Interpretations of I

Does Environmental Policy Have Any Foundations?

Some candidates

• Vulnerability

• Utilitarianism and its derivatives

• Growth (next week)

• Resilience

• Adaptive management

• Sustainability

• Precaution

Some Common Problems

• Lack of a legitimating framework

• Built up from disciplines that are either without substantive ethical norms or orphaned because they are no longer connected to a legitimating narrative.

• Not really about the environment—a form of anthropocentrism.

Outline

• Vulnerability

• The Perfected Market (Nordhaus/Harris)

• Resilience

• Sustainability/Precaution/Adaptive Management

Johann Karl LothThe Good Samaritan (1697)

Some features of Jewish Cosmology

• Linearity of time; Idea that time had a beginning and is moving forward

• Humanity as the pinnacle of creation; created in the image of God

• Moral behavior through following God’s laws • Active, moral God who controls nature to reward

or punish humans for their behavior• Human behavior connected to an end; people

act morally with the view that their actions will be punished or rewarded by God

Some features of Christian Cosmology

• 2 commandments displace the 10.

• A special interest in humanity manifested through Jesus.

• The possibility of an afterlife-through a responsible life.

• Personal and knowable God: through reason and faith.

• The Great Chain of Being.

How Can I Secure Eternal Life?

• Answer: obey the law to love God with all your heart, soul and strength; and your neighbor as yourself.

• Who is my neighbor?

• Schweitzer’s answer………….

Good Samaritan

“Jesus replied, "A man was going down from

Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among

robbers, who stripped him and beat him,

and departed, leaving him half dead. Now

by chance a priest was going down that

road; and when he saw him he passed by

on the other side.”

Good Samaritan

“So likewise a Levite, when he came to the

place and saw him, passed by on the other

side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came

to where he was; and when he saw him, he

had compassion, and went to him and bound

up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then

he set him on his own beast

Good Samaritan

and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

Which of these three, do you think, proved

neighbor to the man who fell among the

robbers? He said, "The one who showed mercy

on him." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do

likewise.”

(Luke 10:30-34:36)

Protecting the Vulnerable

A Foundation for Environmental Policy?

What is protecting the vulnerable?

• An injunction to prevent harms from befalling people. (p. 110)

• Vulnerability is a matter of being under threat from harms. Ibid.

Defeating the voluntarist model.

• Promises generate dependence and therefore vulnerability. Vulnerability helps me decide what promises to make.

• Businesses are more knowledgeable than their customers.

• Professionals must protect the client. Terms of the contract set. Duties to assist. Duties to persist.

• Family relations.• Friends.

Elements of the theory.

• Incidence. Who has the special obligation to whom?

• Content. What protection should be provided?

• Context. When the duties arise.

• Form. The duties cannot be altered even if the parties consent.

Characterizing Individual Duties

• Individual responsibilities. If A’s interests are vulnerable to B’s actions and choices, B has a special responsibility to protect A’s interests; the strength of this responsibility depends strictly upon the degree to which B can affect A’s interests. (p. 118)

• The role of causal histories, and the doctrine of last/best chance.

Duties as Part of a Collective

• If A’s interests are vulnerable to the actions or choices of a group of individuals, disjunctively or conjunctively, then that group has a special responsibility to (a) organize…and (b) implement a scheme for coordinated action by members such that A’s interests will be protected as well as they can be by that group, consistent with the groups other responsibilities.

Duties to Future generations

• Why the voluntarist/contract model does not work for future persons.

• How our unilateral power fits the vulnerability model.

Duties to the Environment

• The great chain of being raises its (ugly?) head.

• Duties to animals no problem—they have interests; but are they neighbors.

• Is protecting the environment just a subset of our general duties to future persons?

• Is the fact that the environment is vulnerable to our actions what grounds our responsibility? Has no moral standing.

The great chain of being

The Perfect Market

A Foundation for Environmental Policy?

What is “I”?

• The current dominant normative, corrected markets, framework is derived from economics/utilitarianism.

• I is impacted negatively when an act or omission causes a net decline in human well-being.

Outline

• The Corrected Domestic Market

• What to do when there is no market

• International Markets.

• Problems in Paradise

• Fellow travelers

1. The Corrected (Micro) Market

National and International Versions of getting more for less. (Difference between free markets

and corrected markets, and between macro and micro.)

Dominion Assumed

Presenting the theory/not the reality

• Globalization and its Discontents.

• The Blood Bankers

• Confessions of an Economic Hitman

• Correction important/regulation?-?

Transactions

Cobus Bodenstein, National Post, October 16, 2000

The best of all possible worlds

•Tariffs

•Subsidies

•Currency frictions

•Immigration

•Capital immobility

•Quotas

•Externalities

•Public Goods

•Monopolies

•Absence of markets

•Transaction costs

•Information asymmetries

Judging improvements from transactions

• Pareto-superior.

• Pareto-optimum.

Pareto superior

• At least one person is better-off

without the other one being worse-off.

Pareto-superior

Peter’s utility

Jeremy’s utility

P

A

B

Pareto-optimum

When it is impossible to make

somebody better-off without making

somebody else worse-off.

Pareto-optimal

Pareto frontier

Pareto-optimal

Pareto-superior

Obstacles to Pareto-improvementsthe nasty six• Externalities.

• Public goods.

• Monopoly.

• No market.

• Transaction costs.

• Information.

Externalities

: Francisco Olvera, La Jornada, March 30, 1999.

Public goods (non-rival)

http://www.nps.gov/goga/

Public goods (non-excludable)

http://exn.ca/FlightDeck/Aircraft/imagearchiveresult.cfm?Keyword=19980616-avroarrow5b.jpg

Monopoly

http://www.aircanada.ca/home.html

No market

Weather forecast for the Montreal Area

Monday, October 19, 3000.

Sunny with cloudy periods

High 9 ° C

Low 0 ° C

Transaction costs

http://www.kksm.com/

Lack of Information

Information

2. Cost/benefit analysis: finding the market solution without the

market

Prices already paid.

• Demand side, e.g. hedonic pricing—travel costs, equipment costs—e.g. fishing tackle, licenses.

• Supply side, engineers salaries, cement, farm land values for land flooded etc.

Computing the balance:non-market value: examples

• Value of human life and health

• Existence value.

• Consumer surplus.

• Contingent valuation.

• Bequest value.

• How much is nature worth? (Costanza)

3. Global markets

Extending the Model

Arguments for Free-Trade

• Comparative advantage.• Protection of some industries,

disadvantages others.• Competition leads to greater

efficiency.• All countries lose when protectionist.

•Tariffs

•Subsidies

•Currency frictions

•Immigration

•Capital immobility

•Quotas

•Externalities

•Public Goods

•Monopolies

•Absence of markets

•Transaction costs

•Information asymmetries

Comparative advantage

Trade

Produce

Protection of some disadvantages others

Www.dell.ca

Www.ebay.com

Competition leads to greater efficiency

Ian Waldie / Reuters http://www.olympics.com/eng/sports/AT/

All countries lose without trade

From the nation to the world: the nasty six become the dirty

dozen• Tariffs• Quotas• Capital immobility• Subsidies• 2 problems unresolved in making a perfect

world:• Currency frictions/manipulations• Labor immobility

Improving the whole world.

4. Problems in Paradise

• One person has everything

• Commodification

• Discounting

• Anthropocentric

• Sneaking cardinal measures back in.

• Economic efficiency doesn’t maximize utility

• Scale not considered.

The market $

Blocked & Penumbral exchanges

Prohibited

Unpriced

Penumbral

PresentValue of

$1Percent

Period 1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 6% 7% 8% 9% 10%1 0.99010 0.98039 0.97087 0.96154 0.95238 0.94340 0.93458 0.92593 0.91743 0.909092 0.98030 0.96117 0.94260 0.92456 0.90703 0.89000 0.87344 0.85734 0.84168 0.826453 0.97059 0.94232 0.91514 0.88900 0.86384 0.83962 0.81630 0.79383 0.77218 0.751314 0.96098 0.92385 0.88849 0.85480 0.82270 0.79209 0.76290 0.73503 0.70843 0.683015 0.95147 0.90573 0.86261 0.82193 0.78353 0.74726 0.71299 0.68058 0.64993 0.62092

36 0.69892 0.49022 0.34503 0.24367 0.17266 0.12274 0.08754 0.06262 0.04494 0.0323537 0.69200 0.48061 0.33498 0.23430 0.16444 0.11579 0.08181 0.05799 0.04123 0.0294138 0.68515 0.47119 0.32523 0.22529 0.15661 0.10924 0.07646 0.05369 0.03783 0.0267339 0.67837 0.46195 0.31575 0.21662 0.14915 0.10306 0.07146 0.04971 0.03470 0.0243040 0.67165 0.45289 0.30656 0.20829 0.14205 0.09722 0.06678 0.04603 0.03184 0.02209

Discounting

Anthropocentric

Photo: Ap

The comparison of utilities

Www.challengeBP.com

Cardinal

The comparison of utilities

http://www.tiemaster.com/

Ordinal

Soft Hard

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Sarah Vivian Rob Andrew Jennifer Dillon

$

Economic efficiency doesn’t maximize utility

(unless you accept the income dist.)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Sarah Vivian Rob Andrew Jennifer Dillon

$

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Sarah Vivian Rob Andrew Jennifer Dillon

$

The problem of scale

• Overwhelming the biosphere.

The principle of Utility is incompatible with any

morality at all.

5. Law and Economics –a cognate framework:

Coase/Epstein/Calabresi

http://www.9thjudicialdistrict-ga.org/whitecthse.htm

The law should mimic the market

• Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost”

• Rights inhibit efficiency. Accidents.

• The case for individual resolution.

• Class actions and the problem of transaction costs.

Torts and nuisances

• Torts: a wrongful touching.

• Nuisances: state may prohibit and may authorize a nuisance.

• The common law defines a nuisance.

Some non-utilitarian candidates

• Growth/Stern

• Resilience

• Adaptive management

• Sustainability

• Precaution

Some Common Problems

• Lack of a legitimating framework of goals.

• Built up from disciplines that are either without substantive ethical norms or orphaned because they are no longer connected to a legitimating narrative.

• Not really about the environment—a form of anthropocentrism.

• All part of the failed emancipation project.

With thanks to Prof Brendan MackeyDirector, ANU Wild Country Research & Policy Hub

And Brooke Hecht Center for Humans and Nature

Resilience thinking: promise and questions

Promise

Redefining and Expanding a Leopold Framework

Adaptive Cycle

Some Key Concepts (from Walker et. al (2004)

1. Resilience: ability to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change and retain function, structure, identity and feedbacks.

2. Adaptability: Ability of actors in a system to influence resilience.

3. Transformability: Ability to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, social or economic structures make the existing system untenable.

4. Taking these three together makes a stability landscape.

Elements of “resilience.”

• Latitude—amount a system can be changed without losing its ability to recover.

• Resistance: ability to avoid change. • Precarious: how close a system is to a

threshold. • Panarchy: influence of states and

dynamics from states above and below the one in question.

Panarchy

From the website: http://www.resalliance.org/593.php

“The theory that we develop must of necessity transcend boundaries of scale and discipline. It must be capable of organizing our understanding of economic, ecological, and institutional systems. And it must explain situations where all three types of systems interact. The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has lead us to coin the term panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and the unpredictable. Thus, we drew upon the Greek god Pan to capture an image of unpredictable change and upon notions of hierarchies across scales to represent structures that sustain experiments, test results, and allow adaptive evolution.”

Panarchy

From the website: http://www.resalliance.org/593.php

“The theory that we develop must of necessity transcend boundaries of scale and discipline. It must be capable of organizing our understanding of economic, ecological, and institutional systems. And it must explain situations where all three types of systems interact. The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has lead us to coin the term panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and the unpredictable. Thus, we drew upon the Greek god Pan to capture an image of unpredictable change and upon notions of hierarchies across scales to represent structures that sustain experiments, test results, and allow adaptive evolution.”

Panarchy

From the website: http://www.resalliance.org/593.php

“The theory that we develop must of necessity transcend boundaries of scale and discipline. It must be capable of organizing our understanding of economic, ecological, and institutional systems. And it must explain situations where all three types of systems interact. The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has lead us to coin the term panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and the unpredictable. Thus, we drew upon the Greek god Pan to capture an image of unpredictable change and upon notions of hierarchies across scales to represent structures that sustain experiments, test results, and allow adaptive evolution.”

Basin of attraction

Why Resilience Theory Falls Short of the Mark

Can it escape the orphanage?

Sources: www.epa.qld.gov.au www.bluemountains.net http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/images/exhibitions/month

Has Resilience Thinking taken a ‘Satin Bowerbird’ approach to formulating theory?

Key terms missing from Resilience theory

Evolution

Planetary Dynamics

Ethics

Evolution

http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/mletters_images/darwin1.jpghttp://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/images/nature03435-i2.0.jpg

Sources:http://www.bible.ca/tracks/Earnst-Mayer.jpg

micro-evolution of species interactions

Source: http://ebd10.ebd.csic.es/Home.html

Evolution – a dynamic balance of stability & change

Changee.g. micro-evolutionary adaptations

Stabilitye.g. stabilizing selection

OCBIL vs YODFLMega species richness

& endemism:• Old (really old;140my)• Climatically-buffered• Infertile• Landscapes

Southwest Australia

Pantepui Highlands(mainly Venezuela)

South Africa’s Greater Cape

Source: Steve Hopper, Kew Gardens

Planetary Dynamics (Biosphere)

According to thermodynamic theory, systems far from equilibrium self-generate dissipative structures to redistribute energy and (re-)establish thermal equilibrium…

The system state of ‘equilibrium’

The Earth is an Optimizing System

• The earth and the life on it is a complex dissipative structure.

• Which grows through co-evolution.

Co-evolution of ‘chemo-life forms’ & environment

Source: http://ebd10.ebd.csic.es/Home.html

And what of ‘Nature Alive’?

Gaia and Lovelock

From the website: http://www.kheper.net/topics/Gaia/earth1.jpg

Gaia: “a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the physical and chemical environment”

What about ethics?

Rampant Anthropocentrism?

• “The combined and often synergistic effects ... can make ecosystems more vulnerable to changes that previously could be absorbed. …ecosystems may suddenly shift from desired to less desired states in their capacity to generate ecosystem services. …the challenge is to strengthen the capacity of ecosystems to support social and economic development.” Folke, et. al., “Regime Shifts, Resilience, and Biodiversity in Ecosystem Management.”

If we deny ecological optimization, and find camels useful, is this therefore an optimal state?

Camel plague near Alice Springs, Central Australia

A biospheric (ecospheric) ethic is essential…

From the website: http://www.news.wisc.edu/news/images/leopShackBW.jpg

Leopold walking outside the shack near Baraboo, Wisconsin

The need for a local land ethic

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Sustainability/Precaution/Adaptive Management

Peter G. Brown

McGill School of the Environment

Montreal, Canada

This power point is based in part on:

Disendorf, Mark. 1997. “Principles of ecological sustainability”, Diesendorf, Mark and Clive Hamilton, (eds.) Human Ecology, Human Economy, (St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin,1997),Chap. 3. pp. 64-97.

Outline:

I. Views on sustainability.

• Economic.

• Ecological.

II. Weak and Strong Sustainability.

I. Views on Sustainability

“Sustainable Development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

(WCED, 1987)

Economic Sustainability

Maintain the level of consumption

indefinitely.

• The environment is seen as an externality.

• Precondition for environmental

sustainability.

Economic Approach

Ecological SustainabilityEconomic Growth

Economic Sustainability

Ecological Sustainability

Promotion of equity between and within

generations.

• Maintaining the earth’s life support

systems

• Improve individual and community well-

being.

Ecological Approach

Economic Sustainability Society

Ecological Sustainability

Principles

• Conservation of biodiversity and ecological

integrity.

• Individual and community well-being.

• Intergenerational equity.

• Precautionary principle.

Biodiversity and Ecological Integrity

• Life support system.

• Evolutionary potential.

• ‘Environmental’ services (i.e., raw

materials, food, maintain soil fertility,

breakdown of pollution).

Well-being

• Improve both individual and community well-being.

Intergenerational Equity

What is to be passed on to future generations?

• Biodiversity

• Ecological integrity.

• Well-being.

Intragenerational Equity

• Create a more socially just society in the present.

Precautionary Principle

• Where there are threats of serious or

irreversible environmental damage, lack of

full scientific certainty should not be used

as a reason for postponing measures to

prevent environmental degradation.

(emphasis added)

Precautionary Principle

When considering economic projects,

proponents must demonstrate that, to a

high degree of probability, the project will

not cause significant harm to the

environment. (emphasis added)

II.Weak and Strong Sustainability Principles

Intergenerational Equity

Weak

• allows the substitution of human-made capital for natural capital.

Strong

• involves substantial conservation of biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, cultural diversity, critical capital, and the enhancement of well-being.

Biodiversity Conservation

Weak

• limited to representative samples of species or ‘safe’ minimum population levels.

Strong

• involves considerably more than the conservation of samples of species.

Emphasis on

Weak• economic growth.

Strong

• well-being including ecological, social and economic indicators (but not committed to growth).

Economic Activity

Weak

• trade-offs between economic activity and environmental quality.

Strong

• Ecological limits are set on Economic activity to avoid damage of critical capital.

Precautionary Principle

Weak

• action is optional.

• Industry may define what ‘serious’ is.

Strong

• action is mandatory.

• ‘serious’ is defined by community concerns.

Substitution

Weak

• markets determine the substitutability of human-made capital for natural capital.

Strong

• biophysical laws and an ecocentric ethic determine the substitutability of human-made capital for natural capital.

Environmental Impact Assessment

Weak• cost-benefit analysis.

Strong

• constrained policy analysis.

Focus

Weak

• on maintaining existing industries.

Strong

• on achieving ecological sustainability, social equity and well-being.

Critique

• Remains a primarily anthropocentric view.

Norton’s adaptive management

• Bryan sees AM as a way to reach the goals of sustainability. Something is sustainable if it will not reduce the ratio of opportunities to constraints of future generations.

• For him there are three elements: 1) Reduce uncertainty by taking reversible actions; 2) multi-scalar modeling; and 3) problems addressed are embedded in local contexts.

What is needed?

• To construct a new morality based on the principle that other life forms and natural systems are valuable for their own sake and not only for human use.