The life of environmental law since 1970 has
been less epiphany than economics. The
design, implementation, and interpretation of environmental statutes have been
deeply affected by two related trends: use of market-based regulatory
instruments, such as tradable emissions permits, and the rise of cost-benefit
analysis as (at least) extremely weighty in choosing the goals of environmental
policy. Legal scholarship has helped to
power these trends with criticism of inflexible and cost-insensitive instruments
and ambitious attempts to assess environmental regulation within a larger
cost-benefit framework. These
developments have been controversial: critics in Congress, the environmental
movement, and the legal academy have charged that these economic approaches
obscure or violate the distinctive value of the natural world and inhibit the
future growth of environmental values.
These questions are basic. Do prices flatten moral distinctions? Does cost-benefit analysis foster an
instrumental view of the natural world?
Those who helped create the forms of environmental imagination that this
paper discusses had, at various times, sharply differing views of these
questions. Nature and economics have
been co-evolving for centuries, so that an idea of one has often implied an
idea of the other, and arguments about each are often, at base, arguments about
both.
**
The same Thomas Morton of
Merry-Mount who so agitated the early Massachusetts Puritans with his
free-and-easy attitude to the Indians and his just-maybe pagan festivals was
also through and through a Renaissance businessman, a merchant type familiar
from Shakespeare. He opened his New English Canaan, an account of the
new world and a score-settling with his erstwhile Puritan neighbors, with a
verse description of North America as “a faire virgin, longing to be sped/And
meet her lover in a Nuptiall bed/… most fortunate/When most enjoyed.”[1]
When men left the continent unimproved by “art and industry,” her “fruitfull
wombe” let its products fail “like a glorious tombe/… in darck obscurity.”[2] As the industrious English rushed to “enjoy”
her, though, they would bring into the light these “Admired things … The worth
of which, in each particuler, Who list to know, this abstract will declare.”[3]
It is a vivid and unsettling
poem. Its euphemisms (“most
fortunate/When most enjoyed”) bring us fairly close to the pleasures of the
bed. The coupling of “wombe” and “tombe”
casts the pre-contact continent in macabre tones: not teeming with life, but
failing to produce it despite potential, a fallow desolation. This dense cluster of hortatory, erotic, and
gynecological images is not here for its own sake. It is the frontispiece to a ledger of
commodities, an “abstract” that will set out “the worth of … each.”
Morton’s “abstract” can seem on
first reading to be just a vivid bestiary.
He describes “Squirils of three sorts, very different in shap and
condition,” the gray, the red, and “a little flying Squirrill, with batlike
winges, which hee spreads when hee jumps from tree to tree, and does no harme.”[4] The bear is an innocent creature, frightening
only to “some effeminate person who conceaved of more danger in them [than]
there is cause,” although “the Beare is a tyrant at a Lobster.”[5] The wolf, which sometimes hunts “puppy
dogg[s]” to feed its whelps, is a “discommodity” in North America as in other
“Countries of Christendome,” the “Salvages [a spelling that reminds the reader
that savage means people of the
forest] treasure its hide and will trade 40 beaver skins for the pelt of a
black wolf, which makes it “worthy [of] the title of a commodity.”[6]
The reader soon realizes that
“commodity,” meaning both that which is useful and that which can be sold, is
the key to Morton’s discussion. Though
he promises a description of the “bewty of the Country” and does give a
cursory, admiring account of “her naturall indowements,” here, as with the
bride of the poetic epigraph, the emphasis is on the fruitful enjoyment that
comes from “employ[ing] her.”[7] His account of trees ends by observing that
American musk roses produces a better rosewater than their English cousins and
that sassafras “doe[s] perfume the airs” in spring, but his focus is on the
uses, and markets, for oak, ash, beech, walnut, chestnut, maple, birch, and evergreens. (The last were especially essential for
navigation, from masts to sealing pitch.)[8] The “curious bird to see, called a hunning
bird, no bigger than a great Beetle,” won Morton’s admiration for its “glosse
like silke … of a chaingable colour,” but was the last bird mentioned after the
many edible kinds whose abundance he trumpeted.[9] The “beasts,” too, he addressed in order of
usefulness, beginning with deer and moose, reliable sources of meat and the
latter showing promise as a harnessed draft-animal (striking thought!) for the
new world.
All these edible things are
commodities in the sense that they are useful: they will keep colonists alive,
like the North American salad greens whose “maskuline vertue” Morton pauses to
admire.[10] The heart of his analysis of “commodity,”
though, is market value, which has a double-headed currency: English money on
the one hand and beaver skins on the other.
The latter are “the best marchantable commodity,”[11]
fetching 10 shillings a pound when Morton wrote, and he provided the value of
many other skins in terms of beaver pelts: between two and four to a deer hide,
and, as mentioned, 40 for the skin of a wolf.
Because the otter’s market was in England, and not in the Indian trade,
it was instead priced in cash, at “3 or 4 Angels of gold.”[12]
Two things are striking about
Morton’s “abstract” of American commodities.
For one, it is a bestiary for an extractive colony, much more than for a
settler colony. There is no discussion
of the fertility of the soil, and the plants that interest Morton, besides
trees, are the wild “Potthearbes and other herbes for Sallets,” not gardened
greens. Usefulness, commodity, refers to
those things that traders can live on during their sojourns in America, and to
what they can sell on the home market.
Second, there is a vivacity, a sensual interest in the continent and its
life, that coexists easily with Morton’s list of uses and prices. He is Falstaff and Prospero, a colonial
master and a voluptuary with time to wonder at the “hunning-bird,” though not
to the neglect of his account-books.[13]
As we have seen in the earlier
chapter on North America as a garden, “commodity” came to be the central value
of the American land in the eyes of its conquerors and settlers. What developed here was not Morton’s
extractive vision, but an agrarian one.
Instead of stripping the wealth of a teeming continent, westward
settlers transformed it by turning forests and prairies into fields and
wood-lots. The key institution in this
movement was private property: by ensuring the settler the fruits of his labor,
property turned the mobs of Eastern cities and the second (through eighth) sons
of New England into a volunteer army dedicated to clearing, planting, and
harvesting. From Thomas Jefferson and
James Wilson forward to Horace Greeley and William Gilpin, Americans called
westward settlement the key to the country’s free, republican (later
democratic) character; a nation of self-reliant landowners could be equal and
free as no large country had ever been. Early in the nineteenth century, a West full
of small farmers was to save the United States from the hierarchical land
ownership of the Old World, where peasants and serfs labored in legal and
economic bondage to great landlords. It
was also to save North Americans from cities, riot-prone and malarial. By the later decades of the century, the
frontier was cast as salvation from class conflict: Europe might split into the
warring camps of capital and labor, Abraham Lincoln argued in 1859, but
widespread property-holding meant that Americans were both owners and laborers,
and could expect to circulate among economic roles (generally upward) through
their lives. The owner-laborer also
became a new ideal of democratic personality: thinking and working, he united
the head and the hands in a way that both landlord agriculture and industrial
capitalism prevented. In North America,
a person could be whole in his work, thanks to the wealth and size of the
continent – or so many argued.
Against this backdrop, one sees more
clearly the radicalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
dissent, and that of the Transcendentalists and fellow-travelers who joined
their domestic exile into an alternative American identity. Thoreau’s Walden
opens with a long chapter (over 60 pages in a standard-sized edition) on
“Economy,” which contains no glimpse of the author’s experimental sojourn in
Walden woods. (That comes later in the
book.) Much of “Economy” is a polemical
satire that aims to reverse the standard American idea about economics and
freedom, not once but twice – first by portraying labor and land-ownership as a
form of enslavement, then by insisting that the “economy” that should concern
Americans is a mental and spiritual sort.
Thoreau calls his respectable Concord neighbors, those who own farms,
houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools, “serfs of the soil” and envisions
many a poor immortal soul … well-nigh
crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing
before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such
inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
feet of flesh.[14]
There are two thoughts here. First, the husbandry that American rhetoric
called an emblem of freedom and source of honor did not deserve the
praise. The culture of hard work
appealed to dignity and the sense of responsibility, but in reality it offered
submission to “an economical and moral tyrant.” [15] The American condition, Thoreau claimed in an
echo of Rousseau, was to “be born free but not to live free.”[16] Second, the great cost of the American
fixation on labor and commerce was in squandered potential: it distracted an
entire people from “the true problems of life,” self-cultivation and the
cultivation of experience.[17]
Thoreau urged his reader not to be “a slave-driver of yourself.”[18] This, much more than any theory of man’s
exploitation of man, was the heart of his complaint and his vision of
emancipation.
Thoreau proposed two changes in the idea of
“economy,” to wrest that word away from the “business” that he called “more
opposed to poetry, to philosophy … to life itself,” than anything else in the
world.[19] One change was to redefine the idea of
wealth, from the market value of possession to the richness of experience. In an extended riff on the idea of
real-estate speculation, and so on the question of what one would hope to gain by
ownership, Thoreau remarked, “I have frequently seen a poet withdraw [during a
walk], having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm.”[20]
He described the poet who conjured in language land he never owned – as Thoreau
never owned his little plot near the Concord-Lincoln line – as possessing it in
a higher sense, having “fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all
the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.”[21] The image of stripping the land, used to
describe a way of seeing that leaves it physically untouched, is high irony,
intended to transform the reader’s sense of what it might mean to be rich.
Wealth was not in getting but in being, and getting was the worst kind of
distraction – especially since Americans had confused it with freedom and
dignity.
Thoreau also proposed to redefine the
personal virtue that is an older meaning of “economy”: diligent labor and
self-mastery, as in the small disciplines of “home economics.” Thoreau would have changed this virtue from a
technique of acquisition to a practice of awareness. He filled his chapter on “Economy” with
balance sheets of income and expenditure from his stay at Walden – our first
introduction to the two years he spent there, since the pond itself does not
appear until the second chapter, and then in a roundabout way. He did not neglect a two-cent watermelon, 22
cents worth of dried apples, or a dime-sack of sweet potatoes, set against
$13.34 earned by day labor.[22] The profit-and-loss tables appear again in
“The Bean-Field,” Thoreau’s chapter on cultivating beans and potatoes, from
which he calculates “a pecuniary profit … of $8.71½.”[23]
All of this is to be taken ironically. Thoreau elsewhere noted indignantly, “I
cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled
for dollars and cents,” and he concluded “The Bean-Field” by declaring that, if
he planted again, he would leave the crop to birds and wild animals, rejoicing
in weeds and giving nature its way.[24] The use of “pecuniary” to specify the kind of
profit that he took from his farming is significant, because this is the kind
of “profit” that Thoreau urged Americans to value less. When he notes, “Nothing was given me of which
I have not rendered some account,” the reader may take that as assurance that no
undocumented watermelon found its way into Thoreau’s cabin, or, alternatively,
as paraphrasing the purpose of the entire book: to take account of, measure and
record most exactingly the author’s transactions with the world. Some of these must be material, but many will
be perceptions, thoughts, experiences – the substance of the poet’s property
claim on the farmer’s estate. If wealth
is in awareness, attention, then maybe the American can transform his
“economy,” the discipline of his self-enslavement, into a discipline of
self-emancipation. Thoreau expressed
precisely this thought in a journal entry wondering at the heroic
self-discipline of a local farmer who arose before dawn every day for decades
to labor in the cold. Such a man should
be an ascetic teacher, Thoreau proposed: the same energy and concentration
rededicated to spiritual innovation could found a new age of humanity.
This is not to say that Thoreau had no
interest in the physical use of nature.
For his call to consciousness to be more than idle, he had to be right
when he wrote that “to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but
a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.”[25] Americans’ labors served “a seeming fate
commonly called necessity,”[26]and
to identify “the true necessaries and means of life” was not only an ironic
literary device; it was what one had to do to give spiritual advice without
becoming fatuous. It is to Thoreau’s
credit as a serious American thinker
that he assumed no caste division between laborers and poets, and so insisted,
“if getting a living is not [inviting
and glorious] then living is not.”[27] For a philosophical way of life to be worth
recommending, it must be possible for a whole people to adopt it, not just
notionally but in concrete practice. So
he declared,
It is pertinent to ask if Plato got his living in a better way or more
successfully than his contemporaries – or did he succumb to the difficulties of
life like other men? Did he seem to
prevail over some of them merely by indifference, or by assuming grand
airs? or find it easier to live, because
his aunt remembered him in her will?[28]
These
were the questions Thoreau had to answer on his own account to qualify Walden as a philosophical polemic for
Americans.
Thoreau, then, proposed quite a
different version of “economy” with nature than either Thomas Morton or the nineteenth-century
Americans who celebrated frontier settlement.
For Thoreau, the basic relationship to seek with nature was a meditative
one – to have one’s own thoughts distilled in the analogies and symbols that
the mind discerned in things carefully observed. To dissolve the natural world into money
would destroy the living places that could prompt insight, but even more
basically it would discourage the search for insight in a living world. “As if a town had no interest in its forests
but to cut them down!” Thoreau exclaimed, having demonstrated at the length the
other kinds of “interest” one could take in a woods – in the sense of being
fascinated by it, but also in the sense of having something at stake in it.
As discussed in an earlier chapter,
this idea made sense if nature were full of signs, meanings, and relations akin
to the organizing concerns of the human mind.
What did that view of nature invite in the way of a new view of
“economy?” On the one hand, “the
economy,” the system of transactions and wealth-production, should be
understood as a practice of attention and storehouse of experience – an
altogether different thought from the dominant view of Thoreau’s time, or any
later time. On the other hand, the
virtue of “economy,” the discipline of husbanding resources, should turn from
penny-pinching to the conferral and preservation of attention that was
Thoreau’s main concern. This may have
been the sense of the word that Emerson had in mind when he wrote in a journal
entry, “The transcendental is an economy also” – also something to be
husbanded, preserved, and increased.[29] Wealth,
at its root, is weal, well-being, and
Thoreau’s argument is that to live well it is necessary to reconsider what
counts as “wealth” and what as poverty.
Famously, economy comes from oikos,
Greek for household, and it shares this root with ecology, a nineteenth-century neologism coined by the German
natural historian, Ernst Haeckel. Economy
in Thoreau’s sense is homemaking, and the stakes of his discussion is what kind
of home people will make of the earth.
The logic of his argument is that what a people counts as wealth is
inseparable from the kind of home it makes.
As Thoreau puts it in “Economy,” “if one designs to construct a
dwelling-house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest
after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum,
an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead.”[30] An economy, then, is at once a form of
material activity and a form of consciousness.
The physical practices that make up an economy are practical expressions
of what those who live in that economy value, that is, regard as wealth, that
is, regard as well-being and so worth living by and toward. At the same time, those practices shape
consciousness: they induct people into the habits that become identities, the
“seeming necessity” that they come to regard as fate. In this mutually shaping cycle between the
individual mind and the common world, Thoreau famously claimed we could insert
freedom only through the mind, the undetermined thought. As long as neither changed, each implied the
other, and, imagining both to be natural, no one would ask whether – or how –
it might all be different.
Thoreau’s idea had a long
pedigree. That the world was a household
whose design told us how to live in it, so that social and political order
should share basic features with natural order, was central to the medieval
idea that analogies among the various “kingdoms” of creation expressed a
common, underlying significance.
Hierarchy and order, upheaval and anarchy, showed up in the harmony of
the stars and the disruption a comet foretold, in the dominance of the eagle
over the skies and the lion (earlier, in northern Europe, the bear) over land
beasts. The “natural theologians” such
as Henry More and, especially, John Ray, who set out to reconstruct this
comprehensive order in response to threats from revolution and the Epicurean
skepticism of Hobbes and others, gave the idea of natural harmony a more
distinctly “economic” cast. They
emphasized the complex scheme of mutual advantage that made every life form
valuable to every other, rather than a straightforward hierarchy of
species. The order they praised was thus
full of paradoxes and surprising benefits, such as the vindication of
“pests.” It also concentrated on
relatively low-built, material benefits: although everything in creation bent
ultimately toward salvation, the natural order worked largely to sustain its
parts, rather than directly to a higher glory.
Theirs was an account of nature for commoners as much as for kings,
though nothing in it tended to displace kings.
In both respects, the natural theologians’
picture of the world had affinities with the theory of market economies that
came into full force in the later eighteenth century, most famously in Adam
Smith. That theory, too, focused on the
material and social benefits that self-interested individuals pursued, rather
than any more elevated purpose, and described order as arising in paradoxical
and non-obvious ways from that pursuit.
Smith, like his contemporary and great influence, David Hume, described
morality, including political philosophy, as arising from certain emotions and
habits of thought in human nature, rather than from a transcendent order. Because they rejected the idea that the
natural world disclosed divine or other moral design – that how things are
shows how they should be – it is easy to miss how much their theory of social
order, or economy, has in common with an earlier, explicitly theological
approach to social order. They
distilled into human nature all the propensity to mutually advantageous harmony
that had previously been rooted in a theory of nature itself, with human nature
a continuous part of the larger fabric.
As we have seen, in the American setting the affinity between a theory
of nature and a market-oriented theory of the economy was more explicit and
longer lived, largely because the idea of an open continent to the West was so
important to the political economy in which figures like James Wilson and
Thomas Jefferson expressed their vision of the United States.
Thoreau was writing in the America this idea
had helped to create, where the cornerstones of public philosophy included the
dignity of labor, nature’s need to be fruitfully cultivated, and an image of
national destiny in which westward development would extend both liberty and
wealth. In Walden and essays like “Life Without Principle,” he insisted that
this way of thinking shut out the highest things: the dignity of reflection and
contemplation, the value of nature as a contemplative object and source of
insight, and an image of national destiny that focused on freedom of the mind
as a necessary condition of political and social liberty. Making good on this second set of ideas, he
argued, would require building a different kind of house in the world, both in
our minds and in our work.
Thoreau insisted on taking seriously that
the American economy was a mode of relating to the natural world as well as to
one another. Moving across the
continent, Americans would shape nature in answer to how they had learned to imagine
it, and would become the kinds of selves they already supposed themselves to
be. What they valued, they would make
and become. This was the national
significance of Thoreau’s adage that reality answers faithfully and invariably
to our conceptions of it. An economy
implied ideas both about good human lives and about the natural world, a
connection that had been vivid in the natural theologians but suppressed in
their Scottish Enlightenment successors.
The right shape of an economy, though, could not simply be reckoned from
the blueprint of the world. Instead, it
was a matter of choosing. In that
choice, what Americans valued, how they related to one another, and what they
made of the natural world were unavoidably tied together.
As the nineteenth century grew older, this
idea – that Americans would make their economy and remake themselves, all at
once – became less a conceit about the power of vision over material things (as
it arguably was for the Transcendentalist Thoreau, although he was subtle and
unruly enough to overrun that simple classification). It became palpable that Americans would
remake the whole continent, and much sooner than the first visionaries of
Manifest Destiny had supposed. The
wilderness’s longing to become an orderly landscape of fertile farms, that
article of early American faith and public rhetoric, did not avert ecological
catastrophes such as small farmers’ move into the semi-arid Great Plains in the
1880s. West of the hundredth meridian,
hardy settlement was no substitute for large-scale landscape engineering like
the irrigation projects that became a federal preoccupation after unaided
pioneers mainly failed to fertilize the desert.
Landscape-making choices would be unavoidable, on a regional scale that
added up, fairly quickly, to a continental scale. In the face of these choices, as well as the
prospect of exhausting essential resources, Progressive reformers like Theodore
Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot made their case for a strong national government
that could manage the interwoven problems of natural and social systems – from
forestry to public health and antitrust – and build a more mature civic culture
in the process.
Progressive reformers saw the natural world
as valuable in service to human interests: they were not interested in the
“occult intelligence with the vegetable” [check quote] that attracted Emerson
and which Thoreau explored in far greater depth than his elder and
landlord. Many Progressives did embrace
a broad idea of the interests the natural world could serve, including
psychological respite from workaday life.
The aesthetic ideas of beauty and sublimity came to be parts of a
public-health program in the hands of parks advocates such as Frederick Law
Olmsted. They also introduced an idea
that would be central to later environmental economics: that although
individual economic decisions can add up to considerable harm and unfairness,
meaning laissez-faire is unsound
policy, regulation can make the economy a “machine that runs of itself,”
producing the right mix of values more or less automatically as long as expert
judgment guides the rules that shape the system. No one expressed this idea more confidently
than Theodore Roosevelt, when he insisetd that a regulatory program of
“national efficiency” would shape the economy to reward each person in
proportion to his or her contribution to the public good, no more and no
less.
The Progressives’ contemporary and
Roosevelt’s sometime camping companion, John Muir, saw these questions somewhat
differently. Muir followed Thoreau in
contrasting two forms of consciousness: the elevated awareness of the person in
communion with nature and the flattened, dulled mind of the laborer in the
lowlands. (For Muir, morally and
psychologically flattening labor was generally that of the lowlands, though he
also condescended to shepherds and shingle-cutters who brought their
economically minded attitudes to his highlands.) It bespeaks the limits of Muir’s thought that
he did not find a way to write about the activity that took up his middle
decades: operating a produce farm outside San Francisco, which served the
city’s markets via a rail spur. Muir
penned no answer to Thoreau’s ironic essay on hoeing the bean-field at Walden,
nor did he put his account books to the literary uses that Thoreau’s
served. His nature was a counterpoint to
the anti-aesthetic, anti-spiritual “busyness” that Thoreau had decried, but it
was also a selective exception to the accepted fact that busyness would
dominate most of life and most of the American landscape. The large share of the natural world that
Americans had dedicated to agriculture, let alone for the (more or less)
regulated industries and cities that preoccupied Progressive reformers, had no
voice in Muir’s writing. Muir’s vision
of the natural world, for all its aesthetic and spiritual appeal, lent itself
so easily to tourism because the nature he praised was an exception, a
geographic carve-out from the progress of development, to be enjoyed in the few
weeks a year dedicated to vacation.
[Bridge]
[The most interesting moment here is a sharp
break in how “economics” was cast in the mainstream environmental
movement. Amid the rise of ecological
interdependence in the 1960s and 1970s, “economics” went from being an assumed
part of the movement’s argumentative repertoire to playing the role of nemesis,
portrayed as embodying the instrumentalism and obsessive wealth-maximization
that the new environmentalists defined themselves against. There was also, however, a counter-current in
which environmentalists imagined an allegedly very different, “ecological”
economics. Today we live in a sometimes
fractious mélange of the three perspectives, with the third recently in the
ascendant.]
The Sierra Club in the 1950s and 1960s was
an uncritical and mostly upbeat participant in the cost-benefit politics of the
public-lands agencies, and regarded the economics discipline as an ally whose
rigor helped the Club to refute spurious claims that dams, roads, and logging
sales would greatly serve the public welfare.
During the dispute over damming Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument,
the Bulletin ran photo-spreads of the
landscape along the Utah-Colorado border, but its article-length arguments
tended to emphasize that alternative developments could achieve the same power and
water benefits at lower cost.[31] Fourteen years later, in 1968, the Club was
instructing its member on the “Uses and Abuses of Highway Benefit-Cost
Analysis,” a technical primer on discount rates, secondary benefits, and the
assumed useful life of a road project, intended to enable activists to comment
intelligently on agency decisions.[32] The tone of the piece is in no way critical
of the cost-benefit procedure, but notes that development interests may try to
inflate the benefits totals, a reason for Club members to be numerate. A year later, a similar piece invoked the
authority of “economists” and “nearly every resource economist” to argue that
sophisticated cost-benefit analysis cut against large dam projects.[33] The argument, then, was within cost-benefit
analysis, not in contrast to it.
The Bulletin
even contended that cost-benefit analysis could integrate beauty. This came in connection with the
establishment of the “aesthetic injury” basis of federal standing in the
dispute over a proposed Consolidated Edison power plant at the Hudson Valley’s
Storm King Mountain: “The [Club] attorneys’ position has been that that scenic
beauty can be objectively analyzed and degrees of scenic beauty can be stated.”[34] Indeed, as the Club’s underlying brief
argued, “There … are standards and experts, and natural beauty can be the
subject of analysis, with sufficient definiteness to distinguish that which is
worthy of protection” in relation to economic costs and benefits.[35]
This style of argument was not simply a
product of the Club’s status as a mature interest group in public-lands
politics. Club leaders made very similar
arguments in the first decade of the twentieth century, in their storied losing
fight against San Francisco’s damming Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley for a
municipal water supply.[36] And, as their arguments supposed he would,
Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield considered “the standpoint of
[Hetch Hetchy’s] scenic effects, natural wonders, and health and pleasure” in
the statutorily mandated public-interest analysis that accompanied his approval
of the proposed dam.[37] The premise of all of these arguments is that
cost-benefit analysis is a flexible, forceful means of specifying competing
considerations and establishing an authoritative public interest. It is not the enemy of beauty or wonder, but
the way those aesthetic values are translated into public policy. The problem was not that decisions came
through calculation, but that persons and groups that lacked sensitivity to
natural beauty would exclude it the public-interest calculus, in favor of a
purely material view of welfare – hence the Club’s assertion that the “moral
and physical welfare of a nation is not dependent alone on bread and water”[38]
and its founders’ contempt for “gain-seekers” who could see in a landscape only
potential income.[39] In both the faith in calculation and the
embrace of interests beyond concern for one’s own material welfare, the Club
was of a piece with the progressive political culture in which it matured and
found a vehicle for the values of romantic epiphany.
Something changed, however, with the
language of ecological interdependence.
Essays calling for “a religion” of ecology and “extraordinary commitment
to an entirely new way of life”[40]
cast “exploit[ation]”[41]
of nature and “limitless expansion of the economy”[42]
as their nemeses. Soon the nemeses were
gathered in “economics.” Bulletin contributors asserted, “We are
told that we must have growth because economists insist upon it”[43]
and argued that “the displacement of spiritual goals by the drive to accumulate
wealth has its origins in the belief that man is separate from nature and is
its master.”[44] Economics had been cast as the embodiment of
the relentless focus on the instrumental value of nature that the new environmentalists,
with their language of humility and interdependence, understood themselves to
be defying. Economics became, in a
peculiar sense, the opposite of ecology.
This opposition was sounded in movement literature, but it had roots in
more systematic arguments about the consequences of an ecological
perspective. Lynton K. Caldwell, the
most important intellectual architect of the National Environmental Policy Act,
argued in 1970 that “two major ways of looking at the world have characterized
man’s attitude … the first may be termed economic,
the second ecological.”[45] The first he described as embracing a simple
ethic: “to make nature serve man’s material needs.”[46] Ecology, by contrast, adjusted human purposes
and values in recognition of the continuity and interdependence of life.[47]
The language of ecological interdependence
may have required an antithesis: its affirmations were vague enough that a
focusing negation was a great rhetorical help.
Moreover, there was symmetry in the scope of the theories. Economists’ study of choice under constraint
and ecologists’ exploration of interdependence both implicate all human
interactions with “resources.” This
shared comprehensiveness might have invited the sense that the two were
struggling over the same world.
All the same, the opposition was also
contingent and, as we have seen, a switch from an earlier attitude. Nonetheless, identifying “economics” with
instrumental mastery over nature and obtuseness to non-monetary values became
reflexive for many environmentalists, who called environmental benefits “a
qualitative advance that is to be enjoyed, not measured.”[48]
At the same time, the attitudes of
progressive management never disappeared.
Those attitudes powerfully influenced neo-progressive scholars and such
post-1970 groups as the Environmental Defense Fund, noted for its early and
controversial embrace of tradable emissions permits. The encounter between economics and
ecological interdependence also produced a second, very different result from
the initial casting of the two as opposites.
This was a sort of eco-utopian economics, the ideal of a market-style
system whose pricing would reflect ecologically complete information, building
complex and systemic costs and benefits into the structure of every production
and consumption choice. Anticipated
already in Caldwell’s acknowledgment that his opposed standpoints might
converge “if all relevant factors were considered,”[49]
this idea emerged in popular polemics in the 1990s and today is a conventional,
if hard-to-specify, endpoint in evocations of environmental goals.[50]
Because this idea is so central to the
ambitions of environmental law and policy today, understanding both its appeal
and its limitations is important. The
touchstone is an economy without unpriced environmental externalities, that is,
in which every environmental effect of any action is expressed in money terms
as a cost or a reward of any action. Buy
gasoline for your car, or burn coal in your power plant, and pay a carbon fee
that captures the effect of carbon emissions on climate change. On the plus side, farm in a way that
preserves topsoil or wetlands, which support soil fertility and clean
waterways, and receive a reward, whether through a tax credit or by selling
someone else permission to do the environmental harm that you have
avoided. Such pricing would plainly
affect consumer decisions, driving down use of, say, fossil fuels and
encouraging more environmentally friendly alternatives. Ultimately more important is that it would
change all levels of economic activity.
Research in alternative energies, or in technology to preserve soil in
large-scale agriculture, would also increase because of increased demand for
such technologies. The whole economy
would tilt in an environmentally friendly direction. A green hue would tinge every decision.
It is conventional to disparage subsidies to
favored industries as inefficient and invitations to political corruption. The argument for the “ecological pricing”
under discussion here is that it would not be a subsidy on top of a working
market, but rather a correction of a market failure – that is, the failure of
the economy to take account of the many harms and benefits that arise from
environmental externalities. It would
not depart from the market, but perfect it.
In its utopian ideal, it would harmonize the ecological effects of human
activity with the rewards and penalties of the economy.
It is unsurprising that this idea developed
in recent decades. Since the perception
of a global ecological crisis arose in the 1960’s, environmental challenges
have inspired utopian responses. One of
the major inspirations for utopian thought is the perception that the present
order is untenable , but that its basic logic is so entrenched that a whole new
order is necessary to repair it. The
analysis of environmental destruction as arising out of the ordinary activity
of modern life, especially the pursuit of economic growth as the measure of
progress, produced this kind of grim prognosis.
Ordinary life, in its most innocent and humane goals – comfort,
security, progress – came to seem covertly bent on self-immolation. Utopias arise from the sense that the present
world is making itself impossible, and that there must be a bridge to another,
even if we have not found it yet.
The idea of the perfect market is the last
utopia (or maybe one of the last two, since historian Samuel Moyn has given the
same title to the goals of the international human-rights movement). Other utopias, such as communism, have
promised to reconcile the basic and mutually contradictory features of human
life – in the case of communism, freedom and interdependence. Freedom is rooted in our power to make
choices, and, more deeply, in our having desires, goals, images of the lives we
wish to lead, which make the power of choice precious to us. Interdependence is rooted in two inescapable
facts. We live in a world of finite
resources, which we need for pursuing our plans and visions of life. Many of the things we need, whether fuel,
fresh water, or just a room of one’s own, cannot serve two people at once, so
my using these things to live my life interferes with your doing the same. At the same time, we need one another in
living our lives. Whether for labor,
knowledge, or affection, there is precious little we can accomplish alone, and
much of what is precious, we cannot have alone at all. But these “human resources” – a rather brutal
term – are finite, too; past a point, your helping me means you cannot help
someone else, and so we all spend our hours and energy making some people’s
visions of life real, while others’ remain only empty wishes.
In its simplest form, the communist utopia
imagined dissolving the first part of problem of interdependence, and, with it,
part of the second. In time, technology
would produce enough wealth that, in effect, there would be no competition for
material resources. There would be
enough to go around. The political
transformation of communism would seize this material possibility by ending
private ownership of economically critical resources, meaning the owner of a
factory, or a new technology or wireless network, could not use the power of
ownership to extract fees or wage-labor from others. Instead, everyone would have free access to the
plentiful things of the world. They
would still, of course, need to persuade one another to help make their
projects real, but they could no longer do it by snapping their fingers and
hiring help. With economic power
equalized and wealth abundant, they would have to use human persuasion – appeals to love, enthusiasm, the pleasure of
creative activity or play. Not every
vision of life would come true, of course, but the forces that ordered our
interdependence would be as compatible as possible with our freedom.
As a general vision, market utopianism is
ironically similar in its broad outlines, though much more modest in what it
offers. It promises that our
interdependence and our freedom can find harmony in a libertarian economy of
informed and voluntary choices: when all consequences of a decision are
included in its price, autonomous choice will impose no arbitrary burdens on
others. Instead, the prices that channel
market decisions will provide a neutral architecture in which individual
actions take place. The resources we
need will still be scarce, but we will determine who gets what by giving it to
the one who is willing (and able) to pay most for it, at a price that takes
into account all effects on others. One
marked difference is that market utopianism assumes resources will always be
scarce enough that we will have to compete for them, and so aims at perfecting,
by its lights, the way that economic order distributes resources. Another is that market utopianism begins by
assuming unequal wealth and economic power, and proceeds on that basis. From a more radical standpoint, then, market
utopianism works out some of the kinks in a highly unequal system, in which the
solution to interdependence pushes down the freedom of the poor and unlucky and
elevates that of the wealthy. From this
perspective, market utopianism is something of a distraction from the more
pressing question of whether we can share out freedom more equally.
Be that as it may, environmental market
utopianism is a cousin of the general market-utopian approach. It promises to reconcile our need and
appetite for the world’s resources with the earth’s finitude and
fragility. Again, it would do this
through an economy of informed and free choice, this time enhanced by
ecologically correct pricing. On the one
hand, this utopia would look just about like the world we actually
inhabit. On the other hand, it would be
basically different. Everything would
have a price – incorporating its environmental effect – and nothing would be
free but what is environmentally cost-neutral.
There is a special affinity between
environmental regulation and this market vision. The neo-classical economics that gained so
much influence in the last decades of the twentieth century bases its support
for markets over regulation in good part on the complexity of the social
world. The information that is relevant
to economic choices is too diverse and widely dispersed for any central
decision-maker to know it all, and the great virtue of markets is that they
gather this information through as many small, locally informed decisions as
there are human actions in a day. When
you compare copper tile with a terra cotta alternative, the price tag
summarizes a huge amount of information: new uses for copper in industrial
processes may have increased orders from factories in China, a recession have
reduced consumer purchases from those factories in Europe, and political
instability in copper-producing countries created worry that supplies may be
reduced next year. You don’t need to
know any of this: the higher price of copper “tells” you everything you need to
know, and coordinates your use of it with everyone else’s.
This image of social life resembles the
picture of the natural world that ecology introduced. Recall that the progressive managers of the
nineteenth century saw nature, and social life generally, as complex enough to
need extensive regulation, but simple and consistent enough that expert
managers could govern it effectively.
Ecology revealed that these managers had considered far too few of the
many forces and life-forms that flowed through any ecosystem. One example is the way pollution refuses to
respect geographic or other boundaries, flowing instead across jurisdictions
and from air to water to soil and flesh.
Another comes from forestry, which was a touchstone for progressive
reformers. They saw, and created, a
radically simplified woodland, stripped down to a few commercial species, neglecting
of the many other species that might be driven out by a management regimen
devoted to economically sustainable
harvests. Sometimes this simplifying
approach to forest management undermined even the economic goals, because
commercial species turned out to depend on non-commercial resources and
processes that progressives had ignored.
Even when their scheme worked on its own terms, though, it left out a
great deal of the life, soil, and water flows that form a forest ecosystem.
The ecological revolution, coinciding with
the neoclassical revolution in economics, came as an invitation to recast
environmental regulation as an ecological market, which could gather and
respond to the complex, dispersed facts of the natural world through millions
of individual choices, pivoting around prices.
This goal married the traditional managerial goal of regulating at the
scale of the problem to the neo-classical technique of relying on dispersed and
adequately informed personal decisions over centralized judgments.
The ideal of an ecological economy is also
an outgrowth of the other major economics-based development in environmental
regulation, which is cost-benefit analysis.
As we have seen, this technique of assigning money values to the harms
and benefits of proposed actions was well established as an administrative technique
by the early twentieth century, and advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club
engaged wholeheartedly in it. In the
1970s and 1980s, it became increasingly ambitious, aiming at ever-broader
accounting of harms and benefits in a pervasively regulated economy. It also took on a different ideological
valence, as it was a favorite tool of critics of the new environmental laws,
while many environmentalists attacked it for artificially rendering ecological
values into prices in order to trade them off against profit and growth. The response, of course, was that the
tradeoffs were unavoidable and cost-benefit analysis only made them explicit,
much as ecological insight had earlier brought hidden environmental harms into
the light.
Whether one saw it as desecration or as
simple rationality, the upshot of cost-benefit analysis was that everything has
a price, expressed in the tradeoffs that come with choosing it over something
else, and, in principle, expressible as a money equivalent. Past a certain point, the idea of counting
every cost and benefit and acting on the basis of this total accounting becomes
a kind of mania or hubris – just the sort that that drove neo-classical
skepticism about central regulation.
Cost-benefit technique can aim at comprehensiveness without falling into
madness, though, if it guides decisions at the architectural level rather than
the individual one, building a context that informs whole classes of decisions,
rather than dictating choice after choice.
Ecological pricing is just such an architectural strategy of regulation.
The ideal of the ecological economy, then,
combines the most influential developments in environmental economics and
economics-based policy with the persistent utopian sense that our economic
order is unsustainably out of alignment with ecological limits and needs a
basically new direction.
The appeal to neutrality that is part of the
basic idea of ecological economics is a clue to its flaw. It cannot deliver what it promises. It cannot rescue decision-makers from
political and cultural conflict over environmental value. Part of the reason for this lies in the
unavoidable limits of the technique. A
scheme of ecological economics depends on “getting the prices right” so that
economic penalties and rewards can attach to decisions. This judgment about the right price may be
direct, in setting explicit costs, or it may be indirect, as in setting a
maximum level of total carbon emissions, which will then be distributed by
individuals’ buying and selling permission to emit. Either way, there is no avoiding the choice
about the price, which is equivalent to a choice about the level of the priced
activity. Where ordinary economic activity
produces prices “automatically” – think of the rise and fall of gasoline costs
with summer demand, the growth of Chinese car use, and political vicissitudes
in the Middle East – it is precisely the point of much of much ecological
regulation to assign prices to activity that the existing economy “prices” as
free.
But how to decide what the prices should
be? Conventional approaches either ask
people what a given environmental amenity is worth to them (“contingent
valuation”) or look for ways that markets implicitly price the unpriced good, such
as real-estate premiums for property near scenic land (“shadow pricing”). But choosing one technique over another, or
asking the question in a certain way, is unavoidably a political judgment with
serious consequences for how environmental values are then priced. So is a judgment about, say, the level of
greenhouse gases to authorize. These
judgments necessarily include how to value goods that can never have
“objective” prices, including public goods such as atmospheric stability or the
preservation of ecosystems. These can be
broken in, in part, into readily priced costs and benefits, and these provide
the favorite examples of neo-classical ecological economists: for instance,
water filtration by wetlands is easily compared to the cost a municipal
system. But there is always an important
remainder, which consists of the questions that have engaged environmental
lawmaking all along: what value to assign collectively to one state of the
natural world rather than another.
Prices are products of this choice, translations of it into market terms,
and they cannot precede and guide it.
There is an even more basic reason that
prices cannot do all that they seem to promise.
Even as far as price-like individual preferences for environmental goods
are discernible, and so can serve as reference-points for price-setting, they
are not objective or authoritative. This
is because they are themselves, in important ways, the products of previous
policy judgments. People learn to value
nature by interacting with the world in which they are born and grow up. When that world includes national parks and
other public lands, intact forests and charismatic species, these become
treasures. Otherwise, like the giant
ground sloth and dire wolf of ancient North America, they fade into wistful
half-memories. What we value is a
product of decisions to preserve some things and give up others, and our
decisions will shape the values of those who come afterward. Our preferences, or values, whichever one
prefers to call them, do not stand outside political judgment to tutor it in
objectivity. In making a world, we also
contribute to making those who live in it.
This is not necessarily a welcome burden, but it is not optional.
Any assignment of value to environmental
goods also depends on ethical judgments about how to weigh the interests of
other people. The most prominent example
of this fact concerns future generations.
Much of environmental policy-making is a choice among futures. Cost-benefit analysis of decisions whose
effects extend across many decades must consider effects on people not yet born
at the time of the decision. No way of
doing this analysis gives those future interests the same weight as interests
affected at the time of the decision or soon after. This discounting of future interests began as
an accounting convention in decisions about present expenditure and investment,
where it is assumed that, at a given rate of return, a dollar of value in the
future is equivalent to the smaller amount that would have to be invested today
to reach a dollar’s value at the future time that we want to compare. Discounting persists for a variety of ethical
and practical reasons, all of them subject to debate, which others have
explored thoroughly. The point I want
to make is that there is no uncontroversial way of weighting future interests
in nature, and whatever weight we assign will affect which parts of the natural
world count as worth preserving and which parts turn out to have a priced
“benefit” below whatever other interest is competing with them.
In making decisions for the future,
attempting to set prices involves unavoidable speculation about what future
people will value in nature and decisions about how to measure and weigh those
values. All of these judgments, in turn,
shape the world in which future people will come to value nature. There is no way out of making judgments about
nature’s value, nor out of making the world that will make future values. The idea that “getting the prices right” can
give us a neutral compass for environmental policy is therefore a fantasy. There are many useful, even invaluable
applications of cost-benefit analysis, but they cannot replace political
judgment about which values to pursue.
Nonetheless, there is something right in the
thought that, in an age of ecological complexity, there is no “outside” of the
economy. Everything that people make and
consume, sell and buy, has effects that ripple throughout the world. The carbon economy, only the most prominent
examples, affects coastal cities and remote wilderness areas, the climate of
mountain plateaus and the acidity of the oceans. All these things are linked and, in some
formal sense, traded off against one another.
Everything economic is also ecological, and everything ecological is
also economic. The contrast that
mattered so much to Thoreau and other Romantics, between the economy on the one
hand and nature on the other, cannot stand.
The mistake is imagining that the
consequences of this insight flow in one direction only, so that we can take
account of it by giving everything a price in some objectively “economic”
fashion. The impossibility of neutral
prices shows that the change flows in the other direction, too. If there is no aesthetic and spiritual nature
above and apart from the economy, then, conversely, there is no economy that is
brutishly independent of the aesthetic and spiritual considerations instinct in
nature. If economic decisions are
inextricably linked to the future shape and makeup of all the world, then the
way we shape the economy must make room for the values we identify with
nature. The mistake was imagining that,
when economics and nature merged in ecology, the resulting system could be
guided in a merely technical way.
Instead, the challenge is to find a way of integrating the technical
considerations of conventional economic analysis with the aesthetic and
spiritual values that enter ecology through the old idea of nature. This is all the harder because those values
have always been in dispute: they were formed through conflict and remain in
conflict today. Nonetheless, there is no
way out of choices of value, and no better resource for grappling with them
than our cacophonous inheritance of aesthetic and spiritual commitments.
Environmental economics cannot supplant
environmental ethics. Ecology does not
mean the end of Thoreau’s ambition to spiritualize nature, but a new beginning
for his aim of making economic life ethical, tying it explicitly to our ideas
of how best to live in this one natural world.
What on earth this can mean is the topic of the next chapters, on ethics
and law.
[1]
The New English Canaan 114 (ed. Charles Francis Adams, 1883) (1637).
[2]
Id.
[3]
Id.
[4]
212.
[5]
209
[6]
Id.
[7]
179.
[8]
182-87.
[9]
198-99.
[10]
188.
[11]
205.
[12]
206
[13]
[Material from Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness?]
[14]
Walden 5
[15]
Walden 7. [I think this is actually LWP, as in next cite.]
[16]
Life Without Principle, 364-65.
[17]
Walden 10.
[18]
Walden 7.
[19]
Life Without Principle, 350.
[20]
Walden 68.
[21]
Id.
[22]
Walden 40-50.
[23]
Walden 134-35.
[24]
Walden at 137.
[25]
Walden 58.
[26]
Walden 5.
[27]
LWP 354.
[28]
LWP 355.
[29]
[Find this journal entry.]
[30]
Walden 25.
[31]
See For the Defense of Dinosaur – An
Outline, Sierra Club Bulletin, Feb.
1954, at 3-9; Counterproposal to
Save a Park and Money, id. at 11.
[32]
Dennis R. Neuzil, Uses and Abuses of
Highway Benefit-Cost Analysis, Sierra Club Bulletin, Jan. 1968, 16-21.
[33] See Alan Carlin, A Question of Value, Sierra Club Bulletin, Aug. 1969, at 5-7
(calling into question “certain ‘secondary benefits’ (which economists regard
as largely imaginary)” and calling dam development “exactly the opposite
direction from that advocated by nearly every resource economist not associated
with the public works interests, who has examined the subject”).
[34]
David Sive, Natural Beauty and the Law,
Sierra Club Bulletin, May 1968, at18.
[35] Id.
[36] See The
Hetch-Hetchy Water Project (report of a committee of the Sierra Club),
Sierra Club Bulletin, Jan. 1908, at 264-65 (arguing against the development on
the grounds that proper development of the valley for recreation would better
serve the public interest in enjoying its beauty, while damming would be
needlessly expensive and create negative externalities for other park uses);
William Colby, Letter to Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield, id. at 264-68 (same).
[37] Decision
of the Secretary of the Interior re. Application for Lake Eleanor and
Hetch-Hetchy Valley Reservoir Sites (May 11, 1908).
[38]
Sierra Club letter to Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources, supra n. __.
[39]
John Muir, The Hetch-Hetchy Valley,
Sierra Club Bulletin, Jan. 1908 at 211, 217.
[40]
Elizabeth Rogers, Protest! supra n. __, at 11, 20.
[41]
Connie Flatboe, Environmental Teach-In,
supra n. __ at 15 (calling for “an
ecological transformation to … a stable economy”).
[42]
Philip S. Berry, Editorial, On the White
House Meeting, Sierra Club Bulletin, Apr. 1970, at 2 (detailing fundamental
disagreement with President Nixon during a White House meeting).
[43]
Dan Luten, Progress Against Growth,
Sierra Club Bulletin, June 1972, at 23.
[44]
Robert Cahn, Sustainable Hope, the
Humanistic Promise (reviewing Lester R. Brown’s Building a Sustainable Society), Sierra Club Bulletin, Jan.-Feb.
1982, at 131, 132.
[45]
Lynton K. Caldwell, Environment: A Challenge for Modern Society 237 (1970)
(emphasis original).
[46] Id.
[47] See id. at 238.
[48]
Richard H. Ellerhorst, Cost-Benefit
Analysis and Our Environment, Letter, N.Y. Times, July 23, 1978, at E18
(criticizing cost-benefit analysis as a tool of industry). See
also Mark Green, The Faked Case
Against Regulation, Wash. Post, Jan. 21, 1979, at C1 (referring to the
“immeasurable benefits” of environmental regulation and denying their
quantifiability).
[49]
Caldwell, Environment at 238.
[50]
See, e.g., James Gustav Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism,
the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability 89-106 (on
reconciling market operations with ecological principles); Paul Hawken, Amory
Lovins, & L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next
Industrial Revolution (1999) (arguing at book-length that ecological insights
complete rather than refute capitalism’s goal of efficient increase in wealth);
Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (1993)
(same).
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