Environmentalism without Economic Change

I finished Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things recently. The book presents a lot of great ideas about how to rethink the way we approach things like manufacturing and housing. These are areas that definitely need to be approached differently.

One thing the authors have a track record on is analyzing the various chemicals available for different industrial processes and eliminating known problems. More of this cannot be bad. Most importantly, they lay a groundwork upon which more research needs to be done for there to be real human-centric progress.

There’s a limitation to their approach, however, and it was clarified for me by a simple comparison between what’s presented in the book and how things played out. A chapter late in the book talks about the Ford Rouge plants and lists a long number of design changes there when they rebuilt some of the facility. If you drive past the Rouge now, there is certainly a lot of greenery filling much of the open space. They also implemented the pressurized air approach to atmospheric control within the plant. Problem is, since they were put into place a few years ago, half the blowers stopped working and there has been no maintenance done on them. Then there’s the “living roof.” This caused a number of “problems” – the most prominent being that it attracted “unwanted” gulls and pigeons. To counterbalance this, you now have at the Rouge what is called the “roof of death.” This is where poisons have been laid to kill all those birds (bit of contradiction to the principles here, I think). And when the wind blows, the decayed carcasses and other detritus come to earth and create a health hazard for the workers there.

The failing, like with books such as Fast Food Nation, is that their final proposals lie within the capitalist system and its reliance upon profit. The core proposals and ideas are good, and I recommend the books, but they always hit the wall of this economic system. Certainly, a niche can be carved out wherein the dwindling “middle class” can feast on safer food, enjoy safer products, and live healthier lifestyles, but without changing the economic system, these kinds of changes will be more about PR than human lives.