Introduction to Sociology - The Environment - Part 1

buddy so today we're going to talk about something that you wouldn't think would necessarily come up in a sociology class but I'm going to try to convince you that it's quite reasonable that this topic come come up in a sociology class and that is the environment and sociology has been so centered on social relationships remember all of that stuff from George Herbert Mead and the social self and human interaction and then all the ways in which we get engaged in doing social surveys and ethnographic observations that is so much about people people people and yet these people are doing business in the physical environment and that includes buildings but it also includes nature and so we get a chance therefore to talk about that physical environment and talk about nature Woody Allen was the ultimate social creature is perhaps the ultimate social creature Woody Allen is alive the ultimate New Yorker and he one of his many quips is that he was as too with nature not one with nature but two with nature and that is a naive comment on Woody Allen's point of view on woody allen's part much as i of course admire and worship the ground he walks on it's not it's it's naive and just as it would be naive to think that human beings exist ever as two with nature we are all in one way or another at one with nature and so we get to talk about that today that's really our subject for this week so how do we do that and how do we talk about that well one of this as to with nature ideas is has been widely held Woody Allen is not the only one who thinks it's possible to think like that and indeed we could think of Woody Allen as a kind of ultimate modernist which is not the way most people think of him but I think it would be fair and appropriate to think of him that way because he's really participating in this notion that part of what it means to be alive in the 21st century or the 20th century or even the 19th century certainly in the last half of the 19th century is that we're done with nature that because of all of these forces of of politics of government of sociological organization of corporations of mass production we have overcome nature or in the language that really was used not so long ago a man has conquered nature and so we have in a way put it aside we can make the desert bloom we can make the desert comfortable we can live in Arizona because we've got air conditioning and so forth and so on right across the world we've developed hybrid crops we don't have to worry about eating and how to produce that eating we've solved the problems of of disaster of starvation man has conquered nature and in part very much through sociological phenomenon like being able to organize things in an appropriate kind of way well in the 1960s as part of all the movements that led to the part of the movements of feminism of other of civil rights there was also rebellion against other aspects of what was going on in the society and hence the birth of environmentalism now environmentalism has been around actually cool for quite a while before that but modern environmental movements began in the 1960s as part of these transformations and changes in the way people thought about many many subjects now the the one of the early orientations toward the problems of the environment took direct aim at people in fact couldn't take more direct aim in a way because it said that well one of the slogans of the time but from a cartoonist very popular then cartoon called Pogo was that we have met the enemy and and and he is us that there are just too many people to get it to get right to the core of it and the person who was the most famous and he was on all the talk shows again and again and again was a guy a stanford a professor of biology named paul ehrlich who wrote a book appropriately titled given what he was trying to do it was called the Population Bomb that not very subtle there is it that tells you exactly who the enemy is and the enemy is is that there are just too many people on earth now in bringing that up and and in that way sort of he was echoing a set of ideas that actually had been around for a much longer time really to the 17th century and I said what in one of the other sessions that the founder of modern economics was Adam Smith but sometimes that title is not given to Adam Smith but is given to a man who many of you I know have already heard about and are familiar with and that is Thomas Malthus and Malthus wrote about the problem of what came to be called he didn't use it exactly this way the problem that is the tragedy of the Commons which is a more modern 20th century formulation of the problem that Malthus was talking about and imagine a Commons imagine that the village has an area in the center which everyone can share and it's you can use it to graze your cattle to raise your your crops to put your sheep and it is your in your interest and this is the tragedy part that both Malthus and later more modern formulators had in mind when they talked like this it is in each individual's interests to put as many sheep as possible on the Commons and they will keep doing that they will keep putting more and more sheep on the Commons until the Commons can handle any more sheep and when that happens it isn't just that the last person is told no you can't come in in the way that the last person at the movie theatres told were full you can't come in by the time you've reached that point what you have destroyed the Commons for example if your grazing animals on on on grasses you will eventually eat all the grasses and subjected to erosion when erosion occurs when the rains come then the topsoil will be washed away and you will have catastrophe that's the tragedy it isn't just that the last people who are trying to get on the lifeboat the last people are trying to get into the Commons won't have room for them we won't have room for them and there will be what the demographers call a die-off in which those extra people can't survive it's that the entire carrying capacity will collapse the ecological system will collapse well if you move this vision up from the the green Commons in the village to spaceship earth as it's later much later came to be called then you see the looming catastrophe in general and of things like global warming for example that eventually will reach a point not only will there be no more room for X persons extra garbage but instead the entire thing will go into an irreversible collapse and that kind of catastrophe is the great disaster waiting to happen if we don't grapple with this now some people of course they that there's always been a way in which technology has saved us but we do know that many of the Commons of the world have in fact gone away and that many of the deserts of the world in North Africa for example are the result of prior over grazing in effect overuse and that's where our deserts come from some of them indeed are due to the fact that there hasn't for eons been appropriate rainfall to support a different kind of ecology but some of them a large percentage are actually due to human intervention which has created irreversible consequences or certainly extremely difficult to reverse consequences so it isn't completely silly to be worried about this phenomenon because Malthus was an economist the the field of economics says sometimes called the dismal science because it just sees that way of doing things as what is built into human nature and so there is always this terrible dilemma that people will acting selfishly which is good according to people who do market thinking economists indeed as people do this individualistic action if they engage in this kind of opportunism they will in effect kill themselves off they will kill all the geese that lay their golden eggs and hence it's a tragedy and that is a dismal orientation to the world hence economics as the dismal science and of course many economists don't accept that and they don't believe it and neither do sociologists and hence enters sociology and how they will save the world by helping us to think in a different kind of way now one of my one of my people that I think has helped a lot to help sociologists think differ about all of this and he was not a popular writer so in this room I can just bet you no one except me has ever heard of him except that if sociology had a Nobel Prize he would have won the first one not just for this but for many many many important works that he did but anyway he has a kind of funny name it's a Dudley Duncan Dudley Duncan a very funny name it's even funnier because his full name is Otis Dudley Duncan and Otis Dudley Duncan came up with a scheme that has a kind of lovely feeling to it it's poet isn't that sweet isn't that nice isn't that not dismal and in a way it's not dismal because Duncan says that there are really four factors that go into creating a civilization and make it be alive and allow it to survive and they're all in interaction with one another so P stands for it's not do a little Sesame Street here P stands for population o and use sociology students now we'll we'll get on to this you know just where this is going organization that's our big fabulous sociological element in poet and then environment is is what this week's lesson is about the nature and the physical environment that that surrounds us and then tea anybody wanna technology is right that man has just won $85 on low budget programs like this tech nah low G there you go and there are these four elements but also these elements are always in interaction with one another so people however many there are are doing things like big and building pyramids and inventing cars and drilling for oil they're doing all of those things they are using technology in doing it they're organized like the modern corporation that allows so many of the things I just rattled off or explorations as when Queen Isabella said go get me stuff those are organizational forces that people put into motion which of course impact the environment in major major ways by today we would say polluting the world in those days we would have said by making things nicer by putting beaches and resort hotels on that very land that Christopher Columbus stuck his pole in the sand and said this is for Queen Isabella and now let's get our microbes spread among those people and then that came back on them now didn't it and affected the population in one of the great historic die-offs in the history of the world so all of these I think I hid all of them didn't I you can go through anything and go through the same sort of pattern so smog in Southern California or wherever it strikes its ugly head it is it can be understood in much the same way and duncan indeed used smog as one of his illustrations of how you could understand the way the world works only by seeing these four forces as in continuous interaction lots of people move to Southern California that move is made possible by the history of colonialism by the deaths of the native peoples and there they are they use technology to create a source of oil other people do but sometimes the people are indeed Los Angeles because Southern California first began its oil development only two years after titusville in Pennsylvania and the discovery of oil and it's the capacity to commercially exploit it only two years later which delivered very cheap gasoline which eventually makes possible not so far into the future the development of cheap automobile transportation which then pumps all kinds of crap into the environment the very sunshine beautiful skies environment that brought many of these white people into Southern California in the first place and so it goes the then the air is destroyed pollution happens people are dying at an earlier stage of life than they otherwise would and and there you go but along comes and here's our ray of hope and sunshine that's coming on this little story because what eventually happens is is that some people in California say wait a minute this has got to stop and they pass legislation Jerry Brown who's come back again into the politics of California is becomes governors many other things happen the environmental movement takes hold that's still another movement of that time and new laws are passed and as a result of the new laws being passed the environment is much improved the rates of smog go down a whole lot more people live than would otherwise have done so and it's made possible by changes in technology which among other things are are urged on by this new legislation and this o that's located there as the second piece of the poet's scheme so a never-ending set of dynamic movements between these various elements of population environment and technology and mostly we of course we concentrate on the O because that's where the sociological magic happens and this is the sociological class will you all know that now there is a thriving Environmental Studies department here at NYU we're the last significant University to ever have one because of the Woody Allen instinct I think I fear but now woody loses and the environment the environment gains a friend in the NYU department well what about that Population Bomb and all of that where are we with all of that because the scheme of Pio ET still leaves plenty of room for population to be seen as a major force in order to get all of this going to get attention on the other pieces of the puzzle for the modern environmental movement to overcome the influence of Paul Ehrlich just having really chosen one thing there have been a lot of arguments put forward to try to overcome that and just the other day I was somewhere on a panel and the the person I shared the program with that does the same thing again it's it's like being sitting with Paul Ehrlich we dealt we have too many people if we don't get a handle on this problem we can't solve any problem and I'm thinking oh my goodness important people still think like that and we've got to we've got to do something well I'm going to lecture in social one that's what I'm gonna do to try to change this way of thinking well so here so here here I am and here we go one thing is what we what we know is that a prime impact on birth rates is things that take place within that oh so for example literacy if you can create literacy you cause birth rates to drop and we watch that happen all over the world so the Paul Ehrlich's of the world think that if you that the problems of for example people not having resources and governments Oh not having resources to educate people is because we have too many people if you have too many people there are too many on the Commons you have to service their needs and there's nothing left over for example to help build them schools you'll never build enough schools for all of those children but wait a minute maybe it works the other way round that the number of people that we have is actually due to the how much education we have so the place to intervene is in Oregon organizationally doing things like getting hold of politics or influencing politics and then changing the amount of literacy and illiteracy in the world and then there will be decreases in in birth rates another thing that we notice is that some people of the world have transformed their birth rates through other processes which are beyond literacy although literacy is indeed part of it but a quad in effect a super modernization of the way people live and the way people think so Italy for example which is a Catholic country a catholic catholic catholicism is both the official language of the country a official religion of the country as well as the massively practiced religion of the country and we used to think that the italians had among the highest birth rates in the world because they were following religious doctrine but in fact these other factors that make up the organizational structure of society which may have to do with the changing role of women in the world the coming of industrialization and the modernization of the economy and the transformation of basic field and farming rural economies transformed the italian birth rate and so italy it may still be the case but in recent years Italy went from among the higher birth rates in the world to the lowest birth rate in the world and the Italians are not reproducing themselves they have zero population growth they have lower than Z then Z P G zero population growth and so Wow something can happen and this runs very counter to this idea of the tragedy of the Commons at least when it comes to human reproduction they don't just keep doing it do they I'm sure the Italians I'm not sure of anything but I assume the Italians are having sex and maybe even more than ever and maybe more enjoyable than ever but they are not reproducing themselves like they used to and indeed are not reproducing themselves at all there is also a world famous economist named a March SN I'll give you his his last name who works in in Britain I think a Cambridge University he's quite old now he's of Indian origin and sen points out he thinks that women's rights are critical to this dynamic so it's another organizational factor that if women have control over their own bodies and he's thinking about third world environments and developing countries like India but also sub-saharan Africa where reproduction rates are very high he thinks that where women have in effect this modernistic notion that they control their own bodies and that means they will be not as subject to men's whims for sexuality under conditions that men dictate which is regardless of where they are in their cycle regardless of whether birth control of any means is being used by any body so the best way to get a hold of the reproduction issue is by changing the social organizational reality and that in particular means providing women with more rights and capacities than they otherwise would be entitled to so gender enters into the apparatus and how we organize how gender relations are organized one of the themes that we took up took up earlier earlier in the class so those are some bullet points of how to understand the contingency of population and how it operates in the world and indeed whether or not it increases or decreases that it's due to these other factors which come first in the causal chain or at least are in dynamic relationship with it which would be Duncan's way of thinking now here are some other attacks and these I'm sure will be familiar to many of you but maybe not to all of you and I can give you the data how many vegetarians do we have in the room well ok great so you are already sold thank you for participating in today's survey about a third I saw roughly a third of the people in this room and vegetarianism in the United States is itself a social movement not necessarily completely organized although somewhat organized that has has changed things especially in sophisticated environments such as this and make this kind of data I'm now going to give you not quite the data that we would find outside this room so in the United States the average American eats you want to know the number I know you want to know the number in the course of a year one thousand four hundred and sixty pounds of meat and that is like a whole lot and versus in the rest of the world it is 255 pounds per head per head of human so we are a a really man we are meat eaters and as you know the fact that our taste runs to me that we've organized so much of our society around meat McDonald's is the street corner place meat and espera and coffee is what is I think our most common retail environmental experience so it is also readily available and of course the fact that we have the taste for it which is cultural many people of the world do not eat meat I just want to make that in a way forcefully that what we take to be perhaps a natural thing to do is not natural at all we have about a third of the students in this room who don't eat meat but when you look around the world there are hundreds of millions of people who don't eat meat and among people who do eat meat there are tremendous variations in what meats they will eat and what meats they will not so Islamic people Hindu people don't the large numbers don't eat meat at all but Islamic people and Jews don't eat pork now I go to the pork business story because many some of you are Jews and maybe you keep kosher or live a kosher life or at least don't eat pork the ways in which people will not eat certain things they will not eat horses for example and I think probably no one in this room has eaten horse and if I told you that's what we're having for lunch you would be appalled there's nothing of course wrong with horse meat I've heard it's good I don't know some people don't eat rabbits because they're too cute there are various things that people don't do my point in raising this is to is to get at how taste varies and how deeply-held are these notions of what you should eat and what you shouldn't eat so my point is is that the reason why we use up so much of the common for the purpose the environmental common for the purpose of raising meat is not due to the fact that we have so many people it's due to the fact that the zeal for for meat is held by so many people who can command the resources who are organized in order to get it done and that means of course a great deal of Earth is polluted a great deal of topsoil is is is destroyed a great deal of industrialization takes place a great deal of methane is put into the atmosphere all sorts of bad things happen from mad people not from population per se but rather by what their proclivities are in terms of the fact that they it's like not liking Chevrolet's but in fact wanting a nobody wants to Toyota anymore a Hyundai or whatever that case sensibility might be except that the food sensibilities are much deeper than attachment to a brand of car but it is something that varies around the world not because people can have it or can't have it but because of these deep cultural preferences that people have or don't have and the way they are organized to be able to have it or not or not to be able to have it so more data I've given you the meat story if we look at resources in general people have tried to figure out how much resources are used by people in the rich countries compared to those in the poor countries the most extreme the piece of little factoids that I've seen is a comparison between Americans who are of course the gluttons of resources of the world and Ethiopians who use a very little of the world and that ratio is three hundred and sixty five to one the uses 365 times the resources of an average Ethiopian in this world so that means that if you just look at a glance at a number like that it starts telling you once again that the poppy thing is not the central problem that we have its rather how we owe it the letter O and the way we see it attach it to that ode of that type to various technologies and the kinds of consequences that then happen on the e on the on the environment and how that works so the world is differently organized to make different kinds of things happen and we have again the good news the sunshine in all of this is that we see that rapid rates and changes have taken place just like in birth rates well in other force forms as well so one of the to pick up Otis Dudley Duncan's musings about Southern California and pollution again we can talk about the car and it was not only an organizational feet to create cars create highways create cheap oil and cheap oil and all of that and and in the internal combustion engine rather than say steam engines which were being developed at about the same time as the automobile engine the arrival of the cheap oil pushed car production in the direction of the gasoline powered engine as opposed to the steam powered car engine which existed at the same moment if the cheap oil hadn't have come we probably would not have the automobile engine that we do but anyway that's the way it happened and at a certain point I think it might have been in the late 1940s 1950s it was decided that the fact that our fuel for cars could be improved by putting lead in the car lead in the in the fuel lead in gasoline and when I was growing up that was proclaimed with great pride that there was lead in the in the gasoline at this gas station I know if it was Exxon and there was an Exxon then whatever it was as opposed to the other competition which didn't have lead in their gasoline and so all the companies put lead in the gasoline it turns out that lead which was supposed to make your car engine run better in fact was a detriment to your car engine but by then a huge following had developed for having led in the car in the fuel it later turned out that lead was having horrible effects on horrible environmental effects I think some of the people who we see stumbling around New York who don't know where they are and what they're doing some of those people crazy people wingnuts as the nears people sometimes call them these people are victims of lead poisoning either in paint or in gasoline of a prior era they get the it's been taken out of the paint let is no longer legal in paint it has been taken out of the fuel and now our quality of life has been much improved and the people who were most vulnerable have or have been particularly have made particulars and those people who are vulnerable are poor people who tend to live approximate to highways and highway interchanges where the where the error is worse from from automobile exhausts and from people who live in old buildings that are badly maintained or her using old products which contain lead from a prior era taking lead out of products has reduced the amount of lead in the brain of Americans and that's been well documented and many people are having better lives than they otherwise would this possibility by the way that that the environment and intervening in the environment has unequal consequences has been much too by a social movement that came after the initial environmental movement but is very much alive and well and it is the movement for what's called environmental justice and that means that the goal of environment of environmentalism should not be to save species and cute-cute species and let it go with that or even sometimes it is argued that much of the environmental movement is off target because it doesn't pay attention to the detrimental effects of a bad environment on specific populations that we have to stop dumping our garbage where the poor people of the United States live and dumping our garbage where the poor people of the world live which is where so much of our trash increasingly goes like our computer parts that are no longer used that end up in a third-world setting where those people have to deal with the consequence okay so let's continue our march through oh and the way in which organizing the world ie sociologically participating in the world creates so many of these environmental consequences so last time I talked about the modern corporation and its birth and since the vast amount of activity that occurs in the world now happens through the the economy and through corporations then it means that all of those mechanisms that young marine Young who was the former student of mine whose work I brought to your attention all of those activities are environmental interventions that whatever corporations do that affect the environment are a result of the ways in which they're organized and the way in which they are not organized so how do we intervene I mentioned before the sick assesses that we've taken lead out that in that California has led the country in terms of improving air quality through regulations that have been put into place regulations are maybe an answer maybe the answer but it's also the case that there is resistance to regulation and every day's newspapers are of course filled with stories of the way in which corporations just like in the way Maureen young was talking about it in the 19 late 19th century that those corporations don't just lie and play dead they're very active in making these things not happen or happen and change or the way in which it works they are joined and if we talk about politics and the political economy which I did so much of last week they're joined by many modern many ordinary people in the United States who think that government is always a threat even when that government is engaged in organizing the corporation for what it's at the advocates of change think of as the public good so we have increasingly learned and and this is not sort of a friendly amendment to Marxist and people who make and see right mills and the idea of the power League and the people who think that these elites run everything we are increasingly disturbed we who might believe that by the evidence that ordinary Americans as evidenced by the tea party in the current and currently in the news that ordinary Americans joined forces with these corporate elites knowingly or unknowingly that's a subject that probably scholars are just only now investigating but we do know that the Republican Party and the anti regulatory elements of the Republican Party have many people in them whose privileges and rights would be enhanced by the regulatory schemes of the Democrats which they then resist and they fight so whether it's coming from the corporations or whether it's coming from their allies there are resistances that need to be taken to into account and I just want to give you a couple of ideas about that resistance that are not in the papers but they're kind of overarching no phenomena that we've realized really now for several generations are built into the dynamic of American politics and thus affect the environment as well as many other things and one of them is the idea of capture and what capture means and this has been developed primarily by political scientists in in the u.s. capture means that the the industries that are to be regulated capture the people who are regulating them so they capture the government agencies so the Security and Exchange Corporation which was created to be our guardian of the marketplace and a fair marketplace and minimize opportunism and ways of rigging markets and ways of exploiting the system in order to keep that greatest good for greatest number alive we know that these financial overlords created by the government some of them as a result of Franklin Roosevelt and the fair deal that they get captured by the very industries that they are right supposed to regulate and how would they get captured they get captured in a number of ways first of all when we talked about the media there's the issue a gender what these regulatory agencies do are is boring and the the scandals the issues the problems that go on are ordinarily not part of our media scape and that's why for example nobody quote nobody of the vast majority of never saw this financial catastrophe coming because it happened through a series of decisions and non decisions that were made going back to the Clinton administration but then intensifying under President Bush that each in their individual quality is utterly boring and utterly tedious so unlike you know the slogan I gave you when we talked about newspapers if it bleeds it leads there's no bleeding and there's no imminent catastrophe it isn't like a fire in Chinatown here in New York where 30 people are killed or there's the sensation of vast amount of flames going up into the sky nothing like that is going on and so that enables anyone who is really motivated to read the fine print to visit their politicians to indeed do so and be able to have an influence that they might otherwise not have had so there is capture that takes place and then of course there's campaign contributions that are made to the politicians or supposed to be supervising these government agencies and that those campaign contributions are heavily directed toward the very people who in Congress are supposed to be doing the oversight the oversight committees as they're called of those government agencies that the lobbyists are most concerned about influencing the other term that is often been used by the political scientists is the term of co-optation and that is that the people who are running those agencies even when they want to do differently are co-opted eventually and they're co-opted by lawyers who give them good arguments but they're also co-opted by their own employment opportunities so to just get right give you one prominent example right now Timothy Geithner who is the secretary of the Treasury has made his life not on well he's made his life a lot of it on Wall Street but not himself as a traitor he has been primarily a government servant a bureaucrat as they like to say and of course he's had a huge wonderful salary and I'm sure he lives a very high standard of living and has been living that high standard of living but when he leaves his office when President Obama tells him it's time to go or when he says I want to spend more time with my family he will be ushered into the major financial corporations of the world and he will I think it's safe to say I'll bet die a billionaire rather than die a millionaire to the degree to which if you are if you are regulating an industry that will want you eventually then you're going to have a much more lucrative future than if you are involved in evaluating and regulating and industry and a sector that is not going to want you and and again we refer to this as a revolving door we have many many examples of this how people leave but the timber industry this was especially true under the Republicans leave the timber industry and become part of the Department of the Interior then they leave the Department of Interior and they go back to the timber industry or to the mining industry a revolving door which keeps the influence of the industries within the regulatory apparatus both because of where the people have been beforehand and where they're going to go after word and it fuses it further fuses the regulator the regulator's with the regulated and in a way that is only only a little bit subtle but that goes on and on and doesn't change well how else does well so this has worked and people have written both historians and political scientists and sociologists have done the long march through all the regulatory agencies through the Environmental Protection Agency through the timber industry the trucking industry we subsidize trucks in a way we don't railroads cars and freeways in a way we don't mass transit in trains and we just keep that going on and on according to again another one of my former students here at NYU who did a wonderful PhD on the garbage her name oops MA see Samantha McBride she works for the city's sanitation department as an official she doesn't actually pick up the trash um and Samantha took up the subject of recycling and here's the unhappy recycling story recycling accounts for in its potential 2% of the waste produced in the United States - I said TW oh I didn't say that 2 percent of the waste is recycled I said 2 percent is potentially recyclable under our system that we have of curbside recycling and all the places we put our bottles and cans and all the rest of it it is hugely successful some cities now recycle 50% 60% even of all their trash maybe even some are higher those are the numbers I know and they're moving higher and higher and higher and so isn't that a fabulous thing and in a way it really is because it shows the lack of selfishness in the society it shows there is a capacity to organize it all and have the blue trash bins as opposed to the white trash bins and all of us do it we walk around with our plastic bottle in fear of putting it in the wrong place and I think even we do it in New York other cities like Aspen Colorado or Boulder Colorado or in California they those people are really religious about it so we have all of this massive human behavior going on that is not self-seeking unlike say the economists would have it as a fundamental notion that everyone is self-seeking but that's not the case because we are doing all this massive recycling but it doesn't amount to much in the larger scheme of things and that's because about ninety percent according to Samantha McBride about ninety percent of the waste generated in the United States is by production so it's not the bottle and what we do with it as consumers that matters it's instead what went into making the bottle in the first place and making the beverage in the first place that's what created the pollution it's not what and why you do will will do with the seats of that you're sitting on once it decides to remodel this building and puts them in the trash heap which is not cool but if that's not the problem the problem is what it took to create the seats that you're sitting on and that of course also are destroying your body and interfering in your bowel movements as well as many other evil attributes that those are doing but it's the production of them that's the problem and McBride says that that evolved historically because of the fact that the corporation's joined in the recycling movement and supported it with great enthusiasm this was not a danger to them in a way that interfering with the production apparatus would have been and so it's a matter of political reality the shift takes place and she traces out how gradually over recent history the environmental movement and environmental organizations became altered in the direction the preponderance direction of their organizing and Lobby and in effect the environmental movement was to put it in extreme terms captured or co-opted into this direction of being non hazardous to corporations as opposed to being non hazardous to human beings and so it goes the corporations are now in many cases our largest corporations are larger than whole countries in the world in terms of the amount of revenues that that they have in terms of their richness and in terms of their capacity to influence the exert influence not only in the United States but in other parts of the globe as well although the US is may be among the most sympathetic now I give you another factoid that you may enjoy we have much discussion now about where our future energy is going to come from and once again we have that set of choice points which is do we do renewable resources do we do nuclear or do we continue with coal and petroleum and of course the corporations are setting themselves up differently depending upon where they are in all of that apparatus and what it is that they do but the point is they are part of the events that will take place in terms of who's been captured who's been co-opted and what will actually be the outcome and I for one don't believe that it is necessarily the truth that the corporations will lose and it might be that particular ones will lose and other ones won't so President Obama has endorsed the nuclear industry and will engage in massive government subsidies of the nuclear industry but he seems less keen on coal although he's even a bit pliable on that as well as oil and offshore oil drilling but to give you a cold factoid that's what I started out wanting to give you it's it's the estimates are our coal plants emit enough pollutant to result in 24,000 deaths annually in the United States that are preventable deaths through the pollution of the air each of these things that goes on in the environment can be quantified too often and turned into deaths per annum and secondhand smoke in the United States kills about 14,000 people every year in a ways that otherwise otherwise wouldn't occur so when you manipulate the environment your nipple ating life and death and distributing it differently than it otherwise would be distributed since as a rule of thumb it's poor people who are going to get dumped on more than more than other kinds of people well again I want to just also I keep mentioning the sunshine the rays of sunshine in all of this we have cleaned up our waterways of the United States in remarkable degrees during the Bush administration some of these were reversed mining safety some compromises were made but in the history of mines in the United States the regulation of mining has caused there to be a drop of 3/4 in the number of people who died in mining it's just another way of saying that these interventions can take place and these interventions can can make their move can can work well finally how can I bring your attention to some still larger issues and that's what I and that's what I want to do right now it is often put that there is a trade-off that must be made between the environment on the one hand and economy on the other and indeed that's been made at the presidential level one of the bases of the popularity of President Reagan Ronald Reagan he ran this of morning morning in America he said that there was no reason for Americans to be deprived of their standard of living and that meant for him bring on the oil bring on the coal let's decrease our restrictions on the environment he wasn't totally successful in that but anyway that was the direction of his thinking and President Carter who was running for re-election pressed forward the idea that no it's a time for sacrifice because of all of these anxieties about the environment that turned out to be a terrible strategy that looking back everybody believes because Americans don't want to be told that they need to sacrifice in their material lives and for for anything and that the environmental difficulties which are the slow gradual mostly invisible problems that come down the pike are just not going to get are not going to get a good answer well what I want to do is try to complete that loop and say that there what there are ways in which there is no no no opposition between the economy on the one hand and environment on another and that's true in a number of ways one way is the way we measure the economy and how we think about it we use a it used to be we've refined it since the gross gross national product sometimes it's called the GDP the gross domestic product and that is the scale of all the economic activities that take place in the United States and that GNP or GDP is the bellwether of how well we're doing it's the summary statistic and if the GNP goes up we're doing great if the GNP or GDP goes down we're not doing so well and you can do that state-by-state they figured out ways to do it for cities by themselves what's the total volume of all economic activity well I had an economist a professor when I was an undergraduate who thought this was a terrible statistic a terrible way of understanding how well a people are doing how well we're doing and rather than gross national product he said it really should stand for the words gross national pain because all it measures is how much work it is to get our lives lived so if for example we lived in a paradise Eden in fact where all you had to do was put your hand up and grab lunch and the temperature never went below 70 degrees and never went above 72 degrees then that would have a gross national product of zero right and yet you are in paradise paradise has a gross national product of zero so how come we just want to get farther and farther from paradise and the farther we get from paradise the better we think we're doing so sales of syphilis the sale of tobacco counts as a positive in the gross national product all all like that that the sale of the cigarettes adds to the gross national product and then the surgery for lung cancer that NYU hospital performs also counts in the gross national product so what you what you're just showing is that in this case this because it's consumed in both the consumption of the cigarettes and the consumption of the surgery to deal with the cigarettes and then of course also the funeral expenses and the flowers all of that goes on the plus sign of of a good economy and that then raises the point and people like my economics professor that I had as an undergrad is to say no no no having these economic statistics is not sufficient we have to think substance substantively about what we're getting as we go through our pain as we do our effort what are we getting out of it and so it is that certain things are not counted so when the coal companies pollute the air we have to pay our least I think we do in places I've lived you have to pay for the garbage to be picked up when I lived in California it was private so I try to check every month to the garbage company for picking up my garbage in a city the city has to pay for the garbage to be picked up if you operate a coal plant and the coal and the bank and you're finished with the production apparatus and it goes up the smokestack and into the air it's garbage in another form but you're paying nothing for that garbage to enter the world no and nobody's buying it literally nobody's buying your garbage nobody's being employed to take away your garbage it's just going and so it's not part of the GNP it is not deducted from the GNP it's a hidden cost so all our environmental costs are hidden so they're just there that's the point and if we can get the GNP up it doesn't matter that we're getting the hidden costs up as well and economists have a word for those hidden costs I think I've given it to you in the in in the past and it is externality that they notice economists do that sometimes when people do things there are external consequences and they are sometimes they are negative externalities and when these negative externalities occur there is no way for them to be built into the market so there's no way when you buy a pack of cigarettes for it too also the price to contain the cost of for example the treatment in the hospital for the people who get lung cancer and that then throws the whole thing off so one final way in which we can think about the environment and the economy as not being in opposition to one another and that is that so many economic activities have a little environmental consequences or at least less than others and the whole development of the so called learning economy the postmodern economy the creative economy the kinds of things that go on for example on your iPhone and iPod so much of that it consists of human beings sitting on chairs in front of a screen and figuring out in new ways what to do and it has a whole lot of different consequence on the environment compared to other activities not to say that Apple computer doesn't have environmental consequences they do but if you stack up say the Apple Corporation or youlet Packard versus Exxon versus the cult the coal companies and the petroleum industry the chemic chemical industry a very small number of operators of industries and corporations create the great preponderance of pollution in the world including global warming as a problem and getting control of them is quite critical so the idea that there is an opposition between the environment on the one hand and the economy on the other causes us not to pick and choose and think about well which types of economic activities are actually the most destructive and maybe we need to regulate those more and regulate the so-called creative economy in a way that encourages their growth and development let's bring on the alternative technologies the appropriate technologies the renewable energy technologies let's get them going otherwise if you just think that regulation for the benefit of the environment is a cost you miss the boat that sometimes it's more of a cost than other times and the evolution of the economy and where the wealth is is increasingly obviously not in those exploitative economies that have the worst effect on nature but on those economic sectors which actually right on the surface have less economic detrimental less environmental detrimental consequences than the ones who are the most backward in the society and I use the word backward not only because they're at the backward end of the history of economic development but also backward in that they are the most resistant to social change they are the most lined up with the anti-regulatory ideologies in general in other words Steve Jobs I don't know his politics but I assume he's probably an Obama guy as opposed to the oil industry which is very lined up historically with while President Bush was a revolving goat went through the revolving door of mineral extraction including the the oil industry so it's all once again aligned and what I'm trying to do is get you to think about the fact to question this idea of economy and environment as having some oppositional quality see you on Thursday as we wend our way

Channel: New York University

Views: 10,512

Rating: 4.6883116 out of 5

Keywords: open ed, nyu

Id: TTbgnkWscKo

Length: 67min 13sec (4033 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2011