Green Planet Blues

Critical Perspectives on Global Environmental Politics

Geoffrey Dabelko, Ken Conca, Geoffrey D. Dabelko, Ken Conca

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000448986
• Auflage: 6
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Politics

Revised and updated throughout, this unique anthology examines global environmental politics from a range of perspectives and captures the voices of both the powerless and the powerful. Paradigms of sustainability, environmental security, and ecological justice illustrate the many ways environmental challenges and their solutions are framed in contemporary international debates about climate, water, forests, toxics, energy, food, and biodiversity.

Organized thematically, the selections offer a truly global scope. Seventeen new readings explore climate justice, globalization, land and water grabs, climate change and conflict, China's international environmental relations, and the future of climate politics in the wake of the Paris Agreement. This book stresses the underlying questions of power, interests, authority, and legitimacy that shape environmental debates, and it provides readers with a global range of perspectives on the critical challenges facing the planet and its people.

This new edition of Green Planet Blues connects directly with a wide-range of upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses.

PART ONE

THE DEBATE BEGINS

THE 1972 UN CONFERENCE ON THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT, HELD IN STOCKHOLM, was a seminal event in the history of global environmental politics. Many important international agreements had already been reached by the time of the Stockholm conference, including a treaty governing Antarctica (1959), a partial nuclear-test-ban treaty (1963), a treaty governing the exploration and use of outer space (1967), and several international agreements on ocean-related matters such as whaling, the use of marine resources, and pollution. But Stockholm was the first broadly global effort to evaluate and discuss the environment in systematic, comprehensive terms, and it helped establish the trajectory of future efforts—including diplomatic initiatives, international institution building, and global movements for social change—that unfolded in the decades that followed.

Although the conference took place nearly five decades ago, many of its central debates are still with us, and several key questions asked there will appear throughout this book: Is global pollution mainly a problem of poverty or a problem of affluence? What is the balance of responsibility between the countries and societies of the North and those of the South in global environmental degradation? Does the institution of national sovereignty help or hinder the effort to construct international responses to environmental problems? An understanding of the dominant ideas and controversies at the Stockholm conference provides an essential historical perspective on the debates and disputes that dominate contemporary global environmental politics.¹

In this section we introduce some of the ideas that shaped the debate at Stockholm and in the years that followed. We pay particular attention to three powerful and controversial claims from that era: first, the idea that there are inherent “limits to growth” facing economic activity, the world’s population, and global consumption; second, the idea that self-interested individual behavior toward the environment adds up to a collective “tragedy of the commons”; and third, the claim that the environmental crisis contains the potential to catalyze international conflict and thus represents a threat to national and international security. Although thinking about each of these provocative claims has evolved considerably since Stockholm, they remain at the heart of debates about global environmental challenges.

For the industrialized countries of the North, the Stockholm conference was a response to mounting public anxiety over the environmental consequences of industrial society. By the early 1970s, concerns over problems as diverse as air and water pollution, wilderness preservation, toxic chemicals, urban congestion, nuclear radiation, and rising prices for natural-resource commodities began to fuse into the notion that the world was rapidly approaching natural limits to growth in human activity. The best-selling book The Limits to Growth did much to galvanize public fears. Using a technique known as systems modeling, the authors tried to predict the consequences of unlimited growth in human numbers and consumption. As the passage presented in Chapter 1 indicates, they concluded that the convergence of several trends—accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment—was moving the world rapidly toward overall limits on global growth. To avoid a potentially catastrophic collapse of the world’s economic and social systems, it would be necessary to implement restraints on growth in population and resource consumption.

The central claims of The Limits to Growth were highly controversial, and most governments were reluctant to embrace them. Critics argued that the book overstated the urgency of the problem, overlooked the possibility of substituting less-scarce inputs, and underestimated the possibility for technological solutions.² But the fears articulated by the book and others like it found widespread popular support in industrial societies, where they converged with the arguments of a growing coalition of environmental organizations and activists.

Not surprisingly, the idea of limits to growth was received quite differently in the global South. Among the less-industrialized countries, the idea of such limits evoked intellectual skepticism and outright suspicion. These sentiments were expressed eloquently in a 1972 essay by João Augusto de Araujo Castro (Chapter 2), the Brazilian ambassador to the United States and an influential voice in North–South diplomacy. It should be stressed that the South has never been monolithic in its views on problems of development or the environment. But as Castro made clear, many in the South linked the North’s environmental concerns to the broader pattern of North–South relations. There was widespread agreement among “Third World” governments at the Stockholm conference that the North was responsible for the environmental crisis; that the North, having reaped the fruits of industrialization, now sought to close the door on the South; that the environmental problems of poverty differed fundamentally from those of affluence; and that solutions crafted with the North’s problems in mind would be ineffective, or worse, if imposed on poor nations and peoples. The South’s political unity at Stockholm revealed that a global response would require linking environmental efforts to development concerns and a broader dialogue about the political and economic “rules of the game” in the international system. The message was clear: if such connections were not drawn, the South would not participate.

Along with limits to growth, a second important formulation of the nature of the environmental crisis during this era was the controversial claim that we face a “tragedy of the commons.” This view was popularized by biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous essay in the influential journal Science in 1968, which we excerpt in Chapter 3. According to Hardin, the “tragedy” occurred when self-interested actors enjoyed open access to, or unlimited use of, natural resources or environmental systems. Because users could benefit fully from additional exploitation while bearing only a small part of the “costs” of that exploitation (including depletion and environmental degradation), the overwhelming tendency would be for individuals seeking to maximize their own benefits to further exploit the resource. Each actor would pursue this individually logical behavior until the result for the system as a whole would be destruction or degradation of the resource in question. Individual rationality would produce collective disaster—hence the notion of tragedy. Using the example of overgrazing on the town commons of communities in medieval England, Hardin suggested that the same combination of self-interest and open access was at the root of current problems of pollution and overpopulation. He offered two stark solutions: open access could be replaced with enforceable private property rights, so that individual users would reap fully not just the benefits but also the costs of their action, and thus have an incentive to conserve their own property; or strict governmental restrictions on access could be imposed, thereby limiting overuse.

Hardin’s model came to be enormously influential in shaping thinking about global environmental problems, particularly for such so-called “global commons” as the oceans and atmosphere, which do not fall under the domain of any single government (just as the English commons was not owned by a single user). One reason for its influence is the model’s simple elegance: the tragedy of the commons combines a recognizable human motive (self-interest) with a recognizable set of social rules (those allowing open access to natural resources and the environment) to produce a result that most would recognize as undesirable (rapid depletion or destruction of the resource in question).

Along with limits to growth and the tragedy of the commons, a third powerful and controversial idea that emerged during this period was the suggestion that environmental problems constituted threats not only to human well-being but also to national and international security. Many works of this era cited the potential for violent conflict around natural resource depletion or the harmful effects of pollution. For some, this was a clear message that national-security priorities had to be realigned to deal with these new realities. Defense budgets and policies should, in this view, shift from traditional notions of war-fighting and be attuned to address these new “threats without enemies.” Chapter 4 presents an excerpt from a 1977 report of the Worldwatch Institute in which its founder, Lester Brown, stresses the need to “redefine security” in these terms. Not all who worried about emergent “eco” conflicts shared Brown’s optimism that security could be thus redefined. Indeed, another identifiable trend of thought during this period was the notion that increasingly authoritarian governance would be needed to keep environmental harm from overwhelming society.³

To many observers during the 1960s and 1970s, the limits to growth, the tragedy of the commons, and environmental (in)security combined to suggest a bleak outlook, in which mounting problems would prove intractable, threatening to business as usual, and highly conflictive. Yet, none of these ideas has gone unchallenged. Hardin’s model of the tragedy of the commons, for example, is at heart just a metaphor: the English commons is invoked as a simplified representation of the complex social rules, customs, goals, and behavioral incentives that shape how people interact with the environment, individually and collectively. Whether such a “tragedy” actually lies at the center of global environmental problems depends on whether this abstraction is an accurate representation of human behavior and social institutions. Critics have noted that Hardin misread the actual history of the English commons from which he drew his metaphor. Historical reconstructions show that access to the town commons was never unrestrained but, rather, governed by a complex set of community-based rules that ensured sustainable use.⁴ The commons, in this view, was destroyed not by population growth or self-interested individual behavior, but by changing political and economic conditions in Britain, which encouraged and allowed powerful actors to privatize the commons and overwhelm community-based systems of property rights and resource governance. Rather than tragedy, the endurance of the commons system—in some cases, for hundreds of years—shows possibilities other than Hardin’s stark choice between purely private property and purely open access. Similarly, the modeling behind the “limits to growth” argument examined broad, global-scale trends, but it did not model the complex behavioral and institutional dynamics shaping patterns of consumption, production, growth, and resource use. And the pessimistic eco-conflict scenarios that emerged around the same time made some assumptions—that scarcity creates grievances, and that grievances trigger conflict—which, while seemingly intuitive, greatly simplified both social responses to scarcity and the drivers of political violence.

Thus, one of the most important responses to these stark frameworks, among activists and scholars alike, has been to identify alternatives that sharpen our understanding of the social roots of environmental challenges and that document possibilities for doing things differently. In Chapter 5 we present two letters published in 1989 by the Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA). In these letters, COICA frames both the problems and solutions quite differently from what we have seen thus far. COICA argued that the future of the Amazon basin and the fate of its indigenous occupants are inherently linked. The rampant quest for modernization, colonization, territorial occupation, and economic development of the Amazon basin was damaging natural ecosystems and destroying indigenous communities. But the drivers here are specific policy choices and practices, rather than abstract growth trajectories or iron laws of human behavior. And the solution is not further coercion, but rather to recognize existing models that afford sustainable alternatives and to empower the communities that embody them.

COICA addressed the first of its protest letters to the multilateral development banks. The destruction was being driven by policies of governments in the Amazon basin, which largely excluded indigenous communities from decision making. But much of the project activity was being funded by external sources, including multinational corporations and multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank. The second letter is addressed to the international environmental movement, which is also taken to task for its lack of attention to indigenous concerns. While acknowledging the efforts of environmentalists and the potential for common cause between the environmental and indigenous peoples’ movements, the letter points out that governments, international organizations, and Northern environmental groups have struck bargains that leave out the people most directly and immediately affected. As COICA noted, decisions about the fate of the Amazon forest and its people, whether made at the national or the international level, were excluding those most directly affected—not only rendering them unjust but also giving them little prospect for success.

Around the same time that COICA published its letters, the Brazilian activist Chico Mendes was assassinated by cattle ranchers in the western Brazilian state of Acre. Mendes’s life and death remind us that environmentalism around the world has historically drawn most of its energy from the grassroots. Despite the growing internationalization of environmental responses, domestic political struggles have remained the most important pathway to change. Mendes was a labor activist and environmentalist who led the fight for preservation of both the Amazon forest ...