Environmental Values in a Globalising World
This multidisciplinary volume presents a refreshing new approach to environmental values in the global age. It investigates the challenges that globalisation poses to traditional environmental values, in general as well as in politics and international environmental affairs, and in environmental governance. Divided into five parts, the book investigates how environmental values could be reconceived in a globalising world: Part I explores contemporary environmental values and their implications for a globalising world. Part II examines the development of Western and Eastern environmental values. Part III discusses contemporary environmental politics. Part IV examines how values inform environmental governance and how governance solutions influence which values are realised. Part V concludes the volume with two different views of the prospects of environmental values in a globalising world. Environmental Values in a Globalising World will be of interest to students and researchers studying the environment in philosophy, political science, international relations, international environmental law, environmental studies and development studies. Jouni Paavola is Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia, and Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society (OCEES), Mansfield College, Oxford. Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University in Brisbane, President of Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former Director of Australia’s Commission for the Future.
Routledge/Challenges of Globalisation Edited by Charles Sampford and Haig Patapan Griffith University, Australia
This series seeks to make systematic contributions to international debates over two intimately related issues: The values that should inform the governance of modern states and the globalising world in which they are increasingly enmeshed, in particular whether the liberal democratic values that sought to civilise the sovereign state need to be reconceived as global values. The institutions that are needed to realise those values, be they local, national, regional, international, transnational or global. 1.
Globalisation and Equality Edited by Keith Horton and Haig Patapan
2.
Globalisation and the Rule of Law Edited by Spencer Zifcak
3.
Environmental Values in a Globalising World Nature, justice and governance Edited by Jouni Paavola and Ian Lowe
4.
Globalisation and Citizenship Edited by Jon Stokes and Wayne Hudson
This series also includes a collection of books that explore the relevance of liberal Islamic and Western traditions of political theory to contemporary governance reform, set against the background of the need to reconceive governance values in a globalising world: Liberal Islam and Western Political Theory: Beyond Conflict Edited by Wayne Hudson and Azyumardi Azra Griffith University, Australia and State University of Islamic Studies, Indonesia 1.
Liberal Islam and the Public Good Edited by N. A. Fadhil Lubis and A. J. Brown
2.
Liberal Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Edited by Azyumardi Azra and Robyn Lui
3.
Liberal Islam and Civic Pluralism Edited by Wayne Hudson and Bahtiar Effendy
Environmental Values in a Globalising World Nature, justice and governance Edited by Jouni Paavola and Ian Lowe
First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Jouni Paavola and Ian Lowe for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-31962-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0–415–34362–3 (Print edition)
Contents
List of illustrations Notes on contributors Foreword Preface and acknowledgements
viii ix xi xv
PART I
Introduction 1 Environmental values in a globalising world
1 3
I A N L O W E A N D J O U N I PA AVO L A
PART II
Environmental values and the nation state 2 Globalisation and the environment: endgame or a ‘new Renaissance’?
15
17
ANDREW BRENNAN
3 Environmental values, nationalism, global citizenship and the common heritage of humanity
38
RO B I N AT T F I E L D
4 The enchantments and disenchantments of nature: implications for consumption in a globalised world
51
K AT E S O P E R
5 Relational resonance with nature: the Confucian vision J U L I A TA O
66
vi
Contents
PART III
Globalisation, values and environmental politics 6 Global liberalism, environmentalism and the changing boundaries of the political: Karl Polanyi’s insights
81
83
JOHN M. MEYER
7 Reconceiving environmental justice: global movements and political theories
102
DAV I D S C H L O S B E RG
8 Environmental values in a globalising world: the case of China
123
PA U L G. H A R R I S
PART IV
Environmental governance and values 9 Interdependence, pluralism and globalisation: implications for environmental governance
141
143
J O U N I PA AVO L A
10 The climate change regime: de jure and de facto commitment to sustainable development
159
J OY E E TA G U P TA
11 Diplomacy and governance for sustainability in a partially globalised world
179
BO KJELLÉN
12 International environmental governance: the story so far
197
P E T E R B R I D G E WAT E R A N D C E L I A B R I D G E WAT E R
PART V
Conclusions
213
13 Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’
215
J I M DAT O R
Contents vii 14 Environmental values in the globalising world: grounds for cautious optimism
236
IAN LOWE
Index
246
Illustrations
Figures 11.1 11.2 11.3
Elements of sustainability National preparation and multilateral negotiations The cycle of sustainability
184 188 193
Tables 9.1 11.1
Main physical resource attributes Enabling conditions of the new sustainability paradigm
145 190
Contributors
Robin Attfield is Professor of Philosophy in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. Andrew Brennan is Chair in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, Perth, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Celia Bridgewater is Project Officer at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University in Canberra where she works on the interaction of language, culture and landscape. Peter Bridgewater is Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. He was previously Secretary of the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Nature Conservation Agency and Chairman of the International Whaling Commission. James ( Jim) Allen Dator is Director of Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS) and a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii. Joyeeta Gupta is Associate Professor and head of the Programme on International Environmental Governance at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Paul G. Harris is Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University in the UK and Research Fellow in the Centre for Public Policy Studies and the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Bo Kjellén is Chair of the Swedish Research Council on Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning and Advisor for the Swedish Ministry for Environment. He was Chief Negotiator for the Swedish Ministry of Environment between 1990 and 1998 and in charge of climate negotiations 1990–2001, holding various chairmanships in the Rio process. Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University in Brisbane. He directed Australia’s Commission for the Future in 1988 and chaired the advisory body which produced his country’s first national report on the state of the environment in 1996.
x Contributors John M. Meyer is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA. Jouni Paavola is Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia, and Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society (OCEES), Mansfield College, Oxford. David Schlosberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University. Kate Soper is Professor in the Department of Humanities, Arts and Languages and a member of the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University. Julia Tao is the Director of Governance in Asia Research Centre and Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
Foreword
I am delighted to congratulate the editors of this volume on bringing together a significant contribution to the ‘Challenges of Globalisation’ series. They and the contributors have laboured long and hard to produce this set of related essays. We all met together for an intensive two-day workshop held in Mansfield College, Oxford to share and hone our own ideas in developing this book. That workshop was thoroughly stimulating and deeply thought-provoking. We hope that the book that has been born of those discussions is similarly stimulating and thought-provoking. The editors have done a splendid job of indicating the themes and structure of the book in their introduction, I will merely seek to provide some context.
The series Since the Second World War, the United Nations and other institutions have sought to encourage both the spread of sovereignty and the recognition of universal values (especially human rights) by all sovereign states. This could be dubbed the ‘UN project’ – every people a sovereign state, every sovereign state a respecter of human rights. However, a range of recent trends, which are popularly labelled ‘globalisation’, have rocked the assumption that a world of strong sovereign states was the natural condition to which human societies were evolving. Rather than a process in which distinct geographic areas were politically crystallised as states, the last 300 years could now be interpreted as a relatively brief interlude in the development of political communities and political institutions. Sovereign states are not the end point of constitutional development but a mere transitory phase. The political and economic forces collectively called ‘globalisation’ have undermined the assumption of the strong state as the context for political debate about the balancing and realising of liberal democratic values. Both detractors and supporters of globalisation have queried the continuing relevance of statebased theory and values. Liberal democratic values were formed in and for strong sovereign states. Citizenship, rights, democracy, welfare and community have clear reference to sovereign states but seem to lack apparent application in a larger, more diffuse, global world. The institutions which promote, sustain and
xii
Foreword
realise most of those values are very much state-based. For example, democracy is realised through citizen participation in the legislatures of states and their federal elements – and has less mileage if the real power and range of choice open to those legislatures is limited. Welfare and welfare rights such as education and health care are currently only realised through the institutions of strong, sovereign (and wealthy) states – and even the capacity of these institutions to fulfil this role is being increasingly questioned. Some might think that the decline of state institutions is a convenient excuse for limiting or playing down liberal democratic values. Others argue for the protection and bolstering of strong sovereign states on the basis that only they can deliver rights that cost money to provide. This series is founded on the view that the values of liberal democracy should be rethought rather than abandoned on the excuse of globalisation, or defended by an attempt to recreate the strong states of the recent past. Indeed, the series contemplates the possibility that globalisation clears the way for the wider application of liberal democratic values. Most of the liberal democratic values proposed since the Enlightenment were claims for all human beings. The Declaration by the French Assembly was of the rights of man. The American Declaration of Independence held ‘these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . .’ But despite the universality of these claims (after the insertion of the gender-neutral terms), the institutions created by the state were almost exclusively devoted to providing rights to its own citizens. A more globalised political philosophy may allow these values to have global application. The concepts of sovereignty and non-intervention provided the context for the development of liberal democratic values. They also provided protection for these fledgling values from outside interference by more authoritarian regimes, which disliked democracy. However, the walls of sovereignty also acted as a barrier to these values spreading to neighbouring states whose citizens were often much in need of them. This series aims to contribute to discussion on these issues through a fourstage process: 1 2 3 4
An examination of the challenges that globalisation poses to the values of liberal democracy. A consideration of how those values might be redefined for a world largely without strong states. A consideration of the institutions (local, national and global) that could realise those values. An examination of the means by which those values could be built into those institutions through basic design, management, ethics regimes and integrity systems.
We are conscious that liberal democratic values were, are and always should be contentious. Furthermore, they can be cut up in a number of different ways. Some liberal democratic values can be very ‘imperialistic’, with some writers
Foreword xiii tending to have expansive definitions of ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and the ‘rule of law’ that effectively encompass all the good things they find or would like to find in contemporary society. For the purposes of discussion, here we have divided liberal democratic values into seven areas: liberty, equality, citizenship, democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the environment. Although this is fairly arbitrary, it does divide liberal democratic values into more ‘bite-sized’ pieces and allows more focused discussion on the different (and sometimes competing) values of liberal democracy.
Environmental values Environmental values may seem to fit uneasily with the other values considered in this series. Most such values deal with the relationships between human beings and the institutions they create. In one sense, environmental values are not eally different. They are values for human beings – involving a valuing of the environment in which we live and of a valued life within it. However, there is the possibility of a real tension here. The Enlightenment not only gave rise to liberal democratic values that might civilise despotic states. It also promoted the idea that science and reason might mean that we could move from fear of ‘nature’ to knowledge, and then to domination of it. However, even in the eighteenth century, some started to fear the manner and consequences of that domination. William Blake decried the ‘dark satanic mills’ that threatened ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. A century later Britain’s ‘National Trust’ was established to defend the countryside, providing a national focus for environmental concerns that would seem to be as naturally global as the universal ‘rights of man’. When environmental values moved to the foreground of political debate in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the global nature of environmental concern was almost universally accepted. However, ‘action’ was ‘local’ and the most effective regime for protecting the environment national – and sovereign states took radically different views as to the nature, causes, extent and remedies to the problem. As a consequence, environmental values are indeed faced with the same problem as other liberal democratic values. Sovereign states have been the means by which environmental values could be pursued but are also an impediment to the achievement of those values on a global scale. Just as universal human rights cannot be achieved through geographically limited states, environmental values need to be conceived and ultimately realised globally. As with all the other values we are seeking to globalise, this raises many value issues and, ultimately, many institutional issues. This volume does not claim to answer all such issues but does seek to make a contribution to the formulation of those issues and the sensible potential responses to them.
xiv Foreword
And thanks I would like to acknowledge the support provided to this project by the Australian Research Council and the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, which made the workshop and this collection possible. Thanks must also go to OCEES, Mansfield College, the Routledge team, the Key Centre and the Key Centre’s Publications Manager, Carmel Connors. Charles Sampford Director, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University, Australia President, International Institute for Public Ethics
Preface and acknowledgements
This volume has its origins in a series of seminars initiated by the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance (KCELJG) of Griffith University on liberal democratic values in the globalising world. The purpose of these seminars has been to reconceive liberal democratic values for the globalising world rather than surrendering them. The seminar that resulted in this volume examined environmental values while other seminars in the series have examined the rule of law, rights, citizenship, democracy, liberty and equality. The volume’s theme is important as global environmental change demands timely and concerted international action and yet that action has to mobilise a large proportion of heterogeneous humanity. The contributors have brought the viewpoints of several disciplines and traditions to bear on environmental values in this volume. They make a number of novel arguments which contribute to both scholarship and policy practice in environmental matters. We have become indebted to a number of people and organisations in the course of producing this volume. First and foremost, we want to express our gratitude to the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation and to the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance for financial support which made it possible for the contributors to convene in the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society (OCEES) at Mansfield College, Oxford. Our Reconceiving Environmental Values in a Globalising World seminar took place on 11–12 July 2002. Jouni Paavola also gratefully acknowledges the support of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the Programme on Environmental Decision Making (PEDM) at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia, of which his work for this volume forms a part. We also present our sincere thanks to Charles Sampford, Director of the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance of Griffith University, and Neil Summerton, Director of the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society of Mansfield College. They helped us make the event and the book a reality. Jouni Paavola Ian Lowe May 2004
Part I
Introduction
1
Environmental values in a globalising world Ian Lowe and Jouni Paavola
Introduction Globalisation has great momentum in the early twenty-first century for both economic and political reasons. At the same time, it poses fundamental challenges for environmental values as environmental problems are worsening at all scales from the local to the global. The scientific community has given urgent warnings according to which we are changing natural systems in serious and irreversible ways which may put our civilisation at risk. For example, the UK Chief Scientist David King argued in a recent article that ‘global climate change is the most serious problem we are facing today – more serious even than the threat of terrorism’ (2004: 176). This assessment suggests an important role for environmental values, especially as climate change is only one of the urgent environmental problems facing us. This volume brings together contributions from prominent philosophers, political scientists and other scholars to reconceive environmental values and to envision new modes of governance which could realise these environmental values in a world in which the role of nation states is diminishing. The challenge in front of us is complex and actions are required at multiple levels and on multiple fronts. Every nation state faces environmental problems such as air and water pollution that demand new institutional approaches at the national level. Other environmental problems, such as those related to land use, water supply and the degradation of agricultural land, pose institutional challenges at the subnational levels. Finally, some environmental problems, such as climate change, are trans-boundary or global in scope and demand new institutional responses at the international if not at the global level. The multiplicity of justifications for environmental protection and the diversity of environmental challenges confronting us call for pluralism in environmental matters. While there are increasingly good reasons to protect the environment for its own sake, many scholars have demonstrated that economic development and human well-being depend critically on a diverse and healthy natural environment. Environmental protection also often makes good economic sense (see Balmford et al. 2002; Turner et al. 2003). This is especially true for people in the developing countries who critically depend on environmental resources for their livelihoods and who are extremely vulnerable to adverse
4
Introduction
environmental change. Environmental protection is also warranted because of the importance of natural systems for social cohesion, cultural traditions and spiritual life. There have been significant improvements in some aspects of environmental quality in the affluent world in recent years. For example, UNEP documents the improvement in urban air quality as a real success story and many rivers are cleaner today than they were thirty years ago (UNEP 2002: 153–157, 210–212). However, this improved environmental quality is unevenly distributed – disadvantaged peoples and communities tend to suffer from far worse environmental conditions than the better-off (see US EPA 1992; UNEP 2002; Stephens et al. 2001). Moreover, other environmental problems such as loss of biodiversity are getting worse even in affluent countries. In poorer parts of the world, most indicators of environmental quality show a continuing decline. Global environmental change is also going to affect people in developing countries disproportionately, while at the same time they are much more vulnerable and less able to adapt than people in the developed countries (see Adger et al. 2005). It is thus no wonder that environmental values and justice are becoming increasingly important in the globalising world. Those who seek to protect the environment because of its cultural significance will not have the same priorities as those who value its economic contribution, or those who nurture natural systems for their intrinsic beauty, or those who want to take a precautionary approach to complex natural systems. So we need to be sensitive to all environmental values that underpin these and other positions and develop institutions that enable broad participation in the making of difficult environmental decisions. The processes used to resolve differences in viewpoints must recognise that there are legitimately diverse viewpoints which arise from the plurality of values. In some instances, it will be possible to find compromises that command broad acceptability and help to build political coalitions encompassing different viewpoints. For example, using fisheries or forests in sustainable ways makes economic sense and protects resource stocks, ecosystem services and social institutions that depend on them. Other environmental issues such as climate change can make a compromise difficult to attain. In those cases, the challenge is to institute processes that all will agree to be reasonable, thus enhancing the prospect that those who disagree with the outcome will be prepared to accept it.
Environmental values and globalisation This book demonstrates how different intellectual traditions have led to distinct environmental values. Within the societies shaped by the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the dominant theme has been the belief that humans are the summit of Divine creation, with the Earth’s natural systems and all other species at our service (see White 1967). These values have sometimes been held responsible for contemporary environmental degradation because they have justified the use of natural resources to improve the lot of humans, as well as underpinning hunting and then farming of animals for meat and other food
Environmental values in a globalising world
5
products. Some scholars have more recently questioned the narrow interpretation of Judeo-Christian values, arguing that humans have a duty of stewardship which requires maintenance of natural systems and care for the welfare of other species (Collins 1995). Some Asian religious traditions extend the duty of stewardship to the point of forbidding the intentional harming of other creatures. Strong environmental ethics is also sometimes attributed to indigenous peoples of both present and past. For example, Wilkinson (1973) argues that hunter-gatherer societies only survived if they stayed in balance with the capacity of their local natural systems to supply their needs: food, water, waste disposal as minimum physical needs, plus whatever cultural and spiritual demands each particular society had. So, the argument goes, those societies necessarily valued their local natural environment. However, the historical record is far from equivocal on this issue. There is evidence according to which humans caused extinction of large mammals and widespread changes in land cover in North America and Australia already in the distant past (see, e.g., Flannery 1999; Kerr 2003; Mannion 1997; Williams 2003). The environmental problems of early civilisations are also well documented (Hughes 2001; Ponting 1993). Globalisation first entered the picture when agricultural and industrial revolutions enabled some humans to live beyond the capacity of their local natural systems. Agricultural revolution replaced local natural systems with humancontrolled or manipulated ones and created surpluses which could be exchanged for surpluses of other goods from other localities. Industrial revolution increased the importing of resources and exporting of wastes, or the ‘ecological footprint’. At first, globalisation meant the wealthiest and technologically most advanced countries such as Portugal, Spain and Great Britain searching other parts of the world for resources and space (see Crosby 1986). In its later stages globalisation was driven by a search for a privileged access to markets for new industrial (and other) products. Until the second half of the twentieth century, globalisation was driven primarily by direct or indirect economic ambitions and based on implicit assumptions of infinite resources and unlimited capacity of natural systems to absorb wastes. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was one of the first serious challenges to this dominant mythology. It was soon followed by more fundamental questioning of the growth agenda in works such as Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). The first dynamic world models demonstrated that the systems of resource extraction, manufacturing, food production and water use were all interconnected at the global level. The models also suggested that there were limits to the growth trends that were being assumed at the time. In oversimplified terms, the debate on globalisation and growth was conducted between scientists – who argued that there were absolute limits to growth (Ehrlich et al. 1973) – and economists such as Julian Simon (1981), who argued that growth was not a problem but rather was the solution to all problems. History shows that decision-makers listened to the economists rather than to the scientists. This does not mean that the economists’ argument was superior,
6
Introduction
but that it was more palatable. As Thurow (1985) argues, nobody likes to be told the party is over, especially if they still haven’t got to the bar. So decision makers preferred to believe that the resource limits and environmental problems were not serious, which freed them to pursue ‘a healthy rate of economic growth’. That view held political sway in the last decades of the twentieth century, despite the accumulating evidence of serious environmental problems. Since economic globalisation promises access to larger markets and pools of inputs, it has the unquestioning support of economic advisers to governments and hence of most administrations. It is axiomatic in those quarters that a global free market provides economic benefits for rich and poor alike, so the globalisation programme is seen as universally beneficial.
Governance, science and values The dominant line of thought is eager to believe that markets can be trusted to solve all environmental problems. Market-based approaches may indeed play a role in environmental governance but they cannot alone resolve our increasingly complex and serious environmental problems. Serious air pollution causing thousands of deaths in the London smog of 1952 was tackled by a regulatory response which banned the burning of coal in domestic fires (see Brimblecombe 1987). Regulatory approaches were also used elsewhere to deal with urban air pollution, water pollution and many other environmental problems (Paavola 2004). Market-based strategies such as emissions trading have been used for example to control sulphur dioxide emissions and acid rain in North America (see Schmalensee et al. 1998; Stavins 1998). This governance solution enabled trading with rights to emit sulphur dioxide within a cap based partly on science and partly on political negotiation. Depletion of the ozone layer was the first serious environmental problem that was truly global in scope. Scientific research conducted during the 1970s suggested that releasing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) would deplete the ozone layer (Molina and Rowland 1974). However, the company responsible for the production of most of these substances argued that this was only a scientific theory (see Dotto and Schiff 1978). Politicians took no action until the mid1980s when depletion of the ozone layer was conclusively observable. It took another decade to reach an international agreement and to tackle the problem effectively. Twenty years of inaction made the problem much worse. In comparison to the depletion of the ozone layer, global climate change has a major complicating factor. We didn’t need CFCs for anything important; other chemicals can be used for all of their applications, perhaps in some instances at greater cost or reduced efficiency. So phasing out the CFCs resulted in limited short-term pain to one large company which is now profiting from replacement chemicals for the CFCs. On the other hand, greenhouse gas emissions result from using fossil fuels which supply most of the energy that makes life more comfortable for us than it was for any previous generation. While there are
Environmental values in a globalising world
7
alternatives to fossil fuels, our dependence upon them makes radical changes in energy use much more challenging than giving up CFCs. Fifteen years ago, many scientists were convinced that the use of fossil fuels was at least partly responsible for climate change (Lowe 1989). Scientists have gradually become more certain that human use of fossil fuels is changing the climate. However, it took until 1996 to develop the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to stabilise at 1996 levels emissions of greenhouse gases in developed countries. This was justified by the growing scientific confidence that fuel use is a discernible factor. But research actually indicates that we should reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to about one-third of the present level to prevent significant climate change (Houghton et al. 2001: 224). Yet the Kyoto Protocol is opposed by politicians who claim that it would cost too much. A new group of opponents in turn argue that the agreement does not solve the problem of climate change (Lomborg 2001). As this book was being finalised, a new report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program warned that climate change is only one of a series of interacting global environmental problems which appear to be accelerating in their impacts. The report warned that it is now possible that human activity could disrupt natural systems such as thermohaline circulation or the fixing of methane clathrates in permafrost and seabed sediments so as to threaten the continued existence of the entire human civilisation (Steffen et al. 2004). At the same time, the programme of economic globalisation proceeds at an accelerating pace and is promoted by organisations such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. They act as if a world dominated by economic logic would not raise social or environmental concerns. It would be possible to explain political inertia by the power of capital in market economies, the line of reasoning being that governments remain in office only if they satisfy the interests of big business. It would be naïve to deny the power of big business. After all, it supports politicians and is the driving force that delivers the economic progress politicians want. The modern world is more complex than that, however. The increasing role of pressure groups has been the defining characteristic of late twentieth-century politics. Technological and institutional changes have made it possible for these groups to run effective campaigns and to shape public policy. For example, nuclear power was widely considered a clean and inexpensive source of energy for the future during the Cold War years. Nuclear energy was effectively sidelined by environmental and community groups in the 1970s despite the backing of big business and governments. For several decades it has been seen as politically unacceptable or even unthinkable in most countries, whatever technical virtues it might be argued to have. The principal motivation of opponents of nuclear energy has been a concern for its environmental impacts, both the short-term risk of accidents such as Chernobyl and the long-term problem of handling radioactive waste. Since the scientific community was seen to support the nuclear industry, the disenchantment with nuclear power precipitated disillusionment with scientific progress.
8
Introduction
This questioning of science has accelerated as the result of other controversies over BSE and the variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, pesticide residues in food, genetically modified organisms and cover-ups of adverse effects of smoking and leaded petrol (see Tudge 2003; Davis 2004). In part, the recognition that science is not objective or neutral and that it is instead value-laden was long overdue. The scientific enterprise was for a long time seen as one of controlling or managing natural and human systems. This reinforced the values of human dominance of humans and nature alike. Few put it as blatantly as Ure (1835: 368) when he argued that science could be used to curb ‘the refractory hand of labour’. However, the same view was implicit in Taylorism or the ‘scientific’ approach to management. The notion of ‘environmental management’ embodies similar values of dominance, suggesting that scientific knowledge can be deployed to manage natural systems for the benefit of humans. Questioning the values base of science has led to an increasing politicisation of scientific process. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established to give scientific advice on climate change (see Miller and Edwards 2001). Once it became clear that its reports had enormous implications for large industries and nation states, its work became politicised. The debate about the wording of the Second Assessment Report has been well documented. While the scientific working group concluded that human activity has a ‘significant influence’ on climate change, pressure from business interests and crucially affected nations resulted in the final summary for policy-makers referring to the less threatening ‘discernible influence’ (see Houghton et al. 1995). Similarly, the conclusion of the Third Assessment Report – that human activity was responsible for most of the climate change in recent decades (see Houghton et al. 2001: 224) – led to charges that the IPCC was claiming more than the science justified. When Dr Robert Watson, the chair of the IPCC, vigorously defended the conclusions, the US government launched a campaign to replace him and saw it through. Complex environmental issues such as climate change often defy clear and simple answers, so that those with different values will come to different defensible conclusions. The same data can sometimes be used to show that the world has serious environmental problems (Worldwatch Institute 2002) and that these problems have been exaggerated (Lomborg 2001). While one of us has argued elsewhere that Lomborg’s analysis is seriously flawed (Lowe 2002), this standpoint is also obviously informed by personal values. There is no value-free position that allows any human to stand outside the interaction between human societies and natural systems. Among other things this suggests a need for more sophisticated analysis that can acknowledge values. Inayatullah and Slaughter have developed Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) for use in futures studies (Inayatullah 1998: 820; Slaughter 2002: 14), but it also offers insights regarding the role of values in environmental decision-making and governance. CLA analysis looks at the levels of Litany, Social Causes, Discourse/World-View and Myth/Metaphor (Inayatullah 1998: 820) or the three levels of Pop Futurism, Problem Oriented
Environmental values in a globalising world
9
and ‘Critical and Epistemological’ (Slaughter 2002: 14, 2004: 143–146). As Kelly (2003: 6) puts it: The Litany or Pop Futures level is the most common expression of problems or issues. It is often over-simplified, exaggerated and devoid of analysis. The Social Causes level identifies problems and short term causes and offers practical responses, often based at the policy or regulations level . . . The Discourse level delves deeper and more widely to show how ‘the discourse we use to understand is complicit in framing the issue’ [Inayatullah, 1998]. The fourth layer, Myth/Metaphor, is usually ignored. ‘These are the deep stories, the collective archetypes, the unconscious dimensions of the problem’. This analytical framework suggests that environmental values have emerged as the result of changes at the level of Discourse or World-View, or at the deeper level of the underlying Myths and Metaphors of industrial society. Most of the environmental literature explores the Litany level, with occasional excursions into the Social Causes. The discourse or world-view of industrial society is one for which the economy is the primary concern and in which business reigns supreme as the driver of the economy and creator of wealth. The role of government in this view is to set the macro-economic parameters, regulate lightly and curb excesses by rogue elements in the private sector. This world-view also includes myths of infinite resources, unlimited capacity of natural systems to absorb wastes and unlimited ability to use wealth to overcome social and environmental problems. The world-view is also based on a faith in technological capacity derived from scientific knowledge, which is in turn regarded as an objective, permanent truth without social or political dimensions. Elements of this world-view are now questioned by many and a sizeable number considers them all to be false. Increasing numbers of people no longer accept that the debate is over once ‘science’ has spoken. Science is not only seen as marked by human fallibility – it is often cynically seen as being at the bidding of government or big business. There is thus a sense in which environmental values are a direct threat to economic globalisation while at the same time being an integral component of what Galtung (2000) has called genuine globalisation. For Galtung, genuine globalisation acknowledges that production and distribution systems of the entire planet use and pollute the same environmental resource systems. Galtung’s genuine globalisation extends to living standards and labour conditions as well as to environmental standards. So it is based on a world-view which differs from the dominant one. These new environmental values are derived from a metaphor which sees humans respecting the absolute limits of natural systems rather than seeking to dominate and ‘manage’ them.
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Introduction
Chapter outline Contributors to this book explore these new environmental values and their implications in our globalising world. In the second part of the book Andrew Brennan, Robin Attfield, Kate Soper and Julia Tao examine the development of Western and Eastern values in relation to the environment. Andrew Brennan argues for a return to a Shakespearean ‘moral holarchy’ as a way to overcome both the tyranny of foundationalism and the relativism of postmodernism. For him, a return to Shakespeare acknowledges pluralism, interdependence and human fallibility, while providing us with a humanistic, open-ended strategy with solid moral foundations. Robin Attfield in turn examines Western values before and during the era of the nation state. He shows how Stoic and early Christian values support ideas such as common heritage and stewardship, which can reinvigorate environmental values in a globalising world. Kate Soper also takes a historical perspective, arguing that past values were not particularly environmentally benign and that Western values have come to emphasise nature more over time, not less. Soper examines contemporary environmental values from constructivist views of nature to spiritualist re-enchantment, finding redemptive views of nature problematic as they often perpetuate inequality and can aggravate injustice by redistributing resources from the poor to the rich. For her, the challenge is to differentiate between needs and wants and to satisfy needs within tightening ecological constraints, while at the same time allowing for individual freedom and cultural innovation. Julia Tao examines environmental values embedded in Confucian thought, showing how it situates humans within the ceaselessly changing natural world. Humans have a duty to behave morally, ideally striking a balance between respecting nature and using human intelligence to maintain harmony and diversity. She argues that the Confucian notion of reciprocity, the duty of returning good for good, could contribute to environmental values in a globalising world. The third part examines environmental politics in the contemporary world. John Meyer contrasts Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the birth of market liberalism in the nineteenth century with the ongoing emergence of the global market economy. He shows how Polanyi’s arguments about the embeddedness of markets, incomplete commodification, the central role of the state in establishing markets and the emergence of counter-movements are all relevant today. His approach recognises environmentalism as a democratic movement that opposes the global commodification of nature because we cannot exist without a sustaining physical environment. David Schlosberg argues for an expanded notion of justice in a globalising world, supplementing distributive notions of justice with the concept of recognition, or acknowledgement of different groups, interests and viewpoints when decisions are made. This puts a new emphasis on procedural justice. While this explicit recognition of pluralism might appear to complicate environmental politics and reduce the chances of reaching equitable solutions, Schlosberg argues that agreement on values is not a necessary condition for agreement on a course of action. Paul Harris examines environmental politics in China. Chinese materialism is not fundamentally different to that of
Environmental values in a globalising world
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other nations but the country’s sheer size makes its potential environmental impact enormous. Harris argues that the traditional emphasis on duty has been harnessed to demand loyalty and adherence to the Chinese government’s commitment to economic growth. While arguing that it will be difficult to make environmental progress in China, Harris sees hope in cultural globalisation because it can result in the realisation that environmental protection offers personal gains. Part four of the book examines how values inform environmental governance and how governance solutions influence which values are realised. Jouni Paavola first investigates how globalisation brings together groups that have widely varying values and notions of justice. He argues that the resulting radical pluralism complicates environmental decision-making and presents difficult challenges for the legitimacy of governance solutions and outcomes. Paavola suggests that living with pluralism requires special emphasis in environmental decisionmaking on recognition, participation, learning, deliberation and justification. Joyeeta Gupta examines values that inform international responses to climate change. She argues that sustainable development and the right to economic growth were both adopted as guidelines when crafting the climate change regime, but that sustainable development has since become the dominant guideline. However, sustainable development has been interpreted either as a right to continuing economic growth or as a duty of sustaining the environment. Gupta argues that the climate change regime leaves it to each sovereign country to decide what the term means for itself, which complicates international collaboration on climate change. Bo Kjellén, who was the Chief Negotiator for Sweden in the Rio process, argues that global environmental change has resulted in the emergence of a new form of multilateral diplomacy which he calls ‘new diplomacy’ for sustainable development. This new diplomacy is less adversarial and self-interested than the traditional one, and necessary if we are to tackle effectively the grave environmental challenges in the future, argues Kjellén. Peter and Celia Bridgewater, drawing on their long involvement in international environmental governance, investigate the roles of science and values in the establishment, design and implementation of governance solutions. They argue that at times science can provide a less contested and more durable basis for environmental decisions than the balance of competing interests and values achieved through the political process. The chapter shows how science has fostered learning and revision of our values and attitudes, reinforcing the suggestion of Milbrath (1990: 34–38) that climate change could be ‘the great teacher’ which forces humans to recognise their impact on natural systems. Part five concludes the volume with two different views of the prospects of environmental values in the globalising world. Jim Dator argues that we already live in a mostly artificial environment. Having largely tamed nature, he says, we now have a duty to maintain the new world we have created. He argues that we may have to focus on preserving intelligence, as it may no longer be possible to save life. Instead of trying to change values, Dator argues, we should establish institutional structures that manage the unfolding of the future and generate
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Introduction
preferred outcomes. Ian Lowe takes a more optimistic view, arguing that the emergence of serious environmental problems at the global level could catalyse a new awareness of our dependence upon each other and upon natural systems. Failure to recognise this dependence is causing serious environmental and social problems that could culminate in the collapse of civilisation. Optimists see that the transition can be driven by a change in values, away from individualism and consumerism towards an acceptance of our responsibility to other humans, to other species and to future generations. In this view, globalisation can drive the values transition needed for a future sustainable society.
The synthesis The volume’s overall conclusion is that we need to reconceive environmental values and develop new governance institutions to realise them in the globalising world. Contributions to the volume show how environmental values have changed over time in different societies and demonstrate that values and practices which may have served us well in the past now threaten our future. The diversity of challenges confronting us supports a strong argument for pluralism and makes environmental justice increasingly important in the globalising world. While globalisation has been driven by an economic agenda, it has produced a growing awareness of the need for a new approach to environmental governance for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Analysis of contemporary politics suggests that environmentalism is a global movement resisting the commodification of nature, holding out the hope that the globalisation of culture will extend the spread of environmentalism. The contributions to the volume also underline the importance of the interplay between values and governance – values inform the choice of governance solutions while these solutions in turn determine which values are realised. The pluralism of values motivating and informing participants complicates decision-making, but the recognition of pluralism can help to devise a new style of diplomacy to tackle large-scale environmental issues. Thus the volume offers some reason for cautious optimism that the emergence of global environmental problems could instigate the emergence of new effective governance solutions and so bring about true globalisation.
References Adger, W. N., Huq, S., Mace, M. J. and Paavola, J. (eds) (2005) Fairness in Climate Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Balmford, A., Bruner, A., Cooper, P., Costanza, R., Farber, S., Green, R. E., Jenkins, M., Jefferiss, P., Jessamy, V., Madden, J., Munro, K., Myers, N., Naeem, S., Paavola, J., Rayment, M., Rosendo, S., Roughgarden, J., Trumper, K. and Turner, R. K. (2002) ‘Economic Reasons for Conserving Wild Nature’, Science, 297: 950–953. Brimblecombe, P. (1987) The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times, London: Methuen. Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring, Boston and New York: Houghton & Mifflin Co. Collins, P. (1995) God’s Earth: Religion as if Matter Really Mattered, North Blackburn: Dove.
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Crosby, A. W. (1986) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, D. (2004) When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, New York: Basic Books. Dotto, L. and Schiff, H. I. (1978) The Ozone War, New York: Doubleday. Ehrlich, P. R., Ehrlich, A. H. and Holdren, J. P. (1973) Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co. Flannery, T. (1999) ‘Debating Extinction’, Science, 283: 182–183. Galtung, J. (2000) ‘Who Got 2000 Right, the People or the Experts?’, Futures Bulletin, 25: 1–6. Houghton, J. T., Ding, Y. Griggs, D. J., Noguer, M., van der Linden, P. J., Dai, X., Maskell, K. and Johnson, C. A. (eds) (2001) Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of the Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houghton, J. T., Meira Filho, L. G., Callender, B. A., Harris, N., Kattenberg, A. and Maskell, K. (eds) (1995) Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group I to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, J. D. (2001) An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life, London: Routledge. Inayatullah, S. (1998) ‘Causal Layered Analysis: Poststructuralism as Method’, Futures, 30: 815–829. Kelly, P. (2003) ‘Futures.con’, Futures, 34: 561–570. Kerr, R. (2003) ‘Megafauna Died From Big Kill, Not Big Chill’, Science, 300: 885. King, D. A. (2004) ‘Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?’, Science, 303: 176–177. Lomborg, B. (2001) The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, I. (1989) Living in the Greenhouse, Newham: Scribe Books —— (2002) ‘Neither Skeptical Nor an Environmentalist’, Australian Skeptic, 22 (4), 61–63. Mannion, A. M. (1997) Global Environmental Change: A Natural and Cultural Environmental History, 2nd edn, Harlow: Longman. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W. W. (1972) The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, London: Earth Island. Milbrath, L. (1990) Envisioning a Sustainable Society, Buffalo: State University of New York Press. Miller, C. and Edwards, P. N. (2001) Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Molina, M. J. and Rowland, F. S. (1974) ‘Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Catalysed Destruction of Ozone’, Nature, 249: 810–814. Paavola, J. (2004) ‘Law – Water and Air Pollution’, in S. Krech III, J. R. McNeill and C. Merchant (eds), The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, Vol. II, London and New York: Routledge. Ponting, C. (1993) A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, London: Penguin. Schmalensee, R., Joskow, P. L., Ellerman, A. D., Montero, J. P. and Bailey, E. M. (1998) ‘An Interim Evaluation of Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Trading’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (3): 53–68. Simon, J. (1981) The Ultimate Resource, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Slaughter, R. A. (2002) ‘Beyond the Mundane: Reconciling Breadth and Depth in Futures Enquiry’, Futures, special issue, Layered Methodologies (August): 1–15. –––– (2004) Futures beyond Dystopia, London: Routledge Falmer. Stavins, R. N. (1998) ‘What Can We Learn from the Grand Policy Experiment? Lessons from SO2 Allowance Trading’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (3): 69–88. Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Jäger, J., Tyson, P. D., Moore III, B., Matson, P. A., Richardson, K., Oldfield, F., Schellnhuber, H.-J., Turner II, B. L. and Wasson, R. J. (2004) Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag. Stephens, C., Bullock, S. and Scott, A. (2001) Environmental Justice: Rights and Means to a Healthy Environment for All, WSRC Global Environmental Change Program: Special Briefing Paper 7. Thurow, L. (1985) The Zero-Sum Solution: The Route to Economic Growth, New York: Simon & Schuster. Tudge, C. (2003) So Shall We Reap: Food, Money and the Future of Humanity, London: Allen Lane. Turner, R. K., Paavola, J., Farber, S., Cooper, P., Jessamy, V., Rosendo, S. and Georgiou, S. (2003) ‘Valuing Nature: Lessons Learnt and Future Research Directions’, Ecological Economics, 46: 493–510. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2002) Global Environmental Outlook 3, London: Earthscan Publications. United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) (1992) Environmental Equity: Reducing Risk for All Communities, Vols I and II, Washington, DC: US EPA. Ure, A. (1835) The Philosophy of Manufactures, London: Charles Knight. White Jr., L. (1967) ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science, 155: 1203–1207. Wilkinson, R. (1973) Poverty and Progress, London: Methuen. Williams, M. (2003) Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Worldwatch Institute (2002) State of the World 2003, New York: W. W. Norton.
Part II
Environmental values and the nation state
2
Globalisation and the environment Endgame or a ‘new Renaissance’?1 Andrew Brennan
Introduction This chapter argues that an ethic derived from Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers can be a source of renewal of the West. The general account developed here rejects two contemporary visions of the new global order. One of these is the despairing vision of the shipwreck of the Enlightenment project, articulated by John Gray in several recent works. The other is the cosmopolitan optimism of theorists of ‘reflexive modernity’ such as Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash and Ulrich Beck. Drawing on the resources of Renaissance humanism, the chapter argues that recovering pre-modern values such as respect for human dignity, the preference for wisdom over cleverness, and recognition of the importance of distinctions can ground a new approach to social and environmental policy in a globalised world. Renaissance values can inspire the design of policy processes that are fair to a plurality of perspectives, and resistant to manipulation by powerful interests. The erosion of distinctions is now so widespread that it is worth special mention. Here are two salutary examples. First, many biker chapters across the United States now subscribe to a movement known as ABATE: A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactments. Scanning the websites of the affiliated groups is a disappointing experience: instead of a concern to preserve individual autonomy and freedom, the bikers are simply opposed to mandatory safety-helmet legislation, which they obscurely link with the ‘evils’ of the welfare state and socialism. The bikers are not alone, however, in playing games with the word ‘totalitarian’. The second example of sloppiness over distinctions comes from the Catholic Inquirer of 3 June 2002 which quotes Pope John Paul II as warning of ‘the grave danger that the false interpretation of human rights’ – an interpretation that would permit abortion – ‘can drive democratic regimes to transform themselves into totalitarian regimes’. Such semantic confusion reminds us that words have emotional as well as descriptive dimensions, and further that they are bearers of cultural memory and significance. As Mark Lilla has argued, ‘conceptually and rhetorically . . . the twentieth-century confrontation with totalitarianism still sets our intellectual compass’ (Lilla 2002). Here Lilla is using the term ‘totalitarian’ in the way Hannah Arendt applied it to regimes which stripped people of all their normal
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securities, friendships, associations and relationships of trust, creating an ‘atomised mass’ ready to follow the charismatic leader – one for whom they would die and, more frighteningly, from whom they accept indignity, contempt, humiliation, persecution and even death (Arendt 1973). Clearly the Pope and the bikers are not using the term to refer to such regimes. Their deployment of the term, in fact, is symptomatic of the blurring of distinctions which contributes to what has in other places been referred to as ‘the crisis of postmodernity’, and with it the crisis of environmental thought. Without distinctions and the principles implicit in them, meaning collapses and the ethical structure of the world is lost – fair is foul, foul is fair, totalitarianism is freedom and lies are truth.
Globalism and democracy Part of the crisis in environmental ethics and environmental thought is due to the ambivalent nature of globalisation and its relationship to an Enlightenment project that is no longer universally admired. On the one side, John Gray goes as far as to speak of the implosion of the Western agenda unless the West’s humanistic rationalism is severely modified (Gray 1995). Larry Siedentop, for whom Western liberalism has become fatally severed from its Christian roots, insinuates that Western culture can no longer rest on positive ideals but can only define itself negatively (Siedentop 2001). On the other, more positive, side theorists of ‘reflexive modernity’ such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck see globalisation as a new form of liberation. According to Beck weakening of national democracy is already a fait accompli. ‘Turning back the clock to national democracy in Europe’, he states in an interview with Danilo Zolo, ‘is sheer illusion. There will be no democracy in Europe – unless it is a transnationally enhanced democracy’ (Beck and Zolo 1999). Elsewhere, Beck argues, rather flamboyantly, that ‘cosmopolitan’ states will be based on the ‘acknowledgement of the otherness of others’ while less democratic national states, buttressed like fortresses against terrorism and outsiders, will ‘represent a threat to the inner diversity, to the multiple loyalties, to the flows and fluids which, in the age of globalisation, inevitably exist within their borders’ (Beck 2001). This analysis poses a puzzle for those who resist the new world order, whether they be bikers desiring the freedom of wind in their hair or bioregionalists who desire to inhabit human-scale communities in harmony with local nature.2 Conceivably, the space opened up by the transfer of power to multinational institutions and regulation may provide opportunities for local experimentation and flexibility – the very things both groups would want. In this optimistic vision, cosmopolitanism may provoke ‘the transnational organised resistance of Nation States, regions, classes and social groups victimised by . . . unequal exchanges’ (de Sousa Santos 2002). The mobile phone and the Internet provide new means of organising such resistance, although its power to change the world depends on the accountability and responsiveness of the new global order in the face of protest and criticism. Just as likely, however, is the scenario in which transnational legislation on compulsory safety-helmets and bans on ecotopian
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communities are enforced on nations and groups too weak or too frightened to fend off the impositions of higher and powerful authorities. The moral to be drawn is that it is increasingly difficult to propose any kind of environmental solutions for a world in which perceptions of globalisation are so bafflingly opposite, the distinctions are so vague and where the temptations of relativism and defeatism are never far away.
Ruthless cogito There is another dimension to the endgame scenario inherent in the lack of clear-cut distinctions in contemporary political and intellectual discourse. As has often been remarked, the workings of modern democracy and its institutions are the fruit of an instrumental reason that clings to and moulds Western perceptions and strategies of action. The modern project was epitomised in the practice of Descartes when he ‘shut his eyes and stopped up his ears’ to concentrate on deducing what could be known with certainty from the slimmest imaginable base, the infamous ‘Cogito’. The closing of eyes and ears cut him off not only from the contemporary factors that might have influenced him, but also from any engagement with tradition. Since his time, modernism has been pursued with an optimistic and ruthless focus on the future and a simultaneous dismissal of social memory as a repository of supposedly doubtful and irrelevant values. The twentieth century gave the project of knowledge freed from memory and context a new twist. Descartes’ ghosts, formerly locked inside the machinery of the body, were set free and metamorphosed into new disconnected, rootless and decentred beings: the great corporations pursuing – at least according to their public relations consultants – a grand vision in which wealth accumulates while simultaneously trickling down, in mysterious ways, to everyone in the world. Like the original Cartesian self, these giants lie beyond space and geography, having no clear physical or cultural location. Not tied to one country, tradition or set of values, these transnational entities operate from one axiom – Expando ergo sum – to interact with national governments in pioneering the new world order, the third way, the global capitalism from which no-one can be free. In a whimsical reflection of the agonies and doubts of contemporary Western civilisations, these corporate monsters are apparently directionless, committed only to their own preservation and expansion, but lacking any other coherent purpose. The biggest of these companies invest now in tobacco, now in fisheries, now in cars, now in chemicals, now in fruit juice – anywhere that offers profits, continuous growth and safe dividends. These institutions represent a unique and novel concentration of economic power. Are we doomed to become their servants? Do they provide the context for lives to come, ones that are lived not so much in nature as in the shopping mall or the Internet store? Support for an affirmative answer to these questions is found in surprising places. In trying to articulate a ‘green theory of value’, Robert Goodin suggests that ‘people want to see some sense and pattern to their
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lives . . . That requires in turn that their lives be set in some larger context. The products of natural processes, untouched as they are by human hands, provide precisely that desired context’ (Goodin 1992: 37). At ease with the idea that we are all consumers now, he adds that ‘both the neo-classical welfare economic theory of value and the green theory of value as I have presented it link the value of nature to the satisfaction consumers derive from it one way or another’ (Goodin 1992: 42). If consumer satisfaction is the key, and a larger context provides the meaning, then perhaps the corporations and the products they supply will provide the setting for our lives, and – in a perverse re-reading of Leopold’s land ethic – an action will be right ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the global economic community’.3
Contexts for flourishing The re-reading of Leopold just given may seem unduly flippant. However, in championing the biotic or ecological community over the individual, deep green theorists – and not just those who follow Leopold – have provided, however unknowingly, just the kind of justificatory structure that would fund an ‘econocentric’ ethic. Consider, for example, how Holmes Rolston implores his readers to care for the species above the individual and for the ecosystem above the species. ‘The species is a bigger event than the individual’, he writes, going on to argue that events – such as predator attacks – that are good for the species can be disastrous for individuals. Further, having argued that the individual is the species’ way of propagating itself, he goes on to remark that ‘the value resides in the dynamic form; the individual inherits this, exemplifies it and passes it on’. Likewise, ecosystems are long-lived selection devices, ones that select ‘over the long range for individuality, for diversity, for adapted fitness, for quantity and quality of life’ (all quotations taken from Rolston 1994. Similar remarks can be found throughout Rolston’s writing – see, for example, Rolston 1988). The trouble for Rolston’s vision is that the long-lived ecosystem is not the only thing that places, produces and promotes individuality. Societies and cultures do so too. Humans are political animals, creations, then, of a larger political context whether this be one that promotes flourishing or spells oppression. They occupy cultures, sites of meaning within which individuals are knots of significance, exemplifying and passing on norms, interests, enthusiasms and prejudices. None of these larger systems can claim to be the sole producer of individuality and identity. But if ecosystems are partially productive of centred, conscious and meaningful lives, so too are social and cultural settings. Once this point is granted, then regional and global economic systems and networks of information and communication also have a claim to be productive of certain ways of being human. For example, economic systems, at all levels of scale, are invisible, long-lived and intangible – just like ecological or cultural ones – and are no less real. They too contribute to the emergence of forms of human life – from those which find meaning and therapy in shopping and wearing designer labels, to those which are bound up with the financial markets, sales,
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management and other aspects of the corporate culture. Corporations, and the global web of negotiations, communications, economic exchanges and property transactions of which they form nodes, seem to be things that have – as it were – a life of their own. They have the potential to outlive the individual specimens of Homo economicus who draw their nourishment from the supermarket or stock exchange. They are not easily subject to individual or group control, and so form a context that is – to some extent – independent of human beings. Do corporate entities and the systems to which they belong have some ‘wild’ autonomous way of being?4 Could we make sense of their having a good of their own, and of their possessing some kind of inherent worth (see Taylor 1981)? Such questions seem no more misguided than similar ones directed towards natural objects and natural systems. The challenge, then, for deep green philosophy, is to characterise value in nature in such a way that natural value is clearly distinct from these other socio-economic ones. Unless that is done, there seem to be many contexts which are big enough in relation to the individual human life to provide a way of placing it in a vast network of meaning, and each of these can claim its own value and demand its own special respect. The good life has many forms, and takes place within many larger embracing contexts. Although it is obviously prudent to preserve planetary life support systems, it stands as an open question to ask whether the natural context, and human life seen under the aspect of nature, has a special moral superiority to all the others.
Absorbing the planet Confusions deepen when we take account of two models of the human agent, two Weberian types, supported by economists on the one hand, and by radical environmentalists on the other. First is the ‘rational agent’ of modern economic and public choice theory, depicted by writers such as Herbert Simon (1957) and John Harsanyi (1969). This specimen is driven usually by just a single catchall desire – that of self-interest – or by a small number which spell out self-interest in slightly more detail (for example, desires for wealth and social acceptance) (Simon 1957; Harsanyi 1969). At the other extreme, there is the seemingly empathetic agent of radical environmental ethics, the one who realises an extended self through identification with nature, or even with the planet as whole. Haunting this radical vision, however, is the ghost of an anthropocentrism that refuses to be exorcised. Næss’ Ecosophy T proposes human Self-realisation (where a capital ‘S’ emphasises the presence of the extended planetary self ) as a solution to the environmental crises resulting from human selfishness and exploitation of nature: the expanded self regards rivers, mountains and forests as its parts, caring for them as it does for itself (Næss 1989). This view is expressed more enthusiastically by his followers than by Næss himself. Val Plumwood, for example, cites the following example: ‘When I say that the fate of the sea-turtle or the tiger or the gibbon is mine, I mean it. All that is in my universe is not merely mine; it is me.’5 This hugely enlarged ‘I’, as critics such as Plumwood and Mharti Keel have already argued, looks like a product
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of (possibly masculine) egoism, unable to give nature its due as a genuine ‘other’ independent of human interests and well-being (Plumwood 1993: Ch. 7). Instead of replacing Simon’s and Harsanyi’s rational actors with more fully developed subjects, the most radical versions of environmental ethics seem to be in danger of creating hyper-extended monsters which claim the entire planet for their bodies and rationally seek to protect it as a means of protecting themselves. The resulting environmental ethic does not draw attention to new values, or to the importance of extending love, care or altruism beyond the human domain. Instead, it settles – as do so many economists – for rational self-interest as the spur to action. The deep green self is not the only creation intent on absorbing the planet. The unlocated, purposeless corporate giants strut and fret on a global economic stage, expanding at nature’s expense and consuming more and more of the planet’s biosynthetic product as they do so, providing goods for the few and little change for the many. By a clever piece of doubling, the problem of sustainability is now widely regarded as a problem for the poor world, not the rich one. In an unsubstantiated overgeneralisation, population growth is often blamed for environmental destruction despite evidence that – at least in some cases – increases in population can bring relief to environmental degradation (Tiffen et al. 1994). In a world in which 90 per cent of the population is responsible for only 10 per cent of total personal consumption, it might seem that the consumption pattern of the other 10 per cent of humanity is the key to the problem of sustainable development. But, of course, there is no objective fact about what ‘the problem’ of sustainability is, and the power to construct and define global problems lies, for the most part, in the hands of those who are not willing to examine their own ways of life too critically. One thing that does seem clear about the globalised world is that the forces driving the destruction of nature include demand from consumers living far from the scene of environmental devastation (see Brennan 1998). The economically powerful corporation, together with its global allies, has become an ever-more significant mediator between destruction in one place driven by demand at another, oppression driven by hedonism, poverty driven by wealth (see Korten 1995, 1999; compare Karliner 1997). Even were we to try to make corporations more accountable, however, massive problems obtrude. Consider the fact that in contemporary society we have to be selective if we are not to become paralysed by information overload. Such selectivity applies to every organisation, from the university department to the transnational. As David Bella has argued, there is a tendency for ‘favourable’ information to be selected for flowing upwards to the top of organisations, that is, precisely the information that is perceived to support the ambitions or the survival needs of the organisation. Without any intentional corruption, dishonesty or manipulation, organisations of all sorts can easily lose touch with the reality of what they are doing, and of their impacts on people and nature (Bella 1996). It is maybe not surprising then that the new ‘executive bourgeoisie’ – the state administrators and corporate managers – operate in ways that show little concern for either environmental or ethical values (Becker and Sklar 1987).
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Once the other regular failings of human beings are factored in – dishonesty, for example, and an enormous capacity for self-delusion – it is hardly surprising that modernity’s superstars, superstores and supertankers seem to run madly out of control, absorbing and destroying the planet’s bounty. Moving beyond self-interest is difficult, given the domination of modern ethical and political theory by the conception of the rational and self-interested actor. Further, confidence in a brave new future and a belief in progress make it hard for people to admit that the modern world has a problem. Rather like those who – despite the clearest of evidence – were unwilling to recognise the reality of mass exterminations in Stalin’s progressive Soviet Union, many people nowadays seem to phase out the evidence of continuing environmental destruction (see Gray 2002: 91–96 for reflections on the relationship between concepts of progress and the occurrence of mass murder). No wonder that we seem to find it hard to articulate and defend empathy for nature’s plight. Against a background of faith in the infinite perfectibility and progress of humanity it is easy to forget how clearly recent history shows that there are no safeguards against the slide back from democracy to totalitarianism, from civilisation to barbarity, from high art to decadence. The modernist ideal, with its message of continual advance, its notion ‘that history is a moral drama, a tale of progress and redemption in which . . . morality rules the world’ (Gray 2002: 174), stands in stark contrast to the genocides and lethal paranoia characteristic of some of the most prominent twentieth-century political leaders. Any optimism that globalisation and the corporate culture will ameliorate environmental destruction and liberate the poor over the next few decades flies in the face of historical record. In light of such confusion, mixed messages and reasons for unhappiness, is there any ray of light? Radical environmental ethics – whether in the form of valuing the system above the individual, or in extending the self to planetary proportions – seems to risk collapsing into its opposite. Gray’s despairing vision is hardly answered by citing an optimistic faith in the new cosmopolitan quest. What would it be like to turn for inspiration to earlier European cultural traditions, ones which show that humanity’s multitudinous needs, longings and aspirations – including the desire for truth, dignity and beauty – limit what is politically and economically possible? Bringing the human dimension into political and policy discussions, seeking to incorporate the wisdom that can be found in pre-modern European thought into our deliberations on social and environmental justice, can – or so I will suggest – forge a whole new way of thinking about our globalised world and its problems.
Back to nature and back to Shakespeare? Invoking Shakespeare, and the Renaissance humanist tradition to which he belongs, as an inspiration for modern environmentalism may seem fanciful if not downright erroneous. John Gray doubts that humanism has a future and regards it as the ‘motive force behind the subjection of the earth and its other life forms to human will through technological domination’ (Gray 1995: 182). For him, the
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only hope for the future of the West is the surrendering of humanism and even – perhaps – the reliance on ‘non-Occidental peoples whose task will then be in part that of protecting themselves from the debris cast up by Western shipwreck’ (1995: 184). Gray, however much he despairs of rationalism, may be doubly wrong – first in associating rationalism with humanism, and second in throwing away humanism itself. Indeed Renaissance humanism may have the very resources to resurrect the spiritual corrective he seeks as an alternative to ‘calculative and representational’ modes of thinking. The Renaissance and the seventeenth century – the precursors to the Enlightenment – may yet inspire a reconsideration of humanist values which, in turn, can help recover not only the importance of spirituality but also reanimate our ideals of love, care, conscience and wisdom. At the centre of Shakespeare’s world is a complex individual, both a ‘poor bare, forked animal’ and a usurper, defying God, stars and nature itself. On closer inspection, however, we find both a cosmology and an ethics which can be drawn upon in confronting the contemporary human predicament. The world as seen by the Elizabethans is defined by dramatic metaphors: we are actors in a theatrum mundi constantly interacting with others, and with the ever-present elements. Our environment, moreover, is a living stage, neither human nor divine, one with its own particularities, logic and order. This order is not always manifest, and part of the human project involves the decoding of the hidden structures and secret motives of all things. It is especially in the interhuman realm that the play of masks, appearances and camouflage occludes our understanding and impedes wise action: When I consider every thing that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; (Sonnet XV) Our status as actors has far-reaching consequences: we cannot help playing roles, pretending, ironising. In this way, we mutually construct and disclose each other: And, all in war with Time for love of you, As he takes from you, I engraft you new. (Sonnet XV) Significantly, this mutual creation and distortion extends beyond the relation between actors to affect the very stage itself. Almost in anticipation of chaos theory, in the Shakespearean world no human action, however slight, is an isolated event; every deed has the capacity to impinge on the environment, and no gesture remains unanswered. In extreme cases, as shown in Macbeth and King Lear, ignominious acts lead to the rebellion of the stage itself:
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Ah! good father, Thou seest, the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, Threaten his bloody stage (Macbeth, II, iv) The so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’ in Shakespeare is hence not so much a fallacy but more a direct consequence of the perception that the human environment is a web of profoundly interrelated beings and events.6 Although the worlds of humans and nature are in one way set apart, there is a continuous mimicry on either side: humans taking on nature’s garb, nature’s moods in turn reflecting the rages, desires and frustrations of human life.7 This world is holistic, hierarchic and one in which dialogue with nature is an intrinsic feature. Its structure points towards a moral holarchy, to play on a term first used by Arthur Koestler.8 Consequently, understanding the order of nature within which humans themselves have parts to play requires a holarchic morality or wisdom, an insight into the nature of things. The holarchic structure of the Shakespearean stage does not elevate humans to the status of demi-gods. On the contrary, all the plays reiterate how incomplete, often unwise, frail and limited we are, subject in the end to nature itself: Wind, rain, and thunder, remember, earthly man Is but a substance that must yield to you; And I, as fits my nature, do obey you. (Pericles, I, I) There is an ongoing dialogue between humans and nature on the Shakespearean stage. If we are to proceed in life, the role of nature as the setting for human actions imposes a constraint upon us, one in which respect for the dignity of those who act is inseparable from reverence for, and understanding of, nature. The ethical basis for action involves anthropocentrism, but one in which humans are neither so one-sidedly destructive, nor so divinely rational, as represented in some of the leading biocentric ethics: but we all are men, In our own natures frail, and capable Of our flesh; few are angels: (King Henry VIII, V, iii) Being cast as actors in the theatrum mundi, humans are seen in tremendous complexity in the full spectrum of their often inconsistent dispositions – as tyrants, villains, jesters, saints, hedonists, wasters, philanthropists. The success or failures of actors depends on the way in which they act: whether in accordance with, or against, the nature of things and the nature of nature herself. Indeed the study of the nature of things and the nature of nature seems to be the central fixation of many of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae (the word ‘nature’
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or its derivatives occurs more than forty times in Lear). Struggling to define the multifaceted and polymorphic nature of the environment and other human actors on life’s stage is the vocation of all the Shakespearean heroes. The nature they try to decode or emulate is daunting. Side by side with the Christian nature (synonymous with God, reason, harmony and custom) lies the ‘lion-headed nature’ (anticipating Darwin) which generates machiavels such as Edmund and also the romantic, empathetic nature embodied by Cordelia. Against this background, Shakespeare’s portrayal of his protagonists provides us with a more compelling and satisfying picture of human agency than can be found in the belief-desire psychology of Hume or the rational actor of economic and public choice theory. At the heart of the great dramas is the insight that to uncover the nature of things is to comprehend their often hidden boundaries and limitations, the transgression of which leads to disaster and tragedy. Implicit in Shakespeare’s theatrum mundi, then, is a holarchic morality based on experience, observation and the judicious use of reason. There are several pillars to this moral wisdom: respect for human dignity, awareness of historical experience, the exercise of dialogic imagination, recognition of the necessity for distinctions and regard for the promptings of conscience. The highest embodiment of this wisdom is, intriguingly, the jester as portrayed in As You Like It, Twelfth Night and King Lear. His dark, ironic vision is free of illusions about the supposedly infinite possibilities of the human; yet in spite of his brilliance in unmasking and demystifying, he remains faithful to principles and norms which testify to the humanity within him. What is important in the context of the present discussion is that even though the jester in Lear thinks with the reason of Goneril and Regan, his heart remains loyal to the fallen king: That Sir, which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form; Will pack, when it begins to rain, And leave thee in the storm, But I will tarry, the Fool will stay, And let the wise men fly (King Lear, II, iv) There is a further component in Shakespearean wisdom meriting special attention in the present context. Time and time again, the collapse of distinctions is the propelling factor of a slide into chaos and confusion, ‘a time out of joint’. Without distinctions and the rules implicit in them, meaning is destroyed, sense is lost and ethics becomes mere wordplay. Shakespeare warns of the normlessness and confusion engendered when distinctions are lost, when foul becomes fair. Just such erosion of boundaries characterises the discourse not only of multinational public relations and government spin, but – as already noted – even the Pope and the bikers. The Shakespearean jester manages to balance a natural relativism by a simultaneous, paradoxically human allegiance to principles which draw from insight into nature, its patterns, shapes and habits:
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‘for the rain it raineth every day’ (Twelfth Night, or, What You Will, Orsino, Duke of Illyria: V, i). The rehabilitation of wisdom in the person of the jester (or, on occasion, the wise king) is accompanied by a constant invocation of folly and stupidity in the guise of cleverness. Lack of wisdom allows cleverness on its own to wreak havoc and ruin. Inherent in Shakespeare is an ideal of sustainability, a belief that uncontrolled excess, even in the service of what is otherwise good and noble, can propel us into disaster. Othello is a victim of Iago’s cleverness and his own excess because he ‘loved not wisely but too well’. Likewise, Lear’s seemingly clever but unwise games with his daughters along with Edmund’s clever meddling trigger the ultimate horror. In Shakespeare, wisdom – unlike cleverness – derives from respect for balance and hierarchy, the avoidance of excess and the cultivation of a moral intelligence that embraces compassion. As John Danby has aptly put it, wisdom is the ripeness which is ‘a combination of the serpent and the dove’ (1949: 201).
Considering the ‘new Renaissance’ If ever an age were dominated by cleverness, it is the present one. The Shakespearean concept of wisdom suggests a means by which the excesses and limitations of this cleverness may be held in check. One aspect of this cleverness is keeping humans at the centre of the stage, on the one hand, while simultaneously showing how easily the human itself may be abolished or replaced by survival machines for genes, mechanical minds, bearers of biospheric values, products of history – anything other than the ‘poor bare, forked animal’ at the centre of Shakespeare’s stage. In the natural and social sciences, for example, humans are threatened with relegation to an ever-more insignificant status in the scheme of things, their behaviour and identity determined by the war of selfish genes or the blind action of social forces. In a few versions of environmental thought, the individual is merely a knot in a web of biospherical values subjugated to the greater good of the planet or even the cosmos.9 Instead of characterising an expanded, all-absorbing self, several ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ depictions of the self simply re-situate it as little more than a cog in a larger mechanism and a means to achieve more distant and compelling goals. My proposal is that restoring dignity to the human individual is seminal to any revitalisation of ethical thinking. When seen in this light, the existing attempts to settle accounts with, and revise, the Enlightenment value platform are problematic. Take just two examples mentioned briefly at the start of the present chapter. First, the reflexive modernity of Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash and Ulrich Beck involves the optimistic idea that under globalisation people will have more freedom to understand and control their own situation. Against this, note that the majority of people on the planet are in no position to be free agents – to mention just one example, think of women in many countries of the South whose status as citizens and moral subjects is often unrecognised by political and legal systems. Beck’s Indian taxi driver in London discussing village affairs via
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the mobile phone is a fantasy figure in a world where the majority of his fellowcountrymen have no access to a telephone (see Beck and Zolo 1999). Similarly, Richard Falk’s ‘citizen pilgrim’ at the centre of a net of ‘cosmopolitan international solidarity’, informed by an ethic of care, respect for biodiversity and compassion for refugees, could hardly inhabit – let alone thrive in – the modern nervous and xenophobic nation state (see Falk 1993, 2002). Theorists of reflexive global citizenship are still locked into the ideal of progress, hoping for an ameliorated modernity where after exfoliation, scrubbing and toning, a rejuvenated Enlightenment rationality will emerge like a star from the beauty salon (see the essays by Falk and the other contributors to Dower and Williams 2002). Second, the darker, despairing vision due to John Gray turns away from the legacy of humanism altogether and leaves us stranded in a Beckettian world with no hope and no prospects for redemption. According to Gray, as already noted, the modern project has expended its moral force, and its only chance for renewal may be an intercourse with other cultures. ‘Humans think they are free conscious beings, but in truth they are deluded animals . . . currents in the drift of genes’ he insists in Straw Dogs, exemplifying the tendency to abolish the human (Gray 2002: 61). For Gray, humanism is tantamount to a fetishisation of human beings while liberalism is reduced to a Western fundamentalist creed excluding alternative forms of self-realisation. These are misconceptions, just as the abolition of the special status of humans is premature. While Gray is right to point to tragedy as an inseparable component of the human condition, this is not yet a sound basis for abandoning liberal theories of justice and moral law. It is in the context of these expressions of optimism and despair that the Shakespearean moral holarchy outlined earlier provides an alternative framework within which to reclaim the humanist legacy. As noted, the jester’s vision is dark but not defeatist. It is based on a moral wisdom which – as opposed to mere practical or strategic cleverness – implies the ability to envision vividly the consequences of one’s actions (something that, as far as is known, no animal can do) as well as understand the holarchic and interdependent nature of values. The idea of a system of deductions from first principles – what Renaissance writers such as Salutati, Charron and Erasmus would have called scientia – is not enough for wisdom. Wisdom, that is to say, sapientia, may require scientia, but is not constituted by it, for wisdom according to some of the Renaissance humanists is a form of moral imagination, the reflection of the divine spark in us humans (see Rice 1958). Such wisdom, then, amounts to much more than calculative rationality.10 There are at least five pillars of a ‘new Renaissance’ which can be tentatively outlined here. First is the rediscovery of subjectivity and dignity, without which no ethical or environmental agenda can be viable. Second is the awareness of the historicity of values and the ensuing recognition of memory as the explanatory background to human actions. Third is dialogic imagination, which goes beyond reflexivity in its capacity to get inside the situated and historical experience of another. Fourth is the importance of distinctions, the articulation and recognition of limits and boundaries without which there is no difference between fair and foul, truth and lies. Finally there is conscience, a
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moral awareness which is not linked to the service of the state but derived, rather, from an autonomous inner voice. When ‘every man’s conscience is a thousand men’ (Richard III, V, ii), its power is not to be underestimated. Bringing forward these pre-modern values highlights the inherent weakness in optimistic appeals to ‘global citizenship’ and ‘reflexivity’ as antidotes to tyranny and totalitarianism. Citizenship on its own cannot be the ideal for conscientious environmental commitment. It must be founded on other values which propel civil disobedience, when necessary, against oppressive or environmentally destructive states, corporations and international agencies. Contemporary environmental movements have their roots less in citizens’ protests and more in imaginative reflection and acts of conscience, inspired by thinkers such as Thoreau and Emerson (see Brennan 2001). The very idea of sustainable development is partially founded on the appeal to collective conscience with regard to environmental despoliation, world poverty and justice between generations. If global citizenship were to be an effective source for change, then its effective moral basis would likely be the sort already outlined in Shakespeare’s vision. Likewise, reflexivity taken as the imperative to reflect on and explain one’s own actions to the world is not ethically sufficient in the absence of historical experience and imagination. The latter both motivate and test the grounds on which we are able to act for the good of the human and natural environment. There is little chance that new environmental platforms and ideals, however appealing in the short term, will sustain their power if they do not resonate with the existing legends, narratives, heroes and models for action. Similarly there is no prospect for any concerted environmental action at a global scale unless all sides develop the capacity to make appropriate distinctions and develop dialogical sympathy with each others’ viewpoints, something that is increasingly imperilled in a world of clashing cultures and civilisations (see Huntington 1996).
Dignity, memory, dialogue – their place in policy It might be doubted whether these pre-modern values briefly sketched above can really make a difference to contemporary issues, particularly those connected with the environment and globalisation. Environmental problems are difficult and complex, and there is a tendency for academics to split into camps supporting or denouncing tough positions on global warming, poverty and resources, population, pollution, land clearing, deforestation and any of a dozen other hot topics. Some of these splits take place along disciplinary lines, as when environmental philosophers, for example, denounce the use of cost-benefit measures as a guide to environmental policy, a denunciation that can easily escalate into a war between moral philosophy and economics (see Sagoff 1988; Brennan 1992). While adversarial confrontations, denunciations and protest can play a temporary role in stimulating and advancing policy agendas, a constructive approach to defining and solving environmental problems needs to get beyond these. Is there any way in which the appeal to the Renaissance inspiration can translate into recommendations at all levels – local, national, regional and global – for a new approach to environmental policy?
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This last question asks, in effect, whether the items mentioned in the previous section – subjectivity and dignity, conscience, historical memory, the significance of distinctions, and dialogic imagination – can help in a substantial way with the design of policy. Since existing policy deliberations are subject to manipulation, spin and other forms of sharp practice, the question also asks whether we can be wise about policy, designing it so that the excesses of cleverness can be moderated even if not altogether avoided. We live in a world where a rhetoric of virtue is regularly coupled with vicious action, and there is no clearer case of this than the situation in Australia where despite a political rhetoric of care for conservation and diversity, the rate of native vegetation clearing has actually increased during the last ten years. Forty per cent more land in Australia was cleared in 1999 than in 1991 (ABS 2002: 26), and so it is hardly surprising that the State of the Environment 2001 report remarks that ‘clearance of native vegetation remains the single most significant threat to terrestrial biodiversity’ (p. 73). Only four countries in the world cleared a greater area of land than Australia did in 1999, namely Brazil, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia (Biodiversity 2001: 75). Existing studies of environmental policy in Australia show little confidence that wise approaches will replace past blunders. For example, Kate Crowley is pessimistic about the chances of dislodging what she calls ‘an emergent amoralism’ in Australia and believes that the ideology of ‘economic rationalism’ has been – and will continue to be – successful in asserting the market above all other policy concerns (Crowley 1997). Meanwhile zoologists and wildlife ecologists, aware of the perilous condition of many Australian species, have suggested that a revolution in farming practice is necessary with an immediate halt to land clearing and the substitution of kangaroos for sheep in the rangelands (Lunney and Dickman 2002, Grigg et al. 1995). What policy approach, however, will make the occurrence of such a revolution more than merely wishful thinking? Here is one very simple way of applying the pre-modern values discussed above to this difficult situation. A wise approach to policy will recognise the existence of a plurality of interests, perspectives and needs bearing on the issues of species loss, salinity and erosion that typify the Australian environmental situation. The wise approach to policy, then, may go further and take on board the suggestion – attributable to Mary Douglas and elaborated by other writers such as Aaron Wildavsky, Steve Rayner and Michael Thompson – that in many societies, and at many different scales, there are some general orientations, ‘mindsets’, ‘cities’ or ‘cultural biases’ which are surprisingly universal. These mindsets are characterised by the fact that different attitudes and norms are regularly associated into clusters, and these clusters are characteristic of orientations which can be organised in a simple two-dimensional space defined as ‘grid’ and ‘group’ (Douglas 1992). Take two attitudes, for example those towards justice and towards nature. According to Douglas’ analysis, low group, or competitive, perspectives characterise people who regard fairness as a matter of equal opportunity or ‘first come, first served’. The very same people will generally regard nature as robust. By contrast, other groups of people will be found
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who regard fairness as equality of outcome rather than opportunity. People characterised by these high group, or ‘communard’, attitudes will usually disagree with those who are competitively oriented. For example, they will typically regard nature as fragile. Egalitarian communards will, moreover, typically regard social problems as being the fault of the system, not of the people within it. Competitive individualists, by contrast, will tend to blame people when things go wrong, not the system. Douglas’ other dimension – grid – refers to the rule orientation that people have. Those who accept a high degree of rule orientation regard fairness as equality before a system of laws, and believe social problems are due to deviation from established precedent. Interestingly, many such people think that nature is robust only within certain limits. When things go wrong, people with a high grid perspective don’t blame the system, nor do they blame people. Rather they think the problems are due to deviation from established precedent. In a simplification of the Douglas structures, Steve Rayner has recently proposed that three different ‘types’ or ‘mindsets’ characterise those who often take different stances in regard to environmental policy. They are, first, ‘hierarchists’ (high on the grid scale, hence interested in developing a system of laws and precedents with which to manage environmental problems). Communards, by contrast, are the sort of people who are often associated with non-government organisations, who are strongly motivated to seek equal outcomes between the rich and the poor and between present and future generations. They score higher than hierarchists on the group dimension, but lower on the grid values. Third, individualists or entrepreneurs show low group and low grid orientation. They take a very different view of problems from those taken by the communards and the hierarchists (Rayner 1999). A simple application of the Douglas scheme explains some divergences in the ways people think about policy processes. For example, it is well-established that salinity, like other environmental problems in Australia, has been exacerbated by massive land clearances that are still continuing to the present. A well-known principle with regard to pollution and resource exploitation is the precautionary one. For the egalitarians – whose view of nature is that it is fragile and prone to catastrophic collapse – a precautionary approach means that if we are in doubt, then clearing should be stopped. Those with a competitive orientation, however, will understand the notion of precaution rather differently. Anticipating new legislation which may restrict future clearances, they will want to take the precaution of clearing land as quickly as possible, so that they can reap the rewards of increased productivity and then invest these in alternative sources of income – say, fish farming or grow-tunnels for flowers. What constitutes precautionary action will differ from one mindset to another, just as the notion of what is fair or just will not be consistent across different perspectives. If the Rayner and Douglas suggestions are correct, then participants in policy will regularly operate with rather different conceptions of what is fair, what is just and what constitutes precautionary action. A great many of the authors writing about environmental justice, sustainability and global citizenship, for
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example, represent the communard perspective (see, for example, the essays in Dower and Williams 2002). Yet, for a policy process to be a wise one, it would need to give recognition to the existence – and legitimacy – of the other perspectives outlined above. A wise approach to Australia’s environmental problems, for example, might ensure inclusion of these different perspectives in any policy process, hence making sure that farmers, conservation organisations and government agencies are all involved in key deliberations. By bringing these groups into constructive dialogue with each other (the conditions for achieving such dialogue are a matter for separate investigation), the policy process would be sensitive to the subjectivity of people from different backgrounds. By engaging with each other, they would bring to policy different sets of historical memories, different understandings of nature and of value and hence be able to stimulate imaginative reflection on, and engagement with, each others’ perspectives. Such an approach does not – of course – guarantee that wise decisions will be taken, or that natural values, sustainability or future amenity will always be preferred to continuing land clearing, with the inevitable pressure on native species and further spread of salinity. But the approach does permit conservation interests to have an equal influence alongside the others. In other words, inspiration from the pre-modern age can be combined with modern analytical and sociological tools to yield constructive ways of thinking about environmental policy discussions. The new Renaissance inspiration can also suggest other ideas about environmental policy. While the tendency to abolish distinctions – for example, between science and myth, truth and construction, fact and opinion – has, according to some, undermined the credibility of scientific input to many public debates (Roll-Hansen 2002), an insistence on the importance of maintaining distinctions may open a space for designing policy in such a way that limits the impact of fads, fashions and irrational enthusiasms on major policy issues. It would be an achievement of some importance to ensure, for example, that only credible scientific information is used as a basis for policy decisions. Such brief remarks only start on the business of outlining a credible policy process and much more would be needed to provide an antidote to the morally corrosive effects of virtuous rhetoric and business-as-usual mentioned previously. The point, however, is that we can seek inspiration from the Renaissance ideals in framing a design for better policy processes. The importance of dialogic imagination, the importance of boundaries and distinctions, the respect for the subjectivity of all participants, the need to seek wisdom – these can all be an inspiration for policy design. These proposals have a further merit: they go beyond the hand-wringing and despair of those who are pessimistic about the current situation while avoiding the easy optimism of those who see increasing globalisation as the remedy for all the ills of the day.
Conclusion The commitment to seek wisdom, honour distinctions and engage in discourse that respects memory and subjectivity can help us to see through the masks and
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deceptions of governments, tyrants, corporations and others, and offers some chance of saving us from our own propaganda, self-delusions and hypocrisy. It is worth noting that humanism as advocated by the Shakespearean jester is neither a brutal anthropocentrism, ending in the delirium of worship of the superhuman, nor the sentimentalisation of humans into maladapted species. Rather it seeks to intensify the solidarity of individuals with each other, and peoples with each other, recognising the dual importance of cultural norms and ethical ideal – natura naturata if you will – and the wonder of nature itself, natura naturans. There have been many critiques of postmodern thought and its bearing on our thinking about environment and humans. Of these, one is particularly telling. This is that postmodernity, in its frantic escape from grand narratives, totalising visions and fundamentalist temptations, ends up proposing foundations for an environmental ethic that are based on the lack of foundations themselves. The Shakespearean ‘moral holarchy’ sketched here as an alternative is an attempt at restoring a ‘foundational’ democracy where values are firmly in place and yet which is resilient enough to fend off fundamentalist readings. The values put forward in outline here may be robust enough to merit further scrutiny in the attempt to renew moral and political thinking at a time when human freedom is under threat from the power of corporations, the pressures of consumerism, deterministic scientism and the technocratic traps of globalisation. It would be premature to jettison them because of optimism about the brave new world of globalisation or because of despair over whether human beings can ever be more than deluded animals. It is at least worth the experiment, or so I would argue, to seek a way out of the crises and puzzles of late modernity by examining once again pre-modern conceptions of humans and their place in the world. As Gray and others have argued, we live in a time when distinctions are dissolving, even those between war and peace, executioner and victim, kitsch and art, totalitarianism and freedom. Such confusions provide no fertile starting point for renewing environmental ethics. By returning to Shakespeare’s metaphor of humans as blundering actors on nature’s stage, inspiration can be found for an ethic of interdependence and responsibility which does not ignore the frailties and ambiguities of real life and action. While suspicious of utopian fantasies and shallow optimism, the orientation proposed here does not dismiss either ideals or idealism. Unlike the global federation of biocentrists and citizen pilgrims which emerges ex nihilo and demands allegiance on the basis of cavalier rootlessness, the new Renaissance springs from elements of the West’s own cultural memory.11 Just as the original Renaissance was pluralist, experimental and oriented towards the other, its contemporary counterpart would be openminded – as shown by the approach to policy outlined in the previous section – without being uncritically tolerant of everything. Its insistence on human dignity as a foundation of all ethical thinking, its preference for wisdom over fashion, and its emphasis on the necessity for distinctions offer a way of thinking about globalisation and the environment that can jolt us out of the endgame scenario into a reanimation of long-dormant ideals, a new Renaissance in
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which the return to – and reassessment of – humanity will be coextensive with a return to nature.12
Notes 1 Research for this chapter was carried out at City University of Hong Kong (research grant no. 9010002: Ethics, Science and the Law: A Multidimensional Approach to Environmental Protection and Quality of Life Issues in an Urban Framework), and at the University of Oslo (Norgesforskningsråd research grant 141625/730: Environmental Ethics and the Humanist Legacy). The final version was completed at La Trobe University. For accommodation, financial support and generous research assistance, I am grateful to the Governance in Asia Research Centre and the Department of Public and Social Administration at City University of Hong Kong, to the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo and to the Philosophy Program, La Trobe University. A special debt is owed to Nina Witoszek, whose disagreements with my conception of Renaissance humanism shaped the chapter almost as much as her many positive contributions. Thanks also to Julia Tao, Lisa Raphals, Y. S. Lo, Eyjólfur Emilsson and John Fox for comments which also helped to shape the final version of the chapter. 2 For an argument that the development of individual potential is best promoted by communal life that is close to the land, see Sale (1985). 3 Compare Leopold, who writes ‘that land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics’ (1949: vii–ix). He later states: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ (1949: 224–225). 4 Arne Næss astutely noticed this problem when reflecting on why green utopian societies looked so ‘dreary’. ‘A capitalist society’, he wrote, ‘is, in a certain sense, a rather wild society’, before hastening to add: ‘We need some degree of wildness, but not exactly of the capitalist sort’ (Næss 1995: 467). 5 Plumwood (1993: 179). The original remark is by John Livingstone, quoted by Warwick Fox. One of the clearest early expressions of the expanded self-theory can be found in Fox (1984) and compare Fox (1990). 6 Panpsychists would dispute the presence of any fallacy in the idea that the world is in dialogic communication, at many levels, with its inhabitants. See Mathews (2003). 7 Bill McKibben (1989) points out that when the rain falls or the storm hits we can no longer be sure whether the event is ever of natural origin, so great is human influence on the world. 8 For Koestler, a holarchy is a hierarchically organised structure of units, called ‘holons’. Each holon looks simultaneously up towards a bigger whole of which it is a part; and down towards its own parts. Relative to its subordinates, a holon is a (relatively independent) whole, while relative to its superiors it is a (relatively dependent) part. When applied to nature, the Koestler holarchy matches some aspects of Spinoza’s understanding of the world (see Koestler 1979). 9 For an extreme example, consult Jencks (1995), who attempts to make the cosmos the measure of all standards. The idea of the individual as a knot in a web of biospheric values was put forward by Arne Næss (1973), although he himself, unlike some of his followers, would not have supported the use of the term ‘merely’. 10 Gray’s ‘calculative rationality’ is still alive and flourishing in analytic philosophy – witness studies such as Michael Smith’s award-winning The Moral Problem (1994), which elaborately attempts to explain the ethically valuable as being just what the fully rational agent would desire.
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11 For example, the humane world order of Richard Falk (1995) is meant to arise from a shift of allegiance from the nation state to the wider global community, affirming values of common humanity, solidarity and a care for nature. Although sharing many of his hopes, I have no optimism that a massive shift of allegiance can come about simply by the diminishing of old loyalties and the emergence of ‘multiple identities’. 12 The idea of a ‘new Renaissance’ emerged from discussions with Nina Witoszek in Oslo in 1995, and was put forward originally in a chapter I read at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1995, entitled ‘Is it Time to Abandon Environmental Ethics?’
References ABS (2002) Measuring Australia’s Progress, Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics (Cat. 1370.0). Arendt, H. (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace. Australian State of the Environment Committee (2001) Australia, State of the Environment 2001: Independent Report to the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment and Heritage/ Australian State of the Environment Committee, Collingwood, Vic.: CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Department of Environment and Heritage. Beck, U. (2001) ‘The Cosmopolitan State’, Eurozine. Online. Available at: http://www. eurozine.com/article/2001–12–05–beck-en.html (accessed 10 October 2002). Beck, U. and Zolo, D. (1999) ‘What Is Globalisation? Some Radical Questions’, Reset, 5. Becker, D. and Sklar, R. (1987) ‘Why Postimperialism?’, in D. Becker (ed.), Postimperialism: International Capitalism and Development in the Late Twentieth Century, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Bella, D. (1996) ‘The Pressures of Organizations and the Responsibilities of University Professors’, BioScience, 46: 772–778. Biodiversity (2001) Biodiversity: Australia State of the Environment Report 2001, Canberra: Australian State of the Environment Committee, Environment Australia/CSIRO. Brennan, A. (1992) ‘Moral Pluralism and the Environment’, Environmental Values, 1: 15–33; reprinted in D. Schmidtz and E. Willott (eds) (2002), Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1998) ‘Poverty, Puritanism and Environmental Conflict’, Environmental Values, 7: 305–331. —— (2001) ‘Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Philosophy’, in D. Jamieson (ed.), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. Crowley, K. (1997) ‘Nature, Culture and the Green State: Challenges and Complications in Australia’, a paper presented at the Environmental Justice: Global Ethics for the 21st Century event at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, 1–3 October 1997. Electronic proceedings edited by N. Lowe. Online. Available at: http://www.arbld. unimelb.edu.au/ envjust/papers/allpapers/crowley/home.htm (accessed 10 October 2002). Danby, J. (1949) Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature; A Study of King Lear, London: Faber & Faber. de Sousa Santos, B. (2002) ‘The Process of Globalisation’. Portuguese original published in Revista Critica de Ciencas Sociais. Reprinted in Eurozine. Online. Available at: http:// www.eurozine.com/article/2002–08–22–santos-en.htm (accessed 10 October 2002). Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge. Dower, N. and Williams, J. (eds) (2002) Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.
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Falk, R. (1993) Explorations at the Edge of Time: Prospects for World Order, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —— (1995) On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. —— (2002) ‘An Emergent Matrix of Citizenship: Complex, Uneven, and Fluid’, in N. Dower and J. Williams (eds) (2002), Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Fox, W. (1984) ‘Deep Ecology: A New Philosophy of Our Time?’, The Ecologist, 14:194–200. —— (1990) Towards a Transpersonal Ecology, Boston: Shambhala. Goodin, R. (1992) Green Political Theory, London: Routledge. Gray, J. (1995) Enlightenment’s Wake, London: Routledge. —— (2002) Straw Dogs, London: Granta. Grigg, G. C., Halke, P. T. and Lunney, D. (eds) (1995) Conservation through Sustainable Use of Wildlife, University of Queensland: Centre for Conservation Biology. Harsanyi, J. (1969) ‘Rational Choice Models of Political Behaviour vs. Functionalist and Conformist Theories’, World Politics, 21:513–538. Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, London: Simon & Schuster. Jencks, C. (1995) The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, London: Academic Editions. Karliner, J. (1997) The Corporate Planet, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Koestler, A. (1979) Janus: A Summing Up, London: Pan Books. Korten, D. (1995) When Corporations Rule the World, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. —— (1999) The Post-Corporate World, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches from Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lilla, M. (2002) ‘The New Age of Tyranny’, New York Review of Books, 24 October. Lunney, D. and Dickman, C. (2002) ‘A Zoological Revolution: Utilising Wildlife to Conserve Wildlife and Landscapes’, in D. Lunney and C. Dickman (eds), A Zoological Revolution: Using Native Fauna to Assist its Own Survival, Royal Zoological Society of South Wales and Australian Museum. Mathews, F. (2003) For Love of Matter, New York: State University of New York Press. McKibben, B. (1989) The End of Nature, New York: Anchor Books. Næss, A. (1973) ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement’, Inquiry, 16: 95–100. —— (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, ed. and trans. D. Rothenberg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1995) ‘Deep Ecology for the Twenty-Second Century’, in G. Sessions (ed.), Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, Boston: Shambhala. Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Rayner, S. (1999) ‘Mapping Institutional Diversity for Implementing the Lisbon Principles’, Ecological Economics, 31: 259–274. Rice, E. (1958) The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roll-Hansen, N. (2002) Ideological Obstacles to Scientific Advice in Politics? The Case of ‘Forest Death’ from ‘Acid Rain’, Oslo: Makt-og demokratiutredningen 1990–2003 and Unipub forlag, Rapportserien Nr 48. Rolston, H. (1988) Environmental Ethics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —— (1994) ‘Value in Nature and the Nature of Value’, in R. Attfield and A. Belsey (eds), Philosophy and Natural Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Endgame or a ‘new Renaissance’?
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Sagoff, M. (1988) The Economy of the Earth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sale, K. (1985) Dwellers in the Land, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Siedentop, L. (2001) Democracy in Europe, New York: Columbia University Press. Simon, H. A. (1957) Models of Man: Social and Rational, New York: John Wiley. Smith, M. (1994) The Moral Problem, Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, P. (1981) ‘The Ethics of Respect for Nature’, Environmental Ethics, 3: 197–218. Tiffen, M., Mortimore, M. and Gichuki, F. (1994) More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya, Chichester: Wiley.
3
Environmental values, nationalism, global citizenship and the common heritage of humanity1 Robin Attfield
Introduction Whenever the era of nation states may be held to have begun, whether 1066, 1648 or 1789, its characteristic values may be taken to have included, unsurprisingly enough, nationalism. Since this era is not obviously over yet, such values may be presumed to remain widespread (and experience confirms this), even if trends such as globalisation have modified them; and these values may be expected to have influenced environmental values for some centuries past. However, environmental problems transcend national boundaries, and tackling them clearly requires some form of global co-operation and global ethic, plus, I suggest, much wider awareness of global citizenship across humanity. So it is worth investigating the impact of the particularist ethics characteristic of nationalism on environmental values, and by contrast the bearing on such values of ethical universalism, including recent proposals for the recognition of the common heritage of humankind, such as the proposals of the Maltese philosopher Emmanuel Agius (1997, 1998a). Two other strands need to be interwoven into this pattern. For we cannot whiggishly assume a progressive evolution of values from tribal to nationalist to universalist ones. Universalist ethical norms, concerned at least for humanity as a whole, are of course to be found widely scattered in the ancient world, in what most would regard as an era prior to that of the nation state, alongside a great variety of particularist values, and their deep roots in European culture help explain the widespread adoption of universalist values such as those of Grotius and later of Kantianism during that subsequent era (Attfield 1999: 32–35). I have in mind the universalist values of (among other ancient systems) Stoicism, Epicureanism and of Christianity, and these comprise one of the two strands that it is important not to neglect. The other indispensable strand concerns conflicting interpretations of traditional attitudes to nature characteristic both of pre-modern (ancient and medieval) centuries and of the era of the nation state. On some views, including that of Agius, the characteristic attitude to nature has been one of domination or mastery, an attitude that now needs to be transcended (1998b: 7), while on other interpretations belief in stewardship, whether among Jews, Christians or
The common heritage of humanity 39 Muslims (and sometimes the practice of stewardship too), has been at least as prevalent as approaches of the domination type throughout these centuries, involving attitudes not too far removed from those commended by Agius for the present (see Attfield 1999: Ch. 3). It is beyond doubt that nature has often been treated with arrogance and rapacity, and that such attitudes partially underlie recent environmental crises. Yet if it is important not to stereotype the era of the nation state as essentially nationalist, it is also important not to stigmatise either the Christian centuries in the West or the era of nation states as involving a uniformly despotic approach to nature. One reason why this is important is that if such stigmatising were justified, the prospects for the spread of environmentally sensitive values in the new millennium would be much bleaker than, I suggest, they are, whether at local, national or global level, because the roots of such values (at least in the West) would either be too shallow or lacking altogether. To investigate the prospects for recognition of global citizenship and of proposals such as those of Agius for recognition of nature (planet-wide) as the common heritage of humanity, I will first discuss the contrast between universalist and particularist ethics (the ethics often associated with the era of the nation state), and then the arguments of Agius. In case, however, the very phrase ‘the common heritage of humanity’ sounds too anthropocentric2 for serious consideration, I should add at this stage that I shall later be putting forward a non-anthropocentric interpretation of that concept.
Nationalism, communitarianism and cosmopolitanism Nation states have always been prone to instil nationalism and patriotic virtues into their citizen body, and more particularly into their armed forces, in order to justify their existence and authority and to induce people to risk danger and death in their defence. Sometimes these tendencies involve what look like arbitrary assertions of the intrinsic superiority of whatever is English or French or German, including on occasion the countryside and wildlife of England, France or Germany. At other times, philosophers have attempted to supply good reasons for prioritising fellow-citizens over other human beings. This is not an impossible enterprise, since most of us accept special obligations to family-members, and special obligations to fellow-citizens are not too dissimilar; indeed, one defence of some special obligations is that their general observance is beneficial to the generality either of humanity or of life on Earth.3 Yet such arguments can be taken to extremes, as in the case of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (who persuaded himself and many of his successors of the intrinsic superiority of the Germans over, in particular, the French: see Rocker [1933] 1998: 217f.), and later among some of the more nationalist of the neo-Kantians. Another possible basis for nationalism may be felt to warrant scrutiny, that of the kind of communitarianism which maintains that responsibilities always arise from relationships, that there are no responsibilities with regard to unrelated persons or beings and that a
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person’s relationships to their country and their fellow-citizens are sufficiently important for the resulting responsibilities to outweigh or trump most others. I should at once grant that (as John O’Neill puts matters) communitarians need not be nationalists (O’Neill 1994). Communitarians could recognise loyalties other than national ones, e.g. to the international community of scholars or of the working class or of the Church, or to those of any nationality who share one’s values. Yet for most communitarians, limits have to be drawn beyond which responsibilities run out, for example towards people who do not share one’s values or towards future people who may well not share one’s values; and sometimes these limits are located more narrowly than at national level (as when Indian Hindus or Muslims deny responsibilities to each other). So it is unsurprising that communitarianism is sometimes used to underwrite nationalism and patriotism of quite jingoistic varieties. (What is prone to go with this is love of the natural aspects of one’s favoured countryside, to the exclusion of nature beyond national limits, and also of the natural systems of the planet. Communitarianism would seem at best to make provision for non-human creatures where such creatures are regarded as adoptive members of our community, but not where they are spatially or temporally distant, let alone undiscovered and unidentified, as at present most species probably are.) While I am not suggesting that communitarianism is the characteristic approach to ethics of theorists of the nation state, I am suggesting that it comprises a characteristic approach. Communitarianism contrasts with cosmopolitanism, which denies communal boundaries to the scope and application of ethics and maintains that responsibilities (despite varying with agents’ power, strength, etc.) do not vary with community membership any more than do rights. Cosmopolitan ethicists maintain that ethical responsibilities apply everywhere and to all moral agents capable of shouldering them, and not only to members of one or another tradition or community, and that factors which provide reasons for action for any agent, whether individual or corporate, provide reasons for like action for any other agent who is similarly placed, whatever their community may be or believe (see Attfield 1999: Ch. 2; Dower 1998). They also deny limits such as community boundaries to the scope of responsibilities; responsibilities (they hold) do not dwindle because of spatial or temporal distance, or in the absence of reasons transcending particular facts or identities. They do not deny responsibilities to family, friends, colleagues or country, but regard such special obligations not as ethical bedrock but as derivative from universal considerations such as the general good, respect for persons, universal rights or what agents would consent to in a fair bargaining situation. Hence they are sometimes called ‘universalists’. Cosmopolitanism has not had to await the decline of the nation state to be expressed; it was already expressed in ancient times by writers such as Terence (whose character declared, at Heautontimorumenos 1, 1, 25, that as a human being he deemed nothing human alien to him: see Shuckburgh 1887), and Paul (who preached, as Acts 17:26 relates, that God had made of one blood all nations to dwell on all the face of the earth). During the period of the nation state, such universalism has been found not only in Kantianism, but also in forms of
The common heritage of humanity 41 contractarianism, consequentialism and of Marxism. Indeed there has very often been a tension between adherents of these kinds of normative ethics and the nationalism that many of them have also espoused. Some kinds of nationalism, admittedly, are consistent with internationalism and recognition of international ties and responsibilities, but others are not, and many people have experienced a conflict between the particularistic nationalism of their community and the values of one or another cosmopolitan ethic. For example, the harm principle central to liberalism, which could in theory have justified action to prevent harm to human beings and other species present and future, local and worldwide, has often been construed as limited in scope to the present people of one’s nation state and its allies or associated territories, although such limitations have also been frequently regarded as an unsatisfactory compromise, unworthy of liberalism and of its implicit universalist underpinnings, whether Kantian or consequentialist. When international and global environmental problems arise, communitarianism is not invariably bankrupt, for there may well be good communitarian reasons to favour (for example) a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions (although there also seem in practice to be strong communitarian reasons against the participation of certain governments). Communitarianism can also foster the kind of local loyalties that promote care for the environment of people’s local bioregion, although other ethical approaches can also achieve this. However, there are certain widespread obnoxious practices against which particularistic nationalism and communitarianism raise few objections, including the exporting to and dumping (in exchange for payments) of toxic waste products to Third World countries. While this growing trade could be considered one of the malign aspects of globalisation, it is also an extension of neo-colonialism on the part of nation states and their companies, and an expression of a form of communitarianism that cares little for Third World peoples and nothing for their environments and for those of their descendants. As Andrew Dobson warns, if policies continue to be determined by communitarian rather than universalist principles, there is a danger that the environmental health of economically vulnerable countries of the Third World, and of coming generations in those countries, will continue to be endangered (Dobson 1998: 106). In this and a variety of other ways, the kinds of communitarianism characteristic of the selective ethics of nation states are liable to prioritise some territories, environments and ecosystems over others. If this meant nothing but leaving the other environments alone, this might not be too pernicious, although policies of inaction are widely recognised to be inadequate in the field of biodiversity conservation, let alone that of sustainable development.4 But in reality it often means not leaving alone the others but polluting or degrading them, whether through toxic dumping or through questionable practices of (for example) mineral extraction, with few environmental or other ethical constraints. The objectionable nature of such activities can be brought out in a variety of ways, but the criticisms will almost certainly have a cosmopolitan basis of one kind or another.5 Further, while anthropocentric forms of cosmopolitanism (such as
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Kantianism, contractarianism and theories grounded in basic human rights) can enter into such a critique, non-anthropocentric theories, with their broader basis, are capable of more trenchant criticism, liable to support the preservation of a wider range of species and ecosystems.
National and global citizenship If a cosmopolitan ethic is needed, so, arguably, is an awareness of global citizenship, capable of motivating matching action and a corresponding sense of identity, rather as national citizenship has often served to motivate national patriotism and corresponding forms of communitarianism. Global citizenship involves commitment to one or another form of global ethic, for which obligations do not stop short at national boundaries and are not grounded solely in any less-than-universal interest. (It is already expressed by the worldwide membership of international environmental and developmental NGOs, in the work of UN agencies and often also in the researches of international academia.) As such, ‘global citizenship’ should be construed as inclusively as possible. If literal translations of ‘citizenship’ turn out to have unintended exclusivist connotations, then supplementary or alternative terms, such as ‘membership’ or ‘participancy’, would be needed to convey that no one is antecedently disqualified from this status. The notion of global citizenship is likely to be criticised from two different directions. The most obvious critique maintains that citizenship presupposes a sovereign state (whether a nation state or an empire), and that as there is no such global state to award such citizenship and allocate related rights and duties, the very concept of global citizenship is an absurdity, short of the establishment of a world government. But this critique assumes too narrow and strictly political a conception of ‘citizenship’ (see Attfield 1999: 197–201), for the loyalties of citizens can be focused not only on states but (at a lower level) on non-sovereign bodies such as cities (for example, St Paul was a citizen of Tarsus, ‘no mean city’ (Acts 21:39), as well as of the Roman state (Acts 22:26–29)), and (at a more inclusive level) of one or another international community, such as the commonwealth of learning or the universal church (Attfield 1999: 202).6 In this broader sense, ancient Stoics such as Epictetus (c. AD 55–135) commended people regarding themselves as world citizens, alongside their other roles (Epictetus, ‘Discourses’, 2.10ff., in Long and Sedley 1987: I: 364); and global citizens have long recognised ties of loyalty and obligation not only to fellow-citizens of their political state but also to citizens of the world. We do not have to await conferment of the role of world citizen in order to receive it; our recognition of international and global ties confers it already. The recent awareness of global environmental problems and the recent growth of international societies and bodies, and of an international culture, have made this ancient notion increasingly accessible and applicable, alongside the notion of national citizenship. Indeed, users of electronic mail and of the Internet often have as many contacts outside the state of their political citizenship as within it,
The common heritage of humanity 43 plus a matching awareness of belonging to an international culture as well as the local one. Far from being absurd, such global citizenship is morally at least as important as it has always been since it was forged in the ancient world and transmitted to us through the era of nation states, and for practical purposes its recognition has become increasingly urgent.7 The other criticism regards belief in the potential global citizenship of the whole of humanity as excessively narrow. Thus when Aldo Leopold wrote of the role of Homo sapiens changing ‘from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it’, he immediately went on to say that the related ethic (which he called ‘the land ethic’) ‘implies respect for his fellow-members, and also for the community as such’ (reprinted in VanDeVeer and Pierce 1986: 74b). According to Leopold, then, the members and citizens of the land community include not only humanity but also fellow-creatures, and also the soils and waters that, together with plants and animals, make up ‘the land’ (VanDeVeer and Pierce 1986: 74a). On this basis it could be suggested that global citizenship is not restricted to human beings, but belongs also to everything that moral agents should respect or treat as morally considerable. While moral considerability can be argued not to attach to inanimate entities, it can just as readily be argued to be a characteristic of living creatures such as animals and plants. Cannot these fellow-creatures be understood as fellow-citizens of the planetary biosphere? The problem with this suggestion is that in standard political and cultural senses citizens have loyalties and responsibilities, and it does not make sense to ascribe these characteristics to plants or (with a few possible exceptions) to nonhuman animals. The main point of talk of global citizenship (and one which stresses the continuity between global citizenship and more conventional notions of citizenship) is that global citizens would show awareness of such loyalties and responsibilities, and this again disqualifies non-human creatures. So if we accept that non-human creatures are global citizens on the basis that they have moral considerability and should be respected as such, and that humans are included among global citizens on the same basis, we need to distinguish this less demanding sense of ‘global citizen’ from a more demanding sense for which awareness of loyalties and responsibilities is required; almost certainly, in this more demanding sense, none but human beings are global citizens. As long as the more and the less demanding senses of ‘global citizen’ are clearly distinguished, there is no harm in using both of them, not least about human beings. J. Baird Callicott rightly points out that ampler forms of citizenship do not preclude citizenship of smaller communities; awareness of patriotic duties or of membership of humanity is compatible with local loyalties (not least as a local citizen), and similarly recognition of the biotic community is compatible with membership of the human community or ‘the family of man’ and with responsibilities ‘to respect human rights and uphold principles of human worth and dignity’ (Callicott 1989: 93). (As Callicott rightly implies, loyalties at none of these levels take automatic priority, either empirically or morally.) Here a valuable recognition emerges that global citizenship at the level of membership of the human community need not stop short at loyalty to that community or at
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inter-human responsibilities either, but can include, as an aspect of global citizenship, responsibilities with regard to the non-human members of the biotic community that are in fact global citizens in a different sense. Adherents of biocentric consequentialism, the normative ethic that I have advocated in various writings, can readily share in this recognition, despite their different understanding of the range of non-human members of the biotic community.
The common heritage of humankind A case has also been presented for regarding wide tracts of nature as heritage, in the sense not so much of cultural heritage but of common resources, and as the inheritance not of single communities but of humanity as a whole: as, that is, the common heritage of humankind. Tracts of nature proposed and now officially recognised as such on an international basis include the seas and oceans beyond territorial limits. Such recognition was proposed in 1967 by the Maltese delegate to the UN, Ambassador A. Pardo, who ascribed to ‘the common heritage of mankind’ the following central characteristics. These resources are not property, not being owned either by a sovereign state or by humanity itself, but are resources to which all present and future human beings have or will have a right of access. Every generation has obligations to humanity to conserve and transmit this heritage. The heritage should thus be managed internationally on behalf of humanity, and for the shared benefit of humanity (present and future) (Agius 1998a: 75).8 An amended version of this proposal came to fruition subsequently in the Law of the Sea Treaty, together with international endorsement of such rights and obligations. The case for incorporating proposals of this kind into international law can readily be accepted, given the overall desirability of access to unowned seas remaining open to the shipping of all nations and of their being managed for the common good in perpetuity. Although the original intention behind the proposal of this treaty was that the mineral resources of the seabed should be deployed in a particular way (to promote the development of inland countries), its emphasis on future people having equal access to communal resources as their predecessors of the present discloses that common heritage resources are generally ones not to be consumed but to be preserved for access or use of a non-consumptive kind. This being so, other unowned tracts of nature seem equally suited to a common heritage approach as the oceans, for example Antarctica (recognised as such in a subsequent treaty), the absorptive capacities of the atmosphere (the subject of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol), and also the stratosphere and outer space. Emmanuel Agius has further suggested that the genetic system (comprising the genes of all existing species and not only of humanity) should be thus recognised and made subject to a World Patent Convention on Biotechnological Inventions. Ownership of genes, as in the current patent system, would be rejected, and genetic diversity would be managed by an international body in such a manner as to benefit both present and future people (Agius 1998a: 72–74,
The common heritage of humanity 45 75–81). Agius also suggests that a Guardian of Future Interests be appointed and empowered to review all forms of genetic engineering which may affect the welfare of posterity (Agius 1998a: 79). In view of the shortcomings of the currently recognised trade-related intellectual property system (TRIPS: see Shiva 2001), there is much to commend Agius’ proposal on biotechnological inventions; however, his proposals cannot be debated in detail here. For common heritage proposals are subject to a large apparent objection. It should first be explained that Agius advocates a large change in human attitudes both to genes and to nature in general. Humanity needs to abandon the still prevalent spirit of ruthless domination of nature, and to replace this he commends adoption of ‘the philosophy of the common heritage of mankind’, with its associated themes of protection and conservation (both of nature in general and of the earth’s genetic heritage in particular). A sustained educational effort is required, so that awareness of nature (and of genes) as a heritage becomes more prevalent; this would be the backdrop to the proposed new system to regulate biotechnology (Agius 1998a: 82). Given Agius’ acceptance that the common human heritage is not property and that it is to be preserved for future generations, his proposal clearly comprises an example of the stewardship tradition, as mentioned above. (To these themes I will shortly return.) Here now is the large apparent objection. Agius’ proposal comprises an entirely human-centred version of the stewardship approach, his goal being benefit for human beings alone, whether of the present or of the future; other creatures are to be preserved only insofar as this promotes human purposes. If any of the various criticisms of anthropocentrism that I and others have adduced elsewhere are accepted, this is a serious defect. So the proposed change is open to the criticism of being insufficiently radical, and of not moving far enough from the spirit of human domination that Agius urges us to oppose. Can advocacy of ‘the common heritage of humankind’ be rescued from these shortcomings? It has been seen, in general, not to advocate the consumption of resources but their conservation for non-consumptive access or use, which could include enjoyment, study, recreation or refuge. Yet nature is still regarded as nothing but resources, albeit ones to be carefully protected to prevent future sufferings or harms. Perhaps this is a proper approach to what Agius calls ‘genetic resources’. But if, as I have previously argued, non-human creatures are not just resources but have an independent value of their own, and if their welfare and future have ethical importance alongside human welfare and the human future, then regarding them as a common human heritage begins to seem misplaced, at least if this heritage is to be administered for human benefit. Yet human beings are the only responsible agents capable of planning for the future (whether human or non-human), and the responsibilities of preserving the planetary biosphere and providing for foreseeable future needs are theirs. As such, the natural environment of the planet really is our heritage, but not in the sense of inherited assets, to be spent for our own benefit either now or later. Instead it is best understood as a trust, of which the beneficiaries are not only those currently alive but also future generations, and not only future human
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generations but other species as well, including those yet to evolve. The heritage is common to humanity not only because no one should be denied their share of the benefits but also because universal (or at least near-universal) human cooperative actions and policies are going to be needed if our responsibilities are to be successfully discharged. For example, in matters such as abandoning the use of CFCs and reducing global warming, non-compliance by significant minorities could undermine the co-operative efforts of the majority of humanity. Agius’ emphasis on the unity of humanity is thus crucial, as long as the correctives just mentioned are recognised. The global commons, then (as unowned aspects and tracts of the planetary biosphere are prone to be called), should be regarded as the common heritage of humankind, because nothing less than humanity as a whole inherits them as a trust, which can and should be managed for universal (and not only for human) benefit. This heritage doubtless includes the genetic diversity of life on Earth. It also includes (at least) the oceans, the atmosphere, the stratosphere and the Moon, now that this is potentially subject to mineral exploitation. These conclusions do not reintroduce anthropocentrism through the back door, but rather stress the distinctive responsibilities held by humanity. Or rather, since much of humanity is currently disempowered, it stresses the responsibilities of the sections of humanity with the necessary power and resources to empower the others so that all sections can grasp and take up this trusteeship role in their own sphere or locality. This then is one key conclusion of this chapter.
Further conclusions Global citizenship can be conceptualised partly in terms of concern to protect and enhance the common human heritage, and, as such, it should be regarded as immune from charges of paternalism, Eurocentrism or dependence on Enlightenment values. What is at stake is the heritage of common goods inherited in every society from previous generations, a heritage capable of being transmitted to coming generations and of being valued for this attribute in all societies (Thompson in Gleeson and Low 2001: 145f.: see also Attfield 2003: Ch. 6). As argued above, some form of cosmopolitan normative ethic is likely to be needed if global citizens and global agencies are to shoulder responsibilities of this kind effectively, and in light of the earlier argument, a non-anthropocentric form is clearly preferable to one that is anthropocentric. These are among the main conclusions of this essay. Yet co-operation can begin simply with awareness of the vital importance of such co-operation itself, and in advance of acceptance of the particular principles on which it should proceed (see Carter 2000: 452). Hence no deep theoretical commitments are prerequisites for participation in the common tasks and responsibilities of humanity. The concerns of global citizenship are not exhausted by environmental responsibilities and can be understood to include concern for peace and security, for international development, for enhanced international communications and understanding, and particularly for enhanced global governance. Yet the
The common heritage of humanity 47 common human heritage remains the backdrop to global citizenship, and the matrix of all that it can ever achieve. This common human heritage has the implication that the different nations, creeds and communities are bound together by shared interests, awareness of which can increase people’s motivation to recognise their global citizenship; such an awareness also sometimes supplies the mainspring of this recognition. However, the importance of enhanced global governance (both in environmental and in other fields) can of itself contribute to awareness of global citizenship, since commitment to enhance global governance comprises a form of global citizenship under another name. These remarks may serve to supplement the above replies to criticisms of the concept of global citizenship. Thus a further reason why no one need await the conferment of global citizenship is that the common human heritage and the common need for enhanced global governance confer it of themselves on each and every newborn human being (subject to his or her subsequent recognition of this status). Further, the apparent problem for this concept – that global rights and responsibilities widely go unrespected in the world as it is – betokens not the futility of talk of global citizenship but the need for better international and global institutions, institutions of global governance that would respect the rights of the Universal Declaration, tackle international inequities and promote and oversee the preservation of the common heritage of humanity and of the global environment. It also betokens the importance of campaigning and activism to foster the introduction of such improved institutions, endeavours that themselves comprise a form of global citizenship in action. These are also among my current conclusions. To return to Agius’ advocacy of recognition of the common heritage of humanity as superior to attitudes of domination, some further comments are called for here. For while the common heritage proposal was in some ways novel, as an expression of stewardship it was a proposal of a long-standing type. For example, the claim that the land is not human property dates back to Leviticus 25:23; further, the explicit language of stewardship has been applied to human responsibilities for nature since the seventeenth century (Attfield 1999: 50), and corresponding ideas of human answerability to God for caring for creation date back to the Church fathers such as Chrysostom and Basil in the fourth and fifth centuries (Attfield 1983: 34f.; 1991).9 Relatedly, Agius’ suggestion that attitudes of domination have been the predominant attitudes to nature until recently turns out to be an unjustified exaggeration, for to dominate is to use one’s power (whether over nature, subject peoples or a subordinate gender) for one’s own benefit, but all this clashes with the themes of the stewardship tradition just mentioned. Agius seems to be suggesting that both the era of the nation state and the preceding era were ages of untrammelled human domination and domineering with regard to nature. But this view is both historically inaccurate and potentially disastrous. For example, the research of Keith Thomas shows how environmental sensitivity increased in England between 1500 and 1800 (Thomas 1983). More
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recent research by Peter Harrison suggests that while attitudes in the medieval period often assumed that everything was made for humanity (the stance of teleological anthropocentrism), this was usually interpreted in terms of nature enshrining lessons for humanity, and not in terms of the manipulation or exploitation of nature. The same study goes on to cite much evidence for the view that such anthropocentrism was discarded by the seventeenth-century adherents of modern science, who felt obliged to conduct experiments because the patterns, structure and designs of nature were not readily apparent to its human students, but needed to be elicited with difficulty and humility (Harrison 1999).10 Neither of these attitudes is one of domination, although each was regarded in its day as compatible with the (quite different) belief in human dominion. The suggestion that these were eras of untrammelled domination is potentially disastrous because it implies that all our traditions, as handed down through the era of the nation state, at least in the West, are environmentally insensitive, and that more sensitive attitudes such as attitudes of stewardship have no roots in these traditions at all. Were this so, I suggest, the possibility of environmental concern taking root (either in Western societies or in those influenced by them) would be slender, let alone the prospects of it inspiring global policies and international agreements. But fortunately, just as the era was not exclusively communitarian, it was not dominated by attitudes of domination either. This being so, both a cosmopolitan global ethic and attitudes of stewardship (including common heritage attitudes) have considerable prospects, in each case in a non-anthropocentric form. The anthropocentrism implicit in writers such as Agius need not prevent their concepts being increasingly given nonanthropocentric interpretations, not least because non-anthropocentric values themselves have deep roots both in Western and in many other traditions. These are my further conclusions.
Notes 1 Some paragraphs of this chapter have already appeared in Attfield, R. (2003) Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press). Thanks for their permission for this borrowing are due to Polity Press, and to the editors and publishers of the current work. 2 By ‘anthropocentric’ I mean the normative stance which limits moral standing to human beings and confines the scope or range of moral concern exclusively to human interests. This is not the same as asserting that all our evaluations are necessarily formed through human faculties and (in that sense) from a human perspective; indeed, it is a fallacy to move from this truistic stance to the contentious normative one just mentioned. Nor is it the same as the meta-ethical stance which suggests that all values are dependent on human valuations (or are anthropogenic). It is possible to adhere to the anthropogenic view in meta-ethics (as J. Baird Callicott does) while rejecting normative anthropocentrism. This meta-ethical stance, however, encounters various difficulties, suggesting as it does (for example) that there was nothing bad about animal suffering in the period prior to the evolution of humanity until human beings emerged and human valuations retrospectively awarded it that quality. 3 The proviso is that special obligations should not be regarded as obligations that invariably override anything else. For if they were so regarded, the practice of
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4 5
6 7
8 9 10
fulfilling such obligations could easily fail to contribute to the general good. Belief systems that represent special obligations in this light are open to such criticism. On the content, implications and significance of sustainable development, see Attfield (1999: Ch. 6; 2003: Ch. 5). Discussions elsewhere in this volume about pluralism give rise to the question of how far cosmopolitanism is compatible with pluralism. The answer depends on just what is meant by ‘pluralism’. Cosmopolitanism is entirely compatible, for example, with recognition of diverse conceptions of the good life; with toleration of a boundless variety of harmless practices; with belief in the possibility and desirability of intercultural dialogue and of building bridges with the values of other cultures; and with awareness of the importance of recognising the voices of minorities and of vulnerable people. There are many other examples. However, there are certain kinds of radical pluralism with which cosmopolitanism cannot cohere. These include the belief that there is no basis for comparisons between values, that all values are relative to cultural perspectives and that no value is preferable to any other. Such beliefs potentially undermine what cosmopolitans stand for. For example, they could imply that there is no basis for preferring tolerance to intolerance, that there are no grounds for fostering tolerance among people whose perspective happens to be intolerant, and that the issue of adherence to tolerance or intolerance is little more than a matter of taste. If, to the contrary, toleration has some kind of universal basis, then radical pluralism of these kinds has to be rejected. There is also a problem with the kind of pluralism that advocates an irreducible plurality of potentially conflicting practical principles, none being reducible to the others and all being on a par. The problem is that such a stance generates contradictions, including contradictory judgements about practical matters; both of two mutually exclusive actions or policies could be mandated, as could both action and inaction on the same occasion. Such a position has to be resisted not only by cosmopolitans but also by anyone concerned to avoid finding themselves perennially committed to pairs of contradictory actions and policies. Some of these international bodies can be joined on a voluntary basis, while participation in others is something that emerges imperceptibly. For a discussion of examples of global citizenship, including activism in the cause of enhanced global governance, see Attfield (1999: 196–201). Where rights are concerned, there is, of course, international recognition of the rights of all human beings already in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ambassador Pardo’s statement to the First Committee of the General Assembly is cited in Agius (1998a: 75) and can also be found in Pardo, A. (1975), The Common Heritage: Selected Papers on Ocean and World Order, 1967–1974. Parallel expressions of concern for nature and for non-human species are to be found in many non-theistic religions. I am not suggesting that the only ancient or medieval precedents for benign attitudes to nature were either Christian or theistic. I have appraised Harrison’s arguments elsewhere (Attfield 2003: Ch. 2). We should recognise that some of these scientists’ experiments involved dissection of living animals, and that such behaviour epitomises the spirit of domination.
References Agius, E. (1997) ‘The Rights of Future Generations’, in J. Friggieri and S. Busuttil (eds), Interfaces: Essays in Philosophy and Bordering Areas, Malta: University of Malta. —— (1998a) ‘Patenting Life: Our Responsibilities to Present and Future Generations’, Philosophy and Medicine, 55: 67–83.
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—— (1998b) ‘Obligations of Justice towards Future Generations: A Revolution in Social and Legal Thought’, in E. Agius and S. Busuttil (eds), Future Generations and International Law, London: Earthscan. Attfield, R. (1983) The Ethics of Environmental Concern, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1999) The Ethics of the Global Environment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —— (2003) Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Callicott, J. B. (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic, Albany: State University of New York Press. Carter, A. (2000) ‘Distributive Justice and Environmental Sustainability’, The Heythrop Journal, 41: 449–460. Dobson, A. (1998) Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Theories of Distributive Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dower, N. (1998) World Ethics: The New Agenda, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Epictetus (1987) ‘Discourses’, in A. A. Long and D. Sedley (eds), The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. I, Translation of the Principal Sources and Philosophical Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleeson, B. and Low, N. (eds) (2001) Governing for the Environment: Global Problems, Ethics and Democracy, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Harrison, P. (1999) ‘Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the Exploitation of Nature’, Journal of Religion, 79: 86–109. Leopold, A. (1949) ‘The Land Ethic’. Reprinted in D. VanDeVeer and C. Pierce (eds) (1986) People, Penguins and Plastic Trees, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Long, A. A. and Sedley, D. (eds) (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luke, St (1st century AD) Acts of the Apostles. O’Neill, J. (1994) ‘Should Communitarians be Nationalists?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 11(2): 135–143. Pardo, A. (1975) The Common Heritage: Selected Papers on Ocean and World Order: 1967–74, Malta: University of Malta Press. Rocker, R. ([1933] 1998) Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase, London: Black Rose Books. Shiva, V. (2001) Protect or Plunder: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, London: Zed Books. Shuckburgh, E. S. (1887) The Heautontimorumenos of Terence with Introduction and Notes, London: Macmillan. Terence (2nd century BC) Heautontimorumenos, in E. S. Shuckburgh (1887), The Heautontimorumenos of Terence with Introduction and Notes, London: Macmillan. Thomas, K. (1983) Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility, New York: Pantheon. Thompson, J. (2001) ‘Planetary Citizenship: The Definition and Defence of an Ideal’, in B. Gleeson and N. Low (eds), Governing for the Environment: Global Problems, Ethics and Democracy, Basingstoke: Palgrave. VanDeVeer, D. and Pierce, C. (eds) (1986), People, Penguins and Plastic Trees, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
4
The enchantments and disenchantments of nature Implications for consumption in a globalised world Kate Soper
Introduction In an era of globalisation, any engagement with ‘environmental values before and in the era of the nation state’ might reasonably be expected to have something of a historical and retrospective focus, and I shall in fact begin by offering some reflections on the past. I should make clear, however, that in doing so I am not so much recalling and endorsing any earlier form of ecological wisdom as questioning the idea that history can provide us with clear-cut prescriptive models for our present predicaments. I should also make clear that my focus here will not be exclusively retrospective. This is partly because I have things to say that are more directed at the present-day situation, and partly because it is not at all clear, in any case, at what point one would count the ‘era of the nation state’ as coming to a close. Globalisation can certainly be viewed as opposed to the era of the nation state in ways that have definite effects for environmental policy-making. Some of these effects are traceable to the way in which it has undermined the political will and capacity of national governments to act as autonomous ecological regulators; others are due to the opportunities it has opened up for international co-operation and control on key ecological problems. Yet as the halting de facto progress on international agreements confirms,1 nation states remain important economic, political and cultural players within the globalised context and they are plainly going to be with us for a good while to come in some form or another. In a review of some of the most recent writing on the state (Bobbitt 2002; Cooper 2002), David Runciman (2002: 8) points out that neither of these writers believes that the ‘state is likely to be swept away in the current rip-tide of globalisation’ but rather insist that ‘there is no alternative to the state as the basic unit of political action and political understanding, and that the choice in the conditions of twenty-first century global capitalism is between different forms of the state, not between the state and something else.’ It is particularly important to recognise that the ecological pressures and dilemmas of the era of globalisation are themselves the product of the ongoing competition for resources and protection from pollution among individual nation states. From an environmental point of view, the pursuit of national self-interest and its economic
52 Environmental values and the nation state consequences are critical to the creation of the context that we now refer to as the new era of globalisation.
Metaphysical versus ecological evaluation When reflecting on shifts in environmental values, it can be helpful to distinguish between two possible approaches or foci. On the one hand, we can chart what might be termed metaphysical or ontological conceptions of nature: the views that have been held at different times by differing cultures of the being and powers and significance or purpose of the non-human world. The questions raised when environmental values are considered in this light concern the nature of ‘nature’ (whether this is viewed as vitalist or non-vitalist, as divinely ordained and supervised or as pure contingency, as governed by law or chaotic, and so on). Included here, too, are concerns about the ‘place’ of humanity within the natural world (whether the human is conceived as organically part of the natural world or as ontologically distinctive from it), and about the general criteria for distinguishing between the natural and the non-natural. Given the diversity of cultures both geographically and historically, any charting of environmental values from this perspective will encounter a great number of shifts or mutations, both major and minor, and at a number of different levels: between cultural formations in the very broadest sense (‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’);2 between different epochs within those formations; between different regions and nations at any given epoch, and – although we are here talking of the less major differences – between different constituencies and classes within any national grouping at a particular time. All that is common to any such charting is its principle of selection: the focus on ontological understanding. In an alternative focus, however, we can concentrate on shifts in ecological attitudes conceived in terms of explicit and consciously held forms of care and concern for the fate of ‘nature’: on changes, that is to say, in the forms of regard or conservatory interest that different human cultures and social groups have displayed at different times towards their environment and its various life forms. Although it is certainly true that one can discern some broad lines of influence or dialectical interaction between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘ecological’ evaluations, there seems no very clear correspondence between shifts in the former and changes in the latter. It is, for example, a commonplace of any historical reflection on Western metaphysical evaluation of nature that we can distinguish between a pre-modern animistic conception of nature as divinely ordered and spiritually meaningful, and a modern (i.e. post-scientific revolution, Enlightened) view of nature as de-animised or disenchanted: as causally determined, law-governed and subject to scientific understanding and technical mastery. As John MacDowell (1996: 70–71) puts it: Modern science understands its subject matter in a way that threatens, at least, to leave it disenchanted, as Weber put the point in an image that has become a commonplace. The image marks a contrast between two kinds of
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intelligibility: the kind that is sought by (as we call it) natural science, and the kind we find in something when we place it in relation to other occupants of ‘the logical space of reasons’, to repeat a suggestive phrase of Wilfrid Sellars. If we identify nature with what natural science aims to make comprehensible, we threaten, at least, to empty it of meaning. By way of compensation, so to speak, we see it as the home of a perhaps inexhaustible supply of intelligibility of the other kind, the kind we find in a phenomenon when we see it as governed by natural law. It was an achievement of modern thought when this second kind of intelligibility was clearly marked off from the first. In a common mediaeval outlook, what we now see as the subject matter of natural science was conceived as filled with meaning, as if all of nature were a book of lessons for us; and it is a mark of intellectual progress that educated people cannot now take that idea seriously, except perhaps in a symbolic role. Of course, this transition was very gradual, beginning, so many would now argue, with technological innovations much earlier than the main period of scientific revolution and Enlightenment (even as early as the eleventh century), and was influenced by an enormous variety of factors of a non-scientific or technical kind including the development of a monotheistic Christianity and its resistance to any pantheistic conceptualisation of the material world. However, this key difference between pre- and post-scientific/Enlightenment ontological views is indisputable and recognised as marking an epochal divide in Western humanity–nature relations. It would seem a vast over-simplification, however, to suppose that this divide corresponds to any straightforward difference in ecological evaluation. Many, of course, have remarked on the way in which scientific revolution and Enlightenment go together with an aggressive application of instrumental rationality, the disenchantment of nature with huge – and ecologically damaging – advances in its manipulation and exploitation. For Carolyn Merchant (Merchant 1983) and others emphasising this conjunction, the progress of science is also the ‘death of nature’. Yet it would be mistaken and anachronistic to suppose on this basis that pre-modern culture was greener or more ecologically concerned in any contemporary sense with the protection and conservation of the environment. There is much evidence to the contrary (Coates 1998: Chs 1–3): the appalling cruelty to animals (or should we more accurately term it indifference to animal welfare?) displayed in antiquity, particularly in the period of Imperial Rome, but also in many forms of animal use and entertainment in the medieval period; the entirely instrumental approach to forest enclosure and conservation of feudal lords bent on snatching and ‘preserving’ as much wooded land as possible for hunting purposes; the insensitivity of pre-industrial production to many forms of waste and pollution, and so on). There is also, of course, long prior to the development of the more powerful technological means for harnessing nature, evidence of strongly anthropocentric conceptions of human lordship over nature and rights to its appropriation – much of it directly
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encouraged by scripture and Christian teaching on the rationality and transcendent qualities of God’s chosen representatives on earth. So it is difficult, despite the efforts of various green thinkers – notably Donald Hughes (1975, 1994) and Jonathon Porritt (1984) – to persuade us of the ecological awareness of ancient cultures, to project back onto pre-modern societies any of the consciously held ecological concerns, whether for animal welfare or with pollution and resource attrition, of our own times (Coates 1998: 23–39). Even if we find evidence of particular individuals or groups expressing ecological ideas that chime with those of environmentalists today, we need to be wary of imputing those to their culture at large. Indeed, if we can make any general pronouncements here it might be to claim that neither pre-modern nor modern societies prior to the twentieth century experienced much in the way of what we would now regard as a developed environmental ethical outlook. These societies were certainly less damaging environmentally (largely by reason of their less developed technological capacities). They could also be said to be ecologically oriented insofar as they were influenced by theological considerations, especially the advocacy of human ‘stewardship’ of the earth (this being an influence that was still felt in the period of Enlightenment even if less powerfully than previously); and from the mideighteenth century onwards the instrumental rationality of modern society was, of course, confronted with Romanticism’s more nature-cherishing ethic. It is from this point onwards, too, that we can recognise the emergence in Europe of a distinctive aesthetic of non-domesticated or ‘sublime’ nature, as theorised by, among others, Boileau, Sylvain, Dennis, Burke and Kant (Boulton 1958: xliv–lxxii; Burke 1756; Kant 1790; Monk 1935; Nicolson 1958; Tuveson 1960: Ch. 3), and this very clearly chimes with the current ecological aesthetic of wilderness. All the same, I think the main point holds, that if we can speak of a culturally pervasive awareness of the environmental consequences of industrialisation, and an extensive and ecologically accented interest in the ‘nature’ of nature and its evaluation, it has come only with the era of trans-national capitalism and globalisation. In the period, if you like, of ‘post-modernity’. Although Robin Attfield is right, in this volume and elsewhere (see Ch. 3; Attfield 1983: 34–50), to advocate the continuing relevance of a ‘stewardship’ tradition, the particular forms of contemporary secular concern for environmental protection and resource conservation, the high profile now accorded ecological policymaking, and the very divergent forms it can take, are all aspects of environmental evaluation that are highly specific to our times and, broadly speaking, without much precedent.
Contemporary conceptions: nature as redemption or construction? The Western political and cultural outlook has, in this sense, become altogether more nature-focused and environmentally accented in the era of globalisation and postmodernity – which is hardly surprising given that this is the period in which the pace of ecological attrition has been most accelerated and its
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consequences become most alarmingly manifest, whether in the form of ozone depletion, irreversible forms of pollution and loss of wildlife, the huge increase in the number of individuals displaced by environmental causes (an estimated 25 million, or twice the number of political refugees) or the intensified garrisoning of the more affluent nations against the influx of environmental refugees and so-called economic migrants.3 But it is in this same period, too, that conceptions of nature have become more complex and divided. On the one hand, in the calls to re-value nature as a site of intrinsic value, to recognise our kinship and continuity with other living creatures and to abandon anthropocentric conceptions of humanity’s privileged place within the eco-system, we have been witness to a form of metaphysical reenchantment directly inspired by contemporary ecological concerns and agendas (although often enough claiming to reconnect with some past tradition of environmental care). With the exception of some eco-feminist and New Age spiritualism, one is, of course, speaking here of what is essentially a normative or symbolic re-enchantment: a call to appreciate the true worth, vital qualities or (inverted commas) ‘meaningfulness’ of the natural world rather than a profound challenge to scientific understanding of its ontology. But it represents a powerful critique of Enlightenment humanism and scientific positivism and is widely influential within green politics (Ross 1994a: 222–236; Soper 1996).4 Not surprisingly, given the thrust of this critique, it has also found some parallels in non-Western philosophies of nature and claimed a kinship with them.5 On the other hand, and running somewhat counter to this symbolic reenchantment (although sharing some of its naturalistic arguments on human– animal affinities), we have the other wing of postmodernist thought on nature. Strongly influenced by recent developments in the fields of genetics and information technology, this prefers to emphasise the social ‘construction’ of ‘nature’, is sceptical of any redemptionist appeal to its powers, and in some cases celebrates the breakdown of clear-cut distinctions between artifice and nature (organic and inorganic) as an emancipatory advance (Haraway 1991 Ch. 8, 1997; Gray 1995; Peperell 1995).6 Instead of seeking social and ecological salvation by overcoming human alienation, this type of position claims that progress can only come about via the estrangements of a post-humanist ontological transcendence of the nature–culture polarity. Political resistance to the oppressions of capitalist globalisation is itself, so we are given to understand, dependent on the emergence of new and alien forms of subjectivity centred on gender and sexual transgression, mutant modes and cyborgism. In their recent and influential work on the condition of global ‘empire’ and the latter-day ‘proletarian’ agents of its eventual transformation, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri enthuse, for example, over what they term the ‘anthropological exodus’ of these revolutionary proletarian ‘new barbarians’ and their unprecedented ‘corporeal transformations’. The primary condition of these developments, they tell us will be: ‘The recognition that human nature is in no way separate from nature as whole, that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth;
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it is the recognition that nature itself is an artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures and hybridizations’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 215–216). In this, then, as in so much of the political rhetoric inspired by the cyborg vision of the future, we are given to believe that the new post-Enlightenment ‘enlightenment’ can only be realised by way of a blurring of any hard and fast nature– culture conceptual divisions: utopia is the end of ontological discrimination, and emancipation can only be entrusted to a monstrous subjectivity. As I have elsewhere argued (Soper 2003), it is difficult to credit this ‘posthumanist’ agenda with any very serious intentions for eco-political transformation. The idea of the exhaustive ‘construction’ or socialisation of nature fails to acknowledge the ‘nature’ that is presupposed as the permanent ground of all bioscience and environmental change, and which remains a conditioning constraint on any and every form of human intervention. It is also quite unclear why the erosion of the organic and inorganic distinction should be thought of as offering any very pleasurable or liberating opportunities for individual selfrealisation let alone provide a platform for a collective agenda for renewal. At the very least, we should recognise that these cyborgian recommendations are often couched in such glibly general terms that they could lend themselves to an extraordinarily wide range of political moves, and in this sense offer no specific guidance on action at all.7 On the other hand, I think there also a number of reasons to be cautious about opting for the redemptive form of evaluation. Writers on ecology have frequently lamented the ‘anthropocentrism’ of human attitudes to the natural world. But to correct for this by prioritising the preservation of wilderness or wildlife conservation over human welfare is also ethically highly challengeable – and in practice can underwrite environmental policies that hit hardest at the least advantaged human communities. We need also to recognise the extent to which the value now placed on species protection, wilderness and the preservation of an intrinsically valuable nature is itself caught up in the processes of globalisation and generating social iniquities of its own. Eco-tourism, now the fastest growing sector of the world’s largest industry, offers one of the more obvious examples. In 2002, the lakeshore village of Ambulong in the Batangas province of Indonesia was attacked by police, who demolished housing and dispossessed 250 Filipinos in order to make way for eco-tourists. Similar forms of eviction and abuse have taken place in Bangladesh, Brazil, Masai, Botswana and elsewhere. Much of this eco-tourist incursion comes as part of a ‘development package’ funded by international banks and is defended as part of an integrated programme of poverty alleviation and environmental conservation. The reality, however, according to the campaigning charities involved, is that this is a natureendorsing exercise that is no less exploitative and destructive than other globalised industries.8 We also need to be wary of the stress placed in this model of evaluation on the continuity between humans and other animals. Humanists like me who argue against basing ecological policy on the kinship between humans and other creatures are often accused of an anthropocentric prejudice against
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recognising the extent of the coincidence between human and animal qualities, needs and ecological dependencies. But there is also something a touch anthropocentric in the readiness to assume that our desires and capacities offer direct access to knowledge of their ‘analogues’ in the worlds and lifestyles of other species. We do an injustice, moreover, to humankind in pretending to a unity or communality with creatures that could be had only by denying or overlooking our more specifically human needs, concerns and qualities. As Andrew Ross has noted (Ross 1994b: 337), ‘there is a slippery slope that runs from bio-centric ethics, wherein all life forms are equal, to the diminution of our hard-won social rights and freedoms, no sooner achieved than transferred elsewhere, to agents seen as more worthy because they are “closer” to nature’. Ideally, maybe, as Robin Attfield argues in this volume (see Ch. 3), the ‘stewardship’ concept should be extended to include non-human life forms. But if recommendations of this kind are not to remain purely abstract and regulative, it is important to consider how they might translate into more concrete policymaking – and it is at that point that all the really difficult considerations about the ‘ranking’ of different species and forms of concern, and the relative prioritisation of human and non-human needs and interests, must come to the fore as requiring attention. What has, then, to be acknowledged in all this is the complexity and diversity of environmental responses that obtain in the era of globalisation, and the extent to which a common concern for resolving its very pressing ecological issues can be experienced from very divergent conceptions of ‘nature’ and the proper mode of its evaluation. It is far from clear, in fact, despite the intensity of the debates in green circles on such issues as whether nature has ‘intrinsic’ value, or animals have ‘rights’, that the position one adopts on these questions directly determines the nature and degree of one’s concern for environmental preservation or animal welfare. Admittedly this is at odds with the claims made by many writers on environmental ethics, who have argued, or at least assumed, that having the right ontological/metaphysical understanding of the nonhuman world is a condition of adopting more eco-friendly or politically constructive attitudes to the conservation of the environment and its life forms. On my view, however, specific ontological commitments (commitments of a kind, for example, that divide between naturalists and humanists, or between those asserting the ‘intrinsic’ value of nature and those denying it) are less critical to the adoption of a green political outlook than is often supposed. Indeed, those debating issues in environmental ethics are usually motivated by a prior and mutual interest in promoting greener policies, and it is clear, as I have argued elsewhere, that theorists can at times argue from quite opposing ontological and evaluative commitments in furtherance of a commonly held ecological agenda (cf. Soper 1995: 160–179, 1997). On the other hand, it would also seem clear that the insistence on the rightness of a specific philosophy of nature can have politically regressive effects, associating the green movement with fanaticism and deterring those who might otherwise take a more serious interest in ecological politics.
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From environmental ethics to the critique of consumption I have always argued, in fact, that the current ecological situation is to be illuminated primarily not by reference to the intrinsic qualities of non-human nature nor by recalling human beings to their fundamental kinship with other living creatures, but by consideration of the fraught nature of their own – distinctively human – condition as beings who are like other animals in their reliance on environmental resources for the supply of all their material needs, but unlike them in the urge they have to engage in a more than immanent and reproductive existence – to fulfil themselves through dynamic and innovative forms of cultural transcendence and individualising self-expression. Considered very abstractly, we may view the ecological ‘crisis’ faced by humanity as a crisis concerning these contrary dimensions of human existence and their respective needs and modes of satisfaction. Capitalism, industrialisation, Western ‘civilisation’: all this can be viewed in the broadest sense as generated in response to the urge to ‘transcendent’ forms of fulfilment and the escape from a more cyclical mode of existence. Yet many of the more transcendent sources of satisfaction offered through this dynamic of capitalist globalisation are reliant on social exploitation and are ecologically unsustainable. This indicates a need to re-think the nature and conditions of human flourishing in such a way as to shift the dynamic of human pleasures and modes of self-fulfilment away from its current consumerist model of satisfaction and allow gratification through other, less polluting and resource-intensive modes of consumption. The need here, in other words, is to find ways of reconciling the ecological – and egalitarian – need for a more cyclical and sustainable use of resources with the more distinctively human – and individualist – need for continuous cultural innovation, enhanced gratification and self-expression. Can we find ways of living rich, complex, creative, non-repetitive lives without social injustice and without too much environmental damage? The problem here is not how better to ‘respect’ or ‘get back to nature’ (in the sense of reverting to tradition, simplicity and immanence), but how to advance to a form of future that is both assertively human and ecologically benign. The focus, in short, should fall less on the adoption of the ‘right’ attitudes to nature or most appropriate modes of environmental evaluation, and more on the essential conditions of human fulfilment and whether – and how – the ‘good life’ can be collectively secured in an ecologically sustainable mode. When looked at from this perspective, global environmental problems are very clearly recast as problems of human consumption, and in a two-fold and interconnected way. First, there is the problem of the huge disparity between rich and poor in their access to resources, and hence to the minimum of material conditions essential to any further flourishing. Redressing this imbalance, I would argue, is both a moral and pragmatic imperative: a demand not only of social justice, but a prerequisite of any long-term, global, ecological well-being. It is true, of course, that a concern for pollution and resource attrition does not in itself imply a commitment to furthering global equality and justice, and that in the shorter term even quite severe ecological damage and depletion can be
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accommodated within the present, extremely inegalitarian structure of distribution. But the longer we continue along that path, the more acute the competition for resources will become, and the more uncivil the methods to which the societies of affluence are likely to have recourse in defending their advantage. These methods might well over time come to include measures that most members of those societies would currently regard as deeply repugnant (the quite blatant and cynical manipulation of poverty, disease and famine to control global population; the coercion of Third World economies into an almost exclusive servicing of First World needs for bio-fuels and other energy substitutes; ever more fascistic policies on immigration to check the flow of eco-refugees from the more devastated areas of the globe). These are measures which are likely to encourage increasingly desperate forms of terrorist activity and could very well end in genocidal and even terminal forms of global warfare. In this sense, a more equitable distribution of both resources and the burden of pollution will be essential to any more permanently secured accommodation of existing and future ecological constraints. The other major problem, as indicated, is that of consumerism, the problem being that human flourishing is currently so widely perceived both by those in a position to ‘enjoy’ it (for the most part affluent Westerners), and by those who lack the means to do so, as dependent on an ever-enhanced consumption of material goods and luxury services. The two problems connect in the sense that pressures for a more egalitarian distribution of resources between rich and poor are unlikely to be applied unless and until the ‘good life’ is reconceived along different and altogether less consumerist lines. Any such re-conception will involve a rethinking of the nature of pleasure and personal fulfilment (an ‘alternative hedonism’); and a deeper and more informed concern with the impact of one’s own consumption on that of others elsewhere. In the longer term, it is to be hoped that an alternative and ecologically sustainable conception of the ‘good life’ can not only win the support of consumers within the richer nations, but also come to figure as an ideal through which the less developed global communities can re-consider the conventions and goals of ‘development’ itself – and thereby arrive at a better understanding of the more negative aspects of North–West ‘over-development’ and how to circumvent them. It goes without saying, however, that at the present time the responsibility for any shifts of thinking must fall primarily on the more affluent global communities. This is in line with Joyeeta Gupta’s suggestion in Chapter 10 of this volume that there is a need to re-think environmental sustainability in terms of the duties of the developed world towards the less privileged, rather than in terms of rights to a particular standard of living. But putative obligations of this kind are unlikely to be assumed by national governments within the developed world without significant pressure from their own electorates; and these electorates, for their part, are unlikely to assert any great pressure for change without fairly radical revisions in the perception of their own, more immediately personal, needs and interests. In the absence, that is to say, of a compelling alternative to existing patterns of consumption and commodity-dependent modes of self-expression and self-realisation, it will prove extremely difficult to provide a
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better deal either for the environment and its life forms or for the less privileged within the human community. The challenge here is two-fold: to evolve more eco-friendly ways of providing for ‘basic’, material-needs satisfaction (provision for food, shelter, transport, etc.) while at the same time exploring and developing means for gratifying creativity and amour propre (the interest in social esteem and recognition) of a kind that are no longer so dependent on obedience to fashion or the continuous and competitive acquisition of new and resource-hungry commodities. Counter to what many in the environmental movement would argue, this is not about getting ‘back to nature’ (in the sense of reverting to simplicity, immanence, tradition, etc.), but about how to proceed beyond the limiting and ecologically unsustainable forms of cultural transcendence currently furnished by modernity. It is about recognising the social complexity and reflexivity of the globalised era and drawing on their resources to develop a new political imaginary. This would break with the assumption that democratisation and enlightened policies on race, gender and human rights can only be carried on the back of conventional economic growth and its shopping-mall culture. It would also offer a profoundly different – secular but at the same time spiritualised – conception of human flourishing as dependent on the shortening of the working week, the expansion of free time and more evolved and universally available educational and aesthetic pleasures, rather than on enhanced productivity and ever higher material standards of living. There is no guarantee, of course, indeed it is pretty unlikely, that such ideological shifts will take place or prove sufficiently influential to issue in any significant policy changes. But it is important, all the same, to accept the extent to which the problems derive from the always changing, historically developing and productivist dynamic of specifically human needing; and to accept, too, that any resolution will depend to a significant degree on the specifically human capacity for a pre-emptive revision of consumption among the affluent nations. Relative to other animals, we are ‘underdetermined’ in respect of the forms of our satisfaction, pleasure and fulfilment, and thus uniquely placed to engage in conscious rethinking about the essentials of the ‘good life’. Global stability, which is itself dependent on a fairer distribution of resources and life-enhancing opportunities, will ultimately depend on the degree to which we manage to achieve such redistribution.
Questions of agency The key issue raised here is that of political agency: how can any change of direction come about in an era of globalisation that is so heavily stacked against redistribution from rich to poor and the promotion of ecological good practice? International agencies have hitherto proved relatively impotent and their credibility as significant forces for change is further undermined at the present time by the reluctance of the developed nations to commit themselves to the major policy shifts needed and particularly by the indifference and isolationism of the 2000–2004 American administration.9
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The immediate outlook seems gloomy indeed, and all that we have to point to as possible sources of a change of heart in the longer term are the fears and disillusionments that have been bred by consumerist culture itself. There is now some considerable public alarm and distress over ecological attrition and compassion for the miseries endured by the more destitute global communities. There is also a measure of moral revulsion for a globalised economic system that puts half the world’s wealth in the hands of some 500 billionaires and will condemn almost 1 billion people to live on less than $1 a day by 2015.10 There are some signs, too, that concerns of this kind will be reinforced in the future by disaffection with the quality of life within affluent society itself. In this connection we should note the politicising impact of some of the more negative effects of the consumer society on need satisfaction itself. Many forms of pleasure and convenience consumption such as car travel, air-flight, disposable goods, fast foods, inorganic and genetically modified foodstuffs have now been compromised by alarms about their safety, their ecological side-effects, their impact on health and their anti-hedonist repercussions for the ‘good life’ itself. Anxieties of this kind are, of course, by no means universal, and tend at present, for obvious reasons, to be largely confined to those in the middle- and upper-income brackets. They will also very often be experienced in conflict with other, more immediately pressing concerns over employment security. Those who are dependent for their livelihood on the less eco-friendly forms of production and consumption will not find it so easy to be enthused about any ecologically prompted fall-off in demand for these commodities. Yet despite these countervailing influences, and their partial and fluctuating impact on the enthusiasm for green measures, we can still point in recent times to higher and relatively diversified levels of consumer interest in ‘ethical’ spending and investment, and public support for anti-pollution legislation, more organic methods of agriculture, and curbs on road and airport extension. We are witnessing, we might argue, the emergence of a new, more contradictory structure of consumer needs whereby some consumers are looking to less ecologically and socially exploitative lifestyles in order to escape the undesirable by-products of their own formerly less questioned sources of gratification. Lest it appear, however, as if all the emphasis in this account is falling on the ‘greening’ of the individual consumer, it should be emphasised that collective strategies for changing consumption must also play a crucial role. The two pressures for change are intimately related, at least in democratic societies, where more collective and institutionally based measures for environmental protection and conservation are always ultimately reliant on the support of the electorate. If I have here stressed the emergence of greater individual consumer equivocation, it is precisely because of its potential political role in forcing governments into promoting more effective collective policies on the environment both at the national and international level. Collective and individual responses are not, in this sense, to be viewed as opposing or alternative forces for consumer change, but rather as dialectically imbricated, since the ‘greening’ of the individual consumers is a precondition of the kind of consensus and electoral mandate that
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would permit the imposition of forms of collective control over the environment and public ‘self-policing’ of the more ecologically destructive types of consumption. Equally, and conversely, collective strategies which focus, for example, on the provision of public transport or the ‘greening’ of urban space, are likely themselves to issue benefits (healthier environments, reduction in congestion, greater safety) that encourage more extensive individual consumer support. At the same time, however, as part of the contradictory pattern of existing affluent consumption we have also to recognise its countervailing influence in reducing the environmental responsiveness and sensual enjoyment of many people, and thus deadening them to the sense of what it is they may have lost, or be in process of losing. Deprivation of this kind may be most extensive among those living in the poorer and bleaker urban areas, but it is by no means confined to them. Urban dwellers are largely deprived of the experience of total silence; they are never enveloped in full darkness nor offered a clear vision of the night sky; in their street perambulations they are constantly interrupted and halted by traffic-lights and other obstacles, and assaulted by the noise and dust and stench of motorised vehicles. Commuters on both conventional and underground trains are submitted to continuous sensory insult in the form of ticket-barrier buffeting and overcrowding. Provisions for shelter or rest are either now non-existent or entirely minimalist. Such accommodation as is still provided is often uninviting and very seldom designed to comfort the flesh or delight the eye. Indeed, in respect of the extremely reduced, or even non-existent, provision today of a whole range of public amenities that were taken for granted a century ago, it is difficult not to feel that people are expected now, in the course of many of their daily activities, to tolerate far higher levels of physical neglect and discomfort than in the (relatively opulent and sensually sensitive) recent past. This creation of an alienating tolerance is but one of many aspects by which the advance of consumerist culture should be viewed as hedonistically regressive. In countering these forms of unpleasure and their often only halfacknowledged status, what needs to be highlighted are the joys of freedom from the car-culture depredations; of a consumption less troubled by the knowledge of its socially exploitative and ecologically destructive impact. We need visions of a future consumption built around environmentally less damaging methods of farming and commodity production, the use of renewable energy sources, the pleasures of unpolluted air and water, the recycling of all waste, the shortening of the working week and the decline of shopping. We need to promote the idea of green cities, the privileging of pedestrian rights, the expansion of the railway, the shift from road building to the provision of multiple cycle routes with covered lanes, insulated homes for everyone, communal provisioning, luxurious public works, universal access to the countryside, education for the sake of its intrinsic cultural rewards rather than for narrowly vocational and instrumental purposes. In arguing for such utopian projections, I am not underestimating the difficulties of building support for an alternative politics of consumption, nor suggesting that such visions can substitute for the less heady forms of economic and political analysis and the campaigning built around them. But they can, I think,
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further the desire for changes in social and environmental policy by pointing to the other possible structures of pleasure intimated in the dissatisfactions with the present. Visions of sustainable societies can help to catalyse the political will for change, and it is in this sense that ‘utopian’ projection should be understood as a realist or pragmatic contribution to the securing of a fairer and more ecologically sensitive world order.
Notes 1 Joyeeta Gupta (see Ch. 10, this volume) is informative about the divergence between the de jure and de facto aspects of international agreements with respect to commitments to sustainable development in the climate change regime. 2 Although there are also points of comparison here as well, as is illustrated by Julia Tao (Ch. 5, this volume). 3 Andrew Simms is co-author of the World Disasters Report 2002. He reports that environmental refugees are now such a contentious issue that the UN high commissioner for refugees does not want them to have international legal status. 4 MacDowell refers to his own proposed re-integration of mind and world – of ‘the space of reasons’ and ‘the space of law’ – as a ‘partial re-enchantment of nature’ (1996: 70–72, 88, Lecture IV passim), but all he means by that is that sensibility, although natural and shared with other animals, is in the human case shaped by concepts. He is not proposing a pre-scientific re-enchantment of the non-human world. 5 See Julia Tao (Ch. 5, this volume). 6 Haraway echoes the calls of the ecological naturalists when she argues that ‘nothing settles the separation of human and animals’ and claims that ‘movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness, but clear-sighted recognition of this connectedness’ (1991: 151). But she is best known for her insistence that there are no longer clear delineations to be drawn between humans and machines, that we have all become fabricated and chimeric hybrids of machine and organism and that the cyborg provides us now with both our ontology and our politics. Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ first appeared in 1985 in the Socialist Register (80: 65–108). It has inspired numerous commentaries and articles (see Gray 1995). For more sceptical and polemical responses, see Bill MacCormick (2000: 409–418); Susan Bordo (1990); Kate Soper (1999). 7 When we do attempt to translate this generalist political rhetoric into advice on more particular policy issues, it often seems ambivalent at best, at worst perversely inept. The prosthetically enhanced body seems a grotesquely inappropriate image of subjectivity with which to campaign against the horrors of modern warfare. The disembodied cyborg hardly seems the icon we would want to employ in making plain our objections to torture, or indeed to any form of assault upon the flesh. Any form of protest against the cruelties of agribusiness and biotechnology is, moreover, a protest against the treatment of organic beings as if they were mere Cartesian machines indifferent to the sufferings of their flesh. 8 See the reports from Tourism Concern and the Rethinking Tourism Project, and cf., Guardian, 22 May 2002, pp. 8–9. 9 The blame here lies as much with electorates who are reluctant to be policed on their most ecologically damaging forms of consumption as with their governments – which view themselves as accountable to their voters in the last analysis and which are equally loathe to jeopardise their re-election. 10 See the information on the World Bank website: http://www.developmentgoals. org/Poverty.htm#EEP on the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.
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References Attfield, R. (1983) The Ethics of Environmental Concern, Oxford: Blackwell. Bobbitt, P. (2002) The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London: Allen Lane. Bordo, S. (1990) ‘Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism’, in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Boulton, J. (ed.) (1958) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burke, E. (1756) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Reprinted in J. Boulton (ed.) (1958) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Coates, P. (1998) Nature, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cooper, R. (2002) ‘The Post-Modern State and the World Order’, in M. Leonard (ed.), Reordering the World: The Long Term Implications of 11 September, London: Foreign Policy Centre. Gray, C. H. (ed.) (1995) The Cyborg Handbook, London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association, Routledge. —— (1997)
[email protected] Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, London and New York: Routledge. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hughes, D. (1975) Ecology in Ancient Civilisations, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. —— (1994) Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Kant, I. ([1790] 1987) Critique of Judgement, trans., with an intro., by W. S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett. MacCormick, B. (2000) ‘The Island of Dr. Haraway’, Environmental Ethics, 22: 409–418. MacDowell, J. (1996) Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merchant, C. (1983) Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: HarperCollins. Monk, S. H. (1935) The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in the 18th Century, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Nicolson, M. (1958) Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, New York: Ithaca University Press. Peperell, R. (1995) The Post-Human Condition, Exeter: Intellect Books. Porritt, J. (1984) Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained, Oxford: Blackwell. Ross, A. (1994a) The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, Nature’s Debt to Society, London: Verso. —— (1994b) ‘The New Smartness’, in G. Bender and T. Druckrey (eds), Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Runciman, D. (2002) ‘The Garden, the Park and the Meadow’, London Review of Books, 24(11), 6 June. Simms, A. (2002) ‘Analysis’, Guardian, 19 June. Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1996) ‘A Green Mythology’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 7(3): 119–125. —— (1997) ‘Human Needs and Natural Relations: the Dilemmas of Ecology I’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 8(4): 59–65.
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—— (1999) ‘Of OncoMice and FemaleMen: Donna Haraway on Cyborg Ontology’, Women, a Cultural Review, 10(2): 167–172. —— (2003) ‘Humans, Animals, Machines’, New Formations, 49: 99–109. Tuveson, E. L. (1960) The Imagination as a Means of Grace, Berkeley: Berkeley University Press.
5
Relational resonance with nature The Confucian vision1 Julia Tao
Introduction We are living in an age when the human community is in search of new and sustaining relationships to nature. Much of our conventional morality and attitudes are seriously challenged by dramatic expansions of our technological capacities through newly available chemical and biological means. The possibility of genetic engineering further puts us in danger of what Dworkin has called a ‘state of moral free-fall’ (2000: 448). Not only is the technology bringing a new way of understanding what we are and endless possibilities of enabling us to influence what we are, at the same time human agency, with the new technology at its command, is also causing increasingly extensive modifications to the natural environment, often destroying ecosystems on which both humanity and other species depend. We are warned that all these modifications and destructions are happening at a speed and on a scale which is unprecedented. Furthermore, some of the possible changes are irreversible, threatening the very existence of all life forms on the planet, including the existence of humankind itself. The need to respond is urgent. This chapter explores environmental values embedded in the Confucian moral tradition. It first discusses the central debates in Western environmental ethics and then examines how the substance of these debates has been addressed in Confucian thought. As will become evident, Confucian thought has often been able to reach the ‘mean’, a balanced middle ground that in the Western debates has been shadowed by dichotomous oppositions.
Central debates One can identify three major sets of debates central to the development of new approaches to environmental ethics. The first set of debates centres on issues of moral considerability and moral significance. The second set focuses on the morality of human intervention in nature. Finally, the third set of debates addresses the position of humans vis-à-vis the natural world. In what follows, these debates will be briefly discussed in order to provide a background for the ensuing closer discussion of the Confucian tradition.
The Confucian vision 67 Debate about moral considerability and moral significance According to Elliot (1998: 12), something is morally considerable if it has a claim to be directly taken account of in our moral evaluations and judgements. Competing environmental ethics express contrasting views regarding exactly what kinds of things are morally considerable and why. Moreover, as Elliot points out, moral considerability does not entail equal moral significance. Even where there is agreement about which kinds of things are morally considerable, there is almost certain to be disagreement about their degree of moral significance (Elliot 1998: 13). The term moral considerability was coined by Kenneth Goodpaster (1978) to express the idea that moral standing belongs to things that ought to be taken into consideration when action is in prospect. Goodpaster has argued along with other biocentrists that moral standing attaches to everything that has a good of its own, and that this includes all living creatures. They disagree with the anthropocentric view in traditional human-centred ethics (see Norton 1991; O’Neill 1993; Varner 1998) that only humans have value and that moral standing should be restricted to humanity alone. They argue that all living creatures have a good of their own, and have moral standing as such, and that their flourishing or attaining their good is intrinsically valuable. Ecocentrists go even further and maintain that ecosystems have a good which is independent of that of their component individuals, and as such have their own moral standing. Their attaining their good has intrinsic value (see Leopold 1949; Routley 1973; Passmore 1974; Næss 1989; Rolston 1983; Callicott 1989). They argue for a need to move away from the atomistic individualism and chauvinism of the anthropocentric view to develop a more holistic environmental ethics. It is believed that such an ethics can transcend obligations based on human interest to take into account an obligation to respect nature and to protect the interests of the non-human world. Debate about the morality of human intervention Another set of debates central to the development of environmental ethics focuses on the morality of human intervention in nature. The moral concerns expressed about interventions into nature may be divided into two basic categories: ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’. An intervention may for a variety of reasons be thought to be either intrinsically wrong in itself or extrinsically wrong because of its consequences (Reiss and Straughan 1996: 49). Intrinsic arguments cut deeper than extrinsic ones. For example, if intervention is thought to be intrinsically wrong, no further considerations are morally relevant, for nothing can reverse that intrinsic wrongness. One such belief is related to intrinsic unnaturalness, which maintains that genetic engineering is in some way unnatural. The argument here is that ‘Nature knows best’ and that the natural world as we know it is the result of a long evolutionary process with a well-established track record. Nature and all that is natural is valuable and good in itself. Human interventions, such as genetic
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engineering, are unnatural in that they go against and interfere with nature, particularly in the crossing of natural species boundaries. Such interventions are, therefore, intrinsically wrong. Moreover, modern biotechnology is thought to embody a lack of respect for nature because it is based upon a reductionist perspective. From the reductionist perspective, life is merely the aggregate representation of the chemicals that give rise to it. In this sense, all life is reduced to a chemical level and becomes available for manipulation. It results in a lack of respect for the environment (Rifkin 1985: 53). But as opponents to this view have tried to point out, a ‘natural’ event, product, process or tendency is not automatically good or desirable. Many ‘natural’ substances are harmful; many ‘natural’ events, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, create destruction and suffering; and many ‘natural’ organisms cause pain, disease and death. Apart from the objection to this ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (Reiss and Straughan 1996: 63), it is also pointed out that traditional techniques, such as selective breeding, have always been used with the aim of modifying life forms for commercial ends, and have been widely accepted as desirable. Hence, there is really no justification for making the new technology, such as genetic engineering, more open to the charge of disrespect for nature than these traditional techniques. Debate about sovereignty, stewardship and citizenship Debates about the morality of human intervention are bound up with debates arising from contrasting views of seeing humans as sovereign, as steward or as citizen of the natural world. The first view gives humanity dominance (or rightful mastery) over all creatures, which were created simply to serve human purposes (Attfield 2003: 31). It conveys not just human control in general, but also human domination. It justifies massive modifications to the natural world to fit human interests and desires. Under the second view of stewardship, human beings do not own the Earth, but hold it as a trust, not least for the sake of future generations (Attfield 2003: 21). Such a view recognises the implications of human responsibility and answerability, and of the high value of the natural world, the care of which humanity is seen as being entrusted with. It emphasises the efficient management of natural resources and the preservation of the Earth intact for our successors. However, under both the sovereignty perspective and the stewardship perspective, the place of human beings is perceived to be outside nature. Under the third perspective of citizenship, the role of Homo sapiens is reconstructed from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. Humankind is a part of the ecological systems of the world, not a separate and sui generis category with unique privileges over animals and the Earth itself (Leopold 1949). Such a perspective tends to emphasise non-interference as a major normative principle for human conduct. But it is also challenged on the ground that there is no way to resolve in a satisfactory manner the conflict
The Confucian vision 69 between priority of human interest and non-human interest. There is also the problem that to say that we ought not to ‘interfere with’ nature could imply that environmental change, or even environmental destruction, is allowable if it results from natural processes. It is certainly counter-intuitive to claim that it is always wrong for human beings to attempt to resist natural catastrophes or to improve upon the work of nature even where it has serious defects or has gone terribly wrong
Confucian insights: ghosts from the past or a living tradition? These debates centre on questions which are foundational to constructing a new approach to environmental ethics. How to redefine the boundary of our moral obligation? How to re-interpret the value of the non-human world? How to reformulate humans’ attitude to nature? The first question asks about the scope and extent of moral standing. The second question concerns the locus and source of values. Central to the third question is the concern about the role of human beings in nature. This chapter argues that the Chinese Confucian moral tradition can provide valuable insights to enrich these debates and to support the development of alternative environmental approaches. Confucius himself lived from 551 to 479 BC. It is true that there is not a system of fully developed environmental ethics in Confucian moral philosophy. But this chapter argues that Confucian insights are relevant to central debates in environmental ethics. Instead of being remnants of a utopian vision or ghosts from the past to be locked away in museums, a revitalisation of the Confucian discourse can have valuable intellectual and moral resources to offer for formulating a new and sustaining relationship between humans and the natural world. The basis of such a new relationship is not sovereignty, stewardship or citizenship, but the Confucian moral ideal of relational resonance with nature. Three fundamental insights in Confucian philosophy are of special significance for this new construction. The first Confucian insight is that only humans have moral significance in their behaviours and decisions, but humans are not the only ones who have intrinsic value or are worthy of moral considerability. Second, Confucian ethics does not see humankind as being apart from, or standing above, the natural world, although it does recognise a separation of spheres and a distinction of responsibilities between human beings and nature. The third insight is the idea that instead of grounding duties to the environment in self-interest and ethical individualism, a more robust environmental ethics can be developed from duties of care and reciprocity to establish relational resonance between humans and nature (Tucker and Berthrong 1988: xxxvii). It should be pointed out at this juncture that in the Confucian tradition, the word ‘Heaven’ is simply another name for physical nature. It does not refer to a deity ‘Heaven and Earth’ – it is the general name for all things. In the concluding section, this chapter also examines how a Confucian approach to
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environmental ethics can have concrete relevance for building a viable praxis for environmental protection, instead of being merely remnants of a utopian vision from the past with no significance for either the present or the future.
Confucian vision of relational resonance At home between the Earth and Heaven There is lack of commitment to a notion of transcendence in Chinese philosophical tradition. There is also absence of the Judaeo-Christian notion of creatio ex nihilo in both Chinese mythology and philosophy. There are therefore no notions of the ‘creator–created’, ‘subject–object’ or such binary notions which characterise the humans–nature relationship. This has made it possible for the Chinese to hold a view of the cosmos as context that both constitutes and is constituted by the elements, which comprise it. There is no element or aspect in the Chinese conception of the cosmos that in the strictest sense transcends the rest (Tao 1990: 122). What seems to characterise the Chinese cosmic view is that there is no ‘linear concept of time’ or ‘a single beginning from which all processes followed’; neither does it allow for a final distinction between creator and that which is created. Each particular is a consequence of every other. Each particular is both self-determinate and determined by every other particular (Loewe 1982, quoted in Hall and Ames 1987: 19–20). The Chuang Tzu, as an example of this tradition, explicitly challenges the principle of an absolute beginning and describes the universe of the Chinese subject in this way: There is a beginning. There is not yet begun to be a beginning. There is not begun to not yet begin to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is not yet begun to be nonbeing. There is not yet begun to not yet begin to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. And yet I don’t know what follows from there ‘being’ nonbeing. Is it ‘being’ or is it nonbeing? (Supp. 20, Ch. 5, V. 4, quoted in Hall and Ames 1987: 19) To the Chinese, this universe was not made by an external creator. Nor were the selves which inhabit it. The universe is seen as a self-generating, organismic process. This has led Mark Elvin to conclude that: ‘Perhaps this absence of alienation from the world gave the self in China slightly less sharply defined margins than it had in the West. For the Chinese, this life was neither a vale of tears, nor a testing-ground, but a home’ (1987: 156). This sense of self being at home in the universe is beautifully captured in these lines from a poem by Duh Fuu, an eighth-century Chinese poet:
The Confucian vision 71 To what shall I compare myself, so blown by the winds? To a lone sand-gull between the Earth and Heaven. The motif of humans being at home between the Earth and Heaven is firmly embedded in the Chinese culture, a central motif not only in Chinese philosophy and Chinese poetry, but also in Chinese painting. Nature as process rather than substance As pointed out earlier, the Chinese have a conception of nature as an organic process, a spontaneously self-generating life force. This life force possesses continuity, wholeness and dynamism. Nature is life-giving, it gives rise to the life, flourishing and development of the myriad creatures – and this is regarded as a morally good thing. But nature is not a ‘creator’, because that would imply agency, design, deliberation and willing (Yu, forthcoming). The regular movements of heavenly bodies and the sequential changes of the four seasons are the ways in which nature works as a creative force and a source of life: Heaven does not speak; yet the four seasons run their courses thereby, the hundred creatures, each after its kind are borne thereby. (Confucius, The Analects, 17:19) Nature as a life force is dynamic and ceaseless, consistent and forever changing, transforming and unfolding new contours, new forms and new lives. We can witness this in the endless birth of new things and the ongoing evolution of all things. That is why it is said in The Doctrine of the Mean: Being ceaseless, it is everlasting. Being lasting, it is evident. Being evident, it is infinite, it is extensive and deep . . . . The Way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They have no doubling (bu ’er) (no two minds), so they give birth to things in a manner that is unfathomable. (Ch. 26, see Legge trans. 1960: 49–420) Imperfect nature, imperfect humans Change, transformation, succeeding and rising are called the virtues of Heaven. While Heaven has never spoken out, people revere its highness. While Earth has never spoken out, people revere its thickness. While the four seasons have never spoken out, people expect their sequences. These regularities ( you chang ) come about because Heaven, Earth and the four seasons all perfect their cheng (consistency, sincerity, constancy) (Xunzi, Ch. 3, 29). Such cheng, consistency or constancy or sincerity, is the virtue of nature. Although imperfect, it is forever striving towards change, transformation and innovation. In this sense, nature is inexhaustible, unfathomable and everlasting.
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Human life is a process of ceaseless cultivation and transformation, as is nature. According to Mencius, an important founder of the Confucian tradition, human beings are born with four seeds or minds which are something distinctly human and which when fully developed become the four basic virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom. The mind of compassion is the seed of benevolence; the mind of shame is the seed of righteousness; the mind of courteousness and modesty is the seed of propriety; the mind of right and wrong is the seed of wisdom. Humans have these four seeds just as the four limbs. For a man possessing the four seeds to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself. (Mencius, 2A:6) To be a person of ren, a person of virtues, requires that one can cultivate oneself to develop fully these potentials for virtue and make them flourish in the same way as nature’s virtues develop and flourish in this universe.
Separation of spheres and distinction of functions The Way of Nature, the Way of Humankind The way that nature works is described in Xunzi in this way: Not to act, yet bring to completion; not to seek, yet to obtain – this indeed may be described as the work of Nature. (Knoblock trans. 1999: 535) What is being argued here is that the Way of Nature is natural – it ‘hits upon what is right without effort and apprehends without thinking’. What is ‘natural’ about the Way of Nature is that there is an absence of conscious ‘willing’, ‘deliberating’, ‘choosing’ or ‘reflecting’. As a consequence of this lack of ‘thinking’ and ‘deliberation’ on the part of nature, The Doctrine of the Mean points out that: Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied (or to have cause for regrets). (Legge trans. 1960: 392) As Yu (forthcoming) observes, since deliberation is not involved in the Way of Nature, the natural course of development of the Way of Nature is not always morally acceptable. The natural course of development may cause worry. This implies that the Way of Nature is not always morally preferable or acceptable for the moral mind.
The Confucian vision 73 Only humans possess the moral mind, based upon the Mencian theory of human nature. In the Doctrine of the Mean, the Way of Nature is contrasted with the Way of Man. The Way of Man, on the other hand, is deliberative, it is described as ‘trying to choose the good and hold fast to it’. It implies that moral deliberation is the essence of the Way of Man. In the opening of The Doctrine of the Mean, the following is stated as an overarching principle: What Heaven has conferred is called the Nature. To follow Nature is called the Way. To rectify the Way is called Culture. (Legge trans. 1960: 383) There is something that we cannot expect from nature, and we should get it through human effort. Nature is morally blind or indifferent. Nature is the source of life; humans are the source of value, the maker of meaning, the fabricator of culture. This opens up the possibility that the moral mind should correct the natural course of development of the Way of Nature when it becomes morally undesirable (Yu, forthcoming). As Yu rightly observes, a basic insight of Confucianism is that the province of nature should be distinguished from the province of humanity. Humans have the responsibility to rectify nature’s moral blindness through the exercise of moral judgements. This is because humans have sight – they can discern injustice and wrongness; humans have hearing – they can heed suffering and pain; and humans have speech – they can articulate judgements on the good and the bad in the universe. Mencius explained the role of humans in relation to nature in this way by quoting from T’ai shih: Heaven sees with the eyes of its people. Heaven hears with the ears of its people. (Mencius, 5A:5) Human beings therefore cannot but make moral judgements, and they have to make decisions concerning which is the better line of development. It is humankind’s responsibility to make laws and build institutions to realise their moral goals. The enforcement of moral sanction belongs to the domain of humanity. Nature does not do the job of the moral mind, and the moral mind cannot do the job of nature. If we do not recognise the domain of nature, then we run the risk of wishful thinking. If we do not recognise the domain of humanity, then we fail to appreciate the ability and responsibility of humanity. So, a responsible person should not refrain from acting. But as pointed out by Yu, a responsible person acting on the Confucian moral imperative is expected to demonstrate proper care and discipline in his or her intervention. Confucius himself has pointed out that a person who aims at having proper behaviour should have the following three qualities: (1) a passion for knowledge, which is
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close to wisdom; (2) persistence in practice, which is close to benevolence; and (3) awareness of one’s own inadequacy, which is close to courage. But most importantly, humans must possess virtue, and exercise virtue if they are truly to assist the Way of Nature, in order not to abuse, harm or destroy nature. Nature and humankind work differently. By each doing things in its own way, Heaven and Earth (Nature) and humankind are able to form a harmonious ‘triad’ without fear of competition, or mutual displacement: In such a situation, the [Perfect Man or the person of virtue], however profound, does not apply any thought to the work of Nature; however great, does not apply his abilities; and however shrewd, does not apply his acumen for inquiry to it. This indeed may be described as ‘not competing with Nature in its work.’ Heaven has its seasons; Earth its resources; and Man his government. This, of course, is why it is said that they ‘can form a Triad.’ (Xunzi, Knoblock trans. 1999: 555) The Confucian understanding of the difference between the Way of Nature and the Way of Man can be further explained in this way. The Way of Nature is to give life. It works through discriminating the strong and the weak. The Way of Humankind is to govern and regulate. It works through distinguishing right and wrong.
The morality of human intervention in nature Distinction without separation Confucian human-centred ethics emphasises distinction without separation from nature. On the basis of this insight into the nature–human distinction, both nature and humanity have their proper functions. We should not expect nature to do humanity’s proper job, namely, to be moral. Neither should we attempt to be able to understand fully the way in which nature works or take up the task ourselves. What is being defended is a triadic relation among humans, Heaven and the Earth – a relation sustained by interdependence, interpenetration and resonance. To the Chinese, the cosmic order is a purposive order which both requires and invites human participation. The human order is not opposed to the cosmic order or the Way of Heaven, both being engaged in a ceaseless and creative process of change and transformation. But: Only the man of perfect purity [in will] can achieve full realization of his own essence; being able to realize his own essence, he can then realize the essence of other human beings; being able to realize the essence of all things, he can join the heaven and the earth in their creative and nourishing activities. Able to do so, he is ready to form a triad with heaven and earth. (The Doctrine of the Mean, Legge trans. 1960: 415–416)
The Confucian vision 75 Human knowledge should be used to assist the work of nature, but not to replace it. Human intervention is justified in cases of rectification or remedy. Intervening is not justified to maximise satisfying individual needs and desires, or to achieve maximal results. Such a view represents a middle position in contemporary debates about the environment. It aims at striking a balance between respecting nature and making use of human intervention (Yu 2004). Harmony without homogeneity Confucian ethics regards harmony as an important value. But harmony must not be confused with homogeneity. In fact, distinction between harmony and homogeneity is emphasised in this way: Harmony gives rise to new things. Homogeneity will lead to stagnation. To balance one thing by another is called harmony, which will lead to enrichment. To add to the same thing yet more of the same thing will ruin the whole thing. (Guo-yu, Ch. 16, ‘Zheng-yu’) Furthermore, harmony is also to be distinguished from sameness or conformity. In The Analects, Confucius himself drew a distinction between a moral person and a mean person in this way: The moral person ho (harmonizes) but not tung (conforms); the mean person tung (conforms) but not ho (harmonizes). (The Analects, 8:23) It is very clear that from the Confucian perspective, harmony or ho does not mean the suppression of individuality or the attainment of a steady state. Harmony or ho is to be pursued because it gives rise to new things; tung is to be rejected because it leads to stagnation. For this reason, if we manipulate the genes of plants, animals or human beings, such that we get what we regard as the best plants, animals or human beings, then we run the risk of sacrificing the diversity that is contained in nature. Such a move is also regarded as an improper move, as it is a move towards homogeneity rather than harmony. Humans should not try to replace nature by disrespecting the role differentiation between humans and nature. Regulation and rectification of nature are positive moral duties if they are undertaken for therapeutic/remedial purpose to assist the ‘full’ or ‘complete’ development of the nature of things. They are justified in order to prevent suffering, to relieve distress, to reduce harm and to assist full or complete development. In this way, humans are not replacing nature or playing ‘God’. According to the Confucian view, intervention in nature is a duty, but we should avoid decreasing diversity or suppressing individuality in order to promote homogeneity. As discussed earlier, intervention is not justified to satisfy
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individualistic needs and desires, or to achieve some uniform standard of perfection. Enhancement using germ-line genetic intervention will be regarded as unacceptable because it can reduce the amount of genetic variations among people. Importantly, Confucian moral thinking supports perfection through selfcultivation rather than through controlled design or external manipulation. Reciprocity without holism Reciprocity, not equality, is the central principle which structures interaction in the Confucian ethical system. The notion of reciprocity has many interpretations. One approach is to conceive it as a give-and-take relationship emphasising a simple tit-for-tat notion, referring to direct and exact return in kind. In the Confucian account, reciprocity is not conceived in terms of a kind of transaction like an exchange of gifts or goods. Neither is it to repay a debt, or to fulfil contractual obligations necessary for maintaining membership in some mutually beneficial exchange. Confucian reciprocity prescribes returning good for good. The Confucian notion of reciprocity is expressed in familiar Chinese proverbs: ‘An earlier generation plants trees under whose shade later generations find shelter and rest’; and ‘While you drink the water, you must not forget those who dug the well for you’. Such a notion of reciprocity involves, on the one hand, giving without consideration of return or obligation; on the other hand, it involves, in the words of Lawrence Becker (1986: 3), a straight moral obligation on the part of the recipient ‘to return good for good’. It is a recipient virtue. Reciprocity enables us to recognise our non-voluntary obligations – the obligations we acquire in the course of life without regard to our invitation, consent or acceptance. It enables the agent to see him- or herself as part of a larger overlapping network of reciprocal relationships. It underscores the process of extending oneself into the circumstances of another, to integrate concern for the self with concern for others, to remain self-directed while at the same time being other-directed. The major normative task for such a self is not to maintain the independence of the individual as a morally self-contained entity but to maintain interdependence with others and nature in harmonious relationships of reciprocity and care. However, what is being emphasised is reciprocity between humans and nature, not unity or holism between humans and nature. When read in depth, the Confucian tradition resists a purely holistic categorisation and is unable to accept interventions or to endorse policies that deny autonomy and respect to the individual (Tao and Brennan 2003). Maintaining distinction and upholding reciprocity are the ways to achieve relational resonance between humans and nature.
A utopian vision or a viable praxis? Do Confucian insights generate actions for environmental protection? If so, how? To answer these questions, one can turn to The Book of Zhou, compiled
The Confucian vision 77 around 533–520 BC. It is the historical record of the Early Zhou Dynasty in China (11th century BC–711 BC). In the chapter titled ‘King Wen’s Transmission’, one finds the outline of an environmental ethics and policy. King Wen explained his agricultural, fishery and forestry policy, based on respecting nature and completed development, in this way: ‘Axes should not be applied in the hills and forests except during the right time, such that plants and trees can complete their growth. Fishing nets should not be used in rivers and lakes except during the right time, such that fish can complete their growth’ (translated and cited by Yu 2002). He reminded his son, King Wu, to follow the good practice. Care for the young and respect for life in nature was also expressed in these regulations: ‘Don’t kill young animals and don’t take away bird eggs, such that birds and animals can complete their growth. Hunting and fishing should be done during the right season. Don’t kill pregnant animals. Don’t drive young horses’ (Yu 2002). Respect for land and regulating the use of resources are also emphasised: ‘Don’t make the wrong use of land. Land may be regulated; resources may be appropriated. Crops cannot be grown in the low and wet land, plant bamboo, reed, and cattail there. Regarding the use of land and natural resources, the sage has to regulate it, and the regulation should be made for the benefit of the people. When the use is regulated, fish will flourish in the lakes automatically, birds will come to the woods naturally. People who lack family support or ability to do farming can make a living from the natural resources’ (Yu 2002). As also pointed out by Yu (2002, 2004), according to The Book of Zhou there are five fishing periods in each year. Fishing is forbidden outside these five periods. Summer in particular is the fishing moratorium for the year because it is the season of procreation. Felling timber is forbidden in spring and summer. The proper season for this is winter. The basic idea is that there should be enough time for plants and animals to grow and multiply, and that there should be appropriate rites to observe in our use of nature’s resources. Following rites or observing rituals is regarded as the means to achieve harmony in Confucian ethics.
Final observations Confucian insights into the relation between humans and nature are distinguished by an emphasis on distinction without separation, on harmony without homogeneity, and on reciprocity without holism. These insights can offer the intellectual and moral resources for constructing a ‘third way’ approach (Yu, forthcoming) to environmental ethics which can free us from either the need to outlaw outright all human interventions in nature because they are intrinsically bad, or to endorse indiscriminately all forms of human intervention in nature because they are intrinsically good. It can also help us to avoid a dichotomised view of the role of nature and the role of humans, enabling us to see ‘interconnectedness’ and ‘interdependence’ between humans and nature. The responsibility, however, rests with ethical humans to build a relationship of relational resonance with mindless nature.
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Note 1 I wish to acknowledge my appreciation to the City University of Hong Kong for the award of research grant no. 9010002 for sponsoring the research on which this chapter is based.
References Attfield, R. (2003) Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Becker, L. (1986) Reciprocity, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Callicott, J. B. (1989) In Defense of Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press. Dworkin, R. (2000) Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elliot, R. (ed.) (1998) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elvin, M. (1987) ‘Between the Earth and Heaven: Conceptions of the Self in China’, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodpaster, K. E. (1978) ‘On Being Morally Considerable’, Journal of Philosophy, 75: 308–325. Hall, D. and Ames, R. (1987) Thinking Through Confucius, Albany: State University of New York Press. Leopold, A. (1949) ‘The Land Ethic’. Reprinted in D. VanDeVeer and C. Pierce (eds) (1986) People, Penguins and Plastic Trees, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Loewe, M. (1982) Chinese Ideas of Life and Death, London: Allen & Unwin. Næss, A. (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, ed. and trans. D. Rothenberg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norton, B. G. (1991) Toward Unity Among Environmentalists, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, J. (1993) Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-being and the Natural World, London: Routledge. Passmore, J. (1974) Man’s Responsibility for Nature, London: Duckworth. Reiss, M. J. and Straughan, R. (1996) Improving Nature? The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rifkin, J. (1985) Declaration of a Heretic, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rolston III, H. (1983) Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Routley (later Sylvan), R. (1973) ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethics?’, Varna, Bulgaria: Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy. Tao, J. (1990) ‘The Chinese Moral Ethos and the Concept of Individual Rights’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 7(2): 119–127. Tao, J and Brennan, A. (2003) ‘Confucian and Liberal Public Policy: Atomistic or Holistic’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 34: 572–589. Tucker, M. E. and Berthrong, J. (eds) (1998) Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Varner, G. E. (1998) In Nature’s Interests? Interests, Animal Rights, and Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Confucian vision 79 Yu Kam Por (2002) ‘Environmental Ethics and Policy According to the Confucian Classics’, a paper presented at the Governance in Asia conference at City University of Hong Kong, December 2002. —— (forthcoming) ‘Respecting Nature and Using Human Intelligence: Elements of a Confucian Bioethics’, in M. Sleeboom (ed.), Genomics in Asia: A Clash of Bioethical Interests? London: Kegan Paul.
Chinese classical texts cited The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (2000), Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. The Book of Zhou (‘Yi Zhou Shu’ Yuan liu kao bian) (1992), Huang Hualxin, Xi’an: Xi bei da xue chu ban she. (Only a Chinese edition is available.) The Doctrine of the Mean, in The Chinese Classics, 5 vols, Vol. I, trans. J. Legge (1960), Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Guo-yu Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, Ch. 16, ‘Zheng-yu’. I Ching or the Book of Changes, trans. C. F. Baynes (1989), London: Arkana. Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (1984), Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Xunzi, English trans., John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, 3 vols, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1988, 1990, 1994); modern Chinese trans., Zhang Jue, Library of Chinese Classics, Chinese–English, Hunan People’s Publishing House, Foreign Languages Press (1999). Zhangzi, trans. B. Watson (1996), New York: Columbia University Press.
Part III
Globalisation, values and environmental politics
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Global liberalism, environmentalism and the changing boundaries of the political Karl Polanyi’s insights John M. Meyer
Introduction How should environmental values change to address our brave new world of a global economy and global flows of information and culture? It is a commonplace, today, to hear environmentalists argue that public environmental attitudes and values must be transformed if environmental problems are to be seriously addressed (see Meyer 2001: Ch. 2). It is equally commonplace to hear critics of ‘globalisation’ – including many environmentalists – argue that the apparent decline of political sovereignty of the nation state makes social and environmental values harder to institutionalise. I intend to show that both of these arguments must be reframed in order to understand adequately the challenges and opportunities facing environmental values in a globalising world. With respect to the first claim, rather than asserting a need for the transformation of public attitudes towards the environment, we would do better to argue for the transformation – or at least significant expansion – of our view of what counts as public environmental attitudes and values. These values ought to be conceptualised in a manner inclusive of material and non-material connections to the environment, both of which are threatened by practices of a de-regulated, neo-liberal, global economy. If we do so, resistance to the severing of either these material or non-material connections can be encompassed within an expansive conception of environmentalism. With respect to the second claim, the very real changes wrought by a global economy crafted in accord with the neo-liberal imagination must not mislead us into neglecting the importance of political power. Greater insight into the dilemmas of environmentalism in our age can be had when we distinguish between the political-economic theory of global liberalism driving much of the current movement towards a global economy and the actual practice of nation states and international organisations seeking to implement this theory. While the former advocates narrow boundaries for political action, the latter reflects a political sphere that has indeed changed in some ways, yet which remains expansive. A way forward thus requires recognition of the often-surprising breadth of both public environmental values and the exercise of political power.
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Normative political theorising on the relationship of environmentalism to globalisation is relatively new terrain. As a result, an effort to engage in such theorising can be furthered by securing an insightful guide to the landscape. The guide I have chosen here is Karl Polanyi. An economic historian and social theorist, Polanyi published his classic work, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, in 1944. A number of contemporary scholars in international political economy and historical sociology have drawn upon his arguments to further their own critical analysis of the amorphous yet ubiquitous processes that have come to be labelled ‘globalisation’ (Mittelman 1997; Rodrick 1998: 17; Gray 1998). Indeed, there seems to be something of a ‘Karl Polanyi revival’ among such scholars, influenced by the fact that his sixty-year-old masterwork, focused as it is upon the nineteenth century, can nonetheless ‘easily be read as a chronicle of contemporary events’ (Mendell 2001: 48; Block 2001: xxxiii–xxxv). In a synthesis of the growing literature on globalisation, political theorist Manfred Steger identifies key claims that collectively allow us to identify what he terms ‘globalism’ as a ‘new ideology’ that connects ‘the central ideas of nineteenth-century free-market philosophers . . . to the twenty-first-century framework of globality’: Presented to the public as a leaderless, inevitable juggernaut that will ultimately produce benefits for everyone, globalism has emerged as the dominant cultural glue that sustains the social and political power of neoliberal elites throughout the world. Its well-publicized promises of material well-being and social mobility often sustain consensual arrangements of rule. (Steger 2002: 79)1 The ‘great transformation’ of which Polanyi wrote was the ambitious nineteenth-century effort to institute a laissez-faire capitalist economy, stripped of government regulation, tariffs and other restraints. Disastrous in its effects upon society, according to Polanyi, this effort was doomed to failure and had collapsed by the outbreak of the First World War. Yet in a manner that parallels Steger’s argument, Fred Block has argued that neo-liberal advocates of globalisation today ‘embrace the same utopian vision’ articulated by the leaders of Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’ (2001: xxxiii). As others have put it, we appear to be undergoing a ‘second great transformation’ (Bernard 1997). Attention devoted to Polanyi’s thought has been much more subdued among environmental writers, and in particular among those of us who have come to be identified as ‘environmental’ or ‘green’ political theorists. Although a number of works have mentioned Polanyi, few utilise his analysis in a central manner.2 I seek to explore both the insights and the limitations of his thought to illuminate the connections between environmental values and globalisation, while also making a consideration of political economy more central to the concerns of environmental political theory.3
Karl Polanyi’s insights
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Polanyi’s writing offers a set of distinctions and concepts that can clarify and illuminate environmentalist arguments. These can also prompt a more careful consideration of the role of the nation state. There are four key concepts and distinctions that I will examine here. The first, and perhaps the most well-known, is his concept of ‘embeddedness’, and the distinction between an economy ‘embedded’ in society and the liberal effort to ‘disembed’ economic activity from social control. Second is what Polanyi terms ‘fictitious commodities’. These are distinguished from ‘real’ commodities because the latter are ‘objects produced for sale on the market’, while the false commodities of human labour, land or nature, and money clearly do not fit this criterion (Polanyi 1957: 72). It is the notion of ‘nature’ as a false commodity that will be of special interest in this chapter. Third is Polanyi’s provocative redefinition of the advocacy of a ‘freemarket’ economy as a utopian effort, while characterising societal resistance to this effort as self-protection rooted in pragmatic realism. This amounts to a reversal of conventional notions of planning and spontaneity, reflected in his oft-quoted quip that ‘Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not’ (Polanyi 1957: 141). The emphasis upon the ironic, yet overwhelming and necessary, role of the state in enabling the growth of a market economy is especially relevant. Fourth is his concept of a ‘double movement’ in market societies; the first part being the powerful, yet quixotic, attempt to ‘disembed’ economic relations, the second part the ‘countermovement’ or social resistance to this effort that Polanyi believes will emerge inevitably as a consequence. Ironically, Polanyi’s thought may be even more valuable where his argument is least clear. At the end of this chapter I consider a critical ambiguity in Polanyi’s work which, once recognised, can lead us to ask more productive questions about the prospects for environmental values in a globalising world. This ambiguity leads us to explore the question: What counts as ‘re-embedding’ of the economy in society?
Embeddedness Polanyi’s work is perhaps the most vital classic of what has come to be known as the ‘moral economy’ approach in the social sciences. In his analysis of this school, William James Booth argues that: [t]he theoretical centre of the moral economic approach is the defining dichotomy of the embedded economy and the disembedded, or autonomous, market . . . . [w]here the economy is embedded, it is Gemeinschaft – the institutions, traditions, and norms of the community – that governs it. (1994: 653)4 To develop the normative importance of this dichotomy, Polanyi and others have drawn upon Aristotle’s argument about the necessity of a conception of the good – and of the ends of a good life – to the structuring of livelihood and economic activity. Aristotle describes the process of economic acquisition as instrumental to a
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conception of the good and thus argues for the importance of limits: ‘there is no art that has an instrument that is without limit’ (Aristotle 1984: 1256b35). This enables him to distinguish the sort of acquisition properly pursued by household managers and political rulers – limited by the end or use to be made of it – from ‘expertise in business . . . [for] which there is held to be no limit to wealth and possessions’ (Aristotle 1984: 1257a1). For Polanyi, this Aristotelian distinction between ‘householding’ and ‘moneymaking’ – between acquisition for use and for gain – ‘was probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of the social sciences’ and his embedded/disembedded dichotomy clearly builds upon it (Polanyi 1957: 53). Thus, an embedded economy is one modelled after the household, in which acquisition is a process of securing use values, where the ends of the community itself define these values. To seek to disembed an economy is thus to model it after Aristotle’s characterisation of what is ‘held to be’ business expertise, where the absence of an understanding of the properly instrumental role of acquisition leads to the absence of ‘limits to wealth and possessions’. Polanyi’s development of the idea of embeddedness is related to his distinction between two meanings of the word ‘economic’, both of which have been blended into our contemporary uses of the term. He terms these the ‘formal’ and the ‘substantive’ definitions. The formal definition has its roots in ‘the logical character of the means–ends relationship, as in economizing or economical’ (Polanyi 1977: 19). Here, we would expect to find Homo economicus: the calculating human driven by scarcity to maximise individual material well-being. This definition regards all forms of acquisition as unlimited by use value or a conception of the good, and is, in Polanyi’s view, a highly culture-bound understanding of human behaviour. By contrast, the substantive meaning of economic is relevant both to Polanyi and to contemporary environmental analysis. This meaning ‘points to the elemental fact that human beings, like all other living things, cannot exist for any length of time without a physical environment that sustains them’ (1977: 19, 1968: 140). This reflects the human condition itself: ‘no society can exist that does not possess some kind of substantive economy’ (1977: 6). The confusion (or misrepresentation) of this with the narrower, formal conception is what Polanyi terms ‘the economistic fallacy’ (1977: Ch. 1). Criticism of the dominant conception of the contemporary economy as based upon this fallacious, formal definition is familiar among environmental critics. Drawing explicitly upon both Aristotle and Polanyi, for instance, John O’Neill identifies the Aristotelian vice pleonexia as a fundamental threat to the environment. This vice of the acquisitive egoist – grasping for more than is proper – is both other-regarding and self-regarding: To treat the environment simply as a resource for the ever increasing satisfaction of newly dreamt-up wants is an other-regarding vice: it is to treat the inarticulate – future generations and non-humans – as if they did not matter. However, it is also a self-regarding vice. To treat a forest merely as a resource is to assume a narrow conception of the goods of life. (O’Neill 1993: 171; see also Booth 1994: 657)
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E. F. Schumacher, in his well-known book Small is Beautiful, also offers such a critique. He rejects what he terms ‘modern economics’ for its misguided effort to ‘maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort’, rather than seeking to ‘maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption’ (Schumacher 1973: 59). It is, again, some particular conception of the good that is necessary to determine what human satisfactions are. In Schumacher’s understanding, some such conception must always exist – he calls it ‘metaeconomics’ – and as this changes so must our understanding of economics itself (1973: 52).5 Another key set of environmental discussions within which these themes have emerged is over the role and meaning of the ‘commons’. Indeed, as one major new survey of the extensive literature argues, ‘[n]early all environmental issues have aspects of the commons in them’ (Ostrom et al. 2002: 4). While Garrett Hardin’s famous essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (1968: 1243–1248) provided the impetus for enormous intellectual interest in and research about the commons (Ostrom et al. 2002: 6), his assumption that human behaviour is inevitably driven by what Polanyi describes as ‘formal’ economic rationality is also distinctive and relevant. It is as a result of this assumption that Hardin asserts that ‘commons’ is analogous to a free-for-all and that it must inevitably lead to the tragedy of environmental devastation in the absence of either centralised state coercion or the elimination of the commons in favour of private ownership of property. In contrast to Hardin, many recent researchers and environmental advocates have cast the commons in a significantly more positive light. A summary of the major empirical studies published over the past two decades concludes: These studies were a serious challenge to the validity of Hardin’s analysis and to the implication that government and private property were the ‘only’ ways to manage common-pool resources. They demonstrated that under some conditions, local groups using a common property regime could manage their resources quite well. This challenge led to a move from seeing Hardin’s formulation as a broad and accurate generalization to a special case that was observed only under certain circumstances. Furthermore, the rich case study literature illustrated a wide diversity of settings in which users dependent upon common-pool resources have organized themselves to achieve much better outcomes than can be predicted by Hardin’s model. (Ostrom et al. 2002: 17) What these studies were finding, in effect, was that the commons was often not an open-access free-for-all, but was instead a source of livelihood embedded within a set of norms and institutions that limited their use based upon a communal conception of the good. Where such conditions (rather than the ‘special case’ that Hardin describes) apply, both the nationalisation of the commons under formal government ownership and the ‘enclosure’ of the commons as private property can lead to a worsening of environmental conditions (Ostrom et al. 2002: 11–13).6
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There is an important normative point here, as well as the empirical one: if human behaviour is frequently embedded within a network of social relationships and structures that predispose us away from the narrowly self-interested calculations of Homo economicus, then we can reject the claim that the latter is co-extensive with human behaviour as such. Polanyi takes the point further to argue that the ideal of formally economic calculating individuals operating within a self-adjusting market is truly a ‘utopia’ – it exists nowhere – and indeed ‘could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society’ (Polanyi 1957: 3). To believe otherwise is the ‘economistic fallacy’. While the goal of disembedding the market from a social and political context is surely one towards which many classical liberals strive, it is not one that can ever truly be realised. Thus embeddedness must always be both a question of degree and of what sort of conception of the good economic activity is embedded within the market. Polanyi’s argument that embeddedness is actually inescapable, despite the best efforts of advocates of market liberalisation, is prominent in his work and yet readily overlooked or ignored given the tenor of his writing at many other points. For example, in an otherwise very careful and systematic evaluation of Polanyi and the moral economy approach, William James Booth argues that at the core of the idea of a ‘great transformation’ is the claim that ‘in modernity, the economy is disembedded, that is, it is an autonomous sphere governed by laws of its own’ (Booth 1994: 656). This allows Booth to identify the distinction between an embedded and disembedded economy with other prominent dichotomies in social theory: ‘pre-modern’ versus ‘modern’ and Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft. Yet while Polanyi argues that this notion of an autonomous sphere of the fully ‘self-adjusting market’ is prized and central to the theory of liberalism, it is equally vital to his argument to recognise that it cannot be fully realised in practice. This is a point that he emphasises on the very first page of his book (Polanyi 1957: 3).7 The reason this theory cannot be fully realised, Polanyi argues, is that it would require humans and nature to be transformed in their entirety into something that they cannot truly be – commodities (see Block 2001: xxiv).
Commodification True commodities, as we have already noted, are ‘objects produced for sale on the market’. ‘Fictitious commodities’ – labour, land and money – are obviously not produced for sale, cannot be wholly subsumed to a market and hence are not properly understood as commodities. As Polanyi states: Labour is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power . . . . (1957: 72)
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Market liberal theory, in both the nineteenth- and twenty-first centuries, is thus dependent upon the impossible: labour as a commodity – an object for sale on the market – cannot be detached from the lives of human subjects; land can be placed for sale on the market, but to believe that this delineation of property can detach it from a broader set of ecological relationships is mistaken. To fully commodify labour and land, then, would amount to treating humans and nature as fully reducible to the quantities of labour activity or property that are exchanged in the market. Yet this reduction can never be other than a rather bizarre fiction that furthers the unrealisable end of economic liberalisation.8 Focusing upon his analysis of ‘land’, it may be helpful to compare Polanyi with a more familiar environmentalist, Aldo Leopold, on this point. First, Polanyi: What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market out of it was perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors. (1957: 178) The tenuousness – the ‘weirdness’ – of this commodified conception of land is echoed more poetically by Leopold: One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o’clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue . . . at daybreak . . . [i]t is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded. Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my county, extends on every hand as far as the dew can reach. (1949: 41) There is both a material and non-material dimension to this argument about the fictitious commodification of nature.9 The material dimension highlights the fact that while land cannot be produced for the market, it is a necessary precondition for it. The non-material dimension, better reflected in Leopold’s writing, highlights the vital aspects of human and natural existence and meaning that are squeezed out by the commodified conception of land as property. Because land or nature is impossible to commodify fully for both these reasons, the effort to do so inevitably results in resistance, or what Polanyi has termed the ‘countermovement’ to liberalisation and (false) commodification. Here, Polanyi offers a conceptualisation valuable to our understanding of the relationship of environmentalism to the current movement towards globalism. The pursuit of commodification of ‘nature’ will necessarily threaten both the pursuit of livelihoods that are closely dependent upon the natural world – the material dimension – and those non-material environmental values rooted in our cultural, aesthetic or spiritual experiences of that world as something more than
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a commodity. Polanyi’s analysis thus leads us to anticipate the growth of environmental resistance movements that are rooted in values that emerge from both material and non-material sources (see Taylor 1995; Mittelman 1998). This expansive conception of environmentalism bridges many familiar dichotomies, for example that between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, which often bedevil environmental writings.10 What Polanyi’s analysis cannot tell us is how pervasive the movement towards fictitious commodification must become before resistance is likely to emerge or what particular strategies such resistance is likely to find effective. But it does offer a unifying source – populist and potentially democratic – from which diverse expressions of environmental action can be understood to emerge. From this vantage point, environmentalism appears as an expansive and pluralistic set of movements that encompasses diverse forms of resistance to the commodification of ‘nature’. Concerns centring around injustice and equity, as well as those centred around urban areas and other built environments can often seem quite distant – if not at odds with – an environmentalism conceived as ‘nature protection’. This point is made clearly in a number of other chapters in this volume, including those by Soper, Schlosberg, Harris and Gupta. Yet by focusing on resistance to the process of commodification, rather than on the purity of ‘nature’, this distance can be lessened significantly.
‘Utopianism’ and the central role of the state The global sweep of economic liberalism can now be taken in at a glance. Nothing less than a self-regulating market on a world scale could ensure the functioning of this stupendous mechanism . . . . [yet] [t]here was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course . . . . laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state. (Polanyi 1957: 138–139)
It is precisely the ‘utopianism’ of the movement to institute a self-regulating market society that demands the imposition of the power of the nation state to try to achieve it. This remains as true in our own age of globalisation as in the period Polanyi discusses. Yet this observation flies in the face of a fair amount of argument and conventional wisdom among advocates and opponents of globalisation, both of whom speak of the decline of the nation state and of state sovereignty. Of course, it also flew in the face of rhetoric and argument about market economies at the time Polanyi wrote: then and now, talk of government ‘intervention’ into ‘free’ markets misrepresents the government’s role by suggesting that it is only significant when it has sought to limit the liberal market order; not when it has sought to create and maintain it.11 It may be helpful, here, to distinguish between external and internal faces of state sovereignty (Conca 1998). While the external face of sovereignty (in relation to other nation states and international organisations) may be lessened as a result of changes that come under the heading of globalisation, police power and other exertions of state power vis-à-vis internal forces of civil society are often magnified by the
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effort to limit or suppress sources of resistance to the globalist ideal. As Fred Block notes, it ‘requires statecraft and repression to impose the logic of the market and its attendant risks on ordinary people’ (2001: xxvii). Thus, discussion about the role of the sovereign state is more illuminating when we ask what values or ends it is promoting, rather than whether or not it should ‘intervene’. Of course, noting that the state exerts a vital role in structuring economic activity even – or especially – in our age of globalisation does not suggest that the character of state action remains constant or that the boundaries of the activities that are regarded as appropriately or feasibly political remain unchanged. Indeed, it is quite clear that certain areas of policy-making are more heavily constrained than they have been in the recent past – in particular the areas of the welfare state and of fiscal policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman enthusiastically characterises these restraints as a ‘Golden Straitjacket’ adopted by nation states. This straitjacket, he makes clear, ‘. . . embodies all the liberal, free-market rules . . .’ (1999: 109–110). It may also be seen as a rigidification of the constraints self-imposed because of fear of disinvestments (Mittelman 1998: 855; Dryzek 1996: Ch. 4). These also restrain certain types of institutional expression of environmental values. At least on the national level, there is evidence that a global economy undercuts the ability of states to internalise environmental costs and promotes instead a standardslowering ‘race to the bottom’ (Daly 2001: 19). In all these ways, the continued exertion of – and perhaps even increase in – state power under globalism appears concurrent with a decline in responsiveness to constituencies in civil society. This suggests that both institutionalised democracy and state legitimacy may be weakened in our globalising era. For a number of theorists and analysts, this dynamic has led to a rise of a politics of civil society or public spheres whose target is not primarily state action. Authors including John Dryzek (1996), Paul Wapner (1996) and Douglas Torgerson (1999) have all discussed this in an environmental context. Thus the changing boundaries of the political seem to have directed various forms of resistance away from the state, despite the ongoing centrality of the latter to the institutional structure of the market economy itself. And yet, in the words of Robyn Eckersley, ‘it is difficult to envisage how global capitalism can be reformed behind the back, as it were, of states’ (2001: 14).
Pragmatism and the ‘countermovement’ For Polanyi, the movement towards the unrealisable liberal ideal of a global free-market system spontaneously generates a ‘countermovement’ of resistance to this ideal from among those whose interests, values and livelihoods are being undermined by the process of fictitious commodification. These bases for resistance are far more diverse than any Marxist conception of class interest, according to Polanyi, and reflect our myriad of roles and experiences as ‘neighbors, professional persons, consumers, pedestrians, commuters, sportsmen, hikers, gardeners, patients, mothers, or lovers . . .’ (1957: 154). Polanyi
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conceptualised this resistance as a ‘defense of man, nature, and productive organisation’ (1957: 162). To conceptualise a countermovement in this manner is to present it as rooted in democratic impulses. That is, to argue that resistance has and can come from virtually any groups or levels in society and that it is a reaction to the pervasive process of commodification is to contend that popular resistance is just that – popular. It is, Polanyi concludes, ‘actuated by a purely pragmatic spirit’ (1957: 141). Even where the movement may be nascent at best and even where it might take on an undemocratic vision of political organisation, its source is presented here as a pragmatic and democratic one. This formulation is, of course, partly an empirical claim: Polanyi argues that commodification under a market liberal regime will generate this resistance.12 Importantly, it also has vital normative implications. If environmental resistance can be understood as rooted in threats to actual public values and practices, then the democratic credentials of environmental action are significantly bolstered. Moreover, as I seek to show in the next and final part of this chapter, the question of the potential for expanding the breadth of liberalism beyond the narrow conception of globalism raises important and ultimately productive ambiguities in Polanyi’s argument. Yet I argue that some of the dilemmas that emerge can be better addressed by asking whether existing public values provide a resource for change, rather than asking whether liberal philosophy – connected only tenuously to these public values – has such resources within it.
Conclusions: Polanyi for the era of globalism What political ideas and structures might effectively channel environmental resistance to the ideology and practices of globalism? This is a key question that Polanyi’s analysis leads us to ask, yet he does not provide a clear answer. Indeed, this question exposes important ambiguities in Polanyi’s analysis and argument that we must consider. What might count as an alternative to the utopian project of globalism? There would seem to be several possible answers. Mitchell Bernard describes the interpretative dilemma: The countermovement that Polanyi described was thus incapable of reembedding economic life as Polanyi originally understood embedding, but it is not entirely clear from Polanyi’s writing if he understood this as a contradiction-laden compromise or some sort of actual re-embedding. (Bernard 1997: 86) What Bernard describes as Polanyi’s original understanding of re-embedding would be a circumscribed economy, embedded within social norms and structures that effectively replaced the liberal premises and ideals that currently structure market societies with a radically different conception of the good and
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hence a non-liberal order. A positive formulation of this alternative would involve ‘a reorganisation of work, a democratisation of state structures, and the socialisation of decision-making about technology and the relationship between economic activity and local, regional and national ecological carrying capacities’ (Bernard 1997: 87). A more negative formulation is offered by William James Booth. He begins by describing the values and ends of the societies that the advocates of market liberalism originally sought to disembed themselves from, yet which are downplayed by Polanyi and others who advance a ‘moral economy’ approach. Booth argues that the pre-liberal economy was embedded in societies distinguished by officially sanctioned hierarchy, often-rigid status demarcations, and the absence of consent as a legitimising basis for public decision-making. Characteristics of this sort – and hierarchy in particular – are not just incidental, he argues, but intrinsic to the understanding (by Aristotle and others) of the legitimate basis for insisting upon the priority of social ends over economic ones. He concludes,: ‘embeddedness is hardly intelligible apart from that context’ (Booth 1994: 661). Booth critiques Polanyi’s historical account for its nostalgic character and reminds us of the unattractive qualities of the pre-liberal embedded economy, but his argument that this character can be equated with Polanyi’s idea of embeddedness as a whole rests upon an understandable misreading. For Booth, his description leads him to view liberalism as offering a contrasting set of moral arguments within which economic activity is embedded, with such familiar attributes as the claim that economic actors should be considered equal, public authority ought not to decide among private preferences and that voluntary contract ought to provide a foundation. In short, the market economy represents to Booth a shift away from a patriarchal, hierarchical and unfree model for economic activity. In this manner, he arrives at a conclusion that I have argued Polanyi maintained all along: that rather than a form of ‘disembeddedness’, market liberalism is in fact ‘a new form of moral embeddedness for the economy’ (1994: 661).13 Polanyi seems to diverge from Booth by emphasising the effort by market liberal advocates to present their argument as both neutral and natural, hence denying that they are in fact making a moral claim about economic activity. Despite the textual support for concluding that Polanyi would regard this outcome less as a critique than as an affirmation, there is also ample basis in the overall tone of Polanyi’s account for Booth to have drawn the contrary conclusion. If the argument is that even market liberalism represents a form of economic embeddedness, then talk of embeddedness – as distinct from claims about the specific values and ends within which the economy is to be embedded – cannot carry much normative weight by itself. By contrast, if not just market liberal theory, but its actual practice, represented the successful disembedding of an economy from the state and society, then an argument for re-embedding would carry clear normative weight – requiring the transformation of these existing practices – but might then also involve promoting the unattractive values of status and hierarchy that Booth describes.
94 Environmental politics It is also possible to see a middle ground of explicit political reform of the global liberal regime. Here, the Keynesian influence upon the post-Second World War economic order suggests a historical model. International Relations theorist John Ruggie characterises this order – distinguished both by its multinationalism and its commitment to a domestic welfare state – as the ‘essence of the embedded liberalism compromise’ (1982: 393). To describe such an order as a compromise, of course, is to beg the question of whether values have been ‘compromised’ to an unacceptable degree. So long as the liberal image of political action vis-à-vis economic activity as ‘intervention’ remains dominant, the effort to explicitly ‘embed’ the latter will likely be limited to modest regulatory reform and still challenged as illegitimate. Moreover, of course, in the historical formulation discussed by Ruggie, ‘embedded liberalism’ operated hand-in-hand with a vast increase in the scale of environmental devastation, so the question of whether an ‘embedded liberal environmental’ regime is feasible must answer even greater challenges.14 To work through these ambiguities we might return to the role that Polanyi prescribes for a conception of the good in structuring and guiding economic activity, and the relationship of this to environmental arguments. We know that this offers a dramatic contrast to classical liberal theory, which conceives of itself as neutral with regard to the good. Thus, the state’s role can be conceived in a minimalist manner, because it is said to keep a hands-off approach here. The boundaries of the political sphere are narrowly circumscribed. It is this proclaimed neutrality, we have seen, that is the basis for what Polanyi characterises as the liberal project’s utopianism. Yet it is the inability to realise this utopian ideal that provides an ironic basis for much of what Fred Block terms its ‘intellectual resilience’. In real world practice, societies will always pull back from the full implementation of the market ideal. As a result, market advocates can always contend that their failure is a result of a ‘lack of political will’, rather than a failure of their ideas (Block 2001: xxvii). Recent examples of this contention can be seen in the aftermath of both the post-Soviet attempts at economic ‘shock therapy’ and the recent energy deregulation debacle in California. If Polanyi’s evidence for the enormous state role in the promotion of the liberal agenda is convincing, and I believe it is, then it becomes clear that the gulf between liberal theory and liberal practice is wide indeed.15 Political practice simply cannot be devoid of an idea of the good here. This is an ontological point, but we can draw important normative conclusions from it. First, if the size of the state or its planning functions are not, in practice, primarily a function of whether or not it is guided by a liberal philosophy, then advocating planning, regulation or even more far-reaching efforts to define the character of economic activity cannot be said to be inherently contradictory with liberalism. The answer to the question of what is consistent with liberal theory is both much broader and less clear-cut in this case. Second, if even the market liberal ideal requires a conception of the good (in practice, even if frequently denied in liberal theory), then it is again not self-evident that environmentalism’s commitment to a conception of the good puts it at odds with the practice of liberalism.
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Third, if the implementation of globalism reflects the particular political agenda of activist states, then the claim to inevitability on behalf of this agenda is undermined and alternatives become imaginable (Steger 2002: 30). The theory of globalism advocates narrow boundaries for the political sphere, yet in practice these boundaries are necessarily broad. In the previous paragraph I have suggested reasons to think that recognition of this fact makes the sort of changes proposed by many environmentalists seem more viable, since it doesn’t require a complete transformation of either existing public philosophy or of the extant role of the state. Yet the task for philosophers, political theorists, environmentalists and all concerned citizens appears more difficult from this perspective. We cannot rely, as at times Polanyi appears to, upon a simple argument that the economy must be ‘re-embedded’ or that we should create a ‘moral economy’. It is not embeddedness, morality or the good per se that must be defended here. Instead, we must be able to develop a much more particular case for a conception of the (environmental) good here, and for the institutions that can carry it forward. It is not the good, but this good; not abstract ‘morality’, but these moral principles; not an ‘embedded’ economy, but one embedded in a particular sort of social structure that must be advanced. We have, then, a partial answer to the question with which we began: ‘what political ideas and institutions can counterbalance those of globalism?’ These ideas must challenge the ‘intellectual resilience’ of this theory, by recognising and highlighting the gulf between the role that both state power and an idea of the good play in this theory and the role they play in the effort to put this into practice. One method that some have utilised to categorise alternative approaches is to divide them into those that remain within the boundaries of the liberal tradition and those that transcend these boundaries. This distinction is central to much contemporary political theory in general and increasingly central to green political theory in particular. Yet despite the richness and insight of many writing in this vein, it seems that they are also often talking past each other. It works like this: critics typically characterise liberalism as an ideological position more or less synonymous with the advocacy of globalism.16 Detailing the failings of this theory, these critics conclude that the failure of this approach represents the failure of liberalism per se. Implicit, here, is the understanding that liberalism is the public philosophy of contemporary societies, and so to reject it is to call for radical social transformation.17 By contrast, those seeking to work within the liberal tradition typically characterise its core commitments to freedom, tolerance of new ideas and its opposition to tyranny as offering the foundation for important challenges to the classical liberal approach that is at the heart of globalism. For example, Avner de-Shalit (2000: Ch. 3) and John Barry (Barry and Wissenburg 2001: 66) have argued that ‘social liberalism’ offers an alternative that can embrace a conception of the good and de-centre the market’s priority in classical liberalism, and hence provide a basis for implementing environmental policies. Thus, the disagreement between these theorists is not over whether the classical liberal approach is sufficient to address critical environmental concerns.
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Neither ‘side’ believes that it is.18 Instead, their disagreement centres upon how narrowly or broadly ‘liberalism’ can properly be conceived. As Barry and Wissenburg put it in a volume that seeks to stretch the boundaries of this tradition, the questions are ‘whether liberalism is (or liberal theories are) in principle compatible with attention for nature and sustainability’ and ‘the degree to which liberalism or liberal democracy can be “reformed” to meet green demands’ (2001: 3). But why cast these disagreements and questions in terms of liberal philosophical principles? The answer to this question seems to focus upon the pragmatics of social change. In these discussions ‘liberalism’ serves, in part, as a stand-in for an evaluation of dominant public values (Barry and Wissenburg 2001: 1). In other words, the issue that is often at stake is whether the pursuit of environmental sustainability can be rooted in values that are widely shared among the publics of what we call ‘liberal democratic’ societies or whether this pursuit can only be at odds with these public values, thus necessitating a transformation not just of institutions but of the public’s values themselves. Surely many existing public values, especially in Western societies, can be identified with ‘liberalism’ in some form. But the analysis could be more fruitful if we began by posing the question without assuming that the two were synonymous. This question is whether our extant public philosophy can provide resources to foster environmental sustainability in our dominant institutions, or whether this effort must be predicated upon its prior transformation. This can also be cast as a distinction between an immanent critique of contemporary society and an external one, premised upon a need for a transformation of values. Polanyi encourages this framework for analysis by characterising the countermovement to market liberal ideology as a democratic impulse rooted in prevailing experiences and values. Thus, the challenge to market liberalism clearly offers an immanent critique of the societies where such a countermovement emerges, whether or not this challenge is properly understood as immanent in liberalism. The question of the boundaries and character of liberalism in relation to environmental concerns remains an important but secondary one from this perspective; its relevance is based strictly upon a normative concern for (at least some) liberal values and the role that these might play in guiding environmental resistance, rather than also being a strategic analysis of the likelihood for change. We must not kid ourselves: offering a theoretically consistent presentation of liberalism as a philosophy either too rigid to adequately accommodate environmental concerns or as elastic enough to be ‘greened’ does not make democratic social change any more or less likely. Logical or theoretical consistency is not a primary concern among agents of environmental resistance. To Polanyi, the divide among critics of the unrealisable market liberal utopia is a disagreement over whether ‘the idea of freedom can be upheld or not’ (1957: 258a).19 This idea of freedom is dependent upon an acceptance of the reality of society and hence the inescapable need for planning, regulation and public control. Since Polanyi himself identifies liberalism narrowly with the advocacy of
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market utopia, he concludes that this is an anti-liberal idea of freedom (1957: 256–257). Surely, however, if the liberal tradition is viewed expansively, no normative question could be more central to it than this. Equally surely, this ideal will be at odds with globalism, which ‘simultaneously intensif[ies] global environmental degradation and undermines the conditions of effective legal and political intervention to resolve the problems posed by it’ (Benton 1999: 223). Following Polanyi’s lead, then, we can conceptualise environmental resistance to globalism as rooted in the actual experiences of people whose values or livelihoods are threatened by the continued commodification of land and other aspects of the natural environment. Polanyi’s characterisation of this commodification as fictitious and hence ‘utopian’ echoes contemporary critiques of its unsustainability. An alternative must build upon these sources of resistance to offer a vision for the future, in which it is the ecological elements now being commodified that are instead sustained. Bryan Norton’s 1999 essay appears to offer a model in this regard. Norton makes a sophisticated argument for an approach to economic development that takes seriously people’s concerns for local ecological resources as a basis for ensuring the options available to people in the future. The relationship between what Norton prosaically terms the ecological ‘stuff ’ to be protected and its role in protecting future options and opportunities is key. When this ‘stuff ’ is not protected, the options available for the future are diminished.20 Only where a democratic process enables people to integrate the ‘stuff ’ they value into a plan for the future can development be said to be sustainable. As Norton puts it: the problem of defining a fair path to the future requires creating a clear articulation of a specific community’s long-term values, and of identifying features of the ecosystem and landscape that are essential to maintain these locally important values into the future. (1999: 133) Thus the problem is truly one of protecting what Polanyi terms ‘freedom in a complex society’. Whereas the advocate of globalism characterises freedom as the abstraction of negative liberty, here freedom becomes intimately tied to the identification and pursuit of an environmentally relevant conception of the good. Here, as elsewhere, governments can play a necessary role. In structuring a process that allows for the public identification of the good, it need not abandon a commitment to freedom, and indeed can further its pursuit. Drawing insight from Polanyi, we can believe that such freedom is possible precisely because he offers hope that a democratic public will find it compatible with the pursuit of environmental sustainability.
Notes 1 Steger discusses five claims that he associates with the ideology of ‘globalism’. They are: (1) globalisation is about the liberalisation and global integration of markets; (2) globalisation is inevitable and irreversible; (3) nobody is in charge of globalisation; (4)
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Environmental politics globalisation benefits everyone; and (5) globalisation furthers the spread of democracy in the world. I will rely upon Steger’s usage of the term ‘globalism’ and its distinction from both ‘globalisation’ and a potentially broader ‘liberalism’ in this chapter. For example, in Peter Hay’s exhaustive new survey of the environmental literature, there is no mention of Polanyi (Hay 2002). For a brief mention by other environmental writers, see: Barry (1999: 159–160, 184); Daly and Cobb (1989: 4–8); Eckersley (1992: 142); O’Connor, (1988: 12); O’Neill (1993: 168); Worster (1993: 56). For the only sustained treatment that I have found, see Bernard (1997). For an argument that green political theory ought to devote much more attention to political economy, see Christoff et al. (2001). Later, I argue that Booth’s association of the embeddedness argument with a particular conception of pre-modern community is overdrawn, albeit understandable given the ambiguities in Polanyi’s argument. Here Schumacher points us towards the argument that even our so-called modern economy is embedded in some conception of the good – it is a ‘moral economy’. Oksanen (2001) argues that the argument for privatisation rests upon the conceptual ambiguity in this term, which can mean either individual ownership or some property rights regime, including a communal one. Granovetter (1985: 482–483) offers a helpful analysis of the relationship of embeddedness to modernity. Manno (2002: 71–83) makes a distinction between goods and services with a ‘high’ or ‘low’ commodity potential. Land, in Manno’s terms, would have low commodity potential in part because its use is ‘embedded . . . in a web of social and ecological relationships’. Bernard (1997: 85) makes a similar distinction between the ‘material’ and ‘ideational’ dimensions of the commodification of land. For an excellent argument that reinforces the value of transcending these dichotomies, see Lohmann (1995). Weiss (1998) and Gray (1998) each develop the point that state power remains central. For Polanyi’s argument see The Great Transformation (1957: 143–150). While this determinism is unconvincing, it is also not central to an understanding of environmental movements that do exist. Granovetter (1985) develops a different argument for the continued embeddedness of the economy. Steven Bernstein (2001) details many limitations of such a regime. For a parallel discussion of the ambiguity between the critique of liberal theory and liberal practice found in communitarian thought, see Yack (1988). I’m thinking of communitarians, socialists, nationalists, radical feminists, deep and social ecologists, among others. Sometimes this theme is explicit, as in Ophuls (1997). Of course, there are others who do. Free market environmentalists such as Anderson and Leal (2001), and economists such as Jagdish Bhagwati (1998), are excellent examples. But I will not be exploring their arguments here. On one side of this divide, advocating freedom, are those that he describes (using his distinctive definition) as ‘socialists’. On the other side are ‘fascists’. Much of Norton’s essay is devoted to rebutting the economist’s utilitarian premise that it is not ‘stuff ’, but instead some distilled measurement of overall wealth such as the GDP that ought to be the measure of future options.
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References Anderson, T. L. and Leal, D. R. (2001) Free Market Environmentalism, rev. edn, New York: Palgrave. Aristotle (1984) The Politics, trans. C. Lord, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barry, J. (1999) Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue and Progress, London: Sage Publications. Barry, J and Wissenburg, M. (eds) (2001) Sustaining Liberal Democracy: Ecological Challenges and Opportunities, New York: Palgrave. Benton, T. (1999) ‘Sustainable Development and the Accumulation of Capital: Reconciling the Irreconcilable?’, in A. Dobson (ed.), Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernard, M. (1997) ‘Ecology, Political Economy and the Countermovement: Karl Polanyi and the Second Great Transformation’, in S. Gill and J. H. Mittelman (eds), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, S. (2001) The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Bhagwati, J. (1998) ‘The Case for Free Trade’, in K. Conca and G. D. Dabelko (eds), Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Block, F. (2001) ‘Introduction’, in K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Booth, W. J. (1994) ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy’, American Political Science Review, 88(3): 653–667. Christoff, P., Dryzek, J., Eckersley, R., Goodin, R. E. and Plumwood, V. (2001) ‘Symposium: Green Thinking from Australia’, Environmental Politics, 10(4): 85–103. Conca, K. (1998) ‘Rethinking the Ecology-Sovereignty Debate’, in K. Conca and G. D. Dabelko (eds), Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Daly, H. (2001) ‘Globalisation and Its Discontents’, Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 21(2–3): 17–21. Daly, H. E. and Cobb Jr., J. B. (1989) For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Boston: Beacon Press. De-Shalit, A. (2000) The Environment: Between Theory and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. S. (1996) Democracy in Capitalist Times, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach, Albany: State University of New York Press. —— (2001) ‘Greening the Nation-State’, a paper presented at the ECPR Workshop ‘The Nation-state and the Ecological Crisis: Sovereignty, Economy and Ecology’ in Grenoble, France, 6–11 April 2001. Online. Available at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ ecpr/jointsessions/grenoble/papers/ws6.htm (accessed 15 August 2003). Friedman, T. L. (1999) The Lexus and Olive Tree, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Gray, J. (1998) False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, New York: The New Press. Granovetter, M. (1985) ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, 91(3): 481–510. Hardin, G. (1968) ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162: 1243–1248. Hay, P. (2002) A Companion to Environmental Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches from Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lohmann, L. (1995) ‘Visitors to the Commons’, in B. R. Taylor (ed.), Ecological Resistance Movements, Albany: State University of New York Press. Manno, J. (2002) ‘Commoditization: Consumption Efficiency and an Economy of Care and Connection’, in T. Princen, M. Maniates and K. Conca (eds), Confronting Consumption, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Meyer, J. M. (2001) Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mendell, M. (2001) ‘A Karl Polanyi Revival’, Canadian Dimension, 35(2): 48–50. Mittelman, J. H. (ed.) (1997) Globalisation: Critical Reflections, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. —— (1998) ‘Globalisation and Environmental Resistance Politics’, Third World Quarterly, 19(5): 847–872. Norton, B. (1999) ‘Ecology and Opportunity: Intergenerational Equity and Sustainability Options’, in A. Dobson (ed.), Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, J. (1988) ‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1: 11–38. Oksanen, M. (2001) ‘Privatizing Genetic Resources: Biodiversity, Communities and Intellectual Property Rights’, in J. Barry and M. Wissenburg (eds), Sustaining Liberal Democracy: Ecological Challenges and Opportunities, New York: Palgrave. O’Neill, J. (1993) Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World, London: Routledge. Ophuls, W. (1997) Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ostrom, E., Dietz, T., Dolsak, N., Stern, P. C. Stovich, S. and Weber, E. U. (eds) (2002) The Drama of the Commons, Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Polanyi, K. ([1944] 1957) The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Boston: Beacon Press. —— (1968) Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. G. Dalton, Boston: Beacon Press. —— (1977) The Livelihood of Man, ed. H. W. Pearson, New York: Academic Press. Rodrick, D. (1998) ‘The Global Fix: A Plan to Save the World Economy’, The New Republic, 2 November: 17–19. Ruggie, J. G. (1982) ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization 36(2): 379–415. Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, New York: Harper & Row. Steger, M. B. (2002) Globalism: The New Market Ideology, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Taylor, B. R. (ed.) (1995) Ecological Resistance Movements, Albany: State University of New York Press. Torgerson, D. (1999) The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wapner, P. (1996) Environmental Action and World Civic Politics, Albany: State University of New York Press. Weiss, L. (1998) The Myth of the Powerless State, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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Worster, D. (1993) The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yack, B. (1988) ‘Liberalism and its Communitarian Critics: Does Liberal Practice “Live Down” to Liberal Theory?’, in C. Reynolds (ed.), Community in America: The Challenges of ‘Habits of the Heart’, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Reconceiving environmental justice Global movements and political theories1 David Schlosberg
The question I explore here starts off in a rather straightforward way: how can the demands of global movements for environmental justice, or movements that articulate environmental concerns in their arguments against globalisation, help in developing a definition of ‘environmental justice’ at the global level? Numerous political theorists have attempted to define environmental justice. My argument is that, given movement demands, and the theoretical innovations of some social justice theorists, most theories of environmental justice are inadequate. They are incomplete theoretically, as they remain tied solely to the distributive understanding of justice and fail to integrate concerns for recognition and political participation. They are also insufficient in practice, as they are not tied to the more thorough and integrated demands and expressions of global environmental justice movements. The central argument here is that a thorough notion of global environmental justice needs to be locally grounded, theoretically broad, and plural – encompassing recognition, distribution and participation.
Recognition and participation as elements of justice One of the key inadequacies of liberal theories of justice is their sole focus on fair processes for the distribution of goods and benefits. For Rawls (1971), in order to develop a right theory of justice, we are to step behind what he calls a veil of ignorance, to a place where we don’t know our own strengths and weaknesses or our own place in the grand social scheme of things. Without knowing your station in life, goes the argument, you’d come up with a particularly fair notion of justice that everyone could agree with: everyone would have the same political rights as everyone else, and economic and social inequality should benefit everyone, including the least well-off. Rawls represents the focal point of liberal justice theory: fair distributions away from any substantive agreement on what we each believe is ‘good’ – pictures of the good life. Brian Barry’s (1995) notion of justice is similar: we should agree on the rules of distributive justice while remaining impartial to different notions of the good life that individuals have.
Reconceiving environmental justice 103 This focus has been critiqued by other theorists, most forcefully by Iris Young (1990) and Nancy Fraser (1997, 1998, 2000, 2001). I find their approaches helpful in coming to understand what movements articulate about environmental justice. Young argues that while theories of distributive justice offer models and procedures by which distribution may be improved, none of them examines the social, cultural, symbolic and institutional conditions underlying poor distributions in the first place. Young is critical of the way distributive theories of justice take goods as static, rather than as outcomes of various social and institutional relations. The claim here is straightforward: ‘distributional issues are crucial to a satisfactory conclusion of justice, [but] it is a mistake to reduce social justice to distribution’ (Young 1990: 1). In moving towards justice issues of distribution are essential, but incomplete. Young’s simple but radical claim is that injustice is not based solely on inequitable distribution. Or, more to the point, there are clear reasons why some people get more than others. Part of the explanation is a lack of recognition of group difference. Young begins with the argument that if social differences exist, and are attached to both privilege and oppression, social justice requires an examination of those differences to undermine their effect upon distributive injustice. Young contends that a lack of recognition, demonstrated by various forms of insults, degradation and devaluation at both the individual and cultural level, inflicts damage to both oppressed communities and the image of those communities in the larger cultural and political realms. In this view, lack of recognition is the foundation for distributive injustice, and it is also an injustice because it constrains people and does them harm. Nancy Fraser’s project has focused on demonstrating that justice requires attention to both distribution and recognition. Fraser argues that culture is a legitimate, even necessary terrain of struggle – a sight of justice in its own right and deeply tied to economic inequality (2000: 109). As with Young, Fraser insists that we have to look at the ‘why’ of inequity in order to both understand and remedy it. Rawls and other liberal justice theorists focus on ideal schemes and processes of justice in liberal societies; Young and Fraser explore what the real impediments to such schemes are, and how they can be addressed.2 These theorists also note the direct link between a lack of respect and recognition and a decline in a person’s membership and participation in the greater community, including the political and institutional order. If you are not recognised, you don’t participate. In this respect, justice must focus on the political process as a way to address both the inequitable distribution of social goods and the conditions undermining social recognition. Democratic and participatory decision-making procedures are then both an element of, and a condition for, social justice (Young 1990: 23); they simultaneously challenge institutionalised exclusion, a social culture of misrecognition and current distributional patterns. While many traditional theorists have offered support for the notion of procedural justice (for example, Miller 1999), there has been quite a resistance to the argument for recognition as an element of justice. For reasons I really do not fully understand, some theorists see the discussion of recognition as a direct
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attack on the intellectual legacy of Rawls. Their response is usually that Rawls thought of it first, and incorporated the question of recognition into his distributive paradigm. So the first objection is that, simply put, recognition is not a distinct issue of justice. The claim is that recognition is an inherent precondition for distributive justice. Equality of persons, which is at the centre of liberal theories of justice, starts with an assumption of equal respect for all citizens. Rawls calls self-respect a primary good (1971: 440), even, perhaps ‘the main primary good’ (p. 544, although that was dropped to the end of a list of five in 1993: 181). Rawls (1971: 440) notes many of the same psychological needs attached to recognition as later theorists such as Taylor and Honneth. He insists that selfrespect is both a precondition and a result of his two principles of justice (1993: 318–320). So it is clear that respect is crucial to Rawls and his theory of justice. Miller (2003) also seems quite sympathetic to the arguments for recognition and the respect that comes with it, but he argues, following Rawls, that respect and dignity are preconditions for distributive justice. After all, one must be recognised and respected to be included behind the veil of ignorance, and one’s station – whatever it may be – is also implicitly recognised in the original position. Miller claims that recognition is also an integral part of procedural justice. So given recognition’s inclusion in the definition of ideal types of distribution and/or participation, Miller dismisses the key claim of recognition as a distinct category of justice. Here he represents the position of many liberal theories where recognition is assumed, and subsumed, within the distributive or procedural spheres of justice. The upshot here is that some theorists argue that recognition and respect are accounted for in theory. But no pragmatic discussion of recognition is offered, and no link between the lack of recognition and existing maldistributions is presented, as is the case in Young and Fraser. It might be argued by distributive justice theorists that if distributional ideals were implemented – if, say, all communities were exposed to the same amount of environmental risk – no matter their race, class or socio-cultural status – then those communities would not be demanding ‘recognition’, as that recognition would be a precondition of the just distribution. The response to such a claim is that without recognition (and not just self-respect, but social respect), such an ideal distribution will never occur. Justice, in theory, may happen in isolation, neutrality or behind a veil of ignorance, but that is simply not the case in practice. If the interest is about attaining justice, rather than attaining a sound theory of justice, recognition is central to the question and the resolution – and is not simply to be assumed. Again, the point here is that a study of justice needs to focus on the reasons and processes behind and determining maldistribution; recognition, or the lack thereof, is key. Perhaps the animosity shown towards recognition comes from a misunderstanding of its status in a larger theory of justice. Young may have initiated this misunderstanding by calling the first chapter of her 1990 book ‘Displacing the Distributive Paradigm’. Young and Fraser’s early argument on the relative importance of distribution vs recognition may have added to the impression that
Reconceiving environmental justice 105 it was to be a choice between one or the other, and liberal theorists may have been concerned that Taylor and Honneth discuss recognition without substantive reference to distributional aspects of justice. But let me be very clear here: justice demands attention be paid to recognition, distribution and participation simultaneously. They are three interlinking, overlapping areas of concern. Fraser is very clear that recognition is an element of justice, to be considered alongside distributional and participatory issues – moving from a bivalent to a ‘trivalent’ conception of justice. Neither Young, Fraser, nor I, am arguing for a rejection of the distributional approach or for subsuming it under recognition. But just as distributional theorists don’t want their key concern subsumed in a theory of justice focused upon recognition, recognition cannot simply be subsumed, or assumed, in a theory of distribution. This is a common response of those caught in the distributional paradigm: recognition is just another thing to be distributed. I have two responses to this. First, most distributional theorists see recognition as a precondition of entry into a distributional system. I’ve noted that Rawls and Miller assume recognition as an inherent trait of just relations. But one cannot argue that recognition is both inherent/presumed in a distributional system and something to be distributed by those systems; if it is to be distributed, it can not be previously assumed. To start, the status of those distributed to (or not) must be addressed. The key is not to assume recognition, but to address it. I am not arguing that states, for example, cannot distribute recognition in some respects – they can, to some extent (for example, by extending the franchise or implementing affirmative action programmes). But that recognition is not only a good; it is also a precondition of membership in the political community. Second, recognition is just not a ‘thing’ to be distributed, but a relationship and a social norm. Theories of distributive justice focus on the state as a neutral arbiter, but ‘recognition’ cannot simply be distributed as, say, education or housing assistance. A state may set an example of recognising a socially demeaned group, but recognition must happen as much in the social, cultural and symbolic realms as in the institutional realm. The state may implement affirmative action, but the social recognition of currently misrecognised and politically excluded communities is a broader issue. In other words, the concept of justice as recognition moves beyond a focus on the state alone for remedies, and brings justice theory squarely into the political space beyond the state. The problem with liberal theories of justice is that recognition, and its link to distribution and to participation, is under-theorised. In the nearly thirty-five years since Rawls’ opus Theory of Justice, we have seen the growth of a microindustry within political theory dedicated to justice as fairness, impartiality, models of distribution and the like – but little on what even Rawls admits is key to the distributional concern – respect and recognition. That recognition is an element of justice should be uncontroversial; that it has been neglected should be admitted. The claim here is that justice is a balance of three key interlinked elements. Thankfully, movements for environmental justice have offered a picture of just such a balanced approach.
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Movement definitions of justice Bearing in mind this theoretical dispute regarding the realms of justice, I turned to environmental justice movements to examine how they articulate their concerns. The literature and demands of global and US environmental justice movements reveal that these movements are less enthralled with defining justice as solely distributional than are most theorists. A critique of the distribution of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ is certainly central to environmental justice movements, but unlike liberal theorists, such movements offer a more expansive and pragmatic notion of justice. In the USA, distribution is the ever-present key issue, but it is always tied to recognition and political participation (Schlosberg 2003). The same goes for global movements. The most obvious and oft-cited evidence of environmental injustice is distributive – the inequitable share of environmental ills with which poor communities, indigenous communities and communities of colour must live. Here, the call for ‘environmental justice’ focuses on how the distribution of environmental risks mirrors the inequity in socio-economic and cultural status. But while distributional inequity is crucial for the environmental justice movement, so is recognition. Environmental justice activists often see themselves as outside the cultural mainstream, as individuals whose identities are devalued. Recognition (or the lack of it) is experienced and discussed both at the personal level and at the level of community. The construction of inclusive, participatory decision-making institutions is at the centre of environmental justice demands. Environmental justice activists call for policy-making procedures that encourage active community participation, institutionalise public participation, recognise community knowledge and utilise cross-cultural formats and exchanges to enable the participation of as many diverse groups as exist in a community. Environmental justice groups demand a ‘place at the table’ and the right to ‘speak for ourselves’. The demand for authentic, community-based participation comes out of the experience of disenfranchisement. To challenge a range of cultural, political and structural obstacles constructed out of cultural degradation, political oppression and lack of political access, communities now are demanding a voice and authentic participation. In what follows, I will illustrate how justice has been addressed in recent actions against the most visible institutions of the new global economy (the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), in initiatives for food autonomy and security and in movements for indigenous rights in both the North and South. These movements encompass notions of environmental justice because in each of the individual foci, part of what is to be distributed are environmental goods and bads, part of what is to be recognised are cultural ways of living with nature, and one aspect of participatory demands relate to environmental decision-making. Equity is at the centre of protests against global financial and trade institutions, against the globalisation of the food system and for indigenous rights. The basic critique is that the current model of development exacerbates inequity,
Reconceiving environmental justice 107 both between the North and the South and between elites and the impoverished in Southern nations, not just in economic terms, but in terms of environmental goods and bads also. Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch (1999), one of the major organisers of events related to the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 and after, makes the point clearly: ‘the WTO has contributed to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich few, increasing poverty for the majority of the world’s population’. Questions regarding who benefits and at whose expense, as well as a demand for an account of the full costs of trade to communities, workers and nature, are key. This is illustrated in Global Exchange’s ‘Top Ten Reasons to Oppose the IMF’ (Global Exchange 2000a). Here, another leading NGO of the recent protests argues that the IMF ‘caters to wealthy countries and Wall Street’ while increasing poverty and hurting workers, women and the environment. Likewise, the movements for democratic food security and indigenous rights criticise the systems and processes that deprive people of their land-based livelihood while enriching others, particularly large corporations based in the North. They point out that the core institutions of new world economy promote an inequitable distribution of economic goods and social and environmental bads. Social, environmental and ecological justice are tied together in these critiques, as the poor suffer both social and environmental inequity and nature is drained of resources for economic gain. This distributional element of the injustice of economic globalisation is clear enough, and much has been written on the issue.3 But equity is not the only aspect of justice addressed by groups who identify with the call for environmental justice. Other critiques relate to the relationship between social, cultural and ecological devastation and to the lack of democratic participation in the construction and ongoing processes of governing institutions. There are many references in the critical literature to the danger of a growing global monoculture. This is not just a critique of the singular vision of neoliberal globalisation, but a lament for the present and coming loss of diverse cultures. The call for justice is thus also a call for recognition and preservation of diverse cultures, identities, economies and ways of knowing. The argument is that a process of homogenisation both contributes to the breakdown of the cultural and social networks in local communities and also destroys the essence and meaning of local cultures. An anti-WTO declaration by the Indian group Peoples’ Global Action (1999) makes this position clear: This unaccountable and notoriously undemocratic body called the WTO has the potential not only to suck the sweat and blood of the masses of the two-thirds of the world, but also has started destroying our natural habitats, and traditional agricultural and other knowledge systems developed over centuries and our cultural diversity by converting us into objects . . . . Certainly, a lack of recognition of local cultural identities is a key problem of the WTO specifically and the globalising economy more generally, from the perspective of NGOs such as Peoples’ Global Action.
108 Environmental politics Part of the injustice wrought by the WTO is thus a lack of recognition, and thus a destruction, of various cultural identities, including ties to the land.4 Vandana Shiva has spent much of the past few years criticising the links between economic globalisation and cultural threats, specifically the development of the global food supply system and its effects on local communities.5 Shiva (1997; 2000) identifies a link between food diversity and cultural diversity; many cultures are defined by their diet – for example, some are rice-based, others cereal-based or millet-based. Globalisation of the food supply destroys local production and market practices, and local cultural identity suffers. Shiva cites the example of different Indian regions being defined in part by the base cooking oil used (which differs according to the local flora); the ban on the local production of oil and the move to imported soybean oil was, for Shiva, an outright attack on diverse local cultures, practices and identities. Another injustice of the globalisation of the food system is the destruction of local farming systems by a singular, corporate and highly-engineered process. For example, local seed banks not only preserve biodiversity, but cultural diversity as well. Monocropping with seeds owned and controlled by multinational seed corporations destroys not only a livelihood (and a sustainable one at that), but also the ways of life of various regional peoples and cultures. In this view, globalisation creates ‘development’ and ‘growth’ through the destruction of the local environment, culture and sustainable ways of living. Cultural recognition is central to the attainment of social and environmental justice by indigenous movements. For many native American and other indigenous activists around the world, the defence of community is nothing less than a matter of cultural survival. Winona La Duke, a leading native American activist (and past Green Party Vice Presidential candidate), cites sovereignty and cultural survival as key reasons for her involvement in the environmental justice movement (Di Chiro 1992: 117). Native American activists have ‘a genocidal analysis rooted in the Native American cultural identification, the experience of colonialism, and the imminent endangerment of their culture’ (Krauss 1994: 267). For activists interviewed in another study of indigenous and Chicana women in the US southwest, threats ‘to the environment are interpreted as threats to their families and communities’. They see ‘toxic contamination of their communities as systematic genocide’ (Bretting and Prindeville 1998: 149). Peña (1999: 6) argues that to ‘the extent that we construct our identities in place, whenever the biophysical conditions of a place are threatened, undermined, or radically transformed, we also see these changes as attacks on our identity and personal integrity’ (original emphasis). The same argument holds for other indigenous movements. The U’wa campaign to stop oil drilling on traditional indigenous lands in Colombia links the expected environmental damage to the cultural destruction of the U’wa. Communiqués publicised through the Rainforest Action Network6 focus on this very issue. The U’wa rejected the Colombian government’s support of Occidental Petroleum, ‘whose plan seeks to subdue the U’wa culture by
Reconceiving environmental justice 109 spearheading an oil exploration project on our ancestral territory’. Culture and cultural sovereignty are the primary things to be defended. The Coordinating Body for the Indigenous People’s Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) insists that both governments and NGOs ‘must recognise the existence of the population’ indigenous to the region (quoted in Conca and Dabelko 1998: 338). Indigenous groups such as COICA work to get both governments and NGOs to understand that nature is not empty and devoid of peoples and culture. A vision of the natural world devoid of the indigenous peoples that populate it simply makes those cultures invisible. COICA’s statement is full of demands for cultural recognition, autonomy and respect for indigenous laws and practices. The group insists that a recognition of the cultures of the region leads to an acceptance of indigenous organisations as legitimate and equal partners (Conca and Dabelko 1998: 342). In the foregoing cases recognition is identified as the first step towards justice. The argument is that ways of life are being lost, and that they are lost because of a failure of recognition, which leads to their devaluation as ways of life. This is an issue of recognition, not simply one of equity. In all of the cases outlined above, justice also includes participation in environmental and other issues. In fact, the most common critique of the WTO, IMF and World Bank after inequity is that of the lack of meaningful participation offered to the public, various opponents or even to the nations of the South in both the everyday practices of the organisations and their meetings and negotiations. A statement signed by over 1120 organisations from 87 countries, and published by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch (1999), includes crucial issues regarding participation: WTO ‘rules and procedures are undemocratic, nontransparent and non-accountable and have operated to marginalise the majority of the world’s people’. The statement calls for a review of WTO policies and impacts, with the full participation of civil society. One of the under-reported events at the 1999 WTO conference was the rebellion of many smaller and Southern nations. ‘We came here with high expectations from our countries in the Caribbean’, said Clement Rohee, Guyana’s minister of foreign affairs. ‘We are very much disappointed over the fact that coming from small economies we ended up with a situation where we are totally marginalised in a process that has been virtually hijacked by the more wealthy developed countries.’7 Global Exchange (2000b: 2) argued that ‘developing countries have relatively little power within the institution, which through the programs and policies they decide to finance, have tremendous impact throughout local economies and societies’. These nations are suffering not only growing impoverishment as a result of the inequitable policies of these institutions, but also from decreasing control over global decisions regarding their own economies, including their environments and natural resources. These criticisms were central to the breakdown of negotiations at Cancun 2003. The lack of democratic participation is also a major part of Shiva’s critique of the current transition of food production from the local to the global. The injustice is not just that cultures and ways of life are ignored, dismissed, disrespected
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and ultimately destroyed; it is also key that local communities have no say in this process. Shiva’s conclusion in Stolen Harvest is a demand – expressed, she argues, by citizens’ movements North and South – for democratic control over the food system (2000: 117). Food democracy is ‘the new agenda for ecological sustainability and social justice’ (2000: 18). Beyond simply identifying that demands for social and environmental justice include elements of equity, recognition and participation, this brief exploration of articulations of global environmental justice indicates that these elements are thoroughly intertwined. It is not simply that the environmental justice of political practice includes equity, recognition and participation; the environmental justice movement represents an integration of these elements into a broad call for justice. In fact, I fail to discuss calls for participation by indigenous groups because I simply could not separate out such calls from the calls for recognition. For the indigenous movements equity, recognition and participation are intricately interwoven. In both the U’wa and COICA cases noted above, the indigenous organisations insist not only on cultural recognition, but also on the democratic and participatory rights that come with that recognition. Kiefer and Benjamin (1993) note that in a 1992 meeting of NGOs dedicated to indigenous issues, a list of critical needs was developed; these included attention to existing indigenous knowledge and skills in relation to nature, representation at various levels of government and respect for indigenous self-government. Indigenous nations in North America argue that there are numerous barriers to participation by indigenous peoples in environmental governance. ‘These obstacles preclude the articulation and acceptance of Indigenous knowledge’ (Borrows 1997: 426). Borrows argues that introducing indigenous ways of knowing nature would not only expand participation, but also demonstrate the ‘socially constructed notions of space’ and the cultural contingency of these ways of knowing the land. In other words, broadening participation would bring a recognition of, and validity to, diverse ways of understand and valuing (in numerous senses) the land. Likewise, in the case of the transition of food production, the affront to culture and the violation of basic democratic processes are linked in that there is a direct relationship between the destruction of local cultural practices, the domination of food production systems and the lack of local participation. In the WTO/IMF/World Bank case, the critique is again based on the threefold nature of justice. Equity is again central, but the critique also encompasses the destruction of nature and culture, as well as existing modes of relation between the two – and the lack of democratic participation in the planning of development. Protesters from Seattle to Cancun were quite clear that they would not be satisfied with minimal participation – a seat at the table or participation in an unempowered working group on one issue or another. The current development model cannot be ‘fixed’ simply by letting some individuals speak at WTO meetings, as that would not guarantee full participation, let alone the recognition and validation of other cultures or ways of living or economic equity. There is a direct link between justice as equity, cultural recognition, and democratic
Reconceiving environmental justice 111 participation; focusing on one notion at the expense of others simply cannot satisfy the three-fold nature of justice sought by the movement. The point here is that the forms of injustice are intricately linked, and all must be addressed simultaneously. Improved participatory mechanisms may help meliorate both other forms of injustice; but those forms of injustice must be addressed in order to improve participation. Justice, then, requires not just an understanding of unjust distribution and a lack of recognition, but, more importantly, the way the two are tied together in political and social processes.8 These notions and experiences of injustice are not competing notions, nor are they contradictory or antithetical. Inequitable distribution, a lack of recognition and limited participation all work to produce injustice, and claims for justice are integrated into a comprehensive political project in the global environmental justice movement.
The inadequacy of environmental justice theory Given theoretical and movement calls to extend analyses of justice beyond distribution, and the implication that three dimensions of justice need to be integrated, theories of environmental and ecological justice have been disappointing to date. David Miller recently explored the environmental implications of justice theory (Miller 1999). He examined the possibility of including environmental goods along with other primary goods in calculations of distributive justice. Miller concludes by dividing environmental goods into three categories. There are some environmental goods that can be easily attached to other primary goods. Ill health, caused by pollution, for example, would reduce the value of, and access to, other primary goods. There are other environmental goods about which we can generate, through democratic procedure, enough public agreement that they would not generate issues of distributive justice. And finally, there are environmental goods that are valued differently by different people; these would have to be counted as primary goods only by those who value them as such. Miller argues that a form of cost–benefit analysis would be a crucial, if difficult, way to measure the desire, the losses and the willingness of the public to pay for environmental goods. Humphrey (2003) takes Miller to task for this last issue; he argues that irreplaceable losses should be an important part of any such calculus, thus tipping the scale in favour of preservation. Still, there are limits to the whole debate over what environmental goods should be considered, and how, in distributional considerations. Certainly, it is an interesting debate within distributional environmental justice – and it does move beyond the environmental ethicists’ insistence on the intrinsic value of nature. Yet all of this misses broader issues of environmental justice: the articulations of those losing traditional relationships with an endangered natural world. To these movements, justice is not simply about categorising environmental goods or debating whether they should be included in a calculus of distributive justice; rather, at issue is the preservation of a way of life that relates to nature in a
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particular way. Self-determination is the issue most often raised among them. And while even distributive justice theorists such as Miller might agree with this principle in a scheme of global justice (2003: 367), it is the recognition of various identities and cultural practices which is crucial to gaining that selfdetermination and, thus, procedural justice. The closest that distributional theorists of justice get to the arguments of environmental justice movements is in the discussion of future generations of humans (for example, Barry 1999; de-Shalit 1995). But those arguments do not address the issue raised by movements for the recognition of particular ways of life and ways of relating to nature. Rather, the point of the focus on future generations is to find a way of using liberal theories of distributional justice to justify the protection of the natural world. Environmental philosophers may use the argument that nature has intrinsic value, but liberal justice theorists must avoid such a claim, lest they enter the liberal no-fly zone of individual notions of the good. Rather, the argument is made that we need to leave future generations of humans the same range of opportunities for the good life that we ourselves have. While this is an admirable way of opening up a theory in a direction many thought it could not go, it remains squarely limited to the distributive paradigm – and distant from many of the demands and articulations of movement groups. Unfortunately, the framing of justice in solely distributive terms has also thoroughly captured Andy Dobson’s otherwise groundbreaking attempt to find common ground between social justice and environmental sustainability. Dobson begins with the claim that ‘all justice is distributive’, and argues that issues of respect are simply not issues of justice, as they go beyond distribution. As such, he does not address key issues of how identity, recognition and political process play into environmental justice. Dobson agrees with the Brundtland Report in its claim that ‘inequality is the planet’s main “environmental” problem’ (WCED 1987: 6; Dobson 1998: 14). He offers a comprehensive examination of the relationship between distributive justice and environmental sustainability. He takes apart various elements of the distributive model proposed by a wealth of authors in political and social theory, examining the ‘community’ of justice (dispensers and recipients), what is distributed, the principles of distribution (utility, need, desert, entitlement, etc.), and whether the theory is partial or impartial, proceduralist or consequentialist, and particular or universal. Dobson’s goal is to compare possible relationships between different views of distributive justice and ideas regarding environmental sustainability, with an eye towards discovering some compatibility; he finds very little common ground however. Dobson’s work is much more of an examination than a prescription, as it explores the relationships between the discourses of distributive justice and environmental sustainability. The comparisons are exhaustive, and the myriad relations make for a complex, albeit illuminating, matrix. Still, by remaining in the distributive paradigm, Dobson misses important realms of justice examined by theorists such as Young and Fraser, as well as notions articulated under the broad banner of the environmental justice movement – including those of academics and activists he cites in his text. This needlessly limits the possible
Reconceiving environmental justice 113 convergences between social justice and environmental sustainability. If one’s main concern is the lack of discourse between environmentalists and social justice activists, it seems counterproductive to ignore additional theoretical and discursive realms where the two might find something to talk about. Low and Gleeson (1998) offer another comprehensive examination of distributive environmental justice. Unfortunately, like Dobson, they also are unable to move beyond the distributive paradigm, and proudly so: ‘The distribution of environmental quality is the core of “environmental justice” – with the emphasis on distribution’ (1998: 133). Through their analysis of notions of justice, Low and Gleeson develop two key principles of environmental justice (p. 156), three ‘rules of thumb’ (pp. 156–157) and two international environmental institutions along the lines of Held’s cosmopolitan democracy (p. 191).9 But Low and Gleeson also miss the opportunity to move beyond a narrow conception of distributive justice. This is especially frustrating given the fact that their two key principles of environmental justice (‘Every natural entity is entitled to enjoy the fullness of its own form of life’, and ‘all life forms are mutually dependent and dependent on non-life forms’) are not focused on distribution. They are really about recognising and respecting: (1) the potential of nature and; (2) the dependence of humans on the realisation of this potential in nature. While they proudly declare their adherence to a tradition of distributive justice, these central principles demonstrate the centrality of cultural practices and beliefs that lead to the distribution of environmental ills – and the centrality of recognition in addressing those ills. Again, I am not arguing that we replace a concern with distribution with a focus on recognition; but we also simply cannot discuss recognition in distributive terms. There is an intimate connection between recognition and distributive justice, yet we cannot just collapse one into the other. We may be able to discuss a poor ‘distribution’ of recognition, but we cannot address or remedy that lack solely on distributional grounds; such a task lies outside the realm of distributive justice. Low and Gleeson are also supportive of political participation as a means to achieve environmental justice – they clearly make links between participation, inclusive procedures and public discourse on the road to environmental justice. Yet these realisations are not incorporated into their ideal principles or practices of ecological justice; the focus is on global, cosmopolitan institutions rather than those at the local, community level. Finally, Low and Gleeson acknowledge the contextual and cultural bases of the meanings of both of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘justice’ (pp. 46, 48, 67), but cannot bring this notion of cultural difference into their definition of either environmental or ecological justice. Justice is understood as a ‘universal moral relationship we share with other humans’, but one that ‘has to be interpreted through culturally specific institutions which will vary’ (p. 67). They seem to see the importance of acknowledging the variety of cultural contexts from which meaning is derived, and insist that autonomy is a key principle of justice (p. 199). Yet Low and Gleeson are blinded by their fear of ‘postmodernism’, which they equate with relativism. Acceptance of different notions of justice, to them,
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means accepting that ‘your conceptions of justice are true for you, in your cultural context, but mine are true in my context’; this makes justice ‘meaningless’ (p. 197). There is no middle ground; there is only universalism or relativism. No matter that this supposed dichotomy has been denied from William James (1909) to Richard Bernstein (1983) and, most recently, by David Miller (1999, 2003). Low and Gleeson, in their focus on justice in the distributive paradigm, fail to see the possibility of engagement across notions of justice – something crucial to notions of justice as recognition and political process. As I will argue, there is still the possibility of unity on notions of environmental justice, even if there is not uniformity of cultural definitions of the term.
Theoretical plurality and movement strategy This leaves us with two practical questions: 1 2
How can we reconcile diverse understandings of environmental justice in the political and theoretical realms? How can such reconciliation assist environmental justice movements in attempts to actually attain environmental justice?
A critical pluralism offers us one framework for thinking about both global social justice and environmental justice. Most justice theorists call themselves pluralist, in that they accept a variety of notions of the good – we can see this in relation to different ways of understanding and relating to both human communities and nature. Some are also ‘contextualist’ – seeing different principles of justice as applicable in different situations. Miller (2003: 350), for example, argues that principles of justice should be developed depending on the social make-up of those making the claim and on the relationship they have with other parties in a justice dispute. The principle articulated by environmental justice movements partly derives from the claims of particular types of social groups (such as indigenous communities) or their relationship with states or the international community. It also derives from the lack of recognition by powerful international and business organisations such as the World Bank, WTO or Occidental Petroleum. Thus a broad contextualist approach works here – there may be certain principles of justice that apply in different types of situations, or groups may apply different emphases in those situations. Such contextualisation is broader than Miller or other pluralists allow.10 Peter Wenz used this approach in an early discussion on environmental justice. For Wenz (1988), pluralistic notions of justice are theoretically welcome. Environmental justice, he argues, is understood in numerous ways, depending on context. Wenz sees value in our being ‘attracted to using one theory in one kind of situation and a different theory in a different kind of situation’ (1988: 313). He argues that we need a pluralistic theory of environmental justice ‘that enables us to appeal in a consistent manner to principles featured in a variety of
Reconceiving environmental justice 115 theories, even when those principles can not all be reduced to or derived from a single master principle’. Wenz resurrects a classic notion of pluralistic philosophy, best articulated by William James. For James (1909), pluralism is not just a validation of difference which comes from various contexts, but a recognition that difference may never come together into a coherent, single, social unity. Connections can be made in the pluralistic universe without recourse to an insistence on uniformity; the result is what James calls a ‘multiverse’ rather than a universe.11 This contextualist and pluralist approach works as a movement strategy also. Environmental justice groups and organisations address differing and multiple, yet integrated, notions of justice. Simply put, priorities change according to context; so too, then, do articulations of grievances and strategies. This may be both a theoretical and a practical reality, but the question then becomes one of strategy. Can such a diverse movement with varied notions of justice, many of which are locally centred, retain its cohesion as a movement and accomplish its stated aims? There have been limited, albeit varied, responses to the question, and there seems to be more support for the notion of plurality in the theoretical realm than in the realm of political action. Like Wenz, but with a focus on the existing practice of the environmental justice movement, David Harvey alludes to the importance of recognising the varied notions of environmental justice – though not entirely in a positive light. He moves beyond the purely distributive, noting approvingly the refusal of the US environmental justice movement to cast the discussion in monetary terms alone (1996: 388). Equity may be about costs and benefits, but justice is broader. The use of identity-based arguments for recognition, including those of various racial and indigenous groups, is apt under the circumstances, argues Harvey. While Harvey is one of the few theorists to admit recognition into an understanding of environmental justice, he sees something amiss in the plurality it might bring about. A plural movement confronts us ‘with a plurality of theories of justice, all equally plausible and all equally lacking in one way or another’ (1996: 398). Harvey sees the initial justification and necessity of local and particular battles with their different readings of justice but, he argues, they are ultimately contradictory and the movement cannot be successful without forming a single universal critique and definition of environmental justice. Harvey (p. 400) wants the movement to ‘create a more transcendent and universal politics’ which has to ‘transcend particularity’; he insists on a move from the multiple and particular to the singular and universal. The local must be transcended and replaced. Harvey’s justification for this view is that a movement for environmental justice must ‘confront the realities of global power politics . . . not simply with dispersed, autonomous, localised, and essentially communitarian solutions’, but with a ‘more complex politics’ and a more ‘rational ordering of activities’ (p. 400). Harvey does not examine the possibility that such dispersed and localised notions could actually take on both the discourse and power of global
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capital; he does not see that such a decentralised – ideologically and physically – movement could have such an effect.12 I (and I believe many in environmental justice movements also) agree with Harvey that environmental justice will be achieved only by ‘confronting the fundamental underlying processes (and their associated power structures, social relations, institutional configurations, discourses and belief systems) that generate environmental and social injustices’ (p .401). But such a confrontation need not come at the expense of the localised, particular places where that power and injustice are experienced, known and resisted.13 It may be the lament of traditional socialists, but there is no single megamachine with a single master ‘off ’ switch to be thrown by a singularly unified opposition. If Foucault (1978, 1980) taught us anything, it is that power is multiple, and arises everywhere in everyday situations and must constantly be resisted where it is experienced. It is no different with (in)justice. The environmental justice movement can be unified, but it cannot be uniform. The insistence on uniformity will limit the diversity of stories of injustice, the multiple forms it takes and the variety of solutions it calls for. The movement demonstrates the power of what Mary Parker Follett (1918) called a ‘unity without uniformity’ as it illustrates environmental justice on so many dimensions simultaneously. Follett’s conception is fairly straightforward and substantiates the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. She discussed a form of unity that would have people recognise differences rather than dismiss them by differentiating quite clearly the terms ‘unity’ and ‘uniformity’. ‘Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.’ Uniformity, she argued, was absorptive, rather than inclusive. Follett’s is a salad bowl metaphor, rather than a melting pot; she used ‘good words’ such as compound and harmonise, as opposed to ‘bad words’ like fuse and melt (p. 29). There is no contradiction, in this form of unity, between unity and differentiation; in fact, heterogeneity is the only way to construct unity, Follett argued (p. 40). The environmental justice movement demonstrates the power of a unity without uniformity. The issues that I have discussed regarding resistance to the global economy, the globalisation of food production and the continued disregard for indigenous rights illustrate both the diverse ways issues such as equity, recognition and participation are articulated and the possibility for unity across this diversity. The environmental justice movement has been successful in bringing together such disparate issues and experiences of injustice behind a unified, but not uniform, banner. An insistence on uniformity behind that banner, to an identity, critique or singular programme, is not only counter to the movement itself, but is also a violation of justice as based in recognition and democratic process. It is also a denial of the plural and contextualist understanding of justice. It is important that environmental justice organising has never been about establishing a major, single NGO based in Washington DC or London or anywhere. Environmental justice organising has always been network-based, and those networks have recognition and democratic process at their core.14 Nor has environmental justice ever been about one issue, outlook, critique, demand or strategy. Unity comes with the
Reconceiving environmental justice 117 recognition of both similarities and differences, and an understanding of how different contexts define various groups. The key visual for me was a march during the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle; side by side were US labour unions, US and global environmental NGOs and groups representing the interests of developing nations in the South. Such unity had not been seen before, yet there was obviously no uniformity there, in either critique or reconstructive propositions. Recognition of other communities, and their right to participate, was central to such an event. I believe Wenz (1988: 2) is helpful when arguing that it is important to understand different peoples’ interpretation or principles of justice – this helps us to understand others. The plurality argument necessitates engagement across these differences. Getting others to understand your experience and framework, and vice versa, is how pluralistic notions are learned, understood, recognised and accepted. This is the difference between a pluralism based on simple acceptance and toleration and a critical pluralism based on more thorough recognition and mutual engagement.15 Such engagement is related to the necessity of combining recognition with participation in achieving environmental justice. Wenz developed what he calls a ‘concentric circle’ theory of environmental justice, where we give moral priority to those closer to us – family for example – and less priority for those further away – foreigners or other species. This makes sense because we engage more with those closest to us. The problem with such a theory is that it is difficult to identify with and argue for justice for those peripheral to the centre of our own circles. The actions of the global environmental justice movement seem to counter this distance. The point of communicating diverse battles, even those emanating from different continents or in the depths of rainforests, is to give those far from, or different from, ourselves a voice and to acknowledge their situation. The explosion of diverse discourses of injustice, the availability of these discourses via the Web, alternative media or mainstream media, and the attention brought to the diversity of environmental injustices through the actions of international civil society, forges empathy, recognition and unity – even across great distances. This was one of the key lessons of the WTO protests in Seattle. Diverse people came with different stories of injustice, with varying emphases on equity, recognition and/or participation. It was common to see those with different experiences of environmental injustice sharing stories; this is important in NGO meetings that have been part of trade protests. Through participation and recognition – two key elements of justice – those who were distant and many circles away (using Wenz’s analogy) became much closer.16 This engagement is what brought unity to many of the diverse groups in attendance. Insisting on ‘transcending’ those experiences would surely be one way to destroy the tentative unity without uniformity as developed in the recent protests.
Conclusions I have argued that justice is a concept with multiple, integrated meanings. A singular focus on justice as distribution only is not merely limited in theory but
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cannot encompass the broad and diverse demands for justice made by the global environmental justice movement. Demands for the recognition of cultural identity and for full participatory democratic rights are integral parts of demands for justice and they cannot be separated from distribution. A look at the global environmental justice movement not only illustrates this, but also demonstrates the limits of insistence on a universalism or uniformity in movements. The global environmental justice movement embodies the potential of a comprehensive, integrated movement for justice in multiple, overlapping forms. But another point of this exercise is that theorists of environmental justice must take a closer look at the justice demanded by those in civil society in order to comprehend fully the diverse and integrated nature of environmental justice in practice. Environmental justice movements have been challenging the discourse of development in the streets, in the media, and in the halls of the institutions of the global economy. But they also challenge our own discourse of justice in academia, and we would do well to listen in.
Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2004 in Environmental Politics (13 (3): 517–540). I want to thank Jouni Paavola, Ian Lowe and participants of the Reconceiving Environmental Values workshop for helpful feedback. Thanks also to Andy Dobson and the anonymous referees for Environmental Politics for their insightful assistance. Revisions to this chapter were done while I was a Fulbright Fellow in the Social and Political Theory Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; I thank both the SPT Program and the Australian-American Fulbright Commission for their support. 2 There are different ways to define the concept of recognition. For Honneth and Taylor, the concept is based on the psychological necessity of the authentic recognition of others. For Honneth, our own dignity is linked to the recognition that we receive from others; for Taylor, recognition is a vital human need. For both, nonrecognition, misrecognition or malrecognition can inflict psychological harm and prevent individuals’ full participation in a community of citizens. Fraser relaxes the dependence on the psychological state of individuals and focuses on the social status of individuals and communities. Recognition needs to be treated as a ‘status injury’ (Fraser 1998: 25), based in social relations rather than individual psychology. Such a focus leads us to examine whether or not individuals have full membership in the social and political realms. Injustice still comes from misrecognition, but misrecognition due to institutionalised subordination. For examinations of recognition as an element of justice see, for example, Fraser (1997, 1998, 2000, 2001); Honneth (1992, 1995, 2001); Lash and Featherstone (2001); Taylor (1994); Young (1990, 2000). 3 See, for example, Greider (1996) or essays in Mander and Goldsmith (1996), as well as the websites of the leading NGOs involved in the protests: www.globalexchange. org, www.citizen.org/trade and www.ourworldisnotforsale.org. 4 Here we come to another key issue needing further theorising by liberal justice theory. Liberal theories were designed to allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good; here, however, the claim is group conceptions, and ways of life. Kymlicka, among others (Kymlicka 1995, 1996, 2001; Shapiro and Kymlicka 2000), has addressed this issue of cultural preservation and loss at length, with reference to justice, citizenship and group rights. The application of these theoretical discussions to community preservation issues in the global environmental justice movement is a
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5 6 7 8
9
10 11 12
13 14 15 16
necessary project, although this is not the place for an extended discussion. I will merely reiterate that the key conceptual issue here is not simply the loss of any particular cultural practices, but the lack of recognition of communities demonstrating sustainable ways of life, communities defined and dismissed as backwards or primitive and so excluded from participation in distributional schemes. Yet even if the practices were unsustainable, the issue of recognition would remain. Reversing the example here, environmental groups in the US Pacific Northwest eventually moved from disparaging logging communities to recognising their concerns; together, they then came to recognise each other’s dedication to the land and forests and often designed mutually agreeable transition strategies. Recognition can be granted to a community without agreeing with their communal conception of the good. So aside from the key issue of group/community ways of life, recognition still plays a vital role in bringing participation and, hopefully, distributional justice as well. See, for example, Shiva (1997, 2000), along with various publications at www. vshiva.net. Information on the U’wa/Occidental Petroleum battle is available at www.ran. org/ran_campaigns/beyond_oil/oxy/. Occidental announced in May 2002 that it would pull out of its claim on U’wa lands. Quoted in World Trade Observer, 3 December 1999, p. 1. This daily was published in print and online during the Seattle WTO meetings; it is now archived at http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/Research/academic.htm. There are some differences between Fraser and Young on this integration, especially regarding Young’s desire to downplay distribution and Fraser’s concern that inequitable distribution is at the heart of the oppression Young addresses. See Fraser (1997: Ch 8) for his discussion of Young. Interestingly, Low and Gleeson’s pragmatic and incremental solutions for both environmental and ecological justice focus on global political institutions rather than on organisation in civil society (where, presumably, the demand for environmental justice originates). An argument for this type of contextualisation in environmental political theory is made by Dryzek and Hunold (2002), although their focus is on movement strategies in the context of different types of states. For more on the critical pluralism and its relationship to environmental justice, see Schlosberg (1998, 1999a). The ultimate goal of environmental justice, for Harvey, is the reclamation of ‘a noncoopted and nonperverted version of the thesis of ecological modernisation’ (1996: 401). But he seems to have left out the important elements of local ‘subpolitics’ and ‘reflexive modernisation’ – which Beck (1992) includes in such a model. And here, refer to the many works in global environmental politics that focus on the power of civil society and networks, such as Wapner (1996) and Keck and Sikkink (1998). For more on this point with respect to the US movement, see Schlosberg (1999a, 1999b). For more on the issue of toleration vs engagement and recognition in a critical pluralism, see Schlosberg (1998, 1999a). It is crucial to note here that identity politics is rarely about identity itself, and especially not about elevating an identity or way of knowing above others (except for supremacist movements, which can be differentiated and critiqued on this very notion). Rather, identity-based movements are about drawing attention to the relationship between identity and various forms of oppression and injustice. Identity politics seeks acknowledgement, recognition and ‘player’ status in a world of heterogeneity; it is about communicating with others, bringing knowledge to others and insisting on accountability in the construction of identity, inequality and injustices (see Dean 1996: 52 on this last point).
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References Barry, B. (1995) Justice as Impartiality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1999) ‘Sustainable and Intergenerational Justice’, in A. Dobson (ed.), Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications. Bernstein, R. (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Borrows, J. (1997) ‘Living Between Water and Rocks: First Nations, Environmental Planning and Democracy’, University of Toronto Law Journal, 47: 417–468. Bretting, J. and Prindeville, D. M. (1998) ‘Environmental Justice and the Role of Indigenous Women Organizing Their Communities’, in D. Camacho (ed.), Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles: Race, Class, and the Environment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conca, K. and Dabelko, G. D. (eds) (1998) Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Dean, J. (1996) Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. de-Shalit, A. (1995) Why Posterity Matters, London: Routledge. Di Chiro, G. (1992) ‘Defining Environmental Justice: Women’s Voices and Grassroots Politics’, Socialist Review, 22(4): 93–130. Dobson, A. (1998) Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Dimensions of Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. and Hunold, C. (2002) ‘Green Political Theory and the State: Context is Everything’, Global Environmental Politics, 2(3): 17–39. Follett, M. P. (1918) The New State: Group Organization and the Solution of Popular Government, New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction, New York: Random House. —— (1980) Power/Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books. Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition, New York: Routledge. —— (1998) ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 19, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. —— (2000) ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Left Review, May/June: 107–120. —— (2001) ‘Recognition without Ethics?’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 18(2–3): 21–42. Global Exchange (2000a) ‘Top Ten Reasons to Oppose the IMF’. Online. Available at: www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wbimf/TopTenIMF.html (accessed 15 January 2004). –––– (2000b) ‘World Bank/IMF Questions and Answers’. Online. Available at: www. globalexchange.org/campaigns/wbimf/faq.html (accessed 15 January 2004). Greider, W. (1996) One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, New York: Simon & Schuster. Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell. Honneth, A. (1992) ‘Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition’, Political Theory, 20: 187–201.
Reconceiving environmental justice 121 —— (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. —— (2001) ‘Recognition or Redistribution? Changing Perspectives on the Moral Order of Society’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 18(2–3): 43–55. Humphrey, M. (2003), ‘Nonbasic Environmental Goods and Social Justice’, in D. Bell and A. de-Shalit (eds), Forms of Justice, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. James, W. (1977 [1909]), A Pluralistic Universe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keck, M. E. and Sikkink, K. (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kiefer, C. and Benjamin, M. (1993) ‘Solidarity with the Third World: Building an International Environmental Justice Movement’, in R. Hofrichter (ed.), Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice, Philadelphia: New Society. Kymlicka, W. (ed.) (1995) The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1996) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2001) Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krauss, C. (1994) ‘Women of Colour on the Front Line’, in R. D. Bullard (ed.), Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Colour, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Lash, S. and Featherstone, M. (2001) ‘Recognition and Difference: Politics, Identity, Multiculture’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 18(2–3): 1–19. Low, N. and Gleeson, B. (1998) Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology, London: Routledge. Mander, J. and Goldsmith, E. (eds) (1996) The Case Against Global Economy, And For a Turn Toward the Local, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Miller, D. (1999) ‘Social Justice and Environmental Goods’, in A. Dobson (ed.), Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2003) ‘A Response’, in D. A. Bell and A. de-Shalit (eds), Forms of Justice: Critical Perspectives on David Miller’s Political Philosophy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Peña, D. (1999) ‘Nos Encercaron: A Theoretical Exegesis on the Politics of Place in the Intermountain West’, a paper presented at the New West Conference, Flagstaff, Arizona, 8–10 June 1999. Peoples’ Global Action (1999) ‘Draft Declaration of Indian People Against the WTO’. Online. Available at: www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en/pgainfos/manifest.htm (accessed 15 January 2004). Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch (1999) ‘Statement From Members of International Civil Society Opposing a Millennium Round or a New Round of Comprehensive Trade Negotiations’, in Mobilization Against Corporate Globalisation: A Guide to Civil Society’s Activities Surrounding the Seattle WTO Ministerial November 29–December 3, 1999, Washington, DC: Public Citizen. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1993) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Schlosberg, D. (1998) ‘Resurrecting the Pluralist Universe’, Political Research Quarterly, 51: 583–615. —— (1999a) Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism: The Challenge of Difference for Environmentalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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—— (1999b) ‘Networks and Mobile Arrangements: Political Innovation in the U.S. Environmental Justice Movement’, Environmental Politics, 6: 122–148. —— (2003) ‘The Justice of Environmental Justice: Reconciling Equity, Recognition, and Participation in a Political Movement’, in A. Light and A. de-Shalit (eds), Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Shapiro, I. and Kymlicka, W. (2000) Ethnicity and Group Rights, Albany: State University of New York Press. Shiva, V. (1997) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston: South End Press. —— (2000) Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Boston: South End Press. Taylor, C. (1994) Multiculturalism, ed. A. Gutman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wapner, P. (1996) Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics, New York: State University of New York Press. Wenz, P. S. (1988) Environmental Justice, Albany: State University of New York Press. World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, I. M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— (2000) Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8
Environmental values in a globalising world The case of China1 Paul G. Harris
Introduction The forces of globalisation are competing with and overwhelming environmental values in the developing world. Nowhere is this more evident and damaging than in China. China’s economic development, and the growth of a middle class seeking and living the Western way of life, is having devastating impacts on its environment. Increasingly this is affecting the global environment, notably through China’s demand for imported natural resources and its emissions of greenhouse gases. Given the size of its population and the scale and speed of its economic growth, protecting the global environment will be impossible as long as environmentally destructive trends continue in the country. But globalisation is not solely, or necessarily mostly, to blame. Despite underlying Eastern values that sometimes encourage living in harmony with nature, China has a long-standing record of environmental destruction and resource overexploitation. Arguably, traditional values are partly to blame. Regardless, invoking environmental values, both Eastern and Western, will not be enough to avert the ongoing environmental crisis and coming ecological disaster in China. Convincing the Chinese to limit their adverse impact on their own and the global environments may require ‘capitalising’ on their widespread, strong desire to consume and achieve prosperity mirroring that in the West. Environmental values are seldom divorced from other values. While we can philosophise and contemplate the wonders and beauty of the natural environment per se, nature almost always suffers when there is conflict between it and other values. The most obvious compromise is made between environmental values – environmental appreciation and preservation – and economic and lifestyle values. Many people may want to live in harmony with nature, but almost nobody does. Having said this, in economically developed countries there are now long-standing efforts on the part of governments, non-governmental organisations and some citizens to create more environmentally sustainable societies. We are not there yet – not even nearly – but this does seem to be the trend in parts of the developed world. In contrast, in most of the developing world the trend runs in the other direction: towards more and more environmental destruction, towards the compromise of ecological systems and elimination of
124 Environmental politics other species to make way for the wider and deeper adoption of Western consumerist lifestyles. We see this latter reality manifest most profoundly in China. There is no doubt that China is going the way of globalisation. Since the 1980s China has opened to the world with a vengeance. It is now highly integrated into the global economy, and its people are either yearning for, or increasingly already living, Western-like lifestyles. As a consequence, environmental pollution and resource depletion is spreading across China on a vast scale. In the Chinese government’s own annual environmental report, many environmental problems are highlighted: acid rain on one-third of the land, including 60 per cent of the 274 cities analysed; water pollution, with serious pollution in one-half of all rivers; severe water shortages, especially in the north; widespread hazardous wastes, including imports thereof; pervasive coastal pollution and over-fishing; and over-grazing and desertification, the latter occurring at the rate of two million hectares per year (see ‘Environment Report Sounds Alarm’, South China Morning Post, 1 June 2002: 6). The story of China is not a new one. It is a story of the juxtaposition of ecology and care for the environment with capitalism and consumerism that has been experienced in the West – simply on a grander scale. In China, the Western experience is exacerbated by an instrumental view of the environment that is nearly devoid of environmentalism. This is not to say that the Chinese are necessarily any more environmentally rapacious than are Americans or Australians, for example. We cannot discount the great harm done to the Earth’s environment by the developed countries.2 To be sure, per capita pollution and consumption is much lower in China than in the developed countries. Despite popular references to idealised values of some indigenous peoples and the arguments of many environmental philosophers, the anthropocentric view ‘which holds that absolutely everything exists for the sake of humanity’, and which Robin Attfield (1999: 27) calls (rightly, in my view) ‘ridiculous’ is, I think, the prevailing view of the environment almost everywhere. (One need only look at the titles of the major international ‘environmental’ conferences: UN Conference on the Human Environment 1972, UN Conference on Environment and Development 1992, World Summit on Sustainable Development 2002.) Those are the sort of environmental values pervasive in China, although even the instrumental, anthropocentric connection to environmental protection and sustainable development that is taking hold in much of the West is often restricted to China’s leadership, not yet adopted at the grassroots level. The Chinese anthropocentric perspective is evidenced by the government’s interpretations of sustainable development, which tend towards ‘sustained’ economic growth with increasing environmental considerations.3 It is also demonstrated by China’s international diplomacy on the environment, which insists that economic development must be paramount (Economy 1998; Harris 2002, 2003a, 2004; Kobayashi 2004). But this is not surprising, given that commonly accepted definitions of sustainable development, notably that of the Brundtland Commission, which served as the basis for much environmental
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diplomacy since the 1980s (WCED 1987), explicitly connect environmental protection with economic development (if not always economic growth, the preferred Chinese reading of the term). The environment is always valued for its instrumental role in protecting and promoting human interests; in the international interpretation it does not have value per se. This describes the state of Chinese environmental values at the turn of the century. There is a very large body of literature on the nature and scale of environmental destruction in China, including its implications for the rest of the world (Smil 1993; World Bank 1997). There is also literature pointing to China, or more precisely Chinese philosophy, as a potential source of inspiration and guidance for new, more environmentally sensitive ways of thinking about the environment that could be helpful globally. However, while traditional Chinese values may have some good messages for the West and the world, China itself is not a place to find much inspiration. Other anti-environmental values, many of them exacerbated by the globalisation of capitalism and consumerism, now have overwhelming force in the country. Increasingly this will adversely impact the global environment. Indeed, Smil argues, ‘No decisive progress towards a globally sustainable civilisation can be achieved without a gradual transformation of the Chinese environment and society. This is not impossible – but will be exceedingly challenging’ (Smil 1996: 175). Therefore, ways must be found to mitigate environmental harm in China. I will try to elaborate on these issues below. In the next section I look at traditional environmental values in China as a backdrop to a discussion of contemporary environmental values there. I also discuss the role of globalisation, although I do not blame it for China’s problems, and I suggest that environmental values are largely impotent in the face of economic values manifested by Western-style consumerism. Finally, I look at environmental governance in China and the implications of what I have said for future environmental governance.
Environmental values in China Human behaviour is largely a product of individual and collective values. There is competition between environmental values and economic and consumption values. Almost everywhere, environmental values are losing the battle. In China, globalising Western consumption values are conspiring with a pragmatic and instrumental view of nature, leading to massive environmental harm. Traditional and historic environmental values Studies of Asian and Chinese philosophical traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism often see them as being instructive for developing more pro-environmental values everywhere (Callicott and Ames 1989: 67–149; Ip 1983; Tao 2002; Weiming 2001; Yu 2000). For example, ancient Chinese (Taoist) philosophy – ‘conventional wisdom, known and quoted by everyone in
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China’ – argues that ‘people must respect the wilderness (“Nature” in its “natural” state), or risk destroying her in well-intentioned efforts to improve upon her’ and, when exploiting nature, they ‘should try to do so without destroying its regenerative capacity’ (Walls 1998: 56). Chinese Taoist thought traditionally schooled individuals and society to ‘live in a balanced and harmonious way with the natural world’ (Ponting 1991: 152). Some forms of Buddhism are well known for their concern about the environment and especially other species, and Confucianism is often touted for its ‘conception of the unity of human and nature’ (Li 1998: 307). However, these Asian traditions, even though they tend to highlight the interdependence between humans and nature and may have ‘a greater “affinity” for environmental care’ (Peterson 2001: 98), may be ‘not only powerless against the force of population and industry but perhaps can, like any worldview, be read to justify humans’ pursuit of a decidedly unenlightened self-interest’ (i.e. one that is environmentally destructive) (Peterson 2001: 96–97). Peterson has argued that the attitudes leading to environmental destruction in China stem not from Western values but from Asian ones (Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism) (Peterson 2001: 96). Li (1998: 307) believes that Confucianism, despite any nonanthropocentric orientation, has arguably sanctioned environmental destruction. Weller and Bol (1998: 482) say it has not led to a biocentric world view. Rather, Confucians ‘were, it turns out, particularly interested in oak trees’ (Weller and Bol 1998: 483). Regardless of their valuing of the environment, in pre-revolutionary China traditional values were overwhelmed or co-opted by powerful political and economic actors, and were too weak relative to ‘pressures of poverty, tyranny, and competition for scarce resources’ (Gardner and Stern 1996: 79). As Weller and Bol (1988: 495–496) explain it, Chinese traditions, which explicitly recognized the interdependence of the human social/ political order and the natural world, did not result in the conscious establishment of ecologically sound environmental attitudes, policies, or practices. We believe this happened for at least two reasons. First, the organismic worldviews . . . were developed to address the dominant concerns of political culture – how to maintain political unity and social harmony – and did not concern themselves with the well-being of nature as such. If anything, they assumed that nature was inherently capable of recovering from human action. Second, the popular practices that emerged from these world views were also put in service of human utility, and not infrequently reduced to means for individual and local self-aggrandizement and factional political advantage. Even if traditional philosophies did lead to environmentalist values in previous centuries, following the communist revolution of 1949 the Chinese government suppressed traditions and ‘sacrificed the environment to development’ (Gardner and Stern 1996: 49). During Mao Zedong’s rule in the 1950s and into the 1970s,
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communist development policies led to widespread pollution and environmental destruction (see Shapiro 2001; Kobayashi 2004). According to Kobayashi (2004: 89), environmental problems in today’s China are ‘embedded in historical precedents that have shaped Chinese attitudes and activities’. Specifically, she points out that ‘Maoist views and policies had little regard for the environment’, and that Mao considered the natural environment to be a ‘common good’ that could be put to good use and as ‘something to be conquered’. The consequence was extensive environmental destruction. Mao’s world view was so powerful that it remains pervasive, often shaping the way government officials think and leaving a vestige of low public awareness of the environment, especially in the countryside (Kobayashi 2004). Subsequently, even as it improved the well-being of many Chinese, the ‘aggressive, Western-oriented modernization’ begun by Deng Xiaoping started a powerful trend towards consumption, energy use and pollution that is growing worse with time (Smil 1996: 182). Contemporary ‘environmental’ values Today, despite the impression one might get from traditional Chinese artwork, poetry and philosophy, most Chinese have very limited concern for the natural environment beyond its utility for human health or economic prosperity (see Weller and Bol 1998). This is manifest in the deplorable environmental conditions in many parts of China, and in the limited degree to which the environment has figured into development planning (cf. Tseng 1999: 381). The situation is starting to change however, although developmental objectives still overwhelm those of environmental protection. According to one observer, ‘the Chinese attitude towards environmental protection is probably that if pollution is an unavoidable by-product of the struggle for prosperity, so be it. For many, it is better to die a slow death by inhaling polluted air than to die a quicker death through starvation’ (Tseng 1999: 390). This sentiment has been extended in many parts of China, particularly the southeast, with fear of death from starvation replaced by a strong, sometimes overwhelming, desire for wealth – what one observer has called a ‘state-sanctioned fixation on getting rich’ (Roy 1998: 142). A national survey has shown that Chinese citizens are more conscious of and concerned about inflation, education, public order, population issues and social morality than they are environmental problems (Lo and Leung 2000: 687). In modern China, people tend to ‘yearn for air-conditioners, video recorders, motorcycles, and some even dream of the ultimate status symbols – a private car and a house’ (Smith 1997: 4). There is low public awareness of the environment, particularly among poorly educated people in rural areas (Qing and Vermeer 1999: 145). In contrast, there is greater awareness among the Chinese elite of the need for environmental protection (Ross 1998: 59). While the government of China has undertaken major efforts to educate people about environmental problems, ignorance of them remains high, particularly in rural areas, and often government officials work hard to cover up environmental problems (see Kristof 2000).
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Even in Hong Kong, which arguably has the most Westernised and environmentally aware citizenry in China, environmental values are underdeveloped. There, ‘environment’ is most often perceived to be the built environment, and is associated with planting shrubs in highway medians, building barriers to limit noise from roads and implementing hefty fines for littering and spitting. In nearby Guangzhou, polling shows that while people worry about pollution, ‘they did not show “euphoric enthusiasm” for solutions or see environmental problems as the top priority. This may stem from the tug-of-war between economic development and environmental protection in the city’ (Lo and Leung 2000: 685). In surveys in the cities of Dongguan, Guangzhou and Yuanshou during the late 1990s, people were ‘less pro-environment in their perceptions of the limits of and the right to exploit earth resources than in maintaining harmonious relations with nature’ (p. 687). Lo and Leung’s study of Guangzhou ‘reveals a co-existence of alertness to environmental problems with an emphasis on human domination of nature’ (p. 687) – mirroring the traditional values described above. Smil has concluded that the lack of environmental concerns among both the elite and the citizenry in recent times is a consequence of several factors: ancient traditions ‘preoccupied with questions of morality and the proper conduct and ordering of human relations, rather than with mankind’s place in nature’ and the poverty and violence of life in the past (Smil 1996: 183). Recently, this preoccupation has been replaced by a ‘frantic quest for enrichment and by higher material consumption’ (Smil 1996: 184). Formal education, while focusing more attention on the environment in recent years, is unlikely to change things very much; school textbooks portray nature as an ‘object for exploitation’ (Weller and Bol 1998: 486). Walls (1998: 60) argues that, despite the environmental values found in tradition, notably in Taoist values, for modern Chinese ‘prosperity concerns supersede environmental concerns’: Having lived through so many decades of life driven by communist ideology, in which the proletariat struggles simultaneously against Nature and against enemies of the working class, most people in China today are more concerned with keeping ahead of inflation than with the very real danger of environmental collapse. For the first time in recent history, they have an opportunity to participate in the actual quadrupling of China’s GNP, which means a significant improvement in the lives of most Chinese people – never mind that the quadrupled intensity in exploitation of an already overexploited environment may not be sustainable for many years. The result has been that most Chinese citizens . . . will be willing to put environmental concerns on the back burner for the time being . . . . As Smil (1996: 184) argues, ‘This frenzied rush is the understandable reaction to decades of Maoist deprivation – but it creates a climate inimical to any widespread appreciation of the environmental foundations of economic success’. Thus today’s environmental values are responses to immediate effects of environmental destruction, and ‘ruling elites, preoccupied with the preservation of
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the old political orthodoxy and the corrupt dash for riches, focus on these matters only when it cannot be avoided – in crises such as urban water shortages – or when there is international pressure to confront regional and global environmental problems’ (Smil 1996: 184). This is not to say that there are no environmental values in China. Environmental awareness is rising, particularly in urban areas (Woodrow Wilson Center 1997: 55–56; Oksenberg and Economy 1998: 356) and among the elite. In areas suffering from the severest pollution (which include almost all of China’s cities), people have demanded changes, and even members of the National People’s Congress and other officials have highlighted environmental problems (Lo and Leung 2000: 682). According to Ross (1999: 299), the increasing ‘scope, comprehensiveness, and stringency’ of environmental laws in China derive from citizen complaints about local problems, notably noise pollution. More people are being adversely affected by environmental changes, the media is covering more environmental problems, and there is more education about the environment. The resulting environmental values may not be the purest, given that they are generally associated with personal well-being rather than protection of nature per se, but they are important indicators of a trend that might be fostered in the future.
Globalisation, capitalism and environmental values in China Like most places, China is experiencing what Lo and Leung (2000: 687) have referred to as ‘dynamics between economic development and environmental consciousness’. The processes of economic globalisation are key features and drivers of these dynamics. The ‘environmental’ values spread by globalisation are ones where humankind, particularly its corporate manifestations, is almost always ranked before nature – as reflected in the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. According to Barkdull and Harris (1998: 163): Such a ranking justifies an ethic of domination and exploitation, leading to heedless destruction of the natural environment. Prevailing Western thought (increasingly emulated in non-Western societies, with similar results), therefore, justifies human domination, exploitation, and objectification of nature. With no moral worth in its own right, the environment has moral value only in relation to human interests, concerns, and valuations. While this ranking and the attendant results existed in China before globalisation had its greatest impact, arguably these are values that are now being embraced in China. Furthermore, one can argue that China’s ‘consumer and retailing “revolution” . . . has only been possible because of keen participation of foreign capital, expecting to make a fortune from the world’s largest market’ (Zhao 1997: 47), with the country’s rapid economic growth reflecting ‘a triumph of international capital which recognizes no national and cultural boundaries’ (Zhao 1997: 58).
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Indeed, the transition to capitalism in China may be most profoundly reflected in the dire state of the environment there. In Smith’s (1997: 13) view: The forces unleashed by capitalist development – competition, specialization, production for exchange, economic individualism, privatization, consumerism – have the effect of worsening many social, economic and environmental conditions for the Chinese even as and indeed largely because this capitalist development is provisioning higher levels of consumption for most, though certainly not all, Chinese. The transition to capitalism is installing an entirely new economic logic – but one that is hardly less brutal or artificial than the communist bureaucratic system it is displacing . . . . Bureaucratic underproduction, scarcity and shortages are being replaced by a capitalist cornucopia of overproduction, duplication and, already, a superabundance of frivolous consumer junk. But it is not easy to ascertain the degree to which economic globalisation can be blamed for China’s environmental destruction and the paucity of proenvironment values there. As Peterson (2001: 95) points out, while ‘some observers attribute all environmental failings in Asian nations to corrupting Western influences’, deforestation and resulting soil erosion over vast areas of China preceded contact with the Western world (Gardner and Stern 1996: 48; Peterson 2001: 96). Many people, among them some Chinese, blame Western values for China’s environmental problems. For example, one Hong Kong advocate of ‘ecotourism’ has implored people to follow Buddhist values of ‘compassion, love and care’ for the environment, complaining that: ‘Often we learn Western knowledge, but we don’t apply our oldest philosophy . . . . I feel shame for the people who study Western education and forget the simple thing, the appreciation of living beauty . . . . How can I teach young kids to appreciate the simple things in their environment if they are being completely globalised by Mickey Mouse? We need to wake up not thinking Coca-Cola. We need to look 20 years ahead and think 1000 years back.’ (quoted in Tomlinson 2002: 16). But this belies a nostalgia for Chinese environmental values that is arguably ephemeral and discounts long-standing environmental destruction before the opening of China to the West. While globalisation has probably exacerbated Chinese values that are environmentally unaware or adverse, and no doubt has assisted them by providing the incentives and means for even more widespread environmental destruction, it is not all to blame. Who or what is to blame, apart from human nature? Among the major culprits seem to be a painful history, a government obsessed with economic growth, and the allure of capitalism and the Western lifestyle. Since the late
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1970s, the official mantra has been ‘getting rich is glorious’. Consequently, a ‘quest for economic improvement currently pervades all aspects of Chinese life’ (Harris 1996: 319). This is hardly surprising given pervasive historic and continuing poverty in China exacerbated by the attractions of modern, Western lifestyles. Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s, the messages from the Chinese government and official media to the Chinese people have emphasised individualism, entrepreneurship and materialism, and young people now crave ‘material attractions’, having been influenced by ‘officially sanctioned hedonism’ (Kwong 1994: 255). Government slogans of the 1980s ‘urged the Chinese to strive for the American way of life – a lifestyle based, above all, on insatiable consumption’ (Smith 1997: 14). As a consequence, consumerism permeated society at all levels (Kwong 1994: 256). Today, Chinese youth’s ‘individualism, pragmatism and materialism reflect the new philosophies in the advertised official ideology and similar developments in contemporary Chinese society’ (Kwong 1994: 263), something that is more and more true each day. Thus it seems that ecological values in China have been subsumed by economic objectives, except when there are immediate and painful consequences of environmental damage. As Smil (1996: 184) describes it, China’s development over the last two decades has been like that of the United States in the 1890s: ‘the country is overwhelmingly preoccupied with growth, expansion, and rapid embourgeoisement’. The attractions of capitalism, materialism and the modern (American or Western) way of life are almost all powerful. Consumerism has been ‘irresistible to the hitherto materially deprived. As a para-belief system, it has firmly entrenched itself in the void left by the bankruptcy of official MarxismLeninism-Maoism in the new era of ideological disenchantment’ (Zhao 1997: 46). Environment therefore becomes important only when it affects economic growth and wealth generation. Smith argues that this ‘capitalist barbarism’ is ‘systematically and inexorably driving China towards social and environmental disaster’ (Smith 1997: 35): ‘By turning over the economy to capitalists [and Western corporations], what gets developed is simply what is profitable, with no concern for society or the environment’ (Smith 1997: 29). In this conception, values in China are at least partly a consequence of ideas from the West. From the Chinese perspective, however, the forces of globalisation are not the problem; instead, they are the saviours for all of China’s ills (starvation and poverty). But, as suggested previously, prevailing values are also a consequence of conscious government actions to shape them. While on the one hand government officials increasingly realise the importance of environmental protection, they have chosen to prioritise short-term economic growth over looking after the environment. Reform of the economic system, while bringing material benefits, has not coped with the attendant environmental harm. Jahiel (1997: 81) asserts: ‘the ethos of the reforms and the political economy constructed to support reform goals are antithetical to solving China’s environmental problems’. Tseng (1999: 390) says that the Chinese government, using this reasoning, ‘often ignores some of its environmental policies and regulations and does what it thinks is necessary for economic advancement’. Even where regulations exist to
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benefit the environment, they can be skirted around: ‘The pervasive emphasis on development, consumerism and profit in government proclamations and throughout society has further provided local governments with the justification to intervene against regulations – such as environmental protection – deemed unfavourable to growth’ ( Jahiel 1998: 757). In short, wealth creation usually trumps environmental protection in China – and this remains the dominant official preference despite movements towards truly sustainable development.
Environmental values and governance in China The Chinese government argued into the 1970s that socialist China did not have any environmental problems, despite having addressed some environmental problems as early as the 1950s. The Chinese government started to show serious concern in the 1980s in the face of the increasingly obvious damage to the natural environment and its adverse impacts on economic development. The Chinese Constitution was rewritten in 1982, with the government pledging to ‘protect the environment and natural resources by controlling pollution and its societal impact, ensure the sensible use of natural resources, and safeguard rare animals and plants’ (Tseng 1999: 383). The following year environmental preservation was declared one of China’s basic national policies and by the end of the decade China had started its first major national campaign to combat environmental pollution (Tseng 1999: 383). The government also instituted new environmental protection laws in the areas of solid waste, noise, air and water pollution during the 1980s. In 1989 the government strengthened the national Environmental Protection Law, which describes implementation and enforcement measures, rules of accountability and responsibility, and remedies for non-compliance, and criminal law was amended to enforce it (UNEP 1999: 241–242). However, while the government implemented a host of laws to deal with environmental and natural resource issues, their effect was negligible. By the mid-1990s the government was getting more serious about environmental issues, even closing some factories guilty of pollution, action perhaps in part attributable to the 1992 UN Earth Summit (Harris and Udagawa 2004). One of the most notable actions was adoption and promulgation in 1994 of China’s ‘Agenda 21’ on population, environment and development. The coverage of China’s Agenda 21 is broad, including guidelines on legislation, policies, education, agriculture, environment, energy, transportation, regional development, population and health. It focuses first on the need for economic development, but there is also a new concern about protecting the environment for sustainable development. Growing environmental awareness at the national level, as evidenced by Agenda 21, was further demonstrated by the pronouncements of national leaders. For example, in 1995 then Premier Li Peng told the eighth National People’s Congress (NPC) to follow the national policies of family planning and environmental protection, and in 1997 President Jiang Zemin reported to the fifteenth Chinese Communist Party National Congress that pressures on the environment caused by overpopulation and economic
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development were harming the country (Tseng 1999: 383). Furthermore, the national agency tasked with promoting environmental protection was elevated to ministerial status at the ninth NPC and re-titled the State Environmental Protection Administration (see Wang and Liu 1998). By the late 1990s the central government was allocating substantial (albeit grossly inadequate) funds to environmental and resource protection. The Chinese government is reported to have shut down tens of thousands of polluting enterprises and has implemented fees for polluting emissions and mandated clean-energy technologies (UNEP 1999: 246). Having said this, the environmental benefits of these actions may be quite limited, and generally environmental laws have been subservient to the desires of powerful individuals and interests ( JEC 2000: 102). Domestic implementation of environmental laws is hindered by lack of money, corruption at all levels, the refusal of local authorities to take laws seriously and the inability or unwillingness of higher officials to force them to do so, the latter often tied to lack of funds and corruption. The central government often has limited control over the vast Chinese bureaucracy, particularly outside Beijing. The institutional structure of China’s environmental management system is extraordinarily complex, ranging from the NPC and State Council at the central level to environmental protection personnel of townships and neighbourhoods, and environmental protection units of small enterprises and villages (see Wang and Liu 1998: 377). China has nearly 3,000 environmental protection bureaus (encompassing 8,400 departments) and over 2,000 environmental monitoring stations, with nearly 100,000 people employed directly in environmental protection (UNEP 1999: 236). In short, China’s environmental problems do not stem from a lack of laws and related agencies. Rather, the laws are often ignored and flouted by officials and industrial actors at all levels of society. Lawlessness in much of rural China does not help. Underlying the general inability to do more is the continuing official and popular focus on economic development above all else. Not surprisingly, environmental policy-making in China has been almost exclusively a top-down process. Even if popular ‘environmental’ values in China were more environmental, there would be little public participation in policymaking, with ‘major environmental policies formulated and decided upon by non-elected bureau officials without public consultation’ (Lo and Leung 2000: 679; Ross 1999: 297). With some exceptions, environmental policy-making has originated with the central leadership, which slowly realised in recent decades that environmental protection would have to be part of development planning. Most environmental campaigns and media coverage are organised by the Communist Party and the government (Mao 1997: 248). But the policies of the central government are often contradictory or half-hearted. While the leadership acknowledges the scale of the environmental problems, it also tends to lay blame for pollution at the door of the developed countries, and has resisted attempts by other countries or international organisations to set pollution limits. According to Smith, ‘China’s leaders seem to think that they – and the rest of the developing world – have the right to develop and to pollute with the same profligacy as the
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advanced industrialized nations have done – and damn the consequences’ (Smith 1997: 27). Public participation in environmental protection is growing slowly. But China lacks experience with civil society, let alone democracy. There are no independent and powerful environmental organisations; with a few recent exceptions, the government restricts non-governmental organisations out of fear that they will challenge its authority and subvert political stability (Lo and Leung 2000: 682, 701). What is more, there is little respect for public opinion among government officials, although they have trouble ignoring protests that have arisen as a consequence of pollution and environmental problems that harm public health (air, water and noise pollution) (Zhou 1997: 38). This means that environmentalists within government have few consistent allies among the population. As Lo and Leung (2000: 679) point out, ‘popular demands for a cleaner environment are not particularly strong since citizens’ environmental awareness is still on the whole at an early stage. In such a situation it is difficult for environmental agencies to gain any powerful extra-bureaucratic allies to counter strong bureaucratic resistance to environmental protection’. Consequently, at present and for the near future at least, the extent to which environmental policies are advanced and implemented ‘depends very much on how much importance government leaders attach to it, and much less on the legal framework, the coherence of related politics and public participation’ (Mao 1997: 252). As we have seen, China’s leaders have been ‘pushing consumerism to distract China’s mutinous masses from political issues’ (Smith 1997: 32). It is crucial for them to sustain economic growth and bring prosperity to the masses in order to avert social – and hence political – unrest that might undermine their hold on power. Many observers, such as Smith (1997: 35–41), argue for greater democracy as an important means of slowing the environmental disaster underway in China. Perhaps paradoxically, given that popular environmental values are poorly developed and instrumentally oriented, more democracy is not automatically a good thing for China’s environment. Given the new Chinese penchant to consume, and the anti-environmental values prevalent in China, increasing democratic control would have to be carried out very carefully. Simply having more democracy without clear environmental protection in place might make the situation worse.
‘Capitalising’ on economic values for environmental protection Given that environmental awareness and concern among the Chinese public are usually low, that raising them depends on the foresight of the government in reflecting it in policy and propaganda, and that even the more enlightened government policies are inadequate in the face of the overwhelming forces of capitalism and the desire for wealth, what can be done? Part of the answer to environmental destruction is going to be a willingness in the developed world to provide additional aid to China for truly sustainable development, and to make
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all aid and foreign investment conditional upon it not being unnecessarily harmful to the environment (see Harris 2001a, 2003b). This will have to be done in a way that ‘capitalises’ on the current pro-consumption and pro-growth values in China. However, while it is reasonable to demand that the rich countries aid China with funding and the latest environmental technologies, it is also important for the government to divert more resources of its own away from corrupt officials and environmentally harmful industries. Government spending on environmental protection has increased sharply over the last decade, but remains at about onefourth the amount that even its own experts say is needed simply to reverse ongoing destruction (Smith 1997: 26).4 Hence, the developed countries ought to give the Chinese government what it has been demanding – more financial aid. But that aid ought to be conditional upon better use of existing funds and agreement upon environmental conditions as a prerequisite for new funds. It seems obvious to recommend that everything possible be done to raise environmental awareness in China and to foster a greater appreciation for nature insofar as can be done. It might also be very helpful to promote nascent, post-industrial environmental values that are taking hold in some Western countries, and it might be helpful to educate the Chinese about the aspects of their traditional culture and philosophy that could serve as better models than the consumption values disseminated via globalisation. However, more education, while welcome and probably essential, is not the answer. In Harris’s words: ‘Westerners are naïve to believe that education alone will save species currently under threat’ (Harris 1996: 318). ‘Post-materialist’ values (see Inglehart 1990) and environmentalism may spread beyond tiny cohorts as China becomes more developed, but we cannot wait – especially given that harm to the global environment continues apace in the Western world where such values are supposed to be well entrenched. Therefore, environmental values in China connected directly to economic prosperity may be the only viable option in the near term. This could be achieved through a wider recognition among Chinese that there is a heavy price to pay for environmental destruction. Individuals suffer the ill effects of pollution and resource scarcities, especially in the long term. There is also a great cost to China’s economy. By the late 1990s, air and water pollution alone caused economic losses equivalent to 8 per cent of China’s GNP (Wang 2002: 187). That is, the very justification for destroying and neglecting the environment – economic development is more important – is being threatened by pollution and overuse of resources. Part of the solution to China’s environmentally destructive values and behaviour is to bring ‘utilitarian capitalism’ together with environmental protection.5 Weller and Bol (1998: 496), drawing on their analysis and knowledge of traditional Chinese values, conclude that ‘efforts to establish environmental policies will only work if they appeal to the profit and welfare of those charged with effecting them – from officials to factory managers to farmers. Abstract appeals to the well-being of “nature” are not likely to work. Successful appeals are likely to speak most to local or individual benefit’. Ross (1988: 60) argues that ‘exhortation and environmental ethics’ have been tried but have
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failed to avert the environmental crisis in China, and that policies appealing to personal self-interest will be more effective. The Chinese should be aided, more than at present, in making the connections between environmental protection and care for the environment and other species, on the one hand, and human health and wealth – their self-interest – on the other.6 One prescription is to continue efforts to implement international environmental regimes, such as those agreed at the summits in Stockholm, Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg. Building on this, there should be more promotion of the pro-environmental Western values (not the pro-consumption ones that have been pushed, or at least disseminated, so far). This invites a very ‘un-politically correct’ conclusion: maybe we need more globalisation of Western environmental values – at least those that are most advanced in terms of environmentally sustainable development (those in some of the northern European countries). However, while we ‘look forward’ in order to disseminate the newest Western environmental values in China, it would also be important to look (very far) back to traditional Chinese values that have been altered (and corrupted, at least environmentally) by history. By combining the best of the West and the best of China’s traditions, an effective prescription for moving towards new Chinese environmental values may be found. What of reconceiving environmental values in our globalising world? First, it is important to (re)conceive environmental values that can be disseminated effectively to everyone, including people in China and the entire developing world. Wherever we look for new values, it does little good to argue for those that will not affect people and their behaviour. The best values may be found in whole or in part in traditional ways of thinking, but this is not a certainty. Second, what seems to follow from what I have said is that reconceived environmental values may not be quite as ‘environmental’ as purists would hope. Human self-interest probably has to be worked into environmental values. This need not necessarily mean that there must be a ‘balance’ between human interests and those of nature and other species (those who advocate a ‘balanced’ approach are too often those who want to delay or weaken environmental regulations). But it does mean that people need to be persuaded that they have a stake in protecting the environment. To argue that environmental values may have to be human centred and ought to appeal to people’s selfish instincts in general simply describes the present reality. What we need, of course, is a new set of values that shifts the burden in favour of the environment and other species.
Notes 1 Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the workshop on Reconceiving Environmental Values in a Globalising World, Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society, 11–12 July 2002, and in Environmental Values journal. The author is grateful for helpful comments from workshop participants, anonymous readers and the editors. 2 I have discussed that harm and its implications, especially with regard to the United States, elsewhere (Harris 2000, 2001a, 2001b).
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3 This mirrors the ambiguity of ‘sustainable development’ in Mandarin Chinese. The term is commonly translated as chixu fazhan, with chixu normally interpreted as ‘sustained’ (according to Sanders 2000: 63). 4 Smil (1993) has argued that the economic costs of environmental changes in China are about one order of magnitude greater than all spending on environmental protection. 5 Harris (1996) has argued that the Chinese utilitarian view of nature can be consistent with wildlife conservation if incentives are institutionalised for long-term benefits instead of present short-term profit. 6 Smith (1997: 36) warns against using market incentives to clean up the environment, arguing that they do little to improve the environmental record of industrial production.
References Attfield, R. (1999) The Ethics of the Global Environment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barkdull, J. and Harris, P. G. (1998) ‘The Land Ethic: A New Philosophy for International Relations’, Ethics and International Affairs, 12: 159–178. Callicott, J. B. and Ames, R. (eds) (1989) Nature in Asian Traditions and Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Albany: State University Press of New York. Economy, E. E. (1998) ‘China’s Environmental Diplomacy’, in S. S. Kim (ed.), China and the World: Chinese Foreign Policy Facing the New Millennium, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ‘Environment Report Sounds Alarm’, South China Morning Post, 1 June 2002: 6. Gardner, G. T. and Stern, P. C. (1996) Environmental Problems and Human Behaviour, Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Harris, P. G. (ed.) (2000) Climate Change and American Foreign Policy, London: Palgrave. —— (2001a) International Equity and Global Environmental Politics, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. —— (ed.) (2001b) The Environment, International Relations, and U.S. Foreign Policy, Washington: Georgetown University Press. —— (ed.) (2002) International Environmental Cooperation: Politics and Diplomacy in Pacific Asia, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. —— (ed.) (2003a) Global Warming and East Asia: The Domestic and International Politics of Climate Change, London: RoutledgeCurzon. —— (2003b) ‘Priorities for East Asia: Impacts of Climate Change and International Justice’, in P. G. Harris (ed.) Global Warming and East and Southeast Asia: The Domestic and International Politics of Climate Change, London: RoutledgeCurzon. —— (ed.) (2004) Confronting Environmental Change in East Asia: Eco-politics, Foreign Policy, and Sustainable Development, London: Earthscan and United Nations University Press. Harris, R. B. and Udagawa, C. (2004) ‘Defusing the Bombshell?: Agenda 21 and Economic Development in China’, Review of International Political Economy, 11: 611–633. Harris, R. B. (1996) ‘Approaches to Conserving Vulnerable Wildlife in China: Does the Color of Cat Matter – if it Catches Mice?’, Environmental Values, 5: 303–334. Inglehart, R. (1990) Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ip, P. K. (1983) ‘Taoism and the Foundation of Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics, 5: 335–343. Jahiel, A. R. (1997) ‘The Contradictory Impact of Reform on Environmental Protection in China’, The China Quarterly, 149 (March): 81–103.
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—— (1998) ‘The Organization of Environmental Protection in China’, The China Quarterly, 156 (December): 757–787. Japan Environmental Council ( JEC) (2000) The State of the Environment in Asia 1999/2000, Tokyo: Springer Verlag. Kobayashi, Y. (2004) ‘The “Troubled Modernizer”: Three Decades of Chinese Environmental Policy and Diplomacy’, in P. G. Harris (ed.), Confronting Environmental Change in East & Southeast Asia: Eco-politics, Foreign Policy, and Sustainable Development, London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan. Kristof, N. D. (2000) ‘The Filthy Earth’, in N. D. Kristof and S. WuDunn, Thunder from the East: Portraits of a Rising Asia, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kwong, J. (1994) ‘Ideological Crisis among China’s Youth: Values and Official Ideology’, British Journal of Sociology, 45: 247–264. Li, H. L. (1998) ‘Some Thoughts on Confucianism and Ecofeminism’, in M. E. Tucker and J. Berthrong (eds), Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lo, C. W. H. and Leung, S. W. (2000) ‘Environmental Agency and Public Opinion in Guangzhou: The Limits of a Popular Approach to Environmental Governance’, The China Quarterly, 163 (November): 677–704. Mao, Y. S. (1997) ‘China’, in M. Jänicke and H. Weidner (eds), National Environmental Policies: A Comparative Study of Capacity Building, Berlin: Springer Verlag. Oksenberg, M. and Economy, E. (1998) ‘China: Implementation Under Economic Growth and Market Reform’, in E. B. Weiss and H. K. Jacobson (eds), Engaging Countries: Strengthening Compliance with International Environmental Accords, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Peterson, A. L. (2001) Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ponting, C. (1991) A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, New York: St Martin’s Press. Qing, D. and Vermeer, E. B. (1999) ‘Do Good Work, But Do Not Offend the “Old Communists”’, in W. Draguhn and R. Ash (eds), China’s Economic Security, Surrey: Curzon. Ross, L. (1988) Environmental Policy in China, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —— (1998) ‘The Politics of Environmental Policy in the People’s Republic of China’, in U. Desai (ed.), Ecological Policy and Politics in Developing Countries: Economic Growth, Democracy, and Environment, Albany: State University Press of New York. —— (1999) ‘China and Environmental Protection’, in E. Economy and M. Oksenberg (eds), China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects, New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Roy, D. (1998) ‘Restructuring Foreign and Defense Policy: The People’s Republic of China’, in A. McGrew and C. Brook (eds), Asia-Pacific in the New World Order, London: Routledge. Sanders, R. (2000) Prospects for Sustainable Development in the Chinese Countryside: The Political Economy of Chinese Ecological Agriculture, Aldershot: Ashgate. Shapiro, J. (2001) Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smil, V. (1993) China’s Environmental Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. –––– (1996) ‘Barriers to a Sustainable China’, in D. C. Pirages (ed.), Building Sustainable Societies: A Blueprint for a Post-Industrial World, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
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Smith, R. (1997) ‘Creative Destruction: Capitalist Development and China’s Environment’, New Left Review, 222 (March/April): 3–41. Tao, J. (2002) How Confucian Notions of Need and Reciprocity can Enrich Contemporary Debates About the Environment, a paper presented at the Reconceiving Environmental Values in a Globalising World seminar, Mansfield College, Oxford, 11–12 July 2002. Tomlinson, P. (2002) ‘Voice of Concern Mix with Calls of Commerce’, South China Morning Post, 1 June 2002: 16. Tseng, E. C .Y. (1999) ‘The Environment and the People’s Republic of China’, in D. L. Soden and B. S. Steel (eds), Handbook of Global Environmental Policy and Administration, Basel: Marcel Dekker. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (1999) Global Environment Outlook, London: Earthscan. Walls, J. (1998) ‘Modern Communications Opportunities for Pro-Environmental Networking in East Asia’, in H. Coward (ed.), Traditional and Modern Approaches to the Environment on the Pacific Rim: Tensions and Values, Albany: State University of New York Press. Wang, H. and Liu, B. (1998) ‘Policymaking for Environmental Protection in China’, in M. B. McElroy, C. P. Nielson and P. Lydon (eds), Energizing China: Reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, J. C. F. (2002) Contemporary Chinese Politics, 7th edn, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Weiming, T. (2001) ‘The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism: Implications for China and the World’, Daedalus, 130: 243–264. Weller, R. P. and Bol, P. (1998), ‘From Heaven-and-Earth to Nature: Chinese Concepts of the Environment and Their Influence on Policy Implementation’, in M. B. McElroy, C. P. Nielson and P. Lydon (eds), Energizing China: Reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. World Bank (1997) Clear Water, Blue Skies: China’s Environment in the New Century, Washington: World Bank. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woodrow Wilson Center (1997) ‘Discussion with the Chinese Citizen Involvement in Environmental Protection Delegation from the People’s Republic of China’, China Environment Series, 7 May 2002: 55–57. Yu, C. F. (2000) ‘Chinese Religions on Population, Consumption, and Ecology’, in H. Coward and D. C. Maguire (eds), Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption, and Ecology, Albany: State University of New York Press. Zhao, B. (1997) ‘Consumerism, Confucianism, Communism: Making Sense of China Today’, New Left Review, 22 (March/April): 43–59.
Part IV
Environmental governance and values
9
Interdependence, pluralism and globalisation Implications for environmental governance1 Jouni Paavola
Introduction There are good reasons to believe that environmental decisions are becoming more difficult to make in the globalising world: they involve a growing number of actors that are increasingly heterogeneous in terms of their interests, values and notions of justice. For example, the participants of the eighth Conference of the Parties (COP8) to the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) forwarded widely differing agendas in New Delhi in 2002, which is one reason why the negotiations failed to make much progress. Heterogeneity also affects the implementation of environmental decisions. For example, the implementation of the EU’s Habitats Directive was delayed and rendered less effective across Europe by protests staged by stakeholders who felt that they had not been consulted in the site designation process (Paavola 2003/2004). This chapter investigates the implications of increasing heterogeneity for environmental decision-making and governance through the lens of new institutional economics literature on local and international environmental governance (Baland and Platteau 1996; Berge and Stenseth 1999; Keohane and Ostrom 1995; Loehman and Kilgour 1998; Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 2002; O. R. Young 1994, 2002). It shares the view of this literature of environmental problems as environmental conflicts but examines the sources of these conflicts in greater detail than has been customary. It also shares the view of new institutional literature according to which environmental conflicts are resolved by establishing, modifying or reaffirming environmental governance institutions. For new institutional economics, institutions are ‘rules of the game’ (North 1990: 3) or the sets of informal or formal rules that define the rights, duties, powers and liabilities of agents (Bromley 1991; Schmid 1987). The chapter also explores the literature in philosophy and social choice theory in order to accommodate a broader range of human motivations than is usual in the environmental governance literature. Here I will argue that globalisation expands the scale of interdependence with regard to environmental resources and creates conflicts between agents that have increasingly heterogeneous interests, goals and values. That is, globalisation and global environmental change will engender a radical form of pluralism. It will be a challenge to environmental governance at both national and
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international levels because it complicates the identification of agreeable principles of distributive justice and threatens the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance solutions. This does not mean, however, that environmental decisions and governance become impossible. It means rather that recognition (Fraser 2001; Schlosberg, Ch. 7, this volume) and procedural justice in general will play an increasingly important role in institutional reforms as the foundation of legitimacy of environmental decisions and governance in the future. In what follows, the first section discusses how environmental conflicts are dealt with in the literature on environmental governance. The second section examines how human motivations could be treated more broadly than has been customary. The third section investigates notions of justice and their relationship to value pluralism. The fourth and final section discusses the implications of preceding analysis for governance solutions.
Environmental governance, conflict and interdependence Environmental governance is about resolving conflicts over environmental resources such as forests, fisheries, the quality of air and water, biodiversity and atmospheric sinks (O. R. Young 1994: 15). Environmental conflicts emerge when agents interested in or affected by environmental resources or their use are interdependent – a choice by one agent influences choices made by (or the alternatives available for) other agents. For example, discharging pollutants into the air constrains the opportunity to breath clean air. Keeping that opportunity open would in turn constrain the use of air basins as waste sinks by industrial and other polluters. The two parties of this example cannot realise their interests simultaneously without a conflict of interests. Interdependence has two distinct sources: physical attributes of environmental resources and the attributes of their users. Rivalry or non-rivalry of use and the ease or difficulty of exclusion are the most important resource attributes that create interdependence – they divide environmental resources into categories usually labelled as private goods, common-pool resources, toll goods and pure public goods (see Table 9.1). Other important resource attributes include immobility or mobility, stability or fluctuation of yields, and amenability for storage or the lack of it (see Schlager et al. 1994: 294–299; see also Schmid 1987). These resource attributes can further complicate the governance of environmental resources. Rival use generates interdependence because two users cannot simultaneously use a unit of rival resource such as fish or a litre of clean air: use by one agent precludes that by another. Non-rivalry enables several agents to use a resource such as landscape simultaneously. However, it creates an interdependence regarding whose preferences ought to be realised because the quantity and quality of goods subject to joint consumption cannot be individually provided. Difficulty of exclusion in turn introduces the possibility of free riding – using a resource (which can be subject to either rival or non-rival consumption) without
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Table 9.1 Main physical resource attributes Rival use
Joint use
Low exclusion costs (LECs)
Private goods
Toll goods
High exclusion costs (HECs)
Common-pool resources
Pure public goods
contributing to the costs of its provision (Paavola 2005a). One agent’s choice to free ride increases the costs of provisioning for others and reduces their willingness to participate in provisioning. These examples again indicate that the interests of interdependent users of environmental resources are often in conflict. The second source of interdependence lies in the attributes of resource users, for example their number, heterogeneity and social capital. When only a small number of agents are involved in or affected by the use of an environmental resource, they can observe each other’s behaviour and keep each other accountable for it. Large numbers make individual behaviour difficult to observe and facilitate free riding, increasing the cost of collective action and potentially undermining collective action altogether (Olson 1971: 11–12). Heterogeneity of, for example, interests, income levels, goals and values translates into conflicting preferences with regard to environmental resources (see Bardhan and DaytonJohnson 2002: 88–90). Social capital can help to overcome problems associated with large numbers and heterogeneity, and its lack has the opposite effect.2 These sources of interdependence often create conflicts regarding whose interests and preferences are to be realised in instances where they differ and everybody cannot be pleased simultaneously. Conflicts over the use of environmental resources have to be resolved one way or another by establishing, changing or reaffirming environmental governance institutions (O. R. Young 1994: 15). The nature of interdependence underlying an environmental conflict influences what decisions must be undertaken in order to resolve it (Schmid 1987: 188–195). For example, when the use of the environmental resource is rival, the question is: which one of the rival users is to have a right to a unit of the resource (and, if the resource can be apportioned between competing users, what are their respective shares in it)? In the case of nonrivalry, the question is: what quantity and quality of the non-rival resource should be provided when preferences differ and agents have incentives not to disclose them? Difficulty of exclusion in turn poses the question: how should the costs of provision be distributed and recovered? Discretionary contribution to costs enables agents to exercise their preferences but also to ride free. Compulsory contribution in turn overcomes the problem of free riding but at the same time creates ‘unwilling riders’ (Brubaker 1975). The nature of interdependence also influences what governance solutions are workable. When exclusion is easy, private property rights and markets may work
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well for resources such as agricultural land that are subject to rival use. However, difficulty of exclusion complicates matters. If a resource which is subject to rival consumption makes only a small number of relatively homogeneous agents interdependent, informal institutional arrangements such as customary common property arrangements may work as a governance solution (Ostrom 1990). When the number and heterogeneity of interdependent agents is greater and resource use is joint, formal governance solutions such as national environmental and natural resource policies or public provision are often needed. Finally, multilevel governance solutions are required when a large number of agents are interdependent. This is especially the case when the interdependence is complex and spans a number of (possibly nested) political jurisdictions. All environmental governance solutions, from customary common property arrangements to international environmental conventions, thus respond to conflicts that have their origins in interdependence.3 The emergence of international environmental governance in the past few decades is related to new trans-boundary and global environmental problems such as acid rain, loss of biodiversity, depletion of the ozone layer and global climate change, the latter part of which make most, if not all, humans interdependent (see Steffen et al. 2004). However, it is also related to and affected by economic, political and cultural globalisation. Globalisation in its different forms brings together individuals and groups who have conflicting values and interests with regard to the environment. For example, many in the North feel that the large mammals and biodiversity-rich habitats of the South should be protected at any cost. For other Northerners and Southerners these environmental resources can be obstacles to economic undertakings such as mining or oil extraction. For still others in the South they can be the ultimate safety nets, for example when livelihoods are under environmental stress as a result of drought. Governance solutions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) strike a particular balance between these (and other) interests. The increasing degree of heterogeneity in the globalising world will complicate the making of collective environmental decisions and will set new requirements for environmental governance solutions. In what follows, I will discuss pluralism in greater detail to identify its implications for environmental decision-making and governance.
Plural values and human behaviour Environmental governance literature often shares the conventional economic assumptions according to which agents seek to improve their personal utility or welfare. It sometimes acknowledges other goals such as environmental stewardship on an ad hoc basis but has not developed any more systematic treatment of plural motivations. Yet doing so would clearly improve our understanding of environmental conflicts and collective choices. In what follows, I will outline one
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way of accommodating pluralism to explore its implications for environmental decision-making and governance. First it is necessary to discuss the conventional treatment of motivations – the understanding according to which self-centred improvement of personal welfare or utility guides our behaviour. There are historical reasons for the confusing interchangeable use of the terms ‘utility’ and ‘welfare’ with regard to the goals of human behaviour. Early economists associated utility either with psychological pleasure or material usefulness (see Cooter and Rappoport 1984: 511–523; Sen 1991: 279–281). The pleasure and usefulness notions had different implications for interpersonal utility comparisons – the former denied it while the latter made it possible. More importantly for this chapter, both of these notions of utility were based on an understanding according to which individuals were unambiguously motivated by the improvement of some notion of their personal welfare. For this reason, I will use the term ‘welfarism’ to refer to these older behavioural assumptions. Economics moved beyond these assumptions when Hicks and Allen (1934: 55–60) redefined utility as the degree of preference satisfaction (see also Broome 1991: 3–5). This definition acknowledged that individuals may have a variety of motivations – including ones not related to the improvement of their personal welfare – but held that a common measure (utility) exists for aggregating changes in the relative fulfilment of preferences which are potentially based on different kinds of motivations. All of these motivational assumptions are problematic. Welfarism does not acknowledge the actual diversity of human motivations. After all, many of us find it perfectly reasonable to pursue goals that are considered valuable or important although doing so would require personal sacrifices. These goals can relate to what is considered right or good with regard to other humans or nonhumans. In principle, preference utilitarianism acknowledges that a broad set of motivations can underlie preferences. However, it suggests that a common denominator exists for the relative satisfaction of preferences. That is, preference utilitarianism commensurates values that underlie preferences although they might not actually be commensurable. Moreover, the maximisation of utility is thought to imply the maximisation of welfare as well, although there is no relationship between the two – the maximisation of utility simply does not have substantive meaning (see Sen 1973: 255–256). The notion of utility as the degree of preference satisfaction also hinders our understanding of the implications of different motivations for choice behaviour (Paavola 2002: 90; Bromley and Paavola 2002). It is more realistic to admit that individuals are motivated by and pursue a number of goals which cannot necessarily be subsumed under any overarching notion of utility (see Simon 1955). Agents are often interested in their own welfare, as is argued by many economists. However, sometimes they are acting out of concerns for the welfare of other humans or non-humans. Agents can also be interested in attaining outcomes such as the preservation of a species that they consider intrinsically good or valuable (or avoiding outcomes such as extinction that they consider intrinsically bad) without regard to the welfare
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consequences of attaining such goals. Finally, agents sometimes act on principles or rules without regard for the consequences. This is the case, for example, when agents assume duties in order to respect rights attributed to present or future humans or non-humans. Economists often argue that agents have to make trade-offs under fundamental scarcity and that in doing so they commensurate alternatives with willingness to pay (see Hanley and Shogren 2002). This may indeed often be true – at least retrospectively. For example, a willingness to pay can be inferred from choices that dedicated resources to avoid adverse environmental impacts or to gain access to environmental amenities. However, this does not mean that choice can actually be explained in those terms (Holland 2002). The possibility of attributing pecuniary valuation to choice ex post does not mean that pecuniary calculation guided the choice ex ante (Bromley and Paavola 2002). We can only gain an understanding of environmental decisions by respecting the potential incommensurability of values that can underlie agents’ preferences. I am making here a particular argument for the acknowledgement of what I call ‘radical pluralism’. For me, radical pluralism is a term that characterises the diversity of ethical and moral positions. As I hope to clarify below, the acknowledgement of radical pluralism does not deny the possibility of making collective moral judgements. I argue that the acknowledgement of radical pluralism helps to shed light on the complications of collective action and choice in the context of significant heterogeneity. Therefore, it can assist us in reaching agreement on difficult but necessary environmental decisions. That is, the argument for the acknowledgement of radical pluralism does not mean giving up hope of agreement on what ought to be done in the future in order to protect the environment. It is a device for developing strategies that can work in the context of fundamental heterogeneity, where unity must be built on difference instead of similarity, as suggested by David Schlosberg in Chapter 7 of this volume (see also Schlosberg 1999).4 The conventional economic approach acknowledges a limited degree of heterogeneity. Let us examine for the sake of an example a situation where private property rights in forest resources do not exist. Agent A prefers the conversion of a part of forest to agricultural land, and agent B prefers its preservation. We have a classic externality situation when A proceeds with the conversion to the detriment of B, who can be, for example, a water user suffering from altered water flow. Coase (1960) suggested that in the absence of transaction costs the problem can be resolved by assigning private property rights to one of the involved parties. Both agents would be indifferent between some amount of money and the area of forest, and would attain the optimal allocation by bargaining no matter which one would initially have the right to the forest. The decision which agent should become owner initially is a matter of conventional distributive justice. The two agents could be argued to have different values regarding the environment but their differences can be reconciled by pecuniary transfers or compensation.
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The situation changes when formal aspects of agents’ value premises differ. I refer with the term ‘radical pluralism’ to this kind of situation, where the ethical premises of agents differ. For example, if B considers preservation of the abovediscussed forest a virtuous or right thing to do, or an intrinsically valuable outcome, she or he would not be indifferent between some amount of money and the area of rainforest. It would become more difficult to decide the question of who has a right to what because non-welfarist goals are incommensurable with welfarist ones. It is not at all obvious that transfers or compensation could assist in achieving a just outcome. Radical pluralism can be manifest at two levels. First, at the intra-personal level, individuals may be informed by a plurality of values and may have to choose which values are to inform their behaviour. This means that some actions are welfare-centred while others are informed by other consequentialist or deontic motivations. Kavka (1991: 145–148) has argued that for this reason, all the complexities of impossibility theorems of social choice theory apply also to individual choice. Second, at the inter-personal level, radical pluralism means that individuals may be informed by different values in essentially the same choice situation and yet arrive at the same or different choices. It should already be clear that people can disagree on, say, biodiversity protection because they are informed by different value premises. However, people can also agree on the basis of different value premises. For example, people can choose to become vegetarians for different reasons – for the sake of their own welfare, for the sake of animal welfare or to respect the right they attribute to animals not to be killed. Of course, there are also many grounds to oppose environmental measures. Therefore, preferences and value premises cannot be deduced from choice behaviour – choices do not reveal preferences (see Bromley and Paavola 2002: 264). To conclude, individuals and organisations informed by different values often pursue conflicting goals with regard to environmental resources. This is one important (but not the only) reason for environmental conflicts. Economic, political and cultural globalisation will introduce radical pluralism because they will bring these increasingly heterogeneous individuals and groups into contact with each other. For example, economic globalisation harnesses the environmental resources of developing countries such as their coastal mangrove forests and soils for the export of shrimps and agricultural products. This may adversely affect the interests of those locals concerned about their livelihoods and of those extralocals concerned with biodiversity. Cultural globalisation can in turn increase rather than decrease heterogeneity in national political communities and it can introduce heterogeneity into previously homogeneous traditional communities.5 This increase in heterogeneity is likely to complicate environmental decisions and governance in the future because value premises influence what governance solutions are considered just resolutions of environmental conflicts. In what follows, I will examine pluralism and justice in greater detail.
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Pluralism and justice As already discussed above, environmental conflicts are resolved by establishing, modifying or reaffirming environmental governance institutions. For example, Coase (1960) argued that environmental externalities can be addressed by assigning private property rights to one or the other of the involved parties. While the so-called Coase Theorem6 explores the implications of assigning private property rights, Coase (1960) recognised that other institutional solutions such as environmental regulations could be used to create rights and that in some instances these regulatory rights could be preferable to fully transferable private property rights (see also Radin 1996). Furthermore, Coase pointed out that most decisions that resolve conflicts are predominantly distributive (see also Calabresi 1991): choice among different social arrangements . . . should be carried out in broader terms . . . problems of welfare economics must ultimately dissolve into a study of aesthetics and morals. (Coase 1960: 43) This reminds us that environmental decisions cannot be based exclusively on welfare considerations, especially when radical pluralism prevails. For example, it is unlikely that even the certainty of positive welfare consequences of an international emission trading scheme for greenhouse gases would be an acceptable justification for actually adopting it for its non-welfarist opponents, who could object to the very extension of market logic to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. An acceptable justification ought to provide reasons for why, under the prevailing circumstances, it would be better to adopt a trading scheme rather than some other solution to allocate emission reductions (see Bromley and Paavola 2002: 270). These reasons must explain why certain considerations (such as some notion of social welfare) ought to be decisive in the policy choice and why other considerations can be considered secondary or be omitted completely. More specifically, environmental governance institutions establish, modify or redefine the rights, duties, powers and liabilities of involved agents (see Bromley 1991: 54–57). Rights and duties govern the incidence of benefits and costs and belong to the realm of distributive justice. Private property rights are at their best in distributing pecuniary benefits and burdens, and other kinds of rights (such as regulatory rights) must be used to govern the incidence of non-pecuniary environmental impacts, for example those associated with human health. Powers and liabilities in turn govern authority and opportunities and belong to the realm of procedural justice. That is, sufficient reasons for environmental decisions relate both to distributive and to procedural justice. Oft-discussed rules of distributive justice include Aristotle’s contributory principle, Bentham’s utilitarian rule of greatest happiness for greatest numbers and Rawls’ maximin rule (see H. P. Young 1994: 9–13). The main contenders of these approaches to distributive justice include egalitarianism of opportunity, resources or welfare (see Sen 1992: 12–30). Often one of these approaches is
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considered the ‘right’ and universally applicable one – witness, for example, the position of many economists and equalitarians with regard to dilemmas of distributive justice. Yet there are good reasons why different rules ought to be used when solving distributive dilemmas. In collective undertakings for mutual gain, the contributory principle can well be fair and provide an incentive for participation for those who are able to contribute and who stand to benefit. Then again, there are difficult choices where not everybody can win. Cost–benefit logic may shed light on some such choices. When these difficult choices pertain to areas of life where people find it difficult or unacceptable to use the cost–benefit logic, rules of equality, priority or need may be used. Distribution of bads, such as the risk of premature death, is also (for better or worse) sometimes left to random processes to avoid making explicit decisions about their distribution (Calabresi and Bobbitt 1978: 18–20). Value premises underlying individual preferences and behaviour influence what outcomes are considered fair by involved and affected individuals and groups. The contributory principle appeals to agents that are informed by selfand welfare-centred values. Other agents may consider equality to be the hallmark of environmental justice. Still others may demand reverse discrimination because of need or in order to rectify past injustices. Furthermore, agents may consider different notions of justice fair in different contexts and issues. For example, the institutional context of behaviour influences the rules of conduct that agents choose to act upon and expect from each other (Paavola and Adger 2002a: 13). This view has elements of both pragmatist theories which recognise that notions of justice defy systematic philosophising and theorising (Radin 1996) and communitarian theories (Bell 1993) which suggest that notions of justice are specific to particular communities. Yet it does not preclude generalisations regarding justice or the possibility (and the necessity) of inter-communal justice. There are several possible ways to try to accommodate pluralism in distributive justice. For example, it is possible to qualify principles such as equality by need or contribution on a case-by-case basis (see Barry 1999). It is also possible to establish priorities between different fields of equality – for example to treat equality in access to basic goods as more important than the achievement of, say, equality of wealth and income (Miller 1999). A loose notion of compartmentalised justice along communitarian and pragmatist lines can also accommodate plural notions of justice. For example, the notion of complex equality requires the absence of domination by one group over others across ‘the spheres of justice’ (Walzer 1983: 17–20). However, the bottom line remains that radical pluralism may make consensus on distributive justice difficult to attain by qualification or in each of the spheres of justice. The difficulty of reaching agreements on distributive justice is likely to emphasise the role of procedural justice in environmental decision-making and governance. Procedural justice has not received the attention it deserves and research on it is scattered. Sometimes procedural justice is associated with the arguments of libertarian philosophers such as Robert Nozick (1974) or
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economists such as Friedrich A. Hayek (1976). Their view is that we should accept the outcomes of legitimate processes such as markets and voluntary action as just even if they are unequal. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962) forwarded a parallel theory of political decision-making which underlines the criterion of unanimity as the foundation of legitimate political decisions. Libertarian theories are problematic, however, because they downplay the significance of unequal starting points, postulate the legitimacy of their favourite procedures and end up affirming the fairness of the status quo. However, there is no reason why procedural justice ought to do so. Jurisprudence, social psychology and organisational studies have taken a more empirical approach to procedural justice. Research results from these areas of scholarship indicate that procedures influence the perceived legitimacy of decisions irrespective of their outcomes (see Lind and Tyler 1988). Research in sociology and political science on the politics of identity and difference has in turn generated important conceptual insights into procedural justice (see Lash and Featherstone 2002). Finally, research on grassroots environmental justice movements has argued that for these movements procedural justice has been both an important demand and a part of their political practice (see Schlosberg 1999; Shrader-Frechette 2002). Procedural justice is important in this wider sense when radical pluralism prevails. It encompasses issues such as recognition, hearing, participation and fair distribution of power (Fraser 2001; Shrader-Frechette 2002). Procedural justice is important because it assures those whose interests and goals are not endorsed by a particular decision that their interests and goals have been considered and that their interests have a chance to count in other decisions. It also contributes to the legitimacy of environmental decisions by enabling affected parties to express their dissent or consent and to maintain their dignity (Schlosberg 1999: 12–13, 90; Soyinka 2004; Paavola and Adger 2002b: 7–8).
Pluralism, justice and governance solutions: conclusions I have argued above that economic, political and cultural globalisation will – together with ongoing global environmental change – introduce a more radical form of pluralism than has been experienced previously at the national and international political levels. Radical pluralism is in turn likely to make environmental conflicts more frequent and complex and to increase the relative importance of justice considerations in resolving these conflicts through environmental decision-making and governance. It remains to be discussed what are the implications of these arguments for governance solutions and their analysis. Legitimacy is often the key to the resolution of environmental conflicts (Adger et al. 2003) and it rests on both distributive and procedural justice. Distributive outcomes should not consistently favour one group of winners at the expense of another group of losers. Moreover, distributive outcomes should not be ‘disgusting’ or violate applicable norms of acceptability and decency (Randall
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2002: 60–61). From a procedural viewpoint, legitimacy requires reasoned and justified environmental decisions. This entails the recognition and participation of affected parties and the legitimate distribution of power in environmental decision-making. All these hallmarks of legitimacy need to be crafted into the institutional solutions that structure the processes of making collective environmental decisions. The acknowledgement of pluralism thus underlines the importance of institutions in environmental decision-making and governance. Initial steps have been made to institutionalise environmental justice at the national and regional levels of environmental governance. The USA pioneered environmental justice with its National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. NEPA required the preparation of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) for projects which could have significant impacts on the environment. NEPA had ramifications for procedural environmental justice because the EIA process was to inform potentially affected parties about the project as well as to facilitate their participation in the EIA process. Other federal environmental policies enacted after the NEPA, such as the Clean Air Act (1971) and Clean Water Act (1972), contained provisions for citizen suits that addressed concerns for both distributive and procedural environmental justice. Distributive environmental justice was addressed more prominently by the 1994 Executive Order 12898 on federal actions to address environmental justice in minority populations and lowincome populations. This executive order established the responsibility of federal agencies to identify and address the consequences of their programmes, policies and actions for minority and low-income populations, to conduct research on environmental justice and to develop agency strategies on environmental justice. In Europe, concerns for procedural environmental justice were first addressed in the EU Directive (85/337/EEC) on the assessment of the effects of public and private projects on the environment. However, distributive environmental justice has received less attention in Europe. Procedural environmental justice was addressed again in the Aarhus Convention which came into force in 2001 (Rodenhoff 2002). The convention commits the European signatories to providing for access to information, participation and access to justice in environmental matters. The EU has recently legislated on these three areas as a response to the Aarhus Convention. The Aarhus Convention is also increasingly offered as a model for procedural justice in environmental matters elsewhere, specifically in the developing world. The USA and the EU have been active in procedural environmental justice in part because representation and participation in environmental decision-making are more difficult to provide for in multi-level political systems such as these. Procedural justice is an increasingly important issue for international environmental governance for the same reason. A good example is provided by the governance of adaptation to climate change under the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). Developing countries are going to suffer disproportionately from the adverse effects of changing climate and these effects are going to be experienced at the local level where much of the adaptation will take place as well (Paavola 2005b). Yet decisions regarding collective
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adaptation measures and burden-sharing are going to be made at the national and international levels. This creates a problem related to the informational basis of international and national decisions – how can it be ensured that national and international decisions on adaptation and burden-sharing are based on adequate and relevant information concerning local conditions? It also creates a problem related to the representation and participation of affected local parties at national and international levels of decision-making. Decisions by the parties to the UNFCCC have created the ‘Least Developed Countries Expert Group’ as a response to the first problem. The second problem has in turn been addressed by requiring national governments to undertake extensive public consultation involving local and other stakeholders when establishing national priorities for adaptation to climate change in their National Adaptation Plans of Action (FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add. 4, Decisions 28–29/CP.7; see also Paavola and Adger 2002b: 14–15). While recognition and hearing are often relatively easy to implement they are no substitute for true participation with non-trivial decision-making power. In fact, recognition and hearing can be harnessed for symbolic reasons only, as instruments to deny any actual influence on collective environmental decisions. It thus remains to be seen whether the adopted provisions make a difference. It will undoubtedly be difficult to reform international and other environmental governance institutions so as to fully accommodate pluralism and its implications. Yet it is important to do so – it is not a matter of justice only but also of the effectiveness of these governance solutions (see King 2004: 177). Governance solutions do need to include ways to identify and recognise stakeholders and to hear their concerns and goals. This is part of a process of learning about the range of values and goals that ought to inform collective decisions, and about the justifications that may need to be presented when certain values and goals are chosen as a guideline for collective environmental decisions and others are chosen to be ignored. There is also a need to include ways for stakeholders to participate in actual decision-making. Democratic decisionmaking arrangements may offer a useful blueprint for sub-national governance solutions but they are unlikely to provide a satisfactory model for multi-level governance solutions. Constitutional rules, such as those specifying decisionmaking procedures under the international environmental conventions, typically provide the basic resolutions regarding procedural justice. They are (and can be) complemented with more specific provisions regarding procedural justice. For example, the creation of checks and balances such as provisions for challenging decisions made by international decision-making bodies in quasi-judicial proceedings may expand de facto participation of stakeholders just as have citizen suit provisions for national environmental decisions. However, there is also likely to be a need for general institutional solutions that deal specifically with procedural justice across thematic areas of international environmental governance. There is also a need to develop analytical approaches that can go beyond efficiency-based economic reasoning and acknowledge the existence of a broader
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set of values. There are outcomes that matter irrespective of their welfare consequences, and certain behaviours and choices matter irrespective of any of their consequences. These approaches also need to be sensitive to conflicts and distributive outcomes (beyond distribution of mere welfare) because this is what pluralism sometimes boils down to. Finally, the analytical approaches have to offer a firm analytical grip on institutional arrangements to illuminate issues that are relevant for distributive and procedural justice, and to do so in a context-sensitive manner that does not succumb to unqualified universalism (see Adger et al. 2003: 1099–1103).
Notes 1 This chapter forms a part of the Programme on Environmental Decision Making (PEDM) at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Earlier versions of this chapter have been presented at the Reconceiving Environmental Values in a Globalising World seminar at Mansfield College, Oxford, 11–12 July 2002 and at the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) conference in Washington, DC, 5–7 January 2003. 2 Social capital is often associated with bonding among the members of a close-knit group. This kind of social capital is also called bonding capital. While bonding capital is important for successful collective action in small, homogeneous groups, other types of social capital are needed in large and heterogeneous groups. Bridging capital helps to tie different communities together with weaker, cross-cutting ties. Linking capital in turn binds groups or organisations together across hierarchies or levels of power and status (see Adger 2003; Pelling 2005). 3 It is relatively common to restrict the term ‘governance’ to refer only to those institutional responses (such as international environmental conventions and customary common property arrangements) that do not directly involve the state. However, governance is what governments do. The presence of a ‘government’ is implied by customary and international governance solutions. In the first case the community performs the functions of government and in the latter case the convention lays down a constitution for undertaking governmental functions within the scope of the convention. The state performs the same governmental functions and its policies amount to ‘governance’. 4 Emile Durkheim suggested already in the early twentieth century in his now classic The Division of Labour in the Society that the organic solidarity of traditional societies (based on similarity) must be replaced by mechanical solidarity (based on difference) in modern society (see Durkheim 1984). 5 Globalisation may (at least temporarily) increase heterogeneity because it facilitates the formulation, articulation and dissemination of environmental values. In so doing it introduces new values to previously homogeneous polities and may increase the heterogeneity in other polities where a degree of pluralism already prevails. 6 The Coase Theorem is actually ‘The Stigler Theorem’, as it was George Stigler (1966) who gave the theorem attributed to Coase its widely known form. The theorem argues that the initial assignment of rights does not influence the resulting allocation of resources. It portrays distributive and allocative decisions as independent of each other: assignment of rights belongs to the realm of distributive justice while allocation belongs to the realm of economics. Ironically, Coase himself presented the theorem as the starting point for his analysis which aimed to demonstrate that the
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initial assignment of rights influences allocation and that distributive and allocative decisions cannot be treated independently of each other.
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10 The climate change regime De jure and de facto commitment to sustainable development1 Joyeeta Gupta
Introduction The world today is changing at a pace never seen before in history. The question for this book is – are the values embedded in society able to deal with the myriad problems and challenges posed by globalisation, and if not, how should these values be reconceived? This chapter takes a practical approach to addressing this question by examining the way values are being enshrined in the principles in international environmental law. To deal with environmental problems, a new set of environmental values are in the process of being created, negotiated and consolidated through the process of the progressive development of international law. This chapter examines the new sustainable development values that are embodied in the climate change regime and the gap between these values and actual practice. It would not be out of place here to include a word of caution. While this chapter suggests that new values are being designed and adopted as principles in international environmental law, this may create the impression that such values are part of the mainstream international legal process. This is definitely not the case, and there are many sceptical lawyers who would argue that international environmental law is at the periphery of the legal process, and within that periphery the principles are at best guidelines! However, the very fact that such principles are being included in the climate change regime – a very important environmental regime – indicates that a first step has been taken in the long journey towards the establishment of such principles as part of the body of customary international law. This chapter argues that there is increasing scientific evidence and consensus on the nature of climate change and that at the same time there is increasing disagreement on the values on the basis of which responsibilities are to be shared among countries (Gupta 1997, 2001a). In other words, are responsibilities to be divided on the basis of who has polluted the most and who has the ability to bear the biggest burden, or should there be some other principles that underlie the sharing of responsibilities? This disagreement reflects a conflict between developed and developing countries, although the same conflict is visible in some South–South and North–North discussions. Interestingly, it is not as if the disagreement is in relation to the nature of the value itself, but instead is in
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relation to the context in which the value is placed. Thus, for example, while the OECD countries have themselves adopted the ‘polluter pays’ principle for problems within their own territories, they appear to be unwilling to accept the principle in the context of global problems because of the implication of a North–South transfer of resources. During the 1990s, compromise was sought in terms of the ambiguous concept of sustainable development. This appeared to meet the needs of current and future generations, thereby dealing with international and intergenerational equity. This concept was launched by the (Brundtland) World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), adopted by the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 and legitimised as the key issue by the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in 2002. There are two schools of thought regarding the concept of sustainable development. For one school of thought, sustainable development is a concept capable of being interpreted in multiple ways and made acceptable to a large number of actors (Gupta and Hisschemöller 1997). For the other school of thought, admittedly smaller but fairly well organised, sustainable development is not just a single concept but is an umbrella concept that embraces a number of legal principles which together form the nascent law of sustainable development. This body of legal principles, some better established in international law than others, provides the conditions under which sustainable development can become a reality. The key elements of this law, as adopted by the International Law Association at its meeting in New Delhi, are principles on the duty of states to ensure sustainable use of natural resources, equity and the eradication of poverty, on common but differentiated responsibilities, on a precautionary approach to human health, natural resources and ecosystems, on public participation and access to information and justice, on good governance and the principle of integration and interrelationship, in particular in relation to human rights and social, economic and environmental objectives.2 These principles call for environmental justice and to some extent correspond to the arguments made by David Schlosberg in his chapter on environmental justice (see Ch. 7, this volume). While the law of sustainable development is not yet developed enough to be the governing principle of all international relations, it is hoped that it will develop in this direction, supported by civil society. Like John Meyer in Chapter 6 of this book, I believe that the spontaneous forces of globalisation need to be checked by some form of state control and global governance. I have made a taxonomy of the options for improving global environmental governance and analysed them from different theoretical perspectives in another chapter (Gupta, 2002). I conclude that a hierarchic approach to managing environmental issues within the UN system is unlikely. Instead, global environmental governance is likely to take a multifaceted form including the gradual development of the law of sustainable development, the strengthening of environmental organisations and the promotion of a set of common values and policies that spread laterally through policy-makers in different parts of the world (the theory of the
The climate change regime 161 decentralised network organisation) as opposed to reflecting domestic top-down or bottom-up views. Personally, I would support the gradual development of new values that can cope with environmental problems and are equitable. Like Kate Soper in Chapter 4 of this book, I feel that such utopian visions are necessary in the longterm for global stability and sustainable development, and that, however idealistic such a vision may be, it may be influential to catalyse political change. Having said that, I am aware that while much has changed in North–South relations (the end of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, etc.), the relationship has remained a very strained one, and many idealistic endeavours to change this have never really materialised. Schrijver (2001) argues that what is becoming increasingly clear is that the law of development, a key element of the position of developing countries over the last thirty years, has not adequately developed and thus remains the neglected dimension in the law of sustainable development. In other words the environmental dimensions are given much more importance. In making this argument, Schrijver (2001) refers to the major elements of the New International Economic Order that have since disappeared or received little attention in the international arena. This chapter builds this argument further in the context of the climate change regime but the line of reasoning is slightly different. In other words, this chapter argues that many elements of the nascent law of sustainable development have been adopted in the climate change regime, but such elements are not clearly reflected in the negotiated agreements or in state practice. The climate change regime refers to the international legal agreements made by the international community in order to deal with the problem of climate change. With the establishment of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in December 1990,3 countries began in earnest to negotiate the Climate Change Convention.4 The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted two years later at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992. It entered into force in March 1994. The Convention includes an ultimate objective, principles and obligations for developed and developing countries. The Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention was adopted five years later in December 1997. This Protocol included quantitative commitments for the developed countries, general commitments for both developed and developing countries and a number of instruments which would allow for co-operation between groups of countries.5 Four years later in 2001, the Marrakech Accords were adopted to provide details regarding different instruments, funding mechanisms and a compliance mechanism. Against this background, this chapter examines the textual commitment in the Climate Change Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Marrakech Accords to the principles of the law of sustainable development. It then looks beyond the actual use of the words and principles to the rest of the text and its effect, examining actual factual commitment to sustainable development.
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Climate change as the test case for sustainable development Of all the environmental problems, climate change is the most suitable example of a test case for sustainable development. Climate change is a complex phenomenon. Greenhouse gases, or gases that can trap the heat of the sun, play a major role in influencing the climate. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased by 31 per cent, methane by 151 per cent and nitrous oxide by 17 per cent (Houghton et al. 2001). The emission of greenhouse gases by humans is seen as the single most influential factor in the climatic system. These gases are mostly emitted from processes that extract and use fossil fuel energy. This means that any human activity including transport anywhere on the globe that uses energy derived from fossil fuels leads to greenhouse gas emissions. Agricultural processes lead to emissions of other greenhouse gases. Wet rice cultivation and animal husbandry are two of the biggest sources of methane from agriculture. If food and energy are essentials of modern lifestyle, then the production processes of these two essentials will have to undergo major structural change in order to reduce emissions (Metz et al. 2001). At the same time the impacts of climate change on society can be tremendous. The sea level may rise by 0.09–0.88 m in the next century. The global mean temperatures may rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees by 2100 (McCarthy et al. 2001). Extreme weather events may occur on a more frequent basis. Precipitation patterns are likely to change. At worst all this could lead to a complete destabilisation of the global climatic system, and at best to major climatic calamities in specific regions of the earth. The projected climate changes will have major impacts on the fresh water and food systems of the world. The emissions in the atmosphere already commit the global community to a certain amount of global warming. Continued emissions will make the situation worse. Therefore, global agricultural communities, coastal communities and those communities near river basins and mountain regions will all have to learn to adapt to climate change. Thus, both from the perspective of the emissions of greenhouse gases and from the perspective of adapting to their potential effects, the global community must restructure its entire production and consumption systems. This calls for such a major restructuring of human systems that it is most likely to be sustainable if it also takes into account other environmental problems. By virtue of being such a complex, challenging and all-encompassing problem, climate change is an ideal case study for examining the new norms and principles that are developing to deal with global environmental problems.
Sustainable development versus sustained economic growth The climate change regime is ambiguous in its commitment to sustainable development.6 The term sustainable development is used only once in the document
The climate change regime 163 but in a critical place, i.e. in the article on Principles where it is seen both as a right and a responsibility: ‘The Parties have a right to, and should, promote sustainable development.’7 This implies that sustainable development ought to have a central place in the climate change regime. However, an examination of the rest of the text reveals that there are many more paragraphs that talk of a commitment to sustainable economic growth. The objective of the Convention states that the reduction of emissions should proceed at a pace ‘sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner’.8 At the same time it is stated that sustained economic growth is essential for sustainable development: Policies and measures to protect the climate system against human-induced change should be appropriate for the specific conditions of each Party and should be integrated with national development programmes, taking into account that economic development is essential for adopting measures to address climate change. (Art. 3.4 of the FCCC) While the literature and negotiation rhetoric indicates that developing countries mostly want sustained economic growth and developed countries want sustainable development,9 the Convention indicates that even for the developed countries, the need for sustainable economic growth is a primary concern. Thus the Convention called on the developed countries to take the leadership role in bringing back their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000: taking into account the differences in these Parties’ starting points and approaches, economic structures and resource bases, the need to maintain strong and sustainable economic growth, available technologies and other individual circumstances, as well as the need for equitable and appropriate contributions by each of these Parties to the global effort regarding that objective. (Art. 4.2a of the FCCC) What becomes clear in the 1992 Convention is that although Parties see the need for sustainable development, they see it as conflicting with the goal of sustained growth. This tension is addressed by making economic growth the primary means to achieve the ultimate goal of sustainable development. In the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Marrakech Accords of 2001 the dichotomy disappears completely. Both the Protocol10 and the Accords11 talk mostly of sustainable development; and all obligations under these agreements are subject to the qualification that they meet the goal of sustainable development. Sustained economic growth survives in one place in the Marrakech Accords and in relation to the rights of oil-exporting countries.12
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Does this mean that since 1992 there has been a major shift in the way countries think about sustainable development and sustainable economic growth? Or does this mean that things have changed so much since 1992 in both developed and developing countries that economic growth is no longer necessary to achieve sustainable development? Or does this mean that countries are confident that the ultimate objective in the Climate Change Convention will guide all measures and that since sustainable economic growth has been prioritised there, it is unnecessary to repeat this constantly? These questions bring us to a further discussion of the way in which various candidate principles in the emerging law of sustainable development are dealt with in the climate change regime.
De jure and de facto elaboration of the sustainable development concept Many elements of and commitments to the nascent law of sustainable development can be found in the climate change regime. This section examines key textual commitments and their factual implications. For a detailed examination of the elaboration of the diverse candidate principles of the law of sustainable development in the climate change regime see Arts and Gupta (forthcoming). The precautionary principle and the targets and timetables It can be argued that implicit in the concept of sustainable development is the precautionary principle (Schrijver 2001). Climate change is considered a serious problem with irreversible effects (Houghton et al. 2001) and is characterised by considerable uncertainty (Sluijs 1997). Thus, it is logical that climate change should be addressed by using the precautionary principle. The Convention duly adopts the precautionary principle which calls on countries: to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures. (Art. 4.3 of the FCCC) The question is: to what extent is the principle actually implemented? And how can this be determined? There are no clear indicators of how the precautionary principle should be translated into targets and timetables (Freestone and Hey 1996). This makes it difficult to actually evaluate whether the commitments go far enough. The climate change regime clearly states that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should be brought back to safe levels, although it does not actually define in quantitative terms what the safe levels should be.13 This leaves considerable room for negotiating. Ten years after the Convention was negotiated, this objective still has not been articulated in quantitative terms.
The climate change regime 165 If one looks at the specific goals of the regime, the negotiations preceding the Climate Change Convention aimed at stabilising developed country emissions of greenhouse gases at 1990 levels by 2000 as the first step.14 This aim has to be seen in the context of the then available science which argued that in order to stabilise global concentrations at 1990 levels (350 ppmv for CO2), it was necessary for the developed countries to bring their emission levels of carbon dioxide down by more than 60 per cent and methane by 15–20 per cent in order to make room for the developing countries to grow (Houghton et al. 1990: xviii). And yet because of the refusal by the USA to accept such a binding commitment, a compromise commitment was couched in weak language.15 Three years later, the international community decided that the commitments in the Convention did not go far enough.16 This led to a process of negotiating quantitative commitments for the developed countries which ended in December 1997 when the commitments were established by the Kyoto Protocol.17 However, far from the expectation that these countries would be asked to reduce their emissions considerably, the collective reduction is a modest 5.2 per cent in 2008–2012 in relation to 1990 levels. Norway, Australia and Iceland were allowed to increase their emissions by 1 per cent, 8 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. Although the EU member states had a combined target of –8 per cent, individual countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal were allowed to increase their emissions by 25, 15 and 27 per cent respectively. Ukraine and Russia were also allowed to increase their emissions back to 1990 levels, below which their emissions fell in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are also a number of ‘flexibility mechanisms’ that allow for a weakening of the targets in the climate change regime (Gupta 2001a: 178). The epistemic community and non-governmental organisations feel that the targets do not indicate a serious commitment to addressing the problem; most people see this as the maximum that was politically achievable at the time however. Leadership versus responsibility Let us then turn to another critical element of sustainable development, that of equity. In the Climate Change Convention, this element is translated into the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof. (Art. 3.1 of the FCCC) This incorporates the leadership principle, the principle of differentiation in responsibilities and the principle to protect future generations. Casting responsibility in terms of the ‘leadership’ concept helps to involve the more powerful
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countries in the process of negotiation. This was realised early on in the formation of the climate change regime, and all the early declarations such as Noordwijk Declaration on Climate Change included this concept. The climate change treaty itself mentions leadership four times, i.e. the developed countries should take the lead in the process. In an earlier article, I argued that the climate change regime was developed along the ‘leadership paradigm’ instead of the ‘liability paradigm’ or the ‘partnership paradigm’. I argued that the rhetoric of leadership has remained strong in the regime but, in fact, the leadership has been more in terms of science and technical innovation than in actual domestic implementation of far-reaching measures to reduce emissions (Gupta 1998a). The FCCC does not provide substantial guidance about how the principle of equity should be interpreted (see Arts 3.3 and 4) (Gupta 1998b: 404). The same applies to international law in general. Most jurisprudence shows that decisions are made in specific contexts, do not necessarily involve distributive justice and do not compensate for natural inequalities (Yamin 1995: 356). In 1996 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the equity challenge can be articulated as parity (equal distribution of burdens and benefits), proportionality (burdens and benefits are distributed in accordance with contributions of claimants), priority (those who need most should be given the most), classical utilitarianism (the benefits should go to the greatest number) or Rawlsianism (equal distribution unless unequal distribution benefits the disadvantaged) (Banuri et al. 1996). The latest IPCC report states: ‘The challenge of climate change mitigation from an equity perspective is to ensure that neither the impact of climate change nor that of mitigation policies exacerbates existing inequities both within and across nations’ (Banuri and Weyant 2001: 87). Banuri and Weyant (2001: 90–91) mention that there are four options – rights based (equal rights to the global commons), liability based (right not to be harmed by others without compensation), poverty based (the need to protect the poor and vulnerable) and opportunity based (based on the right of the people to equal opportunity to achieve an equal standard of living as others). An examination of the convention shows that the climate change agreements bypass these formulae, but provide for financial assistance (see Art. 3.3), technology transfer (see Art. 4.4) and special consideration to specific countries. There are a number of groups that get special attention under the climate change regime. These include the countries with economies in transition who are allowed variable base years,18 have limited responsibilities in relation to financial support to developing countries19 and even receive support for capacity building under the Marrakech Accords. The Least Developed Countries have the weakest set of commitments under the Convention, Protocol and Marrakech Accords20 and are also provided with assistance.21 Special attention is paid to small island states, countries with low-lying coastal areas; countries with arid and semi-arid areas, forested areas and areas liable to forest decay; countries with areas prone to natural disasters; countries with areas liable to drought and desertification; countries with areas of high urban atmospheric pollution; countries with areas
The climate change regime 167 with fragile ecosystems, including mountainous ecosystems; countries whose economies are highly dependent on income generated from the production, processing and export, and/or the consumption of fossil fuels and associated energy-intensive products; and land-locked and transit countries.22 Assistance versus compensation The principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ has been translated into, inter alia, the notion of financial assistance. The FCCC states that: A mechanism for the provision of financial resources on a grant or concessional basis, including for the transfer of technology, is hereby defined. It shall function under the guidance of and be accountable to the Conferences of the Parties, which shall decide on its policies, programme priorities and eligibility criteria related to this Convention. Its operation shall be entrusted to one or more existing international entities. (Art. 11.1 of the FCCC) The FCCC avoided creating a new funding mechanism, instead entrusting the Global Environment Facility, which was established by the World Bank, UNEP and UNDP as the operating entity for its funding mechanism (for details see Gupta 1995). The total GEF budget for its first six years was 3.2 billion US$ of which a part was for climate change mitigation, but not adaptation. The Kyoto Protocol did not establish new funding mechanisms but called on countries to make funds available. The Marrakech Accords, however, established three new funds: the adaptation fund, the Least Developed Countries fund and the special climate change fund.23 The adaptation fund is to receive a 2 per cent levy on projects undertaken by developed countries in developing countries in return for emission reduction credits. Thus it is funded by a tax on North–South co-operation!24 The question remains: Given the falling quantities of financial assistance to developing countries, does the creation of new funds automatically lead to increased funding?25 Further, by making funding dependent on the generosity of countries and on the extent of North–South co-operation, the funds become a vulnerable and unreliable source of assistance. Principles such as those of compensation for harm caused, or the ‘polluter pays’ principle, have not been articulated in the climate change regime at all. Integration versus trade-offs Integration of environmental (and social) goals in economic planning is seen as a key element of the emerging law of sustainable development. In recognition, the FCCC states that:
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This principle is not repeated again in the Protocol or in the Marrakech Accords. The recent IPCC reports indicate that while initially sustainable development was seen as the integration of social, environmental and economic issues, the literature now sees sustainable development as synergies or trade-offs between the three goals (Banuri et al. 1996). In other words, in the process of operationalising the concept of integration, it is not possible to bypass the process of making trade-offs between competing principles. Lip service to public awareness and participation Another crucial element of the emerging law of sustainable development is the concept of public awareness and participation in decision-making. Participation is necessary because local people can help identify and shape the solutions that work best in local contexts; because emission limitation and adaptation options will have to be implemented at local level; and because it is at the local level that the survival of peoples is most at risk (Gupta 1996). The climate change regime allows participation of non-state actors in the climate change negotiations (Art. 7.6 of the FCCC). Non-state actors can also participate in the implementation of the regime through the flexible mechanisms (Art. 6, 12 and 17 of the Kyoto Protocol). It allows for direct communication channels with the scientific community through Article 9 of the Convention. Finally, the FCCC calls on parties to raise public awareness and ensure public participation in decisionmaking. In carrying out their commitments under Article 4, paragraph 1(i), the Parties shall (Article 6 of the FCCC): (a) Promote and facilitate at the national and, as appropriate, subregional and regional levels, and in accordance with national laws and regulations, and within their respective capacities: (i) The development and implementation of educational and public awareness programmes on climate change and its effects; (ii) Public access to information on climate change and its effects; (iii) Public participation in addressing climate change and its effects and developing adequate responses; and (iv) Training of scientific, technical and managerial personnel.
The climate change regime 169 The article goes on to specify that Parties should co-operate at international level to promote such activities. In allowing non-state actors to participate in the negotiating process, in the communication channels set up with the scientific community and in the area of empowering the private sector to participate in the implementation of the Convention, the regime has been extremely successful. For example, in 2001, while 172 states participated in the negotiations, 234 observer organisations (including 20 intergovernmental organisations and 194 non-governmental organisations) and 166 media organisations were present. There were 2432 participants from states, 1569 from non-state organisations and 459 from the media (FCCC/CP/2001/Inf. 4). The private sector participates actively because the regime has set up incentives that encourage them to do so. The communication with the scientific community via the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technological Advice also proceeds fairly smoothly. However, the obligation to take measures to raise awareness and to encourage public participation in decision-making has received relatively less attention. The National Communications (Reports) indicate that a range of measures is used to implement this article. For example, Canada has surveys and vehicle emission testing clinics, the EU has Information Exchange Networks, the USA has public–private partnerships and round table meetings, the Philippines has had a climate awareness survey, public consultations and local action planning on climate change, while Zimbabwe used a national Delphi survey to identify, clarify and rank environmental issues.26 Since climate change is such a serious problem and since it calls for far-reaching measures, public support is an essential criterion. This can be promoted only when the public understands the problem; and much more awareness-raising activities need to be carried out, otherwise the lack of content given to this principle could lead to a lack of public support and defeat the very purpose of the regime (Gupta 1996). This is especially important as actors opposing the climate change regime have published advertisements to raise public opinion against it. Good governance or decreasing legitimacy Good governance is increasingly seen as a cornerstone of the law of sustainable development. The principle of good governance is not mentioned in any of the key documents of the climate change regime. However, the regime has rules of procedure which aim at good governance.27 The regime is also governed by the law of treaties that aims at ensuring the rule of law in the negotiation and implementation of treaties. And yet, there are questions that can be raised regarding the legitimacy and hence the compliance pull of the regime (Gupta 2001b). One of the key procedural complications that affect the negotiations is the imbalance of actual representation in the regime’s decision-making. Most developing countries are represented by one or two negotiators, while most developed countries have teams ranging in size from small to very large. The negotiations take place officially in two simultaneous plenary sessions. There are also a number of side
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negotiations within ‘friends of the chair’ groups, ‘working groups’, ‘joint working groups’, ‘contact groups’, ‘joint contact groups’, ‘informal groups’, ‘informal informals’ and ‘non-groups’ (Gupta 2000a: 16–17). In fact, the bulk of actual negotiations takes place in these groups which often meet simultaneously and use English as a working language. This is essential to facilitate negotiations between 187 parties on complex issues. However, for developing countries, participating in these meetings is difficult given the language, expertise and personnel constraints. One can thus begin to question the actual legitimacy of the final outcome of these negotiations.
Cost-effectiveness and sustainable development Cost-effectiveness has thus far not been seen as a major element of the emerging law of sustainable development. However, it is a major goal of the climate change regime.28 This implies that greenhouse gas mitigation needs to take place at least possible cost to the parties. This appears to be a very reasonable goal and even allows for so-called ‘win–win’ solutions where countries may finance emission reduction measures in other countries if it would be cheaper for them to do so.29 However, the principle of cost-effectiveness divides up the decision process into a number of steps. First it is agreed that, for example, energy efficiency measures are good for the greenhouse problem and also compatible with the goal of sustainable development. If this objective is made subject to the costeffectiveness rule, then it follows that it would be cheapest to undertake energy efficiency measures in the developing countries or central and eastern European countries. This is the rationale of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)30 and Joint Implementation.31 However, it is difficult, ‘ex post, to graft other policy objectives related to development or sustainability (e.g., poverty reduction, human capital development) onto a cost-effective style of development’ (Banuri and Weyant 2001: 80–81). Cost-effectiveness becomes the primary principle in the operationalisation process and it may lead to skewed trade-offs between the three pillars of sustainable development.
Technology transfer versus sustainable development I have chosen the principle of technology transfer for somewhat more detailed discussion, because it is a key element in the climate change regime. The promotion of state-of-the-art technologies in developing countries can provide a short cut towards both sustainable development in these countries and a reduction in the rate of growth of their greenhouse gas emissions. This is based on the notion that developing countries can adopt new industrial and institutional structures based on state-of-the-art technologies available elsewhere in the world. Such new technologies can be adopted via the instrument called technology transfer. The instrument was promoted at the 1990 Second World Climate Conference
The climate change regime 171 (SWCC 1990), and was expressed in Article 4.5 of the FCCC, Article 10 of the KPFCCC and Decision 4/CP.7 of the Marrakech Accords. Recent IPCC reports (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000) demonstrate that the North–South gap can be effectively closed if developing countries make conscious choices regarding the technologies that they adopt. Although elegant, the concepts of industrial transformation and technology transfer are fraught with complexities. First, state-of-the-art technologies are, by definition, expensive and developing countries are, by definition, poor. Financing thus becomes a critical issue for the transfer of technology. The climate regime has, hence, in addition to Article 4.5 of the Convention and Article 10 of the Kyoto Protocol, references to technology co-operation and capacity building via the GEF and the CDM. Unfortunately, interviews and speeches of developing country negotiators indicate that not much has been achieved so far via the instrument of technology transfer (Gupta 1997, 2000b). Second, there is a fear of dependency. Many new technologies such as photovoltaic solar energy are expensive. If developing countries can barely afford to pay for them, is it not possible that this will lead to increased dependency? Will this process mimic the process of debt that the developing countries have been going through over the last few decades? In relation to other treaties Hennikof (1997: 51) argues that ‘years of colonial and fiscal (debt) exploitation have left many countries wary of entering technological arrangements which also might leave them similarly vulnerable’. Third, identifying and choosing state-of-the-art technologies is a politically challenging issue. Are state-of-the-art nuclear, gas and coal technologies to be transferred to the developing countries? Are these the best technologies to achieve sustainable development? Do these technologies have the support of local communities and are the necessary human and organisational capacities available? Industrialised countries with expertise in these areas would like to promote the transfers of these technologies. Will they use the pressure of their investment potential to push their commercial interests? In the context of the CDM there is a lively debate on which technologies would be eligible, especially in light of the requirement that CDM projects should contribute to sustainable development. Environmental groups such as the World Wide Fund for Nature would like to see a restriction to renewables and high efficiency technologies on the demand side. Developing countries themselves may see renewables as interesting, but thermal (and sometimes even nuclear) as far more affordable. Although the Environment Council of the EU has indicated clearly its support for a positive list of technologies that can be eligible for CDM, other OECD countries have resisted such an attempt to limit the technologies that are eligible for CDM. Developing countries, too, may resist on the grounds that they are the best judges of what is sustainable in the context of their own countries. Fourth, within the developed countries there are also key political challenges in relation to technology transfer. The industries that produce the greenhousefriendly technologies tend to be limited to a few developed countries. If a North-based fund were used to finance these technology transfers, this would in
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effect amount to a North–North financial transfer which few Northern countries would find acceptable ( Junne 1995). Fifth, most technologies are owned by private companies. Industrialised country research and development programmes often require early financial participation by companies and are aimed at transferring intellectual property into their hands. That means that investment, sales and licensing policies of private companies become important factors in the process of the diffusion of technology to developing countries. And that means that the social, economic and political circumstances in those countries will determine how much and what kind of investment is being made. Current Foreign Direct Investment patterns clearly show a serious imbalance: only a limited number of developing countries benefit substantially (Metz et al. 2000: 105–141). Finally, the language of the texts in the Convention and Protocol is nonspecific. This is not surprising since there are deep differences of views behind the language. Developing countries have looked at technology as something that the rich countries should give to them, either on a grant basis or on preferential conditions. Developed countries in turn see technology transfer as something that can only be done by the private sector. Vague language, then, is the usual compromise. And that in turn prohibits meaningful action on the ground. As Hennikoff (1997: 57) puts it: ‘the vague language in current treaties not only fails to provide adequate transfer mechanisms and commitments, but also threatens to undermine the credibility of environmental treaties necessary for their successful implementation’. There are some signs that there is a growing common understanding about the mechanisms that drive technology transfer. At the Fourth Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention a consultative process was initiated to investigate the best ways to implement Article 4.5 on the basis of a broad set of questions that do indeed cover all players in technology transfer. However, current trends show that the development and transfer of fossil fuelbased, large-scale, high-emission technologies are dominant. These transfers are supported by export crediting facilities of industrialised countries. There is also the commercial export of ‘second-hand technology’ to developing countries, such as automobiles, CFC-filled refrigerators and outdated industrial equipment. Finally, multilateral development banks also prefer to support large-scale, ‘proven technology’ projects. The recent IPCC report on technology transfer (Metz et al. 2000) argues that the three major dimensions involved in making technology transfer more effective are: (1) capacity building; (2) an enabling environment for the private sector and other organisations; and (3) mechanisms for technology transfer. The report indicates that there is need for establishing National Systems of Innovation (NSI) as an institutional framework to promote the development and purchase of appropriate technologies. Comprehensive approaches to technology transfer which incorporate many of the elements listed above are beginning to emerge on both a bilateral and multilateral basis. The USA has the Technology Cooperation Agreement Pilot Project (TCAPP) and the OECD countries have
The climate change regime 173 established the Climate Technology Initiative (CTI).32 Both approaches utilise a bottom-up, collaborative process under which all relevant stakeholders are engaged in jointly determining the technology needs, selecting technology and identifying an implementation path consistent with that country’s/region’s sustainable development goals for one or more sectors. At Marrakech in 2001, the Parties established an Expert Group on Technology Transfer to analyse and facilitate technology transfer.33 The Parties decided to focus on the transfer of environmentally sound technologies (ESTs) through a country-driven, integrated approach at a national and sectoral level and by involving stakeholders and undertaking activities such as technology needs assessments, technology information, enabling environments, capacity building and mechanisms for technology transfer.34 The Parties asked the secretariat to build further on the work of the CTI and to develop a search engine on the Internet to allow access to inventories of environmentally sound technologies.35 The Parties agreed to establish enabling environments which focus on ‘government actions, such as fair trade policies, removal of technical, legal and administrative barriers to technology transfer, sound economic policy, regulatory frameworks and transparency, all of which create an environment conducive to private and public sector technology transfer’.36 Parties are also encouraged to engage in capacity building to help developing countries deal with the issue of technology transfer. The task of the Expert Group is to find mechanisms to enhance technology transfer. All in all, given the long period of silence on technology transfer under Article 4.5 of the Convention, the Marrakech Accords give considerable attention to it and build on the advice of the IPCC Special Report on Technology Transfer. Whether the Expert Group and its advice can help to reverse the existing trends remains to be seen. This is a concern since the Convention specifies: ‘The Parties should cooperate to promote a supportive and open international economic system that would lead to sustainable economic growth and development in all Parties, particularly developing country Parties, thus enabling them better to address the problems of climate change.’37 Yet an open economic system would lead to the transfer of old technologies to the South since these are affordable. This could render the effects of technology transfer initiatives within the climate change regime negligible.
Analysis and conclusions The climate change regime is a unique regime. Its development is informed by scientific reports that feed into the process. The Convention is probably the only legal treaty that actually talks of the right to sustainable development. The legal jargon of sustainable development and the related principles such as the precautionary principle, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, the principle of financial assistance and technology transfer, and the principle of public awareness and participation are all a part of the climate change treaty. In fact, one can say that the climate change regime
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(including the Convention, the Protocol and the Marrakech Accords) embodies the law of sustainable development. However, the regime contains competing legal principles, including the notion that sustained economic growth is a necessity in achieving sustainable development, the notion that all measures should be cost-effective and the difficulties in ex-post grafting of sustainable development criteria onto projects to implement the Convention and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The support for the open economic system makes it difficult to promote the transfer of only modern, environmentally sustainable technology. The promotion of old technologies via the banks, international trade and export credit agencies may lock the developing countries into a technological trajectory that will lead to increased emissions, not relatively lower increases of emissions. The documents of the climate change regime can be read to substantiate that the Parties have good intentions and have given serious content to the precautionary principle. However, giving affirmative content to the principles of common but differentiated responsibility and of public participation will remain a major challenge. This chapter has also argued that the principle of good governance has not been sufficiently attended to: the way in which the negotiations are undertaken in practice undermines the legitimacy of the negotiating process. The treaties are very clear that what is sustainable is to be left to individual countries to decide. The host countries in, for example, projects under the CDM and Joint Implementation must decide for themselves what is sustainable.38 In doing so, the treaties respect the sovereignty of each country and accept that sustainable development is a context-specific issue. The success of the treaty in promoting sustainable development depends very much on how countries have internalised this concept and how they interpret it in the future. Finally, we return to the issue of what is sustainable? What permutations and combinations of technologies and lifestyles will be sustainable in the long run? This remains an unanswered question. Meanwhile, there is an assumption that the West is in a position to provide sustainable technologies to the South that the West itself is unwilling to implement domestically because of the problem of ‘stranded costs’. There is an assumption that sustainable technologies exist in the West and that the West is able to undertake capacity building and technology transfer operations. If we see current global environmental problems as a side effect of the way Western society and technology is organised, then this assumption can be questioned. The West needs to become sustainable itself before it can transfer such concepts to the South. This chapter has pointed out that many elements of the idealistic and nascent law of sustainable development have been incorporated into the text of the climate change agreements. This indicates that these principles are becoming important in the area of climate change law, if not in environmental law or in international law in general. This, in itself, is a remarkable feat. This chapter has also pointed out that although these principles are mentioned, the commitments enshrined in the agreements possibly fall short of what the principles entail; this is possible because of the wide potential for interpreting these principles and the
The climate change regime 175 gap between the adoption of lofty ideals and the factual commitment to such ideals – possibly because of the lack of domestic commitment to such ideals at a global level.
Notes 1 This chapter has been written as part of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam project on the Law of Sustainable Development. It has been revised on the basis of comments received from the participants in the workshop on Reconceiving Environmental Values in a Globalising World, Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society, 11–12 July 2002 and the New Delhi Conference of the International Law Association held in April 2002. 2 Resolution 3/2002 of the International Law Association: The New Delhi Declaration of Principles of International Law Relating to Sustainable Development. 3 UNGA/Res. 45/212. 4 See Bodansky (1993) for details on the negotiating process. 5 See for example Arts 3, 4, 6, 12 and 17 of the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (KPFCCC). 6 For details, see Arts and Gupta (forthcoming). 7 Art. 3.4 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). 8 Art. 2 of the FCCC. 9 For details, see Gupta (1997). 10 Arts 2, 3, 10 and 12 of the KPFCCC. 11 See for example, FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1- Decision 1/CP.7, Annex A to 2/CP.7, FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1- Decision 5/CP.7, FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.2-Decision 16/CP.7, 17/CP.7. 12 The oil exporting countries are among the better negotiators in the climate change regime. They include some of the richest developing countries. However, their wealth arises mostly from oil and petroleum exports. They fear that if the climate change regime is effective, this will lead to reduced demand for fossil fuels from their countries, leading to a fall in their economic income. They have thus argued successfully for including sustained economic growth in the Marrakesh Accords. 13 ‘The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner’ (Art. 2 of the FCCC). 14 See travaux preparatoires for this period. 15 See Art. 4.2a, b and Bodansky (1993), Sands (1995) and Gupta (1997). 16 See the work of the Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin Mandate (FCCC/CP/1995/7/ Add.1- Decision 1/CP.1, Para 4). 17 See Art. 3 and Annex B of the KPFCCC. 18 Art. 4.6 of the FCCC, Art. 3.5 of the KPFCCC. 19 This is why they are not listed in Annex II of the FCCC. 20 Art. 12.5 of the FCCC. 21 Art. 4.9 of the FCCC; FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 4/CP7, para 6 of Annex; Art. 20c of Annex to FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 4/CP.7. 22 Art. 4.8 of the FCCC. 23 FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 7/CP.7.
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24 FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 10/CP.7; 15a of FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.2 – Decision 17/CP.7. 25 In the Marrakech Accords it is also noted that the EC, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland have agreed to contribute 450 million euros to the new funds by 2005. Nevertheless, there is a declining trend in assistance to developing countries since the early 1990s and help provided by most developed countries falls considerably short of the promised amount of 0.7 per cent of GNP. 26 Issues in the Negotiating Process: Clearinghouse – Public Participation Mechanisms: Public Participation Mechanisms Discerned from a Review of National Communications by Country. Online. Available at: http://unfccc.int/cop7/issues/clearing/ mechanisms.html (accessed 4 February 2004). 27 A/AC.237/L.22/Rev.2 (1995), revised in FCCC/CP/1996/2 (1996). 28 Art. 3.3 of the FCCC. 29 This leads to mechanisms such as Joint Implementation (Art. 6), the Clean Development Mechanism (Art. 12) and Emission Trading (Art. 17), all new instruments in the Kyoto Protocol. 30 The Clean Development Mechanism allows developed countries to invest in sustainable development projects in developing countries in return for credits for emission reduction that can be included in the calculations of the developed countries’ targets (assigned amounts). 31 Joint Implementation allows developed countries to invest in countries with economies in transition for emission reduction unit (ERU) credits. 32 FCCC/SBTA/1999/MISC.5. 33 Para 1 of FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 4/CP.7. 34 Paras 1 and 2 of the Annex to FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 4/CP.7. 35 Para 10a of the Annex to FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 4/CP.7. 36 Para 12 of the Annex to FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.1– Decision 4/CP.7. 37 Art. 4.5 of the FCCC. 38 Preambular para 4 of FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.2– Decision 17/CP.7; Preambular para 3 of FCCC/CP/2001/13/Add.2– Decision 16/CP.7.
References Arts, K. and Gupta, J. (2004) ‘Climate Change and Hazardous Waste Law: Developing International Law of Sustainable Development’, in N. Schrijver and F. Weiss (eds), International Law and Sustainable Development: Principles and Practice, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Banuri, T. and Weyant, J. (2001) ‘Setting the Stage: Climate Change and Sustainable Development’, in B. Metz, O. Davidson, R. Swart and J. Pan (eds), Climate Change 2001: Mitigation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banuri, T. K., Maler, K.-G., Grubb, M., Jacobson, H. K. and Yamin, F. (1996) ‘Equity and Social Considerations’, in J. Bruce, H. Lee and E. Haites (eds), Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change; Contribution of Working Group III to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bodansky, D. (1993) ‘The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: A Commentary’, Yale Journal of International Law, 18: 451–588. Climate Change Secretariat (2001) The Marrakech Accords and the Marrakech Declaration, Bonn: Climate Change Secretariat. Freestone, D. and Hey, E. (eds) (1996) Precautionary Principle: Book of Essays, The Hague: Kluwer.
The climate change regime 177 Gupta, J. (1995) ‘The Global Environment Facility in its North–South Context’, Environmental Politics, 4: 19–43. —— (1996) ‘The Precautionary Principle and Public Participation with Special Reference to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’, in D. Freestone and E. Hey (eds), Precautionary Principle: Book of Essays, The Hague, Kluwer. —— (1997) The Climate Change Convention and Developing Countries – From Conflict to Consensus?, Dordrecht: Kluwer. —— (1998a) ‘Leadership in the Climate Regime: Inspiring the Commitment of Developing Countries in the Post-Kyoto Phase’, Review of European Community and International Environmental Law, 7: 178–188. —— (1998b) ‘Ecospace Rights: Sharing or Dividing’, in E. Denters and N. Schrijver (eds), Reflections on International Law from the Low Countries, in honor of Paul de Waart, The Hague: Kluwer. —— (2000a) On Behalf of My Delegation: A Guide for Developing Country Climate Negotiators, Washington, DC: Center for Sustainable Development of the Americas. —— (2000b) Climate Change: Regime Development and Treaty Implementation in the Context of Unequal Power Relations, Amsterdam: Institute for Environmental Studies, Monograph No. 0–00/02. —— (2001a) Our Simmering Planet: What to do about Global Warming, London: Zed Publishers. —— (2001b) ‘Legitimacy in the Real World: A Case Study of the Developing Countries, Non-Governmental Organisations and Climate Change’, in J.-M. Coicaud and V. Heiskanen (eds), The Legitimacy of International Organizations, Tokyo: United Nations University Press. —— (2002) ‘Global Sustainable Development Governance: Institutional Challenges from a Theoretical Perspective’, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 2: 361–388. Henikoff, J. (1997) ‘Bridging the Intellectual Property Debate: Methods for Facilitating Technology Transfer in Environmental Treaties’, in L. E. Susskind, W. M. Moomaw and T. L. Hill (eds), Innovations in International Environmental Negotiation, Cambridge, MA: Pon Books. Houghton, J. T., Jenkins, G. J. and Ephraums, J. J. (eds) (1990) Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houghton, J. T., Ding, Y., Griggs, D. J., Noguer, M., van de Linden, P. J. and Xiaosu, D. (eds) (2001) Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Junne, G. (1995) Recommendations, a paper presented at the Workshop on North–South Synergy on Climate Change, the Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment, 26 January 1995. McCarthy, J. J., Canziani, O. F., Leary, N. A., Dokken, D. J. and White, K. S. (eds) (2001) Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Metz, B., Davidson, O., Swart, R. and Pan, J. (eds) (2001) Climate Change 2001: Mitigation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Metz,.B, Davidson, O., Martens, J.-W., Van Rooijen, S. and Van Wie McGrory, L. (2000) Special Report on Technology Transfer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nakicenovic, N. and Swart, R. (2000) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Sands, P. (1995) Principles of International Environmental Law, Vol. I, Frameworks, Standards and Implementation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schrijver, N. (2001) On the Eve of Rio Plus Ten: Development – the Neglected Dimension in the International Law of Sustainable Development, Dies Natalis, a lecture at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 11 October 2001. Second World Climate Conference (SWCC) (1990) ‘Ministerial Declaration’ and ‘Scientific Declaration’, Geneva. van der Sluijs, J. P. (1997) Anchoring Amid Uncertainty; on the management of Uncertainties in Risk Assessment of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Utrecht: University of Utrecht. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yamin, F. (1995) ‘Principles of Equity in International Environmental Agreements with Special Reference to the Climate Change Convention’, in A. Katama (ed.), Equity and Social Considerations Related to Climate Change, Nairobi: ICIPE Science Press.
11 Diplomacy and governance for sustainability in a partially globalised world Bo Kjellén
Introduction When I left the Riocentro Conference Hall at Bairra da Tijuca outside Rio de Janeiro in the late evening of 13 June 1992, it was with a sense of accomplishment. I had been chairing some of the most difficult negotiations of Agenda 21 – on Chapter 9, Atmosphere, giving a foretaste of coming battles with oilproducing countries in the climate negotiations – and we had just concluded the deal in a tense bargaining to the wire. The package of Rio was agreed. Our expectations for the future were high. An agenda for the twenty-first century had been drafted, a blueprint for a sustainable world. The new conventions on Climate Change and on Biological Diversity had been signed. Coming on top of the major political changes after the end of the Cold War it seemed to us that the new millennium had already started and that the road to international co-operation on major survival issues was open. Who were we? We were the negotiators, at both political and official level; the representatives of civil society, who had had intense weeks of lectures, debates and panel discussions at the Global Village, close to downtown Rio de Janeiro; and journalists – all in all a total of 30,000 people who felt that Rio was the beginning of something really new. The presence of more than 100 heads of state or government added to this sense of opportunity. And yet today, we have to realise that the decade since Rio has not brought about the expected results. We are still struggling with unsustainable trends, both with regard to poverty and environmental degradation. The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) ten years after Rio was forced to recognise that major new efforts were needed, and there are still many doubts about the efficiency of the measures agreed upon at the WSSD. The often confusing bargaining in big multilateral negotiations tends to hide the fundamental structure of the diverging interests that confront each other, and to overshadow the major underlying issues at play. In this chapter I have tried to analyse some of the central elements of international negotiation processes as a contribution to the discussion of environmental values in the globalising world. This chapter draws from my personal experiences as a negotiator in the Rio process and related processes as Chief Negotiator for Sweden
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between 1990 and 2001. I have used the expression ‘a partially globalised world’ in the title of my chapter as it seems to reflect the reality of the problematic at hand in an excellent way (see also Keohane 2002). My conviction is that we have entered a new era of international co-operation and that the boundaries of traditional diplomacy – concentrated on national security and economic and commercial matters – are being extended to include a much broader concern for global sustainability which I prefer to call ‘the new diplomacy for sustainable development’ (see Kjellén 1999). Some would argue that this new diplomacy is not fundamentally different from traditional branches of international relations, such as international trade diplomacy or international economic negotiations. However, as a practitioner with experience in all these areas of multilateral diplomacy since the early 1960s, I believe that negotiations on global change and sustainability issues really are of a different nature. I try to outline the reasons for this view and to elaborate on it in more detail in what follows. I will first discuss briefly environmental diplomacy as an object of analysis. I will then review the concept of sustainable development and elaborate on the characteristics of the new diplomacy for sustainability. Next I will deal with the transmission of national interests into the international system. I will then briefly discuss central issues of North–South relations and intra-generational equity in the partially globalised world. The chapter concludes with reflections on broader issues of national and international sustainability policy against the background of the present state of the art in earth system science.
Exploring environmental diplomacy When examining environmental diplomacy and governance, important questions which need to be addressed include: why are the results slow to emerge, and what are the obstacles to more efficient action? It is also necessary to analyse the process since Rio in a nuanced way: there have been successes on the road to sustainable development during this period, such as the negotiation of the Convention to Combat Desertification or the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Some may of course argue that US opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and the continued uncertainty about its formal entry into force would make it a rather hollow success. However, if one considers the long-term implications of the fact that 120 countries have in fact ratified the protocol, thereby confirming that the risk of climate change has to be taken seriously and that both preventive and adaptive action has to be taken on a large scale, it is beyond doubt a success in terms of a new way of looking at international relations. But beyond this analysis lie broader issues. Some observers may argue that the period after 9/11 has brought into question the concept of a new diplomacy. Are we not witnessing the erosion of the multilateral system, as the USA is pursuing a clearly unilateral approach to world affairs? Is it not true that the first example of this policy line was the Bush administration’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto
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Protocol? Is the multilateral system in its present shape really capable of taking on the survival issues of the twenty-first century? Undoubtedly traditional diplomacy and power politics continue to rule the world. This point was brought home very forcefully by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his speech to the General Assembly in September, 2003. But he took this state of affairs as a point of departure for proposing important changes in the UN system, in particular with regard to the composition of the Security Council, and he also announced the creation of a High-Level Panel to give advice on these matters (Annan 2003). It is obvious that structures which were established more than fifty years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, are not able to tackle unforeseen problems in a totally new global environment; and that there is a need for an overhaul of institutions. A constant argument against such proposals is that it would be dangerous to start changing the Charter of the UN, because that might lead to paralysis of the institution. It is an argument to be taken seriously, but the perils of inaction are a slow slide into irrelevance. The important point here is that it will not be enough to propose reform of the Security Council, the centrepiece of UN action of the more traditional character. The survival issues related to global change, the very concept of long-term sustainability, forces us to think in terms of yet more radical institutional changes, also mentioned in the Secretary General’s speech. The decade after the Rio Conference, including the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 and the many negotiating rounds on legally binding instruments such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change, have given us valuable insights into the nature of the UN system, both its strengths and weaknesses. One of these lessons is a better understanding of the complicated relationship between the ‘old’ structures such as the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the new bodies established in the follow-up to Rio. UNCED created a Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) as the main follow-up body; and even though the CSD cannot be branded an unqualified success, it has nevertheless brought more than sixty ministers to its main session every year, not just to make speeches, but also to interact on issues related to sustainable development. A few months later, the ECOSOC summer session reviews these issues again; and finally they reappear in the late autumn in the Second Committee of the General Assembly. These traditional discussions very seldom attract the attention of the political level: it is in my view essential to avoid making UN processes unnecessarily bureaucratic and pedestrian. The new ‘Rio Conventions’1 offer other lessons. They are all considered ‘legally binding’, but this concept is not very clear. It is true that they go beyond the purely normative character of UN resolutions or decisions, or the guideline or action programme content of Agenda 21 or the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. This has also been recognised: they are all formally ratified by competent national bodies, mostly parliaments. But their binding character is blurred by weak compliance rules and by vague language in the highly negotiated
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texts. Their strong point is most probably their process character: they establish mechanisms that permit a successive strengthening of the regimes. The Climate Change Convention is a case in point International institutions limit risks of conflict and provide a basis for tackling global problems. These obviously change over time. Certainly the nuclear threat is still there and the threat of terrorism has become acute. But environmental risks such as global warming are of a different nature – they are long-term, creeping and diffuse (see Glantz 1994). And even if resilience and adaptation will go a long way towards avoiding disaster, we have to realise that the earth system requires a better capacity of global management than we have been able to craft so far. It is in this light that the arguments of the new diplomacy would strengthen the forces that seek to strengthen multilateralism during a difficult time, threatening the fundamental gains of the system that was established through far-sighted US leadership in the years after 1945. All of us who are involved in these processes also know that the inertia of the system means a resistance to change and that there is a fear that the present state of international political will is simply not sufficient to generate a momentum for reform. Therefore, we need a vision for the future, but we cannot escape the boundaries of political realism and the need for tangible results in the short and medium term. We need a broader discussion of how multilateral co-operation should evolve to tackle the issues of sustainable development. But such a process of reform cannot take place in a vacuum. The analysis of international events and the future of multilateral co-operation has to take into account the broader picture of national political realities, and of the still wider processes of societal change as spurred by technological development or changing values and trends. Since we are confronting new global environmental risks such as climate change, new theories of environmental risk and social responses to them are needed. Examples of the latter include ‘ecological modernisation’ and ‘multi-level governance’. I now move on to discuss sustainable development as the goal of new environmental diplomacy.
What is sustainable development? There are many definitions of the term sustainable development. This is not surprising in itself. The combination of words may seem ambiguous and imprecise. In academic discourse, this is certainly not satisfactory. And in practical politics, it could easily mean that the expression would be all things to all men, and thus of limited value in negotiations. Many of us who were involved in the Rio negotiations had misgivings of this nature. The expression seemed a convenient political slogan, not a basis for action. But with time, value of this concept has become recognised and accepted. In particular, we have to realise the importance of linking the development imperative to ecological sustainability in a way which is acceptable from the equity point of view. The original text of the Brundtland Commission’s report (WCED 1987: 50) on this issue is very carefully drafted:
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Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future. Far from requiring the cessation of economic growth, it recognizes that the problems of poverty and underdevelopment cannot be solved, unless we have a new era of growth in which developing countries play a large role and reap large benefits. One important reason for the improved operational value of the concept of sustainable development has been the recognition of the three main elements of sustainability: economic, social and ecological. In practical policy terms it means that a new parameter has been added to governments’ traditional responsibility for maintaining economic and social sustainability. The new element is the environment, and the challenge is to give environmental concerns their proper place in relation to other more traditional parameters. A further complication needs to be added at this point. The simple triangular relationship between the components of sustainability is convenient for the presentation of governments’ policies and ideas. But the real world is more complicated, with an unlimited number of factors influencing policy-making at all levels. Figure 11.1 tries to capture these complexities by illustrating the many links that exist between the various components of sustainable development. It also identifies a number of other factors which influence the perceptions of sustainability, such as technological change, policy developments and demographic factors. Our analysis of sustainable development thus leads us into reflections of a more fundamental nature, opening up the perspectives of a new societal paradigm, with particular consequences in a partially globalised world. Because beyond the daily concerns facing governments and individuals there are profound movements that shape the realities of an era and permeate almost all expressions of ideas and all activities in societies. No doubt nuclear power is such an example. As President Truman stated in a message to the US Congress in 1945: The release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas. The nuclear age created a new situation in international relations, which can be compared with the emergence of sustainability as an overarching idea. I realise that the concept of sustainable development has not yet attained the same position as the Cold War and the nuclear balance of terror, but I have no doubt that it will in due course. The point of departure here is that the emergence of the bipolar world of the Cold War came to have an impact on practically all human activities, conditioning the behaviour of people and societies over a long period of time. As we are now struggling to understand the new post-Cold War world, we may well have to realise that global threats such as climate change may soon impact on behaviour in the same profound way we experienced during
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Lifestyles
Values
Education Environment
Health
Energy
Democracy Human rights Participation
Natural r esources
Social issues: Employment Povert y
Food: Land/water Economy d evelopment
Technology
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Figure 11.1 Elements of sustainability
the Cold War years. It may well be that for the absolute need for long-term sustainability – our responsibility for all future generations – the next twenty to fifty years will be decisive. A comparison of the Cold War period and the present situation illustrates some of the linkages: 1
2
Overriding visions. In the Cold War era there was a serious concern for Soviet expansionism which was to be checked by a policy of containment. The vision of sustainability hinges on long-term inter-generational equity, but it also includes combating poverty today – or in short the concern both for the unborn and the unseen. Parties. The bipolar world of Cold War was based on alliances with clearly defined leaders. In the emerging world of sustainability there are many actors. Certainly the USA is by far the strongest country today, but the world of tomorrow will have many other powers such as the EU, Russia, Japan, China, India and Brazil.
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The role of science and technology. During the Cold War, research efforts served military objectives, with important spin-off effects in other areas. Natural sciences have informed the initial responses to global threats such as climate change and the destruction of the ozone layer. However, social sciences will also be involved because sustainability will demand changes in lifestyles and consumption. Outcome. At the height of the Cold War the alternatives were clear cut: either one party would ‘win’ or there would be nuclear disaster. Today we know that the outcome proved not to be the ‘end of history’ but we remain acutely aware of the risks for new conflicts. In the struggle for long-term global sustainability we are all on the same side. It is a question of the survival of the human species under acceptable conditions, of our capacity to avoid a series of acute or ‘creeping’ disasters (see Glantz 1999).
Against this background, we need to develop a better view of the implications of transition to sustainability. We have to link the transition both to concrete, ‘physical’ elements, such as the different industrial revolutions related to information and communications technology, genetic technology, new materials we are now experiencing. But we also have to link it to ethical considerations and culture in the new setting of a global society, possibly realising McLuhan’s vision of the ‘global village’ (McLuhan and Power 1989). The transition also benefits from the recent sociological work on environmental risks by Ulrich Beck (1992, 1999), Piet Strydom (2002) and others.
The emergence of a new diplomacy for global sustainability Already before the Rio Conference in 1992 there were hundreds of environmental treaties in existence. Was this international framework perceived as a new branch of diplomacy? There are no indications in that direction. Environment was a field of action where international agreements became necessary for the same reasons as trade policy, international telecommunications or meteorological services. My argument is that the normative Rio process and the new, global, legally binding instruments related to sustainable development are examples of a new branch of multilateral diplomacy, which I call ‘new diplomacy for sustainable development’. Of course, this new kind of diplomacy builds on the foundations of traditional diplomacy, and there are many linkages between them, both in substance and procedure. But there are some distinct characteristics, in particular the perception of global threats from anthropologically driven changes in immense systems, such as the global climate system. In the 1990s the debates on global change began to gain in credibility, underlining the need for global solutions. I have no doubt that the Rio process was a central driver for this: governments at the highest level acknowledged that global threats to mankind such as climate change, the depletion of the ozone layer, land
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degradation and other phenomena required common action, as expressed in the opening paragraphs of Agenda 21. At that point in history, it was natural to think boldly about the future. The Cold War was over and there was a new sense of opportunity in world politics. The traditional discourse of diplomacy certainly maintained its force, but within a new setting. It was not surprising that the new awareness of global environmental problems was translated into efforts within an additional discourse of international relations. We were all on the same side, and there was no negotiating partner called ‘global change’ who could be forced into concessions. With hindsight, we know that the co-existence of traditional and ‘new’ diplomacy has been uneasy. But the recognition of a different kind of international relations is a useful tool in analysing what is really happening in the international arena today. On the one hand we have the old, power-based diplomacy, which today is illustrated by the military discourse of the US administration, underlining the need for support in the war on terrorism and a fundamental lack of confidence in the multilateral system. The tensions between Europe and the USA, or between the USA and the UN Secretary General, arising out of this state of affairs need to be settled within a framework of distributive bargaining, and the stakes are high. On the other hand, the Rio process has laid the basis for a framework of negotiation which is more integrative, where bargaining positions and the underlying interests are more varied and where the bottom line is the concern for long-term human survival of a different nature than that constituted by military supremacy. As all negotiators of the Rio process know, this does not mean that solutions are easy to find; powerful interests are challenged and progress is slow. A brief review of past and contemporary experiences will illustrate the most salient points. Let us first consider the underlying vision of negotiations. Traditionally, diplomacy aimed at promoting the interests of a sovereign or a nation. These interests could be linked to other concerns of a more general nature, such as maintaining the stability of a region. The ‘Concert of Nations’ in the nineteenth century is a good example. Similarly, the creation of the UN after the Second World War and the establishment of the EEC in 1957 were based on broader considerations such as those for peace, development and the union of European countries. However, the present vision has to move forward and combine the need for intra-generational equity and international solidarity with the concern for the long-term inter-generational equity. The reason is simple: mankind has reached a point where the increase in population and economic development has given us the power to influence the global environment in such a way that a prominent group of environmental scientists argue that we have entered an era of Anthropocene in which human behaviour has a decisive impact on the whole earth system (Crutzen and Stoermer in Steffen et al. 2004: 6). The argument has potentially far-reaching consequences. Negotiators are faced with the challenge of mainstreaming the new diplomacy for sustainable development at the global level. It is no longer good enough just to defend national or
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regional interests. The vision has to be global and long-term and to integrate all dimensions of sustainability. Second, this new diplomatic landscape needs to be illuminated by science and research. Accumulated experience demonstrates that natural sciences have been strong driving forces for negotiations on several issues. A broad network of scientists such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been very influential in creating the basis for the climate negotiations. There are also other examples of governance solutions such as the Montreal Protocol and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants which were based on pioneering scientific research. However, the complexity of involved issues and the significant implications of action needed to achieve long-term sustainability require the involvement of social sciences as well. There are two main reasons for this. The first relates to the nature of the negotiating process itself and will be discussed in greater detail in the next section. Negotiators normally have limited latitude for concessions beyond the instructions formulated by national governments. Therefore, we need a whole range of social sciences to understand international negotiations and not just a few experts on game theory. The second reason for involving social sciences and the humanities relates to understanding the acceptability of decisions regarding ways to achieve sustainability. All effective strategies for sustainable development will require significant changes in lifestyles, consumption patterns and more general societal trends. Third, new countries and groups of countries are emerging as active and influential players in the negotiations. It goes without saying that China, India and Brazil will be great powers of the future and major interested parties. But it is also striking that other groupings such as the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), drought-stricken African countries or the least developed countries (LDCs) in general can become influential participants because of their very vulnerability. Fourth, there is an increased need for contacts between the practitioners of diplomacy and non-governmental actors. Diplomacy first operated under a veil of secrecy. This has changed gradually but diplomacy is still very much based on contacts between representatives of government. The new diplomacy for sustainability must follow different principles. True, the negotiating parties are still representatives of government (this was explicitly stated in a formal decision taken by the first session of the Preparative Committee for the Rio Conference, for example), but a steadily growing circle of non-governmental organisations and other actors are engaged in the process by way of lobbying, side events and active presence at negotiating sessions. Finally, all this has an impact on the role of the negotiators, their background training and their ability to grasp the issues. New characteristics need to be sought and developed among the practitioners, a broad sense of culture and more deep-lying understanding of complicated issues, long-term analysis and systemic thinking. It is also necessary to involve many different government agencies in the negotiating processes. Therefore improved methods of recruitment
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might be sought, in co-operation with universities, and new forms of in-service training need to be developed.
Transformation and transmission of national interests into negotiating positions It is true that there are many stakeholders involved in present-day international negotiations. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the negotiating team, national governments maintain control of events. They issue the instructions and decide on the latitude given to negotiators in the bargaining process. Within the EU, national positions are constantly refined and pre-negotiated before they are taken into the international arena as EU positions. But the fundamental role of national governments as foci for the transformation of different interests into negotiating positions remains. However, every senior civil servant and every student of modern government is well aware of the limitations to this power. Governments are heavily influenced by many different stakeholders at the national level (see Figure 11.2). These groups are to a certain extent represented in the government itself. Ministries of Finance and/or Industry more often than not take positions different to that of the Ministry of Environment. And beyond the government offices, parliament as a reflection of the overall domestic political situation can carry considerable weight. In a non-parliamentary system such as that of the USA, there is a constant threat of non-ratification by Congress as an additional instrument of pressure wielded by the negotiators.
Local level
NGOs
Parliament Research Government Corporations Trade unions
Media
Instructions
Reports
Negotiations
Figure 11.2 National preparation and multilateral negotiations
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Government action is obviously dependent also on other actors: regional or local interests, non-governmental organisations, religious institutions and movements, the corporate sector, trade unions and not least the media (see Figure 11.2). Their views are summed up in what is perceived as ‘the public opinion’. Processes involving these actors in decision-making constitute the very essence of the functioning of a modern, democratic society. As we are discussing global sustainability, we have to realise that in the world of the twenty-first century there are no barriers between the local and the global, in terms of attitudes, and support for policies of national governments. It has been argued that there are more people than ever who are more skilful than their grandparents, since analytical skills and emotional capacities have expanded in response to new educational opportunities, new information and communication technologies, and evolving values. Rosenau (1997) has argued that this has enabled citizens to join the micro level meaningfully to the macro level. This is probably true, but the very complexity of the global challenges means that even the well-informed citizens or civil society will have difficulties grasping the full significance of global change. Information is not sufficient as driver of a paradigm shift. Something deeper is involved, a new perception of the extraordinary responsibility of this generation, a capacity to understand and to have an overview, summed up in the German word Bildung.2 The constant flow of new information may make it more difficult to achieve this state of mind. These are essential issues for international negotiations on sustainability issues over the years to come. Success in evolving international regimes will depend on the attitudes of governments, which in turn depend on enabling conditions at the national level (see Table 11.1). Global sustainability transition will only be possible if the prevailing paradigm of thought will permit it. At what time paradigm shifts can and will appear cannot be foreseen with any certainty, but it is a necessary precondition for efficient global action. The trends of global change seem to indicate that the next fifteen or twenty years will be decisive.
The North–South divide and poverty as challenges to global diplomacy The analysis of global sustainability and enabling national conditions of successful international negotiations have so far focused mainly on a developed country perspective. However, it is important to recognise that intra-generational equity is a necessary prerequisite for effective international action to defend the interests of future generations. It has to be admitted that the performance of the developed countries over the last decade in terms of expressing solidarity in a world of increasing inequities between rich and poor has not been very impressive. Since the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, environment and development have been perceived to have an antagonistic relationship. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India underlined in Stockholm that the central problem for developing countries was not environmental deterioration but
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Table 11.1 Enabling conditions of the new sustainability paradigm Defining areas
‘Trends’ in culture and religion
Research
Media
NGOs Economy Local and level corporate unions
Demography Lifestyles and consumption patterns Technology Values Education Politics and policies Note By placing ticks in this matrix, it is possible to indicate the presence/lack of enabling conditions as a basis for further analysis.
unacceptable poverty and lack of resources. The final agreements in Stockholm managed to bridge the gap in words, but the reality has haunted environmental negotiations ever since. An institutional effort to tackle the problem came with the decision to locate the Headquarters of the new UN Environment Programme (UNEP), established in 1974 as a result of the Stockholm Conference, in Nairobi, the first UN Headquarters outside the developed countries. The decision had symbolic value and a few years later it was reinforced by the appointment of the Egyptian Mostafa Tolba to succeed the Canadian Maurice Strong as Executive Director of the Programme. In practical terms however, the Nairobi location has probably created more difficulties than advantages for global environmental policy. The strengthening of regional offices in Geneva, Paris and New York has been necessary to reinforce the programme. The Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987) tried to tackle these problems by placing an emphasis on the concept of sustainable development, as discussed above. The Commission underlined that economic development and growth could and should be modified in such a way that it would be sustainable in the long term. Public perception of the Brundtland Commission’s concept of sustainability has underlined, if not over-emphasised, inter-generational equity,
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but it is important to realise that the Commission also highlighted the need for intra-generational equity and our responsibility to combat poverty today. In the preparations for the Rio Conference, representatives of developing countries took a rather cautious, or even negative, line with regard to the concept of sustainable development. Thus, the official title of the Conference did not mention sustainability: the compromise was ‘UN Conference on Environment and Development’. Furthermore, in the first years after Rio, the UN system tried to manage at the same time both Agenda 21 and an ‘Agenda for Development’ presented by the Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It was obvious that there had to be a merger of these concepts, and finally the ten-year follow-up to Rio in Johannesburg became the World Summit on Sustainable Development. One of the main reasons why the Rio process has seen continued North–South skirmishes and limited practical results has been the inability of the developed countries to live up to some of the central commitments included in Agenda 21. It is of course true that Agenda 21 is not a legally binding document, but the language related to the transfer of financial resources, in particular the 0.7 per cent target of overseas development assistance (ODA), was quite precise. Yet global ODA transfers decreased in proportion to GDP after Rio. Agreements between the North and the South have also been made more difficult by increasing inequalities in the globalising world. The North–South divisions have been amplified by the strict divide between developed countries and developing countries in the UN system. Developing countries united in the Group of 77 (G 77) in the 1960s. The group has its roots in the first UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) held in Geneva in 1964. At that time the UN Group system was based on geographical criteria which made it logical for developing countries in the African-Asian Group (Group A) and the Latin American Group (Group C) to meet in order to defend their interests in negotiations aimed at improving their position in the GATT. The Conference was premised on a report titled Towards a New Trade Policy for Development by the Secretary General of the Conference, the Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch. The report underlined the role of reformed international trade as an engine of growth and had a great impact both in and after the conference (G 77, undated). At the time of UNCTAD I the groups A and C consisted of 77 countries. The label G 77 has been retained although the group now represents more than 130 countries. It is a major player in UN negotiations and has an important role in negotiations on sustainable development. Chairs of UN negotiations are ill advised to begin a meeting without the presence of the Chair of G 77 and normally the group is invited to open important debates. Furthermore, proposals from G 77 are given special attention since it is by far the largest group in the UN system. There are also a number of very experienced representatives of G 77 who have played important roles in the Rio process and other related negotiations. The New York representatives of G 77 have an especially high profile with their expertise in legal matters and UN procedures.
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At the same time, it is easy to point to weaknesses of the group. It represents a great number of countries of tremendously different sizes which have different levels of development and political systems. Consensus is difficult to achieve within the group and it often crucially depends on the leadership qualities of the Chair of G 77. Moreover, once a G 77 position has been agreed, it is difficult to change. This creates frustration among other parties in negotiations. Developed country representatives also often feel that G 77 tries to ‘politicise’ debates which should be resolved on ‘technical’ grounds. On the other hand, the delegations of G 77 countries are small. Their back-up resources are also very limited which means that they have less capacity to address complicated issues. When the lack of efforts by the developed countries to live up to their ODA commitments is added to the picture it is not difficult to understand why G 77 often adopts the traditional political line of South–North confrontation. Since the unity of G 77 is hard to achieve and maintain, all actions by other parties which seem to aim at weakening G 77 solidarity are looked upon with extreme suspicion. This makes it sometimes very difficult in negotiations to open new negotiating patterns on issues of particular interest to groups within G 77. The only sub-group of G 77 which has achieved partial recognition and legitimacy is the group of least developed countries (LDCs). There is no doubt that G 77 will continue to play a key role in the further development of new diplomacy for sustainable development. Any reform of the current negotiation system has to recognise that the group of developing countries represents a major and increasing share of the planet’s population and must be given a corresponding role in new international arrangements. At the same time this must be done in such a way that the full complexity of the global earth system and global political realities can be recognised. Reform of G 77 itself could be part of such an effort.
Conclusions: new thoughts and research on governance in the global system The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 placed great emphasis on the importance of good governance at all levels. However, the general recommendations seem to give little guidance for action in the real world. National institutions and structures do not seem to respond to the long-term needs of the complex world system. The solutions for international co-operation are also clearly inadequate as we have to face up to problems which humanity has never met before on such a scale. There is a tendency in the political discourse to chapter over these weaknesses with skilful drafting of speeches, resolutions and action agendas. It is an important task for political science to go beyond the generalities and to lay bare the reasons why so little seems to happen; and to highlight the gap between the general statements in favour of sustainable development and concrete policy efforts such as infrastructural investment.
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The new diplomacy for sustainable development needs the support of traditional international structures and methods to cope with the new global problems. But the long time-span of environmental threats complicates the mobilisation of political will. Therefore, extreme events such as flooding, heat waves and environmental health scares can trigger action at the international level. Environmental phenomena can also have an impact on foreign policy if they are perceived to destabilise a country or a region. For example, a Pentagon-commissioned report has recently examined the potentially significant implications of these kind of events for US national security (Schwartz and Randall 2003). No doubt, perceived links between environmental risks and traditional security concerns could underline the need for good governance for sustainable development at the international level. It is however difficult to assess whether these kinds of links can really have an impact in the short to medium term. The realisation that present political and institutional structures, as well as global markets, are inadequate to tackle human-induced changes in the earth system opens up important questions related to democracy and ethics. If the preliminary conclusion is that new and traditional diplomacy have to co-exist and mutually reinforce each other at the international level, then we must also conclude that democratic institutions and practices should co-exist with the need to introduce more long-term and global considerations at the national level. This leads us back to the question of a new societal paradigm, already raised in the previous sections. How can processes be set in motion that will lead to enabling conditions for sustainability governance, both nationally and also at the international level? It seems reasonable to take the current state of the world system as a point of departure (see Figure 11.3). From there on we would study societal structures at the national level in the light of resilience and vulnerability and the capacity of societies to develop new paradigms of thinking and governance. These transitions should then be reflected in the international arenas, both in governance and in international law. These relationships form a loop which illustrates the relationships between responses at national and international levels. (DUWK6FLHQFH *OREDOFKDQJH
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A considerable body of scientific research is now carried out on all these elements. The IPCC stated for the first time that there was a discernible human impact on the climate system in its Second Assessment Report of 1995. The most recent work on the problems related to the operation of the world system was presented by the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) (see Steffen et al. 2004). This concluded that we are now in a new geological era of the Anthropocene, as suggested earlier by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000). That is, human activities are now influencing or even dominating many important functions of the planet’s environment. The statement also echoes the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change (2001) by the leading international research programmes on global environmental change. The Amsterdam Conference where the declaration was made concluded that the present state of the earth system has important new demands for scientific research and that an ethical framework for earth system management is needed. These conclusions were based on several more detailed observations, including the following: • • • • •
the earth system behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprising physical, chemical, biological and human components; human activities are significantly influencing earth’s environment; global change cannot be understood in terms of a simple cause–effect paradigm; earth system dynamics are characterised by critical thresholds and abrupt changes; the nature, magnitude and rates of changes now occurring simultaneously in the earth system are unprecedented; the earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state.
Moving from the global picture to the national realities, the issues of vulnerability and resilience of different countries need to be carefully analysed. In particular, it is necessary to take into account fully development needs in the South and to tackle growing inequalities between and within countries: otherwise the destabilising effects of global change – be they environmental, economic or social – might create serious risks for conflicts of different kinds. However, it is not only the effects of global change at the national level that need to be given attention. It is also at the national level that a broader analysis needs to be done of the obstacles to societal change aimed at creating a new paradigm of thinking and new political equilibria, aimed at enabling radical change in lifestyles, consumption patterns and public perceptions in such a way that the pursuit of sustainability could be combined with the demands of democracy. And finally – to close the loop – these changes at the national level will enable international action to influence the global system in a positive direction, through new agreements and new advances in international law. Conditions must also be created for a more efficient integration of the developing countries into the international system, which itself needs considerable reform, not least the UN.
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Notes 1 The ‘Rio Conventions’ include the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and the Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD). UNFCCC and CBD were negotiated in special negotiation committees in parallel with the preparatory work for Rio and signed in Rio in June 1992. They entered into force in 1994. The decision to negotiate a Convention to Combat Desertification was taken in Chapter 12 of Agenda 21, which also stated that the negotiation should be concluded by June 1994. The deadline was achieved and as chairman of the negotiation committee I can appreciate the advantage of having such a deadline. It is regrettable that deadlines are not used more often in the UN. The CCD was signed at a ceremony in Paris in October 1994 and entered into force in 1996. 2 The word Bildung has no good synonym in English. It reflects a broad, well-informed outlook on life and an understanding of a broad range of subjects, including the humanities.
References Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, Amsterdam: Challenges of a Changing Earth: Global Change Open Science Conference, 13 July 2001. Online. Available at: http://www.sciconf.igbp.kva.se/fr.html (accessed 25 February 2004). Annan, K. (2003) Address to the General Assembly, New York, 23 September 2003. Online. Available at: http://www.un.org/webcast/ga/58/statements/sg2eng030923.htm (accessed 25 February 2004). Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications. —— (1999) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity. Crutzen, P. J. and Stoermer, E. F. (2000) ‘Anthropocene’, IGBP Global Change Newsletter, 41: 17–18. G 77 (undated) Establishment of the Group of 77. Online. Available at: http://www. unesco.org/delegates/g77/history/establishment-of-g77.html (accessed 25 February 2004). Glantz, M. (1999) ‘Sustainable Development and Creeping Environmental Problems in the Aral Sea Region’, in M. Glantz (ed.), Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keohane, R. (2002) Power and Governance in a Partially Globalised World, New York and London: Routledge. Kjellén, B. (1999) ‘Acceptance Address of the Inaugural Elizabeth Haub Prize for Environmental Diplomacy’, Pace Environmental Law Review, 17: 33–44. McLuhan, M. and Powers, B. R. (1989) Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenau, J. N. (1997) ‘The Person, the Household, the Community, and the Globe: Notes for a Theory of Multilateralism in a Turbulent World’, in R. W. Cox (ed.), The New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Schwartz, P. and Randall, D. (2003) An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security. Online. Available at: http://www.ems.org/climate/ pentagon_climatechange.pdf (accessed 25 February 2004). Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Jäger, J., Tyson, P. D., Moore III, B., Matson, P. A., Richardson, K., Oldfield, F., Schellnhuber, H.-J., Turner II, B. L. and Wasson, R. J. (2004) Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
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Strydom, P. (2002) Risk, Environment and Society: Ongoing Debates, Current Issues and Future Prospects, Buckingham: Open University Press. Truman, H. S. (1945) Message to Congress on the Atomic Bomb, 3 October 1945. Online. Available at: http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/post-war/451003a.html (accessed 15 February 2004). World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12 International environmental governance The story so far Peter Bridgewater and Celia Bridgewater
Introduction This chapter seeks first to describe the recent efforts to establish some form of international environmental governance, and, second, to set international environmental governance to its human context. Attempting to govern the environment is, at one level, a wholly new phenomenon which can be traced back only to the late 1960s. But at another, perhaps more visceral, level people have been establishing governance systems to control, modify and manage their environment since taking the branch on the evolutionary tree which led to Homo sapiens – and possibly even before that. But governance of the environment at the local level by a village or a region is very different from environmental governance at the national and international levels. The international level can be viewed simply as a concatenation of lower levels, yet there are specific requirements, needs and drivers for international environmental governance which are different from those at the local level. Increasingly sophisticated science has produced better observations, and a better theoretical and empirical knowledge base, for understanding environmental issues and problems. This has in turn led to the rapid realisation of – and demands for – global environmental governance. For example, global governance responses to the three key issues of depletion of the ozone layer, climate change and biodiversity loss have arisen quickly as the result of clearly articulated scientific evidence. Good environmental governance is fundamental to the strategies for environmental conservation and management. Yet environmental governance is often treated as a mere bureaucratic exercise. Moreover, environmental science and ‘environmental values’ are confused in both public and specialist discussions. This results from a disconnection in communication, each group talking without listening, listening without hearing. This chapter seeks to raise and discuss some of the key issues around these questions, as well as to propose some possible solutions. In what follows, the chapter will first examine the recent history of international environmental governance. The discussion will then move on to investigate the context within which environmental governance must be set.
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The chapter concludes by taking a look at how international environmental governance might and ought to evolve in the future.
Why is international environmental governance important? Reforming international environmental governance is critically important because there is often a dichotomy between the reality and perception of environmental problems as well as between short-termism and long-termism when it comes to responses to environmental problems. Examples of this abound. For example, the International Herald Tribune carried a feature entitled ‘Global Warming’, March 2002. Among other things it commented: Australia is the biggest contributor to global warming, relative to its population, even though its hot, dry climate makes it particularly vulnerable to hotter temperatures. This contradictory position means the country risks both international criticisms over global warming, and potential environmental damage. Yet Australia is reluctant to ratify the Kyoto protocol. (International Herald Tribune, 29 March 2002) Another, and perhaps more practical, example is the duplication of actions and activities across various multilateral environmental agreements. For example, the Spanish Donaña National Park is a national designated conservation area but it is also a listed Wetland of International Importance, a World Heritage site, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a Natura 2000 site, a site recognised under the Barcelona Convention, a recipient of the Council of Europe Diploma for protected areas and a Council of Europe Biogenetic Reserve. It is far from evident that these overlapping inscriptions and recognitions are helpful for protecting the environment – they can actually cause confusion and additional burden (see Harrison 2003; Harrison and Simpson 2003).
A brief history of international environmental governance The first global meeting on the environment was the Biosphere Conference, organised by UNESCO in 1968 (Batisse 1993). This intergovernmental meeting considered a number of issues of importance, and, among other things, established the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme. But it also paved the way for the key meeting on the environment, held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972. That meeting was the genesis for the establishment of a specific UN programme on the environment, institutionalised in 1974 as the UN Programme on the Environment (UNEP). The Stockholm meeting also began a discussion on the principles for international legal frameworks of environmental protection. That process was reviewed in 1982 at a gathering in Montevideo, which produced a programme for
International environmental governance 199 development and a review of environmental law. Then in 1987 the UN established the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), chaired by the (then) Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland. This commission became known subsequently as the Brundtland Commission. The key output from this commission was the still widely cited report Our Common Future (WCED 1987), again frequently referred to as the Brundtland Report. This report set out very clearly the framework within which the discussions should proceed: environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions and needs, and attempts to defend it in isolation from human concerns have given the very word ‘environment’ a connotation of naivety in some political circles. The word ‘development’ has also been narrowed by some into a very limited focus . . . . . . . the ‘environment’ is where we all live; and ‘development’ is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot with that abode. The two are inseparable. (WCED 1987: xi) The Brundtland Report led to the World Conference on Environment and Development – otherwise known as the Earth Summit – in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Besides having detailed discussions on the environment involving many of the world’s heads of states, participants in the Earth Summit agreed to three environmental conventions which are truly global in scale. These included the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). These three conventions all had rather wide scope, changing the tendency of the previous decades to negotiate and to agree to narrow, sectoral conventions. Examples of these include the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) (1973), and the Bonn Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) (1979). The Earth Summit also produced ‘Agenda 21’, a set of codified ways to manage the environment in the twenty-first century, in addition to the foregoing three major new instruments of international environmental governance.
The recent process of developing international environmental governance further Five years later, in 1997, a much smaller gathering was held under the general title of Rio+5. Sombrely, this meeting was much less upbeat than the 1992 gathering. It reported a lack of progress on the entire set of key issues discussed during the 1992 Earth Summit. Also in 1997, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, issued a report entitled Renewing the United Nations, which, among other things, took up the question of global governance, including environmental governance.
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In 1998 the World Bank, UNEP and NASA produced a joint scientific report entitled Protecting our Planet Securing Our Future (Watson et al. 1998). For the first time a report examined environmental governance from the viewpoint of its necessary scientific underpinnings. Also in 1998, a UN Task Force on Environment and Human Settlements was established to examine governance issues linking environmental issues and human settlements. The task force again for the first time linked areas that hitherto had been treated as quite separate – and that were actually quite inseparable! In 2000 a landmark meeting was held in Malmö, Sweden – the first UNEP Global Ministerial Environment Forum (GMEF). This meeting was a milestone because it brought together the world’s Ministers for the Environment to discuss the key issues, especially the issues of environmental governance. Such a gathering brought to one table all the cultural complexities of the world’s countries and their political systems. In 2001 the UNEP Governing Council began to examine the possibilities of establishing new measures for international environmental governance. This initiative sought to create a new ‘landscape’ of environmental governance at the international level. Decision 21/21, February 2001, of the UNEP General Council established an ‘Open-ended Intergovernmental Group of Ministers or Their Representatives on International Environmental Governance’. This group held a number of meetings and some expert consultations. The sequence of meetings and consultations was: • • • • • • • • •
First Meeting, New York, April 2001 Civil Society Consultations, Nairobi, May 2001 Expert Consultations, Cambridge, UK, May 2001 Committee of Permanent Representatives to UNEP, Nairobi, June 2001 Second Meeting, Bonn, Germany, July 2001 Third Meeting Algiers, Algeria, September 2001 Fourth Meeting, Montreal, Canada, December 2001 Fifth meeting, New York UNHQ , January 2002 Final Meeting, Cartagena, Colombia, February 2002.
These meetings established several important themes for efforts to reform international environmental governance. The Civil Society Consultations on International Environmental Governance held in Nairobi came up with two key conclusions. The first conclusion was that UNEP should be strengthened and its responsibilities be extended so as to encompass sustainable development as well as the environment. The second conclusion was that the fragmented multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) should be clustered under the strengthened UNEP. In its discussions on international environmental governance, the Committee of Permanent Representatives to UNEP arrived at a recommendation that the question of the conversion of UNEP into a UN specialised agency should be studied. Finally, the Expert Consultations on International Environmental Governance made two observations. The first one was that the World
International environmental governance 201 Summit on Sustainable Development would have to focus on the role of UN organisations in the context of international environmental governance, and that financing was a critical issue in this context. The second observation was that UNEP should implement its sustainable development agenda and secure support for the integration of environmental institutions. All of these observations are possible to come up with and to follow up because the UN agencies have roles and mandates that are unclear and overlapping, leading to conflicting priorities and inefficiency. The only responses to the above discussed conclusions by July 2004 have been the establishment of the Environment Management Group (under the general management of UNEP) and the relative inactivity of the long-established but relatively ineffectual Ecosystem Conservation Group (also under the general purview of UNEP). These solutions have not delivered sought-after outcomes, although there is a clear potential so to do. In fact, the above discussed series of meetings did not unfold in a fully developmental fashion. The process peaked rather too soon at Algiers in September 2001. Since that meeting (and 9/11) everything has become more vague and the positions of the EU, OECD countries in general and the G77 plus China certainly became more entrenched and incompatible. Indeed, the final plan of implementation adopted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg was disappointing. It largely failed to adequately address the issues raised in the above discussed earlier meetings.
What constitutes international environmental governance? The Commission on Global Environmental Governance (formed by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, State of the World Forum/Comission on Globalisation and Globus Institute for Globalisation and Sustainability) has defined international environmental governance as: ‘The sum of the many ways individuals and organisations, public and private, manage the global environment’. There are certain novelties in global environmental governance, including the varied perceptions of involved actors, strong linkages between the states, and within states, and the central role played by science. Moreover, international environmental governance has become increasingly based on seeking consensus and making trade-offs. One reason for this is the increasingly important role played by non-governmental organisations in international environmental governance. Good international environmental governance has many elements. Among the most important of them are multilateral, regional and bilateral environmental agreements. Over 300 multilateral agreements have been created since 1972, with almost as many other agreements made at the regional and supranational levels. The UN has fostered their proliferation by adding a range of agency and programme structures, including programmes such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP) which has a substantial environmental
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component. UNESCO provides another good example – its science sector is almost entirely ‘environmental’. Environmental governance initiatives and organisations also exist at the regional level. They range from the supra-national structures of for example the EU to special initiatives in the Western hemisphere, Africa and Asia. The experience with regional measures is varied. Some of these measures have well-defined governance structures and are very active and effective while others have remained partial and ineffective for decades. The need for synergy between regional environmental governance measures remains clear however. As Young (2002: 263) notes: as the density of institutions operating in a social space increases, the likelihood of interplay between or among distinct institutions rises. In complex societies, institutional interplay is a common occurrence; the resultant interactions can be expected to loom large as determinants of the performance of individual institutions and of their robustness or durability in the face of various pressures for change. With regard to institutions that address environmental matters – commonly referred to as resources or environmental regimes – this means that interplay is a force to be reckoned with in evaluating whether regimes produce outcomes that are sustainable, much less results that meet various standards of efficiency and equity. Young concludes by arguing: the prospect that (re)designing institutions can play a role in controlling or managing environmental changes provides a compelling reason to invest time and energy in enhancing our understanding of the dynamics of institutional interplay. (Young 2002: 286) McCay in turn comments on the changing role of institutional solutions in the same edited volume as follows: From a rational choice perspective, the existence of institutions that can be adapted for new purposes may be extremely important to the emergence of self-governance of common-pool resources . . . . Accordingly, the emergence of institutions is as likely as not to be a case of adapting or redirecting institutions that already exist and were created for other purposes. (McCay 2002: 370) Yet the interplays which do exist are often of the avoidance kind, even if the cant of ‘synergies are important’ is frequently used in public utterances. Perhaps with that in mind, UNEP has taken the lead recently in expanding its Governing Council to become a mechanism which links National Environment Ministries – the Global Environment Ministers Forum. But UNEP also has the lead within
International environmental governance 203 the UN system for bureaucratic action designed to produce more synergistic action, and better focused results. It hopes to achieve this through the Environment Management Group which was established in 2000 and which obtained enhanced political legitimacy at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002. Finally, all the political and policy initiatives will be for nought without sound information and a strong science base. Here the enhanced scientific monitoring and assessment capabilities being promoted, inter alia, by UNEP, UNESCO and the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) have key roles to play. Yet ensuring all the right agencies are at the table, and that the scientific community is fulfilling its role in an effective way, is proving remarkably difficult.
Problems of international environmental governance Good international environmental governance ought to focus on reducing overlapping tasks between organisations, ensuring a mutual matching of organisational skills among involved organisations, promoting inter-institutional cooperation, reducing competition, building on the established organisational strengths, embracing new knowledge systems and developing the UN system as a learning organisation (sensu Senge et al. 1994). Yet we are very far from this ideal! In talking about governance, one could observe that it is essentially ‘congealed politics’. But whose politics is it? At the Governing Council 22 of UNEP, Ms Rigoberta Menchú Tum, from the World Social Forum and Indigenous Initiative for Peace, noted that ‘Rio was a definitive step-change. Its greatest failings, perhaps, lay in the institutional and financial aspects, which have left the Rio (WCED) ship at the mercy of the political will of the relevant bodies to bring it to port’ (emphasis added). This pinpoints the need for better focus on institutional and governance issues. In the similar vein, the Malmö Declaration (UNEP 2000) noted that: The World Summit for Sustainable Development, inter alia should review the requirements for a greatly strengthened institutional structure for international environmental governance based on an assessment of future needs for an institutional architecture that has the capacity to effectively address wideranging environmental threats in a globalising world. In this context it is important to note that globalisation means not only trade and economic issues, but also the increasing environmental and cultural homogenisation the world faces. For example, Dodds et al. (2002: 5) point out that: There is no one single approach that has been identified as being the most appropriate or effective in regard to international environmental governance. In the absence of an overarching approach, an incremental approach to reform may be the most beneficial for the near future.
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His Excellence M. V. Moosa, Minister for Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Republic of South Africa made a point in an address to the open-ended meeting of Ministers for the Environment on the issues of international governance, held in Bonn, July 2001, that the architecture of international environmental governance is ‘generally fragmented, uncoordinated, politically weak and lacks adequate financing’ (personal communication). H. E. Chérif Rahmani, Ministre de l’aménagement du territoire et de l’environnement, Algeria, noted during the same meeting that ‘Il ne peut y avoir de Gouvernance Internationale en matière d’environnement sans une gouvernance nationale en matière d’environnement!’ (There can be no international environmental governance without national environmental governance) (personal communication). So this problem in particular remains; notwithstanding the need to perfect global governance structures, delivery solutions remain almost exclusively at national level. Here the problems become magnified, if not insurmountable. Minister Rahmani’s comment especially, echoed by many other delegates at that same meeting, brought home that good international governance must begin as good national environmental governance. An excellent discourse on how difficult these issues are can be found, for the USA, in Thomas (2003). The dilemma is that many countries develop national policies and institutions which reflect nationally derived values, are based on nationally understood cultural forms and are informed by nationally focused science. This means that global discussions and decisions for a shared framework of action must be based on concatenating the values and attributes brought to bear in establishing the governance mechanisms.
The concepts at Cartagena The final meeting of the international environmental governance process took place at Cartagena, Colombia, in early 2002. It came up with five key points regarding international environmental governance (see IISD 2002): 1
2
3
4
International environmental governance encompasses all regional and international environmental efforts and arrangements within the UN system and is not restricted to UNEP. Some issues go beyond the mandate of ministries of the environment. Thus other branches of government should be involved in order to enhance national co-ordination and to mainstream environmental considerations into economic and social decision-making at all levels. Any new system for international environmental governance should take into account the needs and constraints of developing countries on the basis of common but differentiated responsibility. The increasing complexity and impact of trends in environmental degradation require an enhanced capacity for scientific assessment and monitoring and for provision of early warnings to governments.
International environmental governance 205 5
The design and implementation of environmental policy requires a clear link to sustainable development as well as greater involvement and engagement of non-governmental organisations, the civil society and the private sector at all levels.
Of the points raised by the Cartagena meeting, most relate to the consideration of environmental values which inform sustainable development and environmental management. The fourth point explicitly needs scientific attributes to be fully effective. As the discussions leading to Cartagena proceeded apace, what was most disappointing was the increasing focus on processes and frameworks, and decreasing focus on the values and attributes which must be considered to promote good environmental governance. Yet they are at the heart of sustainable development.
Previous and parallel processes There have been a number of previous governance-related enquiries, both broad and more narrowly focused on issues such as the marine environment. The key exemplars here are the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987), the Independent World Commission on the Oceans (IWCO 1998), the World Humanities Action Trust Commissions on Fisheries, Water and Genetic Resources (WHAT 2000) and the World Commission on Dams (World Commission on Dams 2000). In addition, several ‘think tanks’ such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) have explored international environmental governance (see e.g. Brack and Grey 2003). Drawing on the earlier studies, including those of the IWCO, the Montreal meeting of international environmental governance initiative in December 2001 focused on marine governance, examining the key differences between the existing regimes for the governance of marine resources. One of the key conclusions of the meeting was that there was a need for a better understanding of the issues of scale in the international environmental governance of marine resources. The other key conclusions identified the needs to promote holistic ecosystem approaches in the Exclusive Economic Zones, to use donors to help promote synergy in management and to promote regional partnerships. Debates continue over the desirability of centralising organisations at one extreme and to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ at the other extreme in the governance of land-based and marine resources. At one end are the proponents of an overarching centralised structure in the form of a World Environment Organisation (WEO). They argue that such an institution is needed in order to reduce overlap, ensure greater coherency and create economies of scale in the current system – and to produce an organisation similar in stature and power to that of the World Trade Organisation. At the other end are those for whom the decentralised nature of international environmental governance has its roots in the varied problems of environmental
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policy. For this reason, they consider the clustering of multilateral environment agreements useful for increasing the consistency of the governance system, enhancing the potential for synergies, while at the same time protecting the unique strengths of the current system, and not creating new bureaucratic behemoths simply to square off to the WTO. Moreover, rather than centralising the science functions of different governance regimes, it is seen as better to reform the existing arrangements and to build a centralised co-ordination of information flows between the institutions responsible for different areas of science policy at national and international levels. This applies especially to global environmental assessments, which are providing important information in the field of changing environmental values. In November 2003, the key global assessments included: • • • • • • • • •
An Ozone Assessment (old and ongoing); The International Panel on Climate Change (old and ongoing); A Global Biodiversity Assessment (completed but not accepted by the Conference of Parties of the Convention for Biological Diversity); The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (UNEP and others, developing); The World Water Assessment (UN water, developing); A Land Degradation Assessment (FAO, ongoing); Forest Assessment (United Nations Forum on Forests, UNFF, ongoing); and, most recently in late 2002, A proposal for an agriculture assessment; A proposal for a large all-encompassing assessment of environmental processes.
A link between these actual and potential assessments, promoting enhanced scientific monitoring capabilities and governance policy delivery, is critical, and suggests that science and human-centred values must combine to attain good governance solutions. Governance solutions based solely on science, without recognising human perceptual issues, and the need to integrate cultural imperatives, will ultimately fail. In the same way, governance solutions based exclusively on human values, without the seasoning of scientific attributes, will also fail.
Attributes and values in the context of biodiversity At the outset I want to distinguish between values, as human-centred, and attributes, as measurable and neutral scientific variables. For example, one can talk about biodiversity values – in the sense that there is a human perception about the importance of particular species or ecosystems. But there are also biodiversity attributes, which are neutral, measurable factors that have no human dimension. It is a further source of confusion that speeches of politicians and written material of non-governmental organisations often talk about ‘values’, apparently meaning attributes in my definition, but actually talking about values in my definition!
International environmental governance 207 Environmental values played an important role in the discussions at the first meeting of the Global Environmental Ministerial Forum in Malmö, Sweden, despite the fact that differences in such values were marked, especially between developing and developed countries. The role of environmental attributes was much less prominent in the forum. This was not a surprise. The discussions in the meeting focused on regional and global environmental imperatives which need to be informed by human values and for which scientifically based attributes are less important. As discussed above, Donaña National Park in Spain is a site with multiple listings. But it is by no means alone! Clearly there are questions as to which values or attributes are essential in determining these listings, which values or attributes inform the decision to seek inclusion of Donaña in the various lists and what are the deliverable results that make the site worth listing under these different designations. For example, Biosphere Reserve and Wetland of International Importance listings are mainly based on physical attributes while World Heritage and European Diploma listings are based mainly on values. Instruments of international environmental governance thus rely on a continuum of trade-offs between attributes and values. Nowhere is this more obvious than in landscape management, especially in the management of cultural landscapes. For example, Tress et al. (2001: 140) argue that ‘all landscapes consist of both a natural and a cultural dimension. The perceived division between nature and culture has dominated the academic world. In the case of landscapes, this divide is counter-productive and must be overcome since all landscapes are multidimensional and multifunctional’. So, all landscapes are cultural, subject to cultural influences, defined by cultural values (which are sometimes interpreted as environmental values) and, in turn, are a source of cultural enrichment. And as such, the sustainability of ecological systems can be achieved only within the context of cultural landscapes. We cannot understand and manage our environment unless we understand the human culture that shaped it. Understanding the environment is essential to comprehend how it, in turn, informs human values through feedback processes. Equal emphasis should, therefore, be given to the cultural aspects of ecosystems in their management – the concept of biocultural systems or landscapes seeks to capture these aspects (Bridgewater and Arico 2002). In other words, landscapes must be sustained in order for human culture to survive and human cultures must be maintained to assist in the management of these landscapes. But what exactly is it that human culture gives to the landscape? What makes it so important for particular cultures and landscapes to be sustained together? The answer is knowledge. Culture holds knowledge about the landscape, from which it is born and nourished, from which its values are synthesised and derived. In the words of de Cuéllar (1995): ‘Societies themselves have created elaborate procedures to protect and manage their resources. These procedures are rooted in cultural value’. For the purposes of this chapter, such cultural values are largely synonymous with environmental values. In essence then, we need to understand the role that
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cultural values and attributes (such as traditional knowledge) play in landscape structure and function, and so determine its management. But it is not just landscapes that matter here. As Bridgewater (2003: 556) notes, with respect to the International Whaling Commission: In the eleven years since the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, significant advances have been made in the management of global biodiversity. But while environmental problems have become globalised, their potential management solutions have become more localised. Global conventions, from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) through the Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora (CITES), as well as the ICRW, among others, have tended to create a ‘lowest common denominator’ approach to resource management. Such an approach often ignores – or even militates against – aspects of cultural diversity, including adequate respect and understanding of issues facing traditional or indigenous people. The Commission on Sustainable Development and its priorities also contribute to this blandly globalising effect. Lynge (1993) has noted the close links between the question of sustainable use of wildlife, the rights of indigenous peoples and the issue of genetic resources. Yet the tension between global problems and local solutions is not simply a policy inadequacy or an obstacle to be overcome. It is, in many ways, inherent in the issue of global biodiversity itself. So there is an urgent need to codify cultural values interacting with biodiversity, which are, in turn, the very environmental values we need to achieve sane and effective environmental governance. But values derive from knowledge and understanding. Due to its abstractness, the concept of knowledge is difficult to define. For example, Horibe (1999: 165) refers to knowledge as a ‘body of information, technique and experience that coalesces around a particular subject’. Wiig (1996) in turn writes that knowledge is ‘the insights, understandings, and practical know-how that we all possess – is the fundamental resource that allows us to function intelligently’. Bridgewater and Bridgewater (1999), and Dalby (2002), suggest a perspective of knowledge as a combination of information and personal experience in relation to a specific topic, and go on to argue that every language is a knowledge repository for the culture that uses it, and that language is a real mechanism for the development of cultural and environmental values. Bridgewater and Bridgewater (1999) also suggest the term ‘linguasphere’ to define the envelope of human communications through language – that most living of human cultural attributes. Such linkages between culture, language and biodiversity management strategies are to be found on all continents, and serve as the fountain for the codification of environmental values, as well as a source for measuring environmental attributes. Ironically, postulated extinction rates for languages parallel
International environmental governance 209 those for species over the next century, and the forces of extinction are essentially the same – the homogenisation processes of biotic and cultural landscapes (Bridgewater and Arico 2002). This homogenisation needs to be understood and also managed, and this can happen only through the development of appropriate governance structure.
Conclusions Without an overarching structure or process to provide guidance, the key to establishing and maintaining coherency within the governance of sustainable development lies in the relationships between regimes, including those for the environment, trade, health, and peace and stability. The development of strong and clear complementarities will both help to create, and reflect, a balance between the economic, social and environmental pillars of sustainable development. But let us not forget the fourth pillar of culture! Every human being holds knowledge about their habitat or environment, but the collective knowledge held by a cultural group is far greater than that of any individual. And the same is true for international environmental governance – it is not simply the concatenation of national governance; it has a form of its own. The dilemma remains, however, that the delivery of the outcomes of international environmental governance is still largely based on national or at best regional solutions. Even the Montreal Protocol for resolving the global problem of depletion of the ozone layer proposed a global strategy based on national implementation. As another example, the 2002 conference of the parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands made forty-five resolutions which will be implemented mainly at the national level. Many of these resolutions assume an additive effect producing a global context for change. Good international environmental governance must thus create a global context, perspective and vision while ensuring actions can be undertaken nationally and easily. International environmental governance can help meet the supporting provisions of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), too. These provisions typically include non-binding techniques for the achievements of the treaty objectives such as capacity building programmes, financial assistance clauses and technology transfer provisions. Joint programmes are an effective means to achieve these goals. Robustness mechanisms that allow a treaty to take on changes, learn and adapt are critical to ensure long-term stability of the MEAs. Finally, joint work between treaties such as the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols, CBD and UNFCCC can inspire a learning process through best practices in other treaties. In the end, international environmental governance must form the heart of Governance for Sustainable Development, building on a sound base of national environmental governance, which derives from all sectors of civil society and which has a firm basis in science, using science sensu lato, and incorporating attributes into the establishment and monitoring phases of governance structures. And governance must be informed, not only by structure but also by the
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changing nature of social and environmental values, ensuring feedback between socio-cultural needs and visions and the effective means to put those visions into practice. This account of international environmental governance stops just after the World Summit on Sustainable Development of September 2002. Yet the story will continue, as it must, in order to provide better support for environmental management, just as the story reaches back to when Homo sapiens started to understand that codices were necessary to husband resources, so as to provide for succour, shelter and trade. This brings us back to the WTO versus the apparatus of environmental governance question. To be continued!
References Batisse, M. (1993) ‘The Silver Jubilee of MAB and Its Revival’, Environmental Conservation, 20: 107–112. Brack, D. and Grey, K. (2003) Multilateral Environmental Agreements and the WTO, London: RIIA and IISD. Bridgewater, P. (2003) ‘Whaling or Wailing?’, International Social Science Journal, 128: 555–559. Bridgewater, P. B. and Arico, S. (2002) ‘Conserving and Managing Biodiversity Sustainably: The Roles of Science and Society’, Natural Resources Forum, 26: 245–248. Bridgewater, P. B. and Bridgewater, C. (1999) ‘Cultural Landscapes – the Only Way for Sustainable Living’, in P. KovárŠ (ed.), Nature and Culture in Landscape Ecology (Experiences for the 3rd Millennium), Prague: Karolinum Press. Dalby, A. (2002) Language in Danger, London: Penguin. De Cuéllar, J. P. (1995) Our Creative Diversity – Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development, Paris: UNESCO. Dodds, S. E. H., Chambers, W. B. and Kanie, N. (2002) International Environmental Governance, The Question of Reform: Key Issues and Proposals, Preliminary Report, Tokyo: United Nations University. Harrison, J. (2003) ‘International Agreements and Programmes on Protected Areas’, Parks, 12: 2–6. Harrison, J. and Simpson, K. (2003) ‘Editorial’, Parks, 12: 1. Horibe, F. (1999) Managing Knowledge Workers, Toronto: John Wiley & Sons. Independent World Commission of the Oceans (IWCO) (1998) The Ocean, Our Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) (2002) ‘Summary of the Seventh Special Session of the UNEP Governing Council, Third Global Ministerial Environmental Forum and Final Open-Ended Intergovernmental Group of Ministers or Their Representatives on International Environmental Governance: 12–15 February 2002’, Earth Negotiations Bulletin 16(24): 2–10. Online. Available at: http:// www.iisd.ca/download/pdf/enb1624e.pdf (accessed 6 May 2004). Lynge, A. (1993) The Story of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, Nuuk, Greenland: Inuit Circumpolar Conference. McCay, B. J. (2002) ‘Emergence of Institutions for the Commons: Contexts, Situations, and Events’, in E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dols×ak, P. C. Stern, S. Stonich and E. U. Weber (eds), The Drama of the Commons, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
International environmental governance 211 Senge, P. M., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R. B. and Smith, B. J. (1994) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, London: Nicholas Brearley. Thomas, C. W. (2003) Bureaucratic Landscapes, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tress, B., Tress, G., Décamps, H. and d’Hauteserre, A.-M. (2001) ‘Bridging Human and Natural Sciences in Landscape Research’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 57: 137–141. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2000) Malmö Ministerial Declaration. Online. Available at: http://www.unep.org/malmo/malmo_ministerial.htm (accessed 15 November 2003). Watson, R. T., Dixon, J. A., Hamburg, S. P., Janetos, A. C. and Moss, R. H. (1998) Protecting our Planet, Securing our Future, Washington, DC: UNEP, NASA and the World Bank. Wiig, K. M. (1996) On the Management of Knowledge. Online. Available at: http://www. km-forum.org/wiig.htm (accessed 15 November 2003). World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Commission on Dams (WCD) (2000) Dams and Development. A New Framework for Decision Making, London: Earthscan. World Humanity Action Trust (WHAT) (2000) Governance for a Sustainable Future, London: WHAT. Young, O. R. (2002) ‘Institutional Interplay: The Environmental Consequences of CrossScale Interactions’, in E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dols×ak, P. C. Stern, S. Stonich and E. U. Weber (eds), The Drama of the Commons, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Part V
Conclusions
13 Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ Jim Dator
Introduction Humans were once a tiny part of nature, no more consequential than any of the other flora and fauna of Earth and substantially less numerous or powerful than most. However, over the millennia, and especially over the last several hundred years, and most especially the last few decades, humans have become the dominant species on Earth (Turner 1990; Willis 1998; Smil 2002; Williams 2003). We have transformed what was once a ‘natural’ environment of which we were only a small part into a largely and increasingly ‘artificial’ environment of our own creation. It is of utmost importance that we understand this change in the human position, and our pressing and novel responsibilities for the future which follow from it, whether we like it, or are ready for it, or not. As Walter Truett Anderson notes in the frontispiece to his seminal book, To Govern Evolution, Antoine de SaintExupéry wrote: ‘People have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose’ (Anderson 1987: vii). I am sceptical of humanity’s ability to avoid environmental and social disasters. The evidence from palaeontology, anthropology and history testifies that humans routinely over-exploit their environment. We then: (1) either move on to other environments which we then over-exploit also; (2) die off locally; or (3) create new technological solutions that provide a fix but one which is purely temporary and after which inevitably starts the cycle of migration, death or new technology all over again. If there are any constants in humanity’s record, this cycle seems to be one (Diamond 1992; Tudge 1996; Flannery 1999; Stiner et al. 1999; Murray 2003; Kerr 2003; Jackson et al. 2001). Humanity is now nearing the end of a cycle of environmental challenge and technological response. But this time the challenge may be too much since the cycle is global in scope in many aspects while still local, if not purely individual, in others. Environmental, economic, technological and health factors are global, but our governance systems are still based on the nation state, while our economic system (‘free-market’ capitalism) and many national political systems (interest-group ‘democracy’) remain profoundly individualistic in input,
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albeit tragically collective in output. In both economics and governance, we individualise gains and socialise loses. There are many potential technological fixes for our current dilemma, but it is unclear whether they will be brought online soon enough to prevent ecological collapse, or at least to prevent major wrenching changes in the lifestyles and lifespans of people in so-called ‘developed’ countries. Many people hope such changes can be achieved, some believe they will be, and some fewer still are struggling to make it so (Goldemberg 2001; Deffeyes 2001; De Leo et al. 2001; Hoffert et al. 2002; Myers 2000; Rees 2003; Worldwatch Institute 2002). But much more importantly, it is unclear whether humanity should be encouraged to seek a solution to our problems through new technologies if that enables humanity to continue our path of perpetual consumption, global environmental destruction and unanticipated social transformation. This is especially the case when we consider the high probability that some humans will leave Earth by the late twenty-first century, thus transporting our human propensities to the inner solar system and potentially throughout the cosmos. If humans are, as it seems, planet eaters, isn’t one planet enough? When I raise this question I often ask people to supply the missing letters in the following sentence: What a piece of **** is a man! Many, immediately recognising the line from Shakespeare, shout out, ‘work’! What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet, II, ii) Others, contemplating the long and tragic destruction of our environment by this ‘quintessence of dust’, supply another four letter word. We are a piece of stinking shit; a cancer on our otherwise beautiful mother, Earth; a cancer that should be removed, and will be, one way or another. Grim conclusions, indeed! Well supported by the facts. And yet, where do these ethical doubts come from except from the mind and spirit of humans? It is we humans who worry about our unsavoury history and our ambiguous futures. And so, we humans – technologically strong while ethically weak – are all we have to work with. Thus I put my efforts, as I believe we all should, albeit almost certainly in vain, towards enabling humanity to continue to evolve by transforming Earth and ourselves into something different from what either has been so far. We may not be able to achieve such a positive transformation. But I see no other alternative. It is far too late, it seems to me, to stop, go back, and let
Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 217 ‘nature’ resume dominion over us, however comforting that thought might be. It is far too late for that. I conclude that we must learn to become ‘responsible for our rose’. We must acknowledge that ‘nature’ is gone. ‘Nature’, in the sense of places and processes uninfluenced by human actions, no longer exists, and those places where the impact of human actions is still small will rapidly decrease in number and importance until all of Earth, as well as all of society, will be ‘artificial’ and require continual human invention, creation, maintenance and re-imagination; that the task of ethics and governance from now on is, as Walt Anderson said, ‘to govern evolution’. The evidence that humanity has already transformed the Earth into an entirely artificial creation seems irrefutable. The evidence that humanity will take responsibility for having caused this transformation, and will strive to govern evolution, is as of yet slight, but not entirely non-existent as I will try to demonstrate below.
Biosphere one and a half: living in an artificial world Humanity has no doubt become a major force on Earth. Walter Truett Anderson summed up the issue at hand most clearly some time ago: Evolution no longer follows the Darwinian rules that provided, for over a century, our best understanding of it. It is no longer an impersonal and mechanistic process obeying the remorseless logic of natural selection. That vision is as obsolete as its first cousin, Newton’s clockwork cosmos. Today the driving force in evolution is human intelligence. Species survive or perish because of what people do to them and to their environments. The land and air and water system are massively altered by humankind which has become, as one scientist put it, ‘a new geological force’. Even our own genetic future is in our hands, guided not by Darwinian abstractions but by science and medical technology and public policy. The world has changed; and the human species, which has wrought the change, is now being required to change in response to the conditions we have created. (1987: 2) Anderson continued: I am not here to argue that the human species ought to take responsibility for evolution on the planet, and begin through public and private institutions to make collective decisions about such matters. If that were the question to be decided I would advocate that we put it off for a few centuries or more – let things run themselves while we get accustomed to the idea of evolutionary governance, develop the appropriate ethics and myths and political structures, and perhaps mature a bit. However, that is not the question before us, since we are already governing evolution. This is the great paradox about the threshold: It is not out there ahead of us somewhere, a line from which we might conceivably draw back. We are well
218 Conclusions across it. To say that we are not ready for evolutionary governance is equivalent to saying that a teenage child is not ready for puberty; the statement may be true, but it is not much help. (1987: 3) Colin Tudge devotes a chapter of his book, The Time before History, to demonstrating that ‘a huge number of creatures all over the world disappeared during the late Pleistocene and continued to die out en masse well into modern times . . . this die-off coincided with the spread of human beings around the world’. ‘The charge is that the deaths of those animals were caused by the diaspora of modern humans . . .’ (Tudge 1996: 283). After detailing the carnage in some detail, Tudge concludes: And now the pace of extinction has increased. Now the world is so arranged, if ‘arrangement’ is the word, that the existence of every other creature is to some extent in our hands. The animals that serve us directly are overwhelmingly successful, if the criterion of success is indeed the replication of their genes, for cattle and chickens are far more numerous than they would ever have been in untamed nature. By contrast, the species for which we have no use are pushed aside – unless they discover some human niche, as aphids and rats have done, and become ‘pests’. So now we have the world at our feet – where do we go from here? (Tudge 1996: 314) An extensive survey of ‘Human Dominated Ecosystems’ published in Science in turn opened with these words (Vitousek et al. 1997)1: All organisms modify their environment, and humans are no exception. As the human population has grown and the power of technology has expanded, the scope and nature of this modification has changed drastically. Until recently, the term, ‘human-dominated ecosystems’ would have elicited images of agricultural fields, pastures, or urban landscapes; now it applies with greater or lesser force to all of Earth. Many ecosystems are dominated directly by humanity, and no ecosystem on Earth’s surface is free of pervasive human influence. (1997: 494) The global consequences of human activity are not something to face in the future – they are with us now. All of these changes are ongoing, and in many cases accelerating; many of them were entrained long before their importance was recognized. Moreover, all of these seemingly disparate phenomena trace to a single cause – the growing scale of human enterprise. The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history; we are changing Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it. We live on a
Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 219 human-dominated planet – and the momentum of human population growth, together with the imperative of further economic development in most of the world, ensures that our dominance will increase . . . . (1997: 499) [H]umanity’s dominance of Earth means that we cannot escape responsibility for managing the planet. . . . There is no clearer illustration of the extent of human dominance of Earth than the fact that maintaining the diversity of ‘wild’ species and the functioning of ‘wild’ ecosystems will require increasing human involvement . . . . (1997: 499) In a very real sense, the world is in our hands – and how we handle it will determine its composition and dynamics, and our fate. (1997: 499)
Through a glass darkly: all reality is virtual Society is a social invention, and not an objective entity that impresses itself the same way on everyone. What we think we know about the world, we know almost entirely because of the way it has been constructed for us by our culture – its myths and beliefs, our language, our family, school, religion and our own (often false) personal experiences and memories of them. Whatever may be objectively ‘real’, ‘out there’, will never be fully known to us except by the devices and metaphors through which it is constructed by each human community. All cultures tell stories, make up dramas and plays, carve statues and form other visual images, sing songs, beat drums, blow horns, invent rituals, give explanations for events, and in many other ways embellish the bare ‘facts’ of ‘real’ sensory experience. And since the stories one culture tells often differ markedly from the ones other cultures tell, people often live in very different realities constructed by their language and culture. Recently we have become more extraordinary storytellers because of new technologies that have made story telling more vivid and multi-sensory than was possible in the old days when we could only speak, sing, dance, carve, mould or paint. The printing press made the ‘fiction’ possible. Before that very few merely popular ‘stories’ were ever written down. Some were, but writing was preserved for ‘serious’ and ‘real’ things such as laws, religious documents, economic accounting and pornography (Goody 1977, 1986, 1997, 2000; Havelock 1986; Ong 1982; Olson and Torrance 2001; Pesce 2000). But with the invention and then widespread use of the printing press during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for the first time information and disinformation became relatively cheap and abundant; not only serious fact and ennobling fiction, but also ‘trashy’ novels began to flow forth, first as a trickle and then as a flood. And with the subsequent invention of the public school system where everyone was taught how to read or write, more and more people
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began to read and write whatever they preferred. While that might be law, religious documents and scientific tomes for some, it was ‘frivolous’ fiction for most (McLuhan 1962; Eisenstein 1979; Katsh 1989). And then, amazingly enough, entire academic departments arose in colleges and schools devoted to the teaching of fiction – of amusing and well-crafted falsehoods – requiring students to deal seriously with worlds that were not ‘real’. Thus, during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, more and more people began to spend more and more of their time in fictional places – in virtual realities – and not in the ‘real’ reality of their five senses. In the twentieth century came the radio, and movies, and television, and board games (such as Monopoly), and video games, and Sim City, and MYST, and . . . eventually, in the twenty-first century, ‘Virtual Reality’, perhaps along the lines of the threedimensional ‘Holodec’ of the American television series, Star Trek (see Rheingold 1991; Rucker et al. 1992; Zizek 1997; Levy 1998; Fink 1999; Weimann 2000; Packer Jordan 2001; Woolgar 2002).2 All of this teaches more of us how to live in many alternative presents, as well as to be prepared for many alternative futures. All of this also helps us gain perspective, distance and perhaps criticism from the ‘crackpot realism’ which ‘authoritative’ rulers, priests, teachers and parents may wish to impose on us. We can and do ‘escape’ from the reality of our everyday lives by reading, watching television, playing video games. Indeed, most of us when asked to explain something will give an example, not from our everyday ‘real’ lives, but from a movie or TV show we have seen. Mediated reality is far – FAR – more real for most of us than is actual reality.
Embracing our sibling artilects: co-existing with artificial intelligence In 1997, after many years of trials and tests, a computer program called ‘Big Blue’ defeated the world’s chess champion and a new era in artificial intelligence (AI) seemed to have been born. Since then, other computer programs have been developed which seem able to defeat the very best human intelligence in every game ever invented, including, eventually (although not yet), the Japanese game ‘Go’ which may be the most complex game of all. Even today, much, increasingly most, of the world is controlled by autonomous artificial rules and processes that present us with decisions which often we literally must follow without question – our very lives depend on it – or which, when we do try to override, turn out to have been the decision we too would have reached if only we had had the time. We increasingly use computers to make decisions for us in situations where it is too dangerous for humans to go, or where it takes humans too long to decide. Given the speed of transport, and especially the speed of light at which all information travels, we increasingly have to leave split second decisions up to machines, just so we humans can survive. We are also making ‘smart’ everything – smart houses, smart cars, smart birthday cards, smart weapons.
Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 221 Even the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is itself a swiftly moving target. It is, as David Miller (1998) argues, ‘whatever machines haven’t learned to do yet’. Miller argues that the intelligence (sensing and decision-making ability) currently in your microwave would have been termed AI twenty years ago. Now it is not, and AI is something even smarter – something which a machine can not yet do (but soon will). Susantha Goonatilake, Ray Kurzweil and Ian Pearson believe that AI that surpasses human intelligence may lie just around the corner, in the early twentyfirst century, evolving by the very practical and almost invisible processes just described. Soon, in the mid-twenty-first century, humans will realise that they are only one of a myriad of intelligent entities on Earth. Some humans will choose to merge with AI to form various kinds of cyborgs. Some humans will link AI to biologically modified beings, and then both to human beings and human intelligence. Some humans will insist on staying pure and ‘natural’. And some AIs might be wise enough to ‘reject’ any contamination from either human or other engineered biosystems, recognising that biology is just a halfway house, if not ultimately a handicap, and that the only good intelligence is bio-free intelligence, electronically linked throughout the globe, the solar system and, eventually, throughout the galaxy (see Breazeal 2002; Brooks 2002; Goonatilake 1999; Kurzweil 1999; Gershenfeld 1999; Moravec 1999; Pearson 2002; McNally and Inayatullah 1988; Dator 1989, 1990).3
We are all cyborgs now: genetic/prosthetic enhancement The most powerful technologies of the twenty-first century may well be generated by biological engineering. Whatever coal and iron did for the nineteenth century, and oil and the electron did for the twentieth, genes and their related proteins, enzymes, sugars and other chemicals may do for the twenty-first – and much, much more. It has been said that we presently live in an ‘information age’. Maybe so, but the ultimate information, that dealing with the structure and processes of life itself, is being better and better understood daily. Old forms of life are being modified, and new forms of life are being hatched. We are only beginning to enter the true ‘Information Age’ of biological engineering. Even though some people and groups may be opposed to biological engineering – and there are many, and often very good, reasons for concern – trying to stop biological engineering is more like trying to stop abortions or recreational drug use than it is like trying to stop nuclear generating plants. Much biological engineering is comparatively easy to do ‘in your kitchen’, and some of it is driven by a desire to ‘correct’ a behavioural ‘defect’ in one’s self or one’s child, and then to ‘improve’ the performance of one’s self or one’s child. It is very private, very emotional and extraordinarily powerful. These technologies are certainly subject to misuse, and they will be misused. But they will be used, somewhere, by someone in the world. While progress in
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one place can be slowed and influenced, and perhaps it should be, it cannot be stopped everywhere. Moreover, biological processes will be manipulated in essentially all living organisms – from humans, to other animals, to plants grown for food, to all plants everywhere in the world and under the seas. Manipulating biological processes influences a lot of the behaviour of an organism, although certainly not all of the behaviour. The role of the environment in shaping the behaviour of each individual organism, and a species, is great. Clearly the interaction between environment and biology is key to the behaviour of any organism. Indeed, the more scientists learn about genetic and other processes, the more complicated biological engineering seems to become – at first. But manipulating genes and their related processes clearly gives humans much more power over the future of life than does manipulating the environment alone. And we have already seen that humans are controlling more and more aspects of all environments everywhere. Biological engineering is just one more – very big – step towards artificiality in all domains (Stock 2002; Fukuyama 2002; Wilmut et al. 2000; Gray 2001; Anton et al. 2001; Mulhall 2002; Sager 2001; Justman et al. 2002).
Do it yourself genesis: new materials and molecular engineering In 1986, Eric Drexler wrote Engines of Creation in which he described the potential power of self-replicating machines that could be created the size of molecules – the smallest physical units of elements and compounds – and then set loose to do whatever they were designed to do, free from further human intervention (Drexler 1986). Nanotechnology has been the subject of considerable research, speculation, hope and some fear since then. After being viewed initially as just another ridiculous science fantasy (like any ultimately useful idea about the future), nanotechnology eventually caught the attention of the scientific/engineering establishment, and since the first years of the twentyfirst century has begun to receive serious funding from such mainstream organisations as the US National Science Foundation: In 2001, scientists assembled molecules into basic circuits, raising hopes for a new world of nanoelectronics, a feat Science selects as the ‘Breakthrough of 2001’. If researchers can wire these circuits into intricate computer chip architectures, this new generation of molecular electronics will undoubtedly provide computing power to launch scientific breakthroughs for decades. (Anon 2001: 2442) At the same time, critics of nanotechnology (and of the other two technologies we are focusing on here – AI and biological engineering) have become more vocal. One of the most important critics, Bill Joy, recently published a powerful piece titled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’ ( Joy 2000) in the high-tech Bible, Wired.
Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 223 If the more advanced claims about nanotechnology prove feasible, all bets are off. Since there is no such thing as ‘waste’ (all molecules, whatever their provenance, are raw material to be restructured into something else via nanotechnologies), the old world of scarcity will be over, as will be the old ways of producing food, clothing, automobiles, buildings – well, everything. The energy requirements of nanotechnologies also are insignificant compared to those of contemporary industrial technologies. And since humans won’t need to pay much attention to the manufacturing processes, it provides even more reasons why we should begin thinking seriously about moving towards a peaceful, prosperous and meaningful world without work. But whether or not that dream can be achieved, the point here is that nanotechnology is one more very important brick in the wall of artificiality. Molecular engineering controls matter at its smallest level, allowing the creation of countless ‘machines’ to carry out countless processes that only nature – and often not even nature – can currently do. As the originator of the idea of nanotechnology, Richard Feynman, said many years ago, ‘there is plenty of room at the bottom’. This is grassroots, decentralised, individualised development at its finest and most powerful (and/or scary).
Not with swords loud clashing: space exploration and settlements Even though the fortunes of NASA and the space agencies of other countries rise and fall with rising and falling economic, political and ideological fads and fashions, and even though the USA seems hell-bent on militarising space against all reason, I remain hopeful that during the course of the twenty-first century humans will establish permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars, and perhaps also on artificial satellites stabilised at various Lagrange points. It is also likely that over the subsequent centuries, manned and artificially intelligent exploratory missions will be sent elsewhere in the solar system, and that AI probes will be moving well beyond the confines of our Sun. In what is still one of the most important volumes on space exploration and settlement from a human perspective, Ben Finney and Eric Jones stated that: [T]he use of technology to expand beyond Earth would be entirely consonant with the whole trend of human evolution. From the time the most adventuresome of apes left the tropical forest to seek a living in the grasslands of the African savannah, our ancestors have been inventing technology to adapt to new environments and to expand over the globe. There is a large techno-cultural distance between grubbing succulent roots from the soil of the savannah with digging sticks on the one hand and growing algae to provide both food and oxygen for Moon colonies on the other. And it is a long way from sailing canoes to interstellar arks. But ever since our ancestors started using tools to survive and eventually flourish in new environments, the pattern of evolution by cultural as well as biological
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Conclusions adaptation has been underway. Although the prospect of travelling and living in space might seem ‘unnatural’ to many, it would represent a logical extension to the technological path our ancestors have been following for some 5 million years. (Finney and Jones 1985: 335)
They continue: If our descendants spread far and wide through space, the forces of evolution now braked on Earth will be released once more. Human evolution in space will hardly be limited to the birth of one new species. Space is not a single environment . . . . There are innumerable environments out there providing countless niches to exploit, first by humans and then by the multitudinous descendant species. By expanding through space we will be embarking on an adventure that will spread an explosive speciation of intelligent life as far as technology or limits placed by competing life forms originating elsewhere will allow. (1985: 335) The point here is that our movement into space is yet another giant step towards artificiality. Clearly it will be necessary for humans to develop completely selfcontained biospheres in which they can safely live in outer space. Oxygen, water, food, perhaps gravity, protection from cosmic rays and solar flares – everything that we take so much for granted on Earth – will have to be brought to space, or created there, artificially, by humans. At first, humans in space will probably try to make space as Earth-like as possible, but it is highly likely that Earth-kind in space will eventually become Space-kind – no longer defining everything, or even anything, by ‘what it was like back home on Earth’. Thus, as Ben Finney says, evolutionary processes long pent up on Earth will be unleashed in space, and the most dramatic explosion of speciation the universe has (apparently) ever seen will occur. This will be aided greatly by advances in biological and molecular engineering so that myriad new intelligent life forms will arise or be created as life moves from Earth to the solar system and beyond. I consider one of the most important reasons for space exploration is to provide humanity with the experience it needs to create a viable artificial biosphere here on Earth. Of course, I suspect that, ultimately, intelligent life – artificial life – will shed its earthly biological container and the biosphere in which it was nurtured and seek other, perhaps silicon, forms. But, for the foreseeable future, we desperately need a biosphere that works, given what we have done, and continue to do, to the only one we know works, Earth. It will require a lot of human ingenuity to create and maintain a new one, so our experiences in creating biospheres for space will be very valuable to anyone engaged in a similar enterprise on Earth.
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Directing tsunamis: ‘law-making’ and ‘governance’ in a chaotic world While every culture in the past has unconsciously invented the world in which it lived, consciously inventing the world is a special characteristic of modernity. One clear example, among many, was what the Founding Fathers of the USA did, first in writing their ‘Declaration of Independence’ so that the entire world would understand the reason for their actions, and then establishing a written ‘Constitution of the United States of America’, so that posterity would be guided by their ‘constituting’ words and deeds. These two profoundly influential documents were also accompanied by a change in the way ‘legislators’ came to view themselves. Once upon a time, established ‘men of reason’ would come together on occasion to ‘discover’ the law that lay apparent to them in nature (and/or God). But by the end of the eighteenth century, legislators were also viewing themselves as ‘law makers’ and not as mere ‘law discoverers’ – they came to believe that they could improve on nature’s laws by using nature’s principles (to be sure) to write laws of their own for the benefit of humanity (Wheeler 1974). ‘Law-making’ has by now become so characteristic of legislatures – and often judiciaries, in the US system (Dator 2001) – that we think nothing of it. However, the early pretence was that once the legislators had made a new law, the problem was fixed and there was no longer any need for more legislation in the area. That is one reason why legislative assemblies originally met (many still do) for only a few months in the winter (while the crops were in and there was little work to do on the farm). But gradually legislators enacted more and more laws, and the creation, modification, interpretation and administration of law became a full-time occupation for an ever-growing number of people. This led Donald Campbell some time ago to suggest that, since legislation never finally ‘solves’ any problems, legislators should view themselves as experimenters, and their laws as social experiments. Let us enact a law and see how it works, modifying it as we go along based on what we learn from its operation. This could become social engineering on a vast scale, so vast that even Donald Campbell retreated from his position, recognising how terribly intrusive it would be to have so many experimenters measuring and monitoring the effects of their experiments on all the citizens of the country (Campbell and Russo 1999). Nonetheless, governments are engaged in social engineering, more or less consciously and more or less intrusively. And even if libertarians continue to have their way, and governments diminish to basically nothing, other social forces – probably economic – will then move in to fill the political vacuum. So we live in somebody’s or some group’s social experiment (currently we live under the myth of the ‘magic of the marketplace’) whether we like it (or know it) or not.
Reasons for future hope I have already expressed my profound pessimism about the future of Earth, and humanity. Nonetheless there are several factors that suggest the possibility of a
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global attitudinal and behavioural shift towards humanity’s assuming responsibility for our ‘rose’. These include the following: Better computer models with more ‘lifelike’ display capabilities may be able to forecast and display impacts vividly at the level of an electoral district or other unit of personal and immediate concern (see Houghton et al. 2001). ‘Sustainability science’ may mature, precipitating the next paradigm shift in the global scientific/research community beyond the Copernican/Newtonian empirical ‘objective’ science that still dominates now, towards interactive, ethically guided educational and research agendas. For example, Kates et al. (2001: 641) have argued that ‘A new field of sustainability science is emerging that seeks to understand the fundamental character of interaction between nature and society. . . . The sustainability science that is necessary to address these questions differs to a considerable degree in structure, methods, and content from science as we know it’. Earlier, the ‘Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge’ adopted by the UNESCO World Conference on Science for the twenty-first century, meeting in Budapest in June 1999, said in part: ‘The sciences should be at the service of humanity as a whole and should contribute to providing everyone with a deeper understanding of nature and society, a better quality of life, and a resourceful and healthy environment for present and future generations’ (see also Collins 2001; Mueller 2003; Harremoes et al. 2002). Age-cohort changes. New cohorts may understand, accept and act on a future generations ethic as older, resisting, cohorts move out of power and influence. One of the most popular and provocative examples of age-cohort analysis can be found in a series of books written by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1995, 1997, 2000). Several rapid and extensive developments in futures studies and in future generations studies also offer hope. These developments include: 1
2
From its origins as a major phenomenon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through using ‘the future’ to help transform political systems during the 1980s (with the emergence and often fading of national futures commissions), through its establishment in some academic institutions throughout the world, and especially its expanding utility in more consulting services, futures studies continues to grow and mature even though it is still absent from most academic or consulting work in the USA (Bell 1997; Dator 2002). A global ethic towards future generations is emerging. That the present generation has ethical obligations towards future generations is only slowly beginning to be understood. It is a concept absent from traditional ethical or moral discourse since, until relatively recently, there was little present generations could do to make the lives of future generations significantly better or worse than their own by their actions or inactions. Although contemporary
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3
economic theory and practice severely discounts the future (Goulder and Stavins 2002; Brennan 1995; Broome 1994; Lowe 1989; Linstone 1973), more people are understanding that the situation now is different from the past, and that, when making decisions, present generations need to anticipate the impact their decisions may have on future generations, as well as upon themselves. Operating initially independently of each other, two groups, one in Malta and the other in Kyoto, organised to create an awareness of the need to create ethical concepts and social structures that identify the needs of future generations and have them active in contemporary decision-making (Partridge 1981; Busuttil et al. 1990; Institute for the Integrated Study of Future Generations 1994a, 1994b; Kim and Dator 1994, 1999). These ideas and activities are bearing fruit. People professing to represent the interests of future generations were first acknowledged to have a legal standing by the Supreme Court of the Philippines in Oposa v Factoran Jr. (1993). On 12 November 1997, UNESCO adopted a ‘Declaration on the Responsibilities of Present Generations towards Future Generations’, helping the discussion to spread worldwide. Beyond provoking more widespread awareness of the ethical responsibility of present generations is the need to create social institutions that make carrying out that responsibility easy, and mandatory. Several recent initiatives have attempted to conceptualise, invent and create such institutions. For example, Co-creating a Public Philosophy for Future Generations (Kim and Dator 1999) was based on a conference of futurists and politicians who had experience in helping existing systems of governance around the world to embrace future-oriented institutions. Others have also presented examples of designs for political institutions and processes that are oriented towards identifying and fulfilling obligations towards future generations (Institute for the Integrated Study of Future Generations 1994a; Kim and Dator 1994; Tonn 1991; Pollard and Tonn 1998).
I want to emphasise the necessity of creating institutions to support ethical (or political) policies. There are numerous popular ideas and scientific theories about why people behave as they do, and especially how to get them to behave ‘properly’. Most of the differences come down to two perspectives. On the one hand are ways to change people’s ‘minds’ and ‘wills’ so that they will want to do good and so will behave as they should by their own free will. On the other hand are ways to construct environments that necessitate people behaving properly, regardless of whether they want to or not. A variant of this is constructing environments that allow people to behave as they wish, but buffers the undesired consequences of their behaviour (Platt 1973, 1966: 108–131; Studer 1971). Most reformers seem to focus on changing people’s minds and wills in order to change their behaviour. While we know from the success of modern advertising that there is much power in this approach, we also know from our numerous educational, religious and even legal failures that it has severe limitations as well. It is often hard to change people’s minds about certain things that
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seem biologically, or at least culturally, deeply rooted. But equally importantly (although this is often overlooked) is the fact that even if people want to ‘do good’ they find themselves in structures that make it very difficult for them actually to do good. Thus, I have concluded that while sincere efforts should be made to change people’s minds about ‘assuming responsibility for their rose’ so that people will understand and support extraordinary efforts at planetary management, it is equally, if not more, important that institutions be created that make such behaviour easy, and perhaps necessary per se, and do not rely upon moral persuasion and/or laws and enforcement. For example, I have been convinced that recycling paper, glass and aluminium cans is good. I very much want to do that. But I happen to live in a community that not only does not even require recycling by law, but also actually makes it extremely difficult for me to recycle things. On my own volition, I must collect and clean the items, package them appropriately and then transport them many kilometres to some distant place I would not otherwise go for further processing. Indeed, the powers that be in my community argue that because of our small size and remote location, it is more economical for us to continue to waste than to recycle. So I am made to feel a fool (if not in fact a net energywaster) if I recycle on my own. This is a clear example of how the structures of the society in which I live shape and override my deep desire to do what I believe to be overwhelmingly good for the environment. There are many other examples, such as speeding. Of course, there are laws against speeding in my community. But they are so rarely and arbitrarily enforced that one feels a sense of moral outrage when one is stopped for speeding, much less is fined for it – ‘You should have seen me last night, when it was raining, and I was drunk and speeding much faster than now! Why didn’t you stop me then? This time I am sober, the street is dry and clear, and I was barely exceeding the limit, going down hill! And why didn’t you stop any of the people who were going much faster than I was, speeding past me? If I was going any slower, I would have been run over from the rear!’ Laws, infrequently and arbitrarily enforced, create anomie and actually encourage outlaws while effectively penalising law-abiders. So what should we do? In the USA, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) some years ago launched a very widespread and largely successful campaign against drunk driving. It is no longer acceptable (indeed, rather ‘manly’) to drive while drunk, as it once was. Although this may encourage certain people to rebel against MADD simply because drunk driving has become a moral and not merely a legal issue, in fact drunk driving is down somewhat, while speeding with children in the car or where children are known to congregate is much less likely now than before because of a shift in the public’s ethical position and behaviour. So moral suasion helps. But what really cuts down speeding are speed bumps in the road and ‘roundabouts’. Both require people to drive more slowly than they would otherwise – or than they want to. And that is the point – devise structures that require people to behave as they ‘should’ regardless of how they want to behave.
Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 229 Here is another ‘silly’ example. Some manufacturing processes require clean water and the discharge of polluted water. While there could and probably should be laws that prohibit pollution, and fines for violating them, a simpler solution would be to require all people to intake water downstream of their operations and to discharge it upstream. They are much less likely to discharge polluted water if they know they must intake it themselves. What about real political behaviour? There are many examples of how political structures create political behaviour. The best-known and most widely understood ‘law’ in political science is that single-member districts (as in the USA) create two-party systems, while multi-member districts (found in most of the world) enable multi-party systems. It is simply not possible for a multi-party system to come into existence in the USA. The single-member district system prevents it. No matter how many minds or wills change, neither a third nor a fourth party can ever gain power in the USA. When a third does arise, it is either rejected or its position (and members) absorbed by one of the other two major parties (or it replaces one of the two major parties). It is entirely a question of structure. Indeed, the entire US Constitution is the world’s first, and best, example of conscious political design to solve certain ‘design limitations’: The ‘separation of power’ with ‘checks and balances’. The creation of three ‘independent’ yet overlapping branches of government so that selfish ‘power will balance power’, thus creating social good. The ‘division of power’ and ‘federalism’. Enables ‘sovereign’ nations to join into a closer political union by ‘dividing’ power between them. Bicameralism. Secures the acceptance of the federal union from the states with small populations as well as the states with large populations by creating a Congress of two ‘houses’, one in which the states have equal representation regardless of their population and another where the states are represented roughly according to their population size. Presidential electors. Since the colonies forming the union had no history of political unity, and there were no means for creating a national political dialogue at that time – and no great faith in ‘the people’ anyway – how could the people in the widely separated new states possibly know who was nationally the ‘best man’ for President? The ‘Founders’ reckoned they could not, but that they would know their local ‘best men’, so they would choose them and they would go to Washington to choose, after discussion, the national ‘best man’ for President. Presidentialism. The creation of the presidentialist system itself has behavioural consequences that even most Americans – even most American political scientists – do not recognise. Fred Riggs has presented convincing evidence that, compared to parliamentary forms, presidentialist systems are much more likely to disintegrate into military dictatorships. Except for the USA itself, all of the thirty countries that had adopted the presidentialist
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Why the difference? Because, Riggs shows, the built-in structural equality and conflict of the presidentialist system leads to inevitable political stalemate that is eventually broken only by a military coup, supported by the civil servants. Riggs also shows how certain features of the US system (unrelated to the formal constitution, but nonetheless structural, and never exported to other systems) have so far prevented the logic of the presidentialist system from turning the USA into a military dictatorship, although post 9/11 developments are certainly making that possibility more likely than ever before. To conclude, while will matters, structure matters even more. If we want people to ‘assume responsibility for their rose’ we not only must convince them to do so, but we must imagine and create institutions that make it easier for them to assume, rather than to avoid, that opportunity (Miles et al. 2002). The first step in reconceptualising environmental values in the globalising world is thus to recognise that we have perpetual responsibility for our ‘rose’, Earth. A second step is to develop an ethical perspective that furthers our acceptance of that responsibility. A third step is then to recognise that institutions need to be envisioned and created that make it easier to accept the responsibility than to reject it. And the fourth and most important step of all is that we then need to do the hard but necessary task of envisioning, creating and testing out those institutions. As I have shown above, we are not alone in this work, several conferences have already been held that have resulted in proposals for institutions which make it easier for present generations to balance their needs against those of future generations. All that is needed is for more peoples around the world to join together in this novel but vital quest.
Notes 1 See also Ausubel (1997), Budiansky (1995), Palumbi (2001a, 2001b), Cronon (1995), Goodman and Redclift (1991), McMichael (2001), Alley et al. (2003) and Tonn (2002). 2 See online games www.thesimsonline.com and everquest.station.sony.com for virtual reality. 3 See Journal of Futures Studies (2001, issue 6) on the evolution of ‘artilects’ and their legal rights. See also http://www.kurzweilai.net/, http://www.media.mit.edu/ ~neilg/, http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/, http://www.bt.com/sphere/insights/ pearson/human_evolution.htm.
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Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 233 Grübler, A., Huntley, B., Jäger, J., Jodha, N. S., Kasperson, R. E., Mabogunje, A., Matson, P., Mooney, H., Moore III, B., O’Riordan, T. and Svedin, U. (2001) ‘Sustainability Science’, Science, 292: 641–642. Katsh, M. E. (1989) The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law, New York: Oxford University Press. Kerr, R. (2003) ‘Megafauna Died From Big Kill, Not Big Chill’, Science, 300: 885. Kim, T.-C. and Dator, J. (eds) (1999) Co-creating a Public Philosophy for Future Generations, London: Adamantine Press. —— (eds) (1994) Creating a New History for Future Generations, Kyoto: Future Generations Alliance Foundation. Kurzweil, R. (1999) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, New York: Viking. Levy, P. (1998) Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, New York: Plenum. Linstone, H. (1973) ‘On Discounting the Future’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 4: 335–338. Lowe, I. (1989) Living in the Greenhouse, Newham, Australia: Scribe Books. McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McMichael, T. (2001) Human Frontiers, Environments, and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNally, P. and Inayatullah, S. (1988) ‘The Rights of Robots: Technology, Law and Culture in the Twenty-first Century’, Futures, 20: 119–136. Miles, E. L., Underdal, A., Andresen, S., Wettestad, J., Skodvin, T. and Carlin, E. M. (2002) Environmental Regime Effectiveness: Confronting Theory with Evidence, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Miller, D. (1998) Personal communication, Honolulu, Hawaii, 18 September 1998. Moravec, H. (1999) Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. Mueller, A. (2003) ‘A Flower in Full Blossom? Ecological Economics at the Crossroads between Normal and Post-Normal Science’, Ecological Economics, 45: 19–27. Mulhall, D. (2002) Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the World, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Murray, M. (2003) ‘Overkill and Sustainable Use’, Science, 299: 1851–1853. Myers, N. (2000) ‘Sustainable Consumption’, Science, 287: 2419. Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds) (2001) The Making of Literate Societies, Oxford: Blackwell. Ong, W. J. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Routledge. Oposa v Factoran Jr., 224 Philippines Supreme Court Reports Annotated 792–818 (1993). Packer, R. and Jordan, K. (eds) (2001) Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, New York: W. W. Norton. Palumbi, S. R. (2001a) ‘Humans As The World’s Greatest Evolutionary Force’, Science, 293: 1786–1790. —— (2001b) The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change, New York: W. W. Norton. Partridge, E. (ed.) (1981) Responsibilities to Future Generations, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Pearson, I. (2002) Future of Human Evolution. Online. Available at: http://www. bt.com/sphere/insights/pearson/human_evolution.htm (accessed 15 July 2003).
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Pesce, M. (2000) The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination, New York: Ballantine Books. Platt, J. (1966) ‘The Federalists and the Design of Stabilization’, in J. Platt, Step to Man, New York: John Wiley. —— (1973) ‘Social Traps’, American Psychologist, 28: 642–651. Pollard, V. K. and Tonn, B. (1998) ‘Revisiting the “Court of Generations” amendment’, Futures, 30: 345–352. Rees, M. (2003) Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century – on Earth and Beyond, New York: Basic Books. Rheingold, H. (1991) Virtual Reality, New York: Simon & Schuster. Riggs, F. (1992) ‘Presidentialism: A Problematic Regime Type’, in A. Lijphart (ed.), Parliamentary vs. Presidential Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rucker, R., Sirius, R. U. and Mu, Q. (eds) (1992) Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, New York: HarperCollins. Sager, B. (2001) ‘Scenarios on the Future of Biotechnology’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 68: 109–129. The Sims game. Online. Available at: http://www.thesimsonline.com (accessed 15 July 2003). Smil, V. (2002) The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution: Dynamics and Change, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stiner, M. C., Munro, N. D., Surovell, T. A., Tchernov, E. and Bar-Yosef, O. (1999) ‘Paleolithic Population Growth Pulses Evidenced by Small Animal Exploitation’, Science, 283: 190–194. Stock, S. (2002) Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Futures, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Strauss, W. and Howe, N. (1995) Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069, New York: William Morrow. —— (1997) The Fourth Turning, New York: Broadway Books. —— (2000) Millennials Rising, New York: Vintage Books. Studer, R. (1971) ‘Human Systems Design and the Management of Change’, General Systems, 16: 131–143. Tonn, B. (1991) ‘The Court of Generations: A Proposed Amendment to the US Constitution’, Futures, 23: 482–498. —— (2002) ‘Distant Futures and the Environment’, Futures, 34: 117–132. Tudge, C. (1996) The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact, New York: Scribner. Turner, B. L. (ed.) (1990) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 years, New York: Cambridge University Press. Vitousek, P. M., Mooney, H. A., Lubchenco, J. and Melillo, J. M. (1997) ‘Human Dominated Ecosystems’, Science, 277: 494–499. Weimann, G. (2000) Communicating Unreality: Modern Media and the Reconstruction of Reality, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Wheeler, H. (1974) ‘Constitutionalism’, in F. Greenstein and N. Polsby (eds), Governmental Institutions and Process: Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 5, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Williams, M. (2003) Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willis, C. (1998) Children of Prometheus. The Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution, New York: Perseus.
Assuming ‘responsibility for our rose’ 235 Wilmut, I., Campbell, K. and Tudge, C. (2000) Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Woolgar, S. (ed.) (2002) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, New York: Oxford University Press. Worldwatch Institute (2002) State of the World 2003, New York: W. W. Norton. Zizek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso.
14 Environmental values in the globalising world Grounds for cautious optimism Ian Lowe
Introduction The future is not somewhere we are going, but something we are creating. We all make decisions and take actions that make some futures more probable and others less likely. In that sense, attempts to forecast the future are fundamentally flawed. Forecasts are implicitly predicated on the notion that the future is effectively pre-determined, so a sufficiently clever person can work out what will happen. There is a tendency to be fatalistic about the future, because we think that the forces of globalisation and technological change are so powerful that they will shape our future, regardless of our wishes. A wise sailing metaphor says that we cannot choose which wind will blow, but we can set the sail. A skilful sailor can use whatever wind is blowing to sail in the direction they choose. We should be aware of large-scale forces, but we should also be thinking about where we want to go, and setting our policy sails accordingly. The earlier chapters in this volume have noted the continuing trend of globalisation and the consequent declining capacity of nation states to determine their own destiny. The closing years of the twentieth century were marked by a particular style of globalisation, essentially a lowering of the barriers to international capital and a systematic reduction of the capacity of national governments to regulate the activities of trans-national corporations. The same period also saw the tentative beginnings of a truly global world in which environmental and even social problems are being addressed at the global level. This chapter summarises the obvious negative trends before outlining the grounds for cautious optimism: the signs of hope that we can develop global responses to global problems, especially those arising from the impacts of human activity on natural systems.
Negative trends Today the chances of any sort of human civilisation surviving the twenty-first century appear bleak. We show few signs as a species of even recognising the scale of the problem, let alone developing solutions. The second report in the UNEP series Global Environmental Outlook said: ‘Our present course is unsustainable
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– postponing action is no longer an option’ (UNEP 1999). In ecological terms, there can be little doubt that we are booked on the Titanic and steaming towards the icebergs. Unfortunately, those who put their faith in growth are still effectively tipping more coal into the burners and encouraging us to accelerate towards the obstacles ahead. A group of people who should know better are still in the First Class bar ordering smoked salmon and the best vintage champagne, secure in the knowledge that their cheque will not reach the bank. My view that we should steer a different course is almost an incitement to mutiny, since those on the ‘bridge’ are clearly not listening. There are serious problems to be overcome if some form of civilised society is to survive even the next hundred years. We face problems of resource depletion, environmental damage, a less equitable and consequently less stable world, and above all else, what a recent international conference called ‘the pressure of the increasing expectations of a growing population in a globalising, humandominated world’ (IGBP 2001). In resource terms, I said in 2002 that pessimists feared that the peak of world oil production might only be five years away; optimists thought it might be as far away as twenty years. A special series of reports on energy in New Scientist in 2003 pointed out that pessimists now believe that the peak of world oil production was actually in the year 2000 and that we are already on the downhill slope (Holmes and Jones 2003). There are still optimists who think that it might be as far away as 2010 or even 2020, but there is no substantial disagreement with the geological fact that the peak of world oil production, if it hasn’t already happened, will be reached by 2020. After that the world will see the real show for which the 1970s was an out-of-town try out, a world in which oil becomes steadily scarcer and more expensive. The change will force fundamental changes in energy use, particularly for transport; all our transport systems are now implicitly posited on the assumption that there will always be cheap, readily available petroleum fuels. While current expectations are that OECD countries will have petroleum fuels for a few decades, this belief is based on two heroic assumptions. The first is that there will be continuing stability in, and willingness to export oil from, the ‘Middle East’, despite the interventions of some Western governments. The second assumption is that the majority of the world’s population will continue to do without the transport options we take for granted while we dissipate the dwindling supplies of petroleum in such selfish indulgences as car races, jet skis, motor boats and using heavy 4X4-drive vehicles for suburban trips. If the entire world used oil at the rate the USA does per person, and it could be pumped out fast enough, the global resources would last about a year! Despite the tendency for the media to talk of an ‘energy crisis’, there is no energy shortage. The natural flows of solar, wind, wave, geothermal and tidal energy are orders of magnitude greater than conceivable future energy demand. The amount of solar energy that hits Australia alone in one average summer day is comparable to the global annual energy use for all purposes (Lowe 1994a). We show no sign of a concerted move towards using these large-scale energy flows even though our grandchildren will probably curse us for having frittered away
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the petroleum resources. This is a political issue. The Prime Minister of Spain recently showed his support for renewable energy by putting Australian solar cells on the roof of his official residence. When Greenpeace put solar cells on the roof of the Australian Prime Minister’s residence, he ordered their removal! There are, of course, other resource problems. More than a billion people do not have access to fresh drinking water. Agricultural land is being lost to salinity and degradation in several parts of the world. Almost all the world’s major fisheries are in decline. The world is still losing forest cover at an alarming rate. So achieving a sustainable future will necessarily involve changes in the pattern of resource use. We also face daunting environmental problems. The second Australian State of the Environment Report said that urban air quality was improving but that all other serious environmental problems were worsening in Australia, including the state of inland rivers, the loss of biological diversity, the state of rural land and increasing greenhouse gas emissions (ASEC 2002). The report argued that the fundamental reason for the worsening situation was the combined pressures of a growing human population and increasing demands per person. This was a reminder that there is no convincing strategy for coping with population growth at the local, national or global scale. On the contrary, most decision-makers still show no sign of seeing that population growth is even part of the problem. Most politicians still see population growth either as a desirable end in itself, or as a tribute to their sound management, or both. There can be no prospect of a sustainable society while our population continues to grow rapidly (Meadows et al. 1972). It is an ecological reality that the human population will be brought into balance with natural systems, either by starvation, disease, fighting amongst ourselves, or by social choices to maintain a degree of human dignity. We ought to be aiming for the civilised choices rather than resigning ourselves to a future in which human lives are again nasty, brutish and short. Similarly, demands per person have to be stabilised or reduced if we hope to live in a stable society because, in the world in which we live, the gap between the materially wealthy and the materially poor is growing every year. The prospects for stability are diminished by the growing gap. While people in poorer parts of the world formerly had little idea of the scale of waste in richer countries, the cultural hegemony of the USA, with the aggressive marketing of its film and television, means that the poorer people of the world are now reminded every day of their material deprivation. A sustainable world has to be a more equitable world. It is not socially sustainable to have entrepreneurs in Western countries doing property deals on their mobile phones in large cars when the majority of the human population have never ridden in a car, never made a telephone call and never owned property. We face very serious global environmental problems as well. This volume documents some of the most serious of the issues. After a comprehensive review, the UNEP Global Environmental Outlook has identified five major challenges (UNEP 1999, 2002). Heading the list is the loss of biodiversity. It is primarily caused by the loss of habitat, which in turn is a consequence of the growing human
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population. The lowest estimates of the rate of species loss still place us in the middle of the sixth major extinction event of the planet. The second issue, mentioned above, is the lack of access to fresh water. About 1.2 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water, while about 2.4 billion do not have sanitation. The third problem is our interference in the carbon cycle, with consequent global climate change. As discussed by Gupta in Chapter 10 of this volume, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is now about 34 per cent above the pre-industrial level and the methane concentration has increased more than 150 per cent. While there has already been significant climate change, it is evident that there will be much larger changes unless the problem can be managed at the global level by reducing emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (IPCC 2001). It is a huge challenge to our political systems to achieve this environmental goal while allowing poorer parts of the world to improve their material living standards. The fourth problem identified by UNEP is our interference in the Earth’s nitrogen cycle: they argue that this will probably be seen in the long term to be more serious than our interference in the carbon cycle. Where the climate is being altered by our addition to the natural flows of carbon, our emissions still constitute a small fraction of those flows. We now process huge amounts of nitrogen, mainly by extracting it from the air to make fertiliser for agricultural use. Most of that nitrogen finishes up in rivers or estuaries, where it contributes to such problems as algal blooms and reduced productivity of water systems. The human processing of nitrogen now exceeds the natural flows. Finally, we are producing, every year, hundreds of millions of tonnes of toxic wastes for which there is no chemical solution except to isolate it from the biosphere and hope that it stays isolated. The 2001 global change science meeting in Amsterdam concluded that human activities are now affecting global systems in complex, interactive and apparently accelerating ways, and that because of our numbers and the scale of our technology, we have the scope to alter natural systems in ways that threaten the very processes on which we depend (IGBP 2001).
A new approach to environmental problems The challenge of ‘meeting fundamental human needs while preserving the lifesupport systems of planet Earth’ (Kates et al. 2001: 641) is now engaging thinkers from a range of backgrounds. The new field of sustainability science has emerged from attempts to understand the interactions between human activities and natural systems. It spans the full range of scales from the local to the global, recognising that land use is affected by the changing global climate and is also effecting change to the global climate, so interactions in both directions need to be considered. It explicitly transcends traditional disciplines, since many of our most serious environmental problems are the direct result of applying narrow specialised knowledge to one aspect of a complex system. It aims to improve our understanding of complex self-organising systems and their responses to multiple and often interacting stresses. Rather than trying to shore up the crumbling myth
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of scientific objectivity, it accepts that different observers with different values legitimately reach different interpretations of complex issues. By explicitly recognising the problem, it endeavours to enable the various social actors to work together towards common goals from their separate perspectives. It is seeking to answer some ‘core questions’, such as whether scientifically meaningful limits can be identified to warn when natural systems are at risk of serious or irreversible degradation. It is addressing specific short-term issues of concern, such as the effect of the recent pattern of ‘development’ on the Himalayas. In that case, teams of natural and social scientists from five countries (India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and China) and from international research institutions are examining the impacts of globalisation on ‘the fragile ecosystems and economies of their common mountain region’ (Kates et al. 2001: 641). There are other international initiatives, such as the Resilience Alliance, which is attempting to define the conditions which determine the capacity of natural systems to cope with pressures (Resilience Alliance 2003) and the Global Scenarios Group, discussed in more detail in the following section. So there is a reason for cautious optimism: the recognition that environmental problems transcend traditional political and intellectual boundaries has spurred a new approach that explicitly takes that into account. Sustainability science is an example of a trend Somerville identified as trans-disciplinarity, ‘embedding various streams of knowledge in one another and seek[ing] to re-create integrated knowledge’ (Somerville 2000: 285). Somerville goes on to argue that one of the challenges of globalisation is ‘to find a language and vocabulary that will cross the boundaries of religion, ethnic and national origin, and culture, [to] capture the profound shared realities of the human spirit that can give meaning to our lives’ (2000: 286). In other words, the recognition that complex environmental problems are regional or global in scope is itself driving a new approach that explicitly takes that reality into account. Growing awareness of the profound implications of global change is promoting an evaluation of the values that are driving that change.
Inventing a sustainable future There have been various attempts to sketch out scenarios or plausible stories of the future. I have been profoundly affected by the report of the Global Scenarios Group, Great Transition (Raskin et al. 2002). The report was based on examination of a range of possible scenarios, distinguished by the dominant responses to social and environmental challenges. For example, the first scenario the group developed was called market forces; it relies on the self-correcting logic of competitive markets to respond to problems. This is the approach promoted by recent globalisation. The policy reform scenario depends on government action to secure a sustainable future by changing incentives and regulations, as well as by educating individuals to make more responsible choices. In the fortress world scenario, we rely on the armed forces and police to impose order, protect the environment and prevent global collapse into another scenario called breakdown.
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The final scenario they explored, called the great transition, envisages a sustainable and desirable future emerging from new values, a revised model of development and the development of new civil institutions that would allow community involvement in choices about the future: a new civil society. The report concluded that the market forces approach cannot even in principle lead to a sustainable future. Allocation of scarce resources through a market inevitably produces widening inequity, while increasing environmental degradation inevitably results from the lack of price signals representing the environmental costs of consumer choices. Those two forces with equal inevitability undermine the social stability and international cohesion needed for the working of effective markets. The most likely result of following a market forces approach is a slide into fortress world in which the wealthier and more powerful nations use military might to secure access to the world’s limited resources and try to insulate themselves from the growing insurgency outside. A credible case could be made for the proposition that we are already several steps down that slippery slope. An equally plausible consequence of the market forces approach is breakdown, a dire future in which we see the collapse of the systems that are vital to a civilised world – production and distribution of food, water, electricity and other supplies to an increasingly urbanised population, treatment and safe disposal of wastes and so on. In principle, the policy reform scenario could cut resource use and environmental impacts. An extension of the sort of policies recently developed in Europe could, at least in principle, lead to dramatic reductions in resource use and environmental impacts. If there was the political will, the problems of deprivation could certainly be solved. Renner (2002) cites a UNDP 1998 estimate that clean water and decent sanitation, basic health and nutrition, universal basic education and reproductive health for all women could be provided throughout the developing world for about US$40 billion a year, or about 5 per cent of global military spending. The obstacle is the lack of political will for a comprehensive reform strategy, given what the report calls ‘the resistance of special interests, the myopia of narrow outlooks, and the inertia of complacency’. In Australia, the consensus reports of the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development are still gathering dust in government pigeon-holes twelve years after the Council of Australian Governments adopted the National Strategy (CoAG 1992), with no sign of the political will to implement even measures which were supported by a spectrum of interests ranging from Greenpeace to trans-national resource companies. Australia’s Howard government has joined the Bush administration in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, despite having secured a uniquely generous target by threatening to sabotage the global agreement. The absence of political will to drive a reform agenda is a vindication of Paul Kennedy’s view in his book Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (1993: 345). He argued that politicians will never take concerted action now in the interests of the future as long as they can argue that ‘experts are divided’ or ‘that more research is needed’. The problem with complex issues involving interaction between social and natural systems is
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that the experts will always be divided and it will always be possible to argue that more research is needed. As long as politicians are more concerned about the next election than the next generation, there is little chance of policy reform on the scale needed to effect a transition to a sustainable future. So, market-led wealth generation and government-guided technological change has to be supplemented by a values shift towards a new global vision, committed to equity and marked by durability. A first step might be to embrace some strategic goals, such as eliminating hunger. That would not require exotic technical advances, such as genetically modified food crops. It simply requires a more equitable distribution of the two kilograms of food per person per day we now produce. A fundamental problem of our market approach is that those who cannot afford food go hungry. Market forces are also driving bizarre changes in land use. Land which formerly grew cheap food for subsistence living in Africa is now increasingly being used to grow flowers to be air-freighted to rich consumers in the developed world. A second strategic goal could be a radical dematerialisation of society. Several European nations have now adopted the goals sketched by the Wuppertal Institute of reducing energy use to a quarter of the present level and reducing material use to 10 per cent of the present level, seeing those as quite realistic targets (Spangenberg 2000). But we also need a values shift away from Homo sapiens, which is gendered and a link back to our past, towards what is called Globo sapiens. Pentti Malaska’s idea that we should become wise citizens of the planet has been developed by Patricia Kelly (2004), who has unpacked the qualities of Globo sapiens and developed the educational principles needed to develop two crucial recognitions: that we share this planet with all other species, and that we hold it in trust for all future generations. That means that we need to see the economy as a means to service human needs rather than as an end in itself, and that we should be committed to genuine globalisation rather than the recent fad of simply reducing the constraints on corporations. Real globalisation would include a commitment to global minimum standards of material support, labour conditions, environmental protection and human rights, with global institutions sovereign over national or local politics. That would be a radically different world. As Inayatullah (2002) put it: ‘We have become alienated from our common humanity, and the attribute, hope, image that might save us is “globalisation” of humanity’. There is ample evidence that growth is not a solution. The Brundtland Commission pointed out in 1987 that the two main causes of environmental degradation are extreme poverty in the poor countries and unsustainable levels of consumption in the rich countries (WCED 1987). Growth can in principle do something about the first problem; but growth is both in principle and in practice making the second problem worse, and will continue to do so unless we embrace a different sort of development which is oriented towards human need rather than human greed. The fundamental problem is still that most decisionmakers are operating under what could be called the pig-headed model of the world, of which the world is seen like the head of a pig, with the economy a
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large shape like the pig’s face, while society and environment are minor protuberances like the ears (Lowe 1994b, 2002). For those who still have that limited world view, it actually makes sense to say that the economy is the be-all and endall, so our social and environmental problems can be handled as long as the economy is going well. The model is clearly flawed, because recent decades have seen unprecedented economic growth accompanied by widening social divisions and deepening environmental problems. The only rational model is one that accepts that the economy is only a part of society. It is a very important part, but only a part; we all expect society to provide us with security, a sense of identity, companionship, love, cultural services and so on, none of these being part of the economy. Our society is in turn totally enclosed within natural ecological systems on which we depend for breathable air, drinkable water, adequate nutrition, a sense of cultural identity, spiritual sustenance and so on (Lowe 1994b, 2002). We tend to behave as though we are not part of natural systems, but every molecule of my body was once part of the natural systems of this planet and will, in time, once again be part of those natural systems. We need planning and conscious decision-making, rather than trusting the magic of the market which cannot represent the interests of other species and future generations. We also need to accept that our social and economic planning should be within an ecological framework; unless our planning is ecologically rational, there is no prospect even of maintaining living standards, let alone improving them. So we need new social institutions; we need new technologies to meet our needs; but above all else we need values based on the principle of Globo sapiens and continuous adaptive management based on social learning. This was the basis of the proposal by futurists Marc Luyckx and Harlan Cleveland (1998) that we are ‘in transition to a trans-modern way of thinking that combines intuition and spirituality with rational brainwork’. They argue that the conflicts of the twenty-first century will not be ‘between religions and cultures but within them, between pre-modern, modern and trans-modern world-views’. In other words, they see the emerging trans-modern view as ‘keeping the best of modernity but going beyond it’ to include an explicit values perspective. In similar terms, the great transition envisaged by Raskin et al. (2002) is above all else a transition driven by a change in values, away from individualism and consumerist greed towards an acceptance of our responsibility to other humans, to other species and to future generations. In this optimistic view, globalisation can itself directly drive the values transition needed for a future sustainable society.
Utopian? I have no doubt that some readers will feel this view of the future is utopian. In one sense it is, but we should always remember that all significant social reforms have been seen at the time as utopian. Two hundred years ago it was utopian to be advocating a world without slavery; the abolitionists were told they were unrealistic because no economy could function without slave labour. A hundred
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years ago it was utopian to be urging votes for women, and those who did so were openly persecuted; in some parts of the world, that still remains a utopian goal. Closer to our present time, twenty years ago it was still utopian to be dreaming of Berlin without the Wall or South Africa without apartheid. In fact, practically all desirable features of modern life were once utopian visions; we have them because visionaries of previous days were not content with the world in which they lived, but worked systematically for a better world. Those who thought long term and who had a moral conscience felt obliged two hundred years ago to be working to end the slave trade, despite the economic arguments against abolishing slavery. Similarly, the moral arguments for a universal adult franchise or for ending the apartheid system were clear, whatever social or economic considerations were advanced for keeping the old ways. In the same way, anyone who thinks about the impact of our choices on other species, on future generations and on the less privileged of this generation, has a moral responsibility to be working for a sustainable future.
References Australian State of the Environment Committee (2001) Australia State of the Environment 2001, Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing. Council of Australian Governments (1992) National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development, Canberra: AGPS. Holmes, B. and Jones, N. (2003) ‘Brace Yourself for the End of Cheap Oil’, New Scientist, 179 (2406): 9–11. Inayatullah, S. (2002) ‘World System Futures – After the Terror’, Development, 45 (2): 58–64. Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (2001) Third Assessment Report, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) (2001) Global Change Science Conference Declaration, Stockholm: IGBP. Kates, R. W., Clark, W. C., Corell, R., Hall, J. M., Jaeger, C. C., Lowe, I., McCarthy, J., Schellnhuber, H. J., Bolin, B., Dickson, N. M., Faucheux, S., Gallopin, G. C., Grubler, A., Huntley, B., Jäger, J., Jodha, N. S., Kasperson, R. E., Mabogunje, A., Matson, P., Mooney, H., Moore III, B., O’Riordan, T. and Svedin, U. (2001) ‘Sustainability Science’, Science, 292: 641–642. Kelly, P. (2004) ‘Not for Wimps: Futures Thinking and First Year Engineers’, in S. Inayatullah (ed.), Causal Layered Analysis Reader, Tamsui, Taiwan: Tamkang University. Kennedy, P. (1993) Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, London: HarperCollins. Lowe, I. (1994a) ‘Global Climate Change and the Politics of Long-Term Issues’, in S. Dovers (ed.), Sustainable Energy Systems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1994b) ‘Performance Measurement’, in Proceedings of the Fenner Conference on the Environment, Canberra: Australian National University. —— (2002) Towards Sustainability, Perth: Environmental Protection Agency of Western Australia, Position Paper No. 7. Luyckx, M. and Cleveland, H. (1998) Religion and Governance, a paper presented at the World Academy of Art seminar on Governance and Civilizations in Brussels. Belgium. Online. Available at: http://www.wnrf.org/cms/govern.shtml (accessed 15 January 2004).
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Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W. W. (1972) The Limits to Growth, New York: Universe Books. Raskin, R., Banuri, T., Gallopin, G., Gutman, P., Hammond, A., Kates, R. and Swart, R. (2002) Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of Times Ahead, Boston: Stockholm Environment Institute. Renner, M. (2002) ‘Lessons of Afghanistan: Understanding the Conditions that Give Rise to Extremism’, World Watch, March/April: 38. Resilience Alliance (2003) Online. Available at: http://www.resalliance.org/ev_en.php (accessed 15 January 2004). Somerville, M. (2000) The Ethical Canary, Toronto: Penguin Canada. Spangenberg, J. (2000) ‘Operationalising Sustainability’, in D. Yencken and D. Wilkinson (eds) Resetting the Compass, Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (1999) Global Environment Outlook 2000, London: Earthscan. —— (2002) Global Environment Outlook 3, London: Earthscan. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Index
Aarhus Convention (EU) 153 Agius, Emmanuel 44–5, 47 agricultural revolution 5 aid: China 135; see also assistance Allen, R. G. D. 147 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change 194 Analects, The 75 Anderson, Walter Truett 215, 217–18 Annan, Kofi 181, 199 anthropocentrism 56–7; China 124–5; criticism of Agius 45; definition 48n2; medieval period 48 Aristotle 85–6 artificial intelligence 220–1 assistance: and compensation 167; see also aid Attfield, Robin 38–48, 54, 57, 124 Australia: clearance of native vegetation 30, 31; environmental problems 238; National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development 241; need for constructive dialogue 32; reluctance to ratify Kyoto Protocol 198; renewable energy 237–8; salinity problem 31
Bernard, Mitchell 92, 98n9 bikers 17 Bildung 189, 195n2 biodiversity, attributes and values 206–9 biology, and environment 221–2 biotechnology, morality of 68 Block, Fred 84, 91, 94 Bolivia 30 Boll, P. 126, 135 Book of Zhou, The 77 Booth, William James 88, 93, 98n4 Borrows, J. 110 Botswana, ecotourism 56 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 191 Brazil 30; ecotourism 56 Brennan, Andrew 17–34 Bridgewater, Celia 197–210 Bridgewater, Peter B. 197–210 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 199 Brundtland Commission 112, 124–5, 160, 199, 242; sustainable development 182–3, 190–1 BSE 8 Buchanan, James M. 152 Buddhism 130
Bangladesh, ecotourism 56 Banuri, T. 166 Barkdull, J. 129 Barry, Brian 102 Barry, John 95, 96 Beck, Ulrich 18, 27–8 Becker, Lawrence 76 Bella, David 22 Benton, T. 97
calculative rationality 28, 34n10 Callicott, J. Baird 43 Campbell, Donald 225 Canada 169 capital (power of ) 7 carbon cycle 239 Carson, Rachel 5 Cartagena, International Environmental Governance 204–5
Index 247 Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) 8–9 Chambers, W. B. 203 change: agency for 60–3; Confucian approach 71–2; see also climate change China 123–36; aid 135; education 127; Environmental Protection Law 132; environmental values 125–9; governance 132–4; policies under Mao 126–7; Western values, impact of 129–31 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) 6 Chuang Tzu 70 citizenship 29; national and global 42–4, 46–7; principles for human conduct 68–9 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 170, 171 Cleveland, Harlan 243 cleverness, and wisdom contrasted 27–9 climate change: sustainable development 159–75; see also change Climate Change Convention see UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) Climate Technology Initiative (CTI) 173 Coase, R. H. 148, 150 Coase Theorem 150, 155–6n6 Co-creating a Public Philosophy for Future Generations (Kim and Dator) 227 cogito 19 Cold War 183–5 commodification, Polanyi on 88–90 communitarians 40 compensation, and assistance 167 ‘concentric circle’ theory 117 conflict: Coase theorem 150; and interdependence 144–6 Confucian approach 69–78, 126 Confucius 69, 71 Congo, Democratic Republic of 30 consumption 51–63; and agency for change 60–3; consumer satisfaction and theory of value 19–20; and fulfilment 58–60; inequality 22; Polanyi on commodification 88–90 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 146, 199
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) 146, 199 Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) 199 Coordinating Body for the Indigenous People’s Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) 109 cosmic order, and human order: Confucian approach 74–5 cosmopolitanism 40–2; and pluralism 49n5 cost-effectiveness, and sustainable development 170 Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease 8 Crowley, Kate 30 Crutzen, P. J. 194 culture: cultural preservation 118–19n4; growing global monoculture 107, 109–10; and justice, postmodernism and relativism 113–14 Dalby, A. 208 Danby, John 27 Dator, Jim 215–30 De Cuéllar, J. P. 207 democracy 18–19; World Trade Organisation 109 Deng Xiaoping 127, 131 Descartes, René 19 De-Shalit, Avner 95 development (law of ) 161; see also sustainable development diplomacy: environmental diplomacy 180–2; North–South divide 18–92; sustainable development, multilateral diplomacy 185–8 distributive justice 102–6, 112–13; pluralism 150–2 Dobson, Andrew 41, 112 Doctrine of the Mean, The 71, 72, 73, 74–5 Dodds, S. E. H. 203 Donaña National Park 198, 207 Douglas, Mary 30–1 Drexler, Eric 222 Dryzek, John 91 Duh Fuu 70–1 dumping (toxic waste) 41 Durkheim, Emile 155n4 Dworkin, R. 66
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ecological evaluation of nature 53–4 economic, Polanyi’s formal and substantive definitions of 86 economic development 3; and sustainable development 162–4 economic rationalism, Australia 30 economic systems 20–1 economists: trade-offs 148 Ecosystem Conservation Group 201 ecosystems, and selection devices 20 ecotourism 56 education: China 127 Elliot, R. 67 Elvin, Mark 70 embeddedness (economy in society), Polanyi on 85–8 energy (renewable) 237–8 Epictetus 42 equity, global financial and trade institutions 106–11 ethics: environmental ethics and consumption 58–60; future hope 226–7; holarchic morality in Shakespeare 23–7; radical environmental ethics 21–2; universalist ethical norms 38; see also morality EU (European Union) 169, 202; Aarhus Convention 153; Clean Development Mechanism 171; Climate Change Convention 165; environmental justice 153; Habitats Directive 143; national interests 188 Falk, Richard 28, 35n11 Feynman, Richard 223 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 39 Finney, Ben 223–4 Follett, Mary Parker 116 food: equitable distribution 242; food production 109–10 Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 203 fossil fuels: greenhouse gas emissions 6–7 Foucault, Michel 116 Fraser, Nancy 103, 104, 119n8 Friedman, Thomas 91 fulfilment, critique of consumption 58–60
Galtung, J. 9 Gandhi, Indira 189 ‘genuine globalisation’ 9 Giddens, Anthony 18, 27 Gleeson, B. 113–14, 119n9 Global Environment Facility (GEF) 167 Global Environmental Outlook (UNEP) 236–7, 238–9 Global Exchange 107, 109 Global Scenarios 240 ‘good’, Aristotle on 85–6 Goodin, Robert 19–20 Goodpaster, Kenneth 67 Goonatilake, Susantha 221 governance 143–55; China 132–4; definition 155n3; interdependence 143–6; international governance 197–210; and legitimacy 169–70 Granovetter, M. 98n7 Gray, John 17, 18, 23–4, 98n11; calculative rationality 28, 34n10; dissolution of distinctions 33; humanism as fetishisation 28 Great Transformation, The: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Polanyi) 84 Great Transition (Raskin et al.) 240–1 greenhouse gas emissions 6–7, 150, 162, 165; sustainable development and cost-effectiveness 170 green politics 55 ‘grid’, Douglas on 30–1 ‘group’, Douglas on 30–1 Guangzhou 128 Gupta, Joyeeta 59, 159–75 Guyana 109 Habitats Directive (EU) 143 Haraway, D. 63n6 Hardin, Garrett 87 Hardt, Michael 55–6 harmony (ho): Confucian approach 75–6 Harris, Paul G. 123–36 Harrison, Peter 48 Harsanyi, John 21 Harvey, David 115–16, 119n12 Hayek, Friedrich A. 152 Hennikoff, J. 171, 172 heritage, environment as 44–6
Index 249 Hicks, J. 147 holarchic morality, Shakespeare 23–7 Hong Kong 128 Honneth, A. 104, 105, 118n2 Horibe, F. 208 Howe, Neill 226 Hughes, Donald 54 human order, and cosmic order: Confucian approach 74–5 Humphrey, M. 111 identity politics 119n16 ideology of globalisation 97–8n1 Inayatullah, S. 8, 242 indigenous peoples 124; movements 108–10 individual: agency for change 61–2; and species 20 Indonesia 30; ecotourism 56 industrial revolution 5 inequality: consumption 22; as environmental problem 112 interdependence 143–6 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 8, 166, 172, 187, 194 International Geosphere-Biosphere Program 7 international governance 197–210 International Law Association 160 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 106, 107, 109, 110 International Whaling Commission 208 Jahiel, A. R. 131 James, William 115 Jiang Zemin 132 Johannesburg, World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) 179, 181, 191, 192, 201, 203, 210 John Paul II, Pope 17 Jones, Eric 223–4 Joy, Bill 222 justice (environmental) 102–18; ‘concentric circle’ theory 117; liberal justice theory 102, 118–19n4; participation as element of justice 102–5, 113, 119n4; procedural justice 152, 153–4; recognition as element of justice 103–6, 113, 118n2
Kanie, N. 203 Kates, R. W. 226, 239–40 Kavka, G. S. 149 Keel, Mharti 21 Kelly, P. 9 Kennedy, Paul 241 Kenya (Masai Mara): ecotourism 56 King, David 3 Kjellén, Bo 179 Kobayashi, Y. 127 Koestler, Arthur 25 Kurzweil, Ray 221 Kwong, J. 131 Kymlicka, W. 118n4 Kyoto Protocol 7, 161, 180–1; assistance 167; Australia’s reluctance to ratify 198; greenhouse gas emissions 165, 241; sustainable development 163; technology transfer 171; US refusal to ratify 241 labour, Polanyi on 88 La Duke, Winona 108 laissez-faire capitalism, Polanyi on 84–5, 90 Lash, Scott 17, 27 law-making 225 Law of the Sea Treaty 44 legitimacy 152–3; and governance 169–70 Leopold, Aldo 20, 43, 89 Leung, S. W. 128, 129, 133, 134 liberalism: liberal justice theory 102, 118–19n4; Polanyi on re-embedding economy 83–97 Lilla, Mark 17 Li Peng 132 Litany/Pop Futures, Causal Layered Analysis 8–9 Lo, C. W. H. 128, 129, 133, 134 Lomborg, B. 8 Low, N. 113–14, 119n9 Lowe, Ian 236–44 Luyckx, Marc 243 Lynge, A. 208 McCay, B. J. 202 MacDowell, John 52, 63n4 machines, and humans 63n6
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Malaska, Pentti 242 Malmö, Global Environmental Ministerial Forum 207 Manno, J. 98n8 Mao, Y. S. 134 Mao Zedong 126–7 markets, and solving environmental problems 6 Marrakesh Accords 161, 171; assistance 166, 167; sustainable development 163; technology transfer 173 Masai Mara: ecotourism 56 Meadows, D. H. 5 medieval period: anthropocentrism 48 Mencius 72, 73 Merchant, Carolyn 53 metaphysical evaluation of nature 52–4 methane clathrates 7 Meyer, John M. 83–97 Miller, David 104, 105, 111, 112, 114, 221 modernism 19 molecular engineering 223 Montreal, meeting of international environmental governance 205 Montreal Protocol 209 Moosa, M. V. 204 morality: Confucian approach 69; human intervention in nature 67–8, 74–8; moral considerability and moral significance 67; see also ethics Myth/Metaphor, Causal Layered Analysis 8–9 Næss, A. 21 nanotechnology 222–3 national interests, and international negotiations 188–9 nationalism 39–41 nation states: agency for change 61–2; continuing importance of 51; Polanyi on role of state 90–1, 94–5 naturalism, morality of human intervention 67–8 natural value 21 natura naturata 33 nature: commodification of 89–90; conceptions of 54–7; Confucian approach to 69–78; ontological
conceptions of nature 52–3; as process, Confucian approach 71 Negri, Antonio 55–6 New International Economic Order 161 nitrogen cycle 239 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) 107, 109, 110 North–South divide, challenge to global diplomacy 189–92 Norton, Bryan 97, 98n20 Nozick, Robert 151 nuclear age 7, 183 Occidental Petroleum 114 oil production 237 Oksanen, M. 98n6 O’Neill, John 40, 86 Ostrom, E. 87 Our Common Future (Brundtland Report) 199 overseas development assistance (ODA) 191, 192 ozone layer 6 Paavola, Jouni 143–55 Pardo, A. 44 participation, as element of justice 102–5, 113, 119n4 Paul, St 40, 42 Pearson, Ian 221 Peoples’ Global Action 107 Peterson, A. L. 126, 130 Philippines 169 photo-voltaic solar energy 171 Plumwood, Val 21 pluralism: and justice 150–2; and legitimacy 152–3; radical pluralism 148–9 Polanyi, Karl 83–97 political structure 229–30 pollution: China 127, 135; water pollution 229; see also greenhouse gas emissions Porritt, Jonathon 54 postmodernism: conceptions of nature 55–6; culture and justice 113–14 poverty: challenge to global diplomacy 189–92
Index 251 Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (Kennedy) 241 Protecting our Planet Securing Our Future (Watson et al.) 200 Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch 107 Rahmani, H. E. Chérif 204 Rainforest Action Network 108 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands 199, 209 Raskin, R. 243 ‘rational agent’ 21 Rawls, J. 102, 103, 104, 105 Rayner, Steve 30, 31 reciprocity: Confucian approach 76 recognition: definition 118n2; as element of justice 103–6, 113, 118n2 religion 4–5; attitude to nature 38–9; environment as common heritage 47 Renaissance humanism 17–34; Shakespeare 24–7; wisdom and cleverness contrasted 27–9 Resilience Alliance 240 respect, justice 104 Riggs, Fred 229–30 rights, animal and human 57 Rio de Janeiro, UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) 179, 182, 185–6, 191, 199, 203 rivalry, and interdependence 144–5 Rohee, Clement 109 Rolston, Holmes 20 Rosenau, J. N. 189 Ross, Andrew 57 Ross, L. 129, 135 Ruggie, John 94 Runciman, David 51 Russia: Climate Change Convention 165 salinity, exacerbation of problem in Australia 31 sapientia, and scientia 28 Schlosberg, David 102–18 Schrijver, N. 161 Schumacher, E. F. 87, 98n5 science: changing attitudes towards scientific community 7–8;
politicisation of 8; subject matter of 52–3 scientia, and sapientia 28 Second World Climate Conference (1990) 170–1 self-interest 21–3 self-respect, as primary good 104 Shakespeare, William 24–7, 33 Shiva, V. 109–10 Siedentop, Larry 18 Simon, Herbert 21 Simon, Julian 5 Simons, Andrew 63n3 Slaughter, R. A. 8 Small is Beautiful (Schumacher) 87 Smil, V. 125, 128–9, 131, 137n4 Smith, Michael 34n10 Smith, R. 130, 131, 133, 134, 137n6 social capital 145, 155n2 Social Causes, Causal Layered Analysis 8–9 social justice 113; see also distributive justice; justice solar energy 237 Somerville, M. 240 Soper, Kate 51–63 sovereign, humans as 68 space exploration 223–4 Spain: Donaña National Park 198, 207; renewable energy 238 species, and individuals 20 state, Polanyi on role of 90–1, 94–5; see also nation state Steger, Manfred 84, 97–8n1 ‘stewardship’ 57, 68 Stigler, George 155n6 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972) 189–90 Stoermer, E. F. 194 Stoics 42 Stolen Harvest (Shiva) 110 Strauss, William 226 Strong, Maurice 190 sustainability science 226 sustainable development 29, 159–75; Climate Change Convention 162–4; commitments 164–70; and costeffectiveness 170; definition 182–5;
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and economic growth 162–4; multilateral diplomacy 185–8; technology transfer 170–3 T’ai shih 73 Tao, Julia 66–78 Taoism, China 125–6, 128 Taylor, C. 104, 105, 118n2 technology: nanotechnology 222–3; technology transfer, sustainable development 170–3 Terence 40 Theory of Justice (Rawls) 105 thermohaline circulation 7 Thomas, C. W. 204 Thomas, Keith 47 Thompson, Michael 30 Thurow, L. 6 Tolba, Mostafa 190 Torgerson, Douglas 91 totalitarianism 17–18 Tress, B. 207 Truman, Harry 183 Tseng, E. C. Y. 131 Tudge, Colin 218 Tullock, Gordon 152 Tum, Rigoberta Menchú 203 Ukraine: Climate Change Convention 165 UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) 143, 153–4, 161, 182, 199; economic planning, integration and trade-offs 167–8; financial assistance and compensation 167; leadership 165–7; legitimacy and governance 169–70; participation and raising public awareness 168–9; precautionary principle 164–5; sustainable development 162–4 United Nations (UN): Cartagena, International Environmental Governance 204–5; Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) 181; Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 181; Malmö Declaration 203; multilateral diplomacy 186–7; overseas development assistance (ODA) 191, 192; Rio de Janeiro
conference 179, 182, 185–6, 191, 199, 203; Security Council 181; UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) (Rio de Janeiro) 179, 182, 185–6, 191, 199, 203; UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 191; UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) 180, 199; UN Development Programme (UNDP) 201; UN Earth Summit 132; UN Environment Programme (UNEP) 4, 190, 198, 200–1, 202–3, 204, 236, 236–7, 238–9; UNESCO 198, 202, 203, 226; World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) 124–5, 160, 182–3, 190–1, 199, 242; World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) 179, 181, 191, 192, 201, 203, 210 universalist ethical norms 38 USA 169; commitment to Climate Change Convention 165; distributive justice 106; environmental justice 153; law-making 225; logging communities 119n4; Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) 228; National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) 153; native Americans 108; opposition to Kyoto Protocol 180; political structure 229–30; replacement of Dr Watson 8; Technology Cooperation Agreement Pilot Project (TCAPP) 172; unilateral approach 180–1; war on terrorism 186 utility, and welfare 147 utopianism, Polanyi on role of state 90–1 U’wa campaign 108–9 virtual reality 219–20 Vitousek, P. M. 218–19 Walls, J. 126, 128 Wapner, Paul 91 water pollution 229 Watson, Robert 8 ‘Way of Nature’ 72–4
Index 253 Weiss, L. 98n11 welfare: and utility 147; welfarism, definition 147 Weller, R. P. 126, 135 Wenz, Peter 114–15, 117 Weyant, J. 166 Wiig, K. M. 208 Wildavsky, Aaron 30 wilderness 54; China 126 Wilkinson, R. 5 wisdom, and cleverness contrasted 27–9 Wissenberg, M. 96 World Bank 106, 109, 110, 114 World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) 124–5, 160, 199, 242 World Environment Organisation (WEO) 205
World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) 179, 181, 191, 192, 201, 203, 210 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 106, 107, 109, 110, 114, 206; demonstration against 117 World Wide Fund for Nature 171 Wuppertal Institute 242 Xunzi 72, 74 Yack, B. 98n15 Young, Iris 103, 104, 119n8 Young, O. R. 202 Yu Kam Por 72, 73, 77 Zhao, B. 129–30 Zimbabwe 169
