We Need More Democracy, Not Less Government

Posted on August 9, 2011 by admin

The Tea Party is partly right.  Democracy is faltering.  But at this difficult juncture in America’s history we need more democracy, not less government.   Tea Party laser-like focus on the size of government and the taking of private property rights creates dangerous distractions to the bigger challenges our nation faces.  Our current problems result from a weakened democracy, not a bloated, power-hungry government.

Let’s keep our eye on the prize.

Democracy is a style of governance that allows community members equal access to influence the decisions that affect their lives. It protects the powerful from exploiting the weak.  It checks and balances the power of the state. It places limits on capitalism by limiting profits that can be made from child labor, worker endangerment, environmental pollution, price fixing, and unsafe products.   It helps us balance life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property rights, and other ideals that define us.(1)

We need an open, deliberate process to help us make the difficult decisions about how we are going to live together as a community. How can we make that happen?  Certainly not by shouting slogans that government is the problem, taxes are too high, small is beautiful, or sustainable development is a United Nation’s conspiracy to negate the US Constitution.

There are several reasons for why democracy is faltering, I want to address two: 1) gerrymandering of voting districts that creates safe seats that don’t require centrist politics, and 2) the capturing of democracy by capitalism.

These problems are easy to fix, conceptually if not politically.  End gerrymandering by enlarging election districts; we could define our districts using watershed divides, economic regions, or other bio-cultural areas that parallels how our communities actually function rather than how to protect incumbents.  Or, more radical still, we could completely take the place out of politics and vote by internet.

Next get the money out of politics, completely out. That means complete campaign finance reform, public financing of campaigns, shorter campaigns, dramatically limiting the access of lobbyists to the people’s representatives in government, and so on. The problem now is that democracy is not strong enough to counter-balance wealth, and we are very close to wealth controlling democracy.

At least the Tea Party is aiming in the right direction: we do need to radically change governance. We need to change how we govern, not whether we govern.  Huge, complex, multi-scalar challenges created by 6-9 billion people living on a finite planet with an interconnected global economy and an expanding consumer-class requires equally complex solution strategies.  Super-sophisticated, game changing technological innovations such as synthetic biology and nano-materials are beyond what reasonable people can be expected to grasp, hence requiring expert-staffed bureaucracies working on our behalf.  Solutions to watershed destroying nonpoint pollution, climate changing emissions, ocean fisheries collapse, and numerous other tragedy-of-the-commons will require comprehensive solutions and coordinated enforcement.  To address these issues we need a thriving democracy to guide a capable government.

To shrink government though starvation, even if the intent is to rebuild it, better and stronger, seems extraordinarily risky and way too radical for me.   It risks too much going wrong, resulting in too much suffering.  Civilization and democracy might not survive a starved government.  Instead, I suggest we fix the source of the problems: end gerrymandering and get the money out of politics. Then, over time, a healthier democracy will gradually change and improve the existing laws and regulations, creating a bumpy but constructive transition rather than risk a radical revolution or collapse.

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(1) A much more nuanced argument is necessary, one that recognizes the need to prevent the tyranny of the majority, and institutionalizing Madison-like strategies of controlling ambition with ambition through pluralism, vetos, divided power, federalism, and other characteristics of a non-tyrannical republic.

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Values and Assumptions Embedded in Sustainable Development

Posted on August 8, 2011 by admin

In the last few blogs I’ve focused attention on the assumptions and values hiding behind the Tea Party critique of sustainable development.  Here I focus attention on the assumptions and values hiding behind sustainable development.   I do this because I believe being open, honest, and reflective about values creates opportunities for self-learning and mutual respect.

Sustainability advocates, like the Tea Partiers, are not one homogenous bunch, so the following generalizations do not apply equally to every advocate of sustainable development.  But, more often than not, sustainability advocates tend to:

– Err on the side of precaution

– Advocate equity and wealth redistribution

– Be communitarians

– Find value in both nature and humans

Err on the side of precaution:

–       Advocates of sustainable development believe scientific reports of degraded environmental conditions (i.e., climate change, ocean fisheries collapse, biodiversity decline, toxic pollution).  They are grounded in ecological science, and therefore see the biosphere as dense, complicated, and unpredictable sets of connections among resources, energy, species, organisms, and ecosystem processes that make up the biosphere and create conditions conducive to human life.  They also accept from ecological science that ecological systems are nonlinear, and if jolted too much by human actions, can “flip” or change dramatically to an entirely different set of conditions, which likely will not be as conducive to thriving human civilization.  That is, they see a clear and present danger, one deserving robust and immediate response, even actions that challenge life styles and standards of living that have come to be accepted and expected by many Americans.

–       They accept US Census population projections that there will be about 150 million more people in the US—approximately a 50% increase—by 2050.  This rapid and dramatic increase in a relatively short amount of time will strain our decaying infrastructure.  We will be growing, they say, so let’s do it smartly.  We will be developing, so let’s do it sustainably. They believe sustainable development and smart growth planning efforts provide the best tools for using our limited financial and natural resources to welcome our new neighbors.

–       Sustainable development advocates also tend to be more cautious in their expectations that technological advancements will solve today’s pressing problems.   The search for safe, clean, abundant energy has proved elusive and even the most optimistic scenarios still require massive increases in our use of polluting, politically destabilizing, and climate changing fossil fuels.  The Green Revolution in agriculture that fed a doubling world population during the last 50 years seems to have run its course.  Soil infertility, rising cost of fertilizers, water shortages, and climate change pose huge challenges for food security, especially as the world’s rising middle class switch to high-calorie, meat-oriented diets.

–       Sustainability development advocates are more likely to accept that Creation Care is a religious duty, that Earth was put here by God for humans to steward not exploit, that God’s promise that He will provide does not absolve us from cautious and careful stewardship of resources, and that any material action we take, whether to purchase a new TV, fill up a tank of gas, or flip on an electric light, emits pollutants and degrades the environment in ways that causes harm where the pollution and degradation occurs and must be interpreted through the Golden Rule: do onto others as you would have them do onto you.  I am not suggesting that sustainable development advocates have less faith in God than Tea Party advocates, but I am suggesting that their interpretations of their responsibilities differ.

Equity and wealth redistribution

–       Sustainability advocates are deeply troubled by global poverty, by extreme conditions that seem to trap people and regions in poverty.  Billions of people live on just a few dollars a day and have limited access to clean drinking water, adequate sanitation, reliable food, employment opportunities, or dignity. While wonderful progress has been and is being made in many regions, the progress for others has stalled, never materialized, or reversed, and that seems unacceptable when there is so much wealth in the world.  Resource exploitation, colonialism, and climate changing gas emissions produced much of the world’s financial wealth.  They also worsened and will worsen conditions of people living in poverty.  With wealth comes responsibility.  Yes, welfare and foreign aid programs deserve critique, but nothing justifies abandonment of those in need.

–       Nationally, the widening gap between rich and poor is problematic. The parallel trends of massive unemployment among the working class and sky rocketing wealth among the moneyed class are creating serious tensions.  The solutions are not obvious, but I sense that advocates of sustainable development are more disposed towards Keynesian economic philosophy and policies, which see a major role for government investment.

Communitarianism over individualism

–       This value system is a tricky one to navigate.  Charges of socialism and communism resonate loudly with a baby boomer population conditioned to fear the Soviet menace.  As children we held drills during school, at least I did growing up outside DC, to practice climbing under our desks whenever sirens sounded for protection from rockets fired by communists.  That sort of experience leaves marks on the psyche that can be exploited with rhetoric that pushes buttons to trigger emotions.

–       I can find no evidence from my many, many conversations with advocates of sustainable development that they are socialist, communists, Marxist, or as some misguided critics claim, Nazis.  They do NOT advocate state ownership and management OF all property.  They are patriotic Americans.  They cherish liberty and freedom.  They appreciate entrepreneurship and celebrate individual achievement.  They applaud the rags to riches American Dream.  They believe in democracy and the critical and cherished role of educated, citizens acting freely as individuals to influence our shared future.

–       They also see the pressures seven billion humans are exerting on our life-support system.  They have seen or believe reports of repeated tragedies of the commons where individual actions, unconstrained by shared governance, have completely destroyed ecological systems that once provided people with abundant food, resources, beauty and solace.  They therefore believe that it is in our enlightened self-interests to impose restraints on some of our behaviors.  Like Tea Partiers, they recognize the inefficiencies and corruptibility of government, but they nonetheless accept the need for shared governance in determining the limits that need to be placed on individual actions and market forces.  Rather than see government as a problem, they accept it as an imperfect solution that needs our investment, attention, and participation.

–       They believe that membership in a community gives you access to its resources, rights, and privileges.  But with membership comes responsibilities.  You must agree to rules and norms of the community. If not, you get punished or expelled.  The United States, like every community, struggles to find the right balance between individual rights and community conformance.  Sustainability advocates and Tea Partiers would agree that the US should err on the side of protecting individual rights.  However, when some individual actions threaten the community, as sustainable development advocates believe is currently the case, then the community must act to restrict those rights and control those actions.  So, advocates of sustainable development feel it is time to rebalance and restrict some rights and liberties in order to protect the community.  To critique sustainable development with the argument that it privileges the community over individual rights makes no sense.  All communities impose conditions on their members, even communities that don’t practice sustainable development; otherwise you don’t have a community, you have anarchy.  The more important question about sustainable development is whether the proposed threats to our community warrant curtailment to individual rights, and if so, how do we go about it in ways that best respect individual liberties and rights.  To advocates of sustainable development, the curtailment of rights in the name of Homeland Security are a greater cause for concern.

Nature’s rights versus human rights

–       The relationship between humans and nature is a defining characteristic of  civilization and a source for philosophical debates echoing down the ages.  How we treat and value our environment reflects who we are as a people. Is nature valueless without human work, ingenuity, and attention or does it have inherent value that exists independent of humanity?  Does every organism have a right to life, or do only humans?  Is nature limitless and will God always provide what is needed for humans to be fruitful and multiply?  Or, does God value nature independently of humans and expect us to exercise dominion over it and help it thrive, like he exercises dominion over us?

–       I hear some advocates of sustainable development answer these questions in ways that clearly assign values to nature that exist independently of humans.  These values may come from God, or not.  Many of the values embedded in arguments for conservation of biological diversity and preservation of wilderness, for example, make explicit reference to the inherent value of species and a spiritual connection to God’s Cathedral.

–       Do advocates of sustainability value nature more than humans, or do they simply not care about people?  Bumper stickers with slogans such as “Save the World; Kill Yourself” justifiably raise concerns about priorities.  Some organizations such as Earth First! do claim to be misanthropic defenders of Earth, with goals to end nature-destroying modern civilization.  But these groups are not part of the sustainable development movement.  Sustainable development has as its goal the sustainable development of humanity and earth.

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Are Property Rights Sacrosanct?

Posted on August 7, 2011 by admin

One gets the impression from reading Tea Party literature that property rights are inviolable, sacrosanct, handed down from on high, and unchanged since the birth of our nation.  But America’s history differs from that interpretation.

When we were a young nation and most of us farmed, conflicts among neighbors over property rights were interpreted by courts and governments in favor of those wanting to limit a neighbor’s ability to disturb the peace and functionality of one’s land.  For example, your neighbor would be denied the right to emit noise and dust or restrict water flow that affected your property.

But community preferences changed with the industrial revolution to favor economic development, industry, commerce, and the infrastructure to support it. Property rights conflicts among neighbors were interpreted by courts and governments in favor of those wanting to develop their properties.  For example, neighbors could no longer hinder your access across their property to resources and infrastructure that created economic growth and thus improved community well-being. Such developments included ditches that drained swamps, channels that brought irrigation water, railroads and roadways that transported things to market, and even natural resource extractions such as oil wells. Later still, as our country became more urban, populous, and wealthy enough to worry about pollution and neighborhood amenity, property rights conflicts were settled in favor of those wanting to limit types and densities of development that differed markedly from neighbors (i.e., single use zoning).

We must also acknowledge as a nation, with some shame, that property rights have not been equally available to all people.  In the early years of the United States, husbands and fathers controlled a woman’s property rights.  It was just over 100 years ago that all states granted women rights to control property.  The access to property rights by immigrants and slaves has also changed over time.

Even protections against trespass—that is, the “right” to exclude others from one’s property that so dominates Tea Party rhetoric—have changed throughout American history. Landowners were required to allow others to wander across their lands and hunt or gather foods, medicines, or fuel, and in some places graze cattle.

Private property rights are not now and never have been absolute in the United States.  Community’s grant, negotiate, and enforce property rights with laws, courts, and police powers.  Property rights have changed over time to reflect what the community deems is in its best interests.  As communities change, so will property rights.

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Liberty through Sustainable Development

Posted on August 6, 2011 by admin

For the sake of argument, let’s assume we agree that members of our community, whether or not they own property, deserve the liberties of free speech, religious choice, voting in elections, privacy in their homes, freedom from fear of bodily harm by thugs operating outside the rule of law, due process under the law, and honesty in business dealings and contractual agreements. We agree that these liberties are good things, things we want protected, enforced, and available in our community, things that we agree would make us worse off if they were lost or degraded.  These things define our community; a condition of membership in our community is to respect these liberties.

Now allow me to describe some other things that I want to define our community.  I want there to be a convenient transportation system that reduces our dependence on petro-dictators and our need to spend so much of our blood and treasure on defense. I want good schools, shopping, recreation, and employment opportunities nearby, ideally within walking or biking distance.  I want careers for our children that provide them dignity, and ideally the opportunity to stay in our community, should they want to.  I want to reduce the risks of the worse-case, catastrophic consequences of climate change.  I want the soil, water, farms, forests, rivers, and aquifers in our region to be healthy so that our children continue to enjoy the life-support ecological services they provide free of charge. I want to sustain the biodiversity—whether created by evolution or God matters not—that, because of civilization’s success, now requires our stewardship.  To take or degrade these things is to take or degrade things I value and hence deny me the liberty to pursue the good life as I define it.

Allow me to argue further that these things I just described are produced by smart growth and sustainable development.  If you use your property in ways that are inconsistent with sustainable development and smart growth principles, you are taking away my liberties.

Enough of us agree that freedom of speech and religion, justice, honesty and other values described in the first paragraph are good things, so much so that we willingly fight wars to protect them, tax ourselves to enforce them, and restrict what we do with our property so as not to degrade them.  We argue amongst ourselves over the nuances of how to translate these ideals into practice, but we don’t question the basic liberties.

If the majority of people in our community want, as I do, land uses reflecting smart growth principles, then people in that community must develop their properties in accordance with those principles, otherwise they are harming liberty.  Respecting smart growth principles, like respecting free speech, becomes a condition of living in the community.

Yes, sustainable development can limit a property owner’s opportunities for economic gain.  Some will argue that in these cases the property owner must be compensated financially, but I disagree.  We do not compensate people for economic opportunities lost by respecting free speech, honesty, or the rule of law.  Respecting these things is a condition of living in our community.  These liberties, established through democracy and enforced through governance, set the boundaries within which economic activity and profit making occur.

Public debate about sustainable development and smart growth is heated because it is a debate about the core ideals and liberties that define our community.   We should expect emotions to be on display and expect our beliefs to be challenged.  We are confronting difficult decisions that define who we are and who we want to become.  Public debate about these issues is a necessary part of our functioning and growth as a community.  Let’s not disguise or derail these debates with confused rhetoric about property rights.  Let us debate the real issues before us.

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Property Rights and Liberty

Posted on August 5, 2011 by admin

Liberty is a cherished American ideal, guaranteed and protected by the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the focus of countless legal and political debates.  Recently, Tea Party activists are making troubling claims that sustainable development is un-American because it restricts liberty.

More specifically, the Tea Party raises concerns that sustainable development and smart growth practices threaten liberty because they impact how privately owned land is used and developed.  Private property, they point out, is a mechanism for protecting liberty.  Citing founding father John Adams they argue that restricting private property rights risks restricting liberty: “Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.”

With land you own, so the argument goes, you should be protected from any interference to do what you want and think what you want, and to accumulate wealth and power that cannot be taken. Thus, private property protects people and society against arbitrary and abusive use of political power, say, by the King of England, the US federal government, or nosy neighbors.

Your neighbors, also property owners, can make similar claims. And, of course, members of your community who don’t own land also have liberties that must be respected (landowners are not the only citizens that have liberties).  Conflict erupts, and a role for community governance arises, when one person’s liberties impinge on another’s liberties.  Specifically with regard to land use, things your neighbors do on their lands can impact your liberties if, for instance, they emit noise and dust or impound or pollute water, air, or wildlife flowing your way.  Conflict also results if your neighbors limit your ability to develop your property’s full economic potential.  For example, they might deny you access to needed roads, infrastructure, or other economic development opportunities.  Conflict also results when things you and your neighbors do affects the liberties of others in your community. In all these cases, someone’s liberties are curtailed because of how someone else uses land.

Resolving these conflicts requires governing land uses,  hence impacting property rights. To minimize conflict, the community establishes laws and policies to set expectations for acceptable behavior.  For the most part, people find ways to work within this framework and life goes on.  Yet, when significant conflicts erupt, the community, through its government, must negotiate a solution that maximizes the common good. Some people may lose liberty, but the intent of community-led negotiations is that more people end up better off than worse off and the common good is enhanced.

Smart growth and sustainable development planning are mechanisms by which a community negotiates these limits and sets these expectations.

Do not construe these arguments as an attack of private property rights.  Private property rights limit arbitrary use of political power, enables markets, rewards innovation, supports core freedoms and liberties, and, although not specifically defined in the US Constitution, are nonetheless a cornerstone of American democracy, economy, entrepreneurship, and spirit.  These are all good things that I support. Rather, this essay seeks to respond to the Tea Party assertions that efforts to craft sustainable development trajectories for our communities are somehow un-American because these efforts, by necessity of addressing how land is used, affect property rights.

Property rights, liberty, and their connections to American history and future need to be studied, debated, and respected in our applications of self-governance.  They deserve careful attention by both advocates and opponents of sustainable development.  The rhetorical sound bites found on Tea Party websites and heard at recent Tea Party demonstrations are inadequate, as are the casual dismal of these concerns by land use planers and sustainable development advocates. Unfortunately, scholarly literature on these topics is difficult to penetrate.  Two resources I find useful are listed below.  Plug them into your internet search engine to locate a pdf.  I find Freyfogle the most accessible of property rights scholars who are addressing sustainable development issues.

Property and Freedom by Benjamin Barros. 2009. New York University Journal of Law and Liberty.

Property and Liberty by Eric Freyfogle. 2011 Harvard Environmental Law Review.

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Dear Board of Supervisors

Posted on July 30, 2011 by admin

Dear Supervisors,

I am writing this letter to express my support for sustainable development planning initiatives in our region.

Sustainable development, for me, boils down to wise investment in our community’s infrastructure: the systems that provide us food, water, energy, transportation, materials, communication, climate, biodiversity, knowledge, and waste disposal.  Sustainable development also increases our competitive advantage in a globalized economy.  It will create conditions that entice others to invest here.  Communities that do not plan for the future will decline over time.  I do not want us to wither; I want us to thrive. And that requires we invest in our future using sustainable development strategies.  Hopefully you will not be the Board that pushed us down the path of unsustainable development.

Without strategic, regional, sustainable development planning:

–       The education of our children will suffer and they will be less able to gain admission to college and compete in the global workforce.

–       Job opportunities will move away to other communities, and our children will be forced to follow them.

–       Roads, sewers, waterlines and other gray infrastructure will be uncoordinated with neighboring communities, expensive to maintain, and leading to nowhere.

–       Major shopping and employment opportunities will locate elsewhere, where infrastructure is better coordinated and maintained.

–       Our tax burden will increase to build and maintain water treatment and storm water management technologies because we will have neglected our green infrastructure’s natural capacity to perform these services.

–       The health of our families will decline as flooding, erosion, and pollution will increase and replenishment of our water supply will decrease.

–       Our regions’ natural capital—fertile soil, natural beauty, diverse wildlife, productive forests and farms, sources of local energy and materials—will erode.

–       Our call to steward God’s Creation will be neglected.

–       Our tax burden will increase to pay for building and maintaining a sprawling, piecemeal gray infrastructure rather than one leveraging existing development and maintenance capacities.

–       Poor gray and green infrastructure will make us unattractive to businesses and residents looking to relocate.

–       We will miss out on economic development opportunities because highly educated, high-wage workers, who are mobile and seek communities with high quality of life, will locate elsewhere.

Abandoning sustainable development may save us money in the short term, but it will cost us more in the future: we will be a penny wise but a pound foolish. Not pursuing sustainable development dooms us to a declining economy, a damaged infrastructure, out-migration of our children, and a greater tax burden.

In recent public meetings you have been asked by some members of our community to withdraw our county from regional sustainable development efforts because of vague and emotionally-charged assertions that sustainable development is a guise for socialism, communism, a United Nations take-over of private property rights, or an effort to force people off of their rural homesteads and into dense, urban, government-controlled housing.  Please do not get distracted by these statements, they are meant to grab attention rather than describe sustainable development.

But do pay attention to the deeper issues being debated. These issues are important and deserve your full attention.  Because the stakes are so high, so are the emotions.  We need serious and open discussions about how property values will change because of public investment in infrastructure projects. We need to ensure that property rights, personal freedoms, and community needs are carefully balanced.  We need you to make difficult but careful decisions about the path we take into the future.  We require your informed leadership.  And we need sustainable development.

Sincerely,

Bruce Q Public

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The Upside of Sustainable Development and the Downside of Tea Party Idealism

Posted on July 28, 2011 by admin

Imagine a house with unconnected water pipes and drains, wires transmitting electricity and information to only a few rooms, and no steps connecting the front door to the street.  Ridiculous, you say?  The builder might save money up front by neglecting infrastructure, but wouldn’t they, in the long term, incur much greater costs by making the house unsafe, unlivable, and unsellable?  But by analogy, Tea Party activists are asking us to do just that, to neglect the infrastructure of our communities.

Infrastructure supports food, water, energy, transportation, communication, climate, and waste services our communities need to function.  It is fundamental to everyday lives and livelihoods.  It is not glamorous, and most of us ignore it – until something fails or the costs of repair become exorbitant. Or, until politically ambitious individuals attack it as a means to rally the troops and solicit donations.

Once upon a time, the US had built and maintained an infrastructure that attracted world envy and business.  It made drinking water plentiful and safe, kept rainstorms from flooding property, quickly transported workers and goods, provided opportunities for contemplation and exercise, and educated and protected citizens. Our once great infrastructure is now crumbling and new infrastructure projects are grinding to a halt because of Tea Party political posturing.  As a result, hope and opportunities are moving elsewhere.

The concerns of self-identified Tea Party activists are many and I review them elsewhere, but they fall into several broad concerns:

1)   Infrastructure projects are socialist wealth redistribution programs.

2)   Infrastructure projects promote federal government or, worse, United Nations takeover of private property rights.

3)   Infrastructure projects are incremental attacks on American and Christian values.

Moving Forward

Negotiating a thriving and sustainable future requires more nuance and strategic thinking than Tea Party critiques of sustainable development seem willing to admit.  There is a critical role for community governance to direct our infrastructure investments.  We need to invest wisely in both grey and green infrastructure in order to increase our standards of living and remain competitive with regions around the world.  It is imperative that we grow and develop, but we must do so smartly, in ways that can be sustained.

Good infrastructure not only makes money, it saves money; an argument that should resonate with tax-adverse Tea Party activists.  Neglecting infrastructure is a classic example of being a penny wise and a pound foolish.  It also weakens our national security by giving competitive advantage to countries investing in better infrastructure. Profits and prosperity flow along and because of infrastructure.  Products must be transported, devastating floods prevented, wastes must be processed and contained, food must be irrigated and processed, and a workforce must be watered.

The civil servants and public planners who put in long hours for little pay to worry about the infrastructure most of us ignore have long realized the expense and inefficiencies of piecemeal and unplanned development.  We need to support them in their work of planning sustainable development because it makes sense—and cents—to link shopping, working and housing opportunities into an efficient transportation system, to use green infrastructure so that rain replenishes drinking water rather than floods neighbors downstream and requires expensive taxpayer supported construction projects to replace what nature does free of charge, and to direct new development where already paid for sewer, water, police, schools, and other infrastructure exists.

Harm is done to us all when these public-spirited civil servants are intimidated and their reputations maligned with slurs that they are un-American, Communists, or Nazis (explicit assertions made at recent public meetings I’ve attended).  We need people to do the necessary, difficult, and thankless task of managing our infrastructure and building us a house that can be a functioning home. Rather than sling mud, let’s work together to build the infrastructure we all depend on.  We currently benefit from the infrastructure our parents were able to build. Rather than increase the tax burden of our children, we need to agree how to build and maintain infrastructure of tomorrow.

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Tea Party: Deeper Issues Simmering Below the Surface

Posted on July 27, 2011 by admin

The critiques of sustainable development by Tea Party activists are many and I review the specifics elsewhere. Here I summarize and critique five deeper issues that seem to simmer just below the surface and motivate many of the concerns:

1)   Sustainable development is a socialist wealth redistribution program.

2)   Sustainable development gives away local control and private property rights to “experts” from far away, including the federal government and United Nations, that may not have our best interests in mind and have done little of late to generate much confidence in their management skills.

3)   Sustainable development elevates nature over humans, nature worship, and indoctrinates children with values inconsistent with Christianity.

4)   Sustainable development is a deceptive and incremental strategy to bait communities onto a slippery slope with the promises of “no-strings-attached” money and “voluntary” participation.

5)   Sustainable development is an attempt to destroy American Exceptionalism.

Wealth Redistribution: Sustainable development seeks fair distribution of benefits and costs within our community.  Economic development projects are unfair if they distribute benefits to a few but distribute costs to others through tax burdens and health risks.  Sustainable Development attempts to allocate the costs of development to those who enjoy the benefits, or it redirects development if developers are unwilling to assume the costs.  Sprawling suburban development, for example, increases the value of property fortunate to be near public roads and utilities but increases costs of water management to those down stream, requires tax revenue for more police and schools, and increases traffic congestion that lengthens commutes of neighbors.

Sustainable development also seeks fair distribution of benefits and costs with our children’s generation.   America is reeling from a spending splurge that produced a national debt so large we can’t figure out how to repay it.  We are passing that burden on to our children.  We also risk passing forward weakened ecosystem services, depleted natural capital, and decaying infrastructure.  Sustainable development plans promotes careful investment in energy, utilities, and transportation infrastructure to replace the benefits we have extracted so that our children have the same opportunities we enjoyed.

Sustainable development also draws explicit attention to worldwide poverty.  Several billion people live on just a few dollars a day, without access to clean water, adequate food, hope or dignity.  However we chose to govern ourselves and distribute our prosperity, as moral beings we must also aggressively attack poverty.  Sustainable development accepts that economic growth is the most successful means of pulling people out of poverty.  Where that growth occurs and who benefits from it requires that we address how wealth is distributed.

United Nations Agenda to Take Property Rights: If critics would dig just a little deeper they would see United Nations Agenda 21 is intended to promote economic development, citizen voice and local control—it advocates the same devolution of power from nations and states to local authorities as does the Tea Party.  Rather than an agenda to implement centralized planning and UN takeover, Agenda 21 was a response to the growing pressures of globalization that have depleted the resources, finances, and jobs of communities around the world.  It is a call to local communities to take control and steer towards a thriving future rather than abandon themselves to the whims of market forces.  As its preamble states, Agenda 21 is motivated to achieve the: “fulfillment of basic [human] needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future.”  It recognizes that changing environmental conditions and the flight of fickle global capital will benefit some communities and damage others, and it assumes that communities taking an active role in shaping their futures are more likely to prosper than wither.

Assertions that smart growth, transit oriented development, infill, urban growth boundaries and related strategies will force people to abandon their rural or suburban homes and move into small, government-owned, high-rise housing, or hobbit-homes, is rhetorical hogwash.  These strategies do not force people to relocate, instead they direct future growth in ways that promote economic prosperity and community vitality.  Sustainable development is not about stopping growth, it is about directing how and where development occurs.  Opponents of sustainable development need to think about where property “value” comes from. Most of a property’s development potential does not come from the land itself, but from its location relative to investment of infrastructure.  Recall the real-estate adage: location, location, location.  Property values result from public investment in transportation, energy, water, amenities, safety, and schools.  Because of budget limitations, public infrastructure cannot be built near everyone’s property.  Therefore not all property owners will benefit equally from public investments.  Smart growth and comprehensive planning are efforts to make decisions about infrastructure location more efficient, transparent, participatory, and rational.  It does not allocate those decisions to experts from afar but rather encourages communities to adopt strategies that include citizen participation.  To do otherwise is to abandon infrastructure development to piecemeal and backroom deals.

Sustainable Development and Christianity: Conservative theologians worry that sustainable development privileges nature over humans, promotes nature worship, questions God’s omnipotence, and teaches children to value environmental concerns over Christian principles. Mother Earth, for example, gets portrayed in environmental messaging as a living, breathing, provider and creator of life, with little or no mention of God or the Bible.  This portrayal of humanity’s relationship with God and earth contrasts with fundamental Christianity, as a minister lamented at a local Board of Supervisor’s meeting I recently attended: “Human beings were not created to sustain earth; earth was created to sustain humans.”

Other theologians suggest that human dominion over earth carries with it stewardship obligations to tend and keep creation (i.e., see the Evangelical Environmental Network).  Most religious denominations now have policy statements recognizing that sustainable development embraces the Golden Rule: to do onto others as you would have them do onto you (i.e., see the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change). Resource exploitation that causes poverty, toxic pollution that causes illness, and climate change that induces famine are inconsistent with Jesus’ preaching about loving thy neighbor.  Unsustainable development distributes burdens on people who did not cause them, often the poorest and least powerful among us.

Paralleling the evolution of environmental Christian theology through the late 20th Century has been a shift in professional environmentalism from environmental sustainability towards sustainable development.  More recently, professional environmentalism has been struggling to deal with a self-directed, internal critique, which argues that in order for environmentalism to remain relevant, it needs to move towards a more human-centered agenda that embraces globalism, economic development, technological advancement, and infrastructure investment.  The evolutions of environmental and religious thinking creates new common ground for collaboration among people and organizations with environmental, sustainable development, and religious agendas. It also creates a clear role for government leadership in efforts such as regional sustainable development planning.

Incremental Steps Lead Down a Slippery Slope: Sustainable development programs are often presented to local officials as voluntary and not usurping local control. But critics point out that if strings are not attached to the current round of planning grants, they will be attached to implementation grants.  The initial grants are strategic ways to manufacture “buy in” at the local level and collect information that can be used further down the road to exert pressure.   I don’t know how to refute conspiracy theories.  It has been my experience that counter-claims and rebuttals to conspiracy theories just take the argument down another rabbit hole. I will simply state my belief that I do not believe there is a puppeteer manipulating a conspiracy to destroy America.  I think it is impossible for anyone to see the entire picture well enough to manipulate a system as large and complex as ours. Instead, I chose to believe that my fellow Americans who advocate sustainable development have our best interests in mind as do my fellow Americans that advocate Tea Party policies. I prefer to place my trust in people in my community who participate in an open, deliberative planning processes—such as those advocated by sustainable development.  I believe that decisions need to be made and that an open planning process will help make better decisions.  Freedom has obligations, among them collaborating with others to plan a sustainable trajectory into the future.

I will, however, argue against blind fear of incrementalism and for adaptive management.  Adaptive management is intentionally incremental.  Difficult lessons learned from failed attempts at developing optimal master plans have taught planners to take small steps and evaluate the results before taking next steps.  Following the process of adaptive management, a community negotiates which direction the first steps should be taken—towards which social, economic, and environmental conditions, then devises and implements strategies to achieve those goals, then evaluates the results before planning and taking the next step.  The evaluations may point out that the strategy did not work, in which case another strategy is devised and implemented rather than throwing good money after bad.  Alternatively, the evaluations may point out that the initial goals were achieved but the community may decide it does not like the outcomes as much as it thought it would, so it choses to adapt and use the new information to redirect its development trajectory.

Incremental change can be good. It prevents big mistakes.  No one knows in advance which development trajectory is the right one for us to follow, what the future will hold.  But  one thing we can agree on is that change occurs—our communities will change, they will develop along some trajectory.  Adaptive management—and incrementalism—is a process to direct that change through learning my doing.

American Exceptionalism:  Times are difficult.  Politics are polarizing.  The future is uncertain.  The Great Recession, mounting federal debt, and protracted wars are humbling. Chinese and Indian economies are creating new world powers.   We hear about the rising gap between rich and poor and that our children may be the first American generation not to be better off than its parents.  These conditions fuel insecurity and caution about new initiatives and make us susceptible to a rhetoric of fear.

But sustainable development projects should not be feared.  They are investments in America’s infrastructure.  They will strengthen our competitive advantage, support a stronger economy, promote national security, and reinvigorate pride and patriotism. Some communities will not survive the tests of time.  Those communities that invest their resources wisely are more likely to thrive.  Sustainable development planning efforts attempt to wisely invest a community’s resources.

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SUMMARY: Tea Party Critiques of Sustainable Development

Posted on July 25, 2011 by admin

Tea Party activists are raising serious concerns about community-based planning efforts promoting sustainable development, smart growth, green infrastructure, comprehensive planning, sustainable agriculture, local foods, and related outcomes.  The issues being debated are significant, and bear upon not just how our communities should develop over time, but also concern core values about democracy, governance, and capitalism.

The purpose of this blog is to assemble and examine key assertions made in Tea Party literature about topics related to sustainable development.  My sense is that considerable misinterpretation exists and the resulting confusion deflects attention away from deeper issues deserving serious and open public debate.

The following table is several pages long and full of references leading to source material for those looking to dig deeper.  A  series of related essays describe various dimensions of the controversy.  A narrative summary of some of the main concerns is posted.

Tea Party Concerns and Assertions An Examination of History and Documentation Reveals…
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Developmentis a strategy to limit American power, restrict consumer spending, limit property rights, redistribute wealth, and control reproductive rights.

 


 Rebuttal:Sustainable Development refers to a diverse array of strategies with the shared goal of developing human prosperity, health, and well-being in ways that can be sustained over time (rather than pursuing a development trajectory that is not sustainable).  Often these strategies explicitly address both the grey and green infrastructure on which human communities and economies depend.
Tea Party Concern: Agenda 21is a United Nations led effort to promote a one-world government, limit the US Constitution, and eliminate citizen control over local issues.

 Rebuttal: Agenda 21 is a United Nations led effort that advocates local control.  It was crafted in 1992 with the purpose of reconfiguring 20th Century economic development and environmental protection strategies for 21stCentury conditions and political realities. It emphasizes local decision making and local solutions to local problems.  It was, in part, an attempt to address legitimate concerns expressed by poorer nations and communities that one-size-fits-all solutions to environmental problems were impractical, inequitable, and needed to promote economic development.
Tea Party Concern: Agenda 21 consolidates power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and plannerswho have a liberal bias/agenda.

 Rebuttal:One of the political realities to which Agenda 21 responded was the realization that rational, scientific planning by experts had serious limits.  Agenda 21 advocates, instead, a more open, transactive planning strategy that actually gives more power to local stakeholders, including economic development interests.

  • Agenda 21: Section III. Strengthening the Role of Major Groups Chapter 23. Preamble
Tea Party Concern: ICLEIis a front organization for the United Nations to promote Agenda 21.

 Rebuttal:ICLEI helps local communities build capacity to respond to local issues.

  • International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives- Local Governments for Sustainability. Mission Statement.
Tea Party Concern: “The seeds for Agenda 21 were planted back in 1987 when the writings of Gro Harlem Brundtland(a woman who was first Vice-President of the Socialist International) caught the eye of the UN.  Dr. Brundtland wrote a report for the UN called, ‘Our Common Future’ eventually got into the business of environmentalism as a tool to control all the people of the world and establish a global government. The growth of ICLEI and the framework being put in place by supporters of Agenda 21 appear to be bringing Dr. Brundtland’s ideas closer to reality”

 Rebuttal:Brundtland—a physician, former Director of the World Health Organization, and three-term Prime Minister of Norway—chaired a UN chartered but independent commission composed of foreign ministers, finance and planning officials, policymakers in agriculture, science, and technology from countries that spanned north-south and east-west divides. Many of the Commissioners were cabinet ministers and senior economists in their own nations.  The commission and many staffers worked for three years, soliciting input at public meetings around the world, to author an exhaustive report, which was reviewed and approved by the entire UN assembly.
Tea Party Concern: The Precautionary Principle(see Principle 15 of Agenda 21) violates the US Constitution because it asserts that people are guilty until proven innocent.

 Rebuttal:In this era of rapid technological advancement, the Precautionary Principle calls for prudence rather than haste.  People and organizations benefiting from widespread adoption of their innovations are asked to take reasonable measures to ensure that their innovations do not cause, unbeknownst to the user, more harm than good, either to people directly, or to them indirectly through harm to the environment.

  • van den Belt, H, 2003. Debating the Precautionary Principle: “Guilty until Proven Innocent” or “Innocent until Proven Guilty”? Plant Physiology, July 2003, Vol. 132, pp. 1122–1126,
  • John S. Applegate, The Taming of the Precautionary Principle, 27 Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol’y Rev. 13 (2002),
  • Stevens, M. 2002. The Precautionary Principle in the International Arena. Sustainable Development Law and Policy, 2(2) 13-15.
Tea Party Concern: Community-based planning efforts are cumbersome and inefficient. They get mired in attempts to balance the advice of experts and conflicting opinions and values. This planning-based approach to decision making will ruin capitalism and destroy marketsbecause it ignores the entrepreneurship, individualism, competition, and independent actions that advance American businesses.

 Rebuttal:Planning is not a bad thing.  Successful businesses plan.  They devote enormous energies deciding where to invest, what markets to develop, what products to manufacture, and how to respond to changing conditions.  Experts offer conflicting advice and someone or some committee makes the best possible decision.  If businesses fail to plan or plan poorly, they go bankrupt and cease to exist.  Planning and capitalism are complementary.

  • Drucker, Peter. 1980: Managing in Turbulent Times
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Development is inefficient. Prosperity will suffer because the allocation of talent, resources, goods and services will not be subject to the tests of competition in a free market. Rebuttal: Sustainable development is about making wise investmentsin our infrastructure that spans generations—i.e., land use allocations, transportation network, energy supplies, and water and waste systems.  It takes a long-term view, rather than a quarterly financial reporting view. It may advocate against investments that cut costs and make profits in the short term, if those investments produce outcomes that impose health impacts and tax burdens that add costs in the long term.
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Development ignores market signalsbecause decisions are based on a planning process that strives for consensus rather than price signals that reward competition and efficiency.

 Rebuttal: Sustainable Development planning attempts to account for externalitiesignored by market price signals.  Externalities are recognized by economists as market failures that justify government intervention.  Examples include children made sick by mercury released when coal is burned to power our lights, floods and famine resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, natural water filtration capacity degraded by poorly designed roads and roofs, fisheries collapse by overfishing, and aquifer depletion by over extraction for irrigating agriculture.

  • Arnold, R. 2009. Economics. 9th Edition. Cengage.
  • Coal Costs US $Billion Annually in “Hidden” Costs. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.  E360 summary

Sustainability-related markets failures are common because “Much of the world’s environmental capital… consists of common-property resources rather than privately held assets; in part because of free-rider problems, private firms and individuals have little incentive, absent requirements imposed by government, to invest in maintaining or growing capital of this kind.”
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Development is an attempt to disguise socialist wealth distributionpolices.

 Rebuttal: Sustainable Development seeks fair distribution of benefits and costs.  Economic development projects are unfair if they distribute benefits to individual property owners but distribute costs to others through tax burdens and health risks.  Sustainable Development attempts to allocate the costs of development to those who enjoy the benefits, or it redirect development if developers are unwilling to assume the costs.Sprawling suburban development, for example, benefits property owners fortunate to be near public roads and utilities but increases costs of storm water management to those down stream, requires tax revenue for more police and schools, increases traffic congestion that lengthens commutes of neighbors, all of which increases energy consumption that necessitates a larger military and increased risks of climate change.Building houses in flood prone areas is another example inequitable distribution of costs and benefits because the homeowners that benefit from living near water require the rest of us to pay for the levees, federal flood insurance, and emergency assistance that protect their lives and investments.
Tea Party Concern: Smart growth restricts property rightsbecause it restricts people outside designated growth areas from developing their property to the same extend as people inside growth areas.  People with property outside the designated growth boundary are being robbed of opportunity to generate wealth.

 Rebuttal: When growth areas are designated, some current owners can be disadvantaged. But future owners will negotiate a purchase price with full knowledge of the property’s development potential; thus the injury ceases once the property is sold.  A goal of smart growth is to insure the benefits to the community resulting from decisions that take development opportunities from property owners far outweigh the costs these land owners incur. Efforts at compensation for taking of property rights have been made, but states such as Oregon have found full compensation too expensive with current tax revenues.Property owners must accept that much of the development “value” results from public investment in transportation, energy, water, schools, and other infrastructure.  Most of a property’s development potential does not come from the land itself, but from its location relative to investment of public infrastructure.  Because of budget limitations, public infrastructure cannot be built near everyone’s property.  Therefore not all property owners will benefit equally from public investment.  Smart growth and comprehensive planning are efforts to make decisions about infrastructure location more transparent, participatory, and rational.Property rights have evolved throughout US history in response to the changing social-economic-environmental context in which the republic operates, despite Tea Party rhetoric suggesting they are fixed, inalienable and God-given rights.

  • Richard Epstein, R. 1985. Takings Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, Harvard Press.

 

  • Freyfogle, E. 2003. The Land We Share: Private Property Rights and the Common Good. Island.
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Development discourages automobile use.

 

 Rebuttal:Sustainable development seeks to limit traffic congestion, minimize time wasted commuting, reduce energy consumption, and efficiently use tax dollars to build a transportation infrastructure.   These goals can sometimes be best achieved by means other than building more roads for single occupancy vehicles.
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Development limits housing choice, increases crowding, and forces people to live in “hobbit houses”

 Rebuttal:Concentrating new development where infrastructure already exists or can be least expensively constructed does increase the density of people per acre.  But this development pattern also increases access to amenities, shopping, and family.  It also attracts an innovative, entrepreneurial workforce that is mobile and in search of quality of life.   These “new urbanism” and “mixed use” developments held their value during the recent real-estate downturn, which may reflect changing consumer preferences.
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable agriculture and local food policies redistribute income, increase taxation and regulation, and take away freedom and property rights.  “American citizens would be stripped of their wealth and property…  When this happened in Russia under Stalin, eleven million people who were seen as resisting socialism were intentionally starved to death.  Food (or lack there of) can become the ultimate weapon, the ultimate control.”

  • Alliance for Citizen Rights. 2011. Sustainable Agriculture. As Tony the Tiger Says, It Sure Sounds ‘G-RR-EAT!!’
 Rebuttal:Sustainable agriculture is a strategy to promote national security and local food security by insuring a reliable and safe supply of foods to complement long, international supply chains that increasingly dominate our food system and may be vulnerable to energy price spikes and global social unrest.

Local food polices are motivated in part by still-debated claims that food miles contribute to climate change and degradation of finite natural resources.

But local food systems are also part of concerted efforts to promote local economies, recirculate local dollars through local economies, and increase revenues for farmers and local merchants so they can better compete with global, industrial agriculture.
Tea Party Concern: Sustainable Development restricts freedom and liberty.  Big government, and particular government regulation, is problematic because it can restrict personal freedoms and liberties.

 Rebuttal: The US Declaration of Independence captures the core American ideology with the oft-quoted assertion that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights.  But this assertion never meant people were free to do things that harmed others.  Environmental regulations and Sustainable Development attempt to reduce these harms and protect lives and opportunities to pursue happiness.     Freedoms come with obligations.  Freedomcannot occur without collective governance.

  • Starr 2007. Freedom’s Power.
Tea Party Concern: Environmental problems such as climate change, energy shortages, hazardous pollutants, and biodiversity decline are overstated. Most of these concerns reflect the aesthetic preferences of people who value nature more than humans. The issues certainly are not serious enough to justify dramatic changes such as limiting property rights, redistributing wealth, controlling population growth, and redirecting economic growth. Rebuttal:“Ecosystems and the biodiversity they embody constitute “environmental capital” on which society depends in multifaceted ways. The “ecosystem services” in support of human well-being that flow from this capital include formation of soil and renewal of its fertility, management of flows of fresh water, maintenance of the composition of the atmosphere, pollination of flowers and crops, control of the distribution and abundance of pests and pathogens, production of fish and game in unmanaged and lightly managed ecosystems, aesthetic and recreational values from pristine landscapes, maintenance of the “genetic library” of global biodiversity as a source of future insights and innovations benefitting humankind, and important contributions to keeping climatic conditions in the range to which human society and current ecosystems are adapted. ““It has been increasingly well documented over the course of the last few decades, however, that bio­diversity and other important components of the environmental capital producing these services are being progressively degraded by human activities. It is becoming clearer, as well, that the degradation of this capital has already reduced or rendered less reliable some of the associated services, with sig­nificant adverse impacts on society. These impacts include: damaging floods arising from deforested watersheds and heavier precipitation events; increasing costs of fresh water supply (higher pumping costs from declining water tables, increased treatment costs because of pollution and declining efficacy of natural purification); dramatic expansion of annual areas burned and property destroyed in wildfires; increases in the frequency and destructiveness of forest-pest outbreaks; disappearance or diminution of economically valuable freshwater fish populations in waters affected by acidification, other pollution, and warming; increased destruction from storms and tsunamis because buffering mangroves have been destroyed by coastal development; the pole-ward spread of tropical diseases; and the peaking and decline of the global ocean fish catch despite increased fishing effort. ““The root causes of the degradation of environmental capital and the associated diminution of ecosystem services are to be found in the combined pressures of population growth, rising affluence, and frequent reliance on environmentally disruptive technologies to meet the associated material demands, with the damages frequently compounded by bad management—attributable partly, in turn, to widespread under-appreciation of the importance of environmental capital for human well-being and to the absence of the value of its services from the economic balance sheets of producers and consumers. The proxi­mate causes of the degradation include: widespread conversion of natural ecosystems to high-intensity human uses; exploitation, beyond sustainable yield, of commercially valuable wild plants and animals; introduction of invasive organisms that crowd out or otherwise kill off indigenous ones; emissions and spillovers of ecologically harmful substances from industry and agriculture; and, most recently, the growing impacts of global climate change resulting from heat-trapping gases and particles added to the atmosphere by human activities.”
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Tea Party: Confusion and Fear

Posted on July 23, 2011 by admin

I attended my first tea party meeting.  It confused me. Discussion ranged over a wide range of topics including sustainability, local economic development, food security, sustainable agriculture, protecting farms, forests, and other open spaces, reducing tax burdens caused by unplanned sprawling infrastructure, and caring for future generations. After each topic was described I nodded yes and thought “these are good things, right?” only to learn that I was un-American and un-Christian for wanting them.  I’ve spent the better part of my professional life working on these topics—and I tend to be overly critical about everything, so I accept that there is much in the details to debate—but never before was my patriotism or faith questioned. Hence my confusion.

I fancy myself to be open-minded, so I listened intently to the critiques, furiously scribbling notes for later research and reflection.  I was perplexed by how much of the story was untold, with key themes being left out and arcane details emphasized.  The intentions and methods behind the critiqued programs, for example, were not discussed; nor were looming global challenges (resource scarcities, declining vitality of rural economies, climate change, billions in poverty, rising tax burdens to maintain a sprawling and decaying infrastructure, etc.) used to justify our attention to these matters and decide whether action and shared sacrifice are warranted. The lightening-rod issue used—rhetorically—to tie the critiques together was a perceived threat to private property rights by power-hungry local, state, federal and world governments staffed by unelected bureaucrats; topics I will discuss in subsequent blogs.

But the real issues, boiling just under the surface and occasionally spilling over into discussion, were even more profound, deep-seated, identity-defining, core-value issues: the definition of freedom in America, the obligations and responsibilities that accompany property rights and citizenship, the debate over abortion and reproductive rights, the demographic shift of power as America diversifies, the threat to fundamental Christianity by new-age religions, the role of government in markets, and the changing status of America’s status and power in the world.

Big issues indeed.  They deserve open discussion.

We do face serious challenges to our identity and survival as a nation.  Core values must be part of the open deliberations by which we write America’s next chapter.  Fear mongering such as I heard the other night perhaps play a role in attracting attention and focusing civic energy, but it can be dangerous if generating fear becomes an end in itself and deflects our gaze from the real challenges we face.

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