Chapter 2
Ideas
In an obvious way, environmental politics is about our relationship with the environment. We saw in Chapter 1 how human impact on the environment has increased over the millennia—to the point where, over the past fifty years or so, that impact has come to seem to threaten everything from local livelihoods to global weather patterns. So if we were to ask ourselves why we should care for our environment, the answer might be: because a healthy and functioning environment is fundamental to human wellbeing. This is probably the most common answer given to that question, but it is not the only one. If environmental politics is about our relationship with the environment, then environmental ethics is about the different reasons we can give for looking after it, and later in the chapter we will see how different these reasons can be. First, though, we will focus on what we might call the practical reasons for environmental concern.
The environment as ‘life-support’, and ‘limits to growth’
From this practical point of view, the environment is sometimes described as a ‘life-support system’. There are two ways of looking at this—or two ‘scales’—and these tend to correspond to the two sites of environmentalist practice that we encountered in Chapter 1. In the ‘close up’ view, the environment is a source of immediate sustenance, and environmental problems are experienced as a threat to day-to-day livelihoods. This is sometimes called an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (this influential term was coined by Joan Martínez-Alier), and while it is usually associated with the global South, or the ‘majority countries’, this can be misleading. In the first place, not all people in the global South are poor. In countries like China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil there is a rapidly expanding middle-class which no longer has the immediate connection with environmental problems that drives the environmentalism of the poor. To the extent that they have environmental concerns, they are likely to be rooted in the bigger scale problems we are about to discuss. The second reason is that there are poor people in the global North, or ‘minority countries’, as well. These people are usually at the heart of what has come to be known as the ‘environmental justice’ movement, and they are mobilized to action by catastrophic breakdowns in environmental conditions that threaten their health and safety. We will look at some examples of these mobilizations in Chapters 3 and 4, but what links the poor in the global North and South in environmental terms is the immediacy of the impact of environmental breakdown on their lives.
This contrasts with the other scale—the ‘long-distance’ view—in which environmental problems seem distant in space and time. Classic examples of such problems might be global warming, or nuclear waste. In this long-distance view, we can once again conjure up the image of the blue-and-white Earth hanging in space, containing all the resources, air, and water that we will ever have. As we saw towards the end of Chapter 1, alarm bells began ringing some fifty years ago with the publication of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but it was not until the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972 that the long-term future of the Earth as a life-support system for human beings was put into question. The report was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a think-tank researching international issues, and the report’s authors were predominantly system dynamics experts. The report consisted of a computer simulation of the world system, plotting five ‘trends of global concern’ in various different scenarios. The five trends were: industrial output per capita, food per capita, population, depletion of non-renewable resources, and pollution. The first scenario the team ran through the computer was ‘business-as-usual’—i.e., the way the global economy was being run in the early 1970s—and in this scenario the system collapsed because it ran out of non-renewable resources in about 2100.
A common response in the face of concerns that we might run out of resources is to say that either more resources will be found or we can extend the life of our resource base by using them more efficiently, or some combination of the two. To test this response, the research group assumed a doubling of resources in the next computer run, but without altering any of the other variables or the controls on them. The result of the computer run this time was that the resource base held up, but collapse ensued again—caused this time by dangerous levels of pollution generated by the increase in industrial production. The research team continued with the computer simulations, each time putting controls in place to deal with whatever limit was encountered in the previous run. In the final simulation, big assumptions are being made about resource, food, and energy availability, and pollution and population controls. Even with all this in place, the world system collapses due to a series of problems involving land use, food availability, and pollution.
The research team drew two basic conclusions from this exercise. First, environmental problems tend to be interrelated, so ‘solving’ one might just mean creating another. In the environmental policy context this has led to questions around the suitability of the traditional ‘departmental’ or ‘silo’ approach to policy-making, with the environment department separate from all the others. The Club of Rome research suggests that a more ‘holistic’ approach is needed, and we will explore this suggestion in greater detail in the Chapter 3.
The second conclusion was that although technological solutions can prolong the period of industrial growth, the ultimate limits to that growth—represented by the finite Earth—remain. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is a big challenge to mainstream politics, in which success is largely judged by how much the economy is growing. The main criticism of the limits to growth thesis is that it underestimates the capacity of human ingenuity, especially in the form of technological advances, to solve environmental problems. In the 1990s a new approach to policy-making emerged which went by the name of ‘ecological modernization’. Ecological modernizers recognized the existence of environmental problems, but argued that they could be solved without wholesale changes in our habits and practices, by the intelligent application of science and technology. Above all, they said, our production processes could be made much more efficient, creating less environmental damage for each unit of output. These initiatives went by the name of ‘Factor 4’ or ‘Factor 10’, thereby signalling the potential for four-fold or even ten-fold improvements in efficiency in regard to the trade-off between the processes of production and environmental impact.
Contemporary critics of ecological modernization argue that the best we can do is only ever to relatively decouple environmental impact and economic output. This means that while we can indeed reduce such impact for each unit of production, environmental impact will still go on increasing in total. For absolute decoupling to take place, efficiency gains would have to be made faster than growth. These critics argue that there is little evidence of this ever having happened and not much likelihood of it either.
The Limits to Growth report is the starting point for many of the debates that swirl around the environmental politics of the global North. We have already seen how it sets up a debate about the proper direction of travel: can mainstream politics and economics accommodate the limits challenge, or is a radical shift of direction required? Even if we can reform our way to sustainability, won’t some curtailment of our freedoms be required, and won’t we at the very least have to put up with inconveniences such as wind turbines in beauty spots?
The report also put population growth near the heart of environmental concern—‘Malthus with a computer’ was one description of its methodology and findings. This led to the criticism that the report is a thinly veiled attack on the poor and vulnerable, as expressed (for some) in the form of Garrett Hardin’s ‘lifeboat ethics’. Hardin argued that in resource terms the world is like a lifeboat, with room for sixty people in it, surrounded by a hundred swimmers. The lifeboat represents the rich countries and the swimmers represent poor countries. This metaphor trades on the limits to growth argument by stressing the apparently fixed quantity of resources available on the lifeboat. Hardin argued that taking all hundred swimmers on board the lifeboat would result in disaster, as there are only sufficient resources for sixty. This leaves one option it seems: leave the hundred swimmers in the water. Hardin’s ‘ethic’ appears to deny the poor a fair share of the Earth’s resources, and this extrapolation of the ‘limits’ thesis brought it into disrepute in some quarters.
Population growth has remained a bone of contention in environmental politics. For some it is just obvious that the more people there are, the more pressure there will be on the resource base. For others, more factors come into play. Paul Ehrlich, biologist and Professor of Population Studies, captured this more complex analysis with his formula I(mpact) = P(opulation) × A(ffluence) × T(echnology). This shows that while bare population figures are indeed important when calculating environmental impact, the level and rate of consumption (affluence), and the processes used to obtain and process resources (technology), are also crucial factors. Ehrlich’s formula is often used by those who argue that small yet affluent populations are more environmentally damaging than large poorer ones.
Whose welfare?
Whatever side one is on in the ‘limits’ debate, one apparently unassailable assumption is that the objective of environmental policy is the welfare of human beings. And when we think of maximizing human welfare we usually think of this in terms of human beings alive today—present generation human beings. This is very much the focus of the global South environmentalism we discussed at the beginning of the chapter. (Even there, though, activists will offer other types of reason for environmental care, such as a sacred reverence for nature.) There are other possibilities beyond a concern for present day humans, though. We could broaden the ‘moral community’ to include, for example, future generations of human beings: we take care of the environment not only for our benefit but also for the benefit of those yet to be born. This idea is captured in the oft-quoted definition of sustainable development in the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, of 1987: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. From this point of view it would be wrong for the present generation to respond to the threat of non-renewable resource scarcity by bingeing on those resources so as to maximize present generation welfare, leaving nothing for the future. The principles of sustainable development enjoin us to use non-renewable resources wisely and sparingly, while developing alternatives to them for use by future generations.
There is a big debate to be had, though, about just how much the present can be expected to do for the future. If it turned out that the needs of future people could only be met by sacrificing some of the needs of the present, would this be acceptable? Perhaps not. But what if future needs could only be met by sacrificing some of the present generation’s wants—such as flying to New York to do the Christmas shopping? Would this be a legitimate restriction on present freedoms? Even aside from cases like this, we do tend to regard present lives as worth more than future ones (just as we tend to value lives lived closer to us—family, friends, co-nationals—than those lived further away), and this is represented in what economists call the ‘discount rate’.
Formally, the discount rate is a way of calculating how much we are prepared to pay today for benefits in the future. So in the environmental context the question might be, how much is it worth to us today to avoid environmental damage (e.g., climate change) in the future? The discount rate we use is very revealing of how important we think the future is. So at a 3 per cent discount rate, we (the present generation) regard £100 ($152 or €134) of environmental damage in the year 2100 as worth about £7 ($10 or €9.5). Another way of putting this is to say that we regard the present as about fourteen times more valuable than the future—and 3 per cent is a pretty typical discount rate. Obviously, the more the discount rate tends towards zero, the more valuable we take the future to be. Debates around climate change policy—indeed any policy with implications for the medium- to long-term future—are heavily influenced by the prevailing discount rate. At a 3 per cent discount rate we can’t justify spending much on climate change today, and a second objection to doing so is that future generations are usually better off than present ones, which puts them in a better position to pay for climate change mitigation and/or adaptation (of course, this assumes that effective climate change policy is a matter of spending money). From this point of view, the job of the present generation is to create the conditions to make the future richer, not to spend money on mitigating climate change.
However big or small we think the discount rate should be, or even if we think we should take no special action in regard to the interests of the future, all of the above suggests a conviction that future people do have interests, and that they should be taken into account. This clearly has implications for decisions we take today which will have an impact on the future—like whether to build nuclear power stations or not.
Moral extensionism—Factor X
At this point we can introduce two ideas which play a key role in environmental ethics—‘moral extensionism’, and theories of value. When we decide that the interests of future people should be weighed in the moral balance, we are extending the moral community. Effectively, we take the ‘model’ moral subject—the present generation human being—and ask what it is that makes it a moral subject. The answer might be: it is human. But because future humans are human too, what reason could we possibly have for denying them what is called ‘moral considerability’? The only reason we could have for doing so is that somehow their being future humans disqualifies them from being moral subjects. But this would be as arbitrary as saying that the interests of women should not be weighed in the moral balance, because in addition to being human they are also female.
We can see from this that there is a ‘Factor X’ at work in moral extensionism—Factor X is the characteristic that makes something ‘morally considerable’. In the case we have just discussed, Factor X is ‘being human’. Obviously much will turn on what we think the Factor X is, and the moral community will expand and contract accordingly. We can illustrate this by looking at two contrasting Factor X accounts, from Aristotle and Jeremy Bentham, respectively. Aristotle famously asked himself what makes ‘man’, of all the animals, a political animal. The answer he gave was that man has the capacity to speak. Other animals can make noises (they have ‘voice’, in Aristotle’s terms), but none of them can use speech to discuss what is right and wrong, just and unjust, good and evil. So for Aristotle, Factor X is ‘the capacity to use speech and reason’.
In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In a footnote to chapter xvii, in answer to his own question as to what makes a being morally considerable, he wrote, ‘The question is not can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?’ Bentham’s Factor X is ‘the capacity to suffer’, and this widens the ethical community at a stroke—evidently the set containing beings capable of experiencing pain and pleasure (this is more generally what Bentham means by ‘suffering’) is much bigger than the set containing beings capable of reasoned speech. This, then, is how moral extensionism works, starting with the being which has undisputed moral considerability—the human being—identifying the characteristic it possesses that gives it such considerability, and then looking for other beings that share the characteristic.
Moral extensionism has been crucial for the animal rights movement (see Figure 3). In Animal Liberation (1975), the Australian philosopher Peter Singer took Bentham’s insight and constructed a utilitarian ethical scheme that included non-human animals capable of experiencing pain and pleasure. A right action, for Singer, is one that contributes to the greatest good of the greatest number—including non-human animals capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. Similarly, the American philosopher, Tom Regan, argued in The Case for Animal Rights (1983) that the relevant Factor X (though he didn’t use the term) is to be the ‘subject-of-a-life’, by which he means a being capable of having beliefs, memory, and self-consciousness, among other characteristics. The set of beings with these characteristics is bigger than the set of beings capable of reasoned speech (Aristotle) and smaller than the set that can experience pain and pleasure (Singer).
3. Do all animals have rights? Or just some? How do we decide?
These theoretical moves have provided the foundations for a thriving animal rights/liberation movement which has made significant practical gains. Under pressure from the movement, countries have passed laws designed to improve the lives of animals in the farming industry, restrictions have been placed on the use of animals in pharmaceutical testing and the fashion/beauty industry, the use of animals in circuses has been progressively scaled back, conditions in zoos have improved, and the Dutch Party for the Animals was the first in the world to gain parliamentary seats (in 2006) with an agenda focused mainly on animal rights. By 2014 it had two members in the House of Representatives, one in the Senate, and one in the European Parliament.
Elsewhere, the idea that if humans have rights then animals similar to humans in relevant respects should have similar rights has given rise to the Great Ape Project, which argues for humanlike rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. In 2013, India banned captive dolphin facilities on the grounds that cetaceans are ‘non-human persons’, and in late 2014 an orangutan in Argentina called Sandra was granted a transfer from a zoo to a sanctuary for the same reasons. A 26-year-old chimpanzee called Tommy who lives alone in a shed in upstate New York was not so lucky. A court ruled in 2014 that because the chimp is not able to assume the responsibilities that go along with rights, he could not be granted legal personhood, and so his owner was not obliged to release him.
All of these arguments have been underpinned by some version or another of moral extensionism, and this introduces the second theme which plays a key role in environmental ethics: theories of value. For our purposes we can say that things can have either instrumental value or intrinsic value (or some combination of them). Instrumental value is the value something has for me when I want to get something done or pursue some goal. Intrinsic value is the value that any existing thing has, regardless of whether or not it is useful to me or anyone is there to value it.
Once we regard something as intrinsically valuable we can no longer treat it only instrumentally, without regard for its own interests. This is what lies behind campaigns to improve the lives of farm animals—beef cattle, for example. Clearly we are using them (instrumentally) for their meat, but respecting their intrinsic value might lead us to campaign against intensive cattle farming and in favour of rearing cattle outdoors on grass.
Ethics and the environment
We have spent some time talking about the ethical status of animals, and this is where moral extensionism tends to lead. But an ethic for animals is not an environmental ethic, and environmental politics is about more than the defence of non-human animals. There have been attempts to generate a broader environmental ethic using moral extensionism, and we will look at this when we discuss ‘deep ecology’. First, though, it is important to see that caring for the environment can be justified by the instrumental value it has for human beings.
On several occasions we have referred to the environment as our ‘life-support’ system. This means that the environment is instrumentally valuable to us in that without it we would not be able to achieve whatever goals we set ourselves. Put differently, a healthy and functioning environment is a precondition for human welfare. This is by far the most common and widely held reason for taking care of the environment, and its strength is that it speaks to people’s common sense: it just seems obvious that our wellbeing depends on a healthy environment, so we need to look after it. But this is not the only way of working up an ethic for the environment, and one key criticism of the instrumental approach leads us in another direction entirely.
The criticism is that the instrumental approach is as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. The general idea is that if we regard something as valuable only in so far as it is a means to our satisfaction, we have no reason to look after it if it doesn’t have that instrumental use. It is hard to argue that every single bit of our environment is useful to us, and this means that some components of the environment are ‘redundant’. So one problem with the instrumental route to an environmental ethic is that it is unlikely to be a full environmental ethic.
The second problem underpins the first. Imagine that we only valued other human beings because they were instrumentally useful to us. Not only would this mean that some human beings were not valuable to us (they are not all useful to us all the time), but we would also think that this was the wrong reason for valuing human beings in the first place. A proper ethic towards other human beings would not so much involve seeing them all as instrumentally useful, but of avoiding instrumentalism altogether. This is the approach taken by some environmental ethicists towards the environment.
Deep ecology
A key figure in this debate is the Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess. In September 1972 Naess gave a lecture in Bucharest in which he distinguished between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ ecology. He characterized shallow ecology as a concern about ‘pollution and resource depletion’ for the damaging effects this might have on human life. This is, in other words, the instrumentalism we referred to above. Naess contrasted this with a ‘deep’ concern for the environment for its own sake. The importance of this for Naess was that care for something for its own sake affords that thing stronger protection than if it is only of instrumental value. One way of understanding this is in terms of intrinsic value, such that the environment as a whole has intrinsic value rather than just parts of it. We saw moral extensionism working, earlier, to ‘share’ intrinsic value between human beings and (some) non-human animals on the grounds that these animals share some Factor X with humans that confers intrinsic value on them. Is there a Factor X that could take us beyond an animal ethic towards an ethic for the environment?
Clearly, the favoured candidates of animal rights theory, such as the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, or to be a ‘subject-of-a-life’, will only get us so far. A common requirement for both of these is a central nervous system—something ‘the environment’ does not possess. An alternative favoured by environmental ethicists is ‘an interest in wellbeing’. This Factor X would underpin an environmental ethic in two ways. First, it can arguably be applied to the whole of the environment, and second, it can be applied to ‘wholes’ like species and ecosystems, while animal rights tends to focus on individual animals (and only on a species in so far as it is a collection of animals, rather than something worth protecting in its own right). Another candidate is ‘autopoesis’, or the capacity for self-regeneration and self-renewal.
Anthropocentrism
An environmental ethic like this is an attempt to move away from not only instrumentalism, but also from ‘anthropocentrism’. We are being anthropocentric when we arbitrarily place the interests of human beings above those of non-human nature. One way to guard against such arbitrariness is to show that non-human nature is similar to human beings in morally relevant respects—and that is what the Factor X gambit is designed to achieve.
There are a number of alternatives to anthropocentrism, but the most common are biocentrism, which asserts that non-human as well as human life has intrinsic value, and ecocentrism, which asserts that the environment of non-living things, as well as living things themselves, has intrinsic value. This means that the ecocentric finds intrinsic value in inanimate objects such as rocks and mountains—or what is sometimes called the ‘abiotic’ (non-living) world.
The Factor X approach to developing an environmental ethic is vulnerable to the objection that the argument is self-fulfilling. Rather than start with the human being and work outwards (moral extensionism/animal rights), it often looks as though the environmental ethicist starts with an assumption that the environment should be protected and then searches for a Factor X that will underpin the moral case for protection. For some, this dilutes the strength of moral extensionism too much, to the point at which it is no longer effective. Moral extensionism works by persuading us that a special feature possessed by humans is also possessed by other beings, so to exclude those other beings from the moral community would be inconsistent and irrational. Now take the ‘interest in wellbeing’ we referred to above. The problem is not so much that this isn’t a characteristic shared by beings other than human beings, but that it isn’t particularly special. It buys moral recognition at the cost of cheapening the price of recognition.
Another problem is that, ironically, the moral extensionist route to an environmental ethic may be too anthropocentric. Even if it doesn’t regard the non-human world as purely an instrument for the realization of human ends, it still takes the human being to be the measure as well as the source of value.
These problems with using moral extensionism to achieve an environmental ethic have led some ecocentrics to take a different approach, one which revolves around the developing of an ‘ecological consciousness’ that connects the individual with the wider world. This is an expanded conception of the self which leads to an identification of the individual with all of life and the environment that sustains it. Once this identification is established, we come to see that self-realization involves working for the prospering of our surroundings too. If we understood better our condition as connected beings, it is said, we would see that harming the environment is effectively harming ourselves, and this is irrational.
Most politics is/are an answer to the question: how should we live? Or, more particularly, how should we live together? In two ways, environmental politics adds a new element to that question. First, the environment is an unavoidable context for both the question and the answer. No other politics foregrounds the environment in this way—indeed most of them have only come to take the environment into account under pressure from the environmental movement. The second novel contribution is that the ‘together’ potentially includes other living and non-living things. Most other politics only consider the relations between human beings when they ask how we are to live together. The first half of this chapter has shown how, potentially, the ‘political community’ is much bigger than that.
‘Ecologism’ as a political ideology
Yet while environmental politics brings new considerations to the table, it draws on and relates to more traditional forms of politics and political expression. One way of illustrating this is by thinking of environmental politics in terms of ‘ideology’—i.e., as a set of ideas like ‘socialism’ or ‘conservatism’. As we are thinking of it here, an ideology generally has three components: first, a critique (or sometimes an endorsement) of the way things are; second, a picture of the ideal society according to the ideology in question (which for conservatism, for example, may not be so different to the one we already have); and, third, a strategy for getting from where we are now to where the ideology would like us to be—i.e., a way of connecting the first and second components. No ideology will only have one set of answers to these questions, so it is usually more helpful to think of ideologies in plural terms—i.e., socialisms, liberalisms, nationalisms, and so on. This plurality is often reflected in putting an adjective in front of the ideology’s name, as in social liberalism, libertarian socialism, one nation conservatism. Having said that, every ideology will have an element or elements that make it different from other ideologies—a beating heart, as it were. So we can think of ideologies and the relationships between them as a Venn diagram, illustrating their distinct and shared components.
The names of most ideologies end in -ism, and the environmental variety is no different. There are, though, two competing names and this can lead to confusion: environmentalism and ecologism. ‘Environmentalism’ is probably the name most people associate with environmental politics, but there have been attempts to distinguish environmentalism and ecologism on grounds similar to those introduced above. Elsewhere, I have distinguished between the two as follows:
environmentalism argues for a managerial approach to environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production and consumption
while,
ecologism holds that a sustainable and fulfilling existence presupposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world, and in our mode of social and political life
On this account, environmentalism is less ‘radical’ than ecologism, and government ministers do not suddenly become political ecologists by trading in their limousines for hybrid (electric/petrol) cars. Environmentalism is more easily incorporated into other ideologies. So we can imagine a ‘liberal environmentalism’ or a ‘socialist environmentalism’, but it is harder to imagine a liberal or a socialist ecologism. Why might this be? What is the beating heart of ecologism that distinguishes it from other ideologies—and from environmentalism?
The answer to these questions lies in the first half of this chapter and in Chapter 1. It is a matter of making a choice on two key issues: the first is limits to growth; and the second concerns why we should value the natural environment. It will be remembered that there were two main responses to the limits to growth idea: either that greater efficiency would overcome these apparent constraints on growth, or that the limits are real and more or less fixed. More technically, we distinguished between the relative and the absolute decoupling of growth and environmental impact. While it is widely recognized that efficiency gains can be made such that the environmental impact per unit of production can be reduced (relative decoupling), this is not the same as reducing aggregate impact (absolute decoupling). So imagine we build 100 cars at a rate of 1 unit of environmental impact per car—this makes 100 units of environmental impact. Imagine, now, that we improve our environmental efficiency by 10 per cent per car. This will allow us to build 110 cars for the same impact as 100 cars when we were operating in a less efficient way. But if we build 111 cars or more, we will still be increasing our aggregate environmental impact despite our efficiency gains. In rough-and-ready terms we might say that those who are satisfied with relative decoupling are environmentalists, while those who see the challenge as one of organizing society around the impossibility of absolute decoupling are political ecologists (we use this term rather than simply ‘ecologists’ to distinguish the politics from the science).
In terms of other ideologies, relative decoupling is less of a challenge to their core positions than is absolute decoupling in that it does not call growth, as such, into question. Other modern ideologies take economic growth as an objective for society for granted—indeed they measure the success of a society in terms of such growth: is gross domestic product (GDP) increasing or decreasing? In this sense, adopting concerns around absolute decoupling would amount to questioning a core—if often unstated—belief at the heart of those ideologies. This, then, is one of the central beliefs of the ideology of ecologism: that aggregate growth must be reduced, and that this is very unlikely to be achieved by efficiency gains alone.
The other core belief turns on the question of why (if at all) we should value the non-human natural world. Earlier we saw that there are two broad approaches to this: we can value it either instrumentally or intrinsically. In other words, we can value it because it is a means to human ends, or we can value it as an end in itself. Once the issue is drawn to one’s attention, it seems commonsensical to value nature instrumentally, if only because that enhances the chances of human flourishing—and even survival. In regard to other ideologies, there is absolutely no incompatibility between their core beliefs and an instrumental valuing of nature. In fact we might say that other ideologies ought actively to incorporate this valuing of nature in their systems, as a functioning environment is a precondition for whatever world they would like to see—conservative, liberal, socialist, or nationalist.
Valuing non-human nature intrinsically is much trickier for these other ideologies, though. Their basic raison d’être is the maximization of human welfare, and non-human nature is only valuable in so far as it contributes to human welfare. Those who would value nature intrinsically are calling this objective into question, at least as an overriding principle. At the very least they will question the assumption that human wants should be satisfied at the expense of non-human needs. This demand that the needs of non-human nature be taken into account for their own sake is too disruptive of the settled assumptions of other ideologies for them to accept it. It is this, together with the idea that aggregate growth must be reduced, that form the core beliefs of what we are calling ecologism.
Other ideologies—conservatism
Having said that, the Venn diagram point we made earlier suggests that there will be points of overlap between ecologism and other ideologies. Here we will look at conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and feminism (the choice is difficult—anarchism, for instance, is also an interesting comparator). There is obviously a common etymological root between conservation and conservatism, so it should not surprise us to find some similarities between conservatism and ecologism. The conservative view of what should be done is very much underpinned by considerations of what can be done, and the limits to growth thesis—which is, as we have seen, so important to ecologism—is very much a reminder that we can’t do everything we might imagine doing. Conservatives urge caution, and in similar vein political ecologists urge precaution. The precautionary principle is a key element in environmental policy-making, and it states that if there is any risk of harm to the environment by adopting a certain policy, then the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those who wish to pursue the policy. We might regard this as a conservative approach to risk, the alternative to which is to go ahead with the policy and clean up afterwards (if necessary and if possible).
Earlier in this chapter, we noted that green thinking expands the moral community by taking account of the interests of future humans as well as present ones. Of all contemporary ideologies, the one that comes closest to sharing this view is conservatism. It was Edmund Burke, the so-called ‘father of English conservatism’, who said that society was a ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. There is a potentially significant difference in emphasis in that conservatives tend to look to the past, while—as we have seen on a number of occasions—the environmental focus is often on the future. Conservatism is interested in the conserving and preserving of the past, while ecologism is interested in conserving and preserving for the future. Despite this, ‘intergenerationalism’—a concern for the relationship between generations and what they might owe each other—is unique to conservatism and ecologism in political thought.
This picture of conservatism painted here will not be recognized by someone brought up with the liberal ‘conservatism’ of the last forty years or so. This is a form of small state, free-market liberalism in which economic decisions are left to the market, and the common good (what is good for all of us, as a society) is produced by all of us pursuing our self-interest. Any attempt by the state to steer society in a given direction will inevitably amount to a restriction on the freedom of individuals to pursue their self-interest, and will also result in bad (‘sub-optimal’) decisions anyway; the state, it is said, has proved itself incapable of backing (economic) winners—only the market can. Free-marketeers argue that one of the fundamental principles of the market—private property—is the best instrument we have for sustainability, on the grounds that private property is better looked after than property held in common. Sceptics will respond that there are some excellent examples of sustainably managed property held in common, such as Swedish forests, and that the private property-owner might calculate that he or she would be better off selling the forest and turning a profit (for example), rather than looking after it for the sake of its human and non-human inhabitants and for the future.
Liberalism
This economic liberalism has changed the face of conservatism, but it is not the only liberalism there is. Our discussion of the potential inclusion of some animals in the moral community was an implicit recognition of the importance of another strand of liberalism in this aspect of environmental thinking. This is because ‘rights’—including animal rights—are a fundamentally liberal idea. What is revolutionary about rights is that they are like a passport to a certain kind of treatment and respect that cannot be taken away—in technical terms, they are ‘inalienable’. They amount to a powerful claim, and it is much better to be a possessor of rights than not. Beneficiaries of environmental-rights talk in our context include present generations of humans (where the idea of a right to a clean and healthy environment has gained traction—even to the point of being included in some countries’ constitutions), future generations of humans (as we have seen on a number of occasions), and some non-human animals. Recognizing these rights in practice is another matter altogether, of course, but such is their authority in political discourse that they throw a spotlight of legitimacy on to anyone or anything that can plausibly lay claim to possessing them. On a broader canvas, it is worth remembering that it was a liberal—John Stuart Mill—who described, in his Principles of Political Economy, the ‘stationary state’ society in terms that many greens would endorse:
there [is not] much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature … If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness—which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population—I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that we humans will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels us to it.
In other regards, though, liberalism has a more problematic relationship with environmental politics—and especially with ecologism as we described it above. First, liberalism has at its heart a concern for liberty, generally understood as the freedom to do what one wants, consistent with other people’s similar freedoms. Ecological thinking might be regarded as going against the liberal grain in this respect, in two ways.
First, the requirement to keep within the limits of a finite Earth might be read as a series of prohibitions on production, consumption, and mobility. It is not that these restrictions can’t be justified in liberal terms, since liberals often operate a ‘harm principle’ which says that my freedoms end where harm to others begins. It is possible to think of overconsumption as doing harm, in the sense of encroaching on others’ ‘ecological space’, and in this sense, liberal justifications of sustainability-related restrictions are possible. But these restrictions will never come naturally to the liberal sensibility, partly because liberals tend to make an important distinction between preferences (what they want to do) and interests (what it is in their interest to do). More particularly, liberals will say that their preferences are their interests, and they will resist the idea that anyone could know their interests better than they can. But this, of course, is what greens will often claim—they are in the business of ‘enlightening’ us as to the true state of things: our preference (to take one long-haul foreign holiday every year) may not be in our best interests (a stable climate).
Relatedly, liberals believe that we should be free to choose our own moral code, and that it is not the job of politics—and far less the state—to tell us what the contours of the ‘good life’ should be. This is why, while liberals are happy for people to practise whatever religion they wish, they are opposed to the state deciding for us which religion we should follow. Think of a roundabout, with various exits. The rules of the roundabout ensure that the cars are kept apart, and the drivers may take any exit they wish. The rules of the roundabout represent the rules of society, preventing people from harming each other as they go about satisfying their preferences, and the exits represent the various versions of the good life that people choose to pursue. In theory, in a liberal society citizens are free to take any exit they wish, and to create new ones, as long as they respect similar freedoms of other citizens and don’t cause them harm. The potential conflict with green thinking is that from a sustainability point of view not all exits from the roundabout will be regarded as legitimate or desirable: the need to keep production and consumption within the limits of a finite planet, and the injunction to recognize the intrinsic value of non-human nature, both act as constraints on our plans for life, and could well close off some types of exit from the roundabout. To this degree, ecologism might be regarded as ‘non-liberal’.
Socialism
Historically, liberalism has had two views of non-human nature, one drawing on John Locke, who saw nature as a storehouse for human benefit, and one with a more benign view, represented by Bentham’s ‘sentience’ criterion for moral considerability, and Mill’s ‘stationary state’ society. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, where he described the stationary state society, was published in 1848—the same year as Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Although they are a long way apart in many respects, what Locke and Marx have in common—and where they part company with Mill—is the belief that human progress consists in dominating nature and putting it to work for our benefit alone. Just as ‘a view from nature’ shows that there are two strands of liberalism, the same is true of socialism. One wing is represented by Marx and his heirs, promoting a productivist socialism, and the other, represented by so-called utopian socialists such as William Morris, offers a less productivist, more decentralized form of socialism.
Unsurprisingly, it is the latter type of socialism with which political ecologists have more in common, not least because Morris and his colleagues tended to view ‘industrialism’ rather than capitalism as the source of humanity’s ills. This is consistent with the analysis of many contemporary political ecologists who argue that as far as the key issue of growth is concerned, there is little difference between mainstream socialism and mainstream capitalism—the objective of both is to grow the economy as fast as possible. Marx felt that capitalism was a brake on productivity, and that is why he argued it needed to be overthrown. On the other hand, capitalists argue against socialism on the grounds that productivity is best achieved by leaving the market to its own devices, and socialism brings with it too much state intervention in the market. What is common to them both, though, is the maximizing of production and growth.
Ecologism and socialism share a concern for the connected ideas of equality and justice. Much of ecologism’s determination to extend ethical concern to the environment is animated by the idea that equality should apply ‘beyond the human’. The same goes for justice. For socialism, justice is about universal recognition of all as participants in creating society’s common wealth, and about the fair shares that everyone deserves as a result of this common endeavour. There are evident echoes of this in ecologism, where the non-human environment is regarded as a partner in, and contributor to, whatever prosperity we may enjoy, and therefore deserving of recognition, care, and justice. Justice is also clearly at the heart of the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ to which we have referred on several occasions. Here it plays two roles. First, this version of environmental politics sees environmental problems as caused by injustice which forces the disadvantaged to degrade their environment. And, second, environmental ‘bads’ (such as landfills) are disproportionately—and unjustly—located in poor communities.
From this brief survey of three ideologies in relation to ecologism—conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—we can see that the interesting fault lines are less between ecologism and these ideologies and more the ones we find within these ideologies. In each case there is a strand that calls into question the idea that wellbeing is necessarily linked with economic growth; and a simultaneous sense that we lose something through our progressive alienation from the non-human natural world. In the Venn diagram illustrating the relationship between ecologism and other ideologies, the overlap areas will be bigger in relation to these ‘subordinate’ streams than their mainstream, more dominant, partners.
Feminism
One final ideology has played an especially significant role in the development of environmental politics—feminism. Just as there are many liberalisms and socialisms, though, so there are many feminisms, and one of these has been especially influential. Recall the remark we have just made: the sense that we lose something by being so distanced from nature. This prompts the question: how do we close that distance? One type of feminism—often called ‘difference’ feminism—offers a possible answer. As the name suggests, difference feminists argue that men and women are fundamentally different, and one of the ways they are different is that women are said to be ‘closer to nature’. This is because of women’s key role in ‘reproducing life’, either as birth-givers or—as is still the case in most of the world—as those who shoulder much of the work of sustaining life. The argument goes that this closeness to nature puts women in the vanguard as far as reconfiguring our relationship with the natural world is concerned.
Even if this analysis is correct, though, some feminists see it as involving a high-risk strategy for women. This is because one of the reasons given to legitimate women’s subordination in the past was, precisely, their supposed closeness to nature. In a world in which nature is regarded as wild, unpredictable, irrational, and a realm of passion, and in a world in which these characteristics are regarded as incompatible with the practices of civilization, any group wanting to take part in these practices would do well to resist those characteristics. An alternative, of course, is to revalue those characteristics, and to view passion and wildness more positively. If this were the case, then groups associated with passion and wildness would be better regarded. The danger, of course, is that if this revaluation doesn’t take place, women are left where they were before—subordinate to men.
This problem has led some feminists to argue that it is not a question of aligning one or the other gender with ‘nature’, but of refusing the nature/culture and man/woman dualisms in the first place. This is a matter of recognizing that women are fully human and simultaneously acknowledging that human identity is continuous with nature rather than somehow different from it. This is a kind of reconfigured humanism. From an environmental point of view, humanism can be problematic if it simply amounts to a reassertion of the sway of humanity over nature. In contrast, this version would be a win-win for both women and nature: women would no longer be battling for acceptance, and nature would benefit from being regarded as on a continuum with humanity.
This chapter has been about some of the key ideas that drive environmental politics, but in politics there is no point in having ideas unless there is some way of putting them into practice. Chapter 3 is about the ‘machinery’ of environmental politics—the movement that nurtures and expresses the politics; the parties that are the electoral vehicles for getting the politics into the system; and the array of policy instruments that are available for putting society on a more sustainable footing.