Environment, economy and ethics

Martin Henry

THE DIANA McCaulay led Jamaica Environ-mental Trust (JET) invited me to a candlelight vigil with secondary school students for Kingston Harbour on the night of May 11.

Unfortunately I could not attend. For a quarter century, Kingston Harbour has been the leading icon of environmental degradation in Jamaica.

This magnificent harbour, one of the country's chief natural assets, has had the attention of powerful institutions like the UWI, the NRCA, and the Ministry of Environment. It has exercised the pen and mouth of almost every leading environmentalist in the country since Barry Wade did his classic study on the state of the harbour in the mid-1970s. We still clog the harbour with our filth.

What can children with lighted candles do? The question goes beyond Kingston Harbour, in ever-widening circles, to the global environment. When the most conscientious environmentalist flushes her toilet in Kingston, not only do gallons of potable water go down the drain, but the other stuff may end up in the harbour from a sewage treatment plant.

It is hardly likely that anyone would have chosen to walk even half a mile to and from the vigil. Yet our cars have been implicated as major culprits belching out greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from their air-conditioning system in other countries has allowed us in Jamaica to obtain cheap Japanese cast-offs with the old ozone-depleting air-conditioning system.

Newsweek in an insightful article 'The Battle for Planet Earth' on April 24, explored the issue of the effectiveness of individual action for the environment. The lead anecdote was the story of Julia Hill who spent two years in a California redwood tree to protest the clear-cutting of old forests.

Hill "became a widely admired symbol as she sacrificed personal comfort to a higher cause." She lived with 90-mile-per-hour winds, downpours of rain, almost constant damp and cold, and deprivation (she lived mostly on raw fruits and vegetables, and used a plastic-lined bucket for a toilet). But during her time in her tiny plywood treehouse which left her barely able to walk when she finally came to ground, the chain saws never ceased. The lumber company left the 1,000-foot-tall tree she occupied standing, as well as nearly threw acres around it. But the rest of the company's redwoods, scattered across 10,000 acres, were fair game for logging.

Hill, Newsweek argued, "has become a symbol of a different sort", a symbol with special resonance around the 30th anniversary of Earth Day (April 22). "Saving a tree only to lose a forest, her protest against logging forced activists to confront a disturbing possibility: that individual actions on behalf of the environment pale beside the actions of big business and big government."

I have long been gnawing at this problem myself. As longtime environmentalist Barry Commoner put it, "Well-meaning people frequently focus on personal responsibility, partly because they see it as a way of doing something without looking at how effective its going to be. It's an escape on their part."

Newsweek says, and I nod in understanding agreement, "No matter how many of us switched from aerosols to roll-ons, the CFCs that powered spray cans continued destroying the ozone layer - until the manufacture and use of these chemicals began to be phased out worldwide by the 1987 international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol. Millions of us might walk rather than drive, but the effect on emissions of the greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide is minuscule compared with the effect of more than 68 million SUVs on American roads.

"A single decision by the chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell has a greater impact on the health of the planet than all the coffee-ground-composting, organic-cotton-wearing ecofreaks gathering for Earth Day festivities. Obviously, if 1 billion people in the developed world would stop driving, switch to solar energy and replace old appliances with super efficient ones, greenhouse emissions would plummet.

The question is whether that mass action, or comparable steps by a few businesses and governments, is easier to bring about".

The environment is very strongly tied to the economy. Linguistically both words are sisters derived from the Greek 'oikos' for house, conveying the idea of household management.

To the extent that the global economy is dominated by giant corporations, the problem of the environment is a corporate problem. At the other end of the scale the problem of the environment is a problem of poverty. The same issue of Newsweek carried another article covering familiar territory: "How Poverty Pollutes".

American syndicated economic columnist Warren Brookes was fond of saying the economy is a metaphysical concept as reflected in the production, distribution and use of 'goods', not 'bads'. The management of both economy and environment is therefore a profound ethical problem requiring an ethical solution. And ethics requires a religious foundation on which to rest.

Newsweek cited a number of cases of green activists working with big companies to develop and use more environmentally friendly products in economical ways rather than just attacking their bad practices.

One case was McDonald's switch from the styrofoam 'clamshell' hamburger box with CFCs used in its manufacture, to a box made of paperboard. Styrofoam and PET are clogging up the Jamaican environment.

In the McDonald's case, the environmental activists surely should have known that the hamburger itself is the biggest hazard to the environment. On a global scale the mass production of meat has a huge negative impact on the environment. Every serious environmentalist should be a vegetarian. But what difference would that make if all the rest of humankind ­ the vast majority ­ continue to gobble up other animals? And even if everybody was willing to switch, what would be the economic implications of killing the massive meat industry?

The magazine explores the widespread 'greenwashing' which is taking place where companies do a few environmental things and then proclaim themselves green with no net benefit to the environment, and with little public scrutiny. In any case, environmental accounting is extremely difficult and the Environmental Impact Assessment, which makes so many environmentalists glow with happiness may leave untouched more than it exposes. Environmental conservation is bigger than technical science.

Sorry, but it is not all certain that "the battle for planet earth" remains winnable. Those of us devoted to the fight will have to seriously reconsider strategy as we soldier on. Surely the strong economic and ethical/religious ties which the environment has will have to be more wisely and deeply factored into the struggle. We are confronting an urgent demand for a huge paradigm shift for human survival.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant.

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