The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice (Advances in Ecopolitics)

THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABLE LIVING AND PRACTICE

ADVANCES IN ECOPOLITICS VOLUME 4

THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABLE LIVING AND PRACTICE EDITED BY

LIAM LEONARD School of Business and Humanities, Institute of Technology, Sligo, Republic of Ireland

JOHN BARRY School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queens University Belfast, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2009 Copyright r 2009 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84950-641-0 ISSN: 2041-806X (Series)

Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print

CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

vii

LIST OF REVIEWERS

ix

CHAPTER 1 THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABILITY: TRANSITION TOWNS AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES John Barry and Stephen Quilley

1

CHAPTER 2 TRADITIONAL LIVING PRACTICES: RETURN TO THE VILLAGES Mark Somma

29

CHAPTER 3 SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS: A NEW FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE BASED ON A GLOBAL CARBON STANDARD Molly Scott Cato

55

CHAPTER 4 UTOPIAN SUSTAINABILITY: ECOLOGICAL UTOPIANISM Marius de Geus

77

CHAPTER 5 ENVIRONMENTAL EXPLOITATION: AN ANALYSIS AND TAXONOMY Gerry Nagtzaam

101

CHAPTER 6 ECOLOGICAL ACTIVISM: SUSTAINABLE LIVING, ACTIVISM AND IDENTITY Liam Leonard

117

v

vi

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 7 ECOFEMINISM: ECOFEMINISM AND THE GREEN PUBLIC SPHERE Chaone Mallory

139

CHAPTER 8 SUSTAINABLE PLANNING: A GREEN PROTECTIONISM Colin Hines

155

CHAPTER 9 SUSTAINABILITY AND THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY: GREEN INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES Lucy Sargisson

171

CHAPTER 10 A GREEN PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY Rupert Read

193

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS John Barry

School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queens University Belfast, UK

Gerry Nagtzaam

Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia

Marius de Geus

Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, Netherlands

Colin Hines

Convener Green New Deal Group, Middlesex, UK

Liam Leonard

School of Business and Humanities, Institute of Technology, Sligo, Republic of Ireland

Chaone Mallory

Department of Philosophy, Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA

Stephen Quilley

School of Politics, International Relations and Environment, Keele University, UK

Rupert Read

School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Lucy Sargisson

School of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham University, UK

Molly Scott Cato

Cardiff School of Management, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK

Mark Somma

College of Political Science, California State University, Fresno, USA

vii

LIST OF REVIEWERS Peter Doran Queens University, Belfast, UK

Miriam Kennet Green Economics Institute, UK

G. Honor Fagan NUI Maynooth, Ireland

Paula Kenny Institute of Technology, Sligo

Alejandra Maria Gonzalez-Perez Eafit University, Colombia

Carmen Kuhling University of Limerick, Ireland

Niamh Hourigan University College, Cork, Ireland

Michael O’Kane Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

John Karamichas Queens University, Belfast, UK

Ariel Salleh University of Western Sydney, Australia

ix

CHAPTER 1 THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABILITY: TRANSITION TOWNS AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES John Barry and Stephen Quilley 1. INTRODUCTION The ‘Transition Town’ (TT) movement pioneered by Rob Hopkins initially in Kinsale (Ireland) and Totnes (United Kingdom) has become the fastest growing environmental movement in the global north (Hopkins, 2008). With over 30 official TT initiatives in the United Kingdom, the concept is now spreading into New Zealand, Canada, and many more countries.1 The movement starts from two premises: (i) the reality and implications of rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change; (ii) the reality of ‘peak oil’ – an imminent, permanent short fall in oil supply, increasing year on year with massive geo-political, economic and social consequences.2 Whilst supporting national and multilateral efforts to reduce emissions and to develop new energy technologies and infrastructures, TT leaves climate change protest to environmental campaigning groups, NGOs and activists oriented towards a global civil society. Acknowledging the need for ‘government and business responses [to climate change and peak oil] at all levels’, the role of TT is to ‘create [a] sense of anticipation, elation and a collective call to adventure’ The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 1–28 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004004

1

2

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

and that this grass-roots bottom-up, local activism could potentially prepare the way for more directly political action at the level of national government (Hopkins, 2008, p. 15). But at the same time, there is a persistent hedging of bets, since ‘much of what we would need to do to prepare for the Collapse scenarios we would need to do anyway to prepare for the Evolution scenarios’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 45). In many respects, TT takes resource and/or environmentally caused geo-political conflict for granted. Rather than campaigning against globalisation or in favour of a ‘globalisation from below’, the TT project is premised on the end globalisation and the inevitability of environmentally induced socio-economic and political disorder. Thus, although TT eschews the ‘doomers’ discourse of many peak oil forums,3 The Transition Handbook does refer to ‘burn out’, ‘collapse’ and ‘overshoot’ as scenarios that are likely to play out in the absence of a ‘planned and urgent energy descent’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 49).4 And whether the end of the current global order takes the form of a planned energy descent or a chaotic implosion, ‘the time for seeing globalisation as an invincible and unassailable behemoth, or localisation as some kind of lifestyle choice, is over’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 15) and ‘Small is inevitable’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 68). But at the same time, TT transforms the survivalist discourse of North American peak oil community, arguing that positive, up-lifting visions of a more convivial post-oil future are more likely to induce active participation and behavioural change: ‘the Transition approach [demonstrates that] the future with less oil could be preferable to the present’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 53); ‘Our best chance of a successful collective transition will not come from presenting people with the possibility of [collapse/disintegration] scenarios’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 49). Thus, this positive dimension of TT can be regarded as a real world example of Homer Dixon’s argument for the Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon, 2006). In contrast to most other groups concerned with sustainability, TT cannot be described as a protest movement, though of course it is not unique in this. Strictly speaking, it operates at a tangent to mainstream climate politics or more well-established environmental organisations. With an orientation that is resolutely non-confrontational, TT communities are seeking to take charge of their own destinies and to develop relocalisation strategies – initiatives that ‘pre-figure’ or anticipate what is seen to be an inevitable reversal of globalisation. Thus, in many important respects, the TT movement is an example of practical, solution-orientated ‘sustainable communities’ in the making. Those involved in the TT movement, while not apolitical or against political activity (which marks other sustainability political organisations and movements), do nevertheless represent a decisive ‘pragmatic turn’ as it

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

3

were within the politics of the transition to sustainability. Focusing as it does on very practical issues such as skills/reskilling, food, energy, transport, land use and cultivation and above all community building, TT could be seen as a form of hands-on, DIY politics, which may have the potential for actual transformation of local communities and preparing them practically for the adapting to the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change. That is the TT movement can be seen as aiming to creating communities with the practical capacity to be resilient in the face of these externally generated shocks over which local communities have little control. Metaphorically one can view TT as a strategy of ‘circling the wagons’ as local communities learn, practice and experiment their way towards creating a more sustainable future for themselves, without waiting on the state or some other outside agency to come and help them. To continue the analogy, TT initiatives are not waiting for ‘the cavalry’ to come riding over the hill to rescue them and ‘give them’ resilience. TT initiatives are examples of local communities ‘doing sustainability for themselves’ on the basis of their own localised understanding of what ‘sustainability’ means. From a ‘peak oil’ perspective, increased material and transportation costs resulting from energy shortfalls will guarantee a massive reduction in global and national flows of people, goods and (eventually/perhaps?) information (Heinberg, 2005; Kunstler, 2005, 2008; Strahan, 2007; McBay, 2006; Deffreyes, 2005). In the long term, this chronic energy shock will engender a much more localised ‘bio-regional’ pattern of economic production and consumption. Recognising the trajectory of our current fossil fuel energy path, TT initiatives seek to enhance the resilience of local communities, increasing their capacity to navigate economic and environmental crises. Actively anticipating the changes needed to survive peak oil; TT initiatives engender behavioural and structural change at the level of families and communities, which places a high premium on the reduction of emissions and the adoption of more eco-cyclical patterns of economic behaviour. For TT advocates, responding to climate change and peak oil involves an integrated and seamless transformation of family, community and economic life – a paradigm shift captured by the notions of ‘relocalisation’ and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. The TT network is a fascinating and deeply significant grass roots response to the converging ecological, economic, cultural, developmental and wider geo-political/security crises of the coming century. All the more interesting is that it has emerged largely under the radar of the mainstream campaigning organisations – presenting the climate change activists in particular with a series of strategic and tactical conundrums. Coming from

4

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

different academic and political backgrounds, both the authors are profoundly sympathetic to the TT movement, which stands at the cutting edge of a much longer tradition of relocalisation. In what follows, we identify a series of issues raised by the movement and which warrant further research. Some of these are academic, pertaining to debates in political science and sociology on the nature of social movements. Some are political, relating to strategic and ethical implications of energy descent scenarios particularly for issues such as democracy, social liberalism and global civil society. And finally, there are a number of research problems that are or more practical significance to the main stakeholders in this process – the Transition Network and particular local TT initiatives. These include problems such as how to measure resilience. Where possible we identify specific research hypotheses and counter-hypotheses. Of course what we outline here is tentative and is presented as a contribution to organising scholarly research on the TT movement, including the contribution of academic research to promote, improve and develop it (through ‘action research’). We hope others (including those within the TT movement itself) also help shape the research agenda on the TT movement. Is the prospect of peak oil proving to be more effective than climate change in stimulating behavioural change amongst individuals, families and communities? The TT movement emerged from under the radar of a mainstream environmental movement focused more or less exclusively on the threat of climate change. Greens have often been wary and even hostile of peak oil perspectives, believing that an emphasis on fuel shortage will divert political attention from the tailpipe problem of emissions. However, climate change propaganda and activism has been signally unsuccessful in changing lifestyles, consumption behaviour and political priorities as provocatively outlined for example by Schellenberger and Nordhaus in their The Death of Environmentalism (Schellenberger and Nordhaus, 2006). In contrast, the rapid ‘horizontal’ or rhizome-like growth of the TT movement (and other relocalisation initiatives in North America and elsewhere) suggests that the peak oil perspective is proving much more effective in mobilising individual, familial and community-level changes in lifestyle, material practices and associated behaviours.

1.1. Research Topic 1 TT is more effective movement in terms of mobilising people because of the tacit and sometimes overt emphasis on survival. TT discourse is all about

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

5

community-level resilience and relocalisation with initiatives focused on familial and local food provisioning strategies (e.g. allotments, farmers markets), local alternative currencies (e.g. the booming Totnes pound) and local, renewable energy systems (community energy projects, community woodlands, etc). Such strategies speak quietly but insistently to private anxieties about global economic disorder (the credit crunch, economic recession, depression, etc.) but also the geo-political and social conflicts that may come along in the wake of a chronic energy shock. This emphasis on personal and family survival does not sit easily with green activist principles of liberalism, global engagement and universalism, civic altruism and democratisation or self-understanding of green politics as focused on improving the quality of life. But although often tacit and unspoken, this survival motif is deep-seated and draws on much more hard-headed North American traditions associated with homesteading (‘Thomas Jefferson with a shot gun’ as it were). Discussion in the Internet peak oil forums (of which there are many) draws heavily upon the resurgent ‘limits to growth’ tradition in ecological economics, and contributors frequently make explicit references to Malthusian ‘die-off ’ or ‘overshoot’ scenarios. This emphasis on catastrophe is at the forefront of the best-selling peak oil books by Richard Heinberg, James Kunstler, David Strahan, Thomas Homer-Dixon and others such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse.

1.2. Research Topic 2 TT is more effective because the effects of peak oil are more immediate, ‘real’ and felt than those from climate change, which are viewed as distant (in time – ‘climate change will only affect those in the future’ or space – ‘climate change is more of an issue for those in other parts of the world’). Peak oil for example is a major (if not the only reason, since alongside the decline in extractable oil reserves, we also have to consider oil speculation and refinery capacity) cause of oil doubling in price to over $140 a barrel within the past year. This oil price spike has had immediate and widespread effects on the quality of life for millions of people: whether in terms of higher heating bills/fuel poverty, the increase in the price of basic food commodities or petrol or diesel prices at the pump. Thus, peak oil has, in a short space of time, had a direct effect on people’s lives in a way that climate change has not, primarily through its economic impacts on consumption and cost of living. The ‘threat’ of peak oil is not a threat but a daily and growing reality, and unlike climate change, it is not associated with ‘greens’ or

6

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

scientists but economists and more importantly citizens’ own observations and lived experience. It thus represents a more tangible ‘tipping point’ that climate change in relation to indicting a major crisis within contemporary globalised industrial capitalism. The effects (and therefore the reality of) peak oil is also an unmediated one – citizens do not need scientists or green activists to tell them about the increase in the price of basic food staples. Increases in food and fuel prices have already led to significant behavioural changes – witness the decline in use of cars in the United Kingdom and United States, and the fact that within the United Kingdom more people buying are now buying vegetable seeds than purchasing flowers or shrubs. Borrowing heavily from the lexicon of twentieth-century anarchism and critical theory, contemporary ‘ecotopias’ are decidedly antipathetic to the state. For instance, in his eulogy to the environmental movement, Spowers (2002, p. 61) comments that all government is seen as ‘the extrapolation of individual human bondage’. Whilst both TT and the wider discourse of peak oil are more ambivalent, there is a marked reluctance to acknowledge the dystopic dimensions of a return to small-scale ‘village society’ as soberly and bluntly outlined by Somma for example (Somma, 2008). However, not all greens share this antipathy to the state and it is of course the case that ‘radical’ cannot be unproblematically monopolised by anti-state/anarchistic green/environmental positions (Barry, 1999). Hence, the relationship of the TT movement to the state and politics is of extremely pertinent topic for research. As Elias (2000) has shown, the processes of individuation and state formation, psychogenesis and sociogenesis, are inextricably linked. In seeking to throw the historical state process into reverse gear, visions of decentralised, self-sufficient tribalism would also reverse the direction of the ‘civilising process’. Any significant reduction in the territorial scale of state pacification would certainly be associated with a decline in the pervasiveness and intensity of relations of interdependency between individuals and groups. In Eliasian terms, such a contraction would by definition constitute a moment of ‘decivilisation’ marked by a significant diminution of internalised constraints on interpersonal violence (Mennell, 1990). The kind of ecotopias envisaged by anarchists (e.g. Kropotkin), social ecologists (Bookchin, 1991) and proponents of ‘deep ecology’ all depend on an unspoken, unacknowledged premise, namely the continuation of a very modern kind of personality with a highly developed superego. This superego is crucial in facilitating affective restraint in relation to inter-personal violence (Elias, 2000). And the implication of the ecological ethic envisaged (and to some extent relied upon) by many ecotopian writers is that this

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

7

superego could and should see further development with the internalisation of new psycho-social restraints on the ecologically damaging material gratification that provides the central dynamic in consumer society. As prominent UK environmental activists and commentator George Monbiot has pointed out, the climate change movement is distinguished as a movement in calling for restraint rather than demanding greater wealth production and distribution, which has been the historical rationale for most progressive movements (Monbiot, 2005). As he puts it, ‘historically at least, no one has ever rioted for austerity, people have taken to the streets in the past because they want to consume more of things, not because they want to consume less’ (Monbiot, 2005). Yet in many respects that is precisely what TT represents – a shift to restraint and moderation, though without the rioting. In this respect, it is very much in keeping with standard green political principles of ‘walking lighter on the earth’ and also in rejecting continual economic growth and exponential consumption of fossil fuel–based energy in particular. However, such scenarios rest upon a major contradiction. The conscience formation implied by such an advanced superego emerged only in the context of highly socially differentiated, relatively materially affluent, individualised, densely populated societies, regulated by states capable of imposing an effective monopoly on violence. Social liberalism, toleration, gender equity, democratic participation, the universal validation of human rights and the sanctity of individual lives and metropolitan sanguinity with regard to ‘difference’ are all core values and ethical motifs shared by liberals, socialists and greens of (nearly) all persuasions. But they became thinkable and acquired meaning only in the context of capitalist, industrial societies with an ever more extended division of labour. Elias’s historical sociology is reinforced by the emerging consensus in anthropology. Contrary to Margaret Mead (1940), the weight of evidence is now firmly that small-scale, face-to-face societies have tended to be characterised by much higher levels of interpersonal violence than modern state societies (Fry, 2005; Chagnon, 1988; Keeley, 1996).5 As Somma (2008) points out, ‘Despite the romanticization of so-called indigenous peoples, first-hand reports refer continuously to the violence, intra and intertribal conflict, and the propensity of tribal members to pack up and move to other tribes as result of real or imagined slights’. Equally, there is a small but persistent ‘eco-authoritarian’ strain in green thinking – going back to the 1960s – and associated with thinkers such as Robert Heilbroner, William Ophuls and Garrett Hardin – for whom the ‘limits to growth’ and the ecological collapse of modern industrial society heralded the evolution of less

8

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

democratic political systems and the end of liberal democracy and its associated culture of rights, tolerance and citizen participation and equality (Barry, 1999). How does the TT project relate to this problem? The vision of the good life articulated by TT and relocalisation activists is not original. ‘Small is beautiful’ (Schumacher, 1973) was a constant refrain of the 1970s ecology movement. It featured regularly in radical critiques of alienation in bureaucratic, urban industrial societies (e.g. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful; Ivan Illich’s De-schooling Society and his Tools for Conviviality; Arne Naess’ deep ecology writings; or the Ecologist magazine’s Blueprint for Survival). And in Britain, it achieved a permanent place in the annals of TV comedy with the satirical suburban homesteading sitcom The Good Life. A recurring idea of this 1970s environmentalism is that individuals and families can escape from the alienation and commodification of urban industrial society and recover an ecological and spiritual integrity by living a more creative, more sociable, lower consumption and more self-sufficient life, ‘in tune’ with nature. In New Zealand, people refer to ‘intentional communities’ to express the notion of people taking responsibility for their own lives in this way, whereas in the United States and elsewhere, the ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement, associated with deep ecology, similarly expressed this conscious strategy to ‘down-size’ as a way of walking lighter on the planet. The discourse of TT deliberately taps into these currents as well as newer and related social movements such as the ‘Slow Food’ and ‘Slow Cities’ movements. A key tactical objective is to map out how a low carbon community with enhanced ecological and economic resilience might also provide an antidote to the alienation and cultural vacuum associated with the proliferation of ‘clone towns’ and the ‘blandscapes’ of modern suburbia. TT hold out the promise to reinvigorate high streets, and local shops, to reweave the social, cultural and economic webs of place-bound, interdependent community. But the wider peak oil literature is less sanguine about the future politics of local communities. James Kunstler, in his novel A World Made by Hand, paints a more ambiguous picture in which a Jeffersonian democracy of homesteaders is nevertheless dominated by the priorities and interests of large landowners. In the context of a less pacified, centralised and more volatile micro-society, he also suggests a revival in the influence and significance of non-rational religious communities. Critically, his post-petroleum society, the reassertion of food production as the overwhelming priority of individuals, families and communities entails a re-establishment of a much more traditional gender division of labour,

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

9

with women once again taking a backseat in the politics of local administration and policing. The double-edged legacy of the modern state and its possible demise or diminution raises a series of difficult questions for the transition movement:  Is ‘resilience’ compatible with the individualism, liberalism and pluralism that is taken for granted by new social movement (NSM) activists?  What might be the consequences of relocalisation for gender relations?  Would relocalisation lead, in the longer term, to a reversal of individualisation, a recollectivisation of social life and the enhancement of the ‘we’ over the ‘I’? What might this imply for identity politics?  Is transition politics necessarily localist and communitarian in nature or could it instantiate what Andrew Dobson has referred to as a ‘thick cosmopolitanism’ and potentially more universal in its political and moral orientation (Dobson, 2006)?

1.3. Research Topic 3 In Europe, left and green politics, especially those strands associated with the new social movements, has tended to be predicated on a high degree of psychological individuation, social liberalism, participatory democracy, justice, tolerance, multiculturalism and political pluralism – all characteristic components of a distinctly metropolitan or cosmopolitan outlook. But individuation is not a static feature of human nature. Rather the material practices that sustain individualism can be seen as contingent historical outcomes of modernisation, urbanisation and marketisation. The discipline of sociology developed largely as a meditation on the causes and consequences of this shift, which was seen in terms of a tension between gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (society). Peak oil suggests that, for the first time in a thousand years, the advancing scale and intensity of trade and communication will be thrown into reverse, with gemeinschaft resurgent and gesellschaft in retreat. The ‘village society’ that comes into view certainly has potential attractions, compared with the alienated clone towns of Anglo-American suburbia. To use the title of one of the educational film used in the TT movement: does The End of Suburbia also necessarily mean the end of individuation as we currently know it in western liberal democratic societies?

10

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

1.4. Research Topic 4 On the contrary, the TT movement also offers a real world experiment in examining the relationship between values and practices of individualism, freedom, tolerance, pluralism and diversity and specific contingent material practices such as hyper-mobility, high-energy intensive economic and landuse and settlement patterns. In short, does the TT movement represent an opportunity to combine the practices and values of liberalism in a postcapitalist, post-growth economic context? Can TT be viewed as articulating a Hegelian claim for the ‘preservative transcendence’ of liberalism – that is, preserving the ‘good’ elements of liberalism (freedom, individuation, tolerance, etc.) while transcending it in terms of moving decisively towards a low-impact, post-carbon and post-growth economic basis? Is freedom dependent on high levels of economic growth or high levels of energy? Does a return to sustainable gemeinschaflich (if that is what the TT movement leads to) necessarily mean an end to the enlightenment achievements of democratic politics, individuation, pluralism and diversity? Does freedom and individuation necessarily depend on affluence and high-energy consumption? Can TT initiatives be viewed as nascent forms of ‘green republican’ socio-economic forms in which, following republican political thinking, there is no necessary relationship between affluence and values and practices of freedom and pluralism, where freedom is viewed as ‘freedom from non-domination’ rather than the liberal view of freedom as ‘freedom from interference’ (Barry & Smith, 2008)? As noted already, the Transition Network is one of the fastest growing environmental movements in the world, and as might be expected, it does exhibit a number of attributes identified by successive generations of social movement theory and research. But emerging without fanfare, under the radar of the mainstream environmental movement, there are also critical differences that turn on its ontological and strategic orientation. These differences underpin a communicative and ideological misalignment with more straightforwardly ‘political’ forms of climate change and globalisation protest. In short, TT is an odd kind of social movement. Although the future of globalisation provides an axial concern, TT is less a protest movement or a campaign against globalisation than a preparation for a chaotic retreat. TT certainly fits Harold Blumer’s (1969) definition of social movements as collective enterprises on the part of social groups driven by dissatisfaction with an existing ‘form of life’ and seeking to establish a new one. Drawing

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

11

on broadly the Malthusian peak oil discourse and an ecological-economic preoccupation with energy and material flows and geophysical ‘limits to growth’, the transition perspective makes a virtue of necessity (‘small is inevitable’). The ‘form of life’ against which TT rails is broadly synonymous with global capitalism – disembedded markets, moving people goods and information through abstract global economic spaces at an accelerating rate. However, what is significant is that the TT movement does not explicitly make global capitalism the ‘form of life’ against which it is struggling and seeking to transform. Rather, in keeping with its resolutely and unapologetically pragmatic character, it avoids such overtly ideological analysis and focuses on spelling out the symptoms of this pathogenic form of life, such as ecological crisis and a pervasive alienation from nature and from other people (neighbours, friends, family, proximate community) – which in the TT mindset are distilled most clearly in the sprawling, suburban landscapes (Kunstler, 1995), ‘edge cities’ (Garreau, 1992) and ‘clone towns’ (Conisbee et al., 2004). The form of life that could be ushered in on the back of the energy crunch is characterised as ‘an abundant future y energy lean, time rich, less stressful, healthier and happier’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 94). For Eyerman and Jamison (1991, p. 4), a defining attribute of social movements is the way in which they engender an alternative public space, ‘moments of collective creation that provide societies with ideas, identities and even ideals’. This certainly describes important aspects of the transition process – the use of film showings, web events, community festivals and the concept of ‘unleashing collective genius’ to solve local problems of resilience and reconstruction. However, much social movement analysis places conflict and protest at centre stage (e.g. Porta & Diani, 1999). For instance, Tarrow (1998, p. 2) refers to social movements as being involved in ‘contentious politics’ involving ‘confrontation with authorities and opponents’. In the case of the Transition Network, the picture is more complicated. TT politics is not characterised by adversarial relations with opponents who make claims on the same goods or values. And nor do participants engage in actions that ‘exceed the tolerance limits of social systems pushing them to change’ (Edelman, 2001, p. 288). TT eschews outright political confrontation with any clearly identified opposition, and the ‘targets’ of TT practice are more abstract – perceived vulnerability in the face of impending climate change, ecological crisis and socio-economic disorder. In this sense, it is perhaps closer to those ‘new social movements’ which confront diffuse social structures such as patriarchy and for which the involuntary complicity of

12

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

movement participants in the objectionable form of life in question becomes an important focus for reflexive politics, or as Crossley (2002, p. 5) puts it ‘social change by way of self change’. Or perhaps, TT is closer to what Leonard (2007) claims is distinctive of Irish local environmental movements in that they are resolutely local and particular in character and seek partnerships with the state or business and the finding of pragmatic solutions and reform rather than system-wide confrontation and transformation. TT is first and foremost about enhancing personal and community resilience by changing individual and group social, ecological and economic behaviour and relationships in relation to a particular place. In this respect, then, TT initiatives can be viewed as sustainability-focused forms of ‘community boot-strapping’ as it were. Finally, social movement analysts all emphasise the central role of informal networks, drawn together by shared beliefs and a sense of solidarity (Porta & Diani, 1999), low levels of institutionalization (Koopmans, 1993; Offe, 1985) and heterogeneity – all attributes which also characterise TT initiatives. However, in comparison with the new social movements that have become paradigmatic in the cause of anti-globalisation (Shepard & Hayduk, 2002; Amoore, 2005), there is an important difference. The Transition Network is increasingly global in reach as well as firmly rooted in particular localities, in so far as the website facilitates the spread of ideas and the export of a successful model of local organisation to America, South Africa and Australia for example. This ‘viral spread of the transition concept’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 202) is underpinned by speaker tours on the part of high-profile TT patrons such as Richard Heinberg and is a deliberate and pivotal dimension of the strategic model. However, this global network is exceedingly thin and is largely located in the United Kingdom. Activists take very seriously both the ethical injunction to minimise emissions (and so curtailing long haul flights) and also the peak oil imperative that such flights will soon be a thing of the past and that the sooner we learn to live according to the constraints of the post-carbon economy the easier we will find the transition.6 What this means in practice is that, aside from high-profile contacts and electronic communications through Internet forums (‘as long as they are available’), the primary networks involve sustained face-to-face relations in the context of place-bound ‘communities of fate’. This is rather different to the loose knit, shifting coalitions and contacts that mark the ‘communities of identity’ described by Alberto Melucci (1989). A key research focus here would be an event analysis of the formation of a TT (Table 1).

13

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

Table 1.

Transition Towns and Social Movement Characteristics.

Social Movement Characteristic

Presence/ Absence

Comment

Dissatisfaction with an existing ‘form of life’

O

Temporary public space/sphere

O

Networks, shared beliefs, solidarity

[O]

Protest, conflict and contentious politics? Low levels of institutionalisation/ lacking in clear boundaries Collective enterprise

X

Clone town, alienation, ecological unsustainability, consumerism – Ambivalence about modernity, urbanism, globalism Yes, thought awareness raising events and food and energy orientated collective practices – allotments and community harvest meals More face-to-face, place-bound Less virtual, though extensive use of the Internet Not based on identity Community of fate rather than community of identity Pragmatic, solutions-focused, partnership building Geography/Place provide clearer territorial boundaries than NSMs Yes, community of fate rather than community of identity focused Non-ideological; ‘Small is inevitable’ and resolutely local in focus, though aware of global challenges of peak oil and climate change Global social justice not a central feature of discourse Malthusian ambivalence Return to some difficult demographic debates of 1970s? Yes, but without the negative connotations – possible tension with the TT movement?

[O] O

Anti-globalisation/globalisation from below

X

Strong positive belief in the possibility of reconciling ecological and (universal) social justice imperatives

[X]

Malthusian realism

[O]

1.5. Research Topic 5 Is it also possible that, in its relative political disengagement, at least to some extent, TT politics reflects a failing liberal resolve about the prospects for liberalism and global civil society and lowered expectations as to the possibility of reconciling equity, social justice, liberty and environmental concern? Here, TT might be interpreted as a retreat into communitarian

14

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

politics, away from cosmopolitan multiculturalism, away from universalism and into the ontological certainties of ‘survival’. Certainly ‘small is inevitable’ does reflect an erosion of belief in the long-term viability of the urban metropolitan life (Calhoun, 1994; Payne, 2000; Pichardo, 1997)?

1.6. Research Topic 6 TT represents a return to an older form of resistance to the encroachments of market society – a (Gemeinschaftlich) Polanyian movement for social (and ecological) protection (Polanyi, 1957) that is closer to nineteenth-century romanticism and ‘back to the land’ movements of the twentieth century, than the summit hopping anti-globalisation protesters aspiring to an essentially liberal or gesellschaftlich global order characterised by an cosmopolitan universalism and commitment to social, global and intergenerational justice and ecological responsibility.

1.7. Research Topic 7 Does the political vision of TT equate with a conservative or more progressive perspective? Here, the characterisation of green politics as essentially conservative by Giddens is telling. Stressing the commonality between green and conservative thought, Giddens states that The conservatives place emphasis on the family, on bonds between generations, and on preserving nature. The greens operate with the same themes, and precisely here one can build a common bridge which can form the basis for a part of the themes which must dominate the radical political agenda of the future. The destruction of nature and the destruction of solidarity must be halted. We must be concerned with solidarity and the preservation of nature, but not in a traditional way or by traditional means. (Giddens, 2000, p. 154; emphasis added)

Does this sum up the TT political vision and what implications would this have, that is, does it matter if it can be cast, presented or understood as conservative or left-wing? Is TT therefore a living example of ‘green politics being neither left nor right but in front’?

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

15

2. SURVIVALISM AND THE PEAK OIL FRAME According to Benford and Snow (2000, p. 611), framing processes ‘have come to be regarded y as a central dynamic in understanding the character and the course of social movements’ (see also Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986; Snow & Benford, 1988). Building upon original contributions from Goffman (1974) and Bateson (1972), frame analysis focuses attention on what Goffman (1974, p. 21) calls the ‘schemata of interpretation’ that enable participants to view and respond to events in a particular way. It draws attention to ‘the politics of signification’ and the role of movement participants in actively producing and maintaining meaning (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 613). For the transition movement, the most important frames are provided by discourses of peak oil and climate change – and because of its relative neglect (partly deliberate) by main stream climate change activism, it is peak oil that provides the differentiating frame. The two critical pillars of the peak oil frame are (i) that an impending energy crunch will cause unprecedented social upheaval, threatening the immediate safety and long-term survival of individuals and groups who do not benefit from resilient food provisioning, economic, administrative and local political systems and (ii) actions that individuals and communities take now can significantly enhance their resilience and increase their survival chances regardless of what happens in the rest of the world.7 The (North American) ‘survival’ frame of peak oil structures and conditions TT politics in interesting and contradictory ways. The peak oil discourse has been mediated and diffused largely over the Internet, with dozens of forums, blogs, news-gathering and networking sites. Prominent in is intrapolitical discourse is an ongoing conversation amongst selfdesignated ‘doomers’ about what is happening, what is likely to happen and what individuals and communities can do. Tips about how to set up a wind turbine or dry and store seeds sit alongside grim predictions of Malthusian ‘demographic corrections’ and the best places to relocate and set up a bunker. High-profile books by Richard Heinberg, James Kunstler, David Strahan, Thomas Homer-Dixon and others have sold well enough to put the authors into the top thousand Amazon sales rank8 and to sponsor global speaker tours. Heinberg in particular has spoken to dozens of local transition and relocalisation initiatives.

16

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

However, the TT movement’s founder Rob Hopkins has been explicit in his rejection of the survivalist framing. For example, in an interview in 2007, he stated as follows: I don’t see that the survivalist response is really any kind of a realistic response to this situation. One might see it as some kind of an option for a very small number of people in a country with lots of space like the US, but here in the UK, your choices are somewhat limited! Not too much gleaning to be had on Dartmoor or Snowdonia! I see this as a challenge that is about coming back to each other, learning how to talk and work together again. When you talk to people who lived through the Second World War, you hear about how once the petrol was rationed, what became important was the people around you, the community, its resources and skills. I think we have to focus on our communities, and on preparing them for this inevitable and historic transition, because without them, we have no chance at all. (Hopkins, in Grover, 2007)

Is there a tension here between a survivalist (individualistic, negative) and a non-survivalist (collective, positive) framing of the end of cheap oil and the impacts of climate change within the TT movement? Does the TT movement represent a particularly non-American (United Kingdom or European) framing of peak oil different and in tension with the more prominent survivalist North American discourse and politics?

2.1. Research Topic 8 The peak oil ‘frame’, by highlighting both anxieties and possible responses to perceptions of short- and medium-term risk – the narrative of survival through resilience – increases the effectiveness of TT relative to climate change activism, in promoting a paradigm shift in sustainable structures and behaviour.

2.2. Research Topic 9 TT initiatives and the ‘social entrepreneurs’ who sponsor them promote a ‘collective effervescence’, which facilitates the suspension of the perceived rules of social economic life and the advancement of novel conventions and norms associated with ‘relocalisation’ (Blumer, 1969; Durkheim, [1912]1915). Transition initiatives engender a process whereby ‘the privatization and individualization of self-hood, supported by a self-controlling and self-consciousness gives way to a more immediate form of social interaction and what [Blumer] calls a ‘‘rapport between agents’’’. For

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

17

Blumer, such a collective excitement lowers ‘interpretive defences’ and fosters a greater receptivity to the actions of others, speeding up a dynamic and unpredictable process – or, in the language of Transition Network, facilitating the great ‘unleashing of collective genius’.

2.3. Research Topic 10 The discourse of (North American) survivalism although understated and usually unspoken is important in explaining the success of the UK-based Transition Network. However, the emphasis on out and out ‘run to the hills’ survivalism does not sit well with British (or New Zealand) political and cultural sensibilities. In the United Kingdom, there are no great wilderness or mountain areas into which a retreat from civilization is conceivable. One of the most densely populated countries on earth, British political culture falls short of the extreme individualism and libertarianism that is a consistent dimension of the North American fringe. And there is no homesteading tradition to nurture such primitivist fantasies (even if such fantasies do exist). In the British context, the trope of survival is transformed into a much more positive and proactive discourse of community building – a cultural response that has more in common with The Good Life than Mad Max. However, this transformation – partly tactical and partly a psycho-cultural habitus and disposition for understatement and against ‘over-excitement’ – does not remove the Millenarian sense of impending catastrophe and the imperative to survive from the frame. Though subordinate, the narrative is clearly present in The Transition Handbook (Hopkins, 2008). Furthermore, it is very explicit in many of the threads on the TT Internet forums. It is also present if more implicitly in the priorities that emerge very early in the development of local TT initiatives – concerns about food production, allotments, buying land and the securing food and energy supplies. The tension between an overt survivalism and a more ‘reasonable’ public face suggests the need for a continual process of ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1959) on the part of both ordinary TT participants and more prominent leaders. This would suggest that positive discourse of community building and relocalisation as a way of life to dominate ‘front stage’ interactions with the media, the public and non-TT friends and acquaintances, whilst a more sombre narrative of survival emerged ‘back stage’, with the group and between peak oil aficionados. Food politics and culture is absolutely central to TT. It provides an immediate and enduring focus for debate and activity with initiatives

18

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

including the promotion of farmers markets, family/domestic production, lobbying for allotments, the creation of community orchards, training and reskilling in food production and preparation, the planting of municipal nut and fruit trees and the creation of a food culture of collective enjoyment and sharing of food (through community harvest meals and potlucks). A central concern of the peak oil literature has been the threat to food supplies. Peak oil will limit fertilizer for food production reversing the gains of the green revolution and creating real food shortages and (in the worst case scenarios) mass starvation. Concerns over peak oil are now exacerbated by ‘peak phosphorus’ (Heinberg, 2007; De´ry & Anderson, 2007). Thus, the discourse of peak oil and food shortages feeds very directly into anxieties about family and community survival. The functional equivalent of the ‘run to the hills’ motif in the English and New Zealand TT movement has been the imperative to acquire land on the part of individuals and on occasion groups and even whole communities. The social movement literature refers to the role of social movement agitators and social entrepreneurs, and in a sense, the TT movement builds upon a much broader current of agitation and cultural engagement around food. Leading from the front TV chefs, such as Hugh Fernley Wittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Thomasina Miers in the United Kingdom and Richard Corrigan and Darina Allen in Ireland, for example, have been using lifestyle cooking programmes and their celebrity status to launch a soft cultural revolution – the recreation of a peasant cuisine of ‘real’ food embedded in authentic processes of production by identifiable artisan farmers in very particular places. Of course, supermarkets have tried to co-opt this movement with a discourse of premium quality; niche ‘organic’ products and an ever more high-tech approach to traceability (Harvey, Quilley, & Beynon, 2002). But for a minority, the logic of this approach to food – organic boxes, farmers markets over supermarkets, keeping chickens at home, running an allotment and eating only seasonal food – is much more radical and moves in the direction of bioregionalism and relocalisation. Ultimately, it points in the direction of a boycott of the high street chains and supermarkets that are perceived as culpable in the McDonaldization of everyday life and the transformation of vibrant (and resilient) local communities into ‘clone towns’. A significant step in this direction was taken with the emergence of the slow food and slow cities movements and the promotion of local and season food by more mainstream environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Green Parties in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

19

2.4. Research Topic 11 TT politics can be seen as the reassertion of a romantic political reaction against modernity – a reaction centred on a Heideggarian politics of place, authenticity, tradition and potentially ‘blood and soil’. This search for authenticity has been viewed as central to environmentalism according to prominent sociological thinkers such as Anthony Giddens. As Goldblatt puts it, for Giddens, ‘environmental politics is not simply the outcome of increasingly perceived environmental risk. It is also fuelled by an increasing demand for the remoralization of abstract systems of social organization that have ceased to be accountable in any meaningful way to those they affect’ (Goldblatt, 1996, p. 71). Can we say that the prominence of food and food-related issues within TT represents the remoralisation of (local) food production, preparation and consumption? This reaction champions the links between healthy, face-to-face and place-bound social relations and authentic, unalienated processes of production – a direct, eco-cyclical link between consumers and producers. As part of the romantic tradition, TT asserts the primacy of ‘dwelling’ in the land and the integrity of place-bound communities iterating an ecological relation to food in which productive landscapes become embodied ‘taskscapes’ (Ingold, 2000). Food consumption and production provides the most significant medium and battleground in this ‘war of position’. There is likely to be a significant and mutually reinforcing relationship between ‘slow’ politics and ‘transition’ politics. In the context of peak oil and climate change, is the solution to food a shift away from a frame of ‘global’ and ‘industrial’ to ‘local’ and ‘slow’?

2.5. Research Topic 12 TT politics can be seen as a realpolitik approach to preparing for the inevitable transition to a low-carbon future. That is, the TT movement is not a romantic ‘back to the land’ type initiative, with the positive and negative connotations of that. Rather, is it simply a pragmatic reaction to the challenges of peak oil in particular in relation to food production, spurred by a sense of urgency as food prices increase and the downsides of a fossil fuel–based and fertilizer-based food production system become more and more apparent? Rather than a romantic-cum-aesthetic movement of ‘foodies’, is this element of the TT movement better viewed as enhancing local ‘food security’, just as it is about securing energy security?

20

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

The TT movement distances itself (at least in public) from catastrophe and ‘doom and gloom’ scenarios, even though these are implicit in the peak oil frame and aspects of the climate change argument. Instead, the TT movement argues for proactive, community-level responses focusing on the potential benefits of ‘energy descent’. This psychological positivity is achieved through a fairly structured process of ‘envisioning’ graphically illustrated scenarios illustrating how communities might reap the benefits of post-carbon transformation. A particular feature of the TT envisioning strategy is to summarise the contrast between the problem and its possible future resolution using micro-landscape vignettes. There is such a vignette on the front cover of The Transition Handbook – a streetscape dominated by cars, carports and ‘McShops’ juxtaposed with its transition mirror image, the same street now given over to pedestrians walkways, outdoor eateries, allotments and wind turbines. The resilient community of the future is presented as a micro-landscape in which an organic patchwork of social, economic, ecological, production and consumption land uses are woven together into a diverse, pedestrian friendly, community ‘taskscape’ (Ingold, 2000). The implication of such multi-functional landscapes is that a walking tour would take visitors through all of the localised production and consumption activities that constitute the metabolism of a healthy, self-sufficient community. Such landscapes are contrasted with the monochrome, mono-functional landscapes of clone town. The development of such visions is an important primary task for each transition initiative, and this is achieved through a distinctive, participatory ‘open-space’ process. The visions tend to place a heavy symbolic weight on food consumption and ‘breaking bread’. Finally, the process of envisioning also creates distinctive and tailored points of departure for individuals in particular professions and occupations who are encouraged to imagine doing their job without access to many, and possibly all, of the high-tech equipment and materials that we take for granted (e.g. post-carbon dentistry or veterinary science). This kind of exercise could be construed as a form of ‘frame alignment’ or ‘frame bridging’. Or it might be thought of in terms of ‘consciousness raising’ and ‘consciousness changing’ in the sense that many within the green movement have thought is necessary for ‘real’ or lasting transition away from current unsustainable development paths (Dobson, 2007). On the contrary, one could view this process as of gatekeeping and agenda setting, and there is the possibility of the new forms of expertise that the TT process creates could become the subject of contention in relation to ownership and control.

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

21

2.6. Research Topic 13 How does the TT model facilitate a gestalt and psychologically deep and lasting understanding of a positive post-carbon future (in ways that climate change activism has failed)? How do the following dimensions of the TT process help in that?  The symbolic, cultural and psychological significance of food and ‘breaking bread’, including rituals around food such as saying grace (religious or secular).  The use of ‘open space’ technologies in facilitating and allowing TT participants to address and feel comfortable sharing their emotional fears and concerns in public meeting or smaller groups of relative strangers (such as each TT initiative’s ‘core group’).  The use of video presentations followed by discussion to raise local awareness and facilitate social learning and sharing of ideas.  The framing of the post-oil future as a localised, familiar ‘microlandscape’.  Peak oil and the particularity of professions/occupations: individual ‘points of entry’; facilitating visions of the future through very specific and personal occupational perspectives (e.g. dentists envisaging post-carbon dentistry).  The significance of the TT movement building in a ‘hearts and soul’ group within each TT initiative and the movements awareness of the centrality of the psychological and emotional dimensions of change.  The addiction ‘Stages of Change’ model (Hopkins, 2008, Chapter 6; DiClemente, 2003): How does the discourse/frame of addiction influence democratic and organisational processes?

2.7. Research Topic 14 One of the key aims of each TT initiative is to engage with its local authority and seek to work with it as a partner in the transition process. According to the TT Primer, ‘The role for local government that is emerging, favoured by government officials and transition initiatives alike, is ‘‘supporting, not driving’’’ (Brangwyn & Hopkins, 2008, p. 36). How and in what ways does (and should) TT initiatives engage with their local authorities? How and in what ways can TT initiatives change local institutional mindsets through co-operation with local officials, councillors and others? Can TT initiatives

22

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

spread the peak oil frame and create a space for its official endorsement? Do and should the TT movement strategically ally itself to sympathetic organisations (such as environmental ones or community development ones) and specific political parties such as the Green Party? Or should it link to and work with any and all civil society groups, businesses and all political parties?

2.8. Research Topic 15 While there is a clear local character to the TT movement, it also has received national media profile, and it has the potential to contribute to national debates on energy, climate change and sustainability? Can individual TT initiatives and the wider TT movement create a space for national peak oil debate? Should this be one of the movement’s goals? Can and should the TT movement seek to move beyond ‘sustainable development’ in unlocking or loosening the hegemonic sustainable development couplet and creating a space for a more ‘thermodynamic/steady state realism’? What is or can be the relationship between TT movement and official government sustainable development policy and implementation? Can and should TT initiatives be used and present themselves to government as ‘on the ground’ examples of ‘sustainable communities’ and ‘one planet living’ both of which are central objectives of the UK sustainable development strategy and the sustainable development strategies of the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland? Should the TT movement make explicit links to quasi-government agencies such as the UK Sustainable Development Commission? What are the benefits and costs of this closer relationship to state or quasi-state bodies?

3. THE SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF TRANSITION TOWNS 3.1. Research Topic 16 Do they reduce local ecological footprints? One possible research project would involve using ecological footprint analysis, material flow analysis (RFA) and resource accounting modelling (Curry & Maguire, 2008) on families; communities and towns should be used to ascertain the energy and material/resource impact of individual TT initiatives within the local

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

23

population and area. Here, there is a clear opportunity to work with the TT network and individual TT initiatives to create useable self-evaluation tools.

3.2. Research Project 17 Do TT initiatives enhance community resilience? Here, an important area of study would be to explore the ‘reach’ of the TT movement and process in involving the socially excluded within a local community, so that the TT movement does not become another gathering of the ‘usual green suspects’ – that is, middle-class, educated professionals in secure personal circumstances. Another possible research project could both use established measures of community resilience (such as those developed by Cutter, 2006) and develop new ones to assess the social, culture and inter-personal dimensions of local community resilience. How should resilience be measured? What qualitative and quantitative resilience indicators are required? Drawing on the peak oil/survival frame, the TT movement places a great deal of emphasis on ‘reskilling for power down’ – that is, the rediscovery of traditional agricultural, craft, domestic artisanal and construction skills for more localized, family/community-centred forms of post–fossil fuel production (Kunstler’s World Made by Hand, 2008). This topic is already the focus for a Transition University network with workshops taking place in October under the aegis of the Higher Education Authority.

3.3. Research Topic 18 What kind of skills does the TT movement view as central for local communities to enhance energy, food and economic resilience? What are the roles of traditional education organisations (schools, colleges, universities) and non-traditional education providers in these processes of ‘skilling up’ and reskilling? Does this aspect of the TT process call for the recreation of and return to the tradition of apprenticeships? How does/would this reskilling impact on the political economy of relocalisation? How would/ could local businesses get involved in this process? What might be the role(s) of a ‘transition university’ and/or ‘university of transition’ in the transition process? What lessons can be learnt from pioneering universities such as the University of Plymouth’s Centre for Sustainable Futures and its four-fold model of sustainability – ‘community, campus, curriculum and culture’ (Barry, 2007)?

24

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

3.4. Research Topic 20 In many respects, the TT movement can be viewed as an off-shoot of or related to the longer established permaculture movement. From the more mundane observation that the first TT in Kinsale was initiative by permaculture students being taught by Rob Hopkins, to more explicit linking TT to permaculture by Hopkins himself (2008) in TT literature, the TT Primes recommends that ‘at least one person on the core team should have attended a permaculture design course y it really does seem to make a difference’ (Hopkins, 2008, p. 15; emphasis added), the role and place of permaculture within the TT movement is something that needs to be explored in more detail. Some questions here include the following: What is the significance and impact of permaculture thinking for TT movement (e.g. how widespread, understood, practiced)? Does the holistic, systems thinking and problem-solving of permaculture translate in TT politics and practices? Does the permaculture mindset create a fire break, inhibiting tactical reconciliation with growth/progress-oriented versions of sustainable development? Does permaculture militate against high-tech, fuel substitution and ‘last-person standing’ or ‘realpolitik’ interpretations of peak oil?

4. CONCLUSION The TT movement as we hope we have indicated in this article is an extremely new, dynamic and exciting social development. Its rapid spread and take up across the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere makes it a phenomenon that social scientists interesting in the politics of and movements for sustainability should be interested in. We hope this article has made a start to (a) sketching an agenda for TT research and (b) opening up a dialogue with the TT movement and communities embarking on the TT process as to what sorts of research they might want to see, which can help the TT further develop and grow.

NOTES 1. See the Transition Towns website http://www.transitiontowns.org/ and many videos are also available on www.youtube.com.

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

25

2. There is an important relationship between the discourse of TT movement and that of the ‘peak oil community’, but the two are not synonymous. For instance, Richard Heinberg, perhaps the most prominent peak oil author, provides much inspiration, and the foreword to Rob Hopkins’ The Transition Handbook – which is the clearest statement of TT rationale, objectives and strategy (albeit in the context of a highly horizontal, network of fairly autonomous affiliates). But at the same time, perhaps for tactical reasons, TT eschews the overt preoccupation with survival and impending catastrophe that characterises many peak oil ‘doomers’. It is perhaps also true that without unpopulated wilderness areas, the ‘run to the hills’ scenario does not square with either British culture or demography. In the rest of this article, ‘peak oil’ refers to the wider (mostly North American) literature upon which TT draws implicitly, but with which it is not necessarily synonymous. 3. See LATOC (http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/) or for a more extreme example, see Malthus (http://dieoff.org/), the ‘population crash page’. 4. Drawing on Four Energy Scenarios by Bryn Davidson (www.dynamiccities. squaresspace.com), Hopkins refers to Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Overshoot, William Catton’s classic Malthusian take on sustainability and carrying capacity. 5. Although pacification within states has also been accompanied by much greater and more lethal violence between states. 6. On the New Zealand TT forum, one participant described a recent trip to Europe as ‘a last chance to see his family’ before the end of affordable intercontinental flights. 7. Heinberg is particularly interesting. Before his career as an apostle of peak oil, he published several wholesale critiques of civilisation from a primitivist perspective. Likewise, Kunstler was well known for his biting attacks on American suburban sprawl well before he began to write on peak oil. 8. As I write, an arbitrary search on Amazon.co.uk reveals that Hopkins’ The Transition Handbook is at 846, Heinberg’s The Party’s Over at 3,807, Simmons’ Twilight in the Desert is at 7,774, Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees at 4,513 and Kunstler’s World Made by Hand at 11,445. These books clearly sell!

REFERENCES Amoore, L. (Ed.) (2005). The global resistance reader. Oxford: Routledge. Barry, J. (1999). Rethinking green politics: Nature, virtue and progress. London: Sage. Barry, J. (2007). Spires, plateaus and the infertile landscape of education for sustainable development: Re-invigorating the university through integrating community, campus and curriculum. International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2(3/4), 433–452. Barry, J., & Smith, K. (2008). Civic republicanism and green politics. In: D. Leighton & S. White (Eds), Building a citizen society: The emerging politics of republican democracy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

26

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Blumer, H. (1969). Collective behaviour. In: A. McLung-Lee (Ed.), Principles of sociology. NY: Barnes and Noble. Bookchin, M. (1991). The ecology of freedom. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Brangwyn, B., & Hopkins, R. (2008). Transition initiatives primer: Becoming a transition town, city, district, village, community or even island. Available at http://transitiontowns.org Calhoun, C. (1994). Social theory and the politics of identity. In: C. Calhoun (Ed.), Social theory and the politics of identity (pp. 9–36). Oxford: Blackwell. Chagnon, N. (1988). Life histories, blood revenge and warfare in tribal population. Science, 239(4843), 985–992. Conisbee, M., Kjell, P., Oram, J., Bridges Palmer, J., Simms, A., & Taylor, J. (2004). Clone town Britain: The loss of identity on the nation’s high streets. London: New Economics Foundation. Crossley, N. (2002). Making sense of social movements. Buckingham: Open University Press. Curry, R., & Maguire, C. (2008). Northern visions: Footpaths to sustainability. Belfast: Envirocentre. Cutter, S. (2006). Hazards, vulnerability and environmental justice. London: Earthscan. Deffreyes, K. S. (2005). Beyond oil: The view from Hubbert’s peak. NY: Hill and Wang. De´ry, P., & Anderson, B. (2007). Peak phosphorus, Published on August 13 by Energy Bulletin. Available at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33164 DiClemente, C. C. (2003). Addiction and change: How addictions develop and addicted people recover. Boston: Guilford Press. Dobson, A. (2006). Thick cosmopolitanism. Political Studies, 54, 165–184. Dobson, A. (2007). Green political thought (4th ed.). London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. ([1912]1915). Elementary forms of religious life. NY: Free Press. Edelman, M. (2001). Social movements: Changing paradigms and forms of politics. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 285–317. Elias, N. (2000 [orig. 1939]). The civilising process (Rev. ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social movements: A cognitive approach. Cambridge: Polity. Fry, D. P. (2005). The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press Inc. Garreau, J. (1992). Edge city: Life on the new frontier. Ann Arbor: Anchor. Giddens, A. (2000). Interview. In: L. B. Kaspersen (Ed.), Anthony Giddens: An introduction to a social theorist. Oxford: Blackwell. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Ann Arbor: Anchor. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldblatt, D. (1996). Social theory and the environment. Cambridge: Polity. Grover, S. (2007). Rob Hopkins of transition town totnes and transition culture. Available at http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/rob_hopkins_transition_town.php Harvey, M., Quilley, S., & Beynon, H. (2002). Exploring the tomato: Transformations of nature, society and economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Heinberg, R. (2005). The party’s over: Oil war and the fate of industrial societies. East Sussex: Clairview. Heinberg, R. (2007). Peak everything: Waking up to a century of declines. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. Homer-Dixon, T. (2006). The upside of down: Catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization. London: Souvenir Press.

Transition Towns and Sustainable Communities

27

Hopkins, R. (2008). The transition handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. Totnes: Green Books. Ingold, T. (2000). Perceptions of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge. Keeley, L. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koopmans, R. (1993). The dynamics of protest waves. American Sociological Review, 58, 637–658. Kunstler, J. H. (1995). The geography of nowhere: The rise and decline of America’s man-made landscape. London: Simon & Schuster. Kunstler, J. H. (2005). The long emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. London: Atlantic Books. Kunstler, J. H. (2008). World made by hand. NY: Atlantic Monthly Press. Leonard, L. (2007). The environmental movement in Ireland. The Hague: Springer. McBay, A. (2006). Peak oil survival: Preparation for life after gridcrash. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press. Mead, M. (1940). Warfare is only an invention – Not a biological necessity. In: D. P. Barash (Ed.), Approaches to peace: A reader in peace studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000). Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mennell, S. (1990). Decivilising processes: Theoretical significance and some lines of research. International Sociology, 5(2), 205–223. Monbiot, G. (2005). ‘Campaigning for austerity’, Big picture TV. Available at http:// www.bigpicture.tv/videos/watch/8613985ec Offe, C. (1985). Contradictions of the welfare state. London: Heineman. Payne, L. (2000). Uncivil movements: The armed right wing and democracy in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Pichardo, N. (1997). New social movements: A critical review. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 411–430. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press. Porta, D. D., & Diani, M. (1999). Social movements: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Schellenberger, M., & Nordhaus, T. (2006). The death of environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world. Available at http://www.thebreakthrough.org/ images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is beautiful: Economics as if people really mattered. London: Abacus. Shepard, B., & Hayduk, R. (Eds). (2002). From act up to the WTO: Urban protest and community building in the era of globalisation. London: Verso. Snow, D. A., & Benford, R. D. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilisation. International Social Movement Research, 1, 197–218. Snow, D. A., Rochford, E. B., Worden, S. K., & Benford, R. D. (1986). Frame alignment processes, micromobilisation and movement participation. American Sociological Review, 51, 464–481. Somma, M. (2008). Return to the villages. Ecopolitics Online, 1(2), 34–59. Spowers, R. (2002). Rising tides: The history and future of the environmental movement. London: Canongate.

28

JOHN BARRY AND STEPHEN QUILLEY

Strahan, D. (2007). The last oil shock: A survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man. London: John Murray. Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Websites: http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork – The Transition Network http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ – Life after the oil crash – one of the most influential ‘doomers’ sites and forums

CHAPTER 2 TRADITIONAL LIVING PRACTICES: RETURN TO THE VILLAGES Mark Somma INTRODUCTION The Epic of Gilgamesh is among the oldest stories remembered. One of its tales, ‘‘Journey to the Forests of Cedar,’’ illustrates early accounts of forest depletion (George, 1999, pp. 30–47). For timber, to expand the city of Uruk where he rules, Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, the forest guardian, who protected a great forest. Gilgamesh and his followers then stripped the forest. The gods warned Gilgamesh in dreams they sent to him on his forest journey that floods and droughts would follow his killing of Humbaba and the cutting of the cedar forests, and so it happened. The mythological tale of Gilgamesh parallels the archaeological records left by ancient Mesopotamian societies that show the steady march from abundance to rationing to the disappearance of forestland and the exhortations and policies that attempted to stem the decline. To meet consumption demands and to repair and expand irrigation canals, Sumerian rulers from the Third (and greatest) Dynasty of Ur in the late 3rd millennium BC sent their armies north as far as southern Turkey to conquer kingdoms and woodlands (Oppenheim, 1955). As deforestation led to flooding and soil salinization, grain production in Sumeria diminished considerably and Sumerian supremacy was replaced by northern kingdoms like Babylonia, which became the dominant The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 29–53 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004005

29

30

MARK SOMMA

Mesopotamian power (Jacobsen, 1982, p. 74). Following his Sumerian predecessors, famed Babylonian ruler, Hammurabi, established strict rules to ration wood consumption and wrote of the woodland, ‘‘[things] are very pressing in the opinion of the palace’’ as depletion began to affect his society in the 2nd millennium BC (Driver, 1924, pp. 11–12). Despite the efforts by rulers and technicians, the loss of forestland destroyed watersheds and accelerated the salinization of the soil, and by 1700 BC, the area had become a land of poor farmers and villages. Societies, most now extinct, that relied on a combination of sustainable farming practices and hunting and gathering, seemed capable of lasting almost indefinitely. Some survived thousands of years in isolation or in limited association with neighbors until more aggressive and acquisitive societies brought them into contact, and thus competition, with the larger outside world. The contact and competition led to their dissolution. How do sustainable societies manage to survive for thousands of years without destroying their local and regional environments? Every human society exploits the physical and natural environment around it. Even the smallest hunting and gathering band can deplete local resources and profoundly change local ecologies. Doubtless, a painful iteration of rises and declines was experienced as generations learned how to protect their local resources within the natural variations of the physical environments and ecologies they shared. From the Amazon Basin to the African Sahel to the New Guinea highlands to pre-Columbian California, sustainable societies established themselves and adopted practices that allowed generation after generation to survive. Sustainable societies are those that exhibit behaviors that sharply reduce or prevent accumulative damage to the surrounding physical and biological environments. While all human societies make alterations, sustainable societies produce relatively little alteration over long periods of time and thus allow societies and ecologies to adjust with minimal damage to each. Sustainable behaviors include strict limitations on population growth, restrictions on technological development, closed economy or restricted terms of trade, and the perpetuation of society at the expense of personal gain (Howarth, 2007). In contrast, arising from and in close proximity to sustainable societies, unsustainable but spectacularly successful societies, often noted in history as empires, rose to prominence and then fell. Unsustainable societies exhibit rapid, unchecked population growth, pursuit of material goods, an accelerating trend toward transforming natural resources into social resources, and the pursuit of technology to increase productivity (Coates

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

31

& Leahy, 2006). Their governments pursue power aggressively, and they tend to exhaust local, and then regional, resources rapidly. Partly driven by the need for resource acquisition, and partly by their hierarchical governing systems, they develop sophisticated war technology and conquer their neighbors. As they felt the consequences of scarcity and environmental destruction, they accelerated their aggressive, often successful, approaches to expanded resource acquisition and a more efficient use of the declining resource base. However, nearly every empire fell directly or indirectly due to their reliance on resource depletion and the strategies that they used to address resource depletion. ‘‘Falling’’ as used here is a socioeconomic and political term. The society realizes a sharp loss of social, economic, and political complexity often referred to by the term dark age (Chew, 2001, pp. 9–10). Why do progressive societies fail to learn sustainable practices and thus ensure their own decline? The world’s empires recognized their environmental dilemma. Historical accounts often read like modern political commentary on the subject of environmental problems. I posit two primary reasons why progressive societies fail to resolve their environmental contradictions: ideological loyalty and elite intransigence. But political history is also a story of folly and hubris or as Barbara Tuchman dryly titled her commentary on history and government, ‘‘The Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest’’ (Tuchman, 1984). Much of human innovation is directly tied to efforts to increase productivity in the face of population and resource pressure. When faced with declines, we assume that our innovative prowess will reassert itself and solve the problem. But our capacity for using resources and degrading the environment surpasses our ability to implement alternative strategies. It is here that our faith in ideologies and the institutionalization of powerful elites who fear the loss of power paralyze our ability to make necessary changes and we fall. The empire becomes a runaway train unable to slow or significantly alter its path until it can no longer power itself and crashes with dramatic effect. Do sustainable societies have anything to teach unsustainable societies that prevent environmental destruction without ending their inventiveness and material progress? No obvious lessons appear. Among many tribal people, no economic or social return to individual innovation exists, except within very narrow and specific boundaries. The close-knit bonds of tribal and village life dissuade innovation, and their decentralized political and economic systems prevent the pooling of capital or labor needed for major

32

MARK SOMMA

projects of any kind. In the case of war, that is probably a good thing. In the case of medicine, it probably isn’t. This pattern of static, low-growth sustainable societies or innovative, high-growth unsustainable societies occurs in every part of the world. Jungles and deserts hid for centuries the remains of once grand empires that fell. Small village societies reside where once their ancestors built large societies with imperial ambitions. Globalization advanced so swiftly over the past century that the division of human society into unsustainable and sustainable may be hidden from obvious view. The cross-fertilization of ideologies, techniques of production and inventiveness allowed a worldwide unsustainable empire based on capitalism to rise. But, despite its impressive scope and breadth, capitalism cannot address the environmental and ecological crises that it spawned any more than its ideological predecessors. What is outside the scope of this limited inquiry is the question of why low-growth sustainable societies transform into high-growth unsustainable societies? As always, key questions in historical inquiry are why did an event take place when it did instead of some other time, and why did it occur in one place and not another. Recently, Jared Diamond has sought to answer these questions by relying on environmental conditions. His argument follows from a long literature, primarily anthropological, that explains the broad dimensions of human cultures using local or regional physical environmental and ecological circumstances. Some societies are prone to aggregation and increased productivity because of favorable topographies and climate, while some societies remain static due to unfavorable ones. Diamond’s argument resonates if for no other reason than it provides one theoretical end to the vast evanescent string ball that represents the complexities of human society. We may not be able to unravel the whole string from the work of cultural geographers but, like untangling a gnarled ball of fishing line, having one end of the line to work with gives us a real advantage. Human societies cycle through periods of growth and decline; cultural geographers’ grip on one end of the string provides a reoccurring insight.

FEROCIOUS TRADITIONALISM For thousands of years, the New Guinea highlands have been the site of successful and sustainable human society. New Guinea farmland was terraced, drained, fenced, and intensively managed but continued to support a large population. Complex drainage systems arose as early as 9,000 years

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

33

ago. Individual New Guinea farmers possess a tremendous knowledge of plants and demonstrate wonderful skills as farmers and gardeners. But they live in an area with few broad plains for farming, almost all the land available to them is steep hillsides divided by impassable ravines. With no centralized control of food production and land ownership, New Guinea highland society had no central political organization and made little cultural or material progress outside a constant learning about domestic food plants. Each village had a governing culture that relied heavily on consensus, tradition, and the influence of charismatic individuals to make decisions. The isolation of villages produced hundreds of languages as New Guinea farmers could not travel easily from village to village. Outside of food production, material inventiveness was not encouraged and, if successful, was not distributed. It was a society frozen in time but capable of surviving indefinitely. Villages are the basic government and economic unit of human society. With rare exceptions of true nomadic hunter-gatherers like the Ik of Uganda or some of the San People (Bushmen) in southern Africa, villages are the starting point for human society. Villages are the minimal level of complexity required for an enduring culture, and all the diverse political complexities of human society arose from villages. When we fall, we fall into villages, and when we rise, we rise from villages. But successful village life places powerful behavioral demands on people and visits harsh punishments on transgressors (see Schlitz, 2007, for a view of European village life in AD 1255). Despite the romanticization of so-called indigenous peoples, first-hand reports refer continuously to the violence, intra and intertribal conflict, and the propensity of tribal members to pack up and move to other tribes as result of real or imagined slights. Quite often, indigenous village life more resembles Shirley Jackson’s, 1948, short story, The Lottery, and less the utopian Garden of Eden posited by some post-industrial commentators. Within the secure embrace of tribal and clan membership exists the demanding, often stultifying, mores and expectations of unchanging cultures. Much of these culture traditions were survival strategies – behaviors that protected local resources from depletion and stemmed population increases. Existing for thousands of years within a local ecosystem requires a strict control of economic behavior and procreation. Ferocious traditionalism is the price that societies paid for sustainability. Among sustainable societies, a constant requirement exists to limit population growth. Even a very small annual increase in population numbers results in terrible destruction of local resources. An increase of 1%

34

MARK SOMMA

doubles a population in 72 years. Sustainable societies existed for thousands of years; therefore, they must have controlled population growth quite strictly. Strict controls over reproduction quickly translate into strict controls over the reproductive behavior of women. Population growth turns on the number of fertile women and the rate at which they give birth. As a result of the need to control population numbers, women are typically devalued. They are considered subordinate to, or property of, male patriarchs. Their menstrual blood is considered unclean, even poisonous. A regular and often fatal danger for women is the accusation of witchcraft. Strict rules govern sexual activity, including efforts to delay sexual activity by young people. Abortion and infanticide are practiced with frequency, with infanticide more often visited on girls than boys. All these practices are found among the highland peoples of New Guinea who adopted strict rules to govern the sexual behavior of men and women. Various tribes and clans regard menstrual blood as poisonous to men and refer to sexual organs as something ‘‘bad’’ (Martin & Voorhies, 1975, pp. 269–272). Among some tribes, sex was taboo for over 200 days each year, and women accused and killed for witchcraft. As with many peoples whose protein supply is limited and whose pressure to limit reproduction is profound, some New Guinea tribes practiced cannibalism. The Australian government, which governed New Guinea Papua until 1975, banned cannibalism in 1959 as kuru, a prion disease associated with eating human brains, became rampant (Lindenbaum, 1979). Accounts from observers and scientists working in 19th-century Australia recorded consistent patterns of infanticide and cannibalism. Adulterous women were subject to cannibalistic killing, and children, particularly girls, were also the victims of cannibalistic killing. Palmerston, in his 1887 dispatches, describes coming upon cannibalistic feasts and noting, ‘‘The hideous habit of murdering and eating little girls is carried on far more in these jungles than in any other part of the colonies, which accounts for the female children being so scarce’’ (Palmerston, 1893). Even where cannibalism is not prevalent, male warfare and female infanticide strongly influence demographics. The ratio of boys to girls is 150:100 in the Yanomamo villages located in the most intensive tribal war zones along the Venezuela–Brazil border (Chagnon, 1974, p. 159). Chagnon writes, ‘‘The data are consistent with the argument that intensive warfare leads to large villages and increase female infanticide y Much of the fighting has to do with the acquisition of women, who are in short supply’’ (Chagnon, 1974, p. 159).

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

35

The egalitarianism and close-knit ties of village communities appeal to the atomized, mobile individuals of post-industrial societies. Identification by family or clan characterizes individual self-description, and people are embedded in the security and camaraderie of large families and clans. Visitors from outside village life often comment on the warmth and closeness of family, tribe, or clan members. But the egalitarianism and close ties comes at a price. Individual achievement, outside strict boundaries, is not prized. The social culture dissuades individuals from becoming ‘‘different.’’ The need for egalitarianism among hunter-gatherer and simple farming societies is implemented through social pressure and expectations. Among the Bushmen foragers of the Kalahari Desert, the most prolific hunters are subjected to complaints, even scorn, about the size and value of their kills. Bushmen explain that social distinctions cannot be allowed to take root or the cohesiveness of tribal equality will break. If an individual tribe or clan member can achieve superior status from increased productivity, the incentive for each member to transform ecological resources into social resources would quickly deplete local ecologies. Peer pressure and social identity, like the force of gravity, exerts its powerful and continuous effect on human behavior. Few policies exist in contemporary society to reflect the ferocious traditionalism of sustainability. One example melding ferocious traditionalism with a modern Leviathan is China’s one-child policy. China’s policy has resulted in female infanticide, particularly among families who already have one daughter. Sex ratios among infants in China are 117 boys to 100 girls (Gupta, 2005). While female infanticide was a common practice before 1990, after 1990, sex-selective abortions contributed strongly to the imbalance in sex ratios (Coale, 1996). Despite these restrictions, China’s population growth remains .9% annually, which doubles the Chinese population before the close of the 21st century. China is changing the onechild policy to counteract the male–female imbalance, to address the problem of an aging population, and to acknowledge the tendency of a more affluent population to have fewer children. In the 13th century, a thriving society, the Anasazi, existed in the southwestern United States. Goods and services pulsed into elite centers like Chaco Canyon in tune with the harvest cycle. After a population and building boom in the 11th and the 12th centuries, a combination of drought and civil war brought down the Anasazi, and the survivors migrated south to the valleys of the Little Colorado River and the Rio Grande. Before they fell, the Anasazi increased the number of dams and canals to store and divert water, moved to more defensive positions atop mesas, and

36

MARK SOMMA

built watchtowers and walls to protect themselves from raiding parties. To support the increased building, they had to import timber from farther away as local sources were depleted. Without the use of draft animals, logs weighing as much as 700 pounds and 16 feet long were imported from outlying mountain ranges, such as the Chuska Mountains over 50 miles (80 km), to the west (Betancourt, Dean, & Hull, 1986). The need for increased road building and the loss of farm labor to timber production and road maintenance lowered the marginal productivity of Anasazi society, and environmental degradation accelerated even as economic activity increased. The cohesive system that characterized the Anasazi’s Chaco Canyon capital began to break down, perhaps in response to a severe region-wide drought, to water management that led to arroyo-cutting and to deforestation. As with their irrigation-dependent predecessors in southern Mesopotamia, the Anasazi developed a water management system in a very dry place. Their success fueled population and economic growth, and when the inevitable environmental problems arose, the Anasazi met them by building more dams and diversions, more storage chambers for food, and increasing production in marginal outlying areas. Religious and ceremonial leaders built additional temples and shrines to seek divine relief. Raiding increased, provoked by high taxes, famine, and drought, and signs of cannibalism accompanied the archaeological evidence of killings by raiding parties (Turner, 1999). By the 15th century, the great societies were gone, replaced by villages dependent on small-scale farming. Also gone, and not yet returned, are the pinyon and juniper forests of Chaco Canyon (Betancourt et al., 1986). The symptoms of decline are familiar to historians and archaeologists. As resource scarcity is felt in the availability of goods and services, increased effort to acquire new resources commence. The efforts grow frantic as the need to stave off crises becomes a reoccurring theme. Competition within society grows more intense, and external conquests become an accepted and legitimate practice. As the reserves of commodities shrink, the effect of normal variances of environmental conditions like weather, previously handled with ease, hit society with much greater impact. Exogenous events like hurricanes or earthquakes hurt more as the reserves needed to rebuild are exhausted. The response is to redouble efforts based on past successful practices. The confidence in past practice and ideology prove fatal to future success. We do what we already know how to do, but faster. The Anasazi were dependent on irrigated farming, hunting, and timber. Modern empires are dependent on fossil fuels, especially oil. On September 5, 2006, Chevron Corporation announced that a consortium of oil drilling

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

37

companies had discovered oil deep under the Gulf of Mexico. One of their drilling wells had reached through 7,000 feet of seawater and then more than 20,000 feet under the sea floor to a total depth of 28,175 feet. The oil is contained in ancient bedrock deep under the ocean. To drill so deep under the ocean floor and pump oil to the surface represent a spectacular engineering feat but is also a measure of desperation. The cost to develop that one oil field so deep in the ocean is estimated at $3.5 billion dollars. The environmental costs of drilling, pumping, transportation, storage, distribution, and burning of that oil are not calculated. The pressure to secure fossil fuel resources by constant exploration and war parallel the Anasazi long-distance timber gathering and the endemic conflict of the Anasazi’s downfall. It is doing what you already know how to do, but doing it faster to keep pace with the acceleration of your problems. It is stunning short-term success at the cost of worsening long-term consequences. It is elite investment in the continuation of their wealth and power at the cost of future stability. It is an ancient tale retold.

THE RETURN OF EPIDEMIC DISEASE The most devastating impact of societal decline is the onset of epidemic disease. Dark ages are characterized by disease epidemics as the decline of infrastructure and productivity allows diseases, previously held at bay, to renew their assault on human populations (McNeill, 1976). Europe lost as much as 30% of its total population from the plague in the 6th century and again in the 13th century. The loss in the settled areas was as much as 50%. Similar epidemics are recorded in China, India, and the Middle East as population increases met regional productivity declines. While we have not yet experienced a recent global environmental and ecological downturn, the impact of lost productivity, infrastructure, and social cohesion would produce overwhelming fatalities from disease. Until the 20th century, cities were the disease and death centers for human populations; infant mortality was higher in cities and longevity much lower. Waste water treatment, reliable food supplies, improved building construction, and improved primary health care are recent innovations that keep epidemic diseases at bay. The deterioration of these innovations would almost certainly see the onset of epidemic diseases with horrible loss of life. A combination of changing climate and ecology, perhaps due to global warming or other environmental alterations, and a weakening of the infrastructure and productivity that allows large populations to crowd

38

MARK SOMMA

together successfully would kill millions of people and erode the cohesiveness of modern societies. John Evans of the World Bank (in Garrett, 1994) cites three stages of public health morbidity: infectious diseases that are communicable and vector-borne diseases; mixed stage, which are infectious diseases for poor people and chronic diseases for rich people; and a chronic disease stage in which populations are relatively disease-free until late in life. High infant and child mortality characterize the infectious disease stage while deaths from heart attacks and cancers are more common in the chronic disease stage. Global warming will allow insect, mammal, and ocean vectors to expand into new territories. Changes in human behavior create changes in disease vectors that produce epidemics. Deadly emerging diseases such as AIDS and the avian flu have quadrupled over the past 50 years according to new research by a team of scientists reported in the February 21st edition of Science magazine (Jones et al., 2008). Humans intrude into new areas and destroy ecologies that bring small mammals or insects into human habitations. The combination of socio-economic, environmental, and ecological factors that correlate with increased incidence of emerging infectious diseases are intensifying worldwide (Woolhouse, 2006) and represent exactly the kind of circumstances that would prevail with global warming, a loss of modern infrastructure and a decline in economic productivity. Contemporary cities would be the perfect incubators for disease as were their ancient counterparts. Besides the overarching effects of global warming, the devolution of the oceans is also a likely source of disease epidemics. One gram of human feces contains one billion viruses and one liter of raw human waste contains 100,000 infective viruses (Pain, 1989). With human sewage worldwide poured into the oceans and the increased acidity of the ocean from atmospheric pollution, ‘‘dead zone’’ areas have increased to over 200 (Diaz, 2008). Dead zones are oxygen-depleted areas, some as large as 27,000 square miles, that consist of a soup of anaerobic bacteria and simple forms of ocean life. Besides suffocation from the loss of oxygen, predatory algae contain deadly bacteria and viruses that kill large sea animals and allow the algae to feed at leisure. These bacteria and viruses can also infect human populations. Despite their modern waste water treatment, developed countries also increase organic contamination of the oceans. By October, each year in Chesapeake Bay, one milliliter of water contains as many as one billion viruses. A tremendous exchange of genetic material occurs as raw sewage, urban waste, and chemicals mix with heat and ultraviolet radiation in

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

39

shallow ocean waters. Cholera epidemics arise from offshore algae blooms, and as ocean warms and algae blooms increase and expand north, we may see more cholera epidemics (Lipp, 2002). The eighth recorded pandemic began in India when cholera came ashore in Calcutta off the Bay of Bengal in 1992 (Epstein, 1993). A thin line of medical and public health infrastructure stands between the mass numbers of people in modern societies and the diseases that decimate human populations. The ability to combat the onset of epidemic disease successfully depends on an expensive infrastructure of waste water treatment, food and drug distribution, and primary health clinics and hospitals. Hundreds of millions of people would die quickly from epidemic disease if this energy-intensive infrastructure ceases to function. The power that civilizations hold over their peoples is not based on physical force or economic control. Any society’s hold on its people rests on loyalty. Theology, culture, or political process can become the bedrock of a faith that capture the loyalty and obedience of people and grant legitimacy to their rulers. Citizens of organized states police themselves based on their faith that the ‘‘principles’’ of their individual societies derive from a god(s) or certain political forms and processes. Their material and imperial successes becomes the proof of the value of these principles and thus a reliable guide to future behavior and a reason to adhere to demands by rulers. Sustainable societies are as aware of the value and restraints of their traditionalism as unsustainable societies are conscious of their choice to innovation and acquisitiveness. Each type of society cloaks the rationale for its ideological choices behind reverence for the past, the word of god(s) or its sense of human nature. By habit and the teaching of societal leaders, people believe in the inherent good sense of their ideology, even when empirical evidence runs contrary. We often accept that contrary evidence tests our loyalty, without considering whether it tests our good sense. We are loyal to our ideologies and traditions for many reasons including that the price of disloyalty can be quite high. The desire to advance careers and gain the favor of those in high rank by writing within the current mainstream of thought acts to persuade scholars and writers to fit their views within accepted frameworks. We are not so far removed from times when the people followed the religion of their king. The successes, real and imagined, of a powerful and influential culture operate as a continuous check against criticism. The progress and power of the society becomes proof that its ideological underpinnings remain inviolable guides. To recommend substantive alteration to the existing governing or economic

40

MARK SOMMA

paradigms remains a heretical act, even in the face of mounting evidence of decline. If nothing else, these constraints act as inertia to slow and delay not only our understanding of changing circumstances but also our ability to alter our behavior to meet new challenges. Our failure to grasp the significance of profound environmental change follows directly from our information bias. A set of cognitive and informational constraints bind our ability to understand the importance of our observations and limit our ability to grasp underlying patterns. Partisanship and loyalty to one’s cultural background persuade us toward the importance of one set of facts and away from another. The concatenation of facts on the basis of errors in judgment becomes the foundation for overconfidence and a concurrent failure to understand the real meaning of phenomena. We already know where and how to expect the next favored fact, and, not surprisingly, we find it just where we expected. An associated problem occurs as the complexity of circumstances and observations prevents placing an event in its proper context. Critical changes of great influence remain unnoticed except to a few, while minor changes of little influence are loudly announced. Virtually everyone around the United States in the fall of 2006 knew that the Democrats won a majority of seats in Congress and that the US stock market hit an all-time high, but few knew that recent reports showed a phenomenal loss of coral reefs throughout the world (Sherman, 2006; Borestein, 2006). History may record that the latter information proved to be a change of great influence while the former was of little consequence. All records, by the way that they are kept, include systematic bias. Even scientific inquiry follows information pathways that prejudice records. Bruno Latour (1999) details a series of scientific investigative steps that reduce nature to collected specimens in a contextless field study. The scientific value of these specimens is amplified because of their comparability and standardization with similar specimens from other ecosystems. His descriptive accounts of the reduction of nature to specimens in a field report and the amplification of those specimens as the definitive parts of a particular ecosystem shows the transformation of an Amazon soil sample into a scientific study. Each step in the reduction/amplification process moves nature and field report farther apart and reduces our understanding of nature to a set of comparable specimens absent their relationship to whole ecosystem. The advantages of the technocratic/reductionist epistemology are confirmed in the practical successes of science while the limits and dangers of that epistemology receive little critical attention.

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

41

As a matter of ease and with the active assistance of those who seek to persuade us, we acquaint ourselves with new information through analogy and comparison (Stone, 1988). Yet, based on our information bias, we use improper analogy and comparison and assume that past experience is a reliable guide to new phenomena. If the power of partial comparison or analogy appeals to our limited understanding, we promote the analogy to metaphor and transfer the correlation of small pieces or analogy into comparisons of entireties or metaphor. As with Latour’s work in the Amazon, the analogous value of the chosen specimens of nature from different ecosystems becomes the basis for elevating the comparison from analogy of specimens to metaphors of whole ecosystems. We make similar errors in trying to transplant social systems from one culture to another or trying to assert the value of past success as justification for future behavior in different circumstances. As long as carefully chosen pieces of analogy recommend themselves to us, we assume that the whole is comparable, not merely a few pieces. Our shared understanding of the power of the metaphor becomes the basis for our confidence in the truth of the assertion. But when circumstances arise that have little recent historical parallel, and with which we have little experience, our inclination to metaphor dissuades us from active investigation. As the shared value of the analogous pieces disappear, we remain tied to the power of the metaphor we derived and fail to see the importance of new phenomena. The use of air pollution and greenhouse gas ‘‘markets’’ represents the power of metaphor in social behavior. Our belief in markets persuades us that they will work like magic in almost any situation; we insist that new circumstances like the filling of environmental sinks are analogous to old circumstances like the most efficient way to translate commons resources into individual economic gains. Thus, market advocates export the metaphor of invisible-hand magic to situations with little comparison to the circumstances that allowed market systems to work so well in the past. Jack Goldstone presents a common pathway of political decline in his book, Revolution and Rebellion (1991). He, and others including Eisenstadt (2006) and Tilly (1993), describes the deterioration of political authority as governments respond to economic pressure in ways that alienate elites and the general population. Intra-elite conflicts arise as powerful families and business interests seek individual stability and power. The intra-elite and external conflicts exacerbate the inability of the central government to rule effectively. General unrest and mobility devolve to insurgencies and the mobilization of the population into competing factions led by contending

42

MARK SOMMA

elites. External wars and conflicts arise over resource supply. In 1991, for the first time, but not the last, the US military came to the oil fields of the Middle East to push a dictator out of his recent conquest and ensure stability in world oil distribution. In March, 2003, the US military returned again for an indefinite stay as a surging Islamic culture and growing population threatened economic and political stability. Once again, an imperial power found itself embroiled in incessant warfare to protect its supply of resources. A universal extravagance exists among elites in hierarchical systems, and, in combination with faulty administration caused by a focus on short-term interest, elite behavior often accelerates the onset of long-term crises. Mancur Olson’s (1982) work, on the short-term goal orientation of modern interest groups and the increasing complexity of rules and loopholes, reflects a contemporary account of the historical behavior of elites. Tied to their fortunes and the ideologies that favored them, elites are unlikely to initiate revolutionary change that threatens their wealth and power. Instead, they hold fast to power and seek to stave off revolutions with appeals to loyalty, subsidy to supporters, and the use of force. A devotion to the principles and processes of capitalism dominate elite discussions of policy to solve environmental and ecological problems, and material success enjoyed by post-industrial societies becomes the proof of capitalism’s virtues and the political leverage to control the discussions of policy. Capitalism arose as an ideology that is premised on environmental plenty and was codified into a foundational text by John Locke in the late 17th century as he refined his social contract argument with Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes argued that our chaotic and passionate nature should surrender to a powerful sovereign who would establish rules for people to pursue their selfish interests within a binding framework of laws. A strong polity was needed to keep the adversarial nature of people in check and prevent a small minority of greedy and violent persons from trapping us in a cycle of conflict. But Locke, who lived in calmer and more prosperous times than Hobbes and who grasped the value of the enormous untapped commons outside Europe, moved away from Hobbes’ requirement for an autocratic leader. Locke believed that the social contract was a natural condition of society, and therefore, he placed the creation of a civil society as the first step with the establishment of a polity as the second step. Locke’s confidence in people’s social comity and his rejection of Hobbes’ Leviathan are premised on ecological abundance. The fullest statement favoring the value of private property and the recognition that material progress is the measure of society came from

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

43

Adam Smith. Smith argued that everyone is free to pursue his own interests, as long as each does not violate the laws of justice. Smith presented the invisible hand argument that economic prosperity grows from the selfish economic behavior of persons operating within a polity that cooperates with, not dominates, individual economic behavior. He believed, as did Locke, that reason, moral sentiment, and prosperity are sufficient to keep people behaving within reasonable bounds. Ferocious traditionalism or the authoritarianism of Hobbes would not be needed or desired. Across the several centuries since Locke and Smith, and bolstered by the political revolutions of electoral democracy, a consensus formed that contemporary material accomplishments were the product of the capitalist ideology. The requirement of a large ecological commons and the vastness of the environmental ‘‘sinks’’ went unnoticed by all but a few. Locke and Smith’s admonition to focus on private property and free exchange as the basis for a successful society provided the impetus for transforming nature into material progress with swift and stunning success. The fierce loyalty of cultural leaders to their free market economic ideology and its political partner, electoral republics, became the basis for aggressive, acquisitive imperial behavior. For our purposes here, the loyalty to ideology blocks discussion, much less implementation, of new economic or cultural paradigms that direct us toward a more benign exploitation of the physical environmental and ecology. Even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, faith in the ideology dominates the discussion of the environmental problems and proposed solutions. The abundant consumption, economic security, and ‘‘free-choice’’ individualism of contemporary unsustainable societies explain the strong faith placed in capitalism and electoral democracies by their citizens, but as William Ophuls pointed out, ‘‘liberal democracy as we know it y is doomed by ecological scarcity,’’ and ‘‘such central tenets as individualism, may no longer by viable’’ (Ophuls, 1992, p. 3). In 1970, the State of California encouraged by local activists claimed that tidal wetlands in the southern California city of Huntington Beach and across the famous Pacific Coast highway from the ocean needed protection from development. That decision launched an ongoing battle to protect the Bolsa Chica wetlands and restore the wetlands’ link to the ocean. On August 24, 2006, construction to lift the Pacific Coast Highway was completed, and a channel that links the wetlands to the ocean was opened. A tidal basin of 366 acres is now reconnected to the ocean, and approximately 200 more acres adjoining the tidal basin will become wildlife and marine life habitat. Restoring the Bolsa Chica is an impressive accomplishment. But, as with

44

MARK SOMMA

Chevron’s deep sea oil production, the project exemplifies a continued environmental and ecological decline, not a genuine effort toward a solution. This small project consumed up to 150 million dollars, not including the costs of 35 years of political and legal conflict. The legal battles continue as oil companies, who owned the wetlands for much of the 20th century, continue to operate oil pump jacks in the wetlands and seek to profit from selling the portion of the wetlands not owned by the state to home developers. Much of the financing for wetland restoration came from the Long Beach Port Authority and the Los Angeles Port Authority. In return for funding up to 50 million dollars of the restoration, the ports received mitigation credit that allowed them to expand into undeveloped wetland and marine areas. The average cost of remediation acreage ranges from $150,000 to $300,000 per acre. Since mitigation credits allow a 2:1 swap for inner harbor development and a 1:1 swap from outer harbor development, the development of the 45-acre expansion at the Long Beach port required only 22.5 acres of the port authority’s mitigation credits from Bolsa Chica (PMPA, 2005). The mitigation policy also allows developers to ‘‘bank’’ credits for development in the future. The city of Huntington Beach has permitted home development surrounding the Bolsa Chica. The housing permits remain subject to environmental review and litigation, but some home construction is already underway. As spectacular a success as the Bolsa Chica represents for local activists, it is a net loss for the almost completely disappeared southern California wetlands. Bolsa Chica illustrates perfectly the costs, conflicts, politics, and media attention of environmental ‘‘boutique’’ projects that make us feel good about our efforts but have little real impact on the problem and give legitimacy to expanded development into other rare ecological areas. Robert Briffault (1932, p. 17) in his book, The Myth of Civilisation, rails against the belief that ‘‘liberal reforms’’ can transform organizations originally established to promote the interests of the powerful into organizations that promote the interests of ‘‘mankind at large.’’ He consciously adopts the realist view that politics is an unsentimental business about distributing power and resources while maintaining order and stability, and power brokers wisely restrict the language of liberty and the general welfare to public documents and pronouncements. In like fashion, wealthy and powerful individuals and organizations that owe their success, in large part, to externalizing or ignoring environmental and ecological damage are in an unlikely position to initiate radical change. They relegate

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

45

their environmentalism to public documents and pronouncements except where immediate effects require tactical changes in behavior such as the removal of lead from gasoline or reducing the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to protect the ozone layer. Like our predecessors, we have become aware of the environmental and ecological problems associated with economic and population growth. As early as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the destruction of nature and the need for ecological conservation appeared. Reform movements arose then and they arise now. The contemporary political context of public opinion, interest group advocacy, and electoral strategies reflect ‘‘environmentalism.’’ We initiate environmental expertise in academic departments that feed graduates into a web of government agencies, consulting companies, nonprofit advocacy groups, and corporate offices. Successful operators in this web shift skillfully from position to position. They focus on mitigating the damage of industrial and post-industrial society without genuinely confronting the fundamental momentum of acquisitiveness that operates as the centerpiece of modern society’s boast of success. They seek to smooth the ecological rough edges of capitalism and consumerism with boutique projects like the Bolsa Chica wetlands that are brief in time, small in scope, and almost without real influence in the broader society or the natural environment. Nature is understood as an environmental and ecological infrastructure that requires integration with the production of goods and services. Yellowstone National Park, one of the premier ‘‘wilderness’’ parks in the United States is the site of over 200 continuing experiments by scientists. On-site ‘‘enhancement’’ and bio-prospecting for animals and plants with commercially-valuable DNA occur frequently. The common complaint among Park Service officials is not the intrusion on ‘‘wilderness,’’ but the failure of ‘‘benefit sharing’’ as the profits from the research are not shared with the Park Service (Robbins, 2006). We exhibit landscape amnesia as our sense of nature diminishes to gardens and parks. Successive generations establish continuously lowered parameters for biodiversity, for example, national parks as ‘‘wilderness’’ with a managed population of monitored and tagged animals. The loss of the great biodiversity reservoirs like the Amazon or the oceans is divorced from ordinary behavior, and the loss is felt like nostalgia, poignant but with no direct impact. Legislatures and agencies promulgate environmental laws that are enforced with decidedly mixed results. Like drug laws, a key set of entrepreneurial actors and a large set of active consumers conspire continuously to ignore the rules. Also, like drug laws, the transaction costs

46

MARK SOMMA

of inspection, enforcement, compliance, and litigation of environmental laws are unusually burdensome. The instinct of business operators is to lower the unit cost of production, and the instinct of consumers is to maximize the availability and convenience of product use. Even committed environmentalists realize that much of their ordinary behavior alters the physical environmental and damages ecologies. The ‘‘green’’ literature of political theory makes several arguments that seek to address the crisis, but, as with their capitalist counterparts who argue that the solution to environmental problems is more capitalism, political theory ‘‘greens’’ argue that the solution is more democracy. But the transition from nation-states to bioregions or the introduction of ‘‘discursive’’ democracy is about how to govern a ship while it sinks instead of how to keep the boat afloat. ‘‘Green’’ theory may have its day but not until the current arrangement of power and wealth collapses and a muchhumbled and devolved society reaches for new paradigms of governance, including ecological ‘‘rights,’’ that transform ecology and the physical environment into economic and social actors of equal value to consumerism and the acquisition of wealth. Perhaps, an insightful look comes from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s catagenesis. Homer-Dixon (2006, p. 22) argues that even as societies devolve, they will give birth to new forms of technology and organization. John Barry (1996) may be right to point out that sustainability is first a normative concept that requires broadening our sense of community to encompass future generations, but his argument that ‘‘changing our lifestyle or pattern of consumption in the interests of sustainability is more effective out of a sense that one believes it is right to do so rather than because one is told to do so, or because it is simply expedient to do so’’ (p. 122) works only with unusually devoted citizens who are willing to reorganize their lives around ecological-based consumption patterns that are far out of step with others around them and do not take advantage of the conveniences and opportunities of modern living. When contemporary lifestyles no longer work (cata), then a ‘‘moral rightness (p. 123)’’ argument for materially diminished lifestyles will make sense (genesis). In November of 2006, the US Supreme Court heard arguments from state governments and environmental organizations that the federal government is required to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05-1120). The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the states, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied waivers that would allow the states to implement greenhouse gas emission standards that exceed federal guidelines. EPA Director, Stephen

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

47

Johnson, refused to allow California and 15 other states to implement new greenhouse gas standards because ‘‘in light of the global nature of the problem of climate change, I have found that California does not have a need to meet compelling and extraordinary conditions’’ (Johnson, 2008). While the Supreme Court debate represents a valiant effort by state governments and environmental advocacy groups to address the problem of global warming, the entire episode has a somewhat ritualistic quality. Given the scope and breadth of atmospheric change and its attendant consequences, legal arguments about institutional scope or government waivers illustrate the inability to address the problem. As evidence by the increase in temple building, our predecessors among the world’s fallen civilizations also turned to the comfort and familiarity of tradition and ritual as they sought answers to their environmental crises. The experience that you have determines the knowledge that you value. Too often, one sort of knowledge is perceived by its owners to be evidence of intellectual superiority over another sort of knowledge. People from aggressive, acquisitive societies quite often see themselves as superior to people from simpler societies. Having practiced the crafts and acquired the skills needed for material prosperity, people of acquisitive societies find their prosperity to be the most compelling evidence of the superiority of their kinds of knowledge. In unsustainable material societies, the skills of business and politics represent the most desired knowledge. In sustainable societies, gardening, farming, gathering, simple carpentry, and tool making represent the most desirable knowledge. Each set of people are likely to view the others’ knowledge base as inadequate, and given the distinct viewpoint of the observer, both are right. The Hopi of southwestern United States provide an illustration of how a society may view the world after falling. Their cultural experience incorporates the earthy wisdom of a people who make a subsistence living from farming, ranching, and hunting/gathering with the learning that comes from a society that recently fell from a lofty perch of material success. The Hopi are the descendants of the people who built and lost a successful irrigation society in the now southwestern United States. Their architecture is quite famous as is their cosmology. They had the earth rotating on its axis. Their sense of physiology mirrors that of Tibetan Buddhism or India’s Hinduism with their identification of psychophysical centers located in key junctions of the body. The Hopi’s striking blend of theoretical knowledge and ascetic behaviors is what makes the Hopi irresistible to New Age spiritualists and ecologists (see Waters, 1963; Courlander, 1971; Malotki, 1993, for accounts of Hopi spirituality and culture).

48

MARK SOMMA

Their theology includes a single god – creator, a vast void before the creation of the universe, the subsequent creation of life, an initial period of peace and unity called the First World, followed by the failure of humans to maintain respect for their god and their fall as the earth was destroyed by fire, a second period of opportunity followed by the abandonment of their god, another fall from grace, and another earth destruction but this time by ice. Once again, humans emerged chastened into the third period. In this third period, the people reproduced rapidly, developed cities, and thus civilization. The difficulty of maintaining goodness in civilization manifested itself, and once again, the world was destroyed, this time by flooding. The people emerged into the fourth period, which is the current time. Hopi kivas represent this emergence with the kiva as a womb in the earth and the ladder leading out as the umbilical cord. For our purposes, and serving as a linguistic clue to their expansion and contraction as a civilization, the Hopi developed terminology to describe the dissolution of societies and their regress to an earlier, simpler way of life (Malotki, 2002). They now see the simpler life as the more pious and make references to the unsustainability of faster-paced, materially progressive, and spiritually corrupt life. Their term, tuskyapqatsi, refers to a crazy or frenzied life, and similar terms exist for a life of quarreling, a life of mutual disrespect, and onto descriptions of abusive and corrupt behavior in sexual practices or the use of alcohol and drugs. Many of these terms are subsumed under a Hopi philosophical concept termed, koyaanisqatsi, meaning the corrupt life or life out of balance (Malotki, 2002, p. 203). These terms and the current Hopi admonitions against a materially ambitious and behaviorally liberal life arise from their experience of societal crashes occurring with some frequency, mostly notably the swift decline of the late 13th century.

CONCLUSION On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans. The levees that protect the city from floods were breached and 80% of the city went underwater. On the day that the hurricane engulfed New Orleans, the city ceased to function. As help from outside required days, even weeks to arrive, city residents discovered how quickly an advanced civilization can disappear. To date, much of the city remains empty. Costs to rebuild are estimated to exceed $200 billion. Building a coastal city below sea level in a

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

49

hurricane zone may have been an act of hubris; rebuilding the same city after the sea reclaimed it may be an act of foolishness. Garrett Hardin (1968, p. 457) reminds us of a key lesson of complex systems, ‘‘We can never do merely one thing.’’ The more we alter physical and ecological environments, the more broadly the effects ripple. At some point, the marginal returns to increasing complexity diminish such that more of the same activity makes the problem worse and not better. Sustainable societies met this dilemma by limiting their actions and thus limiting their effect on the environment and remaining within manageable parameters. Unsustainable societies met the problems of complex effects and marginal returns by ignoring them and attempting to address each symptom independently from the whole. Our innovative nature made this strategy viable, with spectacular success in the short term, but guarantees long-term decline. The real test for capitalism arrives as environmental sinks fill and capitalism can no longer rely on a benign and expansive environment to absorb its externalities. If the natural social comity of Locke and Smith exists at all, it certainly does not exist at the level of the modern nation-state. It may take centuries to build from village society to advanced civilization, but it only takes one day to go from civilization to village society. The social ties that hold civilizations together cannot survive the loss of prosperity, security, and power that comes from resource depletion and environmental decline. William McNeill’s (1992, p. 73) macroparasitic exploitation of classes parallels a similar relationship to nature and both exploitations worsen in the frantic pace to maintain economic success as resources become scarce and environments stressed. As with our view of past societal crashes into dark ages, the current experience is too often chronicled as hegemonic rivalries, falling rates of profit or class struggles. The disease epidemics are seen as exogenous events; natural disasters that strike absent the influence of social or environmental circumstances. Somehow, the prisms through which we view human history filters out the green light, and we only see in anthropocentric colors. Imperial history mirrors Tolstoy’s observation that ‘‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’’ The long and detailed narrative of the fall of great societies reads like high drama. Revolts and revolutions, the stirring glory of imperial war, famine and disease, and the grand pageantry of elite extravagance all combine to produce some of history’s most compelling stories. The charismatic presentation of the drama blinds us to the pedestrian realities of environmental and ecological problems but fits neatly with our historical bias that man is the measure

50

MARK SOMMA

of all things. William McNeill writes, with regard to the relationship between society and nature, that ‘‘[it] deserves a place in any really satisfactory account of the past; they, too, ought to be woven into the narrative of the rise and elaboration of separate civilizations and cultures, and viewed as ecumenical processes comparable in importance with the rise of a world system of economic complementarity and cultural symbiosis’’ (McNeill, 1990, pp. 20–21). Human society, quickly globalizing, has now reached the capability to alter the environment at a global level. Vast reservoirs such as the oceans and the atmosphere are now subject to human-induced alteration. Yet, despite the realization of these alarming conditions, contemporary human society seems incapable of shifting its organizational, economic, political, or infrastructural gears. As with times past, the likely result is a painful devolution and the rise of simpler, sustainable practices while history awaits the next iteration of progressive, acquisitive societies. Few alternatives present themselves. William Ophuls’ mistake may be his belief that an autocratic Leviathan can replicate the successful ferocious traditionalism of village society at the level of empire. No previous empire, including those with impressive elite-driven ferocities of their own (Harner, 1977), survived the ideological loyalty and elite intransigence that prevented environmental and resource depletion. Despite the acceleration of reform activity like rationing or the increase in imperial conquest to secure resources or the warm embrace of theological and legal ritual, ideological loyalty and elite inflexibility led to stagnation and decline. Nascent attempts at revolutionary environmental solutions like Arne Naess’ ‘‘deep ecology’’ or Murray Bookchin’s ‘‘social ecology’’ represent efforts to synthesize sustainable decentralized societies with material innovation and progress. Aldo Leopold, often cited as a precursor to deep ecology, stated that ‘‘an ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence’’ (Leopold, 1949, p. 238). Contemporary issues such as immigration, population control, the use of fossil fuel, the protection of wilderness, and consumer choice are subject to pronouncements from deep ecology–based groups like Earth First! or the Animal Liberation Front. Those listening closely to revolutionary environmental admonitions can hear the echo of the ferocious traditionalism of sustainable societies even as the advocates for those visions seem blind to the harsh realities of sustainable village life. Murray Bookchin argued that ‘‘One of our chief goals must be to radically decentralize our industrialized urban areas into humanly-scaled cities and towns artfully tailored to the carrying capacities of the

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

51

eco-communities in which they are located’’ (Bookchin and Foreman, 1991, p. 79). His vision, shared by many others in the social and radical ecology movements, proposes a decentralized and autonomous set of small towns communally managed with strict reproductive and ecological restrictions. The soft glow of Bookchin’s utopian commune is not consistent with the harsh realities required of ecological sustainability. Bookchin, and others, noticed that much of human society lived in exactly these kinds of communities but failed to notice that these communities endured only with the adoption of social and behavioral constraints that would be anathematic to the tolerance and individual liberties that contemporary social ecologists take for granted. William Ophuls’ prediction that we will turn to an environmental Leviathan to address our depleted and polluted environment requires the wherewithal to maintain a Leviathansized society. No imperial Leviathan in the past successfully met the challenge. More likely, we will ride the decline to devolved societies with new forms of ferocious traditionalism to guide our survival.

REFERENCES Barry, J. (1996). Sustainability, political judgment, and citizenship: Connecting green politics and democracy. In: B. Doherty & M. de Geus (Eds), Democracy and green political theory: Sustainability, rights and citizenship (pp. 115–131). London: Routledge Press. Betancourt, J., Dean, J., & Hull, H. (1986). Prehistoric long-distance transport of construction beams, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. American Antiquity, 51(2), 370–375. Bookchin, M., & David, F. (1991). Defending the earth: Debate between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman. Toronto, Canada: Black Rose Books. Borestein, S. (2006). An underwater holocaust strikes the Caribbean, March 31. Associated Press. Available at www.heraldtribune.com Briffault, R. (1932). Breakdown: The collapse of traditional civilization. Binghamton, New York: Vail-Ballou Press. Chagnon, N. (1974). Studying the Yanomamo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Chew, S. (2001). World ecological degradation: Accumulation, urbanization and deforestation, 3000 B.C.–A.D. 2000. California: AltaMira Press. Coale, A. (1996). Five decades of missing females in China. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 140(4), 421–450. Coates, J., & Leahy, T. (2006). Ideology and politics: Essential factors in the path toward sustainability. Electronic Green Journal, 23(April), 2–21. Courlander, H. (1971). The fourth world of the Hopi. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, Inc. Diaz, R. (2008). Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. Science, 15(5891), 926–929. Driver, G. (1924). Letters of the First Babylonian Dynasty (Vol. 33). London: Oxford University Press.

52

MARK SOMMA

Eisenstadt, S. N. (2006). The great revolutions and the civilizations of modernity. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. Epstein, P. R. (1993). Marine ecosystems. Lancet, 342, 1216–1219. Garrett, L. (1994). The coming plague: Newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance (p. 212). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. George, A. (Trans.). (1999). The epic of Gilgamesh. Great Britain: Penguin Classics. Gupta, M. D. (2005). Explaining Asia’s missing women. Population and Development Review, 3(4), 529–535. Hardin, G. (1968). The cybernetics of competition; a biologist’s view of society. In: W. Buckley (Ed.), Modern systems research for the behavioral scientist. Chicago: Aldine Press. Harner, M. (1977). The ecological basis for Aztec sacrifice. American Ethnologist, 4(1), 117–135. Homer-Dixon, T. (2006). The upside of down: Catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press. Howarth, R. B. (2007). Towards an operational sustainability criterion. Ecological Economics, 63, 656–663. Jackson, S. (1948). The lottery. The New Yorker Magazine. Jacobsen, T. (1982). Salinity, irrigation and agriculture in antiquity: Diyala basin archaeological projects. Malibu: Undena Publications. Johnson, S. (2008). Letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, January 11. Jones, K. E., Patel, N. G., Levy, M. A., Storeygard, A., Balk, D., Gittleman, J. L., & Daszak, P. (2008). Global trends in emerging infectious diseases. Nature, 451, 990–993. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. Lindenbaum, S. (1979). Kuru Sorcery: Disease and danger in the New Guinea highlands (Vol. 12, 174pp.). Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. (Explorations in World Ethnology). Note: [fw July 1961–March 1962, July 1962–May 1963: kuru, Wanitabe For]. Lipp, E. K. (2002). Effects of global climate on infectious disease: The cholera model. Clinical Microbiology Reviews, 15, 757–770. Malotki, E. (1993). Hopi ruin legends. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (Published for Northern Arizona University). Malotki, E. (2002). Hopi tales of destruction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Martin, M., & Voorhies, B. (1975). Female of the species. New York: Columbia University Press. McNeill, W. (1976). Plagues and peoples. New York: Dell Publishing Group, Inc. McNeill, W. (1990). The rise of the West after twenty-five years. Journal of World History, 1, 1–21. McNeill, W. (1992). The global coalition. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Olson, M. (1982). The rise and decline of nations. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ophuls, W. (1992). Ecology and the politics of scarcity revisited: The unraveling of the American dream. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. Oppenheim, A. (1955). Babylonian and Assyrian historical texts. In: J. Pirchard (Ed.), Ancient near Eastern texts. Pain, S. (1989). Water hides a host of viruses. New Scientist, 1678(August 19), 28. Palmerston, C. (1893) (cited Harris, 1987). From Mourilyan Harbor to Herberton. The Queenslander, October 6, pp. 557–558.

Traditional Living Practices: Return to the Villages

53

PMPA. (2005). Port master plan amendment 16 to the Bolsa Chica interagency wetlands restoration/mitigation agreement, October 12. Staff Report. Robbins, J. (2006). The search for private profit in the nation’s public parks. New York Times, November 28, p. D2. Schlitz, L. A. (2007). Good masters! Sweet ladies! Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press. Sherman, B. (2006). U.S coral reef task force announces new conservation initiatives, May 4. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration release NOAA06-052. Stone, D. (1988). Policy paradox and political reason: The art of political decision making. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Tilly, C. (1993). European revolutions, 1492–1992. Blackwell: Oxford University Press. Tuchman, B. (1984). The pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest. In: The march of folly (pp. 3–34). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Turner, C. G. (1999). Man corn: Cannibalism and violence in the prehistoric American southwest (547pp.). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Waters, F. (1963). Book of the Hopi. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. Woolhouse, E. J. (2006). Infectious diseases: Preparing for the future. Science, 8(5792), 1392–1393.

CHAPTER 3 SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS: A NEW FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE BASED ON A GLOBAL CARBON STANDARD Molly Scott Cato 1. INTRODUCTION The present crisis in the global economy is more serious than anything that we have witnessed since the 1930s, yet policies designed to tackle it are limited and inadequate. Those that have been proposed, in terms of fiscal stimulus, rely on an outmoded view of the economy, where money can be used to force economic growth. Since the recognition of planetary limits such a strategy is no longer admissible. Instead, we need a global system where countries agree to limit their carbon dioxide emissions: this chapter outlines the Contraction and Convergence model (C&C), which proposes that countries do this within a framework of equal per capita emissions for all global citizens. However, within the existing financial architecture such a policy would do nothing to prevent the United States from continuing to print dollars and to use these to gain an unfair share of world production. Other countries controlling reserve currencies would also be able to avoid strict limits. The policy answer proposed is that of the Ebcu

The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 55–76 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004006

55

56

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

(environment-backed currency unit) – a neutral global trading currency to be used by countries that have also signed up to the C&C model. Emerging from the debate seeking historical comparison for the crisis we are witnessing in the global financial system is the growing consensus that this is the worst crash since the one that began on Wall Street in 1929, depressed economies around the world through the 1930s and was only really resolved in the huge reflation that was brought about by the Second World War and the increase in global demand as a result of the destruction of goods that wars always bring (Galbraith, 1994). Following the war, the victorious nations met at Bretton Woods to negotiate a system for global finance that would be stable and fair and would ensure prosperity. At this time most of the countries that now make up the United Nations did not even exist – they were still the ‘possessions’ of the Western industrialised countries, which, under the system of colonialism, also claimed to own their resources. It is little wonder that this system has failed to protect the interests of the states that have been born since 1945. What is sometimes rather pompously defined as the ‘financial architecture’ designed at Bretton Woods was flawed but managed to achieve nearly 30 years of stability and steady economic growth for those in the wealthy nations of the West (the system and its consequences, with reflections on its relevance of our current predicament, are well described in an article available online: Davidson, 2008). It relied on nations basing their currencies on the dollar standard, whose value was itself backed by gold. It was Nixon’s decision to cut the link with gold to fund the Vietnam War (Douthwaite, 1999) that finally broke the Bretton Woods system and put the world on the slow but inexorable path to another global crash, a destination we arrived at some time during 2008. The question is whether we can find a new global financial architecture that will have the advantages of the Bretton Woods settlement, but without the flaws. This chapter argues for such a system and one which, in addition, comprises a fair method for sharing CO2 emissions and a new currency in which these emissions can be traded. The chapter builds on two other proposals which are under discussion in various arenas:  Contraction and Convergence (C&C): a mechanism for reducing emissions and sharing them equally between world citizens (see more at http://www.gci.org.uk/contconv/cc.html).  Cap and Share (C&S): a system building on C&C but extending it to include a proposal for a system of issuing and trading in emissions permits, and a currency (the Ebcu) to enable that trade (see more at http://www.capandshare.org/).

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

57

If we could extend the second idea so that, over the next 30–50 years, a neutral, carbon-backed global currency gradually takes over from the unstable debt-based reserve currencies that have dominated the global economy since 1945, we may find a way towards an equitable and sustainable global economy. The chapter argues that the current financial crisis makes the creation of a stable and neutral international currency vital and increasingly urgent. The chapter is in two parts (Sections 2 and 3), which are then linked in the final section and the conclusion. Two separate discussions represent the two sides of the financial crisis–ecological crisis coin: the first relates to carbon trading schemes as a solution to climate change; the second describes the need for a stable, neutral global currency. The following section provides a sketch of the two schemes that are proposed to address aspects of the interlinked crisis: C&C as a solution to anthropogenic climate change and C&S as a means of sharing emissions fairly within nations. The second part of the chapter provides a critique of the reserve currency system we have been living with and argues the need for a new, more stable global currency. It also suggests some ways of closing the gap between money and goods – or between the nominal and real economies – which is the root cause of instability in the financial system. Such policies of monetary management cannot be undertaken by countries in isolation, since investment funds and the speculators who control them can use their financial muscle to undermine them. Hence, there is a need for an international agreement to enable domestic economic management, and this provides the focus for the next section. This reprises arguments made at Bretton Woods about the importance of a neutral currency and of balance in international trade before exploring the possibility that the neutral currency might be ‘backed’ by the global environment and what consequences such a design might have. The final section offers some conclusions and opens the political discussion about how the negotiation of this new financial architecture might be achieved.

2. CONTRACTION AND CONVERGENCE AND CAP AND SHARE Contraction and Convergence (C&C) is a proposal from the Global Commons Institute (GCI) for how the earth’s atmosphere (the ‘global commons’1) should be shared, which is another way of saying how the right to produce polluting carbon dioxide should be distributed

58

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

(Meyer, 2000). It is a simple plan to cap total emissions at the level suggested by the best available science (relying on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]2) and then to share these equally between all the world’s citizens so that everybody receives a carbon credit. Fig. 1 illustrates the C&C model, indicating how emissions have risen and how the countries will be expected to reduce them over the next 50 years. The contraction is this decline and the convergence is the movement towards global equality in per capita emissions. Comparisons of the ratios of various countries’ emissions at present and under an equitable regime are presented in Fig. 2 and Table 1. The figure indicates that countries have not significantly reduced their per capita emissions since 1990, and that in the case of some, emissions are still increasing. The table makes it clear which countries can expect to gain and lose under the C&C regime. An econometric analysis of the C&C proposal (Bo¨hringer & Welsch, 2004) found that such a system combining per capita entitlements with trading was 50% more efficient in terms of reducing CO2 emissions than national limits without trading. The tradable permit regime allowed Contraction & Convergence USA

6

Former Soviet Union OECD less USA

Tonnes Carbon Per Capita

CHINA Rest of World INDIA

8GT

0

Gigatonnes Carbon Gross

Rest of World INDIA CHINA

Former Soviet Union 4GT

OECD less USA Source: GCI 2006

USA

1800

3

1900

2000

2030

2100

2200

This example shows regionally negotiated rates of C&C. This example is for a 450ppmv Contraction Budget, Converging by 2030.

Fig. 1. Illustration of the Contraction and Convergence Model for Global CO2 Emissions Reductions. Source: Reproduced with permission from Aubrey Meyer and Tim Helweg-Larsen of the Global Commons Institute.

59

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard 25 20 15 10 5

Fig. 2.

In di a Br az il Ch in a Th ai la nd Fr an De ce nm ar G k Un e ite r ma d Ki ny n Sa gd ud om iA ra b A u ia st Un ra ite lia d St at es

Bu ru Ca ndi m bo di a Ni ge ria

0

Emissions Per Capita for a Range of Countries in 2004 (Tonnes of CO2). Source: UN Statistics Division.

Table 1.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Per capita, 1990, 2000 and 2004 for Various Countries (Tonnes of CO2).

Burundi Cambodia Nigeria India Brazil China Thailand France Germany United Kingdom Denmark Saudi Arabia Australia United States Source: UN Statistics Division.

1990

2000

2004

0.0341 0.0465 0.4803 0.793 1.4023 2.089 1.7645 6.413 12.3505 10.1281 9.6858 15.6837 16.5139 18.8256

0.0374 0.0416 0.7185 1.104 1.8582 2.6295 3.3215 6.0409 9.7042 9.8543 8.6761 13.0743 17.647 20.9293

0.0291 0.039 0.8263 1.2023 1.8001 3.8393 4.2849 6.1608 9.7881 9.7934 9.8013 13.3811 16.272 20.3792

60

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

developing countries to improve their economic welfare, partly as a result of improvements in the terms of trade (resulting from the imputation of carbon cost to production processes and transport). While the idea of per capita shares appears simple and straightforward, there has been discussion about exactly what ‘equity’ would mean in terms of CO2 emissions (Cazorla & Toman, 2000). Should countries with larger historical CO2 burdens be allowed lower rates of emissions in future to compensate, for example, or should countries whose citizens have particular requirements for fossil-fuel use (say because they live in colder climes or have more elderly as a proportion of the population) be given larger shares? Countries which rely particularly heavily on fossil fuels to maintain their current standard of living make a case for ‘grandfathering rights’, to allow them a larger percentage share in the future to match that they have enjoyed in the past (as in the recent case of Poland in the EU negotiations, see Tran, 2008). Others (e.g. Long, 2006) have argued that the ‘minority world’ (or developed) countries owe debts to the ‘majority world’ countries for the damage that their historic emissions have already caused, which makes pure equity, in fact, unjust. These arguments are significant and will play an important role in the negotiations that will secure an international agreement. For the purposes of this chapter, however, they are a second-order concern and for this reason ‘equity’ is here interpreted as meaning exact equality in terms of carbon rights per individual citizen. The Cap and Share proposal (C&S; see Feasta, 2008) operates within the C&C framework but proposes a mechanism to facilitate the exchange between countries that produce too much CO2 and those which have not yet reached their limit. It proposes that each country is allocated an emissions tonnage share based on its population. This should then be translated into permits to produce CO2, which would be allocated to citizens who could then decide whether to sell them or destroy them (thus removing potential CO2 from the atmosphere). The other side of the market for CO2 will be the purchase of these permits by energy companies: the scheme is ‘upstream’ in the sense that it controls carbon where it enters the economy, that is at the point that suppliers of fossil fuels extract them from the earth. Without a permit any extraction of fossil fuels would be illegal (Fig. 3). This scheme has been criticised on the basis of the complexity of the permit system. An alternative is Barnes’s (2001) idea of the ‘sky trust’, which is similar, except that governments themselves auction the permits and transfer the income generated to citizens via a Citizens’ Income (CI) scheme. Such a scheme would be feasible in countries with sophisticated bureaucracies that are not susceptible to corruption, but in other countries it might

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

61

1 THE CAP

an independent trust decides the cap on greenhouse gas emissions using the best scientific advice

2 THE SHARE

the trust shares out Production Authorisation Permits (PAPs) equally to every citizen (with a % to Transition Funds)

3 THE SALE

citizens sell their PAPs via post offices and banks (or destroy them to take the carbon out of the system)

5 THE ENFORCEMENT ONCE A YEAR

customs and excise inspectors match PAPs with fuels and potential emissions to enforce the cap

4 THE BUY

primary oil, gas and coal companies need to buy PAPs to cover the emissions for all the fuels they sell

Fig. 3. An Illustration of the Cap and Share Model for the Distribution of the Right to Produce Carbon Dioxide. Source: Cap and Share website: www.capandshare.org.

be open to abuse on a massive scale. Both types of scheme can be criticised on the basis that there will be problems with enforcement, illegal extraction and trade in permits, as well as forgery, but these are no more serious than for other carbon trading schemes. So far we are sticking fairly closely to the original proposals made by Feasta, but there is a problem – that of the perverse incentive of taxing ‘bads’. As CO2 emissions decline, a significant source of fiscal revenue will decline with them. In democratic, welfare states, we would hope that these revenues would have underpinned the introduction of a form of CI as they are either sold by the state and the proceeds shared on a per capita basis (Barnes, 2001), or issued to citizens who can then choose whether to sell or destroy them (Feasta, 2008). People will have grown used to relying on this income, especially those who are carbon-frugal: they need to have a continuing incentive to reduce their consumption and engage in pro-climate behaviour. The value that governments can share through C&S schemes is a windfall gained by commodifying the most critical global commons, the atmosphere, and selling the right to utilise it in the form of emissions permits. As this reduces, it could be substituted by the other crucial global

62

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

commons, primarily the land itself, via a land tax. The proceeds of this tax could support the continuing payment of CI, while exemptions could be made available to those using some of their land for sequestration. Lengthy and complex discussions will no doubt ensue about the precise design of the trading system that will enforce a cap on CO2 emissions. For the purposes of this chapter the more important question is, what currency will that trade take place in? However just the initial allocation of permits, if the money that is acceptable to buy and sell more is neither fairly allocated nor independent of political control by a nation or bloc of nations, the permits to pollute will eventually follow the money and a just outcome will not be achieved. Thus, carbon trading cannot be made equitable without addressing the inequities in the current global financial regime. The following section describes the instability of the current financial system which has led to the current crisis. A system designed for stability and neutrality is necessary to underpin a global carbon trading regime.

3. WHY DO WE NEED NEW CURRENCIES? To grasp the importance of creating new currencies requires an understanding of the nature of money creation. This is a discussion fraught with confusion, even amongst leading politicians and bankers, and the investment of some time to study the issue of money creation is recommended if my proposal is to be fully understood (Rowbotham, 1998; Robertson & Huber, 2000; Hutchinson, Mellor, & Olsen, 2002; Hutchinson et al. 2002; Pettifor, 2006). In his recent book Capitalism as if the World Matters Jonathan Porritt (2006) talks about ‘the utterly perverse way in which money supply is managed in almost all countries’ (pp. 190–191). He continues: about 97 per cent of the UK’s money supply is created by commercial banks more or less out of thin air as interest-bearing (profit-making) loans; the remaining 3 per cent is created debt-free by the Bank of England and the Royal Mint as bank notes and coins. The banks in the UK make about d20 billion a year in interest from this arrangement. y The money supply created in this way is not linked to real resource use or to the amount of goods and services in the national economy—it is based entirely upon the banks’ commercial judgement about the ability of an individual or an enterprise to repay their loans. The more money there is, the more debt there is; as the money supply increases, so does a nation’s indebtedness.

The global economy has become – increasingly since the total deregulation of financial markets in the 1980s – dominated by finance rather than

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

63

production (Hutchinson et al., 2002). The gap between real physical value and monetary value creates instability, and this is the cause of the failure of the financial system labelled ‘credit crunch’. Although lending has become increasingly reckless, when the distance between the known value of assets held by a bank or building society and its nominal monetary value becomes unfeasibly large, other financial institutions become unwilling to lend to it. Once this happens, the upward spiral of bank lending goes rapidly into reverse: financial players call in their debts and refuse to lend. In a global economy where almost all money is created as credit/debt, once confidence in the banking system vanishes and the ability to create more money in this way goes with it, the amount of available money rapidly shrinks, making economic activity impossible. This is the credit crunch, and it is difficult to see a way out of it that does not involve major revisions to the global financial architecture. Evidence that this is so can be found in the desperate strategies being pursued by (especially) US and UK politicians to prevent the collapse of the system – if things were not terminally serious we would hardly expect to see a Republican President pouring $1 trillion into the financial system (Milmo, 2008) or the United Kingdom trying to sell nearly d150 billion worth of gilts in just one year, compared with an annual average of around d20 billion (Field, 2008). So the first step towards stabilising the financial system will be a rebalancing of the nominal value that financial institutions, businesses and households have on their balance sheets, that is accounted value, with the real value they hold in terms of assets. This is similar to the gap between money and gross domestic product (GDP), which has accelerated as the bubble has expanded (see Fig. 4). Of course, this is always a fluid picture, since at present the value of assets themselves is declining rapidly, but some attempt to bring the lines illustrated in Fig. 4 closer together will reduce the financial instability. How can this be achieved? Historically, when governments still ran economies rather than leaving them to their own devices, they would have had tools at their disposal to begin to manage the domestic financial system. There are two approaches that can be taken directly to close the gap illustrated in Fig. 4: reducing the value of money via a managed deflation and increasing the value of goods via inflation. A third possibility is to reintroduce some form of credit and exchange controls so that governments intervene directly rather than relying on market mechanisms. A direct means of closing the gap would be a ‘managed monetary deflation’. There is little experience of such a process in developed Western economies in recent economic history, although both France and Italy

64

MOLLY SCOTT CATO 2500 GDP index Broad money (M4)

2000

1500

1000

500

2000

1997

1994

1991

1988

1985

1982

1979

1976

1973

1970

0

Fig. 4. Growth in Broad Money (M4) Compared with Growth in the Economy (GDP), United Kingdom, 1970–2001. Source: Author’s graphic: GDP data from UK Office for National Statistics; M4 data from Bank of England.

experienced serious dislocation between their monetary and real economies in the period immediately following the Second World War. Casella and Eichengreen (1993) explain this inflation as a consequence of the struggle over value in the economy between labour and capital, which also resulted from the dislocation between productive capacity and the monetary capacity of the economy arising out of the War. Its solution was effected by a deus ex machina in the form of the US government and its Marshall Plan goods, which soaked up the excess demand, on condition that Communist parties were excluded from government in the two countries. Such a solution seems implausible today, when the United States is suffering as badly as the other developed economies, and when the problem has been an excess rather than a dearth of cheap consumer goods. If there were international agreement between the main global players in the world economy, or even those countries that control the reserve currencies (perhaps excluding the United States, which seems destined to follow its own route and has most to lose) it might be possible to introduce a co-ordinated deflation – in effect, all the countries eliminating their mutual debts and downgrading the nominal value of monetary assets in their economies. In the past, the practical problems this has presented have

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

65

mainly been because of large cash holdings (as e.g. the problems faced by the French in their revaluation in 1960) but in an era of computer-based money this would be much simpler. However, any proposal of deflation automatically leads to the question, relative to what? In the world of floating exchange rates, there is no fixed standard to adjust to. This is part of the reason for the suggestion of a neutral international standard currency, which is made in the following section. The political problems are another matter. The key point about a deflation is that people will lose apparent value. The advantage of a politically managed deflation rather than a market free-for-all is that politicians will have some ability to control who loses. Just as the UK government guarantees individual savings of d50,000 in any one building society, so it could guarantee to exchange savings in pounds sterling up to a certain value, and exchange these for a similar value (to the extent that this could be defined) in the new currency. Holders of larger quantities of cash might be recompensed only in some proportion, say 75% between d50,000 and d200,000, 50% up to d500,000 and 25% up to d1 million. Beyond that money holdings would be lost. The problem with such a scheme is that the wealthiest (and hence most powerful) would lose most; the reverse of this is that the scheme would be equitable in that the poorest would be protected. And since there are many more in lower asset brackets (only 6% of estates reach the threshold of d312,000 for payment of inheritance tax [O’Neill, 2007]), the majority of citizens would gain from such a policy. In spite of what Stiglitz (2003) has called ‘inflation paranoia’, there may be a possibility of allowing a steady but significant inflation in the price of goods to rebalance the real and nominal economies. We are suffering from what we might term an excess of ‘the wrong kind of money’ – debt money that is owed by people who cannot afford to pay it back. We might also argue that the use of reserve currency power to exert a downward pressure on the price of imports during the boom years of globalisation may have created ‘repressed inflation’: letting this pressure for increased prices express itself might help to rebalance the real and nominal parts of our economy. In a paper that discusses the Russian financial crises of the 1990s, Lines (1998) quotes Hedlund and Sundstrom (1996, p. 895) who clearly suffer from the inflation anxiety typical of academic economists: ‘Wilfully unleashing inflation, in the hope that one will subsequently be able to contain it, may be likened to starting a controlled brush fire’. Their caution is justified in normal circumstances, in that price inflation and wage inflation can easily create a destructive and uncontrollable feedback loop, but in a time of impending slump, inflation does not seem as threatening as it once did.

66

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

Some inflation may also be unavoidable in the near future, as the depletion of oil supplies leads to an increase in the price of all goods in our heavily oildependent economy. The third possible route for managing the rebalance is credit controls: a tool of monetary policy that has fallen into disuse and almost out of memory, although until the 1970s they were used alongside interest rates as a means of controlling the amount of borrowing taken on by a nation’s citizens in most developed economies. The last significant attempt to use such controls to influence economic policy was undertaken by President Carter in 1980, as he struggled to deal with the combination of high inflation and high interest rates. The author of a negative review of the experience concludes thus: Although no legislative authority now exists for credit controls, the U.S. experience with such controls probably has not come to a close. This experience suggests that in times of rising prices and interest rates, there are always voices advocating the use of credit controls. And in such times, Congress grants the authority for such controls, despite its own earlier recognition of the ineffectiveness and economic harm that credit controls have caused. (Schreft, 1990, p. 49)

Interestingly, we are yet to hear such calls during the current crisis. Even if such controls were to be introduced, they would do nothing to deal with the historic inflation of money value relative to real value in the economy. Credit controls are incompatible with a system of free capital movements, and therefore need to be combined with exchange controls. Sweden was the last of the developed European economies to fully manage its national monetary system under a policy which lasted for 50 years and represented a time of stability and prosperity for the Swedish people. The system was based on ‘exchange and capital controls that isolated Sweden from the outside world financially, allowing the monetary authorities to establish a structure of interest rates and a distribution of credit according to political preferences, not according to market outcomes’ (Jonung, 1993, p. 347). During this period, the Swedish government was able to maintain low interest rates enabling cheap borrowing for socially important investment, especially in housing. The argument for a reintroduction of political management of credit in the United Kingdom today appears strong. Policies that are attempting to provide incentives to the credit market to function effectively, primarily the swingeing cuts in interest rates, are failing to be effective. The market is not responding to price signals – interest rates being effectively the price of money – and therefore is not functioning as a market in the classical sense.

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

67

The reintroduction of some form of credit management by the government would be an admission of this fundamental market failure and a political commitment to prevent failure in the financial market destroying the real economy. Jonung identifies the political and ideological conditions that were present in Sweden during the pre- and post-war years to support the political management of the monetary regime. The presence in the government of leading economists of the pro-Keynesian Stockholm School, especially Gunnar Myrdal, was a crucial component of the policies’ success. The promarket ideologues in power in the leading economies today represent a major block to any implementation of similar policies, no matter how effective they might be in practice. The end of the regime of monetary stability in Sweden (and elsewhere) can be traced back to Nixon’s decision to cut the link between the dollar and gold and the oil price rises of the early 1970s, which created global turbulence that Sweden could not insulate itself from. This led to the abolition of credit controls selectively through the 1980s, until by 1989, Sweden opened its economy up to the world by removing exchange controls. As Jonung’s concluding quotation suggests, Sweden’s history may have something to offer us, if we feel the time is right: ‘The life-cycle of credit controls has been described here. This description also suggests that the present monetary regime, based on a market oriented approach, may change again in the future. This will occur if and when the present regime is regarded as unsustainable’ (Jonung, 1993, p. 368). This section has suggested three means by which politicians might seek to manage the rebalancing of the nominal and real value in our economy. Without such an intervention, and assuming that the policy being followed currently, according to which taxpayers subsidise large financial institutions and use their deposits to support a banking system that does not serve their interests, can only work in the short run, we face a future of disorganised adjustment, where inflation and bankruptcy cause a shrinkage of the real as well as the monetary economy – the opposite of what we want to achieve. This would share the pain very unequally, since those who earn less or are no longer earning would rapidly lose purchasing power. The distortions that would be caused in the real economy during the transition would create social and political crisis that could not be tolerated by democratic policy-makers. The key point to notice is that all three scenarios are deeply unpalatable to those within our economy who control large amounts of capital. The abandonment of economic management since the 1980s has led to the interests of capital being assigned power in the market, at the expense of the interests of ‘labour’ – or people. Since what we are talking about here

68

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

is, essentially, a mechanism to close the gap between the nominal value claimed by capital (bank deposits, shares, bonds and so on) and the real value of what people can create with their work using genuinely valuable resources such as land and plant, this will lead to a major shift in value from investors to ordinary people. It will thus, inevitably, precipitate a deeply political struggle.

4. THE IMPORTANCE OF BALANCE IN GLOBAL TRADE The international financial system is complex and closely interrelated with the system of global trade (for a detailed account see Rowbotham, 2000; Pettifor, 2006). The relationship revolves around the system of reserve currencies – the dollar, euro, yen and pound sterling – which countries are prepared to accept from one another, or from third countries outside the charmed circle, in settlement of external trade balances. This system clearly gives the countries that control these currencies a huge advantage in trade terms, especially the United States, which negotiated that its currency should have the supreme advantage of being acceptable alongside gold as the international reserve asset, in the face of opposition from the British delegation, at Bretton Woods. Although at that time the United States undertook to maintain gold reserves to support the dollar, this agreement was unilaterally suspended by President Nixon during the Vietnam War in 1971, meaning that since that time, the United States has been in a situation where it can print dollars (or create them electronically in the national bank account) and then exchange them for imported goods at virtually no cost (see Rowbotham, 2000). In the global trade system as currently structured, there are winners – those countries which control reserve currencies – and losers – those that do not. According to Rowbotham: Allowing the free market to determine the price of surplus goods, offered to corporate monopoly buyers based in powerful industrial nations, produced by underdeveloped nations, carrying massive debts, under pressure to export—this is bound to lead to low prices. In economists’ jargon, instead of being a process involving mutual gain and ‘equal exchange’, there is ‘unequal exchange’ with the benefits accruing principally to commerce based in the wealthy nations (Rowbotham, 2000, pp. 75–76).

The system has not worked entirely to the advantage of the United States, since it is the explanation for that country’s vast and growing external debt.

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

69

However, for US consumers it has been a bonanza. This is one side of the critique, since the ability to suck in consumer goods has led to unprecedented levels of consumption at huge environmental cost – a level of consumption that has then been followed by the other countries of the world. The other side of the critique is the poverty generated in the countries which are forced to sell their labour and their resources to support this level of consumption by the citizens of the countries with power within the global financial system. The only way they can finance their own development is through borrowing from Western institutions and then repaying these loans, increasing yet further the gap between rich and poor countries. From the perspective of green economics, we can never ‘make poverty history’ without renegotiating the terms of the Bretton Woods settlement. It is for this reason that writers such as Ann Pettifor (2006, p. 118) have turned their attention from campaigns like Jubilee 2000 to an intellectual critique of the global money system: ‘IMF and creditor-led policies y encourage low-income debtor nations to export raw materials, undermine subsistence agriculture and local businesses, and turn their societies into markets for imported food and irrelevant consumer goods.’ A managed system for global trading would be based around attempts to ensure balanced budgets, so that countries could neither run large-scale surpluses or deficits (Rowbotham, 2000). Rowbotham (2000) calls for a return to the policy of the Bancor, proposed by Keynes on behalf of the British government at Bretton Woods. Such a system would create a new non-aligned currency (Keynes called it banc-or or bank-gold) to be used for settling external debts. The trade system should be established with the aim of achieving balance between nations, with fines for those displaying trade balances or trade surpluses. That the currency should not be the preserve of a single country, or a small group of countries, is a basic requirement. A similar proposal for updating Keynes’s plan for a neutral clearing system has been made recently by Davidson (2008), but this does not take account of the fact that Keynes was living in an intellectual world that predated the ecological crisis and the recognition of the need to end economic growth. We can build on Keynes’s design, but include in it a pressure to push the global economy in the direction of lower-carbon production and global equity if we tie it to the C&C proposal. The C&C proposal is a good basis because it is absolutely clear about the two criteria for a policy response to climate change: global equity and a serious cap on emissions. However, it is rather vague about the mechanism by which those who are producing too much CO2 exchange this with those

70

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

who do not use their full quota. The reason for the vagueness is that, while the proposal has the benefit of simplicity and political appeal, it does not have a sophisticated approach to economics. As is explained below, if the C&C proposal were introduced into the globalised economy as it operates today, the United States of America would simply create enough dollars to buy the right to emit CO2 as it currently does. For this reason, Richard Douthwaite (1999) proposed the creation of a new global currency he called the Ebcu. This is the link between the two halves of this chapter. At the policy level, the need for a new, neutral global currency gives us the opportunity to include carbon reduction as a design feature of that new currency. At the conceptual level, we can identify the ecological crisis and financial crisis as two sides of the same coin, which represents the way money is created through debt. The Ebcu might be the ideal design for the neutral, global currency that Keynes was seeking at Bretton Woods. As already proposed by Douthwaite (1999, chap. 4), this currency will, over the 30-year period of its phase-in, become the only currency which is acceptable in exchange for the CO2 emissions permits that regulate emissions under the C&S scheme. The fact that the new currency is the only currency acceptable in exchange for CO2 permits will give it real value. Countries might also decide to transact their external trade balances in Ebcus, rather than choosing between the dollar and the euro, as they tend to do now. But what does it mean practically to have a currency that is backed by the environment? Like all currencies, this one would be issued by fiat and accepted by agreement. Nations that choose to sign up to significant CO2 emissions reductions would agree to meet the rules of the new global trading system and use the Ebcu as their sole trading currency. Without such a currency, as argued earlier, the United States and other holders of reserve currencies would not face real restrictions on their CO2 emissions, since they could simply run larger trade deficits and create money to buy up an unfair share of permits. So long as there is an enforced limit on CO2 emissions, the new currency would have real value since it would be linked to something of real value that is scarce, that is the right to pollute the earth’s atmosphere.3 Supporters of the Ebcu propose it as a neat solution to two problems in one. The need to create a new global currency creates an opportunity – to use the moment of currency creation to introduce a new pressure to reduce carbon dioxide. It is straightforward at the level of theory to argue that ‘energy’ in the global economy is presently measured in terms of money but should, because of the climate crisis, be measured in terms of carbon instead. Linking the new global currency to carbon emissions would

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

71

enable this to be made a reality. In future, the global economy would operate to support the planet rather than being in conflict with it. This would be infinitely more powerful than merely trading the right to produce carbon dioxide. The new currency needs to be stable, that is to say, it needs to be issued by a neutral and responsible authority, rather than being created against debts by a small number of countries. The issuing authority (we might call it the International Reserve Bank) would be the first of the new triumvirate to replace the international organisations created at Bretton Woods: it would be responsible for global banking and currency issue. The second body, the International Clearing Union, would be responsible for monitoring and policing the exchange of CO2 rations and Ebcus between nations. The third body would be the General Agreement for Sustainable Trade (as proposed by Hines, 2000; see also Woodin & Lucas, 2004); its primary role would be to ensure trade balances between nations (as proposed by Keynes for the GATT at Bretton Woods), although it would also have a role in managing the decline in the volume of global trade that a serious response to climate change requires in a way that best supports the poorer countries and the global ecosystem.

5. CONCLUSION There are interesting times in the global economy, and interesting times offer interesting opportunities. The first conclusion is that the credit crunch has resulted from the creation of too much distance between the nominal monetary value and the real asset value of companies, countries and the global economy as a whole. While there appears to be plenty of money out there, this is actually just a reflection of excessive debt. Just as our trains cannot run because of the ‘wrong kind of snow’, our economy cannot run because of the ‘wrong kind of money’. This dislocation has allowed those controlling paper assets to inflate their value but then use this value to negotiate themselves an unfair share of the real assets, whether in the form of land or goods. Since in a recession, capital loses more seriously than labour, I can only conclude that the reason there has been no policy proposal to take us off the path towards recession is that the interests of capital cannot find such a policy that does not accept my first conclusion. In other words, solving the crisis must require the rebalancing of the interests of capital and labour.

72

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

But the environmental crisis has made this a game with even higher stakes, and greater opportunities to be fought for. The global economy is suffering from two shortages at present: of money and of energy. One of the aims of green economists is to create an economy where energy, rather than money, is the main accounting unit. Creating a proposal where the introduction of a new global currency achieves this aim might garner sufficient political support to sideline the sectional interests of the minority of owners of capital. In a sense, the global financial crisis offers a wonderful opportunity for us to replace a monetary system that is unstable, creates injustice and drives the destruction of our global environment with one which is stable and just. The challenge will be how to move from one to the other with the minimum amount of pain – and without the massive power blocs with interests vested in the current system blocking the path of human development. The main problem that needs to be addressed – whether we are dealing with radical or orthodox solutions – is how to reinstate the balance between the artificial ‘value’ of the debt-based money that exists in the world economy, and the value of the actual stuff that is out there. The important question is how to build political support for a proposal along these lines. The first question posed by this chapter is whether the system proposed is logical and practical. The question which follows is whether it is politically achievable. In a situation where taxpayers have shown little concern that they are paying to save the fortunes of the super-rich, this seems questionable. However, the experience of the credit crunch is bound to be a radicalising one. If we have an agreed system of radical proposals, now would be a good time to argue for them. The politically astute way to introduce the system might be, as Douthwaite proposed, to begin with a ‘club’ of concerned nations. Since the Ebcu is based on per capita emissions, it is a scaleable solution. Nations within the club might agree to reduce their emissions, share the proceeds via a C&S system and trade in Ebcus. They could then charge external tariffs on goods imported from countries which are still over-emitting CO2. The main advantage of the proposed system is that it is fair; the converse of this is that, in a global economy which is deeply unfair, some players will lose out very significantly, and these are powerful players. This is a political problem that usually remains unexpressed in discussions of climate change. If nothing else, the proposals outlined here help to make that problem explicit. But it is more than a management school platitude to say that a threat is also an opportunity, and the threat of lasting and global recession – not to mention growing tensions within and between countries – might be expected to focus the minds of our politicians on political solutions to what are, essentially, political problems.

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

73

We have a generation of politicians who have grown up with the mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ ringing in their ears. They have believed their own mythology about the pre-eminence of markets to such an extent that, when those markets fail, they are powerless to act. The expansion of the G7 to G20 is a signal that there is recognition that major shifts of power at the global level are an essential part of tackling this crisis. The next step is to design a system which would offer sufficient advantages to all nations to encourage them to negotiate over a global financial architecture for the 21st century. Here, the prospects are not as bleak as we might imagine. If the settlement works as proposed in this chapter, all countries would gain economic stability analogous to that of the 1950s to 1970s and we would stand a far stronger chance of surviving as a species. Beyond that, countries would gain and lose in different proportions and different ways (as indicated in Table 2). The largest winners would be those who lost most from the Bretton Woods negotiations: the former colonies which are now the poorest nations in the world. The C&C model requires the wealthier nations that emit more CO2 to make significant transfers to these countries, either in terms of resources or technology, and so they would gain significantly. The countries that presently control the reserve currencies would lose significantly in terms of their ability to extort cheap goods from the rest of the world, but they would be enabled to extricate themselves from the impossible situation they Table 2.

Gains and Losses to Various Countries from the Proposed Financial Architecture.

Country/Group

Gains

Losses

USA

Debt forgiveness, stable trading in the global economy, avoidance of recession.

UK

Debt forgiveness, stable trading in the global economy, avoidance of recession. End of reserve currency disadvantage C&C transfer payments Higher oil price, end of reserve currency disadvantage Survival

Reserve currency privilege with dollar premium, lower consumption because of reduced CO2 emissions, cost of C&C transfer payments Reserve currency privilege, cost of C&C transfer payments

BRICs Poor countries Oil-rich countries Human species

Smaller but stable export markets None Lower income from oil (?) Major cost of C&C transfer payments None

74

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

find themselves in with regard to unpayable debts. The newly powerful nations commonly referred to as BRICs (Brazil, Russian, India and China – although other nations that are succeeding in the global competition can also be included in this group) would have to agree to forego their right to reclaim their ownership of a proportion of the production of the ‘richer’ countries, which they have accrued by holding considerable stocks of national bonds, but in return they would not face a catastrophic loss of their export markets. The biggest losers would probably be the oil-rich nations which, as is evident from Table 2, would be paying the proportionately largest share of the C&C transfers. But even they would gain from the neutral global trading currency and the higher oil price that would result from a revitalised global economy.

NOTES 1. The ‘commons’ is a term used by economists to refer to resources that are owned by the community at large and are outside the realm of standard property agreements. Examples might be land, urban roads, the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on. Green economists argue that, as they are ‘common wealth’, any value derived from them should be taxed heavily: see e.g. James Robertson, ‘Using Common Resources to Solve Common Problems’: http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/robertson. htm. 2. The present limit according to the proposal on GCI’s website is 450 parts per million volume of the global atmosphere. This is now considered too high by some authorities, but given that we are not yet seeing significant reductions, it is a reasonable starting point. The IPCC process has also been criticised for its compromises to reflect political pressure from the powerful nations of the world, especially the United States of America. Trainer (2008), amongst others, considers that it relies too heavily on economic modelling and does not suggest the fundamental changes to lifestyle and economic structure that would be necessary for an effective climate-change mitigation policy. 3. James Robertson argues that there is no real need to link the currency to something of value: an international agreement would be enough – ‘an international currency specifically linked to the value of carbon emissions is a distraction from the need for an all-purpose new genuinely international currency for use in international transactions.’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the following for engaging constructively with earlier versions of this chapter: James Bruges, Paul Nollen, Richard Lawson, Richard

A New Financial Architecture Based on a Global Carbon Standard

75

Godfrey, Pete North, Conall Boyle and Tom Lines. Special thanks to Chris Hart who is, like many of the best things in life, a seriously undervalued resource.

REFERENCES Barnes, P. (2001). Who owns the sky? Our common assets and the future of capitalism. Washington, DC: Island Press. Bo¨hringer, C., & Welsch, H. (2004). Contraction and convergence of carbon emissions: An intertemporal multi-region CGE analysis. Journal of Policy Modeling, 26, 21–39. Casella, A., & Eichengreen, B. (1993). Halting inflation in Italy and France after the Second World War. In: M. D. Bordo & F. Capie (Eds), Monetary regimes in transition. Cambridge: University Press. Cazorla, M., & Toman, M. (2000). International equity and climate change policy. Climate Issue Brief no. 27. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future. Davidson, P. (2008). Reforming the world’s international money. Real-World Economics Review, 48, 293–305, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue48/Davidson48.pdf Douthwaite, R. (1999). The ecology of money. Dartington, UK: Green Books. Available at www.feasta.org/documents/moneyecology/pdfs/chapter_four.pdf (chap. 4) Feasta. (2008). Cap and share: A fair way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Dublin: Feasta. Field, F. (2008). Face up to the gilt. Guardian, December 8. Available at http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/08/government-debt-gilt-sales Galbraith, J. K. (1994). The world economy since the wars: A personal view. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hedlund, S., & Sundstrom, N. (1996). The Russian economy after systematic change. EuropeAsia Studies, 48(6), 887–914. Hines, C. (2000). Localisation: A global manifesto. London: Earthscan. Hutchinson, F., Mellor, M., & Olsen, W. (2002). The politics of money: Towards sustainability and economic democracy. London: Pluto. Jonung, L. (1993). The rise and fall of credit controls: The case of Sweden, 1939–89. In: M. D. Bordo & F. Capie (Eds), Monetary regimes in transition. Cambridge: University Press. Lines, T. (1998). The price of failure: Money, prices and economics reform in Russia. Institute of Development Studies Bulletin, 3, 18–25. Long, S. (2006). Market ‘‘solutions’’ to climate change: A far cry from climate justice. Chain Reaction, 28, Available at http://www.foe.org.au/climate-justice/learning-resources/ solutions-to-climate-chnage/dinosaurs-and-diversions-1/market-2018solutions2019-to-climatechange-a-far-cry-from-climate-justice/ Meyer, A. (2000). Contraction and convergence: The global solution to climate change. Schumacher briefing no. 5. Totnes, UK: Green Books. Milmo, D. (2008). After $1tn. Cost of housing collapse, America is now bracing itself for the credit card bill. Guardian, December 3. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ business/2008/dec/03/us-recession-credit-debt-citigroup O’Neill, M. (2007). Death and taxes. New Statesman, October 8. Available at http://www. newstatesman.com/politics/2007/10/inheritance-tax-iht-death

76

MOLLY SCOTT CATO

Pettifor, A. (2006). The coming First World debt crisis. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Porritt, J. (2006). Capitalism as if the world matters. London: Earthscan. Robertson, J., & Huber, J. (2000). Creating new money: A monetary reform for the information age. London: New Economics Foundation. Rowbotham, M. (1998). The grip of death: A study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics. Charlbury, UK: Jon Carpenter. Rowbotham, M. (2000). Goodbye America! Globalisation, debt and the dollar empire. Charlbury, UK: Jon Carpenter. Schreft, S. L. (1990). Credit controls: 1980. Economic Review, Nov./Dec., Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Stiglitz, J. (2003). Inflation paranoia. In: A. Pettifor & J. Bush (Eds), Real world economic outlook: The legacy of globalisation: Debt and deflation (pp. 42–44). Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Trainer, T. (2008). ‘A critical discussion of the IPCC analysis of carbon emission mitigation possibilities and costs’. Available at the University of New South Wales website: http:// ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/IPCC-CRIT.html. Tran, M. (2008). Climate change: EU leaders reach compromise deal on emissions. Guardian, December 12. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/12/ eerope-carbon-emissions-climate-change Woodin, M., & Lucas, C. (2004). Green alternatives to globalisation: A manifesto. London: Zed.

CHAPTER 4 UTOPIAN SUSTAINABILITY: ECOLOGICAL UTOPIANISM Marius de Geus INTRODUCTION The main focus of this chapter is to explore whether ecological utopias are capable of providing a useful contribution to our quest for an ecologically responsible future and sustainable society, and in what specific ways. I shall develop a model of ecological utopias as a distant point of orientation, or as a ‘navigational compass’. In this model ecotopias may gradually influence the course of concrete decision making in the direction of a future sustainable society. In this context, a strategic issue to be confronted by the green movement is to look for an eco-friendly view on ‘the good life’ and the ‘art of living’. The basic dimensions of a sustainable lifestyle and an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’ are that society’s focus should be shifted from ‘having’ to ‘being’, and to find a balanced configuration of the vita activa: action, work and labour. It is also vital to find forms of hedonism which are independent of mass consumerism, to relate our material consumption to our ecological footprints in systematic ways, and to cultivate ecological virtues and moral character. One of today’s main questions is how we can all live comfortably and well, within the limited ecological boundaries of the earth. On the basis of serious warnings (the 2007 IPCC reports, the Stern report, etc.) concerning the depletion of resources, vastly diminishing biodiversity, global warming The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 77–100 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004007

77

78

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

and rising sea levels, it can be argued that in the long run our modern materialistic and hedonistic lifestyles are simply untenable. How can the citizens of Western societies now be convinced that it is worthwhile to reject contemporary conceptions of living happily and well, and to opt for a joyful and creative ‘art of living’ in which less materialistic pleasures, ecologically responsible behaviour, and consuming differently are dominant? The dilemma of ecological constraints in our lives has renewed the interest in classic philosophical and utopian questions such as ‘what is the good life?’ and ‘how to live responsibly?’ And also: what do we exactly mean by ‘the art of living’ in an age in which we face the risks of irreversible damage to the environment? In this chapter, I discuss the ecological-utopian debates on ‘the good life’ and explore a number of new visions and perspectives on an ecological ‘art of living’ (ars vitae), in which alternative ideas of pleasure, enjoyment and happiness play a crucial role. In this respect, a fundamental question is where people might find the inspiration to deal innovatively with serious environmental problems in today’s world. In my view, a collective lack of ideas prevails when it comes to the future of our society and the global images of ecological sustainability. The major ideological differences do not appear to exist anymore and there is an absence of grand, inspiring ideas. At the same time, however, it is clear that in debates about sustainability, inspiring visions of the future will have to play an important role. Who will actually envision and create an environmentally responsible society and develop the aforementioned innovative visions and perspectives on an ecologically sound ‘art of living’? In my opinion, it is the task of political parties, the environmental movement, writers and philosophers to envisage a future society in which harmony with nature is achieved. It is often forgotten that in the past one could find different allencompassing visions, as well as evocative images of a sustainable society and an ecological ‘art of living’, in the so-called utopian tradition within the history of political theory. The dilemma, however, is that nowadays utopian thinking has become discredited to an increasing degree. The notion of utopia rarely receives any recognition in politics; instead it is more often seen as a daydream – a dangerous, romantic and unreachable fantasy. According to modern political thinkers such as Jean-Franc- ois Lyotard, Michael Walzer and Francis Fukuyama, utopias do not seem to suit a period that is characterized by pragmatism, postmodernism, and a lack of faith in all-encompassing ideologies and idealistic political visions.1 According to these critics, no single absolute truth exists nor can be expressed in an utopian ‘blueprint’. These critics emphasize the dangers of

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

79

seeking the greatest human happiness and hoping to achieve political perfection. In their view, utopias are essentially ‘totalitarian’ in nature and human history has shown that utopian experiments to create a perfect life on earth have only succeeded in bringing an inhuman society (The former Soviet-Union, China, North-Korea, Cuba).2 It cannot be denied that the utopian tradition has different negative characteristics, but in my view we can still derive inspiration and hope from specific ecological utopias and learn from their ideas and ideals. To reflect on the complexity of future conceptions and sustainability in the West, in this chapter, I investigate whether it is worthwhile to consult the different ecological utopias to be found in the history of political philosophy. In the first section, the main weaknesses and limitations of ecological utopias are analysed. In what ways do they obviously fall short and deserve fundamental criticism? The second section explores whether ecotopias are capable of providing a useful contribution to our quest for an ecologically responsible future and a sustainable society, and in what specific ways. What is the importance of the diverse environmental utopias for the current social debate on sustainability and green lifestyles, and can we really manage without the ecotopian visions, as is often asserted by post-modern philosophers? The third section deals with the question what the basic foundational principles of a viable and attractive sustainable society are. The fourth section examines the various dimensions of an alternative and promising sustainable lifestyle and an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’. Finally, the main conclusion is drawn.

LIMITATIONS OF ECOTOPIAS What are the most obvious weaknesses and limitations of ecotopias? In what ways do they obviously fall short and deserve fundamental criticism? Answers to these questions are highly important to realistically assess the ultimate value of ecological utopias in general for the construction of the future and sustainability. The importance of utopias must not be underestimated, as I believe is generally the case nowadays; on the other hand, the value of the ecotopian genre should not be overestimated either. A first limitation of ecological utopias is that they describe the ideal society as having a static final form that does not seem all that desirable. For instance Thomas More, William Morris, Bernard Skinner, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Callenbach and Murray Bookchin present an image of a society in which a state of equilibrium, harmony and peace predominates. A stable

80

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

state prevails in their utopias with, in principle, a minimum of movement and change. This static aspect, however, is unmistakably at odds with the dynamic, quickly changing events and processes of real modern life. (But see the work on critical utopias which refuse such closure: for example by Sargent, 1994; Moylan, 1987, 2000; Sargisson, 1996.) According to prominent organizational theorists such as Gareth Morgan, Peter F. Drucker and Tom Peters, present-day society is above all characterized by a continuing increase in complexity (Morgan, 2004; Drucker, 2002; Peters, 2006). They present the modern world as being characterized by turbulent social, technological and organizational developments; and they focus attention on the phenomenon that in reality we are time and again confronted with the most unexpected situations. In view of this, it is remarkable that even modern ecological thinkers such as Callenbach and Bookchin basically still adhere to a comparatively static, ‘stagnating’ model of society. With the current level of knowledge, one would expect that these modern utopian writers would attempt to consider a social system that is in ‘dynamic equilibrium’, that is, that there is – in the terms of the American political scientist Aaron Wildavski – sufficient ‘resilience’, elasticity and flexibility built into the society, so that the system is less susceptible to internal and external disruptions and is each time capable of regaining a new equilibrium on its own (Wildavski, 1988, Chapters 4 and 5). As the study of communicative and regulating processes in organisms and machines (cybernetics) shows, the fundamental characteristic of natural and social systems is movement rather than stagnation. Seldom does one find a completely static equilibrium in such systems, but rather processes of continuous adjustment and change that lead to a new balance, a constantly changing equilibrium. By thinking about an ideal ecological society primarily in static terms, ecotopians do injustice to reality and show too little appreciation of the need for a flexible organization of society that takes account of the necessity of elasticity, dynamism and adaptability. The ecological utopias further assume an extreme degree of ‘isolation’; a second shortcoming. The static equilibrium that authors such as More, Morris, Skinner, Huxley, Callenbach and Bookchin attempt to achieve depends upon their ideal societies being in complete isolation. They situate their utopias on a remote island (More, Morris, Huxley), in an isolated environment (Skinner, Bookchin) or in a completely secluded nation (Callenbach). Contact with outsiders is considered threatening by these thinkers, because bad influences, disruptive ideas or behaviour patterns introduced from outside could directly endanger the extremely delicate balance of their ideal societies. (But see the ecotopias of Kim Stanley

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

81

Robinson: The Pacific Edge and The Mars Trilogy.) Few people will be attracted by this requirement of isolation and separation, which also exposes the extreme vulnerability of losing the fiercely desired equilibrium. Nowadays, maintaining intensive contacts with others, everywhere in the world, is considered a good thing. The development of mass media (radio, television, newspapers) and new information networks (such as the worldwide Internet) are incompatible with the isolation that these authors think is necessary for maintaining an elaborate social, economic and ecological equilibrium. This makes it more urgent to search for political institutions that – despite setbacks, conflicts, continual changes and disruptive developments – are capable of ensuring there is sufficient adaptability, so that the stability of the social, economic and ecological system can be maintained. In this respect, the ecotopian thinkers have insufficiently explored the political-institutional framework necessary for an ecologically sound society. Next to these two points, ecological utopias, by and large, tend to present a limited variety of lifestyles (however, an exception is again The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson). Ecotopian thinkers actually tend to assume that there is only one good, ecologically sound way of living: people must live a more austere, frugal and simpler life to be able to preserve nature and the environment. The uniformity of the inhabitants, their rather monotonous clothing; their conventional, intellectual, artistic and creative activities; and their unceasing environmentally sound behaviour will hardly excite most readers. The often total lack of ‘silliness’, excesses, and spontaneity in these utopias shows much less variety in lifestyles than there (fortunately) is in present-day society. It is striking that Ernest Callenbach is the only one to notice this dilemma. He appears to be thoroughly aware that the decreased variety of lifestyles and the resulting uniformity, goodness and predictability of behaviour need to be offset. In his Ecotopia he devotes detailed attention to ritualistic and competitive ‘War Games’ (Callenbach, 1975, pp. 71–76). At first I was completely surprized by these passages and could hardly understand what he meant. Later on it occurred to me that Callenbach realized that the Ecotopians, with their moderated, pacifistic, and environmentally friendly way of living, occasionally do need some exciting and dangerous adventures. Since it is understood that the future is highly uncertain and social changes are often unmanaged, uncontrolled and unpredictable in nature, my approach do not attempt to use a blueprint to create a completely new society. The complex nature of society is too great for this, governmental structures generally do not have the required precision, actual developments

82

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

seldom run according to the intended plan, and the results are mostly unanticipated, and sometimes even diametrically opposed to the original intentions and expectations (Weber, 1982, pp. 53–60, and also Sargent, 1994). In this view of utopia as a politico-navigational compass, due consideration is given to the problems of converting from a polluting to an ecologically stable society. There is no complete break from the existing social system, because it is understood – as for instance Edmund Burke has argued – that it would be foolish and even dangerous to abruptly terminate the existing system (Burke, 1979, pp. 152, 281). The guiding principle is ‘to rebuild the ship while at sea’: our society is not like a ship in dry-dock, but is rather in the midst of the turbulent waves of worldwide economic growth and environmental degradation, and must be reconstructed during this difficult journey. Society does not lend itself to being placed in dry-dock: society cannot be temporarily stopped for a large-scale overhaul. The underlying idea is that the different ecological utopias in the history of political theory can supply us with meaningful questions, points of reference, ideas, perspectives and general criteria, but not any plan for a complete and definitive final stage that can be realized in practice. Ecological utopias can, as a distant point of orientation or as a navigational compass, influence the course of concrete decision-making in a country such as, the Netherlands. Can the continuous expansion of Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) lead to an ecologically stable society? Does the construction of a high-speed magnetic rail line encourage such a society, and how – based on the ‘stable-state principle’ – could such a line work best? What will be the impact of increased housing construction in urban areas on outlying green areas, and on an ecologically responsible development of such areas? The value of ecological utopias is again and again that they can inspire the making of more environmentally friendly choices when such concrete decisions must be made: in that way they can promote shaping a sustainable future. Instead of trying to achieve a ‘perfect, pollution-free eco-society’, ecotopian ideals can be used as ‘utopian compasses’ when making policy decisions, and working in a flexible, subtle and gradual manner towards a generally more ecologically sound society. The general idea is that an ecotopian ideal is not a fixed, abstract final goal, but rather can help make a clear distinction between the many decisions to be faced, so decision-making can turn out in favour of the environment: ultimately the many small changes in course can add up to a substantial benefit. In any case, it makes sense to consider ecotopian ideals and ideas and – where they can make a difference – give more ecologically sound decisions a chance.

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

83

There is indeed room in this strategy – as in Ebenezer Howard’s vision – for idealized images to stimulate creative ideas, to help determine one’s own position, and to orientate oneself, but pragmatic solutions are consistently chosen for concrete policy decisions, and the value of tests and experiments is emphasized. Howard repeatedly states that policy choices need to be based on real-life situations, not on pure ideological grounds. In this way, the ship of state – assisted by the navigational compass – deliberately embarks upon a more ecologically sound course, without aiming rigidly at a completely fixed destination. This method can lead to more profound adaptations and reforms in the medium term, which can still be re-adjusted and tested under Karl Popper’s motto: ‘if they go wrong, the damage is not very great and a re-adjustment not very difficult’ (Popper, 1974, p. 159). In this approach, pragmatism, flexibility and intelligent adaptive behaviour predominate. The main ideas of this compass model are learning how to deal with complexity, conflicts and setbacks; learning from mistakes and successes and learning by trial and error to set a ‘pragmatic’ course in the general direction of a stable-state society. The idea that an ideal, ‘magnificent’ final eco-state is achievable and desirable is replaced by the idea that a strategy of intelligent adaptation, guiding and experimenting is much less dogmatic and will enable society to more efficiently react to unexpected events and developments (also see the argument against Popper in Sargent, 1994).

THE VALUE OF ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATION As I already stated, the ecotopian tradition has different negative characteristics that should not be ignored. The ecotopians’ perceptions are anything but flawless, and it would be careless to accept their ideals as perfect (also Moylan, 2000; Sargisson, 1996). It is noteworthy, however, to realize that most critics of utopias ask the following set of questions: would I want to live in this utopia? Is this utopia feasible in practice? How realistic are the premises underlying the foundation of this utopia? Where could the introduction of this utopia lead? What does history teach us about human nature and about the so-called utopian communities that have actually been set up? Those who ask such questions will end up rejecting the utopian genre, since probably most of the answers will be negative. It is possible, however, to study utopias with a completely different set of questions in

84

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

mind: what can I learn from this utopia? What insights and practical wisdom can be gained from it? What striking contrasts are evoked by this utopia, to stimulate our imagination and possibly enable us to more clearly reflect on political issues? To what extent does it provide a useful and challenging way to solve existing problems? Is this utopia a source of original ideas and does it indicate relevant ways for solving our modern social problems? Can the ideas from this utopia contribute to modern-day discussions and enrich political debate on ecological lifestyles and a future sustainable society? Those who ask such questions approach the utopian tradition from a completely different perspective: they are not out to find fault with utopias, but instead look for useful elements in the utopian genre; they seek the ‘relevance of the utopia’. This is done in complete awareness of all the dangers and risks of utopias, without wanting to blindly follow them, or carelessly bringing them into practice. The utopian tradition is examined for useful ideas, enlightening images, challenging perspectives. The critics such as Lyotard, Walzer and Fukuyama have, without a doubt, a number of strong arguments, but they unjustly close themselves off from the other side of utopias, the ‘inspirational’ side, which also deserves to be seen. The critics are like the sailors in Homer’s Odyssey who avoid a trip to the tempting singing Sirens, because they are scared of being entranced and thus losing their lives. Would they not be better off if – like Odysseus – they bound themselves to the boat’s great mast to be able to hear the seductive song of the Sirens, without endangering themselves (his crew had stuffed their ears with bee’s wax to avoid hearing the singing)? The modernday readers can follow Odysseus’ example: permit themselves to attentively listen to the ideals of the utopians, enjoy the charms and appeal of their highly imaginative propositions, without completely putting themselves at their mercy. The reader will understand that this is the attitude consciously adopted in the following part of this chapter. Let me now turn to the central question of whether ecotopias are capable of providing a useful contribution to our quest for an ecologically responsible future and a sustainable society, and in what specific ways. What then is the importance of the diverse environmental utopias for the current social debate on sustainability and green lifestyles, and can we really manage without the ecotopian visions, as is often asserted by postmodern philosophers? I shall appraise and comment on the appeal and value of ecological utopias for the modern environmental and lifestyle debate in three distinctive ‘images’.

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

85

The history of ecological utopias can counterbalance those approaches that pay insufficient attention to environmental degradation and the deterioration of nature. The ecological utopians try to open our eyes, by providing an interpretative framework by which the current degradation of the environment and the decline of nature become ‘recognizable’: they offer us the opportunity to look at the world through ‘green-tainted glasses’. By evoking ecological utopian images, they provide alternative viewpoints, which allow us to observe the world in completely different ways. It is a valuable function of political utopias to provide alternative frameworks of interpretation, frames of reference and hypothetical positions. They may enable us to take a detached view, to think in contrasts and perceive alternatives which are hard to imagine. We may expect that a close and deep analysis of ecological utopias can lead to an increased number of interesting paradigms, by which our polluting contemporary society may be analyzed more successfully on the one hand, and by which we can learn on the other, to think independently about a feasible future eco-society. In many ways ecological utopias can function as a useful diagnostic and analytic instrument. Just like medical specialists who examine human bodies with the help of advanced scanning apparatuses to diagnose diseases, the ecological utopians try to look under the skin of modern society. These thinkers are not satisfied with superficial analyses of (parts of) the environmental issue, but want to uncover its root causes. They pose the fundamental questions of how far ecological problems are rooted in the current economic, social and political structures and whether they are ‘inherent’ in the very organization and structure of society. They endeavour to produce a coherent and ‘holistic’ approach of environmental problems, which deserves attention and may stimulate people to think critically. A good example in this context is William Morris, who attacked the unbridled production of goods in the commercial age which only led to useless and shoddy articles, caused the annihilation of landscapes and a depletion of resources (Morris, 1983, Chapter XV). But by far the best example is the modern American theorist Murray Bookchin who warns against the narrow environmental approach which is dominant in our era and which he calls ‘environmentalism’. In this line of thought the actual social and economic order is taken for granted and instrumental, ‘technological’ means and a general policy of small and gradual changes are used to try to minimize harm to human health and well-being. Bookchin argues that this ‘superficial’ line of policy will not be successful, since our environmental dislocations are deeply rooted in our anti-ecological society

86

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

and are irremediable by piecemeal, single-issue reforms (Bookchin, 1990, p. xiv). These considerations are not unconvincing and may explain why, although governments have implemented specific environmental policies; the current ecological situation is deteriorating rather than improving (Milieu- en Natuurplanbureau, 2009). Political utopians base their ideals on personal experiences and truths and by this strategy provoke opposing opinions. Anyone who makes a study of utopias is necessarily tempted to enter into a discussion with the author and commit oneself to evaluate one’s own patterns of thought and one’s ideals in life. This is certainly true for ecological utopian visions. By actively investigating these utopias, one is almost forced to form an opinion on the ultimate goals of society and economy, the main goals and opportunities for the future, the desirable choices and ideals for an ecologically responsible society. The reader is challenged to reflect on effective strategies, possible scenarios and models of a future society. In interaction with the ecotopias conceived in the past, one can try to design a contrasting and richly coloured picture of defensible developments and trends in the area of infrastructure, technology, economic organization, life style, environmental policy. The ecotopias are well suited to provide this interactive medium. They can inspire us to take a broader view and to reflect critically on a multitude of relevant subjects. Utopians remind us that purposeful choices can be made and that there is a prospect of a better or ‘cleaner’ future: utopias keep ideals alive and can offer hope for futuristic visions. It is remarkable that many utopias describe a society situated in the distant future. Political thinkers use utopias as an instrument to look forward and get an impression of what lies waiting in the future. By looking ahead and conceiving of a distant future, the utopian wants to get a comprehensive view on the overall situation. Given the actual pressure on our nature and environment, it is not a luxury to compose a detailed model of the political, social and economic organization of a future society. Ecological utopias can contribute to the complicated task of conceptualizing plausible scenarios for a clean and ecologically balanced society. This aspect of ecotopias is exemplified by the fact that ecotopian authors take a long-time perspective and predict the interests of coming generations. Again and again they put the question ‘what does this policy decision imply for the longer term, for the generations that will come after us?’ This follows from the consideration that we live on earth only temporarily and have responsibilities towards our descendants. It is a strong point of the ecological utopians that they take the rights of future generations into account and are really concerned for remoter generations and the planet as a whole.

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

87

One of the most fascinating aspects of utopias in general and ecotopias in particular is and remains their visual dimension, creating an exciting ‘virtual reality’. Utopians are strongly inclined to sketching imaginative and expressive visions. The attraction of utopias can best be explained by their ‘pictorial’ character, the most fantastic and picturesque images being conjured up before the reader in a very ingenious way. In many senses there is a ‘magical quality’ about this ability to evoke colourful, exciting and meaningful images of sustainability through words alone. The image that emerges is that of utopia as a ‘laterna magica’, a magic lantern, the predecessor of modern projectors.3 Ecological utopias fit wonderfully well into this comparison. First, they excel in creating clear images of a possible future ecological society and, like a projector – and much in the way one looks at the projections of a magic lantern in the quiet of the dark – can evoke suggestive ‘pictures and images’. This allows us to imagine an ideal world and stimulates reflection on desirable models of the future and changes in society. Second, ecological utopian visions give us an opportunity to participate in an imaginary world, by dreaming away for a while and by entering a fictitious, ecologically sound society and to come to one’s senses. Third, this comparison can elucidate one of the earlier mentioned shortcomings of ecological utopias. Just like a laterna magica, the projected images on the screen may be colourful and exciting, but they remain essentially ‘static’: in contrast to modern projectors, which throw changing, ‘action’ pictures on the white screen, the lantern’s images hardly move. Despite this obvious deficiency, ecotopias can create appealing images and can be of use in discovering new directions and scenarios for the future, because they are able to stimulate our imaginative powers and provide us with multiple views and goals. It is noteworthy that in modern times this imaginative and expressive function of ecological utopias can obviously also be recognized in ‘Science Fiction’ and ‘New Age’ literature. In particular science fiction novels often depict a perfect future society in a literary form, applying ideals to every aspect of personal and social life. Just like in ecotopian thinking, science fiction literature almost inevitably leads the way to taking a stand and critically reconsidering one’s own opinions about happiness, the meaning of life, and the most desirable way in which economy, society and state should be organized. The reader is stimulated to break through fixed patterns of thinking and test unusual combinations of ideas. Various forms of New Age theory also criticize existing society and offer new ideals in an utopian way. New Age thinkers like Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, 1975, The Turning Point, 1982) and James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy, 1994) tend to use

88

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

an ecotopian mode of thinking to seek the happiest form of personal lifestyles. In this sense New Age theory can be seen as a further extension of ecological utopianism, with its emphasis on limits to growth, sufficiency, ‘ecofriendly and frugal living’, postmaterial values and sustainability.4 It seems to me that after this discussion of images and examples, the overall value and relevance of ecological utopias for the present-day social debate on sustainability and green lifestyles has been adequately established. In addition to the search for appealing images, making scenarios, conceiving of futuristic schemes, using the utopian imagination is one possible and justifiable means of reflection on a cleaner future. If we accept that an open and creative debate on sustainable development is necessary, I would suggest not to reject utopian designs and imagination but rather to apply them sensibly. Only by an open debate between scientifically supported notions, critical social visions and utopian-tinged fantasies, will a fruitful and worthwhile discussion on sustainability and ecologically responsible lifestyles in all their aspects, become feasible. In the Netherlands, for instance, the significance of ecological utopias for the present day social discussion on sustainability and eco-friendly lifestyles has already been taken seriously. Indeed, the Dutch Commission for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (NCDO, Amsterdam) has started an extensive programme to examine possible and preferable future economic and social developments. The Commission has argued that if one has no broader, comprehensive view on a future society, then one possesses no instrument, no compass at all to steer society in a sustainable direction, nor any idea about the kind of future we want to ‘avoid’ under all circumstances. By organizing debates and platform meetings of non-governmental organizations about future ‘ecological dream societies and imaginative visions’, the Commission is capable of providing a meaningful contribution to the quest for an ecologically responsible society.

PRINCIPLES OF A SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLE Those who have studied the IPCC reports published in 2001 and 2007 and have read many recent articles in prominent journals as Nature and Science will come to the conclusion that the current levels of production and consumption in the Western world are simply unsustainable. As I have argued elsewhere, this development will force us to reduce material consumption on a large scale, which in Western liberal democracies will imply a break with existing consumption patterns and prevailing views on

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

89

‘the good life’ and the ‘art of living’ (De Geus, 2003, Chapters 7–9). Let us now investigate the basic foundational principles of a viable and attractive sustainable society. First, I would like to argue that we should not aim for some perfectionist or purely idealistic form of the ‘art of living’, ‘the good life’ and human happiness. It was shown that the history of political philosophy has learned that is inadvisable to strive for forms of ultimate perfection and to try to realize a completely idealistic vision of living well. As was stated earlier, according to Karl Popper our knowledge and experience are too limited to rely on the state to implement extremely radical and sweeping changes in the organization of society or the lifestyles of individuals. To him this perfectionist or idealistic approach is filled with too many uncertainties and risks: undesired results will often be the consequence, as will unexpected developments and discrepancies between theory and practice (Popper, 167–169, but see also Sargent, 1994 on Popper). This is as much to say that it is far more wise to opt for a somewhat ‘pragmatic’ strategy, one in which our interpretation of an alternative and viable sustainable lifestyle and an ecological ‘art of living’ are based on real-life situations, not merely on ‘purely’ utopian and idealistic grounds. In this approach – which actually is still ‘utopian inspired’ – pragmatism, flexibility and intelligent adaptive behaviour are preferred: the most important goal is to set a pragmatic course in the general direction of an ecologically sustainable society by means of citizens learning to live well and in socially responsible ways. Second, it must be accepted that whoever wants to make changes to the ‘art of living’ for the sake of protecting our environment will have to acknowledge that modern society cannot thrive without a high variety of life styles and that a general right to human development and progress is to be maintained. In the past there have admittedly been strands of green political thinking that tended to prescribe very determinate ways of life and proposed a radical reduction of lifestyles. However, nowadays this far too narrowminded approach has been replaced by more realistic and freedom-oriented strategies that take into account the blessings and comforts of modern society. It is a mere fact of life that in Western liberal democracies freedom and diversity of lifestyle, variety in general, and the existence of numerous possible forms of expression to live our lives well belong to the highest social values. We have to accept this great value of variety and plurality of lifestyles in general, and a high variety and plurality of ecologically sound lifestyles in particular: sustainability and biodiversity must go hand in hand with lifestyle diversity. Fortunately, nowadays there is widespread tendency in society to believe that since there are many forms of sustainable societies

90

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

imaginable, there also exist many environmentally responsible lifestyles and ecological ‘arts of living’. Third, another basic starting point is that Western liberal democracies have responsibilities not only towards the present generation but also towards the highly vulnerable future generations. Taking this assumption into account, we can defend the case that ultimately governments do have a right to ask for some kind of ‘sacrifices’ from today’s consumers, more precisely, that citizens decrease their overall levels of material consumption and are prepared to critically rethink and reformulate their firmly established visions on living ‘the good life’. Fourth, it has now become evident that changes in the interpretations and perceptions of ‘the good life’ and the ‘art of living’ are advisable not only for ecological but also for social, cultural and psychological reasons. International empirical research into feelings of happiness has concluded that materialist life styles do not positively correlate to feelings of felicity and bliss. Grosso modo, the increasing consumption and high levels of material affluence of the past five decades in the Western world have not made people happier (Kasser, 2002, p. 22, 59, 72) and also the World Data Base of Happiness on the Internet). Critical social thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Ivan Illich and more recently American sociologist Juliet Schor and psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard M. Ryan have pointed out that once people are above poverty levels of income, an increase in wealth has no positive effect in terms of happiness or well-being (Kasser, 2002; Schor, 1998). On the contrary, materialism and the aspiration for high consumption levels in most cases actually leads to extra strain and stress: abundance does not make people happier. Fully in line with ecological utopian thinking as analysed earlier in this chapter, in their analysis ‘the good life’ is not sought in prosperity, but individual and social happiness is instead to be found in a reduction of material pleasures and in restraining human wants. Let us now turn to the basic dimensions of an alternative and promising sustainable lifestyle and an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’.

BEING VERSUS HAVING It is my firm view that contemporary patterns of mass consumption and fullfledged hedonism are essentially a social and cultural problem. The current forms of consumption, pleasure seeking and happiness are primarily a social and cultural problem related to an ‘outward’ concept of human well-being.

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

91

Our Western liberal culture basically focuses on outward appearances, status and success. Referring to the work of ecological utopians such as Henry Thoreau, Bernard Skinner, Aldous Huxley, Murray Bookchin and social thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Erich Fromm, it can be argued that in modern times we increasingly live in a society of ‘having’, instead of ‘being’. In the case of ‘having’ the emphasis of well-being in human life mainly lies on the possession of material goods and things (Fromm, 1976). In the case of ‘being’, however, our lives, feelings and aspirations are directed to other dimensions which are situated in the personal and social sphere. Important examples are carefulness, friendship, general well-being, self-realization, thoughtfulness for the environment, but also love and friendship. Whereas in Western politics and economics there is a continuous striving for the satisfaction of material needs and the acquisition of goods, the attention for inter-human and spiritual aspects is diminishing. In our explorative search for a sustainable lifestyle and an ecological ‘art of living’, herein lies the key to an inspiring answer on the question whether taking into account the existing ecological limits in the form of reduced levels of consumption, can enrich our lives and make people more happy and satisfied. At the end in a less high level consumption society the overall emphasis will not be on the outward characteristics of status and success, but on the inward aspects of human well-being. One can think of relaxation, balance, a focus on and attention for our fellow-beings (human and non-human), the enjoyment of pleasant and meaningful work, contributing to the community, but also the importance of the spiritual: just to be and exist in a dignified, relaxed and elegant way, instead of constantly being eager to accumulate possessions of whatever kind (Fromm, 1976). In the last decades this fundamental insight has indeed been confirmed by extensive empirical sociological and psychological research. The wish to possess more and more material goods often places heavy burdens on modern citizens. Uncertainty and stress are significantly more common among materialistic oriented people, just as feelings of alienation and mental depression. Materialists have to work harder and longer hours to be able to purchase all their new goods, and also to maintain, repair and replace them at the end of the endless cycle of work and spend. Because of this, materialists have less energy and time to spend on the most elementary forms of well-being: living, caring, loving, learning, the enjoyment of for instance art, sports and humour, in order to keep fit mentally and physically and to become a more complete human being (also Kasser, 2002, pp. 97–116).

92

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

BALANCE OF LIFE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN FULFILMENT In general terms, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is one of the most prominent modern thinkers on ‘the good life’ and the ‘art of living’. In The Human Condition, she argues that there are three fundamental human activities: labour, work and action. Labour is the activity that is linked to the biological processes of the human body and the satisfaction of direct physical needs, like the provision of food and drink. Work is the activity that creates an artificial world of enduring objects, to provide a stable living environment for humans. Action corresponds to the fundamental human condition of plurality and is directed at the creation of a public sphere in which people can enjoy political freedom (Arendt, 1985, pp. 7, 50–54). Arendt contends that while action was of the highest significance in the Greek ‘polis’, in ranking (followed by work and finally labour), in modern times this hierarchy has been completely reversed. Political changes resulting in the systematic loss of so-called spaces of political action and the loss of distinction between the private and public realms have contributed to this reversal. Nowadays, the value of labour and the production of consumption goods are now consistently overrated, whereas the value of the more meaningful activities of acting in the public realm and creating lasting products have almost disappeared (Arendt, 1985, pp. 294–305). Arendt argues that in our era the goal of human activities (vita activa) is no longer to be found in sustaining a public sphere for political action or in creative work, but in routine labour, growing economic welfare, abundance and mass consumption. Nowadays, growing wealth and the greatest consumer happiness of the greatest number are the basic aims of social and political life (Arendt, 1985, p. 133). With this conclusion, Arendt offers the key to a new understanding of ‘the good life’ and an ecological ‘art of living’. For Arendt, the central issue in the debate is not primarily about the necessity to immediately reduce levels of consumption and making an end to our waste economy. Instead, she focuses on reflecting on the ‘condition humaine’ in terms of equilibrium, stability and balance. Her fascinating alternative is to look for a balanced configuration of the just mentioned components of the vita activa. In the words of Kerry H. Whiteside who wrote a most instructive and valuable article on this subject: An active life combines labor, work and action in a unique configuration. Labor both produces and respects a worked-upon world of more permanent creations; this world in turn, derives its significance from public deliberation and memorialisation. Deliberation

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

93

needs labor’s energies in order to maintain its sense of life; it needs work’s accomplishments in order to appear. Maintaining the proper ordering of human existence is a matter of correctly integrating the three activities. Life becomes distorted if it is given over exclusively to laboring and consumption or to work and instrumentalisation, or to deliberation and public display. Thus, adhering to this irreducible pluralism of activities leads us away from a life dominated by labor and consumption that – as many ecological political thinkers have concluded – is incompatible with the welfare of all living things. (Whiteside, 1994, p. 354)

All in all, this suggests a truly fundamental insight to any critical rethinking of ‘the good life’ and an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’: human fulfilment and living a rewarding, complete and well-spent life can best be approached from the perspective of a proper and balanced ordering of action, work and labour, which form the basic components that constitute a happy, satisfying and good human life. To be sure, the basic dimensions of a sustainable lifestyle and an ecological ‘art of living’ do not exclude every form of hedonism, as has also been argued by many ecological utopian thinkers. The dominant forms of hedonism which stress buying huge amounts of luxury goods in the pursuit of pleasure and excitement are ignored here. However, there are forms of hedonism in existence which certainly will not cause any serious environmental pollution or nature degradation. As Henry David Thoreau has aptly put it in his inspiring Walden (1966), apart from the well-known materialistic, superficial hedonism, there is also a more authentic hedonism which is independent of the seductions of the world of goods and consumer society. This is what might be called a ‘spiritual naturalism’ which rejoices in the pleasures of nature. For example, our senses enable us to have intense feeling of happiness when looking at a beautiful tree, a bird circling in the sky, or a butterfly in our garden. As Thoreau explains these almost sensuous experiences are actually like a gift of nature, without any financial expenses. This kind of hedonism aims for pleasure of our senses, but it clearly does so with respect and awe for our natural environment. This kind of hedonism is in my view best called ‘sustainable hedonism’. It is essentially spiritually oriented, leaves nature unharmed, does not intervene with an ecologically-balanced society and is not obsessed with the relentless acquisition of novel and luxurious goods and services.

ECOLOGICAL LIMITS Earlier, I argued that a great diversity of lifestyles is a fact of modern life. However what is also needed, is a fundamental re-examination of the proper

94

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

‘ecological limits’ of various lifestyles and ‘arts of living’ which we all appreciate for so many good reasons. In the end it is not vitally important ‘how’ citizens exactly shape their lives and for which very specific notion of the ‘art of living’ they actually choose, provided they are willing – regardless of the specific lifestyle they choose – to learn to live within the borders set by the carrying capacity of the Earth. This will imply that individual citizens should consider that their so-called ecological footprint ought to stay within more or less reasonable limits. As Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees have noted, the ecological footprint is a measure of the land area needed to sustain the levels of resource consumption and waste discharge by the population of a country (Wackernagel & Rees, 1995, pp. 51–53). Recent footprint analyses show that the available ecological space on Earth is approximately 1.8 hectares, whereas the ecological footprint of people in rich countries like the United States (9.5), Australia (7.7) and Canada (6.4) has expanded massively (Jones & Jacobs, 2006, p. 216). If every person in the world would enjoy an American, Australian or Canadian standard of life, we would need three or even four Earths. It is relatively easy to estimate one’s average ecological footprint with the aid of a quick scan by a simple questionnaire, on the Internet (see for example http://www.footprint.org). In fact, it only takes a few minutes to find out for yourself which forms of consumption add most to our impact on the Earth (e.g., household gas consumption, car use, flying, electricity use, high meat consumption). Overall, people should be much better informed by government schemes and for instance ‘eco-labelling’ about what the ecological footprints of certain consumption goods – relative to the average ‘footprint’ available to humans – are, indicating land use, amounts of energy used, and carbon dioxide emissions. The ultimate question of our times, I would argue, is whether we individually and collectively will become fully aware of the impact of our behaviour on the Earth and start to link our material consumption to global ecological constraints: of being aware and ‘mindful’ of the effects of our daily actions, especially our consumption choices. We must learn to understand the approximate amount of environmental space which we use and will have to be prepared to reduce our overall claims on land, energy and other natural resources. This is logically implied in the argument of Wackernagel and Rees for a so-called ‘fair Earthshare’ of 1.8 hectares for every inhabitant of the planet: ‘The amount of land each person would get if all the ecologically productive land on Earth were divided among the present world population’ (Wackernagel & Rees, 1995, p. 53). In sum,

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

95

provided that people do not irresponsibly exceed their fair share of the Earth, an ecologically responsible lifestyle need not be one-dimensional or bleak. It can just as easily be cheerful, colourful, exciting and rewarding.

ECOLOGICAL VIRTUES In line with the analysis so far, as a central prerequisite of a sustainable lifestyle and an ‘utopian inspired’ ecological ‘art of living’ is the cultivation of ‘ecological virtue’, as is also suggested by my Irish colleague and green theorist John Barry. He convincingly rejects the claim that an ecologically balanced society can only be achieved through a complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, a far-going degree of self-denial or asceticism. There is no good reason to condemn all forms of consumption of goods and services in our world. Barry underlines, however, that it will be necessary to explore the cultivation and development of green virtues and ‘green’ moral character: To use ecological terminology, virtues may be thought of as character traits, modes of being which help to find the best ‘adaptive fit’ between the individual and her interests and the environment (both social and natural) she inhabits. The importance of green virtues for the green position resides in the necessity of self-restraint, prudence and foresight so that long-term (i.e. sustainable) well-being is not sacrificed or undermined by desires to satisfy immediate self-interest. (Barry, 1999, p. 35)

In fact, ecological virtues may correct human frailties and in particular prevent inaction or ‘weakness of will’ (in Greek: ‘Akrasia’), that is, the gap between knowledge/belief and action. Many of us know what we should do (consume and travel less by air, be less selfish, etc.) but lack the will (energy, courage) to do so. In the words of Barry, the general idea behind this approach is that: the cultivation of the ecological virtues, the creation of ecological character and dispositions, help create and maintain a proper balance within social-environmental relations. The emphasis on character stresses the importance of cultivating dispositions and modes of action which will discourage acting from wantonness or ignorance. (Barry, 1999, p. 67)

My strong sense is that John Barry is fully right in arguing for the need of an elaborated and sophisticated theory of ecological virtues and moral character. Fundamentally, the idea of ecological virtue raises essential issues concerning the general attitudes of humans towards nature, the importance of material consumption in human life, and how we can live ‘the good life’ in

96

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

responsible ways without endangering long-term sustainability. Rather than focusing only on broad and impersonal social concepts like a ‘stable state society’ or a ‘green market economy’, the notion of ecological virtues (and of course vices) particularly concentrates on our individual attitudes and actions, our fundamental moral ideals and personal views on living ‘the good life’. By focusing on ecological virtues our private concern with moral character and habits can be increased, which may enable us to avoid ecological vices and weakness of will, and to develop modes of action and consumption that are beneficial towards nonhumans and future generations. In principle, virtues like prudence, respect, care, moderation, self-control, tolerance, balance of activities and awareness of limits to growth and material welfare, seem to be of vital importance here.

ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP AND CONSUMERISM Finally, one of the most radical changes in current conceptions of ‘the good life’ and an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’ in times of worldwide environmental crisis is to be found in the area of ecological citizenship and ecological consumerism. In a similar vein as green political theorist Andrew Dobson, I would like to describe ecological citizenship as a citizenship in which the obligations and responsibilities of humans ‘extend through time as well as space , towards generations yet to be born’ (Dobson, 2003, p. 106). Ecological citizens have learned to take into account their moral and environmental obligations and responsibilities towards other humans on earth and future generations. Ecological consumerism can be described as a way of consumer behaviour in which the selection and purchasing of products and services is not based on considerations of utility maximization, individual profit and enjoyment, but on considerations and feelings of social responsibility and the general burden placed on our environment. This will imply that in the future politics will be interfering increasingly in the buying behaviour and consumption options of the citizens as consumers, since ultimately an overall reduction of levels of material consumption is a quintessential strategy in the abatement of environmental pollution and the realization of ecological sustainability in the world.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS The problem outlined at the beginning is how the world’s citizens can all live comfortably and well, within the limited ecological means of the earth.

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

97

In relation to this, a crucial question is where nowadays people can find the inspiration to deal innovatively with the many alarming environmental problems such as climate change, global warming and loss of biodiversity. In my view, a collective lack of ideas prevails when it concerns the future of our society and the global images of ecological sustainability. For this reason, I discussed the often neglected ecological-utopian debates on an environmentally sustainable society, conceptions of ‘the good life’ and utopian inspired perspectives on an ecological ‘art of living’ (‘ars vitae’), in which alternative ideas of pleasure, enjoyment and happiness play a crucial role. It was shown that the utopian literary genre is today under severe attack. Modern political thinkers such as Jean-Franc- ois Lyotard, Michael Walzer and Francis Fukuyama tend to think that utopias are of little importance and that they should even be ostracized. To my mind this is a most regrettable development and a clearly premature step. Particularly in an era of unfettered, large-scale and irreversible degradation of the environment, there is a need for creative and innovative ‘counter-images’ of an alternative society, one that protects and respects nature. It is my contention that ecological utopias represent a most pertinent form of social critique; they can truly function as a rich source of ideals for a different arrangement of contemporary society. The current environmental debate can surely use the inspiring contribution of ecological utopias, in particular where the discussions remain superficial and show a lack of imaginative power and foresight. Utopian ideas can increase our consciousness of the environmental crisis and incite citizens and politicians to really begin the quest for a sustainable society and ecologically responsible lifestyles. In the post-modern era as much as in any other, to construct a future sustainable society, we cannot dispense with the inspiration and innovative power of the utopian ecological imagination. However, taking into account their weaknesses and limitations, I certainly do not plead for an uncritical acceptance of ecological utopias, let alone for actually trying to implement them in the modern world, but instead for taking them seriously and using them as an essentially valuable approach that can open our minds. A central conclusion of this chapter is to choose a more modest model of utopia and not to use it as the perfect building plan, but as a politiconavigational compass. Ecological utopias can serve as a distant point of orientation and influence the course of concrete decision-making, repeatedly inspiring people to make more environmentally friendly choices. My general argument has been to look for an alternative utopian inspired view on ‘the good life’ and an ecological ‘art of living.’ Such an alternative vision should

98

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

be based on pragmatism, a high variety of lifestyles, feelings of responsibility towards the present and future generations, and the empirical insight that abundance does not make people happier. The basic dimensions of a sustainable hedonism and an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’ are that society’s focus should be shifted from ‘having’ to ‘being’ and that it is advisable to find a balanced configuration of the ‘vita activa’: action, work and labour. It is also feasible to find forms of ‘sustainable hedonism’ which are independent of mass consumerism, to relate our material consumption to our ecological footprints in systematic ways, and also to cultivate ecological virtues and moral character. In addition, ecological citizens and consumers will – by means of trial and error – must be learn to live in responsible ways and to take notice of their fellow humans and future generations. All in all, I have to conclude that in the end an utopian inspired ecological ‘art of living’ implies a highly complex and permanent individual and social learning process which focuses on integrating individual freedom and diversity of lifestyles on the one side, and social-ecological and moral responsibilities towards our fellow humans and descendants on the other side. This can lead to a sustainable society: an alternative organization of society which is both effective, enjoyable and rewarding, while taking into account our fair share of the earth’s goods – in terms of our ecological footprint. Admittedly, utopia as an ‘enforceable and directly realizable blueprint’ for our society and lifestyles has been dead for a long time; but long live the critical, imaginative and ever still inspiring ecotopias that can learn us many worthwhile lessons concerning sustainability in general, the manifold dimensions of ‘the good life’, and a valuable ecological ‘art of living’.

NOTES 1. See for instance Lyotard (1979), Fukuyama (1993), and Walzer (1983). 2. More than 10 years ago, the Dutch philosopher Hans Achterhuis has published a very critical analysis of political and social utopias: De Erfenis van de Utopie (‘The Heritage of Utopia’, 1998). According to him, utopias are based on a misplaced ideal of unity and are fundamentally totalitarian in nature. In line with Karl Popper, Friedrich A. Hayek and Hannah Arendt, he cautions against dogmatically clinging to a utopian blueprint, since this can lead to violence, authoritarianism and restricted freedoms). In the past decade in the Netherlands, there has been an intensive debate in the media on these issues. Despite the severe criticism, I have argued in debates, books and articles that utopias can still be valuable, in particular for reasons of their

Utopian Sustainability: Ecological Utopianism

99

‘literary imagination’ and their ‘visual power’. Apart from this, there is of course a body of political and utopian theory that argues against this anti-utopian tradition: see first of all Lyman Tower Sergeant, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, in the Journal Utopian Studies; Susan McManus, Fictive Theories: Toward a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Theory; Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (eds.) Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, and their Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, the work of Lucy Sargisson and Saskia Poldervaart. 3. The idea of utopia as a magic latern came to me when I read the fascinating autobiography of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman with the title ‘Laterna Magica’ (Bergman, 1987). 4. However, an obvious difference between ecological utopianism and new age literature is that in the former the search for a clean society and sustainability is crucial and in the latter the search for spirituality and self-realization. Ecopolitics Online Journal 1(1), Winter 2007, 49.

REFERENCES Arendt, H. (1985). The human condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Barry, J. (1999). Rethinking green politics. London: Sage Publications. Bergman, I. (1987). Laterna magica. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Bookchin, M. (1990). Remaking society. Montre´al: Black Rose Books. Burke, E. (1979). Reflections on the revolution in France. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Callenbach, E. (1975). Ecotopia. Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books. Dobson, A. (2003). Citizenship and the environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drucker, P. F. (2002). Managing in the next society. Butterworth: Heineman. Fromm, E. (1976). To have, or to be? New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Fukuyama, F. (1993). The end of history and the last man. New York: Avon Books. de Geus, M. (2003). The end of over-consumption: Towards a lifestyle of moderation and selfrestraint. Utrecht: International Books. Jones, P. T., & Jacobs, R. (2006). Terra incognita. Gent: Academia Press. Kasser, T. (2002). The high price of materialism. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. Lyotard, F. (1979). La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Milieu- en Natuurplanbureau. (2009). Milieubalans 2009. Alphen aan de Rijn: H.D. Tjeenk Willink. Morgan, G. (2004). Images of organization. London: Sage Publications. Morris, W. (1983). News from nowhere. London: Kegan Paul. Moylan, T. (1987). Demand the impossible: Science fiction and the Utopian imagination. New York: Methuen. Moylan, T. (2000). Science fiction, Utopia, dystopia. Boulder: Westview. Peters, T. (2006). Liberation management. London: Pan Books. Popper, K. (1974). The open society and its enemies (Vol. 1). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sargent, L. (1994). Tower, ‘the three faces of utopianism revisited’. The Journal of Utopian Studies, 5(1), 1–37.

100

MARIUS

DE

GEUS

Sargisson, L. (1996). Contemporary feminist utopianism. London: Routledge. Schor, J. (1998). The overspent American. New York: Basic Books. Wackernagel, M., & Rees, W. (1995). Our ecological footprint: Reducing human impact on the earth. Gabriola Island: New Publishers. Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice; A decline of pluralism and equality. New York: Basic Books. Weber, M. (1982). Politik als Beruf. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Whiteside, K. H. (1994). Hannah Arendt and ecological politics. Environmental Ethics, 16(4), 339–358. Wildavski, A. (1988). Searching for safety. London: Transaction Publishers.

Website: http://www.footprint.org

CHAPTER 5 ENVIRONMENTAL EXPLOITATION: AN ANALYSIS AND TAXONOMY Gerry Nagtzaam INTRODUCTION The term ‘exploitation’ is much used both in common parlance and as a research term when examining environmental phenomena. However, when examining the plethora of writings on the environment it quickly becomes obvious that neither is there a commonly accepted definition of the term, nor has there been a critical examination of the concept. Consequently, the term ‘environmental exploitation’ is currently poorly understood, left unexplained or undertheorized. The failure to properly comprehend the concept is a serious gap in the environmental literature which needs to be addressed since it leads, inevitably, to normative confusion and policy errors. Given the paucity of analysis of environmental exploitation, it is necessary to approach this topic by examining opposing ideas. Unlike the term ‘environmental exploitation’, the concepts of environmental conservation and preservation are highly prominent in environmental writings. They have been debated and critiqued for well over a century and have formed the underpinning norms within global environmental regimes as diverse as the Antarctic and whaling regimes. When describing anthropogenic environmental damage and the efforts to ameliorate such destruction, other alternative definitions have been The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 101–116 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004008

101

102

GERRY NAGTZAAM

propounded by various researchers as superior to exploitation, conservation and preservation, for example, John Barry’s (1999) legitimate use versus illegitimate abuse of nature categories. However, despite these endeavours, the terms exploitation, conservation and preservation remain the preferred nomenclature of the majority of analysts and the global civil society, and thus will be examined in this chapter. When examining environmental philosophical and policy debates, environmental exploitation, despite being a key term, is rarely explored directly or defined. Rather, behaviour deemed to be exploitation is cast in a negative light, as something to be avoided or as an act to be stopped without considering either the definitional complexities or the term’s (im)moral underpinnings. This chapter seeks to better understand the term environmental exploitation and proposes to do so in the following ways. Since such exploitation is invariably portrayed as almost the ‘negative mirror image’ of conservation and/or preservation, this chapter will first critically examine these terms to see, if, by examining the ‘positive’, it can tease out a greater understanding of environmental exploitation. Further, the antecedents of exploitation will be critically explored with the aims of both historicizing the concept and building a greater picture of environmental exploitation. In non-environmental writings the term exploitation can be considered to be essentially contested. Advocates can, and do, assign a negative, positive or neutral value to the term without seeking to understand competing conceptions of the term. To better understand environmental exploitation, alternative definitions of exploitation from different academic fields will be examined. Lastly, this chapter will propose a working definition of environmental exploitation in the hope of generating a theoretical debate on the term. While divisions about the meaning of conservation or preservation will continue, it may be possible for all environmental researchers and practitioners to agree on what is meant by environmental exploitation and its attendant practices.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION The concept of environmental conservation is often portrayed as a breaking away from the exploitative approach of the past and accepting a more rational, cautious approach to the husbanding of potentially scarce resources without actually defining what such practices are. Mark Smith (1998) argues that the idea of conservationism has tended to act as a brake ‘y to moderate the pressures for an exploitative [my italics] ‘‘free for all’’

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

103

inherent in the drives which propel actions in economic markets’, thus ameliorating damaging practices of the past. Rodman (1983) contends that resource conservation as a norm replaced ‘the reckless exploitation of forests, wildlife, soils etc.’ with an ‘ethical and legal requirement that ‘‘natural resources’’ be used ‘‘wisely’’, in the interests of humanity at large rather than in the interests of a mere few, and considered over the ‘long run’ rather than the short term’. Robyn Eckersley (1992, 2003, 2004) supports this position and argues further that resource conservation can be seen as the first step away from unrestrained development. However, a definition of environmental exploitation is not given by these authors, except in the sense that conservation is trying to correct ‘negative’ environmental practices of the past, the yin to a conservationist yang. By historicizing the concept of conservation, this may conversely lead to critical insights into how humans have understood the exploitation of nature. How have humans traditionally understood ‘conservation’ of natural resources? Certainly, human understanding of the need to conserve resources is an ancient one. The idea of conservation of resources for human gain can be found in such early texts as the Bible, and the writings of Plato and Mencius. The most famous passage in the Bible relating to humans and the environment is Genesis 2:26 which puts forward the position that the earth’s resources are for man’s use stating: ‘And God said y and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth y’. However, other sections of the Bible are more explicit about a need to care for the earth’s resources. Leviticus 25:2–4 argues farmers should: ‘keep a Sabbath unto the Lord y But in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of rest unto the land y thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard y for it is a year of rest unto the land’. This dichotomy between usage and caring for the earth has continued to be a theme through the various human civilizations. Cicero proclaimed humans ‘the absolute master of what the earth produces’ and they should be seeking to produce ‘another nature’. Plato reveals he was cognizant of ecological damage, describing in his writings the impact of soil erosion due to the overgrazing by goats. This tension between stewardship and dominance of the Earth continues to underpin conservationism today, leading to some confused interpretations about what constitutes conservationist practices. Conservationism modern incarnation can be traced back to the Enlightenment period and it was popularised by the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service Gifford Pinchot (1998, 2004). For Pinchot the objective of

104

GERRY NAGTZAAM

conservation is ‘the ownership, control, development, processing, distribution, and use of the natural resources for the benefit of the people’. Further Pinchot recognized that: The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development. There has been a fundamental misconception that conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future generation. There could be no more serious mistake. Conservation does mean provision for the future, but it means also and first of all the right of the present generation to the fullest necessary use of all the resources y Conservationism demand the welfare of this generation first, and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow.

Pinchot argued that the second strand to his conception of conservation was the elimination of waste. He saw this as a necessary component of the industrial infrastructure and felt it was wise to inculcate in people an abhorrence of waste. To this end, he championed the idea of ‘sustainable yield’ when it came to resource usage. It is not that Pinchot was against preservation of certain areas, it is just that for him, such areas had to be useful as a resource to mankind. Conservation was only to apply to human welfare and should therefore endeavour to be of ‘the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time’. The modern conception of environmental conservation is bound up with the production process and regards the non-human world merely in terms of its use-value terms, as a resource to be utilized. Therefore, a conservationist perspective treats the biosphere as a reservoir of matter-energy to be altered by technology for human consumption. This approach mirrors JudeoChristian traditions, especially in its anthropocentric outlook. Nature and natural entities are not sacred, have no end or justification in and of themselves and exist solely as means in terms of which human ends might be fulfilled. For Taylor (1989) such conservation can be of renewable or nonrenewable resources, provided there is a husbanding of the resource for the future where it is acknowledged it will be needed as much as the present. As Rodman points out, modern conservationism is ‘an unconstrained total-use approach, whose upshot is to leave nothing in its natural condition (for that would be a kind of ‘waste’ and waste should be eliminated)’. Environmental conservation at its heart is a utilitarian, human-centred perspective that seeks the greatest good for the greatest number of humans. It embodies a rhetoric of restraint which also suits the interests of states seeking better economic returns from their resources. Thus, as Hay (2002) points out, modern environmental conservationism as a concept ‘concedes that nature is not inexhaustible: accordingly, that there are limits to material

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

105

growth and that husbandry must therefore be practiced because it becomes necessary to consider the interests of human generations as yet unborn when determining courses of action’. The various definitions of environmental conservation examined here do provide some insights into, conversely, what environmental exploitation could be. Environmental conservation is in essence about putting limits or moderating the behaviour of humans in relation to the environment. Exploitationists, conversely, recognize no limitations to their actions and refuse to moderate their behaviour towards damaging the environment. While conservationists work to ensure that wastage does not occur when harvesting a resource, exploiters are reckless or indifferent in their actions, uncaring of the consequences for others of their species or the biosphere. Conservationists seem acutely aware that resources are finite and thus should be husbanded. Exploitationists are either reckless or indifferent to the idea that a resource can be exhausted; assuming it can be replaced by another, or that new technology will provide the solution. Further, while conservation may be seen as concerned to ensure that the greatest good for the greatest number of humans (both present and future), exploitationist practices need not be for a majority of people, but can occur even where a minority of people reap a disproportionate benefit from utilizing a resource. While conservationists are concerned with both present and future generations, exploitationists seem to have no sense of the need to ensure intergenerational equity to ensure resources for future generations of humans to enjoy. Rather, they are concerned with consuming the resource as quickly as possible so as to ensure no other person, or species, can utilize it.

ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION If the saving of a resource is from utilization rather than for utilization, we are generally speaking of ‘environmental preservation’. John Passmore (1980) defines environmental preservation as: the attempt to maintain in their present condition such areas of the earth’s surface as do not yet bear the obvious marks of man’s handiwork and to protect from the risk of extinction those species of living beings which man has not yet destroyed.

Max Oelschlaeger (1993) expands on this by arguing that preservationists reject the notion that nature is merely a resource to be utilized, instead prizing wilderness values, species rarity and diversity.

106

GERRY NAGTZAAM

The modern preservationist ideal grew out of the North American movement led by John Muir of the Sierra Club to set aside large wilderness areas in perpetuity, such as the designation in Wyoming of the 2 million acre Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The period was marked with a fierce contest with the conservationist Pinchot as to whether such areas should be conserved or preserved, that is free from any commercial exploitation. Resource preservation can be argued for on both intrinsic and instrumental grounds by preservationist-minded advocates. Fox (1990) argues that preservationist approaches tend to be better received if it can be shown that humans can also receive instrumental value if they deign to allow the non-human world to exist. Thus, when arguing for the preservation of a resource or ecosystem, proponents have tended to frame arguments in this way. Hay (2002) argues that an instrumental approach maintains that humans derive value from the non-human world if the resources enjoyed by humans are allowed to exist unaltered. Such utilization includes using nature as a retreat (asylum), for recreation (gymnasium), for worship (Cathedral), as a laboratory, as an art gallery, as a silo of genetic diversity, as a monument, for psychological health and maturity (psychogenesis) or simply as a place to marvel and wonder at. The most politically influential arguments for preserving biodiversity to date appeal to their potential instrumental value to humans, for example medicines, as opposed to arguments based on the intrinsic value of nature. Therefore, Godfrey-Smith (1980) amongst others, argues that humanity ‘y should preserve as wide as possible a range of genetic diversity because there is no way of anticipating what our future needs might happen to be’. Nelson (2003) further expands on those categories and maintains that preservation can be argued (and possibly justified) on the following instrumental grounds: its use as a classroom; on ontogeny grounds (we are what we are because of our environment); for cultural diversity (diversity of cultures depends on a variety of ecosystems); for national character (designated wilderness areas symbolically enshrine national character); such areas that allow self-realization as per the tenets of deep ecology; for disease sequestration (viruses in a damaged ecosystem are under extreme selective pressure – when humans enter such a region they bring out potentially deadly epidemics); for salvation of freedom (potential sanctuaries from oppressive governments) and that it is ‘mythopoetic’ (serves as a perfect location for viewing the history of myth), amongst other arguments. Sessions (1992) further proposes that preservation as an argument can be justified in terms of ‘the minding animals argument’, whereby humanity

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

107

needs wild animals in a pristine ecosystem so humans can prosper because human intelligence is ‘bound to the presence of animals’. However, for many environmentalists an instrumental approach to preservation is a morally bankrupt approach because: to categorize and quantify the benefits of what they take y is a flawed approach to y preservation. It is, in effect, to play the game of your opponent by trying to bolster your side by including on your team bigger, better, and more players (or, in this case, more human benefits arguments), while the question of whether or not the correct game is being played in the first place goes unanswered and unasked.

Anne and Paul Ehrlich are typical of those who espouse a preservationist viewpoint in that they argue that the biosphere has a right to exist. They argue that, at its heart, preservationism accords an intrinsic or noninstrumental value to the world even if it conflicts with human interests. Passmore (1980) takes it as axiomatic that ‘true’ preservationist arguments must rely on the concept of intrinsic value. As both Godfrey-Smith (1979) and Norton (1986) have observed, this position is at odds with many preservationist theorists who also include instrumental arguments to support the preservation of nature. However, Eckersley argues persuasively that while it is possible to argue preservationist positions from an instrumental perspective, doing so does a disservice to the intentions of many global actors advocating preservation who, for example, argue that whales or other creatures deserve not to be culled because they intrinsically have a right to exist. What can preservationist arguments and the ongoing intrinsic/instrumental debate teach us about how environmental exploitation should be viewed? This is a harder case conceptually than conservation but there are some points that can be fleshed out. For our purposes of trying to better understand environmental exploitation, both the intrinsic and instrumental strands of preservationism can yield insights into how we might consider such exploitation to be. Preservationism is about acknowledging the role and vitality of the ‘other’ both at the individual and the biosphere level. If, at its heart, preservationism is about an intrinsic right for the other to exist, it should follow that an exploiter would not view any resource as having such a right; it is merely to be used to satisfy his/her appetites. Thus, arguments about nature’s spiritual or cultural value would have no weight, although instrumental arguments couched in its use as a silo or gymnasium may have some resonance. But preservationism, with its belief that all creatures and biospheres have a right to exist, is antithetical to exploitation’s

108

GERRY NAGTZAAM

vision of nature as a mere instrumentality. If we accept that others have a right to exist, morally we must accept the idea of limitations and moderate our behaviour and cease environmentally destructive practices. By denying moral worth to the other, exploitationists do not have to ameliorate their practices and can continue to plunder the biosphere. Having explored the idea of exploitation through examining conservationist and preservationist philosophies and mores, we must now proceed to examine the various definitions of both exploitation and environmental exploitation available to researchers at present to see what insights are yielded.

ENVIRONMENTAL EXPLOITATION The concept of ‘environmental exploitation’ has traditionally received scant conceptual analysis by environmentalists and researchers compared to the concepts of conservation and preservation. When examining environmental issues, many writers fail to give definitions of exploitation within their papers, taking it as a given that the reader will implicitly understand and accept that environmental exploitation is morally wrong. Other writers seem to assume that the reader will automatically share their inherent bias that exploitation is a ‘bad’ without investigating the philosophical underpinnings or the behaviour that makes a particular action environmentally wrong. The problem is further compounded because, depending on the framework through which you are analysing the concept, exploitation is considered by various proponents to be a neutral, a negative or a positive term when utilized to explain phenomena. Social science researchers and practitioners from fields such as international law, politics or economics, all add to this confusion by using the term in various ways as positive, negative or neutral, with no fixed conceptions to compare competing definitions. Thus, utilizers of the term exploitation in negotiations and discussions are often at cross-purposes, and no true ‘meeting of the minds’ can occur until this normative cacophony is cleared up. The concept of exploitation can be traced historically from the works of the Saint-Simonians through to that of Marx and Proudhon. The idea can be observed in Sismondi’s idea of ‘spoliation’ and in Veblen’s concept of the vested interest which he considers to be ‘the right to something for nothing’ which can, according to Gouldner (1960), be understood as a form of institutionalised exploitation. For many writers, such as Fox, exploitation and its concomitant practices have been the dominant approach by humanity at the societal level to

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

109

nature, until very recently. Humankind has traditionally attempted to portray and justify its environmentally exploitative practices as beneficial to itself. Francis Bacon, for example, argued that man’s dominion of the planet gave him the right to utilize nature for ‘man’s’ benefit exclusively. Such exploitation has been described as springing from the human belief that there is an ‘inherent right to take and plunder’ natural resources, a belief which has been justified generally by the aforementioned Christian Bible passage that God gave dominion of the planet to humanity for its own uses. As Carling (1987) has demonstrated, the modern conception of exploitation can be tracked back to Karl Marx’s work on the theory of labour. Marx explored exploitation in both the economic and environmental sense but focused mainly on the role played by economic man. In the Marxist idea of economic exploitation, capitalist exploitation arises invariably from free market transactions. For Marx, Benton (1993) observed, capitalism subsumed exploitation within it. However, Marx limited his definition of exploitation to one of a capital class taking advantage of a working class. Roemer (1982) maintains such exploitation occurs when ‘y the amount of dead labor the worker can command through purchasing commodities with his income is less than the amount of labor he expends in production’ and is brought about via the ‘private ownership of the means of production’. It is tied closely to the labour theory of value since labourers yield a significant percentage of their work to capitalists for no return. Marx’s thesis has been enlarged by the work of a number of economists including Jeffrey Reiman (1987) who argues that a society can be considered exploitative ‘y when its social structure is organised that unpaid labor is systematically forced out of one class and put at the disposal of another’. However, when it comes to environmental exploitation, Marx and his subsequent admirers seem unable to extend the idea of exploitation to nature as an issue to be addressed in a cohesive fashion. Rather, as Smith and Greens (2000) have shown, they tend not to consider the exploitation of nature as a subject of study, since nature is assumed to have no value until crafted into something by the efforts of workers from the ‘great workshop of nature’. For Marx, nature was merely raw material or energy to be accessed by man as part of the industrial process. Given his background in soil analysis, he was aware of the links between nature and exploitation but chose not to make such links explicit. Rather, as Benton (2002) noted, Marx focused on how capitalist systems, through the capital law of accumulation, inexorably keep ‘pushing society y to the limits of its natural resource base y’. As Redclift and Woodgate (1994) point out, Marxists have never desired to understand the carrying capacity of the planet and its implications.

110

GERRY NAGTZAAM

This is not to say that some researchers have not attempted to infuse Marxism with an environmental consciousness. Perhaps the most prominent has been Herbert Marcuse (1964), whose work on ‘liberatory domination’ sought to make explicit the links between Marxist thought and radical ecology. Marcuse believed that ‘the domination of nature has remained [inextricably] linked to the domination of man’. While his early work focused on the exploitation of labour and of women, he came to think that ecological protection was key for the radical project and that transformation could only occur through a process of radical psychology that transformed humanity. However, as both Clancy (1999) and Marcuse and Kellner (2005) have demonstrated, Marcuse remained focused on traditional Marxist definitions of economic or societal exploitation of subgroups without defining the concept within an environmental framework. Turning to contemporary definitions of exploitation in differing fields of inquiry can also yield insights into environmental exploitation. Gouldner (1960) points out that the dictionary defines exploitation merely as ‘an unfair or unjust utilization of another’ without considering the environmental component. O’Riordan and Jordan (1995) maintain that any definition should consider that: ‘any action likely to result in serious environmental harm is morally wrong so should be excluded as an option against which other options should be compared’. This appears to be referencing practices that many would consider to be exploitationist. A further problem with this definition is how should we measure ‘serious environmental harm’ since various actors are going to have markedly differing conceptions of what constitutes serious. Should it be considered behaviour which is not sustainable or leaves permanent damage to the ecosystem? Frederick (1999) argues that exploitation has about it a nonsustainable component but again makes no mention of the time frame in which we should consider questions of sustainability. One of the few authors to explore the meaning of the general concept of ‘exploitation’ in any depth is Alan Wertheimer (1996), who argues that, at the most basic level, it occurs when ‘A takes unfair advantage of B’, thus connoting a wrongful action. Unfortunately, Wertheimer (1996) does not consider within his book examining the subject of and types of exploitation, the exploitation of nature by humans. Cutter and Renwick (2004) maintain that it can be understood as ‘the complete or maximum use of a resource for individual profit or societal gain’. Ludwig, Hilborn, and Walters (1993) argue that it is the search for wealth or the prospect of personal enrichment which generates political and social pressures that almost invariably lead to the unlimited exploitation of resources. Scholz (2001) postulates that

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

111

exploitation should be understood in terms of ‘efficiency’ or commercial application of a particular resource, but this is more a conservationist ideal. Taylor (1989), rather than defining exploitation per se, speaks in terms of an exploitative attitude which he argues occurs whenever nature is thought of as nothing more than a vast repository of resources for the use of mankind. Problematically, instrumental preservationist thought on nature can mirror this definition since it also perceives nature as merely a silo for human needs. Also, it makes no mention of exploitationist practices arising from such a belief system. While how we perceive nature is important, surely how to deal with it is just as vital to an understanding of environmental exploitation. However, it is possible to perceive exploitation as a ‘good’, at least in human terms, if it is in the service of a higher moral goal, for example, the provision of a better quality of life for the citizens of a state. Such an argument is often used by developing states to justify exploitationist practices. Taylor (1989) argues that in human ecology there is nothing morally wrong with choosing an exploitative attitude towards nature. Such non-respect towards nature is permissible since from a human-centred ethical standpoint the environment is ‘rightly controlled, transformed and consumed in the service of human interests alone’ and ‘y [A]side from their actual or potential usefulness to humans, they lack all worth’. However, such an approach presupposes that nature has no intrinsic worth and is merely a function of its value to humans. Economic researchers such as Inozemtsev (1998) argues that an exploitation can be a positive in that ‘y while a social evil, exploitation has nonetheless played a positive role, enabling people to concentrate their material resources and efforts where they were necessary, and developing advanced forms of production that became the springboard for further progress’. Robert Heilbroner (1988) accepts such a proposition arguing ‘Exploitation is not only the dark, other side of civilization; it is also a necessary condition of, if not all its achievements, at least a considerable number of its material triumphs’. However, there is no mention of the cost to individuals or ecosystems in such an approach which merely sees it as a positive in anthropocentric terms. International lawyers have maintained that environmental exploitation is an intrinsic right of states for the benefit of its citizenry and thus is considered a positive goal. As Sucharitikul’s (1996) work has demonstrated, states have historically viewed exploitation of natural resources, both at domestic and global level, as a part of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources they enjoy, and therefore as a right to be used to improve the lot of their peoples (or in some cases the elites).

112

GERRY NAGTZAAM

Principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration (1972) has enshrined this internationally recognized right to exploit environmental resources to the effect that: ‘States have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies y’. Little is mentioned in legal writings about the negative side of such an attitude to environmental exploitation, with the implicit assumption made that this is an internal matter and is a necessary by-product of state development and state determination (a good). Even in the ecophilosophical literature, the concept of exploitation has been only cursorily explored as part of an overarching Western narrative of historically dominating nature. Most ecophilosophical attention has been devoted to the new environmental norms that have challenged exploitation, namely conservation or preservation. As Carter (2001, 2007) points out: ‘a central tenet of green thinking is the belief that the current ecological crisis is caused by human arrogance towards the natural world which legitimates its exploitation in order to satisfy human interests’. Taylor (1989) argues that, for some, the advancement of Western civilization is intricately bound up with the domination of nature in pursuit of the goal of ensuring a better life for the bulk of humanity. Alternatively, some ecophilosophers have made the point that there is a conceptual link between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of disadvantaged groups within society such as women or indigenous peoples, but again, the term is not spelt out but rather left undefined and generally understood as a ‘bad’.

DEFINING ENVIRONMENTAL EXPLOITATION: A WAY FORWARD? Given the problematic history surrounding the term ‘environmental exploitation’ and the lack of a clear definition currently, there is a need to resolve the normative confusion. Given its checkered history, it is not desirable to give such a contentious term a neutral reading. For many environmentalists, the concept of exploitation is too laden with negative connotations to have it accepted as either a neutral or a good in the way it is characterized in development debates and in international law. Rather, there is a need to be explicit about the fact that some environmental practices are both short-sighted and detrimental. Thus, there is a need for a generally agreed to term that clearly defines these shortcomings. By examining the concepts of conservation and preservation and the historical usage of the

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

113

term, both in other disciplines and in environmental writings, it is possible to advance a working definition of environmental exploitation for the purposes of starting an ongoing debate. Such a definition would need to incorporate the idea that such resource usage is unsustainable with no consideration for resource replenishment or for the integrity of the overall ecosystem from which it is drawn and can result in serious environmental harm. Nature is to be considered merely a repository (drawing on exploitation’s Marxist roots) to be drawn down for the use of humanity exclusively and no individual animals or plants species or biospheres have an intrinsic right to exist. At the philosophical level, conservationists distinguish themselves from exploitationists by arguing that such practices benefit both present and future generations. Exploitation, however, assumes that the time frame involved is a short-sighted one, within the present generation at best, and pays no heed to the conservationist notion of intergenerational equity. Conservationists maintain that they seek to protect the environment for the majority of humanity. While conservationist practices can privilege a minority, the driving ethos of conservationist thought is that it benefits human society as a whole. Exploitation can also be carried out by a majority of people (bound together as a state) or a minority of ruthless humans who gain a disproportionate benefit from their actions. For the purposes of a working definition, however, the problem is not the numbers of people involved but rather the scale and effect of the environmental harm caused. What further distinguishes exploitation from conservation is that exploitationists have no concept of restraint. Exploitationist practices have no moral consideration for other species or the planet to limit behaviour. Further they incorporate an element of irresponsibility in that they are uncaring of consequences for other humans and the biosphere. Consequently, environmental exploitation, as a working definition, should be understood as occurring where humanity treats environmental resources as merely instrumental, to be consumed in the short term, without consideration for the survivability of the resource, the overall ecosystem, or of future generations of humans. Such a definition incorporates within it the Marxist conception of exploitation that nature is merely raw material and/or energy, valueless until worked into the industrial process by humanity. For exploitationists, nature is to be prized merely in instrumental terms, as a resource to be harvested. Further, it contains within it an idea that such practices are non-sustainable, for both the current and, in particular, future generations of humans.

114

GERRY NAGTZAAM

It also allows that such an approach can bring about major ecological harm to individual species, ecosystems and the planet as a whole. Environmental exploitation does not allow for moral consideration of future generations of humans and other species. Such an approach has no conception of the need to restrain personal or state actions for the good of others. Thus, it subsumes within it ideas of selfishness and irresponsibility by human actors who are willing to totally deplete the global ecosystem for their own needs/wants. Further, it provides a starting point to examine how and what we consider to be unjust behaviour by humans towards the environment. This would potentially allow for a better moral and practical understanding of how best to conserve/preserve the environment.

CONCLUSION The purpose of environmental exploitation chapter is not to provide a categorical definition of this important term. Rather, it is to start a much overdue debate about the accurate usage of this concept. Other important environmental concepts such as conservation and preservation have been exhaustingly analysed but exploitation, perhaps because of its negative connotations to many environmentalists, has rarely been analysed in a systemic way. Rather, it has been seen as something to move beyond as quickly as possible. While this may be desirable, exploitation practices continue to be a major factor in human development. Douglas Kellner (2008), developing an argument by Marcuse, maintains that a reapproachment of humans and nature requires a ‘transformation of human nature’. If humans, as a race, are ever to transcend exploitative practices, something all researchers can agree is a worthy goal, we must first clearly understand what is being left behind.

REFERENCES Barry, J. (1999). Rethinking green politics: Nature, virtue and progress. London: Sage Publications. Benton, T. (1993). Natural relations: Ecology, animal rights and social justice. London: Verso. Benton, T. (2002). Animal rights and social relations. In: D. Pepper, F. Webster & G. Revill (Eds), Environmentalism: Critical concepts. London: Routledge. Carling, A. (1987). Exploitation, extortion and oppression. Political Studies, XXXV, 173–188.

Environmental Exploitation: An Analysis and Taxonomy

115

Carter, N. (2001). The politics of the environment: Ideas, activism, policy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Carter, N. (2007). The politics of the environment: Ideas, activism, policy (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clancy, J. J. (1999). The old dispensation: Loyalty in business. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press. Cutter, S. L., & Renwick, W. H. (2004). Exploitation, conservation, preservation: A geographic perspective on natural resource use (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Eckersley, R. (1992). Environmentalism and political theory: Toward an ecocentric approach. London: UCL Press. Eckersley, R. (2003). Politics. In: D. Jamieson (Ed.), A companion to environmental philosophy (pp. 316–330). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Eckersley, R. (2004). Soft law, hard politics, and the climate change treaty. In: C. Reus-Smit (Ed.), The politics of international law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, W. (1990). Toward a transpersonal ecology: Developing new foundations for environmentalism (1st ed.). Boston: Shambhala. Frederick, M. (1999). A realist’s conceptual definition of environmental security. In: R. A. Matthew & D. Deudney (Eds), Contested grounds: Security and conflict in the new environmental politics (pp. 91–108). New York: State University of New York Press. Godfrey-Smith, W. (1979). The value of wilderness. Environmental Ethics, 1, 309–319. Godfrey-Smith, W. (1980). The rights of non-humans and intrinsic values. In: D. S. Mannison, M. A. McRobbie & R. Routley (Eds), Environmental philosophy (pp. 30–47). Canberra: Department of Philosophy, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University. Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 25(2), 161–178. Hay, P. (2002). Main currents in Western environmental thought. Sydney: UNSW Press. Heilbroner, R. L. (1988). Behind the veil of economics: Essays in the world philosophy. New York: Norton. Inozemtsev, V. L. (1998). Exploitation: A phenomenon of consciousness and social conflict. Sociological Research, 37(6), 67–86. Kellner, D. (2008). Marcuse, liberation, and radical ecology. Illuminations. Available at http:// www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell11.htm. Accessed on August 20, 2008. Ludwig, D., Hilborn, R., & Walters, C. (1993). Uncertainty, resource exploitation, and conservation: Lessons from history. Ecological Applications, 3(4), 547–549. Marcuse, H. (1964). One dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advance industrial society. London: Routledge and Kagan Paul. Marcuse, H., & Kellner, D. (Eds). (2005). The New Left and the 1960s: Collected papers of Herbert Marcuse (Vol. 3). London: Routledge. Nelson, M. P. (2003). An amalgamation of wilderness preservation arguments. In: A. Light & H. Rolston, III (Eds), Environmental ethics: An anthology (pp. 413–436). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Norton, B. G. (1986). Conservation and preservation: A conceptual rehabilitation. Environmental Ethics, 8, 195–220. Oelschlaeger, M. (1993). Idea of wilderness: From prehistory to the age of ecology (New Edition). New Haven: Yale University Press (ISBN-10: 0300053703; ISBN-13: 978-0300053708).

116

GERRY NAGTZAAM

O’Riordan, T., & Jordan, A. (1995). The precautionary principle in contemporary environmental politics. Environmental Values, 4, 191–212. Passmore, J. (1980). Man’s responsibility for nature: Ecological problems and Western traditions. London: Duckworth. Pinchot, G. (1998). Breaking new ground. Washington: Island Press. Pinchot, G. (2004). The fight for conservation. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publications. Redclift, M., & Woodgate, G. (1994). Sociology and the environment: Discordant discourse. In: T. Benton & M. Redclift (Eds), Social theory and the global environment. London: Routledge. Reiman, J. (1987). Exploitation, force and the moral assessment of capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 16(1), 3–41. Rodman, J. (1983). Four forms of ecological consciousness reconsidered. In: D. Scherer & T. Attig (Eds), Ethics and the environment (pp. 82–92). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Roemer, J. E. (1982). Property relations vs surplus value in Marxian exploitation. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 11(4), 281–313. Scholz, I. (2001). Overexploitation or sustainable management: Action patterns of the tropical timber industry, the case of Para (Brazil) 1960–1997. Florence, KY: Routledge. Sessions, G. (1992). Ecocentrism, wilderness, and global ecosystem protection. In: M. Oelschlaeger (Ed.), The wilderness condition: Essays on environment and civilization (pp. 90–130). San Francisco: Island Press. Smith, M. J. (1998). Ecologism: Towards ecological citizenship, concepts in the social sciences. Buckingham: Open University Press. Smith, T., & Greens, P. S. (2000). Review: James Bellamy Foster’s Marx ecology; Paul Burkett’s Marx and nature. Synthesis/Regeneration, (Fall). Available at http://www.greens.org/ s-r/23/23-14.html. Accessed originally on August 12, 2008. Sucharitikul, S. (1996). State responsibility and international liability under international law. Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Journal, 18(3), 821–839. Taylor, P. W. (1989). Respect for nature: A theory of environmental ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wertheimer, A. (1996). Exploitation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 6 ECOLOGICAL ACTIVISM: SUSTAINABLE LIVING, ACTIVISM AND IDENTITY Liam Leonard INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the ecotopian activist tradition through an exploration of existing literature, within a context of the processes of activism, identity and place which arise from the communitarian impulse. The initial part of the chapter sets out utopian communitarianism into separate phases. Each phase is examined for the exogenous and internalised motivations that compel people in different eras to participate in intentional living projects be they religious, autonomous, or environmental. The chapter develops these themes further by applying Sargisson’s study of intentional communities to the discussion. The chapter attempts to ground this discussion within the context of the wider understandings of green utopian practice, such as Barry’s ‘Concrete Utopian’ realism or de Geus’s ‘utopia of sufficiency’. These studies are examined to facilitate better understandings of the areas of congruence, which lie at the basis of ecotopian and activist behaviour. The conclusion discusses the saliency of ecotopian activism in relation to external and internal motivations in the contemporary era. Here, the threats of ecological degradation on a global scale create greater linkages with the The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 117–137 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004009

117

118

LIAM LEONARD

once dichotomous relationship between the internal motivation and the external event that precipitates the quest for new living arrangements. Finally, the internal moral or ethical frameworks determining the elements that shape this form of response will be outlined, through an examination of the new identities which are created through the cultivation of a type of identity born of relationships between participants and their location as a result of ecotopian living. A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. (Oscar Wilde: from ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’)

This quote by Oscar Wilde provides us with the point of departure for this chapter. In addressing the relationship between ecotopias, activism and ‘progress’, the chapter sets out to examine the relationship between an internally derived moral agency and precipitating external events in the formation of the subsequent intentions of utopian participants and activists. In so doing, the study attempts to address the question of how collective behaviour is also determined by the contours and landscape of the surrounding hinterland. Of course, debates about human interaction with the environment have become prevalent in recent years. The current debates surrounding the impact of humankind’s ‘carbon footprint’ are indicative of prevailing concerns with anthropogenic impacts on our environment. Deep green thinking offers an alternative to current economically derived degradation, while we are also presented with a competing vision of ‘species ecumenism’ through Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology. However, the exact position and role of humanity within this deep green paradigm remains unclear. One social response to this dilemma has been the establishment of ‘ecotopias’; utopian projects where ecocentric living can occur in the context of both a radical undertaking by ecotopian participants as well as creating what Lucy Sargisson (2001) and David Pepper (2005, pp. 3–22) have called ‘transgressive’ social change. Barry’s ‘Concrete Utopian Model’ (2006) presents us with a critique of green political economy, offering a vision of a sustainable model of living which at once combines ‘realism and radicalism’ (Ibid.). Barry argues that the ethic of denial in green thinking may hinder the wider utopian project. de Geus (1999, p. 30) (while highlighting the ‘appeals of utopia’) foregrounds the pragmatic nature of utopians’ attempts to ‘penetrate to the roots’ of problems such as pollution and injustice. Here we have located an interesting point of contention for utopians. Do we, as Barry argues,

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

119

define ‘realism through an acceptance of the fact that ‘consumption and materialism are here to stay’ (Barry, 2006, p. 2) or can de Geus’s ‘utopias of sufficiency’ provide a pragmatic model for citizens concerned by the recent United Nations report that claimed ‘Humanity’s very survival is at risk’ (The Times, October 26, 2007). This chapter attempts to address that debate by examining ecotopian and activist cultures, locating its area of inquiry within the dichotomy between the internalised or personal and the exogenous or externally produced motivations for environmentally derived participation in utopian or activist projects. The chapter discusses these themes through the development of an understanding of the motivations for ecotopian activity which will be framed through the application of Sargisson’s concept of the ‘politicised quotidian’ to participants in collective living projects or activist movements. The study includes a broad definition of utopias, ecotopias and activist settlements and divides its arguments into different sections, each examining an aspect of the cultural background and subsequent motivations surrounding utopianism. To achieve this, we begin by charting the evolution of the utopian concept from its pietistic origins in the sixteenth century through to the onset of communitarian socialism in the 1800s, arriving at the concepts of ecotopian thinking in the latter years of the millennium. In so doing, I divide utopian communal living into three separate phases: (i) the religious phase from the sixteenth century to the early 1800s; (ii) the autonomous phase from the mid-1880s through to the 1970s and (iii) a third ecotopian phase that has emerged through the final decades of the last millennium up to the contemporary concern with intentional communities and activist settlements. At this point, the understandings of distinct phases of utopianism established by Tom Moylan through his discussion of ‘critical utopianism’ in his book Demand the Impossible (1986) and of ecotopianism as established by Marius de Geus in his seminal work Ecological Utopias (1999) must be acknowledged. Within the utopian phases that I set out here, a further, more personalised process will be examined in order to illuminate the inherent distinctions between both the exogenous and internalised motivations for ecotopian participation. For Naess and Rothenberg (1989, p. 131), ‘Ecopolitics’ emerges from the immediate relevancy of politics to all actions. For them, ‘Self-realisation’ and self-reliance occurs as part of a process whereby ‘community, is created from the suppression of the ego in the pursuit of a utopian vision of the future (Naess & Rothenberg, 1989, pp. 130–162). However, Mannheim (1997) has argued that utopian thought

120

LIAM LEONARD

is a reflection of a collectively held ideology, based on a vision of society created through intellectual practice. Therefore, I explore the phases of utopianism through a brief examination of the intellectual and cultural works which surrounded their development, alongside actual the utopian settlements which emerged from their initial cultural settings.

THE RELIGIOUS PHASE The religious phase of utopianism provided the original moral basis for the internal motivations of communitarian participation. In many ways, the initial back to nature impulse of utopians was formed from the ‘return to Eden’ ethic of the utopians in this religious phase. We can also understand this as a moral basis for deep green thought. Utopians understand that the ‘ou´-topia’ is a type of ‘no-place’ (Marins, 1984, p. 100) or imagined concept that is rooted in its textual foundation; without More’s Utopia (and his eu-topia or ‘good place’), Milton’s Paradise Lost or Huxley’s Brave New World we would not have arrived at Ernest Callenbach’s ‘Cascadia’ in his 1975 book Ecotopia. Two years before Callenbach’s work, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess presented his concept of the dichotomy between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ green philosophies crystallised the need for an ecocentric basis for communitarian living projects which had emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s. The economist EF Schumacher published his treatise Small is Beautiful in that same year. We can trace the emergence of such concerns for eco-topias by examining their emergence from a background of religious and communitarian projects that can be traced back over 300 years. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (1999, pp. 183–199) discuss the background to utopian communal societies in the nineteenth century, through an examination of ‘intentional societies’ including pietists such as the ‘Shakers’. In addition, while many early pietists or Anabaptist communes linked their inherent moralism with daily labour, the emergence of a wider American capitalism based on Weber’s concept of ‘the Protestant Work Ethic’ has a shared origin: The widespread expectation of improvement imbued the concept of utopia with much of its nineteenth century vigor. But its glowing vitality was sustained simultaneously by several other prevalent social themes. These included the deep religious interest of the age, the admiration of individual enterprise and pioneering endeavour and that prosaic enthusiasm for practical applicationy . (Lockwood Caren, 1965 in Gusfield, 1970, pp. 420–423)

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

121

Experimental communities were part of the momentum towards improved lifestyles that characterised the young American republic. However, Tom Moylan (1986, p. 6) indicates that post-1850 utopias represented a social impulse towards change that occurred in response to the dominant orders of the day. Moylan goes on to highlight Raymond Williams’s assertion that this impulse was ‘always a fertile moment foryan anarchism: positive in its fierce rejection of dominationynegative in its willed rejection of structures’ (Ibid.). Nonetheless, utopias such as the Oneida community found their influence from the emergence of the Unitarian church in New England, and from a sect known as ‘the Perfectionists’ in particular (Ibid.). Robert Owen founded a rationalist cooperative in New Harmony in the Midwestern United States. The Brook Farm experiment of the 1840s was frequented by utopians, transcendentalists and intellectuals such as Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau, under the influence of Charles Fourier. Later in the century the French utopian movement grew from an underlying conviction that the internal or psychological basis of human nature was the driving force behind collective behaviour, while those who followed Owen believed that exogenous or external agencies of change such as political repression in old Europe, or the opportunities posed by the New World in the eighteenth century, which provided the imputes for those seeking utopias (Bottomore, 1994).

THE AUTONOMOUS PHASE While the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels was critical of the influences of both Fourier and Owen, nonetheless utopian socialism was described as a bridge in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The mid-century bohemian movement had some utopian influences, both intellectually and culturally. The Paris bohemians were among the first to feature egalitarian gender equality as part of their movement. In 1871, the Paris Commune became the focal point of a bourgeoning struggle for autonomy that was reflected in the fin de sicle. Peter Kropotkin wrote that ‘under the name ‘‘commune of Paris’’ a new idea was born, to become the starting point for future revolutions’ (Kropotkin, 1880). Kropotkin addressed the debate about external influences on collective behaviour in a more forthright fashion, noting the distinction between the ‘machinery, factories, raw materials, means of communication and the soil’ (Ibid.) available to the commune on one side

122

LIAM LEONARD

and private property on the other, stating: ‘let each take from the pile what he needs’. Links between communitarians in Europe and the United States continued during the final decades of the 1800s. Maren Lockwood Caren, writing of the US in the nineteenth century, stated that in this era ‘utopia was imminentyUtopia could exist’ (Lockwood Caren, 1965, pp. 403–418 in Gusfield, 1970, p. 419). German Hutterites formed communes in the United States from the 1870s onwards. In the 1900s, the assassination of US President McKinley by anarchists led to a media campaign against utopians that has survived through that century, enduring to this day. Socialist utopian communes began to emerge in the United States during the early years of the century, including a significant settlement at Llano del Rio in California, while anarchist communes existed between the world wars (Millar, 1998, pp. 1–7). Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) emerged from under the dark ideological clouds of the pre-war era, but its focus reflected a new concern with a chemically induced acquiescence managed by the emerging medical industry alongside the dominant order of Fordist planning. George L. Hicks has documented the ‘Celo’ utopian settlement which existed in North Carolina from 1937. Celo had its own system of taxation and land tenure, and became a haven for pacificists who were imprisoned for opposing or refusing to participate in the Second World War (Hicks, 2001). Celo reflected wider American attempts to ‘balance the often contradictory demands of individualism and egalitarianism’ (Ibid.).

THE ECOTOPIAN PHASE The post war years allowed BF Skinner the space to write Walden Two, about a planned egalitarian collective. On the basis of the simplicity of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the book explores a post-war desire for a new beginning or ‘golden age’. Skinner outlines four threats to humanity facing the post-war world which he felt focused a generations’ minds on the themes of his book: ‘the exhaustion of resources, the pollution of the environment, overpopulation and the possibility of nuclear holocaust’ (Claeys & Sargent, 1999, p. 391). The beat movement drew on previous utopian and bohemian cultures, rejecting the crass materialism that had become a feature of American society in the 1950s. With the emergence of the counterculture in the 1960s, concerns about environmental, human and gender rights alongside the peace movement would come to the fore, providing a new impetus for young hippies and alternative utopians who

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

123

wished, in the words of Dr. Timothy Leary, to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ of mainstream society. Communes such as ‘Tolstoy Farm’ in Washington State and ‘Drop City’ in Colorado became significant reference points for counterculture communitarians. Many hippy communes were the subject of accounts by inhabitants or visitors. These included Living on the Earth by Alicia Bay Laurel, about the Wheeler Ranch and Voices from the Farm written by Timothy Miller about The Farm commune in Tennessee and New Buffalo by Arthur Kopecky. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s seminal film Easy Rider (1969) depicted a struggling commune, which was based on the Taos Commune in New Mexico. This phase of American communitarianism emerged in the wake of the decline of urban counterculture centres. Miller links this move to rural communities with ‘the much larger venerable American tradition of alternative culture’ (Miller, 1992, pp. 1–7) in a manner that is congruent with Owenite beliefs in pre-structural influences on communal behaviour: In other words, the urban hippies did not create the first communes; it would be closer to the truth to say that the earliest communes helped create the hippiesythere were also secular (and religious) communities devoted to radical politics, anarchism, sexual freedom, the sharing of labour, creation of arts and crafts, land community, ethnicity, and a dazzling array of visions of assorted seers and cranksyit has been an ongoing theme of American life for over three centuries. (Ibid.)

Many facets of eco-utopianism emerged during the late-1960s and early 1970s phase of communitarianism. A romantic concern with agrarian selfsufficiency displayed by many counter-culture communitarians is reflected in rise of deep green ecological thought. In the aftermath of the publication of Limits to Growth (1972), a Malthusian post-doomsday scenario emerged, leading to a reinvigoration of concepts which engendered plans for (eco) utopian salvation. Nonetheless, these ‘back to nature’ communitarians still embraced the moralistic determinism of earlier utopians, creating a pragmatic but ethical basis for the modern environmental movement. The resulting ‘deep green’ alternative to lifestyles that had come to threaten the planet’s survival became the basis for the intentional communities in the third phase of communal living. The 1980s also witnessed the emergence of political settlements where inhabitants used encampments to provide a continuous base for protest in order to focus attention on a particular issue. One of the more prominent of these was the Greenham Common Peace Camp, which was a women-only camp established in protest at the presence of American Trident nuclear missiles at the British Airbase in Greenham at the height of the ‘Cold War’. Caroline Blackwood’s account of the

124

LIAM LEONARD

Greenham Camp On the Perimeter (1984) describes the motivations of the participants in the camp; in addition to opposing nuclear war, the women wanted to represent the rights of animals and all species of the planet as they feared for the future in the nuclear age. The environmental commentator George Monbiot has also written of his experience when he tried to visit the peace camp. Monbiot ended up sleeping over at the camp only to be rounded on by the women who wanted the camp to remain a woman’s camp: Greenham worked-better and for longer than any other camp of its kind-because it was entirely run and populated by women. Its resilience and its success in mobilising public feeling inspired a direct action movement which spread to dozens of neglected causesyAnd, despite my dramatic ejection, the women’s camp inspired me too: after that summer, everything looked different. (Monbiot, 2006)

Blackwood’s discussion of the suffering of the Greenham women for the cause of all species on the planet demonstrates an aspect of deep green thought which has left an imprint on the ethical backdrop to ecotopic societies. The women’s clear and sane rejection of the madness of a manmade ‘Cold War’ has been repeated in Cindy Sheehan’s own peace camp in Texas. Sheehan’s motivations were induced from the grief of losing her son in the war in Iraq, whereas for Blackwood, the Greenham women’s motivations was derived from an intuitive understanding that the folly of nuclear devastation represented a threat to all species on earth. Both of these anti-war camps involved the expression of the political through alternative living practices; ecopolitics expressed by living with nature alongside a representation of power such as the Greenham missile base or the US President’s ranch. The examples of these peace camps remind us that in many ways ecotopias are about the redefining of civic duties as much as they are about alternatives to existing practices. The position of citizen in relation to habitus and hinterland had been debated by both Michael Saward and John Barry (Doherty & de Geus, 1996). For Saward, the external structures of a decentralised bio-regionalism should provide the impetus for reevaluation of humankind’s role on earth. Barry argues that it is the internally derived moral concepts of the citizen, which created the momentum for sustainability through the realisation of shared duties and goals. Marius de Geus locates the debate somewhere between state intervention on the one hand and eco-anarchism or ‘social ecology’ of Bookchin on the other. For de Geus, the eco-topian model provides an opportunity for societal transformation or ‘ecological restructuring’ (Ibid.).

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

125

Expressions of concern about diminished autonomy for deep green community participants as a result of exogenous interactions have been expressed by critical thinkers such as Bahro and Dobson (Kenny, 1996, pp. 21–23). Nonetheless, divisions of labour, the role of those outside the core group (or incapacitated insiders) and external engagement must be of significant concern to green utopians. As Bahro demonstrates, the fate of all humanity is bound together, elevating ‘the species interest’ (Bahro, 1984, pp. 65–67) into a primary concern for all who purport to seek a better way of co-existing on and with the planet. Bahro saw progress in the workers’ councils and their fundamental instinct towards self management as a way forward for a movement of autonomous groups working towards an alternative lifestyle of cooperative units rather than elite grouping seeking splendid isolation: The rise of the workers as human beings no longer depends on their being able to consume more, but rather on a new order for our entire life process, on a transformation which is both political and cultural, reaching right into their subjectivity; their personal capacity as human being. (Ibid.)

Tom Moylan employs Ernest Bloch to demonstrate the power of the ‘utopian imagination’ as a facet in the re-invention of humankind’s relationships with dominate narratives such as industry, technology and progress (Moylan, 1986, p. 20). The role of capacities and interests impacts upon the social frameworks within green utopias, as the unity or direction of communes wanes over time. Individual motivations become a critical feature in the process of defining ecotopic behaviour. As with social movements there may be ‘free-riders’ or non-committed participants who utilise the resources of a community without contributing to their ideals or rules. Attempts have been made to address these issues with the onset of more formalised ecotopic communities such as the ‘Ecotopia Gathering’, which is held annually at series of venues across Europe. Daily tasks are assigned and co-decisions made at the ‘morning circle’, and hierarchies are avoided. The camp promotes diversity and ‘cultural sensitivity’ in the pursuit of a sustainable lifestyle. Decisions are arrived at through consensus rather than democratic majoritarianism (http://www. ecotopia.org). Sargisson’s field work on green communities (Sargisson, 2001, pp. 68–89) has revealed an ongoing tension between private and public realms for participants. Here, Shenker’s distinction between the goals of movements and communities are outlined as coalescing to ‘realise a set of aimsyunlike organisations or social movements; they are a way of life’ (Shenker, 1986, p. 10 in Sargisson, 2001, pp. 68–69). This analysis

126

LIAM LEONARD

demonstrates a point of congruence for the extraneous and internalised elements of ecotopic participation as a result of the demands on those attempting the lifestyle. To live in a utopian setting, greater levels of commitment are required. Movements on the contrary may afford participants some living space away from the front line. Sargisson’s research into alternative living projects provides us with a set of determinants by which an ecotopian project may be defined. Themes incorporated in the research include commitments to ecological tenets such as holism, planetary and natural intelligence, self-sufficiency and cooperation and sustainable lifestyles (Ibid.). Ultimately, it is the emergence of ecovillages, which better reflects contemporary concerns with ecotopianism. External influences such as the emergence of a consensus on the impending risks posed by anthropogenic climatic change and ecological degradation accelerated the movement towards ecovillage settlements. The onset of reliable environmental alternatives in the area of energy, housing materials and expertise also facilitated this movement. The ecovillage phenomenon has emerged in diverse locations globally. In many ways, the growth of ecovillages represents a movement away from the scientific basis for life which has been a dominating aspect of modernity, albeit within a retrospective embracing of pre-modern practices as part of the onset of postmodernity. In the light of greater understandings of environmental risk facing humanity, a move toward ‘survivalism’ has emerged from ‘the back to nature’ groupings of the counterculture. Some of the momentum for survivalism came from extreme religious groupings’ anticipation of a forthcoming apocalypse. Others, such as the militia groups which appeared in the United States from the 1980s onwards, have fundamentalist political motivations which were influenced by perceptions of impending social disorder, nuclear holocaust or mistrust of government. The northwestern states of Washington, Oregon and Montana have witnessed an increase in survivalist encampments in recent decades. It is interesting to note the consequences of extraneous motivational factors such as the ‘doomsday scenarios’ which have influenced survivalists, activists and ecovillagers. In many cases, pre-existing ideological dispositions are projected through the communal responses to perceived external threats, with survivalists maintaining a negative outlook while ecovillagers present a more positive response within the context of a wider rejection of modernity. Another underlying factor in the development of consequential collective behaviour is identity. For instance, much that was once considered to be ‘counterculture’ survived through the nineteen nineties in the guise of ‘new-age travellers, peace camps and animal rights campaigners’ (MacKay, 1996 in

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

127

Hetherington, 1998, pp. 2–5). Pepper (2005) has described the gradual merging of green values with conventional ones, demonstrating the ‘fate of early green ideas’ in categories such as ‘still to way out’ (‘severely frugal lifestyles’), ‘no longer cranky’ (worker’s co-ops) and ‘mainstream’ (‘green issues are worth paying attention to’). Within the context of the ‘post-materialist thesis’ (Inglehart, 1977), there may well be a generational distinction between the activist camps of new age travellers and those former counter culturists who participate in eco-villages. Although activist-camps are ‘often individually short-livedyand rather ephemeral’ (Hetherington, 1998, pp. 2–5), eco-villages are culturally entwined and interdependent, while also being recognised as committed groups endeavouring to build sustainable lifestyles. Other motivations for seeking an alternative lifestyle identified by Hetherington include searching for ‘authenticity, empathy, distinctive spaces, solidarity, identification and interest in holistic knowledge’ (Ibid.). Subsequently, a new tribalism has been identified as part of a wider cultural reclassification, with ecotopias or ecovillages having emerged as a living space for these autonomous tribes. Although social movements arise from specific moments of societal strain, utopias or intentional communities tend to surface in clusters as part of a gradual and more widespread reaction to externalised crisis and subsequent opportunities such as the response of pietists to the Reformation and prospect of the New World, or nineteenthcentury utopians to the onset of the Industrial Age and worker’s movements, or contemporary utopians to the threat of climatic change and the and the promise of sustainability. These threats and opportunities have had certain cultural moments that have come to define utopian developments. The arrival of the printing press, artistic and literary movements such as the transcendentalists, bohemians, beats, hippies and environmentalists have all added to the growth of a utopian culture which has had been located in identity and place. Moreover, the very rootedness of this culturally embedded utopianism has facilitated the onset of ecotopias and ecovillages, as the original utopian sense of ‘no-place’ has given way to an ethic of sustainability focusing on ‘this space’. Essentially, the relationship between those seeking new identities and new lifestyles from intentional communitarian arrangements transpires from the processes of opting out of the mainstream and embracing new places, new ways of life and new challenges. Therefore, we can understand the ‘transgressive’ dynamic within utopianism as raised by Sargisson (2001) and Pepper (2005) through the process of cultivation and transformation which is infused with an ecological moralism ‘in terms not incompatible with deep ecology’ (Sargisson, 2001, p. 70).

128

LIAM LEONARD

Certain areas of thematic congruence between activists and ecotopians are revealed from Sargisson’s study of intentional communities. In each case study, participants attempt to promote sustainable lifestyles through collective activity. This is expressed through an external projection of ethical concerns about the hinterland by activists, while ecotopians cultivate their surroundings through a moralistic expression of solidarity with their surroundings. The six intentional communities studies by Sargisson have a transient dynamic, but as with most communes senior members provide an element of continuity. Therefore, we are provided with an insight into the significance of leaders in the development of perceptions of ecotopianism within a context of the wider environmental setting of collective activity or settlement. The thematic direction of intentional communities that is set by senior participants within the context of the development of intentional communities creates a moralistic backdrop which attracts transient participants. The utopias discussed in Sargisson’s work reveal patterns whereby the dynamic between senior communitarians and transient participants provides a synthesis of motivational energies that benefit the community. This process continues until such a time as the core group of longstanding participants breaks away to re-found a new community based on an original ethical framework which the group has been diverted from over time by transients with less commitment. Invariably, the development of a collective identity in an ecotopian context evolves as a correlation between ethical or moralistic frameworks derived from longstanding experiences with nature and place. We can locate this nexus within the context of Sargisson’s concept of ‘the Politicised Quotidian’, as wider social concerns emerge from their original domestic contexts. In the case of Sargisson’s study of the Findhorn communities, this process is bolstered by two ‘core elements’: spirituality and education (Sargisson, 2001, p. 69). Although many come and go to sample the atmosphere at the Findhorn centres, it is the combination of a cultivated habitus derived from the merger of identities within specific places that motivates participants to these communities. Given the range of exogenous threats which cause concern in contemporary society, it can be said that this coming together of internal motivations and principles by core and transient participants alike creates a significant bond which ultimately shapes the wider identity of any communitarian project, and provides the space for day to day behaviour to emerge as the politics of the everyday and the commonplace. This outcome leads to an understanding of ecotopias as a space where the fervour of passion for nature and place is transformed

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

129

overtime into a more subtle relationship between participant and both their hinterland and fellow communitarians, as a near Zen-like absorption of the individual into the natural and the communal occurs. This process creates the praxis for the essential individual and social transformations necessary to create a longstanding relationship between communitarians and their surroundings, while the pursuit of this goal remains as a key motivation for each new wave of ecotopian settlement. The formation of identity from interaction with place emerges from a ‘creative participation’ (NorbergSchulz, 1980), or the fusing or culture and desire in nature. For Sargisson (1996, 2000), the realm of the private or internal is merged with that of the ‘practical politics of action’ through its ‘transgressive’ nature, a process which combines an ‘internally subversive’ aspect with a ‘flexible’ and ‘intentional’ utopianism (Ibid.). At the core of this understanding of identity, we find Sargisson’s theme of ‘the relationship of the Self with the Other’ (2000, pp. 116–151). Here, Sargisson is aligned with Bookchin’s own affirmation of the human spirit through ‘social ecology’ as the key determinant in motivations for ecotopian or sustainable behaviour. By taking a stance for openness and against established hierarchical frameworks in the utopian field, Sargisson provides ecotopians with a fresh imputes for understanding sustainable living practices. As we answer her call to address ‘the Self’ and ‘the Other’ as one of the same, our capacity to address wider issues of environmentalism and sustainability is enhanced. It is this ability to critically engage with the mainstream while operating inside of a utopian moment creates a significant cultural position for those who study or practice sustainable communitarianism. Moreover, the transgressive nature of Sargisson’s utopia avoids blueprints in favour of an ongoing process of debate on the nature of communitarian living. Tovey highlights the networked basis of the informal economy as a type of resistance to hegemonic order in the form of what Crossley (2002) has described as ‘working utopias’ or ‘places where a cultural of resistance and a habitus for change become a practical, real phenomena’ (Tovey, 2006, p. 181). There are areas of mutual interest for ecotopians and other rural lifestyles, and these may include interwoven and congruent issues such as daily food production, which in many ways reflects the essence of Sargisson’s ‘politicised quotidian’. Tovey also recognises the significance of local processes of production as a key factor of resistance in the age of globalisation, particularly when such local processes provide opportunities for ‘bypassing the national and its urban centres of power and influence’ (Tovey, 2006, p. 168). Ultimately, it may be that a more politicised form of identity

130

LIAM LEONARD

emerges from the practices of those who seek alternative forms of production and lifestyle. It follows then, that we might add the cultivation of an instinctive from of habitus to the distinction between the ‘utopias of sufficiency’ outlined by de Geus (1999, pp. 20–21) which are based on a projection of internal ethics, and the pursuit of a technologically derived surplus of goods which characterises utopias shaped by exogenous concerns. Although de Geus highlights outcomes such as ‘satisfaction’ or ‘sufficiency’ as critical distinctions within utopian living, it is the original motivations combined with the process of cultivating habitus that shapes these outcomes. By placing technology at the centre of this distinction, de Geus provides a moral barometer for ecotopians to consider. Is it enough to withdraw from wider society if we pursuit similar lifestyles within new living frameworks? It is this reconsideration of the very processes of production and consumption (de Geus, 1999, pp. 21–22) that lie at the heart of what ecotopianism can offer us as a sustainable alternative to capitalist derived mass urbanism and consumerism which, if pursued unchecked, now threatens the planet. Although utopians once chose to opt out of the mainstream on religious or cultural grounds, the possibilities of ecotopian living may now provide guidelines for an increase in sustainable living practices amongst in habitants of the mainstream in ‘our quest for an ecologically responsible society (Ibid.)? The distinction between morally derived ecological lifestyles and those which come to be shaped by political events creates a paradox for participants contending with individual and collective motivations within a community framework. On the contrary, Barry’s model of a ‘concrete utopia’ based on the combination of ‘realism and radicalism’ remains as a goal for utopians and environmentalists alike. Could it be that the motivational power of ongoing cataclysmic events derived from anthropogenic climate change will extend the moral and ethical basis for ecotopian practice? Perhaps we can find some answers to this question by examining the Irish utopian case, as it evolved from an initial concern with plantation style projects, through political co-operation during ‘the Troubles’ and political protests of eco-activists in recent years, or through the more considered lifestyle choices of those involved in the Cloughjordan EcoVillage. In Ireland, while the connection between communitarian living and activism has been significant, nonetheless many of these occurred in a sometimes less than utopian set of circumstances. The Ralahine Commune was established in the 1830s in the midst of violent protests by local farmers angry at the introduction of higher rents and tithes. Ralahine was an

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

131

attempt at collectivised farming in the form of a commonwealth on the Vandeleur estate in Newmarket-on-Fergus, itself a planned village alongside other Clare communities such as Sixmilebridge and Kilrush. With an elected committee and its own currency, Ralahine provided low rents and long working days for its inhabitants, lasting two years in difficult circumstances and represented one of the few pre-famine attempts to deal with the issue of rural labour (Craig, 1983). A number of ‘model villages’ were established throughout the 1800s across Ireland, many of them in the North. A Quaker village was established in Portlaw, County Waterford in 1825. William Thompson established the ‘Cork Co-operative Community’ in Glandore in 1814, based on his experiences leading the co-operative movement in England when Robert Owen was in the United States. By the century’s end, the ‘Celtic Literary Revival’ gave rise to a commune for the study of theosophy at Ely Place in Dublin. George Russell (AE) and William Butler Yeats were frequent visitors to what came to be known as ‘the Household’. Later during ‘the Troubles’ the Limerick soviet of 1919 was formed as a response by the Limerick Trades and Labour Council against the declaration of a ‘Special Military Area’ under the Defense of the Realm Act which required permits from the Royal Irish Constabulary to enter the city. In many ways we can see the establishment of some gaeltachts by the early Irish state as a type of utopian project. The Ra´th Cairn Gaeltacht in County Meath was set up in the mid 1930s when families were relocated from one of the economically stagnant ‘Contested Districts’ along the west coast. Each family was given land, livestock and equipment, and a community school was established. In the 1960s, a movement emerged to have Ra´th Cairn recognised as an official gaeltacht, and later a co-operative was established. The community has grown over the years. The establishment of the Cloughjordan Ecovillage is a contemporary example of a planned and sustainable living project in Ireland. Here, the need to address the pragmatic issue of ‘realism and radicalism’ or ‘sufficiency and abundance’ is being addressed in a modern village employing the best in green technology, with a committed group of participants in a small rural area, at a time when the Green Party are in government. Perhaps we have reached a time of utopian nirvana in Ireland when these things have come to pass! However, as we know, ongoing episodes of ecological activism and activist camps demonstrate that all is not well in the emerald isle. In recent years, the onset of environmental disputes in Ireland has also led to the establishment of protest camps at the Glen of the Downs, Carrickmines, Tara and Rossport. The Rossport region is home to an Irish speaking Gaeltacht community like that in Ra´th Cairn, yet rural

132

LIAM LEONARD

communities have had cause to mobilise and protest in recent years. In the late 1980s, protesters held a series of vigils to highlight the destruction of the Glen of the Downs to facilitate the construction of a motorway. As road building around Dublin increased, two further camps were established at Carrickmines and Tara. This use of transitory settlements has its basis in the tactical settlements of Earth First in the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the protest strategies of ecological activists. The ‘solidarity camp’ in support of the ‘Shell to Sea’ campaign against an onshore gas pipeline provided a focal point for the campaign of the Rossport community. However, the camp has been the subject of a court order to close. Here, local communities have taken on the mantle of environmental protectors drawing on local heritage and beliefs in the process of resisting the onset of a technologically derived industrialisation which has been embraced by state and industry. It can be argued that the ‘social ecology’ of Murray Bookchin is exemplified by those who have established protest camps in support of a cause which values the ecology and community above mainstream economic concerns. Environmentally derived collective behaviour can go beyond contemporary understandings of what citizenship now entails and that a much wider concept of ecologically derived social capital (Leonard, 2006, p. 250) can be formed from ‘culturally viable patterns of emotionally mediated responses’ (Smith, 2005, p. 145) or sentiments borne from alternative forms of communication or expression, although it may be that such principles need to be tempered by the ideological praxis of ecological political activism. From this perspective, a more authentic form of green more likely to be found within rural North Mayo, as part of a community’s subliminal relationship with its surroundings or the protester’s collective support for the rights of the local community and their environment. We can understand this form of collective ecotopian behaviour through an examination of the concept of ‘rural sentiment’ (Leonard, 2006, 2007). This primal response is the basis for understandings of what rural sentiment is about, in part an extension of the underlying expression of what Arne Naess (1972) originally called ecocentricism, the primordial valuing of the hinterland over the self, as witnessed by the activism of campaigners in west Cork in the 1980s, Mullaghmore in the 1990s, or in Rossport in recent years. These protests have been based on a desire to protect the hinterland, a sentiment that has been prioritised over anthropocentric concerns in successive campaigns. Eckersley (1992) develops Naess’ distinction between the eco-centric and anthropocentric spectrums of green politics. For Eckersley, this distinction

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

133

meant the politics of ethical environmentalism which included ‘resource conservation, human welfare ecology, preservationism, animal liberation and eco-centrism’ (Eckersley, 1992, p. 34) was separate from the accommodation of ‘sustainable’ development which placed that development at a higher value than the environment itself. This argument is at the crux of the environmental debate and is central to the definition and public ownership of a shared understanding of what defines our understanding of environmentalism. Bookchin spells out this premise with a view on these challenges of hierarchical systems of development: Community movements implicitly assert that in order to replace social domination by self management a new type of civic selfymust be restoredyto challenge the all pervasive state apparatus. (Bookchin, 1980, p. 15)

Beck claims that ‘ecological protest is a matter, not of natural but of cultural fact; a phenomenon of cultural sensibility and of the attentiveness of institutions’ (Beck, 1996, p. 49). This assertion has its basis in the argument which characterises environmental concern as a cultural as well as ecological from of expression. Essentially, the argument highlights the difficulty in explaining the inherent meanings underlying environmental discourses. Political protests, ecological or otherwise often follow from cultural rather than ideological grievances. As western culture has come to be over-reliant on industrialisation and materialism, an emphasis has been placed on new forms of sustainable living.

CONCLUSIONS This study has explored the ecotopian tradition through an analysis of the internal or personal motivations and exogenous or externally produced incentives for participation in communitarian projects over different eras. By developing the chapter in this way, an understanding of the motivations for ecotopian living as the enactment of moral agency which in itself is a form of activism is established. By outlining the rational underlying both internal and external influences, the separate incentives for communitarian participants are established within a context of the various types of ecotopian projects which have emerged throughout the time-frame presented. This understanding of the motivations for ecotopian living has been presented by applying Sargisson’s concept of the ‘politicised quotidian’ to participants in collective living projects or activist movements. Although

134

LIAM LEONARD

the motivations that compel participants into communitarian living are distinctive in origin, a new form of tribal identity can be arrived at through what Sargisson and Pepper have termed the ‘transgressive’ processes undertaken by participants both individually and collectively. Transcending the established rules by living outside of mainstream society is in itself revolutionary, particularly when this decision is arrived at as part of a wider concern with the environment, risk society, war or any of the other destructive practices currently in vogue with much of humanity. The debate between the pragmatic merits of a ‘concrete utopian’ realism as set out by Barry and that of the ‘utopias of sufficiency’ set out by de Geus is in many ways answered by the participation of eco-activists and ecotopians in projects which underpin a new form of green political economy and ideology which embraces the internal and external, or the local and the global, as one. Through this collective spirit, the ideology of ecotopianism is formulated as a unifying vision of intentional societies that are the opposite of Durkheim’s anomie; by replacing societal drift with a communal unity embedded in nature ecotopias may overcome Mannheim’s ‘problem of reality’ (1997, p. 173). Of course, although the motivations for communitarian living can be exclusive and de-political, the act of seeking a sustainably alternative way of life is ultimately a radical one. For Naess and Rothenberg (1989, pp. 172–179), the process of identifying with the hinterland and nature is linked with a wider ‘solidarity’ with the human community through an embracing of the mutual dependency which exists between the individual, common interests and the hinterland. They recognise that ‘exuberance in nature’ (Ibid.) is compatible with ‘Selfrealisation’ or the suppression of the individual ego in the pursuit of communal living at one with nature. They quote Descartes to this end: ‘knowing the power that effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavensywe might thereby make ourselves’ (1989, p. 191). Devall and Sessions (1985) develop the theme of the intuitive in their book Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Here, the authors built upon Naess’s themes, arguing for an intuitive form of self realisation alongside ‘biocentric equality’. This instinctive relationship between human instinct and nature with may ultimately be recognised as the primary motivation for ecotopian communitarianism. However, these instinctive reactions are often developed alongside the spectre of cataclysmic events such as Reformation era religious corruption or twentieth-century ideological threats in the past or the concerns about climate change facing contemporary society. Although the research of psychologist and utopian writer BF Skinner indicates a view of ‘the human being as an organism whose behaviour is primarily

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

135

determined by external environmental influences’ (Liebert & Spiegler, 1982, p. 460), this chapter argues that the internal moral or ethical basis for this behaviour cannot be understated in the case of ecotopian engagement. In each of the eras examined in this paper, the impulse to return to more naturally derived living conditions occurred as a response the motivational axis whereby internal and external conditions combine to create a personal construct of individual (and later group) identities derived from both motivations and place. Nonetheless, the study of the motivations underlying this process may be somewhat imprecise, as these motivations are as varied from era to era or from one ecotopian group to the next and so on. As Tom Moylan (1986, p. 20) has indicated, the ‘utopian impulse’ can become ‘a liberating utopia’ for both the collective and the self. What is clear is that once the process of the self-realisation spoken of by Arne Naess (or Devall and Sessions) is embarked upon, the potential for utopia is enhanced within social and natural contexts. Although in Re-Enchanting Humanity, Murray Bookchin (1995) expressed concerns about ‘mysticism’, his defence of ‘the human spirit’ can be seen as an endorsement of instinctive self realisation. Earlier in his life, Bookchin proclaimed the following belief: ‘Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution’ (Desire and Need 1967). By embarking on this process of discovery with nature, a sustainable ecotopian identity can be attained.

REFERENCES Bahro, R. (1984). Socialism and survival. London: Heretic Books. Barry, J. (2006). Towards a concrete utopian model of green political economy: From economic growth and ecological modernisation to economic security. Post-Autistic Economics Review Issue, 36. Beck, U. (1996). The reinvention of politics. Rethinking modernity in the global social order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Blackwood, C. (1984). On the perimeter. London: Heinemann. Bookchin, B. (1967). ‘Desire and need’, Anarchist Pamphlet. Bookchin, B. (1995). Re-enchanting humanity. London: Cassell. Bookchin, M. (1980). Toward an ecological society. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Bottomore, T. (1994). Dictionary of marxist thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Callenbach, E. (1975). Ecotopia. Berkeley: Banyan Tree. Claeys, G., & Sargent, L. T. (Eds). (1999). The Utopian reader. New York: New York University Press. Craig, E. T. (1983). An Irish commune: The experiment at Ralahine, County Clare, 1831–1833 (Reprint). Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

136

LIAM LEONARD

Crossley, N. (2002). Making sense of social movements. Buckingham: Open University Press. Doherty, B., & de Geus, M. (Eds). (1996). Democracy and green political thought. London: Routledge. de Geus, M. (1999). Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the sustainable society. Utrecht: International Books. Devall, B., & Sessions, G. (1985). Deep ecology: Living as if nature mattered. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith. Eckersley, R. (1992). Environmentalism and political theory: Toward an ecocentric approach. New York: State University of New York Press. Gusfield, J. (1970). Protest, reform and revolt: A reader. New York: Wiley. Hetherington, K. (1998). Expressions of identity: Space, performance, politics. London: Sage. Hicks, G. W. (2001). Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian community in the twentieth century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hopper, D., & Fonda, P. (1969). Easy rider. Los Angeles: Universal. http://www.ecotopia.org Inglehart, R. (1977). The silent revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kenny, M. (1996). Paradoxes of community. In: B. Doherty & M. de Geus (Eds), Democracy and green political thought. London: Routledge. Kropotkin, P. (1880). The commune of Paris. London: W. Reeves. Leonard, L. (2006). Green Nation: the Irish Environmental Movement from Carnsore Point to the Rossport 5 Irish Greenhouse Press Ecopolitics Series (Vol. 2). Drogheda: Choice. Leonard, L. (2007). The environmental movement in Ireland. Dordrecht: Springer Environmental. Liebert, R., & Spiegler, M. (1982). Personality: Strategies and issues. Homewood, IL: Dorsey. MacKay, G. (1996). Senseless acts of beauty. London: Verso. Mannheim, K. (1997). Ideology and Utopia: Collected works (Vol. 1, 2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Marins, L. (1984). R. Vollrath (Trans.), [Utopics: The semiological play of textual spaces]. Amherst NY: Humanity Books. Maren Lockwood, C. (1965). ‘Experimental Utopia in America’. In: J. Gusfield (Ed.), (1970) Protest, reform and revolt: A reader. New York: Wiley. Miller, T. (1992). Voices from the farm. New York: State University of New York Press. Millar, T. (1998). The quest for Utopia in twentieth-century America: Vol. 1, 1900–1960. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Monbiot, G. (2006). ‘A world without men: An untold story from Greenham Common’ Comment-is-Free, September 7, 2006. Moylan, T. (1986). Demand the impossible: Science fiction and the Utopian imagination. London: Methuen. Naess, A., & Rothenberg, D. (1989). Ecology, community and lifestyle: Outline of an ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Pepper, D. (2005). Utopianism and environmentalism. Environmental Politics, 14(1), 3–22. Sargisson, L. (1996). Contemporary feminist utopianism. London: Routledge. Sargisson, L. (2000). Utopian bodies and the politics of transgression. London: Routledge. Sargisson, L. (2001). Politicising the quotidian. Environmental Politics, 10(2), 68–89.

Ecological Activism: Sustainable Living, Activism and Identity

137

Shenker, B. (1986). Intentional communities: Ideology and alienation in communal societies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Smith, L. (2007). Humanity’s very survival is at risk. The Times, October 26, 2007. Smith, M. (2005). Citizens, denizens and the Res Publica: Environmental ethics, structures of feeling and political expression. Environmental Values, 14, 145–162. Tovey, H. (2006). New movement in old places? The alternative food movement. In: L. Connolly & N. Hourigan (Eds), Social movements and Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CHAPTER 7 ECOFEMINISM: ECOFEMINISM AND THE GREEN PUBLIC SPHERE Chaone Mallory INTRODUCTION Following particular feminisms that theorise the body as a place where the regulatory practices of racism, classism, sexism and speciesism are ‘inscripted’ or ‘sedimented’, but also understand the body as a site of resistance, a place where oppressive practices can be transgressed and transformed, this chapter explores the relation between ecofeminist theories of oppression, the notion of gender and species performativity and environmental activisms. Ecofeminist philosopher Deborah Slicer has argued that it is not only the human body that is capable of resistance through altering the performances around which identity is congealed but nature too has agency, is a player in processes of disruption and resignification. Ecopolitical theorist Catriona Sandilands has written about the ‘chain of equivalencies’ that discursively and materially link women, nature, people of colour, the differently-abled, queer folk and so on and has pondered how ‘a politics of performative affinity’ can help to emancipate both humans and the more-than-human world. Taking this brand of ecofeminist ecopolitical theorising as my starting point, I explore the role of environmental and feminist activisms, focusing on two instances of direct action, one from the US radical forest defence movement and one from the 1999 anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle, in The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 139–154 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004010

139

140

CHAONE MALLORY

disrupting hegemonic notions of who or what counts as a political subject and actor. Such actions, I argue, open spaces for subaltern voices, including non-human ones, to be heard. By considering the liberatory political possibilities of viewing species identity performatively, that is, as something that creatures, especially the human critter (to use the vernacular of the US forest defence movement) does rather than is, I suggest that activisms in all their variety are political sites where meaning is made and ecosocial relations configured, in ways that have material consequences for people and other beings of the earth. Some theoretical feminisms, such as feminist phenomenology and feminist postmodernism, theorise the body as a site where the regulatory practices of racism, classism, sexism and (less commonly mentioned) speciesism are ‘inscripted’ or ‘sedimented’, as the material nexus of particular ecosocial forces that construct some kinds of beings as inferior and thereby justifiably dominated. However, these same feminisms note that the body is also a site of resistance, a place where oppressive practices can be transgressed and transformed and a location where dominating discourses can be ruptured and reconfigured in liberatory ways. This feminist discourse on the ways that bodies are agential and practice resistance is useful to those interested in extra-parliamentary forms of ecopolitics, such as protest and direct action. Scholars working at the juncture of feminist and environmental concerns and at the boundaries of species demarcations, for example, Deborah Slicer, Karen Warren, Val Plumwood and Donna Haraway, have argued that it is not only the human body that is capable of such resistance but nature too has agency and is a player in these processes of disruption and resignification. Ecofeminist political theorist Catriona Sandilands (1999) has written in the book The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy about the ‘chain of equivalencies’ that discursively link women, nature, people of colour, the differently abled, queer folk and so on (see also, Laclau & Mouffe, 1980) and has pondered how what she deems ‘a politics of performative affinity’ can discursively and materially help to emancipate both humans and the more-than-human world. To embark on this foray into questions about politics and action these theorists provoke, a note is in order here on Sandilands’ use of the phrase ‘women, nature, people of colour’ and so on. Sandilands provides this listing following Butler, who has written on the ‘embarrassed etcetera’, the notion that there is no formal, logical limit or end to the list of beings/ bodies oppressed through patriarchal anthropocentric racist, heterosexist material-discursive systems (Butler, 1999, p. 182). For Butler, this very inability to close the boundary around who or what is linked, and thus

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

141

liberated, through identitarian political processes is what provides feminist politics with its best possibilities. Or put in her own words, This failure is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated ‘‘etc’’ that so often occurs at the end of such lines? This is a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the supplement, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all. This illimitable et cetera, however, offers itself as a new departure for feminist political theorizing. (Butler, 1999, 182–83)

Catriona Sandilands in The Good-Natured Feminist draws on Butler’s point here to show how it is that dominant theoretical traditions in the west have connected, through language and practice, these oppressed groups. ‘Women’ and ‘nature’ have been thought in to be similar and are, as decades of feminist theorising has observed, oppressed for similar reasons – for example, through association with the devalued body, with a- or irrationality, immanence instead of transcendence, the sphere of reproduction and not production and so forth. However, Sandilands argues that these are historical, not ‘natural’ connections. Nonetheless, the material-discursive link between ‘women’ and ‘nature’ can be used productively to destabilise relations of oppression, through a coalitional politics that creatively ‘plays with’ these constructed connections and deploys them strategically. A case of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, as it were. Sandilands can also be understood as following through on the suggestion made by Butler to ‘extend the very notion of the political’ (Butler, 1999, p. 188) through asking questions, focused through an ecofeminist lens, particularly about the ‘nature’ part of the chain of equivalencies. In alignment with the desire of Sandilands and other ecofeminists to rethink the political in such a way that we think carefully about our relations with the more-than-human world, this chapter represents an exploratory inquiry into questions raised by particular radical ecopolitical theorists, especially those drawing from feminist traditions, regarding ways that the more-than-human world can enter into our political and public materialdiscursive practices as a co-interlocutor, as beings and entities whose voices are audible in the (green) public sphere. Although I do not elaborate on this here, I hold that such questioning necessarily will provoke a re-thinking of the polis altogether, a task those committed to the construction of more liberatory and inclusive forms of political and environmental organisation have an imperative to engage in (see also Sandilands, 2002; Torgerson, 1999). In light of the insights offered by these theorists, this chapter is concerned with some of the following questions: if Catriona Sandilands and

142

CHAONE MALLORY

Deborah Slicer (two ecofeminist theorists whose work, along with feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad, I will turn to in more depth shortly) are right that women and others similarly subordinated through materialsemiotic practices of exclusion and oppression have a unique ‘performative affinity’ and/or ‘standpoint’ in relation to that which we call nature, then can those embodied subjects who engage the world as ‘women’, ‘non-white’, ‘non-heterosexual’, ‘non-human’ and so on at this point in ecosocial history actually perform the natural in a way that enables nature to resist its oppression? Are those living in the human bodies marked by late capitalism as ‘inferior’, ‘other’ and so on somehow better able than those in ‘unmarked’ bodies, through activism and other means, to rupture the category of ‘the human’ in such a way that our continuity with (as well as difference within) the more-than-human world is revealed? If so, what/where are the social, political and ecological spaces where this rupturing can take place? How can direct action be viewed as a site where humans and the more-than-human world ‘make meaning’ (to borrow the phrase from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad (2008)) together? Adequately addressing these questions entails examining the role of environmental and feminist activisms, especially direct action, in disrupting hegemonic notions of who or what counts as a political subject and actor and opening spaces for subaltern voices, including non-human ones, to be heard. The current state of ecopolitical theory, in the views of some, has an overly instrumental approach and is neglecting considerations of how a radical, green democratic project involves questions of not just how to ‘green’ existing political structures and practices but how to transform the political and the subject of politics. Green democratic theorist Alex Latta (2007, p. 1), for example, has written that current literatures on ecological citizenship, while devoting attention to issues of democracy, have failed to ‘address issues of recognition and inclusion, and to identify the subaltern voices that open the possibility for greater democratic participation through their politicization of dominant socio-ecological orders’. Ecofeminist theorists and activists help to remedy these kinds of exclusions and effacements of subalterns, in ways examined here. To begin our foray into these questions regarding agency and subjectivity for nature and how that agency is expressed, consider what Judith Butler (to both accolades and infamy) wrote in Gender Trouble in 1990: If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no pre-existing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

143

of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. (Butler 1999, p. 180)

Leaving aside for the moment – but just for the moment! – the intense debates over just how thoroughly nature (here, in the form of an essential, biological ‘sex’) exists only in/as language that have ensued since the advent of the feminist postmodernism Butler’s early work exemplifies (see, e.g., Mann, 2006), what we can extrapolate from this (to state what has been repeatedly articulated in the literature)1 is that identities that appear to be stable essences of the beings presenting them, immutable, biological, presocial ‘facts’ can be understood to be ‘regulatory fictions’ deployed in the service of particular kinds of power relations. The power relation that ecofeminism most directly engages is the human/non-human hierarchical dualism, showing how it is entangled with and co-constitutive with other power relations, for example, sex/gender, racism, heterosexism, classism and ableism. Therefore, an ecofeminist application of this famous Butlerian construction shows that differences between humans and the rest of nature, such as markers of species difference,2 are as much a political relation deployed in the service of human supremacism as they accurately mark ‘natural fact’. Let’s now consider the later Butler; Butler after what feminist philosopher Bonnie Mann (2006) calls her ‘phenomenological turn’. In 2004’s Precarious Life (a book no one should mistake for a treatise on or a discourse about the natural environment or human engagement with a more-than-human world!),3 she takes up the question of what kinds of lives count as recognisably, identifiably human – and which do not. That there are ‘racial and ethnic frames by which the recognizably human is currently constituted’ (Butler, 2004, p. 90) should come as no surprise, Butler writes, in an era of demonisation and indeed dehumanisation of the Islamic Other during the War on Terror. Butler continues, It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a ‘Western’ civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human. (Butler, 2004, p. 91)

What then is a human identity and political subjectivity, that is not produced through the same processes of dehumanisation that permit the myriad forms of violence and degradation that happen daily to women, people of colour, animals and the more-than-human world? Or to ask a different, but related, question, what are the ways that species identity gets performed in oppressive ways – how are beings and entities in nature

144

CHAONE MALLORY

constructed as ‘lower’ ‘lesser’ ‘unspeaking’ and/or ‘nonhuman’, through the en-actions of humanbeingness, and how might we alter the ways that humans perform their ‘humanness’ in such a way that a different, more inclusive, less hierarchical understanding of species difference can occur? Furthermore, and even more radically, how can those beings belonging to the more-than-human world also be understood to be engaging in an enactment of ‘the natural’ that has the liberatory potential to overcome the ecologically destructive nature/culture, human/non-human dualism that holds us in its thrall and threatens the very earth all life depends on? If we agree with Butler’s assertion that identity – race, gender, class and sexuality – are things that we do, rather than are, and that subjectivities are produced out of these identitarian processes (and I want to be clear here that I am not here agreeing with the readings of Butler that see a radical linguistic constructivism in her work; rather my uptake of Butler here should understand this notion of identity performance as occurring in complex interplay with the material, as will be demonstrated in what follows); then why would it not be equally the case that species – human or otherwise – is as performative as other characteristics of living beings which are also said to be entirely ‘natural’ but upon closer scrutiny are revealed to be otherwise? As Cate Mortimer-Sandilands (nee Catriona Sandilands) put it, nature may be a social construction, but it is pure hubris to think and act as if human beings are the only ones doing the constructing.4 Ecofeminist philosopher Deborah Slicer echoes these sentiments in a relatively early application of Butler’s views to the theoretical and political projects of ecofeminism. She writes about the usefulness to ecofeminism of feminist political theorist Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory along with Butler’s views. Slicer thinks that Butler can be helpful to ecofeminism by disrupting notions of the ontological stability of nature while at the same time locating the natural or material body as both the site of oppressive constructions and places where such constructions can be challenged. According to Slicer: To concede a constructionist view is not to give over to a radical idealism or to skepticism about the existence of physical stuff; nor does constructionism necessarily result in political nihilism y Both deep ecologists and ecofeminists have urged that we reconceive our Western metaphysics of nature (as inert, passive matter), and of the relationship between humans and nature. Butler’s attempt to politicise the metaphysics of matter, in her case the naturalised category of ‘‘sex’’, seems consistent with and potentially helpful to the projects of deep ecology and ecofeminism. (1998, p. 60)

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

145

Slicer continues, I would argue that the physical imposes certain limits to malleability and that the physical is a ‘‘player’’ has its own agency, in relation to social construction y To engage in a hubris that forgets the material as player, whether we are talking about a human body or a watershed, is self-destructive, as environmentalists have been saying all along (Slicer, 1998, p. 61).

For Slicer, the body is the site of the sedimentations of regulatory practices as well as the (potential) site of their rupture, the place where conventional ideas about women and nature can be transgressed and transformed. And nature too has agency, is a player in these process of disruption and resignification. Feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad, in her orienting chapter in the book Material Feminisms, titled ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, also disabuses of us the notion that viewing embodied interactions among the more-than-human world in this way means ceding a radical linguistic constructivism that denies the materiality of humans and nature. Barad writes, ‘Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real’ (2008, p. 121). Explaining further that an understanding of nature and culture that shows them to be in continual engaged co-emergence does not efface matter nor reduce it to a function of (human) language but rather helps us to get over the human/nature dichotomy that is reinscribed in many postmodernisms as well as modernist philosophies;5 Barad argues that [I]t is possible to develop coherent philosophical positions that deny that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other. A performative understanding, which shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices, is one such alternative y I propose a specifically posthumanist notion of performativity – one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors. A posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘nonhuman,’’ examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilised and destabilised. (p. 122)

Therefore to return to the animating project of this chapter, namely the political possibilities of viewing species identity as something that creatures, especially but not exclusively the ‘human’ critter, does rather than is, enacts in dynamic engagement with that which we call ‘the environment’, let’s ask what the discursive practices and performative enactments might be that call into question the givenness of categories of the human and non and also ask

146

CHAONE MALLORY

who or what might be best situated at this moment in ecosocial history to engage in these disruptive performances. Who and what can engage in a ‘performative affinity’ in the Sandilandsian sense with the nature we currently label ‘nonhuman’, why these bodies, and why in the when of now? To delve in to these questions, let me relay a story. In November of 1999, newly a doctoral student in environmental studies and five months pregnant so a bit apprehensive about the risk of authority confrontation I knew I was taking, I boarded a chartered van with seven other graduate students from Eugene, Oregon, to Seattle to participate in the anti-WTO street protests that have come to mark the advent of a direct action global justice movement that is raucous, playful, disruptive and filled with a prefigurative jouissance.6 To set the context for my own narrative, it is helpful to know the stories others have told about this world-changing event. Journalist Jeffrey St. Clair (1999) and ecofeminist writer Starhawk (2002) are among those who have published first-hand accounts of the events of ‘the battle for Seattle’. Although mainstream media coverage focused strongly on reports of putative aggression from protesters, both St. Clair and Starhawk note how those present in Seattle witnessed – and experienced – far more viciousness emanating from police than from the protesters, who had been conducting nonviolence training for weeks as part of the strategy to disrupt the meeting of WTO delegates, were committed to principles of nonviolence, collectivity, responsibility-sharing and anti-hierarchy and employed consensus-driven decision-making processes within a decentralised organisational structure (Starhawk, 2002, pp. 16–20). One of the things that make the events at Seattle remarkable was the way in which supposed economic-political adversaries banded together to protest the anti-labour and anti-environment policies of the unelected WTO, forming the now-famous blue-green coalition (St. Clair, 1999). To return to my own tale, I saw such solidarity in action. And among the many playfully serious expressions of resistance to global capitalist hegemony and its racist, sexist, classist and ecosystem-destroying practices that I witnessed was a group of environmentalists dressed in sea turtle costume7 marching alongside union steel workers, replete in their own costume of hardhats, workboots and Carhartt overalls. (St. Clair reports on a banner that, displaying this new solidarity among organised labour and environmentalists, read, ‘Teamsters and Turtles Together at Last!’) Watching, and moving with these two groups (and many others), it occurred to me that each phalanx was, to use the language we have been deploying here, engaged in a performative enactment of a particular politicised identity for which they were demanding recognition, generating a political subjectivity which was

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

147

asserting its presence and voice in the decisions and proceedings that affect them, their lives and their livelihoods. The human steelworkers were no less involved in an identity performance designed to destabilise traditional notions about protesters and make way for new varieties of political actors and actions than the humans-come-turtles were. And to ‘flipper’ this around, as it were, the protest speech of the sea turtle voiced through human actor/agents who felt this performative affinity with such creatures was no less real than that of the union workers who were engaged in selfrepresentation and enactment of a collective subjectivity. At this point, many readers might object, as have several commentators at oral presentations of this story, that there is a profound difference here between the steelworkers and the sea turtles; that the steelworkers are, after all, human beings who are indisputably capable of self-representation, are clearly political subjects able to articulate their interests as steelworkers in the public sphere. The sea turtles, in contrast, are literally voiceless, unable to comprehend much less purposefully participate in political practices like street protest. Were it not for the human environmentalists, the sea turtles’ interests would go unrepresented in this sphere, and the environmentalists are performing as sea turtle to make a point. But why would we say that the union workers ‘really are’ union workers with a legitimate claim but that the costumed sea turtles are ‘merely’ people ‘dressed up’ like turtles, if not under the anthropocentric assumption that there is a clear and fixed boundary between the human and the non, and that non-humans are completely nonagential, not capable of self-representation or political voice? To assume that ‘actual’ (read: true? authentic? real?) sea turtles are by their nature (which of course would have to be their biological species-nature) incapable of self-representation is to commit the fallacy that scholars like Butler, Sandilands, Slicer and Barad are warning against: the fallacy of thinking that there is an immutable ‘truth’ to particular kinds of bodies that exists outside political relations of domination, subordination, culture and power, to deny the historicity and constructedness of kinds of subjectivities and to believe that the non-human (here the sea turtle) is incapable of agency, that it is not, as Sandilands, Slicer and Barad explicitly assert, a ‘player’ in the processes of disruption and resignification of ecosocial relations. The fact is that the livelihood and flourishing of both seemingly radically distinct kinds of beings are each being harmed by global capitalism; all of these – the turtles who are caught ‘accidentally’ in the indiscriminate driftnets seeking to entangle commercially valuable species like shrimp, the American union workers whose jobs are lost as capital roams worldwide in search of the cheapest and most exploitable workforce and laxest environmental laws, the

148

CHAONE MALLORY

shrimp whose flesh we consumers find tasty enough that it is worthwhile to ‘harvest’ not only them but millions of non-economically valuable sea creatures like the turtles killed as ‘by-catch’ and tossed back into the depleted waters and the rest – all these embodied subjects are bound together in the material relations of white supremacist anthropocentric capitalist patriarchy8 and as such are inserting their claims, their vociferous bodies into the (green) public sphere – what I have elsewhere named the ‘ecopolisphere’9 – are acting together in the chain of equivalencies. It was witnessing as a participant-observer, and then reflecting, on this spectacle, on the performative spectacle of the steelworkers-next-to-sea turtles that for me brought into relief the questions raised, and engaged here, as well as some others. Who or what counts as a political subject? Who gets to decide? How much of who or what qualifies as a legally and politically recognisable subject is actually the effect of power relations rather than ‘natural fact’? How can the tools and insights developed by feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory regarding the construction of politically efficacious subject positions for marginalised humans be extended to beings in the more-than-human world? How does such reconceptualisation of subjectivity open the possibilities for solidarity and mutual representation among marginalised groups? And how is what we call nonhuman nature involved in all of this, on its own terms and of its own accord? How is the more-than-human world exhibiting agency through the excesses of the very constructions that cause it to be rendered subordinate? How is nature resisting its oppression? Another example, from the women’s and transgender radical forest defence movement in the United States,10 illustrates the ways that women and nature are not just (under western semiotic-material practices) co-constitutive but also produce relations of political solidarity and coalitionality between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human’. To understand how this is the case, it is necessary to return again to Sandilands’ analysis of ecofeminism and a politics of performative affinity. Sandilands, in The Good-Natured Feminist, has the following to say about the ‘chain of equivalencies’ mentioned in the early part of this chapter. Ecofeminism was founded on a specific coalitional gestureywomen and nature are located in a series of narratives that connect them in some way as equivalently positioned products of certain narratives and practices of domination and oppression. It is from this position of constructed connection that ecofeminism can produce a politics of performative affinity. Rather than deny any continuity between women and nature (as has been the tendency in many feminisms y) a performative affinity between women

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

149

and nature allows for the possibility for each to disrupt each other. (1999, p. 120–121, emphases added).

And I would add to this, as Sandilands does in later work (see Sandilands, 2002), that in addition to disrupting and destabilising each other, particular performances have the potential to show – and produce – continuities among ‘women’ and ‘nature’ as well, but continuities that overcome oppressive essentialised constructions of women/nature affinities and yield what ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood calls political solidarity with nature – a standing with the other that permits the difference of the ecological other to remain as an other, but in a way that does not produce a hyper-separation that disallows for the possibility of political affinity (Plumwood, 2002). Where can we find an instance of a member of a subordinated category of humans acting in political solidarity and performative affinity with a being in nature? I have written elsewhere about the experiences of Wombat, a young woman forest defender and tree sitter working to defend the ancient forests of the US Pacific Northwest. Wombat helped to found a collective of forest defence activists of women and transgender persons that conducted some of the most effective direct actions against logging activities in the national forests of Oregon in the early part of this century (Mallory, 2006).11 During her time as a direct-action forest defender, she was sexually assaulted during her first-ever tree sit by a respected veteran male activist nearly 20 years her senior who was supposed to train her. The young activist’s assaulter used a combination of tactics to enable the assault, including intimidating her by ‘showing’ her his ‘knife collection’ and pressuring her to ingest intoxicating substances (which obviates consent, as is widely recognised, for example, in college campus acquaintance rape policies). Later, as the two lay down to sleep on the narrow platform 120 feet off the ground, the male activist began to touch Wombat through her sleeping bag and eventually that night committed sexual assault. Wombat recounts: He kept apologizing [for touching me], but he kept on doing it anyway. I didn’t know what to do. We were up in the tree, and I didn’t want him to push me off the platform; and I didn’t want to push him off the platform. There was no one around to help. I eventually left my body [note: disassociating is a common psychological and physical survival tactic used by victims/survivors of sexual assault], and the next morning he climbed down without having taught me anything [about treesitting]. I stayed up in the tree for another week by myself. It was good that I was alone, because I spent a few days communing with the tree. I thought, ‘holy shit! This is what the tree feels like – it’s all for the white man’s power. They get off on the vulnerability.’ It was two different actions

150

CHAONE MALLORY

[sexual assault and cutting down the tree], but it comes from the same source. (personal communication, August 2005, cited also in Mallory, 2006)

When she told her story, Wombat spontaneously – that is, without being ‘educated’ on the theoretical analysis offered by ecofeminism regarding the intersections between racism, sexism and environmental degradation – made the connection between power, whiteness, maleness and sexualised oppression and the way the tree was being treated by those wishing to cut it down. But was Wombat really ‘communing’ with the tree? Did Wombat, a committed and fierce forest defender, through her experience of sexual assault share an affective world with a member of a different species also (but for different material causes) threatened with loss of autonomy and bodily integrity? A crazy notion indeed to members of the dominant anthropocentric and speciest culture, a culture that routinely dismisses radical environmental activists by labelling them ‘hippies’ and ‘tree huggers’, terms that under dominant usage have quite derisive connotations. For most, if they trouble to reflect on it at all, Wombat has obviously taken her activism a little too far in stating that she shares an epistemology of oppression with the tree she is living in! A standard, anthropocentric interpretation of Wombat’s sense of solidarity with the tree (‘this is what the tree feels like’) after she was sexually assaulted would assert that she is anthropomorphising, that the tree does not ‘feel like’ anything and certainly does not experience the devastation of its ecosystem and the felling and fleeing of the ecological community around it as an illegitimate and violent act of power, domination and control by the forces white supremacist anthropocentric capitalist patriarchy y or does it? Therefore in an untidy, perhaps dissatisfying ending, I leave us with this embarrassed ellipsis, as these questions have barely been raised in contexts other than radical environmental theorising of the sort done by authors analysed here, much less decided upon. I think it an ambitious enough project in this chapter to get these questions to be seriously considered; I cannot hope to determine here how we would revise the entire weight of modern western history and its exclusion and effacement of the more-thanhuman world such that we could seriously consider the possibility that those beings and entities we call nature could be agential subjects and as such be engaged as political interlocutors, co-constructors of a green public sphere. I would count it a great success if I can at least provoke reflection on, and perhaps even considered response to the question of whether Wombat and the tree were standing at that moment in what Sandilands et al. might label a relationship of political affinity, one they each – Wombat and the

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

151

tree – performed, and by so doing forged a new knot in the tangle of culture and nature, one strung through with threads of gender and capitalism, of fear and affection, mammal flesh and cellulose, sunlight and resistance, race and rain. In conclusion, though, I do want to suggest that if we take seriously those like Butler and Haraway (see especially, Haraway, 2008), who argue that identity and the ontological ‘truth’ of bodies – including non-human bodies – and nature are much less fixed than enlightenment/modernist narratives would have us believe, and if we also take seriously Slicer’s, Sandilands’ and Barad’s theoretical provocations regarding the political possibilities of viewing the agential materiality of humans and nature as complexly co-emergent, as coming-to-be performatively, then we can begin to interpret the value of direct action, such as (but certainly not limited to) the actions analysed here from the WTO protest and the radical forest defence movement, differently. Rather than environmental activism consisting of action being taken by ‘humans’ ‘on behalf of’ the morethan-human world, we can see activisms as a political space where humans and the more-than-human world make embodied political subjectivities, and as Barad says, worlds, together.

NOTES 1. As is well known about the work for which postmodern feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler is most famous, Gender Trouble’s (originally published in 1990) major politico-theoretical project is to problematise the notion of gender altogether, by suggesting that there is no necessary link between one’s biological make-up and one’s ‘sex’ and that sex and gender, rather than being ‘natural’, are culturally and linguistically constructed performances. Gender performativity in this context refers to the ways in which embodied subjects articulate, through culturally available and articulated repetitions, the expectations surrounding their assigned gender in such a way that the gender attributes, and especially manifestations of culturally sanctioned expressions of masculinity and femininity, appear to be ‘natural’ or ‘biological’. Because they are performances instead of essences, they can be altered in liberatory ways. Sandilands takes this up for ecofeminist purposes. I here explore concrete examples of what taking seriously the notion of performativity might mean in relation to a transformative environmental politics. 2. Common examples include language, tool using, affective bonds, ‘higher’ cognitive capacities, culture and so on. But as Haraway writes, ‘what ever marker we identify, we locate in a non-human, and must move the bar once again’. 3. In 2005, when Judith Butler was the invited guest of a graduate student and faculty research group in feminist philosophy at the University of Oregon, I engaged her directly regarding her discursive take-up of the language of ‘the human’, asking

152

CHAONE MALLORY

her whether she thought her analysis of how lives become recognisable when they are deemed ‘human’ and dispensable/violable when they are deemed ‘not-human’ could apply to beings and entities in the more-than-human world. I explained my interest in the category of the human in relation to markers of species difference and ecofeminist interrogations of species essentialism and wondered whether our projects were compatible at all. Butler agreed they could be and that although she had only meant to apply her analysis to the dehumanisation of the Islamic other, that there was a potential application to ecotheoretical concerns. I felt then, and still do, that there is something of great use in Precarious Life in bringing into awareness the effacements of those bodies deemed ‘non-human’ in nature. But I also felt that Butler’s failure to talk about the treatment of those who are ‘actually’ not-human and how those bodies are routinely terrorised, subjected to violence, consumed and unmourned was reflective of the general anthropocentrism that pervades this lifeworld. Recently, philosopher Chloe´ Taylor has taken Butler to task in print for neglecting to consider the plight of other animals and the ways in which animal bodies share this fundamental corporeal vulnerability that ties us to ethical interrelation in ‘The Precarious Lives of Animals: Butler, Coetzee, and Animal Ethics’ (Taylor, 2008). 4. Quoted from the narrative for a conference titled ‘Nature Matters: Materiality and the More-Than-Human World in Cultural Studies of the Environment’ held in Toronto, Ontario, October, 2007. Sandilands is clearly borrowing from the prose of feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway here. 5. For an incisive book-length treatment of ways that many postmodernisms rely on a linguistic determinism and inadvertently replicate the mind/body (and affiliated) dualisms of modernity they claim to be overcoming, through a reification of the power of language to create the world and the denial of an independent existence for material nature, see Mann (2006). Mann’s recuperation of the material through a ‘feminist politics of place’ is a helpful intervention into the discourse and in many ways quite aligned with the projects of Slicer and Barad. 6. For a rich participant-observer description of the intersection between the political and performative dimensions of many direct actions, including the antiWTO protests in Seattle and anti-globalisation actions in Genoa, Prague, Quebec, Washington DC and Brazil, see Starhawk (2002). 7. Although, as St. Clair remarks, the unions were far less willing to genuinely challenge the meetings and authorities, opting instead to largely protest in officially sanctioned ways, and did not contribute much to the events which led to the shutdown of the WTO meetings that first day (St. Clair, 1999). 8. Tip of the hat to black feminist cultural theorist bell hooks, who coined the term ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’. 9. See Mallory (forthcoming). 10. This is not to say that men do not identify with the goals of ecofeminism, and certainly, there are male ecofeminists such as the philosopher Deane Curtin (1996), who has written on ecofeminism and ethics of care, among other topics. At least one scholar is attempting to develop a notion of ‘ecomasculinism’, under which male identity would not be founded in a subjectivity which needs to exert domination and control over human others and the natural world. See Pule´ (2008).

Ecofeminism: Ecofeminism and the Green Public Sphere

153

11. See also Mallory (2010) Wombat and her comrades also contributed greatly to a contemporary forest defence movement that has adopted explicit anti-oppression policies, has drawn links between the destruction of wild nature and forms of social oppression and has recently specifically located itself within ecofeminism. See http:// portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/03/373612.shtml; also, for an official statement of adoption of an ‘anti-oppression policy’ in which The Earth First! Journal editorial collective recognises, in language very closely allied with that of much ecofeminism, ‘that the institutional, economic, political, social and cultural dynamics of hierarchy, power and privilege that define mainstream society also permeate the radical environmental movement. These dynamics are expressed in various interlocking systems of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, speciesism, etc.), which prevent equal access to resources and safety, disrupt healthy communities and movement building, and severely – sometimes irreparably – harm our allies, our friends, our loved ones and ourselves’. (http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/section.php?id ¼ 6). As discussed in note 10, this is not to exclude the possibility that men can and do align themselves with ecological and social movements that understand there to be an interconnection between gender oppression and environmental destruction; as certainly some of the most active self-identified ecofeminists in the US forest defence movement are transgender and queer, as well as some ‘straight’, male-identified persons.

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: Toward and understanding of how matter comes to matter. In: S. Alaimo & S. Heckman (Eds), Material feminisms (pp. 120–155). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. Curtin, D. (1996). Toward an ecological ethic of care. In: K. Warren (Ed.), Ecological feminist philosophies (pp. 66–81). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1980). C. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London, New York: Verso. Latta, A. P. (2007). Locating democratic politics in ecological citizenship. Environmental Politics, 16(3), 377–393. Mallory, C. (2006). Ecofeminism and forest defense in Cascadia: Gender, theory, and radical activism. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 17(1), 32–49. Mallory, C. (2010). The spiritual is political: Gender, spirituality, and essentialism in radical forest defense. The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture (Spring). Mallory, C. (forthcoming). What is ecofeminist political philosophy? Gender, nature, and the political. Journal of Environmental Ethics. Mann, B. (2006). Women’s liberation and the sublime: Feminism, postmodernism, environment. New York: Oxford University Press.

154

CHAONE MALLORY

Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. London: Routledge. Pule´, P. (2008). A declaration of caring: Towards an ecological masculinism. Unpublished paper presented at Thinking Through Nature conference, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA, June 20–22. Sandilands, C. (1999). The good-natured feminist: Ecofeminism and the quest for democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sandilands, C. (2002). Opinionated natures: Toward a green public culture. In: B. A. Minteer & B. P. Taylor (Eds), Democracy and the claims of nature: Critical perspectives for a new century (pp. 117–132). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Slicer, D. (1998). Toward an ecofeminist standpoint theory: Bodies as grounds. In: G. Gaard & P. Murphy (Eds), Ecofeminist literary criticism (pp. 60–61). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. St. Clair, J. (1999). Seattle diary: It’s a gas, gas, gas. New Left Review NLR 238 1999. Available at http://www.newleftreview.org/?issue ¼ 234 Starhawk, T. (2002). Webs of power: Notes from the global uprising. Gabriola, BC: New Society Publishers. Taylor, C. (2008). The precarious lives of animals: Butler, Coetzee, and animal ethics. Philosophy Today, 52(1), 60–72. Torgerson, D. (1999). The promise of green politics: Environmentalism and the public sphere. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 8 SUSTAINABLE PLANNING: A GREEN PROTECTIONISM Colin Hines INTRODUCTION Section one of this chapter is a description of what ‘The Green New Deal’ is and how it could be financed. The term was first coined by the author and the report of the same name was first published in July 2008 by the New Economics Foundation (nef) to deal with the ‘triple crunch’ of climate change, energy insecurity/price instability and the financial and economic meltdown (nef, 2008). Section two, on the other hand, is solely the opinion of the author and builds on the work in his book Localisation: A Global Manifesto (Hines, 2000). It makes the case that for the global economy to recover from its present financial crisis in a way that is socially and environmentally sustainable and which will reduce inequalities worldwide, a radically different end goal for nations’ economies is required. The discredited and fast collapsing neoliberal model, with its emphasis on subordinating all national aspirations to the need to be internationally competitive in a world of evermore open borders, is no longer appropriate in the 21st century. Yet present day politicians are still hoping to return to business as usual, that is maximum economic growth through ever-greater resource and energy use, and increasing world trade and financial flows. However, this is not an option in terms of the terminal damage done to the present banking The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 155–170 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004011

155

156

COLIN HINES

system, stock markets and public confidence in the system that is seeing the collapse in demand for both goods and services of the world, or for the future survival of a planet that must reduce energy and resource use, and to achieve this must introduce a completely different goal of rebuilding sustainable, resilient and self-reliant local economies worldwide. For this to occur, the beggar-your-neighbour mantra of international competitiveness above everything needs to be replaced by a better-yourneighbour emphasis on the protection, rebuilding and rediversification of national economies worldwide. However, it is crucial to be clear that this needs to be done in a cooperative internationalist manner, not the one-sided protectionism of the 1930s with its oxymoronic hope that one country could erect barriers to others exports, whilst the rest of the world would continue importing This whole idea of exports as the main motor of the economy has to be rejected, and in its place the goal of diversifying local economies has to be brought in to generate new jobs and business opportunities in a way which has environmental protection at its core: in short, a global Green New Deal made possible by a Green New Protectionism. The arguments for this fundamental shift, the policies needed to achieve it and why it will enhance the potential of really achieving a global Green New Deal in the timescale needed to save both the environment and the global economy are the subject of Section two.

SECTION ONE The Green New Deal entails re-regulating finance and taxation plus a transformational policy programme aimed at tackling the unemployment and decline in demand inevitable in the wake of the credit crunch. It involves policies and novel funding mechanisms to substantially reduce the use of fossil fuels. This in turn will help us reduce the damaging effects of climate change and allow us to cope better with the coming energy shortages caused by peak oil. A Green New Deal will, to some extent, replicate the three major planks of the original 1930s New Deal, designed to deal with the aftermath of the credit crunch of the late 1920s (see Krugman, 2007; Badger, 2008). These were 1. Franklin Roosevelt’s strict regulation of the cause of the problem – a greedy and feckless financial sector. This had been the major culprit in causing the Great Depression, made worse by governments thinking they had to let the market rule.

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

157

2. The provision of funding for infrastructure, part of which was paid for by an increase in taxes on big business and the rich – a measure which also had the positive effect of dramatically decreasing inequality. 3. The investment of billions of dollars in a wide range of infrastructural projects such as highways, dams and bridges, as well as in training and for better working conditions. Its purpose was to get people back to work and generate business opportunities. The Green New Deal will, however, differ from its 1930s predecessor in that there will be a much bigger role for investments from private savings, pensions, banks and insurance. Today’s economic and business downturns, and the consequent rises in unemployment, are not yet on the scale of the Great Depression. But we believe they will inevitably increase as debt-fuelled demand is curbed in response to the present credit crunch. To fill this deflationary gap, the Green New Deal will encourage investments that are labour intensive, generate huge business possibilities and help solve the triple crunch all at once. Using the methodology of the Stern Review (Stern, 2007), it has been estimated that the United Kingdom will need to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent from its 1990 levels by 2050. ‘Although considered conservative by many, several versions of the plans on how to achieve this target have been laid out. One ambitious carbon reduction programme that could meet this goal and also includes detailed costings was drawn up by the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr; Lockwood, Bird, & Alvarez, 2007). This envisages that there will be no new nuclear power, and that the result will be consistent with avoiding a 2 1C increase in global warming, as long as all other nations instigate similar programmes. Importantly, however, early action is necessary so that we are not left with impossibly high targets for carbon reduction as we approach the middle of the century. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, the United Kingdom needs to achieve year-on-year cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades in the region of 7–11 per cent, if it is to play its part in preventing potentially irreversible global warming. This is far, far beyond anything yet achieved in any modern, fossil-fuel dependent economy. It implies a radical departure from the current policy approaches. The ippr proposals would cost between d50 billion and d70 billion per year – roughly two-thirds of the present NHS budget of d105 billion per year. To put these figures in perspective, the government receives d46 billion per year from gilts (bonds issued by the government), national savings and

158

COLIN HINES

so on, and pension funds receive d50 billion in new contributions annually (their total worth being around d1,450 billion; International Financial Services, 2008). The ippr research concludes that it is cheapest and easiest to decarbonise electricity supply first, provided this is matched by increased efficiency and conservation for both suppliers and users. This will involve, for example, a massive increase in offshore wind and decentralised renewables, such as solar photovoltaics (PV). Another key sector is buildings, which are responsible for 40 per cent of emissions. It is these two sectors that will form the bulk of the initial investments facilitated by the Green New Deal. Thus, a serious investment in building new energy-supply systems – including energy efficiency, combined heat and power and renewables for millions of homes and other buildings – would amount to a d50-billion-plus programme per year. Interestingly, these figures are close to what was spent by Roosevelt’s New Deal. It has been estimated that between January 1933 and December 1940 $21.1 billion was spent on public relief and federal works programmes. This amounted to about 3.5 per cent of the total GDP over the same period, and today would be equivalent to d50 billion a year in the United Kingdom (roughly $500 billion in the USA). Roosevelt’s was a huge infrastructure programme aimed at employing 4 million workers. It paid for over 600,000 miles of roads, over 120,000 bridges, nearly 40,000 schools, 8,000 swimming pools and over 2 million public toilets. It also had a ‘green’ aspect. The Great Depression coincided with a wave of natural disasters, including the Dust Bowl and devastating floods. Roosevelt’s New Deal included the Civilian Conservation Corps, which involved millions of Americans in wilderness preservation and the promotion of health through outdoor recreation. These policies were the basis for the emergence of modern environmentalism in the USA (Maher, 2007). An effective Green New Deal approach will require a legislative framework backed up by price signals adequate to accelerate the shift to a low-carbon economy. Such signals should include steadily increasing carbon taxes and a price for traded carbon that is high enough to cause a dramatic drop in carbon emissions. Even more important will be a huge increase in the investment in energy infrastructure. To kick-start this policy transition, the Climate Change Bill should require regular annual emissions reductions on a pathway towards hitting a cut in carbon emissions of at least 80 per cent by 2050. This might not ultimately be enough, given the earlier discussion of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. But it will send a signal big enough to energise

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

159

efforts to accelerate low-carbon technologies. From there on, we can realistically hope for a momentum that will get us on track for low- or zerocarbon well before 2050. There is already now a carbon race, ranging from carmakers to supermarkets, as major industries compete to out-bid each other on pledges to reduce emissions. Sweden has a plan to go zero-carbon, using no fossil fuel, by 2020. The very near future will judge how much is warm words, and how much is seriously meant. An all-encompassing programme, focusing initially on the goal of ‘every building a power station’, will involve traditional energy-saving measures such as insulation through to large-scale combined heat and power. It will also need a greatly accelerated uptake of renewable technology. The production and installation of these technologies will initially need substantial market-enablement support from the government. This has been the case in all big new technological transitions. The Internet was originally developed and funded by the US military (The Internet Society, 2007). In terms of energy, the renewables markets are growing very rapidly overseas, because of the generous subsidy approach of some governments (e.g. Japan and California) or policy innovations such as feed-in tariff laws (e.g. Germany and Spain), which have resulted in a large increase in the use of different members of the renewables family. Germany combines these approaches. It provides low-interest loans for older properties to reach new-build energy standards. Its feed-in tariff programme ensures that anyone generating electricity from solar PV, wind or water gets a guaranteed payment of four times the market rate. This has created 250,000 jobs and the demand is such that Bavarian farmers, with large barn roofs and fields, are the biggest customer group for PV in the world (Guertler, 2008; Seager, 2007). At the heart of a successful programme to tackle climate change will be ever-rising fuel costs per unit of economic activity. A serious recession will cut energy demand and might result in a price drop, but it is clear that the imminence of peak oil, coupled with the need to make fossil fuels ever dearer to enforce climate-change agreements, will ensure rising costs per unit of economic output. Rising fuel costs will allow ever-greater profits to be made from investing in increased energy efficiency and renewables. It is the cost savings from moving out of intensive fossil-fuel use, minus the cost of implementing energy-saving and clean-energy infrastructure, which will fund the repayment of loans made under the Green New Deal. Of course, the more rapid the increase in carbon prices, the greater will be the incentive to invest, the potential profit from investment and the speed of transition to a low-carbon future.

160

COLIN HINES

Government funding for the Green New Deal could come in part from the increase in the Treasury’s coffers from rapidly rising carbon taxes and carbon trading. Also, now that energy prices are high, and before North Sea oil is exhausted, introducing a windfall tax on oil and gas companies would be a huge funding source. Fossil fuels are an unrepeatable windfall from nature, yet the UK government has so far failed to take adequate advantage of its income from oil to prepare for a low-carbon future. Norway, by contrast, has used its oil surpluses to help create a safety net for future generations that is today worth around h260 billion (d198 billion). This amounts to h75,000 (d57,000) for every man, woman and child in the country. The United Kingdom could follow Norway’s lead and set up an Oil Legacy Fund, paid for primarily by a windfall tax on oil and gas company profits. Part of these increased revenues would need to be used to raise benefits for the poorest people in our society, who would otherwise be too adversely affected by such price rises during the transition to a low-carbon future. Grants would be required to cover 100 per cent of the cost of changes needed to the dwellings of the most disadvantaged, to increase energy efficiency and to fit the renewables. Public funding could be augmented by encouraging the use of private savings from individuals, pension funds, banks and other savings vehicles to invest in a government-backed Green New Deal. Savings in banks and building societies are at present guaranteed up to d50,000, and such a guarantee could be extended to a Green New Deal investment. This would carry the proviso that such funds would be earmarked solely for investments that reduce carbon use. Savers could also be let off taxes on gains from investment in carbon-reducing infrastructure, as is the case for infrastructural investment in the US municipal bonds market. Other sources where citizens and institutional investors can provide funding for the Green New Deal include investment in ‘green gilts’ (government bonds), guaranteed not just in terms of an interest rate, but also in terms of their use to reduce carbon. Kiddies Go Green/Families Go Green/Grandparents Go Green bonds could be introduced and would have the side effect of revitalising the fusty national savings industry. Governments normally like to steer clear of the constraints put upon them by such hypothecation. However, the Stern Review showed the level of serious disruption to the economy that will be caused by inadequate efforts to abate climate change, and this should render any such qualms redundant. On top of this, the energy crunch will focus minds on mobilising alternatives to oil and gas as fast as possible. There is a wall of money in pensions and

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

161

other savings, plus a recognised need by the government for people to save much more. Guaranteed investments via a Green New Deal programme will help provide the upfront funding needed for the low-carbon future. Local authority bonds could be the major vehicle for the funds raised for this programme. In the USA, there is a $2 trillion (d1 trillion) municipal bond market. Apart from Transport for London’s (TfL’s) recent successful d600 million bond issues, such an option is virtually non-existent in the United Kingdom. Yet this source of funding, and local democracy, could be promoted relatively easily if the returns on the money saved from the low-carbon investments, minus their cost, were used to repay such bonds. There are no legal constraints on local authorities raising funds through issuing their own bonds (The Local Authority (Stocks and Bonds) (Ammendment) Regulations 2000), but it has not been encouraged by governments since the 1980s. In November 2004, the Treasury authorised the Greater London Authority’s TfL to issue bonds as part of its d2.3 billion borrowing to improve transport infrastructure. TfL is, in legal terms, a local authority. The first issue of the TfL bond in December 2004 easily raised the d200 million required, and in March and December 2006, two further bonds of d200 million each were issued at very competitive rates as the market became more accustomed to such issues (Government’s Prudential Code 2004). Such local authority bonds could be spent on ensuring energy efficiency and providing renewable energy for each of the country’s three million council tenants, as well as for all other local-authority-owned or -controlled buildings, such as town halls, schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure. Local authority bonds could be an investment route for pension funds and even individual savings to help fund such a crash programme. For the private sector, encouragement for homeowners and those running factories and offices would need to take the form of subsidies towards the costs of energy efficiency measures and installing renewables – or tax breaks to carry out such work. In 2007, the world invested over $100 billion in renewables for the first time (UNEP, 2000), most of it private money. Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into venture capital funds investing in renewables and other clean-energy technologies as the oil prices rise. Even if the hardest of times materialise as the triple crunch begins to bite, it seems a reasonable supposition that for the private sector, clean technology is going to be a relatively safe haven. The first thing that the UK government will need to do is put in place a national plan for a low-energy future and its provision on the ground.

162

COLIN HINES

There is no such plan at present: no risk analysis of the peak-oil threat and no contingency plan for what would happen if oil and/or gas supplies collapsed rapidly. Such a plan would include oversight and coordination for generating the funding from the government, the energy industry and a range of private savings vehicles for investment in the multi-decade programme for the transition to a low-energy future. There will be a need for training, education, research and development programmes for the ‘carbon army’ of workers needed to bring about a lowcarbon future. To reduce carbon dramatically will require expertise ranging from energy analysis, design and production of hi-tech renewable alternatives, large-scale engineering projects such as combined heat and power, and offshore wind at the high-skilled end; to medium and unskilled work making every building energy-tight and fitting more efficient energy systems in homes, offices and factories. A carbon finance sector will be needed to publicise, advise and put into practice the range of funding packages inherent in the Green New Deal. The advantage of the required massive scale of this energy transition will be that millions of jobs can be created. Thousands of new and existing businesses and services will benefit, and a large increase in tax revenue will be generated for the government from this new economic activity. There will be vital resource-planning roles for the government. Rapidly decarbonising a national economy will, in the long term, maximise energy security in the United Kingdom. The initial national planning for such a programme will have to consider, however, whether in the medium term there will need to be a guaranteed allocation of fossil fuels to ensure adequate energy for the transition to a low-carbon economy. This will include energy for the production of the enormous amounts of materials, from steel to pipes, needed for renewable-energy generation and energysaving products. It will also include ensuring the availability of the energy required to put in place a new regional grid system, ranging from large-scale wind, wave and tidal electricity to decentralised energy systems that increase domestic and local energy production. The same strategic allocation and reserve process might be needed to ensure adequate supplies of the raw materials needed, such as iron and aluminium. Looking beyond the United Kingdom, as Europe’s economy slows in the wake of the US-initiated credit crunch, the EU could take a much-needed lead. The Green Alliance recently proposed a European budget for climate security that would involve Brussels re-orienting its public investment programme to set up a dedicated low-carbon fund for energy and transport infrastructure, an investment fund to help move China and India towards

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

163

low-carbon economies and a budget to help the poorest countries adapt to climate change (Hale & Singleton-White, 2007). A UK Green New Deal plus a large-scale European investment programme in cutting carbon emissions would demonstrate that rich countries are serious about tackling climate change. Were this to be combined with significant funds for poorer countries to cut their carbon output, this twin approach could be just what is needed to overcome the logjam that is bedevilling efforts to bring the developing world into an effective post-Kyoto agreement. If our Green New Deal ideas are adopted in the United Kingdom, the government will need to work hard to advocate similar policies and practices throughout the world. Appropriate trade and aid policies will be needed to support global progress towards a low-carbon approach. The multilateral climate negotiations will provide a useful platform for this, but the government will need to be vocal and active in other fora too. Any global climate framework will have to guarantee both environmental integrity and a workable, global political solution. For this to occur it will have to display certain characteristics. As a minimum, these are likely to include:  Setting a formal greenhouse gas atmospheric concentration target. A formal international target has been set in terms of limiting the average surface temperature rise to 2 1C, but efforts are needed to keep the temperature rise as far below 2 1C as possible. Anything beyond 2 1C carries the risk of precipitating catastrophic runaway global warming.  Delivery of a fair, effective and equitable international agreement. The agreement which will be drawn up to follow the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 must deepen emissions reduction targets in industrialised countries, allow for greater mitigation contributions from some of the larger developing countries and ensure a strong focus on adaptation. Wealthy industrialised countries need to do their fair share by setting legally binding, annual, constantly contracting carbon budgets. They need to plot a course, year by year, towards zero emissions.  Revival of an important dimension of the original spirit and intent of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – that developed countries should take leadership by reducing emissions at home. In addition, poor countries must be given the opportunity to escape poverty through massive investments in adaptation and renewable energy and through greater flexibility in the rules governing the global economy on issues such as trade, finance and intellectual property.

164

COLIN HINES

 Developing an alternative development paradigm, capable of delivering real poverty reduction in a carbon-constrained world. This would involve extensive dialogue with, and active participation by, people in developing countries.  The recognition of forced displacement – in the form of environmental or ‘climate’ refugees due to global warming – within the Geneva Convention. There needs to be flexibility in immigration policy, proper protection of displaced people and a compensation fund for those affected. Adaptation funds under the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol need to increase in size by several orders of magnitude, in order to match the costs of unavoidable adaptation and pay for clean-energy substitution.  Free technology transfer. This is especially important in relation to energy technology, where developing countries should not be constrained by the restrictive regimes governing intellectual property in the global economy. Another possible source of funding for the Green New Deal proposals lies in the potential for mobilising the capital entrusted to the world’s pension funds to finance the investment required for environmental transformation. Pension funds are not charities. They are governed by the obligation of fiduciary duty to pursue the best interests of their members rather than the ethical whims of their trustees. But two pressures are forcing pension funds to consider this duty anew. The first is the tightening regulation on pension fund disclosure and valuation across the Western world, which is prompting pension funds to more clearly match their liabilities (in terms of making out future payments to their members) with their mix of underlying assets. One recent study from a European investment bank estimated that tightening rules in the United Kingdom, the USA, France, Germany and the Netherlands would shift pension assets out of risky assets, such as equities, into relatively risk-free, long-term bonds to the tune of $2,000 billion (Hagart & Knoepfel, 2006). At present, the supply of such long-dated bonds is relatively limited. This inevitably results in a downward pressure on bond yields, partially defeating the purpose of shifting into bonds (Oddo Securities, 2006). The second pressure is that of climate change. Along with leading sustainable investors, many leading pension funds – such as ABP in the Netherlands, CALPERs in the USA and USS in the United Kingdom – have been at the forefront of efforts to encourage the investment community to acknowledge the systemic threat posed by climate change to their ability to pay out future pensions. As universal investors, pension funds deploy their assets across the market. This means their returns are functionally

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

165

related to the throughput of the wider economy. With climate change threatening to reduce global economic output by as much as 20 per cent, according to the Stern Review (Stern, 2007), pension funds face a further threat to their financial viability. So far, leading pension funds have supported voluntary initiatives, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, to raise awareness in the marketplace. Along with the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, such initiatives have served to drive up standards across a range of environmental and social issues. A number of institutions have also dedicated portions of their assets to specialist clean-energy funds – invested in both private and public equity. The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change has published groundbreaking research showing that incorporating climate change is now essential for effective investment strategies (www.iigcc.org). But no pension fund has yet digested the full implications of the 2007 climate consensus – that emissions need to be at least halved by 2050, with upwards of 80 per cent cuts in the industrialised world. The implications are clear: avoiding catastrophic climate change will require an unprecedented shift in investment capital by pension funds and other holders of long-term assets. These twin challenges converge on a common solution. Pension funds have a rising demand for relatively risk-free assets to match their liabilities in ways that also avoid the severe threat of climate disruption and put their portfolios on the right side of the low-carbon transition. The solution lies in a new generation of Green New Deal-type ‘climate bonds’ raised by municipalities, national government and international financial institutions. We believe the Green New Deal will need to be debated, campaigned for and introduced in the next year. This apparently tight deadline is likely to become more pressing because of the unavoidable need for the government to deal with the seriousness of unemployment and deflation resulting from the worsening economic downturn. In the year ahead, the Green New Deal Group has predicted that authoritative calls for action on peak oil will gather force. And of course, if the ‘peakists’ are correct, then we are most unlikely to proceed far into the next decade before the shock hits (North, 2009). In addition, scientific opinion is now coalescing around the idea that we have less than a decade to start drastically reducing carbon emissions to prevent runaway global warming. So a crash programme of action needs to be put in place as quickly as possible. The more quickly it can be instigated and executed, the bigger the chance of making a soft landing once the full force of the triple crunch is washing over our economy. Change is built into today’s consumer-based, hi-tech economy. But rapid change outside of any meaningful human control is something different

166

COLIN HINES

again. Responding to such unchosen demands for rapid transition is an art in itself. This is what faces us in the multiple crisis driven by energy shock, credit crunch and climate change, in which we can now include the emerging global food crisis. In our living memory, the scale of economic re-engineering needed to prevent catastrophic climate change has only been witnessed in a wide range of countries during war time. No other approach looks remotely capable of delivering the necessary volume of emissions reductions in the time needed. In that light, we can learn from war-time experiences, positively and negatively. The best of those lessons can then be translated into our contemporary circumstances. As Churchill said, it is not enough that we try our best: we have to do what is necessary.

SECTION TWO It seems almost audacious to challenge the unanimous thunderings of the suits of Davos, the free market cheerleaders Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson and yes even the editorial of left-of-centre paper the Observer, all warning of the dire consequences of a return to any form of protectionism. These restatements of economics principles without any argument or attempt to relate them to the real world, are given considerable media attention. Let us start with the usual cliche´ of the lessons of the 1930s. The first thing to make clear is that post-Crash efforts to protect national economies were not the cause of the Great Depression that, like the global recession we face today, had its beginning in feckless, greedy financiers profiting hugely from the gullible. The latter were assured that their debt-sodden investments could deny the laws of economic gravity and that the market could only go up. In the 1920s the investing frenzy centred on shares, in the noughties on property. In the 1930s the collapse of the banking system, and with it credit flows, led to huge increases in unemployment. Governments reacted to electorates’ fears about more job losses from foreign imports by trying onesided protectionism, involving putting up barriers whilst hoping that others will keep theirs low. Not surprisingly, this made an already bad situation worse. Massive expenditure on New Deals and World War II gradually paved the way for a return to increased global trade and financial flows. What is different today is that once we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves down, we will face very different realities. Foremost will be the urgent need to curb

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

167

carbon emissions and wake up to the fact that oil supplies will peak in the next few years (North, 2009). This should and will preclude a return to the recent levels of long-distance trade. Shifting to a ‘Look to the local’ emphasis makes both environmental and social sense (Woodin & Lucas, 2004; Cato, 2009). It provides a route map to the major domestic sources of labour-intensive work crucial to getting us out of our present mess-green infrastructural renewal and face-to-face caring. Deglobalisation is, in any case, happening already. Tanker trade worldwide has already reduced by over 90 per cent, whilst investors are fleeing from foreign investments to the bosom of government-backed domestic savings. This trend should be built on in order to shift the global political and economic mantra away from beggar-your-neighbour international competition, to a better-your-neighbour emphasis on rebuilding and rediversifying local economies every where. This ‘Protect the Local Globally’ approach will also see an end to the well meaning but utterly self-defeating advice to leaders of poor countries to gear their countries futures to exporting to the rich (Hines, 2000). Peddlers of this bog-standard development theory in fact spelt doom for the hopes of those such as Africa’s coffee growers or textile workers, as they were elbowed aside by cheaper Asian exports (Lines, 2008). The global economic slowdown should allow us the space to organise for an era of minimal, but just and green global trade. This would be carried out within as short a distance as possible, in goods that cannot be produced in importing countries, with the exporters’ profits used to benefit the majority and fund evermore broad-based national economies. Thus, Europe, for example, would buy its coffee from Africa, but under fair trade terms involving long-term contracts. This would allow a securer economic future to Third World exporters, rather than today’s emphasis on trying ruthlessly to undercut and outcompete their neighbours. However, the most incredible aspect of the present debate about protectionism is that most politicians, economists and commentators still seem to labour under the delusion that the economy will return to its old ever-growing self. Provided, of course, governments have spent enough of taxpayers money to get the credit sluices open and ensure everyone is borrowing to consume again. This is neither environmentally desirable nor financially likely. The only thing that can now be added to the certainty of death and taxes is savings. People are deeply worried about the threats posed to their economic security and are and will save in response. Yet this is seen by economic commentators as a regrettable hindrance to our return to the threadbare free market comfort blanket they so pine for.

168

COLIN HINES

The reality is that it is vital to see savers as our saviours. The wall of money in pensions and savings, mostly accruing to baby boomers, could be spent in an act of intergenerational solidarity on funding a massive national carbon reducing programme. This would balance the debts we have imposed on our descendents through the bank bailout. This could reduce the public finances that would otherwise be needed, thus reducing the future tax burden for the children of the soon to retire and protecting the planet for their grandchildren. There will doubtless be many who will still see such a localist, just and fair protectionism as a major economic threat. These are the retro economists and commentators, bizarrely in the majority, who reject the logical and common sense desire for the United States to use their own steel in public infrastructural investment, or for British jobs to be prioritised for workers born in Britain, or working here legally They seem to instead pin their hopes on the patronising ‘we feel your pain’ posturing of pro market leaders, awaiting a return to business as usual. For such misguided souls, the BNP’s Ad Van ominously circling the pickets at the Total refinery and playing to their growing gallery with calls for British jobs and bankster bashing, should surely serve as wake-up call. Such forces could well be the winners from misguided yearnings for a return to a status quo long past its sell by date. In times of growing insecurity, protection is what people want, and those who offer a fair and green form of it are likely to be the winners.

CONCLUSION Economic globalization has a clear end goal: maximum trade and money flows for maximum profit. From this end goal comes a clear set of policies and trade rules supporting this approach. The adverse effects of this economic priority have become increasingly evident and include growing inequality globally, job insecurity and adverse environmental effects. There is now growing support for a radical alternative, that of localisation (Hines, 2000; Woodin & Lucas, 2004). This has at its heart the protection and rebuilding of local economies, rather than gearing them to ruthlessly outcompete each other internationally. Depending on the context, the ‘local’ is predominantly defined as part of the nation state, although it can be the nation state itself or occasionally a regional grouping of nation states. Everything that can sensibly be produced within a nation or a region should be. Long-distance trade is then reduced to supplying what could not come

Sustainable Planning: A Green Protectionism

169

from within one country or geographical grouping of countries, the historic role of such trade. Localisation is not about restricting the flow of information, technology, management and legal structures, but it is about a different end goal for such activities. Localisation could help to ensure a more just, secure, environmentally sustainable future. It is not a return to overpowering state control, but merely governments’ provision of a policy and economic framework which allows people, community groups and businesses to rediversify their own local economies. The route to localisation consists of a set of interrelated and selfreinforcing policy areas. The basic steps are  reject international competitiveness and replace this by the reintroduction of protective safeguards such as tariffs and quotas for domestic economies; this is the necessary precursor to being able to carry out the rest of the policies;  create a site-here-to-sell-here policy for manufacturing and services domestically or regionally;  localise money such that the majority stays within its place of origin;  create local competition policy to eliminate monopolies from the more protected economies;  introduce resource and other taxes to increase environmental improvements and help fund the transition to localisation;  initiate increased democratic involvement, both politically and economically to ensure the effectiveness and equity of the movement to more diverse local economies;  reorient the end goals of aid-and-trade rules such that they contribute to the rebuilding of local economies and local control. Under these circumstances, beggar-your-neighbour globalization gives way to the potentially more cooperative better-your–neighbour localisation.

REFERENCES Badger, A. (2008). FDR: The first hundred days. New York: Hill and Wang. Cato, M. S. (2009). Green economics: An introduction to theory, policy and practice. London: Earthscan. Green New Deal Group/nef. (2008). A green new deal. Available at http://www.neweconomics. org/gen/uploads/2ajogu45c1id4w55tofmpy5520072008172656.pdf Guertler, P. (2008). How low? ACE report, commissioned by WWF.

170

COLIN HINES

Hagart, G., & Knoepfel, I. (2006). Sustaining interest: Outcomes of a Mistra workshop on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in fixed income investment. Zurich: onValues Ltd. Hale, S., & Singleton-White, S. H. (2007). European budget for climate security (investing in our future). London: Green Alliance. Hines, C. (2000). Localisation: A global manifesto. London: Earthscan. International Financial Services. (2008). Available at http://www.ifsl.org.uk/upload/PB_ Pension_markets_2008.pdf Krugman, P. (2007). The conscience of a liberal: Reclaiming America from the right. London: Allen Lane. Lines, T. (2008). Making poverty: A history. London: Zed Books. Lockwood, J., Bird, J., & Alvarez, R. (2007). 2050 vision. London: ippr. Maher, N. (2007). Nature’s new deal: The civilian conservation corps and the roots of the American environmental movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. North, P. (2009). Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change: A sympathetic critique. Geoforum. Oddo Securities (2006). The irresolvable $2,000 billion pensions conundrum, cited in Hagart and Knoepfel (2006). Seager, A. (2007). Germany sets shining example in providing a harvest for the world. Guardian, July 23. Stern, N. H. (2007). The economics of climate change. Cambridge: University Press. The Internet Society. (2007). Available at http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/cerf.shtml UNEP. (2008). Global trends in sustainable energy investment 2007. New York: UNEP. Woodin, M., & Lucas, C. (2004). Green alternatives to globalisation: A manifesto. London: Pluto.

CHAPTER 9 SUSTAINABILITY AND THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY: GREEN INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES Lucy Sargisson INTRODUCTION Green intentional communities are easily dismissed as irrelevant to wider academic and political debates. In the first instance, they comprise small vanguards, fringes or minority groups. Surely then they interest only the readers of rarefied anthropological journals or viewers of voyeuristic television shows?1 Secondly, they are part of the green movement, itself often cast (derogatorily,2 positively,3 or otherwise4 as ‘utopian’). Are they not excessively idealist and romantic: wishful day-dreamers? Drawing on the literal meaning of the word utopia, which combines eu (good), ou (non) and topos (place), this chapter explores the idea that green intentional communities are indeed utopias, whereas challenging two common interpretations of that term. The first views it negatively (as unrealistic, unrealisable, excessively wishful thinking) and can be found on the pages of English Dictionaries and in colloquial parlance. The second views utopias as perfectionist: seeking to provide perfect blueprints that map the road to the good life. I shall explore some of the key ways in which these groups The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 171–192 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004012

171

172

LUCY SARGISSON

perform key utopian functions, suggesting that they are indeed utopian but that their utopianism is deeply imperfect and pragmatic, rooted in the real concerns and material limitations of the now. Green intentional communities5 are groups of people who live and sometimes work together for a common purpose, which they identify as pertaining to the environment or ecologism. They are indeed profoundly utopian as these obscure, small-scale groups attempt to realize a better and more sustainable life in the here and now. Members of each community generally share beliefs about what is wrong with modern society and a core of ideas that inform their way of life. They seek a better alternative to the now. Members’ daily lives are on-going experiments, and this experimentation occurs at many levels, informing the physical and social structures in which they co-exist, the nature of their relationships with each other and wider others (human and non-human) as well economic, ethical and spiritual forms of activity, behaviour and expectations. In this very straightforward and fundamental sense, then, I will suggest that they are utopian experiments: inspired by discontent with the now, desiring a better life and working together to try to achieve this in the here and now. I should note at this stage that a considerable amount of controversy surrounds the term ‘utopia’ within the field of utopian studies. This stems partly from that fact that the study of this phenomenon occurs across several disciplines. Scholars who study literary utopias, for example, are sometimes inclined to define utopias as literary texts (see Suvin, 1972, 1973; Kumar, 1991). Others (including myself) define them more broadly, to include political theory and lived experiments. Lyman Tower Sargent set the tone for this latter approach in a key essay ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism’, of 1967 (Sargent, 1967, 1994), suggesting that utopianism is present in fictions, political theory and communal experiments. There are also perennial disputes over the content and function of utopias (see Levitas, 1990). Do they, for example, contain visions of a perfect world, and function as blueprints, or road maps to the ideal world? Some, like JC Davis (1981), would answer in the affirmative. Others (Sargent, 1994; Moylan, 1986; Sargisson, 2000) suggest not. There is some consensus in the literature that utopianism concerns ‘social dreaming’ (Sargent, 1994, p. 2) and that ‘utopia’ can be used as an umbrella term to include eutopias (good places) and ‘dystopias’ (bad places). Scholars also agree that utopias are born of dissatisfaction with the now, desire a better tomorrow and gesture towards what this might look like, and this will be the base definition utilized in this chapter. Consensus ends at this point. Some insist that utopias depict and seek perfection. Others claim that they perform other functions, and we shall come to these

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

173

later. My sources for this chapter are both theoretical and empirical, drawing on debates within the field of utopian studies, green political thought and primary sources on intentional communities, gathered firsthand during fieldwork inside some 40 intentional communities. I shall refer to interview transcripts and field diaries as well as materials published by the communities themselves, including leaflets, pamphlets and webpages, gathered over a 10-year period (1997–2007) in fieldwork in Britain and New Zealand.6

GREEN INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES I propose to begin this discussion by offering necessarily brief introductions to some of the utopian activities that occur inside green intentional communities, with a view to indicate the scope and range of these experiments in the world today. To this end, the discussion below considers case studies of two different ways in which members of green intentional communities work together to create a better world. These are (i) participation in conservationist projects and (ii) attempts to live a fully integrated ecological life. Discussion will then broaden out from these case studies to consider some of the key contributory factors that make green intentional communities imperfect utopias.

Conservationist Projects For many of these groups, core activities include practical work with the environment. This occurs in a number of ways and at a variety of levels. All of this work is global in concern (changing climate, pollution, human degradation of the land and seas, resource depletion, depletion of biodiversity) but work is often focused on local manifestations of these malaise. As might be expected within a green paradigm, some work on the ecology of their local environment, some seek a deeper relationship with the land and others take a more anthropocentric approach. Some are concerned to work purely with ‘nature’ whereas others focus on working with other humans (such as local people, pressure groups, non-governmental organizations and state agencies). Some seek directly to improve their local ecology, others seek to change the minds and influence the behaviour of other people. Some pursue deep inner transformation of the self. In other words, scholars can observe shallow and deep, light and dark, environmentalism and deep

174

LUCY SARGISSON

ecology at play within these communities.7 All seek to make a positive difference to the world in which we live today. An example is the organization ‘Trees for Life’, who describe themselves on their website as ‘form[ing] part of the Findhorn Bay Community, an intentional community comprising various organisations and many individuals drawn together by a common vision of creating a positive future for humanity and the planet’ (http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/about/ aboutus.html, accessed on 13.10.2007). The Findhorn Foundation is based on the east coast of Scotland near the town of Forres in Findhorn Bay and is an umbrella organisation incorporating several intentional communities8 and a collection of businesses and charities. Membership of the foundation occurs on a number of levels, some people belong to the intentional communities, some are also staff within the Foundation, and it is also possible to be a student, visitor or member of the wider ‘global network’. There are approximately 300 ‘members’ and 1,000 non-resident associates in the wider community (http://www.findhornfoundation.org). Trees for Life consists of 12 permanent staff and plus volunteers (attracted via the Findhorn Foundation, as well as through publicity generated by the charity itself).9 Their core aim has remained constant since they were founded in 1981. They seek to regenerate a wild Caledonian Forest. Our vision is to restore a wild forest, which is there for its own sake, as a home for wildlife and to fulfil the ecological functions necessary for the well being of the land itself (http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/tfl.visi.html). This is their utopian dream and its rationale is firmly eco-centric: We are not aiming to regenerate a forest which will be utilised sustainably as an extractive resource for people, although we recognise the need for this in Scotland. We endorse the efforts of other organisations in seeking to establish a new, ecologicallysustainable system of forestry, but we strongly believe that this utilitarian approach must be complemented by the restoration of large areas of wild forest. Trees for Life is unique in being the only organisation working specifically towards this end (http:// www.treesforlife.org.uk/tfl.visi.html).

The group has worked since 1981 in Glen Affric, closely observing species through surveys of fauna, flora and also the minutia of forest life, such as moths, bryophytes and forms of mould. They encourage the natural regeneration of the forest, clear non-native species, fence some areas and, where necessary, re-plant and re-seed indigenous species. This is an expanding project, both temporally and spatially: plans stretch forwards across millennia and, in autumn 2007, they purchased an additional estate in Glen Moriston. Their vision is ambitious and members of Trees for Life desire not only a forest of trees, but a living eco-system that extends all the

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

175

way from the moulds and slime up to larger mammals including, eventually (but long beyond their own lifetimes), wolves and bears. This group collaborates with other organisations, such as Forest Enterprise and the National Trust for Scotland but is firmly embedded within its host intentional community. This makes it very different from other local environmentalist groups as it is imbued with beliefs, practices and codes of behaviour drawn from the Findhorn Foundation. This can be observed (and experienced) through the processes of work. Visitors, guests and members of the Findhorn Foundation often work with Trees for Life on their core projects, which consist of replanting Scots pine, birch, rowan, juniper and aspen trees in a mixed forest. Work forms a core part of spiritual practice and enlightenment at the Findhorn Foundation and the text from e-mail correspondence with the group reveals something of this attitude: The vast majority of our practical reforestation work is carried out by volunteers. We organise volunteer work weeks during Spring and Autumn. During the weeks, the volunteers of all ages, from all walks of life and all over the world join us to carry out a variety of conservation work in the Highlands including planting, felling, fence removal and seed collecting work, whilst at the same time experiencing the wild remote part of the highlands and feeling that they can have direct hands-on involvement in healing the wounds we have inflicted on this planet. (Alan Watson Featherstone, e-mail, 28 May 1999) (see http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/tfl.ww.html for details of the volunteer programme in 2007/8)

For Trees for Life, as for the Findhorn Foundation, work, or rather, willingly given service, is both enlightening for the individual and beneficial to the planet. Trees get planted, seeds get gathered and the agents of this planting and gathering gain an enhanced awareness of both the degradation of the land and the small contribution that they are making towards its regeneration. Volunteers are rarely expert conservationists, and rarely have experience of working with the soil. A week’s work (often in the wet and rain) with the hands deep in the mud, is, for many, an enlightening experience. Moreover, Trees for Life operate within the Findhorn Foundation’s understanding of the relationships between communication, work and spirituality. These involve ‘attunement’, a core practice at the Foundation which occurs at the beginning and end of a work shift. The whole group stands for a few moments together in a circle, eyes closed, seeking inner peace and listening to what, at the Foundation, is called the ‘inner voice’.10 This collective practice involves inner searching and is the method through which tasks are allocated. During participant observation,

176

LUCY SARGISSON

I always found it a powerful experience which bonded and focused the group on the task in hand. For a week, we live as a community, working together in the forest and sharing domestic tasks such as cooking the evening meal. We seek to live in a spirit of harmony and cooperation. We begin each day’s work together with a moment’s quiet reflection; also, the group will meet on occasion to share how the week is going for them (http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/ tfl.ww.html). Work with Trees for Life is a deeply educational experience that works on many levels (conveying pragmatic knowledge and skills as well as spiritual education) and, for a while, members and volunteers become part of a community. This is just one example but others occur in green intentional communities worldwide. They are significant, I suggest because conservationist work takes on a special nature when it comes from inside an intentional community. Members of these groups already live and work together on a daily basis, trying to realise their idea of the good life. For members, conservation projects are just one part of this utopian project. For them, these projects form a good in themselves (in terms of outcomes and process) but they also represent an important point of interface with the wider community. This can form an important mechanism for disseminating the community’s ethos and practices. A second example can be found in one of the most remote areas of New Zealand, on the Coromandel Peninsula. Here, members of two of New Zealand’s older generation of communes, Karuna Falls and Moehau Communities, collaborate with state and non-governmental organisations and other local land owners in a project called the Moehau Enviornment Group (MEG). Farmers, loggers, hippies, activists, ecologists and civil servants have thus worked together to establish a 7,900 ha sanctuary for the protection of native species including birds (such as kiwi and weta), and the hochstetter frog (an ancient species that generates without the tadpole stage). As is the case with many projects hosted in or involving intentional communities, MEG has a strong educational emphasis. The fifth of their ‘key objectives’ is to educate; empower and enable members and nonmembers alike to protect and enhance their natural environment for its own sake and for the health, well being and happiness of all who reside in it (http://www.meg.org.nz./pages/aboutus.html, accessed on 12.10.2007). The emphasis here is on both ‘natural’ and human ecology: native species are protected from introduced fauna (stoats and rats) for reasons of biodiversity (including a desire to restore former ecological balances) and also for human good. Characteristically, the preservation of this remote and rare ecosphere is couched in terms of empowerment and this politicizes

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

177

practical ecology. A different model again can be found in Blackcurrent Community in Northampton, England. This group is urban but/and environmentalism forms an important part of its raison d’eˆtre. From their Victorian house in the city, members of Blackcurrent offer space, facilitates, links and services to other city dwellers. We aim to facilitate action on the environment and social change, by providing      

meeting space for groups; a library and resource centre; examples of eco-sensitive renovation and low-impact living; social events and gatherings; workshops, film shows and exhibitions; the opportunity to access information about peace environmental and human rights issues and meet other people interested in similar ideas;  a display space and website for local groups to inform each other of their activities and  an organic fruit and veg box scheme (http://www.blackcurrentcentre.org. uk/content/index.php, accessed on 10.10.2007). Blackcurrent Community’s organic food scheme (‘Leafcycles’) was a pioneer in this form of food distribution, examples of which can now be found in cities and towns across Britain. It is a non-profit co-operative enterprise which has long offered people in the district the opportunity to eat fresh organic produce. The community is networked into radical politics, such as the organisation ‘Radical Routes’, an ethical investment and mutual aid network which provides loans and support to intentional communities (http://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/). Their library permits access to publications such as The Ecologist, Ethical Consumer, Clean Slate, Peace News and the Permaculture Magazine and this community views itself as a resource centre for green political change. Other, small and/or single-issue, projects are equally as important for similar reasons: they all contribute to smallscale local change and thus intentional communities can act as nodes for green activity, consciousness-raising and networking. For example, Beech Hill Community initiated local community recycling and composting schemes which, in the late 1990s were small-scale but smoothly functioning in the English district of Morchard Bishop, Devon. A websearch for ‘community composting’ in Devon in September 2007 revealed that there are now nine such schemes in the mid-Devon area alone (http:// www.dcrn.org.uk/map/mid.htm). Examples of good practice can have an influence beyond the immediate environmental ‘good’ yielded by the work

178

LUCY SARGISSON

itself. They can showcase good practice and act as a catalyst for similar schemes, and provide an opportunity for members of the wider community to meet and work alongside members of intentional communities, breaking down some social barriers between these groups. Local people participating in the community composting scheme at Beech Hill, for example, discover through conversation with members that the community has developed a reed bed and composting toilets, that members share a car pool, that shared facilities can, sometimes, save resources and yield a high quality of life (e.g. members of intentional communities often live in beautiful homes, have access to facilities like pottery kilns, well-equipped workshops, art and craft studios and yet earn low incomes and work part time-from choice).

A HOLISTIC LIFE To understand more about the utopias sought by green intentional communities it is necessary to move beyond single issue campaigns to think more about the communities themselves. For the sake of clarity I propose to discuss just two cases here. My both examples come from New Zealand and are EarthSong Eco-Neighbourhood and Tui Community. I have selected them because they are very different: Tui is 23 years old and EarthSong is just beginning, one is remote, the other semi-urban, one self-describes as ‘spiritual’, the other self-describes in anthropocentric vocabulary. Both seek a holistic green life, but their visions of the good life are very different. Recalling that utopias stem from discontent with the now, we should note that EarthSong’s website opens with an account of what is wrong with modern society: Over the past few decades many changes have taken place in our society. One of the results is that a growing number of people now find that the available housing fails to meet their needs. Household sizes have dropped, housing costs are escalating, and a multitude of people-single, elderly, single parent and blended families-are trying to live in housing created for the traditional 1950’s family. Families and couples, too, are finding themselves isolated, having to make appointments to visit friends, and taxi children about in heavy traffic. In addition the nature of work is changing, as is our concern for the environment. (EarthSong Eco-Neighbourhood ‘Principles’ http://www.earthsong. org.nz/infobook/principles.html, accessed on 3.10.2007)

This critical account of the status quo is contrasted to their own way of life: We are a group of people currently living in regular nuclear households, but with a vision of how a different way of living could be more sustaining of us individually, collectively

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

179

and globally. Our vision includes building a co-housing community, which we are designing y, with our basic needs in mind, while also caring for the earth that sustains us. We aim to recreate many of the advantages of the traditional village-advantages such as social contact, contact with nature, child care, economic efficiency and celebration. However, we seek to combine these with the sense of individual freedom and independence that is important to us in these times. In addition to modelling ‘social sustainability’ the neighbourhood is being designed to the highest practical standards of environmentally sustainable human settlement, including the layout and design of neighbourhood and buildings, choice of materials, landscaping, and services. We hope it will also become home base for many green businesses. (EarthSong Eco-Neighbourhood ‘Principles’ http://www.earthsong.org.nz/infobook/principles.html accessed 3.10.2007)

This collective statement clearly articulates an environmentalist perspective, and is strongly focussed on meeting human needs. It is critical of a keystone of modern society, namely the housing market (standards of housing, lack of design and prices), and urban culture (isolation, alienation and poor material quality of life). It offers an alternative: a supportive community that takes the best of village and city life without the worst (respectively, suffocating social pressures and alienation). In terms of the environment it is a little vague, speaking of ‘care for the earth’ and the use of ‘sustainable materials’. In fact, a site visit in 2001 revealed passion and commitment to principles of sustainable design and construction.11 Founder member and site coordinator, Robin Alison (herself an architect), explained the three factors that supported the community’s vision: ‘y to be socially sustainable, to be environmentally sustainable and to be a model to demonstrate to others how it is possible to live more sustainably’ (Robin Alison – EarthSong, interviewed on 14.04.2001). Huge efforts were being made to locally source supplies,12 to provide a runaway and collection system for water, and to combine energy sources.13 All of this contributed to a relatively high purchase price (Robin Alison, EarthSong Work in progress at EarthSong, 2001). This raises an important issue concerning the tension between utopianism and pragmatism. These homes are state-of-the-art when it comes to sustainable building and a considerable amount of thought and energy has been invested into the design, sourcing and construction of this site. But because the technologies are relatively unusual, and the material produced on relatively small scales, economies of scale mean that the prices are high. The community is intended for low- to middle-income people and these are not designer eco-homes for the super-rich. But investors are being asked to pay more than they would for a conventionally built home. This is a perennial dilemma for these kinds of developments – some units are still for sale in 2007 and this may explain why the public face of the community now

180

LUCY SARGISSON

stresses the human benefits of the project over the environmental ones. Newer green communities all face this tension between the desire for best practice and the need to attract members. Most respond pragmatically, developing a way of life that is better (more environmentalist) than life outside, but accepting compromises along the way. Some purists might view EarthSong as overly compromised, but the community fits the aims of its founders. This is an egalitarian group of people who want to live more sustainably (and not self-sufficiently). They have some shared facilities (e.g. a common house with a kitchen, laundry room and teenage space) but most members will own and occupy their own homes. Although their vision can best be described as environmentalist, or light green, they insist on a holistic approach to community design. EarthSong is a very new community and it is not possible to comment on how successful this experiment will be, but its founders have certainly tried to anticipate many aspects of sustainable living in their community design including physical infrastructure, social processes, composition and dynamics.14 They are, I suggest, pragmatic and utopian. Tui is a very different kind of community. The primary objective of the community is to live close to the land and create an environment supportive of families and personal growth. We do not follow a specific religious or political creed, or spiritual leader. Tui Community Mission Statement written in 1991 is ‘As a community living together we are seeking wholeness through fulfilling relationships with ourselves, others and the planet’ (http://www.tuitrust.org.nz/index. php?PageID ¼ 9, accessed on 13.10.2007). This group was founded in 1984 in Wainui Bay, in the Nelson district of South Island New Zealand. Wainui Bay lies at the tip of the South Island, on the edge of the 22,530 ha Abel Tasman National Park (see http:// www.doc.govt.nz/templates/PlaceProfile.aspx?id ¼ 38455). It is a remote and beautiful place. This community is home to some 30 people (approximately one-third of whom are children) and contains a mixture of founder and newer members. Interviews in 2001 revealed that some members were withdrawing from the intentional community and preferred to describe Tui as a ‘village’ and the group now self-describes as both an intentional community and a village (see http://www.tuitrust.org.nz/index. php?PageID ¼ 8). Tui community owns of 50 ha of land, originally a farm. This consists of pasture, bush and wooded areas in two coastal valleys by the coast. Members live in 16 owner-designed-and-built dwellings and two mobile homes. Some are beautifully crafted and imaginatively designed wooden houses, and some are vans and shacks. Some members have ‘sleepout’ huts

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

181

in distant parts of the property. There are two communal buildings at Tui. One, near the entrance of the property, is a multipurpose community house, which contains a laundry, food stores, leisure rooms, kitchen and well-kept dining area where the community eats lunch together. This is where most community meetings are held. The other, high in the valley towards the back of the property, contains a kitchen, sanctuary and smaller rooms. The decking outside this building overlooks the bay at the base of the valley. Other collective space includes a craft workshop, barn, sheds and visitors’ accommodation. Tui Community is an educational and spiritual trust and its Trust Deed outlines the first of eight ‘Primary Objects’ thus: The promote education within New Zealand on the role and function of sustainable communities by establishing a living, working example of an intentional community that combines the essential principles of spiritual awareness, earthcare, connection with nature and appropriate lifestyle, where residents and visitors can participate in a variety of educational and spiritual practices (Tui Spiritual and Educational Trust Deed).

This is a remote community in which members live what they feel to be a sustainable lifestyle, which combines practical ecology with spirituality. Members have devised ways of saving and collecting water and safely disposing of sewage. For example, most houses combine solar energy with electricity from the national grid. Two of the homes share a gravity-fed rain water collection system in which sheets of corrugated (rust-proof) metal of approximately 60  20 ft in dimension are stationed in a clearing in the trees, oriented down the hill in such a way that water collects in a large tank. Pipes distribute the water to the houses which lie further down the slope. At the foot of the hill are flat paddocks which run to the shore of a beach. Nearby is a field, (‘the Tree Field’), which used to form part of the community’s aerobic sewage treatment system. It is now a campsite. The community has built the most ornate outdoor bathroom in this part of their land (this lies quite a distance from the houses but is available for campers and used occasionally for festivals and on-site educational courses). It is constructed of strawbale and adobe and consists of communal and individual showers and toilets, a double bath, hot tub and sauna. There is also an open-air classroom. People at Tui spoke, in interview, of the physical infrastructure as a practical manifestation of an inner connection to nature. Some cited this as the focus of their spiritual beliefs, which stress the interconnectivity of all life and the sanctity of life. And some members have dedicated themselves in raising individual consciousness of this.15 Although there is no shared religious belief in Tui, the community does describe itself as spiritual, embracing New Age

182

LUCY SARGISSON

eclecticism. This group is highly organised and a number of ‘Primary Objects’ of sustainable lifestyle inform its structures and processes. These cover several aspects of sustainable living, including ecology and social relationships. In 2001, community meetings occurred on a fortnightly weekly basis: Meetings typically begin with a circle of silence for ‘getting ourselves present’, at times taking the form of a brief guided meditation, followed by acknowledging each other’s presence. Meetings traditionally end with a circle of silence, for reflection, completion, and possibly a song which often captures the mood of the meeting. Each meeting reserves a personal ‘sharing spot’, which is booked in advance on the agenda sheet. This is a space for a person to openly share about things that are happening for them which they want the whole community to know about, often to do with a shift in life direction. (Robina McCurdy (longtime member of Tui), ‘Towards Sacred Society’ 1999)

Tui members have become experts in conflict negotion and management, building on personal experience, training (the communitiy contains professional counsellors and psychotherapists) and processes adapted from Maori culture.16 Interaction with the wider community occurs through a number of routes. First, the community operates a somewhat reluctant ‘showcase’ for alternative lifestyle, is open to visitors (subject to request) and is particularly popular among WOOFers,17 who come to work on the community’s extensive organic gardens. Second, Tui is home to a cooperative business: Tui Bee Balme Products, which are sold throughout the country. Finally, community members offer educational courses, training and literature about conflict management and sustainable lifestyle. For example, Robina McCurdy, cited earlier, works as a consultant through the company Earthcare Education Aotearoa, helping groups of people (throughout the world) to establish sustainable communities and organised the campaign ‘Planet Organic’ in the late 1990s. When conducting short periods of participant observation it is not possible to do more than scratch the surface of community life and the best one can hope for is a ‘snapshot’ understanding of the community at that time. All communities experience tensions and Tui is exceptionally good at weathering change and negotiating conflict. However, it was apparent that a number of issues were causing tension in the group at the time of my visit in 2001 and these are worth noting as they pertain to the discussion in hand. They concerned community finances and ethos. There are robust structures and clear expectations within Tui community regarding money. Members of the group are responsible for their own income and very few claim state benefits.18 Although there is no income pool at Tui there is a collective fund for food. Members pay a monthly fee in return for food from the

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

183

community’s organic gardens and kitchens. A register is employed to keep track of supplies and members sign for foodstuff as they remove it from the stores, according to need. However, an uneven distribution of wealth has emerged in this group. Some homes are quite lavish, whereas others are shacks. Some members earn high wages, whereas others struggle to earn anything at all. When I visited in 2001, one member worked at the head of a pyramid telephone sales company, others described themselves as educationalists, counsellors and artists and some worked for an hourly wage in the community’s co-operative business. Some members clearly struggled to make a living in this remote location and, more importantly, perhaps, it was noted that people who were busy making money had less energy available for the collective endeavour. It appeared that these people (the ‘wealthy’ ones) had withdrawn from the idea of ‘intentional community’ and preferred the descriptor ‘village’. There was little sense of shared ethos among the group. Accounts about core values differed, notwithstanding the community’s coherent mission statements and Trust Deeds. There is always some variation within a group, but it was particularly striking at Tui. This is partly accountable by the fact that this group has an unusually longstanding and static membership. In 2001, all (but one) of the resident members had lived at Tui for more than eight years and this is unusual. Although membership has been fairly static, members’ lives have been fluid and several relationships within the group had changed during this time, causing members’ needs and want to shift over time. I do not offer this discussion with the aim of criticizing Tui members, but rather to offer a glimpse into some of the complex issues and challenges that face people in intentional communities. Living a collective utopia is difficult. Tui community has established the physical infrastructure for a life closer to nature in a fantastic location; they have robust processes for negotiating conflict and addressing social sustainability; and the group contains some highly intelligent and skilled people. However, even given all of these strengths, the group has found the reality of living their dream to be difficult in ways they did not anticipate. It is a problematic utopia. To understand this it is necessary to widen our gaze beyond these case studies to consider recurrent challenges faced by all green intentional communities. The roots of these lie in the historical experiences of such groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, green communal experiments were often founded by people who shared a dream of a life closer to nature in a remote location. The original intent of the founders and subsequent members often revolved around ideas about living off the land in a self-sufficient community. This requires physical separation from the wider society. Many of the first

184

LUCY SARGISSON

generation communities of this kind were communes, founded in remote districts like the Coromandel Peninsula at the tip of the North Island, or along the western coastline district of the South Island. These communities lie on the peripheries of the land: perched on cliff edges (Wilderland Community), or hidden in deep valleys (Karuna Falls Community), some green communities exist in the most splendid of isolation. Ahu Ahu Ohu, for instance, lies miles up a barely distinguishable track across a bridgeless river. Ophui Community involves a long walk into the bush before buildings are spotted. Katajuta Farm Community sits in bushland on the edge of a beach, next to a sea so wild that the smallest pieces of driftwood consist of whole trees.19 In such places, members were able to develop close relationships with the life around them: I needed to live close to the earth. I wanted to learn something of the land I was born into but barely knew, so I sank into a world of natural forms, of winds and tides, trees and rocks, manuka, flowers and gardens. I claimed the opportunity to ‘drop out’, to pause, to take time to live like a simple creature on the earth, to be free for a while of the overbearing social and cultural order, de-prescribed ways (Black, 1985, p. 7). In the UK, physical space is more restricted, and wilderness less available but some green communities manage to find isolated sites in less dense areas of, for example, Scotland and Wales. An example is the community on the Isle of Erraid, which lies off the west coast of Scotland. The beautiful and tiny island of Erraid stands at the southern most tip of Mull, only a short way from the island of Iona. Comprising sandy beaches, lush peat bogs and stark craggy granite outcrops, the island (which has been in the care of the Findhorn Foundation for over twenty years) offers sanctuary to our small community as we enjoy a simple but richly rewarding life. Being here allows us to connect with nature and the elements in a very immediate way, be it growing our fruit and vegetables, caring for our animals, confronting the tides and weather or simply enjoying the rugged landscape of the island itself’ (http://www.erraid.fslife.co.uk/, accessed on 20.07.2000). These remote and beautiful locations were chosen by community founders as appropriate to their intention of living a simpler lifestyle: closer to nature and free from the influences of commercialism and materialism. Often this proved extremely effective and members recall establishing an intimate relationship with their immediate environment: Within the forest is a different world. Detail comes alive; the mystery of generation and decay surrounds you. Tree ferns drop rack after rack of dried orange red branches which

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

185

were once the lightest youngest green. Wade through the living wet worlds of ferns, haul up the side of a steep valley, struggle for the ridge, swim in a foliage of smells, patterns, leaves and light, and then pause by an old log passing its last years colonized by hundreds of plants. How did such diversity come about, such detail? These really are unknown worlds, captured tight in phyllums, named and classified by the botanists, worlds within worlds, pause to understand, to become conscious, if not of names then of being able to see, to see inside of the ‘‘view’’ from the kitchen window and through the gap in the hedge. (Black, 1985, pp. 20–21)

This will sound familiar to ecotopians, and in this extract, Veronica Black articulates a deep-ecological sense of self, similar to the total-field image identified by Arne Naess as lying at the heart of deep ecology (Naess, 1973, 1989). She recalls how life in the remote community of Ophui on the Coromandel Peninsula permitted her to develop an intuitive relationship with the life around her. This is a profound shift in consciousness. The provocation of a paradigm shift in consciousness is, I suggest, a core function of utopias (Sargisson, 2000). In literary utopias’ this shift is provoked through the use of certain conventions which permit the imaginary ‘better place’ to act as a mirror to the author’s home world, revealing its flaws and inadequacies. Often the convention of a visitor is used to articulate this. So, for instance, in Thomas More’s Utopia, the character Hythloday visits the island of utopia, is changed by his experiences and brings back tales of a better life (to a fictionalised Thomas More) (More, 1516). Hytholoday is deeply critical of keystones of More’s world, including rules of property, the unequal social system, and attitudes to crime and punishment because he has seen marvellous land where things are better (see More, 1565, Book I). This convention exists in most literary utopias: William Guest performs this function in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (Morris, 1890) and William Weston does the same in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (Callenbach, 1975). This leads scholars of utopia to note that utopias always contain a critique of the present as well as visions of a better world.20 Similarly, one can visit an intentional community (if they will let you), experience their ways of being and look over one’s shoulder at the world outside. Comparisons and normative judgements arise and some visitors experience a shift in the way that they perceive the world, returning to their lives with a new perspective (or perhaps deciding to remain). Homes at the remote Karuna Bay Community on the Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand. Some communities explicitly encourage this, and those that describe themselves as educational (charities or centres) often seek to provoke (or permit) paradigm shifts in the consciousness of their

186

LUCY SARGISSON

visitors. From even short periods of exposure to such circumstances one’s sense of perspective can indeed begin to shift. Phrases like ‘a simple life’, ‘closer to nature’ and ‘less materialistic’ do not do justice to the experience of life in these groups. Consulting my field diary, I recall that, for me, life without electricity was novel and interesting, but I had my torch and so I could see where I was going; and working in the rain – or sunshine – planting crops, digging holes, gathering and laying stone for a wall, was a constituted a refreshing change from my normal, somewhat cerebral and sedentary life. I enjoyed it. But for me, the things that had the most visceral and deep affects concerned the areas of personal hygiene. Toilets were the real trigger to an awareness of my impact on the land and a deeper-thanintellectual understanding of the ecological aspects of green communities. Many of these groups explore practical innovations or utilise and adapt established methods of alternative human waste disposal. Examples include reed-bed systems, anerobic and aerobic composting toilets of various kinds.21 When they work properly these are wonders of simple technology, yielding usable organic compost. When they do not (i.e. if the liquid is not siphoned off or soaked up) then matter decomposes anaerobically and produces ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and methane. This is quite unpleasant, but even a malfunctioning compost toilet will put its user ‘in touch’ with their physical self. Similarly, methods for the collection and/or dispersal of urine vary widely, ranging from basic (crouching in the bush, preferably off the path) to midrange (two planks over a bed of straw, artfully concealed behind a blanket strung over a clothes line in the garden), to deluxe (a siphon inside a purpose-built composting toilet).22 Although Veronica Black’s account earlier evokes a perception of the self-living a deep ecology, I can testify to a prosaic and partial shift, and a raised awareness of my physical impact on the world. The isolation of these communities, then permit members the space and freedom to develop greater intimacy with place and thus to work towards their utopian vision of a good life. It can facilitate changed perceptions of the world within members and visitors and provide a space in which to respond differently to the natural world. However, it also presents very real physical, emotional and structural challenges and some communities have found these to be insurmountable. Many of the communities aforementioned have depleted membership23 and I have interviewed former members who recall the physical struggles of this pioneer life: hacking out paths through thick bush and building homes from scratch. Daily life was extremely tough: people spoke of childbirth in remote huts with no running water, telephone or power source, of cooking over a fire in sodden huts,

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

187

wading through knee-deep mud to get to and from their homes. These people, often highly educated urbanites, had sought something different and better through a life in the wilderness. However, some found the reality of this life too harsh and the social dynamics unsustainable. Gender relationships were often conventional and restricting, conflicts irresolvable and communities like Ophui now have minimal resident membership. Extreme isolation can be physically and emotionally hard: Domestic life is far more intense without electricity. The women and younger children have a harder working life than their urban sisters. Occasionally a wind powered generator or a two stroke motor drives a washing machine, but more often a back to basics lifestyle includes handwashing and stoking the copper. (Veronica Black, 1985, p. 105)

Another common challenge in the older and more remote green communities concerns economic sustainability. Paid employment is scarce in rural location, the costs of transportation are relatively high and complete self-sufficiency is almost impossible. (Many of Tui’s problems, aforementioned, are accounted for by members as pertaining to their remote location.) Many groups have found their communities financially unsustainable following the wide-ranging reforms of (and cuts to) welfare and benefit systems during the 1980s.24 Isolated communities were vulnerable to these welfare reforms if they relied on state benefits for income. Utopian experiments are, as suggested earlier, always moving, and newer green communities tend to look very different from the older remote communes. This is partly because subsequent generations of community founders have learned from the experiences of these pioneers and have attempted to build economic and social sustainability into their community design. Many of the newer green communities are located in semi-rural or even suburban locations on the rationale that proximity to sources of income enhances financial viability. These include many of the ecological communities and eco-villages founded in the last 10 years, and also green co-housing communities. An example of each kind of these groups can be found in Talamh Community (Lanarkshire, Scotland), Otamatea EcoVillage (Kaiapara, New Zealand) and EarthSong Eco-Neighbourhood, (Waitakere, New Zealand). Talamh is located outside the town of Coalburn, Otamatea lies on the edge of an undeveloped harbour, a couple of miles outside the town of Kairpara, and EarthSong (discussed earlier) lies on the outskirts of Waitakere City. All of these communities are relatively young.25 We sought a site for the neighbourhood within the urban area, so as to support participation in the urban workplace. The location enjoys a blend of

188

LUCY SARGISSON

proximity to town and country. On the one hand, Swanson Road has easy access to the Waitakere Ranges and West Coast beaches. And the precious rainwater coming off the Tasman Ocean is much cleaner. On the other, the site is also more accessible to the city than an average suburb on the edge of the urban area. Being only 3 kms and 2 sets of traffic lights to the motorway gives quick access to urban amenities. Better still, the site is only a brief level walk to the train station, which offers a stress-free commute to destinations on the central isthmus.26 This community focused initially on building houses but space has been left at the front of the site for the establishment of businesses. The design brief, devised by the community for the co-housing architects requested that: The front 15–20% of site is to be left aside for now, for some later but ethically compatible use. Possible future uses include: temporary woodlot (timber trees) secret garden y, shared office/ consulting facilities, village shop cluster; cafe´, gallery; tofu factory, or childcentred activities/home-school base (http://www.earthsong.org.nz/design/ design_brief.html, accessed on 9.10.2007). It remains to be seen how effective this planning will be, but it is interesting to note that community founders now very clearly pay attention to finance. Former generations tended to be profoundly anti-materialist and this sometimes led to a refusal (or neglect) to consider material matters. Some groups have survived this intact after negotiating the unintended outcomes of community life (such as financial hardship, unequal income distribution and increasing materialism in some members, mass exits, low occupancy and distraction from the original intent of the community). The newer eco-villages and co-housing groups may retain an anti-materialist ethos, but they do think hard about how to sustain themselves in material terms. Community planning session at Valley Farm EcoVillage

CONCLUSION Green intentional communities, then, are utopian in a number of ways. They are living responses to feelings of discontent about the modern world; they articulate the desire for better ways of being and explore ways of bringing this to life in the here and now. I have also suggested that they can provoke shifts in consciousness in their members and visitors, that they can be catalysts for local and perhaps wider environmental change. I want to end this discussion by remembering the paradoxical nature of the concept of utopia. The term was coined by Thomas More’s and forms a pun on three Greek terms: ‘eu’ (good), ‘ou’ (non, no or not) and ‘topos’ (place)

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

189

(More, 1516). Utopias remain always, in a truly literal and etymological sense, good places that are no places. They are good places at which we never arrive. More’s neologism is, I suggest, a deeply paradoxical but entirely appropriate term for the kind of human striving discussed in this chapter. Intentional communities are utopian but they are not perfect eutopias. They are often torn by conflict and contain much human unhappiness caused, not least, by the very difficulty of trying to live a good life. And utopian experiments will always contain unhappiness, struggle and sometimes even compromise over core principles because they are embedded in the very world that they strive to change. However, they are, I suggest important and their imperfections absolutely do not invalidate them. These experiments might make their members unhappy – unbearably so, sometimes – but they are pursuing a dream, striving for a better life and seeking a better alternative. They are, I suggest, utopias in process, moving slowly, and sometimes unevenly, towards a better life in this imperfect world.

NOTES 1. See, for example, CastAway 2000 in which the cameras watched ‘Thirty-six people [who] went to spend a year living on the Scottish island of Taransay, building their own shelters and fending for themselves in a community’ (http://www.tv.com/ castaway-2000/show/12395/summary.html, accessed on 4.10.2007) and CastAway 2006 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/07_july/21/castaway. shtml). 2. Hence defensive statements from Green Parties, such as ‘The Green Party is the fastest growing, world-wide movement seen in the second half of the 20th century. It is scientifically supportable, not just a romantic utopian vision’ (Green Party of Texas, USA http://www.txgreens.org/resources/gpinfo/Green%20FAQ%20.rtf, accessed on 4.10. 2007). And this (from the Green Party of Shipley, UK) ‘Are green party members just idealists or utopians? Green Party members are widely caricatured as hopeless idealists who refuse to acknowledge the so-called ‘realities’ of modern capitalist life and dream of a future based on utopian ideas. In fact, the reverse is more accurate’ (FAQs at http://www.shipleygreenparty.org.uk/sgpfaqs. htm#idealists, accessed on 4.10.2007). 3. See, for example, John Barry (2006). 4. See, for example, ‘Earth is too crowded for Utopia’ a viewpoint piece by Professor Chris Rapley (2007). 5. For fuller discussions of definitions of intentional communities see Sargent (1967, pp. 222–230, 1994, pp. 1–37). For recent accounts of definitional debates see Sargisson and Sargent (2004, esp 2–6) and Metcalf (2004, esp 8–11). 6. The work in Britain comprised a project which sought to explore radicalism and utopianism in the green movement in Britain at the time. This research was funded by the ESRC, Grant Reference R000222695. The fieldwork in New Zealand

190

LUCY SARGISSON

formed part of a collaborative project with Lyman Tower Sargent in which we sought to conduct a country-wide survey of intentional communities across New Zealand. This research was funded by the University of Nottingham and the British Academy (Small Research Grant 2000-1 ‘Utopias and Intentional Living in New Zealand’). 7. For discussions of this core terminology see Eckersly (1992), Dobson (1995) and Barry (1994). For examples of their usage in primary texts see Dobson (1991) and Naess (1973, 1989). 8. Somewhat confusingly, one of these, Erraid, is on the west coast. 9. When I first encountered this group in 1997, two members gave a short lecture to participants on ‘Experience Week’ (the Foundation’s induction programme). At this time, members of Trees for Life were a dedicated group but the organization itself had a low profile, compared with that of its host intentional community. They have since developed their web and media presence, attracting a celebrity patron (Muriel Gray), producing merchandise (calendars and cards), and generally raising their profile independently of their host organization. However, their core reason for existence has remained constant. 10. For an introduction to this from one of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation see Caddy (1994). For secondary discussions see Riddell (1990) and Sargisson (2000). 11. Indeed, the community website contains highly detailed information about this, but, it is presented as ‘technical’ information, rather than crucial to the community’s vision. See this link for detailed information about such things as water (source, usage and waste), energy sources and use, etc. (http://www.earthsong.org.nz/technical/). 12. The lower walls are built from rammed earth and the upper storeies are wooden and New Zealand macrocarpa pine was selected as the most sustainable option. 13. They use a combination of solar energy and electricity from the national grid. 14. They operate a clear protocol and consensus decision-making procedure during meetings, for example, which seeks to ensure that nobody dominates proceedings (see http://www.earthsong.org.nz/process/meetin.html and Sargisson & Sargent, 2004). 15. See Robina McCurdy’s work with in New Zealand and South Africa (Earthcare Education Aotearoa and the Context Institute http://www.context.org/ PEOPLE/RMBio.htm). 16. In New Zealand non-Maori communities like Tui commonly adopt traditional Maori practices (and attitudes towards the environment) in their daily life, believing the older culture to be better integrated with the rhythms, processes and spirit of the land. This particular practice is called whaikorero (see http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ GradConf/kawa.shtml). 17. Willing/Worldwide Workers on Organic Farms. See http://www.wwoof.org/ home.asp and http://www.wwoof.co.nz/. 18. Some members spoke of this as a matter of principle and a strong work ethic exists in this group. 19. Anything smaller is instantly smashed to fragments.

Sustainability and the Intentional Community

191

20. For examples of the terms being used in these ways, see key texts in the field such as Levitas (1990), Davis (1981), Goodwin and Taylor (1982) and Moylan (1986). 21. Long-drop, worm-farm, vented and not. 22. Early in my fieldwork in the UK, I made the mistake of arriving at a community in need of the toilet and was unprepared when the answer to the question, ‘Where’s the loo?’ was ‘Do you need a shit or a piss?’ The one was to be undertaken in the newly instated worm farm (‘and don’t pee on them or they’ll drown’), the other in a bucket. 23. In 2000, just one household remained at Ophui. Several members had moved away, retaining their ownership of the space (and their homes), visiting sometimes but holding a formal community meeting on site just once a year. It is almost certain that Ahu Ahu Ohu is now empty. 24. Thatcher’s cuts in the UK may be familiar to readers and in New Zealand from 1984 to 1995, policy from successive governments (initially Labor and then National (conservative)) took the country to the leading edge of neo-liberal free market economics. In 10 years of quiet revolution New Zealand was changed structurally from a comprehensive welfare state Keynesian economy (cited by some as the most comprehensive in the world) to something resembling a New Right utopia (see Kelsey, 1995). 25. Planning for both Otamataea and EarthSong began in the mid 1990s and the first residents moved in in 1999 and 2000 respectively. Talamh is older, beginning life in the early 1993. 26. EarthSong ‘FAQs’ and ‘CoHousing’ at http://www.ecohousing.pl.net, accessed on 10.01.2002.

REFERENCES Barry, J. (1994). The limits of the shallow and the deep: Green politics, philosophy, and praxis. Environmental Politics, 3, 369–394. Barry, J. (2006). ‘Towards a Concrete Utopian Model of Green Political Economy: From Economic Growth and Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security’ Post-Autistic Economics Review Issue no. 36, 24 February. Available at http://www.paecon.net/ PAEReview/issue36/Barry36.htm. Accessed on October 1, 2007. Black, V. (1985). The spirit of the Coromandel. Auckland: Reed Methuen. Caddy, E. (1994). The spirit of Findhorn. Forres: Findhorn Press. Callenbach, E. (1975). Ecotopia. Berkely, CA: Banyan Books. Davis, J. C. (1981). Utopia and the ideal society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobson, A. (1991). The green reader. London: Andre Deutsch. Dobson, A. (1995). Green political thought (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Eckersly, R. (1992). Environmental political theory. London: University College London. Goodwin, B., & Taylor, K. (1982). The politics of Utopia: A study in theory and practice. London: Hutchinson. Kelsey, J. (1995). The New Zealand experiment. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

192

LUCY SARGISSON

Kumar, K. (1991). Utopianism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Levitas, R. (1990). The concept of Utopia. Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allen. McCurdy, R. (1999). Towards sacred society. In: H. Jackson (Ed.), Creating harmony: Conflict resolution in community. East Meon, Hants: Permanent Publications. Available at http:// www.context.org/PEOPLE/robina/tuiart.htm. Metcalf, W. (2004). The Findhorn book of community living. Forres: Findhorn Press. More, T. U. (1965). In: E. Surtz & J. Hexter (Eds), The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (Vol. 4, p. 185). New Haven: Yale University Press. Morris, W. (1890). News from nowhere, or, an epoch of rest: Being some chapters from a Utopian romance (2003 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moylan, T. (1986). Demand the impossible: science fiction and the Utopian imagination. New York: Methuen. Naess, A. (1973). The shallow and the deep: Long-range ecology movement. Inquiry, 16, 35–36. Naess, A. (1989). Ecology, community, and lifestyle: outline of an Ecosophy trans D Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rapley, C. (2007). ‘Earth is too crowded for Utopia’ a viewpoint piece Director of the British Antarctic Survey, on the British Broadcasting Company (BBC)’s ‘News 24’ website. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4584572.stm. Accessed on October 4, 2007. Riddell, C. (1990). The Findhorn community. Forres: Findhorn Press. Sargent, L. T. (1967). The three faces of utopianism. Minnesota Review, 7(3), 222–230. Sargent, L. T. (1994). Three faces of utopianism revisited. Utopian Studies, 5(1), 1–37. Sargisson, L. (2000). Utopian bodies and the politics of transgression. London: Routledge. Sargisson, L., & Sargent, L. T. (2004). Living in Utopia New Zealand’s intentional communities. Aldershot: Ashgate. Suvin, D. (1972). ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.’ College English 34.3, December, 375. Suvin, D. (1973). Defining the literary genre of Utopia: Some historical semantics, some genealogy, a proposal, and a plea. Studies in the Literary Imagination, 121–145.

CHAPTER 10 A GREEN PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY Rupert Read Let me begin soon after the beginning of economics: with money. Money is a concept whose centrality to Economics, especially to conventional Economics, is hard to overestimate: Money is the main means by which economists tend to appeal more easily to an alleged scientificity for their discipline, because it so easily lets them ‘Go forth and quantify’. And yet, economists will protest that I am mistaken. They will say that preference/choice is their fundamental concept, for which money is only a kind of proxy, a conventional ‘measuring rod’ of value. And they are half right; hardly any conventional economics (the main exception being some strands of Keynesianism) has anything to say about what money is. Rather, a vague answer to that question tends to be assumed. I don’t believe that I am caricaturing when I remark that, for all the good sense of perspective actually and quite helpfully yielded in the ways that economics textbooks tend to imagine the creation of money on desert islands inhabited by two people and so on, that is soon forgotten, and money ‘floats free’ of its ‘beginnings’, as soon as economists begin to theorize, as (naturally), being would-be scientists, they love to do. And at that point, as they start to theorize the society they aim to explain, as they begin to produce equations and so on to work up this theory, they start to assume that money is a commodity, a thing, in itself. A thing that is more or less convertible into goods and thus that facilitates their exchange. Money is a thing, an object, a stuff – and of course, as already mentioned, marvellously naturally open to

The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice Advances in Ecopolitics, Volume 4, 193–212 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2041-806X/doi:10.1108/S2041-806X(2009)0000004013

193

194

RUPERT READ

quantification. (It is this fatal assumption that I am above all concerned to challenge in this chapter.) This is what makes it possible for people to talk about ‘how much money’ they ‘have’ and similarly, economics makes the most of money’s apparently numerical character. Numeracy and quantification seem the bread and butter of the economy and become/became the same for Economics. One of the great trends in – one of the motors, indeed, of – Economics is the project of monetizing more and more, of calculating the monetary value of goods that have hitherto not been included in the calculations of academics, businesspeople and so on. I am not saying that conventional economists simply are through and through dangerously naive realists about money, fantasizing that it is a real thing. I am saying that they forget whatever non-naive realism they have, that subordinates money to preference or choice, and tend to fall undeliberately into treating money as if it were in itself a commodity, a good, or at least a direct measure of good. Money is a particularly neat device for giving preferences a numerical face; it is a mathematicisable side of preference satisfaction. Because it mediates exchange and stores value so beautifully. Economics – of the conventional kind(s) – is ‘demonstrably’ a ‘science’ chiefly in that it builds a tremendous edifice of mathematical sophistication and theoretic complexity on the back of the sublimely quantifiable nature of money. But, I am suggesting, Economics does not really know what it is quantifying. Thus, there is something fantastically unstable about the edifice. For, there is something fundamentally misleading about money, except to the very clear-seeing.1 Money at its apparently least mysterious is perhaps money that one can look at: a note, or a coin, with its value actually written on it. But to think then that one is seeing the stuff that money is, and literally reading its value off it, is to be a victim of a deep delusion. For, for instance, the population of Germany in the early 1920s or possibly Argentina more recently, and certainly Zimbabwe now have very bluntly realized, money is nothing unless it is accepted as money. That seems a circular definition. It is. Probably, the best single definition that can be given of money2 is Money is whatever people generally regard as money. The patent circularity of this shows how utterly different this concept – this ‘object’3 – is from the founding concepts of scientific disciplines. Money is a social reality, where it is – but because of its fundamentally social nature (money is (a main element of) what we4use to organize social relations between ourselves), it is through and through conceptual.5 ‘It’ rests on

A Green Philosophy of Money

195

nothing more and nothing less than how ‘it’ is regarded and used. In that regard, it differs fundamentally from the fundamental concepts of (real) sciences: such as electrons, or molecules or cells. The nature of money is best-characterized as a philosophical matter. It takes philosophical reflection, of the kind I have already briefly engaged in above, to disclose the nature of money: as a means of exchange, as exhausted and constructed by its use and as nothing but its capacity for use. Money is whatever is used as money. And what this philosophy of money discloses is then something perfectly ordinary, something that competent members of a society that is of a certain level of complexity and a certain kind of organization in effect know without having to be taught it: what money ‘is’. Philosophy does not teach us a theory of money: how could it, given the patent circularity I have described above? It simply reminds us of something that Economics and the business world and so on can delude us into ‘forgetting’ or into getting confused about the way we – normally, but without any guarantee that we will continue to do so (again, remember Germany or Argentina) – use ‘symbolic’ coins and certain pieces of paper and so on to orchestrate the exchange of goods and services amongst each other and so on. Economics wants to forget this definitional circularity, this human power which is the very essence of money. For, if it be clearly realized that money only is as we choose to do with ‘it’ – that, indeed, there is no ‘it’ except insofar as we continue collectively to find it useful to think and act as if there is – then the ‘iron laws’ of Economics start to run into the sand. The quantificational edifice is only as true as we act it into being. This categorical difference from anything found in the natural sciences is not something that conventional Economics is comfortable acknowledging!6 Money is as money does; or, better, money is whatever does what what we ordinary practitioners of social interaction know to be money – from unquestionable paradigm cases that we are all familiar with7 – does.8 A helpful way of summing all this up is this: Economics would be a normative ‘science’. But there can be no such thing as a science of the normative, a ‘normative science’. Economics is normative because it is about people trying to satisfy their needs and because it cannot prescind from needs that include quite irreducibly normative and open-ended matters such as the need for justice, the need to give and receive love and so on and moreover because these needs and how to satisfy them is not only a matter for individual reflection (such reflection is already enough to head any science off at the pass) but also a matter for social – for ‘circular’ – decision and revision.9 Money is normative, because it is thoroughgoingly involved

196

RUPERT READ

with all this too and in part thereby because its nature is in principle almost utterly open to negotiation and indeed to creation and/or cessation.10 Money is barely constrained at all by the physical world. (As Green economists are well aware, this is precisely one of the key potential problems with it. Money can grow exponentially, in a bank account, and money is exchangeable for stuff: but what stuff can keep growing exponentially? If one attempts to exchange the money that keeps growing for stuff, one will mine the Earth and all its creatures and turn them into slagy.11) And now we start to get somewhere intriguing: for when we really start to take seriously that whatever does the kind of thing that money does is money, then we can start to see how economists’ failure to see through money-as-quantifiable-object to ‘its’ uses – that is, to uses of anything that has a good deal in common with what we would naturally call the use of money – actually blinds them to fundamental – and very practical – possibilities of social reality. For example, the possibility that people will act in ways that ‘the iron laws of economics’ systematically fail to anticipate. A nice example here is the (now mostly dead/refuted – by events, more than by economists, as we shall see!) dogma of monetarism. Monetarism was premissed upon the notion that there is such a thing as the money supply. Given the above, this already probably sounds odd. It should do. Take what happened under Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. The British government defined a measure as ‘the money supply’ and controlled it. Their control over it was successful, but other broader measures of money then suddenly expanded. Over a period of a few years, this happened again and again; each time the government broadened its definition of money, moving up through a series of ‘M-numbers’ and so on, businesspeople and others found ways of switching to using/creating money that was not under the government’s strict controls. For example, ‘Money supply’ tightly controlled, but credit cards not included within the controls? A sudden expansion in the use of credit cards. Eventually, Howe and Thatcher gave up on monetarism. What was the lesson? That in an economy with a large degree of flexibility in the creation of financial instruments,12 and especially where there was explicit awareness of the government’s efforts to tighten the monetary reins, the control of the money supply was not so much a difficult goal as an absurd goal. For again, ‘money’ ‘is’ as whatever-can-be-used-as-money does. Let’s now take a step back. How did people come to ‘need money’ in the first place? Answer (with a nod to Marx): they were dispossessed of their own means of production and reproduction and turned thereby into sellers of labour power. And once this has happened, people really do need money

A Green Philosophy of Money

197

to survive. And thus, the same historical dispossession that turns them into workers also turns them into consumers – that is, it makes them doubly useful to capitalism. (Capitalism does not like peasants. They get in the way of its expansion both because they can produce without capital and because they consume little of what capital produces. Capitalism likes workers who produce a lot and consume a lot – both features clearly put capitalism in permanent opposition to ecologism). Dispossess people of their own means of production and make them dependent on money and you also make the extent of that dependence infinitely elastic: simply by infinite, ‘monetary’ (and thus debt and credit) expansion of the categories of ‘need’ and indeed ‘survival’. Capitalist argument: if it makes sense to say that you need money to buy food, it is just ‘arbitrary’ to deny that you ‘need’ money to buy a Mercedes Benz or an airconditioning system. If you need clothing to survive in cold climates, it is just ‘arbitrary’ to deny that you need 6 weeks of tropical holidays every year to (say) ‘survive’ the ‘stress of modern life’. Again: this is the path, and the ideological high road, to environmental disaster. And of course, you can even tart this recipe for infinite consumption up further with ‘democracy’ and even ‘rights’ notions. (You gonna deny me my ‘right’ to my Indonesian holiday?y) The fetishism of money and commodities has a real basis in historically created class relations of production. After all, if you have only your labour power to sell to live, it is not an illusion or delusion to think that you would be stuffed without your (monetary) wages. Therefore, money is perfectly real in the context of or relative to some particular and problematic historical (and contemporary) phenomena and settings. Money, in our world, is a medium of exchange. But that nice-sounding word, ‘exchange’, can hide a multitude of meanings and of sins. For money is also a kind of storage mechanism for wealth, but what is (this kind of) ‘wealth’? We are now in a good position to provide an answer that yields clearly one of the meanings of money, a meaning or aspect that is fantastically important, and also I would say literally, phantastic. In societies like our’s, ‘wealth’ is in a way perfectly real, but it is also – and, I would claim, most profoundly – a shared illusion that allows it to come to seem natural or just that some people labour for others. ‘Wealth’ is ‘strongly encouraging’ people – more or less forcing people – to do one’s bidding, so that they can do the same, albeit usually on a smaller scale, to other people. Money, as virtual wealth,13 is in this sense nothing more than a con-trick. When people want to get richer and richer, what they want is just to have

198

RUPERT READ

other people do their bidding, more and more and more. That is the astounding humdrum truth that lies behind all the flannel of economics and the mystification of money. Conventional economics is not a positive science: it is a way of attempting to conceal from people the (im-)moral truth, that they are being exploited. The ‘virtual wealth’ that money is (as opposed to the ‘real wealth’ of life and all that actually sustains it) is a power to purchase, a debt always waiting for the future to pay it. The more such debt there is the more the future will have to pay. Raw exploitation is the unpleasant flipside of the ‘laws’ of ‘positive’ economics and the ‘natural’ result of belief in such economics. Yet, this economics not only perpetuates and reinforces itself; as suggested above, I would submit that, interestingly, a number of economic doctrines, notably Monetarism, are flawed by a failure to include proper consideration of the drivers toward virtually ineluctable growth of money supply, in a relatively deregulated financial system and a politico-economic system that demands and pushes growth (which in turn is fuelled by the debt-based/interest-based money system, the fact of the matter being that private banks and not the state now create most of our store of ‘virtual wealth’),14 and by the way in which human beings will work consciously and unconsciously to subvert money supply controls, in such a system, in a way that puts them always one step ahead of the economic theorists, who are then always trying to catch up with the latest mutation in what money is, such mutations being accelerated precisely by the effort to prevent them (i.e. as soon as an announcement is made that (some form of) money is being controlled, the incentive is explicitly in place to move to another means of exchange)! Thinking of economics as a science tends to blind one to the self-defeating effects of the enunciation of and of attempts to employ some kinds of ‘economic laws’, and to blind one to the way in which those alleged laws are in any case at a more fundamental level mere outworkings of the ‘imperatives’ y of particular political and economic systems. This should hardly be surprising: Positivism, in dispensing with realistic assumptions, deprives itself of access to the first-hand knowledge that as ordinary competent socio-economic actors we all have of economic life and of the political and ethical values that underpin that life. If as a society or as a world we in effect manage to decide to rid ourselves of the growth imperative, and of hyper-reliance on debtbased money, then we will probably be able to achieve some collective level of control of the money supply. Until we do that, we should be entirely unsurprised that attempts to control the money supply are now doomed to fail. The very idea of ‘the money supply’ as something to be quantified and

A Green Philosophy of Money

199

controlled does not make sense in our current economic system. The attempt to catch the tail of something that has a built-in momentum to expand is pointless and indeed, as discussed above, self-defeating. Of course, we need to qualify the idea of a built-in tendency to expand. Private creation of money by banks, through loaning out money they do not have (‘fractional reserve banking’), is always bad in that it involves private profiteering (‘seigniorage’) by the bankers (or banksters, as some wags understandably like to call themy). In boom times, it can nevertheless seem good in that it facilitates the boom, the expansion – although of course often simultaneously at drastic ecological cost (the increased output tends to come from somewherey). At times of bust – at times such as now – fractional reserve banking is disastrously pro-cyclical. The failure or refusal to lend that this credit crunch has centred around since mid-2008 has resulted in a massive evaporation or destruction of money. Where has all the money gone? Some of it is being hoarded, but much of it has simply melted into air (for of course it never was anything solidy). The vast oceans of liquidity have turned into deserts where there is no money. When loans are called in and no new loans are made, money is decreated. Green Economics may one day succeed in allowing the economy just the medium of exchange it needs (which bankers in recessions and notably in the Great Depression – that is, Hoover’s America – of the past have more or less deliberately or accidentally more or less prevented) without fuelling inflation. But the very idea of forbidding the economy the medium of exchange it ‘needs’, the very idea of strict control of the money supply, is to a large extent a pseudo-scientific nonsense, in a world – as much of the world has been since some point in the 1970s – where there is a relatively high degree of private ability to create new financial instruments to work to satisfy ‘needs’ that are not tied to genuine (if open-ended, still being workedout) human needs, nor even of course to ecological limits but only to constructible desires and to ‘[conventional] economic imperatives’, such as profit and repayment of loans. To be absolutely clear here, I am not of course saying that governments (and central banks) in modern times in our capitalist world cannot control the money supply at all.15 I am making the conceptual point that they cannot control it nearly as completely as much neo-classical economic theory, working with what I have suggested are dubious or absurd assumptions, would suggest. At the heart of my conceptual point is this: that controlling money is nothing like controlling the supply of a raw material.16 Furthermore, it is just common sense that, the more ‘the money markets’ are liberalized, the less governments can control the circulation and

200

RUPERT READ

production of money. That is, economies where the banks, private entities, are legally allowed to create money in a wide array of ways and to a very high degree magnify the difficulty of such control: the debt generated by such creation produces more or less permanent pressures to expand the money supply. This is the juggernaut that neo-classical economic theory – for example, monetarism – cannot stop. In general, it does not of course on balance want to stop the economic growth that this money system encourages. But Green economists know that we must stop it. Finitude – the disastrous effects for us and our ecosystems of such growth, in terms of unsustainable work, extraction and inequality, frequently mutually compounding one another – implies that money must be brought under control, but with full recognition of ‘its’ morphability, of, we might almost say, its non-existence. (A helpful way to appreciate the nature and character of economics is to consider the following paradoxical sentence as true: Money is perfectly socially real, yet it is non-existent.) The use of the term ‘full recognition’ here is important: it implies that this process will have to be democratic. There will not be a transition to a seriously Greener Economics without a relatively widespread understanding of the basic points being made here, and a Green Economics just will not be so, unless the society/world of which it is the economics is itself democratic. Democracy and sustainability are inseparable. Because, bottom line, you cannot control money without (a good deal of) consent. (Again, there is then a vast difference here between economics and (real) science: it would be quite false to claim that Physics must be a democratic institution or that Physics could not be true without being democratic. But I am saying that versions of economics which are not on balance disastrous for humans and their – our ecosystem(s) must be widely understood and genuinely – mutually – constructed. We could put the point this way, slightly paradoxically: unless Green Economics becomes widespread in its reach – in terms of level of understanding thereof, in terms of actual influence and in terms of being open to change from the learning of those it is understood by and affects – it will not be true. Economics is part of what it describes/explains, in a respect in which Physics is not.17) Thus, we have to look far deeper than the Monetarists did. We need a democratically overseen and explained set of tight – though crucially not too tight to allow into legal circulation in the economy about as much of a convenient exchange mechanism (‘money’) as is needed – restrictions on the generation of money. One possibility might be what I call ‘Citizens’ Money Boards’, which could be established locally, regionally, nationally18 and internationally – at whatever levels there was a currency and at whatever levels the currencies that there were were (at their current quantity and

A Green Philosophy of Money

201

velocity, etc.) having potentially problematic effects. These Boards, springing from and grounded in a relatively widespread set of insights into (Green) Economics, would have a key consultative role in deciding on the (rough) amount of money that should be allowed/encouraged to circulate, the rough amount needed in circulation, at any given time.19 The capacity to so decide would be realistically practicable, only with the gradual or immediate abolition of debt-based money. We have suggested so far various ways in which money can be demystified; turned from a strange kind of object back, in our understanding, into the variegated medium of exchange and so on that is fairly unsurprisingly typical of a society with a certain level of scale – a certain size – and level of complexity of organization. We have not yet much dwelt upon what is perhaps the most powerful single such demystificatory account: that of Karl Marx. Marx’s central topic was money – or, more broadly, capital. His marvellous literary-philosophical ‘analysis’ of ‘the commodity’ – of how it gets fetishized, and thus deludes people into being exploited and so on – immediately suggests a project of demystifying money: ‘Money comes into the world in the shape of its use-value: its being a medium of exchange is its plain, homely, bodily form. Money is thus useful – and, at the same time, a depository of value y The value of money is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of its substance y Turn over and examine a single coin, by itself, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. How can this, this pathetic little piece of metal, be of value far beyond its worth as a treasure or a decoration? If, however, we bear in mind that the value of money has (in reality) a purely social reality, and that it acquires this reality only in so far as it ‘‘expresses’’ – or at least buys – human labour, then at least we start to see what the value of money truly consists in’.20 Thus, the opening of his ‘Das Capital’ is already an entirely pertinent demystification of money, by bringing clearly into view one crucial aspect of ‘it’, an aspect under which money can be viewed that quickly makes tangible to one that and how it is not an object, and starts to explicate and make comprehensible that and how a very unequal social organization can, even in a society allegedly without gods or genetic social hierarchies and so on, appear inevitable and natural: money can be profitably viewed – and an important aspect of money then, at last, becomes perspicuous to us – as a measure of the quantity and quality21 of human labour required for the production of something, and thus for its exchange. As things stand, ‘the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour’ (1978, p. 320–321; italics added), and thus, its social character, its being a

202

RUPERT READ

matter of a social arrangement that can be undone, vanishes, behind the delusive appearance of things – behind commodities, products and what is in effect then the uber-commodity: money. Thus, people start to relate to themselves and their work and each other as if they were relating to or at best entirely through things.22 ‘This is the nature of money under capitalism. But, in its everydayness, it is invisible’.23 Green Economics too must be about making this ‘invisible’ visible. About returning us to the everyday, to our labour, our soil and so on, but without the everyday slavery to defunct economists that economistic and exploitative and consumerist and moneyist propaganda endlessly subjects us to, under capitalism. Money, or at least capital, as we observed above, is then a con-trick, a social device for getting people to labour for you. (Recall the case of the wonderfully indolent Quashees, as described by Marx: ‘As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital’.24 Capital, this trick for bringing about work one wants done, is societally optional.) Other social devices/ arrangements for organizing labour are imaginable, once one sees through ‘the great money trick’. For instance, collective decision-making. Marx tended to think that he had discovered, among other things, what (at least modern) money really is. His focus was overwhelmingly on providing a ‘scientific’ account of the stage of society that he was in, and especially of its most fundamental organizational feature: money in the form of capital.25 Rather, he had shed light on – rendered visible, brought into prominence – an aspect of ‘it’, an aspect of the social life that, not being robots, we all actually understand perfectly well when we are in the thick of it, in our everyday lives, but find hard to render reflectively, in part because of the propaganda (that is both a result of and a bolster to conventional Economics) that we are subject to, almost every day y an aspect that he rightly saw that conventional economics and the socio-economic organizational structures that it ‘describes’ and legitimates obscures and ‘fetishizes’. Green Economics needs to hold firm to Marx’s founding insight, but not use it, as Marx regrettably did, to allegedly found a science of (socialist, or whatever-ist) Economics in competition with allegedly scientific capitalist Economics. We should understand Marx as enabling us to see an aspect of money and so on that is quite shielded from view by the mystification and fetishization (and media-sponsored or educationally sponsored brainwashing) of capitalism. The clearer view we then have is like the clearer view we gain from taking off thick tinted lenses, not from a microscope. Marx simply helps us remove an obstacle from regaining the ordinary understanding that is potentially open to us all of social phenomena, as competent social actors; using him as the basis of a substitute Science is simply erecting a new

A Green Philosophy of Money

203

obstacle in the way of that understanding. Green Economics will be making a probably fatal error if it attempts to substitute its own true theory of Economics for the false or nonsensical theories of the Marxists and the (neo-)classical Economists, alike. We need to realize – and this is hard, partly because the overwhelming scientism of our culture makes it seem unacceptably vague to say this – that the very project of a Scientific Economics is itself unscientific, pseudoscientific. Green Economics is about recognizing the finitude of resources and recentring economics on the satisfaction of genuine human needs. Marx correctly understood that Economics is a historical discipline; compare, for instance, the great difficulty that America in 1929–1933 had in overcoming the tight money situation there with the comparative ease in 1980s’ Britain of overcoming somewhat similar constraints. And right now, in 2009 – in ‘credit crunch’ recession – we are radically in uncharted waters: uncharted, in part simply because we have not lived through them yety The birth of new forms of (debt-based) money has/had become markedly easier over just the 80 or so years in question. There are, I would venture to submit, no timeless laws in economics. But Marx did not recognize the extent to which that means that there are not really any laws of economics at all, and thus that his Scientific Socialism is a mirage. It is not only a mirage because it fails to take into account the conceptual/philosophical point that it must be land and other resources too that are encoded in the price of commodities and so on – not human labour alone, for land/resource too is finite. It is a mirage because it fails to understand how, even staying purely within the realm of the socio-historical, and bracketing the ecological, as Marx generally did, money only ever is as the social ‘system’ of one’s time does it. Enough people choosing, deliberately or otherwise, to end or transform money could do so in an extraordinarily short period of time. Again, some societies have known versions of this – collapses in confidence in money (and then the development of alternatives) – in ways that we, living in a time of relative financial ‘solidity’ and organization, despite – and indeed fuelling – the collective insanity of our economic ‘system’, tend to forget. Money looks natural, the more society ‘happens’ to work consistently with it, in a self-fulfilling way. But this is not the basis for a true ‘social science’, whatever that would be. It is only mutually fulfilling, and self-verifying, social nature/culture. There can be no science worthy of the word for society. The (utterly unlikely) victory and apparent truth of Scientific Socialism – or the (equally utterly unlikely, in light of recent events) triumph of neo-liberalism – would hardly prove me wrong; it would prove simply that economists et al can help to make the propaganda that they foment so

204

RUPERT READ

deep-set that people cannot see that it is propaganda any more. (Note however that it is important to remember that the ‘feedback loops’ that are of the essence of human and social being can go both ways: i.e. some economic doctrines tend to be self-defeating (e.g. Monetarism, as discussed above), but others can tend to be self-fulfilling (e.g. the picture of the human being as a selfish preference-satisfier).26 The latter are of course highly dangerous, because as their ideology becomes natural to a society, they are/ appear to be simply describing and explaining the very norms and effects that they have helped to create! But it remains the case that they/‘we’ have created – not discovered – them.) In an era of the alleged ‘triumph’ of the market, of ‘free-market economics’, it was hard to achieve the undeluded vision that the present chapter aims to foster. But it is becoming easier by the dayy We stand now at a moment of extraordinary opportunity, with ‘market economics’, indeed ‘homo economicus’, no longer the only game in town. For the free market in finance has catastrophically, decisively failed, in the last couple of years – and suddenly there is an opening for a new vision. Green Economics is a new game in town and, provided it does not aim to replace the existing game at its own game – that is, provided it does not seek to become the true Science of Economics – it offers a vital alternative. An alternative that might just help save us from the ecological (and intertwinedly – inextricably27 – social and political and economic) disaster that conventional Economics has rained down upon us, and that now threatens, through the risk of runaway climate change, simply to end civilization as we know it – in very large portions of the globe at least, within a hundred years or perhaps significantly less. And the space can be made for these new games – including for the abolition of interest-based money, and/or the introduction of demurrage – precisely by the aspect-shift that enables one to see that economics lacks iron laws. All its ‘laws’ are in part products of human decisions. And by that, I do not mean the kind of decision involved in the contemporary consumerist ‘choice’ agenda: that is, roughly, Coke or Pepsi. Alternative monies – differently and better functioning money systems – become possible, when we see that ‘Economics’ can become something like not only what I have characterized it as being, but also a democracy, in the true sense of that word (not in the debased form in which we mostly know it today in ‘actually existing ‘‘democracies’’’): in the sense, that is, of the people ruling.28 As suggested above, economics itself can – and arguably, must, if civilization is to survive (or be truly born) – become a democracy. Economics can hardly be a science, for it must not only be of but also be a collective praxis.

A Green Philosophy of Money

205

A proper understanding of the (useful part of the) legacy of Marxism then is that the point of a true economics would be to make (some particular) action(s) seem both necessary and possible. Economics is (or should be) about making it (the world we could be in) happen.29 There is no positive economics, but only normative economics. As with a non-scientistic Marxist point of view, so with Green Economics: if it is not among other things a collective practical political project, then it is nothing.30 But there are perhaps even more radical ways than Marx’s of re-thinking economics and its ‘foundations’, such as money. One that is or should be of great importance to Green Economics is Gesell’s idea – and it has precedents of course in actual historical cases/‘experiments’31 – of ‘demurrage’. Rather than prejudices toward growth and related unsustainable features of interest-based money,32 with its built-in dynamic toward monetary growth and more or less uncontrollable mutation, money could be reconstructed as more simply a medium of exchange, without built-in advantages (which at present it has; i.e. no deterioration – and indeed ease of compound expansion – over time) over goods, if it has a built-in gradual percentage reduction, or some such.33 Does Gesell (and his small band of followers) offer us anything scientific? Not really. His is, first, a critique – including a critique of the delusions that money as we know it encourages – of money. A deflationary philosophy of money, somewhat similar to that that we essayed above. Secondly, a set of commonsense and political/ethical observations and suggestions about what we want from money and from socio-economic organization more generally. Thirdly, a striking idea, a reconceiving of what money could be, which eventuates fourthly and finally in a number of more or less concrete practical proposals. For how we could get from here to there. As in, for instance, the following, from Margrit Kennedy’s (1995) Gesellian work, Interest and Inflation Free Money: ‘It is important to understand that barter clubs reverse today’s banking principles. They reward those who exchange goods and services with interest free money and punish those who sit on their surplus money’.34 Thus, my ‘Citizens’ Money Boards’ would not need to play the main part, in a hopeless uninformed quasi-Leninist fashion.35 They would be profoundly – straightforwardly – guided by the functioning of the economy, in an economy whose money was mostly as it were demurrage-based rather than debt-based. This seems to me part of the solution. Gesell’s wonderful intervention is economics as ethics, as politics, as common sense and as policy studies.36 And as philosophy, as I urge we (should) understand philosophy. It is not economics as science. It does not re-arrange the deckchairs. It does not

206

RUPERT READ

entrench us further in the dominant paradigms: of costing everything using a ‘medium’ that always risks becoming the message, suborning any content, taking over our thinking. As banking money has taken over so much of our lives, it can be hard to think outside it. But we can – and, probably, must. It must make starkly perspicuous the complete absurdity involved in notions that grip our culture, notions such as ‘Let’s make lots of money’.37 When most of us see that there is a helpful point of view available from which we are all workers, only with some of us working very little38 (e.g. in the extreme case of a capitalist, perhaps doing nothing more than making a few phone calls or shuffling a few bits of paper, while thousands or millions sweat and slave for you), then this social reality will start to seem considerably more intolerable, nonsensical, than it presently does. When most of us see that there is a helpful point of view available from which the Earth belongs to all of us and to none of us (as Daly and Cobb (1994) point out (on p. 432 of For the common good), there is an absurdity in regarding money as a whole as private property, just as there is an absurdity in regarding land as a whole as private property – both are, in the end, the ‘property’ of the entire community, distributed across time as well as space), then some people taking such large chunks out of that Earth compared to others, especially when it is through those others’ sweat, will start to seem intolerable, immoral, absurd and unsustainable. This social ecological reality cannot stand. It is a false economyy We need to fashion a new one. And fashioning is much of what this process must be about: Economics needs to be about trying out what works, including by trial and error. About human beings figuring out (together) just what they want and need from their society and polity and economy, and just how they can get it, not just about laying a template over what is already there (such that the latter becomes harder to see!), and characterizing change as a matter merely of applying a theory already learnt from the study of what is. To see that wealth – any accumulation of capital – is the ability to acquire at will, due to utterly malleable and groundless social arrangements, an unequal share, a large chunk, of others’ time and effort and/or of the world’s resources, is to acquire a new point of view, not to see the facts more accurately from one’s existing point of view. The new point of view one acquires when the rose-tinted lenses of the ideology of capitalism drop from one’s eyes is a kind of seeing clearly what our social relations and our dwelling in and of the Earth consist in – it is a kind of return to ourselves and to our home, the Earth. It is new and old. Coming to see that wealth simply is the ungrounded capability to commandeer others’ sweat and/or our collective stuff is an ethical-political-psychological-philosophical

207

A Green Philosophy of Money

transformation. It is what economics ought centrally to concern – and what actually existing economics primarily prevents and occludes from people’s horizons of possibility.39 As we saw, for instance, in our discussion of monetarism, to think of economics as a perhaps true theory ignores the human capacity to falsify any such theory, a capacity for which there is no serious analogue in (real) science. To dissipate the kind of illusions people are prone to in respect of political and economic matters requires not science, not any kind of theory, but rather a simple empirical alleviation of ignorance (e.g. many people do not realize just how little tax is actually paid by most corporations and most of the superrich) and philosophy. It is the philosophical stratagems employed by Wittgenstein (by Kierkegaard, by Marx and by some other greatest of modern philosophers); stratagems that try to inhabit and then explode – rather than, absurdly, to ‘refute’ – delusions and nonsenses that have been my primary inspiration in this chapter. And part of what I have sought to show therein is that a ‘Green’ (and more or less ‘Wittgensteinian’) philosophy of money is possible and indeed is in outline always already present to each of us, and (once again, therefore) that a proper economics is philosophy.40 To close by bringing us back once more to the present, and thinking both eco-economically and eco-politically about our current financial predicament: What we must ensure is that the attempt to bail out the banks and the debtors is not ‘bankrolled’ by unsustainably drawing down on our ‘natural capital’. For the banks can be bailed out – the social magic of money means that there are various ways in which this can be done, including to some degree simply altering numbers on a ledger (in these electronic days, we need not always be so to crude as to actually print more money, if we want more!). But if we allow debt to go on expanding in one way or another, then we increase the risk that we are going to be unable to repay the loan, ever. For there is no such thing as bailing out naturey

NOTES 1. I am not talking here about having microscopic eyes. I am talking about the kind of way in which perhaps the Buddha or Gandhi are helpfully thought of as clear-seeing. They saw through illusions, through self-serving rationalizations, through conventional ‘wisdoms’ and so on. 2. We will in effect examine extensively below why a salient feature of money, this utterly central concept of Economics, is that is in actuality fairly ill-suited to any single all-encompassing definition.

208

RUPERT READ

3. And now, we can perhaps helpfully put the point as follows: Seeing money as an object, as a thing, as a stuff, is always to be deluded. 4. As should increasingly be clear, the identity of this ‘we’ is itself something which may be put into question. I do not mean it to be entirely cross-temporal and crosscultural. I will suggest below something about the historical and economic specificity of money. 5. See Winch (1990) for explication of this key philosophical point in this domain: that social relations are conceptual or internal relations. That they are not, indeed, best thought of as (external) relations at all. Economics fundamentally misunderstands society when it takes society to be a collection of individuals. Society is not only this, but also, at the same time, one. We are many and we are one (or, we are neither). When this point, as clear in Zen Buddhism as it is in Winch (1990), is understood, then the individualist preconceptions that underlie homo economicus, rational choice theory, and in fact all of conventional economics are overcome, and the way is left open instead for ‘economics with a human face’. 6. Marx almost acknowledged it, in rendering economics into a historical and dialectical subject, but he tended to assume that the laws of economics were iron – and indeed that a fairly strong determinism operated there-through – within particular periods of history. This is not un-approximate to the truth but fails to include the social mutability in principle and indeed cessatibility of all such ‘laws’. There is a proper discussion of Marx’s relation to our subject matter below. 7. For example, no economist or theoretician could possibly prove to me that buying a newspaper with coins and so on did not involve the use of money. 8. As for the social meanings of money and of (what we) value, these too are profoundly important, and they are again matters that economists do not tell us about. Rather, we know about them from our ordinary lives and from cultural and historical reflection(s). 9. Very pertinent here is Keynes’s wonderful remark, applied by him originally to as it were market ‘group-think’, but of wider social application, concerning the way in which humans, but again never physical or biological systems, try to figure out ‘what the average opinion expects the average opinion to be’. 10. It should be clear enough from this paragraph that I reject root and branch the dichotomy between positive economics – the allegedly unalloyedly scientific bit – and normative economics, which is widely assumed among theoreticians of the discipline. I have in mind particularly Milton Friedman’s influential – and disastrous – presentation of same, especially in the early pages of ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ (Friedman, 1953). On my understanding, all economics is normative. 11. As Daly and Cobb (1994, pp. 423–424) argue acerbically, ‘the ruling passion of individuals in a modern economy is to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it – to convert wealth into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain, and brings in perennial interest. yAlthough debt can follow the law of compound interest, the real energy revenue from future sunshine, the real future income against which the debt is a lien, cannot grow at compound interest for long. When converted into debt, however, wealth discards its corruptible body to take on an incorruptible one. In doing so, debt appears to offer a means of dodging nature, of evading the second law of thermodynamics, the law of randomisation, rust and rot. But the idea that all people

A Green Philosophy of Money

209

can live off the interest of their mutual indebtedness is just another perpetual motion scheme – a vulgar delusion on a grand scale’. 12. See p. 134 in Harmer (1999) for some comments on the absurdity in the last generation at least of monetarism. [My analysis of monetarism here is in broad brush indebted to the ideas of Charles Goodhart.] 13. As Daly and Cobb argue, following Frederick Soddy, ‘the money supply’ can usefully be regarded as the virtual wealth of the community as a whole. Note that ‘If everyone tried to exchange their money holdings for real assets it could not be done, because all real assets are already owned by someone, and in the final analysis someone has to end up holding the money. So virtual wealth does not really exist over and above the value of all real assets (which is why it is called ‘‘virtual’’). Yet people as individuals behave as if virtual wealth were real, because they can easily exchange it for real assets. The aggregate of individuals behaves as if it were richer than the community really is by an amount equal to the virtual wealth of the community. The phenomenon of virtual wealth must occur in a monetary economy, unless the money itself is a commodity - a real asset that circulates at its commodity value’ (p. 421). 14. See Daly and Cobb’s (1994) account of the creation of debt-based money by banks and how it ought to be reformed (pp. 426–435). Serious, tight controls on credit and capital controls are essential to changing the situation that I am describing here in the text. As I have indicated (and Daly and Cobb amplify), these will not work without complementary fiscal and regulatory measures to ecologies society and end the ‘endless’ momentum for growth. 15. And of course one of the very reasons for the major reforms of money that Green economists advocate is to prevent hoarding in whatever form of money, hoarding such as has had dire consequences at times in history, famously in the Great Depression, arguably also in recent Japanese history and so on – and arguably also right now, with the failure of banks, even though they are being propped up by taxpayers to reduce interest rates, to lend to each other or small businesses and so on. 16. This point could have saved a lot of headaches about why the gold standard was so difficult to stick to, at least without economically disastrous consequences, had it been understood sooner. 17. This point, concerning the necessity for economics itself to be democratic and sustainable, is deftly thought-through on p. 244 of Costanza (2004), which is a volume I think deeply consonant with the radical line of my general argument. 18. At the national level, such Boards would of course tend to more or less coincide with central banksy See p. 429 of Daly and Cobb (1994). 19. See pp. 428ff. of Daly and Cobb (1994) for how this control would be exercised. 20. Compare pp. 261–262 in my work (Read, 2002). 21. Marx of course argues that the ‘quality’ can be ‘translated’ into ‘quantity’: that skilled labour is ‘really’ just a kind of multiplied unskilled labour. I would suggest that this is very often a helpful way of seeing things: though not, as Marx would have it, a scientific fact. 22. Compare also David Andrews’s way of putting this, from Read (2002): ‘Marx points out that the idea that there can be social relations between things is ‘‘fantastic’’, but he says that this is ‘‘what they are’’’.

210

RUPERT READ

23. This is a quote from Read (2002, p. 263). 24. From Grundrisse, p. 250 (in Marx, 1978). 25. Though for some useful counter-suggestions on how actually science was rightly more the clothing than the substance of what Marx at times saw himself as up to (which was closer to artistic creation), see Wheen (1999), for example, this quote from Marx, cited on p. 302: ‘[T]he advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole’ (Letter to Engels, 31 July 1865). 26. The difficulty in seeing which will be which ahead of time is of a piece with the absurdity of picturing economics as a science, which we have been discussing throughout. Economics is sublimely non-predictive. 27. The ecological disaster is for instance largely directly consequent upon the blindfolded and systematic growth-virtual-imperative of money-based economies. 28. Compare pp. 277–278 in Read (2002): ‘Over a long time-scale, over generations, it remains possible that, through praxis, a very large number of people will come to find Marx’s ideas compelling, and, until they do, those ideas are in any case very unlikely to be successfully realisable. Here I am strongly in agreement with Kitching’s guiding thought that an ‘‘undemocratic socialism’’ is a truly hopeless dream (nightmare)’ (italics added). The problem is that it seems increasingly unlikely that we have got generations. 29. Doing this is of course a stupendous challenge in a globalized world: because it is not clear that there can be much in the way of ‘Green Economics in one country’. You can only restructure the tax system, alter your currency, put up tariffs and so on, if you do not lose too many others’ confidence in doing so. 30. See Kitching (1994). 31. See Kennedy (1995, pp. 38–39).. 32. Ibid., p. 22. 33. Than is, an out-of-circulation fee, penalizing money that just sits around not being used productively, such as, fee disincentivizes hoarding (ibid., p. 36). 34. Op. cit., p. 128. 35. They would rather be, roughly, much-enlarged and improved versions of presently existing Boards of Administrators for LETS schemes. 36. Now, it might be claimed that ‘policy studies’ work can be genuinely scientific. Is not Economics as Policy Studies Economics as Science after all? Two things: (1) Such policy studies always is saturated with or rides on the back of – consciously or unconsciously – our ordinary social understandings, of normative political and ethical commitments and orientations, of philosophy and (2) It is hardly science, anyway. More, at best, like engineering. ‘Policy studies’ is the production of attempted solutions in specific circumstances and so on. It bears resemblances, if anything, to (say) applied optics or to the theory of (the art of) surgery, much more than to Physics. 37. The title of an insightful song by the Pet Shop Boys. See also Kennedy (1995, p. 59). Another way of seeing the present chapter is then as: part of a project of transformation of what one might mean by ‘making money’, away from the repellent, destructive and nonsensical meaning that that phrase currently has, toward a democratic and sustainable alternative meaning, in which ‘making money’ will only be something that our Citizens Money Boards (or some such) do, with our consent and our understanding.

211

A Green Philosophy of Money

38. See Read (2002, p. 266): ‘It is only the grand shared fantasy of exchange-value which distinguishes the capitalist’s (minimal) labour from everyone else’s, which gives it a bright – blinding – shine’. 39. Some readers may be concerned that I seem to have moved onto a more radical argument than that which urged moves to non-debt-based money and also to demurrage. That is correct. These money reforms seem to me excellent ways to radically reform capitalism in a green direction. But in the longer term, they may prove to be more part of what I have called ‘environmental economics’ than of ‘Green Economics’; I suspect that the latter will eventually require something far closer to equality of outcome and to the virtual abolition of capital differentials altogether. (That, as with some of the more limited and attainable goals discussed earlier in this chapter, such as various forms of wealth tax, may well only be feasible through a long-term development, almost unimaginable as of now, of the simultaneous policy framework.) 40. The astonishing and mad ecocidal truth concealed by our unphilosophical failure to see clearly the nature of money, a failure fostered and not dissipated by mainstream economics, is that the answer to the question: ‘If we are all so in debt, then who has got all the money?’ is to quite a large degree, at a time like now, No-one. The banks create money by lending. When even they do not end up in the black (as during this mega-credit-crunch, this all-world debt crisis), then collectively we are in the red. For money has been birthed as debt: there is no compensatory surplus of cash. This is a social arrangement ‘designed’ for boom(-and-bust), ‘designed’ to help foment economic growth as its aim – but without attention to what we are growing intoy

ACKNOWLEDGMENT Thanks to helpful reviews and comments by many people, including a referee, Gavin Kitching and Daniel Davies.

REFERENCES Costanza, R. (2004). Changing visions of humans’ place in the world and the need for an ecological economics. In: E. Fullbrook (Ed.), What’s wrong with economics. London: Anthem. Daly, H., & Cobb J. (1994). Money, debt and wealth. In: For the common good (Afterword, Rev. ed., pp. 423–424). Boston: Beacon Press. Friedman, M. (1953). The methodology of positive economics. In: Essays in positive economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harmer, M. (1999). A green look at money. In: M. Scott-Cato & M. Kennet (Eds), Green economics (p. 134). Aberystwyth: Green Audit. Kennedy, M. (1995). Interest and inflation free money. Philadelphia, PA: New Society.

212

RUPERT READ

Kitching, G. (1994). Marxism and science: Analysis of an obsession (pp. 228–231). Philadelphia: Penn State Press. Marx, K. (1978). Capital. In: R. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader (2nd ed., pp. 320–321). New York: W. W. Norton. Read, R. (2002). Marx and Wittgenstein on vampires and parasites: A critique of capital and metaphysics. In: G. Kitching & N. Pleasants (Eds), Marx and Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Wheen, F. (1999). Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate. Winch, P. (1990). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. London: Routledge.