Sustainability and the System Problem
by Gar Alperovitz
Based on an address to the Executive Staff of the
President's Council on Sustainable Development
The Good Society, Vol. 5, No.3, Fall 1995

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Socialism

The easiest place to begin to consider this contention is with socialism, a system which (at least in currently known variants) has produced disastrous, and clearly unsustainable, ecological results in the twentieth century.

Throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union the push for cheap energy and maximum industrial production--together with a wanton disregard for public health--have created vast ecological wastelands in which dirty air, polluted water, and heavy toxic emissions have despoiled ecosystems and threatened human health.

In 1988 more than a hundred cities in the former Soviet Union exceeded legal air pollution standards by at least a thousand percent. When socialism fell in Poland, sixty-five percent of the nation's river water had been deemed too polluted even for industrial use, and large segments of the Polish population (including the residents of Warsaw) were not served by any waste treatment facilities; corrective measures are only now getting underway.

Energy efficiency in each of the former socialist countries of Europe has lagged far behind U.S. standards, to say nothing of those of the pace-setting nations. Much energy is produced by filth-generating brown coal plants, many without any pollution controls whatsoever. At the end of the 1980s it was estimated that one out of every seventeen deaths in Hungary was due to air pollution. "Wherever you point your finger on the map," one Russian scientist recently observed, "there is another horrible place."

Behind such statistics (and many more could be cited) was a domineering, growth-at-all-costs centralized government bureaucracy, and an ideology which suggested that nature could and should be bent to human will at all costs. The governing authorities of the socialist states lacked the will (and probably the capacity) to hold economic operations accountable to true social costs. And local communities had no means of contesting the anti-ecological values of central power. As ecological economist Ken Townsend has observed, "rationality" converted forests of rich diversity into monocrop fields and attempted to reverse the flow of entire river systems.

Sadly, reports from post-communist Russia are hardly more encouraging. In Moscow, a city where eighty percent of the city's smokestacks have no filters, trees and vacant land are being ravaged with few restrictions.

Cancer rates are soaring; a factory was recently built on top of a radioactive dump. Says a pained city official: there is simply no awareness "that there are ecological consequences . . . everyone now is just thinking about when they get rich."

The reasons Soviet-style socialism has produced such results can be traced to certain basic properties or design features of the system. For instance, state-run agencies are compelled to expand by the pressure of internal "grow at all costs" management dynamics and the general expansionist goals of the system. At the same time such institutions are compelled to reduce (and externalize) costs, hence to pollute and degrade the environment if this "saves" money--as it commonly does.

Not only are traditional state socialist systems based on growth imperatives, they produce extreme hierarchies of power which reduce both liberty and the capacity of citizen groups to effect positive change.

Status hierarchies also generate invidious comparisons, hence an unquenchable thirst for "more" as an expression of a peculiarly socialist form of consumerism: "My dacha is bigger than yours!" The outcome is a structurally and culturally determined pattern of growth which is destructive of the environment.

What needs to be stressed, however, is not simply criticism of the result, but rather that the institutional architecture, power relationships, and dynamic properties of 20th Century socialism make ecologically disastrous outcomes all but inevitable.

The problem is systemic.

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