Abstract
Members of the Australian public are caught up in a difficult moral dilemna in terms of issues of environment and development. They are becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about environmental degradation in developing countries. At the same time the reality of Australia as a comparatively wealthy country means that Australians, per capita, are responsible for more global damage to the environment than people in developing countries. Many of the environmental problems of developing countries can be traced back to an economic structure oriented to production for the wealthy countries. To study the environmental attitudes of the Australian public I have undertaken a set of in depth interviews. Interviewees generally believed that environmental problems in developing countries were the result of overpopulation. A common perception was that developing countries were always asking the wealthy West for aid without being able to solve their own problems. These perceptions are undoubtedly racist but it is also interesting to consider why Australians are so receptive to a misleading view of the global economy in which they are enmeshed. The paper considers how these xenophobic perceptions function in relation to problems Australians experience in daily life.
This Study
This review of attitudes to developing countries is based on a broader study of the attitudes of members of the Australian public to environmental issues. Overall, interviews have been conducted with approximately one hundred people from varying social class backgrounds, recruited through friendship and kindship connections with myself and my students. Some of the interviews are one to one and some are conducted with focus groups; some have been performed by students interviewing people they know; in more than half of the interviews I have been the main interviewer. This paper reviews comments made by 74 interviewees in 23 different interviews. In many of these the subject of environmental issues in developing countries did not come up. This in itself is something of an indication of the attitudes of Australians to environmental issues since a first question on the environment was about what they thought were major environmental problems both locally and globally.
Using a somewhat poststructuralist framework I will be suggesting that the responses of interviewees can be sorted into three major discourses about the developing world in the context of environmental problems. By saying that these are discourses I intend to convey the view that the statements which make up these ways of thinking hang together as a cluster of related opinions. In any given section of an interview or in any one interview it may be that only some aspects of a discourse are produced in talk. In that sense the coherent fully formed discourse is an artefact of research, it makes sense of a variety of statements which include different versions of aspects of the total discourse. As well, interviewees sometimes took up subject positions from different discourses on different occasions, sometimes switching discourses even within one passage of speech. However most interviewees took up a particular discourse and adhered to it reasonably consistently within the interview. I will outline these three different discourses briefly before illustrating them at greater length from the interview data.
A first discourse and one which was very common in the interviews is the sole preserve of male interviewees. There were no women who took up this discourse as their own. I will refer to this discourse as pessimistic realism. Starting from the premise that the main environmental problems in the developing countries are population problems it goes on to conclude that these problems can only end with huge environmental and human disasters in which environmental health is restored by a process of natural culling of the human species.
A second popular discourse was mostly produced by women, with some men also producing it. I call this discourse charitable sympathy. It is sympathetic to the plight of the poor in the developing world and particularizes the problems of these people empathetically. It sees the appropriate response to environmental problems in the developing countries to be aid and sympathy from the developed world. While it looks to a moral change it is pessimistic about the chances of this taking place and is depressed by the difficulty of making any difference to events through personal action.
Neither of these accounts see problems in the develeloping countries as coming about through the orientation of their economies to supplying consumers in the first world. This is a key argument of the discourse of left wing environmentalism which also maintains that capitalist multinationals are the main culprits in environmental damage in all countries. This third discourse was produced by a minority of interviewees, both men and women.
Pessimistic Realism
I am calling this discourse pessimistic realism, not because I believe that it’s point of view is in fact realistic. In fact there are many misunderstandings of the nature of the gloabl economy which are implicit in this position. However it is primarily conceived of as being a position which is realistic as opposed to a moralistic position which is not realistic. To be blunt, this position forms itself in conscious opposition to the charitable position and has to answer the charge of being callous. It does this by affirming that from a purely pesonal point of view, the situation described is tragic, but from a more objective perspective this tragedy is unavoidable. A few examples may help to illustrate this.
Martin is a University sculpture lecturer. After beginning by saying that “in our part of the world” people were aware of environmental problems and that they were gradually being dealt with he named overpopulation as the greatest environmental problem:
To me the problem is that actually the earth is facing a population explosion; the qualitative leaps that are occurring in many countries which have virtually no population control, I mean it’s not a very pretty picture. The increasing demand of more and more people just on land resources, water resources so forth, the ways in which the jungles are being stripped piece by piece day by day by people with hand axes. It isn’t just the international conglomerates that is a factor. It’s also just the pressure of local human populations spreading further and further out along trails, clearing, trying to do their little patch, in Africa and South America, in Asia and the potential for total global disaster is right there, you can see it.
I’m not being cynical but the reality is that at certain levels of population biological controls come into play, I mean my, my sad vision for the next fifty years is is massive, if the population continues to build in these sorts of ways you’re going to see massive plagues of different kinds affecting different areas, it’s just inevitable.
In other interviews this moral position was pushed further by saying that such biological controls were a part of nature and it would not be natural to interfere with these biological controls. In the long term both nature and humanity would be better off if famines and plagues wiped out a large part of the earth’s population. Dave and Jamie were young students at a TAFE (technical college). Dave, who spoke the most was studying computer software and Jamie was studying mechanical engineering. Both came from working class backgrounds. Dave produced a very elaborate version of the pessimistic realist discourse and in the following passages he alternates between statements of regret for the suffering that biological controls will produce with statements that these controls are natural and should happen to achieve a sustainable population level:
I think the only thing you can do is let ’em go and it’s probably, it sounds a bit morbid, but let ’em get, let it fall to the population that the land can sustain, and that might mean that millions of people die, of starvation and things like that but, uhh, that’s the way it should be.
Like if a huge plague swept through the world now, wiped out four billion people, it’d be great … for the people that are left, it would be. For the people that uhh, you know, it’s just something that happens, it’s something natural that happened. I mean things like that happen, and if you’re gonna, look “Great disaster, what a tragedy!” and it is. But it’s things like that’ve gotta happen because you reach a limit.
It can be argued that this approach to the problems of poverty has a long history in Western thought. Notions of evolution as survival of the fittest are used to derive the conclusion that natural controls should be permitted to wipe out the least successful members of the human species. As in other versions of such theories the discourse does not acknowledge that the rich speakers of the discourse are in any sense members of a class that has some responsibility in creating poverty. Within the left wing discourse that I shall examine later, export of cash crops to the developed world is one of the causes of overpopulation and land hunger in the developing countries. In other words, according to left wing discourse the first world benefits from the poverty of the developing countries through receiving cheap imports. However in this pessimistic discourse the advantages are seen as going all the other way.
Firstly it is sometimes argued that Australia would be much better off if we stopped all imports from other countries and provided employment for all Australian workers. Secondly the developing world is seen as unnaturally propped up by aid from the rich countries. The speakers resist the moral incitement to help the poor by arguing that aid just prolongs and reinforces the problems of poverty or by saying that to expect the developed countries to step in to deal with the problem is unrealistic. Often this discourse is accompanied by a sense that problems in our own country are severe and should take priority. Particular objection is taken to government taxes being used for overseas aid.
Dave was particularly clear on this issue, seeing aid as a huge and determining part of the budget of developing countries:
Dave: ‘Cause there’s no, there’s not enough population controls around ay, like I was saying I was saying about Africa and that. The places there. They just multiply and multiply and then we help them more and more and more and they can get bigger and bigger. I think what you’ve got do is just say. You’re on your own now, I think and if, you know, eighty percent of the population dies well that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
Terry: But they reckon one of the reasons why those countries are poor is because they export a lot of what they produce to wealthy countries, like tea or …
Dave: Oh yeah, yeah. But when it comes down to all the coverage that gets. You know like now. Like umm, you know that girl that says “Great I can go to school now, I used to have to stay with my brothers and sisters”, that makes at least five of them and we say well OK we’ll do our best and we’ll keep all them alive. They can all grow up and have five kids each as well and we’ll support all them as well and then, I mean there’s a certain limit on it and without outside help things have got to like stick at a limit.
What is particularly interesting about the above passage is the way that the left wing discourse is completely passed over, almost as though it is not heard. What has salience in the pessimistic discourse is the charitable discourse which is seen as informing the TV advertising of international aid organizations. Far from these promotions leading interviewees to adopt the charitable discourse, they are used as evidence to show that aid is a major part of the budgets of developing countries. Because such advertisements are repeated over the years these viewers conclude that aid must be ineffective and may actually prevent a more long term solution to population problems. Martin’s interview set up a similar structure of reasoning by arguing that it was unrealistic to expect rich countries to do anything to stop disasters in the developing world:
There is this notion that some superpower, some wonderful rich group of people are going to come in and solve everybody’s problems all the time. Well they’re not. It’s impossible. If the United Nations isn’t going to do it, who is? What can the United Nations do unless the key players within it make particular commitments? People keep saying the United Nations should go in and solve the problem in this country of Ruanda. What can they do? What are you supposed to do? I mean literally… they should rush in and stop, and stop the … But how? How do you go and stop the umm? How do you go and stop the Yugoslavs from destroying each other? Tell me. Nobody succeeded in stopping the Lebanese from destroying each other. These cultures get, just get into a spin, umm I mean I’m just saying, what global policeman is going to come in and say “Now now chaps, sit down here and we’ll talk about it sensibly”.
Martin goes on to point out that sending in armies to fight these battles would actually cost many lives and that the political leaders of the superpowers are not going to risk that for “the sake of saving afew Tutsis from, the somebody elses”. Again, this view pictures the rich countries of the world as essentially relating to the developing countries only through aid, or in this case through the unreal expectation that aid will be given. It is implied that the problems of the developing countries are internally generated and that it would be both paternalistic and politically unrealistic to call for international action to remedy these problems.
In another interview, with two workers in heavy industry, great resentment was expressed about the donation of money to aid the victims of fighting in Ruanda, whether by government or by private charities. According to these interviewees, such money should have gone to local causes, such as drought stricken farmers or the unemployed in Australia. In the following passage the two interviewees were responding to my view that taxes would have to be raised to deal with environmental problems in Australia:
Ian: I don’t know, I think we pay enough taxes. We get a government that gives so much money to overseas and bloody …
Peter: Yeah. that’s.
Ian: I’m going to get off that point.
Terry: No tell us what you reckon, No go on.
Peter: I can’t understand that myself.
Ian: Well, you had, you got the poor old farmers having a whinge at the moment, well not having a whinge, we want to give them money, right, because of the drought. Fair enough, I give ’em the money to the gov… to the farmers but I didn’t give any money to the ones overseas.
Ian: I guess they think we’ve got big millions.
Peter: Yeah, well, you get the government give them so much, Johnny Farnham did a concert. Four million. Right? Johnny Farnham should have give the money to the, instead of it going overseas, it should have been for the farmers.
Ian: Should have been for Australia, I reckon.
Peter: So, look after … My point of view – I look after the people in Australia first. Bugger what’s overseas. Whatever happens over there happens over there. It’s not our fault, we should look after your own country first. My point of view, we should stop all imports, shut the country off and live by ourselves.
Terry: So what would you say if someone said to that the result of that would be that Australians would be a lot poorer.
Ian: Why would we be poorer?
Terry: Well because, umm, it would cost us more to produce what we import. Like say overseas, like you know, right, your tape deck, right, your car, all that, it’s made by really cheap labour OS and brought into Australia and we send our minerals, our wool, wheat, stuff over there.
Ian: Why? Why should we send our minerals over there? Why can’t we say right. We got, we got we got our own car factories that went broke because the stupid Japanese mob bring their cars over here. Right, fair enough. We got Holden, Holden.
Terry: We’d have to pay more.
Ian: No we don’t have to pay more money. If Australia looks after Australia. I mean look after ourselves. Don’t worry about anyone over there – see you should look after our own people in your own country.
Terry: Would they be as cheap as the Japanese imports?
Ian: Why won’t they? We’re not worried about the imports, but then we’d be making our own cars, that’d be made by Australian people.
This passage begins with a totally exaggerated view of Australia’s overseas aid as a proportion of government spending. In this analysis Australia could solve its many environmental problems merely by redirecting money earmarked for overseas aid into environmental repair. The analysis goes on to say that Australia would be better off if we did not import anything from overseas. Here there is a complete failure to acknowledge the benefits received by Australian consumers from the cheap labour performed in developing countries. Instead, this issue is perceived in terms of the jobs of Australians being lost as imports from overseas capture the local market. Later the interviewees express the view that giving surplus food to deal with overseas crises is acceptable but that sending “billions” in money is not acceptable. The interviewees are very conscious of the falling value of working class earnings in Australia and fear unemployment for their children. In other words the resistance to overseas aid is premised on a sense of despair about conditions for the working class in Australia, a resentment of taxation of any kind as an incursion into one’s pay packet, and a belief that governments of either political persuasion are not to be trusted.
The pessimistic realist view is premised on a number of presuppositions about human nature which feed into its pessimistic conclusions. According to this view it is human nature to be greedy, selfish and competitive. In some interviews, people expressed the view that they did not care what would happen to the planet in fifty years because they would not be alive. In other cases they said they were not worried about what happened in the Amazon or Antarctica because they didn’t intend to go there. These views often alternated with other statements that implied it was sensible to worry about the future, especially where future generations of one’s descendants were concerned. What I want to suggest here is that there is no easy way to defend morally altruistic sentiments within the framework of the pessimistic realist position.
Often this position about human nature was developed to reply to an ecocentric perspective in which all animals and plants had a right to continue their lives on the planet. According to the pessimist realist discourse the ecocentric position could never become widespread because such concern about other species was not an aspect of human nature. If interviewees themselves were concerned about other species this had to be a completely idiosyncratic value position that was not rationally arrived at.
The interviewee who developed these implications of the realist position most fully was Ben, a university student majoring in psychology. In a discussion with other members of the focus group a dilemma was posed – was it better to buy a product from a developing country that was created with very poorly paid labour or better not to buy it and let the worker in the country starve. Wendy was the student interviewing this focus group of her friends.
Wendy: Well by buying that product, that gives that guy the ten cents, you’re saying it’s alright for him to be repressed and …
Sarah: No, no. But what’s their option?
Ben: It comes back to human nature.
Wendy: Exactly, so you’re going to buy it.
Sarah: It’s their own political structures that enable their own manipulation of their people so, hey.
Penny: Well that’s a much higher issue then.
Ben: It’s human nature. Economics is defined by human nature and politics are defined by human nature which is to procreate, dominate and expand.
Penny: So that’s human nature?
Wendy: But that, that’s only a problem of our society. I think there are societies that aren’t based.
Ben: Well we, because we are that. We are sort of directed in that manner to dominate is why capitalism and western society is dominating the rest of the world, because it’s a much more powerful form of expansion than any other sort of more equal socially structured system. It’s genetic domination. We want everyone. We’re even moving to a whole nation, a whole sort of planet that is becoming more sort of culturally similar, homogenized. I think by looking at the problem of economics and politics is looking at the outside issue and we should deal with ourselves on the inside first and our basic motivations for what we are and actually understand human nature more, before we address the external issues of poverty etc. etc.
Wendy: So we’ve got to be transforming ourselves in that then, and transforming humanity.
Ben: Yeah. We’ve got to, our minds. We’ve got to expand our minds and understand ourselves, either accept it or change it. I mean everything we do changes what the future’s going to be.
Wendy: How do you motivate people to do this?
Ben: I don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to do it. I think humans as dinosaurs are doomed. We’re going to die. The planet’ll be alive a lot longer than we are. I mean even if we kill it the earth and soil will still be there and it’ll regenerate in a hundred thousand years or the meantime.
This debate involves a clash between the left wing environmentalist discourse and the pessimistic realist discourse. At two points of the discussion Sarah and Wendy begin to argue that social inequality is a product of social structures that could be changed by social action, that other societies have a different idea about and practice of human nature. Also, at one point Dave is almost tempted to embrace this perspective, suggesting a spiritual practice in which we expand our minds beyond the templates laid down biologically by human nature. Ultimately, however he concludes that human nature is such as to be unchangeable. In a way this is an inescapable conclusion since “human nature” is necessarily defined as that which cannot change, whatever changes in society and culture take place. Consequently he draws out and explicates some of the most fundamental tenets of the pessimistic realist position. It is human nature to procreate, dominate and expand. Capitalism and western society have triumphed because they most fully embody these principles of human nature. However, going further than these old self congratulory maxims of capitalist ideology, Ben draws the discussion to a grim conclusion. The ultimate, though unavoidable conclusion of this process must be the destruction of the living world that supports human life and the extinction of the human species.
Some version of apocalyptic nihilism was a common element in the pessimistic realist approach. The two industrial workers referred to above believed that the following generations of the working class in Australia would be unable to get jobs as industry was automated and companies rationalized their investments. Worse, the Japanese would take over Australia, possibly by genocide of the current population. The two TAFE students, Dave and Jamie, foresaw increasingly disastrous consequences of enviromental problems but argued that ultimately it would only be people and wildlife that would suffer. The planet would go on, Dave predicted:
You’re not really, like in all this thing it might get really bad and that but you’re only phasing people and animals and that. As the earth as a whole you’re not worrying it at all. You could be. Like people could be gone in a thousand years. Right. And there could be nuclear wastes all over the place. And no ozone layer left and things like that. Might take the earth a few thousand years to repair it but it will happen so you’re only really affecting yourselves and other people and just like life and that.
When asked, he maintained that he was concerned about these grim forecasts, especially in terms of worrying about the fate of the next generations. Also as a “bit of an animal lover” he had to agree that he was disconcerted about animal species becoming extinct. On the other hand it was an error to confuse these personal concerns with a broader perspective:
You go whatever it, however many million years it is anyway, it’ll be gone anyway. The sun goes supernova. We get swallowed. Woosh. You know. It’s a bit down the track but (laughs), eventually it will happen.
In the interview with Martin, this apocalyptic nihilism surfaced after I suggested that it was developed countries that were really overpopulated since they produced a much greater amount of pollution per head of population than the developing countries. He initiated this discussion by pointing out that the environment could not provide all the world’s people with the levels of material consumption that we have come to expect in developed countries, especially in a situation of population explosion:
You know when you talk about tens of hundreds of millions of fridges, and when you talk about everyone wanting their own house and all the materials that are required for that and so on and so on. You have that happening at the same moment that the population is going haywire to the point where it’s looking like doubling within twenty years, now this is completely impossible.
This claim is also a proposition within the framework of left wing environmental discourse. In that context it is used to draw the conclusion that the developed countries must cut back on material consumption to allow the developing countries to become moderately prosperous and to allow the world to countinue to be suitable place for humans to live. So at this point in the interview, I advanced that argument saying that it has been argued that it is developing countries that are overpopulated since they use a very disproportionate share of the earth’s scarce resources. Martin’s first response was to point out that this is about industrialisation, not about “capitalism versus communism or first world versus second world versus third world” and then to produce the examples of Mexico City and Buenos Aires as third world countries that were very polluting. In other words these examples were used to refute broader statistics about the relationships between rich and poor countries and environmental damage. Going on from this he acknowledged that our use of resources was a problem:
Obviously we have to have, well cutting back pollution from cars is absolutely necessary. How are we going to stop having cars? The world’s just going to go zooming along at this speed and I don’t believe that oil running out is going to shift it that much. We’ll have different power.
Here is a key moment in the pessimistic realist discourse in its opposition to left wing and charitable discourse. It is not in the nature of human beings to voluntarily give up privileges in relationship to people who are deprived. If the earth cannot sustain car ownership for everyone then those who have cars and have power internationally will hang on to their cars and the developing countries will inevitably seek power by trying to competitively catch up. Clearly within the hegemonic discourse of capitalism of yore, this problem could be solved with a new scientific technique that would reduce resource demands while providing increased levels of consumption for all. Martin floats this scenario only to reject it:
I mean one assumes there will be some other form of power developed, because this is the promise that science always gives us. Just hang on to the ship, you know, we’ll be right, a new solution will come up. I mean and this has not been the case. Look at nuclear power as a classic case in point where this supposed benefit, I mean that’s been one of the greatest rorts of all time, the amount of money that’s been poured into the nuclear industry, the amount of power they have ever generated is pathetic, the amount of potential damage and pollution to the planet is horrendous …
This is a key point in what is novel about the discourse of pessimistic realism. It is generated in large part in response to an understanding of the intractability of the environmental problem and its interconnections with major structuring features of the current global order. On the other hand, retaining some features of capitalist hegemonic discourse – the inevitability of these structures given human nature – it must arrive at pessimistic conclusions. And so Martin finishes up this discussion with the following statement:
It’s a very difficult philosophical fact, where you have to face the question, you know, what a piece of work is man, well “man”. Well, are we so beautiful that we are going to end up being the only … ? We are, we have become like, not a fungus, a scale, red scale, we literally scale all over the planet and the planet just conks out, we just can’t breathe. This is the vision we face.
What also surfaces in Martin’s conclusion in the phrase “man, well ‘man'” is a sort of sense that the features of people’s behaviour that are seen to be the root of environmental problems are in fact features of hegemonic masculinity within capitalist patriarchy. Within the discourse of pessimistic realism these are not seen as socially constructed but are regarded as innate drives, as parts of human nature that cannot be changed. But as well as being named as human nature they are also named as the nature of men as a sex. The drives to procreate, dominate and expand are the drives which sociobiology sees as aspects of the nature of men, not women.
Politically, the discourse of pessimistic realism is quite ambiguous. It certainly bases itself on various viewpoints and factual claims that are elements of more definitively pro-capitalist ideologies. The view that human nature is innately competitive is straight out of what McPherson has called “competitive individualism” and traced to early theorists formative in creating liberal ideology. The new sociobiological version of this theory is commonly enough used to justify class inequality, racism and patriarchy. Factually, the view that environmental disasters in the developing world are produced solely by the developing world masks the relationships of exploitation between the rich countries and the developing world. The view that overpopulation is the main environmental problem for the planet and is located in the developing world ignores the environmental problems caused by the developed world. There is an ethnocentric and often a racist view that we should only be concerned with our own selfish interests, if necessary at the expense of other peoples, and that to do this is an inevitable outcome of human nature.
On the other hand the discourse is by no means a celebration of capitalist society or industrialism. It foresees nothing but disaster from the combination of competitive expansion and ecologically imposed limits to growth. It does not expect that these problems can be resolved by reformist solutions within capitalism and new whizz bang scientific discoveries. It urges a withdrawal from political action and certainly not any involvement with political parties of the right. Economically it can easily be associated with an isolationist stance in which developed countries stop imports from the developing world and concentrate on looking after local unemployed by producing everything within the developed country. In this it echoes demands from some organisations in developing countries that seek to prevent the exploitation of the labour of the developing countries by the rich world.
In terms of gender politics it is very much a man’s discourse in that it urges a dispassionate and unemotional realisation that environmental problems in the developing countries can not be solved by sympathy and attempts at support but must be allowed to run their course in terms of some supposedly natural process of biological control. On the other hand it foresees a global environmental catastrophe arising from aspects of human nature usually associated with men. Doing this it provides a strange confirmation of the essentialist separatist position that men are by their nature a blight on the planet. It is like a grandly theatrical suicide note from the patriarchs caught out in their schemes. Yes it is true that our nature is to dominate, exploit and to lay waste and in our final act we are going to take all of human life with us!
Charitable Sympathy
The discourse of charitable sympathy was produced by a number of women interviewees and a few men. In terms of Gilligan’s research on the moral frameworks of men and women, it is not surprising that this is a position more commonly associated with women. According to her research women are likely to view moral issues in terms of a need to supply care and look after the interests of other people. They tend to respond to the particular situations of others in terms of empathetic identification. By contrast men tend to view moral problems as events which have to be evaluated in terms of general abstract moral principles, regardless of the needs of people involved in particular situations. In the pessimistic discourse some interviewees argued that it would be good for the planet if a plague wiped out a large part of the world’s population.
Often, speakers of the charitable discourse produced similar factual claims to those made by adherents of the discourse of pessimistic realism, but within the context of a radically different moral framework. Diane, a middle aged woman returning to work as an accountant, was convinced that environmental problems were ultimately the result of human self centredness and selfishness. Key problems were overpopulation in the developing world and overuse of resources in the developed world. Like adherents of the first discourse she had a bleak prognosis for the future:
We appear to be running out of space, I mean, not space in the sky. There doesn’t seem enough earth for us to be here because we’re all, even here in this wonderful country, we’re all squashed in. We’re crowding ourselves out, the trees out, the animals out. We’re dirtying everything, we’re messing, we’re mucking everything up, we’re leaving litter everywhere. We’re not getting rid of our waste, are we. We’re just transferring it from one place to the other. There just seems to be too many of us and we’re not living in India. We’re living in Australia we’re you can still find a bit of space to move. That’s the main problem. Just too many of us and I have a feeling this is what happened to the dinosaurs. They just got too big for what was, for the resources. And I think they just went off and died, and maybe we’ll do that. I don’t know.
We’re not giving any thought to the future. It’s a here and now thing. Even though we mouth off about we’ve gotta save everything for our children, I don’t truly believe we mean that. I think we’re selfish. We. This is a general. I think we as human beings are quite selfish. We think we own all this. That it’s our playground and whatever we destroy will come back again.
What mostly differentiates these statements from similar positions taken in the first discourse is only a slightly different view of human nature. There is a sense that we as human beings could be less selfish, if we chose. Dealing with the problem of overpopulation in the developing world she particularizes it, empathetically describing the plight of a woman and calls on the rich world to do something about it. It is a moral failing that we are not acting to help this woman:
Diane: Well, I don’t know, the third world and all that, they say it’s because they need labour and all that. The family is the, the family unit’s the source of income so you have all these kids, to sort of suppose you could go out and earn income or work on the farm or whatever, I don’t know.
Terry: So in their case they’re making rational decisions about having more kids because this is their only way to look after their old age and all that kind of stuff.
Diane: But I can’t … I wonder why it hasn’t hit them, for instance I see on the, you know, some of these reports that you see on telly or whatever, which is probably about the only way I learn – things, you know. You see, sort of the woman of the family walking across this barren landscape with sticks of wood on her back and she’s travelled miles to find these sticks of wood to cook the meal for the family later that day. I can’t see why somebody hasn’t looked and thought, we’re just destroying everything here. This has got to stop. How much further has she got to walk. I don’t know what she can do. This lonely woman, this lone woman walking along this barren landscape but somebody somewhere must look and think well, she’s got to walk twenty miles today, thirty tomorrow, you know, what’s? It must come down to human life’s so undervalued, isn’t it? Does it matter that she might drop down dead or not be able to find the wood for the family meal that night. ‘Cause there’s no trees left over there. You can’t interfere in another country’s way, can you, their culture or whatever. But why isn’t there some world body that is trying to save the world, the whole place, not just pockets of it?
Here Diane calls for and demands the kind of intervention by developed countries that speakers in the pessimistic realist discourse condemn. She makes a moral judgement of the current situation in that no help of this kind is forthcoming. While she is pessimistic about the likelihood of people, as they are now, acting appropriately she does not rule out political change as impossible. She charts her own conversion to a more environmentalist view as coming about through the experience of success in a local environmental campaign that she thought could never be won. She expresses a wish that other people could be more like her and her fellow environmentalists, saying that if “we were the majority, we could live in paradise” by electing governments that would implement environmental policies. In other words none of these changes are against human nature. There is no intrinsic barrier to social change to a more caring society and a more environmentally sustainable one. In addition to her concern for other people she was also concerned for animal species, even to the point of opposing some (male) environmentalists who had proposed wiping out feral cats by introducing diseases into the cat population.
Empathetic concern for the well being of those in developing countries was expressed in a number of interviews with women and often particularized through anecdotes that related the plight of particular individuals in the developing world. Margie, a working class interviewee, attacked environmentalists for being too emotionally involved in environmental issues to be aware of human needs:
I mean cutting down the rainforest is awful yes, but people do need fuel, dont they and things like that. I mean you’ve got to sort of decide when its right to make a stand and when its right to let other people get on with their life.
A focus group of middle class women were angry with mining companies that polluted waterways in developing countries and that allowed oil spills by not looking after their ships. They were particularly disturbed by the Australian government’s failure to support a ban on land mines. Here the issue was again particularized through an example taken from a TV documentary:
Margaret: I guess this is still to do with the environment, but it’s a different topic – land mines. I didn’t realise that the Australian government won’t ban landmines.
Michelle: Yes, I’ve heard that too.
Debbie: What do you mean by land mines, they’re bombs sort of that ..
Margaret: Land mines are cheap little devices that are buried in the ground and they blow kids up.
Caroline: Like what’s been happening in Cambodia.
Margaret: So there’s a petition, actually I’ve got a petition, I should’ve brought it round for you to sign. That’s being presented to parliament some time in September, that the Australian government ban landmines.
Debbie: The Australian government refused to do this?
Margaret: They say that there’s a role for this.
Debbie: You look at the kids that have been shot up and lost legs and arms all through Cambodia, I mean
Michelle: Heard this one last night on the news from Somalia, a girl.
Margaret: That’s right, she was …
Michelle: She’d had one leg blown off, one arm, the other leg was mangled and one eye, from because she. The kids don’t. They’re shaped, some of them are shaped like butterflies and they go out into the fields and just pick them up and get blown to smithereens.
Debbie: That’s awful isn’t it. I mean that’s kids.
Michelle: But that would be aimed at children wouldn’t it.
Others: No.
Michelle: Deliberately aimed at children.
Margaret: Well I can’t see any legitimate reason to have a landmine anyway, I don’t care what people do in war. I don’t think they should be blown up like that.
Debbie: Not maimed.
In this extract the link between the gender role of women as nurturing mothers and the charitable discourse becomes very evident with the view that wars are men’s business and that children as innocent parties should be protected. This is a far cry from the view that wars are an inevitable by product of competitive human nature. Instead wars can and should be regulated and if possible stopped altogether.
When recommending solutions to the problems of environment and development the charitable discourse tended to stress educational solutions. The poor of developing countries should be educated about birth control and sustainable agriculture. Along with this there was some tendency for this view to be accompanied by the patronising belief that people in developing countries were ignorant savages who should be spared from the corruptions of our way of life. As with the first discourse there seemed to be little perception of the extent to which the developing world is already integrated into a global economy and little perception of the extent to which developing countries’ problems are related to unequal power relationships in which consumers in rich countries benefit from low wages in the developing world. In her discussion of the problem of deforestation,overpopulation and cutting timber for fuel Diane went on to recommend a pedagogic solution to these problems:
You can’t interfere in another country’s way, can you, their culture or whatever. But why isn’t there some world body that is trying to save the world, the whole place, not just pockets of it? They’d have, you’d have to start educating them. You can’t rip the trees up. They can see for themselves but I’m assured they can’t see where it’s going to end or anything, but they can see there’s no trees. They know that. Why can’t we provide coal for them to burn? Alright, so we’re gonna, it’s coal going to go up and pollute the atmosphere.
In this passage Diane wrestles with the problems of the charitable position. On the one hand these people must be fools if they can’t see that overpopulation and the use of timber for fuel is deforesting their landscape. On the other hand they can’t be that stupid. Maybe the problem is a cultural one. Educating them seems to be the solution but it is imperialistic to go into another culture and tell them what to do. To some exent these dilemnas are quite real but also what gets ignored is use of valuable crop land to produce luxuries for rich countries, the overgrazing of marginal land by cattle grown for export to the developed world. Like the advertisements for charities, TV documentaries about the plight of the developing world either do not present the whole story or are viewed in terms set by an ethnocentric presumption that their problem is ignorance of the knowledge that we have.
In another interview this pedagogic approach was combined with a slightly tongue in cheek recommendation that we do not corrupt the developing world with our bad habits of consumerism and a life burdened by work:
Maureen: What about with the third world and all the sort of equation of growth and stuff. Do they have a right to try and get the same standard of living that we do, or what do you think about that?
Robb: Do you think that we should try and provide it?
Maureen: Do you?
Robb: Going to be too hard I think. I think probably rather than spoil them. That sounds terrible, it’s like sort of corrupting them and probably sending them on the same cycle we’re already in. Try and keep them primitive and and … Sounds like a pet. (laughter) But try and put them in their, try and keep them in their, it’s like an Indian out of the jungle or something, try and keep them in the jungle in his environment and he’s going to be happy and involved. Yeah. Bring him out and stick him out here and he’ll be on heroin next week.
Andrew: Yeah metho.
Robb: And drunk every other day. Why spoil him with all that? Why spoil him with worrying because I’ve got to hurry up and get to work or worrying because I’ve got to get somewhere else? He’s happy to sit there and eat whatever he can get off the land and he has his three kids and they all work there and that’s great. Why put him into this? It’s too hard for us to get off so why put him into it so let’s educate them and say well, this is how you can get your water, this is how you can feed and so on, rather than rushing straight in and saying, Gee Whizz, here’s a big mac and here’s a computer and you should have one because we like them. Let’s educate them and say well slow down having the children and make it easier on feeding yourselves and then educate them on how to feed themselves and so on. Don’t give them everything else of our problems.
Here Robb is quite aware of the patronizing sound of what he is saying but he continues with it nevertheless since there is no other way to justify a position in which a group of people is condemned forever to live in a world in which the benefits of modern science are not available. The racist overtones of this discourse are made overt by Andrew’s suggestion that the Indian from the jungle would soon be drinking “metho”, a common racist view about Aborigines in Australia. Like the pessimistic discourse, this suggests that it is not a good idea for the developing world to attain to the materialist lifestyle of developed countries. However here this is not argued in terms of the incapacity of the earth’s resources but in terms of the real needs of the developing world. It is not in their interests to get into our consumerist lifestyle. Of course, if this is the case, why don’t we abandon it ourselves and put a stop to a worryingly frenetic lifestyle? Within left wing environmental discourse these issues are resolved by suggesting that people in the developed world should indeed work less and reduce their standard of material consumption.
Politically, the charitable position is in principle prepared to take active steps to redress a morally intolerable situation, whether that is in terms of poverty in the developing world or global environmental problems. On the other hand, like other interviewees, adherents of this discourse tended to have little confidence that anything they might do themselves would have much impact, with the following discussion being typical:
Caroline: So, as individuals, should be take, should we be heard, should we demonstrate or …
Margaret: I don’t know what we should do.
Michelle: The thing is, are they going to listen?
Caroline: Well if no one says anything, if we’re apathetic.
Debbie: And I think action groups nowadays have far more impact than they did even five years ago.
Michelle: Particularly if they go to the media.
Debbie: Yes, particularly if there’s a politician involved.
Margaret: It seems to me that when there’s big money involved you can bypass anything.
In terms of undestanding problems of the environment in developing countries, adherents of the charitable discourse tended to blame the victims of environmental degradation and had little understanding of the economic relationship between environmental degradation in the developing world and affluence in the developed world. I have the feeling that this group of people might benefit from some of their own prescription for people in developing countries; a bit more education would be useful.
Left Wing Environmentalism
This discourse combines environmentalism with a marxist structuralist analysis of environmental problems in terms of the structures of the global capitalist economy. This is an available discourse in some TV documentaries and press articles, in magazines such as New Internationalist, in the literature of NGO’s such as Freedom from Hunger and Community Aid Abroad as well as in much academic writing. It’s relative absence in public discussion in Australia could be regarded as the result of a capitalist media hegemony. However I also believe that it is the implications that this discourse has for massive and fundamental social change which make it unpopular with most affluent and politically secure Australians.
A central element in the left wing environmentalist discourse is that capitalist multinationals are at the heart of environmental destruction in all countries and also that this is not the result of some choice on the part of the capitalist class but comes about through the competitive structure of ownership which is capitalism. Three workers in a maritime industry made these connections quite plain in the following discussion:
Brian: Like we’re the worst enemy [of the environment] and we are the answer, but nobody wants to, people are very reluctant to do anything but the main thing to me is the big push by the companies, they who control the government so they’re not going to do nothing.
Prawn: It’s a matter of, like you say Brian, I believe that we’re the problem and we can be the answer but the thing is, but you know, you hear it all the time, people say “Oh, you know, what can I do?”, you know. That’s why I believe that you, it really needs to start from the head, it really needs to start from the money people and politicians and they say they’re doing it but they’re not, you know I don’t believe they are ’cause if they were and they were showing some leadership and some alternatives and that, I’m sure that the normal person could then see a bit of hope and a bit of light at the end of the tunnel and would grab, like the sheep we are, follow along. But, you know, you think you’re doing the right thing. I try to do the right thing at home, bit of recycling, chasing the kids around turning the lights off, you know all those sorts of things and trying to explain to them, you know, but you may as well go and hit your head against a wall as far as I think, as far as the total global situation, you know. ‘Cause look what they’re doing in, sort of, like the rainforests in the Amazon and that.
Brian: Yeah, it’s hell.
Prawn: Just to feed a bit of meat to the Yanks.
Brian: Yeah, Macdonalds.
Prawn: Yeah for Macdonalds you know.
Brian: But that’s how to do it, not only get rid of the …
Prawn: That’s what I mean it’s got to be the, at the top level, they’ve got to take a stand and say. You know, how are you going to get a company like Macdonalds to say, “Oh OK well we’ll forego our, you know, our profits, you know we won’t worry about, you know increasing our profits for our shareholders. It just doesn’t happen, it can’t happen, you know under the present system.
Prawn begins this discussion begins by calling on the rich to give a lead by developing environmental alternatives to the present industrial order. He goes on to argues that individual domestic action can only be a small part of the solution to global problems. As an instance of these problems he picks the destruction of the Amazon rainforest to produce cheap meat for the American market. Here it is interesting that American consumers are not themselves blamed for this decision – it is the multinational Macdonalds which is causing this destruction. Finally he despairs of his opening suggestion. Macdonalds cannot forego profit because to do so would be to lose shareholders. It is the structure of the capitalist system that makes environmentally responsible choices difficult.
In another interview these elements of left wing environmentalist discourse followed upon the charitable discourse cited above. After Robb concluded his pedagogic solutions for developing countries with the view that we “should not give them everything else of our problems” Andrew said that from what he had heard that was the opposite of what was happening at present. He had heard from the boyfriend of a sister who was “pretty leftist and radical” that Nestles was promoting infant formula in hospitals in Bangladesh through kickbacks to hospital staff at the expense of the eventual good health of the babies. He had also heard that people in Brazil were forced to grow cash crops because of debt peonage to local monopoly stores. He finished this passage by saying that although people in developing countries had a right to get to the same standard of living as people in rich countries, this was unlikely, because multinationals would come in and exploit them.
A common slogan within this discourse is that the rich must live simply so the poor can simply live. In other words, ultimately we must solve problems of inequality and environmental problems together by abandoning affluence in the developed countries. This view was taken up in a number of ways by interviewees. Phillip, a case manager working for a government welfare organisation put this point of view succinctly:
I suppose what it basically is is that we in our society have what is termed a higher standard of living and I believe that with a higher standard of living we actually produce quite a lot of pollution. I think I’ve read somewhere the USA is a certain percentage of the population. However they produce about fifty percent of the world’s pollution. So with society’s trying to increase economically, I see it as a major threat there to the earth. Maybe we should all look at being, is it less well off, and maybe looking at different ways to utilise the resources and looking at different resources like solar power, is what I’m trying to say … Looking at the way the world’s going you have all these countries in South East Asia, the emerging economies. You all can’t have access to what we have because I don’t think the earth has the resources to produce those and I think, in the long term it’s just going to be worse for the planet, which is going to be worse for everybody. And that sort of thing. Is that alright?
As I have shown above, this conundrum is also approached by Martin within the framework of the pessimistic realist discourse. In the pessimistic realist discourse capitalism is merely an expression of the greedy competitiveness inherent in human nature. Consequently the developed countries would never sacrifice their affluent lifestyles for the sake of the planet. Further, as Martin also pointed out, within this frame of reference such a gesture would be foolish since the people of the developing countries would only express their human nature by greedily taking up the resources foregone by the affluent countries.
However Phillip implies a solution to this conundrum through some kind of pact between the peoples of the world; a pact which is designed to minimize environmental damage for the good of everybody in the long run. By implication the developed countries make a deal with the rest of the world’s population. They simplify their lifestyles to the point where the whole population of the world could sustainably live at that level of material consumption. In return they seek agreement from others not to exceed this level of consumption. It is interesting that this argument actually works by assuming that the people of the developed countries are acting out of self interest to cut back their standard of living. The pessimistic realist position has the strange corollary that everyone acts to serve their self interest to the point where humanity as a whole dies out like the dinosaurs.
Within this study interviewees who put forward elements of a left wing environmentalist analysis rarely went on to argue that the capitalist system as a whole should be scrapped. Their position was full of paradoxes. They did not trust the Australian Labor Party which they felt had sold out to business interests. On the other hand most would not vote for environmentalist parties, worrying that working class voters would be ignored by these parties. They favoured a more interventionist state while giving various reasons why the structure of capitalism made an effective left wing intervention by the state unlikely. They regarded state socialist solutions as undemocratic and anarchist egalitarian solutions as going against human nature.
The view that human nature ruled out any kind of voluntaristic egalitarian society was a point in which almost all interviewees seemed to side with a fundamental premise of the pessimistic realist position. On the other hand, as I have shown, both the charitable position and the left wing position depended upon an acknowledgement that humans can be generous, egalitarian and sympathetic to the needs of other people. Another paradox was that interviewees would often declare that humans were by nature greedy and selfish and then admit that only a minority of the people they actually knew fitted this competitive individualist model of human nature. The few interviewees who did seem to have a sense of the possibilities of a totally new mode of production typically based this on some analogy with communalistic hunting and gathering societies. Jason was one of a group of young unemployed people working on a government employment project regenerating a bushland park. Early on in the interview he produced the following model of a utopian society:
Yeah, We’re all going down hill. We’re just fucking up. So we’ve gotta try and save this planet. We’ve gotta also explore outer space, other realms, ’cause we’re pretty much stuffed. Man’s greed for the dollar, is they’ll just take more and more and not give anything back to the environment. But if we put it back into the forests. We should use our shit. We should recycle excrement. No man the plants just grew on the site, just grew in the forests and you’d just go and say “Ohh I feel like smoking”. It wouldn’t be like and drugs, all drugs you’d just have natural ones, and they’d be all legal, there wouldn’t be any trouble with drug barons, live like the Ituri forest people. See if man didn’t stuff up we’d have the land of milk and honey and you’d just pick things from the trees and bum around … Everyone works to, just like do as little as possible, just to get by or just do a little bit more than they have to … The Ituri are these African forest pygmies. And what they do is they’re hunters and gatherers in a real good area. Alright they do as little work as possible a bit of hunter gathering work ’cause it’s a really good area, they can just keep moving on. Then they dance and sing to the gods, smoke hemp through their pipes and umm walk on stilts, play games with bows and arrows. They just play games the rest of the time.
This discourse is framed up in terms of an opposition to alienated labour. What is proposed is what has been called a “gift economy” in that work either provides directly for the needs of the worker or alternatively the products of the work are made available to other people as gifts. It proposes a lower material standard of consumption that is environmentally sustainable and this proposal is linked to the freeing of time for social and leisure pursuits. It has been argued that the constant demand for consumption in developed countries is a demand for compensations for a life of alienated labour. This proposal suggests that a life of alienated labour must be abandoned in order for it to become politically possible to voluntarily reduce consumption.
Conclusions
I suspect that the strength of the commitment to the pessimistic realist position in Australia is related to two main factors. Firstly, within capitalist production and within capitalist society more generally the public has little sense of personal power and efficacy. As evidence of the growing environmental crisis comes in and as the links between this crisis and the structures of capitalism become more and more apparent it is easy to despair of any possibility of acting consciously to achieve worthwhile changes. This despair is reinforced by a view of human nature which says that these structures of capitalism are just human nature writ large. Further this vision of human nature is invested personally by many men as a construction of their own masculinity. Nothing can be done since all men are greedy and competitive; it is in our nature. At the same time a sense of anger with alienated labour finds some expression in these visions of apocalypse – this whole stupid and annoying rat race will come to an end, even if in flames.
A second source of the pessimistic realist discourse is its positioning within the field of these three discourses. The charitable discourse says that we should empathize with people in developing countries and give aid. The left wing discourse suggests that we should live simpler lives so that the planet and other people can flourish. Both these discourses can be seen as moral discourses that attempt to siphon off some of the earnings of consumers in the first world. In fact Australians have in general suffered a gradual fall in real earnings since the mid seventies and this was very salient for many of the interviewees. As I have suggested above, most people in the developed world see their consumption as a very hard won reward for boring and alienated labour or as a token of their moral worth in following the dictates of the work ethic. Any suggestion that this consumption should be curtailed is met with considerable resistance and the pessimistic realist discourse provides a rationale for this resistance. Our selfishness is merely rational and anyway it is part of human nature, no one else would behave differently if they were in our shoes.
To approach these emotional structures effectively it is necessary to work with socialisation in developed countries so that the personal premises of the competitive model of human nature are undermined by personality structures that do not operate within this framework. As I have argued elsewhere this must be through a practice of child raising in which children’s needs and desires are, where practicable, generously met by adults and older children. The practice of child raising which has been traditional in the west is to deny infants the breast except at scheduled feeding times, to forbid dummies and other forms of gratification, to separate infants at birth from their mothers and isolate them in hospital cribs, to deny crying infants cuddles and attention for fear of spoiling them and so on. These practices and their analogies throughout childhood produce adults who are extremely anxious that their needs will not be met by other people. It is no wonder that such adults produce a view of human nature in which sympathy and nurturance go against supposedly fundamental aspects of human nature.
Secondly the link of consumerism with alienated labour is not necessarily best broken by dutiful renunciations of consumer pleasures. Instead we should be working for an appropriation of joyful pleasure in work and leisure through constant minor insurrections against the norms of alienated labour and the work ethic. We need to develop a spiritually informed appropriation of pleasures that is not always and necessarily mediated by the purchase and use of expensive consumer goods and gradually use this to become a population that is not easily controlled in alienated labour.
References
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Holcombe, Susan 1995, Managing to Empower: The Grameen Bank’s Experience of Poverty Alleviation, Zed Books, London.
Hoogvelt, Ankie 1997, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Sen, Gita and Grown, Caren 1987, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, Monthly Review Press, New York.
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