Land Use Policy

Albert Hochbaum, whom we met in Chapter 3, was Leopold’s student and friend; Director of the Delta Duck Station in Manitoba, Canada; and a part-time collaborator on A Sand County Almanac. He also had an admirable talent for succinctly hitting the nail on the head. He summed up Leopold’s message in four words. “The lesson you wish to put across is the lesson that must be taught,” he said, “preservation of the natural.” So much for succinctness; the difficult problem, of course, is to explain what is meant by “preservation” and by “natural.” Thomas McNamee, writing forty years later, uses the same basic approach: “I believe that the true object of conservation is nature,” he says. “What is nature?” The answer cannot help but be complicated, he notes, because “our conception of nature springs from the darkest depths of our culture’s unconscious sense of life itself, and ancient irrational urges and fears give the concept its power.’” But that is only half of the story: “At the same time,” he says, “nature must also have an objective, rational, manageable, thinkable value.” And thus we have the paradox of modern land use theory: Americans love nature; our values were formed in nature’s womb, a huge, wonderful, and horrible wild place. Our values are freedom and independence, “split rail values,” as Leopold called them. But our activities, as builders and consumers, transform our environment into something not-wild; we manipulate and control and artificialize nature; we make it not-nature. As the song says, you always hurt the one you love. But the paradox has also an optimistic face: As we have built and consumed, we have become wealthy by exploiting nature. Wildness has become valuable, objectively, according even to economists, because our wealthy society is now willing to pay to preserve nature. But here is the bitter pill to swallow: We all must admit that, at least in some sense, “nature” preservation is a sham—we’ve gone too far to “free” nature, as we might free a wild animal, release it from captivity.

Diverging Worldviews, Converging Policies

This book began with an anecdote, my encounter with an eight-year-old with hundreds of living sand dollars. While I knew what I wanted the little girl to do—I wanted her to put most of the living sand dollars back in the lagoon—I felt in a quandary when I tried to explain why she should do so. I had no objection if the little girl took a couple home, to watch them in her aquarium or even to dissect them to learn their structure. But the family’s actions showed no respect for life or living systems. I wanted to make a moral point not expressible in the language of economics. I hesitated to introduce, however, without serious qualifications, the moral language of rights. Rights have an individualistic ring about them; if sand dollars have rights, then surely the family should put them all back. One language said too little, the other said too much. This original intuition, that the environmentalists’ dilemma is mainly a dilemma of values and explanations, more than preferred actions, has been borne out by the considerations of the second part of this book. An examination of major areas of environmental policy has reinforced the hypothesis that a consensus on the broad outlines of an intelligent policy is emerging among environmentalists, even though there remain significant value differences that affect the explanations and justifications they offer for basically equivalent policies. Environmentalists of different stripes, as far back as the days of Pinchot and Muir, have often set aside their differences to work for common goals. But those traditional cooperations were, it seemed, almost accidental collaborations originating in temporary political expediency. My hypothesis about the current environmental scene asserts a more than accidental growth in cooperation: In spite of occasional rancorous disputes, the original factions of environmentalism are being forced together, regardless of their value commitments. For example, a growing sense of urgency led soil conservationists and preservationist groups to work together to pass the 1985 Farm Bill, even though they suffered some ill feelings along the way. Similarly, the National Wildlife Federation, a collection of sportsmen’s organizations, and Defenders of Wildlife advocate similar wetlands protection policies.

Worldviews: A Whirlwind Tour

Languages are more like searchlights than floodlights; they do not illuminate equally across the full range of the perceptual field. This generalization is especially true of technical vocabularies that characterize specialized professions such as economics and ecology, and to a lesser extent of systems of favored expressions used by groups that share a special interest, such as nature preservation. Because of this selectivity of focus, languages and special vocabularies can disclose the world differently. If various environmentalists’ descriptions of the same events often sound as though they are perceiving something quite different, it is because environmentalists, who have not adopted a shared worldview, express themselves in a variety of unsystematized languages and vocabularies. It will therefore be useful to examine the systems of concepts that important environmentalists have used to describe what they have perceived. It is important not to think of concepts as abstractions, however. A language and the forms of expression it embodies are the glue that hold worldviews together; our vocabularies therefore carry our perceptions, playing an active role in shaping the world we see. The very meaning attributed to events is affected by the interplay of perceptions, actions, and the linguistic behaviors that express the meaning of events. Perceptions, we assume, directly affect the theoretical hypotheses and conjectures we develop to make sense of our world as we act within it. But theoretical assumptions likewise affect perception; and since perception is the only basis we have for discriminating among theories of reality, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that to some degree at least, the constellation of conceptual, theoretical, and value precepts we operate with, and the vocabulary we use to express them, will determine the shape of the world we encounter. This, loosely put, is the idea behind worldview analysis, as introduced in Chapter 2 and used occasionally throughout this book. Because most people are not accustomed to question their linguistic forms and the philosophical commitments embodied in them, it is often useful to discuss these issues informally in metaphorical terms. For example, the language of atomism as applied to nature is often associated with a mechanistic metaphor, while more holistic approaches are associated with an organicist metaphor.

Interspecific Ethics

What makes deep ecology deep? This is perhaps the most perplexing question about the much-discussed but little-understood deep ecology movement. Its spokespersons, who are mostly West Coast and Australian academics, all cite, with some degree of affirmation, Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess’s 1974 article, “The Shallow and the Deep Ecology Movement.” But nobody, not even Naess himself, still accepts the seven principles of deep ecology that were outlined in the original paper. There seems to be agreement, however, that the movement gains its unity and identity from a shared belief that nature has value independent of its uses for human purposes. To put their point critically, movement proponents all believe that our current environmental policies are in a profound sense “unjust” to other species. Most simply, the deep ecology movement has clearly defined itself in opposition to “shallow ecologists,” or as some of them put it less pejoratively, “reform environmentalists,” who are taken to include all of the mainline environmental groups. Deep ecology, given its self-proclaimed opposition to all “shallow” approaches, represents a modern version of the idea that environmentalists sort themselves into two broad classifications based on opposed motives. More precisely, we can understand deep ecologists’ characterization of two opposition groups as a theory intended to explain the behavior of contemporary environmentalists: Environmentalists pursue two opposed approaches to environmental problems because some believe, while others do not, that elements of nature have independent value. Some environmentalists, according to this theory, are interested only in conserving natural resources for future human use; others, deep ecologists, act to protect nature for its own sake. If indeed deep ecologists are offering such an explanatory theory, it is important to ask exactly what behavioral phenomena are to be explained: Do reform environmentalists pursue policies that differ significantly from those pursued by deep ecologists? Or do they pursue the same policies, but employ importantly different strategies and tactics in these pursuits? These two questions will be the subject of the next two sections, respectively. Along the way, we can also assess the strengths and weaknesses of the deep ecologists’ contribution to environmental goals.

Biological Diversity

As a philosopher who has written on the subject of endangered species policy, I am asked from time to time to join a panel discussion on “the value of biological diversity.” Consider a representative example: At the National Forum on Biodiversity, a 1986 conference organized by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academy of Sciences, I shared the platform with three resource economists and one ecologist. Everyone on the platform agreed that biological diversity has great value; the discussion focused on the question, can that value be quantified in dollar terms? I quickly perceived that I was in the middle of a polarized situation. The economists were there to demonstrate the efficacy of their methods for representing the value of wild species as dollars; the ecologist scoffed at these attempts as irrelevant at best and, at worst, as a symptom of moral depravity. Hovering in the background of discussions like this are celebrated examples such as that of the snaildarter and the Tellico Dam. In that case, the Supreme Court halted work on an almost-completed dam because it would have flooded the only known habitat of the snaildarter, a three-inch member of the perch family. The politically tortured case of the tiny snaildarter illustrates the dilemma environmentalists face in defending biological resources. Environmentalists initially opposed the Tennesee Valley Authority’s plans to dam one of the last free-flowing stretches of the Little Tennessee River because it would destroy white-water canoeing, flood natural ecological systems, and destroy anthropologically important Indian burial sites. Environmentalists made little headway, initially, as the bureaucratic processes ground forward and construction of the dam was begun. Then, in early 1976, in a dramatic development, biologists discovered a hitherto unknown species, the snaildarter, living in the waters upstream from the dam. Since the snaildarter spawned in shallow, fast-moving waters, the dam threatened to wipe out a distinctive form of life. Environmental economists, anxious to use their quantificational tools, saw the Tellico Dam as a case in which assigning a dollar value to a threatened species might tip the scales in an aggregation of costs and benefits of proposed projects.

Conservationists and Preservationists Today

Aldo Leopold died in 1948, of a heart attack suffered while fighting a brushfire that threatened the pines he and his family had planted at the shack. By dint of his strong personality, scientific curiosity, and near-universal respect from professional colleagues and nonprofessional wilderness advocates alike, Leopold had personified the search for a unified vision to guide human use of the land and offered a unifying model for conservationists. His death, at the height of his intellectual and leadership powers, left the movement effectively rudderless. The country was at the time being swept away by the postwar economic boom and a new period of unrestrained economic growth pushed environmental concerns off the political agenda. Stephen Rauschenbush, writing in 1952, said, “Conservation is in danger of becoming a lost cause” and provided a list of five “forces and events that had battered away at the old ideal.” Grant McConnell similarly described the conservation movement in 1954 as “small, divided and frequently uncertain.” Wise-use conservationists and land preservationists appeared in the eyes of their opponents, McConnell lamented, as “but the representatives of particular interest groups and . . . hence no better than those whom they accuse.” But the same economic growth that placed conservationists on the defensive in the late 1940s and 1950s created a new demographic situation, including a baby boom that resulted eventually in a large surge in the youthful segment of the population. Increasing incomes allowed discretionary spending on amenities. Outdoor recreation became more popular and vacation homes near the shore or in the mountains proliferated as more families chose to spend time in areas with natural amenities. Environmental historian Samuel Hays explains the resulting shift as focusing interest and concern increasingly on the quality of life. New social, economic, and demographic factors created a context in which the older conservationist concerns about efficient development and use of material resources—concerns with production—were replaced, in the postwar era, with increasing concern with the consumption side of the picture. These changes created a new constituency for environmental groups.

Moralists and Aggregators: The Case of Muir and Pinchot

Gifford Pinchot first met John Muir in 1896, while on a trip through the West to study possible sites for new forest preserves. Pinchot was much impressed by Muir, twenty-seven years his senior, and recalled the meeting fifty years later in his autobiography. He described Muir as “cordial, and a most fascinating talker, I took to him at once.” Muir, in his writings of this period, was explicitly complimentary of Pinchot’s efforts at sustainable forestry. At the Grand Canyon, Muir and Pinchot struck off on their own and “spent an unforgettable day on the rim of the prodigious chasm, letting it soak in.” They came across a tarantula and Muir wouldn’t let Pinchot kill it: “He said it had as much right there as we did.” Within a year, however, Muir had complained bitterly and publicly about Pinchot’s decision to allow grazing in the national forest reserves. This rift between the Moralist (Muir) and the Aggregator (Pinchot) shaped the two wings of the environmental movement, and its original configuration owes much to attitudes developed in the early life and work of each man. Muir entered the University of Wisconsin in 1861, the year the Civil War broke out. Although he was almost twenty-three, his last formal schooling had been interrupted at the age of eleven, when his family emigrated from Scotland. His father, Daniel, a religious zealot, had no use for any book but the Bible. The elder Muir, who joined ever more extreme sects in search of one sufficiently pure and exacting, chose eighty acres of virgin land and put his eldest son John to work clearing it. Days were spent cutting trees and grubbing out roots, and nights were given over to memorizing Scripture. Daniel Muir planted only corn and wheat for cash crops, and the farmland was worn out in only eight years. Choosing a new and larger plot, the family moved and repeated the process. Again, the hardest work fell to John as his father spent all of his time studying the Bible and preaching to anyone who would listen.

The Environmentalists’ Dilemma

The poignancy of the dilemma facing advocates of environmental protection was dramatized for me in an encounter with a little girl. It was a sleepy, summer-beach Saturday and I was walking on a sandbar just off my favorite remnant of unspoiled beach on the north tip of Longboat Key, Florida. The little girl clambered up the ledge onto the sandbar, trying not to lose a dozen fresh sand dollars she cradled against her pushed-out and Dan-skinned stomach. I guessed she was about eight. Thirty yards away, in knee-deep water, her mother and older sister were strip mining sand dollars—they walked back and forth through the colony, systematically scuffing their feet just under the soft sand on the bottom of the lagoon and bending over to retrieve each disk as it was dislodged. Their treasure was held until collected by the eight-year-old transporter, whose feet were too small to serve as plowshares. Gathering the sand dollars at the point of excavation, she relayed them to the sand bar where a considerable pile was accumulating near the family’s beached powerboat. Many months earlier, I had noted how the fickle current through Longboat Inlet had begun to dump sand in a large crescent spit out into the Gulf of Mexico, forming a waist-deep lagoon. Next came a profusion of shore birds and the colony of sand dollars that multiplied in the protected water, and then came the little girl and her family in their powerboat. I was startled by the level of industrial organization; even the little girl executed her task with square-jawed efficiency. I engaged her as she emerged onto the sand bar. “You know, they’re alive,” I said. “We can put ‘em in Clorox at home and they’ll turn white.” I asked whether they needed so many. She said, “My Momma makes ‘em outta things.” I persisted: “How many does she need to make things?” “We can get a nickel apiece for the extras at the craft store.” I sighed and walked away. Our brief conversation had ended in ideological impasse. But I was troubled.

Intertemporal Ethics

“What good is a world view, anyway?” we might well ask, if environmentalists are allowed to put them on and take them off like hats. This is serious business; after all—it’s no fashion show—the future of the planet is at stake. We have noted that environmentalists lack a fully developed world view, a complete conceptual, theoretical, and evaluative framework for interpreting the world. Environmentalists have generally, as David did in facing Goliath, gone into battle against the powerful forces of exploitation, which are well armed with a reductionistic world view, with just slingshots and pebbles. But environmentalists have done remarkably well, given the apparently uneven distribution of intellectual armaments. The hit-and-run tactics of guerilla warfare have obvious benefits. Playing fast and loose with metaphysical and moral principles, environmentalists have gained considerable political clout by employing that value which seems particularly appropriate for a given issue, or by emphasizing a particular world view that will be effective in reaching a coveted constituency. But guerilla warfare has important costs as well. Environmentalists can appear to outsiders as disorganized and fractious, especially if one listens to their rhetoric, rather than observing their political actions. Further, the fragmentation of environmentalists’ world views has real costs internal to the movement because it results in failures of communication and mistrust, even among individuals and groups that are pursuing identical or nearly identical policies. For example, while committees formed by the Group of Ten could reach a detailed consensus on policy in all areas of environmental concern, they were unable to present the document as endorsed by their respective organizations because some organizations wished not to be publicly associated with others because of differing attitudes toward hunting. The most important cost of world view fragmentation among environmentalists, however, exists not in the past or in the present, but in the future. Environmentalists have failed to articulate a positive vision for the future; they cannot explain in terms comprehensible to each other or to the public at large what is their positive dream. As is sometimes said, environmentalists are always “against something.”

The Pressures of Growth

Critics of environmentalism have often charged that the movement is “elitist.” By this is meant, among other complaints, that environmentalists are mainly members of the middle and upper classes who have achieved a comfortable level of economic well-being and who want to “lock up” natural resources, discourage economic growth, and withhold upwardly mobile job opportunities from less privileged economic groups in the society. Environmentalists, of course, dispute this criticism, arguing that it is unsupported by any reasonable interpretation of either environmentalists’ goals or the socioeconomic data. Nevertheless, the criticism strikes a sensitive nerve. It is interesting that the charge is directed at environmentalists, a majority of whom are liberals or progressives, both from the right, which claims environmental regulations choke off economic opportunities, and from the left, which argues that skirmishes over resource policy represent just one more episode in the ongoing war between the classes. What is undeniable is that the growth issue is the most difficult one facing environmentalists today. Here is a real dilemma. If environmentalists embrace economic growth in America, they apparently embrace endless sprawl, boom towns, high energy use, degradation of watersheds and wetlands, more chemicals—evils without end. If they oppose growth, however, they appear to favor unemployment, reduced wages, and economic stagnation. About growth, the dilemma encourages ambivalence and waffling: In 1977, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund published The Unfinished Agenda: The Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Issues, which emphasized a need for “a major transformation in human values” and argued that the United States has “enjoyed a development that is no longer possible for most [nations].” The United States must, the report urges, aid in “the transition from abundance to scarcity” and provide examples of how, “in a ‘Conserver Society,’ quality of life can be preserved (and, for many, increased) in an era of scarcity.” In the years since the Reagan antiregulatory revolution, however, environmentalists have also emphasized the importance of economic growth in achieving environmental goals. In a 1985 agenda document (environmentalists love to compose agendas), the Group of Ten (chief executive officers of ten leading environmental organizations) said: “Continued economic growth is essential.