Well, the spring semester is over, and all grades are filed. It has been a good semester. I am particularly pleased with my student’s final papers. Members of both my interpretive environmental policy course as well as the senior seminar on sustainability have turned in insightful work.

So this blog will be going on hiatus for a time. There are several projects that will consume my attention over the next six months. In my spare time, I will work on a thorough revision of the website. I’m going to begin a process of streamlining the structure and code in advance of moving to a Web 2.0 platform. In addition, I am planning on refocusing the content of the blog, and need to give that a bit of thought. I will resume posting sometime in the new year.

Cheers, Bill

The value of a college degree varies by major, field and highest degree earned. There is some interesting data from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, encapsulated in the report What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors.

Note that this data only represents the value of a bachelors degree alone. Many fields such as ethics and public policy require a masters or doctorate, which is not covered in this data. In addition, the study does not include specific data on majors in interdisciplinary fields like animal studies and environmental studies. And of course, this study says nothing about the personal and political values of less remunerative majors, quality of life, or vast differences of individual economic and social circumstances.

Use this information to help you think about, not make, your choices about a major.

You can read a short overview of the report at the The Chronicle of Higher Education, or download the full report from Georgetown.

Cheers, Bill

Please remember that final papers in all my courses are due on Friday at midnight via email attachment. In the final rush to finish up, don’t forget to consult the Style Guide, and check that your citations and references are in Author-Date format. Recall too the various writing resources listed on this blog, and the library website.

Cheers, Bill

Administration
Our final week of classes! You’ve been a great class, and I’m going to miss our conversations together.

For those of you who are seniors, the end is finally here. It is the end of the line, so stay focused to finish up, and enjoy your well earned graduation.

Old Business
Last week we discussed symbolic actions and objects, and how they inform the interpretation of public policy. We examined salutes, American exceptionalism, the confederate battle flag and public space in Columbia (South Carolina), cars and public space in Brazil, endangered species lawsuits and legislation, natural resource agency politics, the concept of umbrella species, political art, and animal art . All this from the perspectives of ritual analysis, myth analysis, and discourse analysis. From a hermeneutic point of view, this wide variety of phenomena can be considered as texts to be read for their meaning and implications.

To finish off the week, we also undertook a detailed interpretation of the movie Avatar. What we found is that Avatar is more than a simple action movie, or a straightforward critique of American military adventurism and neo-colonialism. There are layers of ethical meaning about the well-being of people, animals and nature embedded throughout the film, albeit subordinated to its composition as a mass market block-buster.

New Business
Tuesday is the due date for the first draft of your interpretive policy analysis (IPA) paper.

Recall that this paper builds upon and extends your previous abstract and case study, with an interpretation of the policy meanings and implications of the case itself. While it would be preferable to triangulate on this using interview, immersion and documentary evidence, given the context of this class, you’ll be looking at secondary qualitative data and analysis via documents and articles.

As part of our discussion on Tuesday, don’t forget to bring a complete draft of your IPA, and prepare a statement of how you are using two concepts from the interpretive turn to explore your policy topic.

After we finish our discussion, I’ll administer the course evaluations. I’ll need a volunteer to drop off the evaluations in Paresky.

See you soon!

Cheers, Bill

For more on Rob’s wonderful work, see his section in the Muse Gallery (click the menu link above), or visit his website at roberthite.com.

Administration
Two weeks left before finals week. This week will be the last week of lectures and presentations. Please recall that next Tuesday is the due date for a first draft of your IPA paper. Remember that as part of our discussion of your drafts, be prepared to share how you used two concepts from the interpretive turn to explore your policy topic.

Old Business
Last week we explored the symbolic language of Obama’s Inaurgural Speech and 2010 State of the Union. We identified the dominant terms, themes and metaphors of his speeches, specifically freedom, capitalism, and equality. We then interpreted what this language meant in light of American political culture, Obama’s neo-liberal policies, his secondary emphasis on community, work and sacrifice, Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of negative and positive liberty, the national motto of France (liberty, equality, fraternity), and American civil religion. Artifacts of meaning, the hermeneutic circle, exegesis and hermeneusis, and other interpretive tools were the methodological basis for exploring these justifications of Obama’s policy vision. We then applied these insights to environmental policy via the ethics and politics of wolf recovery.

New Business
This week we’ll complement what we learned about symbolic language, with readings on symbolic action and symbolic objects. Yanow introduces us to a variety of suitable methods, including ritual analysis, myth analysis, and contextualist interpretations of objects such as urban spaces and guns. As you read through these methods, recall that they all rest on the hermeneutic idea of text-metaphors, that is, like language, actions and objects can be read for their meanings as if they were texts.

Why then didn’t Yanow simply talk about different kinds of texts and their interpretation? One reason is her training in the theory of symbolic interactionism, a mode of interpretation similar to hermeneutics. Symbolic interactionism is quite popular in American anthropology and sociology, and a key player in the emergence of qualitative methods in the social sciences.

One feature I would like to draw your attention to here social interactionism’s epistemology (theory of knowledge; ways of knowing). Symbolic interactionism generally presupposes a constructivist epistemology, meaning that it believes the meaning and production of knowledge derive from one’s social interactions with others and society. Think of this interactionism as similar to what hermeneuticists mean by the meaning of a text being connected to context and intertextuality.

Yet hermeneutists and social interactionism differ slightly. The constructivism of symbolic interactionism and kindred theories can become ossified around the meaning and interpretations of individual human beings. This can make it hard for constructivists to recognize how information from the natural world, the communication of other non-human subjects, or policy discourses can shape our knowledge. This is not to deny the insight of symbolic interactionism — meaning is embedded and created in a social context. But there are many constructivists who claim knowledge is determined or imprisoned by our social context.

Without denying the insights of symbolic interactionism, hermeneuticists offer an alternative, interpretivist epistemology. Our knowledge of both the human and non-human worlds is an interpretive act, one in which social interactions and context are formative, but also one where information of the natural world (e.g. the natural sciences) and communication with non-human beings, can be just as important. It is this wider horizon of interpretive possibilities that allows hermeneuticists to feel some degree of comfort in falsifying erroneous beliefs (e.g. wolves kill for sport and intentionally cause suffering) as well as recognize an intrinsic moral value in the world, one that stand independently from the moral valuations of humans.

That said, there are many varieties of constructivist and interpretivist epistemologies, and they overlap substantially. Sometimes the difference is simply semantic. Yanow illustrates this by introducing us to some of the methods of symbolic interactionism, while at the same time embedding these methods into a larger hermeneutic frame of reference. So I write this to give you a heads up to look out for the presuppositions behind these and other theories about our ‘ways of knowing’.

With these insights in mind, we switch gears away from ‘explicit’ environmental policy issues, to one of popular culture — the movie Avatar. A hugely successful action movie, Avatar’s viewers lost little time in finding the symbolic meanings embedded in its language, actions and objects. Whether explicitly theorized or not, Avatar was ‘read’ as a ‘text’ with implications for social and environmental policy. Some have even said the movie is a moral critique of our world today, and an ethical vision of what it ought to be in the future (that would be me). What Avatar means to its author(s) and its viewers (including yourself) should be at the centre of your thoughts as you view the movie.

And speaking of movies as text, there is a wonderful video for interpretive policy analysis from last week’s news. Watch Obama’s remarks at the 2011 White House Correspondence Dinner. The event is highly symbolic at many levels, especially with reference to the ‘birther’ claims that Obama is not an American and therefore ineligible to hold the Presidential office. Donald Trump, the most recent birther-in-chief and member of the audience, was thoroughly (and not kindly) roasted by both Obama and the comedian Seth Meyers.

Images: James Cameron, Director of the movie Avatar, protesting the planned Belo Monte Dam with indigenous Brazilians from the Arara Tribe who live along the Xingu River. Members of the Arara invited Cameron to join them because they saw in the Na’vi’s struggle with humanity, something akin to their own struggles with colonialism. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11brazil.html.

Administration
Three weeks left to go. It feels like we only started the semester a few weeks ago!

Old Business
None.

New Business
If we look back over the semester, we’ve learned about the interpretive turn in public policy, the social forces that along with government produce public policy, the variety of discourses that are both root and fruit of environmental policy, and the ethical dimensions of those discourses. Much of this work has been historical and theoretical, with illustrative case studies from real life.

For the final leg of our term together, we are going to focus on Interpretive Policy Analysis as a methodology. Allow me to draw out two meanings of methodology.

The first is the academic study of the methods of research. Methodologist are those skilled in the knowledge and practice of how a field of study conducts research. When you pick up a book devoted to quantitative or qualitative methods, you are reading the work of someone who is a methodologist.

The second meaning is more complex — selecting the theory and methods most appropriate to studying a particular topic. Note the three elements here: theory, method, topic. Each may stand on its own, but to generate useful or truthful knowledge about a topic, one must carefully choose an appropriate theory and method to help one’s investigation.

For instance, if I wanted to study cosmology, I’d select the astronomical theories and methods most conducive to the astral phenomena that interested me. Seeking intelligent life in the galaxy will entail different theories and methods than will studying the origins of black holes. So too, if you seek to understand the values and norms embedded in environmental policy, you will want to select a methodology best able to help you accomplish your research.

Now as we’ve learned, the naturalistic model of the social sciences asserts that those theories and methods used in the natural sciences are simply to be adapted to the ‘science of man’ [sic]. After its many failures and cul-de-sacs, we know this is simply not true. This in spite of the substantial interest groups in the academy that cloak themselves in the garb of naturalistic science as they pursue personal, ideological and material self-interests.

Yanow’s book Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis is a refreshing breath of fresh perspectives in this regard. She provides a robust (but not exclusivist) methodology to study the meanings and values of public policy. Significantly, she complements what we have already learned from Dryzek’s theoretically oriented discourse analysis of environmentalisms. Yanow, however, is much more explicit about her methodology. Learn how she goes about exploring the meanings (e.g. beliefs, values, feelings) about public policy, and you will never again be at a loss when interpreting the meaning of environmental policy. You will also find her methodology a great, step by step guide to writing your final interpretive policy analysis on an environmental issue.

We’ll start this week with a review of Yanow’s hermeneutic presuppositions about interpretive communities — the hermeneutic circle, text-metaphors, artifacts of meaning, and the like. We’ll then move on to her discussion of symbolic language. And we’ll conclude with an interpretation of the symbolic language of President Obama’s Inaugural Address and State of the Union, 2010.

If you’d like to read a bit more about methodology in the context of environmental discourse, see my blog entry, Discourse and Wolves. This features an extract from a journal article that was originally intended for an edited volume on wolves, but was censored at the last moment by the editors for it’s interpretivist approach.

For a more theoretically oriented treatment of the issue, have a look at my 2004 book chapter, The Quality of Ethics: Moral Causation in the Interdisciplinary Science of Geography. In Geographies and Moralities: International Perspectives on Justice, Development and Place, eds. Roger Lee, and David M Smith, 231-244. London: Routledge. Yanow and her colleague, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, also have an excellent edited volume on the subject, Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (2006).

See you soon.

Cheers, Bill

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.

His talk is entitled ‘Consulting the Genius of Place’, and will be held in Brooks Roger at 20:00.

Jackson will also be available to meet with folks from 09:30-10:30 on Wednesday morning in Paresky.

Definitely have a look at The Land Institute’s website. Co-founded by Jackson over 30 years ago, the institute works to ‘develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops’. For those of you interested in the conflict over economic and policy structures that privilege industrial farming while marginalizing sustainable agriculture, have a look at the institute’s white paper, 50-Year Farm Bill, and its other publications.

Administration
None.

Old Business
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over your first test in greater detail, we’ll field questions about them together at the beginning of class on Tuesday.

New Business
The Survivalist family of discourses came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s. A parallel development was taking place with the emergence of the Problem-solving family of administrative rationalism, democratic pragmatism and economic rationalism. While survivalist discourse did not disappear, it was problem solving discourse that held educational and political sway in the late 1970s through the 1990s. Both families of discourse are well represented in environmental thought and practice today.

The family of Sustainability discourses came to prominence in the early 1990s, and over time has become the dominant discourse of environmental politics and environmental studies. One sees this in the common framing of environmental policy around concerns over sustainability, as well as the emergence of sustainability studies programs that supplement or eclipse environmental studies. This state of affairs is variously praised and critiqued, depending on whether or not one thinks sustainability adequately captures the full range of theories, methods and topics of environmental politics and environmental education.

Dryzek divides sustainability discourses into two types: sustainable development and ecological modernization. The first is something pitched towards the Global South (a.k.a. third world, developing world), the second to the Global North (a.k.a. first world, developed world). Both are visions of how extant or emerging industrial, capitalist societies can have their cake and eat it too — economic growth, environmental protection, and in some cases, social justice.

Just what sustainability means, however, is hotly contested. Because it has become a ‘master frame’ — an almost required mode of interpretation — it is invested with very different meanings. For global corporations it can primarily be a rationale for continued economic growth and profiteering. For local ngos, it can be a focus on sustainable livelihoods. For environmental and animal protectionists, it can be a vision of how we ought to live in shared landscapes with non-human others.

We’ll be taking a detailed look at these sustainability discourses this week. As you read through the material, ask yourself the following questions:

* How do you define sustainability?
* Did your definition differ before and after you completed the readings? How?
* How do you find out what kind of sustainability someone is referring to?
* What role should concerns about environmental and social justice play in sustainability?
* Is sustainability only for people, or for animals and the rest of nature too? What would that mean?

Finally, in light of this week’s guest lecture, ask yourself: ‘what vision of sustainability is being promoted by Wes Jackson’?

See you soon.

Cheers, Bill

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.

Charles Blow of the New York Times illustrates this well through an opinion piece entitled Empire at the End of Decadence. He says in part:

America is great in many ways, but on a whole host of measures — some of which are shown in the accompanying chart — we have become the laggards of the industrialized world. Not only are we not No. 1 — “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” — we are among the worst of the worst.

Yet this reality and the urgency that it ushers in is too hard for many Americans to digest. They would prefer to continue to bathe in platitudes about America’s greatness, to view our eroding empire through the gauzy vapors of past grandeur.

He goes on to use portions of a comparison of advanced economies by the International Monetary Fund (hardly a radical rag) to drive home his point. The chart is reproduced below.

It is worth thinking about

Cheers, Bill

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.

Visit the reception and view the images if you can.

Cheers, Bill

There was a time when the only place you could find J. Henry Fair’s Industrial Scars was in the Muse Gallery of Practical Ethics.

That began to change several years ago, however, with small showings around the Hudson Valley, then a landscape exhibit at MassMOCA, and now features in Museum, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNN.

Mr. Fair’s website now has its own gallery of Industrial Scars, and a book, The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis, coming out 2011.

Henry is an old friend, and I’ve always loved his photography, environmental and otherwise. So congratulations Henry! Well deserved.

Cheers, Bill