Strings Attached

Imagine for a moment that you are taking a leisurely walk on a favorite beach. As the calming sound of the waves and the wide horizon clear your mind and heighten your senses, you begin to notice the things around you. A group of birds floating on the wind. The play of light through scattered clouds. The remarkable process whereby stones too strong to break by hand have been transformed by time and ocean currents into countless sand particles crunching under your feet. These and other aspects of the natural world capture our attention and inspire natural scientists to discover their secrets. But there are other realities here that go unseen by the untrained eye, and have yet to enter into the colorful documentaries provided by scientists, journalists, and other chroniclers of the natural world. These are the social rules that pattern this physical reality. Sometimes these rules take the form of laws. In other instances they appear as building codes or product design standards. Voting rules, property rights, and constitutional guarantees count among our most powerful social rules, which also include unwritten but widely recognized principles of right and wrong that guide our actions. Our task in this chapter is to make these social rules more visible—to help you “see” the rules shaping your everyday activities, to understand something of their political origins, and to appreciate why these rules matter for the future of our planet. To begin, let us return to our stroll on the beach and see what traces of politics and power we find amid the shells and stones. First consider what is missing from the beach. Why are there no fences? Why can we walk on this beach at all? If our social rules specified that the surf and sand were available to the highest bidder, or belonged to the first party to stake a claim, we would have no more right to swim in the ocean than we would to plunge uninvited into a neighbor’s pool. In fact public access to the shoreline differs markedly from one country to the next, depending on the rules in place.

Scaling Down

Dominical is a small town nestled on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where tropical forests spill onto the sandy shores of its world-renowned beaches. Dominical has a laid-back atmosphere of surf shops, open-air restaurants, and children in school uniforms weaving between the puddles and rocks on their way to class. But behind the scenes, something else is going on in Dominical. A clue can be found alongside the dirt road that runs through the center of town, where a billboard for Century 21 Real Estate depicts a happy couple overlooking their oceanfront property, accompanied by the English-language caption “Your Piece of Paradise!” The sign provides a glimpse of the larger forces at play in this remote corner of Central America. A frenzy of speculative real estate development is underway, led by foreigners vying for their own piece of paradise before the remaining lots are all sold by the local farmers whose families have inhabited the land for generations. One such farmer is Juan Carlos Madrigal. I visited Juan Carlos with a group of students in 2008 during one of my annual trips to Costa Rica, to learn more about how local landowners are coping with these pressures. This land has been in his family for a long time, its towering tropical forest encompassing tree plantations, bean, and cocoa crops, and sweeping views of the ocean. After a hike across the property, we cooled off in a swimming hole below a large waterfall, one of many in the area, which thundered down from the lush jungle above, the water volume swollen by seasonal rains. After toweling off we sat down and began the interview, discussing his vision for the future of this land. A humble yet dignified man with wrinkles deepened from decades of farming, Madrigal reported that a group of Americans had recently approached him with an offer to buy his property for a million dollars. Shaking his head, he said that of course he refused.

Scaling Up

José Delfín Duarte rises at the crack of dawn in a neighborhood on the outskirts of San Isidro, Costa Rica. He grabs his machete and rain parka, puts on his black galoshes, and heads out in a flatbed truck up a series of muddy roads surrounded by lush forest interspersed with farms. Eventually he arrives at a small water-distribution facility located at the top of a hill overlooking the surrounding watershed. He checks the station’s tanks, carefully noting the water levels. Duarte is the elected leader of a group of local citizens who have been given responsibility for managing water resources in their community. They decide how much water is used and how it will be allocated among families and farms in the area. They collect user fees, purchase equipment, and make numerous daily decisions affecting water use. Their role stems from a power-sharing arrangement with the Costa Rican government, which in recent years has crafted similar agreements with hundreds of local water associations throughout the country. Six thousand miles to the east, Claudia Olazábal begins her day in the outer suburbs of Brussels. She takes the subway to her office in the European Commission, a sleek modern glass and steel building where she heads the Biodiversity Unit of the European Union’s Directorate General for the Environment. On this particular day, her attention is focused on the design of new rules for the control of invasive species, which pose a major threat to ecosystems worldwide. Six years in the making, this rule came about after extensive consultation with stakeholders throughout the twenty-seven member countries of Europe—farmers unions and botanic gardens, prime ministers and pet shop owners. Working with a professional staff of Swiss and Germans, Poles and Portuguese, and many other nationalities, Olazábal is preparing for a lengthy negotiation involving lawmakers throughout the continent in a complex dance that will hopefully produce a new European policy on invasive species. Claudia Olazábal and José Delfín Duarte operate worlds apart, yet they have much in common. Both are creating rules that will shape our planet for decades and even centuries to come.

The Big Trade

As we continue our exploration of who rules the earth, we find that the economy, once you look inside it, relies on a vast system of rules and regulations, its cogs and wheels spinning day and night to enable the countless transactions that make up a modern economy. The relation between markets and rules is a fascinating one, far more complex than is suggested by the usual debates over government regulation versus free enterprise. Markets rely on rules. But increasingly, the reverse is also true: Some of our most innovative environmental policies and regulations have embedded within them market incentives designed to promote pro-environment behavior. To appreciate the stakes, let’s begin by considering what is arguably the greatest environmental tragedy—and biggest environmental success story—of all time. The removal of tetraethyl lead from gasoline has had a profound impact on human health and well-being worldwide. The change began in the United States in the late 1970s, soon spread to Europe, and over the next two decades diffused throughout the entire world. This shift was prompted by an innovative set of rules that actually assigned property rights to poison—and in the process created incentives for widespread changes in corporate behavior. Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, the US Environmental Protection Agency had the legal authority to regulate tetraethyl lead, which had been added to gasoline since the 1920s to boost engine performance. The original decision to add “ethyl” to the chemical mixture sloshing around in our gas tanks took place despite dire warnings from health experts. Foremost among these was Alice Hamilton, Harvard’s first female professor and the country’s leading expert on the health impacts of lead, which she knew intimately from her studies of worker exposure in the largely unregulated “dangerous trades” of the time. In 1925, the US Surgeon General convened a special meeting to decide whether ethyl production could proceed despite the known health risks. Hamilton argued that it would be reckless to deliberately disperse throughout the air a substance whose toxic effects (notably damage to the human nervous system) were well known for centuries.

Feasible Worlds

What would the world be like if high-speed trains arrived every ten minutes to whisk you away to the city of your choice? It would be a lot like Japan. What if our computers and coffee makers were not dumped in toxic landfills at the end of their lifecycle, but were instead reused as raw materials for new consumer products? Just ask Western Europeans. What if instead of crafting environmental rules in secret, governments were required to share all of the information shaping their decisions with any citizen who demanded it? The answer can be found in the United States. The differences among the “worlds” experienced by citizens of Japan, Europe, and the United States stem in large part from variation in the rules underpinning them. In Japan, a national system of bullet trains (shinkansen) came about not because of an inevitable march of technological progress. It was the result of national and local rules that transformed a disjointed collection of railways into an integrated national system—a system that has not had a single fatal accident since its inauguration in 1964. In Europe, new rules make corporations responsible for collecting and recycling the electronic goods they sell to consumers. Because they must safely dispose of any toxic substances in their products, these companies have a strong incentive to remove heavy metals and other poisons from the manufacturing process. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act empowers citizens to demand that government agencies send them all pertinent documents describing the rationale behind their decisions—a degree of transparency that is unheard of in Japan or Europe. Of course, these states of the world did not always exist. They were brought into being through deliberate acts of social change in which old rules were tossed and new ones put in place. Yet many people find the thought of social change too daunting. It seems unrealistic, out of reach. Compared to the dizzying pace of change in technology and popular culture, it appears that progress on big social problems like poverty alleviation, human rights, and environmental sustainability moves at glacial speed.

Recycling Is Not Enough

Faced with an endless stream of alarming news about the environment—rising temperatures and declining water supplies, population growth and species extinction, oil spills and cancer clusters—people increasingly want to know what can actually be done to address these problems. Concerned parents comb through websites late at night in search of safer products for their children. Students pack lecture halls in hundreds of environmental studies programs that have popped up on college campuses across the globe. Our grocery aisles and magazine stands are filled with advertisements promising that sustainability is just one more purchase around the corner. The major current of environmental thinking today emphasizes the small changes we can make as individuals, which (we are told) will add up to something big. Michael Maniates, a political scientist at Allegheny College, observes that the responsibility for confronting these issues too often “falls to individuals, acting alone, usually as consumers.” Yet solutions that promote green consumerism and changes in personal lifestyles strike many of us as strangely out of proportion with enormous problems like climate change, urban air pollution, and the disappearance of tropical forests. We learn that glaciers are melting and sea levels are expected to rise due to global warming—and in response we are advised to ride a bicycle to work. Scientists tell us that one out of every five mammal species in the world is threatened with extinction, and we react by switching coffee brands. Is it any wonder that people despair that real solutions are not within their grasp? You may suspect that tackling these gargantuan problems will require something more—but what? The answer, it turns out, can be found in a mountain of books and research articles published by thousands of social scientists over the past quarter century. But their discoveries have remained largely hidden from public view.

Paper, Plastic, or Politics?

It would seem only fair that an author who places a question in the title of a book should be expected to answer it directly. So who does rule the earth? The answer is Napoleon. He did, after all, leave behind a legal code that, as we saw in chapter 1, continues to guide the behavior of billions of people throughout the world today. And then there’s June Irwin, the country doctor who convinced the town of Hudson, Canada, to create rules banning nonessential pesticides and spawned a nationwide movement for change. And let’s not forget her foes in the pesticide industry, who raced across America passing state preemption rules that deny local communities the right to regulate these poisons. The earth is ruled by the Roman Emperor Justinian, who created the legal precedent for public access to beaches (discussed in chapter 2), as well as the real estate developer David Gottfried (chapter 3), co-inventor of the rulemaking system for green buildings known as LEED. The list most certainly includes Edmund Muskie and Philip Hart, the senators who spearheaded passage of the US Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in the early 1970s. But it also includes José Delfín Duarte, whose local water association is empowered to decide how water resources are managed in his small corner of Costa Rica—an effort that required revising rules at local and national levels. Whether famous figures like Jean Monnet, founder of the European Union, or tenacious groups of citizens like Portland’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance, whether working at the level of empires or that of neighborhoods, the people who rule the earth are those who leave behind a legacy of rules that shape the actions and opportunities of generations to come. If we so choose—if we can put aside for a moment the “little things” we do for the earth, and think about the larger, lasting changes that result when people come together and rewrite the rules they live by—then the group of rulemakers also includes you and me.

Super Rules

If you watch a group of children at play in an unstructured situation, soon you will be treated to a microcosm of how societies make rules, boiled down to the essentials. After some random running about, the children will eventually seek to build a social structure in the form of a game. The process unfolds with remarkable swiftness and predictability. By definition, every game requires rules, and these are the subject of considerable haggling at the outset. You have to touch the tree to be safe; no one can go past the rocks. The participation rules are negotiated with special care, because every child knows intuitively that these will affect the outcome. You have more people, so we get the big kid. It is equally fascinating to observe who makes the rules of the game. Over a chorus of competing ideas, the rulemaker is often the oldest or most assertive child, but not always. Someone may make a credible threat based on her resources and the power that accompanies them: It’s my ball and I don’t want to play that game. Alternatively, she may appeal to a source of moral authority recognized by the other players—it’s my house and my birthday party. Once settled, all participants in this miniature society must understand and abide by the rules. Those who break them are subject to a collective outcry from the group and even efforts at third-party enforcement: Mom, Richard keeps cheating! The situation is not so very different from the inner workings of our entire civilization, which is built upon a vast infrastructure of rules. Every business and every community, every religion and nonprofit organization, every terrorist network, taco vendor, and art museum relies on social rules to achieve its ends. Throughout this book we have seen how our lives and our landscapes are shaped by these rules, be they policies or property rights, safety codes or shared cultural norms. We are now ready to take a closer look at a special and very powerful category of rules—I call these super rules—that decide how other rules are made.

Keep the Change

On a fall morning in 1980, Pitzer College freshman George Somogyi walked out of his dormitory, looked up, and froze in his tracks. In front of him was something incredible. An enormous mountain, over 10,000 feet tall, stretched up to the sky in the near distance. What made this sight so bizarre is that the mountain wasn’t there before. Somogyi had been at college for three months and had never laid his eyes on Mount Baldy, a five-million-year-old formation that stands just a few miles from this campus on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, because it was shrouded in smog so thick that it obscured the view for months at a time. Air pollution is a problem well known to the people of Los Angeles. In the 1970s their city became an icon of urban air pollution, as photos of brown haze choking downtown LA circulated worldwide. The air was so hazardous that people were hospitalized by the thousands. Yet today the air around Los Angeles, while far from perfect, is markedly improved. The amount of smog has been sliced in half since the 1970s, even as the population has doubled in size. More impressive still, the amount of particulate pollution—the small dust particles that lodge deep in the lungs and are especially harmful to human health—has been reduced to one-fifth the levels experienced in 1955. How did a change of this magnitude come about? This physical transformation was precipitated by a political transformation, as the people of Los Angeles joined together and fought for new rules to clean up the air. Beginning in the 1940s, citizens demanded that city officials look into the causes of the problem, which were not obvious at the outset. Their efforts led to the creation of the Los Angeles Bureau of Smoke Control in 1945. Soon the movement spread throughout California, where in 1947 state legislators passed the Air Pollution Control Act—a full quarter century before national policymakers adopted similar legislation.

A Planet of Nations

On December 24, 1989, a man named Charles Taylor marshaled a band of armed rebels in the northern part of Liberia, a small country on the coast of West Africa. Carpeted in green jungle crossed by the occasional red dirt road connecting remote ramshackle towns, Liberia had never managed to attract much attention from the outside world. It carried none of the economic clout or strategic importance of continental powers like Kenya and South Africa. To outsiders, Liberia figured as little more than a historical curiosity, the place where freed American slaves settled and founded Africa’s first independent republic in 1847. Nor did Charles Taylor’s activities attract much notice. Military coups are a common occurrence throughout Africa, as much a part of reality as the tropical downpours that bring life to a temporary standstill in thousands of villages across the landscape before people tentatively poke out their heads and resume their daily activities. But this time something was different. Instead of racing to the capital and storming the presidential palace—as the incumbent dictator, Samuel Doe, had done a decade earlier—Taylor and his men were slow and deliberate in their progress, taking control of one town after the next. Rumors spread that the rebels were supported by Libya, a country that exercises much greater influence throughout the African continent than most people realize. Ultimately Charles Taylor would orchestrate a catastrophic civil war in Liberia, a conflict that would engulf neighboring Sierra Leone and lead to one of the worst humanitarian crises of the past century. At the time I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, where my wife and I were assigned to work in President Doe’s hometown of Zwedru, a remote place that could only be reached through days of travel along roads with mud pits the size of swimming pools or, alternatively, in a single-propeller plane that the tropical air currents would toss about like a toy in a bathtub. It was in Liberia that I first came to appreciate how national governance impacts the lives of billions of people every day.