Light One Up, Pass It Around
Andrew Light, of New York University
What do you recommend I read to get up to date on the subjects of environmental philosophy and ethics? What is the web address of your own work? -- Taro Keefe, Lismore, Australia
How nice of you to ask! My website is here. You can find links there for my books and download some of my recent papers and forthcoming work. I co-edited a college textbook on the subject that has some good introductory essays in it called Environmental Ethics: An Anthology. There are also references there for other general books in the field as well as a healthy sampling of some of the original and latest work from the various schools of environmental philosophy.
Will your concept of "ecological citizen" lead to broader awareness of our culture's car addiction, which most environmentalists seem to ignore? Is it possible to live a "sustainable" lifestyle and drive an SUV? -- Kathy Durham, Palo Alto, Calif.
A robust account of ecological citizenship would include attention to transportation choices. I certainly agree that our daily commutes are one of the most important environmental choices that we make. We are being more environmentally virtuous when we choose to decrease our personal ecological footprint by driving less or not at all. I would disagree, though, that most environmentalists aren't interested in these questions. Many are, and I've been quite happy to see traditional environmental groups take it up in recent years. The Sierra Club's ambitious anti-sprawl campaign is a good case in point. (It's also true that the early history of wilderness preservation in our country was intimately connected to concerns over automobile access to preserved lands. See Paul Sutter's excellent history, Driven Wild, for the full story.)
Given the fact that the U.S. is the biggest contributor to global warming through the production of greenhouse gases, and given the fact that the single biggest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S. is transportation, then it follows that anyone wanting to live a more environmentally sustainable and responsible lifestyle should not drive an SUV. We can't and shouldn't lay the blame solely at the feet of consumers, though. As my colleague Dale Jamieson likes to point out, we don't reward politicians in this country who propose doing even the minimum to encourage better transportation choices, such as raising taxes on gas. If the price of gas were higher, then fewer of us would be attracted to the idea of driving a Hummer, possibly with the notable exception of the current governor of California.
One caveat though: The reason that good ecological citizens should be concerned with such issues is not only because of the environmental damage that our transportation choices can engender but also because of the ways that our sprawled cities, made possible in part because of out attachment to the automobile, threaten community cohesion. Encountering our neighbors only through a thick layer of aluminum and steel has consequences on the maintenance and degradation of what Robert Putman (author of Bowling Alone) and other sociologists and political theorists call "social capital," essentially the building blocks of a robust public sphere through even the simplest forms of public and private association -- everything from PTAs to bowling leagues. I believe that stronger, more robust democracies require active citizen engagement in public life in order to produce more social capital. I also believe that there is a strong correlation between sprawled cities and the decline of these more active forms of civic responsibility. So, unsustainable forms of transportation infrastructure jointly threaten both the environment and more democratically engaged human communities and therefore require a response by ecological citizens on both counts. Again, though, we can't expect everyone to take up such issues and so better transportation choices need to be encouraged through better planning.
What are your reflections regarding the impact of vegetarianism upon alleviation of world hunger and the well-being of the environment? -- Marylou Noble, Portland, Ore.
I don't think that vegetarianism, even if adopted on a massive scale, would make much of an impact on world hunger since now, at least, we don't have a food shortage problem as much as a food availability problem. We've been overproducing many basic foodstuffs for years without being able to get it to places where it is needed.
I do, however, agree that becoming a vegetarian is more morally responsible in relation to other animals and a very important component of a more environmentally responsible lifestyle. Even if one disagrees with arguments concerning direct duties owed to animals, offered by figures such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan, there are ample reasons not to participate in our rather atrocious forms of animal agriculture, given the environmental consequences of confined animal feeding operations. Still, I do not believe that eating meat is always and in every case unjustifiable, nor do I believe that we ought to take a person's dietary preferences as a single, all-things-considered barometer of their moral character. These things are a matter of context. When I lived in Edmonton I bought into a flock of free-range chickens and turkeys and participated directly in their humane raising and harvesting. Not being able to do this in New York, I don't eat chicken or turkey here.
All of these claims are the subject of lively and spirited debates among environmental philosophers and people who work on animal-welfare and -rights issues. I take my own cue on how to assess what is better or worse in terms of dietary choices from Gary Varner's fine book In Nature's Interests? You can find a short summary of how he understands the differences between eating mammals, birds, fish, and shellfish here. When I said that one of my environmental vices was eating fish, I understand this to primarily involve the consequences of overfishing some species and the pollution produced by some forms of aquaculture. In the absence of more aggressive legislation prohibiting some of the more egregious forms of animal agriculture, the best thing that any of us can do once we have come to see the ethical consequences of our dietary choices is to become as well informed as we can reasonably be about what we are eating and then act accordingly.
When the environment is such a huge, complex system, what large-scale hope of reversing human-caused damage to the natural world can we expect from such small-scale projects encouraging public participation as restoring prairies or gardens? -- Jim Powell, Facilitator, Northside Planning Council, and Editor, Northside News, Madison, Wis.
Good point, but I think that the dichotomy between building connections between human communities and their local environments and working on larger, global environmental issues is false. Here are three reasons.
First, many people don't appreciate or understand some of the bigger global environmental problems, in part because the consequences of these problems are distant in either time or space. In this sense, they challenge our ability to reasonably imagine their consequences as something that we should respond to either out of moral obligation or even more simply out of prudential necessity. Take global warming for example. The worst consequences of global warming (despite the titillating picture painted in The Day After Tomorrow) will likely emerge several generations into the future. It's difficult for many of us to imagine this as anything other than an amorphous uncertainty at the moment and hard to conceive that our own individual or collective choices on such a large problem have any ethical consequences. Taking on such hurdles is a huge task and many will respond that what is needed is more "education," without being specific at all about what form it should take or how providing education is supposed to get us anywhere. My claim is that public participation in restoration ecology, community gardening, and the like, in addition to their intrinsic benefits, also can serve as a gateway to get people interested in these larger issues. If participating in these activities helps people to take an active interest in the welfare of their local environment -- and it is very clear from the studies that have been done on volunteers that this is exactly what happens -- then this interest can be used as an opportunity to not only get them interested in larger environmental problems but also to see that the welfare of their local ecosystem is materially dependent in some ways on the outcome of these larger issues. As a consequence, these hard-to-fathom larger problems that seem out of our moral range are brought conceptually closer to home.
Second, even though I think that regulations, laws, international conventions, and the like are extremely important in confronting some of our most pressing environmental problems, in the end they cannot do all the work for us. We don't just want people to do the right thing because they are forced to, or told to by scientific experts, but to also believe that what they are doing is right. For one thing, laws come and go as political fortunes bend and shift. As I said previously, our current administration has been extraordinarily effective in turning the tide of the advances made previously in environmental law and policy. Imagine the case, though, where public money has been set aside for a restoration project and community volunteers -- rather than paid laborers from a landscape architecture firm -- are engaged to do most of the work. Then imagine that once the project is complete, a new administration comes into office that does not want to provide money to maintain the restored system. In such a case it seems plausible that at least some of the voluntary restorationists would have such an invested interest built up in the health of the ecosystem they worked to restore that they would actively lobby for its maintenance, and failing that find some other way to finance the continuation of the project. This is one reason why I think that when we fail to engage local communities in such projects we miss an opportunity to create an active community of interest between a place and a group of people.
Third, I wouldn't want to be interpreted as saying that only small-scale projects should be opened up for public participation or that restoration ecology in particular is only a small-scale phenomenon. The Clinton administration, in conjunction with the Bush administration in Florida, rallied bipartisan support for an allocation of close to $7 billion to restore the various systems comprising the Florida Everglades. This represents both an enormous appropriation of public revenue as well as an opportunity for a more concrete form of public engagement with the local environment or at least public education about the importance of this ecosystem. While much of the work -- such as de-channelizing rivers which were banked with concrete to provide farmland -- won't be appropriate for a local cub scout troop, other aspects of this project could be opened to public participation.
You have said that it's wise for writers in the field to abandon the notion of intrinsic value and instead "bolster the intuitions that most people have" about the instrumental value of nature. I think you're exactly right about that, but my question is: Where's the philosophy? Why should the field of environmental philosophy not just disband and reform as a lobbying organization or something? -- Sam Greenberg, Toronto, Canada
I've received a question like this from budding young philosophers more often than I'd like to admit. The shortest way of answering is to suggest that you read some of my work on my website and then let me know if you still think what I'm doing isn't philosophy. Essentially, though, I don't think it's terribly difficult to find some engaging philosophical work to do along these lines. For philosophers, the point, after all, is not just to articulate what we think are any old expanded instrumental reasons for protecting the environment but also the ones that are sound, valid, and hopefully true.
Here's just one example. One thing that philosophical training is very good at is to teach us how to understand what logically follows from a given set of views. So, if I was asked to go to a Christian church to discuss environmental issues, then, as an environmental philosopher, I'd want to encourage people to think about the ethical implications of our individual and collective choices concerning the environment. But as a pragmatist environmental philosopher I'd also recognize that this group of people (as I think is true of most Americans) understand morality as something they engage with primarily through the language of religion and their spiritual beliefs. As a pragmatist, I'd try to work within their religious framework to encourage them to be more environmentally responsible.
Now, since I don't share the religious or metaphysical views which would ground this community's moral beliefs, I'd be doing this more as an exercise of first, understanding the nature of their beliefs, and second, trying to figure out if the environmental goals which I think are important follow from the premises which ground their moral beliefs. Since I'm not a propagandist or rhetorician I couldn't go to this community and say something like, "Jesus sent me here today to tell you that you should oppose George W. Bush's rollback of the Clinton administration's roadless rule for the national forests." This would be a corruption of philosophical labor as well as dishonest and, well, false. But I could say that as far as I understand a book that they take to be sacred text -- the Christian Bible -- there is a strong case to be made for an ethic of stewardship toward the environment that follows from that text and a good application of being a good Christian steward would be to think hard about this policy. This may seem obvious to some but certainly many could dispute me on the interpretation of this text or the application of it in this instance. We philosophers can make a valuable contribution to such disagreements commensurate with the particular skills valued by our discipline.
I don't think that in this instance or in other cases philosophers can do this alone. It's an old wag now in the enviro-academic community that our response to environmental problems will require interdisciplinary answers. The challenge is to figure out the best contribution that philosophers can make to forming those answers. I agree that theorizing in the abstract has limited potential, but there is something between that and only becoming an advocate or propagandist. I work with empirical social scientists in my own research in order to figure out what kinds of claims will be sufficiently morally motivating to change behavior, or what kinds of changes in policy would be consistent with other democratic values that we profess as important to our culture. This leaves me with a lot of work to do that respects the talents of these colleagues but also adds an important dimension to their own research.
I'm glad you think that when it comes to the environment the important questions have obvious answers. If you really think this, then you ought to consider doing environmental philosophy or developing it as a secondary interest. We need the help. But forewarned is forearmed: Environmental ethics can't simply be about our duties to or for the non-human natural world. Due to resources, competing ethical obligations to humans, etc., our intuitions that we should protect or restore the environment often come in conflict with other competing ethical considerations. A complete environmental ethic either also has to give us some insight into how we should act toward each other as well, or at least be compatible with larger, more well-established ethical traditions. Once we integrate a more morally responsible framework into environmental decision-making then we will be faced with many tragic choices that I hope smart philosophers can contribute to solving.
The earth cycles through hot and cold periods. Why demonize people in this country? -- Scott Crawford, Virginia Beach, Va.
It's absolutely true that the earth cycles through hot and cold periods. No climatologist would dispute you on that point. I'm no atmospheric scientist, but the evidence is overwhelming now that the average mean temperature of the earth is increasing through anthropomorphic causes and the fear is that we may not cycle back into another cold period because of it. Given the impacts that we are already seeing from these warming trends and the projected impacts that we can model with some degree of certainty, I don't think that criticizing the lack of response from the current administration to this threat counts as demonizing Americans. We produce more of the greenhouse gases that are producing these effects than other people in the world and so a fairly simple understanding of distributive justice suggests that we have an obligation to address this problem. Whether or not other countries are or are not doing their part is beside the point. Even if they are doing nothing (which I assure you they are not) then we are still obligated to do something.
It may very well be the case, though, that stemming the tide of global warming through abatement efforts may never be sufficient to solve the problem. At the start of the last U.N. summit on the environment in South Africa, Bjorn Lomborg published an editorial in the New York Times arguing that the best response would be to use the resources that would be invested in a comprehensive Kyoto-type structure instead in a global project to secure clean water for everyone, since we know that shrinking water supplies will be one of the first effects of global warming. Unfortunately, even if Lomborg is right about this, I don't see the current administration proposing a comprehensive form of mitigation of the effects of global warming as an alternative to something like Kyoto. Instead, they are bucking the received wisdom of the scientific community and claiming that nothing is happening. Future generations will look back aghast at us if we let them get away with it.
What is your opinion on so-called "clean" nuclear energy, and what about the transportation and storage of the waste in Yucca Mountain? -- Carrie Lucas, Georgetown, S.C.
Though I don't think that the construction of nuclear power plants is on the rise, our aging nuclear infrastructure and the legacy of decades of nuclear weapons production have left us with a problem that is extraordinarily difficult to solve. I seriously doubt that finding a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, or anywhere else, will lead to much of an increase in nuclear power, due to the continued uncertainty that most Americans have over the safety of nuclear power following from our experiences with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. This legacy presents a public relations problem that couldn't easily be solved by an army of MBAs.
From an ethical perspective, though, I'm fascinated by the recent federal court decision that halted the plans to open the Yucca repository. Part of the decision was based on a claim that the risk models used to design the facility needed to provide for a reasonable margin of safety for future generations for 10,000 years! While this argument turned on the half-life of the materials that would be deposited at Yucca Mountain, imagine the startling impacts this could have on environmental decision-making if it became some kind of precedent in other areas. Underlying the court's ruling was not only a recognition of the moral obligations we have to future generations (which is well established in much U.S. regulatory law) but implicitly that these obligations extend beyond any reasonable expectation of the longevity of our country. We're hard pressed to recognize our obligations to people in distant lands, but in this decision we see an acknowledgement of obligations to people we will never know, who will live in a community that may only be tangentially related to our own. If the decision holds then we will have surpassed the oft-cited precedent of the dictum that Native Americans planned for seven generations into the future!
Do you think we can develop a sound land ethic without first making animal rights primary to our thinking? Do you think "rights" is an appropriate term considering that neither the environment nor non-human animals have any obligations to us (all rights entail accompanying obligations)? -- Adam Gottschalk, Portland, Ore.
This is a great question and one that I've given a lot of thought to of late. You might be interested in my contributions to my next edited book, Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, which is due out in August. Briefly, though, the early history of environmental ethics was rife with a split between "individualists" and "holists." Most individualists think that when we extend moral consideration beyond the traditional realm of our obligations to other humans it can only coherently provide us with grounds to recognize our obligations to other individual animals. This depends, though, on the kind of ethical framework with which one starts. Take for example the basic utilitarian claim that determining the permissibility of an action should be based on the consequences of the action, and that the consequences that matter in a moral sense are the increase of pleasure or the decrease of pain. An individualist might argue that such a rationale for moral obligation can only be applied to individuals with the capacity to have certain kinds of experiences (here, pleasure and pain) or could be identified as having some range of relevant preferences. So, if we are morally obligated not to cause pain to other humans then we could extend that framework to argue that we are also morally obligated not to cause pain in other beings that can experience pain. We know that other sentient animals experience pain in some kind of comparable sense to how we do but, so far as we know, collective entities, such as species, ecosystems, or the earth itself, do not experience pain or have preferences. (We could of course be wrong about this but I doubt it.) Most individualists argue that as a result, we have direct moral obligations to other animals but only indirect moral obligations to "nature."
On the other hand, holists argue that if we are going to extend moral obligations to the non-human natural world then we can't stop at other individual critters. The reason in part is that the science that informs us about how the natural world works, ecology, is not a science of the welfare of individuals but of collective entities like species and ecosystems. A healthy ecosystem in ecological terms, for example, is not one where every hoppy, jumpy thing in the forest lives out its life in some Disneyfied fantasy. For ecosystems to be healthy, things have to die. And so a true ethic of the environment that took its cues from the best ecological science would have to focus on the obligations we have to larger systems, not to the individuals that make them up.
For various reasons I've come to loathe this distinction and think that it is entirely unhelpful. I get increasingly frustrated with holist environmental ethicists who reject the arguments of individualists that we have moral obligations not to eat animals if we can avoid it without seriously considering these arguments. For instance, some environmental ethicists will argue that agricultural animals are not really part of "nature," since we have manipulated them through centuries of breeding and the like, and hence aren't the kinds of things that we owe any form of moral recognition. This simply avoids the issue. Humans are arguably unnatural in this sense as well. But these same ethicists seem to have no problem granting humans moral recognition even at the expense of larger systems. How can we then say that we owe moral obligations to individual humans and ecosystems and species but not to other individual animals? I won't go into all the reasons here but I think that proponents of both views often misunderstand their opponents and that, at the end of the day, there is very little that they disagree on when it comes to larger environmental policies.
Considering that the natural number of people on earth ("natural" meaning before the discovery of agriculture, which is unnatural) is around 10 million, how can you claim that Bjorn Lomborg's conclusions about population are correct? -- Jeff Hoffman, San Francisco, Calif.
The implied misanthropy of a question like this is shocking, and it stands as a good example of the kind of comment that gives people good reason to worry about environmentalists. I won't try to answer all of the assumptions in these questions that I have problems with, but basically I follow Lomborg, and many others, including the U.N. Population Division, in coming to the conclusion that the predicted "population bomb" and "population explosion" never materialized. In fact, the U.N. has had to revise its population projections significantly downwards since the 1990s. According to the AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment, the latest medium projection expects world population to reach 8.9 billion in 2050. This is 1.1 billion less than was expected in the projection made in 1990. The most recent long-range projection has world population rising to 10.4 billion in 2100 and leveling out at just under 11 billion around 2200. Even our rate of population growth has slowed. We reached our first billion in 1804 and the second billion took only 123 years. The third billion was reached in 1960, 33 years later. Since then we've been adding a billion every 13 or 14 years, passing 6 billion in late 1999. Since 1965-70 this rate has slowed considerably, though with varying rates of growth in different countries. Is this too much? We can't be sure right now but we do know that population most likely won't increase indefinitely. Remember that "overpopulation" is a normative category, not a descriptive one. Whether a given population of anything is "over" what it should be is a function of at least three important components: Population x Affluence x Technology. That is, how many people are there, what are the implications of their consumption rates, and what technologies have been developed to mitigate the impact of their collective consumption. I would agree that the developed world is curr
Finally, I'm not sure how we could possibly ever claim that there was a "natural" human population unless we took a very odd view of what "nature" required. Even if we accepted your stipulated definition that what was natural was the state of affairs prior to the development of agriculture, what reason do we have to assume that the human population would have stabilized at 10 million without the development of agriculture? On top of that, why is it that the development of agriculture was somehow unnatural? If one had the view that there were natural limits such as these, and that we were obligated to follow them, then there are over 6 billion good reasons that we might worry about the implications of readjusting to those limits.
What approach do you have for bridging the work of academia and the environmental movement? -- David Zaks, Madison, Wis.
A great question and a much-neglected topic. As I said in the interview, most of my work at NYU is with students who are engaged in public education projects, broadly construed, on the environment. To my mind, any academic working in this field ought to try to "field test" their ideas or at least figure out whether their research is helpful to environmental advocates, both in and outside of government agencies. For my own part, in addition to the work that I do at NYU, I co-hosted a Faculty Development Workshop with the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and the Center for Humans and Nature here in the city specifically on the question of how to integrate ethics into environmental studies toward the goal of creating better links between the academy and the larger environmental community. Materials from the workshop are available at the Carnegie Council website. I take a lot of my own inspiration on these questions from Bill Shutkin's fine study of civic environmentalism, The Land That Could Be.
Given the dazzling constellation of multiple, rapidly evolving changes to both social and natural systems (climate change, potential tipping points of biodiversity loss, ongoing escalation of exotics, introduction of ecological biotechnologies, etc.), what do you predict will happen to the field of environmental ethics over the next few decades? -- J. V. Wells, Berkeley, Calif.
Great question and one that I've been thinking about for some time now. Five years ago I would have predicted that because of various institutional and disciplinary pressures, environmental ethics would never have much of a home or much acceptance in the top philosophy departments in the country. Thankfully, there are lots of encouraging reasons to think that this is finally changing -- in part, I think, because the field is getting better and better and because student demand for these classes is enormous right now.
I would argue, though, that the most successful field of applied ethics in terms of having an impact on actual professional practice is medical ethics. Practically every major research university and teaching hospital now has a significant program in medical ethics or bioethics, such as the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, directed by Art Caplan. There
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