Robert McKim

Scholarship of Sustainability Series

March 5^th, 2015

 

What do we want and when do we want it?

 

Ecological health is preserved when two conditions are met.  First, processes of nature such as water purification, nitrogen fixation, soil stabilization, nutrient retention and recycling, and the production of clean air, are operating normally, with the result that many “ecosystem services” – such as clean air, potable water, flood control and crop pollination – are provided.  A second element in a healthy ecosystem is resilience, or the ability to cope with disturbance.

 

Ecological integrity, on the other hand, is preserved when there is ecological health and, in addition, the historic species composition of the biotic community is intact.

 

Looking, then, at landscapes as a whole, a sensible overall goal is this: to maintain the ecological health… in functional terms of all lands, and to go further in designated patches of wildness to get as close as possible to sustaining their integrity.  (Freyfogle in Reader, 108)

 

What’s religion got to do with it>

 

Relevant Teachings

 

Potentially constructive elements:

Advocates care or appreciation or love for other forms of life or for, say, rivers, or forests or watershed or mountains;

Provides people with a strong sense of being connected to, or kin with, or mutually dependent upon, other forms of life including local animal species;

Advocates the idea of stewardship of the earth; or the idea that certain places are sacred;

Advocates the idea that it is not our place to wipe out other forms of life;

Advocates the idea that we should take a considerate, compassionate, and merciful attitude towards all beings that can suffer.

 

Potentially obstructive elements:

We are the special species and what is going on with human beings is the central drama in history.

What is most important about what is occurring on this earthly scene is the process of getting as many of us as possible into heaven, or ensuring that we achieve some other putative ideal future state.

The end is nigh—so that we do not have to concern ourselves with the world around us,

“He’s got the whole world in His Hands.”  Everything is in God’s hands—with the result that, again, we do not have to concern ourselves with the world around us.

It is mistaken or inappropriate or presumptuous to think that we could seriously damage the earth.

 

“Nudge Factors”

1. A monotheistic perspective on moral obligations
2. Aligning yourself with an ultimate reality and exhibiting or making manifest the nature of this ultimate reality.

• Space for an expectation to be heroic.

 

Possible New Directions in Religion

Comparing Religions

 

1. Overall, are the teaching associated with a religious tradition constructive or obstructive from the point of view of achieving the environmental goal?
2. A second area of inquiry is whether religious faith might provide “nudge factors”?
3. A third area of inquiry: are religions open to grafting on new ways of thinking, new practices and so on that reflects the current global realities?
4. In the fourth area, the focus is on whether religious traditions are actually pursuing and promoting the environmental goal. Here we are interested in actions and in what is being accomplished.

 

The grasp of the nature of the problems that members of a religious tradition exhibit the extent to which they take responsibility for addressing these problems

how energetic are their relevant efforts

to what extent is promoting the environmental goal a priority for them

the extent to which the tradition says that promoting the environmental goal is important for, and even partly definitive of, membership in the relevant tradition

how successful the tradition is at drawing the attention of its members to these matters, at promoting a deep understanding of them, and at persuading members to promote the environmental goal

the extent to which a religious tradition leads the way, providing a model for others

the extent to which future leadership is being trained for leadership in this area.

 

5. The fifth and last perspective involves a shift of focus away from entire religious traditions, whether we are thinking of their teachings or their inspirational value or their performance, and a shift in the direction of a more micro-level issue, namely particular houses temples, synagogues, chapels, meeting houses, gurdwaras, and so on. And the communities of worshippers or participants associated with them.

 

Cindy Shepard

Faith In Place as an intern

 

Cindy Shepard briefly spoke after McKim about her program that includes people from all religions.  The goal is to help people no matter their religion, and how to incorporate the fundamental lessons from each.

 

Mission: inspire people with faith of different religions.

 

 

 

Dr. Kanter

Seeing and Valuing Nature?
March 12^th

 

3 Goals

Awaken you to the diversity of wildlife in east central Illinois.

 

Remind you that “human” and “natural” are interwoven in one fabric, more closely here than in places people go to experience capital N Nature.

 

Provide context for thinking about right relations among people and the other life in their environment.

 

“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into a lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind” (269).

 

— Aldo Leopold, “Conservation Esthetic”

 

About my photography

• Hunting with a camera vs. nature photography
• True vs. truthful
• Collaborative

 

ONE WAS FOUND!

[Birdnotes] Black tern

Freyfogle, Eric T efreyfog at illinois.edu

Sat May 18 09:28:33 PDT 2013

There was one (easily spotted, of course) plying the waters of the main swine pond, just south (and a bit east) of the iHotel, along with a still-respectable variety of other birds-coots (many), pied-billed grebes, blue-winged teal, wood ducks, solitary sandpipers, etc.

Eric Freyfogle

 

Nearest cute, furry creature?

 

Squirrel?

 

University President Andrew S. Draper included the following recommendation in a letter to the Board of Trustees dated July 5, 1901:

“For some years I have had in mind the domestication of squirrels upon the grounds of the University and have made some investigations which lead me to believe that the suggestion is entirely practicable.  Conferences with Professor Charles W. Rolfe have led him to ascertain where the animals can be found, and to look into the methods for housing and retaining them.  The expense of such an undertaking is uncertain, but would easily be within $250…If successful, the influence upon University life, and upon the feelings of students, would be considerable, and students would carry that influence to all parts of the State.   I therefore recommend that Professor Rolfe be asked to initiate and supervise the enterprise, and that $250 or so much as may be necessary be appropriated to meet the expenses.” 3

The University Board of Trustees adopted the recommendation on July 6, 1901.4

 

Predator that lives most closely among us?

 

Hawk??

 

Aquatic life nearby?

 

Retention Pond on dorner??

 

The amount of wildlife around us is astonishing…

Birds (hawks, owls)

Weasels

beavers

fox

wolf

frogs

different fish

snakes

giant turtles (Secundus, the silent)

 

”An acre of remnant prairie might have well over 50 species of plants. Loda Prairie at 3.4 acres has about 100 plant species (probably more). Not too many birds or mammals at that size, but other taxa like insects, fungi, mosses, etc. are numerous. At the small scale of say a square meter, one might easily find 15-20 plant species.”

 

–Jamie Ellis, field biologist Illinois Critical Trends Assessment Program

 

Shifting Baselines Syndrome

People –scientists and nonscientists alike—tend to calibrate their ideas about the health of landscapes and wildlife populations according to their early experiences with them. So a spring migration that looks great to me—I only started birding in the 1980s—may look terrible to more experienced birders, people who got started in the 1960s.

And even the Illinois landscape they inherited was already suffering.

 

In short, the loss of that megafauna has meant that, for the last twelve thousand years, every human generation has inherited a North America that is profoundly out of whack. So many of the ecosystems we see, study and appreciate like architecture are, in fact, mostly ruins—a disheveled set of ripple effects, reverberating from the loss of these big and influential beasts.

–Jon Mooallem in Wild Ones

 

ADULTS DAILY FOUR HOUR WALK

 

Political benefits?

“Cooperation is in our nature: Nature Exposure and environmentally sustainable behavior,” Journal of Environmental Psychology

– or –

“The radical political implications of spending time outdoors,” Washington Post account

 

 

An Environmental Critique of Market Capitalism

 

Scholarship of Sustainability Series

March 19^th, 2015

Professor Eric T. Freyfogle

 

Definitions

• Capital:  Equipment, factories, and land and other assets used for economic production; that is, productive assets
• Capitalism: Narrowly, an economic system in which income from one year is invested in productive assets so as to enhance economic production in later years
• A more common definition: Capitalism is a system in which productive assets are owned and controlled by some people, who then hire labor to use the assets and who control and distribute the income generated in excess of the wages paid to the workers

 

The Longstanding Critique

• Capitalism was sharply criticized in 19th century by Karl Marx and others:
• Marx embraced a labor theory of value: those who produced income should enjoy it
• Under capitalism, much of a laborer’s production was taken by capitalists, who invested in more productive assets to increase future earnings
• By controlling working conditions owners of capital “alienated” workers from their labor
• Capitalism pressed wages down, bringing economic inequality, social dis-ease, ecological ills

 

Capitalism and the Market

• Strictly speaking, capitalism need not be embedded in a market system of allocation
• In capitalism, goods and services can be allocated by centralized planning, by markets 0r (most common) by a combination of them
• Many productive assets today are in fact controlled by governments with services allocated by planning (e.g., schools, parks, utilities, fire protection, health care and more)
• Former Soviet Union: best understood as bureaucratic state capitalism

 

Today’s Critique

• Today’s topic:  a critical look at private market capitalism:  that is, capitalism in which productive assets are privately owned and in which goods and services are allocated through markets
• Much of the critique would also apply to other capitalist systems and to allocation modes that rely on non-market methods
• The critique has much to do with cultural values that are embedded in, and accentuated by, private market capitalism

 

Four Key Questions

• In what ways does private market capitalism encourage cultural values—ways of seeing nature, valuing it, understanding our place in nature—that exacerbate misuses of nature?
• In what ways does it stimulate actual practices that entail misuses of nature?
• Does it in some way blind us to an understanding of our environmental plight?
• Does it hinder efforts to address environmental ills responsibly?

 

Ways of Seeing, Valuing Nature: 1 of 3

• One complaint (which we’ll consider again): market capitalism sees nature as commodities, some parts valuable, most parts not; nature is seen as a collection of parts, not an organic whole
• Value is assessed by the market—exchange value, mostly—which is to say by market forces of supply and demand
• Value is distinctly human centered—value to humans living today—and measured by willingness and ability to spend (thus, money over people)

 

• The economy is central; all else—nature, people—are attached to it and largely defined by it (the contrasting view: economy is embedded in (a subset of) the natural order, as are people)
• The present is valued far above the future; future costs and benefits are heavily discounted—thus a short-term way of valuing and using nature
• In general, humans are conquerors, dominators of nature; only humans have moral status (and then to the extent of money they can spend)

 

• Overall public welfare is defined in terms of levels of market activities (sales of final goods and services) without regard for the nature of the goods and services; known as Gross Domestic Product
• Exhaustion/degradation of nature is not counted as a cost; market caused human illness also omitted
• Quality of human environment as such is not considered—aesthetics, convenience, whether landscapes foster happiness, senses of community

 

Promoting Land Degradation

• Private market capitalism in many ways stimulates private actors to misuse nature, as follows:
• Actors are encouraged to lower costs by “externalizing” costs, including ecological harms; once externalized, the costs are ignored
• Competitive pressures encourage full exploitation of nature, focusing only on commodity production
• Prevailing discount rate discourages worries about long-term degradation; discourages practices that would keep land healthy

 

• Market competition breeds wastefulness of resources: advertising, excess capacity (e.g., empty box stores; gas stations and drug stores side by side), unsold products, excessive investment in production equipment (e.g., fishing boats in open fishery)
• When unchecked by laws, capitalism breeds economic inequality and poverty, which in turns compels the poor to exploit nature in order to survive
• To survive (given downward pressure on wages, cutting employment) it must grow to survive, meaning ever more production and consumption

 

View of People and Society

• Through the lens of private market capitalism, a person is chiefly an autonomous individual, a consumer and worker/producer, not a part of organic wholes (family, community, nature)
• The implicit message: A person has individual preferences and rightly seeks above all to satisfy those preferences—that is, to act for personal gain as consumer and worker/producer
• In contrast, their citizen and community roles are less important or unimportant; people do, and legitimately can, simply act out of self-interest

 

• Society is chiefly a collection of individuals who can associate with one another, or not, as they please; such decisions are simply matters of personal preference, as are connections to nature
• For society, economic growth, measured by GDP, is the prime aim and policies should be focused on it
• The market is the best mechanism for allocating goods and services to the best use—that is, to the person who pays the most for them (thus wealth and ability to pay are important, not just need)

 

Moral Vision

• The market and calculations of GDP are not guided or constrained by morality; goods and services are supplied according to market demand, and methods of production are aimed solely at meeting them
• At best, then, the market gives individuals living today what they want, according to the money they have to spend; it has no other goal or constraint
• Thus, personal choices are all equally valid
• Normative standards—morality, concerns for community welfare, future generations—are all matters of personal choice

 

• Given that moral choices are personal, it is not appropriate for communities or government to act on moral visions except those consistent with individual autonomy (that is, liberal individualism)
• Thus (to quote form VP Cheney), conservation is a personal virtue, not a valid public policy
• The dominant mode of thinking: instrumental rationality (that is, reason is employed solely as a tool to help achieve preference satisfaction)

 

• Implicit theory of justice: only individual humans as such have value, and justice means giving each person her due; it has nothing to do with virtue or right relationships—nothing to do with being a good citizen, good member of a social or land community
• No limits on market processes based on social justice; no concerns about environmental justice issues; no limits on exploitation of land and people
• No vision of community welfare or the good life, except as the creation and manipulation of visions can promote greater consumption

Effects on People

• Encourages people to think of themselves, to focus on their roles as workers and consumers above all
• Encourages resistance to claims made by communities, nature, other life forms, and future generations; thus, a loss of senses of community
• Encourages risk-taking, gambles, lack of precaution in efforts to generate income
• In general: it fosters the disembodied ego, out to gain pleasure with little regard for others; an ego emptied of values and responsibility

 

• A common assumption: the market “cleanses” our  consumption so we aren’t responsible for ills created by the ways goods are produced or for our wastes
• We come to believe that people get what they deserve; hence, little inclination to question economic and social structures or to evaluate outcomes on moral grounds
• Discourages attention to ways people can work together outside the market
• Rewards personality traits that lead to loss of connections with community, nature; go-it-alone

 

Corrosive of Democracy

• Market forces strongly resist legal limits on action, and businesses work hard to undercut such limits
• Wealth is routinely used to dominate politics and to manipulate governments for private gain—subsidies for businesses, increased abilities to externalize harms, increased takeover of common wealth
• Businesses, wealthy interests have strong incentives to distort public discussions, manipulate science and confuse public understanding
• All of this is corrosive of traditions, institutions, moral constraints, non-“economic” uses of nature

 

• Local and, increasingly, national governments are forced to compete with one another in being “friendly” to business, unconstrained markets—thus restricting government powers to limit the market’s ill effects and promote shared assets
• By fostering individual competition and limiting justice to individual freedom/rights, market forces undercut civil society, emphases on roles as citizens
• The market itself is put forth as being the best mechanism for democratic action (one dollar, one vote)—hence, little need for government

 

• The market is given an aura of magic in its ability to harness human cleverness and solve all problems when allowed to function without constraint
• Thus, a free market generates the best of all possible worlds; generates false sense of inevitability
• Market thinking encourages search for technological solutions to all problems, particular solutions that can make money for big business
• Flip side: it discourages critical thought on economic system, cultural values, market assumptions

 

Explaining Problems

• Market forces and defenders offer explanations for causes of environmental degradation and solutions for it, chief among them the following:
• First defense: market would achieve good outcomes if unconstrained; thus constraints are the problem
• Second defense: because market gives consumers what they want, individual consumers are to blame; thus, the solution for ills is for consumers to change their choices—buy green

 

• Third defense: Parts of nature are not yet in the hands of private owners and subject to market forces, thus further privatization and enhanced markets will solve problems
• Fourth defense: problems are the product of misguided governmental policies
• Variant of fourth defense: problems come from misguided efforts by do-good citizen-groups that manipulate government to get what they don’t deserve

 

The Effects, in Sum

• These days, we see the world colored by the market, capitalism, and private ownership of the means of production (esp. lands and resources), a world view that incorporates and accentuates now-dominant strands of our culture, because of which:
• We have trouble seeing land degradation, especially on privately owned lands
• We have trouble evaluating normatively the lands that we do see; we may think they look bad, but can’t be sure given the market’s reassurances
• With normative judgments deemed a matter of personal choice, we don’t discuss morality as a community; we don’t seek shared visions
• Normative thinking is further constrained by the dominance of individual freedom; harder to focus on what we share, our bonds, future generations
• Similarly, we have trouble uncovering the causes of degradation, particularly those embedded in our values, views of nature and our place in it
• Given that we see the world in terms of individuals, we assume problems are due to individual choices and that solutions require change by consumers
• Similarly, thinking of ourselves as consumers and workers we discount our options as citizens
• Meanwhile, governments are increasingly dominated by market forces, which manipulate them to their advantage and distort public discourse
• Thus, we throw up our hands, drop out, tend our little gardens, think locally, buy green; the “reverse quarantine” approach to living

 

Hawken-main points

• Capitalism as practiced is nonsustainable (p. 5)
• Deficiency “cannot be corrected simply by assigning monetary values to natural capital” (5)
• In truth, all economic activity is embedded within the workings of a particular planet (7)
• Need: “a new industrial system . . . Based on a very different mind-set and set of values”; one in which “all forms of capital are fully valued” (9)
• Need to change “the quality and flow of desired services,” to redress global inequities of income, well-being (9)
• Environment for commerce (capitalism?) should be provided “by true democratic systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business”; all commerce must behave “as if all forms of capital were valued” (10)
• More generally, he is technophile, utopian writer
• Source of our problems, in Hawken’s view: not fully valuing nature, plus “misconceived or badly designed business systems, population growth, and wasteful patterns of consumption” (all must be addressed) (9)

 

Critique of Hawken

• His techno-optimism:  By 1820, one worker in England did the work done by 200 in 1750 (11).  True? Yes, but only in one task:  spinning cotton (and nearly true in transport of coal)
• His claim: massive inefficiencies that cause degradation “almost always cost more” (13)  Q: cost to whom, how valued, what time frame?
• He says: fully value nature and get rid of inequities in income and well-being.  But what does this mean?
• He calls for “full valuation” but really means a radical shift in world view and culture
• Also, no probing of that world view, its elements, why they exist (benefits), why they resist change
• He envisions commerce under full democratic control, suggesting (but not describing) massive legal limits on production, consumption
• But, no comment on how to gain this democratic control, given dominance of money, current culture
• In the end, the resulting system he envisions would bear little resemblance to today’s market capitalism

 

Magdoff and Foster—main points

• Agrees with Hawken that we need radical shift in values, but sees the needed change as more wide-ranging; a drastic shift in culture, social order
• Root problem, as they see it: Businesses simply out to make money in short term, to accumulate capital to generate future income; system is soulless (p. 96)
• Yes, massive democratic change needed in taxes, subsidies, trade rules, etc., but these are not possible (challenges “insurmountable” (97) in system where profit is the “only god” and power held in hands of those who resist)
• Money rules government; we have plutocracy (100)
• We are enthralled by market mystique, not seeing it as product of human decisions, private power, political manipulations; no “free market”
• Particular damaging: the market’s sense of abstract value (agreeing with Hawken)
• Key: we are unable to envision an economic system with “fundamentally different goals and decision-making processes” (102)
• We need different goals and decision-making (121-22); “sustainable human development,” enough and no more; a radical change in social relations, culture, economy

 

Critique of Magdoff and Foster

• Heavy focus on owners of capital and profit motive, but the cultural values they attack shape all of society, not just economy
• As with Hawken, no clear vision of the parts of culture that cause degradation, why they exist, the benefits they have brought, why they resist change
• No clear vision of alternative economic system and how it would avoid problems of common ownership
• No real idea how to move ahead

 

Framing Climate Ethics

1. Michael Scoville, Eastern Michigan University

(jscovil1@emich.edu)

 

1. Some assumptions about climate change

• CC-related harms are/will be significant (e.g., deaths due to climate-sensitive diseases, stress on water resources, compromised food security, etc.)
• Among humans, the global poor and future generations are most vulnerable to CC
• Some of the worst effects of global CC can probably be mitigated or adapted to
• Addressing CC will require global arrangements and a global ethic to support these

1. Principle-based ethical framings

First problem: clarifying a fair distribution of responsibility for addressing CC

 

1. Historical responsibility principle(s)
   1. Polluter Pays principle “You broke it, you fix it”.
   2. Fair access principle: Limited resources, such as the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb GHG emissions without adverse effects, are common goods that no one party should be permitted to deny others access to.
      1. General implications of a and b. 1. Compensation for harm causes; 2 unequal burdens with respect to addressing CC
      2. Responsibility for global GHG emissions from 1850-2003: U.S., 29%, EU nations, 26%; China, 8%; India, 2%; (Gardiner 2011)

• Possible support from (philosophical) libertarians

Objections to 1

Compensating benefits of industrialization

Ignorance about environmental damage

Emitters are dead

Practicality

 

2. Ability-to-pay principle
   1. Central idea: ability to pay for climate-related policies without sacrificing anything of greater moral priority.
   2. Possible advantages
   3. Main objection: disincentive effects

 

Second Problem: clarifying a fair allocation of future emissions

A baseline for discussion:

• Atmospheric CO2 concentrations prior to industrial revolution – 280 ppm
• At present: 400plus ppm, increasing – 2 ppm/year
• Goal: limit increases in global temperatures to 2 degrees C
• TO meet the goal: stabilize CO2 concentrations at 250 ppm

 

3. Subsistence emissions principle (Henry Shue)
   1. Basic Idea: Individuals have a right to the emissions necessary for subsistence. These emissions rights can’t be traded or appropriated by governments.
   2. Difficulties:
      1. Specifying the subsistence minimum
      2. Problem of enforcing/ protecting the right

• Problem of disadvantaging future generations (in particular)

 

4. Equal per capita emissions principle (Peter Singer)
   1. Intuitive idea: no individual has a presumptive right to more than an equal share of the atmospheric “sink”, thus permissible emissions should be distributed equally.
   2. Implication: 2 tons CO2 equivalent per person per year
      1. 2010 data: U.S., Canada, Australia, 20 tons (per person); Germany, 11 tons, China, 4 tons, India, 1 ton, Sri Lanka 2/3 of 1 ton (Singer 2011)
   3. Two initial worries about fairness:
      1. Given wide discrepancies in national per capita emissions averages, (4) would place very different, perhaps unmanageable, burdens on different countries.
      2. People’s energy needs vary considerably in different parts of the world.
   4. Response: equal per capita emissions + tradeable permits
   5. Possible advantages of (4):
      1. Merit of simplicity (time-slice vs. historical view)
      2. “Equal per capita” aligns with poor countries development rights. Need

• “Tradeable permits” aligns with rich countries preferences/ needs

1. Two worries/ objections to (4):
   1. Fair enough because most feasible?
   2. The principle and disadvantaging developing countries

 

III.       Concluding Thoughts

• Assigning near-term burdens
• Combining principles
• Harms beyond the human

 

Session #9

 

Political Science Professor

(I FORGOT HER NAME I’M SORRY)

 

Have Humans always been destructive of nature?

The stronger humans become, the worse nature is affected

Always destructive, but it has picked up

Historically have been broadly distinguished land use

 

Eastern and Western hemispheres are like the brain, when one side is dominant the left hemisphere does not regard other side

Knowing the brain will allow us to know HOW or WHY destruction of nature is prevalent

 

Seems likely that destroying the earth is inevitable because we have done it so long

 

Ideally the two hemispheres should coordinate when each are helping another.  Helping would be proficient

 

What might all this mean for sustainability and the world?

 

Sustainability not a real goal… MONEY

 

Resilience thinking

 

Difference in power along with inequality within countries

The shift of colonial power to global and industrialization

Bringing a strong power and giving few strangers the ‘power’

 

The pursuit for eco well-being is still part of the struggle for any elite perspective

 

How does change happen?

–after it happens it seems inevitable, before seems impossible

 

The Path to Environmental Health

Scholarship of Sustainability
April 9, 2015

 

Eric Freyfogle CLOSING REMARKS

 

In General

• We need to identify the root causes of our misuses of nature. Why do we act as we do?
• We need a vision of living well on Earth; of using nature and not abusing it
• Good policy options would address root causes and move us to the overall goal

 

Freyfogles Questions:

• What are the root causes?
• What is our overall goal?
• What needs to happen to move ahead?
• How can we make it all happen?

 

Root Causes

• Yes, technology plays a role, but it expresses our culture and in any event we cannot put the genie back in the bottle
• Yes, population; let’s address it
• But our main problems are cultural. Ways of though, count!  We swim in cultural water that is unhealthy!

 

Cultural Roots

• Overemphasis on human autonomy and exceptionalism
• Lack of sound ecological vision, of our embeddedness in nature; instead; instead, we have commodification of nature and see nature through lens of market and individual rights/ autonomy
• Excessive social and intellectual fragmentation; too individualistic
• Undue primacy of individual rights in our normative thinking, including all-purpose emphasis on equality
• Costly tendency to push normative values, choices to personal realm

 

Our Overall Goal

• Overall, some vision of land community that is healthy in functional terms (fertility cycles, soils, hydrology, climate)
• Special emphasis on species protection and biodiversity generally
• Sharing of planet in just ways

 

What Needs to Happen

• Need collective action at large spatial scales—national, global—to change laws, policies, the system
• This means government far more responsive to popular will, community
• Collective action needed above all to change rules of economic competition
• Cultural change—embrace vision of land community, land health, new emphasis on common good, health of natural and social communities
• Diversionary if not hurtful: focus on green consumerism, changes in personal life
• Voluntary local action OK only if aimed at fostering above changes
• Foremost, green leaders and other reformers need to understand the situation much better, to see root causes, to formulate overall goal, and work for cultural, institutional change
• Need blunt talk challenging primacy of individual rights, liberty, equality

 

Making it Happen

• Concerted, large-scale citizen action is essential; working together, not alone
• Citizen groups must put forth common messages, overall goals; no more “thousand points of light”
• An orchestrated land-health campaign with ecological, long-term message.
• Larger message of common good, economic and social justice; moving beyond liberal individualism
• Displace GDP focus with measures of land health and social welfare
• New vision of private property and private rights generally

 

The Common Good Amendment

The provisions of this constitution, including those recognizing rights, shall be interpreted and applied so as promote peace, social and economic justice, enduring environmental health, and good government responsive to the will and needs of the people.

Once again, we are introduced to an article discussing environmental failure and the need for political and economic restructuring.  Although most of these articles in the reader seem to be formulaic (starting with some hope for the future, discussing the alarming facts of environmental degradation, and finishing with some far-fetched idea of political and economic restructuring that must be implemented), author James Speth finally points blame in a different direction.  That’s right; all you environmentalists out there aren’t off the hook for earth’s damages.  The most impactful paragraph in the first part of the essay was:

“Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone.  The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second, and has for decades.  Half the planet’s wetlands are gone.  An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity.  Almost half of the corals are gone or are seriously threatened.  Species are disappearing at rates about 1,000 times faster than normal.  The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in 65 million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared.  Desertification claims a Nebraska-sized area of  productive capacity each year globally.  Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us” (281).

Although environmentalists have been active in trying to reduce degradation, Speth notes the environmentalism movement has been too lenient in the past twenty years.  They believe they can solve the problem by “calling public attention to it, framing policy and program responses for those actions, and litigating for their enforcement”(283).  This approach clearly hasn’t worked, and Speth believes a movement similar to the civil rights movement is necessary to see drastic change.  Do you think this is the only way to evoke change in government policy?

 

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, share their hopes of economic change in their chapter entitled “The Next Industrialism” from Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution.  The overall dry read proposes a new way of life, where “living standards for all people have dramatically improved…involuntary unemployment no longer exists, and income taxes have largely been eliminated” (187).  The unrealistic introduction to the article attempts to give the reader a ‘beacon of hope’, but instead leaves us dreading to turn the page.  So many articles introduced in this reader have the same framework: One day every being on Earth could be living a perfect, healthy life if we just changed… everything.  I don’t doubt the economic knowledge of the authors, but why must we continue reading these far-fetched articles.  If the answer to solving earth’s degradation issues could be found in a 21-page reading, we would have done something already to implement change.  The article discusses the reduction in natural capital and how civilization depends highly on it to create “economic prosperity”.  “Besides climate, the changes in the biosphere are widespread.  In the past half century, the world has a lost a fourth of its topsoil and a third of its forest cover.  At present rates of destruction, we will lose 70 percent of the world’s coral reefs in our lifetime, host to 25 percent of marine life.  In the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s resources, its ‘natural wealth,’ has been consumed.  We are losing freshwater ecosystems at the rate of 6 percent a year, marine ecosystems by 4 percent a year” (189).  After addressing these alarming statistics, the authors introduce the idea of assigning monetary value to natural capital: an idea we have discussed since the first day of class.  “Nonetheless, several recent assessments have estimated that biological services flowing directly into society from the stock of natural capital are worth at least $36 trillion annually”(189).  The previous quote is assuming values can be assigned to nature’s services that hold infinite value (plants producing oxygen from carbon dioxide… something we would die without).  Here is my test question: If this $36 trillion value is assessed and universally excepted, do you think the state of the economy will drastically change?  In other words, what good does assigning monetary value to natural capital bring to the earth?

 

This week I enjoyed reading Peter Burdon’s article “Environmental Protection and the Limits of Rights Talk”.  Burdon writes about the lack of relationship between human rights and the environment.  He states “Human beings exploit the environment because they conceive it as existing for their own personal use and benefit”.  According to the author, this “environment-controlling” perception of human beings stems from a hierarchy.  Burdon states this includes the “domination of the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of the wealthy over the poor and of human beings over nature”.  I believe that although society may have believed in these hierarchies at one point, they are no longer true.  Women are not dominated by men; certain ethnic groups don’t dominate others, so why do we continue to see humans dominating nature?  This article assumes all humans are anthropocentric and if a certain part of nature doesn’t have use for humans, it then does not have value.  The argument is that capitalism is the problem in environmental degradation: “It simply does not matter if the director of Exxon Mobile or BHP Billiton is a good person or holds an ecological worldview.  No amount of eco-literature, bush walking or Buddhist retreats will release a corporate director from the structural economic and legal pressures that pertain to a capitalist mode of production”.  Does this mean that we will never shift from our current economic system to something more environmentally friendly?  Have we come too far/ Are we doomed to a system of “accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production”?

 

Aldo Leopold is undoubtedly one of the most influential environmentalists of all time.  I have now read multiple selections of his writing in four different courses and his writing style is powerful, detailed and informative.  “A Sand County Almanac” shares his personal experiences and encounters with nature and also incorporates his beliefs on how he feels nature should be valued.  While reading this, I couldn’t help but to stop and ask “Is this really his life?”  He writes with such a great deal of passion and understanding of the environment.  According to the reading, his mornings start roughly at 3:30 am and he then proceeds to observe, sketch and document his surroundings outside.  His style of writing gives personality to all life forms.  When discussing the activities of a mouse, he writes “The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack: supply, demand, and transport all neatly organized.  To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear”(4).  He continues to bring up these similarities between humans and nonhumans through metaphors and similes.  “Bur oaks were the shock troops sent by the invading forest to storm the prairie; fire is what they had to fight… Engineers did not discover insulation; they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war”(27).  Rather than writing in a style that tells people why we should respect nature, he writes about activities in nature that relates humans to nonhumans.  Who would have thought of a mouse as anything, but a pest?  Not Many People.  Leopold shows how a mouse is more than a pest by relating its actions to our basic economic system.

My questions are: Until humans begin to think more like Leopold, Is it possible to respect nature on a global scale?  Does the well-being of humans take priority over Nature?  Is one species going to look out for itself before looking out for others?

Matt Ridley: When Ideas Have Sex

 

• GDP has increased as population increases
• Tripled in his lifetime
  • Compares a computer mouse to homo erectus hand axe
• Comparative Advantage
  • Gains from trade
  • Adam and Oz example
    • Trade saves time
  • The sexual division of labor
    • Hadzas
  • Tasmania
    • Gave up specialized skills because of isolation
  • Leonard Reed “I, pencil”
    • People can’t make pencils because they don’t mine for graphite

 

Tami C. Bond: Energy in the Anthropocene Era

 

• A Tale of Fire, Smoke, Time and Power

 

• Anthropocene
  • “Era when human activities have a significant impact on Earth’s ecosystems”
• Tale of Fire
  • “Stolen from the gods”
    • James Watt
  • Tale of Smoke
    • Ozone changes the Earth’s energy balance
    • Want a smokeless fuel
    • Products of combustion
      • React chemically
      • Perturb energy
    • Tale of Time
      • “The solution to pollution of dilution”
        • *Candles* Black carbon in a flame 330 kilojoules to boil 1 litre of water
      • Tale of Power
        • Engineers
          • Rate of work energy flow
        • Everyone else
          • Capacity to direct or influence
          • The Power to learn
          • The Power to earn
        • How to burn fuel more cleanly
          • Distill
          • Pulverize

 

 

Eric T. Freyfogle Lecture

*Missed Lecture*

 

Eric Freyfogle Introductions

 

• We are misusing nature, focuses on human behavior
• What is it that we are trying to sustain?
• Easier to alter nature with a bulldozer than a stick

 

Speaker: *I didn’t catch her name*

 

• “is-ought” dichotomy
  • Descriptionà Normative
  • Xà Natural = Good
  • Xà Not Natural = Bad
• Any question about morality has 2 parts
  • Value
  • Achieving
• What does this mean in terms of farmland?
  • Scientists can tell us how well we are achieving a goal. Needs to be agreement on what we are trying to achieve
  • Is there a right way to be? Or is it just how we agree
  • We do believe science is different from ethics.
• Objective Morals
  • 8 million species, what allows us to have moral superiority?
  • Some say “Syntactical language capability”
• Intrinsic Value
  • Happiness, I want to be happy because I want to be happy
  • Does Nature have this value
• Justifying view
  • Do I have more value than future generations because I exist now and they don’t exist yet
  • Do we discredit future generations without proof they exist?

 

Protection and Stewardship of The

Upper Sangamon River Corridor

Francis M. Harty

The Nature Conservancy

 

The Four Rules of Conservation

• Good Science
• Passion
• Politics
• The Press

 

 

Mahomet Aquifer

• Sangamon River recharges aquifer

 

Land Conservation

• What is a Conservation Land Trust
• Nonprofit charitable organization that, as all or part of its mission actively works to conserve and hold land by fee…

 

A Case Study:  The Sangamon River

• Pistolgrip Mussels
• Reforestation of the 60-acres
  • Management

 

The Four Muses of Conservation

• Art
• Philosophy
• Religion
• Philanthropy

 

Spring 2015 Illinois Sustainability Series

Professor Hurd, David C. Baum Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Illinois

Animal Individualism versus Ecological Holism

• Consider the following eight non-human entities (four individuals; four collectivities):
  • A single cat
  • The species of Douglas squirrels
  • A single Sequoia Tree
  • The Coastal Redwood Canopy Ecosystem
  • A single Wyoming Toad
  • Khan Tengri
  • Herd of White-Tailed Deer
  • Copper
• Does the entity matter morally?

Week 5

Although Lynn White, Jr.’s article was published nearly 48 years ago, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis gives an excellent timeline of ecological degradation.  As he writes about Aldous Huxley’s childhood story about changes in the environment, he states “Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbit’s destruction of crops” (137).  Lynn White critiques this statement by noting that “the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry”(137).  If those rabbits were never native to that part of England, were the farmers wrong to introduce myxomatosis to control the population?

This question is quite interesting to me because we are quick to label those farmers as cruel towards rabbits because they are intentionally killing them to manage crop outputs.  Does maintaining ideal agricultural production justify controlling a species’ population?

 

Michael Pollan introduces his article entitled, “An Animal’s Place”, by discussing Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation”.  He shares that he opened this book while eating a rib-eye steak at a steakhouse.  Despite the irony of reading Singer and eating a steak, Pollan continued on by sharing the steps that animal rights have taken since “Animal Liberation” was published in 1975.  Select European countries have changed the status of animals from “things” to “beings” and “thirty-seven American States recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime” (This article was written in 2002 and I believe more states are included now).  The question Pollan saw as an argument hard to justify from a carnivore, like himself, was “Can animals suffer?”  All these accusations of speciesism are hard to deny when you are sitting at a dinner table eating a steak.  If cows and pigs brains are wired similarly to ours isn’t it just to believe they can feel pain?  Pollan goes on to discuss the brutality of factory farms and the intriguing option of vegetarianism.   Once he explores vegetarianism in more depth, he realizes it may not be the solution to animal cruelty.  Joel Salatin is discussed in the next few paragraphs, a farmer that runs a food animal farm to allow each species “to fully express its physiological distinctiveness”.  Although this farm does not practice cruelty towards animals and it is a much more humane way of producing meat, do you believe a market transition to humane food animal farms could be possible with the current high demand for meat?

 

In week two’s readings, I analyzed Dan Kahan’s article: Fixing the communications failure.  This article jumped out at me immediately when it began with an interesting psychology experiment.  The 1950’s experiment included students from two Ivy League colleges and involved them viewing a football game with controversial officiating.  During the game students recorded the amount of calls they felt were controversial and the final result showed the losing team recording twice as many ‘bad-calls’.  This study clearly shows how the students are biased on choosing whether the call is good or bad so long as the outcome of the game ends in their favor.  The author ties this mentality in with current issues by stating “The same groups who disagree on ‘cultural issues’—abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer—also disagree on whether climate change is real and on whether underground disposal of nuclear waste is safe”(296).  His point of introducing the experiment is showing that people in groups that believe one issue will agree on another issue as long as the majority of the group agrees.  These opposing views on climate change relate with many other views and thus, “fixing the communications failure” is extremely difficult.  I have a step-uncle that is extremely intelligent; He is a devout member to his church, he is pro-life, against same-sex marriage, and pro-school prayer.  I may disagree with him on many things, but I can’t deny that he received a good education.  Although his opinions on these issues have strong influence from religion, he denies climate change.  No matter how many scientific facts you provide him with, he will shut the idea down with some seemingly nonsensical answer.  I know he is educated, but are his opinions biased because of the news he listens to, or the columns he reads on the computer?  Is there any way to convince people of the severity of climate change without it being a feud between groups?  Climate change isn’t a football game; there isn’t one team that wins and one that loses.  Everybody loses if we don’t change our views and behaviors.

Concerning Environmental Degradation and the Tyranny of Small Decisions,

I found the example interesting in the reading that “the loss of coastal wetlands on the east coast of the United States between 1950 and 1970.  No one purposely planned to destroy 50% of the existing marshland along the coasts of Connecticut and Massachusetts.”  My question from this quote is: Do you think we are fully at fault of destroying marshland even though we didn’t fully understand the environmental damages and is it our responsibility now to restore these lands?  Another way of looking at this is:  Are we responsible for maintaining this earth for future generations even though we don’t know if they will exist yet?  I’m sure we wish now that we didn’t do some of things to the environment that we did, so should we act quick to fix our mistakes?  Odum believes this decision making relies on more than market economics.  On discussing a bettering of environmental decision-making, he writes: “One apparent step would be to strengthen and protect the upper levels of environmental decision-makers (Department of the Interior. NOAA, EPA, etc.)”(75).  Although this is an obvious change that should be implemented, he then shares the inefficiencies of those select organizations would likely “become entangled in their own bureaucratic red tape”(75).  Do you think Kahn’s suggesting of having a holistic view would better environmental issues?