International responses to ecological limits
International reactions to the revival of ecological limits were several and varied. Its influence on the development of international environmental law and governance can be seen in the role of such limits at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, which issued the Stockholm Declaration, calling for international cooperation on environmental protection. Persuaded by the reality and urgency of ecological limits, signatories to the Declaration pledged to cooperate in sustainably managing the planet’s natural resources and guarding against pollution threats, but also linked environmental protection to social and economic development and condemned South African apartheid and the history of colonialism as related to environmental inequality. In this sense, the conference revealed tensions between the global North and South over their inequitable prior exploitation of the global environment, with criticism aimed at the US for its ongoing war in Vietnam as well as its colonial history. It set the stage for later multilateral engagement around environmental equity issues, including the Brundtland Report’s vision for sustainable development (discussed in chapter 5) in 1987, and the two landmark conventions on biodiversity and climate change from the 1992 Earth Summit (discussed in chapter 9), both of which would also revive key international tensions and dynamics from this conference while embracing global equity among their guiding principles.
Delegates from the global South approached the issue of limits with skepticism – not about their scientific validity, but from a concern about limits on development being imposed on poor countries that might impede development opportunities that had been afforded to affluent countries. Since the developed North had benefitted from over a century of unconstrained exploitation of territorial resources, as well as those within the oceanic and atmospheric commons, representatives from the poor South objected to sustainability constraints that would curtail growth, and called for equitable burden-sharing in protecting the global environment (in what would later emerge as the “common but differentiated responsibilities” principle). Later, this tension would give rise to claims to a right to development: the idea that ecological limits should not prevent the least developed countries (or LDCs) from developing, and, in so doing, addressing their poverty, hunger, and economic insecurity. The idea of sustainable development would later come to name this attempt to balance sustainability and development imperatives in a manner consistent with their early expression in the Stockholm Declaration. As defined by the Brundtland Report, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” requires sustainability in order to protect those future interests.
Another tension emerged from the 1972 conference and its attempt to promote cooperation around the environment and development. Noting the interests of “the great international corporations which operate in the developing countries” in ensuring that “environmental controls should be weak in the Third World,” one scholarly observer of the international dynamics at the Stockholm conference suggested that it was also “in their interests that Third World governments should have good arguments to justify that weakness” so that “poor countries” can “agree to be dirt havens for the rich.”10 Here, concern for development rights was alleged to merely be a pretext to justify the continued exploitation of the global South by the North, as necessary for development, on the basis of the pernicious claim (described as “a polluter’s gambit”) that environmental values would not emerge among the global poor until they had experienced higher levels of economic development. Associating development with exploitation of the territorial environments and resources of poor countries was, according to this critique, more about defending profits for multinational corporations than about the global poor.
Other critics have observed a similar dynamic. Thomas Pogge identifies the “resource privilege”11 (the right to control, and thereby profit from, territorial resource extraction, leading to stunted development for some resource-rich LDCs in what has come to be known as the “resource curse”12) as serving the interests of multinational corporations and the governments of the LDCs, with the former getting cheap access to valuable mineral resources and the latter getting revenue from their sale (funds which, as research on the resource curse suggests, are often used to arm states against the people, feed corruption, and thereby hinder development). In the interest of development, designed to benefit the peoples of poor countries, the privilege was in some cases hindering that development, while, in most, hindering its sustainable potential by polluting and rapidly depleting local LDC environments. The cruel irony was that at least a putative concern for global equity in development, along with ecological limits, would result in additional pressures to export pollution and resource depletion from the North to the South, doing little to promote a sustainable transition while worsening environmental inequality.
Ecological limits and US politics
Within the United States, the reception of ecological limits would lead to changes in the partisan alignment around environmental protection. The conservation movement that preceded the environmental movement as the dominant vision for reforming the relationship between humans and their environment largely appealed to (with its main nongovernmental organizations mostly led by) white, male, and upper-middle-class resource users. The landmark environmental laws adopted in the late 1960s and early 1970s (the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, etc.) enjoyed bipartisan support in the US Congress and were championed by the Republican President Richard Nixon, who also presided over the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. California Republican House member Pete McCloskey served as the co-chair of the first Earth Day in 1970, with numerous members of both parties in the House and Senate claiming strong environmental credentials. For generations, protection of the environment enjoyed bipartisan support, which would begin to erode after 1972, in part due to the way in which the idea of ecological limits had been received and translated into policy.
By the 1980s, changes within the US Republican Party led to an abandonment of Nixon’s environmental leadership and its replacement with the deregulatory and obstructionist politics of the Reagan administration, with the widening of partisan polarization on environmental issues in Congress beginning with its shift to the right in the early 1990s. As Dunlap, McCright, and Yarosh show, this widening partisan gap is reflected in widely disparate attitudes and beliefs about climate change, with those identifying as Republicans, in the electorate as well as government, increasingly embracing a particular version of one of the three possible responses to ecological limits to be considered next: supporting business as usual (i.e. enacting no new environmental protections as well as rolling back existing ones) on the basis of climate science denial, which shows similar patterns of partisan polarization.13
The environmental movement, by contrast, increasingly (if haltingly and inconsistently) moved away from what I shall, below, call the “eco-fortress” response (characterized by a desire to maintain exclusive control over scarce resources at the expense of the disadvantaged) that was characteristic of the early conservation movement, and toward what I call the “just transition” response, which aims to protect ecological goods and services for all.