Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change

A Guide to Environmental Decision Making

Bryan G. Norton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226197593
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Sustainability is a nearly ubiquitous concept today, but can we ever imagine what it would be like for humans to live sustainably on the earth? No, says Bryan G. Norton in Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change. One of the most trafficked terms in the press, on university campuses, and in the corridors of government, sustainability has risen to prominence as a buzzword before the many parties laying claim to it have come close to agreeing how to define it. But the term's political currency urgently demands that we develop an understanding of this elusive concept.While economists, philosophers, and ecologists argue about what in nature is valuable, and why, Norton here offers an action-oriented, pragmatic response to the disconnect between public and academic discourse around sustainability. Looking to the arenas in which decisions are made—and the problems that are driving these decisions—Norton reveals that the path to sustainability cannot be guided by fixed, utopian objectives projected into the future; sustainability will instead be achieved through experimentation, incremental learning, and adaptive management. Drawing inspiration from Aldo Leopold's famed metaphor of "thinking like a mountain" for a spatially explicit, pluralistic approach to evaluating environmental change, Norton replaces theory-dependent definitions with a new decision-making process guided by deliberation and negotiation across science and philosophy, encompassing all stakeholders and activists and seeking to protect as many values as possible. Looking across scales to today's global problems, Norton urges us to learn to think like a planet.

PART 1

Change, Complexity, and Decision Contexts

CHAPTER 1

Responding to Change

1.1. Waves of Change

Humans crave stability and security, but everywhere they encounter change. And perhaps nowhere is there more dynamism than in the environmental arena. Rapidly changing systems and problems pervade, which also change in the way they are perceived and in the demands they make on citizens. In 1989, the sociologist Robert Mitchell noted that two “waves” of environmental problems had swept through the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century. He pointed out that original problems of conservation and the environment, the first-generation problems, usually involved threats to a single species or concerns about pollution from an identifiable source. By the 1960s, however, it had become clear that a new wave of problems challenged society, ones that spill over local boundaries and affect entire regions. Mitchell described these problems, including air and water pollution affecting larger systems, proliferation of chemical wastes, and widespread use of pesticides, as the second generation of environmental problems (Mitchell, 1989). He described these new problems as more pervasive, the effects of which were often delayed and subtle yet still capable of creating serious problems in much larger systems and requiring at times the modification of whole industries. Conservationists and environmental groups had to scale up their models and efforts to address these second-generation problems.

Today’s emergent problems, however, exist on a global scale, with current policies requiring further expansion in the face of worldwide biodiversity loss and anthropogenic climate change. The rise of global climate change as a dominant issue in contemporary environmental politics will again require the rethinking of national, regional, and local environmental policies, since projections of climate change reveal threats to almost every conservation goal. To continue Mitchell’s progression, we now, breathlessly, face third-generation problems that manifest at the global scale even as they portend huge negative impacts on all smaller scales. Addressing the progressive generations of environmental problems is distressing because, unlike with natural populations, the older generations of problems have not disappeared. Complexification results.

Third-generation problems accost us even as we are still off balance from the shift from first- to second-generation problems, as controversies over management of resources continue between federal and state governments and between governments and landowners. Meanwhile, the third wave of global impacts raises a host of new problems, ranging from our lack of knowledge about the functioning of global biogeophysical systems such as the atmosphere to the problem that we have weak or nonexistent global institutions and organizations.

While the shift to global thinking requires a radical leap into the virtually unknown, we are not without guidance as well as useful models for expanding the scale of both problems and processes to address them. Aldo Leopold died before third-generation problems were on the agenda, but he provided a useful conceptual tool—a powerful simile—that can guide scientists, managers, and policy advocates into the larger-scaled problems that emerge at the global level.

Before pursuing Leopold’s approach, I note that concurrent with the expanding scale of environmental problems, the public discussion of environmental problems has come to be framed, in policy and in politics, in terms of “sustainability.” This concept has, as both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness, broad appeal in the political arena. As a result, advocates for quite different policies embrace the concept, and it has become a “contested concept,” as practitioners in multiple fields and from multiple perspectives vie to stake a claim to its definition (Jacobs, 1999).

Sustainability as a concept is versatile, as it can be applied at many different scales. For example, an individual’s use of water or energy can be “unsustainable”; so too can the development patterns of a sprawling urban area. One policy, compared to another, might be more sustainable. As climate change invades the environmental agenda, it is necessary to develop a concept of sustainable use of the earth’s atmosphere, and ideally that concept should encompass the multiple scales at which humans struggle for survival and longevity, personally and culturally.

For some, this apparently undisciplined use of the term justifies ignorance or myopia. I take a more action-oriented strategy. While noting the myriad scalar applications of the sustainability concept, I try to develop a theory of spatiotemporal relations that allows for a multilayered conception of environmental challenges that embeds individual, local, regional, national, and global scales into a particular—and comprehensive—approach to sustainability.

This effort requires navigation over multiple scales in a dynamic system; the way is made more difficult because the systems in question mix natural and social forces, requiring models that help us understand human adaptation within these interrelated dynamics. I will soon turn to the wisdom of Aldo Leopold, wisdom that was earned by mistakes as well as successes and, using his idea of multiscalar modeling of problems, I begin to develop several concepts that will promote the beginnings of cross-scale integration in rapidly changing environments. The key to that integration will be a recognition of both change, which happens at all scales but at different paces, and the constant uncertainties that come with facing many situations for the first time. Leopold encountered the importance of scale when, in an attempt to increase a huntable deer herd, he caused unwanted changes on the scale of the “whole mountain” (ecosystem). So Leopold’s understanding of scale will build a bridge to a process called “adaptive management,” an approach that consciously addresses change, uncertainty, and the necessity of learning one’s way toward sustainability.

The themes of sustainability and change, interwoven throughout this book, will necessarily require an improved understanding of how to evaluate change over time, especially human-caused change. The image of “ripples in a pond” is often used to illustrate how effects reverberate through time and space. While this metaphor has become a cliché, its overuse is understandable because it can help to simplify the bewildering world of intertwining causal chains that trace the effects of one’s actions outward in the world. The emphasis here is on “simplify.” In fact, all actions within the complex, dynamic systems that form human environments have impacts that go every which way and make varying impacts on a multitude of natural and social dynamics, from atoms to ecosystems, even as global change makes and remakes those systems. Somehow, within the maelstrom of accelerating change, setting sustainability goals and policies must offer a way of separating good or neutral change from catastrophic outcomes or from even the gradual deterioration of environmental systems.

What is required to become sustainable? To begin to answer this question, I must distinguish between anticipated impacts that threaten the values of a community and those that support such values. In other words, what is needed is a method for evaluating change, a method that—unlike the current evaluative methods available today—can lead those with conflicting values to converge on actions that are agreed to improve unacceptable situations. This reasoning justifies my insistence that an adequate understanding of sustainability will require a new approach to evaluating environmental changes.

No doubt codeveloping a concept of sustainability, together with a more effective means to evaluate changes, seems a daunting task, given the pace of change, the complexity of effects of the actions of technological humans, the lack of basic knowledge of systems within which humans act, and now a recognition that, within this complex dynamic, it is necessary to pay attention to many scales of change and multiple dynamics in natural and human systems. Is it reasonable to think that humans can actually evaluate proposed actions and policies, and then decide whether the impacts of these actions and policies will be harmful or helpful—not only immediately, but also on multiple scales of future time? Could we humans possibly have enough knowledge and foresight to address such complex questions? Do we have any choice but to try?

What if these are not even the right questions to pose? One might expect that the fields of environmental economics, ecological economics, and environmental ethics would provide effective tools for evaluating environmental change; but they, too, are asking the wrong questions. These fields, rather than contributing to a consensus as to which environmental actions and policies should be undertaken in specific situations, have engaged in a polarized war over theories and even words.

Unfortunately, the dominant theories in these fields define environmental values in narrow and theoretically incommensurable ways, and the result has been severe polarization between philosophers and economists, as well as an associated bifurcation of policy discourse into two incompatible, untranslatable vernaculars. As a result, no field of study seems capable of providing a synoptic approach to the task of evaluating ecological and environmental change.1

The problem at hand can be stated quite simply: we must find how to provide a method by which to “evaluate” changes in the environment, one that will turn observations of measurable changes in a physical system into either positive or negative evaluations of that change. Speaking intuitively, the goal is to characterize the human value afforded by a physical system at one time, then to characterize that total value again after an actual or proposed change, and finally to compare those total values. To proceed with this commonsense approach, however, it is necessary to agree on which values will count and which methods will be used to define and measure them. Unfortunately, these basic questions of the nature and measurement of environmental values remain controversial; answers to them are too contentious to provide a sound basis for a comprehensive approach to evaluating environmental change.

Consider, as an example, the decision faced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) when it undertook to reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone National Park by engaging other federal agencies and national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a decade-long effort. This case represents only one example of the difficulty of maintaining populations of top predators throughout the world. Wolves had been exterminated in Yellowstone in the 1870s, and the ecological system had evolved in new directions subsequently. An unnaturally large herd of elk—highly popular with tourists yet damaging to vegetation and watercourses—had developed. FWS, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, faced a dilemma. It had a mandate, based on the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA), to reestablish breeding populations of wolves in critical habitat from which they had been extirpated. But it had to convince other government agencies at the federal and state level, as well as politicians and their constituents, of the need to translocate wolves from Canada to Yellowstone. This decision was particularly difficult because members of local communities—mostly ranchers and those who support ranching communities—strongly opposed the reintroduction, while far more citizens and environmentalists (many living elsewhere and less affected by wolves if they were introduced) advocated for reintroduction.

What if the FWS had set out to comprehensively measure the values that would be affected by a reintroduction? First, it would have to weigh the costs to ranchers from predictable wolf kills of their livestock and somehow balance those losses against the gains to tourists and tourist-related businesses that predictably increased visitation to the park. Ecologists had insisted for decades that the Yellowstone elk population was too large—an artificial condition at least partially related to the extirpation of wolves over a century earlier—and that it was causing ecological damage. One might, for example, try to measure the preference of “affected parties,” but how would one balance the interests of a tourist from the East Coast in seeing wolves against the strong wishes of ranchers to protect their livestock? Even more difficult, how would one measure and take into account the ecological changes that would take place, over generations, if wolves were returned?

Despite the huge controversy, wolves were, in fact, translocated from Canada and reintroduced to Yellowstone, beginning in 1995. What has happened to the ecophysical system subsequently has surprised many people, including some ecologists: “Yellowstone researchers William Ripple, Robert Beschta, and others suggest that since the reintroduction of wolves in the park in the mid-1990s, cascading effects have included a reduction in the elk population, changes in herbivory patterns, a reduction of mesopredators (e.g., coyotes), and recovery of woody browse species” (Eisenberg, 2011, p. 14).

This case illustrates just how difficult it is to know what impacts will occur, let alone to assign monetary or any other measure to the values involved. For example, the effect of coyote population reductions on raptor species was a surprise to many. And, even if it had been predicted, how would one measure (in advance) the value of increased raptors? Similarly, it was only after the experimental reintroduction of wolves that it was possible to study changes in aspen tree populations; yet even if those impacts had been predicted, how would one put a dollar value or any other measure on those impacts? How would one compare, for example, the losses to ranchers from wolf predation against the gains in aspen recruitment and in eagle populations? Environmental values present themselves at different scales of both the social and the ecological system. Wolves affect the individual economic situation of ranchers and the situation of motel owners, one negatively, one positively, but after the reintroduction, unforeseen effects occurred on scales often not expected to be affected by such a decision. Examples like this suggest that humility is appropriate when it is advised that decisions affecting many individuals, groups, and ecological scales should be made by toting up all the effects of possible actions.

One would think that, given the importance of evaluating change as one aspect of understanding sustainability, practitioners of fields that study environmental values would have evolved a unified means to evaluate possible changes to environmental systems. Unfortunately, however, economists and environmental ethicists have found themselves in a theoretical stalemate. Economists, suggesting that we use cost-benefit analysis (CBA), propose using economic measures to estimate the aggregated economic values embodied in the system before an intervention, and then compare these total values with an estimate of the aggregated value of parts and aspects of the system following the mandated change. Environmental ethicists, by contrast, while not questioning the particular assessments of value offered by the economists, argue that the latter fail to understand the “inherent” or “intrinsic” values of nature. Ethicists propose theories about how to understand, identify, and respect this special kind of value, and while they cannot rival the precision of economic techniques, they provide instead arguments that economists’ entire conception of value is reductionistic, unreliable, and incomplete. The debate cannot get down to specifics about how much value to assign to specific parts because it stalls on the prior question of the nature and measurement of value.

I do not expect to resolve this deep disagreement about theory, as it may not be resoluble. My goal, however, is to argue that the disciplinary contestants conceptualize the problem inadequately and that, if we ask different questions, progress can then be made around, not through, this controversy.

Suppose we accept the empirical fact that, in modern, diverse societies, people value nature in multiple ways, and suppose that, instead of measuring identified values, there is a shift to a more process-oriented view by which one evaluates not outcomes but actionable decisions. In this approach, the goal is to seek a guide for policy that recognizes the plurality and also the dynamism of values, and to seek a process by which values can evolve. The key to a more coherent discussion of sustainability is to criticize and replace monistic systems of value—approaches to evaluating change that assume all values can be represented in a single measure—with pluralistic approaches that try to achieve a reasonable balance among multiple values not reducible to a single metric.

Rather than reduce all human values to one kind of value to allow comparison across times, pluralists accept as a fact of life that multiple values will be expressed in environmental policy discourse. From this pluralist standpoint, they can set out to find a fair, effective process that will protect as many of these plural values as possible.

An important consonance of this approach is that, by adopting and celebrating both diversity and pluralism, it becomes easier to conceptualize values as they emerge at different scales of space and time. A plura...