Like most of the problems confronting modern man, those of environmental congestion and pollution resist swift and simple solutions. There is no single cause lending itself to a single cure. Rather, each problem is a synthesis of several, all springing from multiple causes. Much of the current discussion on the environment, however, reveals little or no understanding of these complexities.
The desire to ferret out causes and to swiftly apply remedies has led to speculation about several isolated factors as single determinants of environmental deterioration. Rapid population growth has been placed at the head of the list—an assignment which is deflecting attention from factors of more immediate bearing that are further down the list or absent from it altogether.
Although population growth is the source of many pressing problems, it is not the major factor in environmental pollution now. It is quite likely that it will aggravate the situation in the long run, but to consider the reduction of fertility as the sole response to present problems is to consider a woefully inadequate solution. Effective national measures for enhancing environmental quality must be based on knowledge about the complex and interacting processes that actually underlie pollution, rather than on the popular assertion that population growth alone is to blame.
These processes—the major determinants of environmental pollution in the United States today—can be stated simply: high per capita consumption based on high per capita income, combined with a sophisticated and powerful technology. Some elements of this combination have been recognized and singled out as villains, but as a formula, it is incompletely understood.
Electric power generation—a favorite contemporary villain—illustrates the point. Ninety percent of the growth in power generation in the last thirty years has been caused by higher per capita consumption and only 10 percent by population growth. Were we to consider anything above the 1940 level of electric power generation incompatible with sound environment, we would be unable to tolerate a US population today of more than 20 million, assuming current per capita consumption. Or, taking the present population for granted, we would have to slash per capita consumption by 90 percent.
The pervasive effect of income is surprising. The rise of beef consumption in the past two decades would have been only about 35 percent if based on population growth alone. Instead, it rose 120 percent because per capita use went up 75 percent—and now commercial feedlots are a new environmental problem.
The issue is far more complex regarding technology. To begin with, technology-induced problems form a spectrum, extending from nuisances, inconveniences, and insults to our aesthetic sensibilities all the way to potential threats to the life-supporting capacity of the earth. Similarly, the remedies range from fairly simple and cheap technological and institutional modifications to exceedingly costly ones involving a wholesale revamping of our way of life.
A given technology takes on “good” or “bad” characteristics according to its time, place, and purpose. The internal combustion engine, for example, did not come under indictment as a polluter of air until recently, but preoccupation with the motor vehicle as a safety hazard goes back to its very beginnings. (That this long-term concern has not produced effective safety measures is another matter.)
Only ten or fifteen years ago did the growth in the number of motor vehicles justify their inclusion among the major sources of pollutants. The increase of some 35 million vehicles in the last decade has obviously overtaxed the assimilative capacity of the air, especially over metropolitan areas. This may have happened longer ago. Our increasing ability to measure and evaluate environmental conditions reveals that sometimes the assimilative capacity has been exceeded without our recognizing it.
Certain polluting effects, of course, are by-products of the heat produced by the engine. Thus, the transition from the Model T to the souped-up 300-horsepower high-compression model of the contemporary scene contributed greatly to making motor vehicles a serious problem.
Since air has a vast capacity for harmlessly absorbing emissions of gases, there is nothing wrong with using it as an assimilator of wastes, provided we recognize the damage threshold and the cost of the cure if we go over this threshold. Demands for zero emissions or zero tolerance—which easily turn into demands for zero motor vehicles—needlessly compound a difficult situation.
It is the internal combustion engine in its present form that creates the difficulty. If we are lucky, modifications of engine and fuel will correct it at a moderate cost and a minor sacrifice in “performance.” Failing this, new propulsion systems will be required, and this would entail rather far-reaching changes in the economy. But in either event, the difficulty is well defined and the problem is tractable.
Not all technologies are amenable to such painless modification. Some, if pursued without check, could undermine our life supports, and the remedies are less obvious. This leads many to broaden their concern into condemning “the system” under which technology flourishes, including the economic and political organization, and sometimes a vaguely conceived image called “modern man.”
In most instances, the culprit is an amorphous conglomerate of these factors, since they are difficult to separate. For example, unless the producer who advertises environmentally harmful items is matched by a purchaser who is willing to be persuaded, no untoward consequences will emerge.
Our economic structure is based on a market system using costs, prices, and profits as guides to resource allocation. Few would contend that it is free of defects. But there has been no other system in history—nor is there one on the horizon—that has managed so well, at least cost, to allocate resources among myriad possible and competing end uses.
When it comes to disposing of wastes, however, we have no semiautomatic controls analogous to those regulating production and consumption. Indeed, here, the system often works in reverse. Striving for least cost for themselves, producer and consumer both tend to dispose of waste in ways that impose the greatest cost on society. In short, the market economy is a reasonably satisfactory organizing principle for allocating resources in production, but it does not help us—and often hinders us—in organizing the handling of wastes at least cost to society.
Until recently, this deficiency was of little significance. In earlier times, the capacity of the environment to assimilate waste was quite adequate for the then-prevailing levels of population, income, and technology. Consequently, the environment could legitimately be treated as a “free good,” and limitations on its use were not necessary.
This has been true not only in market economies, but also in societies following totally different economic philosophies. Environmental pollution is a problem in the Soviet Union and in the East European satellites. In these nations, too, production and consumption patterns have imposed strains on the environment for which their economic systems provide no corrective. In the Soviet Union, Lake Baikal is the most publicized example; recent banning of DDT is another.
Any organizing principle of production other than one that explicitly assigns a value to environmental factors will tend to use these cost-free aids of production so intensively that, eventually, symptoms of excessive use appear—namely, pollution. Pollution will tend to occur sooner where incomes are high (and per capita production and consumption are also high) and later where incomes are low. Any economic system, however, can be made to respond to environmental considerations, and that is the real challenge.
Economic growth and its yardstick—GNP—also have fallen into disrepute as more of us begin to perceive the connection between high income and consumption and environmental problems. But economic growth need not consist of extras, frills, and planned obsolescence. It can also consist of public goods, including improved environmental quality.
Economic growth should stand for increased options for everybody. In principle, therefore, it is something to embrace. It means moving from spending 70 percent of the household budget on food, as in much of Asia, to spending less than 20 percent, as in this country.
We should take a close look at the consequences of halting growth merely on the ground that wastes are increasing. And it is foolish to attack GNP—a useful indicator of some of the economy’s characteristics, if not of others. GNP tells us nothing about “quality of life” or happiness because it was never intended to register values that are not bought and sold within the economy. Even so, there is good reason to believe that well-being will be greater at $4,000 per capita than at $2,000. Those at the lower end of the scale will be hard to convince to the contrary.
Then there is the corporation. Since it lives by the profit motive, it obviously exploits any cost-cutting opportunity, especially free use of the environment. But this opportunism is not unique to the private corporation. The Soviet Steel Trust behaves exactly as US Steel does. In both instances, only the imposition of specific constraints on the producer brings about consideration for the environment.
The imposition of charges high enough to compensate for environmental damage would stimulate a search for a technology that would help the corporation reduce these charges or escape from them totally. But air, water, and land pollution are alternative ways of managing waste disposal; hence, the charges must be structured to prevent the air polluter from turning around and becoming a water polluter, or vice versa.
With this qualification, there is no reason to believe that competition cannot become a help rather than obstacle to environmental enhancement. In the search for new policies, we have barely scratched the surface of a large potential. The corporation, after all, has come to terms with industrial safety, with minimum wages, with the end of child labor, and with many other institutions that are not in its short-run interest but that society has imposed on it.
It is a perfectly valid contention that the corporation can be made responsive to policies designed to protect the natural environment. The real difficulty lies in translating concepts into a working system.
Everyone knows the problem created by the nonreturnable container. No amount of exhortation will convince the industry to change to a returnable one, nor the consumer to deposit the empties in ways that facilitate their collection and reuse. In both cases, it is a matter of cost. The producer finds it cheaper not to be bothered by collection and reuse. The consumer finds it more convenient—cheaper, that is, in his own way—to dump the container wherever he has emptied its contents.
In this situation, our economic system works in a perverse way, because we do not put a price on access to the environment and because different parts of the economy have developed at different rates and are out of whack. The considerable rise in wages and the costs of services have made collecting and transporting wastes uneconomical. At the same time, no cost inhibition keeps people from dumping the containers all over the landscape.
Logically, this calls for modification of the incentives. If a cost is attached to the dumping, it will (1) keep consumers from engaging in it; (2) make it worth somebody’s effort to collect those containers that are dumped nonetheless; and (3) by encouraging collection, sufficiently reduce the cost of reuse to make it competitive with new material. It would even pay society to subsidize the operation, if that should become necessary to close the cycle.
This approach is applicable to other solid waste problems. Perhaps modification of ownership characteristics will give us something like a “returnable automobile”; returnable not for constant repairs, but in the sense that a residual of ownership remains with the producer and that he must accept responsibility for the vehicle when it has become unserviceable. In that event, he would design the parts of a vehicle for maximum reuse. In addition, he would have an incentive to facilitate collection. This probably would raise the cost of automobiles, but anyone who believes that environmental improvement can be had without cost engages in wishful thinking.
The best disposal policy is not to generate anything to be disposed of; to close the production-consumption cycle without a leak to the environment. This is not possible, of course, for materials like fuels; and recycling itself commonly requires energy and may generate pollutants of its own. The problems posed by disposal of waste heat, by emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere with its long-run potential for climatic change, and by disposal of nuclear fission products are among the most serious environmental issues of the future and will require a vastly increased research effort. But for most solids, reuse will be a realistic goal.
Some forms of environmental injury will require more drastic measures—situations in which the restraint of a price tag is not enough. The use of certain pesticides is a good example. Though our knowledge is incomplete, prudence demands that, with a few exceptions like malaria control, we prohibit the use of DDT rather than rely on a tax to restrain its application.
In most cases, however, intelligent use of economic incentives will do the trick in a matter more compatible with individual freedom, although it will take real political strength to bring about the necessary changes. In this struggle, as in any other, indignation and rational analysis can make a good pair. The first provides momentum; the second protects us from hastily trying to implement unacceptable solutions.
The ecologist insists on the interrelatedness of the components making up an ecosystem. One of the most complicated ecosystems is a modern industrialized society. For that reason, in our attempt to cure our ailing environment, we should be certain the label on the prescribed medicine always bears the admonition “use well before shaking.”
Adapted from a paper by Hans H. Landsberg, presented at an Environmental Teach-in at Pittsburgh, April 3, 1970.