America's Environmental Legacies

Shaping Policy through Institutions and Culture

Franklin Kalinowski

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349948970
• eBook ISBN: 9781349948987
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This powerful book focuses on the capacity of the American political system to respond to ecological challenges through policy perspectives, the constraints of our written Constitution, and the determination we muster to address these tests of national character. Put simply, this is a book about politics, policy, and political will. Kalinowski brilliantly shows that America's collective will is found in the cultural values enunciated by the Founding Fathers and passed down through history with modifications. It comprises the essential missing ingredient in determining how we currently respond to crises. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison had distinct ideas concerning the role that Nature might play in the future. Recognizing the origins and impacts of their environmental legacies is the key to interpreting where American environmental politics is today, how we got here, and where we might be headed.

© The Author(s) 2016

Franklin KalinowskiAmerica's Environmental Legacies10.1057/978-1-349-94898-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Interpreting America’s Two Constitutions—Looking Through an Environmental Lens

Franklin Kalinowski¹

(1)

Warren Wilson College, Morganton, North Carolina, USA

End Abstract

From time to time, usually during periods of social upheaval, Americans are drawn to reinvestigate and reinterpret their Constitution. This periodic rethinking of our origins is a good thing, for when we take on this examination, citizens of the United States learn something about their institutions and their culture: we come to see them through original perspectives and in a new light. No matter what the causal apprehensions or the resulting scholarship, the reinterpretation of the Constitution breathes fresh life into our understanding of that Founding Document and the culture that supports it, and for those reasons alone, justifies the occasional renewal of analysis. At the same time that we learn something about the early creation of our republic, we also learn something about the present condition of the American psyche; for whatever trends or concerns precipitate the reinterpretation, these will likely be the issues upon which the innovative exploration will concentrate. During this ridurre ai principii (as Niccolo Machiavelli would call it), Americans can gain a clearer appreciation of their contemporary anxieties over the direction in which their Founding Document leads them. The Constitution in this sense becomes a cultural mirror where we can view ourselves more clearly and investigate the social blemishes that may be signs of deeper, more serious, infection. Previous interpretations arose out of economic crises in this nation’s past and explored the impact of the Constitution on America’s search for economic justice. Other historical writers have perceived the country was in a political emergency and reinterpreted the Constitution in an attempt to flesh out the democratic, or anti-democratic, tendencies within it. ¹

There is evidence in the form of many people arguing the existence of an environmental or ecological crisis that we are presently living during a period that calls for another such deep, critical assessment. To the extent this is the case, we should expect to see reinterpretations of the American Constitution with a specific focus on the relationship between politics, institutions, and culture on the one hand, and the nonhuman environment on the other. Such an interpretation would need to be broadly interdisciplinary and synthesizing. It would take the many analyses of our current environmental situation and unite them with the several prominent interpretations of American political structures and national values. An interpretation is an explanation from a particular perspective. It is a way of viewing certain events, facts, or descriptions and placing them within some larger context in order to flesh out meaning and consequences.

Of course, there are a great number of people who deny the existence of serious environmental problems, and they certainly reject the notion of a widespread ecological crisis. For these individuals and their supporting groups, the entire environmental debate is a well-orchestrated hoax perpetuated by left-leaning alarmists who are out to undermine our economic system and further a political agenda of increased governmental interference in what these conservatives see as our perfectly operating free market. At some level, these environmental deniers might grasp the connections between ecological dangers, economic structures, and political responses, but their apprehensions regarding those responses lead them to build an interpretation of environmental politics upon the rejection of any evidence that ecological problems confront us. But all interpretations are not equally supportable: they are more than mere opinions. Explanations of social events that rest upon the rejection of the best, most current scientific evidence assume a large, blind, and rationally unsupportable faith in the status quo that becomes weaker and less tolerable with every new ecological disaster or scientific report.

The result, as we shall see, is a multitude of interpretations regarding humanity’s relationship with its environment stretching from this cornucopian belief that no significant environmental problems exist and that abundant, clean, never-ending exponential growth is our future to deep ecology’s dread that an ecological apocalypse is imminent unless humanity fundamentally reorders its outlook toward Nature. There are so many environmental interpretations, in fact, that one begins to wonder if all these cacophonous antagonists are really talking about the same planet. A review of the voluminous literature on humanity’s relationship to the environment reveals at least ten significant interpretations, perspectives, narratives, or “discourses.” These environmental interpretations lead either to the conviction that no problems exist, or to the assurance that difficulties exist but are manageable within our current set of problem-solving institutions, or to the belief that a crisis is unfolding which will cause us to fundamentally reconsider our social arrangements. Sorting out and understanding all of this can be made a bit less complicated if we focus on the various explanations, the proponents and groups associated with each, and if we direct our attention to some basic questions each interpretation must address. For each perspective or discourse, we need to specify and make explicit first, the severity (or lack thereof) of environmental dangers as each sees it; second, the interconnection both among various environmental dangers and among these threats and our economic and political policies; and third, our nation’s ability to resolve these issues within our prevailing institutions and the social values that comprise the ethical fabric of American culture. Dangers, interconnections, and responses comprise the heart of an environmental interpretation. Looking at the American Constitution through the lens of these interpretations will permit us to see our Founding Document in a new way. It will also permit us to judge the adequacy of this eighteenth-century document and its supporting set of values, beliefs, and habits for the times in which current, and future, Americans live and will live. To this extent, our present and future cannot be fully understood without also considering our past. How we as a nation interpret and respond to various threats becomes, over time, woven into the fabric of our shared communal record. It becomes an integral part of our history, and the legacy of those responses shapes and conditions our reactions to contemporary challenges. There is, therefore, an interconnected pattern that unites science, economics, politics, and history, and although this pattern may be extremely complicated, it is, nevertheless, comprehensible. The key, at first, is to analyze dangers and look for connections.

A contemporary reader, scouring the literature on environmental topics, will find a host of excellent studies on the various dangers we face, the scientific evidence underpinning the issues, and (in some cases) the connections among differing ecological threats. Rather than a detailed study of risks and connections, the book you are currently reading will focus on one big issue in the environmental debate: the capacity of the American political system to respond to these numerous ecological challenges. Before inquiring into this capacity to respond, however, some appreciation of the dangers and connections seems called for. Species extinction, human economic intrusion into the habitats of native plants and animals, and the unending increase of the human population are one set of connections. Another, not unrelated, set of connections we might look at is climate change, the contribution the burning of fossil fuels makes to warming the planet, the seemingly unquenchable need for energy consumption by our economy, and the links between energy, economic growth, global economic instability, and political unrest. These circumstances pose threats that are significant in their own right, but become compounded when tied together in a pattern of effects, causes, and feedbacks. Among the various researchers who have addressed environmental concerns, no one has done a better job summarizing the dangers and interconnections than Oberlin College Professor David Orr. Widely regarded as America’s foremost environmental educator, Orr has authored a number of books that spell out the threats this nation faces. His 2009 offering, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, is particularly helpful in pointing out the environmental, economic, and political dangers we face, demonstrating how they fundamentally interconnect with each other, and critically analyzing the negative consequences of either societal inaction or shallow responses that fail to probe to the sources of the risks. “[T]he hardest tests for our Constitution and democracy are just ahead,” he asserts, “and have to do with the relationship between governance, politics, and the dramatic changes in Earth systems now under way.” ²

The first, and arguably the most widely discussed, environmental challenge is the threat to ecosystem stability and human civilization posed by the alteration of climate patterns currently being brought on by the burning of fossil fuels, the release of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, and the resulting greenhouse effect that is warming the planet to levels not experienced for thousands of years. With each new scientific report, the evidence becomes stronger and more undeniable that humanity is tampering with the Earth’s climate in unprecedented and dangerous ways. For hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of years, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere remained fairly constant at approximately 280 parts per million (ppm). Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, that level has steadily, and exponentially, risen to over 400 ppm of atmospheric CO₂. These human-caused changes are scientifically verifiable. From these empirical facts, respected experts, such as James Hansen and his colleagues, have concluded that the “safe” concentration of CO₂ is somewhere around 350 ppm. ³ In other words, we have already overshot the long-term CO₂ levels consistent with a stable climate. Responsible governance demands action to halt the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and move toward the reduction of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The impacts on the economy of reducing current CO₂ to this safe level are subject to controversy, and the political policies needed to make this reduction are even more contentious, but the actualities of rising greenhouse gas emissions and the subsequent climate change being produced are no longer matters subject to differing interpretations. These are scientific facts and those who deny them deny reality.

The second ecological challenge to governance is the breakdown of ecosystems and the ecological services they provide. In addition to climate change, the destruction of wetlands, pollution, and human population encroachment into previously wild areas are impairing, or causing us to lose, such vital aids to civilization as flood control, water purification and transport, pollination services, waste absorption, pest control, an incalculable storehouse of genetic information, and a host of other benefits that society could neither replace nor do without. ⁴ There are interconnections and feedbacks here: climate change and other factors are degrading ecosystems, degraded ecosystems make our ecological and social systems less adaptive and resilient, and these damaged systems make it more difficult for us to deal with challenges such as climate change.

The third challenge we face is the peaking of global oil extraction with the subsequent collapse of the fossil fuel–based economy. America’s withdrawal of oil from traditional land and offshore reserves reached its yearly maximum in 1972. As predicted by many petroleum geologists using the model developed by M. King Hubbert, world petroleum extraction hit its highest point in 2008, but in the last few years, events have reworked the debate over peak oil and world energy supplies. Spokesmen for the oil and gas industry have declared that a bonanza in “unconventional energy resources” such as shale gas, tight oil (shale oil), and tar sands will usher in an era of energy abundance capable of fueling exponential economic growth for another century and making the USA an energy exporter comparable to the Arab Gulf States. There are, however, reasons to be skeptical regarding these declarations. Extraction techniques associated with shale gas, notably hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) of deep underground reserves, are fraught with environmental risks; prospective sites, or “plays,” for both shale gas and tight oil have very high decline rates as production drops off rapidly after the initial drilling; and the extreme costs (both economic and environmental) of energy from tar sands make that resource very low in “net-energy” or “energy return on energy invested.” Noted Canadian geoscientist J. David Hughes has studied these claims of forthcoming energy abundance and declared, “the projections by pundits and some government agencies that these technologies can provide endless growth heralding a new era of ‘energy independence’, in which the U.S. will become a substantial net exporter of energy are entirely unwarranted based on the fundamentals. At the end of the day, fossil fuels are finite and these exuberant forecasts will prove to be extremely difficult or impossible to achieve.” ⁵

There are other important considerations involved in this debate over conventional and unconventional energy sources, however, which a focus on environmental, economic, and political connections would bring to the surface. Bill McKibben, environmental activist and resident scholar at Middlebury College, has performed calculations that expose dilemmas surrounding climate change, energy extraction, and vulnerabilities in our economic system. Given the amount of CO₂ humans have already pumped into the atmosphere, the planet is currently committed to a 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1^° Celsius) rise in average global temperature. This amount of climate change will have significant and dangerous impacts. From these facts, a large and increasing number of scientists and political leaders have concluded that a 3.6^° F (2^° C) increase represents the upper limit beyond which “we’re entering the guaranteed-catastrophe zone.” ⁶ Those who are warning we must keep global temperature increase below this 3.6^° F limit include the Major Economies Forum (a group comprising all countries that burn vast amounts of carbon), the participants at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and President Barack Obama. The concern is the amount of additional CO₂ it would take to generate this unacceptable increase. We have reached the point where we must ask, what is the maximum quantity of additional CO₂ humans can add to the atmosphere before we cross this “guaranteed-catastrophe” line? That figure, according to reputable geophysicists, is 565 gigatons of CO₂ over the next 40 years. These, then, are the critical numbers that measure the dangers of climate change: 350 ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere is the “safe” level (we have already crossed that line, which is why we are going to have the 1.8^° F increase); a 3.6^° F rise in average global temperature would seriously threaten civilization; and 565 gigatons more CO₂ in the atmosphere (over the next 40 years) would generate that 3.6^° F increase. To give this some perspective: a gigaton is one billion tons. Each year, Americans account for the release of 22 tons of CO₂ per person. With a population of around 320 million, that means Americans release about 7 gigatons of CO₂ per year. Even if we could adopt policies to hold our population and our CO₂ emissions at their current levels (two immense undertakings for our political system), Americans would still release 280 gigatons of CO₂, or almost half of the 565 gigaton target for the entire world, into the atmosphere over the next 40 years. ⁷ Put simply, our institutions of governance and economics face an enormous challenge in keeping CO₂ releases below that perilous 565 gigaton level.

This is the point where McKibben draws the connection between climate change and energy extraction, for according to sources within the world’s fossil fuel companies, they already have located enough coal, oil, natural gas, tight oil, and tar sands to generate, if extracted and burned, 2795 gigatons of CO₂. ⁸ That is five times the amount of CO₂ scientists say it is sensible to release. McKibben states the conclusion with simple arithmetical clarity: in order to avoid climate catastrophe, 80 % of the world’s currently known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground. Transitioning to a post-carbon society based upon alternative energy fuels is essential if we are to restrict and lower CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere. From this perspective, it is almost irrelevant whether or not vast reserves of fossil fuels remain to be extracted. If the withdrawal of fossil fuels has peaked, we need to transition away from a reliance on these diminishing sources. If reserves have not peaked and large quantities of unconventional fossil fuels remain, we must leave the vast majority of them in the ground in order to hold CO₂ at, or below, the upper limit of 565 gigatons. In either case, the era of cheap, abundant coal, oil, and natural gas has come to an end.

But, once again, if we are looking for connections, we need to as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Interpreting America’s Two Constitutions—Looking Through an Environmental Lens
• 1. Environmental Politics and Our Written Constitution
• 2. Cultural Legacies: America’s Unwritten Constitution
• 3. The Heritage: Environmentalism and the Evolving Constitution
• Backmatter