Ecology and Democracy

Freya Mathews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138459472
• eBook ISBN: 9781135777715
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the optimal political framework for environmental reform - reform on a scale commensurate with the global ecological crisis? How adequate are liberal forms of parliamentary democracy to face the challenges posed? These are the questions pondered by the contributors to this volume.

Has Democracy Failed Ecology? An Ecofeminist Perspective

VAL PLUMWOOD

Val Plumwood has taught Philosophy in a number of Australian universities, and is currently teaching in the Division of Multidisciplinary Studies at the State University of North Carolina, USA.

The superiority of democracy over other political systems in detecting and responding to ecological problems lies in its capacity for correctiveness. That this correctiveness is not operating well in liberal democracy is a further reason for questioning its identification with democracy. The radical inequality that increasingly thrives in liberal democracy is an indicator not only of the capacity of its privileged groups to distribute social goods upwards and to create rigidities which hinder the democratic correctiveness of social institutions, but is also an indicator of their ability to redistribute many ecological ills downwards and to create similar rigidities in dealing with ecological ills. It is therefore not democracy that has failed ecology, but liberal democracy that has failed both democracy and ecology. Ecological denial is structured into liberalism in multiple ways, particularly through its reason/nature dualism, its limitation of democracy, its disposition of public and private spaces, and its marginalisation of collective forms of life. A radical democratic alternative would reshape the public/private distinction to open the way for a public as well as a private ethics of environmental responsibility, for the diffusion of practices of responsibility and care through crucial areas from which liberalism strips them, and for the development of a democratic culture which displaces reason/nature dualism.

Ecological Consciousness and the Persistence of Ecological Degradation

As we approach the fourth decade of ecological consciousness and scientific concern about the degradation of the earth’s life support systems, the evidence is mounting that the unprecedented level of public concern and activist effort which these decades have seen is not being reflected in adequate, effective or stable forms of change at the political level. Although ecological consciousness has some successes to its credit in the form of better standards and regulations, and even in some areas better practices, these are themselves under constant threat. What is more significant, however, is that even these hard-earned measures have done little to arrest the ever-accelerating progress of environmental degradation. David Orr outlines this progress:

If today is a typical day on planet earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, the results of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 250 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 250. Today the human population will increase by 250, 000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Tonight the earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

Even in the area where ecological consciousness appears to have had some success, in recycling and consumer education, the results have been disappointing. As Timothy Luke states:

After twenty years of ecological consciousness…the average per capita daily discard rate of garbage has risen from 2.5 pounds in 1960 to 3.3 pounds in 1970 to 3.6 pounds in 1986. By 2000, despite the impact of two decades of recycling, this figure is expected to rise to 6 pounds a day. Similarly, even though ecological concern is rising, the average gas mileage of new cars declined 4 per cent from 1988 to 1990, and the number of miles driven annually continues to rise by 2 per cent by year.

In the sphere of international politics, the message that has emerged most clearly from the Rio Conference and from recent reversals in environmental regulation is the disturbing one of the extreme difficulty of mobilising our present systems of national and international governance to stem escalating ecological damage.

Any civilisation that sets in motion massive processes of biospheric degradation which it cannot respond to and correct will plainly not survive. The escalation of the processes responsible for ecological degradation, despite the great citizen effort which has gone into challenging them in democratic polities, therefore represents an alarming failure. It is not primarily a failure of knowledge or of technology, for we largely possess the scientific and technological means to live upon the earth without destroying its capacity to support life, even if our present numbers compound the problem. The failure is primarily a failure of our political systems and systems of morality and rationality and, what is especially alarming, it includes those systems that many of us have seen as among our finest achievements—systems of political democracy, especially liberal democracy. Although confronting this failure is not popular with the eco-establishment, it is imperative that we do confront it fully and trace the reasons for failure.¹ The evidence of the last two decades suggests that serving up the same recipe for reform will not be effective, and that we will not turn the processes of environmental degradation around without accepting many more major kinds of change in our political systems. In this paper I draw on recent democratic and feminist theory and other critical resources to reflect on the implications of this failure for democracy and to outline some of the systemic change necessary to stop the escalation of environmental damage.

Responsive Democracy and Ecological Failure

The main focus for our investigation must be the failure of liberal democratic systems. It is no real surprise that authoritarian political systems, especially the military systems organised around protecting privilege which control so much of the planet, fail to protect nature. Military systems are neither responsive nor accountable, and have a record of gross environmental destructiveness which parallels their record of gross human destructiveness [Seager, 1993]. Regimes based on authoritarian, military thinking and coercion usually fail systematically to consider the lives and rights of most of their human citizens, so that it is hardly to be expected that they will protect what is even lower in the usual scale of consideration—nature and animals.² Both political argument and political observation suggest that we should rule authoritarian and military-coercive systems out as possible routes to solving environmental problems, despite the arguments of the authoritarian school of environmental thinkers who pin their hopes on environmental and scientific oligarchy. Even if we grant regimes of environmental oligarchy possession of powerful means to enforce compliance with environmental regulation (Thompson, this collection), what is unexplained is how they can develop or maintain the political conditions that will guarantee the oligarchy’s motivation to use these powerful means for the purpose of protecting nature, rather than for other ends which buttress their own power.³ Such regimes must be fatally lacking in capacities for correcting such tendencies and soon must come to suffer, like the normal authoritarian regime, from severe informational distortion.

The environmental disasters and rigidities of the Soviet Union and satellite Marxist systems lend support to the view that political democracy, if not a sufficient condition for adequate environmental action, is at least a necessary condition. Thus it is primarily democracies that have been able to sustain vocal environment movements able to raise and pursue ecological issues in ways that would bring repression elsewhere. An elite-dominated polity which silences messages that those in power do not wish to hear and pushes on regardless with elite-benefiting projects will come to possess a dysfunctional rigidity and informational distortion regarding the degradation of nature which render it resistant to an important range of changes, unable to detect or correct its blindspots, as indifferent to gross damage to the surrounding natural world as it is to gross damage to the social world. In contrast, a polity that is open to reshaping institutions in response to the views and needs of a wide range of social groupings, especially those at greatest risk of ecological damage, is likely to be able to respond reflectively and usefully to a crisis in its ecological, as in its social, world. It is at any rate more likely to be able to do so than a polity caught in structures that are responsive mainly to the needs of a small elite, an elite that derives much of its privilege from the institutions that bring about ecological destruction and is able to buy relief from many of its ill effects.

The superiority of democracy to other systems in detecting and responding to ecological problems would seem to lie largely, then, in its capacity for adaptation and correction. So in order to discover why democracy is failing, we must now ask which political features of democracy contribute to and what forms hinder its capacity for correction? I shall argue that an important feature that hinders this capacity is radical inequality within democratic polities. There is a rather persuasive set of political arguments confirming the thesis that democracy is essential, but these same arguments encourage us to a critical and differentiated approach to what passes for democracy, They suggest that those responsive democratic forms that open communication and spread decision-making processes most equally should offer the best protection for nature. Thus systems that are able to articulate and respond to the needs of the least privileged should be better than less democratic systems that reserve participation in decision-making for privileged groups. This is because radical inequality is both itself a hindrance to correctiveness and a key indicator of other hindrances to societal correctiveness.

Much of the politics of ecological conflict, as Ulrich Beck [1995] notes, takes the form of ‘distributing exposure to undesirable things’ [1995: 9], in contrast to the politics of class conflict, which mainly concerns the distribution of societal rewards. Beck assumes that ecological ills, in contrast to societal goods, are distributed equitably in liberal democracy, cutting across boundaries of class and power: ‘poverty is hierarchical’, writes Beck, ‘while smog is democratic’ [1995: 60]. The assumption of equality of impact, however, holds good only for a certain range of environmental harms—those forms of degradation which have highly diffused or unpredictable effects not amenable to redistribution—and then only partially. For those kinds of environmental degradation that are more local and particularised in their impacts, such as exposure to toxins through residential and occupational area, the same kind of politics of distribution can be played out as in the case of societal goods: the powerful will strive to redistribute these ills, just as they distribute the goods, in their own favour, with varying success depending on the extent to which the social system is susceptible to their influence. Such forms can and do impact differentially in terms mediated by privilege.

For a considerable range of environmental ills resulting from the institutions of accumulation, then, some redistribution and insulation is possible. It is the privileged members of a society who can most easily insulate themselves from these forms of environmental degradation; toxic wastes and occupations can be directed to poorer residential areas (including Third World destinations), and if privileged suburbs, regions or territories become noisy, degraded or polluted, the privileged can buy places in more salubrious environments. When local resources (including amenity resources) become depleted, they will be best placed to take advantage of wider supply sources and markets; often these will continue to deplete poorer distant communities in ways that elude knowledge and responsibility. The privileged can buy expert help and remedies for environmental health and for other problems, and their working life is likely to involve a minimum of environmental pollution and disease compared to other groups [Jennings and Jennings, 1993].

At the same time, they are the group who consume (both directly for their own use and indirectly through income generation) the greatest proportion of resources, who are likely overall to be creating the most pollution and to have the strongest economic stake in maintaining forms of accumulation which exploit nature. Since the privileged can most easily purchase alternative private resources, they have the least interest in maintaining in good condition collective goods and services of the sort typically provided by nature, and are most distanced from awareness of their limits. So they are normally the group with the strongest interest in maintaining the nature-destroying processes of accumulation from which they benefit and the group with the least motivation to support any fundamental challenge to these institutions that might be needed.⁴ For the highly diffused forms of environmental ills, the ability of the privileged to buy relief from vulnerability to environmental ills is ultimately an illusion,⁵ but it may still be a long-lasting and influential illusion which affects political decision-making. ⁶ Thus in a polity in which the privileged have the sole or central role in decision-making, decisions are likely to reflect their especially strong interest in maintaining processes destructive of nature.

If the privileged have the key role in determining culture and information flows, news about the degradation of nature and its impact on less privileged human lives is likely to be obstructed or given little weight in their media, which may be weighted to consider mainly the kinds of problems that impact on the powerful. The wider culture may be distorted in ways that make the ‘losers’ inferior—for example, in the West, those associated with bodily labour, materiality and nature —and give little attention to their ills. Cultural ideals will often tend to idealise the rich and successful, and reflect their styles and standards of resource overconsumption, while portraying low consumption, satisficing lifestyles in negative or contemptuous terms [hooks, 1995]. To the extent that the privileged are able to exert control over cultural and political processes then, these are more likely to be distorted in ways that resist response, deny ecological problems and push exploitation past sustainable limits. Note that these considerations apply equally to those privileged through market systems and those privileged through bureaucratic and authoritarian/ military systems. They apply not only to those privileged by economic class but also to those privileged by race and gender. We can see these insulating and information-distorting features of privilege clearly at work in many parts of the world where environmental destruction has been at its worst, in the decisions of class elites from Sarawak and Brazil to eastern Europe where political systems have lacked most of the corrective measures created in more democratic systems. We can see similar insulating features of gender privilege at work in the association between the destruction of subsistence agricultures and the dispossession of women agriculturalists in the processes of development in India and Africa [Shiva, 1988; 1994]. Here, as a number of Third World theorists have argued, the intentional connection is often even closer: impoverishment and environmental degradation are produced as twin offspring of the same processes of development [Shiva, 1988].

The most oppressed and dispossessed people in a society are those who are made closest to the condition of nature, who are made to share the same expendable condition as nature. The logic of the market is one factor that ensures that the least privileged are likely to feel the first and worst impacts of environmental degradation, as in the case of much deforestation, pollution, waste dumping in poor and coloured communities, and environmentally hazardous working and living conditions for the poor. This logic treats the least privileged as the most expendable, defining them as having ‘le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Political and Ecological Communication
• Towards a Green World Order: Environment and World Politics
• Power-Trading and the Environment
• Community and the Ecological Self
• Environment, Democracy and Community
• Has Democracy Failed Ecology? An Ecofeminist Perspective
• Liberal Democracy and the Rights of Nature: The Struggle for Inclusion
• ‘Monkeywrenching’ and the Processes of Democracy
• The Greening of Participatory Democracy: A Reconsideration of Theory