Our misuses of nature are not due chiefly to any lack of information, whether about nature or about how we’re altering it. Nor are they due especially to any lack of green technology, although better technology, like better facts, might well help. A rising world population, to be sure, does add stresses to the planetary system. But population is by no means the chief problem (rising per capita consumption is more acute) and populations in many regions have stabilized. The major culprit, the central cause of our misguided acts, is modern culture broadly understood. As we’ve seen, culture includes the ways we perceive nature and make sense of it, the ways we value what we see, and the ways we understand our place in the natural order. It has to do with our moral orders, our time frames of understanding, and our confidence in our cleverness. We shouldn’t be surprised that our cultural trajectory has led us to where we are, that it hasn’t developed in ways that pay proper attention to today’s environmental ills. Our evolutionary trajectory as living beings did not adapt to them because there was no need. Our developing moral ideals have also not embraced these problems, not as we need them to, mostly because morality develops slowly and our environmental ills are comparatively recent. But moral order evolves. Culture has and does change.
A more land-respecting culture can in fact emerge, including sounds ways of seeing and valuing nature. Further, the path leading in that direction, if people could only look down it, should offer much that is appealing to us. To move ahead, though, a major reform movement is needed, a movement that seeks nothing less than revisions in our culture’s trajectory. This will involve something far different and grander than the well-known civil rights reform efforts of recent generations. For starters, we need to recognize the nature and scope of the vital work that lies ahead. We have not yet done so, and reform efforts have stumbled because of it.
In a perceptive recent study, The Age of Fracture, Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers traces the many ways American society after World War II became more fragmented and individualistic. Over the era society gave decreasing attention to social ties, context, and common interests with a greater commitment instead to self-selected, fluid identities and to a worldview dominated by the market and competition. “Strong metaphors of society,” Rodgers reports, “were supplanted by weaker ones.” “Conceptions of human nature that . . . had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire.” What changed most of all, Rodgers contends, “were the ideas and metaphors capable of holding in focus the aggregate aspects of human life as opposed to its smaller, fluid, individual ones.”1
This change in tone and cultural focus showed up clearly in the shifting presidential rhetoric between the Carter years and those of the mid- to late Reagan years. While he was president, Carter “talked easily of humility, mercy, justice, spirit, trust, wisdom, community, community and ‘common purpose.’” He carried forward in doing so language used often by his predecessors. There was John Kennedy’s famous admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you. . . .” There was President Nixon’s contention that no man was truly whole “until he has been part of a cause larger than himself. “To go forward at all,” Nixon had said in his First Inaugural, “is to go forward together.” Once settled in office, President Reagan shifted to more self-centered rhetoric. He encouraged individuals to pursue self-actualization, to imagine how they might get ahead separately. “Reagan’s word-pictures of the people,” Rodgers records, “almost never showed them working together, their energy and talent joined in common action.” Reagan pioneered the use of the personal story of the individual rising up against adversity, often pressing against society and government. “In Reagan’s very celebrations of the people, the plural noun tended to slip away, to skitter toward the singular.”2 A well-guided effort at environmental reform will need to propel our shared thinking, our shared culture, in a different direction.
Contemporary public culture—putting aesthetics and tribal loyalties to one side—intermingles three major cultural components. All have played roles in earlier chapters, but it is useful to invite them back on stage, to see how they work in tandem and to reveal how their limitations account for and track the flaws in modern culture.
Perhaps the major building block of current culture is the constellation of ethical values and understandings long embedded in Christianity and pushed forward in Western society by the church and Christian writers. As Oxford historian Larry Siedentop charts in his insightful overview, Inventing the Individual, it was Christianity—with borrowings from ancient Greek culture—that raised high the individual human as a morally worthy being, created in the image of God. As it did so Christianity challenged earlier moral orders that embedded people into families, clans, and tribes and that understood them chiefly as parts of organic orders, which were themselves the chief repositories of value. Over the centuries, Christianity slowly called into question these organic orders and the hierarchies and wide status-differences that they endorsed. Implicit in the new religion was an ideal of equality, reflecting the basic moral importance of all individuals. Individuals as such counted, the church said, which meant, in time, that individuals as such—contra earlier thought—were properly understood as moral agents. An individual could walk away from her family and take up the cross; an individual as such could leave home and join a monastic order. Judgment and salvation came to center on the unique personal soul. Compassion and respect were the new guiding ideals. The family as such counted for much less; moral identity was no longer intertwined with civic membership or engagement.
Christian social ethics brought vast gains, to be sure. But it needs noting that Christianity, for all the moral value that it put forth, presented a quite constricted moral vision overall, one that dealt almost exclusively with one-on-one dealings among people. Christian morality did not offer a plan for a just, durable society, or anything close to it. It did not talk about the welfare of communities as such. It said nothing directly about the common good, except by highlighting how society should respect individuals and honor their equal moral value. Nature was not even in the picture and it certainly no longer contained hidden spirits. By implication only humans possessed moral value; they were best understood as autonomous individuals; and future generations counted for little. Christianity certainly encouraged individuals to share their wealth and aid the poor, but it also encouraged individuals to look after themselves and their futures, opening the way for cultural shifts that fostered self-concern, hard work, and affluence.
This Christian social order, in both its religious and (increasingly) secular garb, played a key role in the origins of the second major component of today’s public culture, the component having to do with political rights and, by extension, individual rights generally. The notion of human rights dates back earlier than commonly thought. Siedentop embeds it in the High Middle Ages with the writings of church scholars on natural law and, later, natural rights. As already considered, rights-based thinking in secular form stood tall in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly in political realms. Particularly as expressed in the US Bill of Rights and related iterations, individual rights had to do with how the individual fit into the body politic. Rights were largely procedural in the sense that they played roles in new systems of popular governance. The aim was to create a political engine that would avoid oppression and, when possible, work for the common good (the “general Welfare,” as the US Constitution put it). This rights-thought did not propose any particular vision of the common good. No more than Christian social ethics did it include an image or plan of a healthy community as such. It too had nothing to say about nature and human dealings with it. It too recognized moral value only in humans now living and presented them as autonomous beings. Rights-rhetoric, in short, was offered as one piece of a new moral and cultural order, a narrowly drawn solution to the political crisis of the day.
For generations Christian social ethics and the language of political rights worked in tandem. They were adequate to keep society moving along, particularly when strengthened by inherited ideas of individual virtue (honesty, integrity) that sank older, secular roots. Indeed, the two cultural components together supplied an impressive array of intellectual and moral tools that social and political reformers could put to good use, particularly civil rights campaigners. And they did so, even as public arenas became more secular in form and as the Christian origins of social ethics were veiled or forgotten.
What we now can see, what we need to see, is that these two cultural inheritances, the centerpieces of modern public morality, rest on problematic assumptions and have vast gaps. They are distinctly human-centered, with little room to recognize moral value diffused in other life forms and communities. The Jewish scriptures—the Christian Old Testament—included passages that honored God’s creation, but core Christian teachings made little room for them. Both moral orders, as noted, focused on the present alone, and both exalted the individual as independent moral agent. Had political rights been kept in their proper place—as safeguards to ensure good government—they might not have gained the great influence that within a century they did. But they expanded their reach as economic elites, in their efforts to ward off government controls, began to contend that the protection of these rights was a chief end of good government, not merely a procedural component of it. The common good, that is, became increasingly defined in terms of respect for individual rights, particularly liberty and private property.
Social ethics and political rights, then, worked well to drive various civil rights campaigns and related initiatives to help individuals. But as a repository of intellectual and moral reform tools, the combination had almost nothing to offer to help interpret and remedy looming environmental ills. Worse, with the dominance of social ethics and political rights in the public realm—and by the late twentieth century they had certainly become dominant—little room remained for other moral ideals to squeeze in. Moral value, again, seemed limited to individual living humans. On the political side, the rising emphasis on individual liberty cast grave doubt on the legitimacy of health and safety regulation. Indeed, to respect liberty in its various forms (particularly private property) was to call into question most steps that a government might take to promote the common good, including healthy landscapes. Similarly, a stress on liberty greatly affected ways of dealing with human ignorance and nature’s incredible complexity. A virtue-based approach could build on humility and embrace a cautionary attitude, minimizing changes to nature when consequences were unknown. A liberty-based approach, in contrast, insisted on a much different stance. With liberty held high, individuals as such—the business owner, the property owner, the wealthy consumer—were entitled to charge ahead, acting as they saw fit, unless critics could offer clear proof of looming harm. Rights largely trumped virtue. Ignorance offered a green light, not a yellow or red one.
Both social ethics and political rights, of course, have had their advocates. And they retain respect, both because important truths and values lie within them and because their track records are impressive. But to admit this is not to refute the high costs that have come by giving them such dominant roles in the collective moral order. They do not, as reviewed at length, supply adequate tools to distinguish the legitimate use of nature from the abuse of it. When it comes to talking about our natural homes and good living, they constrain the talk, question its public legitimacy, and push it into the realm of individual choice—not fully or successfully, to be sure, but with great effect. At the same time, their dominance and aura make it hard for us to identify the root cultural causes of land abuse. And to the extent observers point toward cultural flaws, they are readily pushed aside. A common defensive move is the claim that the values critics promote (moral value in other species, for instance) are simply matters of personal choice, ones for individuals to embrace in private life. When that doesn’t work, the bigger defensive guns are rolled out: Critics are condemned, in so many words, as moral traitors—as misanthropes, socialists, and agents for overweening government.
Social ethics and political rights, in short, do not merely dominate the public moral arena. They go further to resist inroads by new ways of moral thought. They are, one might say, jealous of their hegemony.
Standing along with these two cultural components is a third one, every bit as important and overbearing even as it modestly veils its moral influence: the capitalist market. In key ways it has come forward over the generations to fill-in major gaps in social ethics and political rights, particularly by structuring the ways we perceive and value nature. In doing so, significantly, it has also pushed hard against both social ethics and political rights so that its realm and power continue to wax. In tandem with them, the capitalist market has added to the current difficulties faced by green interests and other moral reformers.
The moral grounding of the capitalist market overlaps considerably with the pillars of social ethics and political rights just described. It too, as we have seen, honors the individual as such, the consumer and worker. It exalts not the morally equality of Christianity or the political equality of the Bill of Rights but rather the market’s willingness to accept all people, regardless of traits, based on the money and skills they have on offer. Individual agency is respected—putting to one side the grave inequalities of economic power—and liberty is barely restrained. Where the capitalist market goes further is in supplying ways to think about nature, as a warehouse of fragmented commodities. The market also gives content to the common good and “general Welfare” with its emphasis on overall economic activity, measured day by day. Market activity, in turn, is linked in theory to the satisfaction of individual preferences, so they too play a role, providing home for all manner of individual moral quirks. The market thus has its own power-tool to ward off alternative moral values and visions: it pushes them all into the category of individual preferences, where they cause little disruption. In the view of market defenders, the market is not just consistent with a democratic ethos but the apotheosis of it—putting to one side, of course, inequality in economic resources. And if government would simply get out of the way, then the market could similarly exalt individual liberty.
When economic productivity stands as the central pillar of the common good, it becomes yet harder for environmental critics to put forth alternative moral visions for collective rather than individual embrace. It becomes harder, indeed, even to talk about collective values and goals in language other than that of personal preference. In this way, the market defends and keeps secure the primacy of individual moral worth, equality, and political liberty. Yet, even as the market seems to respect these core moral values it quietly but consistently works to cut into them. The market honors greed and purports to turn that vice into virtue; as it weakens longstanding moral criticisms of greed and gambling, the realm of social ethics contracts. As it exalts free choice the market implicitly calls into question longstanding moral condemnations of such choices, particularly by the wealthy. If liberty and equality mean letting people make their own choices, then who is to second-guess the choices people might make? Indeed, when the public good equals high economic activity, then those who produce and consume lavishly are honored market participants, if not immune from moral criticism then at least protected by a sturdy defensive shield.
Added to the mix here is the message that the market cleanses. Market participants bargain at arms-length and are responsible for their personal choices, and only their choices. Consumers thus need worry neither about the costs and means of producing their goods nor about the ill effects of waste disposal. On the other side, producers who simply respond to market forces—who do what other producers are doing—are often similarly absolved of guilt. As for Christian sharing, it too gets pushed into the realm of individual preference; it is not, or no longer, a moral principle to guide action in the public realm. Once recast as an individual preference, of course, Christian sharing largely ceases to provide grounds for public moral criticism. Even with respect to private actions, selfish behavior is protected by the shared norms of individual liberty and individual respect. The wealthy magnate who shares nothing is not of course fully insulated from all criticism: Virtues still carry weight, as do Christian scriptures. But the moral criticism is deflected by the principles of free choice. The same story unfolds in the case of land abuse, similarly shielded from moral criticism by liberty, equality, and private property.
Just as it erodes the realms of social ethics and virtue in these ways, so too the market cuts into the practical reach of individual political rights. Most evidently (as noted in the last chapter) economic elites are slowly taking over governments and manipulating them to their advantage. Constitutionally protected property rights have long been used as means to curtail the public sphere; for instance, public downtown arenas, once the classic arenas of free speech, have been replaced by private shopping malls where the First Amendment does not apply. More recently, claims of religious freedom by the wealthy help insulate private practices (discriminatory hiring, for instance) that infringe the rights of others.
Step by step, so it seems, the market and its embedded views of the world are taking over more space on the public stage. They are squeezing out both social ethics and political rights and, in the process, making it ever harder for advocates of new moral orders to gain traction.
In terms of the weaknesses of this overall moral landscape, taking the three components in combination, a quick summary seems useful.
• As repeatedly noted it is an overall moral order focused on individual humans living today, with no real recognition of broader morality in the world except as individuals want to recognize such value in their individual affairs.
• The market alone, with its GDP worship, provides the only real measure of the common good (public safety aside) and the only measure too of how we ought to perceive and value nature.
• Ecological interconnections and interdependencies do not register, any more than do large-scale landscapes (the Mississippi River basin as a whole, for instance) that cannot be bought or sold.
• One can ransack these moral components and still have no good tools to distinguish land use from land abuse, save in the grossly inadequate language of individual preference and economic efficiency.
• Future generations and other life forms are also drawn in, barely, in just this tenuous way.
• Armed with the language of liberty and private property, land abusers can insist that allegations of harmful conduct be supported with vast if not unimpeachable scientific evidence, virtue be damned.
• In this restricted moral order it becomes ever more confusing to make normative sense of nature’s dynamism: if nature itself changes, how can green groups claim that human-caused changes disrupt some moral order?
• Similarly it becomes hard to respond to contentions that the market will harness human cleverness and solve problems when and as they arise. To challenge this presumption is to propose and prove a negative, always a formidable task.
Then there are two matters that perhaps rise above the others. One is the current tendency to accept and embrace competition as the proper means of social interaction in economic matters, including most dealings with nature. The market induces and rewards competition and self-seeking behavior, viewing nature instrumentally as raw materials. Political liberties provide no brake on this behavior. Social ethics could protest but they have little effect once confined, as they largely are, to the private realm of individual choice. To honor competition this much is to call into question all other methods of collective decision-making. It is to cabin individuals within their roles as market participants—as consumers rather than citizens—thereby foreclosing critical collective options.
Atop these factors is the matter of nature’s limits: the fact that our physical planet, though daily bathed in energy, is defined in size and physical resources; defined in terms of overall water flows and waste-handling capacities; defined in terms of the ways that it operates through ecological processes; defined in terms of its life forms. The market admits of no limits; it consumes and exhausts whenever profit beckons. Private ownership usefully checks the ravish-and-run mentality, but only partially and only when owners by choice act well. As for the other two components of our moral order, they are even quieter when it comes to nature’s limits. Social ethics is about sharing what we have today; the religious language of stewardship, of caring for the long term, is a recent add-on and fits in little better than environmental concerns generally. Individual political liberties, far from resisting competition, are largely consistent with a culture and political order that saps nature with alacrity.
This, then, is where we are now. This is the scheme of public values that we need to change, as the central, overarching focus of reform efforts. As explored below, a key reform step is to demote the market from its status as moral co-ruler and embed it in a sound moral and ecological order. The market needs to stay; market-based tools can be of value. It is the market as moral arbiter that needs revision, the market as controller of nature, the market that displaces citizen decision-making and pushes so many moral values into the private realm. As for social ethics and political rights, they do, of course, need to keep important roles. But these moral components too need to share the stage with new understandings and moral visions.
Earlier chapters explored at length the varied normative factors relevant in drawing the vital line between the legitimate use of nature and its abuse. The line is one that will need drawing and redrawing in particular landscapes, acknowledging local conditions and needs and eliciting the best normative thought local people can bring to bear. For reasons noted, the relevant factors are best considered and applied at varied spatial scales. It isn’t possible to look at a single field or forest and make final judgments about the good use of it. A parking lot, all paved, could rightly qualify as the good use of nature when properly considered at various large spatial scales, if in fact it helps meet important human needs and is situated so that it does not interfere with achieving other values.
Good line-drawing will be done, as noted, on an all-things-considered basis. It is not sensible or useful to validate a land use simply because it helps promote one relevant factor of good land use when it does nothing to promote, and by exclusion tends to undercut, other relevant components. The mistake is far too common: we see, for instance, that a field grows food, note that we require food, and then stamp our approval. It cannot be this easy.
Reformers need to recognize and insist that this line-drawing work unfold as public business, subject to collective decision-making, even as landowners are left free to choose among healthy options. Nature is, after all, our common home. And it is work that involves normative choices. Yes, scientific facts are essential. But science taken alone, for the reasons covered, cannot alone draw this line well or even at all.
Sustainability, as noted, is no more than a feeble step as a line-drawing effort. Let us term it an initial foray, a youthful try, to be followed by more mature ones. The call to promote ecosystem services is a little better, but only a bit. It does arise out of a normative claim that we ought to keep nature productive, and to that extent is good and sound. But the moral content here is quickly clothed in science-sounding language, and then subjected to detailed scientific research and economic number-crunching, leading to number-laden reports intended to show why it makes good economic sense today, in GDP terms and for living individual humans, to keep nature productive. Advocates of ecosystem services know well that good-functioning systems will also help other life forms and benefit future generations. But it sometimes seems that these points are kept quiet as if not really pertinent, or as if they were incidental benefits that we gain when and only when the protection of ecosystem services makes sense without them. In too many ways, ecosystem services, like sustainability, comes across as a variant on the sustained-yield language of the Progressive Era. It is the old idea in slightly better garb: Nature exists merely to meet our needs, we can understand it in instrumental terms (empty of moral value on its own), and we can plow ahead based on facts and reason with little recognition of our ignorance.
The major problem with ecosystem services—even as it represents a real step forward—is that it doesn’t challenge cultural values as such. Only indirectly does it hint that we need to see and appreciate nature in different terms. It does not address basic questions about the diffusion of moral value in the world. It puts itself forward as a good idea simply in prudential terms, and it competes with other prudential, money-measured land-use alternatives. It is not framed as, or incorporated within, anything like the kind of frontal, moral challenge that is needed to reorient society. Just as bad, it doesn’t call into question any material element or moral message of the capitalist market. It is, in truth, a way to slip a bit of ecological content into sustainability without really rocking the boat; without demanding, in a way that stands out, that the normative trinity of social ethics, political liberties, and market capitalism make room for a new, major player. It is deficient, that is, in the way that most environmental rhetoric is deficient—it speaks to people where they now are, with language consistent with the ways they think.
Environmental reform efforts need to draw attention to our overriding, shared need to succeed at our oldest task, which requires, among other labors, that we engage in the serious public work of discussing how we ought to live. That work needs to engage the hopes and ideas of many people. That being so, it won’t help if environmental reformers claim up front to have all of the answers; if they show up with detailed blueprints for how people living in a landscape ought to behave. The danger here is, of course, especially high in the case of landscapes that are mostly in private hands.
What’s needed instead is a full airing of the relevant line-drawing factors and an explanation of why they are pertinent, to our oldest task and as a matter of public, not merely private business. In particular settings, environmental groups might offer critiques of how landscapes are used. Land-planners might similarly come up with particular visions and proposals. But the main thrust of the reform effort cannot sensibly involve a green intelligentsia that goes around lecturing people how to live. Yes, stern language is needed. But it should take the form, not of directives on how to live, but rather as a call to show greater virtue and foresight, a call to be a good caretaker and, in time, an honored ancestor.
As early chapters explored, the first building block of good land use is respect for nature’s ecological functioning, for the basic processes that keep the land fertile and maintain its primary productivity. That productivity is complexly linked, in ways still being studied, with biological diversity. Supporting this basic norm of ecological functioning would be the protection and restoration of wild places, managed under norms that minimize further human alteration; they can contribute to the health of larger landscapes while providing, as noted, independent value as well. Good land use would draw in and respect our best-considered moral judgments about the diffusion of moral value in nature, in other species and individual creatures. It would recognize and incorporate the limits on our knowledge of nature—our ignorance—and embrace an element of caution while drawing upon nature’s embedded wisdom. It would include, as explored in chapter 6, the important social justice elements of good land use, often using them to insist that the good use of land in one location not occur at the expense of degradation elsewhere.
What is vital, as noted, is to get these ways of thinking into the public mainstream and get broader engagement with them, as matters of public morality and public business. More refined presentations might be assembled by way of illustrations, as ways of stimulating interest and productive thought. But detailed land-use plans would be, in most settings, premature.
It ought to be clear that the reform effort put forth here is vastly different both from the current work of environmental organizations and from the various critiques of environmentalism circulating in recent years—critiques that are typically embedded in, and would merely perpetuate, our land-degrading culture. (The shrill call to broaden the base of support for environmentalism, for instance, is just a way of saying we need to work harder in ways that are accomplishing little and need to tailor rhetoric so that it is even more consistent with current modes of thinking.)
So strong and successful a generation and more ago, the US environmental reform effort, we must confess, has largely run aground. Once-effective ways of promoting environmental reform are no longer working. Even after a half-century of operation, the environmental movement as a whole has no real overall vision to present to citizens. Many citizens assume the movement is out to protect nature from people—to put as much of nature off limits as possible—and doesn’t much care for places where people live and work. The assumption is quite wide off the mark, but it is easily entertained in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary. A half-century ago most Americans had no trouble naming the key leaders of the civil rights movement. Pressed today, most Americans could not name a single environmental leader, certainly not one whose fame does not arise for some other reason (movie roles, political office). For those who pay closer attention, there is little sense that the environmental movement takes ideas and rhetoric seriously except insofar as they can be used for short-term institutional gain. The rise of the political right, as often observed, was aided by close attention to ideas and rhetoric, carefully assessed and assembled through well-funded think tanks. While noting this impressive record of achievement, the environmental movement has made little effort to follow its lead.
Further insights into the current status and malaise of environmentalism can be teased out of the now-familiar photograph of a polar bear, precariously poised on fragmenting ice-sheet, displayed by environmental groups in the hope that viewers will send money or call a legislator. Perhaps the polar-bear image will indeed elicit a slighter stronger public response than alternative messages. But what messages are embedded in this heart-tugging photograph, particularly for viewers who see environmentalism as remote and elitist? A polar bear lives far away; environmentalism is thus about saving nature in distant places. The polar bear needs space to live away from people, so the movement protects nature from people. Polar bears meet no human needs nor do jobs depend on them. The photograph leaves human exceptionalism unquestioned; it promotes no ecological or communitarian values; it offers no challenge either to the market and market thinking or to the normative primacy of liberty and equality. To be sure the polar-bear photo invites concern for individual large mammals. But that sentiment, good so far as it goes, does little to advance the broader environmental agenda.
Just as the friendly polar-bear image needs reconsideration as a reform tactic, so too the environmental movement needs to reconsider its off-and-on interest in pushing a call for some sort of individual constitutional right to a sound environment. The idea here is that such a right, if embedded in constitutions, might stimulate major change. But would it? Starting around 1970 many individual states did amend their constitutions to proclaim such a constitutional right, often phrased as a right to a healthy or healthful environment. Calls to expand these rights are still heard, even as the rights, in the states that nominally recognize them, accomplish very little. Around the world, the rights-based strategy is even more pronounced.
The impulse behind this reform push is worthy enough, but there are grave limits and costs to it, so much so that the whole idea ought to be shelved, certainly in developed nations. One problem with such rights provisions is that they are simply too vague; they fail to give meaningful guidance on the line between use and abuse, particularly at the small spatial scales where legal disputes typically arise. They invite courts to do the line-drawing themselves, without guidance, a task for which courts are ill-suited by knowledge and temperament. Further, such provisions simply do not match the format of other constitutional rights. The individual-rights tradition regulates the link between citizen and state. It limits how and when government can interfere with people’s lives; that is the standard format (the ban on slavery is much broader). In the case of environmental decline, however, much of it is brought about by private actors, not government. Even in the case of government-linked land abuse, the failings are often due to inaction rather than action. Finally, as phrased the rights tend to protect only against direct health threats to individuals living today, threats mostly (or entirely) due to pollution and contamination. They are not rights that protect land communities as such, ecological processes, other life forms, or future generations. At the international level, positive individual rights—to clean water, for instance—serve social justice and development goals and should be understood in that particular context. They are not sound means to protect the environment as such.
The bigger problem with the individual-rights approach to environmental protection is that it fits in much too easily with established ways of thinking and talking. It does not encourage new ways of perceiving and valuing nature as such; value continues to reside in humans only, understood as autonomous, rights-bearing individuals. The value being exalted is the old, familiar, costly one: negative individual liberty. Rights claims, as long known, can be divisive, and they collide with opposing rights claims—in this instance with individual liberty and private property. To argue about rights is to shift the fight to a cultural playing field—human-centered, individualistic, present-focused, and so on—that strongly favors opponents of environmental protection. As a strategy, rights-promotion is badly flawed.
To move forward, the environmental reform effort needs a long-term strategy for fundamental change. Long-term means decades, not months or a few years. Fundamental change means in the major elements of modern culture, change in the playing field in which current clashes unfold. Strategy means a carefully constructed plan that guides pretty much all reform efforts and that screens out all program work—and fundraising, membership appeals!—inconsistent with it. Communications needs to be more than an appendage of or support for the conservation work of environmental organizations. It should become the central component of that conservation work.
No single environmental organization can hope to push modern culture in a new direction on its own. This hardly seems like an option. The option becomes plausible when many groups decide to work together, when they decide not to glimmer as the thousand points of light but to form a single, strong beam that draws attention. Concerted action is essential, going well beyond, and indeed different in kind, from the occasional joint campaigns that groups sometimes organize. Groups would order their work and public messages to line up with the overall reform strategy, a possibility perhaps hardly imaginable today but the only possibility that offers real hope. Coordinated action, based on careful study, need not begin on all fronts at once; it could start, for instance, with an orchestrated effort to put forth a new vision of responsible private land ownership. But it needs to get started, breaking ground with clear thought on the shortcomings of current efforts and with a full inquiry into the true root causes of land misuse.
Seeing and talking about nature—a new ontology. In the conservation talks that Aldo Leopold gave to audiences in his final years, talks intended to push listeners in new directions, he routinely began by presenting a new understanding of nature and of the human place in nature. The land was a community of life, of interconnected and interdependent biotic and biotic elements, a community that included people. Environmental reform today needs to press forward this same message, one that highlights the ways we are linked to nature and dependent on it. Sound messages could stress the reality and importance of the interconnections as such, the critical relations among the parts, the approach largely used by Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’. It could sensibly employ more openly communitarian language, as Leopold did, particularly when presented as a normative vision rather than as a purely scientific claim. It is hardly conceivable that we might prune our misuses of nature without seeing nature in new ways, more ecologically grounded, which is to say pushing aside views of nature as a warehouse of physical market inputs.
A matter of shared morality. By steps we need to understand that our dealings with nature are matters of public concern, of legitimate public interest, and not merely matters for private resolution. Nature is our common home, where we all live. It is vital that we keep it healthy and productive; it is desirable that we keep it beautiful and pleasing, a place where human life and hopes can flourish. Natural conditions can be better or worse for us (for all life), which means that uses of nature raise basic normative issues, about right and wrong, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, just as human acts in nature are linked to individual virtue. To frame land use as a matter of shared concern, and in moral terms, is to remove it from the dominance of individual preference. It becomes a component of the common good, rightly talked about in that way. It becomes a matter for action by people wearing their citizen hats.
Varied language can be used to convey this component of the overall, culture-change strategy, chosen and shaped by setting and audience, including religious language. Moral claims can highlight the values of other species and individual creatures. They can surely give prominence to future generations and to the virtue of living now so that later generations flourish. The call can go out, in David Ehrenfeld’s words, for us to become good ancestors. Rights rhetoric—species rights, animal rights—might fit in, but only if used with great care and blended with overriding messages that stress community, interdependence, and long-term human flourishing. Virtue-based language will likely work far better—the language of responsibility, good character, discipline, community membership, and clean living.
It hardly needs saying that morally charged messages are best framed so that they invite people to become better than they are, so that they look forward to healthier, more flourishing communities, and do not come across chiefly as condemnations—even as they are that, beneath the surface. Let listeners take the new morality and use it themselves to criticize current ways of living. It is important too to recognize openly that the community-level goal of healthy lands does create tension with highly valued norms of individual liberty. It would be wrong to hide this tension, and certainly wrong to deny it. It would be wrong too not to agree that tradeoffs will be needed. Yet it is possible also to point out that liberty comes in varied forms and that a longtime critical liberty is the positive, collective liberty of working with other community members to protect and enhance the community’s home. Environmental reformers can be—they should be—very much in favor of liberty. What’s needed on this issue (as on private property, considered below), is an alternative moral vision, in this instance one that emphasizes how options are broadened by collective action and how many environmental goals are only within reach when people work together.
As they put forward this message on land use and public morality, reformers should resist expected demands to translate their messages into specific policy changes. Inevitably, regularly, they will be pressed with the question: “So, what does this mean in terms of new laws or polices?” The question is pertinent, of course. But to answer it is to shift attention away from culture change, the key challenge. It is to turn the vital rhetoric about community, interconnection, public business, shared morality into mere background material, leading up to policy proposals, which will then (usually) be evaluated by audiences using old, familiar cultural frames. The reform effort needs to say focused on cultural change. If our culture shifts in good ways, our uses of nature will get better.
Drawing the line. A sound reform strategy, to reiterate, will emphasize the need to distinguish between the use and abuse of nature as a matter of public, moral business. For reasons noted, care must be used to avoid getting far ahead of audiences, particularly in playing the role of land-use expert and telling people how they ought to live. Three aims might be kept front and center.
First, it is vital to emphasize that we humans can legitimately change nature. All change is not abusive. The message may seem obvious, but the public is suspicious and no small number of environmental writers and activities implicitly return to unaltered nature as their benchmark of healthy lands. Yes, the environmental movement has been and must remain a voice for nature. But to succeed it needs to take on a more central role, encouraging audiences to bring competing interests and factors together to generate visions of good land use, ones that keep nature healthy and promote human flourishing.
Second, effective reform will push people to think broadly about the big questions: How should we be living in nature? What kinds of landscapes will best support the community of life, now and in the future? How might we make our natural homes more pleasing for us and our descendants? For most people these will be new questions, legitimate and worth considering only if audiences can see that the questions do raise issues for legitimate public action.
Third, having raised these issues, presenting them as normative ones—not matters of science or economics alone—the reform effort needs to stimulate thinking by interjecting the full range of relevant, line-drawing factors noted above. At the same time, and as important, it needs to insist that this line, once drawn, be used routinely to evaluate human uses of nature; to identify environmental problems. To return to the opening pages of chapter 2, the response to the question, “Why care about mussels in rivers?” needs to turn immediately to this use/abuse line: Mussels are dying because we are misusing our rivers, under standards of acceptable land and water use. Similarly, economic studies of alleged problems need to be challenged on the ground that they have failed (as they typically will fail) to take into account the relevant factors. The work here, of challenging flawed economic studies, will be vast, continuing, and exhausting.
In this line-drawing/cultural-change work, it will be vital to keep attention focused on the good that can come from this, vital to present healthy, flourishing landscapes as places we would want to inhabit. Accentuate the positive. What is less helpful—and perhaps positively hurtful—is to frame this public business chiefly in terms of limits. Yes, to be sure, we need to cut back in many ways. Yes, we need to embrace limits. But the point of respecting limits is to promote healthier lives and landscapes in the future. Framed in that way, behavior changes—limits included—are means to move in a good direction. Indeed, with new cultural frames, what we may be giving up are practices we come to see as wasteful or degrading. Good reform rhetoric would present matters in just that light.
Citizen action and good government. As noted, a sound environmental reform push needs to get people to act more often and forcefully in their roles as citizens rather than consumers, which is to say to support public policies to promote good land use. This part of the strategy will similarly be a long-term effort. It means confronting and revising the negative attitudes many people have toward government. Fortunately much of this animosity is aimed at the federal level and less at local and state levels. Land-use regulation, of course, has long been chiefly a local concern and wildlife law largely resides at the state level. In terms of changing attitudes, a useful approach might be to stress the ways well-run government could bring gains and then to ask: How can we improve government so that it delivers these desired goods? There is little reason to start off defending government as it is; the task is likely too much, though it is worthwhile to emphasize examples of government success. Better is to talk about what government could be and could do, and to encourage demands for improvement.
The reform push here of course also confronts the reality of governmental systems dominated by economic elites. The massive costs of this go well beyond environmental degradation. Environmental reformers need to lend a hand with efforts to challenge this grave and rising darkness. At the same time, it is important to recognize that this ominous trend is itself an expression and embodiment of grave flaws in modern culture, many of them the same flaws that help bring on land abuse and protect it from criticism. The takeover of government by market interests further shows the ways the market is pushing aside competing normative visions, playing upon America’s love of individual liberty and its willingness to leave so many moral issues for resolution by individuals in private lives. On this point, the strong rights rhetoric of the political left is every bit as much to blame as the antigovernment rhetoric of the political right. Indeed, many voices on the left seem even more insistent that moral choices be made by individuals as such, and that government leave people free to chart their own life courses. Hardly any rhetoric could serve better to open the door for moneyed interests to manipulate government to their advantage, as it has.
Major change in our sad political plight hardly seems possible without major cultural change. And the cultural change that would help environmental reform will also make inroads on the governmental front. Good government, if it comes, will emerge out of a heightened sense of the ways citizens are linked and interdependent; it will draw upon new recognitions of community and the ways we are the same, not different; it will gain strength when people talk more of the common good as a matter of public morality and of obligations of all people to cooperate as well as compete.
Owning nature. One of the more adamant obstacles that environmental reform has encountered is the institution of private property rights in nature and the tenacious attachment people have to it. In the common view, successfully pushed by the environmental opposition, environmental laws and regulations regularly infringe upon private property rights. Yes, Americans may want healthier environments, but they aren’t willing to pursue them at the expense of undercutting this bedrock institution.
Without question one of the grave failings of the environmental movement has been its near silence on this issue, its failure to organize a coherent response other than to contend, day by day, that the costs of infringing property rights are offset by environmental gains.
The environmental reform effort will get hardly anywhere on private land-use issues, including (for instance) polluted runoff from fields, without engaging this issue. Private property well structured can help improve environmental outcomes and bring an array of other, well-known benefits. Environmental reform can be, and very much needs to be, openly in favor of private landownership. What it needs to put forth, coherently and consistently, is an alternative vision of what ownership means and why it exists. At present, the environmental movement seems to clash with private property so that property resides on one side of the clash. A far better way to frame the tradeoff is between responsible land ownership, on the environmental side, and irresponsible land ownership on the other. The dichotomy is simplistic, and far more needs to be said. But plenty of room exists, consistent with America’s legal trajectory and culture, to formulate a vision of owning nature that expects owners to act in ways consistent with community needs and healthy lands. Under an alternative, community-sensitive vision of ownership, new land-use rules could make far better sense. With a new understanding of ownership it could make sense to limit landowners to activities on the moral side of the use/abuse line. Often the primary beneficiaries of good land use are other landowners themselves, which is why urban land-use rules are typically promoted more vigorously by landowners than anyone else. Cannot the environmental movement as a whole get together to study this topic and develop a shared stance?
On this issue, as on too many others, environmental opponents have skillfully slanted the playing field. In the typical property-rights story, big government interferes with the activities of a small, individual private landowner, restricting what she can do. Never does the anecdote draw other characters into the land-use drama, whether neighboring landowners, the local community, other life forms, or future generations. Never does it present the issue as one with moral overtones or as one in which caution makes sense. Certainly the landowner at issue is never a giant corporation that wields as much or more power as any government. In fact, land-use regulations almost always aim to accommodate conflicts in land- and resource-uses between competing property owners, so the typical conflict brings property owners to both sides of the table. A thoughtful, effective environmental stance on property ownership would also emphasize strongly the public’s own property rights in water and wildlife and the implications of those property rights.
In talk about private ownership, the issue often turns to whether a particular landowner action is or is not harmful. Landowners admit, however begrudgingly, that they need to avoid causing harm. On this point, environmental reformers can insist that harm be measured using a well-considered normative standard of good land use and that it not somehow be treated as simply an issue of scientific fact or economic calculus. Certainly it is essential to steer far clear from the imposition of any scientific burden of proof. To the extent possible reformers ought to frame the issue as one of values and virtue; about the folly of charging ahead without knowing the consequences; of interfering with the health and beauty of other life. It is important, in short, not to let opponents frame the issue, as they usually have.
Forcefully, though very carefully, environmental reformers also ought to interject the idea that nature as a whole, all of it, is in some ways shared by all people and that public claims to it are overriding. The language here could be framed in terms of public ownership rights that stand above the private rights. The familiar image of stewardship pushes in this direction. One danger here, a big one, is that such language can readily draw the dreaded tag of socialism. On the other side, stewardship language can easily sound like a call simply for individuals to act responsibly as a matter of personal choice, free of communal insistence. In law-related writing, calls to expand the public trust ideal have encountered just such resistance, along with shrill claims that legal precedents are being misused. A better approach may be to leave untouched allodial landownership ideals (in which a private owner accounts to no one) while talking about the rightful role of lawmaking communities in demanding good behavior. Reform efforts can themselves make good use of the longstanding bans on land-use harm and on the normatively powerful claims that individual landowners should do their fair shares to remedy problems caused by landowners in combination.
Taming market capitalism. In a view ascending among environmental scholars, today’s environmental ills are inextricably linked to modern capitalism and cannot be mitigated materially without fundamental changes in the market economy. The claim is sound, of course. But the tendency is to focus too much on specific economic practices and to discount or ignore the underlying cultural problems. As taken up in chapter 7 and again here, market capitalism is perhaps most pernicious because of the ways it frames and empowers the modern worldview. Within that worldview the institution makes decent sense and calls for structural change do not. A much different form of market capitalism can rise up only on a quite different cultural base. The challenge to market capitalism, therefore—and it very much needs challenge, just as critics say—can best push for cultural change.
Most of the strategic changes already included in this list will help weaken the grip of capitalism as we know it:
• A new vision of nature as an ecologically complex, interconnected whole calls into question the market’s much different view. Nature is not mere raw materials, it is our common home, infused with various moral values.
• A stronger vision of good land use can weaken the idea that market suppliers are free to act as they see fit to cut costs and make money. The current market view will also weaken as individual negative liberty takes up less space on the stage of public morality.
• The market currently rests on a particular understanding of private landownership and of the limited role of government in restricting land use options; here again, cultural changes would cast doubt on many market activities.
• In the market view, individuals are cast as producers and consumers. The market’s role contracts when and as they act instead as citizens.
• As Herman Daly and others have long urged, the nation could benefit from new measures of overall national well-being, competing with the now-powerful GDP, particularly measures linked to environmental health.
• Another sound reform often mentioned is to challenge the relatively new dominance of shareholder capitalism as the guiding ideal for corporate management. In the now-prevailing view, corporations exist solely to make money for shareholders. In the older, long-dominant view, corporations existed instead to promote the interests of multiple stakeholders, including employees and local communities. On this issue, as on several others, environmental reformers can join forces with other causes similarly harmed by this profoundly hurtful shift.
• Finally, the power of market capitalism would diminish if states and local governments had a freer hand to set higher environmental standards for interstate and global businesses operating within their bounds. Many jurisdictions of course would not exercise this power, but some certainly would. As a legal matter the Constitution’s Dormant Commerce Clause restricts state and local powers too much. Environmental reformers could join with others to push against it.
These actions and others could help chip away at the ills of contemporary market capitalism. But it is essential, to reiterate, to keep the cultural issues front and center. The market builds on a certain set of values and understandings. To disturb them is to weaken its foundation.
One long-time call for changes in market capitalism takes the form of a demand to shift to a steady-state economy, or in some versions to promote de-growth. The ideas are sound insofar as they recognize that patterns of altering and consuming nature need to change significantly, and the chosen language pushes this reality hard. Again, though, one must question whether such language does not unhelpfully accentuate the negative. It puts emphasis on what is being given up, not what is being gained. It casts accusations in particular at people simply trying to make a go of things in the economy as it now exists, and features a call to restrict current opportunities at a time when, for most people, they are meager enough already. Far better rhetoric and packaging can be used to promote the same changes in culture and economic practices. In truth, it is language like this—so negative, so threatening—that goes far toward explaining why environmental reform struggles while economic liberty platforms gain strength. Desired changes are one thing; the best rhetoric to promote them might well be far different. Anti-environmental forces don’t frame their stances in terms of opposition to environmental laws. Instead they are out to protect and promote good things such as private property, individual liberty, and economic opportunity. Cannot environmental reformers learn from their success?
As environmental advocates look out at modern society, they see entrenched cultural opposition, and rightly so. Vast audiences are immune to scientific information. Economic studies go ignored, or are countered by competing studies that are so flimsy as to lack any credibility. The seeming idiocy of the national Republican Party in denying the human role in climate change, if not climate change itself, is merely the most vivid and infuriating example.
So what language might be used to reach out to these fellow citizens, who beneath the surface are often just as worried about our current predicament and just as desirous of change that leads to a better future? The answer: rhetoric that starts with their moral values and builds on them:
• Most such citizens value their communities, their home lands and cultures, and are motivated to defend them. Yes they embrace liberty, but quite often in just the way America’s revolutionaries did, as language of defense. Green messages to them need to be framed in terms of their community and the common good.
• In the conservative mind virtue and good character remain important, more important, it must be confessed, than it is to many progressive liberals. Good citizens, landowners in particular, are people who act responsibly, who are good community members. Virtuous people do not harm others; virtuous people care about generations to come. What does it mean to be a person of honor and dignity in a world that is crowded and polluted?
• Virtue and community membership come together in the normative ideal of doing one’s fair share, of helping remedy shared problems. When the common good includes healthy lands, those who degrade lands and waters are acting immorally. Indeed, they are stealing from the common fund.
• In the conservative moral view, fertility and productive are good, waste is wrongful, and contamination is repulsive.
• Yes, liberty is good, but taken too far it is license, and liberty is also exercised when local people got together to improve their communities, drawing on the old barn-raising tradition of neighborliness.
• Private property is a sound institution and it works well when owners show good character. Responsible ownership is all-American; irresponsible ownership needs to be challenged. A responsible owner does not act in ways that harm other owners, the community, or future generations.
The normative worldview of the United States, a worldview now greatly influential globally, came together in the decade leading up to the American Revolution of 1776. Moral rhetoric then did feature strands of communitarian, civic-republican thought and organic social hierarchies continued thereafter to carry power. But a new vision was coming together, more individualistic, more liberty-based, more insistent on equality. As the decades unfolded, it made sense to embrace normative orders that elevated individuals and honored their rights, morality that philosophers would term deontological. It made sense similarly to talk about utility-enhancement as an individual and shared goal and to measure utility in terms of how well it responded to individual wants, the morality termed utilitarianism or consequentialism. Christian compassion motivated many reform efforts, even those clothed in the garb of individual rights, but compassion and rights were not always good bedfellows. We see that clearly today in the furor of government-subsidized health care for those without it, a compassionate move some say, a violation of liberty others say, particularly liberty of the eat-only-what-you-kill variety.
It was once thought, for decades really, that environmental reform built upon and continued earlier civil rights campaigns. Just as moral rights and equality expanded for racial minorities, women, and the disabled, so too the moral circle could broaden to include other life forms. Environmental protection was the next step. In his useful review of environmental ethics, The Rights of Nature, historian Roderick Nash told the story in just this way. The time had come for nature to have rights of its own. Nash and others often quoted the vivid, opening paragraphs of Aldo Leopold’s famous essay, “The Land Ethic,” from 1949. In them, Leopold spoke of the expansion of moral concern since the ancient times of Odysseus, who freely hanged slaves who had misbehaved. Moral concern had expanded since then, Leopold observed. It was time, he said, for it to take the next step and include the land community as such.
Not enough attention was paid to the fact that Leopold’s planned expansion of moral value did not form a clear sequence with earlier expansions, or with the kinds of expansions that later animal-welfare writers had in mind. Leopold jumped from present-day, living humans to a vast, interconnected community of life. He did not propose the more logical step of adding individual, sentient mammals to the moral circle, leaving intact the emphasis on individual creatures understood as autonomous beings. In fact, Leopold’s proposal was for a vast overhaul in moral thought, building upon a similarly vast overhaul in ways of understanding humans and their natural homes. Leopold’s essay drew widespread support, but even as it did academic philosophers, more alert to his shift, typically scoffed at the mere idea that a community as such—even if it really existed as an identifiable thing—could possess moral value.
Nash’s claim, consistent with then-prevailing thought, assumed that environmental progress could move ahead by drawing upon the moral materials that had served so well in the hands of other reformers. It could move ahead by talking about the rights of nature, individual constitutional rights to a healthful environment, and—as Rachel Carson did—how pollution and contamination violated the rights of people harmed by it unless they gave informed consent.
Reformers who embraced rights rhetoric faced problems in the late nineteenth century when big business latched on to the rhetoric of liberty and private property to resist much governmental regulation. But progressives regrouped, drew more on Christian social ethics, and pushed on ahead in the early twentieth century and, after World War II, with civil rights campaigns. The morality, the language of political rights, seemed to work still, even as conservative groups saw more and more ways to use it themselves.
What the past forty years ought to make clear is that the civil rights–type moral frame no longer works. Yes, the marriage equality campaign has used it well, so too campaigns for the physically limited. But the examples are narrow. More glaring are the failures, not just ecological degradation but rising economic injustice and the decline of anything resembling real popular sovereignty. And the trends are ominous; in David Orr’s words, we are in failure mode, not so much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic but, in his better, borrowed metaphor, walking north in a southbound train. Looking ahead, rights-based claims seem likely to gain traction only when they do not materially interfere with big business carrying on as usual (as marriage equality and disability gains do not). Environmental reforms do benefit many businesses, new ones especially. But that’s not nearly enough. They collide with business as usual, in very big ways.
Without too much simplicity we might say that our current moral order has now been in place in the United States for 250 years. We are overdue for a major change of course. For the next 250 years, maybe more, we need to pursue a different path. The trajectory turn that began in the 1760s took time to get going. But it gained momentum and strength for the next century, through the slavery-ending Civil War. Looking around, there is evidence already that a new turn has begun. A strong environmental reform effort, well considered and orchestrated, can give it ideas and values, direction, and considerable power.