Concluding paragraphs of "William Stanley Jevons and the Coal Question" by Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, in "Organization and Environment" (Vol. 14, Number 1, March 2001) Although the Jevons paradox [increased efficiency in using a natural resource, such as coal, generates increased demand] has great significance for the ecological problems of today (relating, for example, to attempts to decrease the rate of global warming through greater fuel efficiency), it would be a mistake to see his argument in The Coal Question as primarily ecological in character. Despite his importance to ecological economics, Jevons himself was not concerned with the ecological and social problems associated with the exhaustion of energy reserves in Great Britain or in the rest of the world. He even failed to address the air, land, and water pollution that accompanied coal production. The occupational illnesses and hazards confronting workers in the mines did not enter his analysis. Jevons’s primary concern was how the rapid rate of coal consumption would affect the economic growth, competitiveness, and power of Great Britain within the global capitalist system. Jevons wanted to perpetuate British industry, even if it meant exhausting coal reserves. Coal was the source of economic power for Great Britain, and Jevons feared that the (unlikely) development of an alternative energy source would destroy British industrial supremacy (pp. 15-16, 189-190). Given British industrial development and trade relations, "food and raw materials are poured upon us from abroad, and our subsistence is gained by returning manufactures and articles of refinement of an equal value" (p. 221). The human relationship with nature, he believed, "consists in withdrawing and using our small fraction of energy in a happy mode and moment" (p. 163). "The resources of nature," he wrote, "are almost unbounded." >>Economy consists in discovering and picking out those almost infinitesimal portions which best serve our purpose. We disregard the abundant vegetation, and live upon the small grain of corn; we burn down the largest tree, that we may use its ashes; or we wash away ten thousand parts of rock, and sand, and gravel, that we may extract the particle of gold. Millions, too, live, and work, and die, in the accustomed grooves for the one Lee, or Savery, or Crompton, or Watt, who uses his minute personal contribution of labour to the best effect. (p. 163)<< Jevons (1865/1906) simply assumes that this mass disruption and degradation of earth is a natural process to be approached only from the standpoint of the pursuit of a growing economy. Although shortage of coal generates questions in his analysis about whether growth can be sustained, the issue of ecological sustainability is never raised. Because the economy must remain in motion to accumulate wealth, natural forces of energy, such as water and wind, were disregarded by Jevons as unreliable sources of constant energy, limited to a particular time and space (pp. 164-171). Coal offered capital a universal energy source to operate production without disruption to business patterns. This disregard for nature can be contrasted with the views of Jevons’s contemporaries Marx and Engels, who, although they have been compared unfavorably to Jevons in ecological terms (see Georgescu-Roegen, 1971, p.2), nonetheless argued against the abuse of nature—which Jevons did not. Marx developed an overarching concept of the "metabolic rift" in the human relation to nature, which took into account the degradation of the earth and the conservation of energy (see Foster, 1999). Writing to Marx in 1882, Engels observed that >>the working individual is not only a stabiliser of the present but also, and to a far greater extent, a squander of past solar heat. As to what we have done in the way of squandering our reserves of energy, our coal, ore, forests, etc., you are better informed than I am. (Marx & Engels, 1975, vol. 46, p. 411)<< Engels (1966) warned against the cutting of trees on hillsides, which later led to flooding, destruction of cultivated land, mudslides, and loss of soil (p. 180). The Spanish planters in Cuba burned the forest for fertilizer, which allowed for a single year of profit, but the heavy rains washed away the soil because no trees covered the hillsides. In regards to the larger political economy and social relationship to nature, Engels commented, >>The present mode of production is predominately concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse opposite. (p. 183)<< Engels (1966) recognized the ecological destruction that took place under the capitalist system and called into question a system based on short-term profit and the accumulation of wealth. In regards to a sustainable, regulated interchange with nature, Engels stated, "A complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order" was needed (p. 182). These comments resonate with an awareness that overshadows the predicament that Jevons describes. Despite the ecological and social limitations of Jevons’s overall analysis, the Jevons paradox represents an important element of ecological economics. The following selection, "Of the Economy of Fuel," chapter 7 of The Coal Question, represents Jevons’s most important analysis of how the consumption of coal will not be alleviated by new technological developments or efficiency. These advancements in efficiency will only increase the scale of production, increasing the pressures placed on the environment. Jevons (1865/1906) had no real answer to the paradox he raised. Britain could either use up its cheap source of fuel—the coal on which its industrialization rested—rapidly, or it could use it up more slowly. In the end, Jevons chose to use it up rapidly: >>If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation of our riches, both material and intellectual, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief but true greatness and longer continued mediocrity. (pp. 459-460)<< Expressed in these terms, the choice was clear: to pursue glory in the present and a drastically degraded position for future generations. Insofar as Jevons’s paradox continues to apply to us today—and insofar as technology by itself (given certain patterns of production and accumulation) offers no way out of our environmental dilemmas, which increase with the scale of the economy—we must either adopt Jevons’s conclusion or pursue an alternative that Jevons never discussed and that doubtless never entered his mind: the transformation of the social relations of production in the direction of a society governed not by the search for profit but by people’s genuine needs and the requirements of socio-ecological sustainability. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
