Dauvergne - The shadows of consumption : consequences for the global environment

The Shadows of Consumption

The Shadows of Consumption

Consequences for the Global Environment

Peter Dauvergne

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email . edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.

This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dauvergne, Peter.

The shadows of consumption: consequences for the global environment/
Peter Dauvergne.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-04246-8 (hbk.: alk. paper) 1. Consumption (Economics)Environmental aspects. 2. Environmentalism.

I. Title.

HC79.C6D38 2008

333.7-dc22

2008017002

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my children

Abbreviations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Ecological Shadows of Rising Consumption

1 An Unbalanced Global Political Economy

2 Dying of Consumption

I Automobiles

3 Accidental Dependency? The Road to an Auto World

4 A Better Ride: Selling Safe and Clean

5 The Road Tolls

6 The Globalization of Accidents and Emissions

II Leaded Gasoline

7 Leaded Science: Pumping Out Profits and Risks

8 Lead Must Go

9 Taking the Lead Out of Africa

10 The Globalization of Risk

III Refrigerators

11 Refrigerating the Ozone Layer

12 Phasing Out CFC Refrigerators

13 Selling the Superior Refrigerator

14 The Globalization of Plugging In

IV Beef

15 The Efficient Steer: Fast, Fat, and Cheap

16 The Ecology of Big Beef

17 Sustainable Beef? Chasing a Stampede of Regular Steers

18 The Globalization of More Meat

V The Harp Seal Hunt

19 To the Red Ice: Heroes and Overharvesting

20 The Brutes! Killing Markets with Activism

21 Hunting Beaters for Globalizing Markets

22 The Globalization of Slippery Markets

Conclusion: Transforming Global Consumption

23 The Illusions of Environmentalism

24 A Brighter World Order of Balanced Consumption

Notes

References

Index

Individually, our everyday choices might seem to have no consequences at all for the global environment. What, for example, is the impact of a farmer burning an oil lamp on the Pampas in 1814 or a child eating a bowl of rice in Shanghai in 1889? What, really, is the impact of a man driving a Model T Ford over the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, or a lawyer switching on a bedside lamp to read The Grapes of Wrath in London in 1946, or a teenager opening a Westinghouse refrigerator for a glass of milk in Canberra in 2008? Yet, cumulatively, all these individual acts of consumptionlike raindrops in a typhoonmust have consequences. So, too, must all the processes that make consumption possible.

What, then, are the environmental consequences of consumption? How do they affect our health and safety? These may seem like obvious questions in a world of rising consumption and escalating strains on so many ecosystems. Yet few books have ever tried to answer them, and most of these have focused on the more immediate impacts of consumption on local ecosystems and lifestyles. Examining these questions through a wider lens and from a different angle, I analyze not only the direct consequences of consuming, but also the environmental spillovers from the corporate, trade, and financing chains that supply and replace consumer goods: what, to capture the full resulting global patterns of harm, I call the ecological shadows of consumption. Taking this approach puts the primary responsibility for global environmental damage squarely on those with power and wealth while still accounting for the micro-responsibilities all of us bear as consumers. By emphasizing how political and economic processes displace the costs of consumer goods onto distant ecosystems, communities, and times, it reveals the far-reaching effects of our personal choices, effects that few of us ever seeor want to see. And by pushing the analysis beyond progress in improving particular products, it uncovers a core cause of the continuing slide into a full-blown global environmental crisis.

Mapping the pathways of cause and effect for every ecological shadow of consumption would require many lifetimes of research. Rather than lightly touch upon an endless number of products, I chart the histories of just five, representing a range of political economies, from high-end manufacturing to low-end hunting. Each history unfolds over three chapters and concludes with a summary of its lessons for understanding how and why ecological shadows form, shift, and fade.