The need to balance competing imperatives is hardly unique to contemporary politics, even if the appearance of sustainability as a new imperative has introduced new conflicts with older ideals. To consider only one of many such examples, liberty and equality are often seen as competing with one another. We know that allowing a kind of market freedom will lead to significant economic inequality over time, which in turn can undermine legal and political equality as those with more income and wealth translate these into forms of power that confer advantages with legislatures and in courts. Conversely, maintaining a strict economic equality would conflict with influential conceptions of freedom. Constructively resolving a dilemma like this one requires a normative theoretical method that allows us to appreciate the value of both horns of the dilemma, to understand the historical origins and evolution of the relevant concepts, to propose balancing points in areas of unavoidable tension, while identifying means of reducing those tensions where they are unnecessary.
These powers of political theory – combined with an orientation that counsels epistemological humility in understanding such ideals as constructions that cannot readily be reconstructed at will, but instead call for critical challenges that can only come through collective and political action, rather than words in a book – enable this method of political inquiry to generate insights into the historical trajectory of environmental politics that would not be available to scholars or students of other disciplinary perspectives.
Must we choose to confer absolute priority to one ideal over the other whenever they conflict? Few libertarians are prepared to scrap legal equality (or equality before the law) in pursuit of the variety of liberty that they otherwise favor, and few strict egalitarians would so restrict individual freedom that voluntary simplicity (or the voluntary choice of leisure over more material possessions) would be banned as an affront to material equality. We seek to resolve such conflicts by balancing competing ideals, rather than granting one absolute priority over the others, and, while the libertarian and strict egalitarian may each identify a quite different balance, they both aim to do what will be our goal in the chapters of this book: to strike some balance between ostensibly competing ideals (sometimes by reinterpreting one or both to minimize the tension between them), and then to defend these interpretations and this balancing point. This art of balancing, along with the associated arts of appreciating points of tension in ideas as well as understanding the historical origins and normative force of each source of tension, allows the mode of inquiry used in this book to assist our comprehension of what is needed to usher in the kinds of changes that will allow us to maintain our noblest and most considered aspirations.
Canonical texts in political theory reveal the origins of and major developments in the prevailing social and political ideals, as visionary historical thinkers wrestled with value conflicts or to accommodate important events or changes in the world. Understanding how various and often competing conceptions of key social and political ideals emerge, exert influence, and either become institutionalized or give way to new conceptions can assist our understanding of how an ideal like sustainability, an event like the environmental crisis, or a discovery like ecological limits has shaped our received ideals as well as been shaped by them, and how their evolution in adaptation to the constraints of ecological limits or imperatives of sustainability might occur. In understanding human history and environmental change through environmental political theory, we can gain a unique perspective on how and why we as a species organized into societies and, influenced by their constitutive ideas and ideals, got to where we are today, and can better appreciate our possible human and social futures, what they hold for those residing in them, and how social and political ideas and institutions can in some sense help to determine those futures. It is to this task that we now turn, following a chapter on the idea of ecological limits, and the several possible reactions to it in shaping the sustainability ideal and generating its imperatives.
Notes
1 www.theclimatemobilization.org/climate-emergency-campaign. 2 https://rebellion.earth/the-truth. 3 Damian Carrington, “Why The Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment,” The Guardian (May 17, 2019), online at www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment. 4 William Blake, “London,” in Songs of Innocence and Experience (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1866). 5 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 26. 6 Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (University of Kansas Press, 2008).
2 Environmental Change and the Sustainability Imperative
“In the beginning all the world was America,” John Locke wrote in his seminal 1689 Second Treatise of Government. Locke, who owned thousands of acres of undeveloped land in the Carolinas through his patronage with the first Earl of Shaftesbury, developed perhaps the most influential modern political text with this image of an abundant and largely uninhabited continent in mind. Nature was, for Locke, inert matter or raw materials awaiting human exploitation and transformation. Unless and until humans appropriate land as private property by fencing it off from the commons and laboring upon it – perhaps the quintessential expression of human nature in Lockean liberalism – nature is devoid of value and humans are without purpose or direction. Upon the foundation of this theory of nature, Locke’s canonical text constructs much of the edifice of Western liberalism, profoundly influencing the design and self-image of liberal democracies in Europe, North America, and beyond.
As will be explored further in our examination of Lockean ideals of freedom, equality, and progress, many of our received ideas about politics originated in a text that denied the relevance to politics or society of ecological scarcity, and which consequently viewed nature and its life-support systems as of little value to humans. A key premise for Locke – and, by extension, for many other seminal texts in Western political thought, and consequently in the political cultures of Western liberal democracies – held that finite natural resources were in fact perfectly abundant and so could not be depleted by human activities. Humans as a result need not care for them or design institutions to protect them. Such a premise might have seemed plausible to many at the time insofar as relocation to European colonies like those in America was a feasible option, as much of the English land that Locke describes in his treatise had already been privately appropriated by then, and only colonization of the New World would dispel this fiction of cornucopian abundance on both sides of the Atlantic. It can no longer be seen as plausible.
Indeed, ecological scarcity is the sort of idea that is disruptive of established views about the relationships between humans and their territorial environments, as well as their relationships with each other, and is transformational of their ideas in requiring existing social and political concepts and ideals to accommodate the facts of ecological limits. As historical ideas such as popular sovereignty, the nation-state, and colonial oppression had disruptive and transformational impacts on law, politics, and society, sustainability imperatives have challenged and will continue to challenge our social and political institutions and the ideas and ideals in which they are embedded. They disrupt previously settled conflicts, challenge worldviews that cannot account for their rise or force, and demand to be accommodated within the penumbra of existing social ideals and organizing principles. To the extent that existing ideas, ideals, and institutions cannot do so, the new ideas require the old ones to be transformed, often against the resistance of those invested in the older ideological order.
Popular sovereignty, for example,