The attempt to catch up with my reading backlog led me, from the April 23, 2005 Economist, to an essay called The Death of Environmentalism by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordham, which basically argues that environmental groups have grown out of touch with the world in which they need to function and negotiate for change, and they have reached this state of their own accord by defining themselves and their role in a way that has led to "a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power".
Very interesting reading.
One of the main themes of this essay is how the environmentalists and environmental organizations treat the environment as a thing, separate from the human sphere of activity, something that has to be protected by us but is otherwise separate from our lives. This is basically a mistake in that it is hard to build up enough interest and support to make serious changes happen. If the environment is something separate from our lives it does not really have to be high on our list of priorities, not like jobs, or health-care or various other issues that define our roles in the world and how we view the world and ourselves in it.
"Most environmentalists don’t think of "the environment" as a mental category at all — they think of it as a real "thing" to be protected and defended. They think of themselves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing. Environmentalists do their work as though these are literal rather than figurative truths. They tend to see language in general as representative rather than constitutive of reality. This is typical of liberals, who are, at their core, children of the enlightenment who believe that they arrived at their identity and politics through a rational and considered process. They expect others in politics should do the same and are constantly surprised and disappointed when they don’t."
"The effects of this orientation is a certain literal-sclerosis — the belief that social change happens only when people speak a literal "truth to power". Literal-sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming one must talk about global warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care."
The environmental movement needs to find a way to make environmental issues important to people’s set of values, in the way they view the world and their role in that world. After all, we are a part of the environment in which we live, and protecting "the environment" is only one of many issues. It is a very important issue to be sure, but one that the very movement that the very movement that is supposedly dedicated to helping it has relegated to an almost invisible role.
The authors of The Death of Environmentalism see the progress on the Kyoto protocol as a success for European greens, but not, for obvious reasons, for their American counterparts. The Economist points out, quite rightly, that the success of Kyoto actually masks a larger failure in that both European and American green groups are deeply suspicious of market-based instruments for use in aiding the environment. The Europeans encouraged Kyoto to pass but they fought new market-based initiatives and new third-generation technology tooth and nail, with a deep intensity bordering on Philistinism. A deeply disturbing trend…
This seems to me to be a dangerous thing. The world is changing rapidly and the ability of individual governments to regulate and control the environment, and the people and companies who play a role in its future, is growing more limited as the world becomes ore open and connected. As companies become more global in their scope and markets become more open, they cannot be controlled by any singular government. It will probably become more important to openly court consumers and manufacturers directly, to use market forces as a power for environmental awareness and to emphasize care of the environment as a global commodity that helps individual consumers and the companies that sell goods to them produce better products and live better lives.
In the Economist of April 23, 2005, in two articles "Rescuing Environmentalism" and "Are You Being Served, Environmental Economics", a type of environmentalism that employs a type of cost-benefit analysis is recommended. There are certain benefits to this. We know far more about the true value of the environment and its cost and value to societies than we used to. For environmental movements to really have leverage they must be able to use this analysis and convince communities that saving the environment is important in more than just and idealized way. They need to make the environment and important part of our everyday lives, both socially and economically. Of course we are intrinsically linked to the environment, we live in it after all, but this fact is not played up in most environmental reform pushes.
Three things are recommended by the Economist:
1. Prices must be set correctly through liquid markets.
2. Proper information must be gathered and made available. The tendency to view the environment as a"free good" must be tempered with the understanding of what it does for humanity and how.
3. The embrace of cost-benefit analysis…Some things in nature are irreplaceable — literally priceless. Even so, it is essential to consider trade-offs when analyzing almost all green problems.
One of the problems I see arising from all this is not how governments and populations and even large companies approach environmental issues, but how all of this affects individual landowners. As it stands, the environmental movement has sometimes come head to head with people who support the IDEA of environmentalism but find the environmentalists pushing restrictive bans on individual property use that protect narrowly defined species or types of ecosystem , without really making any attempt to relate the benefits of these actions to the landowners themselves.
If each person’s property has an impact on its neighbors, both near and far, decisions on how to handle property become much more complex and the possibilities for creating conflict magnify. Of course, in American culture the almost inalienable right of a property-holder to determine the fate of his/her land is well ingrained, and it is not necessarily in the society’s best interest to do away with this traditional view of the rights of humans over land. Much negotiation and education is still required. I suppose this is the kind of thing that Miriam is working on, although I have not really read her Master’s thesis yet.
To illustrate this idea and give the mind ample opportunity to think of the implications, I will quote this bit of information from the Economist, from the article entitled "Are you Being Served? Environmental Economics":
"The importance of insect pollination to the quality and quantity of agricultural crops such as coffee, almonds, and apples, has only recently become appreciated. Last year a study in Costa Rica found
that on one farm alone the natural pollination of coffee by insects was worth $60,000. Coffee yields were 20% higher on plots that lay within a kilometer of a natural forest."
How do you weigh the benefits of the forest to the owner of the forest versus his/her neighbors? Should the forest owner receive some compensation for the greater yields his forest provides for neighboring planters because his property makes their production levels possible? What if the forest owner sees his neighbor the planter become rich while he struggles to feed his family from his native forest? We as a society cannot ask him to suffer for the good of the whole while he watches others grow rich off a commodity that is, by some rights, his. Who will decide these things? How do you decide how to regulate land use and still give people some autonomy over their lives? How do you decide these things without causing wars? We need some way to guarantee people sustainable, comfortable, minimum standards of living, while appreciating their different contributions and allowing them opportunity to advance their skills and resources to do better economically and we also need to make valuing and protecting environmental resources a recognizable environmental good with adequate recompense by society.
You cannot really separate the environment from the rest of society. Humankind has tried this for many centuries. Look where it has gotten us.
