How Green Is Our Valley?

Alexander Volokh from the March 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Perhaps the oddest part of Nature's Web is Marshall's insistence that he is a "libertarian"--a word that he uses repeatedly about his own environmental program and his favorite philosophers (including the Taoists, the Iroquois, and Immanuel Kant). He reviles radical Earth First!-types because they're perilously close to "eco-fascism," and "ecotopia cannot be created by coercive means." His approach, which he terms "libertarian ecology," recognizes "the claims of the individual as well as those of the social and biotic community."

"Libertarian ecology," explains Marshall, will save the earth and avoid oppressive government. After all, "ecologically conscious people will not follow private interest but experience ever-widening identification....They will throw off the spirit of gravity, unify mind and body, reason and imagination, and dance to the music of the spheres." Marshall's libertarianism is inspired by the notion that if rights are good, more rights are better. However, the definition of rights is a sticky business in Nature's Web. Traditionally, rights applied only to human beings because they alone can act volitionally, they alone can make purposeful decisions.

By finessing the point, Marshall doesn't have to draw distinctions between stones and humans, even ones as basic as "stones don't care" or "stones don't understand." Instead, stones have inherent value because they're "part of a system which makes up a living whole." Marshall stops short of positing "stones' rights," but even suggesting their moral worth is dubious.

After all, if every object on the planet has inherent value or moral worth, then any human action can, in theory, be banned. Everything we do affects something, and probably kills at least one thing--which means that either everything should be illegal, or someone's got to decide which human actions are stone-friendly and which ones aren't. Neither of those alternatives seems particularly "libertarian."

Wallace Kaufman turns his back precisely on this sort of muddled thinking in No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking. "Nature does not care," asserts Kaufman, "Only we do. And because we care, we have made the world an ever more livable place for ourselves by using science and technology and by exercising our power of dominion, wherever it comes from. The exercise of this power is a natural act....We are doing what every animal in creation has tried to do, only we are doing it more successfully because we have imagination and technology."

Kaufman is good at myth control. Among the myths he takes on: 1) recycling is always good, 2) forests are disappearing and development is the bad guy, 3) global warming threatens life on earth, 4) greed causes environmental problems, 5) nature is always right, 6) "sustainable development" is a good thing, and 7) primitive people were smarter managers of nature than we are.

And he reminds us of certain key truths, such as: 1) nature has no will but ours, and 2) natural resources are almost all a state of mind. Most important, as his book's title indicates, there is no turning back. To go back to the Pleistocene and avoid untold human suffering is the wildest of pipe dreams.

Kaufman is also good at debunking environmental self-righteousness. Thoreau, for instance, went hiking at Walden Pond wearing rubber boots and drinking Indian tea. "The Romantics contentedly enjoyed the blessings of the very things they condemned," says Kaufman. "Such logical contradictions did not bother them greatly. After all, logic was the enemy of real understanding."

This smacks of ad hominem attack, though it has a purpose--to point out that most environmental philosophers can't possibly have meant what they were saying. Sadly, Kaufman's attacks don't stop there. Rousseau is "the French philosopher-poet who was wandering around Europe leaving his children on the steps of foundling asylums as he practiced being a 'natural man.'" "Kevin Costner, who has played a number of anticapitalist roles including Robin Hood, might be dismayed to know that the legend of Robin Hood celebrates the struggle of citizens to win property rights from their government." These characterizations are gratuitous and don't advance Kaufman's argument. Neither do sweeping accusations that the green movement is dictatorial and undemocratic, or that "environmentalists know little of history in general and even less of economic history."

Unfortunately, when he gets beyond attack mode and moves into public-policy overdrive, Kaufman's own consistency becomes an issue. For instance, Kaufman charges that the Endangered Species Act saves no species, that it is an attack on development, that it serves the interests of an elite keen on preserving wilderness at someone else's expense, and that the economic and scientific advantages of biodiversity are marginal. Still, he wants to save ecosystems anyway because "when we lose a species, we often lose part of our own story, our own biological genealogy and family album."

Kaufman is vague because he wants to bash mainstream environmentalism while accepting its premises. He is a kiwi fruit environmentalist--rough on the outside, green on the inside. Thoreau believed that in "Wildness" is the preservation of the world; Kaufman believes that "in civilization is the salvation of wilderness and of nature in general." Kaufman calls these points of view "opposite," but they're not. Both he and Thoreau like wild things. His beef with the environmentalists is over means, not ends. That frees Kaufman to wax eloquent over the power of the market. In the end, though, he wants to do the same sort of environmental management, just with market-based regulations.

Kaufman tells us that "with a population of six billion and growing, we must manage nature for its sake and ours," but what he means is that technology is good because it can bring back extinct species and restore wetlands and old-growth forests. No word on why all that is "for our sake," or why we would want to recover ecosystems, especially if human impact on the environment is just part of nature.

While No Turning Back fails finally to "dismantle" environmental thinking, Charles Rubin's The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism gets the job done. Rather than look hundreds of years back for the roots of our understanding of the environment, Rubin concentrates on six recent gurus of the environmental movement: Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner on chemicals, Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin on population, and the Club of Rome and E.F. Schumacher on economic growth.

These are inspired choices. Carson, Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome are the great green popularizers, dealers in hope and fear who were able to make people think that there was a real and urgent problem, but who were also largely unaware of what the world they were advocating would look like. Commoner, Hardin, and Schumacher filled the void by laying out the relevant moral, political, and economic principles. Rubin convincingly points out the utopian fantasies underlying their visions and explores how the belief that society can be organized according to one principle makes their thought totalitarian.

Hence, Rachel Carson blamed environmental degradation on big business profits and called for a reevaluation of our relationship with nature but made no sustained criticism of either the economic system or of modern industry. Barry Commoner later revealed that guiding policy by ecological principles would require planning, in particular rule by environmental experts. To avoid the problems of totalitarianism, Commoner advocated global democratization as well. Historical evidence to the contrary, Commoner apparently believed that democracy and planning were likely to be consistent, and that planning was likely to avoid being centralized and repressive.