately,
independently of possible underlying causes such as population
growth, patterns of consumer demand, and practices of modern indus-
trial production’ (Levy, Keohane and Haas, 1993, p. 423). Keohane, in a
more general piece on liberal institutionalist theory, explicitly suggests
that ‘increased economic and ecological interdependence’ are the
result of ‘secular trends’ (1993, p. 285). While the context of this point
is to provide a contrast with realist post-Cold War expectations con-
cerning the demise of institutions, in particular the EU, it also shows
how such things are regarded as having their origins outside the funda-
mental operation of the states system.
Lorraine Elliott gives a list couched in similar terms, albeit in less
‘value-free’ language. She writes, ‘Extensive and excessive resources use,
energy-inefficient lifestyles, industrialisation and the pursuit of eco-
nomic growth are inextricably linked to environmental degradation’
(1998, p. 1). In more generic language, Sandler writes that environ-
mental degradation is the result of ‘the actions of individuals to keep
warm, to feed themselves, and to produce goods and services’, which
will be exacerbated as a result of population growth in developing
countries (1997, p. 2).
Oran Young, despite his extensive writings on the subject, man-
ages to stay remarkably clear of explicit discussions of the causes of
Realism, Liberalism and the Origins 27
Institutions
social relations,
beliefs, and
preferences
Available Ecosystem
physical vulnerability
resources
Conclusion
This chapter has shown how the two dominant perspectives in IR gen-
erate particular research agendas for studying global environmental
change. Both start by asking how the international system responds to
such change. Both assume that the system is best characterised as sov-
ereign states interacting in a condition of anarchy, but have different
assumptions concerning the consequences of the assumption of anar-
chy. These different assumptions lead to different research agendas, lib-
eral institutionalists focusing on international environmental regimes,
while realists focus on the potential of global environmental change to
cause international conflict.
34 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
I have also tried to show that while they by and large eschew direct
discussion of the causes of environmental change, they nevertheless
contain in their work assumptions concerning such causes. These are
that environmental change is the result of the overexploitation of
commons, of resources owned by no one, and of a set of discrete trends
generating such change. In some formulations (Vogler, 1992; Litfin,
1993) these explanations are combined. The use of the former explana-
tion is often inconsistent, in that the way in which Hardin’s original
formulation emphasising that the lack of property rights over resources
is a cause of environmental change is ignored – the ‘tragedy of the
commons’ simply emerges as an explanation for why cooperation is
difficult to achieve. But ignoring this part of the implication of using a
‘commons’ metaphor creates an inconsistency. The second explanation
begs the question: what underlies trends such as population or techno-
logical change? In later chapters, I will try to illustrate how trends
which generate global environmental change are best understood as
integral to the reproduction of the major power structures of world
politics. In the following chapter I will outline a perspective on global
environmental politics which takes this argument seriously. Here I
have shown that while some authors have tried to develop such a
structural understanding (including Kurian, Bartlett and Malik, 1995;
Hempel, 1996; Elliott, 1998), they have only gone half-way, with
contradictory results.
3
The ‘normal and mundane
practices of modernity’:
Global Power Structures and
the Environment1
35
36 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Ecocentrism4
For Eckersley (1992) ecocentrism has a number of central features.
Firstly, it involves some empirical claims. These involve a view of the
world as composed of interrelations rather than individual entities
(1992, p. 49). All beings are fundamentally ‘embedded in ecological
relationships’ (p. 53). Consequently, there is no convincing criteria
which can be used to make hard and fast ethical distinctions between
humans and non-humans (pp. 49–51).
Global Power Structures and the Environment 37
Limits to growth
Although the idea clearly has a long lineage, the immediate impetus for
arguments concerning limits to growth came from an influential, con-
troversial and very well-known book published in 1972, The Limits to
Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). The argument there was that exponen-
tial economic and population growth of human societies was producing
an interrelated series of crises. This exponential growth was producing a
situation where the world was rapidly running out of resources to feed
people or to provide raw material for continued industrial growth
(exceeding carrying capacity and productive capacity), and simultaneously
exceeding the absorptive capacity of the environment to assimilate the
waste products of industrial production (Dobson, 1990, p. 15; Meadows
et al., 1972). The team of researchers led by Donella Meadows produced
their arguments based on computer simulations of the trajectory of
industrial societies. They predicted that at current rates of growth,
many raw materials would rapidly run out, pollution would quickly
exceed the absorptive capacity of the environment, and human soci-
eties would experience ‘overshoot and collapse’ some time before 2100.
The details of their predictions have been fairly easily refuted.6
However, Greens have taken their central conclusion – that infinite
38 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
The traditional goals of the modern state – ‘to defend borders and
promote industrial development’ [Princen, Finger and Manno, 1995,
p. 50] – are arguably in friction with the quest for ecological
integrity. But no a priori reason exists for saying that environmental
protection cannot become one of the state’s primary objectives, and
there is evidence that it is doing just that.
(1997, p. 195)
By contrast, there are very good a priori reasons for claiming that
‘environmental protection cannot become one of the state’s primary
objectives’, and to the extent that ‘it is doing just that’, such a goal is
in fundamental conflict with other state imperatives. Unlike those
imperatives, however, sustainability cannot become a structural require-
ment for the reproduction of state rule, and thus the system must be
transformed.
Capitalism
As with the states system, reaching a working definition of capitalism
is far from an uncontroversial exercise. I start however with what I take
to be a fairly conventional account derived from (although not used
exclusively by) Marxism. Capitalism is a social system which is based
46 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
wages to try to get round this problem. Henry Ford’s five-dollar day is
often cited as important here.
But perhaps this inequality was simply displaced to global levels. The
industrialisation of the West was made possible by the extraction of
cheap raw materials using cheap labour from colonies, and the contin-
ued growth of the world economy is still dependent on the ability to
have sharply differing standards of living across the globe (and
arguably within particular societies as well), for example, to be able to
exploit cheap labour for particular parts of production.
Such global inequalities have clearly produced ecological conse-
quences. The clearest examples of these concern the relationship
between the debt crisis, structural adjustment, and deforestation. The
export dependence of many developing countries has meant that once
they incurred large debts to fund industrialisation programmes in the
late 1970s, and were unable to repay them following the oil price-hike
of 1979 and the interest-rate rises of the early 1980s, they turned to
increasing exports of their natural resources to increase their earnings
to pay off these debts. Such a process was intensified by IMF- and
World Bank-imposed policy changes known collectively as structural
adjustment. Even without the debt crisis and its political responses,
however, the organisation of the global economy has meant that many
countries depend heavily on using their natural resources to be able to
earn foreign currency and participate in the global economy. A particu-
larly stark example of this concerns toxic wastes, where what Lawrence
Summers, a World Bank (and later Clinton administration) official,
termed the ‘underpolluted’ nature of many developing countries in
economic terms has meant that their poverty has induced them to take
in dangerous wastes which richer countries export. Within capitalism,
such a development is not just inevitable, but rational. As Summers
pointed out, ‘The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic
waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable’ (as cited in Karliner,
1997, p. 148).
Combined, such arguments suggest that a capitalist society necessar-
ily generates global environmental change. Its basic productive drive
leads it to generate an ever-intensified throughput of resources. It also
continually must increase the range of things brought into the realm
of market exchanges in order to generate new sources of accumulation,
and treats such things as commodities, as objects for human instrumen-
tal use. As firms are forced into ‘cut-throat’, ‘grow or die’ strategies,
profit margins become the ultimate source of value and all other values,
including ecological ones, must be subordinated to that imperative.
50 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Patriarchy
The fourth structure is that of patriarchal power. Here, the argument is
slightly different, since no one (explicitly) argues that patriarchy is
good for the environment. It is more that mainstream views would be
blind to the impact of patriarchal forms of power on global environ-
mental problems. However, a full understanding of the politics of these
problems must recognise the gendered distribution of power, resources
and identity.
This distribution both generates global environmental problems and
constrains the ability of proposals to respond to environmental prob-
lems. Three strands (at least) to an argument connecting patriarchy to
the generation of environmental change can perhaps be identified.
Firstly, central to modern masculine identity is individualism – the
notion that humans are fundamentally independent individuals, and
should strive to avoid dependence on others. Modern political ideas of
52 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
work on the most fertile land, and that they can participate in the cash
economy. Women are predominantly left with responsibility for subsis-
tence agriculture, on the poorer land, as well as with responsibility for
other subsistence activities such as collection of water and wood. Thus
they bear the brunt of environmental problems such as desertification
and deforestation, having to travel progressively longer distances to meet
subsistence needs (Sontheimer, 1991; Dankelman and Davidson, 1988).
The operation of modern patriarchy is, of course, inextricably bound
up with the emergence of modern science, capitalism and the state sys-
tem. Modern science, at its inception with people such as Bacon and
Descartes, had the defining of women as nature and therefore as objects,
as one of its core projects (e.g. Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 1993). The
emergence of the contract as one of the legal foundations of capitalism
and the state in the seventeenth century also had redefining the subor-
dination of women as one of its core aims (Pateman, 1988). Capitalism
continues to be dependent on super-exploitation of women’s labour in
reproducing the labour power of male workers, as well as in child-rearing
(Mellor, 1992, pp. 208–12; Henderson, 1978; Mies, 1986; Waring, 1988).
These structures and their effects clearly interact with each other. Some
interactions were intimated above, although these connections have
not been developed. The argument here is that these structures interact
primarily in mutually supportive ways. They reinforce each other in
ways which mean that those with power within them are able to main-
tain their power, and also in ways which exacerbate the effect of each
on global environmental politics. Indeed, in a pure sense, it is perhaps
misleading to say that they interact with each other, since it would be
more accurate to say that they are mutually constitutive of each other –
they are each other’s condition of possibility. In other words, it is an
abstraction to talk of the states system without reference to its patriar-
chal, capitalist, scientised form. However, it is a necessary abstraction
which for our purposes here we have to live with.
The closest conception to the interpretation advanced here is the
position developed by Alan Carter (1993). Carter outlines an ‘environ-
mentally hazardous dynamic’. This is one where:
Against development17
Writers such as Wolfgang Sachs do not believe the term development
can be retrieved.18 They are highly critical of the term ‘sustainable
development’, in widespread use in environmentalist circles, suggest-
ing that this merely serves to make it easier for ruling elites to coopt
environmentalism. Sachs writes, illustrating this argument well:
The Ecologist (1993) suggests that one of the central features of devel-
opment is enclosure, or the turning of common spaces into private
property. This was central to modernising agriculture in England before
the industrial revolution, and they suggest it is a central part of devel-
opment practice throughout the world at the present. It is important to
development because it is an act of appropriation which makes com-
modity production possible. Commons were organised largely (but not
exclusively) outside the market, making efficient accumulation diffi-
cult. Enclosure makes this possible. However, one effect of enclosure is
to take decision-making away from those who depend on local
resources, which in turn makes environmental degradation more likely,
as well as being socially divisive. This argument is closely tied to the
argument in favour of the commons, explored below.
As a consequence of enclosure, access to resources is denied, which
concentrates resources and power in the hands of fewer people.
Development is thus necessarily inegalitarian, since it depends on con-
tinuous appropriation. Inequality has been one of the central ideologi-
cal arguments governments have often made for economic growth;
that under conditions of inequality, growth enables the worst-off to get
better-off even while inequality is not reduced.20 An anti-ecological
dynamic is therefore built into development. This also illustrates how
the global-ecology writers make close links between the damaging
human effects of development and the damaging ecological effects of
development.
Development therefore entrenches the power of the already power-
ful. This can be seen on the global level – in the global economy in
which the North dominates – and can insulate itself from (many)
socio-ecological effects of development, such as through exporting
dirty industries to developing countries. It can also be seen at the
micro-level, for example in the ‘Green revolution’ in the 1970s, which
concentrated power and land in the hands of the rich farmers, at the
expense of the poor who could not afford the fertilisers and pesticides
to support the new strains of crops (e.g. Trainer, 1985, pp. 139– 41;
George, 1977).
A central part of this concentration of power is to do with knowl-
edge. The appropriation of spaces previously held in common empowers
‘experts’ and denies indigenous knowledges as it transforms those spaces
into objects for commodity production. This means that the tech-
niques involved in attempts to manage those spaces are turned over
to scientists, and other development experts (The Ecologist, 1993,
pp. 67–70; see also Gorz, 1994).
58 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Conclusions
The common land has been divided into two categories – one
category consists of lands on which both grazing and leaf collection
is banned and the second category consists of lands on which graz-
ing is permitted but leaf collection or harming trees is banned. The
first category of land is lush green and full of grass which villagers
can cut only once a year. … Even during the unprecedented drought
of 1987, Seed was able to harvest 80 bullock cartloads of grass
from this parch. The grass was distributed equitably amongst all
households.
(Ibid., pp. 190 –1; see also Agarwal and Narain, 1989, p. 23)
The idea of the commons is clearly very consistent with the arguments
from Green political theory about the necessity of decentralisation of
power, and grassroots democracy. It shows how small-scale democratic
communities are the most likely to produce sustainable practices
within the limits set by a finite planet.
Simultaneously, however, the focus on the commons helps to start
thinking about the second question outlined at the beginning of this
section. It suggests, along with other arguments presented here, that
the sites where global environmental politics can be pursued are less in
the halls of the UN in Geneva or New York than at the sites where
commons regimes, and more broadly small-scale local communities,
are being destroyed by development or being consciously brought into
being. Such a politics is therefore necessarily one of resistance, where
resistance is understood as simultaneously reconstructive (not simply
preventing ‘bad’ things happening, but active attempts to produce a
‘better’ future). I will revisit and develop this theme in Chapter 7. Now
I turn to some empirical cases where I try to illustrate the argument
developed so far. The next three chapters hope to show firstly that the
global power structures outlined in this chapter systematically produce
global environmental change; secondly, that the ways in which partic-
ular political institutions are embedded in broader structures compli-
cates their efforts to respond to such change; and thirdly, that
the sites of global environmental politics should be understood as sites
of resistance.
4
Space, Domination, Development:
Sea Defences and the Structuring of
Environmental Decision-Making
Projects of domination
66
Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences 67
The image of sea defences is perhaps one of the clearest images of the
human domination of nature. The physical control of one of nature’s
most powerful forces, water, exemplifies the project of mastery in sym-
bolic terms as much as anything. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the story
of Canute, King of England in 1016–35, who (at least in popular
mythology) tried to force the sea to recede by virtue of his monarchical
authority and literal command, has also served as a metaphor for the
ways that defences against the sea have symbolically been bound up
with twin projects of domination: of nature by humans, and of space
by increasingly territorially defined political units, culminating in mod-
ern nation-states. These discourses are also closely interconnected with
processes of economic development and capital accumulation. Often,
as I will show regarding Eastbourne, the direct impetus for building the
first sea defences was protection of property. But the need to protect
property in this way was produced by development as it pushed people
closer to the shore. In Eastbourne’s case this was because of the devel-
opment of an urban elite in Victorian Britain which made possible the
thriving south-coast resorts, of which Eastbourne was one among
many, as those elites escaped London in the summer for fresh sea air.
However, the rhetoric of sea defences in Eastbourne remains bound up
with military metaphors where the sea is equated with human enemies.
And the modern concept of property which made possible the notion
that there was a thing to be defended (property being the thing itself,
rather than what one had in the thing), is directly related to territorial
and sovereign notions of the nation-state; both modern notions of pri-
vate property and state sovereignty coevolved as mutually reinforcing
concepts based on absolute, exclusionary rights (Burch, 1994).
The symbolic aspects of sea defences directly concern the twin projects
of the domination of nature and ongoing nation-building. In Eastbourne,
as elsewhere, sea defences show how these two projects are intertwined
with each other. The starkest aspect of this is in the use of military
metaphors. The very term ‘sea defences’ is of course fundamentally a
military construction, connoting defences against an enemy with agency.
Historical accounts of sea defences in Eastbourne are explicit in this
regard. For example:
The Second World War saw the erection of the most long lasting
and systematic set of defences against invasion by the enemy which
have ever been seen. Unfortunately, that other enemy, the sea, had
to be left to do its worst.
(East Sussex County Planning Department, 1977, p. 3)
68 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Wright also invokes such metaphors. ‘The sea was regarded with some
distrust at the beginning of the second half of the last century’, he
writes (1902, p. 163). The ‘encroachments’ of the sea in this period
involved many instances where houses were ‘demolished by the
inroads of the invader’ (ibid.). The builder of much of the late nine-
teenth century defences, a Mr Berry, is regarded in heroic terms ‘as a
pioneer of sea-wall defence’ (ibid., p. 164). In more recent times, public
representation of the sea-defences question continues to be couched
in military terms, with headlines such as ‘Battle against the Sea’
(Eastbourne Gazette, 28 November 1984). Potent symbols, playing on
the historical role of the south coast in East Sussex in the last invasion
(by a human army) of England, are sometimes used. Consider this line
in the middle of a general discussion of the replacement of sea
defences east of Eastbourne: ‘When William the Conqueror set foot on
English soil in 1066, Pevensey was on a peninsula and the sea extended
as far inland as modern Hailsham’ (Bexhill Observer, 12 April 1996).
When the contemporary system in the UK for organising sea defences
was instituted, in the Coast Protection Act 1949, one of the intentions
was to enable the reclamation of land for agricultural purposes. It was
connected closely to the strategy of food self-sufficiency adopted during
and after the Second World War, to limit the UK’s vulnerability (as an
island) during wartime and thus contribute directly to the UK’s capacity
to wage war. The possibility of adopting a ‘managed realignment’ policy
(see below) has been premised on the ‘lessened need for agricultural
self-sufficiency’, as such understandings of the UK’s strategic needs have
waned (Agriculture Committee, 1998a, p. xxxviii).
Metaphors of military battle and nation-building are prevalent in
human attempts to deal with some of the problems caused by water.
The classic case is the Netherlands. Simon Schama (1987) shows
how the defence against the sea was intimately connected with the
construction of a nation. During the late medieval period, the
Netherlands experienced some of its biggest floods. And the processes
of national resistance against Spain and against the sea were closely
linked in the popular imagination during the struggle for indepen-
dence in the late sixteenth century (ibid., p. 37). After independence,
nation-building was associated with claiming new land from the sea.
Land reclamation was always, according to Schama, associated by the
Dutch with the construction of a national identity. Dutch identity was
formed by a ‘trial of faith by adversity’, in which saving land from
water was one of the central elements. Their faith in God was to be
tested by trials, in particular imposed by the sea, but on the other
Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences 69
hand, their capacity to reclaim land from the sea was given scriptural
significance, indicating a special favour with God. Schama cites
Andries Vierlingh, a sixteenth-century hydraulic engineer: ‘The mak-
ing of new land belongs to God alone … for he gives to some people
the wit and the strength to do it’ (Schama, 1987, p. 44). 1 Thus a
Christian nation could be legitimised and forged. In modern times,
such a linkage is still present. ‘“In many ways, our dikes are part of our
identity”, said Hans Scholten of the Dutch water authorities. “They’re
part of being a Dutchman – not just our salvation, but our pride”’
(Guardian, 2 February 1995, p. 9).
John McPhee’s (1989) account of the control of the Mississippi also
tells a dramatic story of how understandings of human dealings with
water are directly understood in military terms. His story focuses on
the controls upstream of New Orleans designed to prevent the main
course of the river from moving West, as it would if uncontrolled by
humans. The story is an epic tale of human domination of nature (one
of the people he talks to calls it the ‘third greatest arrogance’ of
humans in their dealings with nature [1989, p. 99]), in which nature is
directly understood as an enemy. It is also one where human dealings
with nature are directly militarised; responsibility for controlling the
course of the Mississippi along its length rests with the US Army Corps
of Engineers.2
‘Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state’, he
writes (ibid., p. 95). Much like East Sussex County Council Planning
Department (1977, see more below), the Army lockmaster in charge of
the river control schemes, understands the river as an enemy:
This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could
cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce …
We are fighting Mother Nature … It’s a battle we have to fight day by
day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on it.
(Rabalais, quoted in McPhee, 1989, p. 95)
If the river is the enemy, then the control structure, known as Old River
Control, is ‘a good soldier’, in the words of an Army promotion film (ibid.,
p. 100). And floods, which threaten to destroy the control structures,
must be the battles. ‘In 1983 came the third-greatest flood of the twenti-
eth century – a narrow but decisive victory for the Corps’ (ibid., p. 141).
The military metaphors central to understandings of sea defences are
best understood in terms of nation-building. The construction of a
nation under modernity has been a physical manifestation of national
70 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
and this further delayed the process of getting their wood FSC
approved. So the engineers went back to the Council, who reversed
their commitment to use only FSC-approved timber, in meetings in
November 1995 and January 1996, arguing by now, however, that
DTL’s Green Charter was adequate.9
political and economic elites effectively mask the origins and con-
sequences of the catastrophic risk and dangers of late industrialization’
(Goldblatt, 1996, p. 166).
One of the consequences of this is that much of the conflict over
political decisions with respect to the environment will concern
notions of responsibility and agency. One aspect of this can be seen in
representations of structure and agency in this regard. While Channel
4’s narrative was structural, prevalent stories in Eastbourne itself were
agency-oriented. From FoE, the dominant construction was that
Eastbourne Borough Council was destroying a rainforest; their leaflet
asking people to write to the Council protesting had the slogan ‘Visit
the Rainforest … come to Eastbourne’. Indeed, Simon Counsell, when
questioned on this, responded neatly that ‘if the Council’s hands really
were tied, it’s amazing to see the efforts they went to to tie their hands
up’ (interview, 29 November 1996).10 This is consistent with Beck’s
argument that what risk under complexity does is effectively make it
too difficult to attribute blame or causality, allowing agents to evade
responsibility for their actions.
But the dominant public discourse in the local media was also
agency-oriented, concerning the Council’s obligations both to pro-
tect Eastbourne from the sea, but also not to damage the global
environment. Engineers from the Council were perhaps more equivo-
cal in this regard; on the one hand, they ardently argued that they
had made the right decision and when asked about constraints produc-
ing their decision, denied there were any significant ones (apart
from the statutory obligation to provide sea defences), but on the
other hand, their arguments were clearly embedded in an engineering
discourse, such that the ‘logic’ of the engineering requirements for
the groynes predetermined a necessary outcome (involving the use
of greenheart). The structure determining their decision was what
the engineering required; their agency was that they were good
engineers.11
My concern here is to situate this particular, local political decision
within broader, globalised contexts. Such structural and discursive
contexts helped to produce this particular decision. Interpreting the
event in this way can therefore tell us much about the dynamics
of global environmental politics and the possibilities of understanding
such politics in terms which recognise the need for broad social
change, rather than ones which prescribe institutional and policy
change, as is currently hegemonic within academic debates surround-
ing global environmental politics.
82 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Local economies
Eastbourne’s economy, and therefore the local state’s finances, are
characterised and structured by a heavy reliance on tourism. The
Council spent £2.8m in 1996–97 on tourism-related activities or 24.9
per cent of total spending, indicating the substantial importance which
tourism has for the Council (Eastbourne Borough Council, 1996–97).
Consideration of aesthetics and how the sea-defence structure would
affect the local tourist industry were therefore important in influencing
the Council’s decision.
Aesthetics were clearly important in the rejection of a number of
options originally put forward by Posford Duvivier. Three options
(rock groynes, simply improving the sea wall [and abandoning groynes
altogether], and concrete groynes) were rejected either directly, because
of ‘loss of beach for tourism’ (in the case of the improved sea-wall
option), or indirectly, because of ‘substantial visual impact’, which it is
reasonable to assume is a euphemism for worries about loss of tourist
revenue, not least since the seafront in the town centre is predomi-
nantly hotels (Eastbourne Borough Council, n.d, p. 3).12 In the
Council’s formal deliberations, of the three options outlined as most
favourable – timber, rock, or concrete groynes – the Council’s Strategic
and Economic Development Sub-committee rejected concrete as ‘it was
considered that option 4B, concrete bastion groynes, would detract
from the ambiance of Eastbourne seafront to an unacceptable degree’
(Eastbourne Borough Council, 1992, p. 365).
There was a certain amount of slippage here which helped the
Council and its contractors narrow down the options from rock or tim-
ber, to timber only. In formal documents, only concrete is eliminated
because of aesthetic or tourist-related reasons. Rock is later rejected for
‘technical and financial reasons’ (Eastbourne Borough Council, 1993,
p. 743).13 However, in other representations, both concrete and rock
are lumped together as being rejected for this reason. This occurs in the
Council’s information pack, cited above, where there is also a photo-
graph of rock groynes in Arun looking dingy and with a sign saying
‘Caution, keep off rocks, no climbing, no diving, no swimming’, and
a caption reading ‘Rock groynes in Eastbourne would be larger (than
wood or than Arun’s?) and subject to weed growth’ (Eastbourne
Borough Council, n.d, p. 3). It also occurred in the Channel 4 News
item, where it was suggested that one of the reasons why the Council
chose timber over stone or concrete was the fact that it was, in Channel
4’s words, ‘more attractive to tourists’ (Channel 4 News, 11 April
1995).
Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences 83
Such a shift only makes sense in the context of a pervasive local under-
standing of the importance of tourism to Eastbourne’s economy, and
an economistic understanding of what is important in determining
policy; that the Council’s policies should be determined primarily by
considerations of the local economy.16
Global economies
The episode was also economically a global one. At a perhaps banal
level, the emergence of a genuinely global economy makes using wood
84 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
imported from over 4000 miles away possible. Greenheart has been
used in sea-defence structures in the UK since the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Eastbourne’s previous groynes, however, were built of oak, of local
source. Wood has been imported into Britain from South America since
the early period of European colonisation, and a trade existed by the
early sixteenth century (see, for example, Dean, 1987). But the scale
and purposes of the trade were both much smaller and primarily for
luxury, aristocratic uses. It is only from the late nineteenth century and
into the twentieth century, with its progressive and radical reductions
in the costs of transportation, that a large-scale trade for such purposes
as sea defences becomes possible.
One of the specific characteristics of globalisation is that it is an
intensification of what Giddens refers to as one of the central features
of modernity; ‘time–space distanciation’ (Giddens, 1985; 1990), or what
Harvey (1990) refers to, evoking different imagery, as time–space
compression. Modernity ‘increasingly tears space away from place by
fostering relations between absent others, locationally distant from
any given situation of face-to-face interaction’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 19,
quoted in Saurin, 1994, p. 47). Saurin continues:
be if locally grown wood were used). They have thus had to rely on
evaluating the competing claims of environmentalists and the Council.
Council and Posford Duvivier engineers visited DTL’s operations in
Guyana and claimed to verify DTL’s claims at first sight (e.g. in Posford
Duvivier, 1994), but their capacity to experience directly other parts of
the globe was not available to all participants in the process. At the
public meeting in March 1995, Friends of the Earth also produced two
people who gave eyewitness accounts of destruction of rainforests in
Guyana, claiming to contradict directly the Council’s representatives’
first-hand experience of DTL’s operations, focusing in particular on
whether DTL was in fact practising the principles contained in its
Green Charter. Protestors also made much of the fact that the trip by
Posford Duvivier and Council engineers was paid for by DTL and by
Aitken and Howard, the company which would import the timber
from Guyana, and that all information produced by Posford Duvivier
concerning rates of regrowth of greenheart were themselves supplied to
Posford Duvivier by DTL itself, rather than by independent research.17
But even then, the public was left with a heavily mediated account of
processes of environmental change on the other side of the globe but
in which they were heavily implicated. They were left largely with a
choice of which first-hand account, which expert, to trust. And this
choice appears contradictory; we expect the ‘compression of the globe’
to make such distanced consequences more visible, but in practice they
become more distant.
At the other end of the commodity chain, the timber producers in
Guyana are inserted into similar global economic networks in different
ways, which structured their actions in ways which are perhaps more
familiar to students of international environmental politics. As
reported by Channel 4 News, there was a ‘dramatic increase in logging
in Guyana during the last five years’, as the Guyanan government
issued large concessions to timber companies in ‘desperate attempts to
pay its international debts’ (Channel 4 News, 11 April 1995).18 The
influence of the debt crisis on deforestation and other environmental
problems is well documented (e.g. George, 1992). George shows corre-
lations can be observed between those countries with high levels of
indebtedness and with high rates of deforestation. Debt and the struc-
tural adjustment programmes imposed by the World Bank and IMF to
respond to debt crises create a situation whereby countries become
increasingly desperate to find sources of export earnings, and thus cre-
ate significant incentives for companies and individuals to engage
either in logging or in forest-clearance for other land uses, mainly
86 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
They go as far as to claim that ‘DTL not only needs to ensure the forest
is well managed to reassure Western countries, but also to ensure the
future livelihood of the local people. Hence it is not in Guyana’s or
DTL’s own interests to strip the forest for a short term profit’ (ibid.).
The Council’s engineers used a similar argument. In a report to the
Council’s Environment Committee, they quoted the Overseas Devel-
opment Administration’s Forestry Strategy thus:
being acted upon. Colchester also shows persuasively that the priority
of the government of Guyana is clearly to maximise logging to earn
foreign exchange.19
The general conclusion to be drawn from most literature on defor-
estation is that the scenario painted by Posford Duvivier and
Eastbourne Borough Council in relation to the impact of their scheme
on forests in Guyana is in theory possible, but in practice unlikely. The
patterns of forces underlying deforestation are too complex and convo-
luted to allow simple statements about the intentions of the company
involved, as the effects of these statements of intent will be mediated by
government policies (particularly concerning road-building and incen-
tives to convert land to agricultural uses), land ownership patterns,
global constraints on the country.20 All sorts of unintended conse-
quences can be expected which make the impact of logging operations
more widely felt than the benign picture painted in Eastbourne.
However, whether or not one accepts this critique of the neoliberal
argument concerning the causes of deforestation and appropriate
responses to it, it remains the case that such neoliberal arguments liter-
ally only make sense within a capitalist economy. The assumption that
unless the forest is ‘sustainably’ forested the land will be converted to
other uses assumes a set of capitalist imperatives underlying deforesta-
tion, along rational choice lines. People are assumed to be impelled
by motives of self-interest (defined in terms of increasing monetary
wealth). Alternative lifeworlds are simply assumed to be impossible
even to conceive.
countries and companies, the Council and its consultants, and the
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, were all happy that cutting
could continue until scientific evidence suggested otherwise. Science,
having reduced the world to a series of experiments, meant that such
experiments were legitimate until proved otherwise. Arguing on this
basis, environmentalists arguably had little chance of persuading deci-
sion-makers who depend heavily on their own officers for their pri-
mary source of advice, and necessarily build up relations of trust with
those officers. It is structurally difficult for outsiders to overturn deci-
sions essentially already taken. As Smith points out, when environ-
mentalists have to ‘play the game’, while they may contribute to
improving the environment in some ways, they inevitably ‘play’ by the
rules which ‘requires the representation of the issues within a form
that is acceptable, and understandable, within the structure of the deci-
sion-making process itself. This is presented primarily in terms of
expert knowledge … ’ (Smith, 1996, p. 37). Thus environmentalists help
to embed processes of rationalisation of the environment which, in
Smith’s terms, are ‘at the heart of the problem’ (ibid., p. 38).
Conclusions
This chapter has tried to show how decisions concerning the environ-
ment are always also about the reproduction of various forms of social
power. The decisions in Eastbourne reflect the way that various actors
are embedded in local and global economic systems which structure
their actions heavily. Broader discursive shifts concerning sea defences
do not undermine the way in which such projects have always been
about nation-building; rather, they reflect a shift in the content of the
nations being built. The scientised nature of environmental decision-
making acts to confer authority on certain actors and exclude or
marginalise others.
The cumulative effect of the structuring of environmental decision-
making is that political institutions should be regarded as fundamen-
tally ecologically problematic. Their overriding priorities are to engage
in practices which are unsustainable in ecological terms. This therefore
undermines the assumptions of liberal institutionalists that such insti-
tutions are neutral with respect to environmental change. I move now
to examine the dynamics of broader social practices which generate
such environmental change.
5
Car Trouble
Introduction
An advert for the Nissan Primera in 1996–97 has a man get up in the
morning, dress, leave the house, drive to work, get to work, which turns
out to be back at home. As Eagar puts it ‘A smug yuppy in bed says “I
think I’ll drive to work today, Mrs Jones.” His wife replies: “Fine,
Mr Jones.” … You see, they work from home, but he likes the car so
much, this Nissan Primera, that he still commutes’ (Eagar, 1997). The
punch line of the ad is ‘It’s a driver’s car, so drive it’. When asked the rea-
son for such a slogan, the writer of the ad, David Woods, said that ‘“We
were looking for an unnecessary reason to drive a car”’ (quoted in ibid.).
At the same time, British politics produced a most unlikely hero,
known as Swampy. For a few weeks in January and February of 1997,
Swampy was one of the most talked-about figures in British political
debate, and his popularity endured throughout early 1997. Swampy
was one of five protestors against a road-building scheme on the A30
in Devon who managed to get themselves down an extensive network
of tunnels they and others had constructed when their protest camp,
Fairmile, was evicted. Swampy was the last of the tunnelling protestors
to be pulled out of the ground by ‘rescuers’ employed by the bailiffs to
clear the way for the road, seven days after the five had gone under-
ground. Although a certain proportion of the media construction was
negative, portraying the protestors as ‘evil scum’, unemployed outsider
activists rejecting the values of ‘normal’ people,1 what was interesting
about this case was that in most of the British press and TV discourse,
the coverage was largely positive. The predominant image was
constructed though discourses of youthful active heroic idealism, and
the protestors were normalised through various means. This mostly
95
96 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
The ad for the Renault Laguna, running in 1998, has well known
(socio)biologist Steve Jones delivering a lecture on evolution and nat-
ural selection. In the background earlier models of Renault cars ‘evolve’
into the current Laguna model. Jones intones that evolution is ‘not just
a theory, it is going on all around us’. The appropriation of nature as
evolution serves to represent the car in question as being refined and
improved progressively, adapting to its environment as would an
organism (or gene). At the same time, this is a classic example of the
processes discussed by Haraway (1991) whereby social norms are read
on to nature, and then back on to society as naturalising justifications
for social practices. Discourses of evolution and natural selection read
modernist notions of competition, selection, adaptation and most
importantly progress on to nature, and then back, in this case, on to
car design. Such a move renders car-centred development ‘natural’, and
by implication irrational, if not literally impossible, to resist.
In a different vein, Vauxhall ran a TV ad as part of their campaign for
the Vectra in 1998, which had as its general slogan ‘for the corners of
the earth’, focusing on how well the Vectra takes corners while imply-
ing how the owner will want to drive everywhere in it. In one of this
series, the advert starts in a road protest which aims to prevent a forest
being cut down to make way for a road. The roadworks would have
straightened out a road which currently wound around the forest. The
protest succeeds in preventing the road being built and then one of the
protestors (conspicuously in short hair, chinos and polo shirt, as
opposed to dreadlocks, combat trousers, etc.) leaves the group and the
ad cuts to him driving around the forest on the old road, happy with
the winding road because of how well his Vectra ‘corners’. To top this
audacious appropriation of the road protests with a two fingered
salute, the driver passes one of his fellow ex-protestors who is now
hitchhiking, and shouts out of his window ‘Get a job’.
Wernick (1991) suggests that the direct dealing with ways in which
the car’s relationship with the environment has been problematic is
one of the two themes which have been central in the ways that car
advertising has changed since the early 1970s (the other concerns the
family, gender and patriarchy). Car ads have increasingly had to take
into account the environment and critiques of techno-optimism more
generally, and have tended to reappropriate nature for the purposes of
the car (Wernick, 1991, pp. 77–9).
One final point which Wernick makes is that another strategy in
dealing with these challenges to car culture is to use nostalgia, which
he suggests has become a prominent theme in car advertising. He
Car Trouble 99
Autohegemony6
Overy also tends to naturalise the growth of the car, arguing that ‘the
reception and rapid evolution of the motor vehicle … needs little expla-
nation’ (1990, p. 57). The way writers often discuss the (usually
American) ‘love affair’ with the car reinforces such naturalistic notions
(e.g. Davies, 1975, p. 7; Flink, 1975, ch. 1).
These accounts of the rise of the car are misleading and highly
ahistorical. Much of the rise of the car can be explained in terms of
political-economic forces (narrowly understood). For example, cars
have widely been seen to have played a fundamental part in the pro-
motion of economic growth in the twentieth century. Proponents and
social critics alike argue that the car has been central to promoting
growth. This has been firstly because of the way in which investment
in the car industry directly stimulated a whole host of other industries
(petrochemicals, steel, engineering, road-building) and thus the econ-
omy as a whole. Secondly, cars enabled a faster and more flexible
means of distributing goods through the economy than previous
transport modes, thus accelerating growth. Finally, the car industry
innovated extensively in production techniques, producing the
broad political-economic shift known often as ‘Fordism’, which when
adopted throughout the economy, produced substantial increases in
industrial productivity. This has therefore been central in legitimising
the car’s expansion, enabling the car to become perhaps the symbol of
progress for most of the twentieth century.7
Given the state’s structural role in promoting accumulation, it is no
surprise that once the car’s potential in accelerating accumulation was
realised, states began to promote the car vigorously. The car industry
offered significant improvements in the capability to commodify
means of mobility, and at the same time accelerate the movement of
goods and people in the economy. Promoting the car through hidden
and not-so-hidden means has helped it to become the dominant force
Car Trouble 101
where the ‘only truly profound pleasure [is] that of keeping on the
move’ (ibid., p. 273, quoting Baudrillard, 1988, pp. 52–3).
But the importance of the way cars could be linked to freedom
through notions of speed and mobility has also had a context in the
way that industrial societies have become increasingly regimented and
bureaucratised to serve the needs of industrial production. ‘More than
any other consumer good the motor car provided fantasies of status,
freedom and escape from the constraints of a highly disciplined urban,
industrial order’ (McShane, 1994, p. 148; also Ling, 1990, pp. 4 –5).
This fantasy was particularly important since even in the US, the most
motorised country in the world, no one was actually able to commute
or even, apart from a very tiny number, travel far (on holiday, for
instance), until after the Second World War (ibid., pp. 125–7).
The association of cars with speed, and with speed as their main
legitimising motif, is widely recognised in contemporary accounts
(e.g. Ross, 1995, p. 21; McShane, 1994, p. 114; Wolf, 1996, ch. 13). This
can perhaps be best seen in the way that many critiques of the car
focus on the notion of speed and mobility. They focus on the fact that
in many cities, average speeds are now often no faster than they were
before the car’s emergence, with London averaging 7 mph, Tokyo 12
mph, and Paris 17 mph in the rush hour (Wajcman, 1991, p. 127). The
critiques in popular accounts, such as Ben Elton’s Gridlock (1991) focus,
among other things, on the irony and frustration produced by the car.
The myth of the car is centred on speed and mobility, but since it
simultaneously produces congestion on a scale never previously seen,
it is simple (at least in Elton’s fictional account) for political elites to
manipulate this and produce a total Gridlock of London, in order to
justify further road-building.9
A classic critique of this is in Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity (1974).
Illich calculated that:
the typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to
his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks
it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to
meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls,
insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking
hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.
(ibid., p. 30)
On this basis, Wolf suggests that speed is a myth, not in the sense of an
organising social motif, but as something false and to be debunked. He
Car Trouble 105
calculates that taking all these factors which Illich discusses, the ‘real’
speed of car transport averages at approximately 20 kmh, about the
same speed travelled by a ‘very fit cyclist’ (1996, p. 187).
The modernisation of which the car was the ultimate expression is
therefore deeply embedded in individual identities. However, the way
this is embedded in those identities seems to me not best expressed in
Gorz’s terms. For Gorz (1980) ideology is used in the sense of some-
thing which masks reality. All that is required is to unmask this ideo-
logical cloak and social change becomes possible. Similarly, Wolf (1996)
and Gartman (1994) both treat the way that cars are embedded in iden-
tities as primarily a psychological reaction to alienation in the capitalist
labour process; a means by which capitalism displaces the alienation it
inevitably produces. The car for Wolf is then a ‘substitute satisfaction’
(ibid., p. 192), or for Gartman, an ‘ersatz satisfaction’ for the degrada-
tion of work under Fordist mass production (1994, p. 12). But the
notion of false consciousness which underlies these interpretations is
deeply problematic. While not wishing to dispute the ‘facts’ they pre-
sent (Gorz’s argument about the impossibility of everyone owning a
car, Wolf’s concerning the myth of speed, both drawing on Illich), it
seems to me more useful to take seriously the reality and depth of the
identities produced around the car. They should not be dismissed as
false consciousness, but should be understood as deeply embedded. As
Gartman argues, ‘rather than see the needs appealed to by consumer
goods as false needs engineered by the culture industry, my formula-
tion conceptualizes them as true needs for self-determining activity
channelled by class conflict into the only path compatible with capital-
ism – commodity consumption’ (1994, p. 11). However, Gartman still
relies on viewing mass consumption, notably of the car, as a displace-
ment from the alienation produced by capitalist mass production.
Berman again seems to me to understand the relationship and
contradiction here better;
This strategy [of the promoters of the ‘expressway world’] was effec-
tive because, in fact, the vast majority of modern men and women do
not want to resist modernity: they feel its excitement and believe in
its promise, even when they find themselves in its way.
(1982, p. 313)
the time will not be far when our own workers will buy automobiles
from us. … I’m not saying our workers will … govern the state. No,
we can leave such ravings to the European socialists. But our work-
ers will buy automobiles.
(Quoted in Wolf, 1996, p. 72)
So the car has been sold as a democratising force. Of course, this was
also used by non-democratic political leaders. Hitler in particular pro-
moted the ideology of mass motorisation (no actual German civilians
drove Volksmobiles until after the Second World War [Wolf, 1996,
pp. 98–9]) and the first large-scale motorway construction projects. In
Car Trouble 107
Despite what has been argued above, cars do not feature much in dis-
cussions of global environmental politics within International
Relations (or in politics more widely). One reason for this is the focus
within IR on particular environmental problems, abstracting from the
broad interconnections between these problems. Another, as argued
throughout this book, is the exclusion of questions about underlying
causes of environmental change.
Where cars might appear is as particular objects of state or interstate
regulation with respect to global warming or some other problem. But
the silence is therefore more interesting given that in policy debates
112 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Political contestation over the car is not new. Far from being the
unproblematic technology which all people until the early 1990s have
viewed as the promoter of human liberty and welfare, it has often been
seen in a damaging light both in environmental and social terms.
Before the late 1980s/early 1990s, two principal periods can be identi-
fied when car culture came under particular challenge. The first is at
the beginning of the car’s existence. Initially, there were sometimes
severe restrictions to be overcome. Culturally, a classic expression of
opposition to the car is often taken to be Toad of Toad Hall in Kenneth
Grahame’s Wind in the Willows (1908):
it is the motor car that overturns innocent stability, the golden age;
aboard a car Toad becomes ‘the terror, the traffic-queller, before
whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and ever-
lasting night’.14
(Overy, 1990, p. 73, quoting from Grahame, 1908)
romance for many Americans, and had become part of the problem
facing American society (Davies, 1975; Gordon, 1991, p. 14).16
According to Berman (1982), the Federal Highway Program which
the 1956 Act produced was a development of Robert Moses’ grand
schemes for reconstructing New York. Berman describes in great detail
the destruction of the Bronx by the Cross-Bronx Expressway con-
structed by Moses, and the resistance to that construction/destruction.
Later resistance to expressway building in New York, and to the use of
Highway Trust money for expressway construction in other US cities
was more successful, however (Berman, 1982, p. 326; Davies, 1975).
This resistance to road-building and the further development of a
car-dependent economy was to a great extent local in character, in
recognition of the way that such expressway construction necessarily
destroyed city neighbourhoods, and in many ways was designed delib-
erately to do so (e.g. Davies, 1975). But they also took on an environ-
mental character in the more narrow understanding of that term, in
terms of an emerging understanding of the car’s role in resource con-
sumption and pollution, prevalent themes in that wave of environ-
mental concern. For Wernick, this context of resistance to the car’s
dominance on social/environmental grounds explains shifts in the
way car culture was promoted through advertising (1991, p. 78), as
discussed above.
Such resistance to car culture, both in the 1960s and 1970s and again
in the early 1990s, mostly took the form of resistance to road-building
schemes. This is partly because this is where the destructive aspects of
car culture are most visible, and also appear preventable. The road
is clearly the condition of possibility of car driving. But once built,
preventing car use is clearly much more difficult.
I began this chapter with a discussion of public discourse surround-
ing recent road protests in the UK. The point there was to illustrate the
context within which contemporary promoters of car culture have had
to operate. But those road protests also tell us something about the
nature of environmental politics. For mainstream approaches to global
environmental politics, with their exclusive focus on inter-state
processes, such phenomena are simply absent, irrelevant. But if cars are
such an important component not only of the production of global
environmental change, but also of the social, economic and political
processes which make up state power and thus make inter-state politics
possible, then such an absence simply serves to reinforce the way that
the states system, capitalism, patriarchy, and so on, are naturalised and
made unchallengeable.
Car Trouble 115
significant. The state has to go to war on behalf of the car culture and a
multi-national company’ ( Jake, protestor at Pollok protest camp,
quoted in Seel, 1997, p. 122). On the other hand, the state in the UK
has brought in legislation specifically designed to respond to and crack
down on the new forms of protest involved in the roads protests, in
sections of the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 which introduced new
restrictions on ‘trespassatory assemblies’ and a new offence of ‘aggra-
vated trespass’ (Doherty, 1997; McKay, 1996; Seel, 1997, p. 110).
Resistance to the car (and by extension, to road-building) thus has
often been hampered by the car’s association as one of the ultimate
symbols of modernity and modernisation. To oppose it is thus to
oppose modernity itself (Berman, 1982, p. 294). As Berman writes:
the spread of cars rapidly transformed the entire ecology of life, cre-
ating massive, dependent road-systems and transformed cities; while
at the individual level, it accelerated private and occupational
mobility, altering our whole sense of time and space.
(Wernick, 1991, p. 71)
Introduction: McLibel
118
Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology 119
in order to score rhetorical points with the judge. For example, Love
seems genuinely not to understand Steel and Morris, and the thou-
sands of others like them. The trial was clearly about the ‘truth’; that is,
of course, the essence of trials in general, but of a libel trial in particu-
lar, where it is the veracity (as well as the damaging nature) of people’s
claims which are at stake. The point of the trial both for Mike Love and
for Dave Morris was the ‘truth’. ‘ “People are entitled to exercise their
freedom of speech and to demonstrate peacefully within the law,” says
Mike Love. “But we believe that those taking part should look at the
facts and be aware of the truth.” ’ But for Morris, McDonald’s has
forced its way into the public consciousness and yet is trying to sup-
press dissenting voices and alternative views of what it really repre-
sents. … The truth is always worth defending’ (quoted in Carey, 1995).
But the point is that the incommensurability in the exchange
described above between the arguments of the defendants and Love
shows that ‘the truth’ is discourse-dependent. What constitutes ‘bad
wages’ is not something which can be decided outside of discourse.
Discursive frames produce the criteria by which the ‘badness’ of wages
are to be judged. So for Preston, these are clearly produced by market
forces and minimal regulation by governments, while for Steel and
Morris, alternative notions of the good life are invoked. Clearly then,
this is ultimately a struggle over what the good life should be, as much
as over the ‘truth’ or otherwise of particular allegations made by the
‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’ leaflet. McDonald’s represents corpo-
rate capitalism, whose discursive frames produce a notion that ‘bad
wages’ (or many of the other criteria) are simply those which are
illegal.2 For the defendants, bad wages are endemic under capital-
ism where corporations, aided by states, are able to exploit workers
through low wages.
The conflict over McDonald’s in the McLibel case was therefore simul-
taneously symbolic and material. It was symbolic in the sense that Steel
and Morris clearly saw McDonald’s as symbolic of a broader global cor-
porate capitalist order, and as one of its biggest representatives (and par-
ticularly big in how it is directly present in many people’s daily lives).
But that symbolic struggle was simultaneously material, in that what
was at issue were the practices of a large corporation (and by extension
the broader system of which it is a representative) in relation to how it
uses and transforms both people and the rest of the natural world.
Drawing on this argument about the nature of McLibel, this chapter
argues that the practices exemplified by McDonald’s are best interpreted
as ecologically problematic, not solely in terms of particular instances
Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology 123
(Ritzer, 1996, pp. 38–41). Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald’s empire,
was widely regarded as obsessed with efficiency.3 In Kroc’s words, ‘I put
the hamburger on the assembly line’ (quoted by Boyle, AP journalist,
cited in Love, 1987, p. 211).
The second aspect of rationalisation concerns the increasing quan-
tification of economic and other transactions; in this case, the inc-
reasingly detailed specifications concerning the size of a burger
(1.6 ounces) and a bun, the amount of onions, the length of grilling
time, the length of frying time for french fries, and so on. It also
involves quantifying the time taken to serve a customer, so that success
and quality becomes defined in terms of how many customers are
served within three minutes of entering the restaurant (Ritzer, 1996,
pp. 60–4).
The third concerns standardisation of the production process across
all McDonald’s outlets, so that customers know they will get exactly
the same product wherever they buy their Big Mac. Ritzer quotes
Leidner’s book Fast Food, Fast Talk: the Routinization of Everyday Life:
‘The heart of McDonald’s success is its uniformity and predictabil-
ity … [its] relentless standardization’ (Leidner, 1993, quoted in Ritzer,
1996, p. 80). Predictability occurs in the replication of settings, in the
scripted interaction between McDonald’s workers and customers, in
predictable employee behaviour, in predictable products (Ritzer, 1996,
pp. 80–2). The predictability in the final category is as total as techni-
cally possible: hamburgers are regulated in their fat content to high
degrees of standardisation; settings and frying times for french fries
are standardised and mechanised; types of potatoes, methods of freez-
ing, and so on, are all ruthlessly specified in the 600-page McDonald’s
operations manual.
Finally, increasing use of robots and technologies of surveillance
enable both direct increases in efficiency, calculability and predictabil-
ity, and also control of both workers and customers (ibid., ch. 6).
This is the area where Ritzer suggests McDonald’s have not fully ratio-
nalised their operations, but this is in part because he takes technology
to mean machinery; with a broader notion of technology, the opera-
tions specified in the operations manual become instruments of
employee control.
Ritzer then discusses the ‘irrationality of rational systems’; that sys-
tems organised along such rationalised lines produce outcomes which
are in practice irrational. More precisely, they are unreasonable in the
sense that they are dehumanising. Ritzer suggests this irrationality has
a number of features. He highlights some health and environmental
Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology 125
and large a matter of social ontology; the critique pertains to our own
social position and perspective. The critique then becomes simply what
McDonald’s means for us, and we are left without the possibility of
judging that critique. Parker concedes the lack of a firm basis for judg-
ing McDonald’s (1998, p. 15), as does Alfino, who writes ‘Postmoderns
are entitled to feel all the moral concern they want, but without a nor-
mative theory (and a prior commitment to some metaphysic of morals)
they have no rational basis for adjudicating Ronald McDonald’s crimes
against humanity’ (Alfino, 1998, p. 186).
The danger here is that a false opposition is set up; any judgemental
discussion of particular consumption practices becomes charged with
authoritarianism and elitism. But this argument is dangerously close
to neoliberal economic arguments about consumer sovereignty and
rational agency (as exemplified in relation to Ritzer by Taylor, Smith
and Lyon (1998). A rejection of Marxist notions of false consciousness
or needs which underpins Frankfurt School arguments about mass con-
sumption should not lead, either implicitly or explicitly, to an argu-
ment that mass consumption is unproblematic and can in some
versions of the argument become a mode of liberation. It is still possi-
ble to argue that particular consumption practices and the identities
constructed around them are produced through strategies of power,
rather than simply existing as individually decided preferences, let
alone as practices of resistance. As Kellner states:
Mac, have. The ecologist identifies the Big Mac as a product symbolic
of the high-intensity consumption which is undermining the sustain-
ability of the planet’s ecosystems. As shown above in relation to the
McLibel case, the focus on McDonald’s is clearly symbolic; the com-
pany stands as a symbol for all which Steel, Morris, and many others,
regard as a set of social forces to be resisted. But much of that resis-
tance is based on a notion that the practices exemplified are unsustain-
able; that is to say, impossible in the long term. Unsustainability
implies that a practice is impossible in the long run. It seems reason-
able to suppose that a condition of possibility of placing any other sort
of meaning on a Big Mac is that such an object can be presumed to
exist, along with people to eat it.
An ecological critique of this sort challenges the predominant
tendency within studies of consumption. It suggests that the material-
ecological basis of consumption practices is something which necessarily
places limits on the symbolic possibilities of objects of consumption.
In the language of ecological economists:
Meat
Resource intensity
The prosperity in industrialised countries which makes extensive meat-
eating possible facilitates a substantially more intensive form of food
production than can be sustained in non-industrialised societies. And
it is commonplace to observe that meat production is significantly
more resource-intensive than vegetable food-production. Adams notes
that Plato argued that because meat production required large amounts
of pasture land, it would lead to wars as neighbouring states competed
over land for that pasture (1990, p. 115–16). She says that some femi-
nist writers, such as Gilman, in her utopian novel Herland, picked up
on Plato’s argument as a reason for making her utopia vegetarian.
Analyses of vegetarianism suggest that understandings of the ecology
of meat production and its over-consumption of land is one factor
which leads some to become vegetarian, although it is not as common
a reason as health or animal welfare/rights beliefs (Beardsworth and
Keil, 1992).
The ecological aspect of meat-consumption has two aspects. One
is simply that meat-consumption requires much more throughput
of resources than does a diet not involving meat. It is commonly
observed that it takes 16 lb of grain to produce 1 lb of beef (Moore
Lappé, 1982, p. 69). In the UK, 80 per cent of agricultural land is
devoted directly or indirectly to meat and dairy production (Spencer,
1993, p. 330). Seager is worth quoting at length on such resource use:
between 1960 and 1985, 40 per cent of all Central American rain-
forests were cleared to create pasture for beef cattle. … Cattle ranch-
ing is responsible for an estimated 85 per cent of topsoil erosion
in the US, and similar devastation in Australia and Canada. Within
the US, half of all water consumed is used to grow crops that are
fed to livestock; meat production requires at least 10 times more
water than grain production. More than 50 per cent of water
pollution in the US can be linked to wastes from the livestock indus-
try, including manure, eroded soil and synthetic pesticides. … Meat
134 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Now they decided to make speed the essence of their business. ‘Our
whole concept was based on speed, lower prices, and volume’, says
[Dick] McDonald. … ‘Customers weren’t demanding it, but our intui-
tion told us that they would like speed. Everything was moving
faster’.
(Love, 1987, p. 14)
The McDonald brothers thus called their assembly line system the
‘Speedy Service System’.
These intensified consequences in part relate to increased meat
consumption, and increasingly to transformed conditions of produc-
tion of meat. But they also relate to other aspects of environmental
change – increased use of non-reusable packaging, increased use of
energy as more food is refrigerated and transported over greater dis-
tances, increased monoculture in agriculture, coevolution with auto-
mobility and its consequences. The emergence of fast food restaurants
has therefore set in train a dynamic which intensifies the ecological
impacts of food consumption.
Fast-food restaurants are major consumers of the raw materials mak-
ing up most of the products they sell. McDonald’s alone is the biggest
consumer of meat and potatoes in many of the countries it operates
in, in the US consuming 600 million pounds of beef annually, and
136 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
7.5 per cent of the US’s total potato food crop (Love, 1987, p. 3). Love’s
eulogistic corporate history is revealing in this regard; presented in
terms of McDonald’s huge commercial success, Love shows how some
of the deepest consequences of that success are the ‘revolutionary
changes in meat and potato processing’ (ibid.):
the text do the ‘people and their agencies that push the process’
appear, and then by definition nowhere do the people and their agen-
cies who resist the process and argue for alternatives appear. Since resis-
tance is impossible, and Ritzer is not entirely clear that it is desirable,
his argument is that all that can be done is to take steps to ‘humanize a
McDonaldized society’ (ibid., pp. xx–xxi). As Rinehart (1998) argues,
concerning this conclusion, Ritzer thus views all agency in excessively
individualistic terms, neglecting to consider possibilities of collective
action to resist rationalisation.
Rather, McLibel and the argument above suggest that resistance to
McDonald’s and McDonaldisation is possible. On the one hand, such
resistance has clearly had effects in transforming some of the practices
of institutions like McDonald’s. Lawson (1992, pp. 85–6) shows how
McDonald’s has often taken the lead in responding to criticisms, for
example by reducing paper-use by switching to polystyrene packaging
in 1976, and then back to paper in 1990 because of ozone depletion
and landfill concerns, by increasing recycling, and by improved energy
management, involving a 45 per cent reduction in energy-use at a test
restaurant. At the same time, there is much ‘Greenwash’ and PR
spin put on such changes which overestimate their impact (Lawson,
1992, p. 84; Beder, 1997, p. 171). McDonald’s have performed such
Greenwash by ‘forming a partnership with the Environmental Defense
Fund’ (Beder, 1997, p. 132; Rowell, 1996, p. 109; Karliner, 1997,
p. 192). Such PR efforts are at times helped by academic apologists for
their operations, often in management or business studies. Lawson
claims, for example, with obvious ideological effect, that ‘the contribu-
tion which the fast-food industry can make towards mitigating the
effects of major environmental problems, such as the greenhouse
effect, acid rain and the erosion of the ozone layer is probably mini-
mal’ (1992, p. 184). As Belasco suggests in a different but related
context, ‘what was significant was that these campaigns [to persuade
people of companies’ green credentials] had to be waged at all. A more
secure establishment would have had to say nothing … persuasion (or
force) is needed only when authority breaks down’ (1989, p. 130).
But at the same time, that such authority breaks down is insufficient
as evidence that more far-reaching changes will (or even can) occur.
The analysis above suggests that the effects of resistance designed to
promote reform of particular practices by McDonald’s and similar
organisations is always likely to be only ameliorative. For it is the ratio-
nalisation which is at the heart of such operations which is at issue.
Resistance is better thought of as building alternative forms of food
140 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
In the previous four chapters I have tried to establish primarily that the
power structures of global politics, as outlined in Chapter 3, systemi-
cally generate global environmental change. But Lenin’s question,
‘What is to be done?’, remains. For mainstream writers on environ-
mental change in IR, the answer to this question is clear. State elites
should build stronger international institutions to address such change
more effectively than they have to date. Environmentalists should per-
suade and pressure those elites to build such institutions. Occasionally,
perhaps, environmentalists can participate directly in fulfilling gover-
nance functions themselves, but this is relatively marginal to the
central feature of global environmental politics, which is inter-
state management. My intention has been to destabilise the assump-
tions on which this normative vision of international environmental
politics rests. But there are questions of political action still to
be addressed. Two in particular are most relevant here. Firstly, if capi-
talist, statist, scientistic, patriarchal structures are intrinsically unsus-
tainable, what forms of political and social structures are consistent
with principles of sustainability (defined in terms of the argument of
Chapter 3 as those which do not require accumulation, and are not
based on modes of domination)? And secondly, what forms of political
action might help to move societies from ‘here’ to ‘there’ (or, as Mary
Mellor puts it [1995], emphasising Green localist concerns) from ‘there’
to ‘here’?
141
142 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
actors develop shared meanings and norms to deal with problems, and
locally embedded communities share knowledge and norms through
global networks. Lost here is a sense of who is involved in such
processes. Implicitly, it is actors in (global) civil society, but it is unclear
whether state and corporate actors are involved. If not, then how do
the governance mechanisms affect the practices of those actors? If they
are, then surely conceptualising the process as simply one of learning is
inadequate. Either way, then, environmental movements and their
allies in civil society in these networks are necessarily involved in some
form of struggle with state and corporate actors, as is indeed high-
lighted in Lipschutz’s empirical stories.
This point would be emphasised if we also bring in another consider-
ation which is missing from the otherwise very useful analyses of
Wapner and Lipschutz. As already alluded to in the discussion of
Wapner’s book, one absence is a sense of the substantive outcomes to
be produced or promoted by such emerging governing mechanisms.
There is a sense in both writers’ work that such outcomes are radically
different from those produced by prevailing political institutions
(growth, centralisation, globalisation, and so on). But if that is the case,
the likelihood of such governance being effective in helping to pro-
duce sustainable outcomes is dependent on the degree to which they
are successful in devising strategies which resist the dominant logics of
states, capital, big science, bureaucracy, etc. While learning processes
among networks are clearly important, and could extend to parts of
states and some corporate actors, it is unlikely that this will be suffi-
cient (at least if the structural argument I have offered throughout this
book is accepted). Such actors have entrenched reasons not to learn to
‘tread lightly on the earth’ (or whatever other catchphrase is used), but
rather have strong reasons to resist the emerging patterns of gover-
nance outlined by Wapner and Lipschutz. Indeed, they perhaps
have strong reasons to promote forms of global management which
Lipschutz suggests is unlikely to emerge (1997, p. 85), and perhaps are
already doing so, as emphasised by some writers on UNCED (Chatterjee
and Finger, 1994; Hildyard, 1993; Shiva, 1993; Paterson, 1996b).
analogy with the ‘rape script’: just as discourses of rape tend to render
women as powerless victims, which becomes self-fulfilling, discourses
of globalisation render societies as powerless to prevent the ‘penetration’
of global capital. Thus, globalisation should be understood as a ‘lan-
guage of domination, a tightly scripted narrative of differential power’
(Gibson-Graham, 1996, p. 120). Douglas is, in a similar vein, primarily
concerned with:
To fit the Earth conveniently into the modern mind, the latter has
shrunk it to a little blue bauble, a mere Christmas-tree ornament;
and invited modern men and women to forget how immense,
grand, unknown and mysterious it is’.
(Ibid., p. 278)
The political dilemma and the irony here is that the alternative to
global management efforts – that of political decentralization and
local control, which is often posited as the political alternative by
green theory – remains largely in thrall to the same limited political
imaginary of the domestic analogy, and avoids dealing with the hard
questions of coordination by wishing them away …
(1998b, p. 13)
156 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
The conflation here suggests that any argument for living in spatially
discrete places and communities must of necessity also involve an
argument that these ‘political containers’ or ‘local boxes’ must be sov-
ereign – they must regard themselves as having exclusive rights to
determine what goes on in that place. In my view, this is an implausi-
ble interpretation of most of the writers whom Kuehls, Dalby and
Stewart discuss. Localism need not be committed to a sovereign model
of politics even while it is committed to building communities which
have much more intense connections to particular places than do soci-
eties in modernity.
As Helleiner (1996) points out, such arguments perhaps miss
the meaning of the most popular of Green slogans, ‘Act Locally, Think
Globally’. Helleiner emphasises that the initial usage of that phrase by
Dubos10 was precisely to guard against parochial localism, by empha-
sising the way that local action is embedded in global modes of con-
sciousness and normative beliefs. In addition, as Esteva and Prakash
point out, it is precisely global proposals which are parochial:
1 For example, see Conca, Alberty and Dabelko (1995), Vogler (1995), Haas,
Keohane and Levy (1993), Bartlett, Kurian and Malik (1995), Elliott (1998),
Chatterjee and Finger (1994), Miller (1995), The Ecologist (1993). Choucri
(1993) achieves the same effect, as the foreword is written by Maurice
Strong, UNCED’s Secretary-General.
2 The formulation here is not intended to exclude the questions thrown up by
poststructuralist perspectives. Doran (1995) for example, argues that a critical
global environmental politics should be based on poststructuralism. For him,
the most pertinent questions are those of power/knowledge. I would argue that
my three questions can all be investigated through such a lens. But I would
want to make claims concerning the origins of global environmental change
central to a critical global environmental politics. Doran makes answers to
such questions a matter of rhetoric, not amenable to detailed explanation
(such a notion being overly modernist, I suspect). Thus while his normative
position is very close to my own, he has little time for, and few conceptual
tools for, an analysis of the origins of global environmental change.
3 For example Conca (1993), Dalby (1992), Doran (1995), Elliott (1998),
Kuehls (1996), Litfin (1994), Paterson (1995, 1996a), Runyan (1992), Saurin
(1994, 1996), Boardman (1997), Helleiner (1996), Hovden (1998), Laferriere
and Stoett (1999).
4 I develop this point further in Paterson (forthcoming a).
5 Saurin (1996, p. 85). I take issue with Saurin’s argument in one respect. He
suggests a classic Marxian focus on production relations. While I agree that
these are crucial, dynamics of consumption practices are also important, and
while it is clear that they are connected to production, I would argue they
are not simply epiphenomenal. For the case here, it is more that the direct
consumer is the ‘agent’ of environmental change than the direct producer
(Saurin, 1996, p. 87). I discuss questions of consumption in more detail in
Chapter 6.
1 Also on effectiveness, see Keohane, Haas and Levy (1993), Bernauer (1995),
or Victor et al. (1998).
2 For others who use this threefold typology of power, interests, and ideas, see,
for example, Rowlands (1995), albeit in a slightly modified form, Vogler
(1992), or Hansenclever, Mayer and Rittberger (1996).
162
Notes 163
18 For a selection of writings advancing arguments like the one discussed here,
see Sachs (1993b, 1992b), Escobar (1995), Esteva and Prakash (1997), Esteva
(1987), The Ecologist (1993), Shiva (1988), Trainer (1989), Apffel-Marglin
and Marglin (1990). For other discussions, see Hayward (1994, pp. 14 –16)
or Kuehls (1996, pp. 81–5).
19 For a critique of Brundtland along these lines, see Visvanathan (1991) or
Kuehls (1996, pp. 81–5).
20 This is not necessarily inconsistent with an argument that economic
growth (at least under capitalism) necessarily increases inequality.
Inequality increases while the poor are bought off through quantitative
increases in their own consumption, produced by growth in the system
as a whole.
21 Like many other Greens, she suggests that social justice, in the form of at
least a considerably more egalitarian world than that which currently exists,
is an integral part of ecocentric ethics.
22 Examples of this would be Ophuls (1977) and Hardin (1974).
23 There is an important, although never clearly defined, difference between
self-sufficient and self-reliant. The former implies that there should be no
trade or other exchange of material resources between communities, while
self-reliant is a less strong injunction: merely that communities should be
primarily only dependent on their own resources, using exchange with
other communities where they cannot produce particular items themselves.
24 Bioregionalists argue that ecological societies should be organised with
natural environmental features such as watersheds forming the boundaries
between communities.
25 The notion of subsidiarity is often used in Green discourse. It is not,
however, used in the way that many governments use it – to protect their
rights against those of supranational organisations (the classic case being
the UK government in relation to the EU). In the Green version, it has
radical implications for decentralisation of power to the local level, with
power only transferred to higher levels if deemed necessary – local levels
deciding what is necessary.
26 See also Wall (1994).
27 I discuss some objections to the ‘ecoanarchist’, and ‘decentralist’ position in
Paterson (1996c, 1999a). In particular, Goodin (1992) suggests that some
forms of global, authoritative institutions are necessary under any Green
scenario. He suggests this on game-theoretic grounds. His primary rationale is
that any possible future which we can envisage will involve communities
across the globe in ecological interdependencies, and therefore with the need
to cooperate with each other. Goodin, however, makes a misleading move
when he concludes that this will necessarily require authority to be located at
global levels. His game-theoretic models could lead equally to the conclusion
that only mechanisms to facilitate communication would be necessary,
which is something rather different from authoritative institutions.
28 See also The Ecologist (1993) for extended discussions of similar arguments.
29 It will be clear from what follows that this is a usage of commons which
renders the term ‘global commons’, in widespread use in mainstream envi-
ronmental discussions, to refer to problems such as global warming or
ozone depletion, nonsensical.
Notes 167
5 Car Trouble
1 The local Conservative MP, Adrian Rogers, advocated starving the protestors,
depriving them of air and water, and using CS gas on them, according to one
of the protestors’ father, Addrian Hutson (‘Letters’, The Guardian,
8 May 1997, p. 18).
2 For more details on the construction of Swampy and the other protestors on
the A30 protest in the UK press, see Paterson (forthcoming b).
3 When I gave a paper on this topic at Carleton University in April 1999, it
was written up (favourably) in the ‘Wheels’ section of the Ottawa Citizen, as
part of a regular column entitled ‘Clearing the Air’ (23 April 1999, C4).
4 Other car manufacturers have also espoused the joys of unnecessary car-
driving in their ads. VW, for example, in early 1999, has billboard ads for the
Bora, which says ‘Distant Relatives Beware’, and then has a slogan under the
VW logo and the name of the car, ‘Any Excuse’.
5 The force of this advert may have been helped by similar nostalgic construc-
tions of The Professionals by Comic Strip Productions, who wrote two spoofs
of the series (and whose member, Peter Richardson, directed the ad, see
Baird, 1998, p. 141), one in the mid-1980s, called The Bullshitters, and with a
follow-up produced in the early 1990s. The latter focused on the death of a
TV detective, and three different sets of TV detectives fighting over which
era’s style (from the flamboyant, crushed velvet-wearing late 1960s/early
1970s, through all-action mid-1970s [The Professionals/Bullshitters], to laconic,
austere mid-1980s [Spender]) in which to go about investigating the murder.
Perhaps importantly in terms of making the discursive link, the actor in the
advert is also in the second of these two shows, although playing a different
character.
6 As Volti (1996, p. 663) points out, there is surprisingly little academic mater-
ial on the rise of the car, given its importance in twentieth-century society
throughout much of the world. Nevertheless, this account draws in particu-
lar on a number of general critical works which are worth mentioning at this
stage. Of particular importance are Sachs (1992a), Wolf (1996), Ross (1995),
Gorz, ‘The Social Ideology of the Motor Car’, in (1980), Flink (1975, 1988),
Rupert (1995), McShane (1994), Schwartz Cowan (1997), Freund and Martin
(1993, 1996).
7 Wernick (1991, pp. 67–70) suggests that from about 1980 onwards, the car
was displaced as the symbol of progress by the computer. Speed/acceleration
is still the predominant theme, however, which links both and enables the
shift from one to the other. For a fuller treatment of the relationship
between cars and growth, see Paterson (forthcoming a).
8 This episode is mentioned widely. The fullest treatments are in Gordon
(1991), Dunn (1981), and St Clair (1986). For others who discuss it, see Wolf
(1996, p. 84), Hamer (1987, p. 22), Wajcman (1991, p. 28), Freund and
Martin (1993, p. 135), UNCTC (1992, pp. 57–9), McShane (1994, p. 115). For
a fuller treatment of these four themes, see Paterson (forthcoming a).
9 Elton (1991) also focuses on the inequalities produced by car-centred trans-
port, with one of his two main characters having cerebral palsy, and there-
fore unable to drive and disabled by the car-centred system, and the other
having lost her legs when hit by a car, but then reliant on a car because of
Notes 171
(1996). The analyses by Seel and McKay in particular support the interpreta-
tion given here.
01 The main literature to which I refer here is Lipschutz with Mayer (1996),
the title of which is the subtitle to this section, Lipschutz (1997) and
Wapner (1996, 1997). In a slightly different theoretical context, drawing on
critical theoretic accounts of political community, especially by Linklater
(1990; 1992), Samhat (1997) develops similar arguments, using climate
change as one of his case-studies. For an account closer to that developed
here, focusing on debates about TNCs and globalisation, see Newell (forth-
coming 1999).
02 Lipschutz is, however, keen to emphasise that the functionalism here is not
that of the functionalists of the 1960s (Mitrany, Haas). The functionally
specific nature of emerging patterns of governance is not conceptualised as
an emerging pattern of political integration as in earlier models – it does
not lead to a transcendence of existing structures of government. States still
exist in Lipschutz’s model. Rather, functionally specific networks of gover-
nance for him are the consequence of innovation – the response of actors
to the inability of traditional models of government to respond to specific
problems, and the emergence of networks to learn how to respond more
effectively (Lipschutz, 1997, pp. 87–8).
03 Lipschutz erroneously suggests that ‘the political implications of such a
process have not been given much serious thought’ (1997, p. 86). Such an
impression may be correct in North America; it is far from true in Europe,
where the literature debating the implications of globalisation is enormous,
and growing daily. Much of the literature in this debate is concerned either
to show that such measures of integration do not add up to something war-
ranting the term ‘globalisation’, and/or that globalisation does not mean
that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. For a selection of such litera-
ture, see Hirst and Thompson (1996), Weiss (1997), Zysman (1996), Jones
(1995), Ruigrok and van Tulder (1995). For (in my view) more nuanced
accounts, see Palan and Abbott with Deans (1996), Kofman and Youngs
(1996), or Held et al. (1999).
04 This is not to say that globalisation cannot be measured in part using such
accounts of integration. But such measures will inevitably be heavily
debated, turning as they do on the interpretation of statistics, the meaning
of which will always be disputed. Conceptualising globalisation as capitalist
174 Notes
175
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Index 197
environmental security, 7, 19–23 Helleiner, Eric, 39, 74, 142, 148, 158,
and population growth, 29 162, 174
epistemic communities, 2, 14, 50 Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 4, 20–2,
Esteva, Gustavo, 153–6, 157–9, 166 17–19
expert systems, 51, 57–8, 85, 90–2, 94
externalities, 48, 52 identities, 7, 128
cars and, 101, 105–6, 112, 116–17
fast-food operations, 123–4, 135–7 ‘hybridisation’, 127
feminism, see under Adams, Mellor, national, 43, 68–9, 70, 167
Merchant, patriarchy, Shiva patriarchy and, 51
Fiddes, Nick, 125, 130, 132, 137, 172 relation to structures, 33, 42
Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC), see also consumption
78, 79, 87, 90, 169 individualism, 51–2, 58, 101
Friends of the Earth (FoE), 17, 78–81, see also identities
85, 87, 90–3, 142 inequalities, 48–9, 57
Freund, Peter, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, cars and, 106–10
170 class, 109–10
gender, 53–4, 108–9
game theory, 3, 13–14, 15, 19, 25, international, 3, 7, 22, 33, 44, 84–8,
166, 167 132
gender, see patriarchy in meat consumption, 130–2
global civil society, 17, 141–5, 146, 159 international cooperation, 2, 9, 12,
‘global commons’, 23–4, 59, 166 14–15, 23, 25, 43, 50
global environmental change, origins realist scepticism concerning,
of, 3, 5–9, 23–9, 40, 54–8, 61, 62, 18–19, 25
162 interstate competition, 29, 40, 43–4
as ad hoc trends, 8, 11, 23, 26–9
Kuehls’ neglect of, 159–60 Keohane, Robert, 1, 8, 13–16, 17, 19,
Wapner’s neglect of, 43 24, 26, 30, 33, 162
see also tragedy of the commons knowledge structure, 50–1
global environmental governance, 9, Kuehls, Thom, 39, 40, 42, 155–8, 159,
141–5, 146, 148–9, 153, 159 162, 166, 174
global governance, 8, 16–17, 25, 29–30
globalisation, 9, 10, 61, 64, 84, 86, liberal institutionalism, 3–5, 7, 9,
120, 125–7, 144–9, 150, 152–3, 12–19, 23–34, 60, 143, 159
159, 173, 174 limits to growth, 36, 37–8, 40, 46–7,
McDonald’s and, 125–7 56, 61
Lipschutz on, 146 Lipschutz, Ronnie, 9, 17, 143–9, 153,
global warming, see climate change 157, 159, 173, 174
Gramscian IPE, 42, 150–1 Litfin, Karen, 23, 34, 45, 162, 164
green political theory, 35–40, 59 localism, 154–9
and International Relations, 7, 38–40 critiques of, 155–8
see also commons regimes, localism feminism and, 160–1
groynes, see sea defences
Guyana, 66, 77, 84–8, 89–90, 93, 169 managed realignment, 68, 71–3
Martin, George, 99, 102, 107, 109,
Haas, Peter, 1, 14–15, 24, 26, 33, 162 110, 170
Hardin, Garrett, 4, 23–6, 34, 53, 59, Marxism, vii, 39, 45, 48, 55, 128, 162,
61, 63, 166 165
198 Index
McDonald’s, 9, 118–40, 149, 163 realism, 3–5, 7, 11, 12, 18–34, 159
McDonaldisation, 123–9, 138–40 Reclaim the Streets, 115
McLibel, 9, 118–23, 149 reductionism, 50, 53, 91
McPhee, John, 69, 70, 76–7, 167 relative gains debate, 18–19
Meat, 6–7, 118–19, 130–4 regime theory, 6–8, 12–16, 23, 25,
resource intensity of, 133–4 30
sexual politics of, 130–2 resistance, 10, 40, 63, 65, 95, 112,
as symbol of modernity, 132–3 113–17, 120, 128–9, 138–40, 148,
Mellor, Mary, 4, 36, 53–4, 55, 141, 149–53
150, 154, 160–1, 165 Gramscian account of, 150
Merchant, Carolyn, 50, 52, 54, 71, Polanyi and, 150–1
131 resource consumption, 164
militarism, cars and, 110, 114, 171
cars and, 106–7 meat and, 133–4
the environment and, 55 see also consumption
‘environmental security’ and, risk, 50–1, 80–1
19–20 Ritzer, George, 123–8, 138–40
military competition and the
environment, 44, 55 Sachs, Wolfgang, 55–6, 58, 96, 107,
military metaphors of the 113, 154, 159, 166, 170
environment, 67–70, 72–3, 167 Saurin, Julian, 6–7, 30, 41, 84, 123,
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries 162, 163, 174
and Food (MAFF), 74, 78, 89 Schama, Simon, 68–9, 71, 76, 167
Mississippi, 69, 70, 76–7 science, 2, 50–1, 88–94
Multinational Corporations, see political economy of, 92–4
Transnational Corporations see also expert systems
sea defences, 9, 66–94, 131
nation-building, see state-building Shiva, Vandana, 4, 58, 131, 145, 148,
Netherlands, The 68–9, 70–1, 76, 167, 150, 158, 165, 166
168 sovereignty, 43, 67, 70, 156–7
NGOs, environmental, 2, 17, 142, state-building, 40, 43, 67–74
144, 149 state system, 5, 29, 31, 40, 42–5,
see also Friends of the Earth 73–4, 142, 148
structure, usage of the term, 41–2
‘organised irresponsibility’, 51, 80–1 sustainability, 5, 38, 41, 45, 48, 61,
78–9, 84, 88–94, 120, 129, 140–3,
patriarchy, 8, 9, 16, 32, 40, 51–4, 55, 150, 152, 159
61, 98, 107–9, 112, 114, 130–2, sustainable development, 38, 55–6,
140, 160–1 154, 164
population growth, 21, 26–9, 32, 37, Swampy, 95
76, 163
profit-maximisation, 46, 47–8, 49, technological fix, 6, 38
86–7 technology, 46, 51, 55, 58
property, 24–5, 34, 48, 57, 64, 67, in car advertising, 97
75–6 military technology and economic
growth, 43
rationalisation, 41, 44, 52–3, 58, 94, modernity and, 102–4, 123–4
123 as origin of global environmental
see also McDonaldisation change, 8, 23, 27, 29, 32, 163
Index 199