Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change by Irwin Ruth;

Author:Irwin, Ruth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2008-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Technological evolution

Intensive debate over the interface between technology, efficiency, economics and democracy occurs at this jointure. Importantly, technology is neither static or fixed, nor is it tied inextricably to consumerism. Modernity is susceptible to closing down all cultural difference by entrenching consumerism in the ‘end of history’ and failing to register or engage with global inequity. Up until now, the debate has been polarized with technology understood as being either static or radically corrective to environment disaster.

If technology is static and fixed, as Ehrlich presumes, more pressure has to be applied to coercing human behaviour to alleviate population pressure on the planet. Finding biology easier to adjust, Ehrlich’s ‘solution’ is reproduction politics, birth control or sterilization administered either by individuals or by the state. ‘Social control over personal acts’ as Commoner criticizes (Feenberg, 1999: 59). By contrast, Commoner assumes that technology is changeable and that the locus of the environmental problem is not the immense and growing population but in the organization of society. This might require, for example, increased public transport to cut carbon dioxide emissions instead of decreasing the population that requires cars.

Ehrlich responded to Commoner’s criticism in a fierce debate about population pressures on the threshold or natural limits: resource exhaustion that results in diminishing returns. Diminishing returns then require greater pollutant practices, like increased fertilizer on marginal land, to continue use. Commoner replied that increased fertilizer on marginalized land in the United States was a result of national policies to keep some land out of production, rather than an exhaustion of possible resources. The threshold of diminishing returns was a result of policies designed to maintain capitalist value through scarcity rather than the limits of the land itself. It is quite possible that manipulation of diminishing returns for financial gains has taken place. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that diminishing returns will be considerable once the externalized costs of downstream pollution (nitrogen run off changing the acid/alkaline balance of the ocean and encouraging toxic algal bloom, for example) are directly included in the consumption costs.

The political argument that production is driven by economic concerns to increase wealth for big business rather than from environmental constraints is compelling. However, both sides of the debate have significant contributions to make to the regulation of human practices and the recognition of environmental factors. Whether or not we attribute environmental degradation to capitalist modes of production and unfair ownership or to overpopulation, environmentalists today would not deny that depletion of natural ‘resources’ is occurring (take fish stocks, for example). While the political ramifications of 1960 and 1970s overpopulation arguments are unfortunate, Malthus’ theory of physical ecological constraints along with the affects of pollutants on diminishing returns are important considerations.

Ehrlich’s proposals on population control have been criticized for being insufficiently cognizant of the very real political implications of policy on lives; population measures either require Draconian state measures such as China’s one birth per family policy and the State sterilization of particular disadvantaged groups, or it is voluntary and individualistic. Neither extreme aims to alter the structures of civil society or alter the dynamics of capitalism.

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