Profit: An Environmental History

Profit: An Environmental History. Mark Stoll. Hoboken, NJ, & Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2023. 326 pp., references & index.

            Environmental history is a sub-field in the discipline of history that arose in the 1970s.  In a nutshell, environmental history’s contribution to our understanding of the past is by depicting the environment not as a stage on which human history has taken place but rather as a system of living and non-living constituents with which humans have dynamic, reciprocal relationships.  Humans shape their environments, environments shape humans, and those interacting relationships change over time.

            Mark Stoll has taught history at Texas Tech University since 1997.  His main scholarly interest has been in the ways Protestant Christianity, especially Calvinism or the Reformed Movement, has shaped how industrialists have rationalized their uses of Creation to profit financially.  In Stoll’s previous writing, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015), he shows how some Americans raised in the Reformed tradition conceived of the environment as they advocated politically to launch the conservation movement.

In Profit: An Environmental History, his most recent book, Stoll has turned his attention to an even broader topic: capitalism and the long human history of how people have interacted with their environments and with other humans to generate what we call profit.  This is a global history, but because Americans have in recent centuries played a central role in the developments of industrial capitalism and consumer capitalism, the United States is often at the center of his story.

            Stoll’s Introduction begins by calling our attention to the smartphone, a small technological object that is now almost ubiquitous throughout the world.  It allows us to find vast swaths of information about almost any topic. We can purchase nearly anything using it, watch videos and other forms of entertainment, and we can interact with friends, family, and strangers at great distances.  When some people are separated from their smartphones, they suffer severe anxiety.  Then Stoll lists the “Pandora’s box” of environmental evils in the cell phone.  The case is made from plastic derived from petroleum and natural gas extracted at great cost to the environment.  Smartphones require rare-earth and other metals, mining of which has environmental costs, often displaces people from their homes, and can lead to conflict.  Some smartphones are recycled to reclaim those materials, but many are simply discarded, further contaminating environments.  Corporations and governments can and do use smartphones to surveil their users.  In 2007, smartphones were still somewhat rare; soon 70% of the world’s population will have one.  Stoll summarizes: “The smartphone is the very epitome of capitalism in its latest incarnation.” (p 2).  He asks, “Who then is guilty of the environmental crime that is the smartphone?”

            Many thinkers say we are collectively to blame because of the aggregate of personal choices we have all made.   The smartphone may be the technological epitome of the human causes of what some geologists and other scientists call the Anthropocene, a geological era being shaped in part by human activity, evidence of which will be evident on Earth in future geological eras.  Two features of the era we are entering are monumental climate change and significant loss of species diversity.  Other thinkers suggest that we are not equally culpable, that the coming era should be called the “Capitalocene,” because of the decisive roles that giant corporations and capitalists have played in moving humanity in this direction.

Regardless of who’s to blame, we should ask how this happened, and what hope there is for changing direction.  Addressing these questions, Stoll takes us back to the beginning of the period when the human species began to set itself apart from other animal species.  Prior to that time, humans (or pre-human species) had to be able to gather enough energy in the form of food to be able to grow from birth, move about to find food and avoid being food for predators, reproduce, and help offspring grow to repeat the cycle.  As humans began to set themselves apart from other animal species—by harnessing fire and developing stone tools—they still had to accomplish those basic things, but now with fire and stone tools they had devised more effective means of doing.  This gradually gave humans certain survival advantages, until in recent millennia those advantages have accelerated, and humans have developed into the dominant animal species on Earth.

            In his opening chapter, “How It Started,” Stoll recounts the familiar human history of some small groups of hunter-gatherers, or foragers, making a transition to herding animals or cultivating plants—that is, becoming agricultural societies.  Some of those societies developed hierarchies, traveled long distances, and traded with distant peoples, beginning the human role in reshaping ecosystems by transplanting other species of plants and animals.  Stoll sees the beginnings of what we might recognize as the accumulation of capital arising 7,000 years ago with mining for both precious metal (gold for ornaments) and base metal (copper for making superior tools).  The bronze and iron ages followed.  This gave rise to a merchant class that did not necessarily produce food, fiber, or artifacts, and did not rule over others, but accumulated wealth that they could invest in on-going trade. This led to numerical record-keeping and institutions of learning to foster mathematics, science, and philosophy.  Warfare and enslaved labor accompanied these developments.  Coins arose about 2,500 years ago as a tool of empire that could also measure value, store wealth, and serve as a medium of exchange.

            Stoll’s history moves quickly across the empires that arose in the Mediterranean region, China, Africa, and the Americas until Europeans started to establish empires abroad in the wake of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of what he thought was India.  Those voyages of discovery were capitalized by merchants in places like Genoa, Venice, and Florence who sought to profit from their investments in locally manufactured goods shipped elsewhere and in textiles and spices brought from exotic societies back to European markets.  In short order, these merchants learned that they could profit further by growing commodity crops, especially sugar cane, in distant colonies and by using enslaved labor to do so.  Enslaving indigenous people was difficult, because they knew their environments well; people captured in Africa and shipped across the ocean were easier to subdue because they found themselves stranded in a strange land and dependent on their enslavers for survival.  Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English merchants engaged in various facets of the colonial and slave trades.  The Spanish also found an abundance of silver in their colonies in the Americas that could be mined to enhance Spanish wealth.

            The Reformed tradition in Christianity played important roles in the environmental history of capitalism Stoll tells.  As Britain began to emerge as a fount of capitalism in the 1600s, and then began learning to use coal in widespread ways, Reformed Christians in Scotland and England (or thinkers informed by Reformed beliefs) helped shape those developments.  Presbyterians believed waste was sinful, and “improvement” was a way faithful people could approach their uses of the gifts God had given them.  Improvement formed a core of the ideas Adam Smith presented in his Wealth of Nations.  Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine was able to convert the energy in coal into mechanical power, but it was very wasteful of coal.  James Watt was offended by the waste and devised a much more efficient steam engine.  As Britain’s use of coal increased, fueling the strength of its empire into the nineteenth century, the economist Stanley Jevons, whose thinking was shaped more by Unitarianism than the Reformed tradition, cautioned that Britain would one day exhaust its domestic coal resources, and he recognized that devising more efficient technologies for burning coal would not help.  Using coal more efficiently would bring down the cost, and therefore the price to customers, of what coal produced.  Efficient use of coal would not be a solution that would slow its depletion because lower prices would increase consumption and therefore accelerate the use of coal.

            The second half of Profit concerns the rise of industrial capitalism and the conservation movement in the nineteenth century and the rise of consumer capitalism and environmentalism in the twentieth.  Although Stoll continues to give examples of these developments from other parts of the world, most of his narrative is about the United States, which had become the world’s leader in many ways of thinking about resources and humans’ uses of them.   He shows how the Reformed tradition shaped the thinking of leading capitalists in the U.S., like Andrew Carnegie, and of leading conservationists, like George Perkins Marsh and Gifford Pinchot.  He also shows how growing capitalist economies depleted resources and polluted environments.  Many people grew up being frugal, which was consistent with their religious faith and helped them to thrive in an economy in which most people were not wealthy.  The rise of advertising, however, urged people to move away from those ideas and seek gratification in consuming more, helping to move the US economy in the early twentieth century, and soon much of the rest of the world, from industrial capitalism to consumer capitalism.  This in turn gave rise to the advent of environmentalism, as citizens began to appreciate, and want to protect, environments both for their intrinsic value and as places to spend time.  It is in these contexts that we are now concerned with issues such as urban sprawl, growth in the use of plastics and in the injury caused by plastics on land and in the seas, the harm to the atmosphere caused by refrigerants (CFCs), and global warming.

            In the twenty-first century, we have added new concerns.  The environmental-justice movement has helped us realize that poor and minority communities often suffer most from pollution.  The same is true on the global scale: poor nations that have done little to cause environmental harm suffer most of the impacts.  As we try to devise paths forward, we now think in terms of a sustainable future as something that Earth’s abundance can support into the future indefinitely for both the global north and the global south.

Through most of this history of environmentalism, Stoll notes, we have tried to heal the environment, but we have done little to address the engine that is driving environmental harm, i.e., capitalism or the drive to profit.  Corporations contribute to this.  Companies that advertise their environmental concerns often do so by encouraging us to make our own moral choices.  For example, we are all encouraged to recycle our household plastic, but we are not asked to reconsider the system of consumer capitalism that depends on plastics to function.

Stoll points approvingly to the many environmental successes we’ve achieved, like eliminating DDT and most CFCs, but our biggest failure so far is our response to the climate crisis itself.  He shows the complex layers of interrelated institutions we need to steer to find and implement solutions, layers that include governments, corporations, and the amorphous entity that is “the public,” all of which are complicit in the “crime that is the smartphone.”  Stoll doesn’t tell us what we need to do to succeed, but he has identified the powerful factor that is now part of humanity—capitalism, which is driven by an urge to profit.  He doubts it will ever go away, but by focusing on it, rather than letting it stay hidden, perhaps we can learn to handle it.  People will probably not want to go back to a pre-capitalist world, but have we reached “peak stuff” (do we have enough)?  Will we avert catastrophe?

Fredric L. Quivik