Green Political Theory

Robert E. Goodin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

With their remarkable electoral successes, Green parties worldwide seized the political imagination of friends and foes alike. Mainstream politicians busily disparage them and imitate them in turn. This new book shows that 'greens' deserve to be taken more seriously than that.

This is the first full-length philosophical discussion of the green political programme. Goodin shows that green public policy proposals are unified by a single, coherent moral vision - a 'green theory of value' - that is largely independent of the `green theory of agency' dictating green political mechanisms, strategies and tactics on the one hand, and personal lifestyle recommendations on the other. The upshot is that we demand that politicians implement green public policies, and implement them completely, without committing ourselves to the other often more eccentric aspects of green doctrine that threaten to alienate so many potential supporters.

1

What’s New?

1 The Issues

Concern with the natural environment is nothing new. Fears of resource depletion, voiced most powerfully in recent times by the Club of Rome’s 1972 The Limits to Growth, are in many ways little more than ‘Malthus with a computer’, as one of that report’s early and best critics observed.¹ Like his modern imitators, the Reverend Thomas Malthus had at the end of the eighteenth century expressed fears that population demands would outstrip the earth’s resources, his particular concern being its food-producing capacities.² Stanley Jevons, at the end of the nineteenth century, had voiced parallel fears that we would soon run out of coal.³ And President Truman, like many political leaders laid seige to before him, agonized over the adequacy of America’s ‘strategic stockpiles’ of crucial natural resources at the outset of the Cold War.⁴

Or again, we worry today about the unhealthy effects of polluting the air, water and oceans. But in many ways those just echo much older concerns. Anticipating the Garden City movement by fully two and a half centuries, John Evelyn’s 1661 tract Fumifugium (subtitled The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated) ‘humbly proposed … to his Sacred Majestie [Charles II] and to the Parliament now assembled’ that sweet-smelling trees be planted around the city to freshen its air.⁵ Longstanding suspicions about the role of air and water quality in promoting the health of the general population were confirmed with early nineteenth-century discoveries of the particular mechanisms by which plagues of typhoid and cholera are spread.⁶ And when in the early 1950s London’s smoke-laden fogs were finally firmly proven to be ‘killers’, the government promptly required householders to burn only ‘smokeless’ coal in their grates.⁷

Or yet again, we worry today about despoiling areas of great natural beauty. But many people have long felt a special affinity with and responsibility for nature.⁸ Earlier manifestations of this sort of attitude can, for example, be found in the work of the great romantic poets of Germany in the nineteenth century and before; in the work of the great landscape gardeners of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;⁹ and in the writings of mid nineteenth-century American transcendentalists, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.¹⁰ And such examples are of course illustrative rather than exhaustive. Everywhere, this sort of ‘respect for nature’ has apparently long been with us.¹¹ Nor is this attitude prevalent only among artists, essayists and poets. At least since the turn of the century, it has manifested itself in public policy as well as in private attitudes, with certain areas being set aside as ‘national parks’ and suchlike.¹²

In all those ways, current concern with environmental issues might seem to be ‘old wine in new bottles’. Still, something genuinely new does seem to have emerged in recent years.¹³ Indeed, the face of the debate seems to have changed twice in as many decades. At the risk of imposing artificial periodizations up on a smoothly evolving process, we might say that recent years have seen the recognition of not one but two quite distinct ‘environmental crises’.

Widespread appreciation of what might be called the ‘first environmental crisis’ might be dated only somewhat artificially, to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s enormously influential book, Silent Spring.¹⁴ Her particular concern, of course, was with DDT and the way in which that and other pesticides impeded the reproductive cycle of bird life: hence the reference in her title to ‘silence’, the absence of bird song. But Carson was concerned, more generally, about the way in which the indiscriminate use of chemicals of all sorts might poison the environment for humans as well. These themes, and ones related to them, lay simmering for a few years. But by the early 1970s, they had well and truly seized the public imagination. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Lake Erie was pronounced dead, killed by the indiscriminate dumping of industrial wastes. In the minds of many, that was merely a foretaste of things to come.¹⁵

While the concern in that first environmental crisis was with global collapse, the appropriate focus for social action and political pressure was nonetheless seen to be the individual state. Lake Erie was ‘killed’ by pollution almost wholly from Ohio industries, and could be (indeed, subsequently was) resuscitated almost exclusively through the efforts of people in one political jurisdiction. Population pressures were seen as crucial; but population was seen as being best controlled through small-scale policies, and indeed on a personal level as much as on a national one. The suggestion, recall, was principally that couples join the ‘2.1 club’, confining themselves to reproducing themselves but no more.¹⁶

In that first environmental crisis, there were of course intimations of further, greater disasters to come, if the policies that environmentalists prescribed were not implemented.¹⁷ But at least in the first instance, the policies were principally national rather than international in scope. Or, if international, that dimension just amounted to the replication of good national-level policy models in all other jurisdictions one by one.¹⁸ It is good for the United States to stop polluting the Great Lakes; and it is better if Canada stops, too. There was urgency, no doubt. But there was also plenty that each of us – as individuals, small groups or single nations – could usefully do, while waiting for the others to come around.

But all that has now changed once again.¹⁹ The issues presently at the forefront of our attention, in the midst of what might be called the ‘second environmental crisis’, are more genuinely global in scope. Primary among them are the twin threats of changing the global climate and destroying the ozone layer protecting the earth’s plants and people from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.²⁰ When the issue was just ordinary air pollution of the traditional sort, dirty air could effectively be cleaned simply through local regulations such as London’s requirement for households to burn smokeless coal in fireplaces and industrial users to install scrubbers in smokestacks. But no such purely local remedies will reliably suffice to patch the hole in the ozone layer.

True enough, the industrialized countries of the First World contribute disproportionately to the problem. The United States produces something like 28 per cent of all the world’s ozone-destroying CFC-11 and CFC-12, and West Europe another 30 per cent.²¹ But it would be wrong to infer from that fact that if America – or indeed all the member countries of the OECD – singlehandedly banned the use of aerosols, it would in and of itself solve the problem of ozone depletion.

Presumably our goal is genuine stabilization of the ozone layer, rather than merely slowing its rate of depletion. And presumably we want to be reasonably certain of accomplishing that goal. But if so, then we cannot – within the limits of present knowledge – be sufficiently sure of achieving that goal, even through dramatic reductions in emissions by such major producers as the OECD. Initiatives by single countries or small groups of countries can serve as useful starts and important precedents, but they cannot in and of themselves be expected to solve the problem. Unless their lead is followed by others, we cannot be at all sure of stopping the damage.

These new environmental concerns, unlike the core concerns of the environmental crisis, are truly global. These problems are shared, internationally, in a stronger sense. They are not just problems for each nation, taken one by one. They simply could not be resolved by isolated actions of individual nations. The whole world, or some very large proportion of it, must be involved in the solution. That shift from issues which, while recurring the world over, can be resolved on a country-by-country basis to ones which require concerted action by all the nations of the world is what, to my mind, marks the shift from the first environmental crisis to the second. That is the sense in which present environmental concern, and the sorts of social and political theories spawned by it, seem to me genuinely new.²²

That, anyway, is what I think has given rise to the recent upsurge in support for green causes and green political movements worldwide: in local politics, in national politics and in elections to supranational bodies like the European parliament. It is the need to take a genuinely ‘global perspective’, as green politics would apparently promise, to which voters seem to be responding.

Whether or not the greens themselves are fully up to this task is, perhaps, another question. Committed as they are to a programme of radical decentralization – ‘thinking globally’ but ‘acting locally’ – greens at one and the same time especially require but also singularly lack a theory of how the necessary coordination is to be achieved among all those autonomous smaller units. Absent such coordination, there seems to be a real risk that they might fail to achieve the results that they desire globally.

All this will be discussed more fully in chapter 4, section 4 below. There I suggest that we can, and probably should, accept green policy prescriptions without necessarily adopting green ideas about how to reform political structures and processes. As I conclude (chapter 5, section 2), electing a significant minority of greens to national or supranational legislatures – rather than giving greens their heads, and letting them reorganize those larger political entities out of existence altogether – might actually be just about optimal. That might enable us to secure what is best in the green programme while avoiding what is worst in it.

All those are larger issues for later discussion. My aim in these introductory remarks is merely to emphasize the new, genuinely global orientation. It is what seems to mark the distinctively new class of environmental issues, and what has in turn given rise to the recent upsurge in green politics.

2 The Arguments

With these changes in the nature of the issues have come changes in the nature of the arguments offered for environmentalist measures. The older, and often more theologically tinged versions tended to appeal to notions of humanity’s ‘stewardship’ of nature. Nature’s being God’s creation, it is not for us to destroy it; it having been bequeathed to us and our posterity jointly, it is for us to use but not to abuse it. Present people were, on these older theological models, little more than custodians or trustees for future generations – and, indeed, for all the other orders of creation. Human beings, as the crowning glory of God’s creation, have a peculiar obligation to protect other realms of God’s creation that would otherwise stand exposed and vulnerable.²³

Lingering traces of such sentiments can of course be found in attitudes towards nature down to our own day.²⁴ But by the mid-nineteenth century, newer more explicitly utilitarian attitudes had gained the ascendancy. Cast in those terms – as the case increasingly had to be, if it was to prove politically persuasive – the most telling arguments were about the ways in which environmental protection was required in order to further human interests. Allowing indiscriminate dumping of industrial effluents into the air or water poisoned people and diminished profits overall (although not of course the polluter’s own, at least not for a while). Allowing uncontrolled exploitation of common property resources led to the overuse and ultimately to the utter exhaustion of essential resources. Varied though the details of these arguments might be, their essence always remained the same: inadequate protection of the human environment seriously compromised human interests.²⁵

Remedies, too, varied in their detail but not in their basic ethos. Pollution was conceptualized as a divergence between private and social cost;²⁶ resource depletion was conceptualized as the result of overexploitation of common property resources.²⁷ Both represented failures of ordinary markets to force people to internalize fully the costs of their choices. The problem, on this utilitarian analysis, was essentially one of market failure. The remedy, in essence, was to correct that market failure.

Some thought that market mechanisms could be suitably adjusted – through privatization, pollution (or, more recently, carbon) taxes, marketable permits to pollut...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. What’s New?
• 2. A Green Theory of Value
• 3. The Unity of the Green Programme
• 4. The Green Theory of Agency
• 5. Conclusions
• Appendix: The Green Political Programme
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index