Rachel's Democracy & Health News #999
Thursday, February 19, 2009
From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News ...............[This story printer-friendly]
February 19, 2009
CUMULATIVE IMPACTS: DEATH KNELL FOR COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
[Editor's introduction: The impacts of our various economic activities are now adding up to a damaged world -- a world in which Earth's natural capacity for self-renewal has been exceeded and permanent degradation is evident. Our legal and regulatory systems were never intended to limit the accumulation of small impacts. Instead, U.S. law relies on cost-benefit analysis to justify individual impacts -- a practice that is now obsolete because it is destroying the planet as a place suitable for human habitation.]
By Peter Montague
In the beginning, planet Earth seemed limitless. Yes, humans could see that they were making big changes locally -- hunting the wooly mammoth to extinction, for example, or permanently altering forest ecosystems with fire. However, for eons there was never a hint that humans could become a force of geologic proportions, capable of diminishing the entire planet's capacity to sustain human life. Then in 1864 George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, subtitled "Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action," the first scientific study of accumulating harm.
In the U.S., "environment and health" only became a public issue in the 1950s, starting with cancer-causing food additives and radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests. In 1962, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring described widespread effects from pesticides, offering evidence that humankind was damaging whole ecosystems.
Congress passed the Water Quality Act in 1965 because people knew something was wrong when they saw rivers covered with mounds of foam (from detergents). Even more people started paying attention when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland in 1969.
In 1970, M.I.T. Press published Man's Impact on the Global Environment, which estimated that the total human "load" on the natural environment was increasing 5 to 6% each year -- thus doubling every 12 to 14 years. (By this measure, since 1970 the total human impact on the global ecosystem has increased somewhere between 7-fold and 10-fold. At these growth-rates, by 2050 (just 41 years from now), if nothing changes, the total human impact will have grown another 7- fold to 10-fold beyond where it is today. Can you image such a world?)
Public concern, validated by scientific information, forced Congress to pass more than a dozen new national laws in the 1970s, intended to limit specific harms to the environment. But those laws were not designed (or intended) to control the cumulative effects of many small environmental impacts.
As time passed, harm to the natural world grew more ominous and a few scientists and legal scholars began to nibble around the edges of this "cumulative impacts" problem. However, only in the past 2 years have we seen a real breakthrough in analysis -- thanks chiefly to the work of Joseph H. Guth, a biochemist and lawyer, and his colleagues at the Science and Environmental Health Network, where Guth serves as Legal Director.
Acknowledging the problem
In his 1980 book, Overshoot, William Catton, Jr., wrote, "Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential." [pg. 177] And he noted that, by 1973, "The world was becoming a place wherein actions that used to be quite harmless to others became harmful to all of us." [pg. 59]
This is the essence of the "cumulative impacts" problem. Actions that are tolerable or even harmless at the individual level can degrade the planet if thousands or millions of people do them. One person fertilizing a lawn near the Chesapeake Bay makes no real difference -- but when thousands do it, the Bay is degraded and the storied blue crab begins to disappear.
People routinely cut down forests and woods, displacing habitat for wildlife to make space for crops and domestic animals. One small farm makes no difference, but in 1986 Peter M. Vitousek and others estimated that the world's human population (then 4.9 billion) was appropriating for its own use 40% of net primary productivity from Earth's total available land. Net primary productivity on land is the mass of plant material produced each year by photosynthesis using energy from sunlight; it is the total food resource for land-based life. (There is also net primary productivity in the oceans; if you include this, then humans in 1986 were appropriating 25% of total global net primary productivity, Vitousek estimated.)
Vitousek did not extrapolate into the future, but his finding meant that humans would appropriate 100% of net primary productivity from land when their numbers grew just 2.5-fold, which will occur around the year 2050 at the current rate of population growth (1.3% per year) if nothing changes.
In 1991, two researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee examined 11 industrial chemicals [5 Mbyte PDF] that have contaminated the entire globe (PCBs, benzene, mercury, etc.). Using cancer risk estimates provided by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they calculated that the worldwide lifetime risk of cancer from just these 11 chemicals was one-in-a-thousand. They commented, "Current regulatory approaches for environmental pollution do not incorporate ways of dealing with global pollution. Instead the major focus has been on protecting the maximally exposed individual."
This is an important point. U.S. risk assessments (used in conducting "cost-benefit" analyses) evaluate the danger of a single risk to a hypothetical most-endangered ("maximally exposed") individual. If the threat to that individual is found to fall within "acceptable" limits, then no regulation occurs and "acceptable" amounts of contamination can be released forever after. Then another risk assessment and cost- benefit analysis gives a green light to another "acceptable" release of contaminants. Then another and another. No one ever asks, "What is the total impact of all these 'acceptable' risks?" That is the "cumulative impact" problem in a nutshell.
Now Joe Guth has analyzed this problem and offered solutions in three scholarly papers,[1,2,3] which have been published (in the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, in Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems), and in the Barry Law Review.[3]
To me, the centerpiece of this triad is the paper, "Cumulative Impacts: Death-Knell for Cost-Benefit Analysis in Environmental Decisions," though all three papers are essential reading.
In "Cumulative Impacts," Guth lays out the problem in the opening paragraph:
1. We have always assumed that we could tolerate unlimited small increments of harm as byproducts of economic growth.
2. But now things have changed because numerous studies are telling us that the cumulative impacts of our economic activities are degrading the Earth's capacity to support humans.
3. Therefore, humans will have to abandon the use of cost-benefit analysis to justify individual environmental impacts and, instead, focus on limiting our cumulative impact to a sustainable size.
As evidence of cumulative harm, Guth cites the authoritative United Nations-sponsored Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA)[4] -- a five-year study of the condition of the Earth's ecosystems, involving 1360 scientists from all across the globe.
When the Board of Directors of the MEA issued the first volume of the study, they said, "At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning. Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted."[5]
Guth also cites the United Nations-sponsored Global Environment Outlook (known as GEO-4), published in 2007. The GEO-4 report concluded (among other things) that human activities now require 54 acres (22 hectares) per person globally, but Earth can provide only 39 acres (16 hectares) per person without suffering permanent degradation. We are living well beyond Earth's means.
(For additional corroboration, see Mathis Wackernagel and others, "Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 99, No. 14, July 9, 2002), pgs. 9266-9271 and see the web site of the Global Footprint Network.)
How did we get into this shape?
How did this happen? Joe Guth finds the answer in our laws, which are the rules by which society generallly operates. If we want society to operate differently, we've got to change the rules, change the law.
Guth examines legislative law (laws passed by legislatures, such as the federal Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act) and the common law (the body of law created by judges, such as negligence and nuisance). Guth finds that both bodies of law share similar goals and assumptions, and both assign the "burden of proof" in similar ways, which I'll explain.
Guth writes, "Our current property and environmental law,[6] including both federal statutes and the common law, is intentionally designed to promote unending growth in economic activity. It harbors the presumption that economic activity generally provides a net benefit to society despite any accompanying damage it may cause. Grounded almost invisibly in this starting presumption, most of our property and environmental laws permit interference with economic activity only where that starting presumption is proved false, that is, where a particular activity can be demonstrated to fail to provide a net benefit to society. These laws for the most part do not forbid damage to human health or the environment. Rather, even when fully enforced they permit protection of human health or the environment only where the benefits of doing so can be proved to outweigh the costs.... So it is that cost-benefit analysis has become the legal system's primary tool for deciding when economic activity may be regulated in the interest of protecting human health and the environment."
But there's more. As Guth has said, the law does not allow economic activity to be curtailed just because it is harming someone. The law will only allow an economic activity to be curtailed if a cost-benefit analysis shows that the activity is creating more harm than good. And the law puts the burden of proof on the harmed party, or on the government, to prove that costs are exceeding benefits before an economic activity can be curtailed or regulated. If the harmed party (or the government) cannot meet that burden of proof, the law defaults to its starting presumption: it allows the damaging activity to continue.
"This allocation of the burden of proof transforms doubt and missing information into a barrier to legal protection of human health and the environment," Guth writes. "This explains why industrial interests are rationally motivated under our legal system to invest in the manufacture and spread of doubt and confusion." [See David Michaels' book, Doubt is their Product, describing an industry devoted to manufacturing doubt.]
So, if information is missing, or there exists scientific doubt, then the law presumes that an economic activity should continue -- even when the law acknowledges that harm is occurring. The default presumption is that the benefits of economic activity always outweigh the costs unless a specific cost-benefit analysis can show otherwise.
This explains why the environmental movement -- which has made truly heroic efforts since 1970 -- has been unable to stem the degradation of human health and the environment.
Another unspoken presumption of the law is that damage to human health and the environment can continue to grow forever. Guth shows this in in Figure 1. The upper curved line in Figure 1 represents endlessly growing benefits from economic activity. The lower curved line shows smaller (but also endlessly growing) legally-permitted harms from economic activity. The space between the upper line and the lower line is "net benefit" or "net social benefit" or "net social utility" -- it is the residue of good that remains after costs have been subtracted from benefits.
The world is new: on our finite planet, ecological limits exist
What's been slowly dawning on people in the last 2 decades is that there really are limits on how much harm the Earth can tolerate. There are limits to the total costs the Earth can sustain before it is permanently damaged. The lower curved line in Figure 1 (which you can think of as the growing human footprint), by growing without limit as the law assumes it should, will eventually make the planet unsuitable for human habitation. And since this planet is the only place that anyone has ever found in the universe that supports human life, the law is now allowing -- even promoting -- the destruction of humankind's only home.
Guth's Figure 2 includes a horizontal line that represents the ecological limits of the Earth -- the point at which the planet starts to be permanently degraded, the point at which human damage has exceeded the Earth's natural capacity for self-renewal. As Guth says, "This is a limit that our current legal system is utterly blind to." Our legal system does not acknowledge that such a limit exists.
Joe Guth continues, "Thus we see the fatal flaw inherent in our system of environmental decision-making. Routinely allowing all environmental impacts except those proved to fail a cost-benefit test, it permits those impacts to grow without limit even when their cumulative effect results in ecological overshoot. Many of these impacts occur not because they actually satisfy the law's cost-benefit test but because whenever we do not know enough, the law's default structure permits them to continue."
Importantly, Guth points out a fundamental flaw in trying to use cost- benefit analysis after we reach ecological limits: "Even [though] cost-benefit analysis can effectively evaluate impacts when we are far below ecological limits, it cannot do so once we exceed those limits. Each incremental impact, if taken alone in an empty world, might have caused cost-benefit-justifiable harm or even, in many cases (such as carbon emissions), no harm at all. But under conditions of ecological overshoot each incremental impact contributes to a total loss that is immeasurable. Indeed, the permanent loss of the ecological integrity of the Earth, since we need it to survive and prosper, might fairly be considered an infinite loss."
If you are going to suffer an infinite total loss, your cost-benefit analysis of each increment of damage ceases to have any meaning. Under conditions of ecological overshoot, cost-benefit analysis is a meaningless exercise and a diversion from what's really important -- shrinking the human footprint back down to a size that Earth's ecosystem can tolerate, learning to live well below the horizontal line in Figure 2.
Guth concludes, "To maintain the ecological integrity of the Earth, we need a new decision-making structure designed not to promote endless growth in net benefits, but to accommodate the ecological limits of the biosphere, the horizontal line of Figure 2." [Emphasis added.]
Summary: U.S. law is dominated by cost-benefit analysis
To summarize, then, Joe Guth has described how, in general, the law works (both statutory law and common law):
** Its goal is perpetual economic growth, even if some damage occurs as a byproduct
** It presumes that the benefits of economic growth outweigh any costs (or harms) until someone can prove otherwise
** It places the burden of proof on anyone who wishes to curtail or regulate any economic activity, even a harmful activity, requiring them to prove that the harms outweigh the benefits. If such a showing cannot be made because of missing information, or scientific confusion or uncertainty or doubt, then the law presumes that the economic activity should continue.
** Seeking endless growth in net benefit, the law assumes that both benefits and costs can grow without limit. The law has no way to acknowledge that there exist ecological limits that sooner or later must be exceeded by the endless growth of cumulative costs (because the planet has a finite size), and which we exceed at the peril of making our only home uninhabitable for our species.
Federal laws contain a few limited exceptions (which I'll describe below) but, as Guth says, "Taken as a whole... the federal environmental statutes are not directed toward an overarching goal such as preservation of ecological integrity. Instead, with some exceptions, they are deeply committed to a highly fragmented, cost- benefit-driven evaluation of each individual action proposed by the government to protect human health and the environment."
The way our laws are written, government regulators are not allowed to take into consideration, or try to control, cumulative impacts.
Joe Guth continues: "These laws do not permit regulators broadly to take account of what is happening to the world around them. They embed regulators in a decision-making structure that may seem scientific but in fact is profoundly unscientific because it prevents them from responding to the ever more detailed findings by the world scientific community that we are overshooting the Earth's ecological capacities. Rooted in the assumption that ecological overshoot does not occur, our current statutes are incapable of containing the cumulative scale of ecological damage. Their approach to environmental protection is firmly based in the conception of the world as an empty one rather than as the full one that is in fact arising all around us. It is an approach that has become outdated because it is based on assumptions that are no longer valid."
Guth then discusses the common law, showing that modern liability doctrines -- both negligence and nuisance -- do not prohibit all harmful impacts, but require the same kind of cost-benefit balancing that is pervasive in the federal statutes:
"Negligence and nuisance apply broadly to many different circumstances, including cases arising from damage to human health and the environment. These doctrines do not seek to prevent or impose liability for all harm to human health and the environment. Negligence, for example, places the burden of proof on damaged plaintiffs to demonstrate that defendants created an "unreasonable" risk of harm in order to make them liable for the damage they cause. "Unreasonable" is defined not as a moral principle, but in cost- benefit terms that compare the social utility of the particular challenged act to the risks of resulting harm....
"Similarly, nuisance, the quintessential environmental tort, now places the burden of proof on plaintiffs to prove that the defendant's intentional acts are "unreasonable." As in negligence, "unreasonable" is defined explicitly by a cost-benefit test...."
By placing the burden of proof on those who are harmed, the common law "resolves cases of doubt and missing information in favor of economic actors, allowing their damaging activities to continue and rewarding confusion and ignorance," Guth writes.
All is not lost: a new decision structure is possible
With a new decision-making structure, we can learn to enjoy the fruits of modern technologies while living within the Earth's ecological limits.
This is where the precautionary principle fits in. Because we can never be certain exactly where the ecological limits lie, once we understand that we are approaching or exceeding those limits, there is only one way to avoid ecological overshoot: eliminate or reduce every environmental impact that we can. This means applying the precautionary principle to all activities, large and small, that cause an environmental impact:
(a) shifting the burden of proof by assuming that every action that causes an impact on the Earth may be harmful unless proven otherwise;
(b) always seeking, then choosing, the least-harmful alternative; and
(c) paying attention to consequences after decisions have been made, monitoring, looking for evidence of environmental harm, and being prepared to reverse course if necessary.
(d) This last requirement means we should favor decisions and courses of action that are reversible, avoiding irretrievable commitments (such as the current coal-industry proposal to curb CO2 emissions by pumping liquid carbon dioxide deep below ground, hoping it will stay there forever).
Hints of a new decision structure in some existing U.S. laws
In Section II of his "Cumulative Impacts" paper, Joe Guth argues that "Our legal system already harbors examples of decision-making structures that establish a principle or standard of environmental quality or human health and do not rely on cost-benefit balancing. These examples... show that such legal principles or standards can enable the legal system to contain the growth of cumulative impacts." [Emphasis added.]
However, to succeed, Guth argues, we must apply these legal approaches broadly to our entire economy: "We must subject all our actions to a new decision-making structure designed to defend and maintain the ecological integrity of the Earth."
One of these approaches is to establish "environmental rights," as several states have done by amending their constitutions to give citizens an explicit right to clean air and water, for example. But Guth argues that judges typically balance "environmental rights" against other kinds of rights when they conflict, so environmental rights (like other rights) cannot be enforced to their full extent. "Establishing these kinds of [environmental] rights is a critical and valuable step, one that requires care if the rights are to be effective."
Meanwhile, as work to establish environmental rights "can and must continue," Guth argues, "both the common law and legislation are quite capable of defining and enforcing standards of environmental integrity and human health."
He then shows how U.S. common law in the 18th and 19th centuries (before the modern doctrines of negligence and nuisance were developed) was capable of controlling cumulative impacts. The older liability rule was expressed (in Latin) as "sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas" ("use your own so as not to injure another"). If your economic activities harmed your neighbor, you were liable for the harm regardless of what benefits your economic activity might provide to society.
"The principle of sic utere tuo was built around the presumption that material damage to property was socially undesirable, and it imposed a rule of strict liability without regard to the social utility of the interfering activity," Guth writes. In other words, there was no cost-benefit balancing in the older doctrine -- you could not harm your neighbor and get away with it by arguing that your actions created net social benefits. (In his published paper, "Law for the Ecological Age[1], Guth traces legal history, showing how the common law changed profoundly in the 19th century, from "sic utere tuo" to cost-benefit balancing.) Under "sic utere tuo" every economic actor who contributed to a demonstrable harm could be held liable for the cumulative results to which his or her actions contributed.
"Under rules of law that were focused on protecting defined interests [usable water in a river, for example], rather than on whether a defendant's acts provided a net benefit to society, the law was able to protect those interests from the cumulative impact of individually harmless acts," Guth says. He cites older cases in which businesses contributing small amount of toxicants to a river were held liable for the end result, which was a totally-polluted river. They were forced to stop contributing even small increments to the problem. Then, as industrialization increased, cost-benefit balancing was introduced and economic actors were presumed to create "net benefits" and were allowed to continue polluting unless their pollution could be shown to fail the cost-benefit test.
Besides showing that profoundly different legal structures are possible, this history of U.S. property law reveals an important and encouraging fact: in the past, we have changed our law dramatically to suit the goals and circumstances of the times, so we can change it again.
Guth then offers some examples indicating that, in small ways at least, some federal environmental laws are beginning to address cumulative impacts of individual pollutants. He points to particular provisions in the federal Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act requiring the government to take into consideration total emissions of particular pollutants into air and water and then allocate those emissions among economic actors, holding the total emissions of each particular pollutant within fixed limits. He points to the "cap" part of the "cap and trade" system created to limit sulfur emissions in the U.S. Acid Rain program. This "cap" puts a limit on cumulative emissions from large industrial facilities emitting sulfur.
Similarly, once a species is designated as "threatened" or "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act, government must prevent all actions that contribute to the demise of that species.
These are examples of federal statutes and early common laws that are able to control cumulative impacts, but they have been applied only to a few pollutants or impacts on species or common-law-protected interests, each controlled one at a time. They do not broadly seek to prevent ecological degradation as a whole.
A broad legal principle of preservation of ecological integrity
Ultimately, Guth argues, the law will need to expand this conceptual approach to define a broad legal principle of preservation of ecological integrity: "For in ecology we can discover how to evaluate ecological systems, what impacts the Earth can tolerate and what we need to maintain and protect from degradation," he says, acknowledging that it will not be simple or easy.
Some progress in this direction has already been made, he points out. The Swedish government has set 16 environmental quality goals that should be met and maintained for the foreseeable future, with many measurable benchmarks. The Natural Step organization has defined four principles of sustainability that aim to allow economic activity to occur within ecological limits. Various ecological studies and organizations have defined what constitutes "degradation" of an ecosystem. Much more work is needed, but we're not starting from scratch.
Joe Guth offers some new ideas of his own for how to restructure the law around a principle of preservation of ecological integrity. In his paper, "Law for the Ecological Age," Guth has proposed creating a new "ecological tort," a "legal rule of the common law that would presumptively impose liability for impacts on the environment that may contribute to ecological degradation."
He has also proposed a "Model State Environmental Quality Act" that "defines a threshold level of environmental impacts that would trigger placing the burden of proof on defendants, a definition of who should have standing to assert this rule of law, and a temporary affirmative defense for those engaged in a meaningful search for less damaging alternatives."
This does not exhaust the list of suggestions and proposals that Joe Guth briefly describes in his "Cumulative Impacts" paper. The more important point is that Guth's three papers have clearly outlined the specific ways the law will have to change if we are to reverse the slide (driven by cumulative impacts) toward ecological degradation and irreversible destruction of humankind's only home, planet Earth.
He has also excavated our legal history to show that, in the past, we in the U.S. have signficantly changed our law in response to new social objectives and realities, and therefore we can do it again.
Joe Guth concludes,
"The American government and legal system bear a duty to respond to the rise of cumulative impacts. The growing human ecological footprint has made untenable the assumptions on which our current environmental decision-making structure is based. The central goal of property and environmental law must shift from promoting endless growth in costs and benefits to maintaining the ecological systems we need to survive and prosper.
"By adopting such a new goal, the law would transform the shape of the economy. If the law contains the permissible scale of cumulative environmental impacts, the economy would become one that continues to develop but accommodates rather than undermines the ecological systems our welfare ultimately depends on. Cost-benefit analysis might remain useful as we seek less damaging alternatives in a quest to reduce the scale of cumulative impacts, but it could no longer be used to justify limitless increments of ecological degradation."
Now it's up to all of us to decide how best to change the law, and then to get those changes made. The world is new -- because for the first time in human history the regenerative capacity of the Earth is being palpably damaged by the human economy. In this new world, many of our old assumptions, attitudes, and goals are obsolete and getting in the way. But we can fix all that, so let's get to it. Survival is not negotiable.
==============
[1] Joseph H. Guth, "Law for the Ecological Age," Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, Vol. 431 (2008), pgs. 431-512. Available at http://www.vjel.org/journal/pdf/VJEL10068.pdf
[2] Joseph H. Guth, "Cumulative Impacts: Death-Knell for Cost-Benefit Analysis in Environmental Decisions," Barry Law Review, Vol. 11 (2008), pg 32. and following pages. http://www.precaution.org/li b/death_knell_cost-benefit_analysis.081101.pdf
[3] Joseph H. Guth, "Resolving the Paradoxes of Discounting in Environmental Decisions," Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems Vol. 18 (Winter, 2009). http://www.precaution.org/lib/discoun ting_paradoxes.090403.pdf
[4] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment -- a series of reports issued by the United Nations starting in late 2005, assessing the status of ecosystems worldwide, including (but by no means limited to) effects on human health. The work began in 2001 and involved 1360 scientists http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/Global.aspx
[5] Millennium Ecosystem Assment Board of Directors, Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well Being (2005). http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/BoardStatement.aspx
[6] By "property and environmental law," Guth is referring to "all our laws that control the impacts people may have on the environment, both by altering their own lands and by externalizing impacts onto the lands of others, or of the commons."
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From: Rachel's Democracy and Health News #999 ............[This story printer-friendly]
February 19, 2009
THE DAWNING AGE OF BIOCHEMISTRY REVEALS SEVERITY OF CHEMICAL RISKS
[Editor's introduction: The relatively new field of study called biochemistry tells us why industrial poisins are almost certain to cause harm whenever they enter living things.]
By Tony Tweedale
[Tony Tweedale runs a consultancy (R.I.S.K. -- Rebutting Industry's Science Through Knowledge) in Edinburgh, U.K. for toxics activists and scientists short on time, finding the most relevant toxicology results. tony.tweedale@phonecoop.coop]
Science advances largely when its analytical techniques do; in biology this has lead to biochemistry. Mankind has just begun to figure out the intricate sequences of chemical reactions that constitute life. Immediately this investigation shows that life's complexity, and its often tiny chemical signaling concentrations, shout out the message "Danger -- Take Care!" about bringing agents foreign to evolution into the web of life.
Life is an evolved system -- adaptable, but reliant on ultra- specialized biochemical systems. It is an aqueous (cells and organisms are like swamps), pressurized (space, the atmosphere and the ocean are a density continuum), photon-powered system; where the electrical charges arising from the atoms and the shapes of molecules (physics) trigger a torrent of subtle reactions (chemistry), which somehow became and remains organized as life (biology). Powered by cascades of energy originating as photons, cells perform at least hundreds of thousands of reactions every second.[1] The energy-releasing reactions that respiring cells use for energy proceed perpetually at even more astounding rates: 10 million ATP energy-containing molecules are created per second per admittedly-large muscle cell.[2] The enzyme catalase can turn 40 million molecules of hydrogen peroxide into water per second, its turnover rate.[3] But cellular reactions are not just fast, they are complex -- there are thousands of biology functions to be coordinated even in a single-cell organism, the cell may be part of an organ, and all organisms must coordinate a lot with their environment. Such complexity occurs in each of a large majority of the cells on the planet, of which one human has about 60 trillion.[4] Moreover, logic says that such busy reactions can only coordinate if they use low-level signals (or most of a human's thousands of signals would risk being drowned in noise). Biologists have created a new specialty called "signal transduction" and already it has thousands of studies that show biochemical reactions typically do proceed on low dose signals -- sometimes vanishing-ly low indeed (see e.g. the journal Science's signal transduction online collection[5]). Finally, even the fairly new advance in heredity -- genetics (which regulates all of life), the "one gene codes for (is the blueprint for) one protein" paradigm, has already been shown to be uselessly simple -- do a web search on "epigenetics."
Why would such a hyper-complex life system, evolved far along increasingly specialized paths, not be harmed by external influences? Mankind has assumed the opposite by thoughtlessly pouring into this subtle system a lot of chemicals and energy.
The Basis Of Toxicity
Recognizing the risks of that behavior begins with understanding that the properties of toxic chemicals are the same ones that determine the behavior of all elements. Reactions of atoms and molecules are caused by the strength of charges of atoms' electrons (influenced by the nucleus' protons and neutrons). A useful rule with which to predict reactivity is: "like is attracted to (dissolves in) like". Organic (carbon-based) molecules -- soil, vegetation, oil/fat, etc. -- carry few electronic charges; a pure hydrocarbon is quite neutrally- charged; such hydrocarbon-soluble molecules congregate by not repelling each other, and their lack of charge tends to make them un- reactive -- stable, persistent. Conversely, atoms and molecules that carry significant positive (less or further-distant from the nucleus electrons) or negative (more or more proximate electrons) charges are attracted to atoms of the opposite charge. They congregate in (are highly soluble in) water, as water has uniquely strong and opposing charges. Therefore reactive atoms and molecules are very mobile, but tend not to persist. Although life is an aqueous swamp and uses a lot of reactive atoms and molecules, its molecules are carbon based, so charge neutrality is also part of the biosphere. "Like is attracted to like" is very general rule, but incredibly useful for activists who need to predict roughly the behavior in the environment and in organisms to successfully prevent the trespass of a chemical.
Considering toxicity then: first, chemicals that are most reactive are toxic per se to life's molecules: being more water soluble, they are easily brought close to an opposing charge on life's molecules, reacting and doing damage to cells and their signals. But usually they lose their dangerous reactivity in their reaction. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other very reactive agents are frequently generated as the result of both foreign and natural agents interacting with life.[6] Another reason for the ubiquity of reactive damage is that ROS are used by life -- an activated immune system produces many ROS in its effort to get rid of microbial and chemical foreign agents. The activation of the immune system is today called inflammation- epinomyously: "rubor (redness), dolor, calor et tumor (swelling)", as the Roman physician Celsus saw it in the year 40. Health requires keeping the immune system in a close balance between immune deficiency and autoimmunity.[7] Inflammation is involved in many diseases, I suspect in all; and it is likely that so are reactive chemicals damaging all life, sometimes beyond our evolved resistance to and repair of reactive agent damage.
Second, for those "fat-soluble" elements and molecules which are toxic: they are more neutrally charged-relatively un-reactive other than being attracted to similar neutral molecules such as life's fat, where they accumulate. If they come into close proximity to life, there is a good chance their proximity will disrupt the delicate web of electronic charges used to create the biologic signals that are life; especially if the toxic molecules are not known to life. Unfortunately, these toxics do not easily react into an un-reactive state, nor do they leave proximity to life easily! We call these toxins persistent bio-accumulating toxins (PBTs) and these characteristics make them serious toxics indeed.
The halogen elements bond strongly to carbon, the skeleton of life, in the order: Fluorine > Chlorine > Bromine > Iodine.[8] Mankind wastes large amounts of energy to do this synthetically, and has created -- inside of our delicate biosphere -- millions of tons of halogenated organics, which because of that ability to bond strongly to carbon, tend to be PBTs. Only a few organo-halogens are used by life,[9] presumably because in most circumstances, life is too efficient to bother supplying the many enzymes that would be required to react such strong bonds. Note that the least strong of these bonds, C to Iodine, is the most widely used in biology, e.g. in the important thyroid hormone system. Thus our so useful halogenated solvents; chlorinated and fluorinated pesticides, brominated fire retardants and fluorinated non-stick coatings are almost always horrifically foreign to life -- hard for nature to destroy, accumulating in fat and concentrating up the food chains. As with all toxics, not being molded to life's purposes, they disrupt life's molecules and signals.
Also, we are so ubiquitously exposed to perhaps a couple dozen very high production volume non-PBTs toxics, that nevertheless they too are found in significant concentrations in us all the time: three- quarters of the 23 pesticides detected the general population of the USA were non-persistent ones, such as the herbicide 2,4-D.[10] The horrific poison plastic monomer bisPhenol-A (bPA, which can disrupt cells in 30 seconds, at parts-per-quadrillion concentrations) is not a PBT;[11] nor is the dioxin-saturated anti-microbial triclosan, a toxin found in most brands of intimate-contact consumer products.
Metals do not degrade and can also be foreign to life; some are PBTs, as lead and mercury, others as arsenic are not. Obviously, life makes much use of metals (at the core of many proteins, their electric charges are key to determining the shape of a protein, thus the protein's function; proteins create the signals that are the hallmark of life). But metals-the above, cadmium, berylium, aluminum, etc. -- appear to have other properties that are too extreme to be used in the biochemistry of life, as tens of them are very well established potent toxins, especially to the nervous system;[12] and US federal health agencies rank metals as posing the most risk to people of toxins in the environment[13] (probably only because mankind has used and studied them for longer than for organic chemicals). Simple changes in the electron shells of metals cause big differences in their bonding behavior (i.e. in their reactivity, solubility, and uptake); allowing additive, synergistic and antagonistic behaviors and toxic effects.[14]
Proving that an Agent Causes Harm
For all synthetic agents, well over a million published (which includes peer-review) studies have examined this strong hypothesis -- that agents foreign to the reactions constituting life will be toxic to life. As many studies again document the environmental fate and the exposure of organisms to these agents. After filtering out financial conflict of interests (the only one of a researcher's biases that is readily quantifiable) and based on a large random sample (n = 20,000+), I have discovered that almost 99% of the financially un- conflicted toxicology papers find risk.
It is important to understand the logic that although a research finding of risk is much more attractive to a journal editor than a finding of safety (one type "publication bias" -- but another is papers accepted by industry-associated journals), even a single valid finding of risk in the face of any number of findings of safety is cause for caution, while the reverse is not true. In fact, for each of the thousands high-volume chemicals marketed for years -- the time needed for academic toxicologists (who are still largely independent of industry's money) to study them -- we already have from a few to hundreds of published findings of risk. In short, a large majority of all independent published toxicology studies indicates that these toxic agents are destroying the subtle web of life.
However, proving causation is a tough task -- theoretically, nothing is ultimately provable until everything in the universe is known! Practically, proving causation is a stool supported by three legs: controlled animal experiments, epidemiology (correlations between exposure and disease in populations) and etiology (showing the individual steps that lead from the presence of agent A to disease outcome B) categories of evidence. Epidemiology typically studies humans, not other species, while we do not do controlled experiments on humans (except for a few very self- interested companies). Thus to practically prove causation, positive results in all three categories are needed and a "weight of the evidence" approach is required.
A huge obstacle to determining the risks of environmental agents in epidemiology is that we almost never know the trend in disease rates because we did not know the incidence at a baseline. Yet the couple of times that the USA has tracked human disease incidence over time, it again becomes rapidly visible that we are suffering a slow-motion chronic disease epidemic. Cancer incidence has been reliably measured for a few decades and has almost reached half of Americans, but I have uncovered research indicating that it used to be quite rare. As long-time readers of Rachel's know, big increases in recent decades are also seen in many birth defect categories, the second disease for which a partial baseline measure of incidence exists in the USA. Further indirect evidence that pollution has increased all chronic disease rates comes from health care costs in industrial vs. non- industrial areas of Ontario,[15] and from mortality during recessions and booms, reasonably controlled for socio-economic co- variates.[16]
The same observational tools revealing the subtlety of biology (signal transduction) are being employed to also reveal that toxins often operate at the low doses[17] we often encounter them at, instead of the unrealistically high doses we partly-test them at. The above- mentioned mass-produced exquisite hormonal mimic, the plastic molecule bPA, has 18 published studies showing an inverted (n-shaped) D/R curve -- not toxic at high doses but very toxic at very low doses. bPA begins to disrupt cultured cells beginning 30 seconds after a 1 picoMole (0.23 pg/ml) dose-roughly 217 million times lower than what the US-FDA and US- EPA say was the lowest dose that caused an adverse effect (50 mg/kg a day)![18] Many chemicals disrupt hormones, which are famous for functioning at very low doses and inactive at the higher doses at which are tested for risk at.[19]
Managing Toxic Risk: Human Experiment, or Precaution?
How is mankind managing such robust evidence of the toxicity risk of chemicals? Rachel's newsletter has long supported the Precautionary Principle (PP); and it has shown how the risk assessment (RA) practiced today by the regulatory agencies, which we have entrusted to keep us safe, is a total failure: RA fails to test the realistic (lower) concentrations of agents found in organisms, even as thousands of studies show toxicity at the beginning of our ability to detect these low dose toxicities. RA also ignores the complex mixtures that life is exposed to; and it tests toxins in adulthood -- a period of cellular senescence, compared to the complexity of development! But it is also worth noting that chemical RA still relies -- I believe deliberately -- on the visible-light microscope -- an observational method perfected almost 100 years ago; which relative to today's biochemistry methods contributes little to toxicology knowledge.
All three categories of causative proofs summarized above take years to carry out. Yet almost every chemical in commerce has been marketed without being tested for reasonable safety or need. For the few chemicals that are pre-market safety tested (drugs and pesticides), the party who will make millions or billions -- in annual revenue from the agent is the party that controls the testing which informs the determination! Even the European Union, which has just shifted this burden of proof (i.e. it is requiring a showing of relative safety before allowing chemicals to be sold, even for thousands of chemicals already on the market) will largely depend on the corporation to tell government if their money-maker is safe. In addition, the safety tests are done only at very high doses, where toxic effects may have little to do with the everyday exposure levels the biosphere experiences, even as low dose toxicity findings are becoming common. This is simply a global, ongoing toxicology experiment on the biosphere, including ourselves.
Taking again the example of bPA, a literature review showed that every one of the 11 published studies finding bPA was not toxic below "safe" level agency level were funded by corporations such as the producers of bPA and its products (by ignoring disease in positive controls and by using a lab rodent whose sensitivity to estrogens such as bPA had been conveniently bred to near zero)! In contrast, financially independent academic bPA researchers have found both positive and negative findings of low-dose bPA risk, but most all found toxicity: 40 studies found toxicity below the regulator's declared "safe" dose.[20]
bPA reveals the nub of the problem: the agencies we have tasked with protecting our health do not even test the doses we are exposed to and they rely on the profit-seeking producers of the toxins to tell them what the risk is! Many other agents already are known to show toxicity at doses organisms are exposed to.
Therefore the relevant social policy question for mankind regarding toxic agents is: how much initial evidence is needed to trigger action to reduce an uncertain risk? Well, the consequences if the risk is real are deadly and horrible; and as discussed, there is lots of initial evidence of toxicity at the doses we encounter; so obviously mankind should take more precaution than we are, and pay more heed to the toxicology data that is available.
In that regard, note one emotional argument used against implementing the PP: to act before having near-certain knowledge about a question of risk devalues the role of science. Activists respond: no, we need science to determine if precaution is needed or not. But we activists should engage even more science, because doing so throws this argument about "objectivity," and therefore trust, back to the destroyers of the biosphere. The subjective, industry money-driven "science" done for regulatory RA is not science, which is an open and critical-minded testing of hypotheses. Objective science strongly and increasingly suggests that the risks of toxic agents are horrific! Poison in the biosphere is one of the "Four horsemen of the apocalypse" (together with loss of habitat and of genetic diversity, and global warming). Scientists should always protect their key asset -- objectivity -- against misuse. But we activists and others always should use more of the fruits of that objectivity -- let us employ more science!
[1] M. Rechsteiner et al. 1976 "Turnover of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide in cultures of human cells." J Cellular Physiology: 88: 2: 207-217.
[2] http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-05/9597873 88.Cb.r.html.
[3] Creighton, Thomas E., Proteins, (1984) W. H. Freeman & Co., p. 407.
[4] http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1998-10/9052 15349.Cb.r.html.
[5] http://stke.sciencemag.org/
[6] A.E. Taylor and others, editors, "The Physiology of Oxygen Radicals" Amer. Physiol. Soc. Bethesda MD 1986.
[7] U. Weiss (Ed.) 19 Dec. 2002 "Nature Insight: Inflamation," Nature:420:6917:845-889.
[8] wonderwhizkids.com/Chemistry/Organic+Chemistry/Functional+G roup/Organohalogen+compounds/Organohalogen+compounds+5.htm and wonderwhizkids.com/Chemistry/Organic+Chemistry/Functional+Group/Orga nohalogen+compounds/Organohalogen+compounds+6.html
[9] Vetter W, Gribble GW 2007 Nov. "Anthropogenic persistent organic pollutants -- lessons to learn from halogenated natural products." Environ Toxicol Chem.:26(11):2249-52.
[9] Kristin Schaffer et al. May 2004 "Chemical Trespass: pesticides in our bodies and corporate accountability." Pesticide Action Network N. America, San Fran. CA (http://panna.org); which extracted the pesticide data from the CDC's less-accessible overall NHANES-III data.
[11] Wozniak A.L. et al. 2005 "Xenoestrogens at picomolar to nanomolar concentrations trigger membrane estrogen receptor-a mediated Ca2 fluxes and prolactin release in GH3/B6 pituitary tumor cells." Environ Health Perspect 113:431-9.
[12] Landrigan, P. et al. 2007 "The Declaration of Brescia on Prevention of the Neurotoxicity of Metals." Amer J Ind Med:50:709-11.
[13] ATSDR/EPA Priority Superfund List, see http://www.atsdr.cdc.g ov/cercla/.
[14] See the Special Section "Metals: impacts on health & the environment." Science:300:925-47.
[15] Jerrett M. et al. 2003 May "Environmental influences on healthcare expenditures: an exploratory analysis from Ontario, Canada." J Epidemiol Community Health:57(5):334-8.
[16] Granados, J.A.T. 2005 "Point-Counterpoint -- Increasing mortality during the expansions of the US economy, 1900-1996." Int'l J Epidemiology:34(6):1194-1202.
[17] Welshons, W.V. et al. 2006 "Large Effects from Small Exposures. III. Endocrine Mechanisms Mediating Effects of Bisphenol A at Levels of Human Exposure." Endocrinology 147(6) (Supplement):S56-S69.
[18] Wozniak, A.I. et al. 2005 "Xenoestrognes at picomolar to nanomolar concentrations trigger membrane estrogen receptor-a mediated Ca2+ fluxes and prolactin release in GH3/B6 pituary tumor cells." Env Health Perspec:113:431-9.
[19] http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/scienceback ground/2007/2007-0415nmdrc.html and I have about 30 published studies.
[20] vom Saal, F.S. and Welshons, W.V. 2006 "Large effects from small exposures. II. The importance of positive controls in low-dose research on bisphenol A," Environ Res 100:50-76.
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From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #999 ..........[This story printer-friendly]
February 19, 2009
CANCER WAS A RARE DISEASE BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
[Editor's introduction: A study of available medical data reveals that cancer is a relatively new disease, which has grown rapidly during the industrial era.]
By Tony Tweedale
[Tony Tweedale runs a consultancy (R.I.S.K. -- Rebutting Industry's Science Through Knowledge) in Edinburgh, U.K. for toxics activists and scientists short on time, finding the most relevant toxicology results. tony.tweedale@phonecoop.coop]
One little-known gem of evidence that cancer incidence has exploded in the industrial era comes from the time of the founding of the USA's National Cancer Institute. I suspected that its founding scientists were very interested in cancer trends, and indeed I found a major study in the first volume of their journal, 1940. I converted and extrapolated their finding of cancer prevalence (rate at a given point in time) of 363/100,000 (0.36%) in the 12 largest USA cities where the best records were,[1] into a rough estimate of national lifetime risk of cancer of 25.4% (assuming a 70 year life) at that time: the 1930's, when toxic emissions were still minor. This study may well be the source of the zeitgeist that I heard as a child in the late 1960's, that cancer would hit "one in four" Americans in their lifetime!
Yet by the early 1990's better estimating methods (since 1973, cancer incidence trend study has eliminated the bias of today's longer life- spans that allowed us to acquire more cancers) show that Americans' lifetime cancer risk rapidly grew to hit almost one in two Americans -- 45% of men and 39% of women(!),[2] where it has since plateaued not mildly decreased, as claimed.[3] In fact, even when cancers that increased due to smoking and better detection are removed, cancer incidence in the USA increased a bit (0.1%/yr) every year, 1975 to 1994, for women but a lot (1.8%/yr)[4] for men (for whom the increase accelerated every year).
Cancer mortality world-wide shows congruent increases among industrialized countries (at least those with registries reliable enough to estimate the trend), even when excluding lung and stomach cancers (tobacco and food causes).[5] The International Agency for Research on Cancer says that even recently (1990 to 2000), cancer incidence increased a full 19% worldwide (and 44% of the 900 agents that IARC has evaluated to date have been classified as possible, probable or actual human carcinogens).[6]
Additionally, most cancer types arise more frequently in the industrialized world than in the less developed world -- a finding replicated in 2000.[7] Many have noted that incidence rates have increased even among the visible cancer types, whose incidence rates have not been falsely inflated by today's imaging technologies that newly detect some internal cancers.
Furthermore, many cancer types have increased drastically in incidence in the American cancer incidence database; relatively few have decreased. Incidence of childhood cancers in the USA has soared 31% since standardization of the USA cancer incidence data in 1973, from about 130 to 170 per 100,000;[8] including a 56.5% increase in brain/CNS childhood cancers and a 69% increase for immune system/blood cancers.[9] Among children through age 19, the overall increase from 1973 to 2000 was 22%.[10] All-age testicular cancer soared 66% from 1975 to 2002. Prostate cancer incidence nearly tripled 1973-1992, and is still 2.5 times its 1972 rate.[11] Breast cancer increased 25.3%, 1975-1996 -- it (including the less risky ductal carcinomas in situ) now strikes at least one in six(!) women of the USA, up from 1 in 14 in the 1960s.[12]
So it seems safe to say that "about half" of Americans today will acquire an invasive cancer, if we extrapolate mildly because the recent huge decline in autopsies, meaning that we are missing significantly more cancers than we did when autopsies were more common.[13]
In short, cancer seems to have about doubled since the early 20th Century. A far more thorough review of the factors influencing changes in cancer incidence has come to the same conclusion.[14] Could it be true?
Practicing for decades as the only care-givers in remote primitive human populations before and as the industrial revolution first developed, several doctors kept careful records of their patients for decades; they found that cancer was all but non-existent in these primitive people:[35] direct if flawed evidence (as they could not compare their findings to urbanized cancer prevalence) that cancer is largely caused by environment!
There seems little doubt -- in the country with the best records -- that well after the smoking cancer surge, but as industrial and other toxin exposures surged and a radical alteration of our diets began (lately even altering food itself!), an explosion of cancer incidence followed. However, cancer in the USA likely didn't quite double overall, because the original "one in four" estimate above missed more cancers than we do today (however they did try to count total prevalence on their area); and because we live a bit longer today, allowing more cancers to occur.
[1] Collins SD et al. Aug. 1940 "Trend & Geographic Variation in Cancer Mortality and Prevalence." J Ntl Cancer Institute:1:4:425-50.
[2] Ntl. Cancer Institute (NCI) 1994 "SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 1971-1991." NIH Pub. No. 94-2789, Bethesda MD.
[3] See Clegg LX, et al. 2002 Oct "Impact of reporting delay and reporting error on cancer incidence rates and trends." J Ntl Cancer Inst.:16;94(20):1537-45.
[4] Dinse GE, Umbach DM, Sasco AJ, Hoel DG, Davis DL 1999 "Unexplained increases in cancer incidence in the United States from 1975 to 1994: possible sentinel health indicators?" Ann Rev Public Health:20:173-209.
[5] Devra L. Davis et al. 25 Aug. 1990 "International Trends in Cancer Mortality in France, ...and the USA." Lancet:336:478-91 (correspondance exchange 336:1262-5).
[6] Cogliano V. Sept. 2004 "The Science and Practice of Carcinogen Identification and Evaluation." Env. Health Perspectives:112:13:1269-74.
[7] International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) 2001 "GLOBOCAN 2000-Cancer Incidence, Mortality & Prevalence Worldwide, v. 1.0." IARC Press, Lyon France; available at http://www.dep.iarc.fr/glo bocan/globocan.html (accessed Jan. 2004).
[8] Tracey Woodruff et al. Apr. 2004 "Trends in Env. Related Childhood Diseases." Pediatrics:113:4(suppl):1133-40.
[9] Ntl. Cancer Institute (NCI) 2005 "SEER Stat Database: Nov. 2004 Sub (1973-2004)," available: http://www.seer.cancer.gov.
[10] Same as Note 9: NCI 2005.
[11] Same as Note 9: NCI 2005.
[12] L Ries et al., eds. 2004 "SEER Cancer Statistics Reviews, 1975-2001." Bethesda MD:Ntl. Cancer Institute; available: http://www.seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2001/.
[13] Shojania KG et al. 4 June 2003 "Changes in Rates of Autopsy- Detected Diagnostic errors Over Time." JAMA:289:2849-56.
[14] Irigaray P et al. 2007 Dec. "Lifestyle-related factors and environmental agents causing cancer: an overview." Biomed Pharmacother.61(10):640-58.
[15] Stefanson 'Cancer: disease of civilisation?' New York: Hill & Wang; 1960; and V.Z. Goldsmith Mar/Apr 1998 "Cancer: a disease of industrialization." Ecologist:28:2:93-9.
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From: Synthesis/Regeneration ..............................[This story printer-friendly]
December 1, 2009
PRODUCTION-SIDE ENVIRONMENTALISM
[Editor's introduction: Should the environmental movement focus its attention on production or consumption? So far, many of us have been mainly consumption-oriented.]
By Don Fitz
Corporate "environmentalism" is consumer-side environmentalism. "Make your dollars work for the Earth." "Buy green!" "Purchase this green gewgaw instead of that ungreen gadget." "Feel guilty about driving your car."
Consumer-side environmentalism is loath to discuss production.
Consumer-side environmentalism does not challenge the manufacture of cars. Rather, it assumes that producing more and more cars is a sacred right never to be questioned.
Production-side environmentalism places blame on the criminal rather than the victim. It looks at the profits oil companies reap from urban sprawl rather than demeaning people who have no way to get to work other than driving a car. Production-side environmentalism looks at an agro-food industry which profits from transporting highly processed, over-packaged, nutrient-depleted junk thousands of miles rather than the parent giving in to a child bombarded with Saturday morning pop- tart-porn TV.
Production and consumption: A broken connection
Okay. Corporations are the root of environmental evil. What's the point of differentiating between production and consumption? Aren't they just two parts of the same process? Production goes up so consumption can go up -- right? Since America is a "consumer society," environmentalists typically assume that decreasing consumption would force a decrease in production and these two steps would merge into an integrated whole.
Through more than 99% of human history, this simple connection characterized economics. If people wanted more, they produced more, they had more, and they consumed more. During the last century, this connection has been increasingly broken. It has become possible to steadily increase the amount of production (about 2-3% annually) with little to no increase in meaningful consumption.
It has become possible to steadily increase the amount of production with little to no increase in meaningful consumption.
The word "meaningful" is key in understanding whether consumption goes up, goes down, or stagnates. If a stove is manufactured to last 10 years instead of 50 years, a couple may purchase 5 stoves instead of 1 during a 50-year marriage. This is an increase in consumption in only the most frivolous, non-meaningful way. In the world of real people, as opposed to the fantasy world of economists, there has actually been a slight decrease in meaningful consumption. There were four times when the couple was without a stove.
Since WWII, and especially since the 1960s, America has witnessed a massive overproduction of what is profitable and an obscene shrinking of what is needed. There has been a mushrooming growth of nuclear weapons and other war toys that nobody can eat, wear or live in. Being able to get from here to there has been replaced with traffic jams and commercials telling us how happy we are to consume individual automobiles. The construction industry has shot up as buildings last fewer years. Food epitomizes simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption as Americans are increasingly obese and less nourished.
Clearly, production can go up while [meaningful] consumption goes down or stagnates. But, could the opposite be true?
Is it possible to decrease production while increasing consumption?
Yes. Society can reduce the total amount of time spent manufacturing objects at the same time individuals in that society have more to consume. While this was not true for our ancestors, it is the most important principle of environmental economics at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Society can reduce the total amount of time spent manufacturing objects at the same time individuals in that society have more to consume.
This basic principle pervades all aspects of climate change, peak oil, toxins and species preservation. The reason why it is an economic rule now, but not previously, is simple. Some time after WWII there began to be sufficient production to meet the basics of food, clothing, shelter and medical care for every person on the planet. The only way the market has continued to expand during recent decades has been through the expansion of goods and services that do nothing to improve the quality of life, often worsen it, and always put profitability before human needs.
By reducing and fundamentally changing entire areas of production, it is possible to reduce the overall mass of stuff while having zero effect on meaningful consumption. Dramatically reducing production would profoundly reduce CO2 emissions, extend the use of available oil by centuries, and eliminate human expansion into species habitat. If people working at and living near manufacturing facilities were the ones making decisions about production, it would become possible to eliminate toxins that poison humans and other species.
Preaching to people that they "have to learn to do without" what a corporate society forces them to purchase will accomplish little more than antagonizing them. In contrast, organizing people to make corporations "learn to do without" the profits from destructive production is an essential for confronting ecological crises. Let's look at a few economic sectors.
Militarism
The military is the only sector of the economy where emissions of green-house gases (GHG) can be reduced by greater than 100%. This is because militarism is the only type of activity whose primary purpose is destruction.
The military is the only sector of the economy where emissions of green-house gases (GHG) can be reduced by greater than 100%.
When a road is bombed in Serbia, energy is used to rebuild it. Energy usage translates to the emission of GHG, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2). When a home is leveled in Afghanistan, reconstruction requires energy. Every hospital brought down and every person maimed in Iraq means CO2 emissions during the treatment of patients and construction of new treatment facilities.
Military production is unique. If it were halted, GHG emissions would be reduced by an amount equal to (a) GHG emitted from repairing what the military bombed, plus (b) GHG produced during its regular activities of building bases, using weapons and transporting troops and equipment.
Though the official figure for the military budget is $623 billion, the War Resistors League [1] calculates total military-related spending at $1,118 billion by including NASA, Department of Energy nukes, vet benefits and interest on past military debts. Another $110 billion should be tacked on for extra spending on the war in Iraq.
The gross domestic product (GDP) is $13,246.6 billion. [2] Putting these together leads to an estimate that just under a tenth of the US economy is military-related spending: [$1,188B + $110B] / $13,246.6B = 9.80%
This only accounts for military sales to the Pentagon. Since US arms manufacturers are major providers for regimes throughout the world, military spending actually accounts for considerably more than 10% of the GDP.
Militarism may contribute more than any other 10% of the economy to oil depletion, creation of toxins and habitat destruction. Yet, the one area of the economy where a greater than 100% reduction in greenhouse gases is possible is the area least likely to be discussed in connection with climate change.
Food
The most basic necessity is food. It illustrates what "decreasing production" of a commodity means. It does not mean decreasing the amount of the commodity produced. The "production of food" encompasses the labor and other inputs that go into what Americans eat, including:
* huge agricultural equipment, its manufacture, and the oil to operate it;
* chemical fertilizers and pesticides, research to create them, and everything to transport and store them;
* genetically engineered seed, its research, and Monsanto's legal team and seed police which perpetrate criminal trespass to steal plant samples;
* the entire chain of food processing and packaging (up to 99% of the cost of some products);
* transportation of 1400 miles from "farm to fork" for the average morsel of food;
* manufacture of trucks, boats, planes, roads and docks to transport food; and,
* growing 8 to 10 times as much grain to produce a pound of beef protein as would be contained in the grain itself.
Adding everything together means that it could be possible to produce as much or more food than America currently consumes with less than 10% of the inputs that currently go into agro-industry. It would greatly increase the amount of "meaningful" food we eat.
Clothing
Until the last few decades consumer goods were designed to endure. Post-WWII corporations faced the dilemma that increasing the durability of products would mean that people would have what they needed with little reason to purchase more. By the 1960s planned obsolescence had slammed clothing, appliances and household items full force.
Until the last few decades consumer goods were designed to endure.
People of my generation and older can tell dozens of stories of things that "used to last" -- shoes, dishes, coffee pots, desks, furniture, everything bought for the home or office. The most vile form of commoditization is the disposable bag, bottle, cup, plate, and camera designed to be used a single time and then spend centuries contaminating groundwater or choking distant aquatic life.
Business is not immune to the ever-decreasing durability that plagues consumers. Computers and computer software suck capital from industry as they drain family budgets with their out-of-date-by-design formatting.
Take all the useless junk that people are persuaded that they need, add it to those useful goods with a premeditated plan to fall apart, and ask "How much manufacturing is truly needed for the consumer goods that make for a quality life?" The answer has to be that production could decrease by at least 70% (maybe 90%) with zero decrease in the quality of life and the increase in mental health that would come from knowing that you probably don't have to fix or buy something tomorrow.
Shelter
Current standards for urban planning anticipate that 2% of US buildings will be replaced every year. That means the average house is expected to last 50 years. Does that make a 50-year-old home an old building? Many European buildings went up 500 years ago. That proves, again beyond any doubt, that 500 years ago architects knew how to design buildings that would last for 500 years.
...500 years ago architects knew how to design buildings that would last for 500 years.
Unless lead poisoning has irretrievably damaged the brains of architects, they should be able to replicate that in the 21st century. Or maybe the problem isn't individual architects, but a building sector pushing to have each generation of homes constructed to worse standards than the generation before.
After I spoke about global warming at an area high school, the principal privately challenged my figure that US buildings are designed to last 50 years. "I went to a city council meeting last week," he told me. "And they were approving construction of a new government building that the architect said would last 20 years."
"And did the architect promise it would be covered with eco-gadgets?" I wanted to know.
"Solar panels. Double-flush toilets. It would have everything."
The amount of energy saved with green gadgets is lost many times over by erecting new buildings when existing ones will do fine. What could be more absurd than building tens of thousands of new eco-homes at the height of the 2007-08 real estate collapse when more homes are clearly not needed?
Imagine a "green building" plan that said:
1. No building could go up unless there was an absence of unused comparable building space within 50 miles; and,
2. Any new building would have to be constructed to a 500-year standard.
It should be obvious that if buildings were constructed to last 10 times as long we would need one tenth as many new buildings. Intelligent planning should be able to ensure a home for every family (increase in consumption) at the same time there is much less construction (decrease in production).
Health care
The life expectancy in the US is 78.0 years. The life expectancy in Cuba is 78.0 years. The annual cost of health care in Cuba is $193 per person. The cost of health care in the US is over 20 times as much, over $4500 per person per year. A reasonable American could conclude that when s/he spends $100 on health care, less than $5 goes to keeping her/him healthy and over $95 goes to the cancerous bloating of the sickness industry. [3]
Everyone living in a US city should be able to reach a primary care physician by walking or cycling for less than 15 minutes.
This suggests that the US could decrease health care costs by 90% and still spend twice as much per person as does Cuba. Just how could the US make such incredibly deep cuts in the cost of "medical production" without damaging (and even improving) the quality of health care?
* Eliminate health insurance companies. This parasitic growth diverts billions of dollars to enormous office buildings, their construction and maintenance, and labor wasted judging who gets treatment and who is left to die. The entire industry should be surgically removed.
* Focus on community preventive care rather than hospital care. Hospitals are necessary for many emergency treatments. Childbirth and locked mental health wards are examples of what the industry has medicalized in pursuit of profit.
* Eliminate most medications. Require physicians to document that available non-medication treatments have been exhausted prior to writing a scrip. I dumped my last primary care physician after he started yelling at me for refusing to take meds for blood pressure (which is now under control by changes in diet and exercise).
* Replace most specialists with neighborhood primary care physicians. Everyone living in a US city should be able to reach a primary care physician by walking or cycling for less than 15 minutes. The fact that the medical establishment cannot conceptualize this shows its contempt for preventive care.
Demanding that the government increase funds for a bad health care system will make insurance and drug companies richer but it will not make Americans healthier. That can only happen by totally redesigning health care into a much smaller system than it is now.
Transportation
The automobile industry would have us believe that improving transportation means increasing the number of cars on the road. Corporate environmentalists nod in agreement, accepting the car culture as an Act of God but wishing it would be based on hybrid, electric or hydrogen cars. Shallow green plans to cope with transportation are consistently devoid of any thought of reducing the production of cars.
Shallow green plans to cope with transportation are consistently devoid of any thought of reducing the production of cars.
A deep green approach to transportation would focus on eliminating [at least] 95% of cars in American cities. Such a plan might look something like this:
* Redesign cities to rebirth local businesses so that people can make 80% of their trips by walking or cycling.
* Ensure that frequent and cheap mass transit allows for people to use it for 80% of other trips.
* Establish car-sharing or ride-sharing for the 4% of trips remaining.
* Only after the above are adopted, eliminate parking spaces except for emergency, construction and car-shared vehicles.
Would this increase or decrease the "consumption" of a transportation system? Orthodox economists would insist that it would not be increasing consumption because people would not be driving in ever- increasing circles. This rigid mindset fails to realize that transportation means getting from point A to point B, or from all the points A to all the points B you need to get to. The more that destination points are spread apart by urban sprawl and the more that roads are choked with cars, even "green" cars, the longer and more miserable trips are. Despite what economists might tell you, this is increased consumption of agony, not increased consumption of transportation.
Try this way of thinking about it. On your lunch break, you want to run over and say "Hi!" to your mom and pick up your shoes from the repair shop. But each is 20 miles away from where you work, so you can only do one. In a deep green city redesigned so that everything is closer together, they are each 1 mile away and you can bicycle to do both. In the minds of corporate economists and shallow green environmentalists, you would be consuming more of the transportation system if you do one trip of 20 miles. In the minds of rational human beings you would be consuming more transportation if you met both goals in two short trips.
Not necessarily a good thing to do
Though I am one of many who have misdiagnosed environmental problems as being rooted in over-consumption, consumption is not the primary issue. The source of the disease is overproduction. Resolving environmental problems requires us to stop seeing them as the same.
Nevertheless, just because you have the ability to so something does not necessarily mean that it is a good thing to do. As a society, twenty-first century America has the ability to simultaneously decrease production and increase consumption. But the fact that we can do it does not necessarily mean that consuming more or even the same amount is a good idea.
A quick glance at the designed waste and destructiveness of the US economy suggests that we can reduce production by 50-80% (perhaps by 90%) while the average person would have more consumer goods at any one time. If getting serious about addressing climate change and related catastrophes became the norm and if reducing production were to be seen as a virtue, people might think, "Now that shirts last four times as long and only cost a little more, I can afford to have 80 shirts instead of 30. But do I really need 80 shirts?" [4]
Once production for human need replaces production for corporate profit, it becomes possible to reconnect production and consumption. When people again produce what they need, reducing what they consume means less will be produced.
Multiply 80 shirts by a thousand commodities and hundreds of millions of consumers and we have Phase 2 of the reduction of production. Phase 1 was the reduction of production with an increase of consumption. Phase 2 is an intensified reduction of production based on a reduction of consumption and an improvement in the quality of life. How might it look?
Phase 2: Less production, less consumption and a better life
Militarism. With the US having a military budget greater than the rest of the world combined, 800 military bases on which the sun never sets, and enough nuclear weapons to disintegrate every person many times over, it could reduce its spending by over 90% with zero threat to national security. A Phase 1 reduction in military production by 90% would be accompanied by spending some of that money at home in useful areas of the economy and some abroad to repair the damage done. Phase 2 reduction would begin if people asked, "If we are already providing the basic necessities of life with other economic changes, instead of using military savings to produce additional goods, why don't we produce nothing extra at all and use the savings to reduce the work week?" [5]
Food. There might be as much as a 90% drop in food inputs by reducing meat, transportation, pesticides, fertilizers, equipment, processing, packaging and genetic contamination. As people watch this happen with no decrease in the quantity but a huge increase in the quality of food, the stage will be set for Phase 2. Wes Jackson, Stan Cox and their colleagues at The Land Institute have provided brilliant guidelines for developing hybrid lines of perennial food plants that would reduce the amount of land tilled, leading to less erosion and less land being needed for food production. Add this to the expansion of numerous techniques of organic and indigenous farming throughout the world to yield continuous ways to reduce agricultural inputs. [6]
Consumer goods. Core to the concept of increasing consumption while decreasing production is requiring consumer goods to be manufactured to standards of life expectancy that are many times what they are now. During Phase 1, people could well see their work week getting shorter while they accumulate even more stuff than they have now. Railing against people for personal accumulation does little good for many reasons, one of which is if this person buys less, then that person (or that government, that business or that bank) buys or invests more. It is only when production as a whole drops that reductions in personal consumption can lead to further drops in production. In this context, people might well decide to share tools and washing machines and children might enjoy clothes passed down from older siblings, which, multiplied millions of times, intensifies the downward trend in production..
Construction. When we ask how many centuries instead of how many decades a new building should last, it is also time to start thinking about the second phase of decelerating construction. The question for that phase is: If we focus on retrofitting existing structures, how close to zero new construction can we get? How do we modify what we already have to create housing collectives, co-housing communities and urban ejidos? In a post-market economy, new social relationships in living would become the dominant factor in architecture. More dense living and a smaller space per person would be the sine qua non of deep green urban redesign.
More dense living and a smaller space per person would be the sine qua non of deep green urban redesign.
Transportation. The great transportation contradiction is that the more people who own cars, the longer it takes to get from points A to points B. As mentioned, increased car ownership increases the distance between destination points as well as obviously putting more cars on the road. The drive can take a dive only if people can get there without four wheels. Phase 1 of transportation reformulation means designing communities for walking and biking in order to reduce car ownership. Phase 2 begins when people collectively identify needs that can be met without their going anywhere. For example, imagine food warehouses replacing supermarkets. Households combine electronic grocery lists into a neighborhood order that the warehouse delivers and is then disaggregated by neighbors. Instead of thousands of cars each filling a massive parking lot, a few dozen delivery trucks fill orders.
Health care. A big reason for bad health care is the industry organizing itself separate and apart from communities. If neighborhood health centers were to replace distant offices, insurance companies, quick fixes, drugs, hospitals and overpaid specialists, people could then ask how else they could chip away at the sickness business while improving the quality of their lives. Though redesigning neighborhoods so people can walk to their doctor and kicking soda machines out of schools are part of this, changes can be much bigger. Communities could ask: How can a neighborhood share the care of severely disabled people rather than constructing more nursing homes and treatment centers with three shifts per day and a management team that answers to insurance companies?
Barriers
The greatest barrier to coping with climate change, peak oil, toxins and habitat destruction is the total mass of production. This mass is increasing; its increase vastly outpaces any real or imagined increase in consumption; and its increase is made worse by peddling green gadgets as some sort of solution.
The greatest barrier to coping with climate change, peak oil, toxins and habitat destruction is the total mass of production.
A deep green view understands that too much production is the core problem. Necessary changes do not require any reduction in "consumption," at least in any meaningful sense of that word. If a corporate economy cannot allow production to decrease, it only makes sense that preserving the Earth requires replacing corporate power with a democratic economy.
A knife going into a person's stomach can be the death blow of a thief or life-saving surgery. Which is to say: An action can have opposite effects, depending on its context. A plea to replace or reduce individual consumptive habits in a society where market forces dictate that every decrease in energy here is offset by an increase somewhere else is a plea falling on deaf bank statements. But if we could replace production for profit with production for what we need and want, people would have the power to alter society to change its wants and even redesign its needs. With the link between production and consumption restored, lowering consumption would indeed affect production -- but only in a deep green society. This is production- side environmentalism.
The above is based on a talk Don Fitz gave June 29, 2008 at the Surviving Climate Change roundtable in St. Louis. He can be contacted at fitzdon@aol.com
Notes
1. http://www.warresisters.org
2. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Department of Commerce ht tp://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm (Table 3)
3. Dresang, L.T., Brebrick, L., Murray, D., Shallue, A., & Sullivan- Vedder, L., 2005. Family medicine in Cuba: Community-oriented primary care and complementary and alternative medicine. Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, 18 (4), 297-303.
4. While there could be a 90% or greater reduction in several economic sectors, economies of scale may mean that a much smaller drop in basic industry could be achieved, perhaps meaning that less than a 90% overall decrease would occur.
5. If militarism accounts for 11% of the GDP and it were reduced to 1% of the current GDP, that would be a reduction of the GDP by 10%. That could translate to 10% more goods being produced or it could translate to a reduction of the 40-hour work week to 36 hours, or it could translate to 5% more goods being produced and shipped abroad as reparations for US war crimes simultaneous with a 5% decrease in the work week to 38 hours.
6. Cox, S. Sick planet: Corporate food and medicine. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008. Glover, J.D., Cox, C.M., & Reganold, J.P., August, 2007. Future farming: A return to roots? Scientific American, 297 (2), 82-89.