George Bradford Stopping the Industrial Hydra Revolution Against the Megamachine

8/10/2019 George Bradford Stopping the Industrial Hydra Revolution Against the Megamachine

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/george-bradford-stopping-the-industrial-hydra-revolution-against-the-megamachine 1/45



2

Contents

1. Autopsy of a Petro emical disaster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Not Just Another Accident . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5e Failure of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2. e Earth is a Company Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Economic Boom = Ecologic Bust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

e Greenhouse Effect: Capital’s Business Climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3. Disaster Fuels the Ma ine: e Hydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19Limits of environmentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Limitations of le ism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

4. Revolution or Death: Against the Megama ine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Halt Production, Destroy the Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Never Trust A Te no-Fix! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Postscript — Sea Empress west Wales oil spill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44



3

i s article was rst published in the American radical ecological journal ‘Fi hEstate’ a er the Exxon Valdez Oil spill. It describes rst the sp ill itself bef oremoving on to a wider ana lysis of the way that indus trial interests can exploiteven the d isasters that might seem to unde rmine them and wa rns that in man y

cases en vironmen talists are acting as me re salesreps f or indus try. i s incisiveand rather scary ana lysis is backed up hea vily. It also explains how indus trycreates needs f or itself and looks at the limits of both environmen talism andle ism. Its impressive explanation of petrochemical civilisation and its o en f alseoppos itions is especially relevan t considering this years west Wa les oil spill —which released around twice as much oil as the Valdez .



4

1. Autopsy of a Petro emical disaster

Remember the Exxon Valdez ? e ship was the source of the worst oil spill todate in US history, spilling 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska ’s Prince W illiamSound, where it ran aground in March 1989. By the time it had limped into SanDiego Harbour in J uly, it also le at least one other slick some eighteen miles longoff the California coast.

e spill at Prince William Sound was the grand prize in a season of spills. InDecember 1988, 230,000 gallons of oil were spilled, f ouling 300 miles of coast inthe Canad ian-US Pacic Northwes t.1 In J anua ry 1989, an Argen tine sh ip brokeapart, spilling 250,000 gallons of oil off Antarctica’s Palmer Peninsula near pen-guin, seal and seab ird colon ies. In the f our mon ths prior to the Valdez disaster,Alaska suff ered several spills, including a 52,000 gallon sp ill at a Kenai renery,a city pipeline rupture that spilled jet fuel into a creek in Anchorage, and a shipgrounding in Dutch Harbour that closed down sh plants temporarily and killedmore than 500 birds. In J anua ry alone , the environmen tal organ isation Green -peace recorded six ship, barge and boat wrecks in Alaskan waters “that releasedor threatened to release large quan tities of oil.” One acciden t dumped 2 m illiongallons of diesel f uel into the ocean .2 en , in February, Exxon leaked 117,000gallons of oil in Hawa ii. Again, in April, another 10,000 gallons of oil from amystery spill f ouled beaches on the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Lanai. Laterin the spring , over 300,000 gallons we re spilled in the Delawa re River, ano ther420,000 gallons were spilled in Rhode Island’s Narraganse Bay, and the collisionof a tanke r and a barge in Texas’s Hous ton Channe l dumped 252,000 gallons of oil.

Still remembe r the Valdez ? In a petrochem ical civilization , oil and chem icalspills go with the territory. Nevertheless, lif e — or rather, organised death — goeson as usual. e reneries, mines and f actories continue to operate, and the trafficcontinues to roar relentlessly. Oil spills have now — with only sporadic exceptions— dropped ou t of the mass med ia, replaced by “crime” and “drugs” Ame rica’snumbe r 1 problem.” As the appa ratus turns , its media mach ine chu rns. e oilspill in Prince William Sound has become yesterday’s newspapers, entering theexterminist Hall of Fame, along with others, such jewels as the Santa Barbara off-shore oil rig spill in 1968, the sinking of the Amoco Cadiz off of Bri any in 1978,

1 For an excellent essay on the Pacic Northwest spill, see Mikal Jakubal’s “With Enough Tooth-

brushes” in ‘Live Wild or Die’ No.1.2 See “What’s Behind the Spills”, Greenpeace Magazine, June 1989, and “ e Spills and Spoils of BigOil”, by John Greely, e Nation, May 29 1989.



5

and the Ixtoc oil well spill off Mexico’s Caribbean coast in 1979, as well as Bhopal,Love Canal, the Rhine River, r ee Mile Island and Chernobyl, and on and on — atoponymy of extinction. As the hustlers say, pick a card, any card.

Survival, increasingly diminished and cons trained, goes on, leaving an array of

victims in its wake to pick up what li le they can salvage. Everyone else ad justs tothe increasing velocity of Progress, pu ing the wrenching and inf uriating mediaimages o f dying an ima ls behind them . ey still have to get to work, to play,and to Grandma’s house, which is invariably on the other side of Hell six dozenfreeway interchanges away. A few pious calls to drive less are heard, but in theabsence of a mass strike today against the Machine, everyone keeps driving. etyranny of mechanized daily life remains intact, and, in fact, is extended by thedisasters it unleashes.

Not Just Another Accident

Nevertheless, the Valdez spill should not be denied its uniqueness . In magn itudeand in terms of the rich ecosystem in wh ich it occurred, it was exceptiona l. Itoccurred in an area con taining one o f the riches t concen trations of an imals inNorth America; 219 separate species of birds alone ha ve been recorded in theSound. Situated at an important point in the Pacic migratory route of Northernlatitude breeders, the spill happened just in time to greet millions of birds on theirway back north.

From late April to mid-May, the nea rby Copper River delta is theworld’s largestresting area f or shore birds, man y on their way to nest in the Canad ian Arctic.Flocks of as many as a hund red thousand b irds stop two or three days to f eed ,foraging in shallows and at the water’s edge, where much of the oil accumulates.

Almost the entire population of certain species pass through the area, f or exam-ple, 20 million western sandp ipers and dunlins alone. It is also rich with hund redsof thousands of black turnstones, tens of thousands of lesser golden plovers, red-knots and whimbrels, and thousands o f oystercatchers, ruddy turnstones , puffins,tund ra swans , Canada geese , snow geese , gulls, cormoran ts, een spec ies of ducks , peregrine f alcons and o ther birds. Some ve thousand ba ld eagles — thelargest concentration in the world — are f ound in the area. As of September, some146 eagles were f ound dead ; as many as 70% of mothering eagles abandoned theirnests, leaving behind oil-soaked eggs and dead chicks.

e wo rld’s largest concen tration o f northern sea o ers, some ten to twelvethousand , were also f ound in the Sound . Probably ha lf died from the sp ill, but

man y more are at risk. e eff ects on seals, wha les and wa lruses a re not clear,although they have not been affected as dramatically as the o ers. While many



6

an imals have been k illed by asphyxiation and freezing (one drop is enough todestroy protective coverings on b irds and o ers and k ill them ), not much isknown abou t the toxicity of seawa ter contamina ted by oil. Sitka black — taileddeer, f eeding on the ke lp along the beach , and bea rs f eeding on ca rrion le by

the sp ill, have died. Deadly chemicals f ound in o il such as xylene , benzene andtoluene no t only damage the intestines of large animals and kill them, but threatenthe entire f ood chain by killing and disrupting the zoo-plankton on wh ich it rests.

Fish such as herring, salmon and she llsh will be adversely aff ected as well. Allin all, some 400,000 animals may have been affected. About 33,000 birds and 980o ers were found dead by official counts, but biologists consider such a numberto be only ten to thirty percent of animals poisoned by the spill.

e long -term consequences on the ma rine eco logy are, as is to be expected,also disastrous . Li le has been known un til f airly recen tly, but a study by theSmithson ian Tropical Research Institute in Panama , describing the biologicalconsequences of a major oil spill in the Caribbean Sea off Panama in 1986, found

“drama tic eff ects” both mo re severe and longe r lasting than p revious ly though t. J udg ing from laboratory tests, scien tists once had cons idered coral relativelyimmune from oil residues , but this has turned ou t no t to be true. Organ ismsaff ected are more suscep tible to epidem ic disease and a re likely to grow andreproduce more slowly than unaffected colonies.

Recent reports on the a ermath of the Amoco Cadiz spill off France’s Bri anycoas t in 1978 also show tha t oil rema ins a serious problem f or marine lif e longa er a spill. In this case, the mass ive elimina tion of bo om dwe llers such asurchins , razor clams and tiny crustaceans ca lled amph ipods brough t about thedecline and disappearance of sh species that feed on them. According to a New Y o r k Ti mes report on the study, “On exposed mudats that are continually coveredand uncovered by the tides, almost all animal life was wiped out.” (2 April 1989).

Figures vary on how much of an area was contaminated by the E xx on V a l dez ,but it was , at a bare minimum , 3,000 square miles, including at least 1,000 toperhaps 1,600 miles of shoreline. e long -term eff ects are particularly hardto determine given the cold waters and rough seas cha racteristic of the area.Recovery rates, if such a term can even be used meaningf ully, vary widely as well.(“Recovery” can on ly sign ify a relative biological stability at a diminished levelf or a given ecosystem, since none can e ver return to the p re-spill state w ith itsfull panoply of species diversity.) Furthermore, scientists judge “recovery” basedon the ocean ’s ability to disperse and wash awa y oil, a view that implies tha tdilution of contaminants in the larger ecosystem is recovery. But the oil alwaysgoes somewhe re, and w ith it, a steady, generalised con tamina tion o f the who leliving planet. While the consequence of the overall contamination can never be



7

precisely measured by scientists, the silent pall over inlets and coves around theSound, once teeming and noisy with wildlife, should serve as an indication. 3

e Failure of Te nologyEven “cleanup ” represen ts one of those cruel jokes of language tha t mask a

grim reality. Not only do many containmen t and clean ing techn iques p roveineff ective, they are o en worse than the oil itself on the environmen t. Chemicaldispersants, which are considered to be only ten to thirty percent effective underidea l conditions , are themse lves high ly toxic. High-pressu re water treatmen ton beaches is very destructive to beach organ isms, and the f ertilizer used toclean beaches is also toxic. Traffic from workers doing clean-up weakens bo omsediment and destroys habitat. Rescue eff orts only save a minute fraction, perhapsten pe rcen t, of an ima ls f ound , and man y tend to return to the same a rea to be

fouled once again. Birds cleaned and returned to the environment rarely, if ever,reproduce, and so are,in ecological terms, already dead.

Recent work, by American ornitho logist Brian Sharp, has turned up somedepressing ndings. He examined US bird-ringing les for the period 1969to 1994 (wh ich included the a erma th of the Exxon Valdez ), and h is grimconc lusion was tha t clean ing of birds was largely pointless. e “lif e ex-pectancy of oiled and cleaned gu illemots a er their release is only 9.6 days. . . Unoiled birds survived between 20 and 100 times as long as oiled birds. . . modern methods of cleaning and rehabilitating birds had not noticeablyimproved their survival rate . . . a “negligible” number of oiled birds survive

long enough to breed.”Figures provided by Arthur Lindley, head of wildlif e at the RSPCA, tend toconrm Sharp’s conclusions — of “some 2000 guillemo ts ringed in Britaina er being c leaned o f oil . . . [mos t died] within a year of ring ing . . . butso far, six have shown up later than that — and one bird was found 11 yearslater.” While Lindley acknowledges that “very many die within a few weeksof being released” he still, inexplicably, sees the survival of a tiny fraction of the original number of birds as “encouraging”.

In any other eld, a ‘success’ rate of 6 out of 2000wouldbeseenas intolerablylow, calling into question the efficacy of the energy expended on it — which

3 For a chilling eyewitness account of the spill’s effects, see “ e Dead Zone: Disaster in Alaska”, byGeorge Michaels, in the September 1989 issue of ‘ e Animals’ Agenda’.



8

is why Lind ley’s commen ts on the gures seem remarkably weak , no t tosay self-deluding. It reinforces the suspicion that such clean-up efforts areintended less for the benet of the birds than as a form of therapy for us —the expiation o f our guilt and disqu iet at the consequences o f our lif estyle

by doing some thing , even if tha t “some thing” is unde rstood to be largelyuseless. (All quotes, New Scientist 9/3/96.)

— Dead Trees EF!

One great irony is the u er uselessness of the complex technological apparatusthat has been developed to respond to oil spills. As Eugene Schwartz has wri enin “Overskill: e Decline of Technology in Modern Civilisation” (1971), techno-logical ingenu ity came to no thing in the Santa Barbara spill; the on ly relativelyeffective response ended up being the “low tech” strategy of spreading straw asan absorbent and collecting it with rakes and pitchforks.

e immense f ailure of mass techn ics is vividly illustrated by Schwartz’s de-

scription of two oil spills that took place during another season of spills — duringFebruary 1970, when in a period of sixteen days four major oil spills occurred inNorth America: a 3.8 million gallon oil spill in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia; anoil platf orm re in the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans , f ed by crude oil and gasescaping from wells drilled into the seabed; a spill in Tampa Bay from a groundedsh ip tha t eventually covered a hund red squa re miles of ocean bef ore wash ingasho re and k illing thousands o f birds; and the sp illing of 84,000 gallons of gasand d iesel f uel when a ba rge collided with a je y in Calif ornia’s Humbo ldt Bay.Such accidents are “powerful reminders” of the helplessness of human ingenuityin disasters, Schwartz writes:

“ e Gulf of Mexico accident unfolded like a Greek tragedy . . . A er the re

had been extinguished with the help of dynamite on March 10, oil began to pourfrom the wells and to form a heavy slick. On the same day, the National WildlifeRef uge on Breton Island was menaced when an o il-collecting boom b roke. eclean-up was reported to be ‘going well’ as the boom of heavy mesh f ence coveredwith vinyl was repaired —only to break again. OnMarch 11 the vinyl andp lywooddams collapsed in heavy seas and over 1,500 barrels of crude oil began to movetowa rd the oyster beds. e skimme r boats could not operate because o f windand high seas. On March 12 the incident was officially termed a ‘disaster’ as oilslicks covering y square miles of the Gulf neared the oyster beds.

“If necessa ry, it was planned to set off reworks to startle a quarter-milliongeese to begin an earlier migration northward. On March 13 officials consideredse ing the oil on re. An oil slick moved into the ma rshes of a wildlif e ref ugethe next day while officials scanned wind notices to determine the course of the



9

oil slicks. A well head used to cap a spouting well blew off on March 15, and theescap ing oil added to the y-two-squa re-mile slick. Faced with a growing oilslick, the oil well’s owners smothered the spouting wells with tons of mud and dy-namite. ey poured dispersant chemicals on the slicks though the eff ects of these

chemicals on the marine life threatened by the oil had not been established. . .“ e Chedabuc to Bay spill trans f ormed the bay into a cold-water laboratory

— with primitive measures taking precedence over scientic ones. Efforts weremade to burn the spilled oil, but low sea temperatures frustrated ignition effortswith benzine, magnesium and ame-throwers. Old tires lled with napa lm burneddoughnu t-shaped ho les in the congea led oil and sank to the bo om . Chem icaldispersants were halted by the governmen t as being harmf ul to marine lif e. As atSanta Barbara, sawdust and peat moss were used to soak up the oil on the beaches,and bulldozers scraped up the contamination.”

While some of capital’s advanced technology may have improved slightly sincethe 1970s, no equipmen t is capable of responding to spills in heavy seas. Oil starts

sliding under booms in currents of only seven-tenths of a knot, and goes over thetop in wind and wa ves. Even large skimme rs can on ly pick up sma ll amoun tsand can on ly be used in calm seas . When ga le f orce winds came up in PrinceWilliam Sound, the booms just blew away. And in the December 1988 spill alongthe no rthwes t Pacic coast, high seas thwa rted any response . Said a Canad ianofficial, “It was simply a ma er of waiting for the oil to hit the beach and clean itup manually.” ( Toronto Globe and Mail , 1 April 1989).

Ultimately eff orts were to prove so ineff ectual tha t the term “clean up ” wasreplaced with that of “treatment” and “stabilization” of shorelines. Even though ,a er Exxonworkershadcleaned upon ly half a mile of beach, an Exxon spokesmanclaimed tha t the beach had been le “cleane r than we ’ve f ound it”, the Timesreported that “ some of the painstaking cleanup is only spreading the oil around,moving from the high-tide mark down to the wa ter’s edge.” A state official incharge of an inqu iry into the spill remarked, “ e cleanup is just not working .It’s like trying to get the toothpas te back into the tube .” By Septembe r, whenExxon announced that it was going to cease the cleanup, the Alaska Departmentof Environmen tal Conservation reported tha t more than 300 miles of “treated”shoreline were still coated with oily muck as much as three feet deep. 4

4 e New York Times , April 23 and September 10, 1989. “Exxon Reneges on Cleanup”, e G uardian ,August 30 1989. In one report on the disaster originally done for the Chicago Reader, Jill C. Kunkawrites, “What about the waste from the cleanup? Waste disposal may be the climax of Exxon’scleanup nightmare. According to the An orage D aily News , one ton of spilled crude turns into

ten tons of toxic garbage — bags of oily gravel, mountains of synthetic absorbent booms andpads, discarded coveralls and the assorted refuse of 10,000 cleanup workers . . . Service barges arecollecting abou t 250 tons of waste per day. Much of this will be burned; the rest will be sent to



10

hazardous-waste landlls, probably in Oregon.” A friend from Detroit also reported a er a trip lastsummer to Alaska that several temporary incinerators were working around the clock in Valdezharbour. As Kunka writes, “With almost any environmental cleanup . . . the problem just getsmoved around.” “Report from Alaska”, Detroit Metro Times , Sept. 27-Oct.3 1989.

In his 1987 book ‘ e Toxic Cloud’, Michael Brown reports that one exploratory drillship alone “canproduce as much smog as 25,000 cars each travelling 18,000 miles.”



11



12

2. e Earth is a Company Town

For the institutions that administer and benet from the petrochemical mega-machine, the spill was a “terrible disaster” too, if only a temporary one. e spillindicated, contrary to corporate reassurances of infallibility, that not everythingwent exactly according to plan, and that can make the natives restless.

Exxon and the oil company pipeline consortium Aleyska, along with the usualgovernment and corporate allies, immediately followed the strategy always em-ployed in the wake of a toxic accident — managing appearances with the appear-ance of managemen t. us the reassu rances and dec larations of concern camerolling off produc tion lines along w ith slick pho tos of Exxon wo rkers holdingcleaned up, healthy looking o ers and ducks.

e model for capitalist crisis management of such disasters remains the toxicchem ical gas leak at a Union Carbide f actory in Bhopa l, Ind ia, in 1984. As Tara J ones has w ri en in a recen t book, “Corporate Killing : Bhopals Will Happen ”(Free Association Books, 1988): “ e crisis Bhopal created was one wh ich re-qu ired both immed iate and long -term managemen t. In the managemen t of thiscrisis, the victims’ needs were totally neglected: the predominant priorities werethe econom ic interests of [Union Carbide] and the Ind ian s tate. In the ensu ingmacabre dance of death, the dead and walking wounded we re le by the wayside,while the main protagonists acted to minimise damage to their interests.” For thecontinuance of industrial capitalism, the accident at Bhopal was not an ecologi-cal or even a technological crisis (accidents being inevitable) but rather a publicrelations crisis, and thus , potentially, a social crisis if people began to take thelessons of the gas leak seriously. Hence, the entire chemical industry worked “to

reassure the general public that Bhopal was a rare, chance occurrence that wouldnot be repeated,” rather than a dramatic example of a continuous process of toxiccontamination.

As soon as the news h it about the oil spill in Prince W illiam Sound , Exxonf ollowed Un ion Carbide’s strategy of clean ing up . . . the propaganda en viron-ment. By hiring nearly every boat in Valdez and Cordova harbours, and with thestipulation that no media would be allowed on them without permission from thecompan y, Exxon prevented mos t environmen tal groups and c ritical journa listsfrom even ge ing to Bligh Reef to survey the damages. e crew of shing boatnicknamed “the Hea rse”, wh ich brough t garbage bags lled with dead an imalsinto Valdez harbour every f ew days, was told not to bring in an imals tha t had

been dead more than two weeks to avoid stirring up reporters.



13

Exxon’s body counts varied wildly from all others. “ e numbe rs just don ’tma tch,” one disgus ted worker told George Michae ls of e Animals’ Agenda .“ e [Exxon] press release says that 500 o ers have been brought in dead in thepas t six weeks . I’ve coun ted 600 myself in the pas t week .” Exxon con tinued to

release regu lar no tices tha t the sp ill had been con tained and c leaned up e venas it continued to grow in size and severity, and produced a s lick video en titled“Progress in Alaska”, wich extolled the corporation’s environmental commitmentand the success of its response to V a l dez , as well as the benets the indus try hasbrough t to a state wh ich receives 85% of its revenues from o il. Full-page ads innewspape rs across the coun try were bough t by Exxon to def end its role in theaff air, and Exxon maintained tight control of emergency response eff orts, much inthe same way, say, that a mass murderer might be hired to head up the forensicsstudy of the massacre.

e propaganda blitz was intense because the stakes were high. Suddenly, off-sho re drilling and e xploration of sensitive wilderness a reas (policies contested

even before the spill) were ge ing the spotlight along with information about oilcompan y practices — leaks of f ar greater concern to capital than a f ew milliongallons of oil.

Speak ing bef ore the Nationa l Ocean Indus tries Association , an organ isationof companies linked to off-shore oil extraction, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujanwarned his corporate cronies, “If the image of an uncaref ul and uncaring indus tryprevails among the US public, then we can kiss goodbye to domestic oil and gasdevelopment in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, off-shore and in the publiclands .” For Lu jan, the Valdez spill might hinder oil exploitation much in the sameway tha t the acciden t at r ee Mile Island s talled the cons truction of nuc learpower pro jects. And he did not hesitate to call f urther exploration and extraction,including in wilderness a reas, a ma er of “na tiona l security”, even though thecoveted Arctic Nationa l Wildlif e Ref uge is estimated to have enough o il f or amere six months supply f or US cars and trucks. To the indus trialists, the oil mustkeep owing at all costs, and one terrifying question — when will society beginto do without oil — is not even allowed. It is a ma er of state security: capitalism,certainly, cannot exist without oil.

Meanwh ile the image of a “caring” corporation is disseminated f or the gullible.One Exxon pub licist called a boyco of the compan y “un just”, adding that thespill “was an accident — a bad one. But accidents can happen to anyone.” i s wasthe acciden t, of course, tha t such pub licists had f ormerly claimed wou ld neverhappen.



14

Economic Boom = Ecologic BustEver since the cons truction of the Prudhoe Bay oil eld on the Arctic Ocean

(the largest contiguous indus trial complex in the world), the oil indus try provided

every assurance of saf ety to thoseuneas y with oil development in Alaska’s pristinewaters and wilderness. Flush with petrochemical plunde r, the State of Alaska andthe corporations that had staked it out rode a giddy wave of technological hubrisand gold-rush corruption. Alaska became a Boom state, providing one quarter of all US domestic oil. In exchange for Prudhoe Bay, the state doubled its budget onpub lic services, repea led persona l income taxes, and created a trust f und ou t of which it pays an annual dividend to all Alaska residents.

Some Alaskans resisted oil developmen t in the beg inn ing , but Big Oil swep tall oppos ition as ide, both by using the law to f urther its own interests and bycircumventing it whene ver necessa ry. In the 1970s, shing commun ities andenvironmentalists fought the Aleyska pipeline all the way to the Supreme Court

and won, but Congress simply declared the project exempt from environmentallaws. State laws were also overrun and mod ied to accomodate the nine-companyconsortium seeking to build the pipeline across 800 miles of Alaska wilderness tothe port at Valdez.

Oil developmen t came accompan ied by promises of the “best techno logy”,saf ety reviews , and an upg rading of f acilities as volumes rose. Not even thesedubious promises materialised. Instead of cleaning up toxic pits le in drilling, itis cheaper for oil companies to pay penalties for abandoning them, and even theinadequate environmental protection laws are routinely ignored. As John Greelynotes in e Nation , Port Valdez was already considered one of North America’smos t “chron ically polluted marine en vironmen ts” by scientic agenc ies. Smallspills — some 400 before the Valdez spill — were a continuous problem.

Big Oil built itself not just a f ew compan y towns bu t a compan y state. ewave of new immigrants brought by an expanding economy continued to erodeopposition to development and the corporations. Housing, schools, roads, powerpro jects — the who le infrastructure of the mode rn cap ital-ene rgy-commod ity-intensive society — were constructed with the revenues. And when society-widecorruption and collusion didn’t work, Aleyska used a mix of cover-up, publicitycampaigns and legal maneuvers to continue operations unimpeded, for examplegoing into court in May, a er the spill, to block more stringen t pollution controlsat Valdez. Greely quotes a toxicologist: “If Aleyska is an example of how these oilcompanies operate in an environmen tally sound manne r, what are the companiesdoing in more remote wilderness areas with even less supervision?”

A good ques tion . If the idea of a “third world” sugges ts a plunde red colonywhere brute f orce, super-exploitation, and a veil of secrecy prevail, then Prudhoe



15

Bay is a kind of third world colony. e complex, encompassing a 900 square milewasteland of pref abbuildings, drilling pads, pipelines, roads and a irstrips, matchesany nightmare in the industrialised world. Burning fuels blacken the Arctic sky,causing air pollution that rivals the city of Chicago. According to the March-April

1988 G reenpeace Magazine , “ Some 64 million gallons of waste water containingvarying amoun ts of hydrocarbons , chemical additives, lead and arsenic have beenreleased directly into the environmen t. Regulators report up to 600 oil spills a year,and ve haza rdous was te sites at Prudhoe a re already cand idates f or clean -upunder Federal Superfund law. In addition, the oil companies have been cited fornume rous violations of f ederal and state environmen tal laws ,” wh ich does no treveal how bad things are, since many violations obviously go unreported. Roadand bu ilding cons truction has thawed the permafrost and caused ooding ; thishas sp read toxic chemicals, and aff ected an area much g reater than the actualdevelopment itself.

Hundreds of waste pits overow during the late spring thaw, killing off small

freshwa ter anima ls low on the f ood cha in, but also caus ing d rama tic poison ingincidents. Last year, for example, a polar bear was found dead, stained pink fromdrinking industrial poisons not even normally found together. Other wildlife hasbeen aff ected. e oil companies are quick to point out that thecariboupopu lationis up, but that is largely due to the mass extermination of wolves during 1977–78by hunting guides when road construction created more access to remote areas.In reality, many questions remain about the caribou and how they will be aff ectedin the long run.

In a le er to the New Y o r k Ti mes , two peop le who had been wea thered in atDeadhorse (at thehea rt of the Prudhoe comp lex) on their way to the wildlif e ref ugeto the east, describe seeing “thousands o f vehicles in use and abandoned , rangingfrom pickup trucks to massive mobile drilling equipment, stacks of discarded oildrums, small ponds with greasy slicks and general debris.” Dozens of abandonedstructures stand in and around the developmen t at Deadhorse, with no indicationthat any is to be re-used or removed as oil exploitation (which has already reachedits peak ) starts to wind down . “Merely to remove the accumu lated vehicles,buildings and drilling equipment,” they continue, “not to mention detoxifying thepolluted tund ra and d isman tling the roads , airstrips and p ipelines , wou ld takeyears and hundreds of millions of dollars. Who will pay?” (4 April 1989)

Another good question. Yet when one cons iderswha t theactual energy expenseof buildingand ope ratingsucha vast and remote complex might be, evenbef ore ana empt at any kind of “stabilization” of the environment, the realisation sinks inthat this development is representative of the entirety of indus trialism: a massivepyramid scheme that will collapse somewhe re down the line when a ll the ma jor



16

players have already retired from the game . Of course, when the last of thesehustlers cash in their chips, there won’t be any place le to retire to.

e Greenhouse Effect: Capital’s Business ClimateIt shou ld go withou t saying tha t Exxon and its allies don ’t try their best to

protect the environmen t or human hea lth. Capitalist ins titutions produce toaccumu late powe r and wea lth, no t f or any social “good”. us, predictably, inorder to cut costs, Exxon steadily disman tled what emergency saf eguards it hadthroughou t the 1980s, pointing to environmen tal studies show ing a ma jor spillas so un likely tha t preparation was unnecessa ry. So when the inevitable camecrashing down, the response was complete impotence and negligence.

Yet to f ocus on d isasters as aberrations resu lting from corporate greed is tomystify the real operational character of an entire social and technological system.

e unmitigated disaster of daily, undramatic activities in places like Prudhoe Bayand Bhopal —even bef ore they enter the vocabulary of doom — is irref utable proof tha t Valdez was no acc iden t but the no rm. Modern indus trialism canno t existwithou t it s Prudhoe Bays. Capital must always have a super-exploited colony, a“sacrice area” of some kind — the sky, a human commun ity, a watershed , thesoil, the gene pool, and so on — to expand and extend its lifeless tentacles.

e real spillage goes on every day, every minute, when capitalism and masstechn ics appea r to be working mo re or less according to the Plan . e ExxonValdez contained some 1.2 million barrels of oil; at any given time 750 millionbarrels are oatingon theworld’s waters. In 1979 the amoun t of oil lost worldwideon land and sea through spillage, re and sinkings reached a peak of 328 million

gallons ; since then it has dropped to between 24 and 55 million a year, exceptf or 1983, when tanke r acciden ts and oil blowou ts in the Iran -Iraq Wa r brough tthe total up to 242 million gallons. Most of the oil in the oceans comes not fromaccidents but municipal and indus trial runoff, the cleaning of ship bilges and otherroutine activity. Indus try analysts say that ma jor oil spills have declined, but that“sma ller” spills continue to take p lace all the time, a phenomenon pa ralleled inthe chemical indus try by f ocussing on ma jor leaks to conceal the reality of a slow-moving , low-level, daily Bhopal. And no ma er how caref ully indus try tri es toprevent accidents, they are going to occur; the larger and more complicated thesystem, the more certain the breakdown . As the head o f the Camb ridge-basedCentre f or Short-lived Phenomena (!), which keeps track of oil spills, commenteda er the Valdez spill, because such an e vent “takes p lace so infrequen tly, andthe resou rces are never available in a sing le location to deal eff ectively with it”



17

(meaning because booms can’t be stationed every hundred yards along the route,etc.) major spills are inevitable.

In any case, mass society is a continuous oil spill just as it is a constant chemicalleak . e 11 million gallons lost by the Valdez on Bligh Reef is matched every

year in the state of Michigan a lone by citizens pou ring was te oil down sewe rsor on the ground . (See related story in box.) And wh ile it is true that moresafety measures could be taken through institutional or technological means (oreven by revolutiona ry workers counc ils or assemb lies), indus trialism brings in-herent consequences of spills, leaks, inadequa te response, inadequa te “treatment”,and ecological Bust. As petrochemicals are necessary to industrialism whateverthe f orm of managemen t, spills are also integral to petrochem icals. And wha tchem icals and o il spills are to a society addicted to indus trialism, indus trialismis to the living f abric of the plane t. i s observation was raised by writer BillMcKibben in an essa y pub lished on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times onApril 7. McKibben asked what would have been the result had the Exxon Valdez

go en through without a hitch? If ten million gallons had go en through to beconsumed, they would have released about 60 million pounds of carbon dioxideinto the atmosphe re. Carbon dioxide is the ma jor componen t gas causing thegreenhouse e ff ect, in wh ich gases em i ed in eno rmous quan tities by indus trialcivilisation will trap heat in the atmosphere and raise global temperatures, disrupt-ing and prof ound ly transf orming the planet’s ecology — capitalism’s 21st centuryGlobal Business Climate, so to speak. McKibben writes that in the next century,“ ere will be twice as much ca rbon dioxide in the a tmosphe re as there was be-fore the Industrial Revolution.” e effects are unclear to scientists, but nearly allagree that the burning of f ossil f uels combined with the release of chemicals thatdestroy the planet’s ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, the generation of heatfrom all sources, deforestation and other factors will bring about massive speciesextinctions, climate and weather changes, ooding and other havoc.

e average car reproduces its own body weight in carbons each year. i sis “ano ther oil slick”, McKibben no tes, being released every day. And wh iletechnological modications to make “clean-burning” cars may reduce pollutantssuch as carbonmono xideandh ydrocarbons by as much as 96%, such cars will emitas much ca rbon dioxide as a Model T. Electric cars will pose a similar problemif their energy comes from f ossil f uel sources. (See related box inse rt ‘NeverTrust a Techno-Fix’). e production of automobiles, and the production of anti-pollution techno logy itself, are not even taken into account by this analysis, butthe inherent failure of technological reason can be seen.

e rate of clima te change o ver the next hund red years may dwarf by thirtytimes the rate of global warming tha t f ollowed the last Ice Age. Reducing wha tcomes out of tail pipes won’t even put a slight dent in that problem.



18

“ e greenhouse eff ect,” McKibben observes, “is not the result of something go-ing wrong. It doesn’t stem from drunken sa ilors, inadequa te emergency plann ingor a reef in the wrong p lace. It’s harder to deal with than that because it’s justa result of normal life.” Leaving aside the question of whether or not the phrase

“normal life” appropriately describes industrial capitalism, if McKibben’s recom-menda tion tha t “less ene rgy” be used is to mean ingf ully confron t the loom inggreenhouse crisis, such a reduction in industrial activity will have to be far moredrama tic than a lmos t any sectors of society have been w illing to ponde r so f ar.It would signal a deconstruction process more profound than any revolutionarytransformation of society ever seen previously. Whether or not this prospect ispossible is an open question.

Whether or not it is necessary is a question that must include the recognitionthat present environmen tal eff ects are the results of activities several decades ago.And since modern science cannot understand thresholds, there is no telling howmuch time is le , only a certainty that it is running out.



19

3. Disaster Fuels the Ma ine: e Hydra

Warnings of the inevitable crash of urban-industrialism’s house of cards nowappear o en in the leading capitalist newspapers. e ruling classes cannot helpbut suspect that their system is drawing the world toward a cataclysm. Yet theycanno t respond and grimly go about their business like distracted Ahabs trying tomaintain control of their foundering ship. e entropy inherent in their systemoverwhe lms them as they grapple f or a helm that does not exist. In this respectthey resemble any ruling class near the end of its historic journey.

French president Mi erand seemed to sense as much when at summit discus-sions on the environment last summer he remarked that there was “no politicalau thority capab le of mak ing dec isions on a g lobal scale.” e authority of themodern state cannot nd a solution, of course, because it has come to encompassevery aspect of the problem itself. Only a planetary revolutionary transf ormationfrom the ground up — a revolution now fragmen tarily glimpsed in aspec ts of the radical fringe of the ecology movemen t, in the indigenous -primitive revival,in an ti-authoritarian movemen ts and the new soc ial movemen ts against masstechnics, toxics and development — could bring the death train to a halt bef ore itdisintegrates and nally explodes under its own inertia.

at revolution rema ins beyond ou r reach . Our revolutiona ry desire mus tsquarely face the fact that disaster itself tends to fuel the system that generatesit, which means that we must abandon the pathetic hope that perhaps this latesthorror will be the signa l tha t turns the tide (as Chernobyl was supposed to be,and Bhopa l). In ‘Whe re the Was teland Ends ’ (1972), eodo re Roszak points to“the great paradox of the technological mystique: its remarkable ability to grow

strong by virtue o f chron ic f ailure. While the treache ry of our techno logy mayprovide man y occasions f or disenchan tmen t, the sum total of f ailures has theeffect of increasing our dependence on technical expertise.”

at econom ic and techno logical spheres are one is conrmed in the waycapital rushes into the vacuum momentarily caused by its own crisis, renewingoperations and nding new ways to expand and reinf orce its global work machine.

us even the oil spill became good f or bus iness once c risis managemen t wasf unc tion ing , as Exxon took tax breaks , raised prices, and took charge of the“cleanup ”. Valdez and o ther towns boomed aga in as thousands o f people andhund reds of vessels and a ircra were hired. (Boom towns qu ickly f olded intoa shamb les when the compan y closed its operations , but by then investmen t

had a lready moved on .) San Diego, whe re the sh ip was mo ved f or repa irs, alsoenjoyed its 25 million dollar mini-boom. Other spin-offs included the companies



20

developing new c leanup techn iques , scientic organ isations do ing new s tudieson the a er-effects, and public relations.

And extraction continues, with exploration now underway in Alaska’s BristolBay and Chukchi Sea, and drilling platf orms operating just off the coast of the os-

tensibly “protected” Arctic National Wildlif e Ref uge.1 A er the repair, the Valdezwill even be given a new name , according to an Exxon executive, so that the shipcan “start a new career”. e natural world reels, but the bus iness of businessmarches on.

Because they are isolated, localised events, or because they are gene ralised,global ones, the calamities of indus trialism erode the common cond itions of life without necessarily posing any alternatives. Local communities affected bydisasters are forced into rearguard, defensive struggles while having to surviveunder severely deteriorated conditions. Other communities, not directly affected,go on with “norma l lif e”, holding ou t the f aint hope tha t the oil, toxic cloud ,contaminated water, etc, won’t dri in their direction.

e growing awareness of widening catastrophic conditions is insufficient tobring abou t a response as long as the structures of daily urban -indus trial-com-mod ity lif e are not materially cha llenged . When they separately confron t thevarious manifestations of the crisis, communities are le on the terrain of emer-gency response, demands f or technological and regulatory ref orm, and ultimately,“treatmen t” of an increasing ly denuded wo rld. at is to say, we rema in on theterrain of a system tha t thrives on disaster, grasp ing at measu res that may atbest only achieve the same diminished stability in the social sphere that they doecologically in places like Prince William Sound.

Roszak observes, “If modern society origina lly embraced indus trialism withhope and p ride, we seem to have li le alterna tive at this advanced s tage bu t tocling on with desperation.” Of course, this is to cling on to a sinking ship, but clingwe do. Mass society has taken its predictable revenge on those f orced to inhabit it,eroding the inner strength and visionary impulses of human beings as ruinouslyas it has degraded and simplied the natural world. Disaster being a permanentcond ition of lif e, so quickly is one ho rror f ollowed by the next, we have beendisciplined to focus on the mediatized version of this season’s industrial plaguewhile all around us the hundred hydra heads ourish.

e image o f the hydra occurred to me wh ile driving my car to an eventorgan ised to show oppos ition to one of the hydra’s local man if estations — theworld’s largest trash incinerator, which burns abou t a mile from whe re I live.Hearing the news of Prince William Sound, I saw the whole series of misf ortunes

1 e capitalist state has previously implemented recycling as public policy in time of war to gathermaterials at home in order to more effectively blow them to smithereens overseas.



21

originating in Prudhoe Bay (or rather, in some boardroom), and runn ing throughPrince William Sound down to me lling my gas tank in Detroit.

While I was gassing up to get to some modest a empt to oppose a piece of themons ter, it had hiccupped and knocked o ff a whole section o f the p lane t. Every

day, in f act, it is the same conca tena tion of misery, a tidal wave of desolationand ruin tha t does no t in any mean ingf ul way, ultimately serve the long -terminterests of even those who administer it. It’s exterminism in action: the hydra.In the myth, Hercules was at least able to cut off a head bef ore two appeared in itsplace; we don’t even have that small satisfaction before a hundred more appear.

e prof ound b reak necessa ry to contest this horror and create a liberatoryecological society in its place clearly reveals the limitations of two curren ts of fragmented opposition to it, environmentalism and le ism.

Limits of environmentalism

Environmen talism emerged as an ethical reassessmen t of human ity’s relationto, and thus as a p rotest agains t, the wan ton exploitation and des truction of the na tural world. As a social movemen t it has sough t to set aside and p rotectnature preserves, while trying to institutionalise, within modern capitalism andthrough the state, various saf egua rds and an e thic of respons ibility towa rd theland . Despite its appea l to a non -an thropocen tric ethical perspec tive and itso en vigorous and cou rageous ba les to def end na ture, environmen talism haslacked an acu te critique of key social f orces tha t prope l ecological destruction :capitalism, empire and the state. Even where it has elaborated a partial critiqueof indus trialism and mass soc iety, it has gene rally f ailed to recogn ize the close

connection between urban-industrialism and capital. Rather, it has a empted toreform the existing system by rationalising and humanising it.i s perspective is illustrated by a comment made by David Brower, an indef ati-

gable environmen tal crusade r who insp ired man y of the radical environmen talactivists today. Speaking to author J ohn McPhee , Brower remarked, “Rough lyninety percent of the earth has f elt man’s hand already, sometimes brutally, some-times gen tly. Now let’s say, ‘ at’s the limit.’ We shou ld go back over the n inetyand not touch the remaining ten percent. We should go back, and do be er, withingenu ity. Recycle things . Loop the system.” (‘Encoun ters with the Archdruid’,1971). Even if Brower’s gures are true (and even if the ten percent could remainunaff ected by the activities in the other ninety), his statemen t provides li le inthe way of a critique of the world of the ninety percent and says nothing aboutthe forces and institutions that determine “normal life” there.



22

As f or those institutions , they have in man y cases recogn ised the bene ts of conservation and have preserved areas and natural ob jects, but they have alwayschosen to exploit such preserves when it was decided tha t the “benets” out-weighed the “costs”. (One canno t help but be reminded o f the remark of an oil

compan y executive, in the manne r of a vamp ire, “ e day you see gas lines inthe Lower 48, the Alaskan w ildlif e ref uge w ill open to us.”) e environmen talmovement has been, from the beginning, one of retrenchment, temporary stale-mate, defeat and retreat. As Brower comments, “All a conservation group can dois defer something. ere’s no such thing as a permanent victory. A er we wina ba le, the wilderness is still there, and still vulnerable. When a conse rvationgroup loses a ba le, the wilderness is dead .” e same ho lds true f or commun i-ties def end ing themse lves from corporations seek ing to site landlls and toxicproduc tion f acilities. In his painf ul and o en extreme ly en lightening study of such commun ities, “Con tamina ted Commun ities: e Social and Psycho logicalImpac ts of Residen tial Toxic Exposu re” (1988), Michae l R. Edelstein describes a

successf ul ght in Richton, Mississippi, to stop a nuclear waste repository. “Evenwith the pro ject now abandoned ,” he writes, “there remains a f eeling of ‘perpetual jeopardy’ in Richton resulting from the likelihood that so visible a site will a ractsome other hazardous waste proposal.”

Lacking a perspec tive that challenges the cap italist order, environmen talistshave seen their rhetoric captured and emp loyed by the con tam ina ting corpora-tions and the state. e bureaucrats administering hazardous waste and garbageincinerators can be found parroting the environmental slogan “reduce, reuse, re-cycle,” and conservation is touted as a patriotic duty. All such rhetoric on the partof the contaminators amounts to an enormous scam, since capitalism — at leastin its present conguration, which could not be abolished without a civil war — isbased on extractive-exploitive industries such as mining and metals, petrochemi-cals, forest products,etc. [Perhaps modern ‘industrial agriculture’ is an exampleof ano ther such indus try — gures f or soil loss wou ld certainly tend to sugges tthis.] No ma er how assiduous ly the average person recycles househo ld waste,these indus tries will continue to operate,and there is a direct correlation betweenthe economic wellbeing of these industries and destruction of the environment.Econom ic growth demands eco logical bust. If capitalist concerns do no t grow,they will collapse and die. e priviledged f unctionaries of such institutions havealready clearly expressed their preference that everything else die rst.

As for municipal recycling, that pet panacea of liberal environmentalism, notonly is capitalism capable of rationalising its production through such piecemealref orm, it will soon do so in North America once the waste managemen t indus tryhas created technical and economic infrastructures to make it protable. (Untilthat time, recycling will, f or the most part, f ail, which is what is already happen ing



23

in man y mun icipalities tha t now nd themse lves si ing on tons of recyclablematerials that can nd no market.) In places such as Japan and Western Europe,where materials recycling can some times reach more than ha lf of the mun icipalwas te stream , widesp read con tamina tion con tinues . Factories, energy f acilities,

airports, mines and the rest rema in. As it becomes protable and necessa ry,recycling w ill certainly be ins titutiona lised within the system, but it will notsignicantly alter the suicidal tra jectory of a civilisation basedon u rban-indus trial-energy development and the production and circulation of commodities. 2

Limitations of le ism

Despite numerous insights into commodities and the market economy, the lehistorically has always embraced the indus trial, energy-intens ive system origi-nally generated by private capitalism as a “progressive” force that would lay the

basis f or a free and abundan t society. According to this schema , human ity hasalways lacked the technological basis for freedom that industrial capitalism, forall its negative aspects, would create. Once that basis was laid, a revolution wou ldushe r in commun ism (or a “pos t-scarcity” society) using man y of the wonde rsof technology that were capitalism’s “progressive” legacy. Presently, capitalismhas alleged ly outlived its progressive role and now f unc tions as a brake on gen -uine developmen t. Hence it is the role of the le to rationa lise, modernize, andultimately humanise the industrial environment through socialisation, collectivi-sation and participatory managemen t of mass technics. In f act, in societies wherethe bourgeois class was incapable of creating the basic structures of capitalism —urban-indus trial-energy development, mass production of consumer goods, mass

communications, state centralisation, etc — the le , through national revolutionand state-managed economies, fullled the historic mission of the bourgeoisie.In the le ist model (shared by leninist and social democratic marxists, as well as

by anarcho-syndicalists and even social ecologists), the real progressive promise

2 Tara Jones quotes C. Perrow’s ‘Natural Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technology’ (1984):“Systems that transform explosive or toxic raw materials or that exist in hostile environmentsappear to require designs that entail a great many interactions which are not visible and in expectedproduction sequence. Since nothing is perfect — neither designs, equipment, operating procedures,materials and supplies, nor the environment — there will be failures . . . ese accidents then arecaused initially by component failures, but become accidents rather than incidents because of thenature of the system itself; they are system accidents, and are inevitable, or ‘normal’ for these

systems.” While this passage brings to mind dramatic, local accidents like Bhopal or Chernobyl, wemust also consider the systemic failure on an ecospheric scale as the result of industrialism as atotality on the living system of the earth.





25

accumulation of technical knowledge, that is determined by a somehow separateand more f undamen tal sphere of “social relations”. Mass technics have become, inthe words of Langdon W inner, “structures whose conditions of operation demandthe restructuring of their environments” (’Autonomous Technology’, 1977), and

thus of the very social relations that brought them about.Mass technics — a product of earlier f orms and archaic hierarchies — have now

ou tgrown the cond itions tha t engende red them , taking on an au tonomous lif e(though o verlapp ing w ith and ne ver completely nu llifying these ea rlier f orms).

ey f urnish, or have become, a kind of total environmen t and social system, bothin their general and individual, sub jective aspects.For the most part, the le nevergrasped Ma rx’s acute insight tha t as human be ings express their lives, so theythemse lves are. When the “means o f produc tion” are in actuality interlockingelements of a dangerously complex, interdependent global system, made up notonly of technological apparatus and human operatives as working parts in thatappa ratus, but of f orms of culture and commun ication and e ven the landscape

itself, it makes no sense to speak of “relations of production” as a separate sphere.In such a mechan ised pyramid, in wh ich instrumen tal relations and soc ialrelations are one and the same , acciden ts are endem ic. No risk ana lysis canpredict or avoid them all, or their consequences, which will become increasinglygreat and far-reaching. Workers councils will be no more able to avert accidentsthan the regulatory ref orms proposed by liberal environmen talists and the social-democratic le , unless their central task is to begin immediately to dismantle themachine altogether. 3

e le also f ails to recogn ise wha t is in a sense a deepe r problem f or thosedesiring revolutiona ry change , tha t of the cu ltural context and con ten t of masssociety — the add iction to capitalist-dened “comf orts” and a vision of ma ter-ial plenitude that are so destructive ecologically. e resu lt is an incapac ity toconfront not just the ruling class, but the grid itself — on the land, in society, inthe cha racter of each person — of mass techn ics, mass mob ility, mass pseudo -communications, mass energy-use, mass consumption of mass-produced goods.

As Jacques Ellul writes in ‘ e Technological System’ (1980), “ It is the techno-logical coherence that now makes up the social coherence . . . Technology is in

3 See “Revolution and Famine” in ‘Act for Yourselves’, Freedom Press. Presumably many anarcho-syn-dicalist defenders of industrialism will object, furnishing quotes from Kropotkin in which theanarchist prince reveals the optimism towards technology so common in his time. ere willalways be those who insist on overlooking what is most visionary and far-seeing in writers like

Kropotkin while clinging to what has not withstood the test of historical experience. e myth of progress has becomethe real “dead weight of the past” weighing like a nightmareon the imaginationof the present.



26

itself not only a means, but a universe of means — in the original sense of Univer-sum: both exclusive and total. “ is universe degrades and colonises the socialand natural world, making their dwindling vestiges ever more perilously depen-dent on the technological environment that has supplanted them. e ecological

imp lications are eviden t. As Ellul argues , “Techno logy can become an en viron-ment only if the old environmen t stops being one. But that implies destructuringit to such an extreme tha t nothing is le of it.” We are obvious ly reach ing tha tpoint, as capital begins to pose its ultima te techno logy, bioeng inee ring and theillusion of total biological con trol, as the on ly solution to the eco logical crisisit has created. us, the impo rtan t ins ights tha t come from a class ana lysis areincomplete. It won’t be enough to get rid of the rulers who have turned the earthinto a company town; a way of lif e must end and an entirely new, post-indus trialculture must also emerge.



27

4. Revolution or Death: Against theMegama ine

A new k ind of thinking presently haun ts the despa ir and bad f aith that now ruletheworld. It recognises that a whole order must be abolished, that wemus t retraceour steps, tha t the mach ine mus t stop once and f or all, if we are to avoid goingover an abyss. Yet this vision f or the mos t part rema ins h idden ; the necessa rysh i in think ing and the p ractical strategies tha t it sugges ts have no t generallyoccurred even in many of those human communities most adversely affected bygrowing social and ecological degradation.

Michael Edelstein’s discussion of the impact of contamination on commun itiestakes up this problem. Edelstein has s tudied several commun ities reeling fromthe consequences of contamination or in the process of trying to stop industrial

pro jects that are proposed, and describes how these experiences can dramaticallyradicalise peop le, creating the bas is f or commun ities of resistance (if only tem-porarily), and ultimately, inspire people to begin to “challenge core assumptions of the overall society.” Any doubts about the f ar-reaching radical, even revolutionary,potential of the anti-toxics and anti-development movements will be dispelled bythis book.

Nevertheless, as Edelstein points out, it is the f ailure to recognise and confrontthe con text and social content of mass con tamina tion tha t na lly leaves thesecommun ities powe rless to halt it. Society as a who le engages in “den ial andrationalisation” in thinking that a single accident or problem can be resolved inisolation from the total fabric, in thinking that the mass urban-industrial society

can continue to operate without contamination and ecological destruction. “Weno longe r deny the existence of pollution ,” he writes; “instead we adop t theengineering fallacy — that pollution simply needs to be ‘cleaned up.’

Capitalism needs to create demands f or itself, mak ing it and its produc tsindispensab le, and lif e withou t its supply mechanisms unthinkable, thus jus-tifying its existence. In a Faustian pact, its a endant misery and ubiquitousdesolation come to be seen as a price worth paying if the goods and servicesit off ers us are to be obtained . “In the 1920s the birth of mass advertisingsigna lled a trans f ormation of capitalism from a system of the produc tionof goods to one of creating needs f or new goods . In the wo rds of one bus i-ness executive of the time, US capitalism had to engende r the ‘organ ised



28

creation of dissatisfaction’.”1 Two good examples of manufactured, spurious‘needs ’ are the ma rket f or garden pea t, and the use o f (over-priced) dispos -able napp ies in place of terry- cloths; the appea rance of markets f or thesetwo produc ts is a very recen t phenomenon , with demand f or them be ing

practically non-existent before the 1960s. As with most products, there is aserious environmen tal corollary involved — one requires the strip-mining of British peat bogs, while the other contributes to the clearcu ing of temperaterainforests worldwide.

In a similar vein, calls f or environmen tal protection usua lly spring from asense of revulsion (conscious or otherwise) at capitalism and its works. Butthis revulsion can be twisted against itself and to capital’s advantage; thewayin which the environmental debate is framed, and that revulsion expressed,is all important — it can be used to reinforce capitalism, as the analysis thatis eventually adopted gives rise to solutions that create enormous opportu-nities for expansion, creating new goods and services, new ‘needs’. GeorgeBradford highlights this process at work in the wake of E xx on V a l dez , witha tempo rary boom ensu ing from the clean -up ope rations , and everybodyclamou ring f or a piece of the toxic action . Properly managed , wha t lookslike an image crisis f or the compan ies conce rned , and by extens ion , f or allcompanies, can turn into a growth bonanza.

E xx on V a l dez — and other disasters — are, as Bradf ord points out, just spectac-ular manifestations of a much bigger, all pervasive and insidious syndrome.

eir business is disaster — both because its rou tine f unc tion ing involvescon tamina tion the like of wh ich Exxon Valdez is just a time-lapse image ,and because they thrive on the crises they create. i s is exemp lied bythe lucrative ‘environmen t industry’, which has developed to such an extentover the last twenty years that it now represents nearly 2% of the US GNP.2

As pollution started to become a po litical issue , compan ies pushed f or an‘end -of-pipe’ techno x app roach to the problem — rather than p reven tivemeasures involving changes to the production process itself. (Or how aboutthe ultimate preventive measure — an end to indus trial capitalism and to thebulk of its produc tion processes?) Perhaps unsu rprising ly, the compan ies’pref erred option won ou t, and the end -of pipe app roach was installed associety’s answer to the threat of pollution. i s has resulted in an amazinglycynical situation whe reby man y of the greatest polluters (eg. old friends

1

‘Scenes from a California Maul’, Fifh Estate , Autumn 1992.2 ‘ e Environment Industry — Proting from Pollution’, Joshua Karliner, e Eco l og i s t , March/April1994.



29

such as General Electric, Du Pont and Westinghouse ) also snap up contractsto mitigate pollution. ey are ‘market leaders in pollution’, proting at bothends o f the cha in — one might say tha t they, like the rest of the cap italisteconomy — are in a constant state of devouring their own entrails. What is

more, as ird World nations begin to face an environmental crisis of theirown brought on by the Wes tern development model, these ‘pollution special-ists’ are poised to go global, exporting expertise and technology, and therebyemba rking on a brand new p rot cycle.3 e po lluters portr ay themse lvesas the only people who can rescue us from the ne mess they’ve go en usinto — in this set up, environmentalists must beware of functioning as li lemore than company sales reps.

As I said, the critical question is how the deba te is framed — it determineswhe ther capitalism will be able to assimilate our concerns and thus makenancial and ideological use of them. Capitalism depends on the process of enclosure — put crudely, the way in which something is quantied as a nitecommodity (eg.the introduction of the concept of ‘scarcity’ and the so-called‘tragedy of the commons ’) and then p rivatised. e privatisation is thensupposed to regulate a rational distribution and use of the thing in question,thereby preventing a ‘tragedy of the commons ’ from developing . e newdiscipline of ‘environmen tal economics’ is a reframing of the environmen taldebate — it is an a empt to enclose environmen talism and its irksome thesis.Such progressive econom ists seek to assign a value to an item (such as arainf orest — eg. the studies done on how much more income the f orest couldyield if le uncut), in order that its ‘true’ worth be more adequately reectedin a cost-benet analysis. For them, as their leading light David Pearce says,“Every decision implies a monetary valuation”. 4 For the sake, ostensibly, of

environmen tal protection , they wish to make the equa tion mo re accurate,to leave nothing out. Even aside from the insoluble practical conundrum of what criteria are used to determine an ob ject’s value, on a philosoph ical levelthis mode l plays straight into the hands o f capitalism. Instead of assertingthat nothing has a price, it seeks to barcode everything, to leave nothing freeof the stranglehold of market values.

Hence “Air is being enclosed as economists seek to transform it into a mar-ketable ‘waste sink’” 5 — safe maximum emission limits are calculated, and

3 Ibid.4

e Ecologist July/August 1992, p.178. See the chapter on ‘Economy and Economics’ here for anexploration of environmental economics — see the whole of this ‘Whose Common Future?’ issuefor more on enclosure.



30

tradeable pollution permits issued (as in the US recently) “which award cor-porations property rights in atmospheric waste sinks.”6 While it caused muchcontroversy at the time, within this sort of paradigm it made perfect sensefor World Bank Vice-President Lawrence Summers to remark in December

1991 that the Bank should “be encouraging more migration of the dirty indus -tries to the less-developed countries . . . underpopulated countries in Africaare vastly underpolluted . . . eir air quality is vastly inefficiently low [inpollutan ts] compared to Los Ange les or Mexico City”.7 A er all, everyonehas a pollution quota to meet — what is a ‘sink’ for, if not to be lled?

Some f amiliar British compan ies are in on this act -there is a nice ironic logicto the f act that our old friend Tarmac, champion of car culture, was awardeda contract to run an ‘air qua lity mon itoring service’ a couple of years ago.

is combines elements of the opportunistic environment industry with thedynamic of enclosure — Tarmac, one of the agents of enclosure (in the sensethat they have partial responsibility for transforming good quality air intomore of a ‘nite commod ity’), could be seen as pos ition ing themse lves aspurveyors in the new ma rket f or ‘pure air’. Another good exaple is the riseof bo led water in tandem with the decline in public water quality, a recentand p revious ly un imag inab le phenomenon tha t an ticipates the advent of ‘bo led air’: “ Can isters containing abou t 10 minu tes worth of 99.5% pureoxygen are sold in Britain as an ‘aid to healthier living, countering the eff ectsof smog and pollution’ “.8 Similarly, “the governmen t of the Solomon Islands. . . plans to bo le and sell . . . oxygen”9 — no doubt this could be marketedas green, ethically traded ‘rainforest’ air — a la guarana, brazil nuts, et al.

eir business is to sell right back to us wha t was once ou rs. ere aref ew examp les tha t illustrate this principle as clearly (and as b izarrely) asthe trade in frogs’ legs from Bang ladesh , which was na lly brough t to a(legal) end in 1989 a er it boomed throughou t the 1980s. “Taking frogsfrom the wild, it was pointed out, could have devastating consequences .Frogs are insec tivorous and each one can ea t more than its weight . . . inwaterborne pests every day. Fewer than 50 frogs are needed to keep an acreof paddy eld free of insec ts; they keep ma laria and o ther illnesses a t bay;they protect crops and are a natural biological control agent. Frog waste,too,is a ne organ ic f ertiliser. Remove the frogs, said the scien tists, and the

5 Ibid, p.149.6 Ibid,p.176.7

Qoted in ibid, p.174.8 ‘Wisdom of the Solomons’, New Scientist , 27/1/96.9 Ibid.





32

e petrochemical industry, of course, continued operating. For a brief moment,Exxon served as the media “bad guy” and contributed a small share of its businessto other oil compan ies, wh ile manag ing to be consoled by its other sources of prot — plastics, paints, textiles, detergen ts, and services to the pu lp and pape r

indus try. Boyco s, demonstrations and other f orms of militant response f ocus onsome of the real culprits who benet from ecocide, yet fall short of an adequatecha llenge to the system as a who le. On the other hand , to call f or a boyco of all oil and gas as a strategy is the same as ca lling f or an immed iate mass strikeagainst industrialism. It is provocative, but few are listening; even those who arelistening are also trapped in the machinery, burning gas to stay alive.



33

Halt Production, Destroy the Economy

Such a commen tary shou ld not be interpreted as a call to abandon p racticalstruggles in local communities and workplaces or around specic problems. Forman y, these ba les are despe rate measu res, and when the house is on re onetends to save wha tever is in reach . It wou ld be a grave error to simp ly give upsuch struggles on the basis of a more abstract image of a larger totality, for it isin such experiences where many people learn to ght and where the possibilityof a larger perspective begins to present itself. We are also talking about peoples’commun ities and their deepes t loyalties, in any case. But now tha t indus trialcapitalism is f ast burning down the en tire ecosphe re the problem has becomenow mo re than ever how to link local and partial strugg les to a larger visiontha t can assert itself as a movemen t and a cu ltural trans f orma tion carried outby millions of people. We mus t begin to talk open ly and dean tly of the massstrike and revolutionary uprising that it will take to stop the megamachine fromgrind ing up the plane t. We mus t begin to consider wha t it will mean to “pu tourselves out of work”, to halt produc tion and des troy the econom y, creatinga free society based on soc ial and eco logical cooperation in place of the wo rkpyramid.

ose who m ight tr emble at the idea of disemp loying the wo rking class anddisman tling mass techn ics and the econom y of indus trial dependence shou ldknow that this prospect was raised by revolutionaries a century ago. Kropotkin,f or example, took up the question of the f ate of thousands o f workers involved inproducing luxury and export commodities during a revolutionary period, whenthere wou ld sudden ly be no use and no ma rket f or them . To tell the labou rers

to become the mas ters of such f actories “wou ld be cruel mockery”, Kropo tkinwrote. Instead , f acing the inevitable breakdown o f the system, workers mus tlearn to provide themse lves with the bas ic necess ities of lif e, f ood and she lter.Such f acilities would simply be abandoned.1 When pe trochemical workers and therest of us working at meaningless jobs to prop up urban-industrialism confrontour daily activities, won’t our choices be the same ? e idea of a revolutionagains t urban-indus trialism may seem f ar-f etched today. But in the f uture thisidea may prove to have come so late as to be insufficient and not radical enough,given the conditions in which we nd ourselves. While the question of violenceremains an open one, no image of revolutionary uprisings of the past will serveus we ll in articulating the idea . Yet they may ind icate to us wha t they proved

1 ‘Wisdom of the Solomons’, New Scientist 27/1/96.



34

to revolutiona ries of the pas t, tha t a popu lation tha t at one momen t appea rsdefeated and quiescent can rapidly transform itself and create sweeping changes.As Rudolph Bahro has wri en in h is book ‘Socialism and Su rvival’ (1982), “ etendenc y is growing , and it is a tendenc y inhe rent in every human be ing , to

entrust ourselves to an extreme alternative, however uncertain — because there isnothing le to do. e decision can sudden ly take hold of millions — tomorrow orthe day a er — and expand the horizon of political possibility overnight.” Such aprocess would not be motivated by a vision of negation only, but rather affirms theidea of restoration of human community and the integrity of the land organism,affirmsana tural worldandasoc ial world renewed un to themselves and reconciledto one another.

e critical luddite sensibility that underlies it would make society as a wholea kind of philosophical school, through which deconstructing or unbuilding themegamachine —on the land and in our social relations —a f orm of inquiry makingup its f oremos t spiritua l, critical and practical pro ject. By exploring this vision ,

we can pe rhaps beg in to break ou t of our condition ing and domes tication andcreate an en tirely new lif e tha t combines the deep w isdom of primal an imismwith humility that the harsh lessons of history and modernity have brought.

Last spring, a sherman told a journalist that when he was done working onthe Exxon asco, he would load his boat and take his family away. When askedwhere, he replied, “Someplace where the water’s still clean.” One can only wishhim luck. But like the birds that once more headed south through Prince WilliamSound on ly to f ace po ison ing aga in, we’ve all run ou t of places to hide. If theanti-industrial perspective now seems too radical, too visionary, too impractical,f uture gene rations , if there are an y, will wonde r why it took so much time andangu ish to recogn ise it and to make it a practical reality. It rema ins as yet onlya weak app roximation of the road tha t lies ahead o f us if we are to save someremnan t of ourselves and this plane t from the catastrophe whose eng ines we reset in mo tion long ago . Let us begin to throw off our cha ins and w in back theworld while there is still something le of it to win.

— George Bradford, September 1989

* * *

e following were not part of the original article.



35

Never Trust A Te no-Fix!

With the “Great car economy” curren tly unde r a ack on a ll sides, a colossa lhoax is being perpetrated in order to ensure its survival. We are being encouragedto believetha t it is the cho ice of f uel (i.e. petrol) tha t is the root cause of theecological and social havoc wreaked by the car. Simp ly replace the interna lcombustion engine with ba eries and hey presto, a problem that goes to the veryheart of our society disappears. i s is a deeply dubious proposition, f or a numberof important reasons.

Firstly, and most obviously, as Fi h Estate suggest, without a shi away fromf ossil f uels as a source of energy, electric cars will only exacerbate global warming.CO2 produc tion w ill only be centralised and increased . (However, it is worthremembe ring tha t the various non -f ossil f uels tha t are mooted o en still havedamag ing impac ts themse lves — f or a preliminary outline o f such impac ts, seethe Mundi Club’s “ e Geophysiological reats Posed by Green Cars”.)

Second ly, in the un likely even t of wha t Greenpeace ca ll the ‘f ossil free en-ergy scenario’ (ffes) coming about, this takes no account of the historic ‘carbondebt’ owed by human ity to nature — we urgen tly need to balance the historiccarbon budge t. i s would requ ire remed ial action (e.g. perhaps , wide-rang ingreforestation) far beyond simply stopping future emissions. 1

irdly, there is the related, and usually overlooked, question of the ‘demandside’ of the earth’s carbon cycle. All a en tion is f ocussed on the supp ly side —e.g. on exhaust fumes. Simply put, there is no acknowledgement of the fact thatby physically covering the planet with roads, car parks, reneries, mines, etc, youerode its photosynthetic capacity, it s ability to absorb the CO2 that is created.

In England a lone , “Since the wa r 705,000 hec tares of coun try side have gone —more than the comb ined area of Greater London , Hertf ordsh ire, Berksh ire andOxf ordsh ire . . . At the presen t rate of loss, a h of England wou ld be urbanby the middle of the next cen tury.” 2 ese trends on a g lobal level have mean tthat: “Before World War Two, photosynthesizers on dry land produced perhaps150 billion tons of dry weight of organic ma er each year. Now . . . the annua lproduction of organic ma er in terrestrial ecosystems (both natural and humancon trolled) has f allen to only about 130 billion tons . Some of the reasons f orthe decline in productivity are fairly simple and obvious; photosynthesis cannot

1 For an elucidation of the concept of the carbon debt, and the role that it played in the deliberations

of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), see e Terra Firm no.5, ‘ e GreatCarbon Emissions Fraud’, Mundi Club, undated.2 Council for the Protection of Rural England in e Times , 16/10/92.



36

occur on or under buildings, parking lots, airports, streets or highways.” 3 ‘Green’cars will requ ire an almos t iden tical infrastructure, mean ing tha t this assau lton the earth’s photosynthetic capacity will continue unabated — indeed , mighteven step up a gea r, as a perceived clean ing up o f its act wou ld buy more time

for the continued existence of the car. (Tarmac, and other such substances usedf or paving,are, as the Mundi Club point out,li le more than coagulated oil slicks.

ese substances are products of levels of the catalytic cracker process in the sameway that oil is. ey underwrite oil production — make it an economically viableenterprise when otherwise it would not be; for while “ e oil industry is mainlyinterested in gaso line produc tion and p rots . . . reneries mus t run a t highutilisation of capacity to be efficient and protable. Reneries must produce greatquantities of asphalt and various chemicals which must go somewhere . . . thusasphalt and herbicides are spread about the land making it possible for reneriesto function . . .near full thro le.” 4 e advocates of a ‘fossil free energy strategy’un f ortuna tely do not accept an accompan ying end to paving, one of the logical

consequences of that strategy. e production of tarmac, etc, and the productionof oil are interdependen t parts of renery operations , and of the pe trochem icaleconomy — without one, you canno t have the other. So how will they square thiscircle — do their proposals actually require a continuation of that petrochemicaleconomy that we’ve come to know and love?)

Fourth, the car’s contribution to the supply side of the carbon cycle is not evenexamined p roperly — look ing no f urther than the exhaus t pipe obscu res other,more signicant impacts. e Heidelberg Environment and Forecasting Institute,in the rst ever ‘cradle to the grave’ assessmen t of the car, concluded tha t its‘birth’ (production) and ‘death’ (disposal) incurred far more ecological costs thanits working life. “It is ownership as well as use that is the problem of the car anda car used sens itively (if tha t is possible) is still a problem f or energy, pollution ,space and waste.” 5

e accuracy of this assessment becomes abundantly clear when you considerthe sheer variety and volume of materials involved in car production — “ 20% of allsteel, 10% of all aluminium, 7% of all copper, 13% of all nickel, 35% of all zinc, 50%of all lead, 60% of all natural rubber”6 and “10% of OECD plastics production”7 —all major manufacturing processes, all with a endant environmental costs. Suchcosts would continue to arise from electric vehicles (EVs) , with some new ones

3 ‘Earth’, the Ehrlichs, quoted in ‘Ban Cars’.4 ‘Dear Caltrans’, Jan Lundberg, quoted in ibid.5

e Guardian , 30/8/93.6 Ian Breach, quoted in ‘Ban Cars’.7 ‘ e Environmental Impact of the Car’, Greenpeace , quoted in ibid.



37

thrown in: “Researchers at Carneg ie Mellon University in Pi sburgh wa rn . . .tha t the p roduc tion and recycling o f large numbe rs of ba eries f or the vehicleswou ld release dange rous levels of lead into the environmen t [iron ic, given theoutcry over the need to reduce lead in f uel] . . . the mining and smelting required

to manu f acture their ba eries produce lead em issions wh ich can cause b raindamage to young ch ildren , and coma and dea th a t high levels of exposu re. eresearchers argue that even w ith efficient ba eries an electric vehicle wou ldind irectly produce s ix times mo re lead em issions than a sma ll car using leadedpetrol.”8

SinceEVs require more ba eries thanconventional vehicles9, and their ba erieshave a shorter lif espan 10, the issue of disposal becomes even more pressing. Giventha t the introduc tion of EVs is not envisaged as taking place in tandem w ith achange to the wo rld econom ic order, the need to dispose of their ba eries willon ly lead to an intens ication of ‘toxic waste impe rialism’, an already seriousproblem. It will mean an e xpans ion of plan ts such as IMLI, Indones ia’s largest

importer of lead acid ba eries, which “burns 60,000 tonnes [of them] each year,sending clouds of smoke and ash over ad jacent riceelds. e local people say thatash from the f actory o en f alls into their wells and onto their f ood. e effluentfrom the plan t is high ly acidic. e waste from the IMLI f urnace , a mixture of lead and plastic, is dumped outside the f actory gates and taken home by villagerswho melt it down in woks over open res in their backyards to sell the extractedlead . Half of the villagers cough b lood . Lead levels in IMLI workers and localvillagers are between two and three times greater than the acceptable Indones ianoccupational health standards.” 11

e more general objections to the proposition that a move away from fossilfuels will serve as a panacea for the problem of the car are outlined above — butthere are a whole host of other, more specic ramm ications of car use that willnot be alleviated in the slightest by a simple change in fuel type. Some of theseare listed below:

8 Guardian , 10/5/95. ere is li le likelihood of a more advanced, non-lead ba ery emerging in theforeseeable future — see ‘Paler Shade of Green’, Guardian 18/1/94. Even if there were, any ba erywould still be composed of highly toxic elements.

9 ‘Flat out for the Car of the Future’, New Scientist , 7/11/92.10

‘Ge ing From Here to ere’, David Morris, quoted in ‘ e Geophysical reats Posed by GreenCars’, Mundi Club Special Publications no.8, Mundi Club, undated.11 ‘Disposing of the Waste Trade’, e Ecologist , March/April 1994.



38

1. e grim statistics of roadk ill (both human and an imal) wou ld pile on, asbefore. 12.

2. Habitat fragmentation — “Roads [and related developments] can divide habi-tats creating a size that is below an acceptable threshold f or survival of particu-

lar species, and can f orm an ecological barrier preventing movement betweenareas.”13

3. What might be termed ‘social pollution’, or ‘(human) habitat fragmentation’— as aptly described in Dona ld Appleyard’s excellen t research 14 Cars alsoserve to divide peop le, accentuating, and in some cases c reating , the socialinequalities between them. Helena Norberg-Hodge was in a unique positionto observe the impact of development — in this case, on the remote region of Ladakh — since she was p resen t both bef ore and a er the area began to beopened up to the wo rld econom y in 1975. e car was f oremos t among thetrappings of ‘modernisation’ that began to make an appearance — and in heropinion, “ e Ladakhi who goes zooming past in a car leaves the pedestrian

beh ind in the dus t, both physically and psycho logically . . . Lobzang was agovernmen t driver. When he retired, he bough t a jeep and b rough t it backwith him to his village. In the summe r he used it to f erry t ourists to themonasteries, and the rest of the year he drove his neighbours to and from Leh,f or a f ee. As a result, his relationsh ip with the other villagers began to change— he now had something the others did not, and was no longer quite one of them.”15 A similar situation pertains with the carless in our society — perhapseven more so, since the car is far more the ‘norm’ for us.

4. In a related point to 3), the car exercises a tyrann y over space, displacingpeop le and preventing the a rea tha t it monopo lises from being pu t to other,more productive and convivial uses. “Germany’s cars, if one includes drivingand parking requirements, commandeer 3,700sq. km of land — 60% more thanis allocated to housing.” 16

12 For some recent gures on animal casualties, see e Times , 6/1/96.13 ‘Trends in Transpo rt and the Coun try side’, Country side Commission Techn ical Report 1992. See:

‘ eEternal reat: BiodiversityLoss andthe Fragmentation of theWild’ in Do o r D i e no.5, September1995. See also the research by English Nature on the effects of fragmentation on populations of stonechats and Dartford warblers, quoted in “Transport and Biodiversity”, RSPB Report 1994. Onewould have thought that birds have a greater capacity to transcend the effects of fragmentationthan most animals, so if it has this kind of impact on them . . .

14 ’Livable Streets’, Donald Appleyard, University of California Press 1981, quoted in e G uardian

5/11/93, and ‘Critical Mass — Reclaiming Space and Comba ing the Car’, Do or Die no.515 ‘Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh’, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rider 1992.16 ‘Dirty From the Cradle to the Grave’, Guardian 30/8/93.



39

5. e car and roads help to consolidate the territories of thena tion state: bindingremo te regions on the periphe ry r mly to the core, f acilitating the supp res-sion of troublesome separatist movements or feeling, and locking the manydisparate parts of the coun try into a nationa l and interna tiona l econom ic/

cultural entity. Roads are one of the main vectors for what former BrazilianEnvironment Secretary Jose Lutzenberger called ‘the virus of industrialism’.Examples abound — the TransAmerican Highway17, the TransIrian Highway18,Europe’s TERNs19 and the “7300-kilometre motorway hugging the coast fromTobruk to Senegal . . . planned f or North Africa, with a xed link across theStrait of Gibraltar to connect Europe to a new African motorway system.”20 Itis also instructive to note that in the US “there are eight times as many roadsin [the] Nationa l Forests as there are in the Interstate Highwa y System.”21

While these areas have been singled out for special a ention partly to bringthem into the realm of the econom y (by commod itising them into timber),there also seems to be some psychological impe rative at work, to ‘tame the

wild’, to leave the stamp of civilisation upon it — to properly assimilate itinto the territ ory of the na tion s tate in ques tion .Until it is commod itised ordeveloped it is still ‘terra incognita’, the domain of ‘here be dragons’. (” eword ‘f orest’ in its original and mos t extended sense , implied a tract of landlying ou t (f oras), tha t is, re jected, as of no value, in the rst distribution of property.” 22.)

6. Roads interfere with the water table and drainage pa erns. “ Because waterruns immed iately off pavemen t rather than soak ing into the ground , roadso en lower groundwa ter tables and destablilise nearby waterways. In heavilypaved areas, streams uctuate between e xtreme drough t and ood and , inthe process , scour away stream banks and sh hab itats such as poo ls anddrowned logs. Studies in the Sea le area show that stream channe l stability,sh habitat quality, and salmon and amph ibian popu lations all decline if even10–15% of a watershed is covered by impervious surfaces.” 23

17 Snapping at the heels of the Darien Gap rainforest in Panama, and, presumably, connected toNAFTA and the ultimate vision of a trading bloc of the Americas. See also the Trans-AmazonHighway, Northern Brazil’s road to the Atlantic coast via Guyana, and the BR364 through ChicoMendes’ state of Acre, Brazil. (New Statesman & Society , 23/11/90.)

18 In Indonesia’s occupied province of Irian Jaya/West Papua — in part, intended to strengthen Indone-sia’s campaign against the OPM guerillas.

19 Helping to construct Europe as a single market for production, distribution and consumption — e.gsee the plans of the European Round Table of industrialists in various ASEED reports.

20 New Scientist , 30/4/94 — presumably presaging an expansion of the EU trading bloc to encompass

North Africa.21 ‘Dear Caltrans’, Jan Lundberg, quoted in ‘Ban Cars’.22 ‘A Short History of the Wolf in Britain’, James Harting, Pryor Publications facsimlie 1994, p.21.



40

7. e knock-on effects of road building must also be considered — foremost of which is quarrying for roadstone — “ 43% of the rock aggregates quarried inEngland and Wales is used for road construction and maintenance.” 24 In theUK there is the related issue of over 650 loose ‘Interim Development Orders’

f or quarrying, granted just a er the Second World War and threatening someof the best wildlife sites in the country — including 56 SSSIs.25

8. Noise pollution: in much of the British countryside it is becoming increasinglydifficult to nd areas free of the incessan t background hum o f traffic noise.According to the CPRE, “ e southeast has fared the worst. Over two-thirdsof the region was [dened as ] tr anqu il in 1960, but by 1992 these a reas hadbecome fragmented by motorways and increasingly noisy roads, and reducedto unde r half the a rea.”26 i s can have serious implications f or non -humanspec ies as we ll — f or examp le, “Road traffic noise has been f ound to reducethe breeding success of lapwings and redshank for distances of up to 1.5kmfrom large h ighwa ys”.27 As usua l, it wou ld appea r tha t this picture is going

to get worse, because increases in traffic are expected to hit the countrysidehardest — “ e Transport Studies Unit predicts that, while overall traffic maygrow by between 83% and 142% by the year 2025 [the DoT’s standa rd gures],the traffic on rural roads ma y grow by between 127% and 267%”.28 In u rbanareas, peoples’ hearing is worse at age 30 than the hearing of those who livein a car-free environment at age 70. 29

9. Run-off from roads of heavy metals such as cadmium, zinc, copper, and othersubstances contaminates soil and groundwater. 30 Tyre rubber abrasion prod-ucts have a wide range o f eff ects on human hea lth 31,and a re similar to, al-

23 ’Roads Take Toll’, EF! Journal , Brigid 1996.24 National Collation of the 1989 Aggregate Minerals Survey, DoE 1991, quoted in ‘Wheeling Out of

Control’, CPRE Sept. 1992.25 See ‘Blasts from the Past’, RSNC report, November 1992 and ‘Old rights threaten ancient landscapes’,

Observer 14/2/93. e fate of Carmel Woods in Dyfed is an important test case for IDOs — andhopefully its future may have been secured.

26 ‘Breaking e Silence’, Geographical Magazine October 1993.27 Zande e t al, 1980, quoted in ‘Trends in Transpo rt and the Coun try side’, Country side Comm ission

1992. See also Reijen et al, in the Journal of Applied Ecology , 1995 — their research identied roadnoise as probably the most important cause of a reduction in the breeding densities of a variety of woodland bird species adjacent to main roads.

28 ’Road Traffic and the Countryside’, Countryside Commission Position Statement July 1992. See also‘Trends in Transport and the Countryside’ for more detailed workings.

29 From ‘Autogeddon’, Heathcote Williams, Jonathon Cape 1991.30 See (e.g): ‘Roads Take Toll’, EF ! J ou r na l Brigid 1996; ‘Dirty From the Cradle to the Grave’, Gua r d i an

30/7/93; ‘Wrong Side of the Tracks’, TEST, quoted in ‘Ban Cars’; and Dr. Neil Ward’s (SurreyUniversity) research into run-off from the M25.31 See ‘Tire Dust Kills’, Paving Moratorium Update Summer 1995.





42

and incisive response to the crisis that it has unleashed. e problem comesfrom polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), sometimes described as “the f avouritechem ical of the pos twar age”37 and now known to be high ly toxic f or mostliving beings. “Environmen tal PCB pollution has been most frequently associ-

ated with the manufacture of such electrical equipment as transformers andcapac itors, and w ith au tomob ile manu f acture.”38 Wh ile produc tion of PCBsis now declining, “65% of the total volume . . . ever produced wo rldwide [is]either still in use , in s torage or [has ] been depos ited into landlls.”39. If thisvast stockpile, or even a portion of it were “permi ed to leak into the marineenvironmen t, then the extinction of marine mamma ls is inevitable.”40 i skind of inf ormation wou ld tend to reinf orce the Heidelberg Institute’s concernfor the o en neglected issues of production and disposal of cars, as opposedto questions of exhaust emissions during their working lives.

As André Gorz says, “Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself.

Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, andto the way this compartmentalises the many dimensions of life.” (41) Accordingto Gorz, “in order for people to be able to give up their cars, it won’t be enoughto off er them mo re comf ortable mass transpo rtation . ey will have to be ableto do withou t transpo rtation altogether because they’ll f eel at home in theirne ighbou rhoods , their commun ity, t heir human -sized cities . . . e car wou ldno longer be a necessity. Everything will have changed: the world, lif e, people.”41

To take any other approach to the problem of the car, to treat it in isolation fromthe social f orces it produces, and is produced by, is to play into the hands of thosewith a vested interest in the survival of the present, ecocidal, social order, le ingthem off the hook.

Wh ile there is some resistance from the car manu f acturers to a shi frompetrol as a f uel42, at heart most of them recognise that electric vehicles and the likerepresent the last, best hope f or the continuance o f thecar and its economy. J urgenHubbert, chief of Mercedes-Benz’s passenger car division, says that “Entering theelectric car scene is an absolute necessity. We cannot afford not to be present if

37 ‘Under Fire: Environmen tal r eats and the Extinction o f the Wo rld’s Cetaceans ’, Environmen talInvestigation Agency May 1994, p.8.

38 ‘Extinction: e PCB reat to Marine Mammals’, Cummins, e Ecologist vol.18, no.6 1988, p.194.39 ‘Under Fire’, p.8.40 e Ecologist , p.193. Marine mammals are especially susceptible to PCBs because of the process of

‘biomagnication’.41

‘Dear Motorist — e Social Ideology of the Motorcar’, André Gorz, reprinted from ‘Le Sauvage’,Sept-Oct. 1973.42 Eg. Detroit dragging its heels over compliance with California’s zero-emission programme.



43

electric vehicles sudden ly take off.”43 i s is wh y “at a time when thousands o f people in the car industry have been laid off, annual expenditure on developingelectric vehicles (EVs) exceeds £5 billion worldwide.”44

e pitf alls of the sing le issue emphas is are illustrated by Greenpeace Ger-

man y’s eff orts to design their own f uel-efficient vehicle.45. Here, because o f afailure to challenge the ‘dominant paradigm’, they end up acting as auxiliaries tothe car indus try, supp lemen ting the huge research & developmen t programmedescribed above f or free, thereby assisting the indus try in its bid to ensure its ownsurvival.

43

‘Flat Out for the Car of the Future’, New Scientist 7/11/92.44 Ibid.45 New Scientist 25/11/95.



44

Postscript — Sea Empress west Wales oilspill

is pamphlet starts with a description of the sheer weight of death resultingfrom the Exxon Valdez spill and the even greater weight of company propagandathat followed quickly a er.

e Wes t Wa les oil spill from the Sea Empress (!) in February r eleased a t lest72,500 tonnes compa re that against 38,000 tonnes sp ilt in Alaska in 1989 by theExxon Valdez. Yet to hear the PR men talk you would believe the disaster hadn’thappened - oneevenwen t as f ar as to say soonchanne l f our news . No f undamen talques tion ing of petrochem icals was allowed to grace tv screens me rely expertsarguing about the validity of double hulls. One journalist who tried to research apiece properly- a task that took days rather than hours — shock! — was told by

the Times only a week a er the spill that it just wasn’t news anymore. Meanwhiledeath continued.Six weeks a er the tanke r ran ag round the wildlif e toll was still moun ting ,

and oil in one f orm or another was still covering the beaches and d ri ing at sea-aff ecting 180km of coastline from Skomer Island to the Burry inlet. A spell of mainly easterly winds pushed much of the oil well offshore, with oiled seabirds,tar balls and debris reaching parts of south eastern Ireland. It is estimated that atleast 70,000 birds have died.1 In man y peoples m ind the disaster didn’t happen .Beyond the media friendly pictures of oiled seabirds is a greater disaster. Much of the base of the area’s oceanic food chain simply no longer exists. As one wildlifetrust worker replied when a BBC news reporter asked what the situation on theground was he sa id ‘Everyt hings dead ’, a er being accused o f exagge ration hereplied ‘OK, not everyhings dead , but everyt hing tha t isn’t is in the process of dying’.

However as this pamph let argues it is not these spectacular disasters that arethe real ecological threat- but the daily continuance of normal life. is idea wasrecently brought up by J ohn Vidal who stated ‘Up to 50,000 barrels are deliberatelyspilt a year round the wo rld by ships clean ing ou t their bilges. Acciden ts, sayindustry watchers, account for only 10 % of oil spills’ 2.

It is every aspect of daily life that we have to question and challenge if we areto truly create a livable future. is pamphlet has been published as part of thatprocess.

1 BBC Wildlife, May 19962 Guardian, ‘Crude Claims the Blur the picture’, Feb 21 1996



e Anarchist LibraryAnti-Copyright

May 21, 2012

George BradfordStopping e Industrial Hydra: Revolution Against e Megamachine

1989

e original version of this article appeared in Fi h Estate .

Additional text was added by Dead Trees Earth First!Retrieved on 18 January 2011 from www.eco-action.org

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/revag2.html

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/revag2.html

Documents

George Bradford Stopping the Industrial Hydra Revolution Against the Megamachine