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Stan Cox's Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine will be useful reading for anyone who seeks to grab the ship's wheel and to persuade others to join them. His book is a short, readable activists crib which ranges fluently across the environmental costs of bloated corporate healthcare (and the human costs of overprescription and phoney medicalization), to the problem of industrial agriculture and "better living through chemistry."
On healthcare, Cox is unequivocal. Focusing on the U.S., he argues that the healthcare "industry" is hopelessly bloated, noting that, since the 1960s, the average consumption of healthcare products per person has tripled. In a neat turn of phrase, he writes that "for decades, business has been coming up with "solutions" to the problems that result from America's overconsumption of food and underexertion of bodies."
To beef up profits, companies have been hyping minor or non-existent maladies such as "shaking leg syndrome" to extract ever more profit from the American consumer. Yet, unsatisfied with gouging American workers, the same companies have also taken to low-cost production and testing of generic drugs in countries like India, with catastrophic environmental and human results. One of Cox's best sections deals with the region around Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, which will be all but unknown to most readers. Cox finds devastating water pollution from medical factories and massive damage to local agriculture, another hidden holocaust in the annals of neo-liberal globalization.
Yet healthcare is not seamlessly integrated into Cox's wider narrative - that of the capitalist challenge to the planet's ecology and human society. It remains hard to see how drug production, and the waste resulting from it, could ever have an impact as destructive as nitrate pollution or greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Ditto for the effects of the health industry upon American bodies. If Americans wish to waste vast amounts of money on useless drugs and procedures, it is unlikely that this will be a prime cause of eco-collapse. The sedentary and lazy lifestyles of Americans, detached from the land and dependent on industrially farmed produce, may be more significant, but the hyping of ADHD is not related to the looming collapse of capitalist civilization. Not in my book, anyhow, but the same does not hold for agriculture.
Agriculture receives a detailed treatment in later chapters, and as plant genetics is Cox's specialist area, his treatment is strong and chilling. Corporate agriculture, he finds, has massacred rural communities, which now number 450 out of the U.S.' 500 poorest. Converted by the market into factories for processed foods, these rural areas are ironically now often "food deserts" in which fresh produce is harder to find than in urban areas.
Industrial agriculture is hopelessly inefficient - dependent upon continuing injections of natural gas to produce fertilizer, oil for trucks to transport its produce to far away markets while being massively wasteful of the manure that it generates. He calls, not originally, but sensibly, for a more modest, dispersed agriculture in which the 900 million tonnes of manure produced by American farms every year is recycled into the soil. This isn't framed as a utopian dream, but as an essential survival strategy, but Cox argues that the benefits would be very real. Revisiting Patancheru, he cites examples of community driven agriculture which "have beaten back the individual despair that had developed under the brutal logicl of the national and international economy." Yet the case is identical for many American farming families.
Cox makes it clear that the hierarchical and massively unfair economic system which underlies industrial agriculture must be dismantled if a fairer, ecologically sensible world is to be created. He has short shrift for "sustainable development" though - labelling it "code for perpetual growth," which is dead on. What is required, for Cox is a radical downshifting of elite consumption in the developed world and something akin to a "back to the land" movement to localize now dispersed economies and to distribute a safe level of economic surplus to now deprived communities. This is basically eco-socialism, and Cox alludes to eco-socialist thinkers like Joel Kovel and, refreshingly, a side of Karl Marx that few will be familiar with (an afficianado of organic manures and localized agriculture).
Echoing comedian Rob Newman, who penned an acerbic piece in the Guardian in 2006 along a similar theme, Cox concludes by arguing that "before [we] can start designing the kinds of local, regional, and world economies that are needed, we have to acknowledge and act on the fact that in the long run...we cannot have both capitalism and a livable planet." And we can't have reductions in "emissions intensity" or put our faith in miraculous capitalist efficiency either.
As Cox notes, "using efficiency to make growth less destructive is sort of like playing "whack-a-mole" at the county fair. Knock capital out of circulation here, and it will pop up over there." Controlling the beast of capital is Cox's theme, and Sick Planet is an effective call to arms for activists to do just that. Either we do it democratically and rationally, or circumstances will do it for us, bloodily and chaotically:
Provided our species survives, there lies somewhere in its future another stone age, and the faster our economic growth, the steeper the decline will be. The next Stone Age will be more resource poor and probably more toxic than the last, and there will be no shot at a comeback.
Citizens of the United States in particular, should read Sick Planet and then act with conviction and haste if such a situation is to be avoided, but don't bet on it.
Stan Cox paints a picture of the corporate-dominated world as akin to pre-apocalypse Mad Max, yet another movie parallel springs to mind, while we still have a chance to avert disaster. Noting that the average American consumes as much energy as a 30,000 kg primate, Cox summons up the image - which many people will sympathise with worldwide - of a nation of King Kongs, clinging to their Empire State Building and hopelessly swatting the spectres of imperial collapse and ecological crisis.
- Szamko
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Sick Planet: Corporate Food and MedicineNeoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalization's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest. While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.
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