re: environment, II

From: Eric Mielants <br00668@binghamton.edu>:

> It seems to me it does not overemphasize
>population, but just takes it into account.
>Of course people in the core pollute much more than people in the periphery
>-and then one can debate how much- but can one go so far to claim that one
>billion people more or less in the periphery does not matter as far as
>environmental destruction is concerned? That population growth is
>irrelevant and has no correlation with environmental crises? Of course
>population growth can not be separated from the operation of a capitalist
>world economy, which sets the stage for major environmental crises, but is
>it not naive to claim that 'people are not the problem' as if this planet
>can sustain ANY amount of humans ? 

        Actually, I share your concern particularly the last line of the
above quote. However, environmental impact regardless of population is
mediated through the organization of population and the organization of
consumption. There's nothing called abstract population that we can use as
some modernist salvation tool to point to and blame, that leads to the 'one
right way' of solving environmental degradation. The power of such modernist
discourses themselves are typically carriers and destroyers of environmental
variation, and it is environmental variation, locality and specificity that
require institutionalizing in a sense to move towards sustainability.

         There is nothing called abstract population pressure to justify
this concern with population 'acting' in the background here. Instead of
population in the abstract being a convenient and manipulatable discourse of
blame for everything, let's concentrate on first addressing the more direct
relationships visible, then we can play with the metaphysics of the
interrelationships of organization of the population and how that effects
consumption. 
        As I was saying though, I am seriously skeptical that there is a
generalizable statement we can make about how population influences
consumption. It's involved in a great deal of contextualities ,about the
organizational of the population, political structures, particular raw
materials, etc.  If there is nothing called abstract population, there is
nothing called abstract environmental degradation either that requires
abstract solutions. The solution is to recognize the variability, and from
there we can generalize how to support variability.  Both of the abstracted
modernist discourses typically lead to external social engineering
frameworks that further abet difficulties of institutionalizing and
maintaining the variations ('in general') that require supporting.
        Any abstracts/discourses that typically support rationalizing and
simplifying human environmental relationships on tenuous modernist
metaphysical arguments, typically promote environmental degradation. This is
done in the name of 'population reduction' because population reduction is
seen as 'the issue' in this modernist framework.  Instead, let's more
directly consider the issue as environmental degradation and it's variation,
instead of playing with this constructed proxy of abstract population that
is an affront to sustainability anyway.  In other words if we can see that
environmental degradation is occurring because of corporate forms of
extraction and lack of political representation, it is astounding that
people would regardless want to have some modernist abstract to have faith
in, in view this as a population issue. They should instead blame their own
modernism for simplifying our conceptions of human societies, citizenship
and the environment in general for this.  

        So what do I 'do' with this unabstract sense population you ask? for
me, the 'population issue' is more a question of urbanization and the
political economy of urban expansion (and only the urban expressions that
are predominately supported by distanciated consumption and their
consumptive links to the corporate form). This is what should be curtailed,
instead of population. By curtailed I mean politically balanced with
maintaining environmental variability and social variability, particularly
through localization of consumption or at least deinstitutionalizing the
state backed frameworks that lead markets to tilt in this 'underwritten'
form of environmental degradation. There's a state command economy I would
say involved in every instance of environmental degradation, instead of
something called population pressure--particularly for the small population
group in the United States.   I can only see population as mediated through
this urban expansion, within host states, instead of a phenomenon in itself,
because urbanization is (typically) part and parcel of the expansion of
distanciated consumption relationships. Still, there's nothing called
abstract urbanization either that we can fall back upon as a discourse, if
the goals are sustainability.
        And if urbanization and consumption relationships are the issue
instead of population per se (the 'out' used by states and corporations to
justify more and more distanciated market scales and the destruction of
local specificity of laws and frameworks of political expression that would
protect the environment), , the 'solution' is a greater degree of political
input on the citizenship level where people are having their environment
eaten out from under them. Blame environmental degradation on
unrepresentative states and state abetment if you want a narrative story to
tell about it. Perhaps a rallying cry would be "no degradation without
representation?" This perhaps explains all the various attempts to legally
challenge United States corporations by the citizens of other states, they
are seeking this representation that is justifiably theirs, more than the
citizens and courts of the state in question because it is their
environment. They are living there and experience the externalized costs.

        Environmental degradation is a political regime, instead of a
technophilic population  regime. And if it lacks a technical solution, it
requires a political framework to protect and allow for feedback from the
local level, regardless of how distanciated that local level is, with the
aim of course less to 'green' corporations and more to localize consumption
from contexts away from degrading relationships of distanciated 
consumption.  
        I fail to see 'The Large Population Lobby' working to promote
environmental degradation.  It is typically the lobbying of TNCs and states
that are associated with expanding short-term iterative environmental
degradation in a distanciated way, and in demoting local forms of
consumption and its durability. 

        When population becomes the proxy/symbol for fighting environmental
degradation, environmental degradation expands since this relationship has
to be interpreted and is supportive of various political economic frameworks
that typically demote locality and local political feedback or of even
addressing economic organization of societies. As a rather fuzzy
relationship as it relates to policy translation, expanding TNCs and
degradation backed states get to show they are symbolically 'doing
something' by blaming the victim of their/our consumption-translated
depredations in the name of modernist development. 
         In other words, it's less that numbers matter at all. Only certain
types of 'consumptive clientelism' relationships matter, typically through
urbanization/TNC/state relationship. It's this consumptive clientelism that
should be politically opposed. 

        While your point is taken, I feel it is juggling a misplaced subject
of inquiry.  I feel we can expect that any activities that are legitimated
in the name of causing future population reduction will conveniently always
have the argument that 'well, we should do more and more of this, because
it's yet to start working.' This misses how the specific institutionalized
solution, in a very Nietzschian sense, is causing the problem in the first
place--as well as allowing the actual direct issues, the organization of
politics and economics as they relate to the environment,  to be avoided
with the pageantry of modernist generalized solutions.


Regards,


Mark Whitaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison