Humans have been stealing from nature for centuries: we cause deforestation to use wood, create pollution by burning coal, and harm biodiversity by drilling for oil. Stealing from nature has become a part of our daily routine, but such action causes destruction: forests are shrinking, global warming is real, and species are going extinct. But if humans decide to take care of nature instead of solely stealing from nature, we can mitigate the destruction we have caused thus far. Mancilla, a PhD in philosophy, explains appeasing and taking care of nature as a call for compromise. She explains: “the natural realm will have to accept limited intrusion from humans, and humans will have to accept that co-existence and not rampant exploitation is the right relationship with the natural world”. This interpretation claims humans can learn to compromise with nature by stopping selfish exploitations.
Compromising with nature sounds good, but how do we perform such compromise? The commonly used but also unclear term “sustainability” is perhaps the definition of compromise between man and nature. In 1987, a United Nations report, World Commission of Environment and Development: Our Common Future, defined “sustainability” as “development that meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. The “needs” include food, water, and shelter, which all require resources of nature such as vegetation and animal meat, freshwater lakes and rivers, and wood for construction (Schock). To meet these “needs” in the present, we must interact with and extract materials from nature, but simultaneously, to allow for the future generations to meet their needs, we must not degrade the entirety of nature or over-exploit it. Unfortunately, the effects of our actions and interactions with nature only materialize after our deaths, decades and centuries later. The human life is too short to witness these disastrous effects, and we tend to focus on the present issues. The capitalism, needs, problems of our present outweigh the possible, unseeable, disastrous effects of the future – human proactiveness to save the planet will never occur.
Sustainability sounds like a perfect solution with a win-win result – both nature and humanity remain satisfied and happy – but we, as a humanity, continue to over-exploit nature through massive deforestation, construction of oil pipes, and wasting of food. Arno Gruen – a Swiss-German psychologist and psychoanalyst – developed a theory on the ‘insanity of normality’ to explain such illogical behavior (Grober). ‘Insanity of normality’ is a concept that “the normal turns into the abnormal and vice versa, as we lose our sense of what is right and what is wrong. In advanced capitalism, competition is perceived as superior to cooperation, the market as more important than community, growth as implicit in development, and money as more real than people and their needs” (Grober). After modernization, much of the world adopted capitalism as a market structure. But capitalism, in valuing competition over cooperation, causes humanity’s sense of right and wrong to be distorted, valuing the self and money over community and people’s needs. Hence, the wrong appears to be the normal. The ‘insanity of normality’ explains our illogical method in interacting with nature: present humans do not care for the needs and the communities of future generations and would rather compete against each other to create faster development than to cooperate with each other and with nature.
‘Insanity of normality’ explains why we don’t think on a long-time scale to leave enough environmental resources behind for our children and their children. But it is not only the future generations that we neglect. We also do not care about the others in the present – the colored, the poor, the marginalized – of today. The prioritizing of individual competition and money has created ‘environmental injustice’ (Sandler). Ronald Sandler’s Environmental Justice and Environmentalism reveals that “race… economic status, elitism and economic disparity are also significant factors in the unequal siting of environmentally undesirable land uses… and denial of just compensation and informed consent in environmental matters”. The poor, the colored, and even the women are first to be affected by an unsustainable environment and must endure the worst negative side effects of degrading nature. The poor tend to have unprofitable land and do not get compensated for climate change and undesirable environmental resources which are all created by unsustainable development (Sandler). Because the poor, the colored, and the marginalized are otherized people or simply a faceless group labeled “community”, the richer controllers of the economy neglect the others, ignoring their own impact in destroying nature, and continue to over-exploit nature for their financial benefit.
Things are looking increasingly hopeless as sustainability just does not seem plausible in our current systems. So, we return to our title: Can capitalism be sustainable? Or is this thought simply an innocent hope? Alfred Marcus, a professor of strategy and technology leadership at the University of Minnesota, believes sustainability is possible. He writes in his book Innovations in Sustainability – Fuel and Food that we can utilize capitalism to further push for sustainability though the promotion of ‘sustainable innovations’. ‘Sustainable innovations’ are creations of new technology and products designed to perform sustainability. An example, given by Marcus, is the “large-scale [solar power] plants, created by a Chinese company called Suntech. Marcus argues such “sustainable innovations” are “in vital interests of society but… [also] a sound business proposition” as they allow businesses to “fulfill their moral obligation to society and simultaneously pursue their obligations to their financial backers and other constituencies”. Suntech successfully appealed to the values of capitalism to sell their environmentally friendly ‘sustainable innovations’ – the large-scale solar power plants – and simultaneously made profit. Marcus goes as far as to say that ‘sustainable innovation’ is the only way for business owners, investors, and other participants in capitalism to fulfill both their societal duties and financial duties. This method uses the pre-existing structure of capitalism to promote sustainability: participants can compete against each other to create better and more ‘sustainable innovations’, and the audience of capitalism – consumers – would want to purchase these innovations. Even our society today reflects this outcome: a “green” company obtains a better reputation. An academic study showed that 49% of consumers support a firm for its causes such as sustainability and that 54% of consumers admitted to being influenced by cause-related advertisement (Mohr). By appealing to the values of capitalism – money and competition – we can promote sustainability with ‘sustainable innovations’.
Capitalism promotes ‘sustainable innovations’, but it also can be sustainable in and of itself. Environmental damage costs money and hurts the economy: in 2011, the air pollution created by U.S. energy usage cost at least $131 billion. The air pollution instigated health problems, creating a social cost (Harvey). Similarly, other environmental damages such as oil spills, global warming, sea level rising, and more requires billions and billions of dollars for social costs such as loss of homes, deteriorating health, and lack of clean drinking water.
So, maybe a sustainable human interaction with nature is possible. While it may seem impossible at first glance due to capitalism’s distortion of our concepts of right and wrong – ‘insanity of normality’ – which leads to ‘environmental injustice’, hurting the marginalized first and most, if we appeal to capitalism’s values of money and competition with “sustainable innovations”, we can progress our society towards sustainability.
Works Cited
Abbey, Kristen L. “‘See with Eyes Unclouded’: Mononoke-Hime as the Tragedy of Modernity.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 2, no. 3, 2015, pp. 113–116., doi:10.5250/resilience.2.3.01 13.
Grober, Ulrich, and Ray Cunningham. Sustainability: A Cultural History, UIT Cambridge Ltd., 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=13 59621.
Harvey, Chelsea. “The Staggering Economic Cost of Air Pollution.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 11 Sept. 2018.
Mancilla, Alejandra. “Avatar vs Mononoke.” Philosophy Now: a Magazine of Ideas, Philosophy Now, 2011, philosophynow.org/issues/85/Avatar_vs_Mononoke.
Marcus, Alfred Allen. “Introduction: The Path to Sustainability.” Innovations in Sustainability – Fuel and Food, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 1–13.
Sandler, Ronald D., and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. Environmental Justice and Environmentalism : The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, edited by Phaedra C Pezzullo, MIT Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detai l.action?docID=3338665.
Schock, Robert N. What Is Sustainability and What Influences It? 1997, pp. 3–5.
World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. United Nations, 1987, pp. 41–43.
Mohr, L.A., Webb, D.J., and Harris, K.E. (2001), Do Consumers Expect Companies to be
Socially Responsible? The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Buying
Behavior. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 35: 45-72.doi:10.1111/j.1745-6606. 2001.tb00102.x