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Production-Side Environmentalism: Can weproduce less and consume more?

Posted on January 12, 2009

Introduction: In this important contribution to the ongoing debate over “individual” versus “social”solutions to global warming and ecological destruction, the editor of Synthesis/Regenerat ion directlyand convincingly challenges the mainstream myth that the capitalist economy is based on“consumer sovereignty.

He poses a societal approach that is compatible with and expands on the ecosocialist perspectivethat Climate and Capitalism supports. We encourage readers to read it carefully and distribute itwidely.

By Don Fitz

Corporate “environmentalism” is consumer-side environmentalism. “Make your dollars work for theEarth.” “Buy green!” “Purchase this green gewgaw instead of that ungreen gadget.” “Feel guiltyabout driving your car.”Consumer-side environmentalism is loath to discuss product ion. Consumer-side environmentalism does not challenge the manufacture of cars. Rather, it assumes thatproducing more and more cars is a sacred right never to be quest ioned.

Product ion-side environmentalism places blame on the criminal rather than the vict im. It looks atthe prof its oil companies reap from urban sprawl rather than demeaning people who have no wayto get to work other than driving a car. Product ion-side environmentalism looks at an agro-foodindustry which prof its f rom transport ing highly processed, over-packaged, nutrient-depleted junkthousands of miles rather than the parent giving in to a child bombarded with Saturday morningpop-tart-porn TV.

Production and consumption: A broken connection

Okay. Corporat ions are the root of environmental evil. What ’s the point of dif ferent iat ing betweenproduct ion and consumption? Aren’t they just two parts of the same process? Product ion goesup so consumption can go up — right? Since the United States is a “consumer society”,environmentalists typically assume that decreasing consumption would force a decrease inproduct ion and these two steps would merge into an integrated whole.

Through more than 99% of human history, this simple connect ion characterised economics. If

people wanted more, they produced more, they had more, and they consumed more. During thelast century, this connect ion has been increasingly broken. It has become possible to steadilyincrease the amount of product ion (about 2-3% annually) with lit t le to no increase in meaningfulconsumption.

`Meaningful’ consumption

The word “meaningful” is key in understanding whether consumption goes up, goes down orstagnates. If a stove is manufactured to last 10 years instead of 50 years, a couple may purchasef ive stoves instead of one during a 50-year marriage. This is an increase in consumption in only themost f rivolous, non-meaningful way. In the world of real people, as opposed to the fantasy worldof economists, there has actually been a decrease in meaningful consumption. There were fourt imes when the couple was without a stove.Since WWII, and especially since the 1960s, the UnitedStates has witnessed a massive overproduct ion of what is prof itable and an obscene shrinking ofwhat is needed. There has been a mushrooming growth of nuclear weapons and other war toysthat nobody can eat, wear or live in. Being able to get f rom here to there has been replaced withtraf f ic jams and commercials telling us how happy we are to consume individual automobiles. Theconstruct ion industry has shot up as buildings last fewer years. Food epitomises simultaneousoverproduct ion and underconsumption as Americans are increasingly obese and less nourished.

Clearly, product ion can go up while [meaningful] consumption goes down or stagnates. But, couldthe opposite be true?

Is it possible to decrease production while increasing consumption?

Yes. Society can reduce the total amount of t ime spent manufacturing objects at the same t imeindividuals in that society have more to consume. While this was not t rue for our ancestors, it isthe most important principle of environmental economics at the dawn of the twenty-f irst century.

This basic principle pervades all aspects of climate change, peak oil, toxins and speciespreservat ion. The reason why it is an economic rule now, but not previously, is simple. Some t imeafter WWII there began to be suff icient product ion to meet the basics of food, clothing, shelterand medical care for every person on the planet. The only way the market has cont inued toexpand during recent decades has been through the expansion of goods and services that donothing to improve the quality of life, of ten worsen it , and always put prof itability before humanneeds.

By reducing and fundamentally changing ent ire areas of product ion, it is possible to reduce theoverall mass of stuf f while having zero ef fect on meaningful consumption. Dramatically reducingproduct ion 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 nearmanufacturing facilit ies were the ones making decisions about product ion, 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 themto purchase will accomplish lit t le more than antagonising them. In contrast , organising people tomake corporat ions “learn to do without” the prof its f rom destruct ive product ion is an essent ial forconfront ing ecological crises. Let ’s look at a few economic sectors.

Militarism

The military is the only sector of the economy where emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) canbe reduced by greater than 100%. This is because militarism is the only type of act ivity whoseprimary purpose is destruct ion.

When a road is bombed in Serbia, energy is used to rebuild it . Energy usage translates to theemission of GHG, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2). When a home is leveled in Afghanistan,reconstruct ion requires energy. Every hospital brought down and every person maimed in Iraqmeans CO2 emissions during the treatment of pat ients and construct ion of new treatmentfacilit ies.

Military product ion is unique. If it were halted, GHG emissions would be reduced by an amountequal to (a) GHG emit ted from repairing what the military bombed, plus (b) GHG produced duringits regular act ivit ies of building bases, using weapons and transport ing t roops and equipment.

Though the of f icial f igure for the US military budget is US$623 billion, the War Resistors League [1]calculates total military-related spending at $1118 billion by including NASA, Department of Energynukes, vet benef its and interest on past military debts. Another $110 billion should be tacked onfor extra spending on the war in Iraq.

The gross domest ic product (GDP) is $13,246.6 billion. [2] Putt ing these together leads to anest imate that just under a tenth of the US economy is military-related spending: [$1188B + $110B]/ $13,246.6B = 9.80%

This only accounts for military sales to the Pentagon. Since US arms manufacturers are majorproviders for regimes throughout the world, military spending actually accounts for considerablymore than 10% of the GDP.

Militarism may contribute more than any other 10% of the economy to oil deplet ion, creat ion oftoxins and habitat destruct ion. Yet, the one area of the economy where a greater than 100%reduct ion in greenhouse gases is possible is the area least likely to be discussed in connect ion withclimate change.

Food

The most basic necessity is food. It illustrates what “decreasing product ion” of a commoditymeans. It does not mean decreasing the amount of the commodity produced. The “product ion offood” encompasses the labour and other inputs that go into what Americans eat, including:

huge agricultural equipment, its manufacture, and the oil to operate it ;

chemical fert ilisers and pest icides, research to create them, and everything to t ransportand store them;

genet ically engineered seed, its research, and Monsanto’s legal team and seed policewhich perpetrate criminal t respass to steal plant samples;

the ent ire chain of food processing and packaging (up to 99% of the cost of someproducts);

t ransportat ion of 1400 miles f rom “farm to fork” for the average morsel of food;

manufacture of t rucks, boats, planes, roads and docks to t ransport food; and,

growing eight to 10 t imes as much grain to produce a pound of beef protein as would becontained in the grain itself .

Adding everything together means that it could be possible to produce as much or more food thanthe United States current ly consumes with less than 10% of the inputs that current ly go into agro-industry. It would great ly increase the amount of “meaningful” food we eat.

Clothing

Until the last few decades consumer goods were designed to endure. Post-WWII corporat ionsfaced the dilemma that increasing the durability of products would mean that people would havewhat they needed with lit t le reason to purchase more. By the 1960s planned obsolescence hadslammed clothing, appliances and household items full force.

People of my generat ion and older can tell dozens of stories of things that “used to last” — shoes,dishes, cof fee pots, desks, furniture, everything bought for the home or of f ice. The most vile formof commodit isat ion is the disposable bag, bott le, cup, plate and camera, designed to be used asingle t ime and then spend centuries contaminat ing groundwater or choking distant aquat ic life.

Business is not immune to the ever-decreasing durability that plagues consumers. Computers andcomputer sof tware suck capital f rom industry as they drain family budgets with their out-of-date-by-design formatt ing.

Take all the useless junk that people are persuaded that they need, add it to those useful goodswith a premeditated plan to fall apart , and ask “How much manufacturing is t ruly needed for theconsumer goods that make for a quality life?”. The answer has to be that product ion coulddecrease 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 f ix or buy somethingtomorrow.

Shelter

Current standards for urban planning ant icipate that 2% of buildings in the US will be replacedevery 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 wouldlast for 500 years.

Unless lead poisoning has irretrievably damaged the brains of architects, they should be able toreplicate that in the 21st century. Or maybe the problem isn’t individual architects, but a buildingsector pushing to have each generat ion of homes constructed to worse standards than thegenerat ion before.After I spoke about global warming at an area high school, the principal privatelychallenged my f igure that US buildings are designed to last 50 years. “I went to a city councilmeet ing last week”, he told me. “And they were approving construct ion of a new governmentbuilding that the architect said would last 20 years.”

“And did the architect promise it would be covered with eco-gadgets?”, I wanted to know. “Solarpanels. Double-f lush toilets. It would have everything.”

The amount of energy saved with green gadgets is lost many t imes over by erect ing new buildingswhen exist ing ones will do f ine. What could be more absurd than building tens of thousands ofnew eco-homes at the height of the 2007-08 real estate collapse when more homes are clearlynot needed?

Imagine a “green building” plan that said:

1. No building could go up unless there was an absence of unused comparable building spacewithin 50 kiloemetres; 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 t imes as long we would need onetenth as many new buildings. Intelligent planning should be able to ensure a home for every family(increase in consumption) at the same t ime there is much less construct ion (decrease inproduct ion).

Health care

The life expectancy in the US is 78 years. The life expectancy in Cuba is 78 years. The annual costof health care in Cuba is $193 per person. The cost of health care in the US is over 20 t imes as

much, more than $4500 per person per year. A reasonable American could conclude that whens/he spends $100 on health care, less than $5 goes to keeping her/him healthy and over $95 goesto the cancerous bloat ing of the sickness industry. [3]

This suggests that the US could decrease health care costs by 90% and st ill spend twice as muchper person as does Cuba. Just how could the US make such incredibly deep cuts in the cost of“medical product ion” without damaging (and even improving) the quality of health care?

Eliminate health insurance companies. This parasit ic growth diverts billions of dollars toenormous of f ice buildings, their construct ion and maintenance, and labour wasted judgingwho gets t reatment and who is lef t to die. The ent ire industry should be surgically removed.

Focus on community prevent ive care rather than hospital care. Hospitals are necessary formany emergency treatments. Childbirth and locked mental health wards are examples ofwhat the industry has medicalised in pursuit of prof it .

Eliminate most medicat ions. Require physicians to document that available non-medicat iontreatments have been exhausted prior to writ ing a scrip. I dumped my last primary carephysician af ter he started yelling at me for refusing to take meds for blood pressure (which isnow under control by changes in diet and exercise).

Replace most specialists with neighbourhood primary care physicians. Everyone living in aUS city should be able to reach a primary care physician by walking or cycling for less than 15minutes. The fact that the medical establishment cannot conceptualise this shows itscontempt for prevent ive care.

Demanding that the government increase funds for a bad healthcare system will make insuranceand drug companies richer but it will not make people healthier. That can only happen by totallyredesigning health care into a much smaller system than it is now.

Transportat ion

The automobile industry would have us believe that improving transportat ion means increasing thenumber of cars on the road. Corporate environmentalists nod in agreement, accept ing the carculture as an Act of God but wishing it would be based on hybrid, electric or hydrogen cars.Shallow green plans to cope with t ransportat ion are consistent ly devoid of any thought ofreducing the product ion of cars.

A deep green approach to t ransportat ion would focus on eliminat ing [at least ] 95% of cars in UScit ies. Such a plan might look something like this:

Redesign cit ies to rebirth local businesses so that people can make 80% of their t rips bywalking or cycling.

Ensure that f requent and cheap mass transit allows for people to use it for 80% of other

t rips.

Establish car sharing or ride sharing for the 4% of t rips remaining.

Only af ter the above are adopted, eliminate parking spaces except for emergency,construct ion and car-shared vehicles.

Would this increase or decrease the “consumption” of a t ransportat ion system? Orthodoxeconomists would insist that it would not be increasing consumption because people would not bedriving in ever-increasing circles. This rigid mindset fails to realise that t ransportat ion means gett ingfrom point A to point B, or f rom all the points A to all the points B you need to get to. The morethat dest inat ion points are spread apart by urban sprawl and the more that roads are choked withcars, even “green” cars, the longer and more miserable t rips are. Despite what economists mighttell you, this is increased consumption of agony, not increased consumption of t ransportat ion.

Try this way of thinking about it . On your lunch break, you want to run over and say “Hi!” to yourmom and pick up your shoes from the repair shop. But each is 20 kilometres away from where youwork, so you can only do one. In a deep green city redesigned so that everything is closertogether, they are each 1 kilometre away and you can bicycle to do both. In the minds of corporateeconomists and shallow green environmentalists, you would be consuming more of thetransportat ion system if you do one trip of 20 kilometres. In the minds of rat ional human beingsyou would be consuming more transportat ion if you met both goals in two short t rips.

Not necessarily a good thing to do

Though I am one of many who have misdiagnosed environmental problems as being rooted inover-consumption, consumption is not the primary issue. The source of the disease isoverproduct ion. 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 itis a good thing to do. As a society, 21st century United States has the ability to simultaneouslydecrease product ion and increase consumption. But the fact that we can do it does notnecessarily mean that consuming more or even the same amount is a good idea.

A quick glance at the designed waste and destruct iveness of the US economy suggests that wecan reduce product ion by 50-80% (perhaps by 90%) while the average person would have moreconsumer goods at any one t ime. If get t ing serious about addressing climate change and relatedcatastrophes became the norm and if reducing product ion were to be seen as a virtue, peoplemight think, “Now that shirts last four t imes as long and only cost a lit t le more, I can af ford to have80 shirts instead of 30. But do I really need 80 shirts?” [4]

Once product ion for human need replaces product ion for corporate prof it , it becomes possible toreconnect product ion and consumption. When people again produce what they need, reducing

what they consume means less will be produced.

Mult iply 80 shirts by 1000 commodit ies and hundreds of millions of consumers and we have Phase2 of the reduct ion of product ion. Phase 1 was the reduct ion of product ion with an increase ofconsumption. Phase 2 is an intensif ied reduct ion of product ion based on a reduct ion ofconsumption 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, 800military bases on which the sun never sets, and enough nuclear weapons to disintegrate everyperson many t imes over, it could reduce its spending by over 90% with zero threat to nat ionalsecurity. A Phase 1 reduct ion in military product ion by 90% would be accompanied by spendingsome of that money at home in useful areas of the economy and some abroad to repair thedamage done. Phase 2 reduct ion would begin if people asked, “If we are already providing the basicnecessit ies of life with other economic changes, instead of using military savings to produceaddit ional goods, why don’t we produce nothing extra at all and use the savings to reduce thework week?” [5]

Food. There might be as much as a 90% drop in food inputs by reducing meat, t ransportat ion,pest icides, fert ilisers, equipment, processing, packaging and genet ic contaminat ion. As peoplewatch this happen with no decrease in the quant ity but a huge increase in the quality of food, thestage will be set for Phase 2. Wes Jackson, Stan Cox and their colleagues at The Land Inst itutehave provided brilliant guidelines for developing hybrid lines of perennial food plants that wouldreduce the amount of land t illed, leading to less erosion and less land being needed for foodproduct ion. Add this to the expansion of numerous techniques of organic and indigenous farmingthroughout the world to yield cont inuous ways to reduce agricultural inputs. [6]

Consumer goods. Core to the concept of increasing consumption while decreasing product ion isrequiring consumer goods to be manufactured to standards of life expectancy that are manyt imes what they are now. During Phase 1, people could well see their work week gett ing shorterwhile they accumulate even more stuf f than they have now. Railing against people for personalaccumulat ion does lit t le good for many reasons, one of which is if this person buys less, then thatperson (or that government, that business or that bank) buys or invests more. It is only whenproduct ion as a whole drops that reduct ions in personal consumption can lead to further drops inproduct ion. In this context , people might well decide to share tools and washing machines andchildren might enjoy clothes passed down from older siblings, which, mult iplied millions of t imes,intensif ies the downward trend in product ion..

Construct ion. When we ask how many centuries instead of how many decades a new buildingshould last , it is also t ime to start thinking about the second phase of decelerat ing construct ion.The quest ion for that phase is: If we focus on retrof it t ing exist ing structures, how close to zero

new construct ion can we get? How do we modify what we already have to create housingcollect ives, co-housing communit ies and urban ejidos [communal land]? In a post-market economy,new social relat ionships in living would become the dominant factor in architecture. More denseliving and a smaller space per person would be the sine qua non of deep green urban redesign.

Transportat ion. The great t ransportat ion contradict ion is that the more people who own cars,the longer it takes to get f rom point A to point B. As ment ioned, increased car ownership increasesthe distance between dest inat ion points as well as obviously putt ing more cars on the road. Thedrive can take a dive only if people can get there without four wheels. Phase 1 of t ransportat ionreformulat ion means designing communit ies for walking and biking in order to reduce carownership. Phase 2 begins when people collect ively ident ify needs that can be met without theirgoing anywhere. For example, imagine food warehouses replacing supermarkets. Householdscombine electronic grocery lists into a neighbourhood order that the warehouse delivers and isthen disaggregated by neighbours. Instead of thousands of cars each f illing a massive parking lot ,a few dozen delivery t rucks f ill orders.

Health care. A big reason for bad health care is the industry organising itself separate and apartf rom communit ies. If neighbourhood health centres were to replace distant of f ices, insurancecompanies, quick f ixes, drugs, hospitals and overpaid specialists, people could then ask how elsethey could chip away at the sickness business while improving the quality of their lives. Thoughredesigning neighbourhoods so people can walk to their doctor and kicking softdrink machines outof schools are part of this, changes can be much bigger. Communit ies could ask: How can aneighbourhood share the care of severely disabled people rather than construct ing more nursinghomes and treatment centres with three shif ts per day and a management team that answers toinsurance companies?

Democrat ic economy

The greatest barrier to coping with climate change, peak oil, toxins and habitat destruct ion is thetotal mass of product ion. This mass is increasing; its increase vast ly outpaces any real or imaginedincrease in consumption; and its increase is made worse by peddling green gadgets as some sortof solut ion.

A deep green view understands that too much product ion is the core problem. Necessary changesdo not require any reduct ion in “consumption”, at least in any meaningful sense of that word. If acorporate economy cannot allow product ion to decrease, it only makes sense that preserving theEarth requires replacing corporate power with a democrat ic 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 act ion can have opposite ef fects, depending on its context . A plea to replaceor reduce individual consumptive habits in a society where market forces dictate that everydecrease in energy here is of fset by an increase somewhere else is a plea falling on deaf bank

statements. But if we could replace product ion for prof it with product ion for what we need andwant, people would have the power to alter society to change its wants and even redesign itsneeds. With the link between product ion and consumption restored, lowering consumption wouldindeed af fect product ion — but only in a deep green society. This is product ion-sideenvironmentalism.

[The article is based on a talk Don Fitz gave on June 29, 2008 at the Surviving Climate Changeroundtable in St Louis, USA. It was published in Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of GreenSocial Thought and is published here with the author's permission. Thanks to Links InternationalJournal of Socialist Renewal for drawing it to our attention.]

Notes

1. ht tp://www.warresistors.org

2. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Department ofCommerce,ht tp://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/nat ional/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm (Table 3).

3. Dresang, L.T., Brebrick, L., Murray, D., Shallue, A., & Sullivan-Vedder, L., 2005. Family medicine inCuba: Community-oriented primary care and complementary and alternat ive medicine. Journal ofthe American Board of Family Medicine, 18 (4), 297-303.

4. While there could be a 90% or greater reduct ion in several economic sectors, economies ofscale may mean that a much smaller drop in basic industry could be achieved, perhaps meaningthat 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, thatwould be a reduct ion of the GDP by 10%. That could t ranslate to 10% more goods being producedor it could t ranslate to a reduct ion of the 40-hour work week to 36 hours, or it could t ranslate to5% more goods being produced and shipped abroad as reparat ions for US war crimessimultaneous 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.

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