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CIAO DATE: 3/99
American Environmentalism and the Problem of Consumption in a Global Political Economy *
University of Maryland
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
Introduction: The missing link of consumption
Historically, the largest and most influential American environmental NGOs have downplayed problems of overconsumption and consumerism in their diagnoses of America’s and the world’s environmental ills. Rather than mount a central challenge on issues related to growth, consumerism, and the consumption trap, they have pursued strategies emphasizing technological and regulatory controls that address these questions only obliquely.
This underdeveloped focus on consumption can lead to certain ironies. Recently I received an unsolicited mailing from the Sierra Club containing a request in the form of a sales pitch. The letter urged me to become a Club member, using the problem of logging in America’s national forests to stress the need for my involvement. The letter presented an overtly political explanation for the decline of America’s old-growth forests: The destruction is driven by rapacious corporations; access roads on federal lands are a valuable subsidy for the loggers; I and “every honest, tax-paying American” have been subsidizing deforestation; the logging constitutes plunder of the public trust for private gain.
I was also offered a special, discounted membership rate ($15) and a free gift.
In other words, what started out as an urgent appeal for help had shifted into an opportunity to buy into the Club at a low price. The free gift, a backpack emblazoned with the Sierra Club logo, was pitched as “Perfect for a hike in the woods or a picnic in the park” and something that would “help you show your support for all the Club’s efforts on behalf of our environment.” Moreover, the flyer (Join Now and you’ll receive this free gift !) carefully described the backpack’s special features, differentiating it from all the other backpacks presumably already owned by the recipients of this mailing.
Timothy Luke has argued that such practices expose much of mainstream environmentalism as itself a form of consumerism. 1 Luke argues that despite the genuine accomplishments of groups such as the Sierra Club, “Environmentalism, like corporate capitalism, increasingly is forced to pitch its messages in consumerist terms to win any widespread popular support.” 2 For Luke, practices such as marketing calendars with glossy, surreal, and dehumanized images of nature, privatizing landscapes in order to protect them, or promoting eco-tourism reveal mainstream environmental NGOs to be engaged in the commodification of nature.
Even if this harsh criticism were unwarranted, the stance of mainstream environmental organizations on consumption and consumerism is important for several reasons. These groups play a major role in shaping American environmental attitudes. Second, there are signs that the time is ripe for a more explicitly environmental focus on these issues. Large numbers of Americans express great frustration with sprawl, gridlock, an eroding quality of life, and the inability to trade income for free time. At a time when environmental organizations struggle to maintain their financial and popular base, a more direct confrontation with these issues might offer a way to reenergize the movement.
The stance of the major NGOs on consumption also matters because a rapidly changing global economy is forcing the issue. On matters as diverse as NAFTA and climate change, traditional technological and regulatory strategies are proving inadequate in the context of a rapidly changing global economy. Deepening trade integration, accelerating capital mobility, technological innovation, and changes in the global organization of production are rendering traditional technological and regulatory strategies increasingly ineffective. As I will argue below, these changes both alter the nature of the “consumption problem” and make it more central to an effective environmental agenda across a wide array of issues.
But is mainstream 3 American environmentalism willing and able to tackle the problem of overconsumption in a complex and changing world economy? How are the major U.S. environmental organizations coming to understand the linkages between globalization and consumption? In this paper I argue that most of the major organizations share an underdeveloped discourse and conceptualization of the problem of consumerist consumption that is poorly adapted to today’s globalized political economy. To explore this theme I first examine some important ongoing changes in global production and exchange sometimes described as “globalization,” with particular attention to ramifications for the problem of overconsumption. I then look for evidence of recognition of these changes in three recent debates within the American environmental community. These include the highly polarizing NAFTA debate of the early 1990s, the contentious 1998 Sierra Club ballot initiative on immigration and population issues and the ongoing debate over tradable emissions, joint implementation, and other market-based “cooperative mechanisms” proposed to combat global warming. Although there are some signs of recognition of the brave new world facing environmentalism, the main message of these three cases is a failure of mainstream American environmentalism to grasp the full ramifications of economic globalization or the resulting centrality of the consumption problem to a sustainable future.
Consumption in a global economy
What has come to be known as economic “globalization” is sometimes described as merely a deepening of the process of economic interdependence that has characterized the world economy since the end of World War II. In this more limited view of the concept, one hallmark of globalization is the accelerated growth of international trade. This growth, which has greatly outstripped the rate of world economic growth, has been driven by continuing tariff reductions, aggressive attacks on such “non-tariff” barriers to trade as health and environmental regulations, and the incorporation of previously excluded sectors such as agriculture, services, and intellectual property into the global free-trade regime of GATT and the WTO. Also stressed in this narrower view of globalization is growing transnational capital mobility—meaning growth in the overall volume of transnational investment, the deepening integration of capital markets, and the growing speed with which transnational capital can relocate in response to short-term fluctuations in economic conditions. These globalizing trends in trade and finance are often described as the product of technological innovation, although it is generally recognized that they have also been unleashed by policy changes such as aggressive trade liberalization and the widespread relaxation of restrictions on short-term capital movements.
What is missing from this popular rendering of globalization is that the process is also characterized, indeed driven, by underlying changes in the global organization of production. Among these changes, three stand out: the rise of increasingly complex transnational commodity chains in products as diverse as automobiles, personal computers, athletic footwear, and garden vegetables; the shift in many of these chains toward so-called “post-Fordist” forms of industrial organization; and the increasing role of advertising, retailing, marketing, and other “downstream” nodes in shaping the configuration of the entire chain.
An increasing share of global production can be thought of as consisting of transnational commodity chains. 4 The stages of production that form the nodes in these chains—extraction, component manufacture, assembly, packaging, marketing, advertising, retailing, and myriad associated services—are globally dispersed, meaning that the production process crosses borders several times on the road to final consumption of the commodity being produced. The growth of international trade merely hints at a process of transnationalization that is at work across all stages of the chain. Brazil and Mexico, for example, saw a net inflow of foreign direct investment of $14 billion and $12 billion, respectively, in 1997, with much of this money gravitating toward export-oriented industries. 5
In many sectors, these chains are marked increasingly by the rise of so-called “post-Fordist” forms of industrial organization based on “flexible specialization”. Laura Reynolds summarizes the shift:
According to a great many authors, the Fordist model of production has broken down since the 1970s and is increasingly being replaced by a more flexible, post-Fordist pattern of production. Piore and Sabel argue that the new production model is based on flexible specialization—batch production in small firms that are linked through dense networks and produce for niche markets. They suggest that post-Fordist production can out-compete the Fordist model because of flexibilities in work organization, product specification, and marketing strategies. Many studies have found that large manufacturing firms are undergoing a process of vertical disintegration whereby production is increasingly undertaken by small specialized firms linked through production contracts. 6
Within many commodity chains, leverage is increasingly exercised not by industrial or even financial capital but rather the “commercial capital” of retailers, brand-name firms, advertisers, and other “downstream” nodes in the chain. A classic example is Nike, which owns not production facilities but rather a powerful marketing symbol (the Nike “swoosh”), a set of marketing and advertising relationships, and the public images of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. According to Gereffi, these “buyer-driven” commodity chains, which are closely tied to the rise of flexible specialization as discussed above, are particularly common for labor-intensive consumer-goods industries. 7 More generally, however, the shift in global demand from materials-intensive to knowledge- and symbol-intensive industries such as telecommunications, media, fashion, and entertainment also strengthens the hand of these downstream nodes.
What are the ramifications of these changes for environmentalism and the problem of consumption? Some have suggested that change is more apparent than real. Critics of globalization hype and “globaloney” are quick to point out that we have had a highly integrated capitalist world-system since the age of empire and overt colonialism, implying that there is nothing particularly new about the tight coupling the contemporary system. This observation is clearly valid, particularly when the system is viewed from the frames of reference of the global South. But it should not obscure the fact that these very real changes in the organization of production create new problems and new challenges for social movements seeking to promote ecological sanity. Perhaps most obvious is the problem that transnational commodity chains resist the reach of national regulation. This greater mobility in capital shifts bargaining power away from the regulatory state, and flexible specialization facilitates the rapid shifting of activities among existing subcontracting firms.
A second problem is rooted in the ever-more-complex international division of labor that results from the globalization process. The result is to deepen the spatial and social distance between production and consumption. As Tom Princen has argued,
Distance between production and consumption decisions occurs along several dimensions—geography, culture, agency, and bargaining power. At one extreme, zero-distance is production and consumption by one household or individual; at the other extreme, it is global, cross-cultural, and among agents of disparate abilities and alternatives. 8
As Princen points out, these diverse forms of distance block feedback effects by inhibiting knowledge, information, and contextual understanding of the production process feeding one’s consumption decisions. As a result, consumers lack the information and incentives to behave in a more sustainable fashion even if they are otherwise disposed to do so. As Princen suggests
Feedback between producers and consumers in an international market or, more generally, in any market with substantial distance on any set of dimensions, is minimal. All the [producer] and the consumer can respond to is price. And, as has been repeatedly shown, price—especially under relatively non-competitive conditions and conditions where non-market-values are prominent—is a poor indicator of resource maintenance and degradation. Under these conditions, disguising and externalizing costs will become increasingly attractive competitive strategies. 9
It is not only consumers who suffer information scarcity under distancing, but also the crafters of environmental regulations. Distancing undermines several of the favored international techniques of mainstream American environmentalism, including technology transfer and the codification of centralized rules. It becomes ever more difficult to craft rules and technologies with universal applicability and effectiveness, or even to know whether those rules and technologies are having the desired effects.
The rise of “buyer-driven” commodity chains also changes the nature of the consumption problem. The advantages enjoyed by flexible global production umbrellas such as Nike compared to the traditional, vertically integrated manufacturing multinational alter the power distribution both within and surrounding the commodity chain. Within the chain, “downstream” activities such as marketing, retailing, advertising, and distribution gain in power and influence relative to “upstream” activities of extraction, manufacturing, and assembly. Surrounding the chain, social movement groups are forced to shift attention away from protests and policies targeted at the point source of pollution or ecosystem degradation. Instead, they are increasingly challenged to engage these newly powerful downstream activities—and the diffuse, societally based attitudes, ideologies, and consuming practices those downstream nodes seek to stimulate.
A final ramification of globalization, which I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere, is its effect on the global structure of consuming classes. 10 Despite the popularity of “North-South” rich/poor dualistic representations, large numbers of people exhibit consumption practices that fall somewhere between the excesses of a billion overconsumers and the desperate acts of a billion marginalized poor. Although this group is far too diverse to be romanticized as a planetary middle class, it does provide many alternatives to the pollution of excess and the pollution of poverty, and thus a potential global foundation for a more sustainable future. I have argued elsewhere that the problem is the erosion of this potentially sustainable middle from both ends as part of the wrenching changes of the globalization process—with the upper middle being sucked into the global class of overexploiters and the lower middle threatened with marginalization.
These effects can be seen in both the “South”, where so-called “big emerging markets” are being dragged into the world economy through capital mobility and trade liberalization, and the “North,” where global economic integration, de-urbanization, corporate relocation, and the destruction of rural communities have had such disruptive effects.
These consequences of globalization pose serious challenges for environmentalism. They create a world where power is shifted away from the known terrain of nation and polity, and where the familiar categories of soils, forests, and watersheds give way to the less familiar arena of international political economy. As an effort to map whether and how mainstream American environmentalism is making this difficult adjustment, I turn now to three recent debates that have taken place on this new terrain. In the quick sketch of each debate that follows, I pay particular attention to the four dilemmas of the consumption-globalization nexus identified above: The erosion of national regulatory capacity, the problem of spatial and social distancing, the downstream flow of power in transnational commodity chains, and the global erosion of potentially sustainable lifestyles and consumption practices.
Sovereign consumers and consumer sovereignty: The NAFTA debate
American environmentalism underwent several dramatic shifts during the 1980s. The Reagan presidency confronted the major environmental organizations with the threat of increasingly polarized policy debates, the problem of reduced access to key decision makers, and the need to invest more effort and resources simply to defend previous gains. At the same time, the administration’s confrontational approach created fundraising opportunities which several organizations exploited aggressively. 11
These contextual changes led some organizations to adjust their tactics. The enhanced legitimacy of free-market rhetoric converged with a new willingness on the part of some organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and National Wildlife Federation to experiment with “market-oriented” policy approaches and shift away from technology-mandating or technology-forcing regulatory strategies. 12 The rise of this market-based environmentalism made the gap between confrontational and accomodative styles and tactics more apparent.
The NAFTA debate of the early 1990s exposed what these changes meant for American environmental politics. Among the major American organizations, a deep rift developed between pro-and anti-NAFTA groups. In his study of the environmental component of the NAFTA debate, Audley identifies eleven “national” environmental organizations that played a significant role. 13 Several of these organizations supported the NAFTA agreement, most notably the National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Fund, and Environmental Defense Fund. Others, including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace, were opposed. As Audley explains, one of the key variables in determining whether environmental organizations supported or opposed NAFTA was their view of the linkages between economic growth and environmental quality. Major organizations with a more accommodating stance toward what Audley calls the “growth model” were mostly supportive of the agreement, either publicly supporting it or withholding public opposition. Groups with a more adversarial stance toward the growth model were unanimously opposed. 14
The NAFTA split among environmental organizations was only partly rooted in ideological differences among these groups; the Bush and Clinton administrations also made a concerted effort to neutralize the movement as a potential obstacle. As Audley documents, potential environmental opposition to “fast track” negotiating authority forced the Bush administration to make some procedural concessions. 15 Essentially, an “accommodating coalition” of environmental organizations, led by the National Wildlife Federation, provided fast-track support in return for a commitment to a second, so-called parallel track of environmental discussions among the three countries. They also won a commitment to public hearings during the negotiations and advisory status for (some) environmental organizations. Six environmental advisors, representing five NGOs and the California EPA, joined the 17-committee, 1000-person NAFTA advisory team of the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. 16 Crucially, however, and at least partially as a result of this compromise, other NAFTA-related environmental demands emerging from various places within the American environmental community fell by the wayside. These included demands that the agreement endorse the polluter pays principle, reiterate the right to use trade sanctions for environmental violations, enhance community “right to know” policies, and implement a broad “sustainability” agenda. 17 When five major environmental organizations endorsed the NAFTA package signed by Clinton in September of 1993, the environment was effectively neutralized as a salient political issue. As a result, environmental concerns played only a minimal role in the endgame of the NAFTA debate in the U.S. Congress.
The globalization-consumption nexus was engaged in only a limited way during the environmentalists’ debate over NAFTA. Explicit references to consumption tended to fall back into stock characterizations. For proponents, this meant an image of newly wealthy Mexicans scrambling up the Kuznets curve toward greater demand of environmental protection—despite relatively little sound evidence that this relationship actually holds across different income levels and different pollutants. 18 For opponents, it meant undifferentiated warnings about the negative consequences of economic growth.
One dimension of the globalization-consumption relationship that did enter the debate was the question of national regulatory capacity—although the way it was framed failed to clarify the full ramifications of globalization. Each side in the debate tended to stress the capacity question on one side only of the U.S./Mexican border. For proponents, this meant Mexico: NAFTA was said to offer a unique opportunity to turn Mexico into an environmental “model” among Third World states through raised standards and strengthened institutions. Opponents stressed the U.S. side of the equation. For example, the Sierra Club’s opposition to NAFTA stressed the concern that environmental regulations were being recast as barriers to trade liberalization. Citing the famous 1991 tuna-dolphin controversy, in which GATT rules were interpreted to prevent the U.S. from banning Mexican tuna imports on environmental grounds, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope argued before Congress that
Vaguely defined obligations in trade agreements can undermine domestic environmental and public health regulations....As written, the NAFTA package, including the side agreement, is likely only to exacerbate the trade-based pressures on environmental regulation that we have witnessed in the GATT and other forums in recent years. 19
Similarly, several organizations that would ultimately oppose NAFTA fought a losing battle to insert provisions legitimizing trade sanctions as a way to punish environmental violations. 20
In other words, one side argued that a rising tide would lift the Mexican boat while the other argued that NAFTA would plunge the American regulatory vessel into a race to the bottom. The problem with these dueling metaphors is that neither reflects the dynamic changes in regulatory processes on both sides of the border or the increasingly transnational character of the regulatory institutions themselves. For example, Stephen Mumme, a longtime observer of Mexican environmental politics, points out that NAFTA has created a new “trilateral arena” for Mexican environmental policy, which has “midwived several new international institutions, with far-reaching implications for environmental management in the interior and on the border.” 21
The implications of globalization for socio-economic distancing and the downstream shift in market power were also largely absent from the environmentalists’ NAFTA debate. Tellingly, both supporters and opponents tended to accept the dominant frame of NAFTA as a “trade agreement”—even though the agreement actually constituted a much broader framework for capital mobility, corporate relocation, and re-importing offshored production back to the United States.
Finally, The NAFTA debate did show some halting progress in breaking down stale North-South dichotomies and identifying the accelerating erosion of the potentially sustainable global middle strata. The growing insecurity of American workers and the destruction of American communities through job relocation was a theme sometimes tapped by environmental opponents (although a broad environmental alliance with labor never materialized). Similarly, some opponents pointed to the impact on Mexican rural communities through the potentially wrenching implications of the agreement for Mexican agriculture. The pro-NAFTA side of the debate made less conceptual progress: Framing the debate in terms of whether NAFTA would raise or lower the average standard of living in the “Third World” country of Mexico propagated the myth of the average citizen in a highly unequal society, and ignored decades of experience throughout Latin America with rapid economic growth worsening inequality and deepening impoverishment and marginalization.
To be sure, the NAFTA debate among mainstream American environmental organizations raised several important issues: state regulatory capacity, financing mechanisms, popular participation, international law, border clean-up. But the debate also revealed that both sides saw the “international” dimension, not as part of a dynamic, volatile, and increasingly complex global division of labor, but rather as the static sum of a familiar America, a less familiar Mexico, and a largely absent Canada. As a result, there was a strong tendency to project comfortable policy approaches rooted in technology, funding, and administration into new and alien conceptual terrain.
Consumption reduced anywhere is pollution reduced everywhere: The debate over tradable emissions of greenhouse gases
Changes in American environmentalism during the 1980s were not limited to the rise of the market-friendly paradigm. An equally important but less scrutinized change was the rise of “global issues” in mainstream environmental discourse. 22 Several organizations made a conscious choice to elevate the role of issues such as climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, and tropical deforestation in their analysis, advocacy, and fundraising appeals. As a result, a movement that had been energized in the 1960s primarily by local community struggles over clean air, clean water, and toxic neighborhoods was increasingly inclined to frame environmental problems in a paradigm of planetary management and threats to the global commons.
Because this “global issues” framework emerged alongside the rise of market environmentalism, it is not surprise that the concept of “tradable emissions” has been a central part of the debate over the form and content of a climate change regime. In this paper I use the phrase “tradeable emissions” to refer broadly to any of the proposed trade or investment mechanisms by which countries could receive credit for emissions reductions located geographically in other countries. A wide range of specific mechanisms has been proposed, ranging from the outright purchase of another country’s surplus reductions to earning credits for foreign investment that promoted such reductions (for example, by enhancing energy efficiency).
The momentum behind tradable emissions was given a large push at the 1997 Kyoto Conference of the Parties to the 1992 climate treaty. At Kyoto, the Clinton administration made clear that its last-minute proposal to reduce U.S. emissions was contingent on emissions trading. As the post-Kyoto negotiations have taken up more specific rules and procedures, a complex set of issues has emerged surrounding emissions trading and “cooperative mechanisms.” These include debates over whether countries that exceed their reduction requirements can transfer the surplus reductions to other countries that have not met their targets; whether countries that have already substantially reduced emissions can sell those past reductions; and whether investment in emissions reductions abroad can count against a country’s obligations to reduce emissions domestically. These debates dominated the fourth and most recent Conference of the Parties, held in Buenos Aires in November of 1998. Although the details remain highly contentious, the conference did ratify the general concept of emissions trading and adopted a timetable for hammering out the specific rules and procedures.
Among mainstream American environmental organizations, those particularly active and vocal in the climate negotiations include the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace. 23 These groups intersect the climate debate in several ways, including lobbying domestically, lobbying directly within the international negotiation process, crafting alternative policy proposals, and conducting independent research. 24 Several other groups, including Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, have also been engaged on one or more of these levels and/or have taken a clear public stand on the issues surrounding tradable emissions. The positions of the major American groups range from strong endorsement of the “market-oriented” approach, to a more qualified endorsement of certain limited approaches that do not allow countries to dodge their domestic responsibilities, to outright rejection of the concept.
The Environmental Defense Fund has been the earliest, most vocal, and most persistent advocate of market mechanisms among the major American organizations. Its position on tradable emissions in the climate regime illustrates rationale behind the pro-trading position. According to an EDF report on “cooperative mechanisms” prepared in anticipation of the Buenos Aires Conference of the Parties,
Of the many potential compliance methods envisioned by the [Kyoto] Protocol, a broad suite of methods, utilizing various types of flexibility mechanisms and what some call emissions trading, including the cooperative approaches of joint implementation, collective targets, and trading with nations that have not adopted legally binding emissions commitments, was expressly incorporated in Protocol language which establishes a framework for market-based emissions trading and related systems....Such flexibility and market mechanisms provide important pathways to achieving the multiple objectives of successful implementation of the Protocol, achievement of early reductions, and participation of all nations, including developing nations. 25
Although cautioning that certain aspects of the Kyoto framework needed to be further addressed at Buenos Aires and beyond, the EDF report stressed that “flexibility, emissions trading and the closely related Kyoto Protocol mechanisms of joint implementation, collective targets or “bubbles”, and the Clean Development Mechanism, provide a viable and useful implementation strategy for nations.” 26
Other mainstream organizations have been willing to accept the principle of tradable emissions and market mechanisms but remain wary of the motives behind such proposals. The Natural Resources Defense Council has stressed that the key is the specific design of any such mechanisms. According to a lead member of NRDC’s lobbying team at the Buenos Aires Conference of the Parties
The main ongoing substantive debate revolves around something called the “Clean Development Mechanism,” known to climate groupies as the CDM. This concept was invented in Kyoto, but all of the details remain to be worked out. If done right, the CDM can be a vehicle for encouraging sustainable development in third world countries by stimulating investment in projects such as using solar energy to provide electricity to remote villages. If done wrong, the CDM could produce a huge loophole in the Kyoto agreement, allowing the United States and other industrialized countries to obtain emission credits for projects that would have happened anyway....We are demanding that the CDM operate only after the adoption of strict rules to ensure that credit is given only for projects that create real additional benefits for the environment....Although the debate seems arcane at times, the effectiveness of the Kyoto agreement hangs in the balance. 27
The idea that it all depends on the details is also seen in the stance of the World Wildlife Fund. In its position statement leading up to the 1997 Kyoto meeting, WWF called for a “simple and straightforward” Kyoto protocol. At that time WWF opposed joint implementation or allowing countries to trade already attained reductions. The position statement also argued that
Agreed reductions must not be offset by allowing loopholes which under the headline of flexibility are being considered as part of the final agreement. If utilised, these loopholes could effectively cause an increase in emissions from industrialised countries instead of reductions and thus undermine the entire protocol. 28
The position statement did leave room for emissions trading, but only if “much stronger reduction targets than those currently proposed by industrialised countries” were adopted. In other words, as with NRDC, the primary opposition to trading schemes was that they might create a loophole through which major industrialized countries could escape an obligation to undertake domestic reductions. As it has become apparent in the wake of Kyoto that some form of emissions trading will be agreed upon, WWF has reiterated this concern while endorsing the idea of a “well monitored system” of emissions trading. 29 In a press release tied to the 1998 Bonn follow-up to Kyoto, WWF again opposed trade and investment measures—if they create loopholes through which developed countries could avoid their responsibilities for domestic reductions. But the organization also applauded the increased willingness of countries from the global South to “co-operating in defining rules by which private sector finance could be channelled into projects to limit carbon emissions, so long as they promote sustainable development,” while expressing concern that “political progress” on this issue was “painfully slow and marred by confrontation.”
In other words, the position is that these mechanisms have genuine potential to promote global greenhouse reductions if properly designed and carefully monitored.
Both the pro-trading and qualified support positions share several dubious assumptions when see in the context of an increasingly transnationalized world political economy. As in the NAFTA debate, the discussion of state regulatory capacity has been framed in a very limited way. Discussion of the “capacity” issue has been limited primarily to how to build it in the global South, with primary emphasis on the technical and administrative dimensions of state capacity. This framing avoids the most fundamental question: Can any governments in fact regulate, through national means, the climate-impacting activities in the transnational commodity chains that pass through their border? Enhanced capital mobility, and with it the almost infinite substitutability of production sites and material sources, cast genuine doubts.
An interesting corollary of this unquestioned faith in Northern state capacity is the widespread belief that industrialized countries in general, or the United States in particular, retains the power to continue to set the world’s technological trajectories in energy efficiency and pollution control through public policies. To be sure, choices emanating from the financial core of the world economy do shape global technological trajectories. But can we assume that the capacity to steer these trajectories exists in the public sector? And can we assume that the highly flexible, decentralized production umbrellas that constitute the 21st century multinational corporation will be an effective means of exerting such technological influence?
The impact of spatial and social distancing has also been an underdeveloped theme. Tradable emissions embraces an undifferentiated and abstractly global notion that emissions reduced anywhere are emissions reduced everywhere. Because the climate is a physically global system, these groups have framed the debate exclusively in aggregate global terms. Proponents of emissions trading and investment credits stress the efficiency value of implementing reductions where it is cheapest and easiest to do so. The more cautious groups worry that credit will be taken for false savings—but they do not differentiate between the effects of genuine emissions reductions in a highly industrialized market economy such as the United States and genuine reductions in an “emerging market” such as China’s or Brazil’s. In other words, energy consumption anywhere equals an addition to greenhouse gases everywhere, and genuine reductions of a single unit of greenhouse-gas emissions anywhere yield equivalent gains in the global system.
In the long run, in the physical sense, and in the narrow context of the climate problem, this may be true. But viewed through the lens of a highly transnationalized world political economy consisting of transnational commodity chains, the location of the emissions reductions is in fact enormously consequential. Tying emissions reductions to the locale of consumption fights the disempowering effects of distancing; earning environmental credits in remote locations reinforces those effects. Individuals and communities that are forced to grapple with the consequences of their polluting lifestyles see the linkages across different forms of environmental ill—the role of auto emissions in both acid rain and climate change, for example—and thus the synergistic benefits of planning for sustainability rather than merely tinkering. In contrast, allowing polluters to find abstractly “offsetting” savings in remote places directly reinforces the problems of feedback-interrupting, context-blurring, and information-distorting effects of distancing.
The tradable-emissions concept also overlooks the downstream flow of power in global production systems. There is a nearly universal assumption in the debate that national aggregate emissions totals are the correct figures to use in allocating responsibilities and tallying reductions (tradable or otherwise). This overlooks not only the fact that much of global manufacturing pollution is embedded in transnationalized production processes, but also that power in those commodity chains lies increasingly at the end of retailing, marketing, and advertising, and not at the factory end of the chain. 30 The data assign responsibility for emissions in the manufacture of Nike athletic shoes purchased and worn in the United States to an entity known as “Indonesia” or “Vietnam.” This does more than just hide the consuming interests those activities ultimately serve. By arbitrarily disaggregating global production systems, it presumes capacity to change is held by what are increasingly the weakest nodes in the commodity chain.
Taking the distancing problem and the downstream-power problem together, one can see that conventional tradable emissions schemes create exactly the wrong incentives. Cooperative mechanisms are critically important, but only when they tie together the production process, the financing mechanism, and the consuming interests ultimately served by production. If high-consumption societies were to trace the offshoring of their pollution to its specific geographic locale and pay for its mitigation or reduction in that location, we might have the foundation for a truly sustainable “cooperative mechanism”—one that recognizes where power and responsibility lie. When abstract schemes sell high-consumption societies generic credits delinked from lifestyles and responsibility, the effect is just the opposite.
To be sure, there are elements of recognition within the debate that all emissions or reductions are not created equal. WWF, for example, has voiced concern that the rules on cooperative mechanisms should not allow the industrialized countries to monopolize the cheapest immediately available reduction investments, thereby leaving LDCs only with more expensive reduction opportunities. 31 Friends of the Earth has stressed that the industrialized countries, as primary architects of the global economy, should take the lead in reducing emissions. 32 Concern for North-South equity and efforts to tie reductions to the ultimately responsible parties indicate awareness of global political economy. For the most part, however, the debate on tradable emissions has ensnared the major American environmental NGOs instead in the fictional world of international diplomacy, in which the supposedly authoritative governments of internally uniform national states bargain over the allocation mechanisms to limit their national contributions to global pollution. This world—and its core assumption about the ecological and social equivalence of all emissions reductions—bears increasingly little resemblance to the underlying world economy those bargained allocation mechanisms are meant to regulate.
All consumers are created equal: The Sierra Club immigration debate
The conceptual adjustments demanded by global economic change create tensions not only between the major organizations but also within them. A classic illustration is the Sierra Club’s immigration controversy. In this case, the dispute was over the environmental consequences not of mobile goods or capital but rather people, specifically immigrants to the United States. Nevertheless, there were striking similarities to the NAFTA and climate episodes: a strong tendency for parties on both sides of an otherwise highly polarized debate to ground their arguments in undifferentiated abstractions about consumption, false presumptions about borders, and inadequate reflection on the globally linked character of production.
The controversy surrounded a ballot initiative in the Sierra Club’s 1998 elections. The initiative, placed by a group of Club activists using existing referendum procedures, urged support for a strong stand against U.S. population growth, explicitly including immigration measures as well as efforts to reduce domestic fertility. This anti-immigrant initiative was itself a backlash against a 1996 board decision to block inclusion of immigration issues within the context of the Club’s official position on population issues. 33 In reaction to the anti-immigrant initiative, the Sierra Club’s board of directors placed an alternative initiative on the 1998 ballot. This initiative called for the club to take no formal stance on immigration matters and to focus instead on the underlying causes of global population growth and migration pressures.
Members voted independently on the anti-immigration and take-no-position initiatives. After a heated and often vitriolic debate full of recrimination and accusations flowing in both directions, the Club’s national membership rejected the anti-immigrant initiative by a 60/40 margin and approved the board’s take-no-position initiative. Ballots were cast by 13.5 percent of the Club’s 550,000 members.
Some support for the anti-immigration initiative was apparently not grounded in environmental concerns at all; numerous allegations emerged of support for the initiative by right-wing anti-immigrant groups. Others supporters clearly embraced a narrow frame of “not in my (national) backyard,” calling to preserve our lifestyle by reducing our numbers rather than to change our way of living. But many of the initiative’s backers did present a global vision, stressing the status of the United States as chief global polluter, the role of Americans’ consumerist lifestyle in attaining that dubious distinction, and claiming that immigrants were shedding a more sustainable form of living and entering the ranks of the overconsumers upon entering the United States. According to one leader of the initiative movement
Our population is growing the fastest of any industrialized nation. We’ll double in the next 70 years, and 80 percent will be from immigration....That’s a catastrophic effect for the U.S., but also worldwide because of our enormous demand on world resources and our enormous contribution to global climate change....The world cannot afford any more North Americans. 34
The problem with this frame is its undifferentiated and socio-politically decontextualized view of consumption. No effort is made to ask who these immigrants are, where they come from, how they lived previously and how they live in the United States, what cultural or political values they bring with them, or how they enter the streams and currents of American life. This failure to engage any of the complexities of immigrants-as-American-consumers is rooted in a larger premise that all American consumers are created equal, as well as the dualistic notion of an otherwise sustainable North and desperate-to-consume South discussed earlier.
Opponents of the anti-immigration initiative often showed an equally undifferentiated view. Some simply argued that the population problem was globally additive and needed to be addressed in those terms rather than in terms of its distribution—thereby ignoring, if not denying, the reality of American overconsumption. At times in its public pronouncements, the “official” opposition to the anti-immigrant initiative fell back into the same undifferentiated view of people as ecologically equivalent individual members of the species. For example, in an op-ed rebuttal to critics who accused the Sierra Club of ignoring the population problem, executive director Carl Pope argued that
Environmentalists are well aware of the dangers of overpopulation. More and more people mean more and more consumption of fossil fuels, more pollution of air and water, and more destruction of natural resources.
But let’s be clear: The crux of the problem is too many people, not their whereabouts. 35
More troubling than this generic indictment of “people” was a tendency to outsource the problem of consumption. A strong theme in Sierra Club public pronouncements after the balloting was that the way to address “overpopulation at its root” was to stop the U.S. Congress from meddling in Third World family planning programs. In the same essay just quoted, Pope stressed external threats to America’s environment as the “real” problem:
Sierra Club members know that hiring more border guards or scapegoating immigrants for our country’s gargantuan appetites won’t help the environment. Erecting a Pat Buchanan-style fence wouldn’t prevent toxics from crossing the Rio Grande or keep Tijuana’s sewage off San Diego’s beaches....We’re able to distinguish between population, which is a global problem, and immigration, which is a symptom. We know that building walls to keep people out of this country does nothing to fix the planet’s predicament.
Another public statement in a similar vein:
There is no doubt that Americans use too many natural resources, and in doing so generate a disproportionate amount of pollution-more carbon dioxide, for example, than any other nation. But the average inhabitant of Mexico City puts more pollution into the atmosphere than the average Angeleno; the average Greek accounts for more heavy metal in the ocean than the average American; and adding 100,000 people to the population of Sumatra displaces more critical habitat for more endangered species than adding the same number to New York or Illinois. Sorting out the global environmental effects of immigration, we soon find, is too complicated for anyone to reasonably calculate. And pretending that we can set immigration levels solely based on rates of consumption sends a terrible message to the rest of the world: “We know that our way of life is fatal to the biosphere, but we don’t plan to change it, and we can’t afford to have you join us. Please don’t imitate us back in your own countries either.” 36
While usefully and effectively placing consumption at the center of the debate, this framing also obscures the relationship between pollution from Mexicans and “Angelinos,” or between forest destruction in Sumatra and those New Yorkers or Chicagoans.
To be sure, there were also many opponents of the anti-immigration measure who drew connections to the structure of the global political economy. Carl Pope himself pointed to underlying economic structural adjustments as drivers of migration, citing the impact of NAFTA on rural Mexican communities or the effects of IMF conditionality in the Asian financial crisis. Some also made connections to the need to differentiate and contextualize the effects of “immigrants” on consumption and community. In an essay widely distributed via e-mail during the debate, Michael Dorsey used the example of Maryland to illustrate the need to contextualize immigration, pointing out that
Immigrants have substantially lower unemployment rates than native Marylanders. They have lower rates for welfare assistance and food stamps. And immigrant communities are getting recognition by state agencies for resettling and revitalizing communities in already developed areas, particularly in Baltimore City and the Washington suburbs. 37
The emphasis on corporate responsibility and the need for a broader, multicultural environmental coalition in U.S. politics were hopeful signs of recognition that a globalizing world economy must be brought to the center of the analysis, and that these changes create new challenges for social movements pursuing ecological sanity. But the dominant frames deployed on each side of the debate revealed the same steep learning curve on globalization and consumption that surrounded the NAFTA and climate debates.
Conclusion
What can we learn from these quick sketches of how economic globalization has intruded upon these three debates within contemporary, mainstream American environmentalism? The first conclusion is that, when consumption questions are raised at all, they are presented through an extraordinarily simplistic frame that largely ignores the reality of global economic integration and the socially embedded character of production, exchange and consumption. Instead, issues are framed as though all consumers are created equal (the immigration debate), as though emissions reduced anywhere are gains realized everywhere (the climate debate), or as though the alternatives for environmental policy are to either protect one country’s sovereign consumers or enhance another’s consumer sovereignty (the NAFTA debate).
It is important not to be overly pessimistic. Paradigms change, and learning occurs. The rise of sustainability, the decline of the wilderness model, the embrace of market environmentalism—each of these attests in its own way to the fluid character of environmental thinking. Nevertheless, the common ground across the three debates sketched here is the fundamental disconnect between the dominant paradigm of mainstream American environmentalism and the underlying realities of the new global political economy. In the former world, we find a “global” paradigm that promotes an undifferentiated view of humanity as individual planetary citizens, or a naive faith in the enduring regulatory power of individual states, or the specter of an otherwise sustainable North fending off the advances of a desperate and ravenous South. None of these squares with the world we actually inhabit, marked by a globalized political economy and an increasingly differentiated international division of labor and political power. As American environmentalism adjusts to these new realities, the divided, fragmented coalition we saw in the NAFTA debate seems likely to be a recurring feature of environmental policy debates.
Endnotes
*: Prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., February 16–20, 1999. Back.
Note 1: Timothy W. Luke, “The (UnWise) (Ab(Use) of Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized Consumerism,” Alternatives vol. 23 no. 2 (Apr-June 1998): 175-212. Back.
Note 3: My use of the term “mainstream” follows that of Mark Dowie and centers on the organizations at one time referred to as the “Group of 10.” Dowie defines the Group of 10 (later expanded and renamed the Green Group) to include Defenders of Wildlife, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Environmental Policy Institute, Friends of the Earth, the Izaak Walton League, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society. The term is not used to deny important differences among these organizations or an influential role for other groups on certain issues. It does presume that these are consistently the most influential environmental organizations across a wide array of environmental issues. On the Group of 10 and “mainstream” environmentalism, see Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). Back.
Note 4: On the concept of commodity chains, see Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994). Back.
Note 5: U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, “Capital Flows to Latin America and the Caribbean 1997,” CEPAL News 18 no. 3 (March 1998), p. 3. Back.
Note 6: Laura T. Reynolds, “Institutionalizing Flexibility: A Comparative Analysis of Fordist and Post-Fordist Models of Third World Agro-Export Production,” in Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, p. 145. Back.
Note 7: Gary Gereffi, “The Organization of Buyer-Driven Commodity Chains: How U.S. Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks,” in Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Back.
Note 8: Thomas Princen, “Green Production, Cost Externalization: Toward a Political Economy of Business Strategy.” Paper prepared for the 1995 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Chicago, IL, USA, Feb 21-25, p. 12. Back.
Note 9: Princen, “Green Production,” p. 16. Back.
Note 10: The following discussion draws upon Ken Conca, “Imagine there’s no countries: A post-sovereign perspective on the global South’s environmental impact.” Paper presented at the 39th annual convention of the International Studies Association, Minneapolis, March 1998. Back.
Note 11: See Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement 1962-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Back.
Note 12: Mark Dowie and others have referred to this trend as “third wave” environmentalism. See Dowie, Losing Ground, chapter 5; Sale, The Green Revolution. Back.
Note 13: John J. Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade: NAFTA and the Future of Environmental Politics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997). The groups Audley identifies are Defenders of Wildlife, the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund. Back.
Note 14: John J. Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade,: NAFTA and the Future of Environmental Politics (Georgetown University Press, 1997). Accommodating groups identified in Audley’s research include the five NAFTA supporters listed above, as well as two organizations that took no stance on NAFTA, Defenders of Wildlife and The Nature Conservancy. Back.
Note 15: This discussion follows Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade, chapters 3-5. Back.
Note 16: Of these five organizations, four (World Wildlife Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and National Audubon Society) would ultimately support the NAFTA package signed by Clinton in the fall of 1993, while the fifth (the Nature Conservancy) took no position. Back.
Note 17: See Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade, p. 60 for a summary table of environmental demands and their subsequent disposition in fast-track legislation. Audley presents a more positive interpretation than my own of the costs and benefits of environmental support for fast track and the resulting NAFTA package. Back.
Note 18: For a useful discussion of the evidence linking income levels and environmental protection see Peter Thompson and Laura A. Strohm, “Trade and Environmental Quality: A Review of the Evidence”, Journal of Environment and Development vol. 5 no. 4 (December 1996): 363-388. Back.
Note 19: Pope also cited the inadequacy of clean-up provisions along the U.S.-Mexico border and the lack of broad participation in adjudication mechanisms. See Carl Pope, testimony before the Subcommittee on Trade, House Ways and Means Committee, September 21, 1993. Back.
Note 20: This demand was included in an early consensus document but later abandoned by those groups endorsing NAFTA. See “Environmental Agenda for Trade Policy,” February 6, 1991, cited in Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade, p. 35. Back.
Note 21: Stephen P. Mumme, “Environmental Policy and Politics in Mexico,” in Uday Desai, ed., Ecological Policy and Politics in Developing Countries: Economic Growth, Democracy, and Environment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). Back.
Note 22: To my knowledge, a systematic study of the causes and consequences of this shift has not been done. For a short, provocative discussion of the ramifications of “global change” discourse, see Frederick H. Buttel, Ann P. Hawkins, and Alison G. Power, “From limits to growth to global change,” Global Environmental Change 1 (December 1990):57-66. Back.
Note 23: For the purposes of this paper I have not drawn a careful distinction between the global and domestic levels of organization for groups such as Greenpeace and WWF. Although the overall public position on issues tends to be similar if not identical, it should be kept in mind that there can be a complex division of labor in the many ways that these groups try to affect the climate negotiations. Back.
Note 24: I am grateful to Tadashi Okimura for this observation. Back.
Note 25: Quoted from the executive summary of the Environmental Defense Fund report “Cooperative Mechanisms Under the Kyoto Protocol—The Path Forward.” Downloaded from the EDF website at <www.edf.org/pubs/reports/pathforward/index.html>, January 20, 1999. Back.
Note 26: EDF, “Cooperative Mechanisms,” executive summary. Back.
Note 27: Comments of NRDC climate scientist Dan Lashoff, during the Buenos Aires Climate Conference, posted on NRDC’s News page under “Buenos Aires Climate Conference.” Downloaded from NRDC web page at <www.nrdc.org/worldview/fwnews.html>, Jan 20 1999. Back.
Note 28: World Wildlife Fund, “WWF Position Statement for COP 3, Kyoto, Japan 1-10 December 1997,” downloaded from WWF website at <www.panda.org>, January 20, 1999. Back.
Note 29: World Wildlife Fund,“Glimmer of Hope For Closing Loopholes in Kyoto Climate Change Agreement,” press release dated June 12, 1998. Downloaded from WWF website at <www.panda.org/climate/ccc/news/pressindex.htm>, Jan 20 1999. Back.
Note 30: Ken Conca, “Imagine there’s no countries: A post-sovereign perspective on the global South’s environmental impact.” Paper presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Back.
Note 31: “Glimmer of Hope For Closing Loopholes in Kyoto Climate Change Agreement,” WWF press release, June 12, 1998. Downloaded from the WWF website at <www.panda.org/climate/ccc/news/pressindex.htm>, January 20, 1999. Back.
Note 32: See for example Friends of the Earth, “Friends of the Earth’s Goals for Kyoto,” a comparison of FOE’s goals and the decisions adopted at Kyoto. Downloaded from FOE website at <www.foe.org/ga/kyotoassessment.html>, Jan 20, 1999. Back.
Note 33: A good place to find some of the environmental arguments underpinning the anti-immigrant position is the website of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS), found at <www.ecofuture.org/ecofuture/susps/>. See also Lindsey Grant, “The Timid Crusade,” manuscript dated January 1994 (downloaded from the SUSPS website on December 1, 1998) and Leon F. Bouvier and Lindsey Grant, How Many Americans? Population, Immigration, and the Environment (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994). Back.
Note 34: Alan Kuper, quoted in Jane Kay, “Sierra Club: Sidestep on immigration,” San Francisco Examiner, no date. Back.
Note 35: Carl Pope, “Rebuttal: Sierra Club Aware of Population Problems,” Detroit News, Tuesday April 7, 1998. Back.
Note 36: Carl Pope, “Moving On: Lessons of the immigration debate.” Downloaded from the Sierra Club website at <www.sierra.org> on December 1, 1998. Back.
Note 37: Michael Dorsey, “Environmentalism or Racism,” manuscript, March 24, 1998. Back.
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