Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 74

• demographics (human population size and dynamics)
• economic processes (consumption, production, markets and trade)
• scientiic and technological innovation
• distribution pattern processes (inter- and intra- generational)
• cultural, social, political and institutional (including production and
service sectors) processes.
Within this science-based technical framework the environmental
changes taking place and their impacts on human well-being are
more or less abstracted from the global political economy and the real
politic of transnational capitalism (see White, 2010, 2013; and Chapter
Five). Yet, even a cursory examination of dominant world political
economic trends reveals close links between capitalism as a system and
environmental degradation and transformation generally.
Environmental harm is about what humans do to and with nature.
It involves the actions of humans working in concert with each other
to meet their needs in particular ways. To understand environmental
harm, therefore, it is essential to ask basic questions about the mode
of production in any given society.
Built in to the logic and dynamics of contemporary global capitalism
is the imperative to expand (White, 2002). This expansionary dynamic
- the extended reproduction of capital accumulation - has several major
implications for the environment. First, it implies that 'natural resources'
are themselves subject to varying processes of commodification, that is,
the transformation of existing or potential use-values into exchange-
values. Water becomes valued according to how much it can be traded
for, not simply because it is essential to human health and wellbeing.
Second, the appropriation of nature does not merely involve
transforming it into commodities, it also frequently involves capital
actually remaking nature and its products biologically and physically.
Examples include genetic changes in food crops, the destruction of
biological diversity through extensive use of plantation forestry, and
so on. The generative principle behind such transformations is the
search by capital to lower costs, create new markets and reconfigure
the productive use of diminished natural resources. Some key
transformations characteristic of the contemporary time period include
(White, 2010b):
• resource depletion - extraction of non-renewable minerals and energy
without development of proper alternatives, over-harvesting of
renewable resources such as fish and forest timbers