John Dryzek identifies the environmental discourse of “survival” as often countenancing centralized and authoritarian systems of control in response to ecological limits, as with the kind of eco-authoritarian visions discussed in chapter 4. According to Dryzek, the “basic story line” of such responses “is that human demands on the life support capacity of ecosystems threaten to explode out of control, and drastic action needs to be taken in order to curb these demands.”21 In most cases, this “drastic action” and the state of emergency to which it responds is viewed by those embracing this discourse as justifying the suspension of humanitarian ideals, as well as of democratic processes, allowing the powerful to protect themselves at the expense of others. In describing a dystopic response to runaway climate change that he calls “Fortress Climate State” and characterizes as in a permanent state of emergency, Peter Christoff anticipates it “either seeking to protect the welfare of its citizens equally but with little capacity to deal humanely with the world beyond its borders, or by protecting only its political and economic ruling elite.”22 The conscious decision to disregard the welfare of others is justified by the reality and urgency of an environmental threat, coupled with the claim that it requires the abandonment of processes and ideals that would normally apply.
While the eco-fortress response does (unlike business as usual) take seriously the scientific basis for predicted ecological crises, it so prioritizes sustainability within one’s own territory above competing ideals like justice and democracy that it practically sets those aside, rather than seeking any kind of balance. Refusing entry to environmental migrants displaced from their home territories by climate change, or refusing to support famine relief where possible on grounds that “positive checks” on population are needed, would constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, but follow from a fortress ethos.
As in eco-authoritarianism, which we shall consider in chapter 4, replacing democratic institutions with authoritarian ones would likewise respond to the emergence of the sustainability ideal by entirely displacing the democratic ideal, ignoring the dismal track records of existing authoritarian states in this regard. Perhaps most importantly, the response circumscribes the community ideal (discussed in chapter 8) to a particular people (or subset thereof) in order to forcefully defend that community’s privileges at the expense of other communities. The politics of fear and resentment used by right-wing populists to demonize immigrants and the disadvantaged often accompanies this response, and the discourse of emergency often accompanies its call for exclusion of the disadvantaged and the states of political and moral exception this requires. The result of any eco-fortress response would be – and, indeed, is intended to be – highly inequitable.
Milder versions of this response can be seen in efforts at, or proposals for, concentrations of environmental privilege in the midst of increasing scarcity. As discussed in chapter 9, the permanent sovereignty principle grants to states or peoples an entitlement to territorial natural resources, which, for resource-rich states, could be akin to an eco-fortress as the principle guards against competing claims. Proposals to grandfather high rates of per capita greenhouse gas emissions, as was embodied within the Kyoto Protocol, likewise grant legal entitlement to a form of environmental privilege to those states that had polluted more in the recent past, while denying development opportunities to smaller historical polluters. On a local scale, Pellow and Park’s The Slums of Aspen chronicles how residents of an affluent resort community sought to maintain their environmental privileges while scapegoating local Hispanic service workers, in an eco-fortress of gated communities and exclusionary local regulations.23 All share in common the desire to maintain or extend environmental inequality for the benefit of the relatively privileged, often through narratives by which the disadvantaged are blamed for their misfortune rather than acknowledging complicity on the part of the privileged, which might give rise to calls for equity in burden-sharing or a corrective-justice response instead.
The just transition
The third kind of response to the challenge of ecological limits, and the only one that takes seriously the precautionary response called for by the science of environmental change, as well as the social and political ideals upon which modern liberal democracies are founded and toward which they in their best moments continue to aspire, seeks mutual accommodation between the sustainability ideal and those other existing ideals that it disrupts and must transform – but need not necessarily displace. It faults the business-as-usual response for underestimating the disruption posed by sustainability imperatives, and the eco-fortress for overestimating it and thus failing to maintain tenable versions of existing social and political ideals. Recognizing the need for sustainable transition in our institutions, infrastructure, practices, and ideas, this response meets the challenge of ecological limits through constraints imposed by (updated and reimagined) critical social and political ideals, ensuring that the transition it recommends is guided by imperatives of justice as well as sustainability.
Failing to maintain the material conditions necessary for society to treat its members justly and to govern itself democratically makes business as usual self-undermining, as justice and democracy are both threatened by worsening scarcity, while failing to maintain social conditions and institutions necessary to promote respect for, and protect the dignity of, persons and peoples undermines the normative basis for human society itself. Doing both – maintaining defensible versions of key social and political ideals, but making these compatible with the maintenance of those ideals over time – comprises the third response of the just transition. Here, “just” serves as a kind of shorthand for the mix of ideals to be discussed in chapters 3 through 10, with the ideal of justice incorporating the seven others in various ways. For the purposes of the next eight chapters, this response aims to maintain some conceptions of the social and political ideals to be surveyed in those chapters. In the concluding chapter, we shall return to the question of what the just transition might look like, or how sustainability interacts with those other ideals. First, however, we must turn our attention to those eight ideals.
Notes
1 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2 John R. McNeill, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 3 W. Steffen, A. Sanderson, P. D. Tyson, et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2004), p. 131. 4 John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 17. 5 Eleonora Barbieri Masini, The Legacy of Aurelio Peccei and the Continuing Relevance of his Anticipatory Vision (Vienna: European Support Centre for the Club of Rome, 2006), p. 8. 6 Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2004), p. xvi. 7 Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today (September, 1974): 38. 8 See Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 9 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists