Book – Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating

Author: Jeff SparrowPublisher: ScribeReviewer: Stephen Keim

Melbourne writer, Jeff Sparrow’s 2021 monograph, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating (“Crimes”) sorts through well-forgotten histories of marketing and technology to refute the proposition that global heating and other impending environmental catastrophes are the fault of us as opposed to the minority of extremely wealthy people who possess and have access to the vast majority of the world’s resources and exercise inordinate amounts of power and influence.

Most people who care that we are on course to destroy our ability to live safely on this planet are frequently told, by those who are promoting the course to ruin, that global heating is our own fault because we own a car and we buy things at the supermarket that have been produced using fossil fuels. If we fully absorb the message, we find ourselves waiting at a bus stop in the outer suburbs for hours while those who have blamed us drive past us in their latest petrol powered SUV.

The thesis of Crimes is that most of our choices as consumers are pre-ordained for us. We might once have been content to buy most of our products at the corner store or local butcher neither of which continue to exist. We might once have been content to take our own containers to the shop to be refilled but, now, all our goods come with endless wrapping and packaging. As our local stores shut down, we are told by ubiquitous advertising that we love driving to huge shopping centres and that we love walking soulless shopping aisles collecting the goods from the shelf and acting as our own cashiers on the way out. And when we hearken back to the days that we loved shopping local, we are told that all those local shops shut down because we exercised our choice by looking for bargains at Shopping Town Central.

Crimes argues that, from the first adoption of fossil fuels to the ineffectual negotiations on reducing emissions levels, climate change has been driven not by the many but by the few. A tiny coterie has used every weapon at its disposal to coerce or persuade us to accept practices we never wanted. Whether we recycled or rode bikes or switched off unnecessary lights never made any difference. Sparrow quotes Bernie-like figures to the effect that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who comprise the poorest half of the earth’s population. The narratives that we are all guilty and all responsible for global heating are rejected by Crimes. Rather, argues Sparrow, responsibility lies with a set of social and political structures that did not exist in the past and need not exist in the future.

Three of Sparrow’s ventures into history stand out for me. The first involves the origins of the internal combustion engine driven automobile. An interesting sidelight of this narrative is that, as gas guzzlers were being born and becoming popular, they received stiff competition from electric cars. The leading electric car manufacturer experienced a financial collapse and the way was clear for petrol driven vehicles to dominate. This titbit adds a certain contingency to life as we know it, today.

Automobiles, during their emergence were owned by the rich and were unpopular with the many since they were noisy, smelly and dangerous. They disrupted the streets of towns and cities which were then multi-user centres where people walked and gossiped and children played games. All this could be shared, more or less safely, with the horse drawn vehicles that provided transport. Cars, however, were dangerous and killed and injured many people such that laws were promoted restricting the speed of self-driven vehicles for the safety of the populace and the liveability of their neighbourhoods.

  This was when the advertising industry, at the behest of the automobile and gasoline industry, showed their creative talents. The concept of the jay walker, familiar to us, today, though we may be unaware of its origins was invented. “Jay” means unsophisticated, in the nature of a country bumpkin, too unsophisticated to appreciate the beauty and the dangers of automobiles. (Surprisingly, to me, it was never some strange geometrical term describing crossing a road in an arc resembling the letter, ”J”.)

Advertising money meant that pedestrians were slandered in every available medium and blamed for their own deaths and injuries at the hands of automobile drivers. And the laws followed, no longer restricting the rights of drivers to drive at dangerous speeds but penalising pedestrians for using the streets as a communal space as had traditionally been their right.

The second historical anecdote also involves the advertising industry earning big money by flooding the airwaves and other media with a new concept aimed at shifting blame from industry to the ordinary citizen. Before the Second World War, consumers and retailers acted on the basis that drink containers were expected to be re-usable. After the war, both manufacturers of drinks and the packaging industry realised that money was to be made by making containers disposable. The only problem was that the accumulation of rubbish on roadsides, in farmlands and public places was so distressing that legislators were turning to laws that imposed an obligation to make containers re-usable, again.

Manufacturing and packaging capital came together to head off the new laws at the pass. More than twenty organisations came together to create a new organisation called “Keep America Beautiful”, thereby, disguising and separating the purveyors of the message (who stood only to make profits) from the message which was designed to blame all of us as individuals for the accumulating rubbish in our public places. Not only did the genius advertisers manage to disguise the profit-making objectives of their paymasters behind the philanthropic concept of keeping the countryside beautiful but they also created the concept of the litter-bug to transfer moral perfidy upon all of those individuals being sold product in disposable containers. No matter that these same litter-bugs had, dutifully and contentedly, retuned the re-usable containers for generations. The laws requiring re-usability disappeared and laws aimed at individuals, the so-called litterbugs, have been the order of the day, ever since.

The tobacco industry’s scurrilous use of advertising to increase its profits at the expense of public health and the subsequent use of advertising and public relations by the fossil fuel industry to green wash its contribution to global heating are the subject of later chapters.

The third piece of historical learning from Crimes dates back to the industrial revolution. It turns out, looking back, that water wheels were as industrially efficient and much less destructive to humans and their environment than steam power derived from burning coal. But the enclosure movement had driven ordinary people off the commons land they had enjoyed for centuries and a desperately poor workforce had accumulated in the cities. So, to utilise and exploit the desperately poor, manufacturing industry turned their collective back on water power and started burning coal. The industrial revolution which resulted was, thereby, much more profitable to the industrial barons; much worse for the environment; and came at a much greater cost to the lives and well-being of ordinary workers.

The theme from each of these examples is that what is made to appear inevitable and unavoidable was, in fact, manipulated into existence by decisions of the few made for their own profits and benefit and at the expense of the many.    

Sparrow’s analysis touches upon many subjects.

A particularly interesting chapter concerns the way in which Indigenous societies in Australia and the Americas cared for their environment and existed without making destructive demands upon it. Similar observations are made of the poorer agricultural classes in European countries who preserved the commons on which they depended and led lives that were materially poor but punctuated by feasts and religious celebrations and festivals. Settler colonialism, and, in Europe, itself, enclosure, disrupted these simpler modes of living and not only wrought havoc upon the lives of the poor but also on the environments which had been previously been carefully preserved as the demands of capitalism required exploitation of the land in every possible profitable way.

A later chapter discusses the way in which the national parks movement, while indeed driven by concern at the loss of wilderness areas, was driven by the desire to preserve natural areas for big game hunters. Ironically, areas such as that which became Yellowstone National Park were still being used and looked after by Indigenous Americans living their traditional lifestyles. The “conservationists” could not tolerate this and, so, laws were passed to exclude Indigenous Americans from using their traditional country, now national park, for their traditional purposes.

Crimes is a peeling the scales from one’s eyes experience. Not surprisingly, even very recent history is buried and forgotten because it is not convenient to those who have benefitted from the events involved.

It is important that historians like Sparrow continue to remind us of crimes that we have forgotten and of some that we had never dreamed to have occurred.

Crimes is an interesting and important book, well worth the read.