Our Ecological Footprint - reducing human impact on the Earth, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees (1995) New Society Publishers (British Columbia) Reviewed by Paul Hubert The concept of the ecological footprint explains the hidden impact of production and consumption on the world. Human activities require land to supply the raw materials used, for the activities themsetves to soar and to absort the waste generated.
Capitalists frequently set out to externalise many of these costs. For example, uranium mining to provide the raw material for 'clean' nuclear power results in poisoning of watercourses and large expanses of land.
The generation of power also generates large quanti- ons in a bottle. ties of waste, some of which leaks into the environment and what is contained must be safeguarded for hundreds of years.
This book sets out to serve as a textbook for ecological footprint analysis', explaining ings. the basis for calculating the footprint of particular activities and making the use of it more robust and scientific.
However it is not a scientific monograph but tries to make the ideas explained accessible. This is motivated by the beef that something can and must be done. As William Rees says in the alterative. preface: *On a finite planet, at human carrying capacity, a land, contrary to appearsociety driven mainly by self- ances. ish individualism has all the Any activist interested in potential for sustainability of trying to bring ecological a collection of angry scorpi- concerns into their thinking about capitalist society and This is done in a number of economics will find some ways, particularly in the sec- useful insights and tools in tion optimistically entitled this book. Unfortunately "Fun with Footprints'. Telling where it falls down is where comparisons are made many readers will want to about everyday items, many start. using humorous line draw- Wackernagel and Rees recognise that the implicaTomatoes tion of changing current trends is that unpreceFor example, a diagram dented social and economic compares the land equiva- change will be required. lent of the resources needed They also point out the to produce tomatoes inten- enormous inequalities in the sively with fertilizers and world and that some proheating in a commercial posed remedies (e.g. greenhouse and the appar- greater efficiency in producently extensive open-field tion, 'zero-emission' cars)
could actually worsen the The former is shown to problem of sustainability. their faith into a vague balance between centralisation and decentralisation, incentives to protect "natural capital", and indirect ecological taxes. This last idea is described as "revolutionary", not least because they recognise that it's liable to run into the kind of resistance demonstrated in Britain so recently. They hope that people will recognise the danger signals:
"People are beginning to comprehend the ecological bottom-line: no ecosphere, no economy, no society (or, more simply for the business minded: no planet, no profit)."
The challenge for revolutionary socialists is to put something better in the place of the authors' hopeless reformist equations. Again Said, like many intellectuals who identify themselves with the anticapitalist movement (who have somewhat of a different trajectory to the activist wing of the self same movement) seems to imply there was a golden age of democratic capitalism in which the market was less tyrannical. This he suggests is what the Palestinian people should aspire to.
In the end however it is not Said who must bear the responsibility for the fact that he does not understand that the only way forward for the Palestinian people is the road of permanent revolution.
It is rather the failures of the far left in the region which mean that minds as sharply incisive as his are not more often won to perspectives which seek to do more than just survive.