Radical Environmental Reforms in Comparative Perspective

Comparative historical analyses of the four instances of national-scale reform and the incipient global-scale reform underline several patterns. Both focusing and leveling events played important roles in mobilizing reform-minded encompassing coalitions that pushed through the radical reforms. These events seemed especially effective if they underlined the caged nature of people harmed by the events. Caged people seem easier for states and activists to mobilize, and the reforms themselves further cage people. Two important caveats temper these conclusions. First, the reforms did not occur as part of a wave of environmental reforms, as occurred in the early 1970s. Second, the private sector, corporations in particular, did not play significant roles in these processes of reform.

Coastal Maine

Fishers for lobsters in coastal Maine cluster in groups or “gangs” around the harbors where they fish and moor their boats. The State of Maine began regulating the capture of lobsters in the late nineteenth century with the passage of laws limiting the capture of both very large and small lobsters, but fishers rarely complied with the laws, so they had little effect. A lobster bust occurred in the 1920s and 1930s when both the size of the catch and the price of lobster declined. After the bust, compliance with the laws increased and, with active support from the fishers, the state established local management of the fishery with limits on the number of fishers and traps within each management zone. Focusing events played a less prominent role in the environmental reforms in this smaller political arena than they did in the larger political arenas in the Great Plains, United Kingdom, and Cuba.

The World

Comparable environmental reforms have never occurred at the global scale of governance. Segments of the dynamic described in the four case studies have taken place at the global scale. A focusing event, World War II, spurred the creation of a global governance institution, the United Nations, which later became the organizational sponsor for the ongoing international effort to counter climate change. Different kinds of focusing events, extreme weather in the form of droughts or storms, have over time contributed to an increase in the number of nations advocating for radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. These changes suggest that, over time, an international “climate club” could emerge. These trends, while fragmentary and so far unsuccessful in producing mandatory global-scale reforms, are consistent with the theoretical dynamic that has driven the national-scale reforms analyzed in the case studies.

Conclusion

Radical reforms tend to occur in polycentric ways, in multiple arenas at the same time. They also occur in polymorphous ways. In large political arenas, the shock of a focusing event almost immediately mobilizes citizens and leaders, so coalitions assemble without prolonged dialog. In smaller political arenas, labor-intensive persuasion by word of mouth has built the support necessary to enact the reforms. Although the link between radical reforms and eco-authoritarian politics seems plausible, the reforms examined here did not generate eco-authoritarian regimes. The reforms did encourage a corporativist style of governance in which local reform efforts worked in conjunction with reform efforts in larger political arenas. These experiences suggest that corporatism may provide particular advantages as a political strategy for confronting the challenges of climate change.

Cuba

Cuba became the pre-eminent producer of sugarcane during the early twentieth century through the development of input-intensive, industrial sugarcane plantations. Pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary plantations became extraordinarily reliant on imported inputs like chemical fertilizers to support high levels of production. Favorable trade deals with Soviet bloc countries assured Cubans of a market for their high-priced sugarcane. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, this market disappeared, and Cuba no longer had the foreign exchange it needed to purchase foodstuffs for Cuban citizens and chemical fertilizers for sugarcane plantations. Cuban citizens responded to the dearth of food through repeasantization. People began cultivating gardens in cities, and the state began to encourage the creation of small farms. Agro-ecological farming became the favored method of agricultural production because it did not require expensive, imported chemical inputs.

The Great Plains

When the last great North American frontier, the Great Plains, closed three decades into the twentieth century, farmers could no longer replace the exhausted soils on their farms with fertile, uncultivated lands elsewhere. The closing of the frontier caged American farmers. The fall in the prices of agricultural products after World War I, coupled with widespread soil exhaustion, deepened rural poverty during the 1920s. The Depression impoverished rural peoples even further, and it discredited the capitalist class. In a political-economic sense, the Depression leveled some elements of inequality. The Dust Storms of the mid-1930s provided graphic, visual evidence of environmental degradation on farms, and they focused popular attention on the need for more sustainable practices. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded, with support from the large New Deal coalition, pushing through reforms in soil conservation and forest restoration that have shaped natural resource practices in the United States for almost a century.

England

Amidst a worldwide globalization of markets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, England became dependent on overseas sources for grains and for timber. These trends gradually reduced English agriculture to providing dairy products. During the interwar years, English farming declined still further when real estate developers, with the stimulus provided by the spread of automobiles, began to convert fields alongside roads into lots for new homes. The shock of World War II and the German submarine campaign to starve the British into submission focused the public and policymakers’ attention on food security. To assure their access to food in the event of another war, the English established green belts reserved for agricultural land uses around major English cities during the 1950s and 1960s. These regulations made cities more compact and reduced energy consumption among urban residents.

Radical Environmental Reforms

Socio-ecological processes occur either as presses or as pulses. Changes in press-like processes occur in small increments, and this dynamic encourages political domination by “business-as-usual” special interests. Changes in pulse-like processes occur suddenly, and they encourage the formation of encompassing coalitions that challenge rule by special interests. Pulses mobilize people by calling attention to a problem. Focusing events facilitate mobilizations for sustainability to a greater degree in larger political arenas than they do in smaller political arenas. Pulses also mobilize people by underlining sharp physical limits in the situations of people and the degraded resource. These caged conditions on islands, in common pool resources, and in other sharply limited human habitats underscore the limits of human exploitation and make it easier to mobilize people to reform or eliminate natural resource–degrading practices.

Introduction

“Business-as-usual” conditions during the last three decades of global warming have enabled special interests associated with fossil fuels to dominate the political economy of energy in most states. Gradual adoption of cleaner fuels from wind and the sun, a form of ecological modernization, has occurred, but in a context of growing demands for energy, the adoption of cleaner fuels has not reduced the use of fossil fuels, so the warming of the earth through greenhouse gas emissions has continued unabated. Alarmed observers have responded by urging radical changes in energy use. This book describes how these changes have occurred in the few twentieth-century cases of radical environmental reform.