Freedom, Liberty, and Environmental Regulation

Posted on July 21, 2011 by admin

Freedom is a core American ideal, defended with blood and treasure. But its meaning is contested, and perhaps distorted, especially by special interests trying to protect and enlarge their economic and political power.  These loud voices mistakenly and perhaps deliberately conflate personal and political freedom with free markets. The conflation misdirects attention and energy toward efforts to stop government involvement in the economy and away from personal, political, and environmental dimensions of freedom on which America must urgently focus.

Freedom, first and foremost, must mean the limitation of arbitrary power concentrated in governments, churches, or corporations.  This freedom requires reliable enforcement of laws, so that citizens are treated equally, with justice, and cannot be ignored or exploited by the whim or folly of those in power. Freedom also means having the ability to share in and shape government.  We must be free to speak, free to assemble, free to advocate our values, free to vote, free to hold elected office, free to determine our future.

As importantly, freedom requires access to the American Dream.  The basic building blocks of a successful, modern, America life must be accessible to all citizens, now and in the future. Such basics include education, accessible clean water, healthy food, affordable medical care, and safety from flood, famine, and thugs.  To deny these basics is to deny people the opportunity to succeed. To exploit natural resources and degrade environmental systems that make these basic necessities accessible and affordable is to take away freedom and opportunities from those that follow.

Freedom requires a strong, stable, transparent government that can confront and diffuse power, because concentrated and entrenched power tends not to share, and instead becomes more concentrated and more entrenched, denying access and opportunity to others.  The US Constitution limits concentration of power within the government itself by dividing power among executive, legislative, and judiciary branches.  The rise of government secrecy, the capture of the political process by corporations, and the decline of the independent investigative media should be much bigger concerns to those worried about freedom and America’s future than worries about regulations and taxation.

It may seem counter intuitive that a powerful government intervening in selected areas of commerce and daily life can actually increase freedom.  Consider the humble traffic light.  It limits our behavior, forcing us to wait until red turns to green; but, it actually increases our freedom because it prevents gridlock and allows us to cross a crowded intersection.  In the words of Paul Star author of Freedom’s Power: “No state, no rights.  No law, no liberty.”

Government regulations, particularly with respect to the environment, actually increase freedom to freely pursue our interests while protecting the public goods on which we all depend. Our complex world presents complex challenges that requires strong, capable, and complex bureaucracies. We are over six billion and growing.  Providing each of us with comfort, security, health and opportunity on finite Earth requires a means to define and enforce limits so that we can explore our freedoms while operating within those limits, and hopefully extend those limits with our ingenuity.

Starr 2007. Freedom’s Power. Basic Books. Page 20

Posted in Tea Party | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Landcare 3: The Will to Act

Posted on June 9, 2011 by admin

[Part 3 of 3: see 1 and 2]

The challenges we confront are immense, but not insurmountable.  Alternative paths leading towards solutions exist.  Landcare is safest and most rewarding of these paths, but it will be difficult steer our culture along that path because traveling it requires change and sacrifice.

When confronting life challenges, many people simply give up.  They refuse to consider an alternative path for their lives.  They say no to change, on principle, and suffer the consequences, be it a failed marriage, sickness, or bankruptcy.  Other people honestly consider the difficult questions being asked, accept the challenge, construct a new path into the future, and thrive in the new life they’ve created. Aaron Antonovsky, in his landmark studies of health, stress, and coping, sought to explain why some people thrive in the face of adversity and others don’t.  He identified three tendencies of survivors, three characteristics typical of people that successfully navigate a path out from failed marriages, layoffs, persecution, and threats to life and lifestyle.

  • First, survivors see the challenges confronting them.  They possess or find sufficient information to make informed decisions about upcoming risks and opportunities.  They see a pathway that leads them out of harms way, at least its beginnings, and are aware of the need to take it.
  • Second, they have resources.  They have access to money, faith, friends, media, government programs, technical skills and other sources of support.  They have time and physical ability to respond.  They have or can build capacity.
  • Third, they have reason to respond.  They have a purposeful life, one filled with meaning.  They believe their lives make a difference and thus possess the will to act, to care, to sacrifice.  They are willing to ask hard questions about the path they are on and have the courage to alter their journey.

All three characteristics are present in people that overcome life’s obstacles, stay healthy and thrive.  The third is perhaps the most critical, and the hardest to affect.  Let’s look at each in the context of the challenges that face us as a nation.

America is awash with indicators of alarm.  We have access to an overwhelming array of information about degrading social, economic, and environmental conditions.  Satellites report retreating glaciers and eroding forests.   Economists confirm the widening gap between rich and poor, and our mounting debt.  Maps show the sprawl of suburbia and the paving of green infrastructure.  Engineers document the decay of bridges, waterways and other build infrastructure.  Defense experts lament heightening global insecurities and declining defense capabilities.  Scientists report collapsing fisheries and weakening ecosystem functions.  We can always use better information, and certainly need assistance disentangling conflicting claims and disinformation campaigns, but lack of information is not our problem.

America has ample capacity.  We are rich.  We have one of the most trusted and effective governments, ever.  We have an educated population that respects rules of law protecting our respected constitutional rights.  We have police, fire, and regulatory agencies that can protect us from selfish rouge elements that don’t care about our common future. We have creative scientists and engineers.  We have a market system that rewards success.  We are far from perfect and there is considerable room for improvement, but we possess exceptional capabilities to respond to the challenges at hand.

But do we possess the will to act?  America, and more importantly, Americans, seem paralyzed by the challenges confronting us.  Some fault is certainly due to the polarizing and venomous rhetoric that demeans questions about the path we are on, questions that necessarily challenge the privileged positions of people in power.  Civil debate is scarce.  We have abandoned the search for the common ground on which our strength is built.  Instead, we have fallen into the habit of attacking the questioner and denouncing their credibility and sincerity.  The magnitude of this challenge to deliberative democracy cannot be overstated; we must find ways to overcome our divisiveness and stop rewarding and celebrating those who divide.  We must remember the hard earned lessons that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Still more importantly, and the ultimate focus of this blog, is the need for individuals to possess the will to act, the motivation to negotiate, chart, and then take the path that most likely leads to a thriving and sustainable future, however difficult that path may be.  We must care.  A helpless and overwhelmed citizenry is ripe for exploitation by individuals, corporations, countries, and agencies that see and seize opportunities to increase their power as others founder in chaos and apathy.

One source of motivation is fear: fear of rising seas, deformed babies, body burdens, collapsed fisheries, war, famine, and the litany of environmental alarms. But social psychologists warn us that fear is a fickle motivator.  Flight or fight urges sometimes evoke superhuman capabilities.  People lift enormous weight, run great speeds, and take on imposing challengers and impossible odds when adrenaline flows and attention focuses.   But the fear response is also unpredictable, short-lived, and often not rational. The challenges we face require a sustained effort and we can’t risk running the herd off a cliff.

Instead of fear we need hope, we need a vision of a better place, somewhere we want to live in the future, and will sacrifice for now, in return for believing the future will be better for it.  Negotiating such a future is the challenge and bane of constructing sustainability. It requires that we agree the future matters, and that we agree on at least some of the values we want to define that future.  These tasks are not just exceptionally difficult, they are philosophically and politically contentious.  The dominant philosophy and social science of our day—economics— is biased against this task.  It elevates the metric of money as wielded by individuals above all else. Thus, the discipline from which we need great help in designing a compelling vision of a sustainable future is fundamentally opposed, or at least agnostic, to the tasks of explicitly negotiating the path we need to follow.  It rather leave that decision to the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s market, it rather our future be determined by countless, independent, partially informed, greed-driven decisions rather than a deliberate political decision based on values and principles.  I am not denying that fiscal capital is an essential and necessary component of sustainability, on the contrary, I accept it as necessary but not sufficient. We also need to be motivated by more than selfish greed.  Recall the old fable:

A man came upon workers at a construction site.  He asked one man, with the slumped body language of someone resenting his work, “What are you doing?” and the man answered, “I am laying bricks so I get paid.” He asked a second man, whose posture and humming suggested enthusiasm for his task, “What are you doing?” The man answered, “I am building a cathedral!”

Jesus and Mohammed told stories, so did Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.  Stories define a vision and build the will to create a future.  Stories instill courage and sacrifice.  They provide the will to use the capabilities we possess to address the challenges we see.  The theologian, environmentalist, and master storyteller Thomas Berry argued in Dream of the Earth that we need a new story to guide and discipline us as we move into the future.

It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in-between stories. The Old Story – the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story…We need a story that will educate us, a story that will guide, heal and discipline us. (p123)

Thomas Friedman, another powerful storyteller, also laments America’s loss of direction.  In his best-seller Hot Flat and Crowded he crafts a new, inspiring, patriotic story about living in and leading a world challenged by climate change, globalizing economy, and resource scarcities.

We need a story about a new path leading to a new future.  The story must be about more absolving responsibility to mindless pursuit of greater wealth and productive capacity—yes, we need wealth and capacity, but we need it for something.  We need to focus on what that future is.  We need a path leading to someplace tempting—where we will want to live in the future and will willingly, proudly sacrifice to get there.

We are, as David Brooks argues in his new book, a social animal, not an economic one. The choices of living cannot be separated from choices of building a society, they cannot be reduced to consumption and economic growth.  These choices require defining and acting on communal values and concerns, understood through story.  Sustainability represents a commitment to the future.  It is an investment in institutions, things, and places we value.  Sustainability means commitment to one another and to the biosphere. It means care.  Landcare.

Posted in Landcare | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Landcare 3: The Will to Act

Landcare 2: Paths Towards Sustainability

Posted on June 9, 2011 by admin

[Part 2 of 3: see 1 and 3]

It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny our situation is desperate.  Serious observers of trending conditions, even the optimists, now sound like Chicken Littles, pointing to perfect storm forming on the horizon: climate chaos, water wars, crumbling infrastructure, income inequalities, toxic body burdens, food riots, mass extinction and the host of other sky-is-falling trends reviewed in the previous blog.

Paths for navigating through these challenges are visible in the contours of popular culture.  Each path leads towards a different future with different opportunities and risks.  One path, popular because it resonates with the can-do American ethic, and because it is easy, advocates accelerating development of economic and technological capacities.  This path requires supreme confidence that capitalism will reward innovative solutions to all challenges such as those reviewed above, no matter what scope or scale.  Geo-engineering, for example, will control climate change by dispersing sun-blocking sulfate particles in the upper atmosphere or fertilizing oceans with iron. Rising oceans will be held back by dikes.  Crops faltering in hotter, dryer, saltier conditions will be re-invigorated through genetic engineering.  Depleted inland aquifers will be replaced by pumping in desalinated saltwater.  Civil unrest spurred by food riots will be solved by freer trade and greater corporate profits that trickle down to float all boats.  People taking this path are asked to be wise consumers, hard workers, to trust that the market will make wise decisions about our future, and to pass forward wealth so that future generations have more economic and technological capacities to deal with any messes left behind.

Another popular path places confidence not in human ingenuity, but in the Supreme Being.  God will provide. People following this path worship, work, and evangelism in preparation for the next life rather than worry about end of oil or climate change in this life. Free will requires fighting evil and resisting temptation.  It demands minimizing pain and suffering of people currently on earth by reducing poverty, improving access to clean water, and providing shelter, nutrition, and salvation.  It does not require global treaties on climate change that might jeopardize American power by weakening its economy with regulation.  Scientists suggesting that humans can endanger the climate or disrupt the biosphere are deemed arrogant and blasphemous because suggesting so implies that humans have god-like powers to re-direct the Almighty’s Plan for Creation.

A path increasingly, and unquestionably, ridiculed by neoliberalists, but fortunately still well tread, asks a paternalistic state guided by wise science to fix market failures and impose limits on excessive, harmful behaviors.  State and national laws and international treaties define acceptable behavior.  The inefficiencies and mild corruption associated with any large organization are tolerated, as are the invasion of privacy to track down and punish rogue elements and the restrictions of personal freedoms required for a regulated system to function. People on this path are asked to vote the right people into office, obey the law, and staff bureaucracies with honest and well-trained technicians assigned the difficult and thankless tasks of manage our problems.

An unpopular path, but the one advocated here, celebrates sacrifice and responsibility.  People on this path are asked to weigh the impacts of their actions on the larger community, which includes the land.  Reduce your ecological footprint and improve rather than exploit the quality of life of others.  Share resources and opportunities.  Pursue status and self-identity through family and community service, not materialism.  Promote literacy, sport, art, and giving and shun excessiveness, aggrandizement, entertainment and greed. Find meaning in life through improving the beauty, resilience, and vitality of the community.

The first three options have in common absolution of individual responsibility.  They allow us to ignore the implications of our actions on the impending moral, social, and environmental holocausts.  They also are risky.  We have one planet and thus only one shot at getting things right.  What happens if the market or government bureaucrats get it wrong?  What happens if God expects more of our stewardship than we have thus far interpreted?  Or what if no supernatural shepherd exists and fate is of our own making?

The forth option is harder but safer, and ultimately far more rewarding.  It requires compassion for others and for the larger land community.  More importantly, it requires engagement.  We must participate intentionally in making the world a better place.  Economic growth, blind faith, and scientific regulation are important and powerful tools, but they are insufficient for the tasks at hand.  A meaningful and good life requires us to do more.  It requires accepting responsibility; it requires caring about the consequences of our actions on all of creation; it requires stewardship; it requires land care.

Critics of this path claim it will take us back to the Stone Age.  They call its advocates luddites, socialists, and anti-American.  These shallow and rhetorical critiques ignore that the market, on occasions such as toxic pollutants and child labor exploitation, has been misdirected, or deny that some technological advances have created more problems than they solved. They ignore that the Bible also speaks about tending and caring, that God values the creation independently of its utility to satisfy human wants, that Jesus spoke clearly about treating others equitably, and that wealth accumulation can make access to heaven difficult (as difficult as it would be for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle).  Critics of an alternative path celebrate only indulgence and growth, they fail to recognize that sacrifice is part of our culture.  Americans donate time and money to church and community.  We send our children college.  We allow loved ones and neighbors to stand in harms way protecting our country and our ideals.  We resist temptations.  We do these things because we believe the prize is worth the sacrifice: community, family, freedom. Celebrating sacrifice does not mean wearing hair shirts and failing flesh, it does not preclude comfort, convenience, or entertainment.  It just places limitations on wants.  It questions entitlements.  It demands we ask questions of our life and our actions, that we be engaged in the community and not selfish, and that we care.

Sacrifice is hard.  We need good reasons to do it.  We need to know it won’t be in vain. Today’s challenges are daunting.   Why should we walk the difficult path?  Why should we invest our personal energy and attention caring about the impacts of our actions on the land?  Life is already too complicated, we already have too many demands on our time and resources.  And besides, how can one person make a difference?

Landcare requires the will to act, which is the topic of the third blog in this series.

Posted in Landcare | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Landcare 2: Paths Towards Sustainability

Landcare 1: The Problem

Posted on June 9, 2011 by admin

[Part 1 of 3: see 2 and 3]

Why don’t Americans debate landcare with the same passion as we debate healthcare?  We should.  Both are critical to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Healthcare understandably feels more immediate: we want the best care possible for family and friends and for ourselves when we are sick, and we know, firsthand, the incapacitating effects of illness. Perhaps landcare just seems less pressing; its connections to our day-to-day lives less obvious.  Potential problems seem to be far away, impacting peoples in other countries or politicians in another election.

However, it is increasingly hard to deny our situation is desperate: the Earth is Full. Serious observers of trending conditions, even the optimists, now sound alarmist. An increasingly familiar list of woes suggests it might be time to put landcare higher on our agenda.

  • Climate chaos seems inevitable.  Even if we implement the most progressive proposed policies being debated, we still are likely to attain an atmosphere with 450 parts of carbon per million, which will be both costly and hurtful. Rising sea levels will displace millions from coastal areas inland while expanding deserts pushing millions coastward.  Agriculture will be less efficient, relocated or destroyed.  Droughts will be more extreme and, paradoxically, floods more dangerous, with more intense and localize downpours. If carbon rises further or climate responds like some of the less conservative estimates suggest, then acidified oceans will dissolve coral and shells, disrupting food chains and ocean fisheries that feed millions.  Melting tundra and dehydrated rainforests will release their enormous stores of greenhouse gases, collected over millennia, triggering a significant climate flip, such as those that have caused previous mass extinctions, making modern civilization unsustainable. The Pentagon acknowledges that climate change might threaten US security more than terrorism.
  • Several billion young, poor, hungry, thirsty people are cramming into exploding urban systems worldwide, searching in futility for security, opportunity, and hope.  Destabilized political states seem inevitable.  Our complex and tightly stretched global supply chains that fill our stores with food, clothing, and trinkets are in danger of disruption without stable, capable trading partners.  Complex challenges such as climate change, nuclear disarmament, and water shortages will be neglected if governments become preoccupied by civil unrest.  American national defense agencies play war games preparing for global disruptions.
  • In 1950, only 5% of privately owned land had a structure every 40 acres; by 2005 it was 30%.  Nearly one million acres of productive farms and forests are “developed” every year.  Roads, roofs, and compacted soils become impervious to rain.  Gypsy moth, long-horned beetles, kudzu, fungi, disease, and other invasive species get inserted deep within native ecosystems, entirely rewriting species compositions.  House cats, no matter how well fed, destroy song bird populations.  Fences, property boundaries, and roads prevent plant and animal migration.  Water, schools, electricity and other municipal utilities get stretched, traffic congestion increased, and public transportation made infeasible.
  • The income gap between the poorest fifth of humanity and the richest fifth increased from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 by 2000. The wealthiest 101 US families quadrupled the percent of wealth they controlled between 1980 and 2000[1].  In 2008, 13.2 percent of the entire US population, and 19 percent of people under 18, were poor and unable to afford basic necessities. More than 1 in 100 American adults were incarcerated at the start of 2008, the highest documented rate in the world, with perhaps an equal number on probation or parole.
  • Fresh water is becoming sufficiently scarce to generate wars in some countries and legal action in ours.  Agriculture, in particularly the type supporting our meat rich diets, is depleting fossil aquifers faster than they can be recharged.  Biofuels, solar panels, and other green energy sources require intense amounts of water, which is not available where we most need it.   Major rivers no longer reach the sea, every drop diverted to human use.  Glaciers and snow packs no longer sustain summer flows.  Increased pavement and decreased vegetation speed away the rain into pipes, cement channels, and straightened rivers.
  • Dumping and trade of toxic wastes is so widespread that the EPA has a website for America’s most wanted toxic fugitives, people who dump here and escape prosecution. Electric power plants generate six million pounds of toxic combustion waste each year that must be disposed, somewhere.  The size and capacity of lungs of LA children are stunted by chronic smog. Most every American waterway now contains toxic heavy metals and the fish caught in half our lakes have mercury concentrations exceeding safe levels. We each bear a body burden of toxins—known to cause cancer, disrupt immune systems, and create birth defects—such as pesticides, flame retardants, wood preservatives, lead paint, phthalates, PCBs, and mercury.  Only a modest percentage of chemicals used in our industrial and food systems are rigorously tested. The additive and interactive effects of these chemicals are rarely tested. New chemicals are created daily.
  • The current rate of extinction is one of the fastest in all of Earth’s history—a rate comparable to the biodiversity collapse that vanquished mighty dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  Only a few of the world’s fisheries are healthy enough to sustain viable populations, most are heavily overfished, and many are imperiled or depleted.  Dead zones the size of New Jersey result from pesticide, nutrient, and soil running from our roads, yards and farms into the Gulf of Mexico. Bottle caps, plastic bags, medical wastes, and just about every other human artifact that floats aggregate on oceans into drifting monuments of neglect, one is twice the size of Texas.
  • Globalization allows capital to flow freely, thus manufacturing, processing, agriculture and forest industries relocate where labor and resources are cheapest and productivity greatest. The intensification of production and massive economies of scale benefit consumers with low priced goods, but society loses the local skill, aptitude, equipment, and ethic required to sustainably manage local lands and staff local institutions. Rural communities get drained of their talent and capacity to care for the land.  The heartland is depopulating.  Only the farmers, fishers, foresters lucky enough to be located in the most productive sites make profit margins that reward serious stewardship.  The others—by far the majority—must abandon their work or work nature harder, take shortcuts, and slowly but ultimate degrade natural capital.
  • Government capacity to tend and protect our green infrastructure is eroding.  National debt is mounting.  Agencies are retrenching.  Social and national security demand every greater portions of our budget, and investment through taxes has become unpatriotic.  The transportation system is starved and crumbling.  Water filtration systems are antiquated and inefficient. Healthcare costs now bankrupt middle class households, and will bankrupt the nation. Deliberative, respectful, civic discourse about land health has dissolve into bitter name calling: anyone worried about jobs is a greedy rapist of nature’s purity and anyone interested in nature is a watermelon—green on the outside and socialist red on the inside.
  • Green consumerism seduces materialists with an easy way out.  People buying hybrid cars and florescent light bulbs feel freed to build bigger houses and take longer showers. Consumers that carefully buy carbon credits to offset their air travel fly further and more often. Organic food gets transported thousands of miles to be available in season.  Money saved in operating energy efficient appliances gets spent refurnishing the bedroom.  In times of crisis, Americans shop.

How should we respond?   Paths for navigating through these challenges are visible in the contours of popular culture.  Each path leads towards a different future with different opportunities and risks.  One path stays the course, accelerating development of wealth and technological capacities.  Another path places confidence not in human ingenuity, but in the Supreme Being:  God will provide.  A third path, increasingly ridiculed, but still well tread, asks a paternalistic state guided by wise science to fix market failures and impose limits on excessive, harmful behaviors.  The forth path, landcare, is harder but safer, and ultimately far more rewarding.  It requires compassion for others and for the larger land community as well as political engagement and personal sacrifice.   Most importantly, it is within reach.  All we need is the will to act.

These paths are compared in the next blog.

[1] DUMÉNIL, GÉRARD, and DOMINIQUE   LÉVY. 2004 NEOLIBERAL INCOME TRENDS: Wealth, Class and Ownership in the USA. New Left Review 30, (November-December ).

Posted in Landcare | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Landcare 1: The Problem

Ecosystem Services: Perils of Pricing the Priceless

Posted on May 25, 2011 by admin

Nature, our landlord, does not send us a monthly utilities bill. The oxygen we breathe gets replenished for free.  So too our water gets filtered and stored, our wastes decayed and soil fertilized, cancer causing ultraviolet radiation blocked, and crops pollinated. Because these services are free of charge, we waste and neglect them; and we do so at our peril.

Economists, ecologists and accountants are working diligently to price ecosystems services so that they can be allocated more efficiently using the power of the market—they are giving Adam Smith’s invisible hand a green thumb. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), for example, released the Guide to Corporate Ecosystem Valuation in April of this year.  It makes a strong case for incorporating ecosystem service into business decisions and provides a method for doing so:

“Ecosystem degradation presents a real, and increasingly pressing, risk to business operations. A number of global initiatives have highlighted these issues over recent years, and are beginning to shed light on the value of ecosystem services and the cost of their degradation and loss … This affects businesses and impacts on corporate profits, production and market opportunities. The clear message to business is that the status and functioning of ecosystems is not just a biological or ecological concern. It has major implications for economic growth, human wellbeing and business performance….”

The aggregate value of ecosystem services is estimated to exceed the value of the total world economy and current accounting practices are said to ignore (economists say “externalize”) many trillions of dollars of costs.  Alarming trends such as aquifer depletion, climate change, and fisheries collapse suggest the age of ignorance must pass, so I certainly want to encourage efforts promoting full cost accounting that internalize ecosystem services into our capitalist economy.

However, I do want to caution us in thinking we can price everything and just leave decision making to market forces. We still need to deliberate which future we want to create.  The free market, even one informed by priced ecosystem services, will ignore qualities that make life worth living.  We must intentionally and explicitly celebrate values of nature that can’t be priced.  If we reduce all decisions to the lowest common denominator, we will reduce the value of our lives.

Nature provides profoundly meaningful, and for some, spiritual experiences. Standing at a dramatic vista or beside a babbling brook makes us feel small in comparison to the cosmological whole, a pebble on the beach of time.  These moments of connection inspire humility and awe that change lives and cultures in ways that cannot be priced.  It gets harder still to assign dollar values to identity, character, and moral fiber.  Loggers, farmers, and fishers fight hard to maintain their natural resource dependent communities and the identity and integrity their lifestyles promote.  Mountain bikers and hikers define themselves through the experiences, equipment, reading, and social life that revolve around their nature-based pursuits.  Communities commemorate their histories by establishing parks and families commemorate births and deaths by planting trees.  America has long recognized the connection between its culture and environment. Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, Rachael Carson, and Michael Pollan are just a few of our moral guides that used nature as reference.

Even if we could write the total value of nature on a price tag, we might not want to, if doing so leads to sin.  The Pope has warned against “a lack of due respect for nature [and] … the plundering of natural resources.” Muslims, Protestants, Jews, evangelicals, and pantheists have similar programs that preach tending and keeping God’s Creation. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created plants, animals, heaven and earth and, in Genesis, declared them “good,” possessing value independently of human needs, wants, or economy.  Pricing ecological services so they can be bought and traded tempts sin if such trades lead to degradation of God’s creation. It might make economic sense to pave over paradise, consume species out of existence, or emit health-degrading mercury from coal-powered electricity, but does it also violate a moral obligation?

The big decisions that define us, as individuals and as a culture, must be based on more than the cold economic rationality of price and efficiency.  These choices describe who we are and shape who we want to become. Putting all social ideals, not just environmental, on the same scale as the price of gasoline suggests we can trade our principles for profit.

We insist on freedom of speech, private property rights, democracy, and related ideals codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These ideas define us; they have been negotiated over centuries and defended by wars. We violate our ideals only after serious political debate, no matter how efficient or profitable the violations might be.  Previous generations of Americans deliberately bequeathed us not just economic wealth, but also ideals and principles.  Thanks to them we live in communities defined by free speech, representative democracy, museums, libraries, street trees, wilderness, and universities.  If they focused only on maximizing wealth and minimizing cost, we would be living in a different society, one that many of us would value less.

Recent acts of terrorism threatened the American way of life and questioned our core values.  Our response was resolute: we defend our values.  We continue to debate how to best mount this defense and the cost of doing so, but price is not the deciding factor.  Abortion, family values, and separation of church and state are similar socially defining topics for which information about price is largely irrelevant. We must make these decisions deliberately, using dialog, negotiation, education, and politics.  Our understandings of these issues mature through engaged deliberation, better decisions and a cultural identity result. Some environmental values are similarly priceless.  John Opie’s claim that America is nature’s nation is well founded. Environmental qualities not only sustain us, they define us. They are our future and our legacy.  We need courage and deliberation to create a future we will value, an environment where we will want to live, and an identity of which we will be proud.

Posted in Environmental Fundamentalism, Markets, Philosophy/ethics | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Ecosystem Services: Perils of Pricing the Priceless

The Benefit of Hindsight

Posted on May 21, 2011 by admin

Many Americans enjoy health, wealth, and convenience exceeding our ancestors’ wildest dreams, living better than royalty did just a few generations past.  These achievements were not cheap; in fact, they consumed much of our inherited natural capital.  Now we are questioning whether we can sustain this trajectory towards affluence or whether we are exceeding Earth’s capacities to sustain these lifestyles into the future. Given the benefit of hindsight, some of our past decisions that put us in this bind were immature and perhaps irrational.  I’d like to focus on some of the reasons we made the decisions we did, in the hopes that we can make better decisions in the future.

Fear: Early settlers and pioneers died of famine, cold, injury and disease. One of the first European efforts to settle in North America, the “lost” colony of Roanoke, disappeared in the time it took supply ships to return.  Jamestown, famous because it persisted, still lost half its people during the first year.  Nature was something to be fought and fenced out. Kill it or it killed you. Tame it our tame your aspirations.   We still justify actions because we fear famine, exotics, and change.

Ambition: The riches of our inheritance seduced us: clean water, plentiful game, fertile soil, tall forests, ample minerals … all endlessly abundant and there for the taking.  Early government policies encouraged exploiting natural resources to fuel the economy on which a nation could be built.  It was our Manifest Destiny to harness this natural capital and ensure the success of democracy. Waste, exploitation, and greed were good. Today, we continue to embrace these values by promoting economic growth above most other national goals.

Ignorance: We don’t see the intricate ecological systems supporting our lives and livelihoods.  When we flip the light switch, we receive no feedback that connects us to removal of mountain tops, burying of streams, and sickening of children with asthma.  When we buy the latest gadgets, we don’t see what it took to gather the materials, transform them into products, wrap and ship them to our stores, and bury them when discarded.  We attend, instead, to blaring messages promoting consumerism, career advancement, personal hygiene, and sexual prowess. We live in blissful ignorance, feeling no shame for the harm our actions cause.

Protectionism: Putting nature on a pedestal, wrapping it in the protective cocoon of public ownership and conservation easements, distracts us from the challenge of living sustainably.  Preservation ignores the struggles of life, the mutualism of a nurturing relationship, the give and take of partnership.  It separates people from nature rather than teaching us how to construct a sustainable lifestyle in nature.

Faith: We dismiss reports about a dangerously degraded biosphere because of faith that God or the market will provide: blind faith that solutions to environmental problems will appear when needed, either through miracles or though technological innovations and free market efficiencies. Environmentalists are alarmists with misplaced priorities, so this reasoning goes, because they lack faith.  Rather than follow their recommendations to sustain environmental systems, America should instead focus its energies on strengthening markets, developing technologies, reducing poverty, and saving souls.

The challenge of the 21st century is to move beyond fear, ambition, ignorance, protectionism, and blind faith to construct an honest and mature relationship with nature.  We need a new definition of progress, and a new understanding of the good life—one based on respect, compassion and love. We need to commit to the land like we commit to a family, making positive contributions for the generations that follow.  Sustainability comes from responsibility born of love. It requires human creativity to improve, refine, and enhance the land community. It requires responsible citizenship in the biotic community.  We must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Posted in Philosophy/ethics | Tagged , , | Comments Off on The Benefit of Hindsight

The F Word

Posted on April 15, 2011 by admin

Use the F word.  Go ahead. Feels good to turn heads and command attention, doesn’t it?   Those of us who care about sustainability need to sprinkle what we say with the F word.

Which F word did you use?  Several F words capture attention and motivate action: Fortune, Family, Faith, Freedom, Fairness, Fame, and Fun.  Were you thinking of another word?  You’re right, it certainly motivates behavior; but in polite company, it’s probably best to classify that activity as Fun.

Fear is another four letter F word that attracts attention.  But it is overused.  I recommend we deploy it infrequently and strategically.   Doom and gloom messages about timber famine, ecological collapse, the 6th great extinction, rising sea levels and related apocalyptic scenarios are red meat for environmental fundamentalists, but the same messages sound shrill and hollow to many who have faith in humanity and God.  Even if the fear message penetrates those we hope to motivate, the resulting fight or flight response is erratic and short-lived.  Fear generates a survival response prompting immediate action against a perceived threat: we strike out against the threat or flee from it.  Since the most pressing environmental challenges are hard to perceive and harder to affect, recipients of the fear message are left agitated and helpless, they may even resent the messenger.  We need another message, with carefully chosen words.

Look at national polls of what people care about.  The top issues typically include jobs and economy, war and national security, health care, budget deficits, taxes, and religion.  The “environment,” even biodiversity and climate, tends to be much further down list, often not showing up at all.

Can a sustainability topic become relevant in this hot political potato context? Can it even get discussed when so many other issues have lighten rods attracting media energy? Absolutely.  But not if we only use enviro-techno speak.  We need to link our message to values that dominate political debates, and frame messages in ways that illustrate sustainability’s social relevance. F words are key: Fortune, Family, Faith, Freedom, Fairness, Fame, and Fun.

Scientific and analytic tendencies often get in the way of mobilizing political action because these practices, unfortunately, intentionally try to ignore values and we end up talking about things most people don’t care about.  Moreover, we deceive ourselves and insult others by thinking scientific advice deserves credibility because it is value free (it is not). A typical response of a science-trained environmental professional to those who disagree with them is to offer them education: “if only they know what we know, then they would agree with our advice!”  Attempting to educate the public to think like us is not only arrogant, it is ineffective.  Not only do we need to change our message (the topic of this blog), we probably should change our research and professional goals to reflect pressing social concerns (a topic for another blog, or three!).  We have much work to do, but success is within reach.

Allow me to focus on forests as an example.  Forests are a difficult sell.  They rarely make it into the light of public debate, and if they do, it is usually about deforesting the tropics or burning homes with wildfire—i.e., narrow but charismatic issues that ignore most of the challenges and benefits of forests. In this way, forests are like most other environmental topics—technical, nuanced, and difficult to sell with a sound bite.

Few efforts better illustrate the convergence of forests, sustainability, and real politics than the 1992 United Nations’ Earth Summit. The summit produced, among many things, a Statement of Forest Principles and a plan of action for the 21st century called Agenda 21, which resulted in a meeting in Montréal in 1993 that began the process of identifying indicators to defining sustainable forests.  The Montréal Process continues today to expand its relevance to different forest types and to refine and monitor specific indicators that countries use to evaluate the sustainability of their forests.  The Montréal Process indicators are to be applied to all the forests and thus provide a means to hold each country to comparable standards—a laudable and important goal.

Seven criteria are used to define sustainable forests.  They are framed within the technical rationality of ecological and economic science (see the chart below). Each criterion, in turn, has multiple specific indicators that lend themselves to affordable and reliable measurement: hectares in forest, numbers of species, tons of forest products. Unfortunately Montréal criteria and indicators do little to capture public attention or portray social value.  We need some F words!

Fortunately, these criteria and indicators can be cross-walked to freedom, family, fortune, faith, fun, and fame.   For example, freedom is closely aligned with homeland security, which is enhanced to the extent we have a reliable supply of forest products to fuel our economy and meet our future energy needs, and to the extent we can mitigate terrorism via wildfire.  Freedom is also associated with private property rights, which is a specific indicator in Montréal; many landowners fear losing the freedom to use their forests as they see fit.  Forests also deliver family values in the form of clean water, flood prevention, and clean air that protect the health and safety of loved ones.  Forests also provide good, wholesome entertainment and privacy.  Fortune, obviously, is easily linked to forest related jobs, investments, and economic impacts that are well represented in the list of criteria.  The linkages between forests and carbon bring climate change to the fore, which others successfully link to family safety, economic development, and national security.

Faith is a powerful frame for America, especially during this era of religious revival.  Most religious denominations now preach environmental stewardship, some even promote Creation Care as a path to salvation.  Conserving biological diversity can be framed as stewarding God’s Creation.  People worship God in nature, communing with the Word written directly by the hand of God. The Bible is a book inspired by God but translated by humans–Creation is God’s first Good Book.  Spiritual people outside the mono-theistic traditions worship spirits dwelling on Earth, manifesting in other life forms. Even the agnostics among us find deep spiritual meaning in wild places and wild things, experiencing oneness with the cosmic process of evolution or a smallness relative to universal scale.

Forest-based fun is certainly not trivial, and is probably underrepresented in Montreal indicators.  Much of our early conservation successes can be credited to hunters, anglers, birders, hikers, photographers, and other avid recreationists, such as Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, John Burroughs, and members of outdoor organizations such as the Boone and Crocket Club, the Sierra Club, and the Boy Scouts[1].  Visits to natural areas continue to nurture a political consistency for land management agencies and fuel regional economies through tourism.  In fact, most people think of forests as parks.

Montreal ignores two Fs. Most importantly, indicators of fairness are missing. It is difficult to tell who gets the jobs, profits, recreation opportunities, clean water, and other benefits sustainable forests produce.  Lessons from environmental justice suggest that the distribution of environmental benefits and costs is not always fair. Wealthy and powerful groups probably capture more of the profits and amenities associated with forests while poor minorities get exposed to more pollution and environmental degradation. The second F missing from Montreal, personal fame, is a significant motivation for personal action in our culture.  People work and sacrifice to achieve social status and personal dignity.  Montreal ignores the social standing of professionals and advocates within the forest community.  Regrettably, forest and environmental professionals tend to be held in relatively low regard compared to lawyers, doctors, architects and other professionals that service society’s needs.  Clearly we have work to do to prove to others our relevance.

Perhaps the most important but least emphasized consequence of the Montreal Process is social learning.  Building on the adage that it is easier to create a future than to predict it, planning processes such as Montreal provide opportunities for stakeholders to learn about cultural and ecological systems, respect and influence each others’ values, and collaboratively craft scenarios and motivate actions that lead society towards a sustainable future.

Social learning occurs because the planning process situates people in the unfolding trajectory of history, giving us roles, defining settings, and giving direction.  It thereby motivates and engages us in creating that future.  By articulating criteria and indicators of sustainability, we identify and refine our values.  By using the indicators to monitor changing conditions, we learn whether our individual and institutional behaviors are having desired effects; whether we moving towards or away from desired future conditions.  And perhaps most importantly, as desired conditions become realized or sacrificed, we learn about ourselves, our values and what we deem to constitute a thriving and sustainable society.

We likely will change our minds along the way. For example, Montreal has defined sustainability in narrow ecological and economic terms.  In the future, as we succeed in producing these conditions, we may realize that other criteria are also important, or even more important.  We may want to focus less on the content of the forest (hectares, species, tons) and more on the ecological processes and ecosystem services that flow in and from the forest.  We may come to more greatly value the cultural opportunities and local economies that flourish when communities are surrounded by working forests.  We may emphasize less the products and more the experiences of a sustainable forest.

By engaging in a process, by attending to the consequences of living, by being explicit about what we value and why, we can invent thriving, sustainable and resilient communities.
Example Montréal Process Indicators of Sustainability

Criterion Example Indicator
Conservation of Biological Diversity
  • Area of forest ecosystem type, successional stage, age class, and forest ownership
  • Number of native forest species
Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems
  • Annual harvest of wood products
  • Annual harvests of non-wood products
Ecosystem Health and Vitality
  • Forest affected by insects, disease, fire, storm, … beyond reference conditions
Soil and Water
  • Proportion of forest activities that meet best management practices
  • Area and percent of forest with significant soil degradation
Forest Carbon Cycles
  • Forest carbon pools and fluxes
Socio-economic benefits
  • Value of wood and wood products
  • Capital investment and expenditure in forest related industries and activities
  • Employment in forest sector
  • Forests available for public recreation
  • Forests managed to protect cultural, social, and spiritual values
Legal, Institutional, and Economic Capacity
  • Clear property rights
  • Periodic forest inventory and planning
  • Enforced laws and regulations

[1] Opie. Nature’s nation.  Huth 1957.

Posted in Forests, Leadership, Philosophy/ethics | Tagged , | Comments Off on The F Word

Talking Higher Ground

Posted on March 8, 2011 by admin

I walked past a bumper sticker the other day:  I’ll keep my guns, ammo, and money.  You can keep the “change.”

I chuckled at the clever wording, but so strongly disagreed with the implications that I sat down and drafted this blog.   Obama was calling for a change of perspective from the individualist, consumerist, anti-community rhetoric of Bush-era neoliberalism that paints anyone who speaks in favor of community as socialist, evil, anti-American and wrong-headed.

I think we do need a change. I believe we will be better if we invest in each other—if we see ourselves as citizens and members of the community rather than as isolated individual consumers. I’ll willingly sacrifice my personal interests to make us better.  I value you more for your contribution to our community than for the dollars you spend in the store.

To use a familiar sporting analogy, there is no “I” in “team.”  It’s the best teams that win championships, not the teams with the best stars.  Just like in football and basketball, teamwork, synergy, and attitude matter.  Yes, popular media celebrates the star, but the coach applauds the successful play requiring unselfish acts.

Don’t get me wrong.  It is fine to ask: “what is in it for me?”  And, yes, excellence should be rewarded.  But there can be too much of a good thing.  The obsession with the ownership society has a serious downside.  Unwillingness to question where the invisible hand of the free market takes us created massive holes in our middle class body politic.  As the power of moderates and moderation have drained away, fear mongering and divisiveness have increased.  The result is paralysis.

Our house will not stand when divided.  We cannot buy our way to prosperity. We cannot build a future on debt. We cannot prosper once we’ve consumed all natural capital. We cannot thrive if our ecosystems no longer nurture us.  We cannot make good decisions if we’ve cannibalized the political process for political gain. We must invest rather than consume and restore rather than degrade.

Plenty of higher ground exists, if we have the courage to climb there. We can reduce energy costs and increase national security.  Rather than welfare, we can create jobs that clean air and water. We can promote ecological and social entrepreneurship rather than hand out entitlements.  On this higher ground exist endless solutions that satisfy both progressives and conservatives.  These solutions promote prosperity and community.  They create a future where we want to live.  They can be realized because we believe in them and we willingly sacrifice to make them happen.

Yes we can.  But only if we tolerate some change.

Posted in Philosophy/ethics | Comments Off on Talking Higher Ground

Engaging Nature

Posted on March 3, 2011 by admin

Even within the cocoon of suburbia I occasionally engage nature: walking to work when the snow is too deep to drive, clearing roots, rocks and earth to construct hiking paths, chopping trees into pieces to be burned for heat, planting vegetables for summer salads, digging ditches to dry a damp basement,  pushing a lawnmower, trimming back an aggressive vine. Upon each engagement this modern, suburban, male learns something of how nature works, of its brutality, its indifference, its frailty, its beauty, and its infinite connections into and through my life. The magnitude of each lesson reflects the intensity of labor. Labor invokes intention—purpose that gives meaning.  Some labors struggle against nature’s currents, others float downstream, but no labor can be indifferent.  It requires investment. It makes things personal.

When I look where I worked I see both nature and me. I think about the future.  I evaluated both short and long term consequences. I focus on the relationship and calculate how to sustain a lasting, informed, caring partnership.  If either partner fails, the project fails.

I engage nature during leisure: clinging to a raft ricocheting down river rapids, hiking century old trails, chasing fading ridgelines along the Blue Ridge Parkway, watching trees grow out the office window or African tigers mating on nature-TV.  Some of these experiences engage me through the sublime, captivate me with beauty, and inspire me because of complexity.  Other leisure experiences just entertain. They distract me.

I also engage nature through my wood-frame house: it provides the roof over my head and the walls that keep out rain and wind.  I engage nature when I turn on my electric lights, drive my hybrid, eat dinner, wash my hands, and breathe. I often forget how engaged I am.  I don’t see the links between daily activities and natural “resources” and ecosystem “services.”  Food comes from supermarkets, electricity comes from wall sockets,  waste drain down sinks, and resources and services get delivered because I pay with dollars.  I don’t see the fertilizers, biocides, and vast monocultured acreages supporting my diet.  I don’t hear the mountain tops pushed into streams.  I don’t smell my sewage being burned back into the air I breathe.

Ignorance has consequences. A partnership ignored does not last long. We must be deliberate so we remain respectful. We must remain attentive so we can be nurturing.  We must remain engaged so we can create a future that sustains us all.

Posted in Philosophy/ethics | Comments Off on Engaging Nature

Who Should You Thank?

Posted on January 8, 2011 by admin

You sure are one lucky #!%.  By accident of birth-species, you are conscious, feel love, and are intelligent enough to marvel at life’s wondrous complexities.  By accident of birth-time, you can survive a broken leg, a tooth abscess, a childhood virus, and a bad case of diarrhea.  By accident of birth-place, you can read, drink clean water, and fall asleep in safety.  You might be one of the ultra-lucky who drives a car, air-conditions a home, and owns a computer hooked up to the internet.  You have more health, hope, comfort, understanding, and safety than most any other past or present life on earth.  You live high on the hog, better than royalty just a few generations past.

Who do you thank for your good fortune?

For the religious faithful, the answer is the Almighty: God will provide. For the humanist, the answer is creativity: inventors solving urgent problems get rewarded with market riches.  Both the religious and the humanist explanations can be problematic if they distract us from respecting mounting environmental challenges. Faith in God can lead to environment apathy and ignorance in this life in deference to preparations for the next.  The humanist risks hubris—seeing no challenge as insurmountable and human ingenuity more important than soil, water, or climate.

I’m more pragmatic, and much more humble.  I thank random chance and dumb luck.  The dice of evolution could have fallen differently: Homo Sapiens might not be here had the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed earth. I thank accidental gene mutations that stumbled into body symmetry, visual acuity, consciousness, and compassion.  I thank fossil fuel.  The food, water, shelter and comfort so cheaply and readily available to the fortunate few would not be possible without pools of power gifted from past generations, conveniently stored just a pin prick below earth’s crust.  We would live very different lives if we relied on our own energy to produce what we consume.  Cheap energy grows corn, powers earth movers, smelts steel, and purifies silicone.  Coal, gas, oil, and tar are free.  We pay a modest fee to process these ancient stores of power, but mostly we pay only what it cost to transport it from where it lies dormant to where it gets used: gas tanks, electric outlets, fertilizers, and plastics.

I thank tinkerers who stumbled onto gears, antibiotics, and transistors, and I thank courageous politicians willing to invest in very expensive, very risky, and much more difficult technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering, that likely hold the keys to our future.  I also thank ancestors who had the courage to invest in social experiments that gave us science, banking, education, and democracy.

I hope we have the good sense and humility to realize that our success as a species is tenuous and not guaranteed.  I hope we accept our good fortune and turn our attention to the significant challenges awaiting us.  It is time for us to grow up and recognize what we have been given.  Mother nature can no longer suckle us; she is abused and worn. It is time we accept responsibility for our future, see through our ignorance, overcome arrogance, act sustainable, and practice stewardship. From here on out, we are responsible for our destiny. Humility, not complacency or arrogance, are required if we are to thrive in a finite biosphere dominated by human industry.  The natural life-support systems and resource reservoirs we chanced upon and used to build human civilization are now failing and exploited. We might not like our chances when our luck runs out.

Posted in Philosophy/ethics | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Who Should You Thank?