Environmental Political Theory. Steve Vanderheiden

of the governed, challenging the patriarchal authority of kings who had previously been regarded as ruling by divine right, in hereditary succession. Once the idea gained traction, older accounts of political authority could not accommodate its demand for popular consent, which required attention to the many, and ultimately to their participation. Associated ideas and institutions had to adapt or be displaced. Some, like the British monarchy, adapted to its challenge and managed to persist, albeit through significant transformation. Others, like the monarchy in France, could not adapt and ended. The idea of the nation-state forged new identities, redrew old borders, and required entirely new sets of institutions. With the idea of colonial oppression, institutions and practices organized around the “white man’s burden” view of benign imperialism were challenged (a challenge that is still resisted), ushering in a period of decolonization and shifting the patterns and practices of economic globalization.

Ecological scarcity has, over the past half-century, begun to exhibit this disruptive and transformational potential. As we shall explore further, many of our norms, ideals, and institutions depend upon maintaining the conditions of merely moderate scarcity in which they were established (indeed, this condition is among what David Hume called the “circumstances of justice” that allow for relationships of justice to order politics and society). Conflict would not arise without some scarcity, obviating the need for governments to resolve such conflicts and otherwise allocate social resources, but many of the norms, ideals, and institutions that have developed over time to more peacefully and fairly resolve conflicts and allocate resources (including those ideals to be examined in later chapters of this book) come under strain and may collapse with intensifying scarcity. As episodes of more severe scarcity of food, water, or other critical goods around the world have demonstrated, characteristics of a well-ordered society – such as freedom of movement, due process, democratic governance, and the rule of law – can erode and disappear under such conditions.

      We must, of course, be attentive to maintaining those necessary conditions of merely moderate scarcity for manifold reasons, among which is the ongoing viability of our most cherished and considered ideals. To the extent that our existing ideals fail to accommodate sustainability imperatives (or, worse, actively contribute toward exacerbating scarcity), they may contribute to their own erosion and eventual irrelevance. Insofar as a society’s ideal of freedom is construed as allowing for unlimited exploitation of finite resources or the prerogative to undermine the planet’s life-support systems, for example, the idea of ecological limits requires that the ideal either evolve to accommodate the facts of scarcity or risk undermining the material conditions of its continued possibility. Likewise with its prevailing view of the democratic ideal: if it (as some critics allege) cannot accommodate sustainability imperatives or allow for their successful pursuit, then democratic governments and societies will be guided by an ideal that risks contributing to its own undoing.

The overarching thesis of this book holds that the eight social and political ideals to be examined in this book now exist in some tension with the idea of ecological limits and its associated sustainability imperatives, but that it is at least conceptually possible for each of these ideals to accommodate that idea and those imperatives. Put another way, the environmental crisis is, among other things, a crisis of ideas and ideals, and the challenge of sustainable transition includes the sustainable transformation of those ideals. In this time of increasing scarcity of ecological goods and services, a window of opportunity for transformed conceptions of freedom, equality, democracy, and sovereignty remains open, but at some point it will close. Whether we, as members of societies whose attitudes and institutions are founded upon or informed by ideals that cannot accommodate to ecological scarcity, will recognize this in time remains to be seen. With recognition should come a sense of urgency, along with the opening-up of previously settled convictions and conventions that accompanies the disruptive force of an idea such as ecological limits.

      Some of this disruption is already evident, with the urgency implied in the contemporary discourse of a climate “crisis” or “emergency” observed above. But many have not yet noticed it, and the entrenched resistance to its disruptive force must not be underestimated. Nor must we assume that successful disruption necessarily leads to successful transformation; ideals such as freedom or democracy could well be abandoned if viewed as incompatible with sustainability imperatives, or they could be replaced with different but equally dysfunctional alternative conceptions. Transformation of these ideals, if it occurs, may need to happen within the next generation, so many alive now may be witnesses to either the successful sustainable transition of our social and political ideals (and with this, of our societies and politics) or the impacts of a failed transition. They may, in those ways that we either reinforce or challenge prevailing ideals in our everyday lives or through concerted political efforts – and with or without realizing that they are doing so – become participants in this process. Developing an appreciation for this fact among students of environmental political theory is therefore among the primary objectives of this text.

Ecological limits and sustainability imperatives

While well grounded in the physical sciences, the idea of ecological limits is abstract and defies sensory observation. We can observe a rising price for gasoline at the pump, from which we might infer decreasing market availability, but such observational data are several steps removed from resource scarcity itself. Planned production decreases designed to raise the price of crude oil, geopolitical conflicts in oil-producing regions, or overseas economic expansion are more likely explanations for oil price increases than is diminishing supply (as a nonrenewable resource, oil supplies can only decrease, albeit at varying rates, whereas market prices fluctuate in both directions). Likewise, we might observe diminished snowpack in the mountains or reduced water levels in our reservoirs (key indicators of future water availability where I live), but the climatic changes that lie behind these indicators can only be grasped conceptually, utilizing theory and abstraction, not observed empirically.¹

      The concept, in turn, arises to explain observable phenomena, and then alongside competing explanations. Ecological limits and scarcity may contribute to a lot of bad outcomes, but they are never their only cause. As the case studies in Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005) illustrate, several historical instances of relatively small and isolated societies contributing to and then experiencing severe resource scarcity (Easter Island, the Anasazi of the American southwest, etc.) underscore the importance of accommodating ecological limits in the ideals that inform the organization of those societies. However, settler colonial societies tend to exploit distant sources of such resources to counter any domestic shortages, in so doing preventing (with a few notable exceptions) the concept’s appearance in the social and political thought of such societies, as Locke’s treatise illustrates. Biophysical limits and sustainability imperatives remain abstract and contested, not urgent and serious.

      Now, in what John McNeill has aptly termed the “great acceleration of the Anthropocene”² (itself in reference to the dominance of human impacts on the environment within the geologic epoch), whereby the past half-century has, according to natural scientists, “without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind,”³ the observable indicators of increasing ecological scarcity cannot so easily be ignored. Nor can their human causes or impacts, as these become increasingly evident and linked in the public imagination to our failed planetary stewardship. The effects of this failure cannot readily be mitigated through resource colonialism – where affluent countries plunder ecological goods and services within poor ones to make up for their domestic overuse – as the impact of the Anthropocene and transgression of ecological limits transcends borders; nor can they be entirely transferred onto distant and powerless others: put out of sight and mind.

The good news is that humans have historically shown a remarkable ability to adapt to change and may yet be able to successfully adapt to anthropogenic environmental change and the increasing scarcity that it involves. In addition to our infrastructure and institutions, our norms and ideals must also find a way to accommodate ecological limits if humans are to successfully adapt to the environmental changes that we (through our existing infrastructure and institutions, as well as norms and ideals) have brought about.