THE END OF NATURE

(Earth’s environment as no longer cyclical in restoring itself but linear, like human history)

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (where the knight cheerfully picks up his severed head) no longer captures the nature of life.

The population growth curve.

The Malthusian assumption revisited:

Food production spurs a cycle of population growth then famine. Though this seems wrong, neo-Malthusians also target population growth as pushing us past the earth’s carrying capacity.

Complicating the message of the Malthusians: Population growth is not the only factor in environmental degradation. Consumption patterns. (Consider golf courses, suburban lawns, etc.) The ecological footprint.

The categorical imperative of mainstream environmental ethics: “Reduce your ecological footprint” (or at least live within your ecological means). The ecological footprint of different nations.

Preview of next week on radical environmentalism, eco-feminism, and the Gaia hypothesis (“deep ecology”):

Criticism of democratic approach: There is (reprehensible) systemic anthropocentrism in public policy (penguins don’t vote).

What gets calculated in a cost/benefit analysis?

Answer: Things that have a price tag.

EXERCISE: List the ten things that you value the most. For each, decide whether it is a private good (has a price tag), public good (does not, e.g., air, the rhinoceros at the Washington zoo), or intangible (e.g., X’s friendship).

What is the non-moral good (considered abstractly)? Human happiness?

An alternative theory:

Value = degree of organic unity

Example: the spotted owl (an endangered species)

Question: What is the value of the spotted owl?

to HUMAN HAPPINESS? vs. as an ORGANIC REALITY? (usefulness to human welfare vs. intrinsic value)

Is a utilitarian calculation adequate with respect to environmental issues?

NB. Not only do radical environmentalists (the “deep ecologists”) say no but also many who are less radical. On the right, there are libertarians, who want maximum liberty for individuals and minimal government. On the left, there are socialists and communitarians who are, like utilitarians, antrocentric with respect to environmental policy. Among middle positions are those of some developmental economists and philosophers, for example, the Noble-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen (“progressive mainstream”). See Sen’s paper (required for 18 Nov) WCH pp. 187-90. (Nutrition, says Sen, is not just a matter of the availability of food but includes, among other factors, knowledge of nutrition. Consider the latest development in Cuba: pinto beans and papaya replaced by buttered popcorn and Wrigley’s gum.)

Relevant facts:

1. The end of nature (cyclical time replaced by human, linear time)

a. global warming

b. depletion of ozone

c. loss of biological diversity (extinction of species)

d. loss of wilderness

2. Population explosion (many difficult political factors at play here: religion, fundamental freedoms, fundamental cultural assumptions, standards of living, etc.)

3. Technological and industrial explosion (pollution visible from outer space)

The mainstream environmentalist (the “liberals”) analysis:

CONTROL: (i) population growth and (ii) pollution (which is mainly the result of industry and the burning of fossil fuels)

Here we find a true “tragedy of the commons” with the logic of “prisoners’ dilemma,” i.e., lack of cooperative effort with non-optimal results (see prisoners' dilemma).

NB. The Ecologist editors (Whose Common Future) say G. Hardin’s view of a commons is really of an “open-access regime”: p. 30/13.

PROTECT: biological diversity (restrict logging, development; protect wilderness; try to restore damaged wetlands, etc.)

DO IT NOW

But HOW?

The internationalist theses:

A. Many (the worst) environmental problems are global.

B. Global problems require global solutions.

(Liberals usually favor international law and international and “multilateral” institutions.)

Complication: enormous difference in human prosperity North and South.

An alternative approach:

“Small is beautiful”

Local empowerment movements (advocated by the authors of the Ecologist in WHOSE COMMON FUTURE):

(We’ll call this camp that of the “regional communitarians’’ (or, “pluralist communitarians”). Their views are different from those of old-style communitarians--also known as “socialists”--Carl Cohen, for instance.)

Local groups to assume control over local environments and to resist development (the NIMBY attitude exalted to a moral virtue).

DEVELOPMENT IS BAD (see p. 20) BECAUSE IT FUELS ENCLOSURES OF COMMONS (transferring power away from local communities).

Promote appropriate technologies, e.g., those that have evolved in a local “habitat” (the spinning wheel vs. the textiles plant)

Problem: Don’t people like “living like Americans,” i.e., as rootless individuals?

Answer: No. Even in the control center of world capitalism, NYC, there is the example of Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses, determined mother and populist defeating the Goliath of neighborhood-destroying expressways. The Bronx was hurt by Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway but Jacobs saved the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan.

Problem: Small may be beautiful but capital is scarce for subsidy of endangered lifestyles, and vested interests are powerful, e.g., large utilities who want to build dams.

Answer: Government subsidies should be re-directed away from big business to help communities sustain themselves by promoting, for example, small-scale energy production (windmills, solar panels, etc.), OR Government should simply stop all subsidies altogether. It should not empower big business.

The Ecologist editors are anti-globalization and are alarmed by the power of big business, both international corporations and local “enclosers of the commons.”

Hardin’s mistaken analysis of the concept of a “commons” (see pp. 12-13). The commons is not an “open-access regime” (as Hardin has it) where authority rests nowhere but a regime where authority rests with a local community.

Implied message: it is right to join community actions to resist development and to support others who are resisting.

Ecologist editors: We have no public-policy recommendations because we believe that all solutions must be local.

Problem: The issues raised amount to questions of authority and power. This vision of local power seems “romantic” (utopian and nostalgic) in our age of State power and organization.

Answer: We have the “techniques of the weak” (moral argument, grassroots organization, protest, civil disobedience).

The free-market approach (of the “mainstream conservatives,” championed in our readings my Gurcharan Das): Set up market mechanisms to check pollution, etc. (Compare to the carrot-and-stick approach of China.)

INEFFICIENCY OF GOVERNMENT BUREAUROCRACIES thesis:

Markets are better in controlling
pollution than government regulations.

Why?

1. Congress has no incentive to weigh a piece of legislation's costs.

2. Successful lobbying by vested interests creates distortions in legislative analyses.

3. Congress is prey to false universalism: e.g., air pollution is not a problem in Montana.

NB. Many economists of this “market-solution” camp do not favor a policy of no State intervention but rather of a certain kind of State intervention, for instance, the creation of markets of pollution warrants to fight pollution. And so on.