Environment – Shades of green

By Christine Rose 

Sometimes it seems that everyone has ‘gone green’. Mining companies, land ‘developers’, factory farmers, even Monsanto, all have sustainability policies and claim varying degrees of green credentials. With increased use of sustainable development language has come wider use of ‘green’ tools, economic instruments such as market-based solutions and environmental offsets to reconcile economic development with the limits of natural resources and sinks.

But some observers challenge both the language of sustainable development and the tools used to mitigate the costs of relentless growth.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so in our modern capitalist economy, market solutions are offered for almost all environmental problems – even though it’s largely commodification of nature that’s got us in this ecocidal situation in the first place. Therefore, we see pollution and emission trading as remedies to life-threatening contamination of the atmospheric commons. We see the creation of quotas as the solution to over-fishing of the ocean commons. Paying contributions to councils or governments is used to offset destruction of forest wilderness or rivers, even though those tools don’t save the rivers, stop the pollution itself or challenge the fundamentally destructive use of the earth’s natural values or the growth paradigm.

American ecologist Garrett Hardin justified enclosure and privatisation as a response to what he argued was the ‘tragedy of the commons’, destruction of commonly owned and shared land and other resources through self-interested individuals each taking more than the ‘resource’ could sustain. Even though his views of ‘commoners’ as greedy and unsustainable has been anthropologically disproven, his wider sentiment has provided an ideology for further alienation, privatisation and enclosure of commonly owned resources. It’s no coincidence that land “owners” can degrade land and water almost with impunity because private property is sacrosanct, though those actions on commonly-owned sites would be blamed on the common ownership, not on the damaging practice itself. It’s important to separate ideology from fact, problems from perceptions of their causes, and to challenge environmental damage wherever and however it occurs.

The contamination of the atmosphere with pollution and greenhouse gases, Fukushima, destruction of the oceans, reduction of biodiversity and of forests need to be challenged. The loss of aesthetic values in our communities, noise and light pollution, and species habitat destruction are harms common to us all. But so are the patenting of genes, bioprospecting indigenous plants by pharmaceutical companies, privatisation of public utilities and healthcare, and other modern forms of enclosure. But these have parallels in tree clearance, monoculturalism and soil loss on private land, also creating problems we all share.

Sustainability discourse has been appropriated by corporate profiteers, harnessed to support unsustainable growth practices. Biological and cultural inheritances are our birthright – human and non-human inhabitants of the planet alike. We have a common risk in environmental destruction and solving many big ecological issues will take an honest, and common, response.