Posted February 27, 2017
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     The Trump administration is taking decisive action in support of corporate interests with respect to the fifty-year conflict between corporations and the ecology movement.  It is in essence a conflict over government regulations, with the ecology movement advocating strong government regulation of corporations in order to protect the environment, and with the corporate world so opposed to regulation that it has undertaken campaigns to confuse the people by creating a false image of division among scientists.

      For example, the Trump administration has taken steps to reorient the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Trump has appointed a long-time opponent of the EPA to be its administrator. And he ordered the EPA to remove the climate change page from its website, a page that includes links to data on greenhouse gas emissions, including data from individual industrial facilities.  Moreover, Trump administration officials have indicated that scientists employed by the EPA will be required to have their research reviewed before permission to disseminate their findings, changing the past policy of encouraging EPA scientists to publish the results of their work in scientific journals.

       The EPA in recent decades has been making available information that supports the conclusion that human forms of production have an adverse effect on the environment, including research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.  Inasmuch as such scientific findings are the basis and the rationale for government regulations that are designed to protect the environment, the dissemination of them by the government undermines the political agenda of the corporations, and to a certain extent it undermines the legitimacy of anti-environmental regulation comments by high public officials.  The Trump administration is attempting to eliminate this inconsistency and to bring the EPA in line with the pro-corporate policy of the Trump administration with respect to the environment.  

     In addition, during his first week in office, Trump issued executive orders that intend to advance the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota is opposed to the construction of the oil pipeline, concerned that a leak could pollute Missouri River drinking water and damage Native American cultural sites.  In reaction to protests that attained national and international attention, the U.S. Corps of Engineers decided in 2016 to delay construction, pending a review for possible alternative routes.  The Trump administration has asked the Corps to expedite the review or rescind its decision to conduct the review, so that an easement can be issued to Energy Transfer Partners, enabling the company to complete the final crossing under the river.

      The tension between the Trump administration and the EPA is one particular manifestation of a general phenomenon of tension between transient high public officials and the permanent bureaucratic structures of the government.  The effort to reorient the EPA can be seen as an indication of the intention of the Trump administration to transform the state bureaucracy in accordance with its ideological vision.  Indeed, chief Trump strategist Steven K. Bannon, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, declared that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” has just begun. 

     The moves by the Trump administration to defend corporate interests with respect to the environment received ample news coverage during the administration’s first week.  But Trump’s January 27 Executive Order on immigration provoked a firestorm and a court battle, thus sidelining the environmental issue.  The intense debate that broke out over the order had a relatively narrow focus, concerning the rights of U.S. residents and visitors from seven countries. Important due process issues are at stake here, and certainly the matter is of great importance to the persons affected.  Nevertheless, the debate on these matters distracted attention from the defense of corporate interests with respect to the environment, and it also contributed to the negation of any possibility for public discussion of the false ahistorical narrative that frames the war on terrorism or of the root causes of uncontrolled international migration (see “Trump and the war on terrorism, Part One” 2/20/2017; “Trump and the war on terrorism, Part Two” 2/21/2017; “Trump on immigration” 2/22/2017).

       One wonders if the January 27 Executive Order was planned deliberately as a distraction.  If so, the liberals took the bait: they reacted with the predictable fury, and they took the lead in distracting the people from the essential.  

      Most transnational corporations for decades have been irresponsibly attempting to deceive the people by hiding or distorting knowledge with respect to the impact of human production and consumption on the environment.  But the ecology movement has not had it entirely right.  As I will discuss in a subsequent post in this series of posts on Trump, the ecology movement formulated its critique in a form that was disconnected from the struggles of the people for social justice on other fronts, especially the movements of the Third World.

      A central component of the movement of the peoples of the Third World since 1994 has been the concept of sustainable development. The concept comes from the ecology movement, which emerged in the West in the 1960s and 1970s.  In that period, the ecology movement called for constraints on production, for it saw continued economic growth as a threat to the ecological stability of the planet.  As the idea of ecology was disseminated internationally, movement leaders in the Third World appreciated the importance of protecting the environment, and they recognized that the prevailing global patterns of production and consumption were a threat to nature.  However, they also understood that constraints on economic development were not practical for the Third World, because it suffered from underdevelopment, a consequence of historic colonial domination and current neocolonial structures of domination.  So the nations of the Third World formulated the notion of sustainable development, in which the goal would be continued expansion in production, but characterized by the continuous quest for forms of production that conserve the environment, thus constituting an ecologically sustainable development (see “Sustainable development” 11/12/13).

     In spite of the universalization of the phrase “sustainable development,” there remains a tendency in the North to see the issue of ecology in a form that is isolated from the neocolonial reality of the Third World.  This is a consequence of two factors.  (1) The historic segmentation of popular movements in the United States, retarding the development of integral forms of thinking.  (2) The pervasive “colonial denial” of the cultures of the North (see “Overcoming the colonial denial” 7/29/2013).  In contrast, in the Third World, anti-colonial popular movements have been formed that integrate issues that emerge from the excluded vantage points of various popular sectors, including workers, peasants, students, women, blacks and indigenous persons.  This gives rise to integral forms of thinking, in which the understanding of ecological issues is intertwined with other issues.  At the same time, Third World governments that have been captured by popular movements must struggle to transform structures of neocolonial productive, commercial, and financial penetration in order to address the social and economic rights of the people, thus giving rise to the view that ecological needs must be balanced with other overwhelming needs of the population.

     An example of the segmented thinking of the North may be the position taken by Mitchel Cohen, who in 2013 called upon Cuba to abandon its experiments in genetically-modified agriculture.  Mitchel has impressive left-wing credentials.  In 1967, at the age of 18, was a leader in the student anti-war movement at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He was one of the founders of the Red Balloon Collective in 1969, and he has written numerous political pamphlets.  He currently is a member of a number of organizations of the Left, and he hosts a weekly internet radio show.  

     In his criticism of the Cuban experiments in genetically-modified agriculture, Mitchel cited a Cuban scientist who stated that in Cuba the needs of the people must take priority over the environment.  Mitchel considered this to be “a surprisingly un-dialectical view.”  But in my view, it is a common and necessarily balanced view, a reflection of neocolonial reality.

     Following Mitchel’s presentation at a conference in Cuba, he and I had a brief debate on the theme in the discussion list of the Radical Philosophy Association.  I maintained that Cuba sees its approach as a centrist position between two extremes in the North.  On the one side, there are the large corporations that engage in genetically engineered agriculture for the sake of profit, without concern for ecological consequences.  On the other side, there are the ecologists, who call for the abandonment of genetically-modified agriculture, concerned for its ecological consequences.  Cuba, seeing the enormous benefits of genetically-modified agriculture with respect to food production, is conducting experiments under carefully controlled conditions, ensuring that the genetically modified seeds do not mix with conventional crops (which of course also have been modified from natural plants for ten thousand years by virtue of human participation in the process of natural selection).

      From my apartment terrace, I have a wonderful view of the city of Havana.  I can see across the bay a smokestack, which every morning spews smoke into the air to mingle with the clouds.  The smokestack is part of the infrastructure of an oil refinery.  The national assembly, the highest authority in the land, has enacted laws with respect to environmental protection, and the oil refinery every month is in violation of the law.  But no state entity takes action against the state company that owns the refinery.  The reason, of course, is that the state petroleum company has a contractual obligation to manufacture a given quantity of oil each month in order to respond to the productive and transportation needs of the nation, and enforcement of the law would mean that the productive quota could not be met.  So the smokestack does its thing, in contradiction to the expressed political will of the people, and in conformity with the needs of the people.

     It is not that the city of Havana suffers from air pollution.  The air of the city is in far better shape than many metropolitan areas of the North.  The reason for the relatively clean air is that there are fewer cars.  The great majority of people use public transportation in the form of city buses and collective taxis, which are cars that follow regular routes on major avenues, collecting and discharging passengers, carrying up to five passengers at a time.  It is an ecological approach to urban transportation, born of necessity.

     I enjoy looking every morning at that smokestack on the other side of the bay, for it is a daily affirmation of the common-sense intelligence of the Cuban Revolution.
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Posted November 12, 2013

       We have seen that in the evolution of the meaning of democracy, the movements and nations of the Third World arrived to proclaim that nations and peoples have rights, and among these are the rights to self-determination and development (“Right of nations to self-determination” 11/8/2013; “Social and economic rights” 11/7/2013).  Since the 1980s, the concept of development has itself undergone an evolution, and it is now understood as “sustainable development,” in which the satisfaction of the needs of the present does not compromise the capacity of future generations to satisfy their needs.   By the end of the 1980s, the concept of sustainable development was diffused widely throughout the world, as reflected in “Our Common Future,” a report emitted by the World Commission on Environment and Development. 

       The evolution from development to sustainable development was tied to what Pearce and Warford (1993) have called the second environmental revolution.  The first environmental revolution of the 1960s had seen economic growth and environmental protection as irreconcilable opposites, always in conflict.  But the second revolution of the 1980s did not question the need for growth.  Rather, it sought to define how to grow, or how to develop in a form that is sustainable.

     The Cuban scholar and environmental specialist Ramon Pichs (2006) maintains that the turn to sustainable development occurred as a result of the participation of organizations and movements of the Third World in the global process of reflection on environmental issues.  From the point of view of the Third World, the ecological revolution of the 1960s, with its call for conservation and for constraints on economic growth, made sense in the context of the developed societies, characterized by over-production and irrational patterns of consumption.  But limiting growth was not a reasonable approach for the underdeveloped societies, which did not have productive patterns that could provide even basic human needs, as a consequence of the neocolonial situation.  However, the Third World discerned from the outset the importance of the ecological revolution as it developed from the 1960s through the 1980s, given its consciousness of the contaminating effects of the prevailing patterns of production and of the global scope of environmental problems.  Thus, Third World participation in the discussion led to a reformulation of the issue, and sustainable development emerged as a new consensual understanding.

     In spite of the emergence of a global consensus on sustainable development, the concept is subject to different interpretations.  In the developed nations, there is a tendency to recognize the immense global socio-economic inequalities, but a failure to understand the mechanisms that have generated these inequalities.  This can lead to utopian interpretations of sustainable development, in which it is imagined that there is a union of interests between the North and South, and the two worlds can together attain social equality, economic growth, and conservation of the environment.  From the Third World perspective, there are indeed common human interests, but to find expression for common interests, the different and opposed interests that emerge from different sides of the colonial divide must be acknowledged and addressed.

     In addition, as the international environmental debate has proceeded, the governments of the North have insisted on treating separately the problems of the environment from those of development, in spite of the fact that the 1992 Summit on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro affirmed that the eradication of poverty and the protection of the environment are connected.  From the point of view of the Third World, this appears to be a maneuver by the governments of the North to avoid their responsibilities.

     Pichs maintains that, in spite of the different interpretations that emerge from the North-South divide, sustainable development is an important and necessary concept, and the emergence of a global consensus embracing the term is a significant step.  The concept assumes that the economic and social objectives of development ought to be defined in terms of sustainability.  It establishes the possibility of a multidimensional global process that seeks sustainable development in economic, social, and environmental terms.  However, Pichs maintains that the creation of a world characterized by economic, social, and environmental sustainability will require a fundamental transformation of the world-system and a restructuring of international economic and political relations on a foundation of equality and social justice.  

     The renewed movements of Third World national liberation that have emerged since 1995 have embraced the principle of sustainable development, and they proclaim sustainable development as a right of all nations and peoples.  They maintain that “a just, democratic, and sustainable world” is possible and necessary.


References

Pearce, D. and J. Warford.  1993.  World Without End: Economics, Environment, and Sustainable Development.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pichs Madruga, Ramón.  2006.  “Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo, 1964-2004” in Libre Comercio y subdesarrollo.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, sustainable development, environment, environment and development, ecology, ecological revolution