Environmental Political Theory. Steve Vanderheiden

regulation, at the same time that US conservatives were rejecting these. The idea of ecological limits could not be ignored, but how the idea was received gave rise to widely disparate and competing political visions. Some chose science denialism or other forms of dismissal, while others saw limits as justifying the exclusion of others from the benefits of development or enjoyment of increasingly scarce ecological goods and services, and still others saw the challenge as requiring a new focus on equity in understanding the causes of and solutions to environmental problems. To those three kinds of response and to their implications we shall now turn.

Business as usual

One kind of reaction to the emergence of ecological limits is to deny that such limits require the reevaluation of any existing ideals or practices at all. In one form, this response involves the contestation, attempted suppression, or denial of the science behind such limits in rejecting imperatives for action to mitigate environmental problems. A model for this strategy had been set in the 1960s, with the chemical industry threatening to sue Houghton Mifflin and the New Yorker to prevent the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, then mounting an expensive public relations campaign to discredit it (including the circulation to US media outlets of a parody entitled “The Desolate Year,” claiming that Americans would not be able to grow enough food to survive without pesticides), along with vicious ad hominem attacks against Carson herself. Half a century later, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which has also been active in climate science denial) continues to malign Carson by falsely claiming on its rachelwaswrong.org website that her “false alarm” on the dangers of DDT is responsible for the suffering and death of millions from bans on its anti-malarial uses¹⁴ (in fact, the chemical’s use to combat malaria was explicitly allowed in the 1996 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and it continues to be used for such purposes in Africa and Asia).

      This model was also used in the US tobacco industry’s strategy for avoiding smoking-related lawsuits by what the majority opinion in United States v. Philip Morris (2006) describes as a conspiracy to defraud the public “with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.” The industry’s regulatory avoidance strategy of contesting the scientific consensus and creating doubt about the scientific basis for the dangers of smoking created a playbook that would later be used to contest the existence of ecological limits or resist pressures for regulatory responses to them. David Michaels notes of this strategy of “manufacturing uncertainty” that “the vilification of threatening research as ‘junk science’ and the corresponding sanctification of industry-commissioned research as ‘sound science’ has become nothing less than the standard operating procedure for parts of corporate America.”¹⁵ Climate science denial is perhaps the most prominent use of this model, but it has also been used against scientific research on acid rain, biodiversity loss, and animal pain and suffering.

Both uses involve the politicization of science, or intentional effort to deceive policymakers or the public about scientific facts in order to promote the narrow financial interests of industry, a strategy that has been central to the US anti-environmental movement and is increasingly being used elsewhere to similar effect. Following the template advocated by then-corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell in his 1971 “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” memo, corporations began in the early 1970s to establish contrarian sources of expertise in defense of corporate interests against what Powell characterized as anti-capitalist critique “from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals.” Powell’s memo, which was quoted at length in the 1973 establishment of the Pacific Legal Foundation¹⁶ (an industry-sponsored legal advocacy group designed to oppose environmental regulations that would also play a role in the anti-environmental Wise Use movement¹⁷), describes much of the strategy of anti-environmental foundations (Olin, Coors, Scaife, Koch, Bradley, etc.) and the free-market “think tanks” that they established to obfuscate science on behalf of industry.¹⁸ They pursue their advocacy goals through industry-sponsored contrarian science and other public relations efforts to discredit mainstream scientific research, in a campaign to deceive the public about the scientific bases of environmental problems and thereby to delay calls for stronger regulatory protections against environmental degradation.

      Under the Trump administration, this politicization of science has included not only the president’s own expressed climate science denialism but also the replacement of scientists with industry advocates on key regulatory bodies, the termination of numerous science advisory posts and commissions, the muzzling of government scientists and scrubbing of their research from agency websites, and even the pressuring of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather forecasters to corroborate a false claim by the president about whether Hurricane Dorian was expected to threaten Alabama in September of 2019. Its disregard and disdain for science-based decision making became so anomalous and alarming that the bipartisan National Task Force on Rule of Law & Democracy describes Trump administration politicization of government science and research as having reached a “crisis point” in obfuscation and denialism that includes “almost weekly violations of previously respected safeguards” and “undermine[s] the value of objective facts themselves.”¹⁹

While science denialism is perhaps the most prominent version of the business-as-usual response, another version accepts some of the science behind anthropogenic environmental threats but claims that market-driven technological innovation will successfully avoid any adverse human impacts, obviating the need for state regulation or any kind of retooling of prevailing ideas or practices. In the context of peak oil forecasts, for example, such a response would dismiss calls for stricter government efficiency standards or alternative fuel research and development by citing the market incentives available to entrepreneurs in bringing alternative automobile technologies to market (ignoring the sordid history of General Motors’ EV-1 in 1997, as well as government subsidies needed to launch Tesla Motors). Its message is one of optimism about markets but skepticism about policy solutions. Ecological limits may be real, but neither government nor the public needs to worry about them or do anything to fix them.

      Rejecting the call for governments to proactively anticipate and respond to ecological limits with conservation and efficiency policies, this version acknowledges the need for change but denies that it needs to be directed by states, instead vesting markets and voluntary rather than regulatory efforts with the power to transform production and consumption. An associated view invokes the environmental Kuznets curve (discussed in chapter 5) to suggest that continued promotion of economic growth will eventually rectify any environmental impacts of growth once a tipping point has been reached, again rationalizing business as usual against calls to more proactively address the impacts of ecological limits. Regardless of which form it takes, all versions of this response reject any need to embark upon planned changes to government institutions, economic organizations, or public values or behavior. For our purposes here, they also deny the need to disrupt or transform social and political ideals like the ones to be examined in later chapters, since ideals can neither be complicit in, nor serve as solutions to, nonexistent environmental crises that require no change from the status quo.

The eco-fortress

A second and quite different response (if one also being advanced by right-wing populists in Europe, America, and Australia, alongside science denial) accepts some threat to human welfare from ecological limits or anthropogenic environmental change unless some kind of action is taken, but seeks to insulate powerful states or groups against the biggest impacts – typically at the expense of the disadvantaged. In Hardin’s version, extending his opposition to famine aid on neo-Malthusian ecological grounds from his “The Tragedy of the Commons” (discussed in chapter 3), the international sharing of agricultural surplus from affluent countries in the form of emergency food aid for famine victims would “move food to the people,