Organization & Environment

A possible link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly called "mad cow" disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal human equivalent, has been announced. Both of these diseases are forms of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies that attack the brain and destroy its nerve cells. That a disease identified with cows since 1985 could possibly be spread to human beings by eating meat from infected animals prompted a crisis for the meat industry and consumers. Most responses to this crisis represent a search for anthropocentric solutions to an anthropocentric problem: that is, improve the meat supply rather than examine the practice of meat eating. In this essay, the author examines this beefeating crisis through ecofeminist analysis, which resists such anthropocentricity. From an ecofeminist perspective, the beefeating crisis represents a small piece of the larger animal industrial complex and its production practices and attitudes. This analysis explains why this is a problem, and stresses a closer examination and a possible rejection of meat eating.

A conventional view of politics is oriented toward the rule-directed struggle between parties for privileges and levers of power. The ecological issue underlines the need for a more differentiated analysis of politics. In the world risk society, politics is made in various realms of subpolitics, whether it is in the finn, the laboratory, at the gas station, or in the supermarket. New types of conflict emerge and new coalitions become thinkable. Subpolitics thus questions the status of existing systems, calls for a rethinking of the various schemes of classification according to which people are accustomed to perceive their organizational environment, and asks for the invention of new institutional ways to deal with environmental risk.

Organizations are the most intensive and effective environmental destroyers. Organizations in a competitive unregulated market such as the United States and emerging Asian and former Soviet countries are more likely to be destructive because externalizing environmental costs increases profits and competitiveness, but organizational properties encourage destructive practices even in command economies. In the United States, a fully wage-dependent workforce makes whistle-blowing risky, structural interests of employees limits the reform efforts of even an environmentally sensitive executive, decentralization limits accountability, consultants and public relations staffs are available to reassure executives that trade-offs are in society's interests and that regulations mean waste, and organizations socialize all employees, making whistle-blowing even rarer.

Thirty-five years after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this article takes stock of the relevance of her message for present-day society. How much progress has been achieved with respect to reducing and regulating pesticides? The answer is a grim one. Not only have Carson's warnings too often gone unheeded, but we are entering a new stage in our understanding of the level of risk that these chemicals pose, beyond the scope even of Silent Spring. More than ever we need to draw on powers of understanding and explanation of the kind that Rachel Carson exemplified.