This analytical statement is backed up by a number of relevant themes that were identified from data descriptions. The six key ones are summarised below in chronological order.
• From early in the 20th century, mining viability and racial exploitation went hand in hand and were later legitimised and legalised under Apartheid policy.
• The ERPM became the backbone of Boksburg’s economy and brought considerable economic growth as well as ecological and social ills.
• Unrestrained development was promoted from the 1960s until the late 1990s.
• From the 1990s there were serious issues of water quality from industry and mining, including the increasing acidity of local water bodies.
• By the late 1990s, after decades of intensive economic growth, the social (such as increasing crime, many vagrants) and biophysical (e.g. degradation of water bodies, deterioration of public spaces and increasing litter) ills of development were becoming apparent.
• From 2002 onwards, Boksburg Lake was under the spotlight for severe water pollution.
The social and ecological degradations experienced in Boksburg mirror more global patterns. Section 1.4 attempted to give a sense of the devastating extent of global social and ecological degradations and the potentially catastrophic social-ecological risk modern society is producing.
Numerous authors make the link between modern processes of economic growth and notions of progress and human and ecological exploitation. According to Rist (2007:
488), “the essence of ‘development’ is the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations in order to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by means of market exchange, to effective demand”. Anderson (2010) provided many examples of ecological and social costs of economic growth and progress. He described the huge loss of migrant song birds that are declining at a rate of 1-4% per year: “My children and their children will never see what I saw in my youth: trees and bushes filled with brilliant, flashing colors, ten or twenty or fifty migrant warblers and tanagers in every tree or bush over a whole forest or mountain (Anderson 2010: 13). Anderson also described the “economic progress”
based on intensely irrigated cotton that destroyed the Aral Sea, an inland salt lake in Central Asia, which used to be the fourth largest lake in the world in central Asia. The lake dried up to one tenth of its original size, water became polluted with pesticides and inorganic fertilisers, the million dollar fishing industry collapsed and clouds of toxic dust from the now dry, poisoned lake bed affected nearby towns, causing children to die from poisoning. Today in an area south of the Aral Sea, infant mortality is at 10% and in a few areas, as high as 50%. This is one of many stories of seemingly positive economic progress having devastating human and ecological consequences.
The work of a number of authors (Marx 1849; Bhaskar 1993; Bauman 1994; Westley et al. 2002) provides theoretical lenses to probe the relationship between economic growth and human/ecological exploitation.
Westley et al. (2002) explained that social systems are influenced by structures of signification, which include symbols of meaning and values. These structures of signification can also be referred to as normalising ideologies (Foucault 1981;
Thompson 1990). The nature of these will have profound effects on how society is structured and relates to the biophysical world. There are influential modern western normalising ideologies identified in the literature that provide insight into generative mechanisms influencing the dynamics of Boksburg’s social-ecological system. Four key ones were identified and discussed in chapter 5, namely human-ecological dualism, anthropocentrism, nature is mechanised and nature is to be controlled. These four normalising ideologies promote a type of human progress (that has become equated with economic growth) at the expense of ecological health. Because humans are integrally part of ecological systems, pursuing this form of progress will produce both social and ecological degradations.
As discussed in statement 1, consumerism drives our economic system that depends on growth. The world is cast “as a warehouse overflowing with consumer commodities”
(Bauman 2000: 89). This consumerism and the quest for economic growth are having an increasingly devastating effect on the biophysical world. As Schumacher (1998: 16) indicated, this system “does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited”.
Leonard (2007) stated that 99% of what is consumed is trashed within 6 months and that the household waste of an average USA citizen has doubled in 30 years. In addition, there are 70 units of waste produced for every unit of household waste. It is therefore not surprising that Boksburg has faced the increasing problem of litter accumulation and illegal dumping.
Bhaskar (1993) discussed how western society is founded on power2 dynamics where the powerful exert their influence to the detriment of the relatively powerless and result in structures of domination and exploitation and an unequal society. This helps explain why human degradations are a part of the present form of human progress as resource extraction is for the benefit of the few. For example, the literature frequently highlights how economic growth is leading to a few getting rich while millions are worse off (Anderson 2010). There are countless examples of the disempowered and marginalised bearing the brunt of economic externalities (unaccounted social and environmental costs) (Hallowes & Butler 2002). For example, Native American Reservations are used as toxic waste dumps while rural areas in Louisana, home to marginalised black populations, have the greatest concentration of America’s polluting industry and have become known as cancer alley (Anderson 2010).
Marx (1849) explained the socially exploitative nature of capitalism. He argued that the proletariat, a group of people paid minimum wages never rising much above the subsistence level, is necessary for capitalism to function. Because the proletariat is not paid the true value of their labour, the surplus value becomes profit available for the owners of capital and is a driver for the growing gap between the rich and poor. A group of persistently unemployed people is helpful in keeping these wages at a minimum. Marx (1849) referred to these as the industrial “reserve army”. In Boksburg the black proletariat was a necessary condition for mining and industrialisation to succeed in the area, which almost solely benefited the white class during the Apartheid era. This points to the hegemonic interests in maintaining present forms of capitalism, as it benefits those already in economic power. Power dynamics are therefore a key driver maintaining the economic status quo and entrenching power differentials (Bhaskar 1993). This statement is moderated by the opportunities for upward mobility
Leonard (2007) provided insight into how this system self perpetuates. She has described the linear nature of our economic system that is dependent on ‘resource’
extraction, mostly in the Third World and which has decimated large parts of the natural world. For example, in the last three decades one third of the planet’s natural resource base has been consumed, 40% of waterways became undrinkable, 75% of global fisheries were fished at or beyond capacity and the Amazon Forest alone is losing 2 000 trees per minute (Leonard 2007).
The erosion of these environments and economies has forced millions of people who depended on local livelihoods to move to cities and enter the wage economy. Leonard (2007) provided global figures of 200 000 people a day moving from environments that have sustained their communities for generations, to cities to look for work, many of whom end up in slums. This has created a steady supply of cheap labour to maintain the system. Anderson (2010: 13) provided examples of this process. He found that rural people from Madagascar to Mexico, who had sustainable and viable livelihoods through subsistence agriculture, “are now starving and dying”.
According to Bauman (1994), compared to pre-modern social structures, there are currently vast distances in both space and time between our actions and their consequences. This is evident in the Boksburg case study where the biophysical and social ills only became apparent after decades of unrestrained development. Bauman argued that global society lacks the ethical frameworks to deal with this new space- time dynamic. Without adequate ethical frameworks, the voiceless (plants and animals making up the biophysical world) and the poor will feel the brunt of the negative consequences, as is the case in Boksburg.
The following theoretical discussion around analytical statement 3 provides a deeper exploration of power dynamics occurring in the Boksburg Lake social-ecological system.
3. The structure of the Boksburg social-ecological system is made up of