From Past to Present - Philosophy of the Anthropocene - Section 4

      Continuing our journey, we complete The Great Acceleration, by J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke. The last section of this book focuses on the effects of the Cold War and the rise of environmental movements around the world in its wake. The authors explain how the mindsets of the global powers during the Cold War era were focused so heavily on militarization and competition that they completely disregarded the effects of their actions on the natural world, and, often, even the human tolls.  They write:

One of the distinguishing features of the Cold War was its sustained militarism. In modern history, most countries, after major wars, reduce their military spending sharply, stop buying mountains of materiel, and cashiered most military personnel…During the Cold War, however, the major powers maintained high levels of military spending decade after decade. (p.155)

     Another characteristic of this time era was “gigantic state-sponsored infrastructure projects and development campaigns.” (p.156) Some examples of this are provided:

The United States in 1956, for example, authorized unheard of sums for the world's largest engineering project. The building of the interstate highway system reshuffled American landscapes, hastening suburbanization and altering wildlife migrations, among other effects. Like most acts of government, this decision had many motives behind it, but prominent among them was military preparedness in expectation of war with the USSR. In 1958 Mao's China launched a frenetic campaign to overtake Britain and the United States in economic production within only a few years, a quixotic quest known as the Great Leap Forward, and in 1964,...it undertook to build a new military-industrial complex from scratch. After the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union for its part built a second Siberian railroad line, which provided a more secure link to its Pacific ports because it stood further back from the Chinese border than the old Trans-Siberian Railway. This rail line opened up vast new possibilities for accelerated harvesting of timber, furs, and minerals in the Soviet Far East. (p.156)

     An additional byproduct of the politics of this era was that China and the USSR felt the need to develop their own economies and become self-sufficient, especially in light of U. S. sanctions and embargos. And, these efforts to create thriving economies of their own led to devastating environmental issues. The authors discuss several examples of these environmental effects:

In the late 1950s, for example, after Stalin's death, his successors chose to convert dry swaths of Central Asia into cotton land. This required massive irrigation works drawing water away from the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, so that by the early 1960s that salt lake began to shrink. Today it stands at a tenth of its 1960 size and is divided into several salty puddles. The strangulation of the Aral Sea evolved into one of the twentieth century’s signature environmental disasters, what will the vanished fisheries, desiccated delta wetlands, a tenfold increase in the seawater’s salinity, airborne salt blown onto the croplands by dust storms arising from the newly exposed lake beds, and a dozen other problems. But the Soviet Union needed cotton, and in the Cold War context importing it from India or Egypt entailed risk that Stalin's successors wished to avoid.

Equally attracted by the vision of economic autarky, Mao's China concocted the ambition to grow rubber in the rainforest corner of Yunnan Province called Xishuangbanna, a prefecture in the Mekong River watershed near the border with Burma and Laos…It was a strategic good, necessary for tanks and aircraft (all airplanes use natural rubber tires). Inconveniently for Moscow and Beijing, most of the world's rubber came from Malaya, then a British colony, and Indonesia, ruled by anti-communist generals allied to the United States…In China's most biologically diverse region, they cut trees over thousands of square kilometers, destroying animal habitat and obliging the local Dai population to migrate to higher elevations, which put them in conflict with other minorities…[In the end,] The replacement of forest by rubber plantations over an area the size of Lebanon even altered local climate, bringing a sharper cycle of drought and flood and far fewer days of fog. Rubber processing also filled the nearby rivers and lakes with chemical pollution all of it destined for the Mekong River. (p.157-159)

     The authors also discuss the environmental effects of the various guerrilla wars that popped up around the world in the wake of the Cold War. They write:

The United States and the USSR especially, but also China, Cuba, France, and South Africa from time to time, thought it cost-effective to support separatists, revolutionaries, resistance movements, and their ilk wherever that could weaken their rivals. Thus, in places such as Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua, the Cold War superpowers waded into local power struggles, backing their preferred factions with arms, training, money, and occasionally troops. Guerrilla struggles normally involved a large component of environmental warfare – burning forests and crops, slaughtering livestock, flooding fields – because one side or the other typically used forests as cover, and because peasant populations had to be punished for supporting (or merely tolerating) one's enemies. Moreover, these wars produced legions of refugees, people fleeing combat zones or on the move because militias and armies had destroyed their livelihoods. Refugee movements, like other migrations, brought environmental changes both to the lands people left and to those where they settled. (p.159-160)

     The authors next go into great detail about what might be the most quintessential element of the Cold War, the proliferation of nuclear weapons by the major powers at the time, and the environmental havoc that was wrought by their production and testing. They state: “All nuclear powers developed Atomic archipelagos, networks of special sites devoted to nuclear research, uranium processing, and weapons manufacture and testing.” (p.160) Often, part of these archipelagos, their testing sites, were not part of the mainland of the countries that were testing there, and many times these areas were inhabited. The authors explain: 

Remarkably, in retrospect, statesmen often took a relaxed attitude toward radiation risk. In Oceania, the Americans, British, and French tested nuclear weapons beginning in 1946, 1957, and 1966, respectively.  Atomic explosions shook various remote atolls again and again. The appeal of Oceania for atomic experimentation was that population was sparse, so testing did not immediately imperil many people – and most of the imperiled people were not citizens of the United States, Britain, or France. They were Polynesians and Micronesians with little formal education or political voice, which made it easier for statesmen to take risks with their health. Beginning eleven months after the end of World War II, American nuclear testing exposed the islanders of Bikini and adjacent atolls to repeated dangerous doses of radiation. Their experiences provided useful information about the susceptibility of the human body and its genes to radiation-related illness and mutations. They, and some US military personnel, were essentially human guinea pigs in the early days of atomic testing. (p.162)

And, the Oceanic islanders would continue to suffer various degrees of poisoning and death throughout the tests conducted by Britain and France. 

     However, some of the worst environmental damage occurred within the USSR’s nuclear archipelago. The Chelyabinsk region became one of several ‘sacrifice zones’ throughout the world. The authors explain:

Chelyabinsk region, once a landscape of birch and pine groves amid thousands of lakes, became a main cog in the Soviet military-industrial complex during World War II, when it produced half the tanks used by the Red Army. It was far from the vulnerable frontiers of the country and had plenty of water, as well as metallurgic and chemical industries, all of which recommended it for nuclear weapons production. For fifty years it has been the most dangerously polluted place on Earth. 

The Mayak Chemical Complex opened in 1948, creating the USSR's first plutonium. Over the years, at least 130 million curies…of radioactivity has been released at Mayak, affecting at least half a million people. Most of that occurred in its early years, especially 1950-1951, when nuclear wastes were dumped into local rivers, tributaries to the Techa from which thousands of people drew their drinking water…

A small and shallow pond used after 1951 as a dump for nuclear wastes, Lake Karachay is now the most radioactive place on Earth. It contains about twenty-four times as much radioactivity as was released in the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. Today standing at its shore for an hour would provide a fatal dose of radiation…In all the contamination from Mayak affected about 20,000 square kilometers. (p.163-164)

     Other parts of these nuclear archipelagos reached into our atmosphere and the world’s oceans and seas. The authors point out:

Atmospheric test (of which there were more than five hundred) scattered about four hundred times as much radioactive iodine-131 to the winds as did Chernobyl. The Soviet navy used dumping sites at sea for its spent nuclear fuel and contaminated machinery, polluting inshore waters of the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans, especially around Novaya Zemlya. Surprisingly, perhaps, the world's most radioactive marine environment was not Soviet responsibility, but Britain's. The Windscale site (renamed Sellafield in an attempt to shed notoriety), which produced weapons-grade plutonium for the United Kingdom's nuclear arsenal, released radioactivity into the Irish Sea, especially in 1965-1980. The Irish Sea’s currents do not disperse pollutants quickly, so the radioactivity lingers and turns up in British seafood. (p.165)

     However, out of all the bad that the proliferation of nuclear weapons has produced, some silver linings came out of this era. Firstly, as the authors discuss, was the development of unlikely wildlife preserves. They write:

In one of the many ironies associated with the Cold War, some of its nuclear weapons development sites became de facto wildlife preserves. The Savannah River Site [in the United States], for example, produced plutonium and tritium, and its 300 square miles were kept free of routine human activities. As a result of banning humans in the interest of building bombs, ducks, deer, snakes, 250 species of birds, and the largest alligator ever found in Georgia (not an atomic mutant) flourished despite 35 million gallons of high-level nuclear waste scattered around. The Rocky Flats Arsenal in Colorado, which produced plutonium until the mid-1990s, became a prairie wildlife preserve, a protected home where the deer and the antelope play under the watchful eye of up to a hundred bald eagles. The Hanford stretch of the Columbia, where the first atomic bombs were built, hosted the healthiest population of chinook salmon anywhere along the River. (p.166) 

Secondly, “...One of the world's first international environmental agreements arose from nuclear testing…In late 1963 the USSR, United States, and United Kingdom signed a partial test ban (meaning no atmospheric testing), and many other countries soon followed, although not France or China, each of which prized its own independence in matters of nuclear politics.” (p.166) 

     Additionally, the Cold War itself produced some unexpected positive environmental consequences. The authors explain: 

The Cold War also created a few war-zone wildlife refuges. These were not combat zones but corridors in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. Churchill in 1946 famously called the line that separated zones controlled by the USSR from those of the West “the Iron Curtain.”  It ran from the Baltic coast, where West and East Germany met the sea, to the Adriatic,…from the border of Hungary with Austria all the way to the Baltic, the Iron Curtain was a no-go zone for forty years, bristling with barbed wire and military observation towers. Unauthorized human visitors risked their lives by entering.

As a result of exclusion of ordinary human activity, the Iron Curtain gradually became an unintended nature preserve, a north-south wildlife corridor in the heart of Europe. Border police served unwittingly as park wardens, maintaining ecosystems and wildlife through exclusion of humans. Rare insects survived because no pesticides were used. Deer and boar proliferated. Along the Baltic shores, where the Iron Curtain met the sea, coastal species flourished…The Rhodope Mountains form the border between Bulgaria and Greece, another prohibited corridor during the Cold War. Consequently, the mountains hosted a wealth of rare and endangered species, with perhaps the greatest biodiversity in the Balkans. In Berlin the area immediately around the wall became a de facto Sanctuary for urban species. 

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain parted in 1989, a German doctor gathered allies to campaign for the preservation of the unusually rich environment the Cold War left behind. With the help of nature conservation organizations in Germany, and eventually the IUCN, long stretches of the former frontier have been set aside as parkland in a project known as Europe's Green Belt. 

The same thing could conceivably happen in Korea. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, a demilitarized zone (DMZ)  has separated North Korea from South Korea…It contains a broad cross-section of Korean ecosystems, from coastal marshlands to mountain moors. It is home to dozens of endangered species, some fifty mammals in all, including bear, leopard, lynx, and a very rare mountain goat. It hosts still more species of birds and fish. Many of East Asia's migratory birds, including several kinds of majestic cranes, use the DMZ as a rest stop on their travels between Siberia and warmer climes. Red-crested cranes, now exceedingly rare, are symbols of good luck and longevity in Korea and throughout East Asia. The DMZ, the last frontier of the Cold War has given them a new lease on life. (p.181-183)

     The last topic discussed in this section is the rise and growth of environmental movements around the world during the Cold War era. The authors explain in a section that harkens back to Hegelian dialectic:

Economic expansion threatened environmental conditions in a great many places. This caused a reaction among those concerned about their lives, health, and livelihoods. A global economic thesis generated its own antithesis, environmentalism. (p.184-185)

This leads one to wonder: What is the natural synthesis that history will reach between this thesis and antithesis? Hopefully, it contains some understanding of the harmony that must be reached between human endeavors and the natural world. But, I digress; back to the development of the environmental movement. 

     Beginning by discussing the environmental movement in the United States, the authors explain:

The beginning of the mass environmental movement in the United States is often tied to the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Songbirds, Carson argued, were caught in a chemical web of contamination that might lead to their elimination. But behind the book’s evocative imagery of lost birdsong stood a stark message for humankind, namely, how chemicals such as DDT were destroying the very basis of life itself. Modern chemistry was leading humanity to its own doom…

But as environmental historians point out, it is a gross oversimplification to pin the emergence of a mass, heterogeneous, and global movement on a single book. Over half a century before Carson, the United States had gone through a debate about the proper use of public lands, in particular forests. It had created national parks and had busily expanded that system throughout the 20th century. [This was thanks, in no small part, to John Muir.]...

Moreover, the times were right for the message in Carson's book…By 1960  some influential Americans were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the side effects of prosperity. One was the Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose best-selling book The Affluent Society, published in 1958, argued among other things that wealth entailed adverse effects upon nature. Grassroots groups across the country, many led by women, were linking suburbanization, the ultimate expression of American post-war prosperity, to the destruction of the countryside. (p.185-186)

     The authors then explain the rise of the global environmental movement. They write:

Global environmental activism intensified rapidly after 1970. For the first time, environmentalists could mobilize large numbers of people in mass demonstrations. While the most famous of these might have been the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) and the mass protest against nuclear power in Western Europe later in the decade, such demonstrations occurred in a great many places and for a great many reasons. Older conservation organizations were put on the defensive as more confrontational groups formed, motivated by frustration over tactics and a more critical outlook based in the ecological sciences…In the early 1970s a new wave of publications appeared that questioned economic growth itself. The Limits to Growth, a report issued in 1972 by the Club of Rome…, was by far the most significant of these. It sold twelve million copies in thirty languages and helped to trigger an intense debate among intellectuals about industrial society, pollution, and environment that would last for decades. (p.188)

     Next, the authors discuss the ‘environmentalism of the poor’. They explain that, as the developed countries of this era sought to expand their economies, their demands for materials and resources also increased. And, those who suffered the most from this mad dash to extract more and more from the natural world were the poor, indigenous, and marginalized groups who depended on these resources for survival or lived on the lands that industries sought to exploit. They write:

As extractive industries began their operations (or intensified existing ones), the worst outcomes fell on the poor residents of these places. These outcomes were of two types. One resulted from extraction processes,  which produced all manner of unpleasant and even deadly problems. Mines produced huge piles of tailings and polluted drinking water for miles around. Timber extraction denuded steep mountain slopes, leading to soil erosion and mudslides. Hydroelectric projects flooded large areas where rural people lived. A second outcome concerned access to natural resources. The rural poor depended for their existence on the very same resources that were now being extracted by far more powerful and rapacious industries. Fishing villages that had relied on small boats and low technology, for example, were now confronted by industrial trawlers able to wipe out entire fisheries. 

These outcomes fueled what is known as “the environmentalism of the poor.” The idea originated during the 1980s, when Indian intellectuals subjected environmentalism in the richer parts of the world to intense scrutiny. In their view, environmentalism in the United States and other wealthy countries had been motivated by concerns for idealized (and constructed) forms of nature such as wilderness. Thus, it failed to address the root causes of environmental degradation – in particular, consumption –  whether in their own countries or other parts of the world.  In addition, some North American and European intellectuals had subscribed to a “postmaterialist” theory of environmentalism's origins. According to this theory, people in the West had become environmentalists only because their basic needs had been securely met. Environmentalism, so this theory went, had begun in the rich world because wealth allowed people there to stop worrying about their next meal and start caring about whales, bears, and wilderness. Poor people in poor countries had other environmental priorities because they were busy trying to stay alive. (p.190-191)

     One of the best, and well-known examples of ‘environmentalism of the poor’ is the Chipko movement out of India. Though the book does not discuss it, this movement has its origins in another revolutionary act that had terrible consequences but left an indelible mark in the memories of the Indian people. The Bishnoi movement (1730) may be the forerunner to all non-violent environmental movements, such as the Chipko movement. It was led by the local Bishnoi women, who hugged their sacred trees in hopes that the King’s soldiers would not cut them down to build the prince’s palace. The soldiers began to kill the local activists, and, hundreds lay down their lives for the trees before the Maharaja ordered the killings stopped. This is where the people of the Chipko movement learned their tactics. The authors explain:

[I]n 1973…a group of villagers, including women and children, stopped a timber operation by threatening to bind themselves to the trees. This act gave the movement both its name, Chipko (roughly, “to hug”) and everlasting renown. Chipko's initial successes allowed it to expand for a time to other parts of the Himalayas, after which it faded. Besides earning environmentalists everywhere the “tree-hugger” moniker, Chipko provided the iconic example of the environmentalism of the poor. (p.192)

     Then the authors discuss the struggle of those in communist countries to enact environmental changes. They explain that the people of China and the USSR were no different than other citizens in their desire for a cleaner environment; but, they were far more constrained by their leaders because the communists saw environmental issues as a capitalist issue. The authors explain: “Socialist orthodoxy simply defined environmental degradation as a capitalist problem. Pollution occurred under capitalism because profit-maximizing firms foisted their pollution on society as a way to save costs. Soviet theorists maintained that pollution could not exist under socialism.” (p.193-194) Despite these opinions, many ordinary citizens still worked to better their environment. However, it was a much slower process in these countries and was often met with heavy resistance and the potential for dangerous outcomes if a group became too outspoken or seemed to be taking a political tone. 

     Lastly, the authors discuss how the emergence and popularity of environmentalism may be yet another sign of the times. They write:

Modern environmentalism, perhaps, represents a stage in the development of the Anthropocene. For many decades people tinkered with the basic biogeochemical cycles of the Earth without recognizing that they were doing so. As the scale of these unwitting interventions grew, more and more people noticed that, in some ways at least, humans could have an impact on the Earth. By the 1950s, if not before, a few saw that human action could affect matters as vast and important as atmospheric chemistry and global climate. Popular environmentalism from the 1960s prepared the way for a fuller recognition of the scale and scope of human impact, to the point where, in the early twenty-first century, scientists and journalists began to adopt the term “Anthropocene.” 

So far humankind has influenced basic Earth systems without consciously managing them. It is as accidental by-products of actions undertaken for other reasons that we have our powerful impacts on the global carbon and nitrogen cycles. If we elect to try to manage Earth systems, that is, if we undertake explicit geo-engineering, that will amount to yet another stage of the Anthropocene –  whether it goes well or badly. (p.205)

In the next leg of our journey from past to present, we will engage with a few of the writings in The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene: Axial Echoes in Global Space (The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene).