Ecological Crisis and the Limits to Economic Rationality

Abstract

When, in Strategy for Labour, Gorz detected the emergence of new, essentially qualitative needs which could not be satisfied by rising income levels, he was already close to the ecological critique of industrial society which he began to formulate more deliberately during the 1970s. The pertinence of this critique grew as the destructive consequences of economic growth – what Illich called ‘industrial nemesis’ – started to accumulate. Beginning in the late 1950s with the Minamata mercury poisoning, where effluent released into the sea by a chemical plant in southern Japan had killed scores and incapacitated thousands in a community dependent on local fish, the hidden costs of industrial prosperity had started to attract the world’s attention. In a series of critical discoveries and disastrous events, the physical limits to scientifically orchestrated production and to the technological domination of nature were cruelly exposed. These ranged from the destructive effects of chemical pesticides – which Rachel Carson had shown in her landmark text Silent Spring (1963) to have wiped out huge populations of wildlife and firmly established themselves in the human food chain – to a series of industrial accidents of catastrophic proportions (120,000 tons of oil spilled off the West coast of England by the tanker Torrey Canyon in 1967, then double the volume by the Amoco Cadiz