One piece of advice commonly offered to inexperienced short-story writers is to begin a narrative not at the beginning, but close to the end. Start in the thick of things and fill in the background as needed, and the shorter the story the closer to the end one ought to begin. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” for instance, a well-wrought tale by Katherine Anne Porter, begins with Mrs. Weatherall on her deathbed. We witness her final hours and through asides learn about her life, the suffering she endured, the choices she made and how they affected her plight. Much of the background, though, goes unsaid or is merely implied, and we are left to read between the lines—just as Ms. Porter wants us to do and enables us to do. We are left to piece together the ethical and perceptual lay of the land.
This story-writing suggestion is usefully recalled when one attempts to survey academic thought about environmental issues, particularly writing that deals with environmental law and other practical embodiments of environmental policy. (In the legal and policy-setting arenas, the term environmental has shown few signs of yielding to conservation or other terms.) Intentionally, perhaps, but more likely from a hurry to get to where the action is, most environmental policy scholars have heeded this literary advice. Articles typically begin by laying out a problem or issue, but they rarely start at the beginning of things, any more than Ms. Porter does when she opens the scene with Mrs. Weatherall dying. The typical environmental piece is merely the final installment of an argumentative narrative, where the forces finally clash and a resolution is achieved.
In Ms. Porter’s story Granny Weatherall is the narrator, but to understand the story we need to recognize quickly that she is not a reliable one. So part of the job of reading is to get inside the narrator’s mind, identifying the author’s hints and recognizing how the narrator is distorting, editing, and coloring life. Then, too, no story exists apart from its author (despite schools of literary criticism that periodically argue the contrary), and so to grasp a story fully it is helpful to know something about the background voice. We need to know how the author came to the first page of the story as well as how the characters got there. Environmental policy scholarship is not all that different. The typical way of reading policy-related writing is to look forward in time, to see where the author’s conclusions might lead. But as much or more can be learned by taking backward glances, determining insofar as possible the author’s intellectual and moral path to the opening page.
Scholarship about environmental law and policy comes in more varieties now than it ever has. And much of that variety has to do with the paths authors have taken and the motives and perceptions that drive them to write. Three decades ago, people wrote about environmental concerns for obvious reasons: the problems were unmistakable and needed solving; selfish businesses and misguided governments were the apparent enemies; and the battle lines were clear. The primary goals were to safeguard human health and to save key wilderness areas, exotic species, and other natural gems. Policies were crafted and then, one by one, incorporated into law.
Today the situation is far different, for reasons that are not apparent on the printed page—indeed, part of the current weakness of environmental scholarship arises because so much of the ideological and intellectual background is left off the page. And the cost of starting in media res is far greater here than in literary realms. In fictional writing, a reader who misses the background cannot enjoy the story fully; he cannot appreciate its many resonances and pursue its suggestive leads. In the scholarly realm, the deficiency is more fundamental. A reader who fails to chart the author’s path cannot engage in the indispensable readerly task of critically evaluating the author’s work.
Environmental policy scholarship can be loosely characterized by isolating five different scholarly types, reflective of the several moral and intellectual paths diverse authors follow to the opening page.1 The real world is not this clean, of course. Real scholars never adhere to one type all the time, and there are always outlying scholars who defy simple categorization. Still, the basic types have enough integrity to be helpful for the purpose at hand—to identify and clarify distinct intellectual approaches, enabling us to think clearly about them and spot their underlying differences.2
The five types are these: libertarians, simple fixers (a group with two overlapping subgroups: the free marketers, and the technological fixers), dispute resolvers, progressive reformers, and land community advocates. These types are arranged roughly from right to left on the political spectrum, though the last type fits uneasily due to its communitarian leanings.3
Three decades ago, libertarians did not write much about environmental issues. Their attention was largely focused elsewhere. Government was the problem; it had become too invasive in people’s lives and violated individual liberties. Today environmental laws are part of that invasion, a particularly annoying part as many libertarians see it, and they require pruning if not a significant thinning. In the worldview of the libertarian type, the moral landscape is simple. People alone count, morally and practically, and they count as individuals rather than as families or neighborhoods or communities. Maximum liberty is the goal, defined negatively and with reference only to governmental (rather than private) invasions, with minimal government the desired corollary. People achieve their goals acting alone and in voluntary cooperation with others, not through means that coerce dissenters. Environmental problems, with few or no exceptions, are either adequately solved or exaggerated. Any lingering problems are viewed as matters of resource allocation, best addressed by expanding the market’s reach and improving its operation. Protecting individual liberty, again negatively defined, is the primary moral imperative and the chief if not sole reason for government’s existence. In the case of environmental degradation, governmental coercion is inappropriate except when degradation violates individual property rights.
The second type, the simple fixers, indicates scholars who believe or assume that environmental degradation stems chiefly from deficiencies either in the market or in modern technology. Scholars of this type vary in their appraisal of environmental problems. Some think the main problems are largely solved but that the solutions can be improved. For these scholars, today’s top job is to rewrite laws and regulations to achieve greater economic and technological efficiency, reducing the size of government in the process. Other simple fixers recognize that some problems are not yet solved—runoff water pollution, for instance—which leads them to propose an expansion or refinement of the market or the stimulation of new technology. Proposed market improvements take various, now-familiar forms: internalizing external harms (and, less often, benefits); reducing transaction costs; defining property rights more completely, clearly, and securely; and facilitating markets in previously untraded entitlements.4 Technology improvements are stimulated either by creating financial incentives (preferably market-based) for technology developers or, less desirably, by specifying exact environmental goals for particular entities and then giving those entities wide technological latitude to achieve them.
On the middle path are the dispute resolvers. Scholars of this type are most true to the legal tradition; they are primarily lawyers, political scientists, and other students of decision-making processes. Adhering to this type (or close to it) are scholars who view the political scene as a clash of legitimate pressure groups with competing interests. For them, the main need today is to bring disparate interests together to achieve resolutions. More often than not, the best policy lies somewhere down the middle, with some accommodation of the paradigmatic jobs-versus-owls trade-off. Such scholars commonly concern themselves with inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the lawmaking process: too much red tape, too much litigation, policy decisions skewed by flawed decision-making processes and overly powerful pressure groups. Because of deficiencies such as these, statutes are not implemented as written, administrative decisions are sometimes in error, and appellate decisions go awry.
Scholars in the middle largely focus on the law as it is and try to make it better, taking note of environmental problems only to the extent that these are addressed in the law. Lots of basic legal work is done here: careful reading of texts, digging into legislative history, harmonizing inconsistent provisions, attacking bad reasoning, and blending one area of the law into other areas. Also drawing attention are the political processes of decision making, with talk about ways of getting citizens more involved and helping them understand better the issues being discussed. In some settings, market mechanisms are proposed for greater efficiency, but there is no dogmatic faith in the market. Cost-benefit analysis is mentioned often and favorably, and so is comparative risk analysis; though imperfect, both are viewed as sturdy staffs. Much writing has to do with the expanded use of negotiation methods and with tools for making complex data more comprehensible to ordinary people.
The fourth type group, the progressive reformers, comprises scholars most similar to the pioneers who instigated the great era of federal environmental law-making between the late 1960s and late 1970s— although they have now mellowed some, show more gray hair, and see the world more complexly. The aim for these scholars is to keep chipping away at key environmental problems, and they evaluate environmental laws and policies primarily by how successful they are in solving those problems. The progressive reformer is more likely to look outside existing law and processes, to read about underlying environmental issues, and to call for action to remedy those that the law addresses either poorly or not at all. The legal tools of choice vary, and keeping costs down and avoiding overregulation are preferred, in part so that more can get done. For the most part, the issues addressed by these scholars are the ones familiar to society at large, and they are commonly understood and described discretely. They chiefly have to do with direct threats to human health—things like pollution, toxic wastes, and now atmospheric problems—although they can also deal with endangered species, disappearing wildlands, and less familiar, more slow-developing problems.
The final type group, the land community advocates, is the most ecologically oriented. Scholars who embody or approach this ideal are the most worried about environmental problems and the most comprehensive in their understanding of them. Their chief focus is on issues that the law does not address. The pervasive sense is that grave environmental concerns are being addressed poorly, if at all. Although such scholars consider direct health threats to humans, even more troubling to them are the various forces that disrupt the healthy functioning of the entire land community—a community that includes soils, waters, plants, animals, and people. Along with the progressive reformers, scholars of this type are most closely linked to conservationists outside the field of law and most likely to work for public-interest conservation groups.
Land community advocates typically believe that environmental problems are deeply rooted in American culture. Quick fixes rarely work, they assert, and indeed often cause nearly as many difficulties as they solve. New technology that aims to cure the problems of the old technology often yields unexpected problems that are as bad or worse. Market solutions, intended to achieve greater efficiencies in resource use, can draw upon and exacerbate the very utilitarian, fragmented, ecologically uninformed view of nature that is a root cause of land degradation. Environmental ills, according to this scholarly type, are best understood as manifestations of underlying cultural problems, issues arising out of, and easily traced back to, the Enlightenment worldview with its reliance on reason and empirical data, its narrow moral and spiritual visions, and its unquestioned acceptance of human domination. Such scholars are likely to employ a broader perspective than scholars in other categories, and they are most apt to present issues in overtly moral terms. They also more frequently draw upon work from other scholarly disciplines, particularly history, environmental ethics, and sociology. At bottom, says the true land community advocate, conservation is not something that a society can buy or build. It is a matter of humility and discipline, an ethic that respects other life and future generations, a community orientation that favors quality over quantity and health over wealth.
We need to dig deeper than these quickly sketched categories to understand their differences. By and large, the variations among these scholarly types involve eight moral and intellectual issues.5 On most of the issues, we can adequately survey the spectrum of views by identifying the two poles and taking selective note of the intermediate positions.
Human nature. Scholars differ widely today in how they understand the individual human and the human experience. Are humans best understood as autonomous individuals, or are they fundamentally social creatures? Are their understandings of the world, their values, and their perceptions individually formed, or are they rooted in and guided by tradition and surrounding social forces? Are people basically good when left alone and will they act responsibly, or do they act most responsibly in settings where they interact with others and are constrained by social norms? Are people able to achieve their goals acting alone and through entirely voluntary arrangements with others, or do they frequently need a more structured environment with decision making at the social or community level? Is there even such a thing as community, and does it make sense to talk about the well-being of the community as such?
In rough terms (and with a good deal of intermingling), libertarians are the most pronounced in their individualism; land community advocates are the most community focused. Libertarians readily allow individuals to pursue their self-interest and seek satisfaction of their self-selected preferences; along with the free market simple fixers, they are largely content to let people express their views as individuals acting alone and to let the market aggregate those views and translate them into policies. Land community advocates, on the other end of the spectrum, are apt to judge—and on occasion condemn—individual actions and preferences according to moral codes protective of the common life.
Libertarians are likely to portray individual preferences as autonomous choices, independently embraced by individuals acting as such. Land community advocates are contrarily prone to perceive such preferences as significantly shaped by social forces, including tradition, social norms, and (increasingly) aggressive advertising. They are likely, accordingly, to take a critical interest in the moral and ecological content of those social forces. They see knowledge as in large part a social construction and often view community wisdom as far greater than individual wisdom. They are also likely to note—and to place great emphasis on—the vastly different policy choices people make when acting as citizens rather than as consumers.
Libertarians commonly assume that individuals can adequately achieve their wants through voluntary means that respect the independence of all individuals. Land community advocates, in contrast, believe that many essential objectives are achievable only through collective and coercive action, including both landscape preservation goals (for example, wilderness area preservation and waterway management) and goals that require limits on destructive market competition (such as preserving soil on farmlands). As they see things, accordingly, a ban on coercive means effectively puts many environmental objectives out of reach. Focused on the community and desirous of community health, these conservationists call for decision-making processes that enable people collectively to get to know their lands, to learn about their problems, to exchange ethical and aesthetic preferences, and to make more healthful decisions about their collective fates.6
In the libertarian worldview, communities are chiefly aggregations of individuals and possess no real separate moral standing, nor are future generations owed any duties.7 Land community advocates, in sharp contrast, see communities as vital structures deserving (and in many settings urgently needing) protection, and they view future generations as highly interested (if perforce silent) participants in current discussions. Both libertarians and land community advocates speak often about individual responsibility; they differ in that the latter perceive the individual’s responsibilities as far more extensive.
Human place in nature. The first issue, views of human nature, blends into the second: how humans are understood in relation to nature.
For many scholars—those that embrace the dominant American ethic—humans stand apart from nature; humans hold a unique position among creatures, and the land is merely the place where they live.8 Nature in this moral view is a collection of natural resources that humans may use at will. Some believe that we ought to conserve certain resources for future use by means of collective planning; others conclude that well-structured market mechanisms can manage the issue as well or better. In either case, there is little question that nature exists for human use and consumption. Because the land is merely a tool for humans to use, human dealings with it are best understood in utilitarian terms, with calculations properly focused on how various strategies directly affect humans. Because the land is well understood as a collection of resources, it is appropriate to divide it into pieces—legally, physically, and mentally—and to think about the parts individually. Fragmenting nature is particularly important to free market fixers, for a true market can work only if the market can move nature’s pieces around, shifting them to their highest and best uses. In valuing nature’s many parts, the market is the best guide, and market substitutes are useful in the case of parts that are not bought and sold.
On the other end of this issue, land community advocates (and to a lesser degree the progressive reformers) see the natural world far more complexly and holistically. Humans are not distinct from the rest of nature, ecologically or morally. As much as any organisms, humans are linked to the land, to the soil, waters, air, and other life forms.9 The parts create a whole, however variable over time, and humans depend ultimately on the well-being of that whole. From this perspective, the landscape is an integrated community, and human-drawn boundaries are artificial and hence dangerous, however necessary or useful they might be in particular settings. The moral worldview embraced here stands in contrast to many of the dominant assumptions of modern culture, particularly American culture, which more than others has embraced individualism and framed important social issues in terms of individual rights, not the overall good. The anthropocentrism of values, the separation of humans from nature, the privileging of human reason over other ways of knowing, the tendency to base decisions on knowledge alone, the focus on the present, the acceptance of market valuations, and most of all the acquisitive individualism: all of these cultural elements are suspect, not because they are entirely wrong but because they are too powerful, too influential, and hence destructive.
Our knowledge of nature. A third difference regards our knowledge of nature and how we use that knowledge in our individual and collective lives. Here again, the land community advocates stand out from the other types in their belief that human knowledge is glaringly inadequate. Nature is more complex than people know and more complex then they probably can know (a common land-community expression). Science is important, and the gathering of more information is essential. But it is a mistake to think that this information can ever be more than a partial representation of the natural world.
This sense of human ignorance pervades the thought of land community advocates, and one of the chief challenges for scholars of this type is to find wise ways to deal with that ignorance. One way is to exercise caution and act humbly, to embrace what is sometimes called the precautionary principle.10 Equally valuable is to draw upon nature’s embedded wisdom, to tailor human ways to comply with nature’s modes of operations, whether the task is growing food or fiber, managing rivers, or dealing with wastes. Because knowledge is incomplete, decision-making processes are inevitably flawed when they look solely to what is known. The known needs to be blended with the unknown, and that can occur only by drawing upon ethical values and mimicking nature’s ways.11
For scholars at the other end of the typology spectrum, knowledge-based decision making is un-problematic. Indeed, there is often hostility to any decisions that are not based entirely on hard, verifiable facts. Decision-making processes are commonly slanted so people can act as they please, unless the proven facts show unmistakably that harm is occurring (scientific proof, loosely pegged at the 95 percent confidence level, is sometimes demanded). In the antithesis of the precautionary principle, the burden of proof is pushed to the opposite side. For technological fixers, the assumption is that good science can for the most part uncover all that we need to know, and the main need today is simply to get the missing information and put it to use. For free market fixers, on the other hand, current knowledge is good enough to make sound decisions and market forces provide adequate incentive to gain more knowledge. People acting alone are presumed to know what they need to know to live rightly in relation to nature (that is, to make rational decisions). When consumers enter the market and register their views with their dollars, they presumably know enough to make sound choices about their long-term well-being. Public policy is simply a matter of aggregating these individual choices.
Identification and understanding of environmental problems. Different burdens of proof, different epistemologies, and different perceptions of human nature help account for the widely varying understandings scholars have about current environmental problems. At one end of the spectrum are scholars who focus on direct, immediate impacts to human health, measured with the burden of proof sternly imposed on those who would claim problems. For libertarians and free market fixers, resource exhaustion is not a problem because the market can be counted on to find substitutes. Since nature is basically just a collection of resources, land degradation causes worry only when markets are askew. The only true environmental concern is with direct health effects on humans living today, and claims of adverse impacts, especially when coming from conservation groups, are typically judged with suspicion. Particularly for libertarians, the bigger issue today is not environmental degradation but overregulation and restrictions on individual liberty.
As one moves from the libertarian side toward the other, the burden of proof slowly lowers and the range of perceived problems increases. Ecological interconnections start to gain mention, and at some point the understanding is introduced that people are part of a complex, interconnected community and dependent on the well-being of that community. Attention begins to shift from problems considered in the law to those that are not. As the perspective lengthens in time, gradual, serious problems begin to surface, so much so that by the time one reaches the perspective of the land community advocates, the most severe environmental issues are ones that are hardly ever noted by libertarians and fixers. An array of issues relating to biological diversity rises toward the top, along with associated worries about genetic tampering, overuses of antibiotics and pesticides, and the spread of exotic species. In many parts of the country, soil-related issues take top billing as the greatest long-term concern. Issues like hydrologic modification, rarely mentioned on the libertarian end of the typology spectrum, break into the top five most severe problems for many land community advocates.
Ultimately, though, land community advocates do not view environmental problems as severable from the cultural and ethical deficiencies of modern society.12 Specific environmental issues—water pollution, for instance—while obviously problems in themselves, are equally symptoms of an underlying malaise. They are the fever that provides evidence of the infection. The true problems have to do with human perceptions and values, with modern culture’s infatuation with human reason and information, with excessive individualism of the acquisitive, irresponsible type, with human-centered value structures, and, most of all, with a cultural disconnection from the natural order.
Spatial and temporal scales of analysis. As scholars consider problems, they display remarkable variations in the temporal and spatial scales that they employ for analysis. This issue is one rarely remarked upon,13 but along with burden-of-proof differences it probably accounts for a greater part of the variation in scholarly types than any other single factor.
When libertarians and free market fixers consider the best use of a parcel of land, they typically think of the particular parcel alone, as a discrete part of nature, just as they consider a water flow alone or a particular threatened species alone. They speak of its value as a distinct thing and of its potential highest and best use considered in isolation. On the other end of the spectrum, the tendency is to consider a broader scale, to look at the landscape or ecosystem as a whole and to consider individual resource-use issues in the context of the healthy functioning of that landscape. A part of nature is valued, not alone and apart, but in context, with due regard for its roles in sustaining the health and beauty of the community of life.
The spatial scale issue, however, is a tricky one, and it is a mistake to assume that one scholarly type always favors a small scale and another a larger one. Land community advocates examine problems from a variety of scales, with the aim of gaining the best understanding (as they see it) of the community’s long-term well-being. Libertarian critics, on the other side, employ spatial scales that tend (and perhaps are intended) to discount alleged problems and to discredit the need for conservation proposals. Thus, we have libertarians claiming that a particular species, once widespread but now endangered, is adequately protected if it exists in even one location; that is, they assess the issue on a large spatial scale. Land community advocates, on the other side—worried as they are about the health of every neighborhood—mourn the species’ absence from the many places that it no longer inhabits; for them, the fact that a species is alive somewhere on the planet doesn’t help the small-scale health of a neighborhood where it is gone.
In terms of temporal scale, free market fixers nominally consider the future but subordinate it to present values. In practice, though, the future quite often is ignored except to the extent that individual consumers choose to let it affect their buying decisions. Libertarians are equally focused on the present, or rather equally willing to permit individuals living today to decide for themselves whether the future counts. At the land community end, issues like soil degradation loom large, even though effects may not be noticed for decades, generations, or even centuries. Land community advocates and progressive reformers alone seem to care that tree-farm practices are sustainable for only a few generations of trees; for other scholars, a few generations of trees is, as a policy matter, the same as forever.
Overall goals of conservation work and environmental law. It is on this issue, the overall goal of conservation, that the five scholarly types most visibly show their stripes. For libertarians, the goal of environmental law (meaning, for them, the law governing our interactions with nature) is to structure rules so that humans are allowed maximum individual freedom in their dealings with the land, consistent with equal freedom for others. For free market fixers, the goal is to get the prices right and otherwise correct market failures so that markets in nature adequately reflect relative resource values. For technological fixers, the focus is on promoting the best technology; otherwise, these scholars largely leave the work of goal setting to others. Here, as in other areas of law, dispute resolvers are out to find the compromise that gives every side a bit of what it wants. Progressive reformers, in turn, work to make incremental progress in remedying the obvious threats to human health and overt signs of land degradation. Finally, land community advocates seek to promote the long-term health and beauty of the entire land community. At one end of the scholarly spectrum, then, the focus is on mitigating direct, immediate impacts to the health of humans living today while at the other, it is chiefly on the community and on the long term, with special recognition of future generations and other life forms.
Of all the scholarly types, progressive reformers are most apt to see the law as a potent tool in bringing about environmental gains. Land community advocates are typically more pessimistic, sometimes so much so that they see wrangling about laws and formal law-making processes as diversionary if not wasteful. If environmental degradation stems from social and culture deficiencies, then those deficiencies need to be addressed directly. To change laws without changing society is to produce merely a facade of progress. According to the true land community advocate, people need to think more ecologically and recognize their ultimate dependence on a healthy land; they need to embrace better values, particularly greater humility; they need to admit and act upon the limits of human knowledge and reasoning; perhaps above all, they need to love the land more and feel greater emotional attachment to it. According to this type, the law is a weak tool to bring about such growth.
History and environmental progress. Because they take the longest-term view and because they see environmental problems as having deep historical roots, land community advocates show the most interest in history. Environmental history, in fact, is one of the primary nonlegal disciplines they use. Few others see much value in history, although free market fixers sometimes offer their own versions of history. In the free market story, history tends to comply with (or to be aptly summarized by) rather simple neoclassical economic theories. Economic forces and unrestrained enterprise account for essentially all progress. In this view, environmental improvement occurs more or less invisibly as a country gets more wealthy, which means that the key to improving the environment in a country is to increase its wealth. Land community advocates, in sharp contrast, see environmental progress as largely stemming not from the market but from democratic restraints on the market. Indeed, the entire environmental movement,14 which is given credit for much of the improvement that has occurred, is viewed principally as a much-needed reaction to the destruction wrought by a free market. For this type, economic growth might be correlated with environmental improvement (ignoring for this purpose ecological declines and environmental costs shifted overseas), but the causation largely works in the opposite direction.
Land community advocates pay particular attention to the evolution of values and institutions over time. In that history of change, in that record of cultural growth, lies their hope that environmental ills in time might lessen. From their institutional study of private property, for instance, they conclude that ownership norms have shifted significantly over time. Definitions of land-use “harm” have been malleable, cultural creations, reshaped in response to evolving conditions and values. That record of change offers hope to this type that property norms one day might reflect, far better than they now do, the limits that nature imposes on sound land use. Focusing by necessity on the long term, land community advocates hold out the hope that humans one day might embrace a humble, religiously oriented understanding of the precarious human predicament.
Role of the imagination. In terms of imagining how the land might be better, the dispute resolvers in the middle have very little other than a vision of widespread social consensus. Libertarians cherish the vision of a society populated by individuals who, on their own, choose to live responsibly and are given freedom to do so. Free market fixers look forward to an endless unfolding process of greater economic growth; how that growth might occur, in terms of the particular goods and services that a market generates, is presumably of little interest. Progressive reformers look instead to a lessening of particular environmental ills so that people can live more healthful lives with ample opportunities to interact with nature. Land community advocates dream of a time when the land waxes in its natural health and when people are more aware of it and attached to it. They think not just of clean air and water but of farm fields that build soil rather than lose it, of rivers with water flows that are largely natural, and of forests that are true biological communities rather than monocultural farms.
When it began in earnest, scholarship about environmental law and public policy was a distinctly value-driven enterprise, as conservation biology is today. That characteristic has become less evident, as fewer and fewer scholars display passion about environmental ills. Within the profession of practicing lawyers, the change is even more evident. Indeed, an “environmental lawyer,” as often as not, is now someone engaged in helping polluters and land developers diminish their environmental responsibilities. Environmental law is merely another field of practice-for-hire, not a value-driven effort to craft more enduring, satisfying ways to live in nature.
Money accounts for part of this shift; defending polluters is far more profitable and there is more work to be had. Then, too, self-interest and even greed have resurfaced as more respectable values, particularly in libertarian writing. But the principal cause probably lies in the greater complexity of issues today. No sane person a generation ago spoke in favor of flaming rivers and fields filled with dead songbirds. Today, no environmental issue goes unchallenged by defenders of the status quo. In truth, polluters know the benefits of public relations, and they can easily outspend citizen watchdog groups. They know, too, the benefits of generating scientific and economic studies that support their positions—or at least that confuse an issue enough to create the two-sides-to-the-question policy clash that journalists find convenient. Yet, even aside from such smoke screens, issues have in fact become more complex, particularly in the case of problems that are long term or that affect humans in ways that seem remote to ordinary citizens. Good work has become necessary—not just good science and good economics but good philosophy, good social and political criticism, good history, and just plain good thought and feeling.
Too often today’s readers of scholarly journals are required to fill in the background gaps in the scholarly presentations, and they are left confused by what they read. The points that scholars directly address are important enough. But scholarly debates are often weakly joined, if joined at all, because the true disagreements are deeper and on points not overtly raised. So we see, to use merely one example, disputes among legal scholars about regulatory “takings” and private property rights that have little or nothing to do with the superficial issue being discussed—how much protection property should receive—and far more to do with ecological perceptions, burdens of proof, views of humans as individuals versus community members, short-term versus long-term scales of analysis, the perceived cultural roots of degradation, the extent of human knowledge about nature, and the like. Disputes over free trade and market-based environmental policies are also rarely joined, and for similar reasons. Here, too, we have unstated disputes about whether humans are or are not appropriately viewed as autonomous, mobile individuals, disconnected from any place and not properly concerned about the health of any place. We have unvoiced assumptions about how environmental progress occurs, whether by community study and action and restraints on the market or whether by simple economic growth. We have disagreements about whether it is useful or hurtful to strengthen perceptions about nature as a warehouse of natural resources, available for humans to tap.
Many authors avoid background issues by assuming the posture of the detached, scholarly technician, devoted to remedying problems—much like the automobile mechanic who takes on a sputtering carburetor. The results of this approach are too often unsatisfying, producing fragmented scholarly fields in a wide array of policy subfields. Small pockets of scholars speak to one another, but the scholarly community as a whole often does not. Indeed, it hardly has much ground to interact, given the distance among many scholars before their opening sentences are written, let alone read. Surely our work would improve collectively if we stepped back and talked more about the earlier parts of our stories, if we talked more about our intellectual and moral paths. It is along those paths where our real differences are to be found.
One benefit of talking more about underlying assumptions is that we’re likely to understand them better ourselves. To talk about them, we need first to identify them and think about them, deeply and professionally. To do that, we need to explore the extensive literature written about them. At the least, we need to state our assumptions more overtly, noting our reliance on them, so that our conclusions can be viewed as they ought to be: as conditional conclusions, conditioned upon value assumptions that are debatable and that very much need debating.
In a thoughtful study of environmental law scholarship, Richard Lazarus has highlighted some of the challenges that confront scholars first wading into environmental law.15 The statutes are numerous, complex, inconsistent, and just plain poorly written. Regulations are voluminous and every bit as contorted. Law in the field is far different from law on the books. Then there is the scientific complexity of it all and the infusion of complex economic jargon. Not surprisingly, Lazarus relates, many legal scholars skirt the field by addressing instead issues of environmental federalism, environmental justice, or administrative process—topics that require far less mastery of the environmental literature.
The complexity of the field, though, is even greater than Professor Lazarus allows, for the tribulations he mentions are all within environmental law as a distinct element of conservation policy. To think seriously about background issues such as overall aims and ultimate causes—which legal scholars need to do, just as much as other environmental policy specialists—is to add whole new layers of complexity. The literature on these background issues is hardly less vast than it is on strictly legal subjects. Included here are not just the foundational, growing literatures of conservation biology, environmental philosophy, environmental history, and communitarian social policy but the poetry, essays, and fiction of Wendell Berry; the agriculture writings of Wes Jackson, Gene Logsdon, and David Kline; the cultural critiques of Lewis Mumford, Christopher Lasch, David Ehrenfeld, John Ralston Saul, and David Orr; the cultural forays of Gary Nabhan, Evan Eisenberg, Bill McKibben, Ted Williams, and Stephanie Mills; the community-based writings of Alan Durning and Scott Russell Sanders; the meditations on Western lands by Wallace Stegner, Gretel Ehrlich, Patricia Limerick, Richard Manning, and Charles Wilkinson; and even such literary works as Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s engaging exploration of nature and culture.
No scholar, of course, has time to read everything pertinent, nor is there need to redo work already done well by others; a division of labor is as useful as it is necessary. But it is one thing to divide up the tasks, leaving others to grapple with fundamental questions of value and direction, and something far different to charge ahead with little sense of direction, ignoring the issues and unaware of the literature.
Good scholarship is necessarily written with a clear understanding of where conservation work needs to head. Thus, a sound sense of ultimate aims is necessary for nearly everyone. It is not enough, for instance, to put neoclassical economic policy models to use, as if they were value free or enjoyed unquestioned scholarly acceptance; they are not and do not. Nor is it enough to embrace a goal such as sustainability, at least without specifying clearly what the term means and how it fits into the long-term ecological functioning of natural communities. (See chapter 4 for my fuller criticism of sustainability.) The same can be said about the use of biodiversity indicators as measures of good land use; they are ecologically vital but tell us little about how lands can best serve human needs. A different problem arises in the work of scholars who dwell upon alternative policy means without ever stopping to think clearly about the desired ends. With no ends in sight, how can one judge the effectiveness of alternative means?
Katherine Anne Porter may have begun “Jilting” with Mrs. Weatherall on her deathbed, but we can be sure that before beginning to write her tale, she knew all about Granny’s life and struggles. She knew, that is, Granny’s exact path to her final scene. And while Porter gives us only pieces and hints about that path, it is enough for us to make substantial progress in reconstructing it. As readers, we know from the opening paragraph that we are entering a tale close to its end, so we are alert for background clues.
Good environmental writing can be crafted in just this way; it, too, can begin close to the key conflict. But it can begin like this only when the author, like Ms. Porter, has carefully thought out the path and gives readers enough clues to reconstruct the essential parts of it. Undue repetition always presents a trade-off, and good writings are kept succinct. But current scholarship cries out for more attention to the fundamentals.