Administration
Believe it or not, we only have four weeks of classes left. Please remember that your final test and interpretive policy analysis are due in only 3+ weeks from now.

Old Business
None.

New Business
As we’ve noted previously, discourses are akin to language. We have them and use them without ever being entirely in control of them. Because of this they emerge, grow, evolve, wither, perhaps die or rejuvenate in ways that are also beyond our total control.

For instance, the environmental discourses of Survivalism and Prometheanism may be said to have their roots in the scientific ecology of the 20th century. Whatever its flaws, survivalism accepted the lessons of closed ecological ecosystems while prometheanism clung to a vision of man’s [sic] mechanistic mastery of nature. So too, the discourses of administrative rationalism and democratic pragmatism can be traced back to the progressive movement in the US, and before that to the social administration of Canada and Great Britain. In a similar manner, the discourses of economic rationalism, ecological modernization and sustainability have significant roots in conservative and neoliberal capitalist ideology.

Green Consciousness and Green Politics also have deep roots. Some of these roots lay in 18th century romanticism, and its trenchant critique of the Enlightnement, industrialism and anthropocentric humanism. Romanticism was a complex intellectual movement with many strands. It was not a simple contrast between reason and emotion, science and faith, that apologist for positivism and its variants like to propagate. And the organicist, nature-centred sensibilities of portions of romanticism did play a role in the emergence of an ‘ecological conscience’. Other roots lay in the radical political visions and social experiments that, however marginalized at their birth, have played an outsized role in political life. Democracy, feminism, socialism, and animal rights are but a few of these political visions that continue to reshape our political life to this day. Dryzek’s chapters on green consciousness and green politics demonstrates the variety, vitality and tensions between these alternative discourses.

It may be tempting to dismiss this diversity of moral and political viewpoints as unrealistic, utopian, and impractical. Whether you believe this to be true or not, it is a mistake to do so hastily. Consider that every major extension of political rights and responsibilities the world over has been preceded by ideas and movements that the ‘mainstream’ deems deviant, dangerous, or radical. The history of moral and political progress is our historical evidence for this. Movements for national liberation, anti-colonialism, economic justice, women’s suffrage and equality, peace, and environmental protection would not have been possible if people had not adopted and adapted discourses to help them think and act outside the box, so to speak.

One contemporary case in point is the Bolivian Law of Mother Earth, which establishes intrinsic moral value and legal standing for people, animals and nature. This is but one of many efforts underway in Ecuador, Spain, Germany, and other countries.

Before class on Tuesday, read the following news report — Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth (The Guardian) — and peruse The Pachamama Alliance website (especially the About page and the Initiatives pages).

After you do so, ask yourself the following questions.
* What is the relationship between green consciousness and green politics?
* How do these laws and organizations represent the family of green radical discourse?
* How do these laws and organizations challenge the other families of environmental discourses?

See you soon.

Cheers, Bill

Image: Ant-globalization protesters at the G20 summit in London, 2009. The Guardian.

Announcements
Welcome back to the second half of the semester.

Administration
I’ve returned your test scores and case study papers to you via email attachment. I’ll distribute your tests during our first class together. Please check your email (and spam folder if necessary), and if you do not have something from me, let me know and I can resend.

Old Business
Before Tuesday’s class, I encourage you to have a look at the slide shows we produced for the policy discourse of administrative rationalism. This will help remind you of some common features of environmental discourse that will facilitate our discussion of democratic pragmatism and economic rationalism.

New Business
On Tuesday I will be discussing democratic pragmatism and economic rationalism in some detail, and along with administrative rationalism, contrasting all three species of these ‘problem solving’ discourses. I’ll also start our discussion of moral values and moral community, key concept in understanding the normative dimensions of environmental policy.

I’m looking forward to see you folks again.

Cheers, Bill

Image: The image above is from rexcurry.net, an attorney advocating free market environmentalis, eco-capitalism, libertarian environmentalism… and manateee farms. The specialty tags being marketed here exemplify the emphasis on privatization, a prominent theme in the discourse of economic rationalism.

Announcements
It is the last week of classes before spring break!

Administration
A few updates about this coming week.

First, Test 1 is this Tuesday. Pay close attention to your essential readings from Yanow, Moyer, and Dryzek, as well as the core readings used to frame the history and meaning of interpretive policy analysis — Lynn, Fischer, Jennings, Smith, and Yanow.

Recall that I am primarily interested in your knowledge and application of conceptual tools. Look over the lecture slides and your notes with care to review the concepts most important to our discussions. As part of this, note that I place great emphasis on concept maps and diagrams. It may be worth your while to be able to reproduce these maps on your own. ‘;-)

As only one concrete illustration, we have been discussing discourses of environmentalism, and how they inform environmental policy. It might be a good idea to commit to memory Lynn’s concept map of discourse, as well as Dryzek’s classification of environmental discourses. This goes for other visual aids we have encountered throughout the term.

Second, your case study paper is due this coming Friday at midnight via email attachment. On Thursday, please bring a draft of your paper and specific questions about its format or content that you would like to discuss with the class as a whole. By sharing our individual questions together, we’ll contribute to the shared knowledge of the whole group. That will make for better preparation and papers all around.

Old Business
Before we start the test, come prepared to ask whatever questions you like!

New Business
Per your request we’ll begin placing a bit more emphasis on ethics and environmental policy. While this course is not focused on questions of ethics and environment policy (that’s my Ethics and the Environment course), moral values are such an important part of policy debate that ignoring them is unwise. Since we are operating as a presentation-based tutorial, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble fitting small doses of this in. This won’t involve any new readings, but rather a few conceptual tools you can use to unravel the moral dimensions of policy.

Cheers, Bill

Image: The Fab Tree Hab from TerreForm. The Fab Tree Hab envisions a fusion of living and built structures as one means of reintegrating human habitations into the ecological community. It is an ‘out there’ idea for now, but were it possible, implementing such an idea would entail profound changes in building codes, zoning, urban planning, and housing subsidies — all concrete manifestations of public policy. One can only imagine the debate over the moral motivations and/or implications of putting this design vision into practice.

The sixth week of the semester, and there are only two more weeks before spring break.

Announcements
None

Administration
All of you should have received your policy paper abstracts back via email attachment. If you did not, please let me know as soon as possible and I will look into it. After reading some very good work, the one general piece of advice I want to stress is focus. The best abstracts were built around a single policy document, such as a law or white paper, and not a major topic that includes so many subtopics it is difficult to know where to go with either your research or writing. So if you have not as of yet chosen a specific enough topic, then it is time to drill down and find it. Please don’t hesitate to chat with me more about this so I can be of help to you too!

Old Business
Last week we began our discussion of the concept of discourse, and what this reveals about humanity’s troubled relationship with the environment. Discourse links language, action, objects and institutions together as both informed and informing of our patterns of thought and expression. Think worldviews and ideology, and you’ve got a rough sense of what interpretivists mean by discourse.

The first discourse we examined was survivalism, an environmental discourse that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Stressing limits to stocks natural resources, carrying capacity for population growth, and absorptive capacity for pollution, survivalism is still prevalent today, particularly in the form of warnings about global climate change. Spaceship earth was one of its signifying metaphors.

Survivalism itself was responding to an industrial view of the world, because its presupposition and committments constitute the antithesis of most environmental discourses . At first Dryzek refers to this in a general way, as industrialism. Later on he specifies two versions of industrialism in the discourse of prometheanism and cornucopianism. Prometheanism emphasizes the role of human technology laissez-faire capitalism in the control of nature to meet the material interests of human beings. It is complemented by a companion discourse of cornucopianism, which believes the resources of the earth are somehow inexhaustable. This can be a tad confusing as it is unclear what Dryzek means at this junction. Are prometheanism, cornucopianism and industrialism the same, subtypes of one or the other, or something else?

For my part, I find it helpful to think of industrialism as a resonant set of discourses bearing a family resemblance. For instance, despite differences in their economic theory, marxism and capitalism are both industrial points of view, sharing a common set of presuppositions about ‘metabolizing’ the earth as a resource for human beings. To understand the distinctiveness of industrialist discourses we need to examine its anthropology (view of humanity), epistemology (beliefs about what is knowledge), ontology (beliefs about how the world works), and axiology (beliefs about what has value).

As diverse as this family of discourses may be, they share at least three moral commitments in common.

The first is in anthropocentrism, the belief that only human beings have intrinsic moral value. The rest of the world — all its animals, ecological communities, and physical systems — is simply of instrumental value, tools and resources for human beings to use. One therefore only has responsibilities to human beings, and all else is but a distraction.

The second is their belief in the unilinear ‘development’ of human kind, whether this is phrased in terms of Tyler’s ‘stages of civilization’, Marx’s ‘historical materialism’, or Rostow’s development theory. Industrialism conceives of ‘primitives’ living like ‘animals’ before the light of science and power of technology raise them up to our current way of life in the world. It thus becomes our moral duty to bring others into our way of life.

The third is a faith in the power of instrumental reason, technology, secularism, science, and urbanism to control nature, and thus provide infinite material well being and social stability. The American pragmatist termed this aspiration ‘the moral equivalent of war’. Marxists, ‘the domination of nature’ thesis. Contemporary social theorists, ‘the social construction of nature’.

If you would like to learn more about industrialism and how it plays the foil to environmentalism, allow me call several books to your attention.

Sibley, Mulford Q. 1977. Nature and Civilization: Some Implications for Politics. Itasca: F. E. Peacock.

Worster, Donald. 1985. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Second ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Manes, Christopher. 1990. Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

With respect to survivalism, I was struck by several newspaper articles last week that traded on the discourse of a finite earth facing catastrophic threats to nature and the human civilization in general. Science online published an article, Are We In The Middle of a Sixth Great Extinction?, and the Washington Post carried an opinion piece entitled, A Climate Change Activist Prepares for the Worst.

Don’t get me wrong. Scientists have been talking about the sixth great extinction for some time now. And rapid climate change will certainly turn the world upside down according to the US military and security think tanks. It is not that I doubt them per se. Rather I’m trying to point out that the survivalist discourse is deeply embedded in our ways of thinking about the environment. Whatever it’s insights and/or errors, it deserves to be identified and understood as such. You’ll find that doing so helps you understand the views of environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike.

To my mind, two books best exemplify the survivalists discourse, especially as it is translated out of the conservation sciences and into environmental policy. They are:

Catton, William R. 1982. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana: University of Chicago Press.

Ophuls, William. 1977. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

New Business
This week we’ll be examining the discourse of prometheanism (a direct and conservative response to survivalism), as well as administrative rationalism (a technocratic continuation of the the conservation movements government based management of natural systems).

Image: Thomas Cole, Prometheus Bound (1847). Oil on canvas.

Is it already the fifth week of the semester? Time is flying by!

Announcements

Today is the last day of February. And its beginning to ice over.

Administration

Thank you for your policy abstracts. I’ll mark them up using the comment function and return them to you one week from now. In the meantime, please remember that your policy case study paper is due three weeks from this coming Friday.

Old Business

Last week’s evening with Jen Jones (Program Officer, IHP) on “Invasion of the NGOs” was fascinating. A few thoughts of my own to share.

Jones, who is a good friend and someone I admire greatly, offered a blistering critique of Western conceptions of culture, nature and development, while challenging assumptions about the benevolence of international development aid, as well as big non-governmental organizations (BINGOs) like the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy. According to her, BINGOs are beholden to large funders that coopt these ngos into tools of corporate greed or foreign policy. And these neocolonial policies are about advancing western interests, with negative consequences for local peoples and their environments.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with her critique, it was very informative and beautifully illustrated using a case study of national parks and reserves in Tanzania, particularly how the Masai people and the Serengeti plain are affected by conservation policies. Personally, while I recognize that individual ngos may do wonderful work, the larger structural framework of neocolonialism can work against people’s rights, interests and well being. I do not want to overgeneralize here. Nonetheless, the spectre of neo-colonialism is an important concern that we must consider.

We lunched together that afternoon, and talked about her upcoming presentation in detail. I’d complement her critique with a few comments on its implicit moral discourse.

I think the social justice dimensions of her position are clear and persuasive. There are the undeniable needs and human rights of the region’s people to consider. This includes political autonomy and access to local resources free of neocolonial control. So too her argument that environmental protection serving western interests can have a negative impact on a regions wildlife and wild lands. Think exploitative ecotourism, de-peopled national parks, poaching by international criminal gangs, forced agricultural resettlement, and the like.

At the same time, note the implications of framing the Serengeti as a ‘resource’ and not a ‘community’. The Serengeti-as-resource implies an anthropocentric worldview that conceives of animals and ecosystems as nothing more than instruments to human needs. It foregrounds the interests and conflicts of its human inhabitants, yet backgrounds the well being of its many non-human inhabitants. And since oppressed peoples are often treated ‘like animals’ by privileged elites, their well being is sacrificed in analogous ways. So by engaging in the resource framing of the Serengeti, we end up reinforcing the very instrumental rationality and technocratic sensibilities that are at the centre of Jones’ critique of neocolonialism.

In interpretive theory and method, we term this the presence of absence. What that means, in this case, is that an anthropocentric moral discourse is influencing environmental policy and practice, even when it is absent from direct discussion and consideration. If we are to fully benefit from Jones’ critique, then we will have to address the moral values that inform environmental policy, as well as thinking about the well being of the entire Serengeti community, human and non-human alike.

New Business

The comments above are a nice segue into the next section of our course, environmental discourses.

Up to now, we have been talking about the environment comparatively little. Instead we have been illustrating interpretive public policy with a range of social and international policy issues, the revolutions in Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere to be precise. This will change as we begin discussing John Dryzek’s The Politics of the Earth (2005).

Dryzek’s book is a fulsome investigation into the characteristics and variety of those discourses most used to frame our understanding of the environment. What surprises most of my students is the sheer variety of environmental discourses, and the diversity of their presuppositions, worldviews and implications. Survivalism, prometheanism, administrative rationalism, democratic pragmatism, economic rationalism, sustainable development, ecological modernization, green consciousness, green politics — these are some of the discourses that Dryzek identifies as shaping our individual and collective understanding of the environment and environmental policy.

As you read the first couple of chapters, on discourse itself and survivalism, think about the following questions.

What are your own ideas about the environment?

What do you assume should be the relationship between people, animals and nature?

What about your own beliefs resonates with industrialism or survivalism?

See you soon!

Cheers, Bill

We are now in the fourth week of Envi 309 Understanding Public Policy, and will finish up our discussion of how social movements drive changes in public policy. A stunning example of this is occurring in North Africa and the Middle East as I write.

Announcements
On Wednesday evening, 23 February, Jen Jones of the International Honours Program will be speaking in Paresky Auditorium at 8:00 p.m. Her title is ‘Invasion of the NGOs: Nature, Territory, and Identity in Tanzania’.

Jen is a good friend, and a former visiting professor in Environmental Studies at Williams College. She runs a fascinating study abroad program, Beyond Globalization. Here is the description. If you are interested in study abroad, I cannot recommend a better person or program with whom to share the experience.

Beyond Globalization
Reclaiming Nature, Culture and Justice
Rapid economic globalization has dramatically altered business paradigms and government policies with unprecedented effects on societies and cultures, ecosystems and health, justice and equality. These changes have precipitated a widening sense of urgency and a search for new economic, cultural and political options in the face of conflicting worldviews and increasing identity assertion.

Students in IHP’s Beyond Globalization program meet some of the world’s most important critics of current patterns of development and connect with a diversity of social movements and individual initiatives that are confronting the consequences of a globalized economy. They experience firsthand a variety of contested development programs and projects, and witness the emerging alternatives being tried to recover and maintain a just and sustainable world.

From Tanzania to New Zealand, India to Mexico, students visit urban and rural landscapes and communities affected by globalization. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, ecology, economics, environmental policy and politics, they examine how globalization, development and progress affect the planet and its inhabitants.

Most important, students learn how to see and experience the rich diversity and plurality of the world and how to interact with others. Going beyond mere empathy, they try to find shared ground for the creation of equitable and sustainable alternatives, harmonious coexistence, and ways to make a difference in their own world.

Key Questions
* What are the alternatives and possibilities being regenerated, imagined, and implemented for a just and sustainable world?
* Which voices, social movements and ideas currently resist and challenge dominant development paradigms and policies?
* What are the pathways now opened for dignified work and meaningful life?
What is the role and responsibility of each of us in addressing the broader human and ecological dimensions of globalization and in finding our own place and destiny?

Administration
We will review how tests work in this course on Tuesday, so please read your Test document (from Glow) before class. Recall that your first, in-class presentation will happen this coming Thursday. At midnight on Friday, you also turn in the abstract for your policy papers (i.e. case study, interpretive policy analysis) via email attachment. I’ve previously stressed the importance of following the Style Guide in terms of formatting and sourcing. If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to bring them up during class or office hours.

Old Business
None

New Business
In last week’s discussion of Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (MAP), we covered definitions of social movements, models and theories of power, strategies for social change, and the role of movement activists. We learned that good public policy is not something created by individual citizens asking governments to do the right thing, but by groups of citizens exercising collective agency to demand governments act for the public good.

We shall pick up where we left off, and discuss the eight stages of social movements, and the various ways those stages impact policy discourse. I’ll also be discussing the meaning and role of non-violent direct action (NVDA) in social movements, and illustrating MAP and NVDA with current events from Northern Africa and the Gulf States.

In preparation for the latter, please read the following newspaper articles. They discuss some of the features and thinks who worked with the Serbian, Ukrainian, Tunisian, and Egyptian youths whose network and organization were key to the emergence of these revolts against dictatorial regimes.

A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History, New York Times

Gandhi in Tahrir Square, Tikkun Daily

Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution, New York Times

Watching Protesters Risk it All, New York Times

In addition, you may be interested in downloading and reading the work of Gene Sharp, the leading theorist of strategic nonviolence. His short ebook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, is indispensable for understanding how repressive and violent regimes can be resisted by social movements composed of grassroots citizens. For more on Gene Sharp’s work, see the Albert Einstein Institution website.

Cheers, Bill

Image: Tahrir Square protest at night, via Twitter on 07 February 2011.

Announcements
None

Administration
Please recall that the abstracts for your research papers are due next Friday.

On Tuesday we’ll review the research paper assignments, comprised of an abstract, case study and interpretive policy analysis.

This coming Thursday, we will meet in Sawyer Library for a research seminar conducted by Rebecca Ohm, research librarian for Environmental Studies and other fields. Rebecca is wonderful, and I’m sure you’ll get much out of this session. Meet at the research help desk inside the library at the regular time. This seminar is to help you prepare the abstracts of your research papers. Those abstracts are due next Friday at midnight via email attachment.

So too, your first presentation is in class next Thursday. May I gently suggest you break your presentation into thirds, with the first section summarizing what we’ve learned about social movements and policy, and the remaining sections illustrating the MAP theory with concrete case studies?

Old Business
Last week we discussed the technocratic and interpretive turns in public policy, the emphasis on agency, meaning, and deliberation in interpretive approaches to environmental policy, and some of the basic tools of interpretation drawn from hermeneutics, e.g. the hermeneutic circle (otherwise known as contextual analysis), the metaphor of the text, and so on. Throughout the term, we’ll return to these foundations and extend them with new conceptual tools.

We also heard a fascinating public panel entitled Getting Biomass Right. The speakers, Bill Moomaw and Mary Booth, were both environmental scientists with expertise on global climate change and atmospheric pollution. Their panel spoke to the question of siting a biomass plant in Pownel, VT (near the college) as well as using biomass to generate electricity more generally. Their presentations and the subsequent discussion nicely illustrated the tensions within and between technical and interpretive approaches to environmental policy. We’ll discuss this in further detail in class.

New Business
While we cannot cover the plethora of theories and case studies about social movements, we can begin to explore their role in public policy with a look at one of the most fruitful and interdisciplinary approaches yet — Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan, or MAP.

In the technocratic vision of policy making, citizens give their consent through elections, but thereafter play an inconsequential role in developing, implementing and assessing policy initiatives. The model of power that informs technocracy is hierarchical, and governance is reserved for political elites, experts and their corporate benefactors. If that sounds much like government today, it should. US technocracy at state and federal levels took took deep root in the 1950s and 1960s, and whether you are liberal or conservative, is currently the dominant discourse of policy making in this country. While interpretive voices in public policy are ubiquitous, especially around local planning and social justice issues, they are still in the minority. Sadly, interpretive voices are often non-existent when it comes to environmental concerns.

We also learned that the technocratic model has not worked out very well. Its theoretical and methodological commitments to objectivism and technical rationalism blind it to the value-laden, ethically inflected nature of policy disputes. A discourse of ends, it forgets that policy is ‘ethics writ large’, that is, envisioning and acting for the public good. And when technocracy really goes wrong, it lacks the self-correcting mechanisms of deliberative politics to put matters aright.

And so social protests are often mounted as a means to reassert democratic governance. Moyer’s MAP helps us understand social movements like environmentalism with a set of conceptual tools by which to understand the interplay of political power, the grand strategy of grass-roots led change, the various roles (positive and negative) of activists, and the eight stages through which social movements progress to achieving their goals. It is important to realize that this is not meant to be a predictive strategic plan, but an adaptive scenario for strategizing.

The take home point here is that environmental and other policies cannot be fully understood by looking at government legislation and regulation alone. Rather, they must be understood within the wider social and cultural context in which they arise. A key political player in these contexts are various social movements, each of which embodies a distinct set of values and interests about the workings of our political community.

Cheers, Bill

Images: Protesters from EquAnimals and AnimaNaturalis protest the 2009 opening of the Canadian Seal Hunt. Social protests often use shock tactics to garner public attention and create openings for public education. While effective marketing tools, shock tactics can backfire. They can also bring advocates for different social movements into conflict. The use of nudity in the animal and environmental movement, for example, has drawn sharp rebuke from some members of the women’s movement because of the objectification of women’s bodies. Whether you agree or disagree, such concerns raise important questions of pluralism, solidarity, marginalization and oppression both within and between social movements.

Announcements
Getting Biomass Right: Should we be Generating Electricity from Trees?
Thursday, Feb. 10, 7:30 p.m. Paresky Auditorium

Bill Moomaw, director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, and Mary Booth, co-founder of the Massachusetts Environmental Energy Alliance (MEEA). Each will present remarks before taking questions.
Moomaw is professor of international environmental policy at Tufts. His work and research over the past two decades have focused on stratospheric ozone, climate, energy, forests, water, and sustainable development. He has served as a lead author or coordinating lead author for four Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and is coordinating lead author of the IPCC special report “Renewable Energy and Climate Change” due out this year. He was also a member of the Technical Steering Committee that published new forest management recommendations based on ecosystem services for Massachusetts. He has advised corporations, governments, and the World Bank on climate, energy, and forest issues. He graduated from Williams in 1959, earned his Ph.D. at M.I.T., and taught in the Williams chemistry department from 1964 to 1990.

Booth is a scientist whose research has examined human influences on soils, waters, and forests. She is currently serving as an expert witness on air-permit appeals for biomass plants proposed nationally. The MEEA, which she co-founded with Alexandra Dawson, advocates for sustainable energy solutions by carrying out scientific and legal analyses of the impacts of energy policies. The organization promotes issues such as energy conservation and efficiency and transparent, science-based state and federal energy policies, and opposes large-scale biomass plants. Booth was formerly a senior scientist at Environmental Working Group. She received her Ph.D. in ecosystem ecology at Utah State University.

Administration
Getting Biomass Right is an opportunity for extra credit. You must sign-in with me before hand, attend the entire event, and participate in the question and answer session. Each extra credit opportunity adds 2% to your participation grade.

Old Business
The snow storms disruption of classes last week means we have a bit of catching up to do. Please make sure you have all your course materials including books before you come to class on Tuesday.

New Business
On Tuesday we will begin with a brief overview of the syllabus and course policies, then move straight into a discussion of the meanings and dimensions of public policy and environmental policy. If we have time, we’ll start our discussion of the interpretive turn in policy studies, and how that shapes the contours of this course

One of those visitors is Bill Vitek, Professor of Philosophy and chair of the department at Clarkson University. Bill is a delightful human being, with deep insight into the moral and cultural dimensions of sustainability.

Bill recently shared a talk with our program on his philosophy of limits. It sums up his principles for shifting our discourse and way of life towards one that is Earth friendly in every respect. What immediately caught my ear is his epigram — No Harm, No Hubris, No Hurry. Wouldn’t our lives be better if we lived by these maxims each day, a?

Bill has kindly agreed to share the talk on Ethos.

Cheers, Bill

~~~

Toward a Philosophy of Limits: No Harm, No Hubris, No Hurry

by Bill Vitek, Ph.D. (Philosophy, Clarkeson University)

We live in an increasingly interconnected global system the merits of which are touted with the intensity of American TV ads for beer and pick-up trucks. The costs are rarely mentioned and just as loudly discounted. And while it may go against the grain to say so, what we commonly call “progress” has produced some of the very problems we expect progress to eradicate. Advances in agriculture and medicine have led to the exponential growth of the human population, and that has put increased demands on top soil and fresh water. Technology has made more and more of the world’s fossil fuels accessible, leading to increased consumption and an increase in atmospheric carbon, leading to increased global temperatures. Worse, many of the solutions to these monumental challenges depend upon the logic of plenty: finding more oil, increasing soil and seed productivity, promoting economic growth and material consumption, utilizing more land for human food production, and even increasing human population. Each calls forth a faith in the unbounded human spirit to rise to any occasion, to conquer any foe. The recipe for success is simple: unleash human ingenuity; utilize it to harness and commodify nature’s immense and complex forces; enjoy the new and improved world that results; deny, repair or accommodate damage; repeat.

Considering how many of the problems that threaten to overwhelm us are the direct consequences of this Herculean paradigm, it is not unreasonable to reject outright the many attempts to tinker and jigger, and to offer an altogether alternative approach. It begins with a statement of limits and three propositions that follow from it. Both the principle and the propositions are well-established and form a foundation for thinking differently about ourselves and the world. They may sound shrill to those raised on the sign-song optimism of human “know how.” But were they to be applied collectively to our daily lives, and incorporated into the leading social and cultural “operating systems” of the modern world, it is more than reasonable to imagine a future in which the second hand of the doomsday clock moves slowly in reverse.

The Limits Principle:

Prosperity in all of its forms requires limits, broadly construed.

Limits Propositions

No Harm: Except for planet Earth, life seems pretty rare in the universe. Thoughtlessly and willingly destroying it or limiting its diversity and co-evolution —or the “non-living” systems upon which it depends, especially at the level of species—is a moral wrong among self-conscious creatures who surely should know better by now.

No Hubris: Human beings are the unintended offspring of evolutionary processes, and as such lack any special or pre-ordained tools for divining the world’s inner workings. Because areas of certainty are small relative to the large field of ignorance, we should behave as if our ignorance will always exceed our knowledge. It will.

No Hurry: All life depends on sunlight and the complex and integrated chemical and thermodynamic processes it powers. Life needs optimal temperature, water, soils, and photosynthesis. Net Primary Production (NPP) is the technical term that describes the energic and organic material production of these ecosystem processes—the calories and biomass that life produces. NPP is constrained by many factors and cannot be improved substantially, increased or sped up over time without the addition of inputs from outside the system. For centuries we’ve been supersizing NPP by adding highly energy-dense materials (i.e., fossil fuels—the past solar income of the planet) to earth processes. Doing so, we draw down stored capital stocks created over long stretches of time by the very same ecosystemic production we seek to augment. Think of the “high density” taste of maple syrup, a gallon of which begins as roughly 40 gallons of maple sap, boiled over a very hot fire to evaporate 39 gallons. Nature provides the sap and the fire, the pans for boiling, the tools for tapping the trees, the wheat and soil fertility for the pancake flour. Not unlike the Little Red Hen in the children’s folktale, it is nature that performs all of the work, and that should get all of the credit. Our high life of consumption is brought to us both by contemporary NPP and the rapid drawdown—in mere centuries—of an eon or more worth of accumulated fresh water and highly energy-dense materials. Across the board this drawdown is increasingly noticeable in soils, aquifers, fisheries, oil and natural gas. (Along with the sources of stored natural capital being exhausted and degraded, the natural sinks—atmosphere, soils and oceans—that absorb the waste products of our consumption are filling to capacity. The necessity of theses sinks and the limits of their capacities are expressed by the second law of thermodynamics.) In the grand sweep of human history and culture, these are one-time drawdowns. In the industrial era our species has been like the college undergraduate cramming for exams who uses caffeine and amphetamines to artificially augment his stamina. Like that undergraduate we will learn that when it comes to sustainable activity, we can’t do better than nature. And if we can’t speed up natural processes, then our only option is to slow ourselves down.

No harm, no hubris and no hurry: each represents a limit on human behavior. Each requires us to think of ourselves and the Earth in radically different ways. Each sounds and feels foreign to us, and is likely to put us in a defensive and surly mood. But each is necessary for the transition that is coming, that’s already in full swing. It may help, then, to express these limits in a pledge, one worthy of repetition privately, publicly, aloud, silently:

The Limits Pledge:

“I accept The Limits Principle regarding moral behavior, the pursuit of knowledge, and the use of the earth’s material and energy productivity, and I hereby pledge no harm, no hubris, and no hurry in my daily thoughts and actions“.

Action Items
How then should we live our lives? The Limits Principle implies some general heuristics. The list below is wide-ranging and inclusive, and the reader is invited to make additions and to adapt the suggestions to specific contexts, interests, and projects.

Don’t always think you know better.

Become an Ambassador of Limits. It will strain your friendships and you will be called unpatriotic, pessimistic, the grim reaper, and worse. But all signs point to the correctness of your position.

Block unbounded faith—your own and others’—in the “No-Limits” dogma peddled by technological optimists, economic theorists, and those who believe that “the future” and “greater economic activity” are synonymous.

Offer no hope about the immense problems we face before the full scope of the challenges is clear and understood.

Insist on some sign or evidence from others that they understand the full scope of these challenges.

Help others to see why and how so many of our central paradigm’s initial operating assumptions violate one or more of the limits principle propositions.

Don’t be nasty or condescending about any of it.

Count the number of times in a given day your motivations, choices, and actions rely on the most primitive parts of your primate brain. Multiply by 6.85 billion. Update the multiplier at least every six months.

Show no enthusiasm for attempts to improve on nature’s efficiencies. Such schemes always cheat by drawing down natural capital stocks somewhere else in the system.

Acknowledge the Net Primary Production of sun-powered ecosystems as the only long-term energy-material feedstock for sustaining life on Earth.

Slow down. And when going fast (car, plane, jet ski), admit your role in the global run on the natural capital bank.

Welcome limits as one of the initial and permanent operating conditions for any life-enabled solar system.

Resist solutions to current environmental problems that ignore the size of the human population as a central factor limiting the ability of the rest of the planet’s life-community to thrive.

Resist solutions that create harm or extinction to fellow creatures.

Count calories. Not just the ones consumed, but those embodied in our everyday products as well.

Understand and appreciate the role that the so-called inanimate world of soils, minerals, and elements—particularly nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, sulfur, and magnesium—play in your life. Stop calling them “life support systems.”

Demand a public and accurate accounting of our net primary production and stored natural capital feed stocks.

Demand that losses of natural capital be accounted for in any calculation of costs and benefits.

Don’t rush natural processes, or to judgments about those processes.

Discount efficiency as nothing more than a clever way to increase consumption (the Jevons Paradox).

Accept blame yourself.

Don’t let good friends off the hook about limits.

Honor your debt to the universe by drinking a toast to its—and your—continued existence. You can do this every day.

Motivation
The Limits Principle unites individuals and institutions around a few central beliefs that, if not absolute truths, provide a foundation for a new and improved way of looking at the world. It relies on a base of knowledge describing the state of the world as we best understand it now, and suggests a range of choices and actions consistent with this understanding. It contributes to the process—and by necessity a greatly speeded up process—of curtailing the many ailments of our global home and its myriad inhabitants. The factors mitigating these ailments will be many and varied, but they will be more robust and durable if they conform to a few basic principles with which large numbers of individuals and organizations can agree, and around which corrections and adjustments can coalesce. It is difficult to think of any great social revolution that lacked a basic and common core of beliefs shared by its members. And it is a great social revolution that we are talking about here, as important as any other in human history.

Those who accept The Limits Principle will agree to sequester their squabbles over the details and fine print, and suspend their well ingrained urges to find yet more evidence for its veracity. Nor should they argue for pride of place in marshalling change. Let us agree that it is enough to say that the Limits Principle is supported by the grudging recognition in our own lives that we can’t have it all; that those who burn the candle at both ends get burnt; that too many chips and dip are bad for you and vegetables and exercise are good for you. A good example of a formal definition of the principle can be found in Aldo Leopold’s work: “An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing.” First courses in biology, physics and ecology articulate well understood biophysical principles and laws that describe and predict fertility, resilience, and diversity within strictly constrained systems. There is, too, the warning given to the first humans in the Genesis account of creation. Placed in a garden paradise they are told they can have it all, but for one tree “lest they surely will die.” We know, and live with, the rest of that story.

The first proposition—no harm—the physician’s byword, is a moral truth as old as the Golden Rule and the principle of ahimsa (the ancient Sanskrit word for, and practice of, non-violence toward all living beings). Forms of it are found in nearly all of the world’s philosophies and religions. The second—no hubris—is derived from a clear, rational, scientific understanding of our origin as a species, and the history of science, which demonstrates ably that behind every scientific discovery lies a vast field of new ignorance yet to be explored. Or as Wes Jackson observes: “human beings are a billion times more ignorant than they are knowledgeable, and will always be so.” The third proposition—no hurry—is a less well known, but an equally established understanding about the origin, nature, and supply of the energy that fuels life. “All flesh is grass,” Isaiah said, capturing the thermodynamics of ecosystems in a four-word assertion.

There’s nothing wrong with marshalling more evidence for the principles and its propositions or disagreeing out on the edges. But the purpose of the principle and the propositions is not to marshal that evidence, but to state them as truths that are now and must more generally be seen to be self evident.

To state boldly that they are self-evident does not make their conclusions easy to accept, especially for those of us who have spent our entire lives within a cultural paradigm that has lured, seduced, and commanded us to deny and transgress limits.

It is not surprising that such a perspective still powers the popular imagination in every region of the globe. Fueled by ever-increasing amounts of monetary wealth, energy, materials, knowledge, and personal freedom, it has produced marvels. The “genius” of its approach is to answer every challenge and hurdle with the call for more knowledge, more freedom, more energy and materials—a more vigorous assault on any experience of limit. It is a positive feedback loop of biblical proportions. Positive feedback loops are very powerful, but they are also potentially dangerous and unstable, and this one has created global challenges that are becoming impossible to deny: climate change, species loss, loss of essential ecosystem services (such as nutrient recycling, water purification, and climate moderation) from loss of natural capital among them.

The astonishing and flashy feats of the modern worldview make revision or outright abandonment of it seem a quixotic task. But whatever its appeal and power, the world is being shaped by a failed perspective the dangers of which now greatly outweigh the benefits. The data of our times increasingly reveal that we are nearly at the end of a line of thinking that is no longer supportable by the material and energy conditions upon which it rests. This would suggest an urgent need to dismantle the no-limits worldview before it dismantles the world.

We can, of course, continue to both deny and transgress The Limits Principle. We can deny it until kingdom come. But it can be transgressed only a little while longer. The definitive character of an unsustainable system is that it will, it must, change.

Any species in nature reproduces to the limits of its food supply—and we have not exempted ourselves from that truth even as we learned how to commandeer the niches of other species, even as we learned how to turn the planet’s vast stores of past solar income (oil) into grass and (human) flesh. If any other species or human culture were given the same access to resources and energy, a moral green light for their use, and effective techniques for blocking natural negative feedback loops, we would see roughly the same outcomes. Given continual replenishments of food, bacteria in a Petri dish will multiply until they die en masse on their accumulated wastes. We are as bacteria, with two exceptions: our flashy brains and the absence of similarly-brained competitors have made us capable of extending our reach—and consequently widening the range of our negative effects. In both we harm and destroy other life.

The Genesis creation story says as much. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and in that moment fell from animal innocence into conscious human life.

By becoming agriculturists Eve and Adam symbolize the first modern humans separating from nature. (The “forbidden fruit,” scholars tell us, was cultivated wheat grass; the serpent, the guardian of the granary.) For this original separation, this original sin of pride, as St. Augustine describes it, the Lord cast them from their garden idyll, and, interestingly, “to the east of the garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and a sword whirling and flashing to guard the way to the Tree of Life” (Genesis, 3:24). The author of those words had some inkling of the need to protect the panoply of life from the destructive potential that a willful species with a well-developed frontal cortex could unleash on the rest of the world. Those who still want to hold on to the idea that there is something unique about human beings may yet be comforted if and when we learn to limit ourselves, using our stolen property (knowledge) to consciously protect the Tree of Life. If we do so, it will be an act as unprecedented as our control of fire.

Finally, it is hoped that a full-bodied acceptance of The Limits Principle will, on average, bring more lightness to its adherents than fear and loathing. Even a brief meditation on limits demonstrates their power and creativity. The universe itself operates, surely, due to the limits we call the laws of nature. Alphabets, musical notations, rules of grammar and harmony, and even the rules of chess and other games, all create limits on what we can say, think, and do; limits that provide enormous opportunities for creativity and freedom. The best accounts of social justice put limits on some so that all can thrive. It’s time to shed our despairing attitudes about the constraints expressed in the very idea of limits, and instead find in them the powers of restoration, insight, and joy.

The Gist
Properly understood The Limits Principle is invigorating rather than paralyzing. It encourages creativity, invites one to challenge institutions, friends, and family, and to imagine alternatives. Use it in your everyday life; in discussions about the news or politics; to organize clubs; to generate goals; to help resolve questions and dilemmas; to feel more at home in the world.

No Harm. No Hubris. No Hurry.
Take the Pledge.
Try to live it.
Spread the word.

All this is being sponsored by the Center for the History of Ideas (CHID) and organized by Professor Maria Elena Garcia. My thanks in advance for the invitation to visit, and what promises to be a wonderful experience.

If you are in the area and you would like to attend these events, please check the CHID events calendar.

More on all this when I get home.

Cheers, Bill

A few thoughts of my own.

First, in reading about this tragedy, I’ve come across a number of news stories, editorials and talk shows I’ve found particularly insightful. Paul Krugman calls out the climate of hate that nurtures violent extremism. Gail Collins reminds us that second amendment rights should not stand in the way of reasonable regulations of firearms. Timothy Egan has a nice piece on the myth of the hero gunslinger in the American west. And Tom Ashbrook of WBUR’s On Point has a set of interviews that are worth a listen. Not to be left out of the limelight, we’ve been treated to Sarah Palin arguing that she is a victim too through her ‘blood libel’ video. This was a low point for her, especially when juxtaposed with Barack Obama’s memorialization.

Second, I am nothing short of amazed at the political vitriol, violence, and easy access to military style weaponry in the States. A simple glance northward into Canada reveals a society much like ours, certainly as free personally and politically, but without the level of hate speech, political violence, and weaponry that so often punctuates American history with carnage. It is not that Canadians are any better than Americans. We are all fallible human beings. But there is a different moral and political ethos, one with a great deal more civility, respect for difference, aversion to violence, and sensible regulations on access to lethal force.

And finally, I am offended by the cheap disavowals of responsibility from those whose ratcheted rhetoric contributes to this toxic political environment. On the face of it, there seems little doubt that the perpetrator, Jared Loughner, was mentally unstable. Serious personal and medical issues played a role in his acts.

Yet many have used this man’s problems to shield themselves from criticism for establishing a moral climate in which political violence may seem justified. Commentators and politicians such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sharron Angle, and Sarah Palin have failed miserably at upholding ethical norms of personal reflection and democratic deliberation. I hope that in the court of public opinion and history, they will be called to account for their actions.

King deservedly holds a place in our political culture for many reasons. One was his resistance to the continued oppression of blacks, the poor, and other marginalized people in our society. Another was the ethical commitments he brought to this struggle through the practice of strategic non-violence. Most appreciations of King focus on these elements of his politics. Without diminishing their importance, I want to emphasize a third — his ethical discourse of the beloved community. Speaking in the prophetic tradition, Kings concern was not simply individual rights or a legalistic norm of due process. It was rather a vision of a community of equals in right relationship with one another. Such a relationship necessitated the use of non-violent direct action as a lever of power. Nonviolence was not simply an instrumental tool, however, but a moral choice to respect the dignity of every person and citizen. A vision of the beloved community was repeated time and again in King’s sermons, speeches, and writing. It is a vision we would all do well to remember.

Sincerely, Bill

Cheers, Bill

~~~

The 4th Annual Undergraduate Ethics Symposium
DePauw University — April 7-9, 2011

Invitation
DePauw University invites you to take part in the Undergraduate Ethics Symposium at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, a center for interdisciplinary reflection on ethical issues. This symposium is an opportunity to engage in dialogue with leading scholars and professionals about today’s ethical concerns.

Although students may write about any ethical issue, this year we especially encourage submissions focusing on personal morality, as well as environmental ethics, bio-medical ethics, media ethics, feminist ethics, and diversity. Students may submit an argumentative, interpretive or analytic essay or a creative piece. Accepted students’ work will be the primary focus of the symposium workshops.

Highlights
Participating students attend seminars with distinguished visiting scholars or professionals.
Students’ travel (up to $400), lodging, and meals while at DePauw will be covered by the Institute
Accepted work will be published.

Submissions
Deadline : February 11, 2011
Submit to Linda Clute at prindleinstitute@depauw.edu
All submissions should be electronic; texts should be MS Word, not pdf.
Place name and collegiate affiliation on separate page.

Guidelines
* Argumentative, analytic and interpretive essays should be submitted in Chicago style with a 3,500 word limit.
* Fiction should also be submitted in Chicago style with a 3,500 word limit; poets should submit 5-10 poems, not more than 10 pages total.
* Playwrights and screenwriters should submit a single work, up to 10 pages in length.
* Film makers and documentarians should submit a single work, up to 10 minutes long.
* Photographers should submit approximately 10 photographs or a video accompanied by a short description.

Notification
March 1, 2011

Speakers and Workshop Leaders
Robert G. Bottoms, President of Seabury Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and President Emeritus of DePauw University

June Cross, Columbia University Professor, Award-winning Television and Documentary Producer, and Author of the Memoir, Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away

A. Rafik Mohamed, Sociology Professor at Clayton State University, Author of Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class

Alison Bailey, Philosophy Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Illinois State University, Co-Editor of The Feminist Philosophy Reader

For additional information about the 2011 DePauw Undergraduate Ethics Symposium, or the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, please visit http://prindleinstitute.depauw.edu or call 765.658.4075.

The ‘I’ refers to my individual students, of course, and the essay provided an opportunity for them to reflect upon what they have learned, articulate what environmentalism means, and explore its implications for their individual and collective lives. There was no right answer to this question. Environmentalism is a diverse species of political animal. Rather the clarity and quality of their answer was what counted.

This is the first time I have assigned this exercise, so I thought I would record some of my impressions as I read through these essays.

First, a majority of my students thought of themselves as environmentalists. It was here that they referenced the empirical and scientific aspects of environmental issues that spoke most directly too them. Taking concerns about sustainability quite seriously, their definition of environmentalism had two distinct aspects. One was an awareness of environmental issues, and the other was an individual commitment to an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

This definition reflected a shift from the discourse of environmental studies as an academic field, into the discourse of environmentalism as advocacy. What interested me most about it was the individualistic interpretation of what it meant to be an advocate. Individual agency as measured by personal commitment and lifestyle was the primary focus of attention. Structural issues such as the manner in which human cultural, political and economic patterns relate to the environment were of secondary concern. To the degree that structural interpretations occurred, they tended to emerge later in the discussion, particularly with reference to the food system, anti-consumerism, and cultural norms. In all fairness, however, I think most of my students would say the connection between agency and structure, if not explicit, was implied.

Second, a plurality of the course felt hypocritical because, in their eyes, they failed to live up to their ideals. These students would sometimes refer to themselves as partial, passive or ‘soft’ environmentalists. Presumably, those who are not hypocrites are ‘hard’ environmentalist: they walk the talk.

While I admired the critical self-reflection of these essays, I couldn’t help but think about what I call the hypocrisy fallacy. The idea behind this fallacy is that unless you live a perfect life, then all one’s concerns and commitments are nothing but hypocrisy. The claim this fallacy makes may be true in particular instances. We all know hypocrites, and have ourselves been hypocritical. On the whole, however, I think the claim of hypocrisy is used to dismiss advocates of social change and sidestep their arguments. It imposes an unrealistic standard of perfection as the criterion to judge one’s actions. Its as if we are required to choose between doing everything or nothing, instead of everything or something.

To frame this in more theoretical terms, ethics and policy are not the stuff of angels. They are for fallible creatures like ourselves, who need principles of belief and maxims of behaviour to help guide us in ‘how we ought to live’. We are never perfect in following these principles and maxims. Yet it is the pattern of our lives, not particular instances of failure, that matter most. It is better that we do something, rather than give up because we cannot do everything. So too, it is unfair to hold oneself responsible for a system of economic and political relations that commodify and abuse people, animals and the rest of nature (PAN).

So I think my students were being too hard on themselves. As a whole, they are helping the college move towards ever expanding goals of sustainability, as manifested through resource conservation, waste reduction, local foods, green energy, and the like.

Third, based on a set of side conversations to this essay, I suspect some of the critique reflects frustration with the pace of sustainability initiatives at the college. Students, faculty and staff can feel hard pressed to hurry up the process, and blame themselves when the wheels of change grind slowly.

I think this too demands too much of the individuals concerned. Williams has made great progress in the very short time since it established its sustainability principles and the Zilka Center for Environmental Initiatives. And it is hardly as if we have easy answers to how to transition to and then live sustainable livelihoods. Indeed, the principle officials of sustainability on campus themselves acknowledge we have much to do before we are a carbon neutral, locally sourced engine of green higher education.

How then one evaluates this evolution depends, in part, on what you believe an education in sustainability should look like. For instance, I am more concerned about the facts and values my students learn, than the amount of paper we generate in tests, papers and presentations. Which is not to say one cannot think about both. I’m only noting that there will be legitimate differences of interpretation and priorities that require negotiation. It also depends, in part, on whether you see the glass as half empty or half full. I’m generally an optimist, and tend to see the glass as half-full and getting fuller. But I have been in academia and think tanks most of my adult life, and recognize that the normal pace of collegial decision-making can feel unresponsive to others. Stil, all in all, Williams has taken substantial strides towards sustainability, and will undoubtedly take more in the future.

At times like these, I remember the Quaker saying that while the actions of any one individual are but a drop in the bucket, the ocean is made up of many drops. Sometimes the structures of cultural, economic, and political life feel impossible to break through, and despair seems all that is left to us. Then come the tipping points, where individual lives, moral argument, political movements, liberal education, and direct action all converge to make a shift in an institution, a community, a society. The evidence for this is readily found in the labour, progressive, conservation, preservation, anti-colonial, peace, civil rights, free speech, women’s rights, animal protection, environmental justice, globalization, and slow food movements (to name a few). In all these instances, higher education and student activism the world around played an important role. Seen through the eyes of history and geography, positive social change is ubiquitous and progressive, however episodic and prone to setbacks.

Fourth, a small portion of the class tended towards cornucopianism. They doubted the evidence or reasoning behind sustainability, and believed warnings about global warming and resource constraints to be overblown. The power of technology to solve environmental problems, alongside a faith in the market to provide economic development and social justice were at the centre of their reflections.

The contrasts between cornucopians and environmentalists loomed large in this course’s readings, lectures and presentations. With all this information at our disposal, I am perplexed by beliefs that deny or marginalize the importance of humanity’s geographic agency, the harm we have done the planet, and the norms of sustainability. Yet while I do not hide my considered judgments on these matters, neither do I enforce a uniform outlook on environmental studies. My goal is not to make Mini-Me(s), but to help students learn to critically deliberate on environmental issues (e.g. population, biodiversity, agriculture, climate change, and energy) using insights drawn from the main theoretical traditions of environmental studies (e.g. ecology, economics, policy and ethics).

Yes, I do worry about the denial of settled, empirical facts and theories. It is impossible to accurately discuss the sixth great extinction of biodiversity, or global warming, or the the relationship between population growth and resource consumption, without taking into account the anthropogenic element of all these issues (complex as they may be). Yet as any student of the history of science knows, no matter how subversive the facts, they only speak in the context of a welcoming paradigm. When the facts are denied, its time to focus on the values and discourses that make facts intelligible. We make a start on that in this course, and I hope the seeds planted now bear fruit in the future.

Moreover, I want my students to trust me and tell me what they really think. I do not want them to worry that they will be penalized for doing so, and I appreciate their honesty. I also want to manifest mutual respect despite our differences. Good faith disagreements about facts and values, reasoning and evidence, are opportunities for further dialogue, not a reason for admonition. In addition, learning why they adhere to cornucopianism was an important learning moment for me. With so many people in denial about the Earth’s limits, this is a conversation I need to listen to carefully.

Fifth, the concrete issues that most hailed my student’s attention varied widely. Yet I was struck by two thematic threads — the place of animals, and the power of place. Whether they were addressing sustainable agriculture, endangered species, climate change, wilderness, the built environment, green energy, or environmental justice, animals and/or place were important touchstones of their reflections.

Now granted, I believe animal concerns need to be better represented in the field of environmental studies. My students get a good dose of thinking about people, animals and nature (PAN) as distinct foci of scientific interest, moral consideration, and policy initiatives. I’m also a geographer, and give prominent attention to questions of wild and humanized landscapes, second nature, the ecumene, the built environment, and cultural sensibilities about places.

Yet I think there is more going on here. A wide variety of research undertaken in animal studies and humanistic geography references the importance of non-human animals and geographic place to our sense of what it means to be human. Sometimes our human identity is situated alongside other animals or nested in specific places (e.g. animal protection and environmental preservation movements). Sometimes it debases animals and glorifies human transcendence (e.g. Cartesiansim and transhumanism). Animals and place are two of our closest connections to nature, and twin portals by which many people come to an environmental consciousness.

Finally, defining and fulfilling one’s responsibility to a moral community was as prominent concern in a large majority of the papers. Of these, an admirably honest minority were anthropocentric, and believed that the only moral beings are people for whom the environmental is nothing but a resource. A plurality used distinctions about intrinsic and extrinsic value to press for ecocentrism or geocentrism. Many of these students were also anthropofocused, that is, primarily concerned with the needs of humans while accepting the intrinsic value of the natural world. Some were expressly geocentric, using the concept of co-value (concurrent intrinsic and extrinsic values) to think about all people, animals and nature as members of a more-than-human moral community.

A fascinating element to all this was the emergence of ethical awareness throughout the semester. This was partly a matter of learning about the moral aspects of environmental issues through readings, lectures and student presentations. It was also about individuals struggling to identify which vision of the moral community best resonated with themselves — anthropocentrism, geocentrism, or something in-between. Discussions with entry mates and family members were especially important moments of personal insight in this regard.

Another fascinating element was the rejection by several students of an identity politics rooted in anthropocentrism. Early on we addressed the canard that poor people the world over don’t care about animals or nature unless it serves their instrumental needs. So too we dispensed with the notion that one’s view of the environmental is a simple outgrowth of one’s prior social position, whether based on race, class, gender, ethnicity. This opened up the possibility of thinking about humanity’s relationship with the environmental in more nuanced ways. The mutual oppression of women and nature as identified in ecofeminism, and the inextricable interconnectedness of the self, other animals and nature as expressed in deep ecology, were important to students beginning to think in this manner.

~

I’ll leave it at that. Overall, I was blessed this term with two classes full of smart and good natured students from whom, in addition to a set of guest experts, I learned a great deal. I hope what my students learned from this semester will help them be better global citizens. Judging by their papers, they are off to a good start.

Cheers, Bill

As part of the test, I asked an extra credit question of my students.

Imagine it is 2020. The college has moved to construct 10 wind towers on the Berkshire Ridge. This is not only to meet the electrical demands of the college, but to provide energy to a newly upgraded ‘green grid’ in the Williamstown area. Shortly before a road was built to the site, a wolf den with pups was discovered. The Sierra Club sued to stop construction as wolves are protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). They won. Shortly thereafter, the US Fish and Wildlife Service designated the site as critical protected habitat for the wolves. In response, the college’s Board of Trustees sought to have Congress pass a rider to eliminate endangered species protections for eastern wolves, and thereby lift the ban on construction. A major conflict erupted on campus and elsewhere over whether to protect the wolves and their habitat, or to construct wind turbines for green energy.

This fictional story illustrates that underlying all concerns for sustainability is the question, ‘who is sustainability for’? Using the concept of PAN, how would you interpret the problem above? How would you solve it? Can it be solved?

I intended the question to emphasize the value-based elements of environmental policy disputes. I specifically mentioned the conceptual tool of PAN (people, animals, and nature) for two reasons. First, it raises questions about the moral standing of people, animals and nature that is presupposed in all policies about the environment. Second, it elicits the moral and policy disagreements between weak and strong sustainability.

Much to my delight, I received a range of well considered answers, many of which sought to side-step win-lose approaches to the question itself, and offer alternative means to establish both wind power as well as protect endangered species. The question also elicited strong personal value statements, with some students preferring policy solutions that optimized anthropocentric or ecocentric values (e.g. renewable energy, mitigating climate change), while other students emphasized biocentric and geocentric values (e.g. intrinsic value, capture and release, relocating the road).

The most fun answer, however, was this humorous drawing.

Perhaps another creature for Sarah Palin to shoot on TLC, a?

Cheers, Bill

This is week 14, our final week of classes, and the penultimate post of this series. I know you have much to accomplish this week, so I’ll keep this brief.

Announcements
Not on my side. Yours?

Administration
On Tuesday we’ll perform the student evaluation surveys at the end of class. I’ll be asking for volunteers from each class to collect and deliver the surveys to the proper location. I take these evaluations quite seriously, and look to them to help me continuously improve my courses. I have a post about course evaluations you should read beforehand.

On Thursday, Test 3 will be administered in class. It is closed book and closed notes. The primary emphasis in Test 3 is on the material covered after Test 2. This includes your readings, the Ethos posts, guest lectures and so on. Still, you will see several questions that reach back to previous sections of the course. These will not be so specific or inconsequential as to require a perfect memory to answer. Instead, they focus on big picture concepts and facts, and how they inform the topics we have recently covered.

For those of you already studying for your test, Professor Dethier’s slide show on wind, energy and sustainability is available. I’ll have Ms. Boyd’s slide show on campus sustainability up as soon as I receive it. I’ll post my own thoughts on sustainability after classes on Tuesday.

Finally, your second essay assignment is due next Friday at midnight via email attachment. Please review the Essay Assignments and Style Guide *pdfs before writing your essay. If you have any questions about the assignment itself, please do not hesitate to speak with me either after class or during office hours.

Old Business
We’ll use Ms. Boyd’s presentation on campus sustainability to help inform our larger discussion of sustainability, so there will be no need for a special debrief as part of old business.

New Business
We wrap up the course by considering different notions of sustainability, and how they inform, and are informed by, a liberal arts education.

Colleges, especially those affiliated with a religious denomination, used to dominate higher education in the US. This began to change with the specialization of academic fields, the formation of large universities, and the rise of professional medical, legal and technical schools. As the landscape of higher education institutes have changed, so too has the curriculum most students experience. Liberal arts curriculums are declining in numbers, and professional training is growing rapidly.

Even so, a liberal arts education remains the gold standard of North American higher education. Why? Because liberal arts graduates tend to have better verbal, written and critical thinking skills. They do better on standardized tests, and are more desirable to discerning recruiters because liberal arts students can readily adapt to different kinds of learning environments.

And this is because a liberal arts graduate is exposed to so much more in the way of scholarship — the arts and humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. Liberal arts programs intentionally seek to develop contributing citizens through a broad education that addresses questions of both facts and values.

So it should come as no surprise that questions of sustainability — with its complex mix of facts and values, ecological and economic and technical and social and ethical concerns — have loomed large on college campuses in recent years. Liberal arts colleges are places where different perspectives on sustainability can be readily examined from an interdisciplinary perspective. They are thus hotbeds of debate and student action over sustainability, what it means, and how to put it into practice.

This is nowhere more true than in environmental studies as a field. Not only is sustainability a central concern of students, it has become the dominant discourse by which environmental programs explain themselves and design their curriculums. On Tuesday, we will continue to address the conceptual puzzle of what sustainability means, and then build on Dethier and Boyd’s excellent presentations by discussing your ideas of what a sustainable Williams College should be like.

I’m looking forward to this discussion!

See you soon.

Cheers, Bill

Announcements
A few announcements from the Center for Environmental Studies

The last Log Lunch of the semester will be held this Friday. Cindy Franz (Psychology, Oberlin College) will give a talk entitled ‘Not Just for Rich White Liberals: Turning Carbon Offsets Into Environmental and Economic Justice’.

There is a Morris Udall Fellowship Informational Meeting on Thursday, 2 December at 5:15 p.m at the CES. The Udall Foundation seeks future leaders across a wide spectrum of environmental fields, including policy, engineering, science, education, urban planning and renewal, business, health, justice, and economics. Recent winners from Williams include Julia Sendor ’08, JJ Augenbruan ’11 and Jen Rowe ’11. JJ and Jen will be at this meeting to answer your questions.

The Climate Ground Zero Roadshow will give a talk about mountaintop removal, direct action, and their winter training camp. The talk will be on Friday, 3 December, at 7:00 pm in Griffin 4.

[For those of you not familiar with direct action, the name means what it says. Its a form of activism that engages in actions that directly support or resist political goals, but does so outside the normal political process. Nonviolent direct action is the most common form. Examples include spontaneous street protests, workplace occupations, sit-ins, sabotage, property destruction and political graffiti. There are also violent forms, including intimidation, vigilant violence and assassination. Activities such as grassroots organizing, election politics, and negotiation are not direct but 'indirect' action, as they depend on a governmental political process to implement policy decisions. Nonviolent direct action is sometimes considered a form of civil disobedience (e.g. a human blockade of a corporate headquarters), but is sometimes legal (e.g. a workplace strike).
Martin Luther King and Gandhi are perhaps the world's most famous nonviolent direct action theorists, while organizations like GreenPeace and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are well known for their use of direct action tactics. It is all controversial stuff, and something we talk about in Envi 309: Understanding Public Policy.]

Administration
I’m very pleased to report that your performance on Test 2 was very good, and the grades are up on Glow. I’ll distribute your tests back to you in Tuesday’s class, and say a few words about the test’s grading and answers. My comments will be brief so we don’t cut into our discussion of sustainability too much. Give yourself a day or two to think about your answers and then come speak with me if you have any concerns. I’m available after both sections and during office hours, so we will have plenty of time to talk. Tests that are not picked up in class will be available at the CES. If you have not picked up your Test 1, that too is available in CES. Please see Kate Fletcher in the main office.

Please note that I’ve also estimated your participation grade to date, and recorded any extra credit points you have earned to date. These are listed in separate columns on Glow as well. As a whole, you are doing quite well in participation, and I want you to know that I do notice and appreciate your efforts to come prepared and attend all your classes. Nothing is set in stone, however, and there will be more ‘opportunities’ to improve your participation grade, so keep up the good work!

Finally, Glow is not set up to calculate your grades for you. You can estimate your own final grade by using the following formula*
AVERAGE((Essay1*0.05)+(Test1*0.2)+(Test2*0.2)+(Test3*0.2)+
(Presentation*0.15)+(Essay2*0.1)+(Participation*0.1))

* This is from my grading spreadsheet, and is simply a weighted average of your various assignments. Remember the extra credit points are added to your participation score.

Old Business
We’ll take 15 minutes after we discuss the test to debrief about last week’s presentation on wind energy by Professor Dethier (Geoscience, Williams College). Take a look at your notes and his presentation (online at Glow) before we do so. I’m interested in your thoughts about what the potential for wind energy can tell us about the path to sustainability.

We will also continue our discussion of the idea of sustainability by looking at what the term means to different communities of scholars and practitioners. Before class, have a good long look at the map of sustainability in Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien’s article, Sustainable Development: Mapping Different Approaches (2005). We’ll use this map to organize our discussion.

New Business
Wind turbines are a technology that could make a substantial contribution to the world’s energy needs. This will only come about, however, under one of at least two conditions. The first is that we figure the actual economic costs and incentives for using wind power. Internalizing the real costs of fossil fuels in terms of subsidies, foreign wars, and climate change is a place to start. The second is that we build a power infrastructure that can incorporate renewables (e.g. a smart grid).

Still, discreet technologies are only as useful as the social context in which they are understood and deployed. How a society designs (as in plans the operation of) its energy sector, and how it powers its living and working spaces, is as important as the technology itself. Technology and design are reciprocal features. Afterall, the most sustainable power production in the world is of little use if an outdated grid or economic disincentives militate against its use. So then, how might we design our homes, hospitals, factories, transportation, communication, urban spaces and the like for a more sustainable future?

This is obviously a huge topic, and it would be easy to get lost in abstraction. So lets bring it down to earth, and focus on what lessons we might learn from the sustainable campus movement in this regard.

To do this we’ll be joined on Thursday by Stephanie Boyd (Zilka Center, Williams College). Ms. Boyd is an engineer, Director of the Zilka Center for Sustainable Initiatives at Williams College, and the college’s main liason with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education — a coalition of colleges and universities working towards creating sustainable campuses. As someone who grapples with designing and transitioning the college’s towards sustainability, she is best placed to share practical wisdom in this regard. Go here to read about the college’s principles of sustainability.

As you read through the materials, ask yourself these questions.

What does a sustainable life mean to you personally?
What do or would you do, or not, to live sustainably?
What sustainable actions has the college undertaken that have come to your attention?
What actions would you like the college to undertake in the future?
How might we redesign our campus to be more sustainable?
Do the college’s principles of sustainability go far enough?

See you soon.

Cheers, Bill

Image: Block diagram of the Center for Environmental Studies, Oberlin College.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The election last week was very grim for the climate, and the future. Perhaps the Tea Party will over-reach, with effects lasting only a few years, but regardless, these are the critical years. Last Tuesday, the window for bold near-term climate action slammed firmly shut. The story almost came true, the grassroots climate movement almost drove national legislation. But now that way forward has hit a brick wall. It will be at least four years before the House swings back to a majority for clean energy.

Here is how the strategy unfolds:

1. For the next 6-10 years, the Clean Air Act, RGGI, and California’s laws can be used to hold US emissions steady, and maybe even cut them 5%-15%. This means fight like hell to keep the policies strong. In 2012, the Presidency, not Congress, will be the key, in determining the speed at which the EPA moves forwards.

[The EPA regulates carbon as a pollutant. RGGI's are Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives. California has set ambition targets for carbon reduction.]

2. In the meantime, rebuild a grassroots political movement demanding clean energy. Support all efforts at the state and local level, and work all levers to drive investment into clean energy.

3. By 2016 or 18, or even 20, rebuild super-majority congressional support for clean energy, and pass comprehensive carbon legislation. The timing will depend on the degree to which climate disasters unfold.

So we stabilize as low as we can, and then leave it to our kids and theirs to then drive levels back to 450, and within a couple of centuries, back to 350. Hope and pray that all our combined work catalyzes some cheap clean technology, that solves the problem in ways we can’t imagine, and sooner than we ever thought possible. And hope and pray also that we don’t cross tipping points along the way, triggering runway warming in the process.

That’s where we are: looking at another decade of work, just, really to get started. Truly depressing. But it is, as they say, what it is. Now we need to search and find the courage within ourselves to carry on.

Still so many beautiful parts of the earth, so much of creation to fight for….

Thanks for the work you are doing.

Eban Goodstein
Director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Bard has made climate action the signature focus of its environmental policy program. And Goodstein’s despair over recent events is obvious. He is hardly alone. Two of the more important and credible climate blogs — Climate Progress and RealClimate — share this outlook. Both of these blogs are also severely critical of the Obama administration for failing to provide the leadership required on either the domestic or international fronts to achieve sustainable climate goals.

I’m reminded of peace activism during the 1980s. It was a time when global nuclear war was increasingly likely. Had it occurred, it would have been a policy failure equal to that of our collective inaction on climate change. Those of you not attuned to this time probably do not appreciate just how close we came to a hot war, and how the prospect of it helped shape the environmental movement of the time. This apocalyptic threat loomed over other environmental debates. It is not that people stopped working to address pollution, population, endangered species, habitat protection, and the like. Nor did it prevent the emergence of discourses like earth ethics, biodiversity, environmental justice, and sustainable development. But it was the larger context, the discourse that, for a time, structured how other environmental issues were discussed.

To be sure, this was not the first time the global environment was in the spotlight. Wildlife protection and resource conservation were major issues before World War II. One outcome of this concern was the founding of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN) in 1948, a synthetic organizations of states and civil society loosely affiliated with the United Nations. The IUPN is now the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Its name change that bespeaks the organizations philosophical and political orientations. This was not so much a shift from preservationist to conservationist sensibilities in the sense of American environmental history, but an ongoing struggle between anthropocentrism and geocentrism in the discourse of sustainability.

This is a story for another time. Back to the peace movement.

Peace activists worked hard, and got lucky. Both the capitalist and communist blocs were sorely strained by the weight of military spending. The Soviets more so than we at the time, although the cost of empire has certainly caught up with us twenty odd years later. Both blocs were placing first strike nuclear weapons in Europe, thus undermining the deterrents to nuclear war. Yet President Reagan and Premier Gorbachev were forced by relentless public opposition at home and abroad to step back from cold war brinksmanship. To be fair, a generous spirit from both men helped foster a rapprochement. Meanwhile, the green movement in the Soviet bloc created the social network used to organize the mass protests that eventually brought down the Soviet Union. Despite the rhetoric of cold war triumphalism in the West, nonviolent direct action played a large role in collapsing the Communist bloc from within.

The 1990s brought hope for a peace dividend (reduced military spending) and a ‘new world order’ of international cooperation. Sadly, both the Clinton and Bush administrations squandered this opportunity.

Clinton and company left the former Soviet bloc to the depredations of neoliberal economic theory, huge market failures, entrenched criminal gangs, widespread political corruption, and the kleptocracy that has arisen in this wake. Along the way, the US, NATO and the EU underfunded weapons security programs in the post-Soviet states. The result was a range of biological, chemical and nuclear materials (and scientists that made them) slipped out of sight, and now present a grave security threat the world over.

Bush’s free market fundamentalism and international unilateralism, alongside his post-911 military adventurism, whittled away at the credibility and participation of the United States in global accords (e.g. the stalled strategic arms reductions talks; the provocative placement of missile defence in central Europe). This made a mockery of our commitment to non-proliferation, and provided further justification for nuclear weapons by states like India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Israel, and South Africa. To its credit, the Obama administration is trying to undo some of this damage, and ‘reset’ relations with Russia and a suspicious post-American world.

There are parallels here between the environmental and peace movements. Over the last decade, no other environmental issue has been so emphasized as climate change. Globally there has been an enormous amount of successful advocacy, education, and policy initiatives around the subject. Both the peace and environmental movements provide an alternative narrative to understand the meaning and risks of their time. Nuclear annihilation versus detente and anti-imperialism was the narrative shift offered by the peace movement. Catastrophic climate change versus sustainability and green energy is the shift advocated by the environmental movement. After all, one cannot have animal welfare, biodiversity, environmental justice, or sustainable development on a planet whose climate is so altered that previous patterns of natural and cultural diversity are unviable.

Indeed, I suspect it is the increasing dominance of the climate change narrative that has shifted environmental discourse generally towards the language of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability is a big tent that allows climate change to be integrated as first amongst equals in environmental debates. To be sure, this is a source of friction for some environmentalists whose priorities begin elsewhere, object to the relative marginalization of their concerns, and worry that over-focusing on one dimension of sustainability will undermine others. The environmental justice movement comes to mind, especially in light of the well understood relationship between peace, justice and appropriate development. The concern for biodiversity is another, given the role ecological services play in making the earth habitable for people and other living things.

Regrettably, the US has been unable to grasp the nettle of climate action. Although not alone in its recalcitrance (Australia comes to mind), we failed to support the Kyoto Protocol, privileged corporate special interests in climate talks, delayed substantive technology transfers and transition funding to the global south, and ducked greening our own domestic infrastructure and energy policies. Under the Obama administration, there are some bright spots — the EPA can now regulate carbon as a pollutant, mileage standards for cars have been raised (after decades of delay), a green energy future is at least talked about, and the Bush administration is no longer in a position to censor scientists or doctor scientific research. But this has been too little, too late. This is especially so for emerging economies who, from an environmental perspective, are insisting on repeating the mistake of using the atmospheric commons to externalize the costs of their own industrialization.

So two decades on, both the environmental and peace movements are, if not back to square one, facing daunting challenges in creating a world that is more democratic, peaceful, socially just, and ecological whole.

Where do we go from here? I do not know. A set of questions, however, has been weighing on my mind.

What did the 2010 midterm elections mean? Were they an anti-environmental rejection of climate action by the public, a wave in a bad economy whose beneficiaries also happen to be global warming skeptics, or evidence of a fundamental ideological divide on environmental issues?

How should the environmental movement(s) respond? Do we wait for our children and their children to grapple with this issue? Should we being doing more to build solidarity with other movements, such as those for animals, peace and justice, and hope the synergy alters the political landscape? Should we be redoubling efforts to sign up big corporate and individual donors in a political environment where American elections are routinely bought?

How should environmental studies programs respond? Do we teach ‘just the facts’, or do we become more actively involved in public outreach and policy making? The debate over facts and values in the academy is as alive today as it was when Weber reflected on science and citizenship a century ago. We often assume the facts will lead citizens to make the right choices. Yet as important as facts are, environmental policy is as much a matter of values. So do we shift the conversation and curriculum about global warming so that it invokes a greater engagement with value-laden questions of ethics and worldviews?

How can educators at all levels best communicate the full depth of our situation without killing the hope, optimism and political engagement so necessary to solving this problem? How do we attune students to what the UN Convention on Biodiversity terms our ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, so that we can acknowledge different individual and collective opportunities to foster just development, the protection of biodiversity, and reversing climate change?

Finally, how do we hold all contributors to global warming to moral account? How do we demand that the main contributors in the past (the global north), the present (the world’s major economies) and the future (the global south) for the harm that has been done (or may be done) to the planet and its people, animals and nature?

My head hurts. I need to sleep on this.

Cheers, Bill

Image: Polar Bear on Ice Floe.

But first, the common agenda.

Announcements
The Center for Environmental Studies (CES) want you to know that Harper House (where the Center is located) is open 7 days a week from 8 a.m. until 12 midnight. Students are welcome to use the building in the evenings for meetings, studying and tea-drinking (we provide lots of tea). Also, there’s a computer lab with 4 Windows computers (bring your own Macs), a seminar room, lounge and kitchen. We have the New York Times, the local papers, and lots of environmental magazines and journals. It is also a great place to meet and get to know environmental studies majors and concentrators. So, please feel free to use the building.

The Log Lunch speaker this Friday will be Bill Vitek, Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies. He is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. Bill is a wonderful philosopher of the environment and public life, and someone I know from past work with an ethics think tank. His talk could not be better timed for this week, and is entitled “Toward a Philosophy of Limits: No Harm, No Hubris, No Hurry.”

Remember to make your lunch reservation by Thursday noon with Kate Fletcher at kfletcher@williams.edu or x2346. Lunch is from 12:00 to 1:00 pm at The Log, on Spring Street, $4 for veggie soup, salad, bread and dessert. Everyone is invited, so bring your friends if they are interested.

Note: If Friday is Mountain Day, Log Lunch will be canceled and Prof. Vitek’s talk will be postponed until October 22nd.

Administration
Please note that I have returned your first essay via email attachment. We will take a few moments in class to discuss how I evaluated them, and a few features they shared in common. If you would like to discuss your papers with me in detail, please schedule an office or lunch appointment. If you are comfortable discussing your paper with a group of friends, I encourage you to do so. The insights and issues of one paper are frequently relevant to another paper.

In addition, as you prepare for your student presentations, I would like you to know about an important resource. Rebecca Ohm is the research librarian who covers environmental studies at Williams College. She has kindly put together a web page with a set of links that you may find of use. You can find it at http://library.williams.edu/courseguides/envi/101/

Old Business
After we discuss the papers, we will spend a few minutes debriefing on last week’s Hopkins Memorial Forest presentation by Andrew Jones.

New Business
Ethics is shot through environmental studies. It appears when we are discussing particular ethical theories about environmental justice, when we look for the ethical presuppositions behind various discourses on the environment, in the ethical sensibilities embedded in environmental policies, and finally, in the consequences our actions have on the well being of people, animals and nature.

Back in the 1960s, environmental studies was re-emerging in biology and other natural sciences (recall that in the 1860s it was located in geography and other social sciences). At the time there was a belief that environmental science told us the ‘truth’ about nature, and public policy was the messy process of applying that truth in politics. While the natural sciences remain indispensable to environmental studies and policy, this unilinear model of science-to-policy turned out to be flawed. The environment and society are a tad more complex than that model could grasp.

More than any other field of scholarship, it was ethics that exposed the value laden character of environmental concerns, and thereby challenged the unilinear model. It did so in numerous ways — by calling attention to different cultural norms, expanding the circle of concern to non-humans and ecosystems, identifying the normative presuppositions embedded in other fields of research, and applying ethical criteria to environmental policy questions (to name a few). In doing so, ethics opened up the field to a wider diversity of perspectives, and paved the way for the growing interdisciplinarity of environmental studies, a process that continues today.

That said, many folks are uncomfortable talking about ethics. Some worry about being judged, others of being made fun of, and still others about incomprehensible ethical theories. We certainly can’t cover everything there is to know about ethics and the environment. We can, however, make a good start in a gentle and welcoming manner.

We begin on Tuesday with some classics readings, one on the land ethic by Aldo Leopold, and the other on the ethical roots of environmental concerns by Lynn White. I’ve paired these with a recent video on partnership ethics by a well-regarded ecofeminist, Carolyn Merchant. On Thursday, we look at a set of readings that speak to a selection of ethical issues having to do with people, animals and nature — environmental justice, wolf recovery, the moral standing of dolphins, and deep ecology.

I’ll start off by teaching you a short definition of ethics, and a little bit about moral values, moral community and value paradigms. The rest of the week we will devote to small group work and discussion.

As you read this literature, allow these questions to help lead your reflections.

1. What are your ethical beliefs, and where do they come from?
2. Do you believe in human rights? Why?
3. How about animal rights, or the rights of nature? Why?
4. Do you regard yourself as a ‘plain citizen’ of a larger moral community that includes other animals and nature?
5. Is Christianity (or religion in general) to blame for our environmental woes?
6. What would it mean in practice to live a life in partnership with nature?
7. Is environmental justice only concerned about human beings?
8. While other animals aren’t people (i.e. human beings), are they persons? What would that mean for environmental policy?
9. Is the current focus on ‘sustainability’ shallow or deep?
10. Do people have moral responsibilities to animals and nature independent of other people?

Finally, here is a question inspired by the philosopher and geographer Immanuel Kant — Is it wrong to kick the dog or burn down the forest, because of what it does to the dog or forest? Or is it wrong because it might injure another human being’s emotional or material welfare?

Fun stuff, a? See you tomorrow.

Cheers!

Image: St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, Sassetta, 1437-1444.

As an ethicist and professor of environmental studies, I pay close attention to Earth Day. I have read or heard an abundance of commentaries on how people mistreat our planet. One after another, they rehearse the same statistics, recite the same politics, and offer the same short-term solutions.

Breaking the repetition, however, is the wildly popular film, Avatar, which went on sale to the general public in honor of Earth Day. Since its release in 2009, Avatar has struck a cord with the general public and the environmental community. Students and colleagues alike continue to excitedly discuss its meaning and messages.

So I wonder: what might Avatar teach us about how to celebrate Earth Day next year?

Avatar tells the story of a moral awakening by a former marine, Jake Sully, who is a mercenary for an inter-stellar corporation. He is sent to the world of Pandora to protect a mining operation that threatens the way of life of an indigenous population of humanoids (the Na’vi), as well as the natural world for whom the Na’vi have profound respect.

What Jake and his companions discover is that the Na’vi do not see their environment as a set of resources for them to own and exploit. Rather they see themselves as part of a larger community of life, a moral community where other creatures and the planet Eywa (the Na’vi name for Pandora) have intrinsic value. Value, that is, that exists irrespective of whether the animals or the planet are useful for either humans or Na’vi.

The Na’vi also believe human beings are ignorant of their place in this moral community. This message comes through loud and clear when Jake is upbraided by his Na’vi teacher and eventual mate, Neytiri. Telling him that he and his people ‘should not be here’, she notes that humans are akin to irresponsible children who do no fully ‘see’ (understand). Despite their advanced technology, humans have not yet learned how to respect the natural history, cultural knowledge, and moral standing of the Na’vi themselves, Pandora’s animals, or Pandora itself.

Avatar does take aim at colonialism, racism and militarism as they metaphorically exist on Pandora, as well as literally on Earth. Commentators have praised or condemned the film for these reasons. This has been particularly evident amongst the political right, where claims of paganism, anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism abound.

What has not been discussed is Avatar’s critique of speciesism, or human prejudice against non-human beings.

Avatar is not just a metaphor for how we treat other people on this earth. Nor is it simply an allegory for wide-ranging ecological destruction here and now. It is a cautionary tale about the harm done by our instrumental worldviews of people, animals and nature. Avatar is pushing the boundary of moral concern, demanding that we consider the well being of creatures and communities that are both human and non-human. It offers us a vision of another people, another place, and another way of life with such a profound sense of moral connectedness, that we cannot help but compare it to the situation on our own planet, and find it wanting.

What then does Avatar offer to our understanding of Earth Day?

Earth Day has become a sedate affair, dominated by the posturing of politicians and the decorative art of school children. More distressingly, it has become a self-absorbed event, where we measure humanity’s declining prospects by the steady degradation of nature (e.g., global warming).

If Earth Day is going to fulfill its promise, we need to turn this situation around. Avatar reminds us that we must reconnect with the moral passion that animates environmentalism as one of the great social movements of our time. It teaches us that we need to use this moral commitment to build bridges between those advocating for animal protection, human rights and environmental justice.

We need a day of education and grass-roots politics in service of the Earth itself and all her creatures, not just its most powerful inhabitant. Most of all, we need to stop thinking and talking about sustainability as if it were only for human beings. The well being of the entire community of life is a better base line for sustainable ways of living.

In Avatar, Jake came to understand that the interconnectedness of life is not simply a scientific fact, but a moral value that ought to guide our behavior to others, human and non-human alike. Perhaps in Earth Days to come, we can take this lesson to heart.

Cheers

I recently had a wonderful visit at Lafayette College.

Lafayette is a highly regarded institution located in Easton, PA. It has a twin-fold emphasis on the liberal arts, as well as engineering and the applied sciences. This creative mix of the arts and sciences is sorely needed in a society like ours that risks loosing sight of larger values amongst technical details. While technology is never a ‘neutral tool’ as some would like to think, our choices to use technologies for good or ill are the more important issue. Bringing the value-relevance of the liberal arts into creative dialogue with the applied sciences seems like a great idea to me.

I was visitng as a keynote speaker for Earth Week. Unlike other speaking engagements, this was not a one-off presentation, but an extended opportunity to engage with the campus community about ethics and sustainability. So alongside my presentation, I had the pleasure of meeting with a wide variety of the college’s faculty and students.

My talk was on ‘Avatars of Sustainability’. I interpreted the movie Avatar as a cultural text, the meanings of which have something important to say about our approach to ethics and sustainability. It was fun to do, and the discussion session afterwards was quite lively. I was peppered with insightful questions about the movie itself, and its implications for the troubled relationship between people, animals and nature. These questions touched on capitalism, militarism, colonialism, patriarchy, race, anthropocentrism, speciesism, power, animal domestication, practical versus analytic ethics, ethics in environmental policy, and the ethical norms of sustainability.

The next day I met with LEAP or Lafayette Environmental Awareness and Protection. Organized by a core group of environmentally minded students, LEAP is particularly active in the local food movement and the introduction of sustainable practice at Lafayette. Following that I was a guest in Humans and Other Animals in Contemporary Culture, a course instructed by Carrie Rohman of the English department. Students in this class had a wide range of ethics-related thoughts on Avatar, offering many distinctive insights on the movie. Following this, I met with faculty for a wide-ranging and productive discussion about the state of environmental studies programs and curricula.

So a big thank you to all the faculty and students who made my visit such an enjoyable one.

Cheers!

(a) focus on ethical issues pertinent to actual animals (as opposed to animals as only metaphors, tropes, or philosophical concepts); i.e. work with a certain normative value;

(b) adopt a broad critical orientation to animal studies, including (but not limited to) work that investigates and challenges the complex dynamics of structural, institutional, and discursive power formations that organize life conditions, relations, and experiences of animals, humans, and the environment alike; work that explores diverse forms and sites of human/animal resistance; work that contributes to current global debates by contextualizing critical animal issues within, for instance, processes of globalization, climate change, and biotechnology; work that intervenes in the animal economy of the production, science, service, experience, and culture industries; as well as work that critically analyzes ideologies, practices and effects of the current animal welfare movement;

(c) bridge boundaries between academic/activist knowledge, between theory/practice, as well as between existing disciplines. Based on this commitment to interdisciplinarity, all work published must be in language that is as clear and accessible to as wide an audience as possible;

(d) contribute to creative, bold, innovative, and boundary shifting knowledge development in critical animal studies.

If we can be of any further help or assistance in discussing projects please do not hesitate to contact either of us via email. Further information and submission guidelines are found on the book series website: http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/?page_id=299

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Helena Pedersen
Senior Co-Editor, Submissions and Review Process
Malmö University
helena.pedersen@mah.se

Vasile Stãnescu
Senior Co-Editor, Promotions and Outreach
Stanford University
vts@stanford.edu

ASI is one of the few policy think-tanks associated with animal studies. Amongst other activities, the institute publishes the Animals and Society journal, the Human-Animal Studies book series, offers training programs in animal related policy issues, and commissions policy white papers.

ASI also sponsors Human-Animal Studies Fellowship. This interdisciplinary program enables seven fellows to pursue research in residence at a partner college or university, supporting recipients’ individual research through mentorship, guest lectures, and scholarly exchange, as well as contributing to the intellectual life of the host institution. Creating and sustaining fellowships like this is crucial to building a network of scholarship and policy expertise that can speak to the shared well-being of people, animals and nature.

This year, the fellowship is being held at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Host faculty are Jacque (Jody) Emel, Professor of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark and Susan McHugh, Professor of English at University of New England.

I’m pleased to say that I will be participating as one of this year’s fellows, working on proposal for a practical ethics for people, animals and nature. I am both honoured and excited by this opportunity, and look forward to sharing my experience with you.

Cheers!

Isn’t it better to honor Ms. Brancheau’s death by carefully reconsidering our relationships with killer whales, rather than resuming the spectacular Believe show only two days after her drowning? Is it enough that before the show began, a slideshow tribute to Dawn played on the watery stage’s massive screens, and the trainers wearing their orca-styled wetsuits refrained, for now, from swimming with or petting the orcas as part of the killer whale show’s choreography?

SeaWorld’s website still sells Believe as a show that “accentuates the close relationship SeaWorld trainers have with the killer whales,” and a “journey in which anyone believes they can connect with these magnificent mammals.” I imagine the bubbly violence that some customers witnessed a few weeks ago did not highlight the sort of connection SeaWorld wanted to display.

I don’t mean to be flippant. And I’m not suggesting for a moment that the trainers do not have a close relationship with the orcas in their care—or that we, as humans, cannot or do not connect with dolphins and whales—I believe we can, we do, and we should! But the question is how ought we to connect with them, what kind of relationship is best for their well-being and ours, and how can we best honor dolphins and whales as the magnificent individuals we so admire?

To me, SeaWorld’s Believe show is exciting, beautiful, and wildly entertaining; it is also—like SeaWorld itself—an outmoded, arrogant, insensitive story of captivity and dominance. The music, lyrics, choreography, architecture and landscaping are lavish decorations that distract us from the facts: It is not appropriate or wise to keep dolphins and whales for our pleasure. It deprives them of their physical, psychological and social needs and desires. We have witnessed the pain, distress and tragedy that captivity produces—for them and for us.

In light of the recent catastrophe at SeaWorld, let’s more than just pause before resuming business as usual. Instead, let’s recognize this as the major event it was, and just… stop.

It is a huge, thrill-ride of a movie. As importantly, it is interlaced with threads of environmentalism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, spiritual crisis and personal redemption.

I’ve been asked to give an Earth Week Keynote address at Lafayette College in April. I think I’ll discuss Avatar, and its implications for sustainability, ethics and environmental studies. More on this subject after the talk.

Cheers!

One of WCMA’s more beautiful and though provoking installations is Mocha Dick, a sculpture by Tristin Lowe. Here is how the museum describes it.

Over fifty feet long and ten feet high, artist Tristin Lowe’s sculpture of a white sperm whale sprawls across the museum’s largest gallery. Mocha Dick is a life-sized rendition of the infamous leviathan that once harassed ships near Mocha Island in the South Pacific Ocean.

The exhibition is open 13 March – 08 August 2010. I’ll be sharing comments on ‘Life Boat Ethics’ during an interdisciplinary gallery panel, The Whiteness of the Whale, to be held on Thursday 08 April 2010. Please come join us for this event. Admission is free.

For more information on the WCMA, visit www.wcma.org.

Cheers!