Environmental Values
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Environmental Values

John O'Neill, Alan Holland, Andrew Light

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eBook - ePub

Environmental Values

John O'Neill, Alan Holland, Andrew Light

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About This Book

We live in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems;increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy-making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us.

Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protection through an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability.

Written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience, this volume will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2008
ISBN
9781134760374

1 Values and the environment

Environments and values

This is a book about the environment and about values. However, at the outset it is important to register two seemingly perverse points about this topic:

  1. There is no such thing as the environment. The environment – singular – does not exist. In its basic sense to talk of the environment is to talk of the environs or surroundings of some person, being or community. To talk of the environment is always elliptical: it is always possible to ask ‘whose environment?’ In practice talk of the environment is at best a shorthand way of referring to a variety of places, processes and objects that matter, for good or bad, to particular beings and communities: forests, cities, seas, weather, houses, marshlands, beaches, mountains, quarries, gardens, roads and rubbish heaps.
  2. There are no such things as values. There are rather the various ways in which individuals, processes and places matter, our various modes of relating to them, and the various considerations that enter into our deliberations about action. Environments – plural – and their constituents, good and bad, matter to us in different ways. First, we live from them – they are the means to our existence. Second, we live in them – they are our homes and familiar places in which everyday life takes place and draws its meaning, and in which personal and social histories are embodied. Third, we live with them – our lives take place against the backdrop of a natural world that existed before us and will continue to exist beyond the life of the last human, a world that we enter and for which awe and wonder are appropriate responses. These different relations to the world all bring with them different sources of environmental concern.

Living from the world

We live from the world: we mine its resources; cultivate and harvest its fruits; shape the contours of the land for human habitation, roads, minerals and agriculture; dredge rivers for transport. And all these activities are subject to the action of the natural world: flood, drought, hurricane, earthquake and landslide can be a source of ruined endeavour and human sorrow. Human life, health and economic productivity are dependent upon the natural and cultivated ecological systems in which we live – on their capacity to assimilate the wastes of economic activity and to provide its raw materials. The damage that economic activity does to these capacities, accordingly, is a major source of increased environmental concern. The effects of pollution directly on the health and life chances of citizens and on the productivity of agriculture, forests, and fisheries, the depletion of natural resources – of fishery stocks, mineral reserves and drinkable water – have all served to highlight the environmental problem in an immediate way both to the general citizenry and to policy makers. At the same time there is growing evidence of global risks to the ecological systems upon which human life depends, such as the depletion of the ozone layer and accelerating rate of climate change – including the threat of global warming. For many people at present these may have little immediate impact – and that mostly localised – but this could soon change. Their implications for human welfare more generally are subject to scientific uncertainty, though here again there is a growing consensus that the effects are unlikely to be benign. Taken together, these sources of concern have given rise to the perception of a global environmental crisis that is in part fuelled by the very invisibility and uncertainty of the risks involved.

Living in the world

We live in the world. The environment is not just a physical precondition for human life and productive activity, it is where humans (and other species) lead their lives. Environments matter to us for social, aesthetic and cultural reasons. Some of this dimension often comes under the heading of ‘recreation value’ in economic texts, and for some part of the role that the environment plays in human life the term is a quite proper one: it catches the way in which forests, beaches, mountains and rivers are places in which social and individual recreational activities – of walking, fishing, climbing, swimming, of family picnics and play – take place. With some stretching of the term, elements of the aesthetic appreciation of landscape might also come under the heading of ‘recreation’. Concerns about quality of bathing water, the loss of recreational fish stocks, and the visual impact of quarries or open-cast mines, in part reflect this value. However, the term ‘recreation’ can be misleading in the sense that it suggests a view of the natural environment as merely a playground or spectacle, which might have substitutes in a local gym, or art gallery, whereas the places in question might have a different and more central part in the social identities of individuals and communities. Particular places matter to both individuals and communities in virtue of embodying their history and cultural identities. The loss of aesthetically and culturally significant landscapes or the despoliation of particular areas matters in virtue of this fact. Thus, for example, the public significance attached to the damage to forests and lakes in Scandinavia and Germany reflects their cultural as much as their economic importance. This social and cultural dimension also has a more local aspect, for example in the importance that local communities place on the ‘ordinary’ places in or near which they live – a pond or copse of woods – places that from the economic or biological point of view have limited significance (Clifford and King 1993). The cultural dimension is also realised in issues concerning the quality of the urban environment: in the kinds of social life that different urban environments make possible, the effects of the car not only on the quiet of the city, but also on the capacity of individuals to meet in public spaces: in the heritage the built environment embodies and the sources of cultural identity it provides, and hence concern with the effects of pollution and urban development on that environment.

Living with the world

We live with the world: the physical and natural worlds have histories that stretch out before humans emerged and have futures that will continue beyond the disappearance of the human species. This fact is one to which environmentalists often make appeal. Correspondingly a source of growth in environmental concern manifest in the nature conservation movement has been the steady accumulation of data provided by the life sciences. The loss of biodiversity, the disappearance of particular habitats and the extinction, local and global, of particular species of flora and fauna have all become increasingly central to public debate and policy making. While these issues sometimes have an economic dimension – for example, it may be that there are herbs and medicines that will be lost, or resources that will disappear, and a cultural and aesthetic dimension (the loss of significant forests in Germany had both) – the concern for the environment is not reducible to these. Often such indirect justifications for concern look weak: it is doubtful that human life chances or economic productivity will be much affected by the loss of the blue whale or the red raft spider, or the disappearance of marshland. And significant biological sites can be quite ugly. The supermarket trolley rule of thumb for assessing the biological significance of ponds – the more supermarket trolleys the greater the significance – may not be an exceptionless guide, but it points to the divergence between the beauty or cultural significance of a place and its worth as a habitat. A good part of people’s concern is not about the conservation of natural resources or about cultural significance, as such, but about the natural world as a direct object of value, often quite independent of any use it might have for individuals. This concern has been voiced by philosophers in terms of the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature and by economists in terms of its ‘existence value’. Whether either term has done much to clarify the issues is a moot point to which we return later. What it does signal is the direct response of many to the needless destruction of the non-human environment.

Addressing value conflicts

Value conflicts

Distinct dimensions of environmental good and bad can clearly coexist. Acidification might have effects on forests regarded as a source of timber (economic), as a habitat (biological), and as a socially significant landscape, an object of aesthetic appreciation and source of recreation. On all three dimensions of value the reversal of acidification might count as a good. However, the different dimensions of damage point also to the conflicts that can exist between different kinds of value that might be attributed to the environment. The drainage of marshland from the economic perspective of agricultural productivity and the possibility of increasing sustainable agricultural yields over time might count as improvement; but from the perspective of biodiversity or the cultural significance of ancient marshes it may be damaging. Conversely, a farmer might see the decision to flood as damaging and will worry about the growing influence of conservation policy on the future of his livelihood. From the landscape and recreation perspectives, the decision to destroy rhododendron on the hillsides of Wales might be seen as damaging: from the perspective of protecting the local flora and fauna it is an improvement. A windfarm is both a way of decreasing the loss to the resource base of the economy by the use of a renewable resource and potentially a visual eyesore. Within the same dimensions of value, too, there can be conflicts. To increase the amount of deciduous trees in a forest plantation in the UK may constitute an improvement in the diversity of local flora but threaten the red squirrel who fares less well than the grey in mixed woodland. The policy maker is often faced, not with a clear-cut decision between protection and damage, but with the distribution of different kinds of damage and benefit across different dimensions of value. Moreover, there is a conflict between the avoidance of environmental damage, and other social, economic and cultural objectives. These include not only direct conflicts, say, between the economic benefits of a road development and the environmental damage it will cause, but also indirect conflicts in terms of the opportunity costs of environmental projects, that is, the resources employed that could have been employed for other projects, both environmental and non-environmental.

The distribution of goods and harms

Any decision on such environmental conflicts has a distributional dimension. A decision will take place against the background of a distribution of property rights, incomes and power and it will distribute damage, costs and benefits across different social groups. Hence environmental problems raise issues of equity and justice. To preserve tigers, rhinoceros or elephants through the establishment of a nature park will benefit visiting tourists and might even benefit the animals. But it will often adversely affect the livelihoods of those pastoral and agricultural communities living at the margins of survival. The benefits of increases in the production of greenhouse gases may come to first- and third-world elites, but the costs fall on the poor. The siting of roads, power stations and dumps for toxic waste will damage the quality of life for particular communities. Thus, any decision-making procedure has to be assessed in terms of the potential distributional implications it might have. Who is damaged and who gains the benefits? The environment has added a strong temporal dimension to these distributional concerns. Many of the adverse environmental consequences of human activity that are beneficial to favoured members of our current generation – for example, the use of non-renewable resources – will fall upon future generations. This raises questions about our responsibility for future generations and the inequities many current decisions might have for them.

Addressing conflicts

Environments are sites of conflict between different values and different social groups. They are also sites of conflict within social groups and even within individuals, where they appear as dilemmas. These conflicts occur at a number of different levels – at the local level in the management of environmentally significant sites, at the level of decisions about specific economic and environmental projects, at the level of policy and at the level of regulation. They are conflicts that concern both citizen and policy maker. How are such conflicts to be resolved?
One response to the problem of value conflict is to find a common measure of values through which the gains and losses in different values can be traded off one with another. This position is associated with utilitarianism which, through cost-benefit analysis and welfare economics, has tended to dominate much public policy making. Classically the utilitarian argues that we should aim at the decision that maximises welfare. Hence we need a measure of welfare such that gains and losses in welfare can be appraised and the choice that produces the greatest total welfare be discerned. Thus utilitarianism, understood as an account of decision making, recommends the policy that maximises the welfare of affected agents.
In its modern form, the welfare of agents is often taken to consist in the satisfaction of their preferences, the stronger the preferences the greater the welfare improvement. One putative advantage of this definition from the perspective of modern welfare economics is that it brings welfare improvements and losses under the ‘measuring rod’ of money: a person’s willingness to pay at the margin for an object or state of affairs, or their willingness to accept payment for its loss, provides a measure of the strength of their preferences for it. The different values that conflict are understood within this perspective to be expressions of different preferences which through willingness to pay measures can be bought under a common currency for the purposes of comparisons of different options. The aim of public policy is realised through the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in which welfare benefits are traded off against welfare costs.
This approach has dominated recent environmental policy making, and cost-benefit analysis has been the most widely used decision-making tool in environmental policy making of the last thirty years. It is assumed that individuals in society have preferences whose satisfaction increases their welfare, and that these can be measured by individuals’ willingness to pay for their satisfaction. The analyst can thereby simply compute the costs and benefits of any project. The benefits are identified by summing the different amounts that affected individuals are willing to pay for the project, the costs by summing the different amounts affected individuals are willing to pay for the project not to proceed. If benefits outweigh costs then a project is worthwhile. Of a number of projects, the best is that which produces the greatest sum of benefits over costs.
In the first part of this book we examine this dominant utilitarian approach to environmental policy making and find it wanting. In chapter 2 we outline the central assumptions of the approach. Utilitarianism is the doctrine that the best action or policy is that which produces the greatest amount of welfare or wellbeing of agents. As such the doctrine is welfarist – it holds that the only thing that matters in itself and not as a means to some other end is the welfare of individuals. It is consequentialist – whether an action or policy is right or wrong is determined solely by its results, its consequences. It is an aggregative and maximising approach – we should choose that policy which produces greatest total of welfare. In chapters 2 through to 5 we critically examine each of these assumptions and examine their implications for environmental decision making. In chapter 2, we look in detail at the welfarist assumption. We consider different accounts of the nature of human and non-human well-being. We consider whose well-being might count in consideration of public policy, human and nonhuman. And we look at whether it is possible to compare changes in the welfare of different individuals. In considering the possibility of such comparisons we will consider the ways in which many welfare economists have attempted to modify utilitarianism to allow for choices without making such interpersonal comparisons of the welfare of different agents. In chapter 3 we consider the consequentialist component of utilitarianism and introduce the reader to the other two central perspectives in ethical theory, the deontological perspective and the virtues-based perspective. We do so by considering two of the central objections that have been raised against consequentialism. The first objection is that it permits too much. There are, it is claimed, some acts, for example acts of torture, that we ought not to do even if it improves general well-being. This claim is often supported by the Kantian proposition that individuals have a moral standing and dignity which rules out certain acts towards them, even if this improves the general welfare. Sometimes this view is expressed in terms of individuals having rights that cannot be overridden for the general welfare. This Kantian perspective has itself been subject to criticism from another direction by communitarian writers who reject the particular form of individualism that it assumes. The second objection is that consequentialism requires too much, that there are acts which may improve the general welfare, but which, since they clash with an agent’s deepest commitments, one cannot expect her with integrity to perform. In outlining those objections we thus introduce the reader to the two main ethical perspectives which are offered as alternatives to consequentialism. The first is the deontological perspective which claims that there are constraints on performing certain actions even if they should lead to the most valuable state of affairs. The second is the virtues perspective, which claims that we should start ethical reflection with the question of what sort of person we should be, what excellences of character, virtues, we should develop, and what defects of character, vices, we should avoid. We consider how consequentialists might respond to these objections. We conclude by defending a pluralist perspective in ethics which is developed in more detail in chapter 5. Chapter 4 considers the maximising assumption of utilitarianism, that we should aim to improve total welfare, and discusses some central problems concerning the just and equitable distribution of goods that this position appears to face. It considers in what way our assumptions about equality should be introduced in environmental choices. Chapter 5 examines two distinct assumptions of classical utilitarianism: value monism – the assumption that there is only one thing that is ultimately valuable in itself, and value commensurability – the assumption that there is a single measure of value through which we can arrive at policy choices. In this chapter we criticise both of these assumptions and examine alternative deliberative and expressive accounts of rational choice that are consistent with the recognition of value pluralism and value incommensurability. We consider how the different consequentialist, deontological and virtues-based traditions of ethical theory can take pluralist forms and the different accounts they offer for the resolution of value conflicts. We defend a form of pluralism that rejects a central assumption that recent presentations of those traditions share, the assumption that rational reflection on ethical choices and conflicts requires an ethical equivalent of a scientific theory, complete with theoretical primitive assumptions, from which our specific obligations could be deduced.
The main alternative to the dominant consequentialism in recent environmental ethics centres around the claim that our environmental crisis requires a radically new environmental ethic. This new ethic is taken to require fundamentally new foundational assumptions that break from the anthropocentric assumptions of existing Western traditions of ethical theory. The new theory involves the extension of the class of beings to whom moral consideration is owed and the recognition that non-human nature has intrinsic value. In part two of the book we examine these claims about the need for a new environmental ethic. In chapter 6 we consider the attempt to offer a new ethical theory that extends the domain of moral consideration beyond human beings. In chapter 7 we examine the claim that nature has intrinsic value and the various meta-ethical debates this has raised about the status of ethical claims. We will suggest that the demand for a new environmental ethic shares with its opponents the assumption that we criticised in chapter 5. It assumes that rational ethical reflection requires that we develop a new ethical theory with a few ethical primitives from which our moral obligations can be derived. We suggest that while our environmental crisis might require radical changes to political and economic institutions there is no reason to assume that it requires a new ethic in this sense of a new ethical theory. Such an approach divorces reflection on the environment from the specific ways that environments matter to people, and as such it loses touch both with why it is reasonable to care about the environment and with what is at stake in many environmental disputes. Where it does have an influence it is not always a benign one, issuing, for example, in an over-emphasis on the value of wilderness conceived in a particular way. This has been employed in the unjustified exclusion of marginal communities from the places they have inhabited. It has also tended to employ an abstract and thin meta-ethical vocabulary which is blind to the role of place and history in the evaluation of both cultural and natural worlds. In contrast, we argue for the need to begin ethical reflection from the human scale of values evident in our everyday encounters with human and non-human beings and environments with and in which we live. Ethical reflection needs to be embedded in the different kinds of human relation to our environments we have outlined earlier in this chapter, and the thick and rich ethical vocabulary through which we articulate those relations. In chapter 8 we examine what claims, if any, nature has on us in virtue of being natural – the claim that naturalness is itself a source of value. We argue that what does emerge from consideration of ‘naturalness’ as a value is the role that history and narrative play in our evaluative responses to environments, beings and things around us. However, this role that narrative and history play is by no means confined to the natural, but applies also to our relations to human and cultural landscapes and environments.
In our critical discussions of alternative approaches to environmental values in parts one and two we defend two claims. First we defend a form of pluralism about values which is sceptical of the attempt to understand ethical reflection in terms of moral obligations that are derived from sets of ethical primitives. Second we argue for the importance of history and narrative in environmental valuation. In the third part of the book we develop those claims in more detail and examine their implications for environmental policy making. In chapter 9 we expand on our account of the role of history and narrative in environmental value through consideration of some everyday nature conservation problems. In chapters 10 and 11 we consider the ways...

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