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Title: Anarchism & Environmental Survival
Author: Ray Cunningham
Date: 1998
Language: en
Topics: green anarchism, environment, survival, Red & Black Revolution
Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr4_env_city.html
Notes: This article was originally published in Red & Black Revolution No 4.

Ray Cunningham

Anarchism & Environmental Survival

Graham Purchase is one of the most prolific writers in the Australian

anarchist movement, and in books such as ‘Anarchist Society & its

Practical Realisation’, has made a serious contribution to the debate on

the future of the anarchist movement, and how our ideas can best be put

into practice today. Here, we review his latest book, ‘Anarchism and

Environmental Survival’.

Alongside the classical anarchist structures of unions and traditionally

‘political’ organisations, anarchists are increasingly to be found in

the environmental movement. This is hardly surprising given that,

although one wing of the green movement has entered mainstream

parliamentary politics, there is still a wide base of grassroots

activism some of which, in its methods and organisation, is very close

to anarchism. What’s more, the more radical environmentalists are

becoming aware that their demands cannot be accommodated by capitalism,

and are beginning to make connections between their campaigns and other

issues. Why then are the links between anarchism and environmentalism

not much stronger? And what are the issues that still divide them?

Mutineers on the Titanic?

Most anarchists have some idea of the serious state of environmental

degradation caused by capitalism. You don’t have to be politically

active to know about the hole in the ozone layer, or the chopping down

of the rainforest, and the pollution caused by a transport system based

on cars is obvious to anyone who lives in a city. Anarchist groups

rarely see these as issues to be campaigned on, like women’s rights or

trade union struggles. But environmental issues effect the working class

disproportionately. They are the least able to escape the effects of

environmental damage, and the most likely to bear the brunt in terms of

disease, malnutrition and so on. We know that poverty-level wages and

poor housing in the developing world are a result of capitalism. The

fact that the slums this creates are the hardest hit by flooding, for

example, is another symptom of capitalism putting profits before people.

But campaigns against this sort of indirect oppression are thin on the

ground.

One possible reason why anarchists don’t campaign as much on

environmental issues is the gradual nature of environmental problems.

Unlike other struggles where there is a clear line that is crossed, an

obvious point to focus on — whether it be a repressive piece of

legislation or a strike — pollution, for example, is incremental. The

problem is generally not that one factory opens and suddenly the air is

visibly polluted. The level of pollution tends to increase steadily over

time, and it is hard to get excited over a difference that you can’t

see. Of course there are exceptions — a few years ago in Cork a

particularly bad toxic spill led to calls for stricter controls on

chemical production and safety (see Workers Solidarity 41 for details).

But, in general, we become accustomed to the degradation of our

environment if it happens slowly enough.

The final, and most important problem, for anarchists in tackling

environmental issues is that we disagree with most of the solutions on

offer. The mainstream green line on the environment is that we are all,

more or less equally, to blame for its destruction, and we must all,

again more or less equally, make sacrifices if the ecosystem is to

survive — this when the poorest 20% of the population produce only 3% of

carbon dioxide emissions. Even more radical greens, though they do

realise that corporations and capitalism are doing most of the damage,

insist that we must all reduce our consumption and simplify our lives.

They also say that industrialisation, in itself, is a bad thing, no

matter who is in control. Anarchists, on the other hand, think that

everyone should have more of what they want, not less. There are

problems with how production is organised, and certainly if things are

produced for need and not profit a lot of waste will be cut out. But

most of the world has a standard of living far below what westerners

would take for granted and, as an absolute minimum, this has to be

addressed.

A World Divided

The history of this century has been of deepening divisions in humanity.

The gap between rich and poor has widened enormously, today 225 people

own more than the poorest 50% earn in a year. Eighty four people are

together wealthier than China, three people wealthier than the poorest

48 countries. The wealthiest 20% of the global population consumes 60%

of the energy, 45% of the meat and fish, and owns 87% of the

vehicles.[1] This is not to say that everyone in the ‘developed’ world

is well off, of course. Within the richer countries the gap between rich

and poor is also growing, with the figures for homelessness,

unemployment and malnutrition rising all the time. In the last decade,

diseases like tuberculosis, caused essentially by poverty, have

reappeared, having been eradicated earlier this century. The US may be

the world’s biggest consumer, but it also has the highest per capita

prison population, and 16.5% of its population lives in poverty.

On a global level, the picture is of a southern hemisphere owned,

controlled and exploited by the north. Raw materials — minerals and food

— are produced in the south and consumed in the north. The environmental

problems in the north/west are mainly those caused by over a century of

industrial production — pollution has become a fact of life. The earth,

the air, the rain, all have been contaminated.

The south may not have as long a history of industrialisation as the

north, but as far as environmental damage goes it is gaining rapidly.

When a corporation shifts production to the developing world, it does so

to escape not just trade unions, but also environmental regulations.

Workers in the south are not just lower-paid, they’re subject to much

more dangerous working conditions, and much more damage to their

environment, than workers in the north. As well as industry, agriculture

is made more damaging. Leaving aside the use of insecticides and

fertilisers that have been banned in the north, the trend towards

large-scale monoculture farming means the soil becomes exhausted and

prone to erosion. The need to expand the area of land under cultivation

means the destruction of wilderness areas and deforestation, which also

causes soil erosion. This in turn causes flooding, which destroys

people’s homes and crops under cultivation, leading to more pressure on

the land.

The worldwide increase in the human population and the level of

(industrial and agricultural) production means that the potential impact

of humanity on the environment continues to grow. At the moment, this

impact is enormous because, often, the people who are making

environmentally sensitive decisions are shielded from the results.

Whether this is because of money or distance, the end result is that, no

matter how damaging their decisions may be, they can be sure the damage

will be to someone else, and so are free to continue their pursuit of

profit.

Making the Connections

Graham Purchase’s book, Anarchism and Environmental Survival, is an

attempt to bring anarchist and green theories together, and propose a

model for a possible post-revolutionary society. His anarchism is based

on the idea that decisions must be made by those who are effected by

them. The basic social unit of society, then, is the community. Your

community is where you live and work, the particular area you identify

yourself with. Depending on the context, this could be your immediate

surroundings — a village or suburb — or an extended area — a county or

city.

Each community is linked to a particular place, although the borders of

this region are rarely clearly defined. You could draw the limits of a

town where its buildings end, or include land cultivated by its

inhabitants. Sometimes these are useful definitions, but the people

themselves, when talking about ‘their land’ may include nearby forests,

lakes or mountains (and again, since the size of a community varies

depending on the context, this region can also vary in size).

Communities are made up, then, not just of relationships between people,

but of the relationship between the people and the land. This, Purchase

feels, is the key to environmental protection.

With the globalisation of the economy, and society in general, the

current trend is to tackle environmental problems on a global level.

This appears to make sense with an issue like the destruction of the

ozone layer, but it can often become ridiculous — as when the Earth

Summit’s decision to fix the level of global emissions merely led to the

creation of a new market. Developing countries can now sell some of

their ‘pollution quota’ to richer countries. Most problems, says

Purchase, are better tackled at the local level, but this means some

changes in the way production is organised. Earlier I talked about how

money can shield you from the effects of environmental damage — the same

is true of distance. Those of us who live in urban areas know the

problems that industrial concentration has caused locally, but only get

second or third-hand reports of the problems of intensive food

production, for example.

Small is Beautiful?

If you think of the global economy as a factory, with each

worker/community making only one part of a complex machine, and

depending on the others to make all the other parts, you can see how

difficult it is for one worker/community to change what they’re doing.

Purchase proposes that we shift from the current, locally specialised

and globally interdependent society, to a society made up of more

balanced, self-sufficient communities (individual artisans, if you

like). Thus we would immediately deal with some of the problems

overconcentrated production has caused, like pollution and soil erosion.

We would eliminate some, at least, of the costs of transport between

these production centres. We would also make it easier for each

community to deal with the problems that arise in their own region.

When Purchase talks of increasing local independence in this way, he

does not mean these communities would be entirely self-sufficient. The

fact that some areas are richer in minerals, or more suited to growing

certain foods, means there will always be a certain degree of

specialisation. Nor does it follow that, if there is a shift towards

food production in urban areas, for example, that each rural area has to

include a certain amount of factories. Finally, self-sufficiency should

not be confused with isolationism — the communities Purchase describes

are starting points for federations, not a return to feudalism. Even if

it is just on the basis of common environmental influences, a shared

river, or mountain range, or coastline, communities would obviously come

together to discuss things that affect them in common. And in an

anarchist society, based on the idea of our common humanity, there would

surely be an abundance of regional, continental and global projects,

covering every aspect of science and culture.

Equal Wealth, not Shared Poverty

There is still a clear sticking point in any attempt to integrate

anarchist and environmental positions, and that is the question of

levels of production. Depending on how far down the path of

self-sufficiency you go, you rule out more concentrated, specialised

production, and so reduce the possible output. (Or at least, reduce

efficiency — you can build a train in a workshop, but it’s a lot easier

to do it in a factory). In an anarchist society, a lot of work will be

recognised as socially unnecessary, and it’s hard to overestimate how

much effort goes into keeping the apparatus of international capitalism

and the nation state going. When money goes, we get rid of the banking

industry and financial exchanges. Without states, there is no need for

armies and the whole weapons industry — a sizeable part of most western

economies — becomes defunct. When production is based on need, we will

be rid of most advertising, and the useless duplication of identical

goods it was created to hide. There will be no more built-in

obsolescence, because who would build something they know is going to

fall apart rather than something that will last, if it wasn’t for their

boss’s desire for higher profits.

The production that remains will be changed. No rational society would

base their transport system on cars. A good public transport system

would improve the quality of most people’s lives immeasurably. The

benefits in terms of lives saved, public health, and countless other

areas are obvious, and well-known. Over-dependence on cars is a result

of the pursuit of profit, and it is profit that makes our industries so

polluting. Cleaner sources of energy, like solar and wind power, are

available but not profitable. Scrubbers and filters for chemical

outflows, biodegradable, recycled and non-toxic materials, all of these

could be used in most of our factories. But as long as control of

production is in the hands of those who do not feel the effects of

pollution, they will be overlooked in favour of the cheaper, more

profitable alternative.

By eliminating, or greening, all of these processes, we would go a long

way to reducing our ecological footprint. But eliminating useless

production is only part of the story, an anarchist society would also

increase useful production. Even in the developed West, far too many

fall below the poverty line — we need more homes, more schools, more

hospitals, enough to meet everyone’s basic needs — and then we must go

further. An anarchist society will want to have more than just the bare

essentials, surely we want to improve everyone’s standard of living.

Some may choose to live a life of austerity, but most of us want a new

world because we want more of the good things in life, not less.

In the developing world, the gap between what people have and what they

need is even bigger. The southern hemisphere has been exploited

ruthlessly by the north, one of the first priorities for an anarchist

society must be to redress that balance, and the enormity of that task

cannot be under-estimated. Millions of people don’t even have a clean

source of drinking water, we want everyone to have a standard of living

beyond the current average for an industrialised country. There is no

way this can be accomplished without increasing current levels of

production.

These are major problems with the idea of self-sufficient communities.

On the one hand, we need a globally integrated economy, for the

foreseeable future at least, because of the vast gap between the wealth

of a community in Namibia, for example, and one in Oregon. At the same

time, we can’t afford the relative inefficiency that small-scale,

localised production implies. Even if we decide that decentralising

production is a good thing, it can’t be our first priority. And is it

necessary?

A World Without Borders

Anarchism has always been international, has always stressed the

importance of our shared humanity over all those things — nationality,

language, race, religion, gender — the ruling class tries to use to

divide us. We stress the importance of democracy, of people having a say

in the decisions that affect them. We also realise that some decisions

are too far-ranging in their effects, too intertwined with the

situations of others to be made at a local level. That is why large

anarchist groups often operate as federations, and a lot of thought has

gone into creating structures — like mandating delegates, rotating

positions, minimising the need for full-time bureaucrats — that allow

decisions to be made democratically, with mass participation, involving

thousands, or millions, of people.

After all, there will always be a clash between the needs of society and

the needs of a particular area, the only question is about how to

balance them. Factories have to be built, and food grown, somewhere.

Nuclear power may be unnecessary, but gold isn’t,[2] and you can’t mine

it without damaging the local environment. We will always have to walk

the line between decisions being made by groups far-removed from their

effects, and the NIMBY tendency — do what you like, but not in my

backyard. The difference, in an anarchist society, is in who makes the

decisions, and why.

Capitalism is notoriously short-termist, decisions are made based on

their immediate profitability, thinking even a few years ahead is

unusual. What other kind of society would build nuclear power stations

without knowing how to dispose of the waste safely? Why else would the

economy be based on non-renewable fossil fuels, when the only question

is when, not if, they will run out? If the earth is an uninhabitable

wasteland in 100 years, what does it matter, as long as the profits are

good? All the green consumerism in the world won’t fix this insane

system, if we want a rational economy we’re going to have to run it

ourselves.

Agriculture and industry need not be as damaging to the environment as

they are at the moment — we already know of cleaner and safer ways of

doing things, that aren’t used because they aren’t profitable. How much

can we change things if, as well as using the technology we know of now,

science is directed towards cleaning up pollution instead of weapons

research? If research was done on minimising the damage of intensive

farming, instead of developing ‘Terminator’ genes? We don’t have to

believe that science has all the answers to know that there is a lot of

room for improvement.

As anarchists we have always argued that, from union struggles to

environmental protest, from community organising to revolution, the best

way to victory is through mass participation and democracy. Whenever

they seize the opportunity, people are well capable of organising their

own lives, and their own movements, better than any ‘wise’ leader, or

‘benevolent’ dictator. We should be more confident that a free and

democratic society will handle the problems of environmental damage, and

the questions of local autonomy and global interdependence, in a just

and fair way. After the anarchist revolution, do we really need a green

revolution?

---

Meat ‘n’ Veg ‘n’ Microlivestock

Vegetarianism and environmentalism often go hand in hand. This is partly

because the consumption of large livestock has itself an effect on the

environment. It takes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef

— if we were all to become vegetarian, so the argument goes, much less

land would have to be used for agriculture. This is true to a certain

extent, but the grain:meat ratio leaves out many things. For example, a

cow produces not just meat, but milk, leather and dung (a fertiliser,

soil stabiliser, and even fuel source). Wool, feathers and eggs are all

useful ‘by-products’ of animal husbandry that have to taken into

account.

Even so, raising animals is not the most efficient use of agricultural

land. But a lot of land is not suitable for other forms of agriculture.

Animals can be raised in forests, or on the side of mountains, and in

areas where the soil is too poor for crop production. Many animals can

be reared alongside crops, and others, like poultry, are well suited to

small scale farming. Turning over whole prairies to cows for grazing is

certainly inefficient, but that’s not the only way to farm animals.

The tendency in agriculture (as in industry) in the last century has

been for specialisation, and for the production of smaller herds, made

up of larger animals. Purchase goes into some detail on the virtues of

microlivestock — smaller, more adaptable, and generally hardier versions

of the more common modern animals. Such animals are more productive —

the greater number that can be raised on a given area of land makes up

for their small size — and it’s easier to match the size of the herd to

the land available. All of these factors make them ideal for the kind of

small-scale mixed farming he proposes should be (re-)introduced to our

cities.

The question of efficiency is not the only reason so many

environmentalists are also vegetarian. After all, the battery farm is

perhaps the epitome of efficiency, and that has few friends in the green

movement. There is also a moral argument, that we should try to reduce

the effects of humanity on the planet, and on the animals that live

alongside us. Purchase quotes Elisee Reclus, a well known anarchist of

the 19^(th) century, “for the great majority of vegetarians...the

important point is the recognition of the bond of affection and goodwill

that links man to the so-called lower animals, and the extension to

these our brothers of the sentiment which has already put a stop to

cannibalism among men”.[3] You will have to judge the merits of this

argument for yourself, Purchase shows that it is not necessarily

relevant to a discussion of the environment, and that a meat-eating

society can still be green.

---

Cities of the future?

Purchase’s proposal for more ecologically integrated communities usually

meets with most scepticism when it is imagined applied to cities. Even a

relatively small city, like Dublin, is almost completely dependent on

food from neighbouring regions, and its ecosystem is made up of cars,

people and concrete. If a city like New York or Mexico was sealed off

from the rest of the world, it would die within days; the only question

is whether it would be from starvation or asphyxiation. Given the number

of such large cities around the world, and the fact that, even if it

were possible, given the size of the earth’s population, for everyone to

live in small towns and rural communities, many would not want to, how

can cities be accommodated within an environmentally sound anarchist

society?

It’s an obvious point, but cities did not spring into existence fully

formed, with all their support networks intact. Like any community,

initially they produced most of their food themselves, but as the

industrial base increased, the demand for land for industry and

accommodation for the workforce grew, forcing food production into the

hinterland. Most cities, even up to recently, would have had small farms

comparatively close to the town centre. The supercities of today are

only possible because of advances in food preservation (through chemical

additives and refrigeration) and transport. Before these advances, the

pressure for a city to grow in size was met by the necessity to have

enough farms, near enough, to produce the food. Nor is the ejection of

agriculture from the city irreversible — during the Second World War,

for example, food shortages in Britain led to an immense drive towards

small-plot urban farming, something of which has continued to this day

in the ‘allotments’ scheme.

Cities, in Purchase’s model would continue to exist, but agriculture

would be reintroduced to the residential/commercial mix. There are

different ways of doing this — you could divide the city into sectors,

with each concentrating on a particular use of the land, aiming at

sufficiency on a city-wide scale. Or, and this is more in line with the

overall project, each sector would be a community in itself, diversity

being brought down to a more local level. (‘Sufficiency’ is used here as

an ideal, not expected to be reached. Cities would still be more densely

populated than other areas, and so more likely to be a base for industry

and other labour-intensive activities, the aim is to reduce the

dependence on other areas for food.) Food production would be integrated

into the city — cattle grazing on green spaces, lawns turned into

vegetable patches, small neighbourhood farms. Between the demands of

industry and accommodation, argues Purchase, there are spaces which in a

properly planned city could be filled with life.

The immediate question is whether this could ever be more than a

gesture. Sure, some farming could be integrated into urban life, but

could it ever come close to meeting the needs of those who live in the

city? If we are to continue to have the same population density, and the

same concentration of industry in our cities, can these urban farms ever

be more than a supplement to large-scale farming elsewhere, a token

‘greening’ of the city? If cities were to seriously approach

self-sufficiency, wouldn’t this necessitate a huge expansion in their

size, or a fundamental change in the nature of urban life? Do we want,

or need, such a change?

[1] United Nations Human Development report, 1998

[2] Gold is not just decorative, it has many important industrial uses,

but you must use cyanide in the mining and purification process.

[3] “On Vegetarianism”, 1901