A Thinking Reed

Category: Environment

  • The conservatism of Ray Davies

    Apropos of yesterday’s post, the lyrics from The Kinks’ “God’s Children”:

    Man made the buildings that reach for the sky
    And man made the motorcar and learned how to fly
    But he didn’t make the flowers and he didn’t make the trees
    And he didn’t make you and he didn’t make me
    And he got no right to turn us into machines
    He’s got no right at all
    ‘Cause we are all God’s children
    And he got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

    Don’t want this world to change me
    I wanna go back the way the Good Lord made me
    Same lungs that he gave me to breath with
    Same eyes he gave me to see with

    Oh, the rich man, the poor man, the saint and the sinner
    The wise man, the simpleton, the loser and the winner
    We are all the same to Him
    Stripped of our clothes and all the things we own
    The day that we are born
    We are all God’s children
    And they got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made
    Oh, the Good Lord made us all
    And we are all his children
    And they got no right to change us
    Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all
    Yeah, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

    The Kinks are probably the only great reactionary rock band. Not reactionary in some kind of mean-spirited sense, mind you. But in the sense of writing wistful songs about the English countryside getting chewed up by sprawl and the drab conformity engendered by the welfare state. And in this case a quasi-Luddite opposition to the mechanization of modern society. The albums Muswell Hillbillies and The Village Green Preservation Society are the loci classici here.

  • “Green consumerism” vs. consuming less

    A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a story on the new “green consumerism.” Today George Monbiot writes that it’s not good enough to “buy green”; we have to buy less. His contention is that “green” consumption is at this point a supplement to rather than a replacement of conventional consumption and that people have started to by flashy “green” items more as a sign of social status than as concrete contributions to the problem. The result is that individual consumption ends up being seen as a replacement for political action.

    Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and mini-wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts: partly because they love gadgets, but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious (and how rich) they are. We are often told that buying such products encourages us to think more widely about environmental challenges, but it is just as likely to be depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation – a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.

    […]

    Challenge the new green consumerism and you become a prig and a party pooper, the spectre at the feast, the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Against the shiny new world of organic aspirations you are forced to raise drab and boringly equitable restraints: carbon rationing, contraction and convergence, tougher building regulations, coach lanes on motorways. No colour supplement will carry an article about that. No rock star could live comfortably within his carbon ration.

    It does make you start to wonder if consumption is the only response we know how to make to any social problem. Hip articles associated with a particular cause become status signifiers, especially when they’re expensive. You can’t ostentatiously show off buying less stuff.

    In theory Christianity should be able to provide resources for dealing with this. Theologically we deny that our identity is grounded in what we buy and consume. And the tradition of living simply as part of the path of virtue goes back at least to the Desert Fathers. But how many churches have addressed this? And how many have encouraged being virtuous consumers instead?

    Not that the two should be seen as inevitably opposed. After all, we need to consume things! Things are good! And it’s probably better to drink organic fair trade coffee than conventional coffee. A lot of churches have been good at promoting things like that. But we’re probably less good at evaluating whether we really need the things we find ourselves wanting (I know I am!). What kinds of practices and resources do we have for making those distinctions? (By the way, yes I do need coffee, so don’t ask.)

  • Green is the new Right(?)

    Philosopher Roger Scruton has a pretty good piece on conservatives and the environment in the latest American Conservative. He mostly avoids the ususal conservative pitfalls when talking about the environment, namely snarky dismissal or ad hominem attacks against Al Gore and dirty hippies.

    Scruton does make some solid points about the dangers of any “movement”: how it can take on crusade-like qualities. He contrasts this with a genuinely political approach to environmental problems that assume the legitimacy of various interests and try to reach a reasonable accomodation among them.

    He also emphasizes conservative distrust of centralized statist solutions but also points out that it is a cardinal conservative principle that one should take responsibility for the consequences of ones actions. In other words, costs should be internalized wherever possible. He also thinks that a specific contribution that Anglo-American conservatives can make is the idea of our environmental inheritance as a “trust” – something that we received from earlier generations and will pass on to the generations after us.

    One criticism I have is that Scruton seems to underestimate the degree to which legal remedies are a necessary part of environmental stewardship. He’s certainly right that popular grassroot initiatives are preferable to the heavy hand of centralized top-down control other things being equal, but regulation has acheived a lot, especially in terms of clean air and water. If the state has a role in ensuring that people don’t foist the cost of their actions off on others, then this applies to the environment as well. And if climate change is as serious a problem as we’re led to believe, it will likely require government action and coordination between nations, even though Scruton is rightly skeptical about some of the proposed approaches.

    Further reading here and here.

  • Farm bill victory

    A while back I blogged about opposition to section 123 of the proposed 2007 farm bill from animal welfare and environmental groups, including the Humane Society. The section was widely understood to pre-empt at the federal level any state efforts to regulate or ban food items and animal products over and above the standards set by the feds. This would rule out, for instance, state laws banning particular methods of animal farming like confinement crates.

    It looks like the offending section, as well as a subsidy for the veal industry, has been removed from the bill.

  • Localism versus/and nationalism?

    I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit sympathetically disposed to Bill Kauffman’s paean to neo-secessionists in Vermont, but I’m not so sure that ultra-localism is the solution to the problems that the secessionists identify.

    For one thing, to the extent that they deplore the effects of the global marketplace, it’s not clear that smaller communities are able to effectively resist it.

    This is one of the reasons that Daly and Cobb give for their qualified nationalism. They actually hope to see a greater devolution of economic and political power, but believe that right now the nation-state is the only entity capable of putting checks on globalization that has some measure of democratic accountability:

    Nation-states are today extremely important societies. They are in many instances the only loci of power capable of asserting themselves effectively against those forces that erode all community. They do, in many instances, contribute strongly to the self-identification of their citizens, and at least some of them allow for considerable participation in governance. Most of them have concern for the well-being of their citizens, and some affirm the diversity among them. Hence nations can be communities, and some are quite good communities. At the present time we join [Dudley] Seers in calling for economics to serve national communities.

    It is important to see what difference this would make. The current economic ideal is that national boundaries not impede the global economy. Increasingly this means that economic decisions of determinative importance to the people of a nation are made by persons who are not responsible to them in any way. In short, whatever form of government the state may have, its people cannot participate in the most important decisions governing their daily lives. This weakens the possibility for a nation-state to be a community. With a national community, on the contrary, there is some possibility for the people through their government to share in decisions. A healthy national community is possible.

    There can be no effective national economy if a people cannot feed themselves and otherwise meet their essential needs. Hence a national economy for community will be a relatively self-sufficient economy. This does not preclude trade, but it does preclude dependence on trade, especially where the nation cannot participate in determining the terms of trade. (Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good, p. 173)

    Invoking the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, Daly and Cobb enunciate, as a general principle that decentralization is good if the community can effectively exercise control over its economic life:

    In many instances the nation-state is already too large and too remote from ordinary people for effective participation to be possible. Decentralization of the economy within the nation should accompany nationalization in relation to the global economy. Many regions within the United States could become relatively self-sufficient. With economic decentralization there could come political decentralization as well. The main formal point is that a political community cannot be healthy if it cannot exercise a significant measure of control over its economic life. The second formal point is that of the Catholic teaching of “subsidiarity”: power should be located as close ot the people as possible, that is, in the smallest units that are feasible. Our special emphasis is that except for a few functions, political power that cannot affect the economic order is ineffective. Hence we tie political decentralization to economic decentralization. (p. 174)

    The secessionists of the Second Vermont Republic, however, don’t see the nation-state as a potential ally. They see it as the enemy and themselves as the foes of “giantism” in all its forms.

    From Kauffman’s article:

    “The left-right thing has got to go,” declares Ian Baldwin, cofounder of Chelsea Green Publishing and publisher of Vermont Commons. “We’re decentralists and we are up against a monster.”

    What might replace left and right, liberal and conservative, as useful political bipolarities? Globalist and localist, perhaps, or placeless versus placeist. Baldwin argues that “peak oil and climate change are linked and irreversible events that will within a generation change how human beings live. The world economy will relocalize.” He dismisses homeland security as “fatherland security”—for “homeland,” with its Nazi-Soviet echoes, has never been what Americans call their country. What we need, says Baldwin, is “homestead security”: sustainable agriculture, small shops, a revival of craftsmanship, local citizenship, communal spirit. The vision is one of self-government. Independence from the empire but interdependence at the grassroots. Neighborliness. The other American Dream.

    Personally I like the idea of acheiving the ends of community and sustainability through noncoercive libertarian means. I’m just not sure it can be done. I certainly think that Daly and Cobb would agree with much of the spirit of the SVR folks, but their view is that the nation-state has to play an essential role in shielding local economies and communities from the ravages of the global marketplace. But the radical decentralists of the SVR are likely to reply that you can’t strengthen localities by concentrating more power in the center.

    It may be that what’s needed is a mixture of both approaches. In reviewing WorldChanging, a vast compendium of ideas for saving the planet (and a pretty nifty book that we received as a gift from some friends), Bill McKibben writes:

    If there’s one flaw in the WorldChanging method, I think it might be a general distrust of the idea that government could help make things happen. There’s a Silicon Valley air to the WorldChanging enterprise – over the years it’s been closely connected with Wired magazine, the bible of the digerati and a publication almost as paranoid about government interference and regulation as the Wall Street Journal. Like Internet entrepreneurs, they distrust both government intentions and abilities – bureaucrats tend, after all, to come from the ranks of those neither bold nor smart enough to innovate. A libertarian streak shines through: “When we redesign our personal lives in such a way that we’re doing the right thing and having a hell of a good time,” Steffen writes, “we act as one-person beacons to the idea that green can be bright, that worldchanging can be lifechanging.” I’m sympathetic to this strain of thinking; I believe we’re going to need more local and more nimble decision-making in the future to build strong, survivable communities. But it also makes it a little harder to be as optimistic as you’d like to be when reading these pages, which are filled with good ideas that, chances are, won’t come to all that much without the support of government and a system of incentives for investment.

    Frankly I’m not sure what the right balance is. It may be that one of the necessary functions of government is to create a protective framework or space within which communities can flourish. This wouldn’t have to entail either bureaucratic micro-management or utter laissez-faire. Rather, what may be needed is some way to permit communities to freely experiment in different ways of living while enjoying a measure of protection from the levelling effects of the market.

  • A veggie Fourth

    Grist has a good article offering suggestions for meat-free twists on summer classics.

    Parenthetically, it’s interesting how people who curtail their meat consumption for environmental reasons differ in their approach from those who are primarily concerned about animal welfare. Not that the two positions are mutually exclusive, mind you. But enviros, I’ve noticed, tend to focus on red meat, presumably because cattle ranching has a greater environmental impact than raising say pigs or chickens (although the environmental impact of commercial fishing is also severe). Animal welfare concerns, however, would incline one to say that chickens, followed closely by pigs, are treated the worst of commercially raised animals and should therefore be the first to go from one’s diet. Cattle, by contrast, are at least relatively better off.

  • Peak oil and the end of liberalism

    Patrick Deneen writes that modern liberalism – “the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., bio-technological improvement of the species)” – rests ultimately on our ability to exploit fossil fuels. All that freedom, autonomy, and material progress is a one-shot affair since the reservoir of energy that made it possible took hundreds of millions of years to build up.

    Deneen says that the view of life that underlies liberalism is profoundly anti-natural:

    Oil has been the silent but world-altering source of our collective delusion that we could live in this way and get away with it. It has allowed us to contrive a civilization based upon a theoretical fantasy, and to make it functional for about a century, during which time we took the exceptional for the ordinary, the unnatural for the given, the hubristic for the norm. We have reshaped the world to accord with a self-delusive fantasy, with the only stipulation being that there continue to be unlimited quantities of this external power source that would let growth and its attendant power over nature go on forever. Most of us assume there’s no problem with this basic presupposition – except that we are about to discover that you can only defy gravity for so long, as the example of Icarus ought to have served as a reminder.

    Conservatism, while a salutary reaction against the excesses of liberalism, usually fails to grasp the underlying economic realities that make those excesses possible:

    Conservatives rightly decry the decline of culture, the assault on the family and the unlimited infanticide of our abortion regime, but find nothing else wrong with the basic arrangement and largely do not question whether our political and economic arrangements have contributed to what we denounce. Books will be written about how this could have happened. But, perhaps we are not long from the day when conservatives will realize the fantasy they have themselves been purveying, and will demand that we prepare ourselves now for a post-petroleum reinstatement of human culture, cultivation, and tradition.

    I take peak oil and global warming catastrophists with a grain of salt if only because their predictions of what will happen post-catastrophe seem to align so neatly with the kind of society they would like to see. Still, the fossil fuel binge does seem like it will have to come to an end at some point, so it’s well worth thinking about what that implies.

  • Who is my neighbor?

    *Christopher has posted the text of a talk he recently gave on Christianity and the environment. It’s terrific stuff, with a very Lutheran and Benedictine flavor.

    I think that rooting our ethics (including our environmental ethics) in our response to what God has first done for us is exactly right and it’s one of the insights of Reformational Christianity that I resonate the most with.

    Andrew Linzey has written that one of the things that Christians can contribute to the movements for animal and environmental well-being is a sense of our solidarity in sin and our dependence upon grace. This can provide a powerful counterweight to temptations toward self-righteousness, as well as a motivation for doing good without falling into despair or utopianism.

  • The Humane Society vs. the farm bill

    The Humane Society is opposing section 123 of the proposed 2007 Farm Bill which is supposed to be voted on by the House very soon.

    The section says that:

    Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no State or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Agriculture has—
    (1) inspected and passed; or
    (2) determined to be of non-regulated status.

    The HSUSA interprets this to mean that states and localities would be prohibited “from banning activities they deem to be contrary to public health, safety, and morals. Section 123 would undo bans on horse slaughter, intensive confinement of pigs and calves raised for veal, force-feeding of ducks and geese to make foie gras … [etc.]”

    This piece at Grist describes further implications of this provision:

    [T]his broad statement basically says that if the USDA says something is safe, a state or local government is not allowed to regulate it. For example, there have been a number of counties around the country that have banned genetically modified organisms from being produced within their borders. This preemption-style language, if it’s passed in the Farm Bill, would void those local laws.

    This seems to me to be a bad idea both substantively and on grounds of democracy and local control. The HSUSA encourages people to contact the congressional representative about the provision here.

  • Economics for community

    As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an abstraction as exhaustive of the reality it describes as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

    Chief among these abstractions is the market. While the free exchange of goods and services is key to any flourishing economy, treating “the market” in isolation has some built in limitations. These include the tendency for competition to be self-eliminating (monopoly), the corrosive affect of encouraging the pursuit of self-interest on the moral context necessary to sustain the virtues the market order requires, the need for public goods and the existence of public “bads” (externalities), and the market’s blindness to judgments of value such as those pertaining to the distribution of wealth or the overall scale of the economy in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.

    Daly and Cobb also criticize the reliance on GNP as a measure of economic well-being. They argue that it doesn’t accurately reflect income, much less genuine economic welfare. Homo economicus is the model of the human self posited by much economic thought. It assumes a human being who’s interested primarily in maximizing utility understood in terms of consumption. Economics qua economics forbids us from making value judgments about individual preferences and seeks instead to understand how those preferences can be maximized. Finally, “land,” the economic stand-in for all of non-human nature, rather than being seen as a productive and living system with its own intrinsic value, is reduced to a largely passive and inert commodity. An overly idealistic point of view tends to see all resources as having their ultimate source in human ingenuity, presdisposing economics to ignore the question of the finitude of resources.

    All of these abstractions, Daly and Cobb contend, serve to create an overly individualistic and short-term picture of the world and lends support to similarly constituted policies. Their goal is to reconceive the context of economic life as being in service to community, including the wider community of non-human nature.

    To this end, they advocate a shift from short-term to long-term thinking, with particular attention to the scale of the economy. Their argument here is fairly simple: the economy is situated within an ecosystem which is finite in size (i.e in terms of resources). Therefore, the economy cannot grow indefinitely. They define “scale” as population x per capita resource use rate and maintain that our trajectory of growth is pushing against the limits imposed by the natural ecosystem within which our economic life exists.

    Consequently, what they think is necessary is an economy that is oriented away from growth and toward more of a steady-state model. Economic well-being shouldn’t be measured in terms of increasing consumption, but by a combination of economic and non-economic welfare. Individualism should be replaced by a vision of human beings as persons-in-community whose relationships to others are seen as constitutive of their identity. Economic development should focus on the well-being of the community as a whole rather than individuals.

    Concerning this last point, Daly and Cobb see communities as the fundamental building blocks of a sound economic order. But they are also decentralists who would like to see a revival of local communities over against the atomized cosmopolitanism that globalization promises. They envision a world in which one’s primary loyalty is to one’s local community, with increasing and overlapping circles of loyalty expanding outward. Unlike many on the Left, they have no particular affinity for “post-national” globalism.

    In fact, Daly and Cobb acknowledge that in our world the only entities currently able to resist globalization and foster steps toward an economic order more in line with their aspirations is the nation. They are more or less unapologetic nationalists, resulting in some surprising policy prescriptions that would put them at odds with much of the Left. They are against free trade and for protectionism for domestic industries by means of tariffs, they favor population control, and the form they advocate for most developed countries, including the US, is a curtailment of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Sounding for all the world like Pat Buchanan, they argue that a chief function of the nation-state is to secure its borders against unwanted immigrants. They oppose not only economic entanglements with foreign nations, but also foreign aid. All nations need to be self-sufficient, at least in essentials. Finally, the support a defense policy of what could fairly be called non-interventionism and suggest that a United States less enmeshed in a global market would have less cause for foreign meddling.

    The keystone of Daly and Cobb’s position, then, is a community of more or less self-reliant communities whose economic life is geared to stability and self-sufficiency rather than expanded growth. This is rooted in what they describe as a biocentric and theistic vision that sees all of creation as related to a good God and having value apart from human needs and interests. Their emphasis on the value of the biosphere leads them to support sustainable and organic agriculture and to favor subsistence agriculture over agriculture for commodity export as well as a tax system similar to that proposed by Henry George that treats land as a trust rather than a commodity.

    A lot of what’s contained in this volume will be familiar to anyone who’s paid much attention to debates about the economics of sustainability. What I find appealing about Daly and Cobb is their desire to foster a more decentralized, humane, and participatory economy instead of increased centralization. I also think they’re more realistic than some in viewing the nation-state as the best hope for gaining some measure of democratic control over economic life. Too often folks on the Left put what appears to me as an unrealistic hope in international institutions like the UN which, after all, are even further removed from popular control and participation than most national governments.

    However, I still can’t help but have some reservations about Daly and Cobb’s vision. On a sheerly factual level, I wish they’d spent more time making the case of a finite economy. To a certain extent they seem to cherry-pick their opponents, using the most extreme-sounding quotes from people like George Gilder. I would’ve liked to see more engagement with serious opponents of their view. Secondly, they seem to me at times insufficiently appreciative of the real benefits of liberal individualism. Like many who oppose “community” to “individualism” they tend to paint the former almost exclusively in glowing terms that downplay the genuine difficulties of close-knit community. There’s a real tension between individual liberty and community control, however democratic. To the extent that the community exercises control over a particular area of life, it leaves less room for indvidual discretion. There’s a genuine balancing act there and I’m not sure Daly and Cobb have paid much attention to it (their discussion of population control, for instance, is disturbingly sanguine about China’s coercive policies without actually advocating them). Finally, they don’t, in my view, deal adequately with the objection that participation in an expanding economy is necessary for many people in the world to escape from grinding poverty.

    Overall, though, Daly and Cobb seem to me to be asking the right questions: Is an ever-expanding economy consistent with the limits imposed by ecological fragility? How do we reconcile the need for democratic control over the economy with individual freedom? What kind of balance should be struck between ties to local community and a more cosmopolitan outlook? How do we honor the value of God’s creation without sacrificing vital human interests? These all strike me as among the most important questions we face in the 21st century, even if I’m not satisfied in every case with Daly and Cobb’s answers.