The Treadmill of Production: Land, Waste, Food, and Technology
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
Capitalism is an economic system that is organized around three main dynamics:
- Private property
- Competitive market
- Profit growth
Though each of these dynamics is central — and in particular, in the ways in which they interact — the treadmill of production is rooted in the last feature: GROWTH.
Capitalism is organized around the logic of perpetual growth. A capitalist company must increase — GROW — its profits in order to remain competitive in the capitalist marketplace. Of course, capitalism is also organized around the 5 components of the materials economy (Leonard 2010) :
- Extraction
- Production
- Distribution
- Consumption
- Disposal
The logic of growth is embedded in each of these components. The treadmill of production implies that growth is only an aspect of the production process, but in order to produce more we first have to extract more, and once we extract and produce more, then we must also distribute and consume more. Of course, this leads to the social problems connected to disposal: burning garbage, plastics in the ocean, and ridiculous amounts of food waste.
This treadmill of production — which really could be called a treadmill of growth; or, the energizer bunny treadmill of production, that keeps going and going and going and going — also leads us to the social problems connected to food systems and health. Growth is the logic behind pumping animals with antibiotics, and certainly, the logic of growth has impacted our bodies, and subsequently, made health care significantly more expensive (as we get increasingly sick, our health care costs skyrocket).
Finally, the treadmill of production has also coincided with technological transformations. First, the first major and hugely (environmentally) impactful human technology was agriculture. This led to larger populations and decreased nomadic lifestyles; agriculture led to the establishment of towns and further, the idea of “government” as a mechanism to organize people (Krebs 2013). Agriculture laid the foundation for everything that is central to our society. It has also always been connected to the idea of GROWTH, which is relational: if we can grow more, we can feed more and if we can feed more we can birth more, and if we birth more we have to grow more (Mann 2018). Growth and agriculture have always been connected, but it became about more than human sustenance when Industrial Agriculture came to the scene and added the need to incorporate profit growth into the dynamic. Thus, the need for more and more technology has been needed to manage this growth.
Plus, technology has been, since the beginning, about solving problems, and thus we have tended to be a people — in particular in the U.S. — that sees all technological advances as problem solvers and benefit adders. As Gould (page 106) writes,
We have, for example, created food-based treadmill scholars refer to as the “pesticide treadmill” (Thrupp p. 273). In this case, in order to grow more food, more pesticides are used, which increases problems such as soil erosion, and “these trends not only do social harm but can undermine productivity” (Thrupp p. 269).
We tend to look at technology through the lens of optimism; we welcome new technology without concern for the (potential) consequences. We did this with coal in the 18th Century and we did this with computers and the internet in the 1990s and the 21st Century. We do have a bit of skepticism now, especially around Artificial Intelligence, likely because we’ve finally tuned into the latent functions of technological advances.
As our landfills have grown and our health care costs have grown and our houses have gotten bigger, our desire for technological gadgets to fill those houses has also grown. “Excess accumulation” (Juliet Schor) leads to lots and lots of garbage!
~From Garbology, Page 5, Edward Humes
We have an economic system that mandates an increase in production; growth is integral to the system. Increased production requires increased consumption. As the pressure on consumption increases, historically after World War II, we shift to a consumer lifestyle of wants rather than needs. We need clothes (and not a lot); we don’t need fashion. But, only needing a few items of clothing doesn’t lead to the necessary profit growth that is required in capitalism. Enter fashion. Fashion is a social system that compels us to purchase clothes that we don’t need so that we can be “in fashion” (e.g. fit in with others). This means we will always be engaged in increasing our clothes consumption. This leads to clothes that we don’t wear, don’t need, and don’t even realize we have (we all have a few things in our closet that we don’t even know are there!). This is what Schor calls “excess consumption”:
~From Prices and Quantities, Page 311, Juliet Schor
Per this quote, excess consumption emerges not randomly, but through the way in which the global (political) economy is organized: U.S. companies outsourcing factories, lower wages for (sweatshop) factory workers, and cheaper clothes are exported to the U.S. Thus, clothes are produced in the global South, consumed in the global North, discarded in the global North, and then re-distributed to the global South through places like Goodwill. “Excess consumption” means to consume in excess: “an amount of something that is more than necessary, permitted, or desirable”.
The result of this — the irony? — is that this “excess consumption” becomes undesirable during the last stage of the “materials economy”: disposal (Leonard, Story of Stuff). Though there is an emerging market and cultural capital surrounding thrifting, historically secondhand clothes have been stigmatized/pitied. Thus, the people associated with what is secondhand, with what has been discarded, and with litter, become stigmatized and/or pitied people.
~ From Literrers, Page 213, Alexandra Murphy
In other words, we consume too much, but we don’t want to see it (hegemony!). And, whether we do or don’t see it, through a sociological framework, is about the systems that organize the disposal process. But, at the micro level (as a result of the macro level, historical systems of inequality), trash/second-hand/litter comes to be associated with certain people: poor people, people of color, “third-world” people, and bad people.
This shapes what Hooks and Smith call the “treadmill of destruction,” a pattern whereby the growth of the military — not strictly the economy — contributed to Western expansion and the colonization of and destruction of land inhabited by indigenous communities. As the concept of environmental racism highlights, where we live, which is shaped by historical, institutionalized racism, also shapes the toxins we are exposed to.
Though as we breathe the air in the Midwest that is shaped by the fires in Canada, it’s clear that eventually we will all be impacted by a changing climate and “global weirding.”
The system produces trash, we make trash, and we construct “single stories” (Adichie) with social meaning around that trash that uses “trash” as an insult to hurl at actual people, thus perpetuating the inequities of production (low wages, sweatshop conditions, toxic materials) through the consumption process. In order to address these inequities we have to stop blaming the most marginalized and exploited and look to changing the systems, in order to get off the “treadmill of production.” We can, of course, also look to our own consumption practices. Each person matters.
Another consequence of the treadmill of production is that our loneliness and disdain for solitude have also grown (Deresiewicz). While we extract coltan to make batteries for our cell phones (Leonard 2010), our cell phones are also extracting our in-person communication skills and our capacity for exploring our own internal self-worth and ability to be happy with ourselves (Deresiewicz 2009, Turkle 2016). And here, of course, I mean truly with ourselves, alone and with no distractions of any kind — no screens, no food, no books, just ourselves. Some of you have been working each week in your journals on decreasing your phone use, spending more time with your friends, doing gratitude practices, reading more, and walking outside, in part because you are trying to get off the treadmill!
It can be argued then that all the problems we’ve looked at all semester are connected to the treadmill of production, down to the need for land to extract from (hence the continued importance of colonization and the need for conversations about land equity) and to the need for cell phone vacations. The treadmill is an aspect of the SYSTEM that produces these social problems. Of course, we as PEOPLE can figure out ways to get off the treadmill, too. To think sociologically we have to explore the SYSTEM, but we are always still people who have the ability to shape how we are engaged with the SYSTEMS that organize us. Systems change — hence, the focus on Mills’s relational understanding of history and biography ☺.
SOURCES:
Deresiewicz, W. (2009). The end of solitude. the chronicle of Higher education, 55(21), 6.
Hooks, Gregory, and Chad L. Smith. “The treadmill of destruction: National sacrifice areas and Native Americans.” American Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2004): 558–575.
Humes, Edward. Garbology: Our dirty love affair with trash. Penguin, 2013.
Krebs, J. (2013). Food: a very short introduction. OUP Oxford.
Leonard, A. (2010). The story of stuff: How our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet, our communities, and our health-and a vision for change. Simon and Schuster.
Mann, C. C. (2018). Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?. The Atlantic.
Murphy, Alexandra K. ““Litterers” How Objects of Physical Disorder Are Used to Construct Subjects of Social Disorder in a Suburb.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 642, no. 1 (2012): 210–227.
Thrupp, Lori Ann. “Entrapment and escape from fruitless insecticide use: lessons from the banana sector of Costa Rica.” International Journal of Environmental Studies 36, no. 3 (1990): 173–189.
Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin.
