Table of Contents
People and Nature Before Profits introduces the
Communist Party's environmental program. Its collective author is the National Environmental Commission of the CPUSA which was established by the Communist Party in 1992. The Commission is composed of communists active in the environmental and union movements in various parts of the country. It is chaired by Virginia Brodine, formerly editor of Environment and author of two environmental books. She writes on the environment frequently in Political Affairs and the People's Weekly World.Return to the table of contents.
Profit is the decisive factor in our economy. Actually, it is not "our" economy. We may be the workers in the factories, the mines, the shops, the offices,the fields, the forests and all the other workplaces that make the profits possible, but the economy is run by the CEOs of the big corporations and the business lobbies in Washington, D.C. and all the state capitals. They hold the scales that balance people and nature against profits.
In their eyes, both workers and nature are costs of production. The fewer the workers and the lower the wages, the higher the profits. And it is more important to keep costs down than to add the expense of dealing with nature in a way that will maintain its ability to continue producing.
They see nature as merely the supplier of raw materials: coal, oil, metals from below ground, crops from the fields and trees from the forest. Air, water and land are "free" or cheap sites for the waste that comes out the other end of the production and marketing processes.
All or most of the burden of protecting air, water, land and people from the harmful byproducts of production and from the sheer quantity of waste material is shifted to local, state and federal governments, where the people's taxes pay the price - when it is paid at all.
In only one way do workers increase their weight when corporations balance them against profits: by organizing in unions. Nature, however, cannot organize. Of all the millions of species of plant and animal life, only the human species can organize. People, organized to protect nature, can give it more weight in the balance against profits.
We are told that people are stacked against nature in the balance (with profits conveniently forgotten). Capitalist spokesmen claim that protecting nature cuts jobs. Sometimes environmentalists fall into that trap, advocating measures that may temporarily cut jobs, without looking for ways that might save those jobs, and looking on workers as obstructionists. Unions sometimes blame environmentalists for problems created by the corporations.
Actually, cleaning up past environmental disasters, and organizing production in a more environmentally sound way, will create more jobs in a more stable, sustainable economy.
New jobs are already being created in the cleanup of polluted and damaged natural systems and in monitoring both the pollution and the effects of cleanup. The new enterprises needed to manufacture pollution control equipment, and to develop and operate waste disposal and processing systems, with all their limitations, have created jobs. Pollution control got underway in the 1970s and within a decade nearly 600 new companies had been started, providing jobs for thousands of workers. True, not all of them are what they profess to be. Sometimes "environmental" or "waste management" in a company's name is mere window dressing. But the more real it is, the more jobs it creates.
Changes necessary for more sustainable production would require more workers, not fewer. Some of the "technologically advanced" but environmentally destructive methods in both mining and logging have been developed specifically because they use fewer workers.
The misuse of nature for the sake of profits today has consequences that may not show up until tomorrow. But unless we care for nature today it will be a bleak tomorrow, possibly for us, certainly for our children, and even more for the generations that follow.
We must organize to protect our natural environment in order to give it weight against profits in the scale now. To make people and nature the decisive factors in what will be truly our economy, we will eventually have to remove profits from the scale altogether.
How do these factors of profits, people, and nature relate to each other now, and how can we change the way they work with or against each other in order to insure that we do have a tomorrow, a people's tomorrow?
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table of contents.Many of us go to work today knowing or suspecting that our jobs may be dangerous to our health. This is not new.
No sooner did the industrial revolution begin, than the new technologies created dangers to life and health on the job. In 1851, after boiler explosions had killed 407 people in a single year, Congress finally passed a measure to lessen this danger and hold employers responsible. The law was not passed without loud screams from the employers and their mouthpieces in the Senate.
"Can a man's property be said to be his own," one Senator demanded, "when you take it out of his control and put it in the hands of another, though he may be a federal officer?" (From Fear at Work, p. 74)
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Whenever workers have called for a healthy environment on the job or environmentalists have called for a healthy environment off the job, they get that same argument. Just as the drive for the right to a job was turned upside down, and the slogan "Right to Work" is used to bust the unions, so the drive to use the environment wisely is turned upside down and the slogan "Wise Use" is used to bust the environmental movement.
Under the guise of this beguiling slogan, with the claim of defending the property rights of small owners, the real goal is to end restrictions on polluting companies and wipe out environmental organizations.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is supposed to monitor the work environment and protect workers on the job. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is supposed to monitor the environment and protect us all off the job. It took vigorous struggles by environmental organizations against bitter corporate opposition to establish EPA in 1969; and by unions (with help from environmentalists) against the same opposition to establish OSHA in 1971.
OSHA and EPA standards are fought down to the last part per millionth of a pollutant, their enforcement resisted, evaded and fought case by case by polluting corporations. The regulatory agencies have been underfunded, understaffed and undercut. Both are subject to constant and powerful pressure from the very industries they are supposed to regulate.
Both EPA and OSHA have set their standards, not to eliminate pollutants dangerous to the health of workers on the job and communities outside, but to reduce them to "acceptable risks." "Acceptable" means the corrective cost to the corporation will not be too high to frighten the owners and the number of illnesses or fatalities will not be too high to frighten the public.
Chemical products such as some cleaning agents which are "acceptable" for use in open, well-ventilated areas can be lethal when used by workers in confined spaces. Some 300 workers a year die, either because they used such agents in a confined space, or because they tried to rescue a fellow worker who had already succumbed. (Dangerous Premises, p. 54)
A certain level of air pollution is "acceptable" in the regulatory system. A clean industry can sell its "pollution rights" to its dirty neighbor. The EPA actually auctions off to utilities allowances to pollute the air with sulfur dioxide. It is cheaper to buy an allowance than to cut down pollution.
Pollution control was supposed to clean up our air and water, but though campaigns by environmental organizations from the community to the federal level, have frequently kept pollution from getting worse, or improved things slightly, they have not made either air or water truly clean. This environmental failure is described in Barry Commoner's Making Peace with the Planet.
Labor and environmentalists work for stronger laws, but laws are only enforced when people demand a commitment from federal and state administrations. Determined investigators and sincere lower-level administrators cannot do their jobs unless they have meaningful support and direction from the top, and unless agencies are constantly "watchdogged" from the bottom by individual whistle-blowers, union locals and environmental groups.
That pressure can mean changes at the point of production. It means laws, regulations, and regulatory agencies that say, not just "make less pollution," but "don't make pollution - period."
As it is, even when OSHA and EPA do go after corporate criminals who may be responsible for causing disease and even death in their plants, or even harming the environment in ways difficult, if not impossible to correct, little happens. The corporations hire teams of lawyers to fight these cases. Found guilty? Sometimes. Jail? Never. Fines? Cheaper to pay the fine than to act legally and responsibly.
Dennis P. DeMaio gives the example of General Electric, cited by EPA for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act, by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for violations of the Clean Water Act, and by California for violations of the California Safety Code at the Vallecitos Nuclear Center.
"Will GE suffer any meaningful punishment for these crimes?" DeMaio asks. He finds the answer in the company's own documents, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Here the company assures its investors that "it is the view of management that none of the above described proceedings will have a material effect on the financial position of the Company."
DeMaio comments, "How right they are...the aggregate penalties sought by all regulatory authorities chasing it will not represent a blip on its swollen balance sheet." (Political Affairs, Dec. 1993)
Environmental health on and off the job are interlocked. Workers are the guinea pigs who get the first and most concentrated exposure to pollutants which then escape from the factory through the stacks, the water outlets or the plant's solid waste disposal, or are incorporated into the products used by consumers.
The threat of job loss is the employers' most potent weapon against needed change on the job. Only when the workers are organized do they have protection for whistle blowers and the collective power to fight for change.
For the public as a whole as well as for the workers, unions are the first line of defense. Every environmental organization should support specific struggles to control or eliminate a given pollutant on the job, such as the pesticides to which farm workers are exposed. They should also support the organization of unions in every occupation, and join the labor movement in resisting every effort to weaken or break a union.
The labor movement should support the environmental movement also. They need each other. In the past, workers usually lived near the plants where they worked, which made the tie between union and community much more direct than it is today, and often brought broad community support to striking workers. Although the work force is now likely to be scattered, there is another tie between union and community. Communities in the vicinity of a plant are increasingly concerned about its environmental effects.
A few years ago, workers at Urotek, a textile plant in New Haven, Connecticut, were experiencing mysterious liver problems. Medical examinations (done by outside physicians, not by the company doctor) led to the discovery that dimethyl formamide, a chemical used in textile treatment, was the toxin causing the workers' problems. An organizing drive by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union was sparked in part by the need to stop this contamination of the work environment. The possibility of ground water pollution and exposure of neighborhood children brought community concern into the picture. A union-community coalition won a union shop and elimination of the toxin. The union recently signed a new contract with management (its third) containing 22 pages on health and safety.
Some workplaces are outdoors, not indoors, and have different but no less severe problems that directly impact those who work in them, and affect all of us less directly, or in different ways.
Farm workers are subject to an array of highly toxic pesticides, both on the job and in their communities. Some of these pesticides persist, in lesser amounts, on the food we eat.
Chemical fertilizers have been in part responsible for the high yields of U.S. agriculture, yet the resultant agricultural runoff is now a source of serious water pollution.
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table of contents.Farm and forest land are being gobbled up by the unplanned growth of urban sprawl and luxury resorts, without consideration for the need to protect these important bases of renewable resources. The profit vs. nature decision is made on whether it is more profitable, on a given piece of land at a given time, to farm it (or forest it) or sell it to a developer.
In the state of Washington, environmental organizations succeeded in getting a law passed by the legislature called the Growth Management Act. As county after county struggles with the unaccustomed task of trying to manage the growth that has always been unplanned, sharp confrontations develop.
Coalitions in support of preserving resource land are drawing together workers, Native Americans, small business people, local environmental groups and local chapters of national groups such as the Audubon Society. These groups see the land as a resource on which both their county's economy and its quality of life depend, and as a microcosm of the land use problems facing the nation and the world.
They are confronted by land owners who claim the unrestricted right to do what they wish with their land, and real estate companies to whom land is a commodity to buy and sell.
The profits of farmers have not been threatened as long as they continue to farm, yet the agricultural community is sometimes divided, with family farmers more likely to be on the preservation side, agribusiness almost always on the "profits first" side. Yet, sometimes people who own only a house and garden and are not threatened in any way by efforts to manage growth, fall for the "property ownership is sacred" propaganda.
Other efforts are directed at halting the loss of forests through destructive timber "management": a rate of harvest too rapid to permit the forest to grow back, clear-cutting, followed by replanting of a single species and the use of chemical herbicides. This results in a tree farm that uses up the soil instead of nurturing it as a natural forest does. Logging roads that erode the hillsides and heavy equipment that compacts the soil further undermine a forest's sustainability.
The future of logging and lumber mill jobs are in danger when the future of forests is in danger.
We need old growth forests in particular, but newer forests as well, and not just as timber resources. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and thus are a shield against the global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere. A loss of forests can mean a change of climate. A change of climate can make it impossible for the trees to grow back.
Forests protect the soil and provide habitat for thousands of plants, animals, and micro-organisms. Old growth forest ecosystems are only beginning to be understood in all their richness. This applies to the old growth in our own national forests, as well as to the tropical rain forests of other countries.
The value of an endangered species has sometimes been pitted against the value of human beings and their immediate livelihood. That is a totally false comparison. No other living species threatens our survival. Our survival is threatened, however, by the extinction of plant and animal species which is proceeding at a rate that is tearing at the web of life on which the livelihood of all human beings depends.
The disappearance of the spotted owl in old growth forest or the presence of E. coli in drinking water is like the canary in the mine that warns of coming danger. Another as yet unknown species may hold an answer to a human health problem, as the bark of the yew offered taxol to cancer sufferers. Above all, each species is part of a complex living system, the consequences of whose removal to the whole, including its human component, are unpredictable.
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table of contents.We have environmental concerns that come from where we live as well as where we work. The 1990 United Steelworkers' Task Force Report on the Environment put it this way:
We once saw toxic chemicals only as a threat to the workers using them. But it is essential to look at the entire life cycle of a chemical, from its manufacture, to storage, use and ultimate disposal. Every year billions of pounds of toxic chemicals are released into U.S. and Canadian air and water. Working class communities are hit especially hard, with industrial workers exposed both inside and outside the plant.
Whole communities - Love Canal is the best known example - have been destroyed by toxic waste. A "Superfund" to clean up the worst of the superdumps is to come in part from the corporations committing the crimes, but much time and money has been deflected as corporations sue the government to avoid paying what they owe.
Special targets of concentrated pollution are African American, Native American, or Latino communities, or poor communities, of whatever race or color, with a high rate of unemployment. They become the unwilling recipients of toxic waste dumps, illegal industrial emissions, uncontrolled groundwater contamination, and/or far above average urban air pollution.
The concentrated pollution in these communities is a warning of what is, in smaller amounts, already affecting the whole country. Both companies and government agencies have assumed that these communities are out of sight to the rest of the country, and "out of sight is out of mind."
A 1987 study found that half of all Native and Asian Americans and three out of five African and Hispanic Americans live in communities with waste dumps. (Southern Exposure, Winter, 1993)
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act specifically states that in siting Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) facilities (a kind of encased nuclear dump), the government should "attempt to find a state or Indian tribe willing to host" each one. The bait offered is the (actually few) jobs an MRS would provide.
The Sac and Fox people in Oklahoma have rejected an MRS, the Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico have accepted one. The Yakima Nation in Washington State, after agreeing to the first step - to investigate the suitability of an MRS - informed the Federal Government they could not commit to its installation without a vote of the people.
Ashtabula County, Ohio, a largely rural county with high unemployment, refused an MRS. Opposition was sparked by an anti-nuclear citizen's group and joined by the Central Labor Council. County commissioners concluded it would not be to the benefit of the county for safety and financial reasons. (People's Weekly World, 4/18/92)
In October 1991, a National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit assembled under the aegis of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice It put environmental justice on the environmental and political agenda.
The environmental racism that has targeted people of color in this way has produced a fightback. Networks are developing, especially in the South and Southwest with people of color rejecting this outrage which is devastating their communities, destroying their health, and affecting the ability of women to give birth to healthy babies.
These networks are in the frontlines against toxic contamination for all of us. The fight for environmental justice must become the fight of the trade union and environmental movements as well as of those now on the receiving end and saying, "No more!"
And what is the official response? In public, some new rhetoric from the EPA claimed "environmental equity" as a guiding principle. In private, an internal EPA memo advocated that the agency try to draw support away from civil rights groups before the "minority fairness issue" reaches a point where "activist groups finally succeed in persuading the more influential mainstream groups (civil rights organizations, unions, churches) to take ill-advised actions." (Memo released by Congressman Henry Waxman)
President Clinton has committed the government to reject environmental racism as a policy in selecting sites for toxic dumping. Where will they go? Take over the golf course in an exclusive suburb for a dump? Imagine the outrage! Ship it overseas to a Third World country? That's not environmental justice.
"Environmental justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing and the extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food." (Fourth principle of Environmental Justice, our emphasis) That's pressure for fundamental solutions.
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table of contents.Cities, the nerve centers of our civilization, are so wholly structured by people that those of us who live there - the large majority of the country's working people - may be tempted to believe that it is possible to get along without nature.
We breathe the most polluted air and have to cope with the ugliness and contamination left behind by industries that have moved to the "industrial parks" of the suburbs. Our cities are beginning to choke on their own garbage, and strangle on their own traffic. No wonder that those who can afford to do so flee to the suburbs. Most workers and especially most people of color don't have that choice.
One of the shames of the older cities is that if we live in old housing, our children are still subject to the poison of lead paint, in spite of the fact that its hazard and its solution have been known for half a century.
The newer cities of the west have their problems too. As if the African-American and Latino people of Los Angeles did not have enough other probelms, they get a double dose of L.A.'s air pollution. A UCLA study has shown that 71 percent of Blacks, 50 percent of Latinos and 34 percent of whites live in areas with polluted air.
These things happened because cities have grown and changed based on the private ownership of land, that most basic aspect of the relationship of people to nature. "Planning" was done by successive generations of land developers and speculators.
As Morris Zeitlin says, "Land allocation by price has distorted our cities into patterns of social segregation and a hodgepodge of specialized uses, creating crazy quilts of brocade and burlap patches...Green open spaces, essential for a healthful urban environment, kept shrinking...building and housing costs kept rising."
Furthermore, he says "Cities have tended to sprawl in unplanned ways because builders of new homes and commerical facilities have 'leap-frogged' over high-priced city land to cheaper rural and suburban areas. This has wasted urban land, lengthened home-to-job distances, and extended the length and cost of sewer, water, road and transporation lines." (American Cities, a Working Class View)
Electrically powered mass transit is the most desirable way to deal with traffic problems from the point of view of both people and air pollution, yet as Bernard Snell told the U.S. Senate twenty years ago, "The powerful automobile, oil and tire monopolies have manipulated all levels of government to methodically destroy intra- and inner-city rail transportaiton throughout the country to promote the construction of highways and the sale of motor vehicles." (Quoted by Zeitlin, p. 201)
The amount of trash cities create can be cut down by making more consumer products and more packaging reusable, and by simply reducing the amount of unnecessary packaging. Toxic waste must be removed. If that is done, studies by the Center for Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College have shown that as much as 85% of the waste stream can be composted or recycled in other ways, leaving only 15% for landfills.
Business economists, however, balancing nature against profits, want to put all our trash in landfills. They claim we can leave the problem to future generations for as much as 180 years. One must, they admit, overcome the resistance of the people who live near "acceptable sites" for landfills by paying them to "host" the deposit of the city's trash in their neighborhood. ("False Economy: the Folly of Demand Side Recycling" by Boerner and Chilton in the January/February 1994 issue of Environment)
Once again, this year's bottom line ignores the societal value of conserving resources - land, energy and materials.
Every problem mentioned affects us as citizens of the United States as well as residents of particular communities. There are some problems that can be dealt with only on a national scale. They are important to us if we want a livable, sustainable environment, one which we and future generations can enjoy and which can continue to provide the basis for our economy into the future.
One of the most crucial of such problems is the use of energy. Coal mining, oil production and refining and power plants - whether their source of energy is coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium - are at the base of our economy. Workers in the field of energy are thus in the most basic of our industries. How energy is obtained, how it is used, and what its future is, are crucial to them and to all of us.
Most of our energy comes from non-renewable resources, none of which will last forever. As they become scarce, they will also become more expensive. Gas, oil, and uranium reserves worldwide will run out long before coal, but even coal will some day come to an end. Yet energy is being used wastefully, as if it had no end - and created no environmental problems.
Nuclear plants pose serious risks, as Three Mile Island demonstrated in a small way, and Chernobyl in an appallingly big way. Coal- and oil-fired plants contribute to acid rain, a regional problem wherever sulfuric acid emissions from industries and utilities are removed from the air by rain, with severe effects on both land and water ecosystems and damage to buildings and works of art in cities.
Coal- and oil-fired plants have another, less visible, but even more serious effect: the carbon dioxide they emit is one of the major causes of global warming.
As a result, fragile and unique ecosystems like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with its incredible array of caribou, bear, and bird life, and the Gwich'in people who live there, are threatened by the insatiable quest for energy profits.
The sun shines every day, bringing us an enormous and mostly unused fund of energy. The technology to capture solar energy is already available, but is still expensive because it has not yet been put into mass production. Wind energy, hydroelectric energy - including the energy of the ocean waves, geothermal energy, biothermal energy, are all secondary sources of solar energy.
Capitalist propagandists like to hold up the U.S. quality of life as a model. They conveniently ignore the fact that it is built on the use of a larger amount of non-renewable energy than any other country, and consequently on a larger release of the gases causing global warming than any other country. If the rest of the world were to imitate the U.S., the energy sources would rapidly run out and the natural balance in the atmosphere would be overwhelmed.
It is not only U.S. industry that uses too much energy. The Pentagon uses enough energy in one year to run the entire U.S. urban mass transit system for fourteen years. (Environmental Action, May/June, 1991, p. 25)
Ever since World War II, we have been living in a military environment. This remains true in spite of the end of the Cold War. War is the most destructive of all human activities, to nature as well as to people, but even when war is not being fought, its preparation is destructive, depleting natural resources, creating nothing useful but much that is harmful to both nature and people.
Either in actual use, or not used but outdated, the whole military machine becomes useless junk with a severe problem of safe disposal. To make matters worse, the military has been exempt from worker safety and environmental regulations. The result is that military installations have produced truly horrendous pollution, much of it radioactive or chemically toxic.
Our economy has become dependent upon military production, so much so that large sections of workers are trapped in this production. Many work staffing the army, navy and air firce - working in an industry that may destroy them and their environment.
Many square miles of land have been withdrawn from productive use in order to fabricate weapons and train soldiers. These areas are contaminated so severely by radioactive waste and other pollutants, or so degraded by military exercises, as to present a difficult and expensive problem of cleanup and regeneration even if they cease to be used for military purposes. In some cases regeneration may be impossible.
The number of seriously contaminated sites has been estimated at as many as twenty thousand. They will remain among the nation's most critical problems for years to come. Some cleanup efforts have begun, but not as yet on the scale with the funding or thoroughness needed. And no safe method has yet been devised for the safe and permanent disposal of nuclear wastes.
Meanwhile, the military budget remains high, which means that new pollution is being created before the old is cleaned up. Not only that, the U.S. continues to invest in the military as if World War III were right around the corner. Our country is also the world's biggest arms merchant. Our own soldiers faced weapons in the Gulf War that had been manufactured at home. In fact, the U.S. could hardly engage in combat with any country in the world without finding itself in this situation.
A reduction in military spending and a transition to peacetime industry would be enormous steps toward a more sustainable nation and a more sustainable planet. Plants that now produce tanks could produce railroad cars. Scientists that now design ever more destructive weapons could focus on how to "beat swords into plowshares."
If properly planned, conversion could produce more jobs in environmental restoration and in the construction of needed housing, schools, bridges and other infrastructure than would be lost in military production.
Nature has no borders. Neither has pollution, Even the sky is no longer the limit. Twenty five years ago higher smokestacks were built to solve the air pollution problem. The wind blew the particulates that gave the smoke its dark color away from the immediate vicinity. But the gaseous components of that "smoke" rose into the atmosphere, and together with similar gases from other stacks in the U.S. and other industrial countries, are changing the composition of the atmosphere and beginning to warm the earth below.
This process is invisible, it is easy to ignore, and anyway, what difference does it make if the average temperature of the earth is raised a degree? A big difference. A small average temperature change can hide a much higher temperature in some parts of the globe. And very small changes in the composition of the atmosphere can trigger very big changes in the climate.
Scary scenarios of what global warming will do to our climate are countered by soothing statements that we don't know how much warming will take place or exactly what effects it will have. Can't we let the scientists fight it out, while we go about the more pressing business of taking care of the environmental problems we can see in our own shops and communities?
No! Global warming affects us in our own communities. In spite of apparent differences among scientists about how much warming is going on, how fast the temperature is rising, and exactly what effects it will have, one thing is clear. Global warming is taking place. The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other gases is responsible. It is urgent that we stop making it worse.
Some of the same gases, and in particular CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) which are used primarily as refrigerants and propellants, are making a hole in the protective ozone layer - another invisible but dangerous change.
The recent World Scientists' Warning to Humanity told us in no uncertain terms that our world is in danger. Sixteen hundred scientists from 69 nations warned:
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.
No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminish.
What threats? They go on to explain:
Our massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life - coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change - could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand.
The world and its people have to stay in balance. Some people use this fact to claim that the principal environmental problem is too many people. The principal problems, however, are really the devastation of the resources and their extremely unequal distribution.
Too high a birth rate can overwhelm resources in a given area, and could even do so on a world scale. The world has had enough experience to know that a nation in poverty - one which is not getting its fair share of the world's food and other necessities - is a nation with a high birth rate. Where these resources, however meager, are adequate and available to all the people, and where the equality of resources is accompanied by advances in the equality of the sexes, the birth rate begins to fall. A nation where women have no role except the struggle to survive and give birth to many children is a nation with a high birth rate.
Blaming population growth for all our problems deflects us from the real culprits and the real solutions, and too often becomes not merely anti-population growth, but anti-people. The most extreme advocates of zero population growth are willing to abandon whole countries, even whole continents, to starvation because they have failed to balance people and resources. Never mind that the resources may well have been decimated by generations of imperialist exploitation.
Imperialism, as it affects one country after another in Africa, Central and South America and Asia, causes environmental problems on such a scale that it is, in itself, another danger to the global environment.
The almost unrestricted power wielded by transnational corporations based in the U.S. and other capitalist countries has imposed "profits first" policies worldwide, magnifying in developing countries some of the same problems we have at home and creating new problems.
Transnational companies feel free to use the government of the country housing its home office as a tool in international trade negotiations. NAFTA is a prime example. Behind the banner of "free trade" U.S. companies are getting a free ride to plunder Mexican natural resources. They can establish factories in Mexico almost without protection for the workers or the outside environment. Of the 1,750 U.S. companies now operating in Mexican free zones, not one is in compliance with Mexican environmental laws!
This is not only illegal; it is inhuman. The dreadful environmental conditions in the maquiladora factories and communities are some of the worst in the world for the people who work and who are trying to live on both sides of the Mexican/U.S. border.
Yes, use the "home" country's government, but when it comes to any responsibility to such a "home" country, that is another story. A leader in "socially responsible investing" recently commented that "we are witnessing...the disintegration of the concept of nation as primary, and its replacement by the global company...answerable to no one."
When that power has been challenged, outright war or "low intensity conflict" have taken their environmental as well as human toll, from Vietnam to Nicaragua to the Gulf. The Gulf War was waged over who is to own and control Persian Gulf oil. As a result, both the people and the environment in Iraq were decimated, while in Kuwait millions of gallons of oil were burned, polluting air, land and water.
A few current problems: In almost every developing country except Cuba, agriculture is distorted to serve the U.S. market, even to the extent that people in Central American countries, for example, do not have enough land to raise their own subsistence crops. Pesticides banned in the U.S. are still manufactured here and exported to the Third World. Rain forests have fallen to the plunder for cattle raising to supply meat for U.S. hamburger chains. Southeast Asian forests are now being destroyed by Japanese transnational companies to make way for luxury resorts and golf courses.
Environmental racism extends beyond our borders, with toxic waste exported to Africa in exchange for a meager fee and a few jobs, but without explanation of the sometimes lethal contents of the containers. The international traffic in hazardous waste is described by the Center for Investigative Reporting in Global Dumping Ground and a companion documentary film. Companies headquartered in industrial countries from Italy to Japan are implicated, but those in the U.S. are the greatest culprits.
The current imperialist assault on the global environment is clothed in the propaganda of the global market and marches under the banners of NAFTA and GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariff). Lowering environmental protection, the global market will raise profits for the corporations, and destroy both people and nature, not only abroad, but at home, too.
International treaties have been designed to curb some of our global environmental problems: the loss of biodiversity, global warming, ocean pollution, the loss of the ozone layer. The U.S. government, at the behest of the big corporations, has thrown its influence into watering down these treaties , dragging out their conclusion or ratification, sometimes refusing to sign them as in the Law of the Sea.
Environment, like peace, is an international issue that can bring people together across borders and across oceans.
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table of contents.All humanity is in danger as the scientists warn, and the danger comes from activities by humans, not from natural or supernatural forces beyond our control. But all humanity is not making the decisions and guiding the operations that are devastating nature and undermining our future. It is the big corporations that are doing so in pursuit of profits. Nature is calling on us to organize on her behalf.
It has to begin at the grassroots in local unions and local communities, or in citywide union/environmental coalitions fighting specific battles together, against contamination of workplaces and living places and against local misuse of land and resources, against environmental racism and for more livable cities.
Union and environmental support for the networks organizing around environmental justice can enhance that struggle and bring African American, Latino and Native American partners into the coalition. Other regional coalitions, too, are developing in various states, linking peace and environment, or those two issues plus social justice. Labor/ environment conferences, taking place in several cities and states, are another promising development
Only organizations and coalitions at the national level can deal with issues of the national and global environment, and back up local and regional organizations as they confront national and transnational companies.
It is significant that environmental organizations dropping out of the anti-NAFTA fight, were, with the exception of National Audubon, those without a grassroots membership base. Local Audubon chapters are often ahead of the national leadership.
Still ahead is building the international strength to deal with NAFTA's results and fighting GATT, the next attempted "free trade" sellout of labor and the environment, as well as many other issues. The combined strength of the labor and environmental movements is needed.
One union which has shown what a union-environment coalition can accomplish is the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW). When OCAW struck Shell Oil in the early seventies, thirteen environmental and public interest groups endorsed its demands. In the mid-eighties OCAW workers were locked out by BASF, a transnational chemical plant in Louisiana with headquarters in Germany. The union helped organize in the community which suffered from chemical pollution, and secured the help of the National Toxic Campaign and other national environmental organizations.
One more example of the potential in joint labor/environmental action: In 1992, a conference of the Long Island Sound Watershed Alliance, was hosted by the Audubon Society, aimed at cleaning up the Sound. It was at first picketed by over a thousand workers who feared job losses would result.
But instead of a hostile confrontation, a labor/environmental dialogue ensued which led to a coalition of Audubon, other regional conservation groups, construction workers, the International Union of Operating Engineers and other building trade unions. It was pointed out that for every billion dollars spent on sewer infrastructure, 57,000 jobs are created. A platform was crafted, including a multibillion dollar public works program to improve sewage treatment plants along our nation's estuaries. A joint labor/environmental delegation delivered the platform to Washington.
There are many other stories of such cooperation, little known beyond their own localities because the media are much quicker to feature -- and foster -- antagonisms between workers and environmentalists.
One obstacle in the road to union-environmental coalitions is the same one that has held back worker struggles against unhealthy work conditions -- the fear of job loss. Do we have to choose between jobs and a healthy environment?
"Protecting the environment," said the Steelworkers' report cited above, "ultimately protects our jobs." Noting some of the problems that reach beyond the workplace and even beyond the community, and some of the changes needed, the union task force states:
The most important problems are not technical -- they are economic and political.
Our society will change enormously, either through our efforts to save our environment, or because environmental destruction finally overwhelms us. As a union we cannot stand aside from these issues.
Difficult choices will have to be made. The only question is, who will make those choices, and how? Will working people be the victims of change, or will we help control that change for the benefit of ourselves and our children?
Henry Kendall of the Union of Concerned Scientists says, "A program that promotes clean, renewable sources of energy, sustainable development in Third World countries and conservation of air, soil, water, and forests will stimulate the economy, create jobs and entire new industries." (People's Weekly World, 12/19/92)
Union and academic studies have shown conclusively that jobs increase with pollution control. Conversion to a more sustainable economy will bring a healthier economy as well as a healthier environment.
Workers, however, are understandably skeptical when it comes to a change that affects their own industry. They know only too well that economic changes tend to rest most heavily on the workers. The promise of a generalized increase in jobs is small comfort if they see an immediate loss of their own jobs, especially at a time of pervasive unemployment.
Such concerns, as well as failure by environmentalists to bring workers' concerns into their proposals, have produced hostility between workers and environmentalists. While "much of the jobs vs. environment propaganda is nothing but garbage, thrown at us by opponents of change," as an Earth Day article in the People's Weekly World pointed out, "any transition in a capitalist economy inevitably means some job losses." The article called for the environmental movement to get behind the AFL-CIO's jobs' program, calling it "a significant environmental initiative" because a high employment situation is needed to make the transition to a sustainable economy without a high cost to workers.
It is time to take the jobs issue out of the bosses' hands with a jobs program that would create environmentally sound jobs everywhere, and specific jobs programs that would be implemented in tandem with environmental changes, plus public works jobs to clean up the problems left behind by past assaults on nature, as in the Long Island example.
Some environmental organizations have begun to recognize the problem and advocate extended unemployment benefits, retraining programs, and economic help to communities impacted by job losses related to environmental change.
The environmental movement needs labor and people of color because the unions and the civil rights and environmental justice organizations are already in a struggle to put people before profits. That is the essence of union organization and a pillar of environmental justice. That recognition of where the struggle lies and of how not to expect help from the corporations adds needed strength and direction to the movement.
Moreover, the working class has a tradition of international solidarity that is essential in dealing with transnational companies and global pollution.
The ghastly environmental record of the Reagan-Bush years were followed by high hopes for the new administration, especially with Gore as Vice President. These hopes disappeared. Clinton issued a few good executive orders requiring federal agencies to purchase recycled paper and to switch from oil for heating to less polluting sources, such as natural gas or solar power. Then he pushed NAFTA through and cut OSHA and EPA funds.
He reversed the Bush denial of family planning funds to other countries where abortion is one of the options. Yet the U.S. has still not signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. At the recent UN Conference on Population, the U.S. was an obstacle to any real attack on the poverty that keeps women's status and opportunities low in many countries.
The Sierra Club calls the 103rd Congress the worst environmental Congress in two decades. Two examples: The attempt to reform the Superfund Law to increase community involvement and make the law more workable was defeated. So was the effort to amend an outdated mining law that permits mining companies to take minerals from public land without taxation, and to literally destroy the environment in the process.
The Administration compromised and compromised on the meaning of the bills, then gave them indadequate support and lost them anyway.
For altogether too long, most of the big national environmental organizations have settled for what they could get within the political status quo. It's time for independent political action on the environmental front. Environmental PACs, Public Citizen and some other individuals and organizations in the environmental movement have begun to chafe at the limitations of action within the Democratic Party.
Green Parties are getting a toehold in some states, notably in Arizona in 1994. A significant step was taken in California, also, with a joint conference of the Peace and Freedom and Green Parties. Grassroots union-environmental coalitions could provide a base for "greening" Labor Party Advocates.
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table of contents.Fundamental change, the scientists tell us, will be needed to meet the global environmental threats. As important and valuable as grassroots local movements and coalitions are, as necessary and significant as changes in state and federal administration, state legislatures and Congress can be, as hopeful as international cooperation on environmental issues may appear, no change is truly fundamental unless it grapples with the economic causes of the problems of the present and the threats to our future. Fundamental change means economic change, and a new politics built on the new economic base.
Every environmental struggle -- on the job or in the community -- comes up against the corporation that owns the mine or the oil wells or the utility, the factory or the forest. This ownership gives the corporation the power to oppose change in the direction of a better environment.
Every environmental struggle to change state or national policy, comes up against the combined power of national and transnational corporations. Sometimes a struggle is successful, as in the case of the laws enacting OSHA and EPA, yet no sooner are such laws on the books, than the corporations move behind the scenes, and through misinformation and propaganda in the corporate owned and dominated media, to evade them, erode them, gut them, or wipe them out altogether.
The fact that a few individual capitalists contribute to environmental causes does not change the basic fact that the system is profit-driven to the detriment of nature. When the scientists conclude their warning by calling on (among others) "the world's business and industrial leaders" to effect the needed changes, they are looking in the wrong direction. Some business leaders may put their dollars behind preserving an aspect of the world's beauty, or support a campaign that does not threaten their own profits. They may be willing to cut down on pollution but they are not willing to cut up the system.
Capitalist economies are based in part on the exploitation of nature. A dictionary definition of exploit -- "to utilize, especially for profit" is exactly what capitalism does to nature. To make it more specific: The exploitation of nature is the expropriation of land, natural materials, and energy sources at one end of the production process and of the waste-absorbing capacity of the environment at the other end without paying the cost of maintaining the capability of nature to continue supplying the one or to continue absorbing the other.
This exploitation becomes obvious in the quantity of natural resources, renewable and non-renewable, that capitalists withdraw, and the methods they use to obtain these resources. It shows up in the methods of production, distribution and waste disposal which impact the health of workers and the community, and burden air, land, and water with pollutants.
The power to so use resources, inherent in the private ownership of the means of production, is also the power to dominate the government and limit correction of environmental problems. That is why we have meager efforts to ameliorate pollution at home, and further degradation of the environments of countries subject to imperialist exploitation.
To sum up: The need for a sustainable environment is overpowering, but within this system, impossible. The pressure of the capitalist system on nature is so ingrained, so pervasive, and so severe, that it is not too much to say that it is an unnatural as well as an inhumane system.
Environmental struggle within the system is necessary, nevertheless. Measures to keep the situation from worsening are urgent. Limited gains are important. Moreover, people have to be organized around the issues as they see them and feel them, which is within the political and economic system they know. Only by learning through experience the limitations of this struggle are they prepared to press the system to its limits and to recognize that it must be changed.
The more environmental movements develop this basic understanding, the more effective will be campaigns for immediate goals. When people believe the present system is forever, they craft their programs for what seems possible within it. Keeping our eyes on what is necessary, rather than what is possible, is more effective even in the short run.
In the long run, the environment that sustains us can be saved only by changing our economic system. Eventually, we must put the ownership of natural resources and all means of production in the hands of all the people, and remove the private profit motive as a determining factor in economic and environmental policy. In one word, what we need is socialism.
Socialism would provide a sound basis for bringing the production system into harmony with the natural system.
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table of contents.We are hearing a great deal these days about the environmental failures of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. If socialism is the answer, why such failures as Chernobyl and some of the devastating examples of air and water pollution?
The change in property relations that a socialist revolution brings about is only the beginning, as Fidel Castro has often said. The hard work comes after the revolution. Surrounded by hostile capitalist nations, the Soviet Union was forced to put much of its resources into the military, and to gear its economy to the achievement of industrialization and production in the short term. The quickest, cheapest way failed to always take environmental protection into account.
In the effort to overcome the industrial backwardness of the pre-revolutionary period, to recover from the devastation of World War II, and to catch up with and surpass capitalist countries, a kind of ideology of technological progress developed. Unlike a similar technological ideology in capitalist countries, its ultimate goal was to provide a more abundant life for all the people. Yet, in the socialist countries, too, every advance in technology was seen as good, whatever its effect on nature. In the focus on labor as the source of value, nature was treated as valueless and therefore free.
Nevertheless, just because it was a socialist country, the Soviet Union had some environmental successes, totally lost in the current media flood of stories about the failures. For example, the planless suburban sprawl and vehicular air pollution that characterize U.S. cities were avoided by city planning for people, not for cars. Without the power of the auto companies which has held back mass transportation in U.S. cities, Soviet cities were able to move ahead on mass transportation. Without rapacious real estate developers they were able to plan green belts around Soviet cities. The indigenous people of northern Siberia, and the reindeer on which they depended, had a very different history from that of their counterparts in northern Canada. There were some important environmental initiatives in many parts of the country in the '70s.
We need to probe much more deeply into Soviet history in general, and Soviet environmental policy in particular, than is possible in these few pages, if we are to understand Soviet environmental successes and failures.
Some Russian scientists still have the illusion that capitalism will be an improvement. "Russia's environmental well-being depends on the success of the systemic transition -- on the rapid creation of democratic and market institutions," two Russian scientists conclude in Environment, December 1993. Yet their entire article is devoted to the worsening of the environmental situation since the transition began. While some problems are attributable to the current instability, the hope for true democracy and environmental protection in a capitalist Russia is a fantasy.
In our own hemisphere, it is no accident that one of the best environmental programs was in a country with a mixed economy having a large socialist component -- Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. This was a program that was defeated by the Contra counterrevolution. Nor is it an accident that the best existing environmental program is in socialist Cuba.
With a socialist understanding of the need to maintain sustainable ecosystems as a base for a sustainable economic system, the struggle against the exploitation of workers which has always been the core of movements toward socialism can now be enriched and strengthened by the struggles against the exploitation of nature.
The Communist Party of the United States sees the capitalist ruling class as the enemy of both workers and the environment. Without the working class, whose very existence forces it into opposition first to the corporations and then to the capitalist system, environmentalists will never succeed in shaking the system. The inclusion of environmental concerns in the working class struggle today ensures that they will become foundation stones of a socialist tomorrow.
Those who have a class interest in the exploitation of both workers and the environment cannot be allowed to put that interest above humanity's interest forever, cannot be allowed to stand in the way of all of us who depend for our future on putting people and nature before profits.
The program of the Communist Party of the USA points the way toward solutions.
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table of contents.We are now campaigning for a Rebuild America public works program, to provide thousands of jobs with union wages and affirmative action. This includes, but is not limited to:
True environmentalism requires social justice.
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Like NAFTA, GATT will tend to lower environmental protection to the lowest level of any of the participating countries and put environmental decisions into an unelected international body.
The protection of the global environment should be a basic element of U.S. foreign policy, making our country a partner in every effort toward a sound global ecology. The drive for a global market dominated by transnational corporations and the military power of the U.S., is making the U.S. a threat to the people and the environment of the whole earth. A few of the things we should do, not already mentioned above:
The ambitious goals outlined above cannot be achieved in full as long as the U.S. remains a capitalist country. Socialism makes the change in property relations which provides a sound basis for bringing the production system into harmony with nature. Socialism can end both the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of nature. It can make possible the planning of production for the needs of people and for sustainable ecosystems in a sustainable economy.
The struggle for this environmental program can help to show the way toward the kind of socialism we need to build. The common need of all people for protection of our common home on planet earth is a powerful tool for change. As its pressure rises, it can become an explosive charge under the private ownership of nature's resources and the class and national oppression built upon it.