Grünen Kapitalismus - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

air and water. Two technological develop-ments broke down this separation.
One was nuclear weapons-testing and radioactive fallout; the other
was the rise of the petrochemical industry. Both these innovations helped
end any regional compartmentalization of pollution effects. Fallout
could appear – like acid rain, but with more alarming immediate effects
– in the most unexpected places, and petrochemicals were hazardous not
just in the vicinity of their production-sites but also, in many cases, in
their intended applications, notably in the insecticides that were sprayed
on vast swaths of farmland. Awareness of these new dangers propelled
the work of the two leading ecological critics of the ensuing period, Rachel
Carson and Barry Commoner, both of whom put forward wide-ranging
and radical exposés of the forces responsible for the stepped-up dangers.
177 Their critiques of human domination over nature and of the profit
motive provided the intellectual underpinning to an environmental
movement which, bursting onto the world scene with the first Earth Day
(April 1970), portended a far more sweeping challenge to the social status
quo than had been offered by any earlier current of “green” opinion.
The capitalist response to this challenge has from the beginning been
divided between those who choose to ignore or even deny the environmental
crisis and those who, while acknowledging it, seek to finesse it
via some combination of (a) public relations drives (which came to be
dubbed “greenwash”), (b) support for government regulatory activity
(within limits), and (c) advocating market mechanisms as the key to
green outcomes.
The environmental “denialists” appear to have had, from the outset, a
stronger constituency in the US than in other industrialized countries.
This is undoubtedly a result of the same complex of factors that has
made the US the country with the highest executive salaries and with
the lowest level of social services relative to its resources. It reached its
extreme during the administration (2001-09) of George W. Bush, which
deliberately falsified environmental reports prepared by government scientists.
The perspective in question gains mass diffusion through rightwing
talk shows (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) and is buttressed by
the considerable influence of fundamentalist religion (see Jacoby 2008).
The upshot of this ideological setting is that the environmental debate
is skewed sharply to the right. Within the US political spectrum, conse-
177 See Carson 1962, Commoner 1966, and Foster & Clark 2008.
239