Ideology Run Amok

In the Soviet Union in 1968, a small party of visitors was standing near a beautiful lake in Karelia. The group, eight from the U.S., eight from Great Britain, and eight from the Soviet Union, was there as part of a Quaker-sponsored work camp and seminar. I was among them.

Karelia is just across the border from Finland, a country of pine forests, snow in winter, and astonishingly blue lakes. And here, not a quarter of a mile from where we were standing, was a paper mill pumping raw sewage into one of those lakes. One of the party, not from the Soviet Union, asked our guide about pollution.

"That is not a problem under socialism," the guide replied. And still the plant pumped its refuse into the lake.

Years later, during the reunification of Germany, the reorganized government discovered to its horror that almost no East German manufacturing plants had pollution controls of any kind—let alone controls that met Western European standards. Pollution, you see, was not a problem under socialism. It occurred only under capitalism.

The problems with Eastern European pollution didn't surprise me. I had stood less than a quarter of a mile from a plant that was actively polluting a lake and heard a Soviet bureaucrat argue that neither I nor anyone else in the party was seeing what we plainly were seeing. Eastern European and Soviet plant managers had production quotas to meet, and never mind the effect on the environment or, for that matter, the bodies of the workers.

In fairness to those plant managers, we need to remind ourselves repeatedly that the capitalist West only discovered the environment after uncontrolled industrial pollution had already done quite a lot of damage. And only in the last forty years have we begun to realize just how serious that damage was. An industrial ideology that puts its faith chiefly in the economic bottom line—which, in their different ways, unrestrained market capitalism and Soviet-style socialism are—is always a threat to the environment unless other forces intervene to hold it back.

Now we must begin to pick up the pieces. But as we try to find ways to do so, I worry—a lot—about China. The Chinese are not Soviet-style socialists, and they are not laissez-faire capitalists. It is hard to put them in any category but their own. Unlike industrialists in the West, they are aware of the costs of what they are doing. But they are caught up in the same Faustian bargain that entrapped both the West and its Communist opposite numbers. Industrial development on the traditional model uses a lot of fossil fuels and creates a lot of pollution. To develop, one must put the environment at risk.

Or so it has been in the past. A society bent on growth, wealth, and production simply did not take the environment into account. Now we are learning that this was a mistake. Will we find new ways of development fast enough? And, just as important, will China?