The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment (review)

Shadows of Consumption is an exceptional book. Dauvergne sets out to explore both the “direct consequences of consuming” and “the environmental spillovers from corporate, trade and financing chains that supply and replace consumer goods” (xi). He calls the resultant global patterns of harm the “ecological shadows of consumption.”

The book traces the causes and implications of these shadows of consumption via five products: automobiles, leaded gasoline, refrigerators, beef, and harp seals. Dauvergne repeatedly notes the many benefits brought to humans by these products as he seeks to analyze the substantial environmental and human tolls they extract and engender. This is not a book about the privilege of environmental quality or activism, nor one that is primarily or merely academic. As Dauvergne rightly argues, people are dying of consumption.

Each of the five cases presents a product history, including attention to the roles of national and international firms, technological innovation and marketing, consumer beliefs and demands, environmental movements, research and risk/harm analyses, and government action. Every case includes critical debates about knowledge and technology, with most cases showing that scientific and technical information is a force for the globalization of ecological shadows and for the resulting resistance. All cases confirm that environmental governance institutions, like ecological shadows, are globalizing over time.

For example, the automobile extracts a heavy environmental and human price as it transforms societies around the world, increasing urban air pollution and the risks to drivers, passengers and pedestrians, to say nothing of its growing contributions to global climate change. As environmental social movements and government policies demand fewer pollutants and safer vehicles in Northern, consumer societies, these risks move—sometimes they are clearly pushed—onto populations and ecosystems in the developing world. This dynamic also is clear in Dauvergne’s treatment of leaded gasoline, about which safety concerns were raised when it was introduced in the 1920s.

The 1920s arguments about lead risks, and those from the 1950s through the 1980s, sound quite familiar to a contemporary environmental advocate or analyst. Actors with material incentives to avoid regulation worked tirelessly to keep the burden of proof on those seeking to identify and regulate risks to human health and the natural environment. One depressing aspect of the book is its demonstration of how little things have changed over time, even in a world where politics has been partially transformed by the globalization of environmentalism. While automobile efficiency and safety improves globally, and leaded gas and ozone depleting substances are phased out, the globalization of other risks and harms (climate change, beef consumption, e-waste, and the seemingly endless growth in material throughput of consumer societies in the global North and South) continues apace.

Dauvergne’s work also reveals the possibilities and limits of both the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement and state-led environmental governance, as he traces the central importance of large and small corporate actors within domestic and international politics. Basic capitalist economics tells us to expect firms to search for ever larger markets in ways that globalize their products and practices. Dauvergne reveals that such efforts also globalize risks and harm, frequently concentrating such risks in poorer and more marginalized societies. So, like US tobacco firms that have redoubled their efforts to replace Northern addicts with addicts in the developing world as they face greater regulation and taxation in across the OECD economies, the ecological shadows of cars, leaded gasoline, ozone depleting substances and beef extend around the globe, often shifting over great distances toward more marginalized populations.

Yet, Shadows also reveals that states, international organizations and NGOs can learn from each other and accelerate the globalization of improved environmental governance. Environmentalism has engendered state and international organization capacity building and policies that limit, at least in some places, ecological harm and human health risks. For example, the United Nations Environment Programme and other international organizations, partnering with firms and donor states, have seen substantial success since 2000 in their attempts to rid much of the developing world of leaded gasoline. US...