Introduction

Reach into your pocket or bag and pull out your smartphone. Almost certainly you have one within easy reach. You might even be reading this on it. The palm-sized technological marvel you hold can connect you to billions of people, even in some of the most remote spots on earth. It can tell you where you are and how to get to where you are going. It can play music, videos, and movies. With it, you can find almost any information you want, in many languages, from the history of the Wattasid dynasty of Morocco to Great-Aunt Tilley's latest pictures of her cat. The consumer products of the world's factories and artisans are yours with a touch of a "Buy" icon. This little device has wormed its way into daily life so deeply that separation from it provokes anxiety.

The smartphone is ubiquitous because it is cheap-so cheap that service providers give away older models. This miraculous contrivance, though, costs more than advertised. The touchscreen and case conceal a Pandora's box of environmental evils. The plastic in the case derives from petroleum or natural gas, which a multinational corporation extracted from underground, often with damage to ecosystems and watersheds, and transported by pipeline, supertanker, truck, or railroad with spills, leaks, and clouds of the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide. A low-paid worker in a factory in east or south Asia used dangerous chemicals to make and form the plastic case. Inside the case, metals like rare earths, aluminum, gold, cobalt, tin, and lithium make the phone work. The rare earths come from China, which has 95 percent of the world's reserves. Mining them uses tremendous amounts of energy and materials and generates radioactive waste, hydrogen fluoride, and acidic wastewater. Ships burning fossil fuels bring the other metals from mines in southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Pacific islands. Those mines have displaced people, incited violent conflict, destroyed agricultural land, polluted water, and damaged the health of often unprotected miners, who sometimes are child laborers. Energy for manufacturing your phone and charging its batteries (not to mention powering telephone and Internet services and server farms) comes, more often than not, from powerplants that burn coal or gas and produce sulfur and mercury pollution and more greenhouse gases. Companies design smartphones to be replaced about every two years. Most people discard old phones, which end up in landfills, slowly leaching toxic chemicals. Some owners recycle them, but recycling their complex, compact, and integrated components is not easy or clean and requires harmful chemicals that produce hazardous waste.1

How did the environmental crime that is the smartphone end up in the hands of billions of people who have little idea of its environmental costs? The answer is complicated. Most certainly, people want them for convenient communication, social media, entertainment, features like cameras and alarms, and access to the Internet. They may be responding to social pressure or work requirements. Then, too, smartphones have nearly become a necessity in modern life. But looming behind all these factors is a group of huge corporations that sell them for the profit of investors and shareholders. Other corporations provide the content, application programs ("apps"), and social media websites that cleverly keep users' attention nearly constantly on their phones. Finally, standing almost hidden in their shadows are some of the most important actors, the corporations that lobby governments for favorable laws and regulations and others that provide promotional campaigns to convince people to buy the device or its attendant services and apps. They have been extraordinarily successful at getting people to acquire something that only a short time ago no one knew they wanted. Before 2007, the smartphone barely existed, but in the near future, 70 percent of the world's population will have one. The smartphone is the very epitome of capitalism in its latest incarnation.

Who then is guilty of the environmental crime that is the smartphone? A detective on the case might suggest the Murder-on-the-Orient-Express solution: everybody did it. Under the promptings of a variety of considerations, we thoughtlessly buy and dispose of smartphones without any compulsion whatsoever. Alternatively, an environmental Hercule Poirot might instead name the culprits who most stand to benefit and who hide the smartphone's environmental costs: the corporations that profit from making and selling the device and its services. The smartphone and its cousins the tablet, laptop, and personal computer are astonishingly profitable. They provide the incomes of what in April 2021 were the world's six largest private corporations by market value: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, and Tencent. Founded since 1975, and four of them since 1994, these gigantic corporations are barely older than the smartphone itself and none is older than the personal computer.2

We have lined up suspects for the crime. What will be the verdict? We have a hung jury. Some jurors call the crime a part of the "Anthropocene" and blame humans collectively. Environmental thinkers like Bill McKibben, E. O. Wilson, and Elizabeth Kolbert blame our personal choices.3 If everyone would simply behave, believe, buy, and ballot more responsibly and more morally, we could save the world. Others, among them Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, and Naomi Klein, prefer "Capitalocene" and point the finger of guilt at capitalists and corporations.4 Jurors also disagree over the time of the crime. One party dates it to a Great Acceleration after World War II. Another argues for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. Still a third group sees human fingerprints all over the environment much deeper in time, perhaps as long ago as the adoption of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Frankly, the fault lies both in our stars and with ourselves. It is difficult to identify anything in our modern lives-food, fuel, clothing, housing, transport, work, or leisure-that is not also complicit in similar crimes against the earth. They all present our jurors with the same conflicting evidence. One may argue that the rich, who consume the most, are more culpable than the poor, and that no amount of water can wash guilt from the hands of leaders of industry. True enough. Yet none of us today lives completely free of the web of consumer capitalism. The ongoing pillage of the planet lends length, ease, and quality to the lives of the great majority of us and in truth makes it possible for us to exist at all. The human species flourishes as no biped or quadruped ever has. Neither hunting and gathering nor premodern agrarian practices, as sustainable as they often are, could feed, clothe, and house the world's population of nearly 8 billion people or give a substantial minority of them previously unimagined abundance, but the global capitalist system does.

Calculations of the total body weight of all humans and land animals through human history show how miraculous this really is. In the late Pleistocene, according to one study, human biomass was vanishingly small, while terrestrial mammals collectively weighed about 175 million metric tons.5 By 1900, after the agricultural and industrial revolutions, as Vaclav Smil has reckoned it, humans weighed in at 70 million metric tons while wild animals had declined to 50 million metric tons. Species under human control living on formerly wild habitat-cattle, horses and donkeys, water buffalo, pigs, sheep, goats, camels, poultry, and more-counted for 175 million metric tons, the total body weight of all wild animals many millennia earlier. In other words, humans had found ways to support an additional 120 million metric tons of body weight out of the same environmental resources.

Then consumer capitalism kicked in and terrestrial biomass made an astounding jump. By 2000, Smil calculates, humans alone made up over 300 million metric tons of biomass, or over two-thirds more animal weight than all animals together before the rise of Homo sapiens. Domesticated animals composed another 600 million metric tons (with a couple million more for dogs, cats, and other pets). The combined biomass of humans and domesticated animals amounts to greater than 500 percent of the Pleistocene total. At the same time, the biomass of wild animals had declined another 50 percent since 1900 to about 25 million metric tons, about a sevenfold decline since their Pleistocene peak. This means that the figure for wild animals equates to about four percent of that for domesticated animals and only 2.7 percent of that for humans and their animals together.6

Perhaps we should be grateful that we have somehow left any resources for them at all. But this marshalling of the earth's resources for human needs is what makes it possible for nearly 8 billion people to live.

This book tells the story of how this world came to be. The title Profit is ambiguous. In its common current usage, it means financial profit, which today we associate with a system we call capitalism. Profit in its original meaning can also mean any benefit, as when we say we profit by experience. In the financial sense, most of capitalism's profits accrue to a very small proportion of the world's population. In the broader sense, considering that capitalism supports so many people, and a large proportion of us very comfortably, we all profit from it. Profit tells the history of capitalism through the...