Water Ethics

A Values Approach to Solving the Water Crisis

David Groenfeldt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351200172
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökosysteme & Lebensräume

Fully revised and updated, this second edition of Water Ethics continues to consolidate water ethics as a key dimension of water-related decisions.

The book introduces the idea that ethics are an intrinsic dimension of any water policy, program, or practice, and that understanding what ethics are being acted out in water policies is fundamental to an understanding of water resource management. Alongside updated references and the introduction of discussion questions and recommended further reading, this new edition discusses in depth three significant developments since the publication of the first edition in 2013. The first is the growing awareness of the climate crisis as an existential threat, and associated concern about adaptive strategies for sustainable water management and ways of using water management for climate mitigation (e.g., practically through agricultural soil management and conceptually through ethics awareness). Second, there has been increased clarity among the religious community, Indigenous leaders, and progressive academics that ethics needs to become an arena for application and action (e.g., the Vatican encyclical Laudato Si, protests at Standing Rock and Flint, Michigan, in the US, and climate demonstrations worldwide). Thirdly, there have been new normative water standards ranging from "water stewardship" (industry initiative), water charters (Berlin) and the on-going initiative to develop a global water ethics charter.

Drawing on case studies from countries including Australia, India, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States, this textbook is essential reading for students of environmental ethics and water governance and management.

1 Introduction to water ethics

Seine River, Paris, May 19, 2018

How do we judge whether our use of water – whether for brushing our teeth or irrigating a farmer’s field – is wasteful or necessary? When we read about the proposed dam that the government of Laos wants to build on the Mekong river, what determines whether we feel that is a good idea or a terrible one? I use the term “water ethics” to denote these underlying principles that influence our own water behavior and our reaction to other people’s behaviors.

The kind of ethics I am talking about are rarely black and white. We usually need more information to form a judgment about the dam, or even about whether we are using too much water in brushing our teeth: What is the source of the water flowing out of the tap, and what will happen to it when it goes down the drain? What sort of dam is being proposed on the Mekong? What will be the impacts on the river’s fish and on the traditional communities and cultures that depend on fishing? What will the electricity from the dam be used for and what are the alternative energy options? What will happen to the people who live in the proposed reservoir area?

The questions we ask in our inquiry about whether the dam is desirable or not, or whether we are using too much water in our own homes, reflect our values about what is important. What information is relevant to our support or opposition to the dam proposal? Does it matter if fish can navigate around the dam through fish ladders? Does it matter if local communities have to give up fishing and work in a factory powered by the dam’s electricity? Does it matter what is being produced in the factory that uses the electricity from the dam? What about the labor conditions? Where do water ethics end and other ethics begin?

The American conservationist Aldo Leopold believed that an extension of ethics beyond our immediately obvious self-interest, to include the well-being of nature, is “an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity” (Leopold 1970 [1949]: 167). Our civilization has already made good progress on the social aspects of our ethical path; embracing nature is the next step. In his most famous essay, “The Land Ethic,” Leopold illustrates how far we’ve come in our ethical evolution, by relating the Greek myth of Odysseus returning after twenty years away from home (ten years fighting the Trojan War and another ten years finding his way back). His wife and son have been loyally awaiting his return, but what about his slaves, and particularly the female slaves? Had they been loyal too? Just to be sure, Leopold tells us, paraphrasing Homer, “he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.” What would today be considered mass murder was then seen as justified house-cleaning. “The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong …” (Leopold 1970 [1949]: 167).

Leopold’s story has been recounted many times not only because of the powerful imagery, but also because there are two deep truths in his example. The first truth is that we have made incredible progress over the past few millennia, and particularly in the past century, in extending our ethical boundaries. While we continue to give special attention to our immediate families and communities (“charity begins at home”), and contemporary politics of nationalism notwithstanding, there is a prevailing ethical sense that the welfare of all people, even those we do not know and will never meet, has inherent value. Through the United Nations, we have endorsed resolutions proclaiming the rights of people and cultures. In 2010, we (again through the UN) even recognized the right of every person to have safe water to drink. Clearly, we are making progress, uneven though it may seem.

The second truth in Leopold’s account is that, for all our recent progress in caring for the larger human community, we have not yet made room for nature in our ethical sphere. The well documented reluctance to tackle climate change and the phenomenon of “climate deniers” who refuse to acknowledge “inconvenient” scientific evidence is only the latest expression of fundamentalist anthropocentrism. The way we treat our rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands, and estuaries has long been governed more by expediency than by reason, much less by ethics. The easiest place to discharge industrial waste is the river that is flowing by.

Our stalled reaction to climate change is Exhibit A for illustrating the missing role of ethics in our decision-making. How is it that normal reasoning about consequences, the sort of logic that we try to instill in our children, is so difficult to apply when our short-term self-interest is at stake? Why are so many political leaders willing to disbelieve what scientists tell them? How is it that my country of the United States can lead a counterattack on the 2015 Paris Accord? Agreements can be broken; laws can be changed. In the absence of clearly established values and ethics (which are more enduring), the legal system is vulnerable to political manipulation. Whether we frame the problem as an absence of any ethics, or the presence of the wrong ethics, the essential role that ethics needs to play cannot be more apparent than in the phenomenon of climate denial.

Whether we attribute climate denial to psychological disorders (Jessani and Harris 2018), conspiracism (Lewandowsky et al. 2018), or moral corruption (Gardiner 2006), a plausible antidote could be to delineate and systematize one’s values and associated ethics. Norgaard (2018) suggests that clarifying one’s values and norms can stimulate “sociological imagination” and help deniers break through their psychological obstacles to operate in a more reasonable manner. In other words, they might choose to believe the 97 percent of scientists rather than the 3 percent. My own ideas about climate denial hinge on the concept of “ethical space” as a container that needs to be filled either consciously or unconsciously. Better to fill that space carefully with well-considered values and structure those values within an ethical framework than to leave the space open where random values might fall in and take over. Particularly when marketing, advertising, and social media are so effective at suggesting what we should value and how we should act, some proactive valuing can be a way of protecting ourselves.

This is not to suggest that we need to approach our values about climate change, or water, from the perspective of a blank slate. We do have intellectual ancestors. The water ethics we will be considering in this book grow out of a very respectable legacy of environmental and social thought. The environmental movement of the 1970s and the paradigm of sustainable development, defined at the Rio Conference in 1992, showed that the ethical evolution Leopold anticipated was underway. But looking out from the vantage point of 2018 as I write this, the path to an ecological ethic seems neither imminent nor inevitable. There is no lack of incentives: From the ever-increasing global crisis of climate change to local crises of contaminated water supplies and drying aquifers, the futility of separating nature’s welfare from our own should be overwhelmingly apparent. Nor is there any dearth of analytical tools and concepts to document our human dependence on a healthy nature. The economic value of ecosystem services is not in doubt; the Green Economy is widely accepted as the new paradigm of global progress, but terminology like “sustainability” are too easily twisted into old concepts with new names.

What’s keeping us from finding new solutions for co-existing with nature on a healthy planet earth? The problem, it seems to me, lies more in “how” we are thinking than “what” we are thinking; how we are using the analytical tools that we already have in abundance. There is nothing wrong with the tools themselves. Ecosystem services is a powerful concept with far-reaching implications. But then, cost-benefit analysis is also a powerful and valuable tool which has been around for many decades, but has not really helped us along the Leopoldian path of evolution. What’s missing? In a word, ethics. We have ethics, personally, and there are normative ethics in every society, but we are not applying those ethics to our decisions about the natural world: water, forests, fish, soil, minerals, and of course, oil.

The standard explanation for why we (whether “we” as individuals or members of society, citizens of countries, or shareholders in oil companies) so consistently exploit nature in unsustainable ways is that we are greedy and selfish. Powerful people and institutions are better able to manifest their greed, but we all have it, and that’s why the world is in such a mess. The standard solution prescribed to counter the “we are all greedy” explanation is better governance and particularly environmental governance. We need a stronger UN system and we need to stamp out the collusion between big business and corrupt governments. In other words, we need to control the dark forces so we do fewer and less egregious bad things: Limit the bad, to make way for the good.

That is probably good advice, but it’s not very much fun; the focus is about what not to do (don’t pollute), rather than creating inspiration about what to do (reuse and recycle so pollution is less of a problem). Ethics, in the sense of guidelines for good actions, cannot solve problems by themselves, but they establish an enabling context to unleash “ethical imagination” (Muehlebach 2013; Werhane and Moriarty 2009) for creative problem-solving. Ethical principles can serve as design parameters that focus our attention and stimulate innovation (Simpson 2017). When we are clear about our values and what’s important, we are not only identifying those values, but we are identifying with those values, and some of the values we identify with are going to be in conflict. I want to take water from the river to irrigate my crops, but I also want the river to have enough water for the fish, and I want to tap the river for hydropower, and I want to transport my crops down the river, etc. These become my design parameters and inspirations for innovation. I don’t want to miss out on any of these services from the river, so I look for solutions to each value that leave room for realizing all the other values as well. This is how ethics can drive innovation. A hydroelectric dam can provide energy but interferes with other values, such as a healthy river with fish and using the river for transport. Perhaps modular hydropower pods could operate from the river’s flow, would allow fish to migrate, and enable barges to transport my crops, and so forth. Water is multifunctional and so are my values (Netherlands Enterprise Agency 2016).

Water is a technical subject, but that’s only part of what water is, and even the technology of water has values embedded in the technical choices. Moreover, the governance of water – the laws, policies, and institutions which set the context for technical water management – is anything but technical. Water governance is all about values, and if we don’t take the trouble to offer our own values to the water discourse, we are going to be living with the values of the people who do take (and often make!) trouble.

Imposing our personal ethics onto water discussions in our home communities is not necessarily going to get us very far along Leopold’s path either. What I believe Leopold had in mind (and he was rather vague about the details) was that through reflecting on both the moral and practical implications of alternative courses of action (e.g., whether to increase the water supply by building a dam or investing in water conservation to create water savings), we would be able to discern the better choice. Eventually we would also realize that interfering with natural processes, like flowing rivers or atmospheric CO₂, has limits, and if those are exceeded (e.g., taking too much water out of the river, or putting too much CO₂ into the atmosphere) we will undermine nature’s productivity. Bringing nature into our ethical sphere is not necessarily an act of altruism, though it can be. It is also, I believe, in the long-term self-interest of our civilization, and our very survival as a species.

The message of this book is that an awareness of ethics can contribute to better decisions about water management, and that if we can learn how our values are connected to water, we can apply the same ethically informed decision process to the larger domain of human-nature interactions, including that huge elephant in the room: climate change. The process of thinking through the ethical implications of alternative water (or energy) policies and practices will favor outcomes that are better for us as people, and for the planet on whose health we ultimately depend. If our management of water becomes more sustainable, we will be further along Leopold’s path, and further away from a water crisis. It is in this sense that water ethics has the potential to “solve” the water crisis.

Ethics and values

In our everyday speech, and in this book, the words “values” and “ethics” are often used interchangeably but it is sometimes helpful to make a distinction. Values refer to “standards or criteria to guide not only action but also judgment, choice, attitude, evaluation, argument, exhortation, rationalization, and, one might add, attribution of causality” (Rokeach 2000: 2). Ethics refers to the principles we adopt in order to apply our values within the complicated settings of actual behaviour. We need ethical principles because most behavioural choices (“Should I do A or B?”) involve multiple and conflicting values, and we need to choose which values to honour and which values to ignore. Moreover, we need to make these value decisions quickly and efficiently so we can get on with our lives.

If you stop to think about your value choices, you will discover that your daily actions comprise a steady stream of small choices about doing one thing or another thing, and that your decision-making process in dealing with these small choices involves the application of principles that guide your behaviour along certain lines or patterns. If you are someone who places a high value on timeliness, you may still feel the pang of parental emotion as you drop off your toddler at the day care centre on your way to the office, but you will not tarry long in saying your goodbyes. You will want to get to the office on time, and the value of doing so over-rides the impulse to spend a few more moments with your daughter.

Your office mates might describe you as being “religious” about getting to work on time, but they could just as well use the term “principled” because you are acting in accordance with consciously identified principles about the virtue of timeliness. Your values tell you that being on time is important; your ethical principle of timeliness prioritizes that value in your actual behaviour. But does your timeliness ethic mean that you love the office more than you love your daughter? Clearly you have many opportunities for expressing parental love, and you do not need to choose between your office and your daughter. But we can certainly imagine a situation where the zeal to be on-time for work might conflict with the daughter’s well-being: If she is sick, or if the neighbor unexpectedly comes over with a pet hamster, or some other unexpected event, you might decide that it’s OK to be late for work. We need to maintain a sense of perspective even as we strive to maintain our principles. The therapeutic activity of “ethical reflection” helps us sort out our values, establish the principles (ethics) we will try to live by, and assess how we are doing and whether we need to make changes in how we conduct our lives.

The field of ethics encompasses a range of theories and practices about working with values for the purpose of making decisions that will lead to whatever we consider to be good outcomes. There is an intrinsic feedback in the process of using ethics to make decisions that align with your values. We are often juggling multiple values-based priorities. The balance between work-life and family-life is perhaps the most commonly invoked, but there are many other categories and sub-categories of value principles that we navigate in our daily lives. In the grocery check-out line, should I yield my place to the person behind me who is buying only a single carton of milk? My decision will depend on how many groceries I have in my own cart, how pressed I feel for time, and how I feel about myself. If I’m feeling that I’ve been too self-centred of late – failing to clean up my breakfast dishes this morning and leaving it to my partner because I was feeling stressed about getting to work on time – I might be more likely to yield my place in the grocery line as a compensatory behaviour.

The realm of values, as with emotions, is partly self-evident, but much is hidden within our psyches. It is not a simple matter even to identify what our values are, much less how we feel we should be responding to our values, which gets into the ethics part of “values and ethics.” Ethics is the manifestation of our values. Our values are challenging to identify in the first place and, once identified, still need to be sorted out to deal with overlapping and conflicting values that we all have. The process of ethical reflection is where our values, which are just theoretical concepts (“I want to spend more time with my children”), start to emerge as guidance for real action. Instead of the abstract notion that you need to be a more engaged parent, you start planning a weekend outing...