Sociological Theory and the Environment: Classical Foundations, Contemporary Insights by Riley E. Dunlap

Author:Riley E. Dunlap
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781461642503
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2001-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

4. WST Holds That Nations Occupy Structural Positions in a Global Stratification System

Like class structures within nations, a few nations move up and down, but the structure remains intact over time. Also, like most national stratification systems, the majority of nations remain trapped in their current level within the global system. The relevance of attempting to characterize this global system of inequality becomes clearer if we remember Gandhi’s point at the 1972 Stockholm conference that the pollution of poverty differs from the pollution of wealth. For example, much of our own previous work has shown that the relative wealth and World-System position of nations is an excellent (but not at all complete) initial predictor of the level or type of environmental degradation it is likely to be creating (Grimes, Roberts, and Manale 1993; Roberts and Grimes 1997), as well as its level of commitment to international environmental agreements (Roberts 1996b).

It was mentioned earlier that many remnants of modernization theory persist in Washington policy circles today. One derivative argument that gained favor in the 1990s was the “Environmental Kuznets’s Curve.” When one plots some types of pollutants such as levels of urban smog against a nation’s gross national product (GNP) per capita, an upside-down U-curve is evident. This fact led economists Grossman and Krueger (1995) and the World Bank in its influential 1992 World Development Report and its 1995 Monitoring Environmental Progress to argue that countries will first get worse as they develop and after reaching some “turning point” will improve their environmental performance. The argument is based on Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and the “postmaterialist” hypothesis (see Inglehart 1995; Roberts and Grimes 1997). On the face of it, the argument makes sense: nations will ignore pollution controls until they have dealt with basic human needs and only then will they begin to care about “quality of life” issues like clean air and water. As Salinas, the former president of Mexico, is reported to have said on the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service show McLaughlan Group, “We have to pollute now, to develop first and deal with pollution later.” Based on the pattern for several pollutants, Grossman and Krueger put the “turning point” at about $8,000 per capita. The policy implication is that nations need economic growth first to reach environmental protection later.

However, based on the repeated findings of the WST school, we argue in a recent World Development piece (Roberts and Grimes 1997) that assuming that things will get better for the world’s poor nations is extremely perilous and in fact historically counterfactual. Research presented by Sanderson (1995) demonstrates that, contra the assumptions of the modernization theory underlying the Kuznet’s curve, the gap between countries has grown geometrically over the past century. Some environmental effects have Kuznet’s curve-type relationships with national wealth, while others increase linearly or even more quickly as countries get richer. In our examination of the historical trend over thirty years for national carbon intensity, it becomes clear that the environmental Kuznets’s curve does not represent a historical

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