What kinds of beliefs or values do you hold about some of the following contentious issues?

• Spotted owl, fires, wilderness preservation and resource use (logging, minerals)
• Global warming and drastic greenhouse gas reductions
• Snowmobiles in the National Parks
• Horses, hikers and bikers on the same trails
• Wolf re-introduction
• Breaching dams on the Columbia/Snake
• Factory farming of animals
• Genetic engineering of agricultural crops
• Limits on use of waterways (even on rafting permits)
• Drilling for oil in the Arctic
• The Keystone Pipeline project
• ‘Clean coal’ and ‘clean and safe’ nuclear power
• Banning use of plastic bags
• Taxing carbon emissions

Now, what is an ‘ethic?’

You might think of it as a guiding principle, or set of principles, that govern behavior. Maybe some examples will help:

• The golden rule — basically, treat others the way you’d like to be treated (this shouldn’t apply to sado-masochists, however);
• How about poachers? Do they have ethics? Field research suggests that elk and deer poachers who hunt for meat feel that hunting out of season is legitimate, and that the real crimes are committed by trophy hunters who take the head and leave the carcass to rot.
• The mafia, police departments — they each have a code of silence, designed to protect those within the system. Police officers require the trust of their partners, knowing that even if they break procedural rules, they won’t be reported–without the complete trust of a partner, operating in life and death situations would be pretty dicey.
• Medical, research professions: The principle of ‘do no harm’ operates.
• Governments: we expect that politicians serve the public interest, and are not ruled by conflicts of interest (and boy are we disappointed …)
• Jewish diamond dealers: This has been reported on in the sociological literature (Granovetter 1985). Diamond dealers will trust each other with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry to examine–because of a high level of trust and assurance (backed by what would happen within the community should that trust be violated … ). They have high social capital.

In sociology, we also call this a norm. Essentially ethics are a part of culture–shared understandings, values. My own research uncovered the practice of a ‘subsistence ethic‘ in rural African society, which had been reported in other areas as well (e.g., political scientist James Scott’s work on the Moral Economy of the Peasant). People are living near the margins in agrarian societies, in harsh environments, and as a result, land and resources should be made available to those who need them for survival. If I’m not using a parcel of land, I should let someone else use it who wants to clear and cultivate it. Resources not being ‘used’ should be made available, regardless of who claims them as theirs. This is a way to ensure collective survival at the community level.

So . . . do we have an environmental ethic? We’re looking at a few examples of ethical positions this week. There are many, maybe for instance you’ve heard of the ‘deep ecology‘ movement or ‘ecofeminism,‘ of John Muir, Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson. We will focus on the wise use movement, environmental stewardship, Edward Abbey and his views on industrial tourism, and David Orr’s concept of ecological literacy (how can be have an environmental ethic without some level of ecological literacy?).Below are some examples to help you wrap your mind around this concept.

Wendell Berry — From solar farming to chemical farming

What we had (‘traditional’, pre-industrial practice):

1. Solar energy was cheap, clean–chemical inputs are not, and farmers have little control over them.
2. Farming practices were more adapted to local conditions (rather than one size fits all, chemicals dumped onto depleted and overworked soils).
3. Addressing the soil fertility issue–how to maintain fertility organically without fallowing?

According to Berry, farmers practiced a system of production that took into account the environment. The industrial agricultural model essentially is like using a cake mix–follow the instructions on the back of the box, apply generous amounts of petrochemicals and inorganic fertilizers, borrow huge sums from the bank, and hope that world commodity prices or government subsidies are kind to you.

What we did–industrial agriculture, supported by agribusiness research in land grant schools

1. Mechanization (tractors, heavy machinery)
2. Mechanization led to topsoil erosion–topsoil is a precious, non-renewable resource
3. Massive chemical inputs are required to farm the same land annually, if a farmer wants to offset losses in soil fertility–essentially, the crops take up the nutrients in the soil, allowing plants to grow and providing them with the nutrients that make them worth eating, nutritionally speaking.
4. Displaced laborers, toxic chemicals and machinery, produced in factories–quite a change. At the turn of the 20th century in the U.S., 50% of the labor force was in agriculture. At the turn of the 21st century, this number was between two and three percent. Clearly, technology has allowed for the intensification of agricultural production–we’re growing more crop on a given piece of land in a given time period. Feeding seven billion people probably requires it at this point.

What has happened

Some effects of this agricultural revolution include

1. the disappearance of the small farm (competition from corporations, economics of scale, globalization make it difficult for the family farmer to compete–farming is expensive, inputs cost)
2. There is a subsequent loss to farming communities, rural economic vitality.
3. Consumers benefit from cheap food. Right? Okay, so the store-bought tomatoes are a little, how to say, waxy. But cheap, right?
4. ‘Cheap food’ is the result of externalized costs–chemicals in the food and in the food chain, for instance, or the eutrophication of waterways (sewage and human settlement help this as well–eutrophication is the loss of oxygen to plant and microbial life, making it more difficult for other organisms such as fish to survive)
5. Farmers are as a result subject to low prices, high costs, and overproduction. Food companies get their production cheap, use raw commodities and chemicals to produce processed foods, market them heavily, and you have the highly profitable corporate food industry of the 21st century.

What course of action?

According to Berry, we must

1. pay attention to nature, adapt farming to local conditions, rather than adapting local conditions to industrial farming and one-size-fits-all techniques.
2. base the food production system on ecosystem and community health, not the health of the economy or of industry.
3. ‘re-learn’ the meaning and significance of stewardship, using local knowledge as a base on which to build.
4. appreciate the value of diversity, diversification, in terms of our own species’ survival and the survival of other species and crop varieties (why is diversity of value?)
5. ‘localize’ regeneration of fertility, rather than relying on inputs conceivably from around the world.
6. foster cooperation between local farmers and consumers.
7. learn to control production. Overproduction leads to low prices for producers. Those who sell the inputs (chemicals, machinery) benefit, though–there is no overproduction problem there!

What’s stopping this from happening?

1. lack of political clout–in framing issues, addressing them
2. lack of understanding of the consequences to the environment, to public health–food companies are big advertisers, which news organization with any kind of audience will risk alienating that revenue source?
3. big processes–such as globalization, run counter to trends toward more local production. Who is likely to win out, and why? Or can different models of production and consumption co-exist?

For Berry, key issues include not only preserving the land, but preserving the producers. Farmers are not technicians following the directions on the back of the box, and once they’re gone, their kind will be difficult to replace.

Ron Arnold (Overcoming ideology)-the wise use movement

Ron Arnold is no fan of Wendell Berry or his land ethic. Nor of the environmental movement, which he sees as an obstacle to economic development. According to Arnold, the founder of the wise use movement, the environmental movement challenges the dominant Western worldview and its three assumptions:

• Unlimited economic growth is possible and beneficial.
• Most serious problems can be solved by technology.
• Environmental and social problems can be mitigated by a market economy with some state intervention.
  Hence, following this logic, the environmental movement dictates that:

   

  • Growth must be limited.
  • Science and technology must be restrained.
  • Nature has finite resources and a delicate balance that humans must observe

According to Arnold, this ‘environmental ideology’ is based on the following principles:

1. All things are connected. “[N]ever will we understand completely the spin-off effects of the environmental changes that we create, nor will we measure our own, independent influence in their creation.” Similar to Barry Commoner’s rule, ‘everything is connected to everything else.’
2. Earthly goods are limited. “As applied to people, carrying capacity is the number of individuals that the earth can support before a limit is reached beyond which the quality of life must worsen and Homo, the human animal, becomes less human. One reason we humans–unlike animals in the wild–are prone to exceed carrying capacity is that our wants exceed our needs.”
3. Nature’s way is best. “Woven into the fabric of environmentalism is the belief that natural methods and materials should be favored over artificial and synthetic ones, when there’s a clear choice. Witness the vast areas of the globe poisoned or degraded by the technological economy of our century.”
4. The survival of humankind depends on natural diversity. “Although species by the billions have vanished through natural extinction or transformation, the present rate of extinction is thought to be at least 400 times faster than at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Humankind’s destruction of habitats is overwhelmingly to blame.” Diversity means that disruptions in the environment will meet a wide range of responses from organisms and species–some will fare better than others, but the more diversity, within an ecosystem and even within a species, the better the probabilities of survival of the ecosystem or of the species.
5. Environmentalism is radical “in the sense of demanding fundamental change. It calls for changes in present political systems, in the reach of the law, in the methods of agriculture and industry, in the structure of capitalism (the profit system), in international dealings, and in education.”

Arnold suggests that the ‘environmental ideology’ (in quotes because he is generalizing that this embodies a monolithic group) is a radical agenda that will harm economist interests. Fighting the ‘wolf in the garden’ (in sheep’s clothing, to boot): who’s fighting this fight against environmentalism?

• Property rights groups (that believe in private property and use of that property with few restrictions),
• anti-regulation legal foundations,
• trade groups of large industries,
• motorized recreation vehicle clubs,
• federal land users,
• farmers, ranchers,
• fishermen, trappers, small forest holders,
• mineral prospectors and others who live and work in the middle landscape

These are the ‘articles of faith’ of the wise use movement:

1. Humans, like all organisms, must use natural resources to survive. ‘This fundamental verity is never addressed by environmental ideology. The simple fact that humans must get their food, clothing and shelter from the environment is either ignored or obliquely deplored in quasi-suicidal plaints such as, “I would rather see a blank space where I am–at least I wouldn’t be harming anything.” ‘
   ‘If environmentalism were to acknowledge our necessary use of the earth, the ideology would lose its meaning. To grant legitimacy to the human use of the environment would be to accept the unavoidable environmental damage that is the price of our survival. Once that price is acceptable, the moral framework of environmental ideology becomes irrelevant and the issues become technical and economic. ‘
2. Nature isn’t fragile. The earth and its life are tough and resilient, not fragile and delicate. Environmentalists tend to be catastrophists, seeing any human use of the earth as damage and massive human use of the earth as a catastrophe. An environmentalist motto is “We all live downstream,” the viewpoint of hapless victims.
3. We only learn about the world through trial and error. The universe did not come with a set of instructions, nor did our minds. We cannot see the future. Thus, the only way we humans can learn about our surroundings is through trial and error. Even the most sophisticated science is systematized trial and error. Environmental ideology fetishizes nature to the point that we cannot permit ourselves errors with the environment, ending in no trials and no learning.
   ‘There will always be abusers who do not learn. People of good will tend to deal with abuse by education, incentive, clear rules and administering appropriate penalties for incorrigibles. ‘
4. ‘Our limitless imaginations can break through natural limits to make earthly goods and carrying capacity virtually infinite. Just as settled agriculture increased earthly goods and carrying capacity vastly beyond hunting and gathering, so our imaginations can find ways to increase total productivity by superseding one level of technology after another. Taught by the lessons learned from systematic trial and error, we can close the loops in our productive systems and find innumerable ways to do more with less.’ According to this tenet, imagination defies the laws of thermodynamics!
5. (Hu)Man’s reworking of the earth is revolutionary, problematic and ultimately benevolent. ‘Of the tenets of wise use, this is the most oracular. Humanity is itself revolutionary and problematic. Danger is our symbiote. Yet even the timid are part of the human adventure, which has barely begun.
   Humanity may ultimately prove to be a force of nature forwarding some cosmic teleology of which we are yet unaware. Or not. Humanity may be the universe awakening and becoming conscious of itself. Or not. Our reworking of the earth may be of the utmost evolutionary benevolence and importance. Or not. We don’t know. The only way to see the future is to be there. ‘

These two views–of environmentalists and the wise use movement–are quite different. Can you critique them?

Edward Abbey and progress-what does it mean for the national parks?

Abbey talks about the ecological costs of progress. By progress, he’s referring to the development of the National Parks, making them more accessible to the public and to their motorized vehicles, whether they be RVs, SUVs, ATVs, jetskis, snowmobiles, etc. How does this affect the quality of the experience of national parks and the natural treasures? He talks about Capitol Reef National Park and how the Fremont River Valley was graced with a road, the main road going through the park. Arches, where Abbey worked, now has a pretty well-developed network of roads leading tourists to the main attractions–few people stray from these, partly because during the high season it is extremely hot and uncomfortable in the desert.

Ethics

Abbey advocates preservation of wilderness, intact and undiminished, and contends this is part of the mission of the National Park Service. Without wilderness, he says, civilization loses its meaning. But doesn’t the government have an obligation to make the parks and their resources available to a wide variety of people, not just those with the physical capacity to trek it on foot or on bicycle? What’s wrong with building roads, hotels, toilets, electricity, tourist infrastructure, so that more people can enjoy the parks? Making parks accessible to the car culture is certainly good for the local economies around parks as well.

What to do?

Nevertheless, Abbey has a few ideas he’d like to see implemented:

1. eliminate cars in National Parks – bicycles or other non-destructive forms of transportatio would be allowed.
2. no new roads in NPs (use them for services, bicycles). this would -encourage hiking, and actually change the quality of the experience most people get out of a visit to a park.
3. put rangers to work, get them out of the office. They should be turning tourists on to what parks have to offer, not managing crowds or emptying toilets.

Are these ideas feasible? What would it take for them to be taken seriously? Remember, Abbey wrote this book in the 1960s. The parks have changed a great deal since then, and not in the ways he envisioned. Can you see how a certain ethical approach can influence how the National Park system developed?

So, we have three to four markedly different views of how humans should relate to their environments. What kind of an ethic could you advocate, and why? How would you go about educating others? Clearly there are many competing ethics in the U.S. alone, among different groups, with varying levels of political clout. They cover a wide range of attitudes about the environment and our relationship to it, from the view that humans are just another species with no special privileges over other creatures (deep ecology), to a decidedly human exemptionalist view that humans know best and will work things out because of their vast ingenuity and resourcefulness as a species (wise use).

The idea is not so much to apprehend these three specific ethical frameworks, but to understand more generally how most any policy initiative embodies, at least implicitly, some ethic principles that can be ‘unpacked’ so to speak, and evaluated. Even in such cases as the ‘wise use’ movement, which has little to do with wisdom and much to do with economic exploitation for human utility–if it is so noble, why not state this up front as an ethical principle?