Video lecture trial

Hi Class!

This is only a test! I just bought a really cheap Sony HC26 camera to take to Egypt and thought I would try out the idea of delivering video lectures for our Environmental Psychology on-line class from remote areas. Yesterday we went to the Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland California (go ahead and google map it... it is a very cool environment!) and bought a "JuiceBag" solar powered back pack. Then we bought the camera for about $250 along with an Energizer car charger for the battery which can be plugged into the backpack. Now we can make videos anywhere the sun shines without worrying about running low on battery power.

While I was buying the camera, I decided to get a gift for the DiMassa kids, so I bought them "Guitar Hero II" -- a sony playstation game that the whole family can enjoy. The idea was that, since everyone is complaining that video games are wrecking families, we would find a game that Frank and his wife Karen and the kids could all do together.
It really rocks -- and makes us think that "School of Rock" (the Jack Black film) has a lot to tell us about why the school environment is all wrong for learning

Environmentalism Future

Environmentalism Future:
"Looking Backwards" toward Policy Instruments through Eutopian Thought
T.H. Culhane

Introduction

"Our thesis is this: the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power…It was … at the height of the movement's success, that the seeds of failure were planted. The environmental community's success created a strong confidence -- and in some cases bald arrogance -- that the environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a policy level. The environmental community's belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of "the environment" has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming at the national level… We believe that the environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn't as "environmental." Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing…Environmentalism is today more about protecting a supposed "thing" -- "the environment" -- than advancing the worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir, who nearly a century ago observed, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."" -- quote from The Death of Environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus 13 Jan 2005[1]

In the last two chapters I reflected on Nietzsche's late nineteenth century declaration of the death of God and Merchants' and McKibben's late twentieth century declarations of the death of Nature. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, Shellenberger and Nordhaus, two prominent members of the "environmental community," have declared the death of environmentalism. They invite us to consider life in a post-environmental world.

As far as I am concerned the death of environmentalism couldn't come soon enough. Through the lens of post-modern deconstructivism it seems to me that the very existence of an "environmental community" predicated its own demise. By definition it set itself up as "just another special interest". The Environmental "community" became an unbearably "othered" phenomenon that would have to be assimilated or obliterated. How could a community that defines as its boundaries the un-bounded spaces that environ every community remain relevant? The same post-Enlightenment atomization, objectification and dissection that Merchant (1990) blamed as foretelling our eventual conception of nature as inert has neutralized and rendered environmentalism lifeless; how could its "leaders" be anything but arbitrary about what gets counted and what doesn't as "environmental?" If they did spend all of their time advancing Muir's worldview of total connection instead of trying to protect a supposed "thing", what claim could they make to a cogent agenda? Would they not face the same uncomfortable dilemma that all modelers of reality face when trying to describe "the all"? Would they not end up back to the need for reductionism that led Bacon and Descartes' and others to advance the scientific method, now held responsible by Merchant for killing the organismic conception of mother earth? Without fragmenting "the environment" as a whole into easily handled parts there could be no environmental action[2]. But by doing so the arbitrariness of the reduction becomes obvious. So environmentalism contains the seeds of its own undoing. Therefore we must ask, what is environmentalism future?

Whatever the merits of their arguments, we think it all to the good that Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Adam Werbach (henceforth known as "the reapers," to save on syllables and to amuse ourselves) are attempting to spark an open, public debate over the future of environmentalism -- if it has one, that is.[3]

Will the master narrative of Environmentalism Future continually re-cast it as a special interest political movement, continuing to offer technical solutions to tactical issues using the three L's of lobbying, legislating, and litigating? Will it be re-cast as a revolutionary resistance movement, perpetually championing the rights of the downtrodden and marginalized? Or will it be, as Luke predicts, "environmentalism as the highest form of capitalism", representing the environing power of the astropanopticon? Will it continue the enlightenment project beyond the darkness of political nihilism and into the light of "genuine Nihilism", liberating humanity and other life forms from power politics by creating a life-affirming sociobiological valuation system that protects bioregional autonomy and local self-governance and merely needs maintenance to help life forms respond to environmental change (a hybrid of the ideas of Rene Dubos in "Man Adapting" and Lenin's Marxist dream as described by Weiner 1992[4]) Will it plunge us into the horror of some political nihilism where the only recognized value is that of the "winner" in local struggles for power? Or will it simply vanish as a maladaptive concept; too nebulous to do much more than confuse and defuse?

Murray Bookchin (1988) asked a set of similar hard questions in his classic essay "The Crisis in the Ecology Movement"[5]. The answers he derived, however, were overwhelmingly positive: embrace them all!

These sharply conflicting alternatives are very real. And to openly state them is not "divisive" or "confrontational." Accusations like "divisiveness" and "confrontation" are being used with outrageous cynicism to blur significant differences in outlook and prevent a careful exploration of serious problems. The phony cry of "Unity!" has often been used to silence one viewpoint in the interests of another. We can certainly have unity -- and discussion, if you please -- despite major differences. "New Age" rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, this what democracy is all about. (p. 1)

In environmental future, if it is to be a democratic future, we will have to learn to avoid dualistic thinking and embrace post-modernism's "both-and-also" (Soja, 1996), because environmental attitudes will always be as different as the individuals espousing them and the environments surrounding them in which they find meaning. A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman ("The New Red, White and Blue", Friday, January 6, 2006) demonstrates the shape-shifting nature of environmental discourse and how easily environmentalism can be morphed to fit one or another agenda. He says,

"What’s so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying - all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe…But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today - making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green - they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary…Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad….Living green is not just a “personal virtue,” as Mr. Cheney says. It’s a national security imperative.[6]
I don't disagree with Friedman about the dangers of "Petrolism", nor do I feel that living "green" is not a national security imperative[7]. I applaud his attempt to snatch the terms of reference away from the disparaging nonsense used by the right wing. But calling "the most important issue"? That rings false to me because I don't think anybody can claim the most important anything. We must determine our priorities by consensus, and clearly there is no consensus here. I don't think that environmentalism future cannot survive both the essentializing tendencies of its own discourse and the Newspeak transmogrifications of recently converted Greens if the exercise simply turns into a search for a new definition of the movement. If the future is to be democratic, environmentalism should be locally definite but globally indefinite. It should add up to the equivalent of anthropologist Robert Redfield's area studies dictum that our books should all be biased but our libraries neutral. This is time honored wisdom:

Wendell C. Bennett of Yale University cited John Stuart Mill’s advice about the imperial British needing to destroy their own provincial attitudes by "‘frequently using the differently colored glasses of other people’" and asked: "Is not there a similarity in our own position today? Do we [not] need ‘those differently colored glasses’ to live wisely in our new ‘one world’?"[8]

This should be just as true in an era of global environmental problems that require international coordination. We can't be fooled into embracing totalizing discourses just because we are dealing with global issues that "affect everybody". The Russians may actually claim that global warming may have some positive benefits for them (aren't they part of everybody?) while the residents of the Maldives worry about being "the first modern nation to be drowned" (New York Times Op-Ed Sunday, January 8th, 2006, p. 15). We have to take all these viewpoints into consideration. We must be honest about openly stating our conflicting alternative visions, as Bookchin suggests, and stop treating the environment as a sacred cow. Otherwise, we will get caught in the cross-hairs of our own totalizing beliefs. When we see that the foundations for environmental policy can have their signs so quickly flipped back and forth, environmentalism starts to seem as funny as the joke about the Jewish immigrant who is amazed at how easy it was for him to be converted to Catholicism and then justifies eating chicken on a Friday by simply repeating three times over "once a chicken, now a fish". A more nuanced read of Friedman and others like him doesn't tell us anything about how we should relate to our environment as evolving beings in a interconnected biosphere, it merely gives us a new controlling narrative, telling us that if we are patriotic and we value national security, and if analysis shows that, as Friedman concludes, "green is the new red, white and blue", why then we should go "green". If we next learn that we are best served by being "brown" we will assumedly switch to that strategy. There is no grounding – no philosophical underpinnings (like those attempted by the "Deep Ecology" of Bill Devall, Arne Naess or George Sessions or the "Strong Sustainability" of Daly and Cobb) to hold it all together. Such an Environmentalism Future is likely to be as mercurial as the financial markets became after they were liberated from the gold standard. Today we can peg it to homeland security, tomorrow to another issue du jour. The movement stays partisan and utilitarian and then becomes the property of those who control our utilities. Fascism – red, white, blue, green or brown, rears its ugly head (Bookchin 1987)[9]. Democracy fades.

The notion of a coherent environmental movement depended on an agreed upon concept of what "the environment" was. This depended on a universalism that was only possible for a brief period in human history, beginning with the Gutenberg printing press and the imperial expansion of Europe and culminating in the worldwide hegemony of information broadcasting at the end of the 20th century. Some might even argue that the use of the term "the environment" was part of a hegemonic totalizing discourse that served to abstract and distance environmental concerns from direct action. L.L. Bernard (1930)[10] was one of the early theorists who commented on how our linguistic descriptions of "environment" enabled social control. After developing a theory of how the bio-social environment developed into successive forms of thepsycho-social environment, which have become humanity's chief concern, Bernard tells us:

In my classification of social and cultural environments I have included a fourth phase of artificial environment, which I have called the derivative control environment. It is in the main institutional in character and is a composite of the other three artificial environments, and even of as much of the natural environments as may survive untransformed to the stage of institutionalization and as can at the same time be integrated into a social control system. This environment is primarily conceptual in character and its function is to serve as a system of norms, expressed primarily through its psychosocial or symbolical content for the standardization and regulation or control of the coadaptive or social adjustment behavior of individuals in the presence of their environment. The physico-social and bio-social phases of his environment, in so far as they are included in the institution which directs his adjustment, serve as means to the adjustment. (p. 332)

The Environmental Handbook, published to coincide with the first Earth Day in April of 1970, more often used the collective term "our environment" than the general term "the environment", and used the terms in specific contexts:

The forward to the book starts by quoting Rene Dubos' scientific claim that

"the health of the environment is no mere convention… it has real biological meaning because the surface of the earth is truly a living organism" (page i, italics mine)

It then asks the political question,

"Is our environment to be dealt with in these terms or is it to be handed over to ceaseless, unthinking development by those who think only of what it could yield to them today?" (Ibid, italics mine)

From a reading of early environmental works it appears as if the definite article is useful when dealing with environment in the abstract, as a scientifically generalizable phenomenon, whereas "our environment" is useful when galvanizing action.

In the Handbook the excerpted remarks of John W. Gardner delivered to the National Press Club, December 9, 1969 have him quoted as saying

"we see the brooding threat of nuclear warfare. We know our lakes are dying, our rivers growing filthier daily, our atmosphere increasingly polluted… [one] thing the citizen can do is to throw the weight of public opinion against those in the private sector who are unwilling to work toward the solution of our common problems… our system of checks and balances dilutes the thrust of positive action. The competition of interests inherent in pluralism acts as a brake on concerted action." (p.5).

Use of the impersonal term "the environment" (where "environment" is defined by its definite article as a separate space) essentialized ecology and "othered it" (see Edward Said (1979)[11] for notions of how semantics marginalizes concerns and renders them powerless, see Escobar (1999)[12] for "steps to an anti-essentialist ecology"). Once we were no longer dealing with "an environment", (whose indefinite article implied locality and invited consideration of "which" environment or "whose" environment, and could be answered by "mine, yours or ours") we were left with a semantically owned space subject to the logics of commodification and hegemonic power. Thus "the environment" became defined as "that place out there" – the "wilderness", the "no man's land" "the commons", the "Edenic Paradise" – anything but our own toxic homes, invaded by pesticides and offgassing synthetics, our barren monocultural back yards, invaded by herbicides and Kentucky Blue Grass, our sterile neighborhoods, homogenized to resemble English manor meadowlands, our polluted and degraded poor communities, sited for the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes (the "residuals" of industries who don't want to pay the costs of proper disposal or recycling). For many people saving "the environment" became a matter of placing checks in envelopes with pictures of baby harp seals to buy a piece of some peace of mind. Activism on behalf of "the environment" would be better left to "the experts". In this way the radical populist roots of Environmentalism Past, with its focus on "rights", were cut and the movement passed into the professional accounting discourse of Environmentalism Present. But in the unwritten landscape of environmentalism future, the DARPA inspired logic of the decentralized internet and the proliferation of multiple channels of information through cable and satellite television and desktop and localpublishing are threatening information hegemony and giving local actors agency and voice. If nothing else this should kill environmentalism as a global special interest movement led by Western strands of romanticism and professionalism and force consideration of plurivocality in development[13] .

Well intentioned "environmentalists" have wanted to frame environmentalism as a general interest movement (Boynton 2004[14]) -- one world, one earth, one environment, ultimately what? One government? Granted authority by whom? One God? -- and to be fair, they may have believed that a supposedly neutral term such as "the environment" would help us overcome our partisan differences. But the post-modern, post-colonial turn in history cannot accommodate such generalities or simplifications.

The formerly unitary and controlling discourse on the environment has been broken up into questions of whose environment. It no longer makes sense to talk about "the environment" as though it was some place, some never never land, that could be destroyed, or degraded or improved or conserved, or preserved, or saved. The lessons of environmentalism past and environmentalism present are that each environment dialectically (trialectically?) affects every other. Of course the idea that there are basic cultural differences in conceptualizing environments is something that anthropologists have been saying for generations (Frake 1974[15], Levi-Strauss 1962[16]). But trends in globalization tended to collapse all of these and enfold them into the master narrative of the master environment, too easily dominated by power interests. It takes the turn of post-modernism to return environments to their specific and local constructions.

My environment, part social construction, part personal construction, part physical reality, shares features with, but is different from, your environment, and his and hers and theirs. The environment I am interested in protecting might include Bambi (Cartmill 1993)[17] but it might just as well include Aibo[18]. Nature for me might include Yosemite but it might also include Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. Both are managed enframing spaces, commodified picture postcard landscapes (Spirn 1996 [19], Steigerwald 2000[20]). To achieve political consensus for a given environmental impact we can speak collectively about "our environment." This would appear to be a return to the rhetoric of the late sixties and early seventies when environmentalism tried to involve us all in a feeling of interdependency and shared responsibility for our biosphere (much as the civil rights movement employed the term "brother" to emphasize biological unity within our species). But today our greater sophistication and our resistance to essentialist and universalist tendencies impel us to make explicit our awareness that there is (and should be?) environmental diversity, and each of our environments, while interconnected, have different characteristics and management needs. We no longer respond favorably to the hegemonic notion of "one size fits all" proposals. We are deeply suspicious of development schemes from the "outside" (Scott 1998). And to pick a fight we can still talk about what "they" are doing to "our" environments (including, along with our favorite fishing holes and hiking paths, our local union hall, and our treasured ball fields), and what we may not like about "their environments" (with their manicured lawns, their water-intensive biocide-heavy golf courses, with their characterless, energy intensive sprawl, with their toxic industrial parks and landfills, with their deadly power plants and shoebox shopping malls or, on the other side, with their bio-diesel VW vans and trailer-homes, or their insipid child-safe nature centers where hunting and snowmobiles are prohibited).

There is no such place as "the environment".

What this realization will do to "environmentalism" is hard to predict. At the very least it makes it harder for totalizing discourses and the plans they inspire to take hold over our consciousness. And this makes utopian visions, as authored by any individual or party of individuals, harder to achieve global realization. The modernist project, a product of the utopian visions of a few philosophers, statesmen, architects, scientists, artists and other so-called (and often self-avowed) "visionaries", is crumbling as if infected by the fungal incursions of post-modern insight.

What I will try to do in this paper is to discuss what life in Schellenberger and Nordhaus' post environmental world might look like by taking us into the world of environmental modeling as it was conceived before the first and second waves of environmentalism. I will draw most of my arguments from popular utopian literature, making the claim that speculative fiction, corrected for individual and historical bias, may offer better models of the future than even the more mathematically and scientifically rigorous system models being used by planning professionals and policy makers to predict the future state of the world. I do not ague that we should use one instead of the other, because, as in the fable about blind men describing and elephant, each contributes a needed dimension to our understanding of possible future realities. I argue, along with Lyman Tower Sargent (1982)[21] and contra Karl Popper and Ralf Dahrendorf, that we must not leave out utopian fantasies from our planning arsenal. Because artistic representations of the future tend to include the human dimension left out of hard science maps of the future, I feel they often have more heuristic value than supposedly value-free maps whose assumptions are often obscured by our implicit faith in positivist science, a faith that even in the post-Kuhnian world, still permeates professional planning. My view echoes the thoughts of the turn of the century German economist Theodore Hertzka (1889) who wrote the following justification for putting aside his academic work to create his utopian fiction "Freeland":

It happened to me as it may have happened to Bacon of Verulam when his studies for the 'Novum Organon' were interrupted by the vision of his 'Nova Atlantis'--with this difference, however, that his prophetic glance saw the land of social freedom and justice when centuries of bondage still separated him from it, whilst I see it when mankind is already actually equipped ready to step over its threshold. Like him, I felt an irresistible impulse vividly to depict what agitated my mind. Thus, putting aside for awhile the abstract and systematic treatise which I had begun, I wrote this book, which can justly be called 'a political romance,' though it differs from all its predecessors of that category in introducing no unknown and mysterious human powers and characteristics, but throughout keeps to the firm ground of the soberest reality. As this book professes to offer, in narrative form, a picture of the actual social life of the future, it follows as a matter of course that it will be exposed, in all its essential features, to the severest professional criticism. To this criticism I submit it, with this observation, that, if my work is to be regarded as a failure, or as the offspring of frivolous fancy, it must be demonstrated that men gifted with a normal average understanding would in any material point arrive at results other than those described by me if they were organized according to the principles which I have expounded; or that those principles contain anything which a sound understanding would not accept as a self-evident postulate of justice as well as of an enlightened self-interest. I do not imagine that the establishment of the future social order must necessarily be effected exactly in the way described in the following pages. But I certainly think that this would be the best and the simplest way, because it would most speedily and easily lead to the desired result…

Hertzka, not given to fancy, was careful to set his utopia in real places and among real peoples on the continent of Africa so as to ensure the plausibility of his model. Because he believed that the future must be created by informed free men and women he deliberately chose create his model in a narrative form that would invite the largest possible readership.

Just a few words in conclusion, in justification of the romantic accessories introduced into the exposition of so serious a subject. I might appeal to the example of my illustrious predecessors, of whom I have already mentioned Bacon, the clearest, the acutest, the soberest thinker of all times. But I feel bound to confess that I had a double purpose. In the
first place, I hoped by means of vivid and striking pictures to make the difficult questions which form the essential theme of the book acceptable to a wider circle of readers than I could have expected to reach by a dry systematic treatment. In the second place, I wished, by means of the concrete form thus given to a part of my abstractions, to refute by anticipation the criticism that those abstractions, though correct in thesis, were nevertheless inapplicable in praxis. Whether I have succeeded in these two objects remains to be proved.

This is not an unfamiliar technique for many thinkers who believe in the value of participatory planning. Revolutionary thinkers such as the reformation's Martin Luther (1483-1546), who insisted the Bible be available in the language of the common people, and the German scientist and physician Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), who insisted that science and medicine must be taught in the local language, believed that the language of thinking and planning should be accessible. The utopian fiction is a very accessible medium for playing out "what if" scenarios that almost anyone can participate in. Rich in details about the environments surrounding and sustaining its protagonists, I contend that utopian fiction should be read as a form of virtual environmental modeling in which authors and readers get to play out the drama of human-nature relations before they decide on a course of action. In Schellenberger and Nordhaus' post-environment future, without an explicit environmentalism or community of environmentalists to oppose, it is my hope that future history, occurring when population pressures and distributional inefficiencies are often taxing environmental subsidies beyond their capacities to sustain lives, will come to resemble what the pro-utopia philosopher Ernst Bloch saw as the essence of past history:

"… a struggle against those conditions which prevent the human being from attaining self-realization in non-alienating, non-alienated relationships with itself, nature and other people. Bloch constantly argues that Marxist theory ought not to forget its telos, which is, as Marx puts it in the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts: 'the naturalization of man and the humanization of nature.'" (Kellner and O'Hara 1976: 14-15)

Without the essentializing and opposing tendencies of diverse and confused environmentalisms it is hoped that we can recognize the utopian tendencies of all movements and initiatives whereby people struggle to make sense of the world and work towards what Bloch calls "the development of the wealth of human nature… its enrichment and fulfillment" (Ibid). To complete the thoughts developed in Chapters 1 and 2, which environmentalism per se is unnecessary and redundant, I make the claim that environmentalism is a form of utopianism and back that claim up with Lyman Tower Sargent's assertion that "any developed political theory implies a utopia…" (Ibid: 566)

"Utopia is at the root of all radicalism and even much of what we call liberalism. It is the archetype and harbinger of social change – good, bad, and indifferent. Perhaps if we had better utopias, we would be able to produce a better world, say the utopians. The antiutopians answer that if it were not for utopias, we would not have the present mess. Antiutopians are not simply conservatives, and utopians are not all radicals or even liberals. There have been conservative utopias, and much of the attack on utopianism comes from liberals, or even radicals, who fear that detailed plans for the future cannot be implemented without resort to force." (Ibid: 567)

Sargen't argument applies to supposed environmentalists and supposed anti-environmentalists, to moderns and anti-moderns, to those who fear industrial or state fascism and those who fear eco-fascism. If we embrace utopianism, environmentalism becomes redundant.

Returning to the insights of our ecosystem model, we might conclude that all organisms who strive to adapt to their environments and who simultaneously strive to adapt their environments to their own intrinsic nature (what I referred to in Chapter I as "niche constructivism" per Lewontin 1983, Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman 2003) are eutopian. The failure of any of us to achieve the desired Eugenic or Euphenic stasis of perfect phenotypic adaptability or our failure to Euthenically engineer the Edenic stasis of a perfect world to match our genotypic needs doesn't and shouldn't ever stop us from trying. The ecosystem model merely tells us that such attempts to improve our fitness in the face of Sisyphean change is what evolution, and thus life, is all about.

III. Whither we are Tending

…it is certainly the fate of all Utopias to be more or less misread… H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, p. 43

“. . The fantasies of utopian existence promoted by proponents of the technological, industrial mode of life for the last one hundred years are now demonstrably false. That's not what we got. What we got was alienation, disorientation, destruction of the planet, destruction of natural systems, destruction of diversity, homogenization of cultures and regions, crime, homelessness, disease, environmental breakdown, and tremendous inequality. We have a mess on our hands. This system has not lived up to its advertising; in developing a strategy for telling people what to do next, we first have to make that point. Life really is better when you get off the technological/industrial wheel and conceive of some other way. It makes people happier. It may not make them more money, but getting more money hasn't worked out. Filling life with commodities doesn't turn out to be satisfying, and most people know that. (Jerry Mander, 1991)”

“It is a characteristic of scientists in general that they have no flair for predicting the future. That is better done by the H.G. Wellses and Aldous Huxleys. The scientist may have ‘future in his bones’, as Sir Charles Snow puts it, but alas not at the tip of his tongue. Science may be the engine of social, economic, military, industrial and intellectual change, but the scientist is not in the drivers seat.” Professor I.I. Rabi “An American View: The Scientist in Public Affairs” from “The World in 1984” Volume I, The complete New Sceintist series, Edited by Nigel Calder, Penguin Books, 1964.

The philosopher Ernest Bloch and his contemporaries Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, used the optic of cultural criticism between 1930 and 1973 to expose the arts as mirrors of social realities and human dreams, believing that genres such as theater, film, opera, poetry, painting and even pulp fictions and fairy tales helped us strive for something better, for a more humane "Heimat" (homeland). In his book "The Utopian Function of Art and Literature" Bloch (1988) took on a wealth of popular forms, mining them for models of the good life and he discovered that "the content of the utopian changes according to the social situation." (p. 5). Each age seems to have its own competing visions of utopia, all grounded in the particular environmental perceptions, technologies (and the social conditions that shape technological manifestation) and mapping/modeling capacities of their time. From the political utopias of past centuries to the consumer oriented fantasy based utopias of our own centuries, Warren tells us,

Utopian discourse, thus, is both myth and concrete description; it draws its power from its ability to function as hegemonic dialogue through which contemporary social conditions are negotiated, distorted, and transformed (Levitas 1984).
But the ability of individuals and groups to create new maps or models of alternative futures, through whatever technologies may be at hand – narrative styles, comic art forms, independent film, and lately the graphing and databasing power of new Geographical Information Systems – give plurivocality an ever greater chance to throw its visions into the ring and disrupt power driven distortions. Warren offers the following hope:
A more nuanced understanding of the utopian…leads us to a much more intriguing set of possibilities. As Harvey (2000, 193) has noted, it is the same conditions of which dystopian observers despair that also offer seeds of hope: "Those internal contradictions provide the raw materials for growing an alternative." Technologies like gis embody those contradictions and can also be used to expose and change them. Utopian activities involving gis may not much resemble the language of formal nineteenth-century utopias; they may instead exist as fragmentary and sometimes disconnected elements within the "hidden utopianism" to which Harvey refers. Nonetheless, in those individual utopian moments, gis technology can offer an excellent strategy to "interfere" in the broader industrial capitalist fabric from which it comes and to bring about change, although in small steps at a time. Public participation gis and feminist critiques of gis hint at these possibilities (Warren 2004)[22]
All predictions, even those made with the ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extension which "bridges the gap between a simple map on a computer and real world analysis for deriving solutions to complex problems"[23], are speculative fictions. Policy makers and planners by their very nature are engaged daily in speculation and nowhere is planning more a curious hybrid of imagination and applied empiricism than in the field of environmental policy planning, where the ill understood dynamics of human and non-human interdependencies creates non-determinative outcomes. By its very nature, straddling the borderlands between scientific analyses of past events and (theoretically informed by these analyses) predictions of future events, environmental planning is of necessity a form of "science fiction".

Speculative fiction, science fiction and scientific speculation literature (i.e. "futurology") are all more than useful reference sources for planners, but have frequently been ignored by university policy planning and engineering programs. The question is, from where, then, do environmental planners get their ideas for how their policies and projects will pan out? Who is informing the planner as she lays out a design for what society should look like at the end of the rainbow she has sketched out?

Mapping and Modelling

The father of general semantics, Alford Korzybski stated, 'A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.' What this means is that our perception of reality is not reality itself but our own version of it, or our "map".[24]

Countless essentialist concepts of “nature” exist in both scientific and popular discourse; more realistic conceptualization is needed. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Escobar raises and addresses a key question: How do we deal with the perception that the category “nature” is culturally constructed yet there is something out there that is of increasing concern? This is an application, or case, of the classic philosophical problem of how to square human perception (inevitably distorted, and sometimes downright hallucinative) with whatever is “out there” being perceived. The reality that refuses to go away is the world environmental crisis. This is where political ecology finds its great challenge. (Anderson, 2000)[25]

I make the contention in this chapter that for all organisms environmental movement and thus the "environmental movement" require a combination of genetically inscribed reference maps and experientially built cognitive maps of the environment; forethought and planning rely on imaginative projections of those cognitive maps with new variables inserted and played out in the virtual reality that is mental space-time. These maps are referred to as "models".

An article on Futures Studies in Wikipedia outlines the diverse range of forecasting methods used by Futurists:

* Anticipatory Thinking (Futures)
Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)[26]
Environmental scanning
Morphological analysis[27]
Scenario method
Delphi method and consensus building[28]
Future history
Monitoring
* Backcasting (Eco-History)
Back-view mirror analysis
Cross-impact analysis
* Futures workshops
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis
Futures biographies
Futures wheel
Relevance tree
* Simulation and modelling
Social network analysis
Systems engineering
+ Thinklets[29]
+ Visioning
* Trend analysis

Modeling has occupied the attention of scientists and economists since mathematics and the scientific method became formalized (see Mahoney 1997[30], Casti1989)[31]. Indeed the strength of the so called "hard sciences" derives from their ability to be formally modeled in "cypherspace" (the abstract realm of numbers and mathematical relationships, often called "laws", that physicists and economists used to scribble in notebooks and on blackboards) and then tested in the so called "real world". Increasingly "cyberspace", the "virtual reality" of computer modeling, has emerged as a mediator between blackboard cypherspace and reality[32]. Wolfram's Mathematica is probably the most obvious and powerful of these intermediary tools today, but even CG modeling programs used by Hollywood special effects teams, such as 3D Studio Max, fill this function.[33]

Once again, employing David John Frank's ecosystem model as my own optic, and taking seriously Darwin's adage "the difference between man and the other animals is one of degree and not kind" I think we must regard all modeling as forms of thinking and all thinking as forms of modeling. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics suggest that these differences in degree apply to inorganic animals ("animatronics") as well. As Samuel Butler wrote in 1871

“There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing.”[34]

The recent Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge robotic vehicle race on October 8th of 2005, in which 5 autonomous vehicles successfully traveled 132 miles over torturous desert terrain in under 8 hours demonstrates how far our understanding of world modeling and mental mapping as prerequisites to thinking have come[35]; Mitsubishi's winter 2005 release onto the domestic care market of the robot servant "Wakamaru", who can self navigate around the house, charge his own batteries, recognize 10 individuals by sight and voice, detect stress in its owner, and carry on intelligible near Turing-test conversations using a vocabulary of over 10,000 words[36] also shows internal mapping and the ability to compare sensory inputs of reality to stored models as key components of thinking, common to all self-motivated animate beings (Menzel and D'Aluiso 2000)[37]. Even this holiday's popular toys, "Robo-Sapiens" and "Robo-Raptor", "Robo-Pet" and Hasbro "Bio-Bugs"[38] which many people take for granted because they are sold at stores like Best Buy and Toys R Us, are pushing the envelope for animatronic self-awareness because of the sophisticated mapping and learn-by-comparison algorithms and "nervous-net technology" they contain. Robo-Sapiens V2, for example, can distinguish colors and appropriately name them and can distinguish objects with complex color patterns (such as people) from those with simple patterns (such as walls). Unlike conventional digital computation models, these "toys" use analogous computation and genetic algorithms, just as living organisms do, to produce complex behavior from simple logiccircuits. They are the brainchild of controversial engineer Mark Tilden, the defense-designer-turned-toy-maker, whose company, BEAM Robotics, espouses the very philosophy of machine evolution that Samuel Butler warned humanity against in his utopian fiction "Erewhon":
The idea is to improve robo-genetic stock through stratified competition and have an interesting time in the process. The science behind the idea stems from current concepts in artificial intelligence (AI), artificial life (ALife), evolutionary biology, and genetic algorithms. It seems that building large complex robots hasn't worked well, so why not try to evolve them from a lesser to a greater ability as mother nature has done with biologics? The problem is that such a concept requires self-reproducing robots which won't be possible to build (if at all) for years to come. A solution, however, is to view a human being as a robot's way of making another robot, to have an annual venue where experimenters can let their creations interact in real situations, and then watch as machine evolution occurs… In other words, robogenetics through robobiologics.[39]
Butler's prophetic word's 133 years earlier were:
“Either…a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher machines)--for (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist, except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom. This absence however is only apparent, as I shall presently show… “It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject, that the machines can never be developed into animate or quasi-animate existences, inasmuch as they have no reproductive system, nor seem ever likely to possess one. If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry, and that we are never likely to see a fertile union between two vapour-engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant it. But the objection is not a very profound one. No one expects that all the features of the now existing organisations will be absolutely repeated in an entirely new class of life. The reproductive system of animals differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive systems. Has nature exhausted her phases of this power? Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does anyone say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of the machines? But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was not made by, neither will it ever make, a thimble. Here, again, if we turn to nature we shall find abundance of analogies which will teach us that a reproductive system may be in full force without the thing produced being of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system at present, have we not just seen that they have only recently obtained the germs of a mouth and stomach? And may not some stride be made in the direction of true reproduction which shall be as great as that which has been recently taken in the direction of true feeding?" [40]
Interestingly, when Butler, himself a staunch evolutionist, wrote Erewhon his book was seized upon by anti-evolutionists as such a ridiculous fantasy that it would "reduce Mr. Darwin's theories to an absurdity".[41] Today we see that Butler's attempt to think through the possibilities, and think-them-out-louder, helped humanity to ultimately "think them out loudest", i.e. actually make them real. If we take our models of nature at all seriously we must admit that non-human intelligence and even inorganic intelligence are inevitable, and must be included in all planning models of the future.

Thinking out loud, thinking out louder, thinking out loudest

An explanation of my terminology is needed here: If mapping and modeling, on an internal level, are the chief characteristics of "thinking", and we accept that almost all animate organisms continuously map, many think, and the most intelligent among them plan, it follows that one of the chief distinguishing characteristics of the Homo sapiens is our ability to share models and maps and collectively improve and reproduce them. What makes humans so special is that we alone (right now), through the magic of language, can reproduce our maps and models exobiologically. Any medium we create for sharing our maps and models would be a form of communication, a form of "thinking out loud".

I describe the tendencies of public modeling, moving from the internal maps that all animate beings make to the building of real environments in the external world, as different forms of "thinking out loud". Here I identify what I believe to be three evolving levels of communicating shared models of future environmental scenarios to enhance the possibilities for participatory planning and survival.

I. Thinking out loud: the function of animal communication

Gestural, uttered, spoken and written (or graphic) forms of communication would be the first level of thinking-out-loud. In personal, internal thinking, an observer senses the world, forms an audio-visual-tactile-olfactory map or model in the brain (often comparing it to a general environmental hard-wired "instinct" map) and then, at least among intentionalorganisms, imagines what the outcome of a movement (change of state) in the relationship between self and environment might bring about. In highly intelligent social animals, to test any hypothesis without commiting to it (and thus running the risk of loss of fitness) the observer "thinks out loud" by making an intelligible utterance that transfers his or her internal cognitive model to another mind for error checking. As the poet Khalil Gibran put it " It takes two of us to create a truth, one to utter it and one to understand it." This is an early evolutionary form of what military planners now call Delphi consensus modeling. Mitroff and Turoff (1973, 2002) remind us that the "first pioneers of the Delphi technique [wanted] to study how and under which circumstances a group of reflective minds was better than one."[42] When a group of minds share the same thought they can run simulations based on their experiences and on the applications of generalities they have confidence in. Assuming a culture with checks and balances on power (Bello 2002)[43], these minds can then reach consensus about the possibilities for a desirable outcome to an actual environmental movement. Anthropologists have been telling us for a long time that all human cultures, from the most "primitive" to the most "advanced" have always done this.

People come up with their categories (political, cultural, personal) through interacting with the actual entities and events
they categorize. People literally construct concepts just as they build houses: by working with whatever they have to build something that will serve their needs and, ideally, not fall down on them. The resulting structures are in the mind, in the social universe, and in the “real” world… We have since learned that even the “simple” hunter-gatherer cultures had complex worldviews and complex ways of influencing and altering their environments (see, e.g., Blackburn and K. Anderson 1993). Above all, we have learned more about the old Boasian point that traditional peoples were not caught in some timeless “ethnographic present” but changed their exploitation strategies (and presumably their perceptions) over time, often dramatically (see, e.g., Kirch 1994, 1997). (Anderson, Ibid)

Allowing all people to participate in modeling the future and in trying out their own eutopian experiments (forward thinking "Delphic consensual" participatory development as opposed to merely allowing people to "vote" on somebody else's plan) is crucial to truly sustainable development (In Social Choice theory, Kenneth Arrow showed that all voting rules will conflict with democratic norms, whether majority vote, two-thirds vote or status quo. His impossibility theorem demonstrated that no social welfare function could satisfy all conditions at once). We must stop believing that "the masses", particularly "the poor" and those modern society perceives as "backwards" are somehow incapable or unqualified to plan their own futures. We have to stop assuming that they are "backwards" by choice or that their economic, social or technological stagnation are the result of any lack of desire on their part to participate in "the good life", however they or we conceive of it. Everybody should have the chance to map out their own eutopia. Bello warns us,

"Only in such a global context – more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic, with multiple checks and balances – will the citizens and communities of the South and North find ways to develop based on their own unique values, rhythms, and strategies… The price of failure would be high. In the early 20th century, the revolutionary theorist Rosa Luxemburg warned that the future might belong to barbarism. Today, corporate-driven globalization is creating instability and resentments that in turn can give way to fascist, fanatical, and authoritarian populist impulses. The forces representing human solidarity and true community must step in quickly to convince the disenchanted masses that a better world is possible. The alternative is to see the vacuum filled by terrorists, demagogues of the religious and radical right, and – as in the 1930s – the purveyors of irrationality and nihilism." (Ibid p. 42)

To avoid this, and to encourage participation in constructing a "better world" (a.k.a. an "eu-topia") I believe that policy should encourage everyone to "think out loud" (through freedom of speech and right to assembly) and then to "think out louder" (through a free press, support for the arts, and subsidized training opportunities in the use of multi-media technologies) and finally to "think out loudest" (through well supported opportunities for free educations in science and engineering and encouragement of experimental prototype communities of tomorrow). We must assume that all people dream of a better life for them, and that policy should give them the chance to put their vision out there where others can experience it and where it can compete for representation in the great development debate.

Thinking out louder: The function of art

After being encouraged to "think out loud", the next step in perfecting our predictive capacity is what I call "thinking out louder". In this step a mind doesn't merely speak a hypothesis about the world, but creates an entire simulated world with various rules of interaction that can be experienced by another mind. Thinking out louder turns every individual into an "authority figure" through the magic of "authorship". It thus undermines traditional autocratic authority by the literate global elite (see Boynton 2004 "The Tyranny of Copyright" in the New York Times in which he compares the 'Copy Left' movement to create an information environment commons to the Environmental movement[44]). An "author's" position on given environmental changes and movements usually occurs in a narrative storyline (i.e. in a timeline) that allows consequences to play out in dimension t. These imaginative movements can be fixed in oral tradition, as they were for thousands of years before the development of symbolic coding schemes, but are most effective when fixed in media that allow them to transcend not only the local time limitations of immediate thought but possible disruptions due to the loss of living carriers; the thinking can then be broadcast to many minds over large spatio-temporal intervals without relying on cultural embededness as long as the appropriate codecs are preserved. In the past this kind of thinking-out-louder was done through the creation of speculative fictions – storylines of imagined realities – that were then fixed in scrolls and books. Often these text based speculations could be "unpacked" and reconstituted by living humans to add verisimilitude to the fantasy through engagement with living minds and bodies acting as "models".

Thinking out Louder: Theatres of Liberation

Brazilian playwright Agusto Boal (Theatre of the Oppressed[45]) and East German playwright Bertolt Brecht both believed in transforming the social order through dramatic performance. Boal, who was heavily influenced by Brecht, added the dimension of theatre as a pedagogy of liberation, following Paulo Freire's notions of "conscientization - developing consciousness, but consciousness that is understood to have the power to transform reality' (Taylor 1993: 52)" [46] Through "live performance" the eutopian speculations of oppressed groups could be collectively "played out louder" by actors in simulations that involved "role playing" so that both participants and observers could experience the social and emotional dimensions of proposed changes. This dialogic form of experiential learning and experimenting removes the authoritarian tendencies of both pedagogy and performance, where the "sage on the stage" delivers "wisdom" to passive audiences, something Freire called "banking", in which the educator makes one-way deposits to the mind of the educatee (Smith, 1997)[47]. Liberation theatre was often used to counter such irreversible vectors, but even in a situation with passive audiences, the "acting out loud" aspect of theatre made it a particularly good venue for presenting alternative models of reality, for encouraging people to understand their own lives better and to introduce speculations on what the good life could be. This was as true among the ancient Greeks as among moderns, and seems to have varied in political impact throughout the ages. Theatre was of course also widely used by oppressors. Though it could be used as a tool to question the status quo and to empower the masses[48] Boal and Brecht both felt that the elite used theatre to broadcast and maintain their ideas of social norms as well as to experiment with different lifestyles and win adherents. We are all trying to impose our vision of the good life, after all.

H.W. Janson and Dora Jane Janson in "The Picture History of Painting: From Cave Painting to Modern Times" [49] show that three dimensional theatrical simulations were popular among the nobles of Europe in pre-revolutionary France:

"Watteau's love of the theatre gives us a clue to the spirit of Roccoco society. It was, for the nobles at any rate, an age of play acting – of pretending that their life was as free from worry as that of Francois Boucher's shepherd and shepherdess, who live in a delightful world where the sheep never stray, so that they can devote all their time to the pursuit of love. Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France, actually had a model farm built on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where she and her friends could play at being milkmaids and field hands when they tired of the formality of court life." P. 408

Through art and artifice the human mind and spirit (and, with theatre, body) could play at different experiments in adaptation.

Play as a form of theatrical modelling

We know that play is serious business among almost all mammals and many birds (Bekoff and Byers 1998, Bock2004)[50]; the history of phenotypic adaptive response to environmental change is written in the increasingly complex patterns of play that organisms with expanded neo-cortical function engage in. Play is a form of modeling, Brian Sutton-Smith (1998) contends. He suggests that play "might provide a model of the variability that allows for 'natural' selection." As a form of mental feedback, he believes that "play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability."[51]

That play would manifest itself in coded symbolic representations of reality is not surprising; as Desmond Morris observed, most ritualized behaviors among reptiles, birds and mammals involve a form of play acting and modeling that is used to signal intention before a behavior is committed to or a relationship consummated. Much courtship behavior is the acting out of partial scripts that never complete, as if the organisms are giving each other a chance to "try out" a potential mate before buying. The similarity with the "window shopping" that occurs in the red light district of Amsterdam is obvious. But we can see that all human modeling – from runway fashion models to department store mannequins – is an extension of the "try before you buy" adaptation that evolved among most cognitively sophisticated beings. It shows up in mating rituals: in the lekking we see in birds and in the genetical mimicry we see in non-human primates; it shows up in conflict management in the chest-beating of gorillas and the playing-dead of canids. It is well described in the socio-biological and ethological literatures (see E.O. Wilson 1975 and all the works of 1973 Nobel Prize laureates Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch). All of these tendencies involve the creation of abstractions or simple models of reality that can be easily understood and have useful predictive properties, helping animals make decisions without large investments and possible losses of fitness. In effect, the abstractions of modeling help all animals to lower transaction costs, so they have selective advantage (Scalise, 1999)[52].

Given the long natural and social history of organisms using symbol, ritual, play and even fantasy to model reality and enhance survivability[53], it is odd that so few academics and planning professionals mine the symbolic arts for insights into how best to construct our relations to our environments.

"It's an amusing aside to wonder why self-styled practically-oriented people reserve their greatest scorn for 'useless abstractions,' when the very essence of an abstraction is to reduce the description of a system to a simpler and , presumably, more tractable form. Thus, in many ways there is nothing more useful and practical than a good abstraction. This calls to mind Hilbert's dictum that 'there is nothing more practical than a good theory.' Much of our subsequent development is focused upon tricks, techniques and subterfuges aimed at finding good abstractions." (Casti, J.L. 1992:6)[54]

When experience, knowledge, education, intelligence, common sense and intuition are not enough we need to use models. Models are meant to tease a little extra pattern out of the noise by weaving together things we already know or think we can guess into new things that expand the range of what is expected and predictable. (Couclelis and XiaoHang 2000) [55]

Since the late 19th century "full bodied" if abstracted models of reality that human beings produce to make predictions have been captured in audio-visual media that have permitted artists to ever more faithfully simulated imagined realities. We call much of this "cinema". In the last half of the 20th century the development of the computer took modeling a quantum step further, enabling "thinking out louder" to be shared with the enormous and rapid computational and modeling capacities of artificial intelligences, programmed with the laws and logic of math and science. Computer simulations of reality enable us to manipulate parameters in very complex ways so that virtual realities are being created that often appear indistinguishable from reality itself. As with thinking itself, and unlike the commitment demanded by "hard copy", the timelines of electronic text and virtual reality simulations are ever reversible. The sudden possibility to move freely in four dimensions, x, y, z and now t, is one of the quantum leaps of modern thinking out louder. Chemical and physical reactions and even biological evolution can be reversed, undone, even erased with no meaningful increase in entropy. Mistakes are corrected, failures get a second chance. And a third, and a fourth. Again, we need not commit and thus need not suffer any possible loss of fitness.

Thinking out loudest: The function of science

The ultimate stage of thinking I call "thinking out loudest". This form of thinking lets us create ever changeable realities in the real world but (in the best of all possible worlds) without any long-term consequences. This kind of thinking is the domain of science. Theoretically such reified thoughts are also reversible without penalty. In a very real way this is what scientific experimentation has always hoped to achieve. The idea of establishing controls and adjusting variables to learn about the world is an idea of modeling played out in four tangible dimensions.

No experiment ever shows you "the truth" because "truth" occurs in a world in which you cannot establish controls. In fact, one of the things that distinguishes reality from a model of reality is the fact that you cannot control reality. Every attempt at creating a control, every attempt to control, shows that we are operating in a simulated environment. By this logic, the state and all of human civilization can be seen to be mere models of reality, not realities themselves, and this may go a long way toward explaining the profound discomfort many people have with the mere slice of life that life in the "built environment" (read "modeled environment?") affords us, and the resistance we see to planned utopias translated into the real world. Any attempt to establish controls and manipulate variables puts us in an artificial world that is vulnerable to disruption when the unforeseen and unexpected intrudes. To keep the model going demands management, and management implies simplification which demands power. As Lord Acton warned, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely". So people are wary if not outright terrified.

The modernist project and all scientifically rational positivism can be seen as an attempt to create a model of reality and thenconvince everybody to believe in it. And this may be why different parties heap so much scorn and derision upon modernism and upon other "utopian" models of the future – in their pursuit of perfection the models show their falseness. Their stasis and repeatability is their disquieting undoing. The perfect world quickly turns into a dystopia. Either, as in Huxley's Island and James Hilton's Lost Horizon, or the 1993 film "Demolition Man" the perfection is spoiled by the inevitable invasion of hostile outsiders or ideas, or, as in Capek's R.U.R., Huxley's Brave New World and Zamiatan's We the perfect control necessary to maintain perfection is itself the source of the nightmare. No evolving life form can long tolerate the clockwork precision of a scientifically ordered society.

Our attempts to define and control our environments so that they conform to our models and maps, rather than progressively updating our maps to reflect our growing awareness of our environments puts these environments in the category of models themselves. This is to say that by "thinking out loudest" in creating a built environment or landscape that conforms to our sense of aesthetics and our desire for control we reveal that our attempts to adapt our surroundings to our own needs and desires are mere experiments. For example, we assume we understand how hydrologic systems work and design systems based on our models. When the climate suddenly changes or the well runs dry or political uprisings cut off water supplies we learn that our model was incomplete. We scurry to refine the model to include the missing variables and give our new model greater predictive power. But the more we try to impose our model on nature the more we see how incomplete our abstraction is. Useful for statistical survival yes, but only for that.

When a scientist cuts down a swathe of forest to see how deforestation affects watersheds, she is modeling. When a scientist tests pesticides or cosmetics on laboratory animals he is modeling. The problem is that by working on models in the real world our experiments have effects on the welfare of living beings. Each failed attempt to create a eutopia results in a dystopia for the victims.

There is one space where "thinking out loudest" is beginning to occur with no suffering and hence no moral transaction costs. This is in the realm of simulacra based on robotics. More and more dangerous activities use ever more realistic dummies in their training. In the world of audio-animatronic beings (on nascent display in theme parks and in laboratories and in the arenas of robot enthusiasts and played out fully in fiction films such as Michael Crichton's films "Westworld" (1973) and "Futureworld" (1976)) we get to experiment with the consequences of everything from sword fights and gun battles to sexual encounters[56] and different forms of social organization without causing any loss of welfare at all ('no humans or animals were harmed during the making of this simulation' the disclaimer might read). Robot warfare is a popular but bloodless sport all over the world today, with a weekly "Battlebots robot combat competition" television show broadcast globally[57]; the real military uses robotic systems for weapons testing and will be engaging in robotic warfare more and more[58]; ever more sophisticated "crash dummies" have been testing the safety of cars for several decades now; even surgeons now train on robots before commiting to real procedures.[59] Whether all of this will lead to a more bloodless future is still uncertain.

Viewed historically, civilization is a vast experiment that must still be played out with live human and animal subjects. Rarely do we invoke the precautionary principle before we leap into the application of a new experiment. The few who think out loudest (policymakers, architects, planners, inventors, captains of industry) push new models forward and often create positive benefits for humanity but they also make the many the unwitting victims of their failed hypotheses; we are not yet at the stage, for example, where we can "think out loudest" and test the simplistic mathematical models of utopian economists such as Arrow and Debreu without disrupting Pareto optimality in the real world and without diminishing somebody else's welfare. Programs such as SimCity and SimLife and Zoo Tycoon let us build worlds in virtual reality to try out various environmental and management scenarios and professional planners have even more sophisticated tools in their arsenal; the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, for example, were very faithfully modeled and reported in National Geographic a year before the actual event took place. But to get a more realistic idea of what the future holds people feel the need to model with physical entities – with "policy instruments" as well as with real liquids and gases and solids and behaving bodies. Often the behaving bodies we try our policy instruments on are citizens of third world countries or urban and rural poor communities in first and second world countries. When our experiments fail we tend to calltheir suffering "collateral damage". The feedback we get then informs policy decisions for richer communities. So cynically we can look at poor areas and "wild" areas of the world as "policy testing grounds"; they are, after all, often described as "environmental sacrifice zones" (see Schweitzer 2004[60]). For aircraft and other expensive vehicles we are not so callous. Before we put them to the test in the real world we have wind tunnels to test their resilience in; NASA routinely puts spacecraft and robots through extreme temperatures and vacuums in a controlled fashion before committing them to the rigors of outer space. The Biosphere II experiment was an attempt to think out loudest modeling a space colony, NASA and the ESA are now simulating manned Mars missions in the Arctic Circle – astronauts and space missions, after all, are expensive; EPCOT center was supposed to be a simulated multi-cultural, ever changing, technologically and ecologically integrated city – the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow". These are all places we can look to for more complete models with more predictive power upon which we can base policy, for this is where "thinking out loudest" is going on.

Perhaps in the future we will find ways to experimentally transform living matter and then reverse it back to its original condition. Nanotechnology seems poised to take us into this strange experimental realm[61]. If we achieve the ability to, say, turn a man into a newt and then back into a man, we will have achieved the kind of thinking out loudest described in our legends of sword and sorcery (or at least in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail!"[62]). The highest form of thinking-out-loudest, in which we can experiment with various changes in organisms and their environments and then take it all back, would be indistinguishable from what we today call "magic".[63] The future may hold such possibilities and the genres of science fiction and fantasy may one day re-blend, as they did in 1000 AD at the time when the Arabic Picatrix was written[64], and as they do now in many bookstores and video stores where people do not distinguish between stories in which the actions and behaviors conform to what we know of the laws of physics, chemistry and sociobiology and stories in which they do not. While the line may be very easy to see today, in environmentalism future it may begin to blur significantly. As the saying goes "today's science fiction may be the tomorrow's scientific fact". The magical, the surreal and the fantasies of witchcraft and sorcery may soon follow for all we know. Perhaps we should be planning for them.

The Science and Art of Euthenics: Utopias as Environmental Models for Planning

In common language, eugenics would denote the science and art of being well born, and euthenics the science and art of living well or wise living… we immediately recognize that practically all the sciences contribute to this subject, as in medicine, engineering, economics, psychology, physiology, sociology and education… it is [also] well recognized that… applied arts… center about this issue. The question then arises: Can the salient interests and contributions from all such sources be selected and coordinated into a specific applied science [and] art?[65] (Seashore 1941 p. 561)

According to a 1942 article in Science magazine, in 1910 Ellen H. Richards, the first woman professional chemist in the nation, who "played a major role to open scientific education and the scientific professions to women"[66] wrote a popular book called "Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment, A Plea for Better Conditions As a First Step Toward Higher Human Efficiency"[67], bringing the ancient Greek term "euthenics" into common parlance. The term also appears in the same magazine in 1926 in an article about heredity and environment called "Eugenothenics" in which the author calls for a movement that would combine both eugenics and euthenics. He defines euthenics as "the study of race improvement by the regulation of the environment".[68] Scientists and statesmen throughout the industrial revolution were constantly debating the best way to improve humanity and although the history of the issue has been radically whitewashed since the Nazi Holocaust, America in particular, with its complex racial and immigrant history, was obsessed with eugenics. Backed by theories of social Darwinism, eugenics was championed as the best way to improve long term welfare. Euthenics was more of a resistance alternative, inspired by the radical turn of the century theories of Ebenezer Howard and his "Garden Cities of Tomorrow" (1902)[69] that kicked off the green cities movement in England and the landscape engineering experiments of Frederick Law Olmsted in America. Champions of euthenics sought to "control" or "regulate" the environment (external nature, otherwise known as the environment of human nurture) as a humane and socially just alternative to control or regulation of human nature. At the time nature vs. nurture meant eugenics vs. euthenics. What was called "nature" was human genetics. What was called "nurture" was the place we confusedly call "Nature".

Carolyn Merchant (and many eco-feminist followers of her work) claims that those who followed the ideas espoused by Francis Bacon in his utopian fantasy "The New Atlantis", where the good society results from "controlling Nature" in order to improve welfare, were somehow responsible for our contemporary alienation from nature. She claimed that this was due to an ongoing project of rational power seeking dominance over "the wild". But this is to lose sight of the liberating intentions of euthenics. Euthenics, which saw a properly constructed bio-social environment as the way to bring out the best in human nature, without trying to alter or distort or control human nature, appeared to its proponents to be the most benign way of constructing human-environment relations. Nobody argues that New York's Central Park, which was an architects' attempt to create a theme park for salubrious living out of a filthy stockyard in an unhealthful and crowded city, was an attempt to "control" or "dominate" nature, yet every tree and rock, hill and pond in there was as deliberately placed and controlled as the ersatz jungle in Disneyland. The same is true of America's national parks and even of romantic wonders of nature such as Niagra Falls[70]. Euthenic projects generally carried with them no antagonism toward "nature" or "wilderness, rather, they prescribed various landscape features, from the wild to the manicured, as therapeutic environments, as if they were medicines for ailing hearts, minds, bodies and souls. Euthenics variably sacrificed or enhanced romantic notions of "the wild" in the external environment, depending on the prescription, to give untrammeled human wildness a chance to self-actualize and reach its highest level. It stemmed from a belief in experimenting with the ideas of Rousseau and Locke – having faith that the best in human nature could be brought out by the best possible environments.

Euthenics, when "thought out loudest", created landscape experiments whose impact on the psyche could be measured, disproving the racist theories of the supporters of eugenics. But even today, the battle goes on, as studies are still cited that intend to marvel us with obvious conclusions such as "the crime rate in ghetto housing projects went down when trees and green space were provided"; the racist suggestion is that the readers might actually believe that it wasn't some aspect of the socio-physical environment that was causing the high rates of crime among inner city dwellers but rather the fact that they were black or Hispanic! (see Holt-Jensen 2001 for positive ghetto resident perceptions of green space aesthetics[71], for a contrasting view, in which green space is seen as promoting crime, see Brunsdon et. al 1995[72])

When euthenics cannot be actually experimented with in the built environment, or "thought out loudest", we see euthenics being "thought out louder" in the created worlds of eutopian modeling, and it is to this genre that I would like to now turn my attention.

Eutopia vs. Dystopia in Planning

For the purposes of this discussion of environmentalism future I will restrict myself to the genre more respectfully called "speculative fiction", a statement that implies a level of realism accepted by today's ecosystem model of what reality is. I would like to argue that the chief characteristic distinguishing eutopian from dystopian models is that the former are generally euthenic while the latter are generally eugenic. By this I mean that the sets of assumptions guiding the storylines of eutopian novels tend toward a belief that we can design environments that will set human and non-human beings free to pursue their own happiness. Dystopian stories show us worlds in which power holders try to constrain human freedom by creating dysthenic environments that are intended to lower the genetic fitness of the majority of free agents (human or non-human) and favor those of the ruling class. If we look at literature about the future this way a lot of the misunderstandings and misclassifications of the genre melt away.[73] I believe it is vital for planners to mine the eutopian genre this way so that we can decide how to proceed given that we now have enormous power to inflict eugenic, euphenic and euthenic changes in the world.

As far back as 1964 Physiology and Medicine Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote

“The scientific community has little special qualification to impose institutional remedies or moral criteria for the problems of human opportunity. It has the responsibility to teach these problems especially in the university, and to look for imbalances in our technical capability… meanwhile, a deeper understanding of our present knowledge of human biology must be part of the insight of literary, political, social, economic and moral teaching; in this spirit I can think of no better dedication than to the memory of the prophetic vision and artistic clarity of Aldous Huxley.” (p. 28)[74]

In particular I want to focus on just a few of the classic utopian fictions that I feel are representative of the genre in its attempt to model future reality and argue why these sorts of works are valuable for meaningful planning of our future.

Back to the Future

Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual … into a part of a much greater whole … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762[75]

It may be that, without any formal courses of study in "future history" (Shick, Misse and Hackett 1974)[76], environmental planners (and by this term I include all those involved in development, resource extraction and landscape modification) are mislead into forming their opinions of the possible consequences of their actions through often negligent misreadings of passé or zeitgeist ideas of the man/nature relationship[77]. Revolutionary thinkers have long felt that we must do away with the past if we want to make a better world. As Roger Kimball says in his essay "the Death of Socialism",

Human nature is a recalcitrant thing. It is embodied as much in persistent human institutions like the family and the church as in the human heart. All must be remade from the ground up if “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” are at last to be realized. Since history is little more than an accumulation of errors, history as hitherto known must be abolished. The past, a vast repository of injustice, is by definition the enemy.

But we also know that "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." I believe the solution is to mine the past for ideas about the future that can give us hope. Without hope for a better future, planning becomes a defeatist exercise, and without a sense of a future history, where does hope come from? As the saying goes, "the optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this may be true." Certainly when a people use a positively imagined future that has stood the test of time and been long debated as their frame of reference they find ways, in their changed environment, to push through limits that held earlier generations back. Obviously models of reality that suck thinkers into the trauma vortex[78] (Ross 2004) by focusing on past defeats can paralyze action. Nostalgia for a distant "glorious past" or "golden age" can give people an inferiority complex because they tend to see their best days as behind them (this may help explain a lot of the stagnation in so called "developing" or "underdeveloped" countries).

Shick, Misse and Hackett, arguing for the urgent need for "future history", quote a correspondent in American writing home to a London magazine in 1821 marveling at America's optimism:

"Other nations boast of what they are or have been, but the true citizen of the united states exalts his head to the skies in the contemplation of what the grandeur of his country is going to be… others appeal to history, an American appeals to prophecy, and with Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other he boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be, and chuckles his delight over the splendors the geometrical ratio is to shed over her story. This appeal to the future is his never failing resource." (1974:221)

Even Malthus was mocked and boldly taken on by high spirited future oriented Americans, and America's rise to preeminent power in the ensuing 184 years must be partially attributable to that forward thinking tendency. Despite the supposed neo-Malthusian "doom and gloom" of The Club of Rome's "Limit's to Growth" and the other environmental warning literature of America's environmentalism past, the authors point out that such books, including Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970), Charle's Reich's The Greening of America (1970), John McHale's The Future of the Future (1969), Zbigniew Brzezinski's Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1970) Robert L. Heilbroner's The Future as History: The Historic Currents of Our Time and the Direction in Which They are Taking America (1960) and even the Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) and Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969) demonstrated an incredible interest in the future and a youthful embrace of possibility that kept American culture strong even in the face of severe problems (Ibid: 222). Even the dystopian and apocalyptic visions of the future kept alive what pioneering futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel called "futuribles, that is, the possible futures which might emerge… Projections for the future, de Jouvenel asserts, are not meant to give us a quasi-divine knowledge of what is predestined to happen, but an indication of the possible outcomes of actions taken today, thus permitting more intelligent choices…" (Ibid: 223)

To make those choices, however, we need to emphasize future studies, build analyses of utopian thought into the planners curriculum and into public policy. "But as Henry Steele Commager has recently warned" say Shick et al., "most of our educational enterprise… is engaged in a kind of conspiracy to persuade the young that nothing is really relevant unless it happened yesterday… " (Ibid: 223).

Unfortunately, by not balancing the dystopian futuribles (which are often presented as cautionary tales to the young against messing with the status quo) and the eutopian futuribles (which offer liberating critiques of the status quo), the resulting loss of optimism that can accompany too much time wandering around frightening models where one must submit to alienating authority can begin to tug people into the trauma vortex. A frequency analysis of the number and type of speculative fiction novels in the standard curricula leading to professional degrees in the arts and sciences pertaining to development, planning and improvements in the human condition and the human relationship to nature unfortunately shows a preponderance of dystopian concepts. Orwell's 1984 (1948) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932)[79] represent the over-read canon of dystopian works about "excessive centralization of power"[80] passed off as utopian literature; Huxley's Island (1962) a utopian foil to his Brave New World's dystopia, his post-nuclear-holocaust Ape and Essence (1948) and his commentary about how much closer reality has moved to his model in one generation, Brave New World Revisited (1958), are practically unknown (yet I suspect Lederberg would have insisted on a closer read of these more nuanced works of that author). A few truly eutopian fictions are suggested to students: Thomas More's genre defining Utopia of 1516, Tomaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602) and occasionally Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1624) are often used as straw men for ridicule, said to contain venerable but impractical ideas, quaint for their age, to be burned in effigy through critical analysis. Sometimes William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) and Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) are added to the list with Morris often criticized ad hominem for being a socialist and Butler criticized for the supposedly rigid stasis of his utopia; Butler's Erewhon Revisited (1901), in which he details the vast changes in philosophy and technology that transpired 30 years after Mr. Higgs and Arowhena's departure in a balloon ("the apparently miraculous ascent of a remarkable stranger into the heavens with an earthly bride")[81] is completely ignored. Yet these works disprove that the author's of utopian stories conceived of their "good places" as perfect and unchanging. So why is utopian literature marginalized in planning, or treated with derision or hostility?

Lyman Tower Sargent finds the problem to be a historical legacy issue that can be partially traced back to the hostile writings of Karl Popper, who conceived of utopias as dangerous blueprints whose detailed plans cannot be implemented with resort to force. Sargent dismisses Poppers view of utopias, saying "commentators insufficiently acquainted with the vast scope of utopian writing speak ex cathedra, as if the few utopias they had read were typical of the genre (1982 op cit.:)

Nonetheless, those few utopias are the one's that make it into the curriculum. The student of planning finds few futuribles to trade in. As one webblog says, the deconstructivist turn in academia is great at tearing things down, not much good at building things up. Besides this, post-modern critiques of euthenic projects and our suspicions over Le Corbusian style attempts to make-over the environment to change human behavior make it hard for us to endorse the idiosyncratic visions of planning agencies no matter how well intentioned.

Euphenics – the necessary third between Eugenics and Euthenics

How then do we improve the human condition? Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg talked of “EUPHENICS” back in 1964 as opposed to Eugenics or Euthenics - centering on modification of development, influencing the character of single organisms. This contrasts heavily with the populational impact of eugenic measures. For all its Lamarckian resonances (the hope for positive macroevolution through individual striving) it may be that individual phenotypic adaptation, which is what culture has been all about anyway, is the safest way to raise general welfare. We already have evolved clothing, shoes hats and gloves and centrally heated houses so that we don't have to change the climate – global warming may be euthenic attempt at terraforming as the Charlie Sheen movie "The Arrival" (1996) suggests, but its benefits are more likely to accrue to the aliens responsible for it in the sci-fi than for human beings and their life supporting ecology. Euphenics is always safer than euthenics. Very soon we may have the capability to grow clothes on our bodies in the winter and shed them in the summer (this isn't at all far fetched; on other animals we call it "fur"). We might also fulfill Jacques Cousteau's prophecy of implanting gills in our necks; the possibility for growing wings might render the airline industry obsolete.

Lederberg, who took human evolution very seriously, was asked to participate in a think tank in the early sixties about how the world would look by the year 1984. He believed that we should seriously consider what the most imaginative thinkers had to say.

“Prophecy is just a target for irony, but planning for the next twenty to fifty years is a major responsibility of our political and intellectual leaders. The exigent time scale of evolutionary crisis still has not captured their attention... the net effect has been the relegation of many biologists’ thinking on human evolution to an area of dubious efficacy, and of many others’ to the view that there was a comfortably long time during which not to worry about it; meanwhile we could all be more happily preoccupied with the Bomb, with fall-out, with the population explosion, and with pesticides. And, rightly, our colleagues have not been deeply impressed with forebodings that molecular biology would soon give us the capability of directly altering or producing the human gene string…” (Ibid. p. 25).

The impact of Euphenics - in which the character traits of an individual “might well exceed the present bounds of genetic and developmental variation” (Ibid p.27) has been predicted by comic book writers and has fascinated children from the 1960’s through the present era when state of the art computer generated special effects has brought euphenics to mass consciousness through film versions of such comics as Spiderman, the X-men, Batman, the Hulk and the FantasticFour. With the popular fervor over the films, with their increasingly plausible scientific explanations peppering the dialogues of otherwise improbable scripts, popular science magazines such as “Science et Vie” have been running articles depicting “the truth behind Comic Book superheroes - what’s real, what’s not” while popular books have emerged explaining “the science behind comic books”.

Dr. Lederberg, who, after winning his Nobel Prize in 1958, was the director of the Kennedy Laboratory for Molecular Medicine at Stanford, concluded his essay,

“I will be accused of demonic advocacy (and have been) for discussing such matters and not pretending they are indefinitely far off. But they are insperable from the advance of medicine, especially as we turn our attention to such urgent challenges as mental retardation, the degeneration of ageing, and mental illness.” (Op. cit. p. 27)

Almost 40 years later science is showing us the truth of Lederberg's prediction. Just as Rene Dubos in Man Adapting (1968) had alluded to the idea that medicine was a form of environmentalism (i.e. a euphenic way of helping individual humans adapt to their environment as opposed to the euthenic project of adapting the entire environment to the human animal) we can now see our capabilities to improve fitness moving to the point where we can be ever more subtle in our approach to adaptation. With the ability to micro-manage individual adaptations to changing environmental conditions we may even be moving beyond the species concept. Human-animal hybrids (chimeras) already exist in the lab as oddities (so far they are limited to growing human ears on the back of mice, implanting pigs hearts into children and growing mice with human brain cells) but they might soon enable us to do things that will make us more comfortable in unmanaged environments. Robotic prostheses are already moving in that direction (Daniel Kamen's wheelchairs that can walk up and down stairs and extend so paraplegics can reach high bookshelves, and his new generation of Segway human transporters, are an example of euphenics rendering the euthenics of landscape transformations such as ramps and slow speed mass transit vehicles unnecessary). It is all part of a trend toward minimalism in environmental modification, whether that environment is the landscape or the chemistry of the body that we currently alter through drugs.

In the year 2000 an article appeared in the journal Neurosurgery (which is most definitely a euphenic field) called "Brave New World: Reaching for Utopia". The author concluded

From many aspects, the evolution of neurosurgery over the past 50 years in attitude and technology may be viewed as a march characterized by progressive minimalism in technical therapeutic approaches. The advent of new capabilities in cellular and molecular biology, when coupled with neurosurgical needs and capabilities, with an end point of cellular and molecular neurosurgery, would seem to offer us ultimate minimalism and a concept of medical utopia accompanied by a truly liberating Brave New World![82]

This "ultimate minimalism" is the sort of progress that could render the obsolete the large scale macro-engineering projects of eugenics and euthenics, so often responsible for misery when the unintended consequences of poorly applied models or the brutality of tyrants impact populations and habitats. Instead of trying to make the world fit us, or trying to shape the entire species through artificial selection, we are on the verge of allowing individuals to choose their adaptations to the world. We can work our way through the possibilities of this recent utopian endeavor through the writings of British philosopher David Pearce and his "Hedonistic Imperative" in which he talks about "paradise engineering"[83]. We can also think it through by reading Comic Books.

Comic Art as a form of Liberation Theatre for Planning

Scott Mcleod's (1994) seminal study of the phenomenon of Comic Art provided what the Chicago Sun Times called a "rosetta stone" for a medium that has had a disproportionate influence on society yet has been treated by most planning institutions with as much derision as they have treated the speculative fiction literature. Futurists, however, take Mcleod and Comic Art seriously. Stewart Brand, famous as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalouge and his book on how houses adapt to their environments (How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Viking-Penguin, 1994) wrote for The Global Business Network that "McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal work at the level of Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information..."[84] Like Tufte's (1990) work, which analyzes how different media can help us "escape flatland" (his argument is one germane to creating better models of reality; he complains that many of our mapping problems occur because "The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, flat.")[85] McLeod shows us how one can transcend the limitations of flatland using layout, color, perspective and tromp l'oeil. This has profound implications for the message encapsulated in the medium (see McLuhan 1967 The Medium is the Massage).

The most enduring examples of the comic medium share the eutopian and dystopian storylines of speculative fiction literature, but, as McLeod points out, comics can do more than text; the medium transcends the limitations of story forms constrained by the one-dimensional linearity of text that must be read left-to-right. As if in answer to Ed Soja's 1996 call for media that privilege space over time, comic art gives us the needed "third space". Furthermore, comic art, in which an artist can play with space and time and, unlike traditional paper or canvas based art, evolve both the individual characters and their environments frame by frame, grants the artist both euphenic and euthenic possibilities. Most have chosen to emphasize the euphenic aspects of human-environment relations.

The fact that a generation of kids all over the earth grew up reading and delighting in speculative euphenic fiction while society rightly eschewed eugenics and hardly anybody could agree on the right direction for euthenics shows us that environmental themes and their possible euphenic solutions have been on the minds of popular culture’s offspring for quite some time[86]. While adult culture was characterizing environmentalism as a battleground between preservationists and developers, hybrid-friendly youth culture, in lands where the cult of the individual was blossoming, tried to resolve the paradox between their simultaneous love of civilization and nature. They found solace in obsessing over individual possibilities to transcend both. Almost invariably the cause of the personal adaptive transformations of the protagonist (or the villain) in the overwhelmingly euphenic genre of super-hero comic books has been environmental decay or alteration. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction have figured prominently into the storylines, and so have toxic waste and climate change. The solution, however, has rarely been any kind of redress of the cause of the problem euthenically, but a localized adaptation to it - “mutants” such as “the toxic avenger” or “the X-men” do fight evil corporate polluters, but the fight never ends, euthenic eutopia is never achieved. At the end of the day the message we take home is that “we must adapt to survive”, and bit by bit the world gets more populated by mutants or by technologically enhanced superbeings such as Iron Man and The Green Goblin. This adaptation is not a state project – there is no attempt at eugenics here. There is rarely a superhero army. In fact the super-heroes and super-villians are almost always marginal. The readers of these storylines (far from “comic” in the original sense of the word), marginalized by their education systems to begin with, and further alienated by their teacher’s insistence that euphenic literature is not “appropriate” to a “serious education”, are now, as adults, adjusted to their self conception of being “misfits” and apprehensively or, sometimes, gleefully, anticipate the world changing to fit them.

In this regard the Reagan idea that “man will adapt” to the changing environment suits the “mutant” generation well, and they now immerse themselves in virtual environments of mayhem and destruction through computer role playing games such as Resident Evil and other scenarios where you can mutate into a superhero and fight against mutated supervillains in an ecologically comprised landscape. One has to wonder if people who spend their leisure time in social and ecological nightmare scenarios aren’t preparing themselves for a truer reality that they sense is just over the horizon.

The Environment as Testing ground and Battleground for "Super Heroes"

Comic book stories are the fairy tales of the nuclear and space age and they continue a trend in human-environment relations that started in story telling as long ago as the Gilgamesh epic. In almost all these tales "wildernesses" (uncontrolled or uncontrollable spaces) are places where heroes test their metal and are born. William Cronon and other environmental historians have reminded us that to many Europeans, particularly the urban elite who did most of the writing and who disseminated most of the cultural propaganda that history records as the spirit of the times, "wilderness" was not only perceived as a source of "free" capital (if the peasant's and forest dwellers could be thrown off their land) but was conceived as a dangerous and forbidding place that, like its inhabitants, needed to be subdued and transformed. The Environment, as we mentioned before, has been a backdrop for various competing eco-dramas and social dramas to be played out.

The Brother's Grimm between 1806 and 1852[87], for example, assisted in the project of recording quaint folklore from a countryside mosaic of forest, stream and meadow benign enough to sustain generations of technologically simple people in houses unconcernedly built weak enough to be blown down by any big bad wolf, and transforming this bucolic peasant eutopia for the bourgeoisie into a domain for horror tales of intelligent wolves who prey on little girls and old women, of evil witches who eat children, and malevolent trees that snatch at clothing and strangle their victims. Protagonists were euphenically transformed in these stories through their encounters with the wilderness. As the Terry Gilliam's fanciful film adaptation of the Brother's Grimm life story shows, their work was used by the state in the service of Napoleanic oppression of the German peasantry under the guise of "enlightenment" and the introduction of "reason" to the barbarous (read "insurrectionist") German polity. By casting the forested German folk landscape as a forbidding and dangerous wilderness, would-be military heroes could be induced to try their valor in bringing order to the wild people and places. We see this also occurring in stories that brought adventurers to conquer the savage environments and peoples of the New World, and it goes back to Tacitus' Germania and Agricola. This notion puts a new spin on Bruno Bettleheim's "Uses of enchantment", suggesting that folk tales, many of which originated as resistance tales, have often been co-opted into the stupefying service of the state, tempting mercenaries to earn prestige by subduing these landscapes and enchanting children into dummified obedience to authority so as to warn them away from "wild spaces", i.e. away from freedom.

Maria Tatar, dean for the humanities at Harvard and the John L. Loeb professor of Germanic languages and literatures, author of The Annotated Brothers Grimm says,

In the great migration of fairy tales from the fireside to the nursery that was finally accomplished in the course of the 19th century, "Little Red Riding Hood" was twisted, pretzellike, into a cautionary tale, warning small children not only about the dangers of straying from the path but also about their own unruly desires. Charles Perrault's version of 1697 shows us a Little Red Cap who never emerges from the belly of the wolf, and her story becomes a platform for teaching children many lessons, among them the fact that "tame wolves / Are the most dangerous of all."

Tatar shows us how fairy tales were framed

…with platitudes about obedience…In popular sendups of the classic plots, the purpose is usually to mock the values found in the earlier variants, whether it is the virtue of selfless industry or a lack of vanity.…long before Bettelheim had enlightened Americans about the therapeutic power of fairy tales to strengthen young superegos…the maturational effect was a sound beating …and a lifelong engagement with stories, whose power to change us [was] not least by frightening us into imagining alternate realities[88]

It is certainly a complex topic, and it is hard to know how stories or the environments they model will fit into peoples attitudes, values and behavior. As Lois Takahashi says "norms change as people move and adapt to new circumstances".[89] But it may be that where cultures tell stories that are future-oriented rather than past oriented, and where euphenic notions give what Takahashi calls the needed "capacity for self-direction"[90] and empower individuals to rise above their environmental constraints and limitations, communities can begin to agree on truly euthenic strategies that will help the common weal. I'm inclined to believe that societies that tell eutopian stories and think ever forward find solving environmental problems easier.

Technoptomism through Eutopian Speculations of New Ways of Conceiving the Environment

In the free realm of art and imagination objects take on new uses and from this innovation and invention occur. Societies that conceive of ordinary objects in extraordinary ways are usually the first to find new utilities in nature. In the New Scientist Series edited by Nigel Calder in 1964, top scientists, policy makers and sociologists were asked to close the gap between science fiction and science fact through the imagination of alternative realities based on the principles of science. The project was to predict what the world would realistically look like in 1984, and in so doing, make provocative policy recommendations for how to get there. The very first essay in the series, under the heading “Science and Human Goals” was “A British View: Working with what we know” by Professor Lord Todd. In it he spoke of the mastery of thermonuclear fusion, still as far away in 2004 as it was in 1984, let alone 1964, and says that “only then, of course, will the reservation of coal and oil to their proper use as chemical raw materials become practicable.” (p. 11). What is remarkable here is not that policy makers haven’t been talking about fusion power all these years and throwing money at it (they have) but that so few policy makers picked up on Lord Todd’s more subtle and impactful point: that fossil fuels better serve humanity as a source of carbon and hydrocarbon molecular building blocks than as a source of combustion. Environmentalists for decades have been decrying “the use of fossil fuels” without specifying that it is really the “burning of fossil fuels” that is responsible for so many of our environmental and health problems, not the use of these minerals per se. Casting the oil companies as villains has been a popular but useless sport for generations, and we might have been better served if we had dialogued with them about proper uses for the raw material they mine. Only when art-inspired imagination transforms the uses of common objects and materials by emphasizing their unobvious properties do we find new avenues for hope. As long as we essentialize environmentalists and industrialists we miss the point that everything is environment and that all agents have been working to improve what they thought were their environmental problems.

To play devil's advocate to the totalizing claims of the mainstream environmental movement I offer the perspective that scientists involved in energy exploration perceived their ability to tap into stored solar capital, accumulated over millennia, as a great boon to humanity, freeing us from life threatening constraints of our environment. The Hobbsian idea that life was "nasty, brutish and short" didn't spring up from nowhere. For the temperate zone descendants of ice age tribes with long cultural memories of harsh environments, it often was. Exposed during the middle ages to the crop failures and plagues, to say nothing of the exposure deaths, caused by the "little ice age" (a general cooling trend between 1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850)[91], the idea that the earth's providence included buried treasures of heat energy was liberating. Now we find that what many once saw as powerful allies to break the chains that bound us to the energy starved misery of seasonal environments (fossil fuels) have now imposed their own environmental constraints. So we look elsewhere for ways to break free. But the project of modern environmentalists I see as functionally similar to the project of the modernists – release from the prisons of scarcity, fear, and danger.

The ultimate triumph over the limits to growth imposed by our embeddedness in "the environment", the greatest source of hope for our earthbound species, was also the most imaginative. It was supposed to derive from the severance of our umbilical cord to mother earth and her stern discipline. Dr. Wernher von Braun wrote in 1964:

If mankind in 1984 is freer in thought and spirit, as well as politically and economically freer of the shackles of the environment, I firmly believe it will, in large measure, be thanks to the benefits of space exploration.” (p. 42)[92]

In 1964 there was a tremendous amount of optimism about space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life, and serious scientists, politicians and philosophers were actively engaged in public discussion of the needed technologies, educational initiatives and policy maneuvers we would need to achieve these goals. As von Braun stated,

“Just as the Crusades saved Europe much bloodshed by diverting the energies of its fighting men to a far-away objective, so space exploration provides a worthwhile outlet for the pent-up energies of man in the late twentieth century. Until recently, huge defense programmes had provided much of the stimulus for research and development work without which industrial progress comes to a halt. In 1984, the limitless scientific and technological challenges of the space-exploration programme [will] have taken over this vital, invigorating role. The ‘spin-off’ products of the space programme, direct or indirect, are visible everywhere. More citizens of the world than ever before are taking part in the affairs of government. Well-informed thinking men will continue to support this intriguing and profitable endeavour of space exploration. How far we go in space - and how fast - will continue to be affected by the measure of public support.” (p. 42)

Von Braun’s enthusiasm was indeed shared by the public during the space race. It is hard for us to recall a generation later just how much the race to put a man on the moon affected public policy and technological development. Space exploration was seen as the answer to so many of our social ills at a time when “wars, which had somewhat similar ‘rallying’ effects, are no longer feasible between industrialized nations nor are they a suitable yardstick for their strength - now that any military exchange with weapons of mass destruction would mean total annihilation of friend and foe alike.” (Ibid) Popular films depicted space emigration as the answer to our population explosion and other environmental catastrophes (see When World’s Collide, Lost in Space etc.) while serious space scientists saw a greater appreciation for and ability to cure the environmental woes of spaceship earth by studying “manned orbited space laboratories with closed ecological system” capable of supporting “pioneering crews comfortably in space for an uninterrupted stretch of two years.” (ibid) . Much of those dreams have indeed come true - our deep understanding of the changing earth environment owes the lions share of its debt to observations from space; from our realization of the worsening ozone hole to our appreciation of global warming and its impact on ice caps and ocean currents, our perceptions of the extent and consequences of deforestation and global monitoring for weapons of mass destruction. Spin-offs from space exploration, such as photovoltaic energy systems, fuel cells, aerodynamic and efficient wind turbines, hydroponics and drip irrigation systems and new lightweight structural materials, all well positioned in the “green development sector”, are extant thanks to the space race. And the Biosphere II experiment in Arizona certainly demonstrated the extreme difficulties with recreating a functional ecosystem, leading to a greater appreciation of our own.

But the enthusiasm for space exploration and its exigencies faded when we got to the moon and found it barren. Each probe to an area a little further out that showed no signs of life dampened further the excitement for this “final frontier”, and by 1979 Pink Floyd’s haunting lyric “Is there anybody out there?” would reverberate through the skulls of disappointed and alienated youth who would then seize the fundamental theme of the bands’ post-war nightmare into the loneliness of the consumer lifestyle, singing “we don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control… all in all we’re just another brick in the wall.”

The gains in education the space race that we realized, and (to paraphrase the Beatle's song "Help") our dreams of environmental independence, "seemed to vanish in the haze". By the 1980’s space exploration was just another military adventure and the average consumer was tired of the failed promises of the decades of reform and optimism and ready to turn inward to pointless hedonism. Though, as mentioned in chapter 1, the first mention of the word "Environment" in the New York Times index came from an article about space exploration, somehow, during this time, environmentalism divorced itself fully from the space science, and its proponents exhorted people to eschew any attention or money paid to “out there” and force people to pay attention to “right here”, ignoring the idea that only by confronting the dilemma of surviving “out there” and by getting observation posts “out there” could we begin to get a handle on the extent of the problems we were facing on our decaying biosphere, "spaceship earth" (Boulding 1965 Fuller 1973) .

It is useful to examine the literature from moments of technological change and uncertainty to see what options thinkers of the time thought they had viz a viz adapting to their environment (euphenics) or adapting their environment to them (euthenics). Many technologies emerge around the same time and society then engages in a free for all of competing interests before any given technology gets established. Many of the nightmares associated with the internal combustion engine so eloquently described by Kenneth P. Cantor’s classic “Warning: The Automobile Is Dangerous to Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Mind and Body”[93] were not inevitable, as any student of automobile history could tell you. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian classic, Herland, depicts a contemporary matriarchal society in 1912 where women have eschewed the combustion engine in deference to the electric car (p.37). Both Ford and Edison had electric cars on the market in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A conversation with my own grandmother before her recent death confirmed that electric cars were popular among women in the early part of the last century; she used to ride to the beach on Lake Michigan in a friends electric motorcar in the late teens and said, “they were clean and quiet and fun”. The direction we actually go in regarding a given technology, depends on where we are trying to go. When that place is outer space, we tend to invest in solar energy fuel cells and other "soft path" light technologies. When we feel we are stuck here, we tend to turn back to fossils and radioactive rocks and other "hard path" heavy technologies.

Defeatist Environmentalism as a consequence of profound disappointment in human agency.

Nietzche declared God dead in 1882[94]. Bill McKibben declared nature dead a century later, in 1989. In between, having suffered two world wars with media coverage of global atrocities at a scale never before seen, the world was poised to give its people one last chance at eutopia - with slogans like “better living through chemistry”, “the friendly atom” and “look to the skies” giving a renewed faith and optimism. With the glory of the World War II triumph of “the good guys” and the cornucopia of goods that followed in the 1950’s, it finally began to seem that everybody could participate in the fruits of global capitalism. Minorities began to vocalize their need for rights and services and made gains. But the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Watergate so disillusioned America (and by extension the rest of the world, all now tied into the unfolding drama of the US empire in real time through global television and radio) that by the time it was discovered that there was “nobody out there” - not even a shred of evidence for even the simplest life, let alone intelligence in space (and this after all that preparation!) it dealt human beings a tremendous psychological blow. By 1975 the Soviet Venera landers survived the descent to the surface of Venus but found it hot enough to melt lead. On July 20, 1976 the two American Viking spacecraft touched down on the surface of Mars and seemed to prove decades of speculation about life on the red planet wrong. We were all we had --- we and what was left of “nature”, and we didn't trust ourselves anymore.

Naturally with the collapse of the church as a confidence giving institution for so many affluent suburban and urban masses, many people began to turn to nature as the antidote to human ills, and to mistrust any notion of “progress” that permitted human beings to “have their way with her”. And thus the environmental movement took on a kind of religious fervor. This was not confined to the deep ecologists – even objectivist rationality became sacred, as if by banishing our hopeful fantasies of angels and extraterrestrials we could find the Absolute in the cold light of a solipsist science.

"Modern, objectivist rationality claims a monopoly on legitimate knowledge construction, suggesting a confusion of map and territory. But to the extent that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, it will not allow itself to be encapsulated in any specific set of words. There will always be more than one way of drawing a map. Cognitive scientists are concerned not with truth but with the adequacy of representations, and the only measure of adequacy we will ever have is survival (Maturana & Varela 1992[1987])... " (Hornborg 1998: 5)[95]

Hornborg's interest privileges the local and his aim is to move us "beyond the paralysis of constructivism" through the "renewed concern with the performative dimensions of our narratives" that deep ecology offers. He feels this would give us a power to bring meaning back into the world that Foucault (1971) says we lost in classical Greece when "what words said started to become more important than what they did". Through this lens Hornborg argues for "specificity: for embeddedness, local economies, local knowledge, and local identity…

"Friedman (1997) would call such conditions decline. But then, the world system historian Fernand Braudel (1979) found that periods of decline are in fact Golden Ages in the daily life of the masses. Are the Dark Ages of the historians experienced by the majority as tax reductions? In the light of the unity that we have posited between them, such a cyclical recuperation of local communities may go hand in hand with a recuperation of nature. And just maybe, the social condition that some prefer to think of as 'decline' could give us some ideas on how to redesign money and market institutions so as to select for ecological embeddedness." (p. 5)

A. Ecology - Natural History

Bill McKibben in “The End of Nature” invites us to imagine what the planet would look like if we decided to act as if we really believed that other life forms besides humans mattered and if we started to apply “appropriate technologies” and “sustainable development” to the affluent segments of society from whence, presumably, the bulwark of environmental damage arises. No friend of either the negative Popperian view of Utopia or Bloch's positive view, he seeks a non-anthropocentric "atopia", saying,

"… conventional utopian ideas are not much help, either. Invariably they are designed to advance human happiness, which is found to be suffering as the result of crowding or stress or lack of meaningful work or not enough sex or too much sex. Machinery is therefore abolished, or cities abandoned, or families legislated against – but it's all in the name of man. Dirt under your nails will make you happier! The humbler world I am describing is just the opposite. Human happiness would be of secondary importance. Perhaps it would be best for the planet if we all lived not in kibbutzes or on Jeffersonian farms, but crammed into a few huge cities like so many ants. I doubt a humbler world would be one big happy Pennsylvania Dutch colony. Certain human sadnesses might diminish; other human sadnesses would swell. But that would be beside the point. This is not an attempt at a utopia – as I said, I'm happy now. It's a stab at something else – an "atopia," perhaps – where our desires are not the engine." (p.191).

All one can do when predicting possible futures is speculate according to trends and assign probabilities. As Francois Lyotard pointed out (A Post-Modern Fable) IF we take our most celebrated minds seriously a few things are “sure” to happen: human beings and other organisms will continue their descent with modification (i.e. they will “evolve” and “co-evolve”), the planet will continue its ceaseless rythms of change, matter will continue to decay, the earth will continue to attract extraterrestrial objects and will be struck by them, climates will change, other periods of intense cold and heat will occur on the earth, life forms and ecosystems will go extinct, life forms will tend to spread to wherever they can eke out a living (bacteria found in the lithosphere, in the atacama desert, in the arctic and Antarctic wastes, in volcanic vents and in the stratosphere all bear witness to this) while human explorations of the solar system and beyond suggest a positive trend toward life and its artifacts colonizing other spaces and objects within those spaces. The sun will extinguish its fuel and either go supernova or burn out into a red giant and then brown dwarf, in either event consuming the earth and the inner planets in the process. Stellar evolution will proceed, overall entropy will increase, the universe will either undergo heat death or the “big crunch”, starting the cycle again with another big bang. All speculative fiction that follows the ecosystem model of reality operates within the constraints of this narrative. (For discussions of the future according to the Edenic narrative one may look at the books of Revelations in the Bible, into the predictions of Nostradamus and other seers in other religious traditions. For discussions of the future according to the Deep Ecology narrative one can continue to look at Bill Mckibben's discussions of "atopia" in "The End of Nature", quoted above).

In keeping with our thematic outline the first step is to lay out an “impartial” narrative of how environmental speculation would proceed according to a “scientific” understanding of the laws of nature – a nature in which humans are as natural as trees and cognition is as likely to develop among any other species as Homo sapiens.

H.G. Wells used this kind of logic at the turn of the century in “A Modern Utopia” when he outlined how political theories develop or go extinct according to laws analogous to those operating in “non-human” Nature, and he spoke euphenically:

The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be static, and this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly; we have to provide not only for food and clothing, for order and health, but for initiative. The factor that leads the World State on from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of individualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for the sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the method of initiative. Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her individuality is marked, breaks the law of precedent, transgresses the general formula, and makes a new experiment for the direction of the life force. It is impossible, therefore, for the State, which represents all and is preoccupied by the average, to make effectual experiments and intelligent innovations, and so supply the essential substance of life. As against the individual the state represents the species, in the case of the Utopian World State it absolutely represents the species. The individual emerges from the species, makes his experiment, and either fails, dies, and comes to an end, or succeeds and impresses himself in offspring, in consequences and results, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world. Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning, and the World State of the Modern Utopist will, in its economic aspect, be a compendium of established economic experience, about which individual enterprise will be continually experimenting, either to fail and pass, or to succeed and at last become incorporated with the undying organism of the World State. This organism is the universal rule, the common restriction, the rising level platform
on which individualities stand. P. 39

Wells' comparison of the Utopian World State with the Ecosystem, in which "The individual emerges from the species, makes his experiment, and either fails, dies, and comes to an end, or succeeds and impresses himself in offspring, in consequences and results, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world" is an euphenic idea. Coupled with Aristotle's observation and belief in humanity's ability to succeed through imitation, we get a prescription for a more anarchic model of society in which policy encourages individuals to do their best and then society evolves through other individuals imitating the best practices that emerge. Planning would not be by fiat or imposition; desirable outcomes would result as emergent properties. And as for Property itself, the source of so much conflict in Capitalist society, according to Wells, it would merely represent the resources an organism needs to secure freedom, and would only constitute a problem once it impinges on another's freedom.

Very speedily, under terrestrial conditions, the property of a man may reach such proportions that his freedom oppresses the freedom of others. Here, again, is a quantitative question, an adjustment of conflicting freedoms, a quantitative question that too many people insist on making a qualitative one…The object sought in the code of property laws that one would find in operation in Utopia would be the same object that pervades the whole Utopian organisation, namely, a universal maximum of individual freedom. Whatever far-reaching movements the State or great rich men or private corporations may make, the starvation by any complication of employment, the unwilling deportation, the destruction of alternatives to servile submissions, must not ensue. Beyond such qualifications, the object of Modern Utopian statesmanship will be to secure to a man the freedom given by all his legitimate property, that is to say, by all the values his toil or skill or foresight and courage have brought into being. (P 40)

Wells' view recalls to me the ideas of Amartya Sen, in Development as Freedom (Anchor, 1999), wherein he calls for freedom and democracy first and then has faith that individuals will use their freedom to create desirable outcomes[96]. The notion of a positive result from individual utility maximization ("freedom") does harken back to the ideas of Adam Smith[97] and David Ricardo – the idea of desirable emergent properties resulting from individual's being free to maximize their own benefits is reminiscent of the invisible hand. Some could argue that this is a narrow definition of freedom (one could be equally free to be altruistic, or self-less) but Nobel laureate George Stigler would insist that

"the concept of self-interest provides a universal explanation of human activity. 'Man is eternally a utility-maximizer,'' [Stigler] wrote, and not just in economic activity but "… in his church, in his scientific work, in short, everywhere.'' Another Nobel laureate, Gary Becker, has elaborated how self-interest could explain the most personal decisions, including marriage, child-bearing, and so on."[98]

Amartya Sen certainly wouldn't go that far; he feels that to limit rationality only to self-interested behavior "seems altogether extraordinary.'' (Sen, 1987)[99] By Stigler and Becker's logic, though, even self-sacrifice becomes a form of self-interest; presumably the good samaratin gets some kind of endorphin kick, some holier-than-thou high that is worth more than any net losses in material comfort. The biochemical rewards of masochism (production of endogenous opiods under predatory threat) have been well studied (Nell 2005[100], Solomon 1980) Nell reports,

It is incomprehensible that the infliction of pain on the self is both pleasurable and also sexually arousing. This unlikely conjunction has long puzzled moral philosophers and psychologists. In a famous passage, Freud wrote that “the existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from an economic point of view” (1924/1985, p. 413). Yet using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Becerra, Breiter, Wise, Gonzalez, and Borsook (2001) report that a pain stimulus (a probe heated to 46NC applied to the skin) activated the brain’s reward circuitry, following a pathway similar to that of the pleasure response: protein from the cfos gene shows “that many neurons in the amygdala that are aroused by aggressive encounters are also aroused by sexual activity” (Panksepp, 1998, p. 199): the underlying motivation may be the seeking of safety. (Nell, 2005)

And Solomon reports in "The opponent-process theory of acquired motivation: The costs of pleasure and the benefits of pain" that certain pain or fear inducing behaviors can become highly pleasurable:

"…if they are derived from aversive processes they can provide a relatively enduring source of positive hedonic tone following the removal of the aversive reenforcer. Fear thus has its positive consequences."[101]

So while Freud may have had a hard time understanding masochism from an economic point of view, economists such as Stigler and Beck could argue for maximization of the utility of an individual's reward circuitry. Richard McKenzie supports this view in an introductory Economics text without resorting to biochemistry ("the 'rationality' of altruism can be saved provided the altruist wants to serve others 'just as he can want to own a new car'" he says[102]) but "wanting" still demands a neurological, thus chemical underpinning. Either way, the implications of a biochemical calculus of personal gain as a path toward a pharmacologically induced eutopia are clear (for extensive writings on this see David Pearce's "Hedonistic Imperative")

What apologists for the invisible hand leave out (and Charles Dicken's took great pains to put back in through his dystopian novel Hard Times) is the moral dimension of our preferences; as Frey points out, Smith made it seem as if the outcomes of the invisible hand were superior to those that would be achieved if we actually did some planning and intended good outcomes. He says,

Given Smith's assurances, it is no wonder that the laissez-faire authors of the nineteenth century, such as Jane Marcet, typically rationalized indifference to the plight of the economically weak as serving the best interest of society. (Ibid).

Frey points out how both extreme individualists and their detractors both thought they were serving "the common weal". Just as almost all people think theirs is the real eutopia (who really wants to create a deliberate dystopia after all?), everybody seems to think they can speak on behalf of the greater good.

Daniel Raymond rejected the extreme individualism of the classical political economy as it had developed by the 1820s. He warned that self-interest endangers the common good, baldly stating that the interests of a nation and of individuals "are often directly opposed.'' Raymond rejected individualism entirely to suggest that the government should be the main agent of the common good, that it "should be like a good shepherd, who supports and nourishes the weak and feeble ones in his flock.''
The ecosystem model eschews this kind of thinking on both sides, tossing it into the dustbin with the failed notion of Group Selection Theory. The idea that any organism should sacrifice for "the good of the species" was shown to be biologically absurd as long ago as 1859 when Charles Darwin considered the apparent paradox of sterile castes of insects in Chapter 7 of the Origin of the Species. By the 1930's J.B.S. Haldane was beginning to formulate a theory of altruism consistent with individual self interest, stating famously "I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins". By 1964, with a full understanding of Mendelian genetics and an inchoate understanding of DNA, W.D. Hamilton formalized the theories of Kin Selection and Kin Altruism.[103] Just the same, the growing environmental movement conveniently ignored this literature and continued to speak about our need to sacrifice for "the good of the species" in the same way that Marcet had invoked sacrifice (of others, always others!) for the good of society. Rather than applying Kropotkin's early insights into symbiosis and mutualism to find a natural model that explains the evolution of cooperation and altruism, both environmentalism and free-market capitalism relied on an uncertain appeal to "ethics". Biologist and game theorist John Maynard Smith (1982)[104] took great pains to develop mathematical models showing how self-restraint, self-sacrifice and other ethical forms of behavior could become an enduring part of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. It is likely that the natural history of Environmentalism Future will cast it as a general "eutopian" or "welfare maximizing" movement and find ways to make the invisible hand visible and show how natural selection can create "kinder gentler people" and that nature is not always "red in tooth and claw". Otherwise we run into the defeating dilemma that Frey (op cit.) talks about when he considers Stigler's characterization of all behavior as the maximization of self interest:

"To Stigler ethics are largely rules to guarantee that self-interest take the long-run view and not ignore market externalities. Ethical rules "in general prohibit behavior which is only myopically self-serving…'' in order to advance long-term interests. Stigler quickly added, however, that "some people will gain by violating the rules.'' This last observation, of course, would seem to undermine the possibility of any ethic based on self-interest. (What argument can be advanced against cheating on an ethic of self-interest if self-interest itself is the motive for cheating?)… In this view the only thing that would make crime irrational is that the expected punishment outweighed the probable gains. According to such reasoning, honest people are really motivated the same way criminals are: it is just that "honest'' people don't calculate that the net payoff to crime is worth it. The intentions of both the honest and the criminal are identical. Everyone is a criminal at heart! "

Richard Dawkin's refinements of Hamilton and Maynard Smith's kin selection theory beyond even his own selfish gene theory into wider theories of the extended phenotype and the reproduction of memes opened up possibilities for social welfare based not on maximizing individual satisfaction (a local cluster of genes) but on maximizing the future representation of discrete genes and memes and distributed clusters of these entities extended throughout phenotypes and institutions throughout space and time. Looked at this way, life becomes a shifting mosaic of genetic and memetic possibilities, gathering together in temporary alliances and assemblages, competing and cooperating forrepresentation. The notion of maximizing self-interest becomes just one of many notions of utility maximization, and the good of society or the good of the species or the good of an individual cell (a cancer cell perhaps?) become concepts we must also consider, each being just a different scale's temporal cluster of replicating information.

Said Milton Friedman (1962) the ultimate social value, freedom, "has nothing to say about what an individual does with his freedom. …''[105]

The ecosystem model, framing any natural history of the future, tells us that this insight must apply to all levels of biology, from DNA on up to the entire Gaian biosphere. Environmentalism Future and any Eutopian project must consider the possibilities and perils of conceptually setting the world free and embracing the law of unintended consequences, recognizing that despite our efforts to control the world, and declaring the death of Nature, it is, has been and always will be "wild".

B. Production – Technology and Its SocioEconomic Relations


Caveat vendor will be a sound qualification of Caveat emptor in the beautifully codified Utopian law – Wells’ Modern Utopia p. 41,

According to former Senator Paul Simon, whom I spent time with in Damascus Syria when he was there during the summer of 2001 promoting his book “Tapped Out: The Coming Water Crises”, one of the biggest problems we face in creating environmental policies is that there is a gap between scientists and policy makers that is all too often filled by people with uncertain scientific knowledge and/or partisan interests. The other problem is that most people trained in policy don't really understand the artifacts they are supposed to advise on. He said "most of the people we have advising us politicians on technology don't know much about science and engineering." We examined a unitary regenerative fuel cell that I had brought with me which I suggested could be used to provide energy and clean water at the same time. He told the crowd gathered at the Assad Center to hear him debate solutions with the Syrian Environment Minister "I know about the possibility of fuel cells in the transportation sector, but nobody has told me about their use in water purification."

What I didn't share with the former Senator is that my understanding and interest in the possibilities of fuel cells, which were invented in 1839, did not come from my university education. My fascination with fuel cells began with a read of Jules Verne's eutopian fiction "The Mysterious Island" in which Harding, in Chapter 11, talks about the disadvantages of the coal economy, predicts the exhaustion of fossil fuels and praises the benefits of a hydrogen economy based on the electrolysis of water[106]. I also learned about fuel cells from space drama science fiction's in which URFC fuel cells are used (as they are in real life on the space station) to recycle urine and sweat and waste water into potable water while providing heat and electricity. Speculative fiction readers get a chance to see various technologies tried out in the virtual worlds created by their authors; those who don't engage in such playful and imaginative constructions would find it difficult to think through the consequences or alternative uses of a given technology, and might see only the limited conventional use of a given artifact. This might explain Simon seeing the fuel cell as a transportation sector technology only.

Every object and technology has myriad possible uses and policy should train people to think outside the box. Nowhere is this truer than in the energy sector.

Given Joseph Tainter's (1998) hypothesis (cited in the first chapter) that civilizations rise and fall relative to their ability to secure energy supplies commensurate with their investments in complexity, one can see a lot of anxiety in future modeling scenarios about where the energy will come from and what civilization will look like if supplies are cut. Observance of the consequences of supposedly "environmentally friendly" trends in energy technology underscores just how complex the issues really are. While the Los Angeles MTA advertises its possession of the "world's largest fleet of clean energy buses" and Cairo, Egypt works assiduously to position itself as both a major supplier and consumer of natural gas, the shift to this low carbon fuel is not without its own dangerous domino effects. The New York Times of January 3rd, 2006 talks about tensions over a rise in interest in "clean burning" natural gas, given that the three countries with the major holdings – Russia, 1,700 trillion cubic feet (27% of the world total), Iran, 971 trillion cubic feet and Qatar, 910 trillion cubic feet) belong to politically unstable regimes. To avoid being caught in yet another quagmire of foreign control (epitomized by the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine) neighboring Finland has announced the construction of the "world's largest nuclear reactor" as "a move that would lessen its reliance on imported Russian natural gas"[107]. America, meanwhile, reeling from sticker price oil shocks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and worries about the vulnerability of its natural gas storage facilities to natural and man-made disasters, is licensing new nuclear power plants in the southern state of Alabama[108]. At the same time, Iran, which is afloat in natural gas, is defying world opinion and pressing ahead with its own plans to build nuclear reactors, stating a need for greater energy. World opinion holds that Iran is using domestic nuclear energy as an excuse for acquiring the technology to build nuclear weapons, under the assumption that once you have active reactors you have the capacity to produce weapons grade fuel.

For reasons that cut to the heart of the skewed nature of north-south relations and post-colonial prejudice, almost nobody worries about Finland getting the bomb. Furthermore, despite the reactor meltdown at nearby Chernobyl in 1986, and the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, there is great faith in improvements in safety in the nuclear industry. One would think that people would have taken at least those two, out of the dozens of nuclear accidents that have occurred, as sufficient warning signs to abandon a technology that has been described as "the most dangerous way of boiling water ever invented". Instead confidence is higher than ever as this quote from the December 2005 issue of Scientific American makes clear:

Despite long-standing public concern about the safety of nuclear energy, more and more people are realizing that it may be the most environmentally friendly way to generate large amounts of electricity. Several nations, including Brazil, China, Egypt, Finland, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam, are building or planning nuclear plants…If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods, namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium.[109]

The way forward, according to Hannum et.al., all eminent researchers in the field of nuclear materials processing, is to retire the 438 thermal, mostly water-cooled commercial reactors in the world (103 of which are in the U.S.) and add more "advanced fast-neutron reactors" (sometimes known as "breeder reactors" when they produce more plutonium than they consume) to the 20 now operating, with preference to liquid sodium and other liquid metal cooling systems (apparently less prone to melt-downs)[110]. At the same time they urge us to leap into full scale pyrometallurgical processing ( "a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel") wherebye little or no new uranium would need to be mined (using conventional reactors, the authors tell us, we could run out of uranium in "a few decades".) One advantage to this is that whereas a 1,000 MW thermal plant generates more than 100 tons of spent fuel a year, a similar capacity fast reactor generates just over 1 ton, plus "trace amounts of transuranie wastes" leading the authors to assert "with this approach radioactivity from generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, therebye eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years."

The authors conclude "For the foreseeable future the hard truth is this: only nuclear power can satisfy humanity's long term energy needs while preserving the environment." The paradox here is how this carryover from environmentalism past is being used by the traditional foes of the movement to convince us to embrace their technology to save the very thing we claimed they were threatening. Ironically to save our environment (the one free of radionuclides that can cause us cancer and mutation) well intentioned environmentally concerned people must now be asked to sacrifice "the environment". They need to be asked if it wouldn't be better for us to deal with climate change (which the brown-lash has been trying to convince us is "natural" anyway!) or with radiation – even if the next generations production of it will only be lethal for hundreds of years at a time (we still won't have eliminated the past generations production of wastes that are poisonous for thousands of years!) Rarely do we hear fundamental questioning about the our need to consume so much energy in the first place. Amory Lovins, champion of "soft-path" energy alternatives, tells us in Winning the Oil End Game: Innovation for Jobs, Profit, Security (2005) that we can, by implementing energy efficient technologies already developed, save more energy than we currently import from Saudi Arabia. Lovins would have us ask epistemological questions that cut to the heart of energy use:

End-use/least cost analysis begins with a simple question: What are you really trying to do? If you go to the hardware store looking for a drill, chances are what you really want is not a drill but a hole. And then there's the reason you want the hole. If you ask enough layers of "Why" --as Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota production system told us — you typically get to the root of the problem.[111]

Lovins and his team at the Rocky Mountain Institute have calculated the costs and benefits of nuclear power versus renewable energy and shown renewables to win on all counts – jobs, profit and security, to say nothing of "the environment". But this doesn't stop industry from ploughing ahead with nuclear energy, most likely because, unlike renewables, it lends itself to centralized control – something the energy industry got used to in the fossil fuel era and seems unwilling to abandon, despite its own rhetoric about the benefits of "deregulation", "decentralization" and "distributed energy". So, like it or not, we are likely to see Nuclear Energy playing a major role in the energy sector for a long time to come, and this means that any environmentalism future will be forced to deal with the growing presence of toxic radionuclides, essentially forever (i.e. relative to the lifespan of the human species).

Rachel Western points out this uncomfortable reality facing any eutopian or dystopian future in the environment that we have co-created: the threat of nuclear waste. In an article in Peace News she states:

“During the Second World War, nuclear weapons were developed and used. Obviously they have no part in a utopia, but although these weapons can be taken apart, the materials used to make them will be left behind.
There are high-tech schemes to "zap" away these wastes, but they are enormously expensive and don't actually do the job. In addition, the huge volumes of radioactive wastes left from the manufacture of the weapons will present a threat of cancer for hundreds of thousands of years…There is no solution to the problem of nuclear wastes; however, there is the possibility that facing up to the problem, in such a way that we cope with it in the best way possible, could create new patterns of care, respect and humility that would be an important part of the establishment of a utopian society.(Western, 2005)”

This chilling fact at once disturbs and throws off any utopian vision that does not consider the creation of radionuclides and their dispersal and concentration in our environment. They are there. They are life-threatening. They can be abused deliberately or accidentally. The “genie is out of the bottle” as the saying goes, and there is no way to put it back in. So any utopia must consider this issue. If the proposed solution is to implement the “high-tech schemes” that Western talks about, it has to suggest where the funding comes from and what the consequences would be. This reality has been dealt with in Dystopian fiction – the film “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1969) featuring Charleton Heston in a reprise role (second in the series of 5 Planet of the Apes movies with Roddy McDowell, based on the Pierre Boule utopian novel from 1963) shows that the descendents of the human race lost their ascendancy on the surface of the earth because of mutations that rendered them mute and compromised their intelligence, while other races of anthropoid primates, descended from modern gorillas, chimps and orangutans, gained in relative intelligence and capabilities and became the dominant social order. But underneath the earth, in the remnant of a nuclear silo, a race of irradiated and mutated but technological human beings persists, worshipping a left over atomic bomb as their deity. As unrealistic as modern day humans would like it to be, the vision isn’t irrational – we do worship our technology and radiation does cause mutations and there is no biological reason why other anthropoids can’t evolve to be as intelligent as we are, nor any reason why we couldn’t “devolve” to a lower state of intelligence (see Vonnegut’s Galapagos (1986) for more on this).

A quick reading of past history gives us no confidence in the hypothesis that people learn from their mistakes or can even agree what constitutes acceptable risk when it comes to technology. Mustard gas was banned after World War I by the Geneva convention of 1925, only to be revived by Iraq between 1983 and 1988 in its war with Iran[112]. DDT was banned in the U.S. but continues to be used in Africa (particularly Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa) and is produced by several countries, such as Ecuador; world production was estimated at 2,800 tons in 1990, and despite data to show that most of its restriction was due to a loss of effectiveness through mosquito evolved resistance, a controversy rages today whether the ban is responsible for millions of malaria deaths. It is alleged that banning DDT represents a kind of "eco-imperialism"[113]. About the only technology that seems to have remained on the world's black list is the widespread use of hydrogen as a fuel, and this despite the fact that hydrogen is clean burning, releasing only water vapor in combustion, is easily handled and has an enormous range of industrial uses. Nonetheless, when it comes to creating a hydrogen economy the precautionary principle, rarely invoked by the mainstream media, suddenly comes out in full force. This is despite the fact that the only evidence against hydrogen, used time and again, is a cautionary tale produced from a gross misreading of the Hindenberg incident. As the Hydrogen Now! Website points out:

Of the 35 deaths from the disaster, 33 were caused by jumping or falling. Only two deaths were caused by burning, and it is likely that those two were from proximity to the burning skin of the airship, or from the stores of diesel fuel that were ignited by the covering. Whereas the hydrogen burned within one minute of ignition, the diesel fires burned for up to ten hours after the ignition.[114]

Side by side readings of statements by the energy industry defy logic. On the one hand the public is told that global warming and the greenhouse effect is a scare tactic conjured up by money-grubbing attention hungry environmentalists, on the other the public is told to support nuclear energy because it releases no greenhouse gases and is therefore environmentally friendly. Hydrogen as an alternative to gas, even when used in fuel cells (which involve no combustion at all) is considered too dangerous, while hydrogen fusion reactors are touted as the panacea to all our energy woes. Doubtless this reflects the political power of the various sectors of the energy industry.

What do models of the future have to say about the use of nuclear energy? The nice thing about the social models produced by writers and artists who include the social variables of human passion and greed is that they often have more predictive value than the idealized models of the economists or natural scientists. One thing almost all of them explore is what human folly can do when equipped with the power to utilize weapons of mass destruction. The point isn't whether the scenarios depicted in speculative fiction will come true exactly as conceived by the artist. The point is that human beings have shown their tendency to act irresponsibly in the past and show no indication of acting any better in the future.

In the films "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" (1969), cited earlier, based on the speculative fiction novel "La Planete Des Singes" by Pierre Boulle (1963) Charleton Heston epitomizes the contradictory tendencies of human beings faced with gross environmental changes and the ability to destroy their environments. At the end of the first film Heston kneels in despair in front of a crumbling statue of liberty, pounding the sand and crying in rage "We finally really did it -- you maniacs, you blew it up! God damn you, God damn you all to hell" because he learns that humanity plunged the world into nuclear war and destroyed civilization, leaving the earth to our ape cousins who evolved amore peaceful if religiously intolerant and scientifically backward society. But when, at the end of the second film, Heston loses his mute female companion in a conflict between the apes and a group of telepathic mutant human survivors who thrive underground, worshipping a cobalt nuclear bomb from the late 20th century called the "doomsday device" as their God, he unilaterally decides that since life isn't worth living for him, he might as well end it for everybody. He deliberately pushes the nuclear button. The final narration in the film says, "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." The orangutan scientist Dr. Zaius, says of humanity at the end of the first film "I have always known about man. From the evidence I believe his wisdom must walk hand in hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself… the forbidden zone was once a paradise… your breed made a desert of it ages ago." The moral of the movies, if anybody cares to take the prognostive propensities of popular culture as seriously as they do those of computer models, is that the only thing you can safely predict about human beings is that, given time and the availability any technologies (such as weapons of mass destruction), we will use them. It is just a matter of when.

One could argue that the 4 tropes of storytelling explicated by Hayden White - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony – and their inhabitance in the romantic, the heroic the tragic and the farcical plot devices -- make it very difficult to write a novel or a screenplay that doesn't result in somebody using the nuclear, biological or chemical genie in some horrible way. From Pandora's Box to Genesis to A Canticle for Lebowitz, storytelling almost demands that man yield to the terrible temptation of self-annihilation. But must this be true of real life as well? Given Weiskel's and Merchant's and others' contentions that we are living out real-time ecodramas, where do we get the idea that we can have a satisfying ending without tragedy? Do we have any models at all that predict happy endings?



C. Cognition -- The Mental Realm of Ideas, Ethic, Myths and So On.

If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
-- Karl Popper

Though Popper seemed hostile to Utopias in general a closer read reveals his hostility to the authority of authorship by the few and their ability to impose their endings to the drama on the rest of us. He felt that all attempts to impose a preconceived blueprint on society, no matter how well intentioned, would result in the misapplication of force. But his work could also be conceived to be utopian because he too, was seeking a happy ending to the human story. The dilemma of endings such as "and they all lived happily ever after" is that we rarely get to see how they lived happily ever after. We imagine a kind of perfection fixed in glass and justifiably feel claustrophobic. What is more, perfection, as Popper rightly saw, implies a governor, some kind of quality control, and that destroys freedom. Freedom comes from imperfection, from movement off of the straight or prescribed path. Freedom spoils the happy ending. The irony is that the happy ending, by virtue of its perfection, becomes unhappy and thus imperfect. Ultimately these become mere word games, played in the models of the mind. Thought out louder they become a collective fantasy, thought out loudest they become absurd and even dangerous. Perfection is a model, a map. And, as Korzybski said "the map is not the territory". It is merely a guide. For this reason Christianity, at its best, superseded its old Testament rage at man's fall from grace and perpetuation of sin, and created a new myth of absolution and forgiveness of sin that was supposed to help us accept the fact that we would never be able (nor should we try too hard) to be perfect. We can never create "Heaven on Earth".

There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than de trop: it is an impediment to perfection.[115]

Joshua Muravchik in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism[116], wrote that Socialism's epitaph would be "if you build it they will leave" – if they can! Somehow in the pursuit of a lasting perfection thought out loudest, defenders of a given utopian model of reality have seemed historically inclined to try to keep the rest of us a captive audience to their three-dimensional dramatic realization of their ideas. It is as though they were angry directors of a play that has gone on far too long who lock the theatre doors and force some of the spectators to play bit parts in their absurdity without allowing any true participation. As Muravchik observes, dissent is almost always strongly discouraged. And by seizing upon the dialectics of science and "historical materialism" as the grounding for the utopia, rather than the debunked authority of mystical revelation, a pre-Kuhnian polity could be lulled into believing that a higher authority lay behind the applications of the new model thought-out-loudest – the new god of infallible reason.

However, Muravchik's observations of socialism could be equally applied to Capitalism; the latter just seems more clever in how it squashes dissent – not by elimination but simply by overwhelming it into insignificance. Interestingly the two genres of storytelling that involve happy endings – children's fantasies ("and they all lived happily ever after") and eutopian literature, are pushed into sections of the library where they can do little or no harm – the "arts". The pressure for social conformity does the rest. Neither are given much credibility at all, in fact, in the nihilism of the post-World War II era these genres have been particularly derided. "Realistic" is now associated with doom and gloom – the very word "utopian" has come to mean "hopelessly naïve and unrealistic". So we are not really allowed to look at models that predict happy endings with any sort of rigor.

The sole exceptions to this, of course, are the rosy predictions of technoptomists and economic utopianists like Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg – in other words, anybody who defends former president Bush Sr's notion of "staying the course". It comes down to a question of competing visions of eutopia – as if mother culture (the hegemon) were saying, like some jealous God "you must forget that I am also a mere model of reality. You must accept me as truth, justice and liberty, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even though I have my flaws, I am the best of all possible worlds. I am the one and only good place, the only eutopia you shall worship. Do not question me too heavily, do not abuse your freedom of thought and freedom of speech. As long as you relegate your critiques to children's fantasies or obscure journals, and keep them innocuous, you can keep your other ideas alive, just as we keep smallpox alive, in case we should need it later, when things outside of our control threaten us. Until then, keep your other utopias at the margins." Examined in this light we begin to see that all instances of thinking (out loud, louder, loudest) are competing utopian visions – competing models of reality intended to improve the fitness of the thinker through euphenic and euthenic changes. But because of the inevitable individual variations (due to genotypic differences produced by sexual reproduction, mutation and environmental affects on phenotypic expression), very often (as the old adages tell us) "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "one man's garbage is another man's gold". In other words we all see things differently and desire different things. Perhaps with the advent of cloning we will see a society emerge that is more conformist and where a single vision will find universal appeal, though even this is still unlikely due to inevitable phenotypic variations that occur even among twins. But humans do have the capacity to not only clone a given genome today, but to euthenically clone uniform environments that can bias the expression of the genes into a more uniform product (we saw this operating in industrial age schools based on the Prussian military school model imported to the US by Horace Mann, and we certainly see this in factory farms where domestic animals are grown to be almost identical copies of one another). The status quo, in such a scenario, is unlikely to be vigorously fought.

Today, defenders of the status quo are supposedly reviled in academia, which sees itself the heir of a long intellectual tradition of resistance to state power (universities are often seen, and sometimes see themselves as havens for "leftists"). But universities also reproduce power and the status quo, particularly by putting down those who offer alternative eutopian schemes or by simply using the powers of classification to marginalize them. There is a deep structural bias in the "department" system of academia that reinforces the status quo – merely by placing future studies and utopian studies in the "liberal arts" and eschewing them in the conservative "social sciences" and engineering departments they lose their ability to transform politics. In a society that operates according to Smithian economic principles of naked self interest, it seems that to be taken seriously by the power holders in society one must speak from within the parameters of a Hobbsian world-model.

This is something many Utopian authors tried to counter by looking for mass appeal instead. Whether it was the economic and social welfare ideals of Hertzka and Morris or the technological ideals of Verne and Wells, utopian authors hoped to bypass the powerholders and put their faith in democracy by appealing to the masses. The irony is that to appeal to the masses you must assume that they are a uniform mass, and they are not. Perhaps this is why Wells, for one, was very clear in his novel "A Modern Utopia" (1905) that individuals should be encouraged, through an understanding of science and environmental economics, to propose their own euthenic changes that could benefit the whole community.

"…the object of Utopian economics will be to give a man every inducement to spend his surplus money in intensifying the quality of his surroundings, either by economic adventures and experiments, which may yield either losses or large profits, or in increasing the beauty, the pleasure, the abundance and promise of life. (P. 42)

So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon toil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but struggle to confer just as much of this blessing as possible upon one another. But now that the new conditions physical science is bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but supply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it is becoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyone to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class--that is to say, a class of workers without personal initiative--will become unnecessary to the world of men…there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use. Wells, p. 44

I see utopian literature and speculative fiction in general are merely technologies for modeling outcomes of policy, seeking the maximization of net social benefit. This is an idea developed by Drass and Kiser in their 1988 article "Structural Roots of Visions of the Future: World System Crisis and Stability and the Production of Utopian Literature in the United States 1883-1975.". They also see utopian literature as a form of entrepreneurial innovation created by "ideological entrepreneurs" designed to help us get through bad times:

“The link between crisis or decline and novel ideas has been suggested by Schumpeter (1939), Toynbee (1947) and Brenner (1985). Schumpeter (1939) argued that economic contractions encourage entrepreneurial innovations. When existing methods are not producing a profit, people will be motivated to develop new ones. Both Gordon, Edwards and Reich (1982) and Brenner (1985) suggest that the creativity accompanying periods of crisis is not limited to business people. When existing social arrangements are deemed ineffective, many “ideological entrepreneurs” will be motivated to suggest new ones… Conversely, during periods of stability and prosperity, discussion of alternatives will not be considered necessary or important since the status quo will be seen as working fine. To the extent that alternatives are discussed it will be to compare them unfavorably to existing social conditions. In periods of stability and prosperity, such as economic expansion or hegemonic dominance, an attitude of “Roman provincialism” will often prevail, justifying the denigration of alternative systems and providing a market for dystopian literature. For example Solberg (1973:510) characterizes the period of U.S. hegemony as dominated by a 'nay-saying ideology' full of 'principles of anti-this and amendments of anti-that.' Dystopian literature is ideal for such a narrow and negative ideological climate.” (Drass and Kiser, p. 423).[117]

The difficulty with their argument is that for the most part both eutopian and dystopian authors are voices from the margins -- they neither represent nor agree with hegemonic perspectives. These rebels, far from trying to maintain the status quo, tend to use their literature to criticize the status quo. In fact much of the dystopian literature is a mere extrapolation of the production status quo into the future, giving it and its logical consequences full reign. In this sense, contra Drass and Kiser, I see dystopian society as a critique of the status quo, not of change.

Orwell’s 1984, as a classic example, is a critique of Schumpeter’s optimism – state power in the novel completely discourages innovation in order to maintain hegemony, despite economic contractions. Ideological and technical entrepreneurs are destroyed in this extrapolation of Stalinist stagnation. In these cases the author isn’t arguing that change is bad, he is arguing that the world already has changed (the existence of Stalin being the change) , and that extension of that change to the world as a whole, that is, hegemony of a production mode or ideology, is what must be avoided. This is the same case for Brave New World – the change was Fordist production and Taylorized efficiency (ergonomics). The dystopia comes from rationally applying this production status quo to the entire sphere of society. Huxley does not suggest that the answer lies in recidivism – the world of the savage is equally abhorrent. Huxley wrote his antithesis to Brave New World not within the text but in another piece of often neglected eutopian literature, “Island” in which he presents a blueprint for a perfect society, balanced between ecology and culture. The enemy there is not change, but the defenders of the industrial status quo – the oil barons who destroy the island eutopia in their greed. In fact what most Eutopians seem to ask for is not stasis but an accelerated change from a status quo that only benefits the oligarchic few. Because very few analyses of Utopian literature think of the modes of production (probably because of an unfamiliarity with Marx and Engels) they often miss this point.

Where Drass and Kiser see economic, political and cultural fluctuations in the world system in a more or less cyclical pattern affecting the creation of eutopian or dystopian literature (in much the same way that Weber (1981,1982) analyzed how economic cycles affect the value content of British speeches from the throne and Namenworth (1973) demonstrated the effects of economic cycles on political party platforms (Drass and Kiser, p. 424)), another analysis might reveal utopianliterature (and speculative literature in general) as agents of economic change. Information affects the market, and speculation drives everything from land deals to stock prices – how that information gets into the economy depends on the various media of transmission. Certainly Toffler, Naisbitt and other Futurologists act as advisors to presidents and policy makers, and all are influenced by popularizations of eutopian and dystopian themes presented by artists. There is doubtless a profound feedback network and this may be a chicken-egg problem. But the historical trend, since before the celebrated Cassandra, seems to be that prophets and predictions precede rather than tail political decisions; even the Reagans employed an astrologer to make some of their decisions. Currently the Bush party (according to Bill Moyers) seems to be making policy based not only on the logic of capital but a belief in Imminent Biblical Apocalypse. The question then becomes, which is the dependent variable and which is the independent variable?

Drass and Kiser use the cultural value cycles discovered by Namenwirth and Weber (1987) and suggest four phases for analysis: Parochial (at the bottom of an economic cycle, heading up, and thus characterized by innovations and a general realization that drastic change is required, a progressive phase, a cosmopolitan phase (at the top of an economic cycle, heading down, characterized by aggressiveness and self confidence (p. 425) and they suggest that eutopian literature appears at the parochial phase and dystopian at the cosmopolitan. They fail to see that the reverse may be true – dystopian literature may reflect discomfort with current trends and a need to seek alternatives through critique of the status quo by showing its nightmarish possibilities , and eutopian literature might serve as another critique of the status quo, but suggesting a way out during a time of plenty when a better way of living is still possible.

The Drass-Kiser thesis falls apart when speculative fiction is included with the strangely contradictory genre “speculative fact” – books about the future by futurologists and scientists, such as Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” and subsequent publications (The Third Wave, Power Shift), the Naisbitt’s “Megatrends” and “The New Scientist Series” classics, “The World in 1984”, edited by distinguished British Scientist Nigel Calder and published in 1964 as a realistic look by “professional scientists, academics, economists and politicians” as to what the world could be in 20 years time. This genre would also include the work of Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) and indeed almost all Environmentalist Literature, purporting to be non-fiction, warning or anticipating the way the world could be. It is particularly applicable to “The President’s Report 2000”
Obviously more research is needed. Drass and Kiser address this in the conclusion of their paper when they call for

“a dialectical model that could measure the effects of literary utopias on society. A study of the relationship between revolutions and literary utopias may be the best way to uncover these dialectical effects… Recent work by Wiley (1985) and Galbraith (1986) suggests a relationship between economic cycles and theory in the social sciences. Huaco (1986) posits that hegemony may also shape social science theory. .. The dialectical relation between social structure and ideas can also be addressed in this context, since political communication does not just reflect reality but shapes it by setting agendas and proposing courses of action.” P. 435.


Contemporary society as a utopia

There are many critics of the unfinished project of the Enlightenment who consider it, and the American experiment that grew out of it, to be a utopian scheme. Some of these critics help us to see that, in fact, Modernism has never truly triumphed (Bruno Latour (1993), for example, in his book We have never been modern[118] rearranges our mental landscape by showing us that modernism is more an article of faith than a reality). They help us to see that Capitalism can be conceived of as much of a failure as Socialism or Communism, that Lenin was wrong and the Peasantry will not disappear, that hunter gatherers and nomads will continue to exist, we will not cease to use animals for work or transportation (nor should we), and that “sustainable development” is an unachievable oxymoron. Most of these criticisms of the Modern Utopia stem from post-modern critical theory.

Hegemonic stability theory (Krasner, 1976; Keohane, 1980) sees America as the most entrenched utopian experiment:

“there is one clearly successful model in the system; the hegemonic nation. Other nations, like organizations in an uncertain environment (Dimaggio and Powell, 1983) will generally try to imitate the successes of the hegemon (Modelski, 1978: 228, 231). Although hegemony is usually defined as economic and military superiority, it also includes a cultural and ideological component (Russett, 1985). Hegemonic states seek “to reinforce the advantages of their producers and to legitimize their role in the interstate system by imposing their cultural dominance on the world (Wallerstein, 1984:17)" (Drass and Kiser, p. 424.)

But it is difficult to position eutopian thought as something that aids the agenda of the hegemon. For example, though a series like Star Wars, spanning 20 years and influencing values throughout the entire world, may originate in the hegemonic state, it is unclear how such a mix of eutopian and dystopian visions reinforces the hegemon, and how much it undermines it, particularly as the hegemon has been continuously criticized as being “the empire”. Star Wars first came out when there was some debate whether or not the evil empire was the Soviet Union or the United States but the latest film in the series, which I watched in Egypt in 2005, leaves no doubt that the evil empire ruled by the dark side of the force is America, a fact not lost on Arab audiences when the chancellor of the empire and creator of the evil Darth Vader uses President George W. Bush's words when corrupting the ideals of the federalist state. From Thomas More's flagship novel Utopia in 1516, written in criticism of the power structure in England under Cromwell (who would later take More’s life), Utopian speculations have often been produced in opposition to the hegemon, with suggestions of post-modern hybrid social relations that embrace innovation and tolerance. The main theme of dystopia is generally simply that intolerance, fear and political control are bad. The narrative merely shows how oligarchies use various modes of production and organization to control, censor and destroy people and their freedoms.

New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball (2002)[119], exploring Muravchik's thesis that root of the problem lies in our attempt to realize Heaven on Earth when it should remain in the realm of the after-life, says,

“regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered more than one hundred million people since 1917.” Why? Why is it that “the more dogged the effort to achieve” the announced goals of socialism, “the more the outcome mocked the human ideals it proclaimed”? And why is it that conservatives, who by and large have agreed with Samuel Johnson that “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization,” have regularly been demonized as uncaring brutes? A large part of the answer lies in the intellectual dynamics of utopianism. “Utopia” is Greek for “nowhere”: a made-up word for a make-believe place. The search for nowhere inevitably deprecates any and every “somewhere.” Socialism, which is based on incorrigible optimism about human nature, is a species of utopianism. It experiences the friction of reality as an intolerable brake on its expectations. “Utopians,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered,” “once they attempt to convert their visions into practical proposals, come up with the most malignant project ever devised: they want to institutionalize fraternity, which is the surest way to totalitarian despotism.”
I believe that Kolakowski has hit the nail on the head – it is, in my opinion, the attempt to institutionalize utopia that makes attempts to think-out-loudest so dangerous. But that doesn't mean we should ignore utopian thinking-out-louder. The greatest eutopian thinkers have long recognized this – B.F. Skinner, in Walden II, took pains to let his readers no that any utopia must be experimental, constantly subject to revision and change as the actors and the environments they lived in changed. Hardly any literary eutopianists called for institutionalization. Walt Disney, who went far in thinking his eutopia out loudest, even called his tangible utopia "The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow." His plan was explicit: create something that would never stay the same. Far from the stasis loving tyrant his disaffected critics have maligned him for being, Disney time and again proved that his belief in the best way to create "the happiest place on earth" was to constantly change the definition of "happily ever after". As if in proof his heirs have since gone on to create such film sequels as "Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) in which the rags to riches princess teaches her imperious husband how important it is to share their wealth with the commoners and break traditional rules that separate classes (apparently this is one girl who won't forget her roots!) Every Disney fairy tale today has multiple sequels where the paradoxes of living happily ever after are explored – Pocahontas has to confront racism in Mother England, Wendy's daughter has to return to Never Land to see how things have changed with Captain Hook, even the Little Mermaid has to return to the sea and confront her own demons[120]. Life goes on, even in "ever after". The pursuit of happily ever after is still a dynamic struggle, and true Heaven is not a place on earth, or even in storybookland. True Heaven remains at the terminus of the timeline, at the end of lights out, after life ceases.

Utopian confusions

Fleming is quoted in Norwood (p. 754) as saying that the “new Conservationists” of the 1960s (Carson among them) “were basically hostile to utopian schemes in general” and “cites Carson’s description in Silent Spring of government inspired “nightmare utopias of eradication.” But Carson was really critical of the modernist utopian project that resulted in American development hegemony; she might have embraced Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia Emerging and Ecotopia; her own Silent Spring and other writings gave eutopian alternatives to the nightmarish disregard for human and non-human welfare that a misapplication of what she called "barbarous science" produced. It seems one man's utopia is another's nightmare.

Competition for power creates a free for all in which the same rhetorical weapons are used by all parties. To use the style of ridiculing argument that modernists have used against environmentalists' “utopian” notions, the “new Conservationists” cleverly subvert the old guard's power and turn their own guns against them. To me the modernist project more clearly resembles the absurd utopian tradition of wishful thinking than does any literary utopia ever penned. For example, Norwood tells us,

“Those acting on the notion of earth as a household modeled on industrial economics do not even understand good management, according to Carson. In Silent Spring she takes up the burden of their education by redefining productivity and efficiency. Basically, she questions the value of progress toward ultimate goals, as well as the managerial ethos informing most 1950s’ discussions of how to improve production in nature. Her analyses of “progress” in scientists’ attempts to control the gypsy moth and the fire ant are examples of her manipulation of the economic household metaphor. For both of these pests, new insecticides were hailed as offering the opportunity to create a perfect environment – one with no “noxious” insects. Expensive and technologically demanding campaigns using these insecticides, however, destroyed or contaminated crops and other agricultural crops such as milk and honey, made no change in the gypsy moth population, and led to an increase in the fire ant population. Further, Carson argues that less “sophisticated” methods, not requiring large-scale management techniques, are not only more successful at control but are also less expensive (Silent Spring, 142-56, quoted in Norwood, p. 754).

Carson’s suggestion, as indicated earlier, is that any attempt to cast our natural environment as a passive actor, as a helpless female who can be manipulated by dominant male technologies and arrogance, is as utopian as those fantasists and science fiction authors who write novels about societies where females submit as slaves to male power willingly. Carson's eutopia of compliance with nature using small scale management techniques was pitted against the modernist utopia of creating the "perfect environment" through large-scale management techniques.

The Never Ending Story

Perhaps the most important thing that can be said about utopian projects is that no matter what their author's intended in terms of implementation, almost none of them were ever considered finished; almost all, even the earliest, were merely intended as heuristic models of possible realities.
As H.G. Wells said of Plato:

“His suggestions have the experimental inconsistency of an enquiring man. He left many things altogether open, and it is unfair to him to adopt Aristotle's forensic method and deal with his discussion as though it was a fully-worked-out project” (1905 p. 91)

Wells felt that it was often the critics misread of utopian works that makes them subject to derision as "mere fantasy". In many cases the misreading is deliberate because the model proposed in the eutopia threatens vested interests and beneficiaries of the status quo. Wells blames the great classifier, Aristotle, and his desire to keep things within their convenient class, for pushing the ideas of his teacher Plato to the margins.

[Aristotle] asserts rather than proves that such a grouping [Plato’s republic] is against the nature of man. He wanted to have women property just as he wanted to have slaves property, he did not care to ask why, and it distressed his conception of convenience extremely to imagine any other arrangement p. 92

But Aristotle did believe that one of the defining attributes of humanity was our propensity for imitation, saying in his Poetics (Part IV) "The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lesson." Aristotle might not have been against people imitating a given utopia if he thought it was the right utopia. The point is that there isn't only one utopian tradition. Lyman Tower Sargent (1982) identifies at least two in the literature:

“Examining the elements of what might be called the utopian tradition broadly defined, there seem to be two traditions. The first, coming from the myths, Cockaigne, and Arcadia, are utopias (eutopias) that exist by nature rather than human contrivance and that provide a life ofease. The Cockaigne (ranging from the medieval originals to the Big Rock Candy Mountains of the U.S. depression) makes the point most explicitly. In Cockaigne, perhaps best illustrated by Brueghel’s painting of that name, people lie around with food literally flying fully cooked into their mouths and wine rivers running directly past them… there is no work, no fear of want or danger and no death or an easy death. The golden ages, earthly paradises, and Noble Savages are all like this with the addition that women give birth without pain. Clearly, in the Christian tradition these are rejections of original sin. Each of the curses of the Fall is overcome…
The other utopian tradition is the one that transmutes these natural givens into human inventions. Eutopia becomes more possible because it is a human contrivance. It suggests that a good society can be brought about if the correct decisions are made. But the same elements are there. No work becomes easy or at least meaningful work. No fear of want becomes sufficiency. The easy death and the goal of a fulfilling life replacesno death. The only thing not achieved is the elimination of pain in childbirth (although see Huxley’s Brave New World, often considered a dystopia, for that achievement – T.H.).” [121]

Drass and Kiser also create a dual typology for utopian literature, but base it on the more problematic question of what is good or bad, ignoring Shakespeare's relativist aphorism that "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so":

“Literary utopias can be divided into two main types: (1) eutopias, which create positive images of alternative societies, and (2) dystopias, which create negative images of alternative societies. Although all utopias are oriented toward the scope of ideological discourse, eutopias and dystopias are oriented in very different ways. Eutopias expand the universe of “what is possible” by favorably depicting alternative social arrangements, whereas dystopias narrow possible choices by depicting alternatives to the status quo unfavourably. As a result of this fundamental difference in orientation, eutopias and dystopias flourish under very different structural conditions. The number of literary eutopias and dystopias produced in any given period should reflect the breadth of the scope of ideological conflict. An increase in the quantity of eutopian literature should occur when the scope of ideological conflict has broadened, while an increase in the quantity of dystopian literature should occur when the scope of ideological conflict has narrowed.” (p. 422)[122].

The flaw in Drass and Kiser’s analysis is its reliance on a uniform conception of what constitutes “good” and “bad” in a given vision of the future so as to render the exercise “eutopian” or “dystopian”. Given that human minds and bodies adapt to changes in both social and ecological structuration of their environments, to call a given future in which people have adapted successfully either "good" or "bad" is to open oneself up a deconstructivist critique. An example is Huxley’s 1938 vision of an industrial future in Brave New World. Certainly for the protagonist, John the Savage, the Brave New World is a dystopian nightmare; his suicide at the end is powerful commentary on the alienation one feels moving from one world to another. But there are suicides in every transition – Akira Kurosawa's 1975 film classic “Dersu Uzula” depicts a woodsman forced to live in Moscow in the 19th century in the same light, and his tragic suicide makes the same statement – “nature” is good “civilization is “bad” – Nature being seen as Edenic, Civilization the world we carved out after the fall. The ecosystem view of nature leads to different interpretations – if we trust the voice of Lenina in Brave New World we get a different take – that the Brave New World really IS better than the old pre-Fordist world, that childbirth and old age really are nasty legacies to bear from the cruel blindness of natural selection. In this world of incipient cloning and genetic engineering and the promise of freedom from the ravages of mortality and pain, Huxley’s vision as extrapolation doesn’t appear so bad after all.

Elsewhere, however, Drass and Kiser champion the idea that all speculation literature, eutopian or dystopian alike, can be positively used to extend our ideas of the possible:

“Eutopian literature can be understood as an aspect of ideology providing conceptions and evaluations of possible alternative social structural arrangements (Mannheim, 1936; Therborn, 1980) Reflecting the direction in which both Marxis and non-Marxist theorists have been moving (Althusser, 1971; Gouldner, 1976; Seliger, 1976; Ricouer, 1986), we do not view ideology as “false consciousness” or incorrect belief, but simply as ideas, often embedded in material practices, that pertain to power relations and social structural arrangements…
“According to Therborn (1980), ideology consists of answers to three questions: (1) “What exists?” (2) “What is good?” and (3) “what is possible”? IN spite of the wide variation in their content, all literary utopias provide conceptions and evalutations of alternative dsocial structures (Mannheim, 1936:192-93; Ricouer 1986); that is, explorations of both “what is good” and, especially, of “what is possible.” By creating and evaluating possible alternative social structures, literary utopias help set the limits within which ideological discourse takes place – i.e. the scope of ideological conflict. (Ibid).

The only real difference between Utopian literature and its “non-fiction” counterpart is that the literature models individual human reactions and human relationships (complete with scenarios, dialogues and behaviors) while the ostensibly more “serious” works of speculation tend to leave out the drama and focus on material trends and assumptions of group dynamics – a depersonalized "population" seeming to react as a whole to given environmental changes without consideration of individual or marginalized voices. In this sense the literature may actually be a better predictor if only because its model contains more variables, while the “futurist” tends to leave out the uncertainty of human agency in order to present his or her vision of the future.

The great gulf between the humanities and the sciences generally creates conditions where the scientized reader eschews the utopian literature while the liberal arts reader eschews the speculative trend writings, and a deep mistrust is set up between them.

Utopias as Nowheres?

Utopias, contrary to the popular myth, are much more than nowheres. Somehow a poor translation of the greek became enshrined then vilified and is now used as popular disparaging currency. When Thomas More coined the word he was being evasive. There is no such word as “Utopia”. EU-topia means “good or true place”, and OU-topia means “no or not place”. More chose to leave off both E and O and leave it up to the reader to decide if the world he had created existed. He allegedly did this because of his own fears of political repression, the ideas in his novel acting as severe and subversive critique of the regime in England (the same Cromwell regime that would eventually take his life for espousing so many of those ideas in opposition to the outopian fantasy of individual power created by King Henry the VIII.) It’s not that there isn’t any place on earth that resembles Utopia, it is simply that there is no such word. Thus U-topia is a word in search of a vowel.

Centuries later, critics of social order with a pessimistic world view created worlds that might have been called Ou-topian, but rather than being labeled “not places”, their frightening plausibility earned them the label “Bad places” – DYS-topia.

The ambiguity of an utopian dream now lies in its delicate tightrope act – whether an attempt to realize it will result in a eutopia or a dystopia or whether it will remain a ou-topia. Utopia is kind of like Schrodinger’s cat – it both is and isn’t there. But it is far from useless. When we really crawl into the future and really open the black box and peer inside we find that many elements of a given utopian desire really are there – commingling with memes from so many other utopias. In fact utopias exist during the time of their writing or imagining since they are built of ideas – of reproducing memes – available in mother culture all along. Thus More’s Utopia was not really such a fantasy. It’s deep subversive quality (which More knew well, and which contributed to his playful word coinage) came from the fact that the Utopia he was describing contained not only elements of European cultural and physical experiments that were competing for infiltration into English society, but contained robust and well working systems from the native Americans. Actually, Utopia was unabashedly set in the Americas and was concocted from reports More collected of voyages to the “New World.” The beauty of the word Utopia in its ambiguity is that it more than any other word in the language of development implies – indeed forces – a Hegelian dialectic. Labelling something Utopian should instantly encourage vigourous debate about whether we should put the E or the O back on the suffix. Marxists tend to deride others utopias as lacking mechanism and insert their own utopia as the EUTOPIA (after an inevitable period of dystopian destruction) but in their stubborn insistence they are doing a grave discredit to both Marx and Engels – particularly Engels, who championed the idea of dialectical solutions to problems and wanted us to observe the dialectic method in everything.

Stephen Coleman and Paddy O’Sullivan (1990) have edited a volume called William Morris and ‘News from nowhere’: a vision for our time[123] whose purpose “is primarily to show the text as a prototype of ‘Green ideas of resource management, environmentalism, decentralization, and production for use. The book “reminds the reader of the texts intentions and its influence” sending the reader “back to the text for inspiration.” But as usual the critics have to denigrate the effort: Nash says “While contemporary revolutions in eastern Europe are evoked as following Morris and his libertarianism, the reader wonders what Morris would make of frantic consumption in the new Germany”[124]. Well, Mr. Nash, this reader would imagine that Morris would be just as upset about it as you are, and might write another book suggesting a solution to this social ill. The problem in the argumentative and hostile tone most critiques take toward utopian works is that it is NOT dialectical, it is snide and holier than thou. Instead of considering the pros and cons of a utopian vision merit by merit they tend to throw out the baby with the bath water i.e. there is frantic consumption in Germany, therefore the fall of the Berlin wall was not a success therefore William Morris’ eutopia will never succeed… as if Morris were God and his vision THE WORD. Nash points out Coleman’s assertion that "utopianists have an appalling track record at socializing adherents” as if it were their job to do so. It is H.G. Wells who dealt with this argument the best in his book A Modern Utopia when he discusses the paradox of meeting an angry nature-loving barefoot vegetarian in Utopia who hates the system.

One expects to find all Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of their Utopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its order. And here was this purveyor of absurdities! And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the necessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finite compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not irrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend is exactly just where he ought to be here.

What is most concerning to this reader is how fashionable it is to reject utopias out of hand. Kriss Drass and Edgar Kiser (1988) ran a time-series analysis on utopian literature and showed “that world-system crises such as hegemonic decline and prolonged economic contractions tend to increase the publication of eutopian literature in both Great Britain and the United States.” (p. 421[125]). They conclude “content analysis of the novels would help to bolster the arguments made here and would also be the first step toward constructing a dialectical model that could measure the effects of literary utopias on society. A study of the relationship between revolutions and literary utopias may be the best way to uncover these dialectical effects.”(p. 435). Of course the problem with their time-series analysis is that it assumes that the publication of movements and their success in altering the landscape have some simultaneity. If memes are like genes and utopias like newly evolved species, as H.G. Wells suggested, then a completely different timeline is suggested. Just as the mammals appeared over 65 million years ago but didn’t begin to dominate the globe until the passing of the dinosaurs, and Homo sapiens appeared at least one million years ago, but didn’t begin to dominate the earth until roughly 10,000 years ago, so an idea can appear and then sit unnoticed by the majority of actors for many generations. (See Wuthnow 1976, Brenner 1975, and especially Bellah 1975[126], for ideas about a “superabundance of competing visions”) Still Drass and Kiser have made a start:

“The dialectical relation between social structure and ideas can also be addressed in this context, since political communication does not just reflect reality but shapes it by setting agendas and proposing courses of action. This study of utopian literature is but a small part of what we hope will be a growing effort to theoretically explain and empirically model the complex dynamics of the world-system.” (p. 435).

In fact they point the way to a widening of scope in the analysis by pointing out that where we see a decline in the production of eutopian literature we may be in fact seeing not a decline in the popularity of the eutopian theme, but a replacement of the novel as the vehicle for that meme-set. “Other types of books” and “types of alternatives to literary eutopias have proliferated” (p. 433) they tell us, from analyses and academic discourses on hegemonic decline to the rise of popular media of other kinds (films, video games, computer simulations).

Utopias don’t fail, they simply succeed as compromises in meme survival, symbiotically hybridizing, opportunistically parasitizing, innocuously commensalizing, through the same complex form of natural selection that governs living species. Once an idea is given birth to and finds a niche in the ecosystem of ideas it competes for survival. If it seems appealing or logically coherent it becomes part of a cultural work that is issued forth by the mind in which it originated so that it can colonize other minds. When it aids other individual organisms to survive it is propagated by them and finds its way into the culture with ever greater frequency. But like genes, memes come apart in their mixing. The body decomposes, and what is passed on is a new assortment of genes. Similarly the cultural context in which the meme found expression decays and the meme is passed on in a new body of ideas and cultural artifacts. This is why it is foolish to criticize a work of fiction or imagination – or any model – even sophisticated computer models of climate or population – simply because it did not come true.

It is equally insidious to critize a utopian cluster of ideas based on the perceived character flaws of the author (which themselves are ideas with loaded histories). Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel (1979)[127] argue that “in order to understand Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) we must realize that he was constantly bothered with constipation and may have been a latent homosexual.” This kind of ad hominem character assassination is joined by the misrepresentation of Bacon as a control freak who would make all of “nature” subservient to human utilitarian purposes. Hearing these criticisms of the man it is no wonder that so few environmentalists or planners turn to his utopia to find ideas. And yet a true reading of the text gives all sorts of immensely valuable memes to incorporate into a sustainable green future. This is something that the environmentalists of the past certainly knew. For example William Shipley formed the Society of the Arts in 1754 and

“[its] philosophical justification lay in a line of direct descent from the Baconian notion of a “Soloman’s House’, in the activities of the Hartlib circle and in imitating the Royal Society itself… Almost from its inception, the Society became associated with tree planting… after its inception it… developed a sharp institutional and arguably physiocratic interest in stimulating agricultural and arboricultural development in the colonies, especially those in North America and the Caribbean. After the Peace of Paris, the Society suddenly found itself able to exert a very direct influence of colonial land-use policy.” (Grove 1995: 268).

These followers of Bacon's eutopia promoted the ‘planting of timber trees in the common and waste grounds of the kingdom for the supply of the Navy, the employement and advantage of the poor as well as the ornamenting the nation', they gave prizes for tree planting all over the colonies and in England, and “encouraged an official concern with environmental matters.” (Ibid). For Bacon, long since deceased, to reach out through his utopia over 130 years and positively affect environmentally sustainable land-use policy thousands of miles away by contributing compelling memes to the dialogue of development is testimony to the power of utopias and shows that they are far from “nowheres”. In fact they are everywhere.

Reproduction – the home, labour, culture (skills and norms), laws and policies

All architects and planners and scientists who think out loudest will tell you that getting an idea off the page and into the environment takes money. The artists and modelers who think out louder and put the ideas on the page, who sketch out the maps, will tell you their craft requires the same. Even thinking out loud, going to meetings, sharing ideas in conferences, talking on the phone, requires money. And as millions of graduate students will tell you, thinking itself requires financial support. So does reproducing the ideas that are thought out loud, louder and loudest. The point is, everything costs something. Environmentalism Present involves full cost accounting and a consideration of all externalities, positive and negative. From what seemed like a stark and dehumanizing form of cost/benefit analyses is evolving a notion that we can assign prices to all sorts of intangibles, such as aesthetic preferences and moral sentiments. Somehow, to make the ideals of democratic participatory planning – euphenic or euphenic – come true, we need not only to encourage consideration of ideals themselves through our policies and approaches to education, but we need to find ways to lower the transaction costs of thinking and experimenting with eutopian thoughts. We can't afford the social and environmental costs of our failed utopian experiments. This is as true for environmentalists as it is for industrialists – banning DDT should not cost lives and neither should using DDT, banning nuclear energy or fossil fuel combustion shouldn't cost lives or jobs and neither should using them, and so forth. We certainly can't afford any more world wars, holocausts or Gulags. We should be able to go beyond abstract measures of welfare such as GDP and find ways of empowering individuals so that they can talkmeaningfully about what really matters to them, echoing Amory Lovins call for the epistemological questioning of "what we are really after" and find solutions that lead to win-win situations for every being. It is the supreme challenge of a thinking being. This is where we must really apply our imaginations.

Critics of economics and political economy often argue that the discipline artificially restricts our imaginations regarding what matters for individuals. Martha Nussbaum (2000), for example, argues that aggregate notions of well-being contained in figures such a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita are seriously flawed. These figures fail to capture what is most important to living a meaningful life…Amartya Sen (1999), in near agreement with Nussbaum, makes persuasive arguments that we must adopt broader goals for development than growth rates in per capita income. In particular, Sen argues that we must concentrate on increasing human capabilities. By this he means expanding the ability of individuals to lead the sort of lives that they value. Wealth is an enabling factor and thus necessary, but it is not sufficient for explaining human progress. Development is a process of expanding the real freedoms of a people. This process requires removing the sources of un-freedom that include poverty, tyranny, and restricted opportunities (both economic and political). Good health, educational opportunity, increased life expectancy, democratic decision making, and toleration of alternative life-styles are all important components of human well-being that are unfortunately left out of traditional economic measures of human welfare. We must expand our measures of well-being beyond income per capita, Sen argues, to include these factors if we want our work to have relevance to the dialogue on the human condition…Our compassion is not truncated by the teachings of economics, as Nussbaum suggests, but instead that compassion is redirected toward an appreciation of the institutional pre-conditions which provide individuals with the material means which enable them to rise up and realize their potential as human beings. That is, we believe that the expansion of human capabilities is best understood to be the result of an institutional framework that encourages wealth creation. (Boettke and Subrick[128])

Given that institutionalization of utopian ideas (wealth creation is one of them!) has so frequently shown itself to be dangerous, we need to find such a framework that can adapt easily to fluidly changing, dynamic assessments of what the good life (how to fare well!) that will vary as individuals and their environmental circumstances change over time.

Rule of Law and Economic Growth

"Wogaman …hints at a fundamental paradox of self-interest values. Economic morality insists that the self have the freedom to pursue its interests, yet defines those interests relative to a framework of incentives, such as relative prices that are outside the individual's control. Thus, the self's freedom is simply the "freedom'' to move to an outcome dictated by external incentives impinging on one's preferences. Wogaman hints at this unfreedom when he suggests that there are always those in a position to set the incentives for others, who may "motivate people through their insecurities and vulnerabilities."[129]
To reproduce viable eutopian ideas that can improve welfare, we need to create a rule of law that lowers transaction costs and allows modelers to make predictions that ever more closely conform to reality. That is to say, we need to increase the strength of our predictions and make our eutopian outcomes predictable, stretching the time horizons into futures that inspire confidence and hope. As
Boettke and Subrick (2002) emphasize,

…we want to examine the impact that the rule of law has on economic development and explore the relationship between economic development and human capabilities. Our first conjecture is that the rule of law is a significant factor in explaining economic development. This is hardly controversial (Barro 1997). We believe this to be so because the rule of law provides us with the stability and predictability in economic affairs required for agents to engage in entrepreneurial action both in terms of exploiting existing opportunities for profit through arbitrage and the discover of new profit opportunities through innovation (see Hayek 1945, 72-87; Hayek 1960, 133-249; Rizzo 1980; and Epstein 1995). Absent the security and predictability provided by a rule of law, and economic actors will shorten their time horizon of investment and economic progress will be thwarted. As Hayek pointed out: The classical argument for freedom in economic affairs rests on the tacit postulate that the rule of law should govern policy in this as in all other spheres (1960, 220). Economic policies not in conformity with a rule of law introduce discretionary and ad hoc decisions that undermine the predictability and stability in the economic environment. A policy environment consistent with the rule of law, on the other hand, leads to an enhanced ability by economic actors to predict the behavior of others with whom they must coordinate their plans.

What I am arguing for in this essay is a Rule of Law to govern a specific policy maneuver: institutional encouragement and protection for all forms of eutopian thinking, giving people the time and space and funding to think eutopian ideals out loud and experiment with them without totalizing, without essentializing, without fear of retribution, without harming or coercing others. Such policies would protect freedom of thought and freedom of expression, and protect the public from the forms in which the thoughts were expressed. Radical ideas would no longer be judged as dangerous and radical thinkers would no longer be marginalized, silenced, imprisoned or put to death. They would reproduce as memes along with the genes of the individuals possessing them and evolve into ever more hopeful life forms and environments, bringing to our society the same diversity and robustness that characterize rain forests and coral reefs and other spaces where evolutionarily stable strategies have permitted life to flourish. We might not always like the thoughts or life forms that are produced and reproduced, but our policy would at least give them time and space to express themselves and to be heard, and their survivability would be contingent on how well they suit the local nexus between ontic being and ontological Being.

"Gracchus" Babeuf, the French revolutionary writer (who took his first name from the Roman land reformer), ceased thinking out loud and generating fresh utopian ideals and ideas in 1797 after his "conspiracy of equals" was discovered by the French authorities and he was executed. His out-louder-thoughts however, the doctrines called "Babouvism", lived on through endless reproductions by secret revolutionary societies, and through reproduction by the authors he influenced, in particular Marx and Engels, who wrote in The Holy Family that his attacks on private property "gave rise to the communist idea" and, more recently, Herbert Marcuse, of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists who "championed Babeuf’s thought as a tool to battle the seductive evils of advanced capitalism."[130] But as Babeuf declared in his defense at the trial at Vendome in February-May 1797, shortly before the thinking part of his anatomy was chopped off, his own thoughts were merely reproductions and elaborations – natural imitations, as Aristotle would say -- of the great thinkers before him:

“Such is the natural and palpable inclination felt by every man who loves his fellows, who gives thought to the calamities of which they are the victims, who reflects that they themselves are often the cause of these afflictions, to examine in his imagination all the possible curative measures that could be taken. If he believes that he has found these remedies, then, in his powerlessness to realize them, he afflicts himself for the sake of those whom he is forced to leave to their suffering, and contents himself with the feeble compensation of tracing for them the outlines of the plan that he feels could end their woes for all time. This is what all our philosopher-legislators did, and I am at best only their disciple and emulator, when I am doing anything more than merely repeating, echoing, or interpreting them. Rousseau said: "I fully realize that one should not undertake the chimerical project of trying to form a society of honest men, but I nevertheless believed that was obliged to speak the whole truth openly.'' When you condemn me, citizen Jurors, for all the maxims that I have just admitted stating, it is these great men whom you are putting on trial. They were my masters, my sources of inspiration--my doctrine is only theirs. From their lessons I have derived these maxims of "pillage," these principles that have been called "destructive." You are also accusing the monarchy of not having been quite as inquisitional as the government of our present Republic; you accuse them of not having prevented the corrupting books of a Mably, a Helvetius, a Diderot, or of a Jean Jacques Rousseau, from falling into my hands. All those who govern should be considered responsible for the evils that they do not prevent.”[131]

One can agree or disagree with the violence advocated by Babeuf and that used against Babeuf. Each individual must ultimately decide how to behave in order to create and maintain the environment that best suits them. From the ecosystem model of nature however, our only true responsibility seems be to keep the great chain of being and the great conversation going, i.e. to reproduce. As long as our minds are free to think their own thoughts, and life-supporting environments continue to exist that afford us some way to think out loud, euphenic and euthenic experiments to create "the goodlife" will continue. I believe that policy and institutions should be focused on preserving our freedom to think and experiment, safeguarding life through the precautionary principle, but encouraging innovation and enlightenment. Ultimately, the reproduction of thoughts (memes) and the reproduction of thinkers will lead to the evolution of entirely new ecologies of mind and being that even the most radical dreamer cannot yet conceive. Until then, our responsibility is to keep the torch burning and pass it on into the darkness of Environmentalism Future.


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[1] Full text at http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-reprint/

[2] Bush Sr. effectively used reductionism and synecdoche to marginalize environmental movements. He described environmentalists as "the spotted owl crowd" and juxtaposed "them" against "the economy". Very few people could argue that spotted owls were more important than the entire economy that affects us all.

[3] We've Got Issues: What we talk about when we talk about the future of environmentalism Grist Magazine, Environmental News and Commentary 13 Jan 2005 http://www.grist.org/comments/gist/2005/01/13/doe/
This is the first in a series of editorials Grist will publish over the coming months to address the issues raised by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus's essay "The Death of Environmentalism" and Adam Werbach's speech "Is Environmentalism Dead?"

[4] Weiner, Douglas R. (1992)Demythologizing Environmentalism, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall), pp. 385-411. "Let us not forget that the communist vision of Lenin and other Marxists was of a society ultimately without "politics" (i.e., where "politics" based on clashes of interests would be supplanted by the mere "administration of things"). P. 386

[5] Bookchin, Murray (1988) The Crisis in the Ecology Movement GREEN PERSPECTIVES Newsletter of the Green Program Project A LEFT GREEN PERIODICAL No. 6, May http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/gp/greenperspectives6.html

[6] A free reprint of the article can be found at http://www.mdgreens.org/montgomery/blog/

[7] Wangari Maathai also believed a healthy environment was a security issue: "If we did a better job of managing our resources more sustainably, conflicts over them would be reduced. Protecting the global environment is directly related to securing peace."

[8] "Reconstructing Liberalism? Notes toward a Conversation between Area Studies and Diasporic Studies" by Dipesh Chakrabarty, http://www.newschool.edu/gf/publicculture/backissues/pc26/chakra.html

[9] Bookchin, Murray (1987) 'Social Ecology vs. Deep Ecology', quoted in Orton, David (2004) "Eco-Fascism, What is It: A Left Bio-centric Analysis" Green Web Bulletin #86 http://home.ca.inter.net/~greenweb/Ecofascism.html

[10] Bernard L.L. (1930) Culture and Environment. I. The Unity of the Environment Social Forces, Vol. 8, No. 3. (Mar.) pp. 327-334.

[11] Said EW (1979) Orientalism New York: Vintage Books

[12] Escobar A (1999) After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology Current Anthropology 40:1-30

[13] Anderson, commenting on Escobar's After Nature, says "Two very separate problems get somewhat mixed in Escobar’s article: (1) Granted that “nature” is a construction of Western European civilization, and a rather vague and ill-defined construction at that, how can we conceptualize and look at our external environments? This is a problem in phenomenology. (2) We now realize that people have been influencing the planet and its biota for a long time—over 10,000 years in the New World and up to several million years in Africa. There is no “pristine Nature” out there." (Anderson, 2000). That said, who should tell us what should be preserved and what changed?


[14] Boynton Robert S. The Tyranny of Copyright? New York Times | January 25, 2004 http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/01/25/thetyran.html

[15] Frake, charles. (1974). Language and cultural description. Edited by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cited in Anderson (2000)

[16] Levi-strauss, claude. (1962). La pense´e sauvage. Paris: Plon., cited in Anderson (2000)

[17] Cartmill, Matt. (1993) A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History. Cambridge: Harvard UP see also, Bambi and the Hunting Ethos by A. Waller Hastings, online at http://www.users.csbsju.edu/~mewing/sym/bambi.html

[18] Steels, L. and Kaplan, F. (2001) AIBO's first words: The social learning of language and meaning. Evolution of Communication, 4(1):3--32. http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~junwang4/langev/localcopy/pdf/steels02aiboFirst.pdf

[19] Spirn, Anne, (1996) “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmstead” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground (New York: W. W. Norton), p. 98.

[20] Steigerwald, Joan (2000) The Cultural Enframing of Nature: Environmental Histories during the Early German Romantic Period Environment and History 6: 451-496

[21] Tower Sargent, Lyman (1982) Authority & Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought Polity, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Summer), 565-584.

[22] Warren, Stacy (2004) The Utopian Potential of GIS Cartographica Volume 39 / Number 1 Spring 2004 http://www.utpjournals.com/jour.ihtml?lp=product/carto/391/carto391p05.html

[23] http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/arcgis_spatial_analyst.pdf

[24] The Map Is Not The Territory by Rex Steven Sikes http://www.idea-seminars.com/articles/map.htm

[25] Anderson E. N. (2000) "On an Antiessential Political Ecology" Current Anthropology, volume 41 pages 105–106 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v41n1/001601/001601.web.pdf

[26] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Causal layered analysis (CLA) is a new research theory and method. As a theory it seeks to integrate empiricist, interpretive, critical and action learning modes of knowing (loosely, science, social science, philosophy and mythology). As a method, its utility is not in predicting the future but in creating transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures. It is also likely to be of use in developing more effective — deeper, inclusive, longer term — policy. Causal layered analysis consists of four levels: the litany, social causes, discourse/world-view and myth/metaphor. The first level is the litany – the official unquestioned view of reality. The second level is the social causation level, the systemic perspective. The data of the litany is explained and questioned at this second level. The third level is the worldview/discourse. Deeper unconscious held ideological, worldview and discursive assumptions are unpacked at this level. As well, how different stakeholders construct the litany and system are explored. The fourth level is the myth-metaphor, the unconscious emotive dimensions of the issue. The challenge is to conduct research that moves up and down these layers of analysis and thus is inclusive of different ways of knowing. Doing so allows for the creation of authentic alternative futures and integrated transformation. CLA begins and ends by questioning the future. In the words of James Dator: Inayatullah’s ‘Causal Layered Analysis’ is the first major new futures theory and method since Delphi, almost forty years ago. CLA is a very sophisticated way to categorise different views of and concerns about the futures, and then to use them to help groups think about the futures far more effectively than they could by using any one of the ‘layers’ alone, as most theory/methods do."

[27] From wikipedia:"As a problem structuring and problem solving technique, morphological analysis was designed for multi-dimensional, non-quantifiable problems where causal modeling and simulation do not function well or at all. Fritz Zwicky (1966, 1969) developed this approach to address seemingly non-reducible complexity. Using the technique of cross consistency assessment (CCA) (Ritchey, 2002), the system however does allow for reduction, not by reducing the number of variables involved, but by reducing the number of possible solutions through the elimination of the illogical solution combinations in a grid box.

[28] From Wikipedia: "The Delphi method has traditionally been a technique aimed at building an agreement, or consensus about an opinion or view, without necessarily having people meet face to face, such as through surveys, questionnaires, emails etc. This technique, if used effectively, can be highly efficient and generate new knowledge. To build consensus, the Delphi method often uses the Hegelian dialectic process of thesis (establishing an opinion or view), antithesis (conflicting opinion or view) and finally synthesis (a new agreement or consensus), with synthesis becoming the new thesis. All participants in the process shall then either change their views to align with the new thesis, or support the new thesis, to establish a new common view. The goal is a continual evolution towards 'oneness of mind', or consensus on the opinion or view. The person co-ordinating the Delphi method can be known as a facilitator, and facilitates the responses of their panel of experts, who are selected for a reason, usually that they hold knowledge on an opinion or view. The facilitator sends out questionnaires, surveys etc. and if the panel of experts accept, they follow instructions and present their views. Responses are collected and analysed, then common and conflicting viewpoints are identified. If consensus is not reached, the process continues through thesis and antithesis, to gradually work towards synthesis, and building consensus."

[29] From Wikipedia: Thinklets is a keyword coined by Dr. Robert O. Briggs with GroupSystems, Inc. in an award-winning paper submitted to the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) during January 2001. Thinklets are the repeatable peopleware protocols devised to help facilitate virtual team tactics with "EayWinWin" Groupware. Thinklets support anonymous voting to negotiate workable compromises (ALL-WinWin) among collaborating organizations with diverse priorities. Unisys human factors experiments with virtual team tactics protocols demonstrated anonymous voting was a critical success factor ...
A thinkLet's social capital value proposition may be assessed by its distributed application as either an Actionable Distilled Insight or Reusable Learning Object ...
Keyword consistency remains pivotal for pioneering interdisciplinary Knowledge Management/Social Engineering.
Having clear and unified terms to define and resolve shared global concerns is vital to facilitating the Pacific Asian Management Institute (PAMI) programs. These multicultural blended learning programs are co-located with the MidPacific Ocean virtual campus CBA Program offered at University of Hawaii at Manoa as Adult Lifelong Learning.
Futures studies programs adapted these protocols to help cultivate the MentorshipART of innovative scenario-spinning.
Failure of imagination (collective anticipatory thinking) was the root cause cited as reusable lessons learned after reviewing catasrophic global events.

[30] Mahoney, Michael (1997) "The Mathematical Realm of Nature," in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge), 702-55. http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/articles/mathnat/mathnatfr.html

[31] Casti, John, (1989) Alternate Realities: Mathematical Models of Nature and Man, John Wiley
& Sons

[32] THE COLONIZATION OF CYPHERSPACE by James Hart in #TL05C: HOW TO SEIZE YOUR FREEDOM Compiled and edited by Frederick Mann © Copyright 1998 Terra Libra Holdings http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl05c.shtml

[33] One of the great examples is director Brian DePalma's use of computer modeling in his epic film "Mission to Mars" to show the evolution of life on earth and its future possibilities. De Palma's artists created the basic morphology and bones of Coelocanth fish, input the "rules" of ontogeny and phylogeny and simply ran a time series of morphs, albeit with teleological constraints. The end result was a world inside the computer in which fish became amphibians became reptiles became quadrupedal mammals became bipedal primates became humans became macrocephalic spacefarers. This is detailed in the "making of" section of the DVD.

[34] Butler, Samuel (1871) Erewhon, found on line at http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Butler/Erewhon/

[35] http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/overview.html

[36] http://www.mhi.co.jp/kobe/wakamaru/english/about/technology.html

[37] Menzel, Peter and D'Aluisio, Faith (2000) Robo sapiens MIT Press

[38] http://www.robosapiens.org/vorenberg.html

[39] http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot//

[40] http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Butler/Erewhon/erewhon24.html

[41] From the introduction to his second edition, quoted on http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Butler/Erewhon/

[42] MITROFF, IAN I. and TUROFF, MURRAY (1973) Technological Forecasting and Assessment:
Science and/or Mythology? TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING AND SOCIAL CHANGE 5, 113-134 (1973) 113 and quote from Mitroff, Ian I. and Turoff, Murray (2002) 11.B. Philosophical and Methodological
Foundations of Delphi. http://www.is.njit.edu/pubs/delphibook/ch2b.pdf

[43] Bello, Walden (2002) Cover Story: What Is the International Community? Battling Barbarism Foreign Policy, No. 132. (Sep. - Oct.), pp. 41-42.

[44] The Tyranny of Copyright? Robert S. Boynton | New York Times | January 25, 2004 Boynton's argument is contrary to mine; he believes in replacing specific environments with a universal one, saying, "The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts to establish a cultural commons to those of the environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual "land" to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century's advances in industrial production, the growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. "The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently," he writes, "to see that there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it." http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/01/25/thetyran.html

[45] Boal, Augusto & (trans.) Charles A. & Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (1979). Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press (originally published Teatro del Oprimido y Otras Poeticas Politicas 1974). See http://www.dramavictoria.vic.edu.au/resources/mask/augusto_boal.htm

[46] Taylor, P. (1993) The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press, quoted by Mark K. Smith (1997) on http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm . For original text see Freire, Paulo & (trans.) Myra Bergman Ramos (1972). Pedagogy of theOppressed, London: Penguin (originally published Pedagogia del Oprimido 1970).

[47] Smith, Mark K. (1997) "Paulo Freire" on http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm

[48] Ronaldo Morelos wrote "What is empowerment? Empowerment is the reinforcement of the expectation that individual effort and power, which may or may not act in concert with others, can influence the social environment.[6] Empowerment is a practice in the production of new meanings, symbolic elements operating together in a transitive fashion wherein operants expect to be able to apply power to the world in order to change it, however minutely.[7] Howard Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, in Power and Society, elaborated on power in the political context. 'Power is participation in the making of decisions', and 'the political process is the shaping, distribution and exercise of power'[8]. In The Sociological Imagination, Wright Mills observed that power is concerned with whatever decisions human beings make about the arrangements under which they live and the events that make up the history of their period.[9] Empowerment is one of two directions in the spectrum of power relations, its opposite requires us to subject ourselves to external forms of control. To be empowered is to possess and practise a developed critical ability. To be disempowered requires a developed susceptibility." #6 Morelos 1999, Symbols & Power in Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 8 (MA
thesis, QUT Brisbane). #7 Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the
Young - Paul Willis 1990 (Open University Press, Buckingham) pp. 11-12. #8 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry - Harold Lasswell & Abraham Kaplan 1950 (Yale University, New Haven) p. 75. #9 The Sociological Imagination - C. Wright Mills 1959 (Oxford University Press, New York) p. 40.

[49] (Standard Reference Works Publishing Co., Inc.)

[50] Bekoff, Marc and John Alexander Byers (eds.) Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative, and Ecological Perspectives
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; online at http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Bekoff_Byers_98.html, INTRODUCTION: NEW EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON PLAY Human Nature, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 1–3.John Bock, Guest Editor Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York http://anthro.fullerton.edu/jbock/15_1%20Introduction.pdf, see also http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dead99/participants.html

[51] Sutton-Smith, Brian (1998) The Ambiguity of Play Harvard University Press, Cambridge; quote from review at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SUTAMB.html

[52] Scalise SAP Narrative as virtual reality" Acquiring knowledge first-hand can be dangerous and costly; we may therefore expect selection to have favored a system or systems by means of which information could be acquired at second hand. Language is perhaps the most obvious means of accomplishing this task. Verbal communication takes several forms, however: conversation, precautions, threat, argument, and so on. In other words, verbal communication appears to be specialized: it is possible that each of the several forms it" Scalise (1999) Conference Proceedings The Annual Meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society June 2 - 6, 1999 Salt Lake City, Utah Abstracts http://www.hbes.com/HBES/abst99.htm

[53] "Fantasy play may allow juveniles, both nonhuman and human, to examine situations from a variety of perspectives, and as a result may have immediate benefits." Bock (2004) summarizing the work of Pellegrini and Bjorklund.



[54] Casti, J.L. (1992) Reality Rules: Picturing the World in Mathematics, Wiley and Sons.

[55]Couclelis, Helen and Liu XiaoHang (2000) The geography of time and ignorance Dynamics and uncertainty in integrated urban-environmental process models 4th International Conference on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling (GIS/EM4): Problems, Prospects and Research Needs. Banff, Alberta, Canada, September 2 - 8, 2000. http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/ucime/banff2000/136-hc-paper.htm
"To understand the significance of real (or, for that matter, Newtonian) time for model prediction we need to consider the epistemological roots of prediction itself. What justifies a belief that a statement about the future (or about an unknown aspect of the present or the past) may be reliable? The answer is to be sought in the concept of determination, defined by Bunge (1959, p.7) as ‘constant and unique connection between things and events’. Every model determines an answer or family of answers in that sense. But there are many different kinds of determination, each with different logical credentials. Bunge (1959) distinguishes at least eight, of which causal, statistical, and teleological determination are perhaps the best known.

The key point discussed in this section is that much of determination, and thus prediction, has little or nothing to do with time. Bunge (1959, p.312 ff) discusses several mechanisms used in science for the derivation or ‘prediction’ of unknown facts from known facts. Here is a slightly adapted list:

1. Logical inference includes deduction, induction and abduction.

2. Structural laws help predict new properties from the known properties of material or formal structures (e.g., properties of chemical elements can be deduced from their place in the periodic table).

3. Phenomenological laws predict phenomena on the basis of known constant associations (e.g., the laws of geometrical optics).

4. Functional laws infer functional properties of a system from knowledge of the functional role of the parts and their interconnections (e.g,wingless birds cannot fly).

5. Statistical laws help derive collective properties of classes of events from an analysis of such classes.

6. Mechanical laws extrapolate future (or past) states on the basis of known current states and relations (e.g, the Newtonian laws of universal gravitation).

A moment of thought will show that at least the first five of these inference principles are genuinely atemporal, and the sixth is the one that gave birth to Newtonian time. They all help postulate determinations or ‘constant and unique connections between things and events’ (or classes of events in the stochastic case) regardless of when these events may be happening. Reference to temporality is indirect: whenever, if/then, usually when… To turn these statements into temporal predictions, ordering and cross-referencing events along a linear continuum is all that is needed: before-after, in 1856, in 2010. They work backwards and forwards and for however long the particular kind of determination may be expected to hold. For them the future (and the past) is indeed ‘the unfolding of a tapestry that exists now’.

In addition to the above inference principles familiar from mainstream science there are other, more informal ones that contribute to the stability and continuity of everyday life: habits, customs, settings, rituals, social and institutional rules and practices – in short, the sources of the daily, weekly, and annual routines we all rely on. A large number of social science models can be built and fairly reliable predictions can be made about the future based on things people are doing now. Although not atemporal in the same sense as mechanical laws these principles too are of and about the present.

The surprising implication is this: models can predict the future to the extent that they are not about the future. We can indeed predict many aspects of what is to come because events are constrained by several different kinds of determination that are in themselves outside of time. Some of these constraints are empirical: the life expectancy of a particular population, the rate of growth of a tree species, the time it takes to plan and build a major freeway. The range of variation of these quantities may be assumed to remain fixed for the foreseeable future. Other constraints are systemic or formal: once a system has been defined in some particular way, at some particular level of abstraction, all kinds of conceivable predictions about its domain of application become thereby impossible.

Which brings us back to ‘real’ time: in real time, time itself – qua temporal position - is a determinant of events. Our predictive devices, based as they are on either strict but atemporal forms of determination (or perhaps on more or less reliable speculations about what ‘usually’, ‘lately’, or ‘currently’ may be the case), can say nothing about possibilities that are a function of futures not yet realized or even thought of. But is real time relevant to integrated environmental modeling? Since real time presupposes an agent capable of anticipation and memory, the answer is positive to the extent that such agents have a place in environmental systems."


[56] Exemplars in the media are Twilight Zone: "The Lonely" Season 1, Episode 7 First aired: November 13, 1959, the cult film "Cherry 2000" with Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and the dystopian film "Blade Runner" basesd on Philip K. Dick's "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep". http://www.first-androids.org/ shows what is actually going on in this arena.

[57] http://www.robotbooks.com/battlebots.htm, see also http://robots.ural.net/robots.htm for virtual robot warfare created in Russia that can be played online.

[58] http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2003/pa072903.htm also http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/weapons/a/robots.htm

[59] http://betterhumans.com/Members/futuretalk/BlogPost/4790/Default.aspx

[60] Schweitzer, Lisa (2004) UCLA Urban Planning Dissertation: Environmental Sacrifice Zones: Risk and Transport in Southern California

[61] see "Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology" NSET Workshop Report Edited by Mihail C. Roco and William Sims BainbridgeNational Science Foundation http://www.wtec.org/loyola/nano/NSET.Societal.Implications/nanosi-es.pdf

[62] Sir Bedevere: What makes you think she's a witch?
Peasant 3: Well, she turned me into a newt.
Sir Bedevere: A newt?
Peasant 3: ...I got better. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/quotes

[63] "This Art is called Magic...[It] is not easy to understand, and it is hidden from the simpleminded.
Magic is a divine power, affecting by original causes...' Picatrix. http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/picatrix.html
Picatrix, or Ghâyat al-Hakîm fi'l-sihr, "the Aim of the Wise" written in Andalusia in 1000 AD was an early type of grimoire (a book of magical knowledge written between the late-medieval period and the 18th century. Such books contain astrological correspondences, lists of angels and demons, directions on casting charms and spells, on mixing medicines, summoning unearthly entities, and making talismans. The word grimoire is from the Old French gramaire, and is from the same root as the word grammar. This is partly because, in the mid-late Middle Ages, Latin "grammars" (books on Latin syntax and diction) were foundational to school and university education, as controlled by the Church — while to the illiterate majority, non-ecclesiastical books were suspect as magic. But "grammar" also denoted, to literate and illiterate alike, a book of basic instruction." says Wikipedia. The Picatrix is said to have influenced Tomaso Campanella's "City of the Sun"


[64] Aphorisms from the encyclopedic Picatrix blended magic with environmental awareness: "The cautious Soul collaborates with the Astral action just as the skilled peasant collaborates with Nature when plowing and digging"; "The stars should be used in the construction of cities; in the construction of houses we must use the planets." --- Picatrix http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/picatrixaphorisms.html

[65] Seashore Carl E. (1941) The Term "Euthenics" Science, New Series, Vol. 94, No. 2450. (Dec. 12), pp. 561-562.

[66] http://www.greatwomen.org/women.php?action=viewone&id=123 Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment. Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows, published posthumously in 1912."Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman professional chemist in the nation, and played a major role to open scientific education and the scientific professions to women. Applying scientific principles to domestic life, she pioneered the new study and profession of home economics, a major opportunity at the time for higher education and employment for American women.
The first woman to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richards developed MIT's Women's Laboratory. Her innovative studies of air, water and food led to the creation of national public health standards and the new disciplines of sanitary engineering and nutrition. The interaction between people and their environment led this visionary to predict future environmental crises and to advance the concept of ecology as an environmental science - an idea not widely accepted until almost a century passed.
Richards was central to the founding of the American Home Economics Association and served as the group's first president."

[67] Seashore, Carl E.(1942) Origin of the Term "Euthenics" Science, New Series, Vol. 95, No. 2470. (May 1), pp. 455-456.

[68] Goldsmith, William M. (1926) Eugenothenics Science New Series, Vol. 63, No. 1633 (Apr), p. 403

[69] Howard, Ebenezer (1902) Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London. Reprinted, edited with a Preface by F. J. Osborn and an Introductory Essay by Lewis Mumford. (London: Faber and Faber, [1946]):50-57, 138- 147.

[70]" Municipal Parks and City Planning: Frederick LawOlmsted's Buffalo Park and Parkway System" by Francis R. Kowsky Reprinted with permission from the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, March 1987 online at http://preserve.bfn.org/bam/kowsky/kowold/

[71] Holt-Jensen, Arild (2001) Individual relational space in deprived urban neighbourhoods Paper delivered at ENHR conference 25-29 June 2001 Pultusk, Poland http://www.nhh.no/geo/NEHOM/publications/ENHR%20Warsawa%202001.pdf

[72] Safety, Crime, Vulnerability and Design - A Proposed Agenda of Study Previously published in August 1995 as Working Paper No. 53 By Chris Brunsdon, Rose Gilroy, Alai Madani Pour, Maggie Roe, Ian Thompson and Tim Townshend Environment and Safety Group

[73] Brave New World (1932) remains ambiguous on this score, with British Philosopher David Pearce believing it to be a true eutopia and science writer Matt Ridley believing that it represents an "environmental, not a genetic, hell." Because it was written 20 years before Watson and Crick discovered DNA its biological determinism did not involve genetic engineering but rather euthenic manipulations of the amniotic test-tube environment. I would argue, contra Ridley, that insofar as genotypic expression was severly constrained during embryogenesis resulting in biologically determined castes, Brave New World's dystopian elements derive from the society's attempt at eugenic control – though there is no birth and no parents, the state is still interefering with heredity to achieve social outcomes.

[74] Lederberg, Joshua Stanford (1964) “A Crisis in Evolution”, (1964) The World in 1984 New Scientist series, Nigel Calder Ed. Penguin Books.London

[75] quote from "The Death of Socialism" by Roger Kimball http://www.falange.us/socialis.htm " We owe the term “socialism” to some followers of Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century British industrialist who founded New Harmony, a short-lived utopian community on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana. Owen’s initial reception in America was impressive. In an 1825 address to Congress, Joshua Muravchik reports in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Owen’s audience included not only congressmen but also Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, President Monroe, and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Owen described to this august assemblage how his efforts to replace the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system would bring forth a “new man” who was free from the grasping imperatives that had marred human nature from time immemorial. (And not only human nature: the utopian socialist Charles Fourier expected selfishness and cruelty to be obliterated from the animal kingdom as well: one day, he thought, even lions and whales would be domesticated.) The starry-eyed aspect of socialist thinking did not preclude a large element of steel. As Muravchik points out, the French Revolution was “the manger” of socialism. It was then that the philosophy of Rousseau emerged from the pages of tracts and manifestos to strut across the bloody field of history. The architects of the revolution invoked Rousseau early and often as they set about the task of “changing human nature,” of “altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”

[76] "The Future as History": An Experimental Approach to Introductory History for the General Student
James B. Schick; Fred B. Misse, Jr.; David A. Hackett The History Teacher, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Feb., 1974), pp. 220-227. StableURL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00182745%28197402%297%3A2%3C220%3A%22FAHAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O.

[77] "For it is in just such times as these that anachronisms proflierate, and when they cease to be harmless myths and grow into rigid dogmas over which nations go to war and race of men tear at each other's throats… Anachronisms are the perculiar concern of historians… the historian is pecularly fitted also to serve as mediator between man's limitations and his aspirations, between his dreams of what ought to be and the limits of what, in the light of what has been, can be… a creature so long described as earth bound and so newly transcending those bounds, so giddy over his spectacular innovations, so guilt-ridden about his past, and so anxiety ridden about the present and the future is not a creature who can safely turn away from history." -- C. Vann Woodward, "The Future of the Past", 726 justifying "The Future as History", in Schick, Misse and Hackett 1974, p. 227).

[78] Ross, Gina (2004) Beyond the Trauma Vortex The Media's Role in Healing Fear, Terror, and Violence http://ginaross.com/publications.html

[79] see the analysis of British Philosopher David Pearce and the implications for "The Hedonistic Imperative" in BRAVE NEW WORLD ? A Defence Of Paradise-Engineering at http://www.huxley.net/

[80] Tower Sargent, Lyman (1982) op cit. p. 565

[81] Author's note from 1901, published on http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.1/bookid.1784/sec.1/

[82] Apuzzo, Michael L. J. Brave New World: Reaching for Utopia Neurosurgery: Volume 46(5) May 2000 p 1033 http://www.neurosurgery-online.com/pt/re/neurosurg/fulltext.00006123-200005000-00001.htm;jsessionid=DFbyvLJT7Zdx1RCk25jNBIA1ZA7obst4Q2WjlGD7T0xRFRWuc2jF!-943888906!-949856145!9001!-1

[83] Pearce has a brilliant critique of Brave New World in the light of modern pharmacology and lots of other great writings here at http://www.hedweb.com/confile.htm

[84] http://www.scottmccloud.com/store/books/uc.html

[85] Tufte, Edward 1990 Envisioning Information Graphics Press; see review in Technology and Society by Kirk McElhearn at http://www.techsoc.com/ei.htm

[86] (and here we must agree with Dr. Stephen Krashen of USC that comic books have had a disproportionate effect on education throughout the world - a truth we can witness not only in the robust Manga craze from Japan but the sheer number of adult comic book shops and conventions throughout Europe (predominately Belgium and France) as well as the U.S., and by the historical translations of these euphenic storylines into Arabic, Indonesian, Hindi and Chinese (Marvel superhero comics have been available in the Middle East since I was a child in the 1970s and in Indonesia in the 1980s, and these countries’ own regional imitations, with localized story lines, are now sold all over and distributed on Middle Eastern airlines).

[87] http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html#chronology

[88] Fairy Tales in the Age of Terror What Terry Gilliam helps to remind us about an ancient genre. By Maria Tatar Posted Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005, at 7:18 AM EThttp://www.slate.com/id/2126727/

[89] personal communication, UCLA Urban Planning January 11, 2006

[90] Takahashi, Lois and Daniere, Amrita G. (1999) "Environmental Behavior in Bangkok, Thailand: A Portrait of Attitudes, Values and Behavior" Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 47, No. 3 (April) 525-557

[91] "During the LIA, there was a high frequency of storms. As the cooler air began to move southward, the polar jet stream strengthened and followed, which directed a higher number of storms into the region. At least four sea floods of the Dutch and German coasts in the thirteenth century were reported to have caused the loss of around 100,000 lives. Sea level was likely increased by the long-term ice melt during the MWP which compounded the flooding. Storms that caused greater than 100,000 deaths were also reported in 1421, 1446, and 1570. Additionally, large hailstorms that wiped out farmland and killed great numbers of livestock occurred over much of Europe due to the very cold air aloft during the warmer months. Due to severe erosion of coastline and high winds, great sand storms developed which destroyed farmlands and reshaped coastal land regions" http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html; see also Lamb, H.H., 1966, The Changing Climate, Methuen, London.

[92] Von Braun, Werner (1964) The World in 1984 New Scientist series, Nigel Calder Ed. Penguin Books.London.

[93] Environmental Handbook, 1970 p. 197

[94]Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science (1882), sections 125 and 343; the german and english texts of the original can be found at http://atheism.about.com/library/weekly/aa042600c.htm


[95] Hornborg, Alf (1998) Ecological Embeddedness and Personhood: Have we always been capitalists? Anthropology Today, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Apr.) 3-5

[96] for critiques of Sen by Devreux and others in the context of his statement that "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy" see The New York Times, March 2, 2003 posted on http://www.wehaitians.com/does%20democracy%20avert%20famine.html

[97] "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self love.Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Book I, chap. 2. Donald E. Frey argues, however, "Of course, an earlier book of his had argued that humans respond to more humane "moral sentiments.''… Smith was asserting here, however, that, in an economic world defined by the division of labor, economic agents inevitably would become morally isolated from each other. The social interrelatedness necessary to develop these moral sentiments simply would be lacking. Thus, in economic society characterized by division of labor and the social distance that it creates, only the appeal to self-interest would be effective.Over the years an influential number of economists have minimized these nuances of Smith's thought and represented self-interest, almost pure and simple, as the key to human behavior. The axiom of self-interest is embodied in the neoclassical utility-maximization model that can be found as the core of virtually all microeconomics texts." The Good Samaritan as Bad Economist by Donald E. Frey http://www.crosscurrents.org/frey2.html#FOOTNOTE_2

[98]George J. Stigler, The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 35. quoted in Frey, Ibid.

[99] Sen, Amartya (1987) On Ethics and Economics (London: Basil Blackwell), 15--16.

[100] Nell Victor (2005) Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press) © Cambridge University Press 2005 http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Nell-06242003/Referees/Nell.html#_ednref2

[101] Solomon RL: The opponent-process theory of acquired motivation: The costs of pleasure and the benefits of pain. Am Psychol 35:691-712, 1980 quoted in Van der Kolk (1989) "The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism" Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Volume 12, Number 2, Pages 389-411,
June. http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/vanderkolk/

[102] McKenzie, Richard (1986) Economics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), 375. quoted by Frey http://www.crosscurrents.org/frey2.html#FOOTNOTE_8 " According to this argument, the outer act may look like self-denial, but the inner intent remains entirely the satisfaction of the self. One is serving others, not due to moral obligation, nor because someone else displaces self in one's own regard, but only because such activity happens to please oneself. Nor is even the outer act true self-denial. What one gives up for the sake of others is no different from the money one gives up to obtain the car one wants to own: in either case one is merely engaged in a transaction to obtain what one wants. Economics does not study the source of tastes or preferences --they are given. This means that one's taste for cars as opposed to one's taste for serving others is inexplicable, simply a datum. Since tastes are inexplicable they have no moral status; or, more accurately, all tastes have the same moral status. The intent to obtain a car is morally no better or worse than helping another human in need. Either way, one is simply satisfying the self, based on given tastes and preferences. A thorough moral relativism is implied. "

[103] Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I and II. — Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-16 and 17-52.

[104] Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press.

[105] Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 12.

[106] However," resumed Gideon Spilett, "you do not deny that some day the
coal will be entirely consumed?" "Oh! the veins of coal are still considerable, and the hundred thousand
miners who annually extract from them a hundred millions of hundredweights
have not nearly exhausted them."
"With the increasing consumption of coal," replied Gideon Spilett, "it
can be foreseen that the hundred thousand workmen will soon become two
hundred thousand, and that the rate of extraction will be doubled."
"Doubtless; but after the European mines, which will be soon worked more
thoroughly with new machines, the American and Australian mines will for a
long time yet provide for the consumption in trade."
"For how long a time?" asked the reporter.
"For at least two hundred and fifty or three hundred years."
"That is reassuring for us, but a bad look-out for our great-
grandchildren!" observed Pencroft.
"They will discover something else," said Herbert.
"It is to be hoped so," answered Spilett, "for without coal there would be
no machinery, and without machinery there would be no railways, no
steamers, no manufactories, nothing of that which is indispensable to
modern civilization!"
"But what will they find?" asked Pencroft. "Can you guess, captain?"
"Nearly, my friend."
"And what will they burn instead of coal?"
"Water," replied Harding.
"Water!" cried Pencroft, "water as fuel for steamers and engines! water
to heat water!"
"Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements," replied Cyrus
Harding, "and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have
become a powerful and manageable force, for all great discoveries, by some
inexplicable laws, appear to agree and become complete at the same time.
Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel,
that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will
furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which
coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of
locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed
gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There
is, therefore, nothing to fear. As long as the earth is inhabited it will
supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either
light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or
animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of
coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will
be the coal of the future."
"I should like to see that," observed the sailor.
"You were born too soon, Pencroft," returned Neb, who only took part in
the discussion by these words". http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/mysteriousisland/33?term=hydrogen

[107] "A Dispute Underscores the New Power of Gas" by Simon Romero, Business Day, The New York Times, Tuesday, January 3, 2006, C1 p. 13

[108] http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=3&catid=186

[109] Hannum, William H., Marsh, Gerald E and Stanford, George S. "Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste" Scientific American, December 2005, p. 84 To see the debate that the article caused go to http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2005/11/scientific-american-article-on-used.html

[110] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf98.htm

[111] Quote from interview in Discover Magazine, February 2006

[112] http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/cw/program.htm

[113]Special Report DDT, Fraud, and TragedyBy Gerald and Natalie Sirkin
Published 2/25/2005 12:08:42 AM http://www.americanprowler.com/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7812

[114] http://www.hydrogennow.org/Facts/Safety-1.htm

[115] Kimball, op. cit.

[116] Muravchik Joshua (2002) Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism,; Encounter Books, 400 pages,

[117]Drass K.A. and Kiser E. (1988) "Structural Roots of Visions of the Future: World System Crisis and Stability and the Production of Utopian Literature in the United States 1883-1975." Int. Stud. Q. 32: 421-438.

[118] Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,. 157 pp

[119] The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 8, April 2002 ©2002 The New Criterion http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/apr02/social.htm

[120] http://www.progressiveboink.com/archive/disneysequels.html

[121] Sargent, Lyman Tower (1982):Is There Only One Utopian Tradition, p. 685, , Journal of the History of Ideas.

[122] Kriss A. Drass and Edgar Kiser, “Structural Roots of Visions of the Future: World-System Crisis and Stability and the Production of Utopian Literature in the United States, 1883-1975. International Studies Quarterly (1988) 32, 421-438

[123] (Bideford: Green Books, 1990)

[124] (David Nash, review p. 805)

[125] , in Structural Roots of Visions of the Future: World-System Crisis and Stability and the Production of Utopian Literature in the United States, 1883-1975 (International Studies Quarterly (1988) 32, 421-438)

[126] Wuthnow, R. 1976 The Consciousness Reformation. Berkely: University of California Press, Brenner, R. (1985) Betting on Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and especially Bellah, R. (1975) The Broken Covenant

[127] (Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass., Belknapp Press, 1979, quoted in Lyman Tower Sargent, 1982, p. 686)

[128] RULE OF LAW, DEVELOPMENT AND HUMAN CAPABILITIES
Peter Boettke and J. Robert Subrick http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/working/WPE_02/02_19.pdf


[129] ' J. Philip Wogaman, Economics and Ethics: A Christian Inquiry (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 41. quoted in Frey, op cit.

[130] Kimball, op cit.

[131] http://www.kat.gr/kat/history/Mod/Leaders/Babeuf.htm

Environmentalism Present

T.H. Culhane
Field Paper Chapter II

Environmentalism Present: "The Price is Right"

In this chapter we explore current attempts to resolve the dilemma of finding a development path compatible with preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, maintenance of environmental services and enhancement of social welfare using emergent theories of what have been variously called “eco-economics” (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1991, Daly, 1999; O’Connor 2000) or “ecological economics” (Costanza and Daly, 1991), “bio-nomics” (Rothschild 1992), “full cost accounting” (Bebbington et.al. 2001), “true cost economics”[1] “environmental economics” (Sagoff, 1993, Turner, Pearce and Bateman 1993), Steady-State Economics (Daly, 1991); and “Green Economics” (Pearce, 1989, 1992), using concepts such as Uneconomic Growth (Daly, 1999) “Natural Capitalism” (Hawken et. al, 1999) “valuation of ecosystem services” (Costanza, 1997) “Sustainable Development” (WCED 1987, Lele, 1991, Munasinghe, 1993, Pearce and Atkins, 1998), “Green Development” (Adams, 1990) “Smart Growth” (APA 2002, Katz 2002, Downs 2004), and (as a backlash) "Wise Use" (proponents Gottlieb, 1989 and Arnold, 1995, critics Helvarg, 1994, , Brick 1995, Boston 1998 and Switzer 2001)[2]. It is argued that these and other linguistic attempts to bridge the gulf between traditional conceptions of ecological theory and triumphalist capitalist economic theory characterize “Environmentalism Present”, a movement distinct from the first wave of environmentalism that inspired the first Earth Day in 1970.

Where We Are (Introduction, pp. 2-12)

I. Ecology - Natural History (pp. 13 - 26)

Population
Ecological Footprint Analysis
Biodiversity Loss
Loss of Ecosystem Services
Human Immiseration
Weapons of Mass Destruction

II. Production – Technology and Its SocioEconomic Relations (pp. 26 -37)

IPAT revisited
Sustainable Development
Industrial Ecology
Clean Production

III. Cognition -- The Mental Realm of Ideas, Ethic, Myths and So On. (pp. 37 - 60)

Story Telling – Plurivocity vs. Grand Narratives
Capitalism: The Defining Myth of Our Age
Current Approaches
The Market Approach
Econometric Models Driving Policy
The Economic Exit Strategy
Ecosystem Services and Industrial Ecology: The Materials Balance Approach
Environmental Ethics and Environmental Justice
The Neopopulist Approach and Participation : Who will the players be?
Problems with participation
The Brownlash: Anti-Environmentalism

IV. Reproduction – the home, labour, culture (skills and norms), laws and policies (pp. 60 - 63)

Laws and Policies
Acts as agreements to spend public money and as ways of influencing private expenditures by the public

V. Conclusion (pp. 63 - 66)
The third wave of environmentalism
Is there a need for Environmental Economics?
Oh Brave New World: On to Environmentalism Future

Appendix:
Footnotes


Where We Are

Environmental and Ecological consciousness go Main Stream

We’ve started the 21st century with a radically transformed consciousness about our relationship to our environment. The transformative image of our fragile “spaceship earth” (Fuller, 1963, Boulding, 1965) as seen from the sterile landscape of the moon in 1969 is now a comfortable part of “mother culture consciousness”. (Cosgrove, 1994, Bryant, 1995, Bell, 2004[3]) Almost every book store carries and displays child-friendly enviro-education materials such as “50 Things you can do to Save the Earth”, and environmentalism has gone “mainstream” with Earth Day and Earth Week activities sponsored by major industries and utility companies.

Issues such as global warming are so well diffused that they even form part of the normal dialogue in teen slasher/horror movies such as “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.” The movie industry has made heroes and household names out of environmental justice crusaders like Erin Brokavich, while blockbuster adventure films like the Clive Cussler hit “Sahara” detail how the dark side of globalization has turned third world countries like Africa into the dumping ground for illegal toxic waste. U.S. President George Bush admits “The policy in the past used to be, let's just accept tyranny and for the sake of... you know, my cheap oil or whatever it may be, and just hope everything would be okay” – something "the right" has been denying for years -- but vows we've learned from 9/11 and won’t do it again[4]. School children in Egypt and Kuwait (even members of the Sabah oil family!) sing songs about the problems caused by oil and the possibilities of renewable energy systems[5]; Dyak tribesmen participate in International conferences about deforestation where they blame unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices used by the Indonesian government and foreign companies for the tremendous forest fires of the 1990s and accuse the media for scapegoating them with stories about their slash and burn systems of swidden agriculture getting out of control because of El Nino weather systems (Samsoedin, pers.com) Indigenous peoples form alliances with the Eco-village network and talk about a resurgence of nomadism and tribalism enhanced by 21st century modular portable subsistence technologies (Angaangaq a.ka. “Uncle” 2002a and pers. comm.); telecommunications and energy companies exploit this imagery in glossy magazines by advertising Bedouins with camel mounted solar panels and nomadic hunters with cell phones. Major agro-industrial corporations talk about the benefits of permaculture, General Electric advertises Green Energy and Clean Coal, and the major oil companies have changed their names, becoming “energy companies” with friendly sobriquets such as “BP – Beyond Petroleum” and “Shell Solar”. Coca Cola, a firm boasting that it operates in 200 countries (“more than the UN itself”!) is now working with NGO’s such as the World Wildlife Fund, CARE and agencies of the UN to clean up its tarnished image as a company that has been “aggravating the growing global problem of freshwater scarcity” and, in India at least, is even promising to “capture enough water via ‘rainwater harvesting’ to offset all of its water use by 2006.” (The Economist, October 8th-14th, 2005, p. 69) Major auto companies tout the coming fuel cell revolution, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inaugurates California's "Hydrogen Highway" and almost all big polluting firms now have advertising departments dedicated to bringing the elusive carrot of clean industry ever closer (some would say keeping it thus ever more tantalizingly just out of reach.) From a rhetorical perspective it would appear that environmentalism has won and all we have to do now is implement the great world saving ideas…

It is hard to know where, in this post-modern world of accelerated change and multi-cultural hybridity, “Environmentalism Past” ended and “Environmentalism Present” began, to say nothing of how to define the tidal wave of changes in environmental perception that is washing over us even as we speak. For organizational purposes, however, we define “Environmentalism Present” as the period beginning with what Kay Milton calls “The Second Wave” of modern environmentalism (Milton, 1995). This wave had its genesis in the late 1980s when a United Nations appointed World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland (WCED 1987) published a book called “Our Common Future” which summarized the “Brundtland report” for the public. The key concept of that report was its stress on the interdependence of “ecology” and “economy” and its notion that problems in both arenas needed to be (and possibly could be) solved together (Kaarhus 1996:65)

Our common future” ushered in a key conceptual term that has become the uneasy meeting ground for the traditional enemies of the first wave of environmentalism – “sustainable development”. Seen by some as one of the world’s most intractable oxymorons, “sustainable development” was defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (United Nations World Conference Environment and Development, 1987, p. 8). The needs of the present were generally broken down into economic, social and environmental needs (see Goodland, 1995, for a table comparing these three forms). The logic of a general sustainability in a contentious field of competing interests, each vying for their own individual sustainability, has made for rich debates as interested parties each try to push the long term viability of their own interests ahead of the others; as Eugene Guribye (2000) says “It has been a source of debate whether priority is given to the sustainability of the environment or the sustainability of the economic system which was part of the environmental problems in the first place”.

What characterizes Environmentalism Present?

What I feel distinguishes Environmentalism Present from Environmentalism Past is the complexity and interdependence of its arguments, occurring in a globalized, interconnected post-colonial, post-feminist, post-modern context. During the era of what I’ve described as Environmentalism Past the dominant notion of organizational change was linear, following a progressive “era-by-era paradigm displacement theory” (Drucker, 1957; Boje, 1995). The era-by-era theory would enable a paper like this to suggest a teleological story of humanity’s climb from ignorance to enlightenment with environmental degradation (the "price of progress") followed by environmental improvements occurring every generation alongside “take-offs to sustainable development” (Rostow, 1956, 1960) that themselves were occurring with the frequency of airliners leaving LAX. Development was supposed to be accompanied by an “environmental Kuznets curve” that almost guaranteed things would get better once everyone got richer through the adoption of a grow first clean up later environmental strategy (Andreoni, J. and Levinson A. 2001; Panayatou, 1993, Panayatou et. al. 2000) .

Instead, today we see a complexified world of human and non-human relations that conforms more to a theory of “hegemonic struggle among multiple discourses for dominance and survival”. According to this model of discursive analysis “the basic elements get shifted between foreground and background, without being vanquished” and contemporary organizations demonstrate "the active (spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving) and reactive (countervailing, taming, remedial) struggle of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern discourses” all the while attempting to “reorganize and re-territorialize their rivals in ways that reconstruct business as usual”. Each borrows words like diversity, voice and empowerment from rival discourses and redefines them “to fit the status quo.” (Boje, 1995, p.5). Nowhere does reality conform to any given "master narrative." As Curry (1999) points out,

The reason is that any perception, assertion, valuation and meaning of it is unavoidably only one among many others, none of which are self-evidently true, let alone their implications. And all of them are unavoidably contingent (partial, local, unstable) - which is not to say subjective - and competing in a complex economy of counter-claims, including counter-values, all with actual or potential winners and losers (relatively speaking, as always).

Environments of the 21st century as Anthropogenically Co-constructed Spaces

Nobody can deny the human impact on the earth (Thomas, 1956, Turner II, 1991, Meyer, 1996) – where once it was alleged with astonishment that only the great wall of China could be seen from outer space (it couldn’t – at least not by the naked eye; see Arnold, 1989) we now have satellite images detailing our anthropogenic modifications of the entire planet (El-Baz, 1997). Any schoolchild can log into Google Earth and look at updated hi-resolution satellite images of their own back yard – a NIMBY informational triumph if ever there was one (with enticing populist possibilities for the NIABY movement! See Ford, 2003)[6]. We can see deforestation and siltation and urban sprawl. But there is still vast disagreement as to whether that impact has an overall positive or negative value on aggregate human welfare (Chen and Ravallion, 2004); as Meyer points out "change is not a synonym for damage" (Meyer, Ibid., p.3) -- habitat and non-human species loss would seem uncontestable (but see Leach and Mearns 1996); despite the 1992 "Scientist's Warning to Humanity" there is still uncertainty in the business community whether or not we should “stay the course” (as Bush Sr. was fond of advising) or change the status quo.

The question in Environmental Present, however, is no longer whether we should clean our environment and preserve our wildlife – these are the friendly green givens since Rio – but rather a question of hard nosed choices: which policy tools should we use, how much should we rely on regulations and how much on free market clearance, how much will it cost, who will pay, what are our priorities and what are we willing to sacrifice? Environmental Present is overwhelmingly governed by cost/benefit analyses, and different parties see different costs and different benefits all relative to their current position so the balance sheet is never clear. In a seminar at the UCLA School of Public Policy on January 9, 2001 moderated by former Governer Michael Dukakis, former Republican Senator Larry Pressler (South Dakota) and former Democratic Congressman Bob Carr (Michigan) both agreed that “everyone wants a clean and healthy environment” but they disagreed radically on how to achieve this. They couldn't even agree that there was an optimal mix of policy tools that would provide Jeremy Bentham's "greatest good for the greatest number". With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a counterweight, the illusion of a United States, a European Union and even a United Nations has been shattered into a plurality of views that describe a planet filled with loosely federated group of special interests that transcend regional, state or national boundaries. As Economist Herman Daly (1999) told his audience at Trinity College in Dublin in a speech on "Uneconomic Growth", globalization is much different than internationalization; it erases such qualities as comparative advantage and regional self interest that would allow for good governance. What are left are competing transnational companies that many see running in a race to the bottom, or "low world average," for ever higher profits. Daly said,

"By globalizing, we take away from nation states their ability to enforce and to enact the policies necessary to internalize external costs, to control population, to do the things that are necessary. We enter into a regime of standards-lowering competition in which trans-national corporations are able to play off one government against another in an attempt to get the lowest possible social and environmental costs internalized into their product and production." (p. 14)

It is as though, in the drive to privatize the commons, we have lost our sense of the common interest.

On the bright side, we don't all live in a black and white world. We don't live in the either/or world of the "modern era" but are beginning to embrace the postmodernist's liberating "both-and-also" through what UCLA's Ed Soja calls "trialectics", a spatialized form of dialectics that deprivileges the temporal and the notion of a master text (Soja, 1996). For example, in the fantasy of certain free market economists "command and control" was supposedly doomed eventually to give way to "free market" strategies, just as in the Marxist fantasy capitalism was doomed to give way to socialism. We now see that these are no irreconcilably polar opposites, and we are now nuanced enough to know, for example, that the WTO is happy to use command and control policies (coercion) to open up a free market for G8 countries, we can have free market policies in communist China, and that we can openly use the visible hand of public funds to subsidize the fossil fuel and nuclear and automobile industries to keep them competitive so the "invisible hand" that emerges from "unfettered" competition can do its magic. Environmentalism Present adds "stimulating confusion" (Ibid) to past assumptions, and seems to be a free-for-all where power holders and resistors can use any argument or epistemology that suits them (see Biodiversity section) . Meanwhile, for those who ignore the insights of De Certeau (1984)[7] and who do cling to "the myth of the monumental" the military logic of triage and sacrifice zones has permeated environmental policy as the “realists” or “progressives” determine that it will be “impossible” to save all endangered life forms and habitats and maintain economic growth, even though, as Clinton told us in his last State of the Union address, we can have both. Optimism on the biodiversity front is considered hopelessly unrealistic. Bush's appointee entrusted with the Endangered Species act has publicly stated that hundreds of species will go extinct. Even Greenpeace is making corporate alliances to “sauve qui peut” (see Beder, 1999 “From Green Warriors to GreenWashers).

Among the profit sharers the old notion that "whatever the costs to biodiversity, habitat and healthy surroundings 'this is the price of progress'" is still alive and well, only this time the price is being paid in somebody else’s backyard, out of sight and out of mind; for some, like Larry Summers of the World Bank, this is rational and is the way things ought to be. To calm today's losers, the promise of a future if forestalled share in the global pie is sweetened by a neoliberal economics utopianism that all prices are dropping – just be patient (for this see Julian Simon, 1981). More pessimistic apologists for the losses in social and environmental welfare due to past structural adjustments – even those who predict austere times ahead -- still argue that though the big flood is coming, the rising tide will continue to lift all boats, even the makeshift and leaky Arks of our dwindling wildlife refuges and marginalized human settlements. This is of course, “provided that increasing technological progress compensates for declining natural resource stocks”… (Stiglitz, 1974)

The point of Environmental Present is that there is no single ruling paradigm, and all voices are welcome to express their opinions, from rain forest villagers and Eskimo elders to NGO spokeswomen, government ministers and industry leaders and even the man on the street. But, of course the hegemonic discourse of "the bottom line" will prevail, as it alwayshas. Your job as a gladiatorial participatory stakeholder is simply to try to make your argument stronger than the next fellow's and join the good fight.

And still, the empire is preparing to strike back.

As ecological consciousness has spread, there has been what critics call a “brownlash” – (Beder 1998; Ehrlich 2002; Stauber and Rampton, 1995) or “green backlash” (Rowell, 1996), or even a "war against the greens" (Helvarg,1994). This is an industry and political backlash against “green” activism. Far more dangerous than a battle of words and ideas, the brownlash includes a casting of any meaningful ecological activism as a species of terrorism, and in the “war on terror” eco-saboteurs are considered by an FBI report to be little different from Al-Qaeda (Jarboe, 2002), (though even the most radical have never taken any lives, restricting themselves to property damage - usually in defense of a legally protected area or endangered species. See Vanderheiden, 2005). But this is because true exposure of the Costs of Environmental Degradation and a real purposeful attempt to enforce their internalization would deliver "the coup de grace" to Capital that would allegedly end profits as we've come to know them (Wallerstein, 1997). So industry has to fight, and fight hard. But some new cleaner industries are gaining competitive advantage by complying with environmental standards, particularly those in the European Union and Japan, so it is unclear that every industry will fight environmental compliance. However, new clean industries are threatening dinosaur industries with vested interests in older technology so the fight is going on on many fronts during this time of "Power shift". (Toffler, 1970, 1981, 1990) For example, at a time when at least one highly industrialized first world nation (Germany) has mainstreamed and mobilized its effective “green party” and is pushing environmentalism into the European Union agenda and, through technical extension, into third world countries, American historians are busy unearthing radical green elements in previous unpopular ideological struggles (communism, fascism). They are misquoting founding Green Party member and ecologist Herbert Gruhl, (author of “Ein Planet wird geplündert” (A Planet is being plundered): The Balance of Terror of Our Politics” 1975[8], called by some "The German Edward Goldsmith"[9]) and Rudolph Bahro so as to vilify them as fascists, (even calling the latter “the green Adolph”! – see Orton, 2005), they are making a big deal out of the so-called "green wing" of past German National Socialism and the “immanent” nature philosophy of a Heidegger “now revealed to be a Nazi”, and they are then producing cautionary tales about the dangers of environmentalism as contemporary “ecofascism” (Bookchin, 1987, Biehl and Staudenmaier, 1995, Zimmerman, 1996).

Biehl argues,

“During the Third Reich… Nazi "ecologists" even made organic farming, vegetarianism, nature worship, and related themes into key elements not only in their ideology but in their governmental policies. Moreover, Nazi "ecological" ideology was used to justify the destruction of European Jewry. Yet some of the themes that Nazi ideologists articulated bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to themes familiar to ecologically concerned people today.” (Biehl, 1995)

Smear campaigns like these undermine confidence in nations or mainstream movements that adopt a strong green ethic and create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty about who to follow when seeking political solutions to eco-catastrophes. In fact, Orton, (2000) has stated that the legitimate use of the term "eco-fascism" applies to Arnold and Gottlieb and their "Wise Use Movement" followers who target environmentalists with "vigilante-style tactics ranging from telephone death-threats to arson and shootings.[10]" "Wise Use" ideas are now mainstream in the Bush Administration[11].

Popular writers and film-makers from Michael Crichton (State of Fear) to Robert Ludlum (The Lazarus Vendetta) now cast environmental groups as “eco-villains”. In both books enviro-terrorists hijack dangerous technology (such as the military’s HARP system in Crichton’s thriller and nanophage biotechnology in Ludlum’s) to cause ersatz natural disasters that can be blamed on human activity so they can either prove the point that natural disasters are no longer natural or to create “a vastly depopulated world that [the eco-terrorists] can redesign into an environmental paradise…” In these fictions, replete with lengthy appendices of citations from scientific journals helping to blur fact and fantasy, it is the environmentalist wackos who are now taking lives to protect the greater good. It makes the head spin just to think about it.

But spin is what Environmentalism Present is all about (Beder, 1997). The gains of the first wave of environmentalism created awareness and spawned regulations that have constrained the free-wheeling activities of many businesses. There have been some closures of factories, some businesses have had to relocate and many have complained their profits are threatened by a “polluter pays” attitude that is gaining ground. Some land has been “protected” from exploitation and somechemicals and practices have been banned. For those whose profits are made by externalizing negative residuals or receiving free subsidies from Nature, this has had an impact. But Capital has an AIDS-like ability to change its coat, re-invent itself and mutate to adapt to any threat; many economists (Jafee, 1995) are now saying that environmental regulations and policies as often increase profits as diminish them[12]. In Environmental Present there doesn't seem to be any consistent storyline at all.


Boje (op.cit: 6) reminds us that Lyotard (1984) helped us to see each individual as being located in the center of a multiplicity of communication circuits and language games, while Jameson (1983) and Clegg (1989) focused on the interrelationship, interpenetration and interplay of multidiscursive struggles and “circuits of power” that simultaneously co-opted and appropriated one another. Jameson said,

“Radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content, but rather the restructuration of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary” (Jameson, 1983: 123)

In environmentalism present this is certainly the case. New spins on ecologic and economic ideas are crossing the ranks from camp to camp. Even as a new breed of environmental economists emerges armed with the instruments of the “dismal science” (the derogatory name Thomas Carlyle (1849) gave to economics allegedly after reading Malthus – actually it was the field’s emancipatory tendency to treat all beings as equal that he found dismal! See Levy and Peart, 2001) to green the economy (Sarraf and Larsen, 2002, 2004a) , a new breed of “skeptical environmentalists” is also emerging, using the rhetoric of ecological science to insist that “there is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark” so to speak, and that we now have authority from natural science to keep on doing business as usual (see Lomborg, 2001) Postmodern deconstructionist critiques of the epistemologies underlying modernist assumptions strike at the heart of progressives and recidivists alike, twisting and enfolding narratives into such a jumble that it is hard to know who stands for what (Zimmerman, 2003, Kassiola, 2003).

Today’s environmentalists and market liberals alike twist and turn the logic from Natural Science to their own ends, “Necker-cubing” (Dawkins, 1976) from short term to long term effects. And still the power holders prevail. When defending a given subsidy to a dirty dinosaur industry (coal, for example) where there are entrenched vested interests, we are morally persuaded that we should not impose hardship on coal miners or coal mine owners (the old 'jobs vs. the environment' dualism), but at the same time we are told that in the name of market efficiency it is perfectly alright to cut subsidies to wind energy farms (to hell with the wind farmers) because over the long run the market alone should determine the competitiveness of energy options. And yes, we all agree that subsidies are a bad thing, so just give us time to "phase out" the old ones; no sense in complicating things and distorting the market by introducing new ones! Justice is meted out with preference to the powerful.

In the debate over biodiversity loss the logic is even more insidious. The Bush administration's top two appointees in charge of the Endangered Species Act, Secretary of Interior Gale Norton, and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks Craig Manson told the L.A. Times (November 14, 2003) that "the interests of developers should often prevail over endangered species" and "the Bush administration… does not believe all species should be saved from extinction and…it does not believe there is an extinction crisis."[13]

Manson was quoted as telling the Times,

"If we are saying that the loss of species in and of itself is inherently bad – I don't think we know enough about how the world works to say that…"

In a follow up interview with Grist Magazine (April 15, 2005) Manson, the man responsible for species protection in the U.S., elaborated on this uncertainty, ironically accusing environmentalists (elsewhere represented as unorthodox radicals) of being too conservative and unwilling to "question the orthodoxy of anything":

"…the orthodoxy is that every species has a place in the ecosystem and therefore the loss of any species diminishes us in some negative way. That's the orthodoxy. Now that certainly has validity with respect to most things, maybe almost everything. But it is a presumptuous thing to suggest that we know for sure that that is a fact. And it sort of flies in the face of Darwinian science…"[14]

In Manson's slippery defense of the concept of "survival of the fittest" he went on to say that if the environment changes and an organism can't keep up then we can't say if its loss was good or bad. This, we must remember, is coming from an administration that claims Darwin's theory is false to begin with, and supports teaching Creationism (now called "Intelligent Design') in the schools. Yet they don't mind using a Spencerian view of Darwinian logic to defend policies resulting in "more species loss in the last several decades than have been lost cumulatively in the last several millennia" (Grist, p. 2). The scientists tell us "everything goes extinct naturally anyway" and the pro-business Bush administration uses this "truth" as a justification for species loss. Somehow that same rule doesn't permit us to tolerate the loss of uncompetitive, unsustainable businesses…

The administration of the world's most powerful and influential nation, masters of Orwellian Newspeak, are quite willing, when it suits them, to use the very science whose validity the administration disputes; they are also clever enough to leap into a form of cautious deconstructivist logic when the actual scientific evidence threatens business as usual. In this post-Kuhnian world, where everything is suspect, Manson's response to the fact that "studies show that the rate of extinction directly correlates to the rate of industrial development and population growth" is as insidious as his post-modern attempt to demolish "orthodoxy", but is cleverly disguised to suggest that his actually appears the more "orthodox" or "responsible" scientific attitude. He said,

"The most that one could say on that evidence is that there may be some connection. And it is a logical fallacy to suggest that because two things happen concurrently that they are necessarily related, without further evidence."

This is the same stall tactic the Bush camp uses to avoid compliance with the Kyoto protocol. In his Alice and Wonderland way, Manson is talking about the difference between a correlation and a statistically significant regression, of course. But he conveniently leaves out the fact that in these studies the statistics have been done, and the correlation was found highly significant, and that is why so many of the world's leading scientists issued their "Warning to Humanity" in 1992…

Ecology in the service of Industry?

One of the great ecological insights of the latter half of the twentieth century has been that the environment itself is constantly changing, that the natural world is a dynamic, not a static place, a landscape of short term and long term evolutionary changes where the story of life is being incessantly rewritten. This information, while useful for ecologists to understand the processes of change, is being abused by industry and governments to permit a reprieve for the “laissez faire” or “anything goes” policy.

Gone are the days when rain forests and coral reefs and other so-called “pristine environments” can be talked about by serious scholars as primeval untrammeled wildernesses that provide a window into “the way the world looked before human beings messed everything up” (see Gomez Pompa and Kaus. 1998: “Taming the Wilderness Myth”). It is now recognized, at least in scientific circles, that “nature” is a world in flux and that “change is the only constant”. This does not mean that there are not ecosystems with extremely long cycles of nutrient turnover or that there aren’t organisms and symbiotic associations that haven’t endured in form and function for eons (Callicott, 1998; Waller, 1998). “Climax ecosystems” do exist as semi-stable assemblages of species that function well until the next disturbance takes place. But the notion of nature as a static backdrop against which human rates of change stand out as an “un-natural” anathema has been replaced by the concept of a “restless earth” on which a dynamic drama of co-evolution is played out every day (Calder, 1972). In fact, says Wallerstein (1997) :

“The entire process of the universe is of course one of unceasing change, so the mere fact that things are not what they were previously is so banal that it merits no notice whatsoever” (p. 1)

But this is not to say that we shouldn’t resist changes that are antithetical to our moral and existential health cautions Wallerstein -- as long as we can resist the essentialist and dualist tendencies to play the dangerous game of “jobs vs. romanticism”, “humans versus nature” or “the virtues of nature versus the evils of science”. Environmental Present “presumes that there is never any system that can realize fully all these sets of values simultaneously” (Ibid, p.6) but argues that we can adopt a “Third Space” perspective on things (Soja, 1996) that resists such easy dichotomies and still be “substantively rational” so as to make wise choices.

Post-modern writers on environmental thought (Ignatow, 2005) have abandoned the idea that “man” stands apart from the rest of nature, and universities now offer courses on “industrial ecology” and “urban ecosystems” in which the human built environment is considered to be little different from the termite mound or beaver dam and all ecological considerations revolve around the “assimilative and regenerative capacities” of the cyborg biological-mechanical hybrid systems humans and their symbionts have created (for discussion of this hybrid cyborg reality, see Donna Haraway, 1991).

Current environmental thought embraces the view of a non-essentialist socially constructed nature (Berger and Luckmann, 1966, Proctor, 1966, Worster, 1977, Cronon, 1996, Escobar, 1999) and it is this perspective that has inserted itself into the debate on sustainable development, mixed-use conservation policies, biosphere reserves and buffer zones, protected area management, political ecology, poverty alleviation strategies, resource management and the like. But it is not without its dangers. Wapner (2002) raises the concern that “Recent postmodern international relations (IR) scholarship threatens to undermine global environmental protection efforts” and asks,

How can societies protect the nonhuman world if the very identity of that enterprise is cast into doubt? How can states cooperate to protect nature if the meaning of the term is socially and historically contingent?

While Environmentalism Past decried the alienation of man and nature as antecedent to the causes of environmental destruction (White Jr., 1967) Environmental Present is a challenge precisely because it has re-inserted human agency into nature and defined it as “natural” (therefore desirable? Benign?) without clear models of how human industry fits into ecology.

Just another animal with especially destructive predispositions?

In the last chapter I described a dichotomous debate about the trends we see in nature and how it led to a species of environmentalism that was essentialist and thus easily marginalized. The dominant figures in the debate – Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin, Donella Meadows and the Club of Rome, E.O. Wilson, Norman Myers, Sandra Postel et. al. were caricatured as peddlers of “doom and gloom” because they argued that “natural systems” were in collapse due to human activity and that “natural resources” were diminishing. This “pessimistic” view suggested to some that nature could only abide in “set asides”; its proponents tended to regard areas of human encroachment as worlds without nature. The Cartesian dichotomy of Environmentalism Past was “nature good/humans bad”. Another, more “optimistic” view – following Rene Dubos, Buckminster Fuller and other technological utopianists -- argued that we are a part of nature, and that nature and human development suffer no essential estrangement. This view suggested that if we could just model our industrial and urban systems after ecosystems we could continue to derive use values from nature without dire consequences. In a strange way, by erasing the dualism that Lynn White Jr. called one of “the Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” this optimistic view attempted to resolve the tensions in the orthodox Judeo-Christian view that nature exists to be utilized for human advancement. The first view had argued that we weren’t placed here by God to dominate Nature, but acted as though there will still an Eden to spoil and that we were responsible for the spoiling. The second view agreed that we weren’t placed here by God to subdue Nature but felt we could still use our special intelligence to exploit Nature without getting thrown out of The Garden. It is the former view whose obituary has been written in the now famous tome “The Death of Nature” (McKibben, 1989)

For the purpose of this paper I consider the main discourse in “environmentalism present” to be about the triumph of the latter view, confirmed by a recent internal document called “The Death of Environmentalism” (Shellenberger and Nordhaus, 2004) that has been ruffling feathers since it was released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grant-Makers Association. The ethos of Environmentalism Present mirrors the triumphalism of capitalist thinkers who have likewise declared Communism and Socialism dead since the fall of the Berlin Wall (they aren’t!). Of course these are all simplifications – actually gross distortions – all the previous forms of resistance to one hegemonic world view are alive and well. In fact today’s master narrative is all the more powerful for its seeming willingness to include marginalized voices! Says Thachankary (1992:231) “The notion of plurivocity, that there are multiple meanings in the story, is very empowering, because it gives organizational participants considerable flexibility to create their own interpretation of what is going on.” The problem is that it is chiefly empowering to the power holders, who can claim there is no repression, no conspiracy, because, hey, we even have a staff environmentalist…

Truth still speaks to power (Foucault, 1979, Lasswell, 1971; Forester, 1989, Hoppe, 1999, Funtowicz, 2004), and definitions are used for political purposes -- assimilation, exclusion, and ultimately control. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union Capitalism has not only assumed larger proportions, but redefined itself yet again to embrace or spin those ecological insights that can be used to prop itself up.

Environmentalism Present exists in a climate where “free-market” environmentalism has “become part of the mainstream” (Anderson and Leal 2001; Shaw and Anderson 2005; Stroup, 2005) and defenders of “untrammeled wilderness” and “gentle ways of living in harmony with nature” are left clutching at what they are told are socially constructed straws. It is a time when “emissions trading”—paying others not to pollute so you can continue to do so – even if they weren’t polluting in the first place -- is seen as a viable way to privatize the commons and thus end its “tragedy” (Hardin1968; Gardiner, 2001) The major institutions of the Capitalist Economy – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, blamed for so many disastrous environmental policies and for the deleterious effects of structural adjustment during the first wave of environmentalism, are now putting on a big show of rushing to correct the errors of their past, using funding incentives to push a new sustainability agenda that uses more sophisticated modeling methodologies to ascertain the “costs of environmental degradation” and the “costs of inaction” (Arif, 2003). The Economist runs cover stories with titles such as “Environmental Economics: Rescuing Environmentalism”, lauding this “new green revolution”, a species of environmentalism that, we are told, finally makes sense (The Economist, Apr 21st 2005) . The editors applaud what they want us to believe is the final and correct form of the movement with its attempt to capture in dollar figures everything from direct use values of Nature and indirect use values of Nature (ecosystem services and subsidies from nature) to “Existence Values”. The spin doctors seeking to write a new hegemonic master narrative want to construct the illusion of an economy in which humans can continue to pursue their self-interest, but this time be guided by an invisible hand wearing “a transparent glove” of appropriate (read “profit permissive”) rules, norms, and institutions that ensure full disclosure and encourage stakeholder participation in all environmental policies (Florini,1999). In this way it is thought that human activities can at last work in harmony with nature.

All this may also turn out to be completely untrue. If the Ecosystem Model that subtends our attempt to fit into Nature’s Economy is itself valid, and we are “merely” a part of the Natural Cycles of Evolution and not the descendants of special creation, guided by intelligent design, we may very well simply drive ourselves to extinction in a very short period of time, following the vast majority of other mere life forms on this restless, directionless planet. In this case the entire debate, to paraphrase Shakespeare, will have been "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."


I. Ecology - Natural History

State of the World 2005 –

“…ask yourself, are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” Ronald Reagan, debate with Jimmy Carter, 1980.[15]

Population

“The largest generation of young people in human history – 1.7 billion people aged 10-24, projected to approach 1.8 billion by 2015 – is now reaching reproductive age. The number of women already aged 15-49 is at an all time high at 1.55 billion and could increase to 1.82 billion by 2015…” (Engeleman et. al., 2002, p. 139)

Let’s forget for a moment where we’ve been. Let’s forget about where we might be going. Let’s simply imagine we woke up in the world as it is today, like a modern day Rip Van Winkle, or like the botanist and the narrator in H.G.Wells A Modern Utopia, or indeed like any of the storytellers of 500 years worth of utopian plots who suddenly appear in a given society alien to them and which they must interpret for outsiders. Objectively then, what is the State of the World? Is it “just fine” as Bjorn Lomborg contends in “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, is it a eutopia, or is it a dystopian nightmare, as many doom and gloomers contend?

Given our initial premise of following David John Frank’s Ecosystem Model of the Universe (see Chapter I), we see that for some organisms Earth is truly an eutopia –if only for the present: for the people of earth in high income brackets, for dogs and cats, pigeons, sparrows, members of the Poaceae (grasses, including grain crops like wheat, rice, corn and oats) for many dipteran and hymenopteran insects, many bacteria and viruses and protozoans, most r-selected fast reproducing opportunistic species, for the handful of plants in the global commodity chain and in common landscape and ornamental use (Pollan, 1992, 2001), and, arguing from population size and reproduction alone, from the perspective of cows and chickens and other domestic livestock and pet animals (for this argument read Budiansky, 1992 Why Animals Chose Domestication) these are the best of times. Furthermore, if you are a predator or parasite on any of these organisms, life is a gravy train. Engelman et. al. (2002) argue, for example

“Epidemiologists increasingly see hints of the overarching impact of population growth on the spread of infectious disease, as greater density boosts exposures, and shortens transmission distance, making life easier for the organisms that spread infections.” (p. 135).

Yes, life is indeed easier for certain populations of humans and non-humans.

For other organisms – the poor of Homo sapiens, the disenfranchised and psychologically stressed and alienated, for most large mammals and other slow reproducing K-selected species of animal, and for the prey and hosts of certain predators and parasites, this is a terrible planet to be on right now. So it really depends on what niche you occupy in the complex geography of the world.

Now the issue for the losers is, “how do I get the world to be the way I need it to be to be happy” while for the winners it is “how do I keep the world the way I want it to be to keep my satisfaction.” (For notions of how to evaluate non-human needs and goods and contemporary debates about 'speciesism', 'human chauvinism', 'human racism', and 'anthropocentrism' see Eckersley, 1998, Fjellstrom, 2002; for discussions of extensions of Kantian deontological ethics (categorical imperatives and practical imperatives) to non-humans see Regan, 1988 [1984]; for applications of Bentham and Mill's consequentialist (teleological) or utilitarian ethics to non-humans see Singer, 1990 [1975] )

As for what may happen tomorrow, given that the present is but a fleeting moment that recedes instantly into the past, we are always in a war with complex forces of competition and cooperation swirling around one another. There is great uncertainty about how to act whether one wants to maintain the status quo or to change things. Some people want to “save the earth” by keeping it the way it IS. Some people want to “save the earth” by changing it. In fact everybody wants to save the earth that benefits them. But nobody really knows how…

What is sure, and should stand foremost in any consideration of the state of the world in 2005 is that the population of Homo sapiens is exponentially increasing and this unprecedented population explosion of a single species is having the greatest impact on the life support capabilities of the planet earth that it has undergone in 3.5 billion years. (See Chapter I: Extinctions )

“Environmentalism present” is a wave riding on a sea change in population -- 6,446,131,400 as of July 2005, double the number in 1965. (The World Factbook, also provides populations for each country.[16] “World population increased from about 3.85 billion people in 1972 to 6.1 billion in mid-2000 (see figure right), and is currently growing by 77 million people a year (UNFPA 2001)[17]

The geometric growth curve is familiar -- it took a looong time to get to our first billion Homo sapiens:

3,000,000 yrs – 10,000 BC

10,000,000 (10 million)

1400 BC

100,000,000 (100 million)

0

200,000,000

1200

400,000,000

1700

800,000,000

1800

1,000,000,000 (1 billion)

We hit the 1 billion mark somewhere between 1800 and 1804; when John Muir wrote in 1880 it was around 1.46 billion, and our second billion came little more than a century after the first, in 1927 or 1928. After that the pace started to quicken dramatically: our third billion came a mere generation later, around 1962, the year I was born.

When the first wave of environmentalism peaked through the first Earth Day in 1970 it broke over a planet that had roughly 3.85 billion people, and we hit our fourth billion somewhere between 1974 and America’s bicentennial year of 1976, less than half a generation later. The fifth billion was added between 1987 and 1989, and the sixth just before the year 2000 (Estimates are unsure because demography and census taking are woefully inexact sciences – some believe these are actually gross underestimates! Nordhaus, 1973, is the classic paper, but is now grossly out of date, however, see O'Neill et. al., 2001). Though it is claimed that the population increase is slowing, we are still adding close to a billion people every decade. Furthermore, though economists talk hopefully about an income-inspired "demographic transition" (Galor and Weil, 2000), saying that the rate of increase is slowing is not saying that population growth is stopping. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation in the literature about the demographic transition and what a slowing growth rate means for humanity.

An example of the worst of this is Betsy McCaughey’s article in Investor’s Business Daily, “As Population Goes Bust, World Economy Faces Grim Future” (now quoted around the world on alarmist sites such as “The Free Market Foundation” and the “National Center for Policy Analysis”.) In her article she gives us a statistic that she claims has “many demographers and world leaders concerned.” The report:

“Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute finds that the global annual population growth rate – which was 2 percent in the 1960’s and is now down to 1.3 percent – will drop to 0.8 percent by 2025.”

The fear: not only will there be a lack of young people to support pensioners but “too few workers to support economic growth.” Using this logic, the National Center for Policy Analysis concludes “At any event, the prospect undercuts the arguments of those who seek zero population growth.” (NCPA 2001)[18]

Far from being undercut, ZPG advocates find this ludicrous. A global 0.8 % growth rate is quite quite far from zero population growth and even farther from a population decline. For proof of this, one merely has to go to Palomar University’s WaynesWord population website[19] and do the math. There, a nice Java applet lets one enter the initial population and the growth rate and the number of years to yield a classic compound interest rate result. Putting 6.5 billion in with a 1.3 % growth rate for the next 20 years yields a population of 8.4 billion, and a 0.8 % growth rate for the twenty years after that would yield a population in 2045 of almost 9.9 billion people. Even if the growth rate were down to 0.8% today there would still be 7.6 billion people by 2025. Another calculator on the site shows that if you enter a growth rate of 0.8 you double the population in a mere 86 years.

McCaughey, like many others, is clearly confusing growth rate with TFR (Total Fertility Rate). A TFR of 2.1 is considered replacement -- greater than 2.0 to allow for childhood mortality. A TFR of 2 suggests that each couple produces two children. The 1960’s growth rate of 2% that McCaughey and others lament declining is something quite different, but it is often confused (deliberately?) with the magic fertility number of 2. It is only when we reach zero population growth itself that we will be at a TFR of 2.1! At that point the population will NOT decrease, it will simply stay wherever it happens to be – some say at a level that is already far beyond carrying capacity (Hardin, 1986, Brown, 1995).

Even the pro ZPG website http://www.overpopulation.net/ uses confused rhetoric. It states in an article whose headline pronounces “Zero Population Growth Will Occur Somewhere Between 2020 To 2029” that

“The exponential growth of human population peaked in 1987. That year 87.01 million more people were added to the Earth. Since 1987, the population has declined on average by 2.1 million less people added per year…The decline of human population has been even more dramatic over the last 6 years. In 1994 we added 78.5 million more people, this year we will add 60.1 million.”

But this is fallacious reasoning as well as bad writing. In fact the population isn’t declining at all, it is still growing. Only the rate of increase is slowing down. The impact of such confusions on policy is concerning indeed.

Besides the sheer magnitude of the number of humans on earth, which is projected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050 (“The population of industrialized regions, currently 1.2 billion, is expected to change little in the next 50 years while that of the developing regions is projected to increase from 4.9 billion in 2000 to 8.1 billion by 2050 says the United Nations Population Division 2001[20]), there has been an unprecedented increase in the “Ecological Footprint” of each individual human being.

Ecological Footprint Analysis

In Environmentalism Present it is considered bad form to uncritically accept Neomalthusian pessimism about population growth. That was the doom and gloom rhetoric of Environmentalism Past, when the Limits to Growth scared everybody into thinking there would be mass starvation in the 1980s. Since the nightmares failed to materialize, particularly for Americans and Europeans, it is now considered passé. Despite the 40 million who starved to death during China's "Great Leap Forward" (1959-1961) and the 2 million who starved in the Ukraine during Stalin's Collectivization, the Maoist notion that "every new mouth creates a new pair of hands to feed it" and optimistic paraphrases of his famous slogan 'with more people, things more easily get done' (Li, 2000) are pervasive in the 21st century, particularly in the Capitalist West where they blend nicely with Adam Smith’s statement during the year of American Independence (1776) “The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase in the number of its inhabitants” (quoted in Galor and Weil, 2000, p. 806) and input subsidized “miracles” of the “green revolution” (Perkins, 1993; Conway, 1999; Osmani, 2001, but see critiques of the Green Revolution by Shiva, 1991 Chrispeels, 2000, Duda and El-Ashry, 2000). The idea that "the problem is distribution, not scarcity" (Lappe and Collins, 1978, Sen 1981, Lappe,1991) combines with optimistic Star Wars inspired imagery of planets covered with people living in ant-hill like cities to create hopes in the minds of voters and consumers that we could actually accommodate many multiples of the current world population. It is unclear, however, even if distribution issues could be solved, how long population growth at any modern consumption level can last given the energetics and material flows of the situation. (Giampietro et. al., 1992) For example it has been estimated that "the food system consumes ten times more energy than it provides to society in food energy"[21] (Giampietro and Pimentel , 1994) and, because the land gets poisoned with salts, "irrigation of farmland, as it has been practiced throughout history and up to the present time, cannot be sustained." (Abernethy, 1993, p.136; for critiques of the thermodynamics of these ideas also see Ehrlich and Holdren, 1971). To gain insight into what population actually does to the ecosystem services that subtend all life, new analytical tools are needed.

Ecological Footprint Analysis is an attempt to capture the impact that human individuals and aggregations (households, communities, cities, regions, nations) have on the global resource base. It uses estimates of net productivity and consumption of natural and cultivated resources and assumptions of how much area (terrestrial and aquatic) is necessary to support consumption and models the “true size” of our footprint if we were to metaphorically step on all the resources we actually exploit. Wackernagel and Reese (1996) explicated the idea in their book Our ecological footprint: reducing the human impact on the Earth and websites are now available where users can input .general data about their lifestyle and the computer model calculates the footprint. The “Redefining Progess”[22] site has general footprint analysis for nations, regions and cities. A user input calculator for individuals in multiple languages for multiple nations found at http://www.myfootprint.org/. Other websites are offering similar calculators, some simplistic, some fairly detailed, such as the one the Portugese have put together for their Almada region[23].

Some ask for specific information, and some prompt the user with generalities. For example, on http://www.bestfootforward.com/footprintlife.htm the default condition, set to parameters for the “average American” yields the result: “Your ecological footprint is estimated to be 12.3 hectares (30.4 acres). If everyone in the World lived like you we would need 6.6 Planets to support global consumption”. The same parameters with the subject living in Europe yields 6.3 hectares (15.6 acres), "3.4 Planets needed to support global consumption if everyone lived the same way." And Australia yields, “8.5 hectares (21 acres); need 4.5 Planets.” You can play with the parameters to more closely approximate your lifestyle reality. The disclaimer states: “Warning: This simple calculator is based on average National data. It cannot accurately reflect all possible lifestyles. For further details about ecological footprint analysis, and how you can calculate the impact of products, individuals, organizations or regions, please see the links below”.

Many schools and universities now use these tools to get students to become aware of the difficult tradeoffs between consumption and environmental sustainability. The trick in the game, given a certain global population and a sense of social justice, is to get your lifestyle to be such that if everyone lived like you we could still live on 1 planet. One of the parameters you can manipulate is wildlife habitat. Interestingly (and obviously) the more of the productive areas of the planet you wish to devote to non-human species, the less you can consume to keep the number of earth’s down – the paradox is that when students compete to keep their footprint down, they often put the other species parameter at 0% to improve their chances!

Wackernagel and Reese choose specifically and determinedly to make the concept of carrying capacity relevant and urgent again and refute the logic of conventional economists and planners who “generally ignore or dismiss the concept when applied to human beings” and whose vision of the human economy is one in which "the factors of production are infinitely substitutable for one another" and in which "using any resource more intensely guarantees an increase in output" (Kirchner et al., 1985)[24].”

Ecological footprint analysis is a more sophisticated form of the early IPAT model originated by Ehrlich and Holdren (1971), where impact is equivalent to population x affluence x technological efficiencies. The greatest irony of the Ecological Footprint Analysis and other models is what the trade-offs in the models imply about human use landscapes and “wilderness”. Nowhere in the models can you sustain even the current human population at even the lowest modeled levels of consumption and keep as much as 40% of the biosphere “wild”. Regardless of your optimism in terms of the IPAT equation, environmentalism present suggests that environmentalism future will occur in a considerably impoverished biosphere, in an age that E.O. Wilson in his book "Consilience" (1998) calls, “The Eremozoic” or “The Age of Loneliness”.

Biodiversity Loss

One popular website (Buddycom.com) offers this sobering perspective: Of all the environmental crises in the world, only one is forever irreversible. As the popular slogan goes “Extinction is Forever.” Air and water can be cleaned, further pollution can be prevented, distribution of resources can be improved and recycling of waste outputs can avert scarcity problems. So far so good. “Weak Sustainability” proponents (for example, Solow and Wan, 1976, Solow1993; Hartwick, 1977, 1990, 1993) believe that factor substitutability can avert economic and industrial crises. But “Strong Sustainability” advocates point out that there are no substitutes for wildlife once their unique genetic signatures have been lost. It is this worry that inspires cautious scientists like John Terborgh (1999) to write books with arresting titles such as "Requiem for Nature"

The prognosis here doesn’t look good. A cursory look at wild populations of charismatic megafauna alone gives numbers that are cause for not mere alarm but despair. Recently our own evolutionary order, Primates, experienced its first extinction since the 1700’s when Waldron's red colobus (Procolobus badius waldroni) went the way of the quagga (Equus quagga) and the blue buck antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus) (Slack, 2003). Many more species, such as the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) one of the rarest mammals on Earth with about 30 left in the wild may soon be singing “The Song of the Dodo” (Quammen, 1996). With habitat fragmentation (Weiner, 1990) and “ecosystem decay” (Lovejoy et. al., 1984, Laurance et. al., 2002,) creating ever smaller “island ecosystems” subject to edge effects and an internal mortality rate higher than genetic inflow, the dismal extinction vs. immigration, predictions of classic island biogeography (McArthur and Wilson, 1967) now apply to a vast number of species – perhaps as many as 17 to 35% (Lovejoy, 1980, Wilson, 1998). The effects of inbreeding depression and loss of genetic variability interacting synergistically with ecological changes such as logging, hunting, fires, land conversion and armed conflict, combined with the statistical chance for stochastic events alone to push a species into extinction, leave no room for optimism.

The data speaks for itself: In a testimony given before the Fisheries, Wildlife and Water Subcommittee Of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee May 9, 2001 David S. Wilcove, Senior Ecologist, Environmental Defense, stated:
“In 1993, Margaret McMillan, Keith Winston, and I published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology in which we examined the population sizes of U.S. species proposed for listing or added to the endangered species list from 1985-1991 (inclusive). Nearly 500 plants and animals were either proposed for listing or added to the list during that seven-year period. We discovered that the median population size of a vertebrate animal (mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, or fish) at time of listing was 1,075 individuals. The median population size of an invertebrate animal at time of listing was fewer than 1,000 individuals, while for plants, it was fewer than 120 individuals. (In fact, 39 plant species were listed when 10 or fewer individuals were known to exist.) These low numbers of individuals were clustered in a small number of populations: For animals, the median number of populations at time of listing was fewer than 3; for plants, it was 4. By any scientific standard, such low numbers make these species highly vulnerable to extinction. One way to highlight this point is to note that half the animals added to our endangered species list are rarer even than the giant panda.” (italics mine)
TNC and ABI rank plant and animal species on a scale from 1-5. Species classified as G1 (the “G” indicating that the rank in question pertains to the entire or “global” range of the species) are considered “critically imperiled.” Such species typically occur in 5 or fewer places or have a total population of 1,000 or fewer individuals. A G2 species occurs in 6 to 20 places or has 1,000 to 3,000 individuals left. It is considered “imperiled.” A G3 species is classified as “vulnerable.” It typically occurs in 21 to 100 places or has 3,000 to 10,000 individuals remaining. Species ranked G4 or G5 are in no immediate danger. Note that all of these ranks are based on numbers of individuals and populations; they do not take into consideration the degree or immediacy of the threats facing these species. (italics mine)
“The authors of Precious Heritage have identified no fewer than 1,385 U.S. plants and animals with a rank of G1 (critically imperiled). An additional 1,737 species are classified as G2 (imperiled), while 3,338 are classified as G3 (vulnerable). By any reasonable measure, all of the species ranked G1 or G2 would qualify for listing as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act; these two categories alone contain well over 3,000 species—more than double the current endangered species list. And in all likelihood, a significant fraction of the species classified as G3 (vulnerable) would pass muster for listing, too. Thus, there are a great many rare plants and animals that are at risk of extinction but are not yet protected under the Endangered Species Act…
“From 1991-2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added an average of 63 U.S. species per year to the list. At that rate, assuming a backlog of about 2,000 imperiled, unlisted species, it would take the Service nearly 32 years to catch up. By that time, many of these rare plants and animals may be gone…”
Finally, we must not forget that simply placing a rare plant or animal on the endangered species list does not guarantee its survival, much less its recovery. If, as the data indicate, most species are added to the list only when their populations have reached critically low levels, then we must find ways to increase those populations. Doing so usually entails restoring or enhancing their habitats. For species that depend upon private lands, the key to restoring their habitats is to enlist the cooperation of the landowners. Incentive-based approaches, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s safe harbor program or its Endangered Species Landowner Incentive Program, have proved to be very successful in making landowners active participants in recovery efforts. More support for programs such as these will go a long way toward saving our imperiled wildlife while removing much of the controversy associated with the Endangered Species Act.”[25]
The IUCN Red List for threatened species of Animals lists 26,329 species. This number of course excludes the 699 species that have recently gone extinct – more than 108 since the Red List began listing species only a two decades ago[26]. This number excludes 37 species that are now extinct in the wild and survive only under controlled conditions of intensive human management. These 37 species, including the black footed ferret, the red-tailed shark, the gray wolf, the Saudi gazelle, the soft shelled turtle and the Saudi Gazelle, are the sorts of creatures which a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina can easily wipe out -- for example, while most of the animals in the New Orleans Zoo survived the Hurricane, a simple failure to restore electrical power in the city in its aftermath killed all of the thousands of organisms at the New Orleans aquarium[27].
Of the 26,329 listed threatened species, the IUCN excludes those of “least concern” for the purposes of best resource allocation and alerts our attention to the fate of 13,365 animal species that are in desperate need of individual protection and of sufficient protected habitat. The numbers break down as follows:
1,389 Critically Endangered (CR) , 2,118 Endangered (EN), 3,759 Vulnerable (VU), 2,314 Near Threatened (NT) , 2,931 and 736 Data deficient, 118 Lower Risk (LR), (and 12,964 of Least Concern (LC))
It is worth knowing that, simplistically speaking, among the criteria to qualify for a given category are:
< 50 mature individuals remaining on earth or less than 250 mature individuals with 25% decline observed over one generation to qualify for CR,
< 250 mature individuals or < 2,500 with an observed decline of 20% over two generations to qualify for EN,
< 1000 mature individuals or < 10,000 with an observed decline of at least 10% over three generations to qualify for VU,
NT is recommended when the species in question is down to numbers close to VU status but hasn’t quite crossed the threshold (we are still talking somewhere between 1000 and roughly 15000 members of the entire species left)[28]
When you consider that merely to make it on the vulnerable list your population must number between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals and that in this desperate triage system to qualify for “least concern” (LC) (and therefore receive no substantial protections) you could still be down to a between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals you begin to see the magnitude of the problem in terms of survivability in the face of the drastic climate changes and catastrophes of both anthropogenic and “natural” origin. As Craig Hilton-Taylor, IUCN Red List Programme Officer pointed out,
A species may be considered globally threatened (because of declines over much of its range), but it could be listed nationally as Least Concern if there has been no or very little reduction in a particular country. Similarly a species could be highly threatened in several countries, yet in Least Concern globally because it is very common elsewhere. Aggregating national assessments such as these could result in totally spurious global assessments.[29]
When creatures only number in the tens of thousands (or even the hundreds of thousands) it becomes statistically unlikely for them to survive even the smallest catastrophic event. At the time of the Ice Age, when many other creatures (particularly large mammals) did go extinct, human beings are estimated to have numbered somewhere around 10 million worldwide; at that density we obviously got through such periods of intense climatic disturbance (for reference the city of Cairo alone today has an estimated daytime population near 20 million.) How small a population renders a species vulnerable to extinction is a question that cannot be easily answered but statistics show that stochastic events can be powerful determinants of survivability. In this age of extreme habitat modification, rampant zoonoses (diseases transmissible from one animal species to another) and unstable climatic patterns, it is not merely a question of the genetic crapshoot of homozygosity for beneficial or deleterious alleles, the chances of successful mating opportunities and the odds of surviving to adulthood that we must consider; it is a question of the possibility for single events – diseases or disasters – to push a species over the brink (Shaffer 1981)
To get an idea of how many lives a single catastrophic event can claim we merely have to look at our own species in recent history: 2,749 people were killed in the World Trade Center terrorist attack alone[30]; this is close to the entire population of Bengal tigers in the wild (note that the Bengal tiger is the most numerous tiger species in the world; the next most numerous, the second most numerous, Indo-Chinese tiger, numbers around 1,200 while the Siberian tiger and others are down to a few hundred individuals. The Javan tiger went extinct in 1988). We are all aware that the 2004 Tsunami in South Asia claimed over 286,000 human lives[31]; few realize that this is near to the entire world population of all the other great apes combined – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans (Humans are taxonomically classified as one of the great apes in the Hominidae). By comparison some 350,000 human babies are born per day. This does not diminish the tragedy by any means but should call attention to the dangerously low replacement rates of the other primates with whom we share our planet and our evolutionary history. [32] Earthquake of October 2005 in Pakistan killed over 80,000 Homo sapiens; this is equivalent to the total number of living Central African Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes troglodytes.[33] What is more, when we talk about these extreme human tragedies we are talking about catastrophic mortality among highly intelligent and resourceful animals with extreme mobility and social organization skills. With populations down to 3,000 for most of the listed “Vulnerable Organisms”, a median population size of fewer than 1,000 individuals for all listed “Threatened Organisms” and as low as a few individuals for many critically endangered species it is easy to see why those who monitor biodiversity call these creatures “living fossils”[34] or “the living dead[35].”
Loss of Ecosystem Services

One of the key things that has changed dramatically on the planet earth in the last half century is the loss over vast areas of “undisturbed” habitat offering ecosystem services that once buffered drastic population swings and allowed for assimilation of wastes and regeneration of productivity. In addition, “One critically important service that undisturbed ecosystems offer, according to Dr. Eric Chivian at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and Global Environment, is maintaining equilibria among hosts, vectors, and parasites and between predator and prey.” (Engelmann, Ibid)

Ecosystem services such as the provision of clean water, replenishment of nutrients (through seasonal flooding for example), storm de-intensification and other environmental buffering services, pollination and seed dispersal by insects and other animals, labor-free and management-free growth of animal and plant stocks, capture of insolation and provision of consumable energy through photosynthesis (nutrition, biomass) all have a value that can be calculated based on what humans would have to pay if they had to create the services themselves (Vitousek, 1986, Costanza et. al., 1997, Daily, 1997, Sagoff, 1997, Pimm, 1997). Costanza et. al, 1997 estimate that ecosystems annually provide at least US$33 trillion dollars worth of services at the current margin (p. 259). Much of this is outside of the market system (see below for new attempts to capture these values in “full cost accounting”) but the services are critical ones for which manufactured replacements are either non-existent or prohibitively expensive to substitute. Examples are gas regulation, estimated at 1.3 trillion/yr, disturbance regulation (2.3 trillion/yr), and nutrient recycling (17 trillion/yr). The bulk of this (63%) is estimated to come from marine systems, of which more than half is derived from coastal systems. 38% is imputed to terrestrial systems, primarily forests (4.7 trillion/yr) and wetlands (4.9 trillion/yr). Whether regarded as centers of primary production or waste assimilation, it is clear that the ecosystems in the biosphere are responsible for much of human wealth, despite the tendency for classical economists to underplay the significance of natural capital (Wallerstein,1997, Pearce and Atkinson, 1998) As Moore (2002) points out in a review of J.R. McNeill's (2000) environmental history of the 20th century, these ecosystem services are not just important for non-human organisms and for the poor of our species:

"Although McNeill did not say it, the disappearance and deepening erosion of these "ecological buffers" removes one of the chief means that capitalists have employed to avoid paying their bills over the past five centuries or so." (p. 315)

Will the market protect nature services?

Neither Wallerstein (1997) nor Daly (1991) seem to think so, for the sheer reason that “growth-mania” is embedded in the capitalist system. Since GNP is a measure of activity, not welfare (Nordhaus and Tobin, 1972) it can keep growing and growing even as MEW (Measured Economic Welfare) declines. And as long as policy is bent on an ever rising GNP there is no incentive to cease destruction. Kenneth Boulding, who conceived of the earth as a spaceship in a 1965 paper to the Committee on Space Science, argued that GNP was largely GNC (Gross National Cost). In fact GNP grows both when we deplete capital stock and when we add to it. As Herman Daly said in 1980 interview in Plowboy (Mother Earth News)

“we take all the costs of growth and add these to our Gross National Product as benefits! Have you ever noticed that nothing is ever subtracted from the GNP? That's because we count our expenses as income…”

This observation has led different authors to make the following comments about economic growth

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived. - Paul Samuelson
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. - Edward Abbey

Policy tools such as the creation of set asides and parks and other forms of landscape management such as “Integrated Landscape Management Models (ILMM)” and Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) (Canadian Government Policy Research Initiative, May, 2005[36]) are designed to correct for market inefficiencies that threaten ecosystem services. In the aftermath of a spate of terrible hurricanes in the U.S., for example, there is talk about protecting more coastline for storm buffering. But are protected lands really protected? Some authors believe that nature reserves and refuges and national parks are merely a form of land speculation. Environmentalists applaud Teddy Roosevelt for creating the national parks, and swoon with joyful disbelief when South American or South Asian governments set aside rainforest for preservation or when “debt for nature” swaps succeed. But, as discussed in the last chapter, despite its transcendentalist wrappings the "conservation movement" that preceded what we called "Enviromentalism Past" was ostensibly utilitarian (Pinchot,1910) . Trees were spared the saw so they could increase it size only to be cut later. It somehow rarely is discussed that set-asides and parks are really a great economic benefit to any nation – since the resources are not consumed at NPV (net present value) their FV (future value) can only increase over time. So any timber, wildlife or minerals that are not mined today become part of an increasing asset portfolio for the nation that conserves them. (But see Daly, Steady State Economics[37] for two arguments against the idea the market automatically provides for conservation by offering high profits to farsighted speculators who buy up materials and resell them later at a higher price: 1) exponentially growing extraction leads to "unexpectedly" sudden exhaustion and 2) future profit must be discounted to its present value. P. 8). The U.S. has taken this Future Value approach for the past 200 hundred years, preferring to consume other nation’s resources rather than its own. But when push comes to shove, as with the current oil price spiral, we discover that no place is sacred at all. The Alaskan Wildlife Refuge will be drilled, no matter what the effect on permafrost and wildlife, and the longer the fight goes on to preserve it the more valuable the oil there will be once it is drilled (it just received another reprieve, according to the NRDC on November 15, 2005). This same rule applies to our old growth forests and stocks of whales. In fact the IWC moratorium was really put in place only until such time as the “stocks” recover. Iceland and Norway and Japan are still whaling, and certain whale species are still facing extinction. In a service economy, nature’s services can always be considered an investment.

While the celebrity antics of radical environmental groups like Greenpeace did have an effect, one could argue that governments merely used such publicity to help reign in businesses whose greed for profits could ultimately place a net burden on the government. By controlling access to land and usufruct values governments can make money from renting “the commons”. At a certain point it makes more sense to fence off “the commons” (really state owned land) for a while and let it increase in value until such time as higher rents can be charged. The Conservation movement, which Roosevelt takes credit for spearheading, always operated that way (again, see Pinchot, 1910) . From this perspective "Preservationism" and the rights-based environmental movement became merely the moral refuge of those whose wishful thinking saw a utopia on the horizon in which the killing would stop. It demanded permanent and inalienable rights for wild spaces and their inhabitants. It’s resistance to the whole market valuation of nature services approach is based on the moral indignation and outrage people feel when they realize that conservation represents a merely temporary reprieve before the slaughter begins again. To conserve land or wildlife is merely to fatten the cow before you slaughter it. From this point of view, biodiversity is only as valuable as its future value discount rate. Speculators talk about the importance of hitherto undiscovered rain forest and coral reef species to future pharmaceutical industries or for adding robusticity to an agriculture threatened by genetic homogeneity and vulnerability to rapidly evolving pests. But the differential expense on the development of genetic seed and germplasm banks and private holdings of exotic organisms, maintained through expensive hi-tech solutions, leaves little hope for vast tracts of wilderness, and no hope for organisms not charismatic enough to provide a return on their investment. The only good argument for preserving ignoble creatures and huge wilderness areas now seems to be their ecosystem service value – if it can be determined.

At the same time as land and sea are being intentionally altered, climate change is taking its toll on threatened ecosystems and their inhabitants, with no sign of improvement. With the exception of the European union, whose Greenhouse gas emissions declined by 1.4%, and Russia, who inexplicably dropped 30.7 percent, Greenhouse gases have continued to increase dramatically. (Table 2-1 page 35 State of the World, 2002) . Nobody has come close to their Kyoto Emissions Targets. Hope is often inspired by observations of the success of the 1987 Montreal Protocol that led to a ban on Chlorofluorocarbon production in 1996 and a phasing out of their use over the next decade (see Benedick, 1991, “Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet”) but it should be recognized that the Ozone hole is still increasing in size as rogue chlorine atoms from previous emissions still in the stratosphere continue their damage (they will like continue to do so for the next century or so). Furthermore, the Montreal Protocol was led by the U.S. whereas the Kyoto Protocol is opposed by this one nation that unfortunately is the world's largest policy and business leader.


Human Immiseration

Can one really say the world is better off now than 4 years ago? The comparison with Reagan's slight of hand is really an apt one – American’s felt they were better off because they couldn’t see the deficit that the Republicans were plunging them into. All that borrowed money – trillions of dollars gained by mortgaging our future, made the 80s seem like a time to party. Despite the cheery whitewashing done by “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, the data alone speaks to the disproportionate suffering that is occurring today.

According to Christopher J. L. Murray and Alan D. Lopez in The Global Burden of Disease (1996; 2002) between 1990 and 2000 Lower Respiratory Infections deaths only dropped from 4.29 million to 3.87, and diarrheal diseases from 2.95 to 2.12, measles from 1.06 to 0.78 and tuberculosis from 2.04 to 1.66. These are not substantial improvements given the investments made. At the same time, deaths from Malaria increased from .86 to 1.08 million and AIDS from 0.31 to2.94. Summing the total deaths from these diseases we see that in 1990 11.51 million people died from the 6 leading infectious diseases, while in 2000 12.45 million died from the same 6 diseases, a net increase of nearly a million. This is not trivial, especially since, as the report points out, “70 percent of chest infections are resistant to at least one of the first-line microbials”, “resistance to AZT and protease inhibitors are beginning to appear”, “multidrug resistance is a growing problem… co-trimoxazole… today… is largely ineffective against shigella (a form of dysentery)”, and “1-2 percent of TB cases are now resistant to all anti-TB drugs… in Israel, Italy and Mexico the figure is 6 percent…” We may thus be on the verge of terrible plagues and epidemics.

Using its U5MR (Under five mortality rate) methodology, (a standard development indicator) The World Health Organization estimates that 11 million children under 5 are lost to preventable causes every year, 70% from treatable diseases[38].

Cancer

Arguably the most frightening cause of human suffering today is cancer, the internal jihad caused by true "terrorist cells" in one's own body. Here the outlook is even bleaker. Though “Reason Magazine” (Bailey, 2001) claims there is no cancer epidemic per se (vilifying Rachel Carson and Lester Brown as scare-mongers) they do not deny the NIH estimate that approximately one out of every two men will get cancer (44%) and one out of every three women (39%). It all depends on what your definition of “epidemic” is. They cite Cancers Facts and Figures 2001 from the American Cancer , stressing a marginal decline in incidence and death rates during the 1990's after a dramatic upwards spike during the 80's. This argument is as fallacious as the decline in population growth rates argument talked about earlier – aggregate incidents and deaths are still going up. The latest data show that over a generation, from 1973 to 1999, "the overall incidence of cancers (expressed as the numbers per 100,000 population), adjusted to reflect the aging population, has increased by approximately 24% and despite advances in treatment, mortality due to Cancer has increased by 30%, from 17.7% to 23.0%.[39] Cancer affected 1.4 million Americans and claimed 570,000 lives in the US in 2004 (up from 544,278 in 1996, despite a decline in mortality from certain cancers such as prostate cancer), and is second only to heart disease in total number of deaths (733,834). In the United States the statistics suggest an environmental justice component; "Blacks are about 33% more likely to die of cancer than are whites, and more than twice as likely to die of cancer, as are Asian/Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and Hispanics" report Greenlee et. al. (2000). Few people talk about the rising cancer rates in developing countries. But the WHO World Cancer report states that in 2000 malignant tumors accounted for 12% of 56 million deaths worldwide and that in some developing countries cancer accounted for over 25% of the deaths; worldwide cancer cases have doubled; furthermore, once considered a "western" disease, more than 50% of the cancer cases worldwide now occur in developing countries. [40]

Industry has tried to paint cancer as a "disease of longevity" (despite the epidemic proportions of childhood leukemia and other young people's cancer, see ACCIS, the "Automated Childhood Cancer Information System);[41] a "disease of affluence" (despite the cancer statistics for the urban poor, see Greenlee et. al. Ibid.), a "disease of lifestyle" (despite the fact that people are getting cancer who do not smoke or drink alcoohol or eat improperly or live in urban or industrial areas[42]) and other such labels that effectively “blame the victim”[43].

It is alleged that huge numbers of people always died of cancer, but medicine had neither the name nor the tools to diagnose it so we attributed the mortality to different causes. It is alleged that most people died younger than they do today and if they had lived long enough, they too would have gotten cancer, because cancer is an inevitable part of living. It is even alleged that "natural food" is more likely to give you cancer than synthetic chemicals. Researchers such as Bruce Ames (originator of the Ames Test for LD50 or "Lethal Dose 50%") and Lois Swirksy Gold have even gone so far as to state "epidemiological studies do not implicate low-dose exposures to synthetic pollutants or pesticide residues as important risk factors for human cancer" (Gold et. al., 1992, p. 271). Ames and Gold recently redefined their careers "debunking" rodent carcinogen studies by ranking MTD (Maximum tolerated dose) and TD50 studies and claiming that, given exposure doses, a glass of wine or beer, a cup of coffee or a glass of orange juice are all more dangerousthan synthetic chemicals (Gold et. al, 1992).

The popular interpretation of their publications has become the devil may care slogan, "what the hell, everything gives you cancer". But in fact that isn't true, and we know very well what factors increase cancer rates, what can lower risk, and what substances are iatrogenic (Epstein, 1987). Ames and Gold correctly identify smoking as a principle and real danger, but while a debate rages about whether it is tobacco per se or the carcinogens "added" to "natural tobacco" by the cigarette companies that are causing the damage[44] - again, turning the debate into a "lifestyle" issue - most analysts are continuing to ignore the role of radionuclides irresponsibly released in our environment and their rising concentration. Since the time of the Curies and after exhaustive research into the effects of the nuclear weapons we twice dropped on Japan and detonated all over the world in “tests” we know well that radiation is a prime carcinogen. Some even believe that much lung cancer from cigarettes (both primary and second-hand smoke) is the result of tobacco being contaminated by fertilizers containing the alpha-emitting isotope Polonium 210, (see Rahman et. al, 1987, Cohen and Eisenbud, 1980, and Evans 1993[45] and Martell, 1974[46] ).
The National Academies' National Research Council has concluded that there is no safe dose of radiation[47], (see Brenner et. al. 2003 for a more technical discussion and see footnote for a popularized account of the dangers[48]). If this is true, and if it is also true, as the National Cancer Institute alleges, that the 500 + untested new synthetic chemicals “that the average person has in their body fat that didn't exist in 1920[49]” which Lester Brown has been warning us about really only account for 1% of the cancer load, then we have to closely examine the radiation issue, since it is well established that radiation is iatrogenic.

Too much actual policy concerning environmental risk factors routinely ignores the precautionary principle developed for the Rio Declaration in 1992 (Principle 15)[50] and expanded on in the 1998 Wingspread Statement[51]: “when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically” (Kriebel and Tickner, 2001). Industry driven policy allows us to commit dangerous “type II errors” (Tickner, 1997) and confuses the public by interchanging the words “natural” and “organic” with “healthy” or “good”. What is interesting about Environmentalism Present is that it is increasingly industry and business who use appeals to “nature” to defend their products or practices while environmentalists are more interested in health and equity and ethical and aesthetic concerns. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the cancer and radiation debate. Claiming that living next to a nuclear power plant exposes a New Yorker to less radiation than someone in Denver receives "naturally" from the "background cosmic radiation” doesn’t help the New Yorker at all. It relies on that worn out dualism that "natural" is good and "artificial" is bad, when in fact no exposure to radiation is good, whatever the source. (This same essentialist thinking lies behind the Ames and Gold papers: if, for example, "natural" coffee is as bad as they claim it to be this is no excuse to tolerate the spraying of "artificial" pesticides. Simply because you have demonstrated your willingness to tolerate the risks of something that you enjoy drinking, this is no argument to allow unscrupulous companies to poison your air and water and food with a pesticide rather than adopt integrated pest management strategies, it could, however, be an argument to stop drinking coffee!) But the most insidious cause of cancer, beyond the estimated 70,000 synthetic chemicals created since 1940 that are now in our water and food supply[52] is the sheer amount of radioactive isotopes being spread throughout the world through weapons manufacture, use and testing and through the domestic use of nuclear energy as well as bioaccumulation over time of all previous releases.

Rachel Western (2002) has written a brilliant series of articles in Peace News saying that atomic waste will become the chief issue of environmentalism future as it is the one legacy we will leave our grandchildren that nature will never be able to repair or clean up. Given their multi-generational half-lives, the plutonium and other highly radioactive materials we have created and concentrated on earth will remain a threat to health and a temptation for terrorists or other evil doers for the rest of our tenure as a species on planet earth (although see Lovelock, 1979; 1995, for a curious optimism that the deadly and mutagenic radiation we have released around the world my be a "good" thing because it will "accelerate evolution"!) The "Database of Radiological Incidents and Related Events” on the web[53] is devoted to the number of large (> 1 megacurie) nuclear accidents and radiation releases that have occurred worldwide since the second world war, listing 128 non-combat incidents accounting for 197 fatalities and 1,130 injuries; no data is available for the increased incidence of cancer and other disorders from the cumulative and synergistic effects of these events. Nuezil and Kovarik (1996), in a book called "Mass Media and Environmental Conflict : America's Green Crusades" document the sad case of the "radium girls" – female laborers in the watch industry who were all told repeatedly that painting glow dials with radium was not only harmless but healthy, and who all subsequently died of cancer. Much like the radium girls we are all being poisoned by ever increasing concentrations of radioactive material, from depleted uranium and continuous discharges and leaks of radiation waste from the nuclear industry, to say nothing of fallout from past atmospheric testing, seepage from current underground testing and leaking containers as well as the tremendous amount of radiation emitted by coal burning power plants (Ramachandran, Lalit and Mishra, 1987) -- something almost nobody talks about. As these toxins tend to bioaccumulate, and interact synergistically with other known carcinogens, one can expect the cancer rates to continue climbing and climbing. Even if a "cure" for cancer is one day discovered, the costs of treatment and medication alone, under the current market system, will condemn the majority of cancer sufferers to a certain painful death, making cancer survivability in a world filled with carcinogens a privilege of the rich.

Poverty

As for the number of people suffering below the poverty line in 2005, a brief look at statistics shows that on a planet of nearly six and half billion people, the percentage under the official poverty line (1 dollar a day equivalent) now equals the entire world population in the early 1800’s. The number with consumption levels below 2 dollars a day were 2.7 billion in 2003, roughly equivalent to the entire world population just before I was born. (World Bank, 2005) How anyone can say that things have improved is bewildering to this vast number of sufferers, particularly since almost all of these people are now integrated into the global economy and survive in places where ecosystem services are so degraded that they cannot easily supplement their low incomes with freely available natural resources. The myth that things are getting better all the time persists, however, because the sheer number of humans who are living better than any king or emperor in the Middle Ages (there were 1.2 billion living in the rich nations in 1990 according to Ehrlich, 1994) is now the equivalent of the entire earth population in John Muir’s day. And they are a very powerful and vocal minority (15 or 16%) of the 6.5 billion on the planet. Thus there is an ample chorus of voices proclaiming the triumph of modernism in ending scarcity. Again, it depends on which side of the fence you are on.

Weapons of Mass Destruction/Weapons of mass production

C.S. Lewis wrote "Man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." This is the essence of political ecology through whose optic (revealed by the work of Hecht and Cockburn, 1989) we learn that "the devastation of nature is due to pervasive and enduring patterns of exploitation and injustice between human groups". Hecht and Cockburn warn against "the seduction of models" and becoming too caught up in the rhetoric of development technicians (Chapin, 1988; see Nordhaus, 1992 for a different take on models) and ask us to see struggles to protect the environment as subsets of human rights struggles. For them justice is at the heart of any solution to environmental crises. Unfortunately both the pursuit of justice and the imposition of injustice have been enforced by violence and violence has created a spiraling demand for weapons.

Despite decades of touted progress in arms reduction among superpowers the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to say nothing of smaller weapons with big environmental effects, has continued to the point where we are at greater risk today than at any time in the past. Renner (2002) provides an overview of the link between resources and repression in State of the World 2002 Report, showing how "land rights conflicts, compensation demands, human rights violations, and environmental damage" keep triggering violent and nonviolent protests. (p. 165) He calls attention to how resource extraction triggers conflicts and how industries rush in with weapons, mercenaries and armies to maintain their control over everything from "blood diamonds" to tantalum for the mobile phone industry, to, of course, oil, wreaking ecological and social havoc in the process.

Mass production in a globally industrialized world has vastly increased the number of chemical, radioactive and biological agents capable of inflicting grave harm on living organisms and their ecosystems. With an estimated 2000 new chemicals being manufactured every year[54] the palette of potential destructive poisons is radically enlarged all the time (but see the humorous "Facts about Dihydrogen Monoxide" website[55] for a look at how any substance, including water, can be considered a hazard!) In addition to intentional weapons, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have showed the world that there are serious actors in the world who can find an intentionally destructive use for nearly any object – technological or natural. Fears of chemical, biological and nuclear materials – from “dirty bombs” to contamination of air and water to the spread of diseases that can affect people, livestock or crops – are even greater with the availability of information on the internet on how to unleash their destructive potential ("anyone can now download the DNA sequence for anthrax toxin genes … anyone can order synthetic DNA from offshore companies" says Drew Endy, an MIT researcher who builds TNT detecting bacteria for military application (Gibbs, 2004); the use of the deadly neurotoxin Ricin, a natural derivative of the castor bean plant, which is a common weed found all over the world, or the pesticide Sarin, chemically similar to malathion, by terrorists such as those who attacked the subway in Japan, are also good examples of this how such knowledge affects our environment (Breithaupt, 2000, Frischknecht, 2003). Furthermore, the general “assault on nature” has continued with even greater destructive power using deliberate biocidal and ecodestructive “weapons” such as vastly more potent herbicides, pesticides, bulldozers, chainsaws, earthmovers, drilling rigs, supertankers, supertrucks and what I call "weapons of mass production" and “weapons of mass construction” – massive amounts of prefabricated materials, from cinderblock to cement mixers and easy to assemble building materials that make conversion from farmland or wilderness into industrial park, shopping mall or urban sprawl a matter of days.


II. Production – Technology and Its SocioEconomic Relations

The technoptimists, from Schumpeter and Fuller and Solow to Beckerman, Simon and Lomborg and McDonough, though different in their policy outlooks and sympathies, all look to this sector to find the holy grail of environmental improvement, despite the fact, as Barry Commoner has been pointing out for decades, that technology is what got us into this mess of mass destruction to begin with. In some sense the technoptomists are right though – if the simple equations of their models are reliable – by focusing on bringing down the T variable of the IPAT equation we can reduce our environmental impact, at least theoretically. Given that so many of our problems were engendered by technology in the first place, much can be done to eliminate the more obvious problems associated with processes that create undesirable "externalities". But this ignores one fundamental physical reality – a growing economy depends on low entropic inputs and results in high entropic outputs and there is no way to recycle high entropy residuals without increasing entropy. To do so would be to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics – a fact most technoptomists fail to address (Daly, 1999). So from the outset technoptimism may be unfounded, at least in terms of achieving the holy grail of unlimited growth. What Immanuel Wallerstein called the “dirty secret of Capitalism” – the externalization of costs – may be incompatible with ecological sustainability no matter what technologies we employ. This prompted Wallerstein to claim there is “no exit” as long as we are operating within the framework of the world capitalist system (Wallerstein, 1997). But there is no question that our ability to capture and derive useful work from the transformation of high quality energy and concentrated matter to low quality energy and dispersed matter can dramatically improve in efficiency. And this might just buy us time for a transition to another form of economic life more compatible with biological life.

Scientific American gave us the following optimistic outlook in their 150th anniversary issue:

“The end of the 20th century has seen a subtle change in the way many industries are confronting environmental concerns: they are shifting away from the treatment or disposal of industrial waste and toward the elimination of its very creation.” (The Industrial Ecology of the 21st Century. "Scientific American"; 150th Anniversary Issue, Vol. 273 Issue 3, p178, 4p)

It would seem that the captains of industry are finally heeding the 1992 “Warning to Humanity” of an environmental crisis escalating out of control. The warning was given by 1,670 of the World's most respected scientists (104 of them Nobel Prize Winners). But there is skepticism over how much of the change is real and how much is mere talk or wishful thinking. In aggregate, given the trends mentioned in the last section, it appears to some that “nothing has been done”, at least nothing positive. UCLA instructor Scott Sherman’s environmental fiction adventure It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I could use a drink) is indicative of popular sentiment along these lines:

"They came from 71 different nations, including many from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. They came from the largest 19 economic powers and the 12 most populous nations. Yet despite their differences in race, religion, culture and creed, they had all apparently come to a consensus on a threat more immediate and more dangerous than even nuclear war.
The earth had as few as 10 years left.
Of course, this was the most important news of our lifetimes. But most people never even heard about this event. Others simply ignored it and went on with business as usual.
Now it was 1997, and nothing had been done to solve the ecological crisis. In fact the situation was only getting worse. Five years had already passed…
Time was running out.” ( pages 6 and 7)

Sherman’s Prologue was written after the UN Special Assembly met in June of 1997 to review progress on sustainable development since 1992. There, a leading member of the British Delegation summed up the outcome with the acronym SLUDGE (“slightly less unsustainable development genuflecting to the Environment”, Parkin, 1999 p. 47). All the progress seems like "one step forward, two steps backward". Sherman’s Prologue is called “Truths” but it contains one epistemological falsehood: the idea that “nothing has been done to solve the ecological crisis.” Inserted for dramatic effect (Scott’s book is an adventure story whose cover bears the subtitle: “A work of fiction that incidentally happens to be true”), this one fictive passage in an otherwise very responsibly laid out story about one man’s crusade to solve the ecological crisis (the hero must always be doing what nobody else has done before) is the key misperception that allows other authors to claim that, in terms of their dire predictions “all those environmentalists were wrong”.

In fact a lot has been done to solve the ecologic crisis, and it is precisely because things have been done that many of the catastrophes predicted in Environmentalism Past did NOT universally occur. (for more on this, see the famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich[56]. It isn’t that the predictions were wrong – the predictions were conditional “if-then” statements. They said IF we went on with business as usual terrible things would result, but we DIDN’T go on with business as usual. In some cases we changed technologies, in many others we simply exported our problems elsewhere, and subsidized our own growth by the destruction and/or Borg-like assimilation of their ecosystem services; as Parkin (1999) observed in her paper “Environmental Security: Issues and Agenda for an Incoming Government” :

…an estimated 20 million people have died each year because their locality no longer provided a life-supporting environment. This compares to an estimated 20 million who have died in armed conflict in total since 1945. (p. 1)

The same sort of critics who don’t want to hold American policy responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children’s deaths during the embargo leading up to the current Gulf War will dispute that the mortality in developing countries is due to environmental degradation caused by Western style Economic and Technological development, but it is hard to find any other explanation given the historical background of similar instances of mass mortality (of course eco-catastrophe predates the Capitalist system and haunts all systems of unsustainable extraction and inequitable distribution: see Ponting, 1992 for descriptions of ancient ecological holocausts, Michael Davis, 2000, for explanations of Late Victorian Holocausts that claimed as many as 60 million lives “at the precise moment when famine disappeared from Western Europe”, see Wilson, 2001, for descriptions of modern Holocausts that in fact are worse than any in the past, despite better technology). And as Herman Daly pointed out in his essay on Stead-State Economics , in many cases we are living in denial of the holocausts that have occurred and continue to occur that actually vindicate the environmental doomsayers:

“Note… the blind assertion that Malthus was wrong, when in fact his predictions have been painfully verified by the majority of mankind. But then majorities have never counted. Only the articulate, technically competent minority counts. But even for them Malthus was not really wrong, since this minority has heeded his advice and limited its reproduction…

Citing Jorgenson and Grilliches, 1972 and Maddala, 1965 who looked at total factor inputs of industries from 1945 - 1965, Daly supports the decision of “Limits to Growth” authors to dis-include exponentially growing technical knowledge as a sixth constituent of the World Model :

What formerly was considered as technical change now appears as a process of factor substitution… such findings cast doubt on the notion thattechnology, unaided by increased resource flows, can give us enormous increases in output. In fact the law of conservation of matter and energy by itself should make us skeptical of the claim that real output can increase continuously with no increase in real inputs… the assumption of some critics that technological change is exclusively a part of the solution and no part of the problem is ridiculous on the fact of it and totally demolished by the work of Barry Commoner (1971).

More to the point, the very technologies that created the ecologic crisis were themselves “things that were done to solve an ecologic crisis”. They were things done to solve crises in supplying food when and where and of the type we wanted, supplying water where and when and at the temperatures we desired, eliminating wastes that used to accumulate in our outhouses and streets, crises of temperature and lighting regulation in our homes and work spaces, crises of smoke accumulating in our kitchens and living rooms, crises of insects and parasites and predators feeding on us or our foods, etc. In fact the entire human story can be read as a response to one or another ecological crisis.

Part of the problem is the shifting meaning of “ecologic crisis”. While the term “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 to describe the interlocking systems that maintain life on earth, the roots of the term are the same as those we use for “economy” - namely “ekos”, greek for “house” or “home” By this logic “ecology” (the study of the home) and “economy” (that which quantifies the activities of the home) are really the same subject - ideas that humans have about the functioning of their world. From this etymological perspective it is clear that things that were done to solve an “economic crisis” were also things done to solve an “ecologic crisis” - i.e., human inventions and interventions to make life in their home world better. For example, cars, the big nemesis of so many environmentalists, were invented primarily to solve transportation problems in an age when horses were the prime means of conveyance. Both health officials decrying the disease-bearing filth of urban streets and animal rights activists (can we lump them in with environmentalists?) decrying the mistreatment of horses, mules, elephants and camels pressed into transportation service could laud this “crisis averting technological solution” as being a “clean” and “humane” way to be earth friendly. The toxic and greenhouse gas causing byproducts of combustion were not necessarily related to cars per se, especially since some of the first automobiles ran on biofuels (alcohol) and electricity (Bernton et. al., 1982). Many of the problems associated with automobiles are really problems associated with the combustion of fossil fuels and simply changing the fuel source could have profound positive effects (though would have little effect on Sprawl and congestion!).

But to some it appears that each new technology we invent to get us out of an old mess merely creates a new one. This is known as Sevareid's Law (after CBS elite war correspondent Eric Sevareid): "The chief cause of problems is solutions". (Sevareid, 1970). Like "Murphy's Law" it has no empirical foundation, but has influenced the Regional Planning Literature (Bartlett, 1998) A recent example: we know that Thomas Midgley invented CFC's to be a benign solution to the problem of toxic refrigerants such as ammonia, and that they appeared to be a health and environmental boon at first (inert, nontoxic); only later did we learn that they could end life on earth by destroying he ozone shield (Somerville,1998); the very characteristics that made them "safe" to ecosystems and organisms make them persistent threats to stratospheric ozone. Now a Greenpeace report has been issued that the CFC replacement chemical that industry rushed to in order to protect the ozone layer, HFC, while not an ozone destroyer, may be one of the most potent greenhouse gases that we are now releasing into the atmosphere.[57] In terms of "total equivalent warming impact (TEWI)” many touted technological solutions, when analyzed using a life-cycle systems approach, turn out to be less than ideal. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, so to speak (see Fischer et. al. 1991 and Fischer, Sand and Baxter, 1997 for an analysis of “Energy and Global Warming Impacts of HFC Refrigerants and Emerging Technologies”; see Scientific American August 2003 for a report on “Not So Friendly Hydrogen” in which the authors point out the dangers of the Bush plan for building a hydrogen infrastructure that depends on nuclear energy and fossil fuel reforming for hydrogen production and Matthew Wald's "Questions about a Hydrogen Economy" in Scientific American, May 2004 in which he details a "new genre of energy analysis" called "from Well to Wheels" that approaches energetic full cost accounting in terms of "conversion efficiencies" and exposes hidden energy and residuals costs at every step of the energy chain.)

Similar examples include the replacement of lead in gasoline with MTBE, now accused of contaminating ground water supplies, and of course the invention (imposition?) of nuclear energy as the "too cheap to meter" panacea for the rising problems and costs associated with fossil fuel combustion. (Calder ed, 1964., The World in 1984) Still, those who understand science and engineering know that not all technologies with downsides are equally risky and some have waste products more easily neutralized or assimilated than others as well as social costs and risk factors that are more palatable than others. It doesn't necessarily hold that all technology carries with it comparable or undesirable levels of risk. But in the hotly contested marketplace for factor substitution it is hard to know which analyses to put stock in. For example, recent use of LCCP analysis, ( Life Cycle Climate Performance) by the “Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy”, which provides “the cradle-to-the-grave” warming impact of any product, has given a “thumbs up” to HFC’s, declaring

“that earlier statements of R-134a’s global warming impact “substantially overstate[d] the net warming impact of HFCs, given the significant contribution to energy savings that the unique properties HFCs provide in many applications.”[58]

We can also give a hearty thumbs up to Franklin Fuel Cells for their recent discovery of the benefits of copper-ceria anodes, simultaneously solving such problems as the need for pure hydrogen in electrochemical motor technology and the production of lung-embedding particulate matter, smog and carcinogens when using Diesel and gasoline fuels[59]. Their new technology permits such fuel flexibility that, once installed, they can run on virtually anything we currently use, from fossil to biofuels to hydrogen itself (see FranklinFuelCells.com). It is hard to see an environmental downside to their technology. Japan’s success with small-scale hydroelectric power generation (often called “micro-hydro”[60]); which doesn’t disrupt natural stream flows, calls into question previous assertions about the ecological devastation assumed to always accompany otherwise clean water power schemes. Recent analyses of photovoltaics and wind power showed that over their life time these clean technologies, which create no harmful residuals, produce approximately nine to seventeen times more energy and thirty times more energy respectively (for PV see Knapp and Jester, 2005; for Wind, see the British Wind Energy Association[61]) than it took to manufacture them. But these “Schumacherian solutions” (i.e. “Small is Beautiful”, Schumacher, 1961; 1973) depend on a Proudhonian or Kropotkinian (read “anarchist”) decentralization of production to achieve the aggregate production demanded by society and this may be too radical a change for today’s capital holders. Thus, while the appropriate technology movement, variously known by such terms as “AT”, “intermediate technology” “alternative technology”, “community technology”, and even “liberation technology” (see Willoughby, 1990 for the full spectrum of semantic descriptors), may indeed be liberating people from dependency on unsustainable technologies, these small scale solutions are unlikely to be embraced by the captains of industry (see Rybczynski, 1980, cited in Willoughby, 1990, for a review AT as a protest movement).

At the core of all this, of course, is what Daly (1999) referred to as Schumpeter's pre analytic vision – that perceptual filter that precedes analysis and is °∞highly determinative of what we end up with in our conclusions.°± †The Frankenstein vision, an outgrowth of the Christian view of man°Øs fall from grace, mistrusts all technology as °∞meddling with nature°± and will mistrust all solutions humanity invents. †The Ecosystem model of the human place in nature, by claiming humans as just another animal in the ecosystem, offers more hope in this regard – human wastes, for example, may seem dangerous when put into sources of drinking water, but when composted they are not only benign but serve as a nutrient. This model suggests that we can find our way back to grace by using ever more graceful technologies.

IPAT Revisited

There have been numerous revisions made to the IPAT model originated by Ehrlich and Holdren in the early 1970s (Lovins 1990, Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1991, Olson 1994, von Weizsäcker et al. 1997, Chertow 2001, Nordberg 2002, Peet 2003), and some doggedly optimistic authors (Robert Solow and Julian Simon, to name two) continue to believe[62] that if Impact truly equals Population x Affluence x Technology and we are improving the efficiency of our technology and getting richer we should be able to continue to expand our population indefinitely. For example, since electricity demand in the lighting sector is rapidly decreasing, with savings of nearly 75% per bulb lumen using compact fluorescent technology, we should theoretically be able to support the current population using 3 times as many light bulbs or support 3 times the current population using the same number. Light Emitting Diode technology has the possibility of improving this performance by up to 20 times, while new “quantum dot lighting technology” – once “the holy grail of lighting technology” promises such a staggering increase in productivity that some are predicting the end of the light bulb as we know it.[63] In fact, Nordhaus (1997) found that although it was not captured in conventional lighting price indexes, when measured in lumens the real price of lighting fell a thousand times between 1800 and 1989 after remaining essentially constant between 1265 and 1800. This is supposed to suggest a massive increase in Solow-style productivity that can offset population pressures (Hansen and Prescott, 1998). Similarly, if inductive motors in refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines and other machinery use 50% the energy as previous models then a doubling of the population should merely maintain the status quo. If hybrid cars are now getting 50 miles to the gallon instead of 25, then again, a double in the world population should have no net effect (at least in terms of fuel consumption). This rather naïve application of the IPAT equation ignores the fact that environmental problems are multi-dimensional, and ignores that current levels of consumption without any change have had and are having tremendous deleterious impacts – current global warming and cancer rates are the result of fossil fuel use by much lower populations – and no matter how clean point-source emissions in first world countries have become, the non-point source pollution from the energy industry itself are tremendous causes of environmental degradation at present levels. It is also worth remembering that the degradation circa 1965 that inspired the first world-wide environmental movement and the predictions of doom and gloom occurred when we had half the number of people on the planet, when American's were consuming half the energy per capita that they consume today (with no visible reduction in life style quality says Daly, 1980) and when, relatively speaking, the vast majority of human beings were hardly consuming any resources at all. We must also remember that the level of affluence and the number of affluent people today is greater than ever before in history, yet ecosystem services – the benefits supplied to human societies by natural ecosystems – have never been more depleted and tenuous (Daily, Alexander, Ehrlich et. al., 1997).

Sustainable Development

The most difficult thing about sustainable development, according to authors such as Clark, (1995) and Farber and Hemmersbaugh 1993, is that the present occupants of spaceship earth are essentially held hostage by stakeholders who don’t even exist yet (see Pearce and Atkinson, 1998 p. 9, for their take on the implications of Nordhaus, 1995 and Weitzman and Lofgren, 1997, whose independent but parallel ideas of exogenous technological change absolves us from having to account for changes in natural assets and suggests that "no matter what the degree of care between generations and the bequest of assets across time, technological change will always take care of the future such that the current generation is always the poorest.") Farber and Hemmersbaugh call these problems “intergenerational opportunity costs” and “the problem of discounting benefits that future generations will experience” saying “mature individuals behave responsibly with respect to the interests of their descendants, but do not necessarily owe a "duty" to as-yet nonexistent individuals…”(pp. 12-13)

By being forced to meet the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their needs we are actually letting unborn kids spoil our own party. What is more, we don't even know if the brats will appreciate the same things we value. They may be quite happy with Aibo type robot pets instead of real animals. They may enjoy living underground in spaces like the “La Ville Souterraine” in Montreal, and immersing themselves in virtual reality experiences where they don't have to get their feet cold and wet hiking, but can explore Yosemite flying around like Neo in the Matrix. For this reason some author's believe "the future should take care of itself". There are two ideas behind this. One is that we have enough trouble trying to meet our needs without comprising the ability of existing generations (of poor people, of groups we don't particularly like, of non-human animals and plants) to meet theirs, so what good is it adding another group's unrealized needs to our concerns? The other idea is that we all come into a world filled with challenges and part of life is creatively meeting those challenges. Our ancestors didn't waste time restricting growth for our sake, they just went about pursuing self-interest in the fashion Adam Smith and David Ricardo celebrated and voila, here we are. Besides that, if we are going to successfully move out into space and colonize other planets we need practice dealing with survival issues on hostile planets devoid of ecosystem services, and what better place to start than home, where we can adjust to such deprivations in easy stages? Daily et. al. (1997) use a compelling thought experiment to help us appreciate the value of ecosystem services – they simply ask us to plan a colony on the moon and to ask ourselves which animals, plants, bacteria, protozoans, and fungi we would bring along to create sustainable soil, air and water creation and cycling systems that would enable human beings to survive. Since the first real efforts to do this for real were dismal failures (Daily et. al, 1997; following Vernadsky (1945) there were experiments in "Manmade Closed Ecological Systems” (Gitelson et. al., 2003) called Biosphere 3 in Russia from 1972-1973 which lasted 180 days, and the Biosphere II experiment in Arizona from which cost $200 million and ran for two years from 1991-1993), we need all the practice we can get, and nothing will get us to get serious like collapsing systems around the world – as long as they don't all collapse at once.

While this may sound fanciful to generations that did not grow up seeing the earth from the surface of the moon, to people born after 1969 there is nothing odd about the idea of human beings living and working in space. At any event, from a traditional economists point of view, there are only three ways to approach sustainable development if you don't want to slip backwards into "de-development". Either you consider development to be different from growth, following the model of an organism (like a healthy human being) which only grows to be so big but then continues to develop (intellectually, emotionally, physical) (this is Daly's "Steady State Economy concept and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s (1975) idea of living within “the terrestrial dowry”) or you grow fatter and fatter until you explode, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life, or die of health related diseases (this is the ‘SuperSize-it’-until-collapse concept), or you grow out, ever outward, colonizing every landmass, colonizing the oceans and colonizing space (see Daly’s 1999 lecture on Uneconomic Growth,[64] and Peet, 2003 “Sustainability – A Scientific Dilemma”[65]) For the cornucopianists this is the only logical palatable solution. The question is, can we do it? And can all economies grow like ours? Should they? Even if they don't (either they are unwilling, or can't or are prevented) what are the consequences of our own ever expanding growth? At some point, even if were to displace all other cultures (as we did the native Americans and Australians) won't we face the same dilemma soon enough?

Rostow’s classic papers on “The Take-Off into Self-Sustained Growth” (1956) and “The Stages of Economic Growth” (1960) described a world that ran like clockwork in a five stage process –traditional societies with ceilings on productivity due to their economic, political and scientific techniques develop the preconditions for take off into sustained growth through an embrace of modern science and the ability to fend off diminishing returns at which point they experience a watershed event when old blocks and resistances to steady growth are overcome and “compound interest becomes built, as it were, into its habits and institutional structure.” (1960, p. 7) After this “take off” the society expands and extends its range of technologies, and finally enters into the “age of high mass consumption”. Rostow himself was unclear what happened after that.

Rostow’s linear model came under attack almost immediately and was abandoned to the notion that there really is no clear typology in development history that can be used to predict the future (O’Brien, 1986). For a time development theory adopted Gershenkron’s more nuanced and non-linear model (Gerschenkron, 1962) that questioned Rostow’s stage two preconditions and argued for a wide range of substitutes for the prerequisites. Perhaps the most hopeful part of Gershenkron’s vision which we see resonating in the environmental movement today, (though most environmentalists are probably unaware of the heritage), was Gerschenkron’s suggestion that “backwardness” could actually work to a country’s advantage. This is because it offers "greater opportunities for fast growth once a successful institutional response had been created”. This sort of logic has been used recently by Newsweek Magazine (16th December, 2003) and the Toronto Star (Hamilton, 2004) to explain why China, for example, will have an easier time transitioning to the Hydrogen Economy than the U.S. – because China lacks the vast network of petrol stations with complicated franchise and partnership deals, and has an immature auto industry that has not heavily invested in machinery for producing ICE cars it can jump into the fuel cell era without too much political opposition, economic losses or conflict with vested interests. This is the notion of “leap-frogging” into sustainable development, often using “borrowed” technology (taking advantage of low R&D investment costs) and then improving it – a wholly different kind of take-off than Rostow envisioned. (See Taguchi, 2004 for a contemporary application of Gerschenkron’s ideas to environmental policy in his discussion of “Environmental Kuznets Curves and Latecomers’ Advantages in Selected Asian Economies”, also Iwami on latecomer advantages in pollution abatement, for reviews see O,Connor D, 1994; Panayatou, 1995). The logic is again that technology will come to the rescue and that the problem wasn't growth per se, but the A and T part of IPAT. Leapfrogging economies can dispense with the problems of the dirty industrial age and spring forward to a service economy or a clean production economy.

As I see it, this is still in alignment with the Rostovian notion that all countries will sooner or later take off intogrowth. Nowhere do these other models predict countries that will voluntarily give up the idea of sharing the fruits of modernism. Rostow should not be too quickly dismissed or caricatured. Although his critics characterize him as being rigidly linear, Rostow himself was the first to decry economic analyses whose forms were “so rigid and general that their models cannot grip the essential phenomenon of growth”. (Rostow, 1960, 13) He was looking for a dynamic theory to oppose “static assumptions which freeze – or permit only once-over change – in the variables most relevant to the processes of economic growth.” (Ibid). Furthermore, his sixth stage “Beyond Consumption” acknowledged the impossibilities of prediction and he quoted Thomas Mann’s novel of three penerations, (“the first sought money; the second, born to money, sought social and civic position; the third, born to comfort and family prestige, looked to the life of music”) suggesting we must anticipate “the changing aspirations of generations, as they place a low value on what they take for granted and seek new forms of satisfaction.” (p. 11). A reading of Rostow could be improved by looking at what people and societies take for granted and why, without making modernist assumptions about what people “should” want and take for granted, and by then applying his insight that “the demand for resources has resulted… not merely from demands set up by private taste and choice, but also from social decisions and from the policies of governments – whether democratically responsive or not." Rostow anticipated today's focus on integrating social, anthropological and uncosted environmental variables into analysis. He said,

"It is necessary, therefore to look at the choices made by societies in the disposition of their resources in terms which transcend conventional market processes. It is necessary to look at their welfare functions, in the widest sense, including the non-economic processes which determined them.” (p. 15, italics mine).

The tools and equations developed by these early economists are still valuable – it is the variables that must be reinterpreted. In a post-modern context, looking at the development of development theory, we find that it is valuable to mine the insights of both Rostow and Gerschenkron in a dialectic, not dualistic fashion, and use our greater sophistication to figure out what their insights have in common and where their models fall short. Says Crafts,

“The early postwar pioneers in economic history still have something to offer economists. In general, however, this is in terms of useful insights rather than generalizations that are still defensible. Notions like takeoff, demographic transition theory and the Kuznets Curve have been largely discredited. On the other hand, Gerschenkron on development from conditions of economic backwardness still deserves to be read and might usefully be revisited from the perspective of modern microeconomics. Three big messages stand out from recent work in economic history. First, the attempt to force patterns of economic growth and development into the framework of the Augmented-Solow neo-classical growth model are seriously misconceived. Second, institutions matter for economic growth but different countries can be expected to diverge significantly and persistently in terms of institutional arrangements. Third, it is important to distinguish between growth in real wages or GDP/person and growth of living standards and in different stages of growth and/or different epochs the relationship between them has varied greatly.” (Crafts, 2000)

Industrial Ecology

One of the benefits of the ecosystem model of the environment is that a) it helps us to understand what "growth" and "development" have meant to all the other organisms who have evolved with us on this planet, and b) inspires us to learn from nature how nature does things when nature does things "right" (i.e. sustainably). In their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things architect William McDonough and chemist John Braungart (2002) use the metaphor of a cherry tree to show how one of nature’s “factories” produces no waste or pollutants but simply creates inputs for other biological production processes. The implication is that we can eventually discover ways to close the production circle – something Barry Commoner has been championing since the first Earth Day. We will have turned all of our outputs into inputs and separated biological processes from abiotic processes so that there can be no dangers to health emitted into our environment. When we finally learn to mimic nature it is assumed we will then do things naturally, and that should be a good thing. We will be "back in the garden" so to speak. Of course there are three major problems with this notion – one is that it assumes a beneficence of nature that is epistemologically alien to the ecosystem model, i.e. it suggests that just because cherry trees have adapted to their environment in a way that allows the local ecosystem to flourish we will have the same luck. This is a non-rational teleological model of the universe that is more Gaian in the Deep Ecology sense than scientific. In fact there are many organisms (Casuarina trees and some Pine trees and, as the Roman’s discovered, Walnut trees) that will actually poison the soil they inhabit and dramatically reduce biodiversity. The late Harvard Paleontologist Stephen J. Gould (1992) gave numerous examples of evolutionary “hypertrophies” that drove their possessors extinct. In the struggle to create sustainable ecosystems many experiments were tried by many organisms and most of them and their strategies died off. It may turn out that in order to create the kind of durable products and the kind of relationships to the world that any reasonable civilization depends on (containers, materials and structures that don’t biodegrade during use, areas where competitive or parasitical or predatory organisms are excluded, surfaces that are comfortable and pathogen free and easy to clean, etc.) there are no reasonable substitutes for the factors of production we now use and no easy or cost effective use we can make of the wastes generated by their production. If this is the case much of the hope of industrial ecology will turn out to be hype. Second, if we do find economical ways to isolate the biological cycles of production from the inorganic cycles of production as industrial ecology demands, it may turn out that our sheer numbers and consumer appetites will demand more energy for production and recycling than we can cleanly supply and that any biological assimilation limited to the rates of solar income and enzymatic process will not be able to keep up with our needs. Pollution, after all, is essentially an assimilation rate problem (Fuller, 1981, pp. 220, 227). Third, even assuming we can tackle the above problems, the mere presence of a massive closed production loop of toxic substances, even if not normally released into the environment, suggests the possibility of dangerous contamination by natural disasters, negligence, warfare or terrorist activity.

The incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, and past and present incidents in Cancer Alley, Lousiana, among many others show that even when dangerous substances are tightly guarded and controlled they can still have tremendous unforeseen effects (for coverage of the Bogalusa Incident of 1995 where a railroad car imploded, spewing nitrogen tetroxide into the black community, see Zimmerman’s essay “On Reconciling Progressivism and Environmentalism”[66] for amazingly prescient modeling of the effects of Hurricanes such as Katrina, see Bourne Jr., 2004)

Furthermore, the unfortunate tendency of so many toxins to bioaccumulate over time (Landis and Ming-Ho, 1995) as we saw in the Minamata Bay disaster in Japan with methyl mercury (Smith, 1975) and with PCBs and DDT (Carson, 1962), suggests that the mere presence of these poisons in our biosphere today may spell disasters tomorrow that we cannot foresee. Some environmental toxicologists are now documenting the effects the constant discharge of hormones (endocrine disruptors) and antibiotics and medical wastes into our sewage system, for example (Landis and Yu, 1995). Though we are all heartened by the return of fish to the Thames (Wheeler, 1970) and the clean-up of the Bayer Industrial Site in Leverkusen, Germany (now the site of a riverfront park; see Bayer Sustainability Report)[67] the statistics show that while environmentally degraded areas in the Northern rich countries are being restored (at great cost), dirty industries are simply moving their operations to the poorer countries where, on balance, the amount of degradation is orders of magnitude greater than it has ever been. In this way, Capitalist modes of production can wage a great green campaign, pulling out the odd success story and making a lot of ballyhoo about an exotic green technology, while doing its dirty work – the majority of its profit making portfolio – elsewhere. Thus we learn that, for all the talk, renewable energy still accounts for a mere 4% of the global energy market[68], while more oil was pumped and burned (an average of 83 million barrels a day) in 2005 than in all years previous.[69] Even coal, once the scourge of John Evelyn’s Fumifugium in seventeeth century England and the textbook cause for the evolution of Biston betuluria, the peppered moth, is being mined and burned in quantities the coal barons of yesteryear could only dream of – Today 52% of the electricity in the US is still generated from burning coal, while China is emerging as one of the biggest coal burners on the planet. But since the media are controlled by conglomerates in countries that have indeed cleaned some of the more visible outrages of environmental degradation (the black faced chimney sweeps of Mary Poppin's England are indeed a think of the past), it certainly appears that things are getting better all the time.

Actually U.S. and World coal combustion have increased steadily from 1937 until the present from 500 to 1000 million metric tons and from 1500 to 4000 million metric tons respectively. Thus, despite all rhetoric about the shift from coal to oil being a major achievement in environmental quality improvements representing a historical transition from high carbon to low carbon fuel sources (with natural gas now emerging to "replace" oil and eventually hydrogen, a zero carbon fuel, replacing gas) the reality is that consumption of all forms of fossil fuel are rising. Instead of replacements we merely see additions. According to industry analyst Alex Gabbard[70] by the year 2040, the year Bush announced we would transition to a hydrogen economy, coal use worldwide is expected to increase to 8000 million metric tons with the US accounting for 2500 of that.

But optimists hold out that we can and will discover ways out of this mess. Clinton, in his last State of the Union address in 2000 spoke of the new economic opportunities that environmental technologies would bring the nation so that we could have our cake and eat it too… the creative destruction of technology that Schumpeter talked about works nicely in a capitalist economy where every model of car or refrigerator or air conditioner is better than last years model – more efficient, sexier… thus we can consume our way to sustainability! To be environmentally friendly is not to repair and maintain old technology but to throw it out or trade it in. With this form of planned obsolescence we never face the underconsumption crisis that drove us into the first Depression and stimulated planned stagnation responses like Orwells vision in 1984.

In his final State of the Union Address (2000)[71] U.S. President Bill Clinton made explicit the new opportunities available within this paradigm. He said,

The greatest environmental challenge of the new century is global warming. The scientists tell us the 1990s were the hottest decade of the entire millennium. If we fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will flood, and economies will be disrupted. That is going to happen, unless we act. Many people in the United States -- some people in this chamber -- and lots of folks around the world still believe you cannot cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. In the Industrial Age that may well have been true. But in this digital economy, it is not true anymore. New technologies make it possible to cut harmful emissions and provide even more growth. In the new century, innovations in science and technology will be the key not only to the health of the environment, but to miraculous improvements in the quality of our lives and advances in the economy.

Recently, cost-benefit analysis and market valuation of environmental services (transmutation of natural and social capital into financial capital) have emerged as powerful conceptual notions in environmental science and are changing the faces of “environmentalism” and “environmentalists” in the 21st century. The theoretical prowess of these concepts is now being applied by “greens” and “browns” alike to explain and develop various aspects of policy dynamics and functions. Their fundamental strength is considered to lie in the fact that they build on the power of the market – the traditional “enemy” of the environment – to repair the damage done, by making environmental stewardship profitable. They inherently lie outside the traditional duality of the powerful institutions of modern society – the state (regulator) and the market (perpetrator), and by using the weapons of both, resist their hegemonic forces. They have also been widely embraced by development and planning scholars to overcome many of the shortcomings that have rendered top-down “command and control development efforts ineffective (see “Rescuing Environmentalism” The Economist April 21 2005)[72]. These concepts dovetail with the ideology supporting decentralization and good governance, -- the other sweeping changes that have come about in development thinking and practice. In terms of development, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the most prominent entities of civil society and are believed to be effective agents for extending sustainable development to the poor, introducing and implementing appropriate technologies (Schumacher, 1973), and delivering broad education in environmental and ecological perspectives. However the new paradigm seems to favor emerging technology companies working with government incentives and NGO’s to make environmental technologies and assessments of nature services a tradable “good”. In this endeavor, making environmental services profitable is held as desirable both as a means and an end.



Clean Production: Green washing or reality?

In environmental present, as in environmental past, there is deep skepticism over the true intentions of industries that use environmental rhetoric (see Turner's 1970 classic "Eco-Pornography or How to Spot an Ecological Phony" which was in The Environmental Handbook for the first Earth Day Teach-In; see also Frank, 2001:14) . The chief difference today is that emerging technology companies are themselves in competition with firms whose profits derive from externalization of residuals. So it is unclear whether they are merely trying to palliate the desired green consumer or literally seizing comparative advantage or competitive advantage over polluting and destructive industries (King, Lenox and Barnett, 2001) The marketing strategy of Delphi corporation, for example focuses on good citizenship – in fact they place it in an achievements folder on their website called “citizenship”.

Delphi: Driving Tomorrow’s Technology

“Environmental stewardship is not simply a catchword at Delphi, it is the guiding force behind our manufacturing processes and the products and technologies we create. In every aspect of our business, Delphi works to minimize negative environmental impact, with products and processes that 1) consider environmental impact from the beginning; 2) help reduce the effects of global warming; 3) decrease dependence on natural resources ; 4) use recycled materials and can be more easily recycled. Our "green" products not only help our customers comply with global environmental regulations, but also offer higher performance. This marriage of performance and environmental sensitivity creates greater value in Delphi products.” [73]

Alternative products and technologies can be pitched as having a less adverse effect on environment or health, or it can be pitched as a veritable solution to previous degradation. For example, LEV’s (Low emissions vehicles) such as the hybrid gas-electric cars of Toyota and Honda, are “an improvement” but ZEV’s (Zero Emission Vehicles), such as the now defunct GM EV-1 and the not-yet-on-the-market fuel cell cars promoted by BMW and Ford, are variously claimed to either end the vehicle pollution problem or, in some scenarios, such as Volvo's Versatility Concept Car, actually IMPROVE the quality of the air. (Gartner, Wired, April 21, 2003)[74] General Electric has launched a big campaign introducing “clean coal” technology, but they don’t account for the residuals – neither global warming gases, nor removed sulfur nor the energy and materials costs associated with transforming coal to a ‘cleaner burning’ fuel. It is assumed, however, that these will be dealt with in some benign way. In Egypt, environmental engineer Salah El Haggar has developed clean production techniques that eliminate waste and turn it into feedstock for other industries; while Egypt doesn't have the ability to implement these techniques everywhere itself, it exports these technologies to other countries (El Haggar pers. comm.) As new industries come in they are turning out to be cleaner than their predecessors so policy is now focusing on ways to retire older dirty factories.

Transformations of habitat and ecosystems is a trickier issue. In landscape change there is much work on environmental restoration and on the creation of parkland and there is a resurgence of the “Green Cities” ideas of Ebenezer Howard and Frederick Law Olmsted, discussed in the last chapter. But there is tremendous skepticism about the consequences of this attempt to re-create “nature” – first there is a lack of confidence that we are capable of replicating the functional characteristics of ecosystems. After his landmark studies of Island Biogeography and species-area effects with MacArthur, E.O. Wilson stated that the Earth itself was probably the minimum size for a functional biosphere that would not drive itself to extinction. He therefore doubted that the colonization of space would ever bear fruitful results without continual (and costly) subsidies from our home planet. The failure of the expensive Biosphere II project in Arizona seemed to confirm this suspicion.

Second, there is a feeling that the commodification of landscapes and organisms as “frames” and “spectacles” for human consumption (Cronon, 1996, Spirn, 1996, Davis, 1997) radically alters their role as ecosystem service providers and biases them toward human valuations which are fickle and may have no relation to their co-evolutionary relationships with the web of life as a whole. Organisms and ecosystems then become subject to artificial selection more than natural selection, and the traits selected may lead to hypertrophies that can in turn lead to extinction (Pollan, 2001, Pollan 1992, Gould, 1977). Some are questioning whether eco-tourism really has the power to preserve natural landscapes in all their complexity or whether it will simply lead to more simplification according to the demands of the theatre goers expectations of nature (Mastny, 2002, Weiskel, 1987). In a recent interview Jerry Mander expressed this concern saying “authentic places are beginning to advertise their features in order to promote tourism. They become commodified versions of themselves." The interviewer commented: "The irony is that we are trying to re-create what we've been busy destroying all these years. It's like the example you give of advertisements on television selling us back our feelings of connection. Now we'll have to buy back Eden--in a dome." Mander replied, "Yes, people will have nature inside domes, but little nature outside anymore.“ (Ingram, 1991) The Eden project in England is an example of such biodiversity in a dome as are many contemporary zoos and aquaria.

Whether society will ultimately accept ersatz nature as the real thing may be besides the point however. The real questions move beyond form to function – will the ecosystem services be rendered intact? Is “domed” nature inevitably doomed, as it was in the 3 acre glass biosphere experiment, where, despite the heroic efforts of the 8 scientists inside, oxygen levels dropped from 21% to 14%, nitrous oxide concentrations were high enough to impair the brain, algae, vines, cockroaches and ants had population explosions, all the pollinators died, food became scarce and the extinction rates were so high that 19 out of 25 vertebrates were lost (Cohen and Tillman, 1996) ? What will the costs be relative to the benefits? Is it even technically feasible? G. Evelyn Hutchinson in his seminal paper, “Homage to Santa Rosalia, or Why Are There So Many Kinds of Animals” answered the question with a theory that is still considered controversial among ecologists. He contended that “there is species diversity partly because ecosystem complexity increasesstability”(Hutchinson, 1959). The concept of nature’s buffering services aiding humanity over the long haul may be contingent on the very biodiversity we are now wiping out.
III. Cognition -- The Mental Realm of Ideas, Ethics, Myths and So On.

There are many myths about what goes in nature: foundation stories, “Lost Eden” narratives, ethos and ethics debates, market, use value and economic arguments, cultural practice issues – as Candace Slater (1996, 451) says, “Nature is a noun with a necessary multiplicity of modifiers, if not a singular in desperate need of pluralization. Amazonian nature isn’t Californian or Japanese nature, except on the very broadest of levels.” With so many definitions of nature, it becomes hard to decide what in nature can be exploited and what should be saved. But this may be beside the point.

Lost in this debate about “the nature of nature” is an understanding of how, even if we could decide what is “natural” and what “un-natural”, the dichotomization of “degradation” and “recuperation” when applied to “nature” really affects the way we conceptualize it and hence limit our possibilities for interacting with it. By focusing on nature as something “out there” to be used or protected, we ignored the hidden dimensions of the interplay between human and non-human beings and systems that make up the world around us. But in conceiving of “everything as natural”, we lose insight into what Faustian bargains we have made that can lead to our own destruction. We ignore the value of “taboos” that warn us away from meddling, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, with forces that will escape our control (Mander, 1991) and we lose sight of the chief benefit of transcendent human culture which is not just “a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity [whose] corruption invokes calamity” as Wendell Berry reminds us. “A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.” (Wendell Berry, 1977 p. 238 in Sources). Those who would see humans as just another group of competing animals miss the stewardship ethic, present in the many “Flood and Ark” myths, which is perhaps our most promising behavioral adaptation.

There are advantages to mixing nature and civilization in our minds of course. For example, it is now being recognized that among the most important “nature” hotspots on the planet are “urban areas”, commonly written off as “un-natural” spaces (Botkin and Beverage, 1997). Ironically, in the urban landscape, a huge amount of biodiversity exists and with it the possibility to use our built environment as a kind of modern ark (Croake, 1998). As urban development encroaches on previously unmanaged landscapes many issues, ideological and epistemological, emerge and are played out in the context of urban construction and environmentalists are discovering that “cities aren’t so bad after all”. But in celebrating the tenacity of non-humans that survive in our concrete jungles we carelessly toss away any notion of the “sacredness” of wilderness that led us to protect unmanaged buffer zones whose ecosystem services are invaluable and irreplaceable.

Environmentalism Present, occurring at a time of rampant urbanization and globalization, must, of course, include ideas and ideologies of nature as they unfold in urban and urbanizing regions. Under the rubric of agro-ecology it includes a notion of agricultural zones as potential sites of biodiversity restitution (The State of the World, 2002). It assumes a world in which people, their effects and concerns, are everywhere, but in which people might not be (must not be?) so bad after all. It contains development paradoxes such as the idea that many of Africa’s environmental dilemmas are not caused by overpopulation, but by underpopulation. (Djibril Diallo, chief spokesman, UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa has said "Of all the myths about Africa prevailing in the West, none is propagated with more vigor and regularity than the notion that overpopulation is a central cause of African poverty....Indeed, in many African regions the problem is underpopulation."[75]; still it should be noted that Africa’s population, 100 million in 1900, is now over 800 million and expanding at the fastest mean annual growth rate of any other continent, 2.9%, expected to reach 1.6 billion in the next quarter century according to the American Museum of Natural History, (Slack, 2003)[76], so it is difficult to understand how African productivity could decline because of underpopulation with an 8 fold increase over the last century. Population distribution may provide a better answer as rural depopulation has led to profit crises everywhere – see Wallerstein, 1997, also Sen, Gita (1994)).

Environmentalism Present contains powerful critiques of the neo-Malthusian scares of Environmentalism past. It blames much environmental degradation on poverty, and blames poverty on a lack of political and economic freedom (Sen, 1999). By looking at (and even celebrating) how nature is constructed and manifested, recreated and displayed in “the built environment” -- cities, parks, theme parks, zoos, botanical gardens, eco-villages, business and residential developments and other active “cultural landscapes” (some recognized by the IUCN! – Bridgewater and Bridgewater, 2002), “environmentalism present” differs from the wave of environmentalism that became mainstream in the last century, with its popular focus on “the wild”, on bald eagles, whales and redwood trees and edenic spaces of refuge. Environmentalism present hopes to preserve or reclaim the “hidden natures” that environmentalism past would have shuddered to call nature at all. It contains a wide body of literature that pardons or exalts the status of these hybrid natures, increasingly cast in utilitarian cloth as “ecosystem services” which, like Sherlock Holme’s purloined letter – are concealed in plain view all around us but sustain our lives. It embraces the idea of a socially constructed nature, and recognizes that cultures produce particular landscapes that evolve from particular ideologies of nature. Environmentalism present makes tangible the “reality of nonhuman features and phenomena” that modern life depends on (Anne Spirn, Ibid, 448). It accepts offshore and mountain-range farms of tall white wind turbines as “green”, and applauds vats of algae and bacteria churning out fuel and foodstuff as being a form of “cooperation with nature”. By making heretofore invisible nature visible, even as visible nature, viewed from space, gets fragmented out of existence, environmentalismpresent presents the hopeful fantasy that planners will have a better idea, when confronted with nature in the age of global urbanization, of what to do and how to go about it.

Capitalism: The Defining Myth of Our Age?
According to Daly, the orthodox growth economics that define Capitalism are a "generalization of the chain-letter swindle… the current beneficiaries of the swindle, those at the beginning of the chain, try hard to keep up the illusion among those doubters at the end who are beginning to wonder if there are really sufficient resources in the world for the game to continue very much longer…" (p. 9 Steady State economics). Wallerstein (1997) agreed and argued that nobody wants to foot the bill at the end of the thermodynamic chain. Maxwell's demon does not exist to reorder and add value to the high entropy outputs of accumulation, he pointed out. According to the logic of the Capitalist system, environmental cleanup and restoration proposals (turning high entropy states back into useful low entropy states),

"are indeed too costly, by and large, if we define the issue in terms of maintaining the present average rate of profit. They are too costly by far. Given the deruralization of the world and its already serious effect upon the accumulation of capital, the implementation of significant ecological measures, seriously carried out, could well serve as the coup de grace to the viability of capitalist world economy." (p. 4)

"In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (CSD, 1942), Schumpeter presented his paradoxal thesis that capitalism will destroy its own foundation, not by failure but by its success", say Albrecht and Gobbin (2001) in "Schumpeter and the Rise of Modern Environmentalism". But nobody knows what will be built on the shifting and eroded sands that remain.

They say that Capitalism, fleeing its own mortally wounding internal contradictions, rather than evolving naturally into the Socialist Utopia that Marx and Engels predicted, uses two mechanisms to survive 1) the spatial fix and 2) the many headed hydra metamorphosis[77]. The spatial fix is akin to Timothy Weiskel’s perpetual 4th act of the colonialist eco-drama (Weiskel 1987) referred to in Chapter 1. Capitalism, unable to consume and transform natural resources without regulation on home soil, simply migrates to areas with lax or no regulations. This spatial fix is one of the underlying ideas of dependency and underdevelopment theory (Myrdal, 1957, Gunder Frank, 1975) – in the zero-sum game of resource extraction and utilization, for the developed countries to continue their prosperity, another region must suffer the losses in ecosystem services that underpin the profit margins of the extractive or polluting industry. But this cannot continue indefinitely. “Capitalism's transformation of the earth undermines its own social reproduction at the same time as it endangers the planet's capacity to support human life” affirmed Immanuel Wallerstein recently (1999, 2002). From this perspective, the contradiction between capitalism's relentless expansion and biospheric sustainability suggests, as Wallerstein has been arguing for some time now, that we are living not in an age of globalization but rather in an "age of transition" from one historical system to another.

On the other hand, the many headed hydra school believes this new system will in fact be "industrial ecology". It is this second fix that we see emerging in the “developed countries” and in the logic of “sustainable development – the “kinder gentler” capitalism that George Bush Sr. talked about when he dubbed himself the “environmental president” – a supposedly green capitalism that embraces industrial ecology and makes its profits in the old Fordist way – by articulating economies and ending disarticulated accumulation (DeJanvry, 1981) increasing the wages and welfare of its working class (like the 5 dollar day) so they can recycle those dollars right back to the company. Green capitalism is clever – in Tom Sawyer fashion it tries to get the consumer to pay not only for the goods her consumes but for the recycling of the containers and materials and effluents. As Tony Freiji, CEO of Wadi Holdings, a major agroindustrial corporation in Egypt told me, “I would never separate my own garbage. It is a waste of my time. Here in Egypt we have a class of people called the Zabaleen who make their living sorting the garbage we throw out. Somehow in countries like Germany they have fooled the average consumer into wasting their precious time doing it.” If Capital can continue to pass the buck to the consumer and somehow make a cleaner healthier environment profitable (as Arif's "Gateway to Profitable Environmental Compliance" presentation for the World Bank suggests) then Capitalism may well survive, even if a vast number of species and ecosystems and poor people do not.


But as prize-winning Egyptian Economist Galil Amin (1998) writes with bitter irony,

"Egyptian landowners of the 1930s and 1940s knew quite well, and were often even ready to admit that the Egyptian peasant was the real source of their prosperity. In the eyes of today's ruling elite, however, the Egyptian peasant, along with the industrial laborer and the government employee, are something of a burden and a nuisance. Such people only eat and drink and reproduce, while burdening the state budget with their incessant demands for food subsidies which inevitably reduce what is available to spend on improving the country's infrastructure. The children of these lowly beings encroach on the beautiful beaches bringing such noise and ugliness with them that the beaches become almost uninhabitable. In short, as far as the newly portrayed upper class is concerned, the great majority of the Egyptian population have no real justification for living at all, and the world would be a much better place without them." (p. 144).

This sentiment is certainly echoed in the response the Bush Administration gave to victims of Hurricane Katrina and in the way World Governments are approaching the AIDS epidemic. But it may not be merely Capitalism that we need fear.

Karl Polanyi (1944) wrote a classic book called "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time" in which he described the greatest change to come over Europe some two centuries ago that has since transformed the rest of the world and, recently, our mainstream approach to environmentalism. This change, he insisted, was not the advent of capitalism. Nor was it the enlightenment, or advances in science and technology. According to Polanyi, it was the creation of 'the market system' in which, for the first time "the market engulfed such things as agricultural land and human labor which had not been considered marketable commodities until then." (Amin, 1998, p. 170). Indeed, this system is distinguished from all other ways of relating to the environment by its insistence that everything has a price and is thus tradeable in transactions of buying and selling. For Polyani, Capitalism and Socialism were both to be considered mere variants of this overarching conceptual philosophy, both have caused their social and environmental holocausts and famines, and this is why many radical environmentalists hold no hope for either approach to solve our environmental woes. But there are many others in both world systems of government who believe that the market (or government control of the market) can be used very effectively to preserve environmental values, once they are priced properly.

Story Telling – Plurivocity vs. Grand Narratives

In Environmentalism Past it was assumed that if we just had all the right information we would see the error of our ways and make amends. This linear Positivist Enlightenment narrative (Lyotard, 1984; Thachankary, 1992; Boje, 1995 )is cast into doubt by the realities of Environmentalism Present in the Information Age. Our greater sophistication (in terms of obtaining sheer quantities of information) is merely giving ever greater armaments to an expanded number of ideological positions. Despite the green gloss, our ideas about nature and our environment and what and how to preserve what we value (if we could even figure out what we value, let alone price it) are perhaps more confused than ever.

At the dawn of contemporary Environmental Economics, Ayers and Kneese (1969) applied the first and second laws of thermodynamics to economic models and by using the argument that all economic activity involves a transformation of matter and must conform to the law of conservation of mass and energy, argued that externalities “are a necessary outcome of all production and consumption processes” (Weinberg and Newbold, 2002). Similarly Ernst Worrell writes: “Historically, society and industry have operated as an open system, transforming resources to products or services and emitting wastes and pollutants to the environment at all stages of the life cycles.” Bhaskar Nath, Luch Hens and David Pimentel also believe that “it is hard to find any human activity or intervention for economic development that has been beneficial, benign or cost-free to the natural environment" (quoted in Desrochers, 2002, p. 1)

But in “Does It Pay to Be Green? Some Historical Perspective” Pierre Desrochers, (2002) takes on these arguments and those of such authors as Richard Florida and Derek Davison (in a book sponsored by Resources for the Future) and Paul Hawken and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins (in their best-seller Natural Capitalism), who claim that “Since the dawn of the industrial age, the goals of economic growth and enhanced environmental quality have been at odds” (Florida and Davidson 2001: 82-83) and that traditional capitalism is a "’financially profitable [but] nonsustainable aberration in human development' rooted in wasteful practices that result in ecological strain causing not only the loss of forests, topsoil, fisheries and freshwater, but also ‘poverty, hunger, malnutrition, rampant disease, crime, corruption, lawlessness, anarchy and refugee populations’”. Descrochers critizes the “widespread belief among contemporary writers on sustainability that past economic development was characterized by wasteful practices.” Citing “numerous cases where the profit motive led to so-called ‘win-win’ situations where firms improved their bottom line while reducing their environmental impact” he observes that “the incentives behind such behavior are as old as market economies”. His book goes on to provide historical evidence to make the case that it has always paid to be green.

Jaffe et. Al. (1995), also dispute that production always has to be dirty and depleting. They point out the logic that gave firms the idea that they had to make a tradeoff between environmental health and profit:

“Natural resource endowments have been a particularly important determinant of trading patterns (see, for example, Edward E. Leamer 1984). Having recognized this, we note that when a firm pollutes, it is essentially using a natural resource (a clean environment), and when a firm is compelled or otherwise induced to reduce its pollutant emissions, that firm has, in effect, seen its access to an important natural resource reduced. Industries that lose the right to pollute freely may thus lose their comparative advantage, just as the copper industry in developed countries lost its comparative advantage as copper resources dwindled in those regions. The result is a fall in exports.” (P. 143)

But they contest this conclusion vigorously, saying that although

“the conventional wisdom is that environmental regulations impose significant costs, slow productivity growth, and thereby hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete in international markets [and] this loss of competitiveness is believed to be reflected in declining exports, increasing imports, and a long-term movement of manufacturing capacity from the United States to other countries, particularly in 'pollution-intensive' industries…under a more recent, revisionist view, environmental regulations are seen not only as benign in their impacts on international competitiveness, but actually as a net positive force driving private firms and the economy as a whole to become more competitive in international markets” (p. 133)

If Jaffe et. al. and Desrochers are correct, then why does anybody pollute at all? The usual answer seems to be based on time horizons and scale – the very argument given by Meadows et. al. in “The Limits to Growth” with their space-time graph where they claim, “Although the perspectives of the world’s people vary in space and time, every human concern falls somewhere on the space-time graph. The majority of the world’s people are concerned with matters that affect only family and friends over a short period of time. Others look further ahead in time or over a larger area – a city or anation. Only a very few people have a global perspective that extends far into the future.” (quoted in Goldfarb, 1997, p. 50).

We come back to the idea that "pollution is somebody's profit" and that environmentalism, past or present, is a subversive activity that exposes the “hidden costs” and "dirty secrets" of certain power holders and that environmentalism's push for full cost accounting implies that somebody has consciously been trying to hide them. Because if it is true that the same incentives have always existed for Clean Production (CP) and industrial ecology as Desrochers and Jaffe insist, then the only conclusion we can draw is that human shortsightedness and greed have always been behind environmental destruction. Buckminster Fuller was a little more generous when he stated that unsustainable practices may have been understandable until around 1973 (when we began a serious appraisal and use of renewable energy) but that,

“it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete . . . It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human life advantaging and environmental controlling.” (Fuller, 1981)

Fuller, like Schumpeter, believed in technology as the way out (assuming that technology was the way in in the first place). He wrote

"While it is fairly simple to write a list of socioeconomic conditions we consider to be fundamental to omnihumanity's sustainable physical and metaphysical success, we must remember that our grand strategy is based on producing the artifacts that will induce the right behaviors rather than depending on politically enacted and enforced reforms." (Ibid, p. 252).

During the past few years, a heated debate has arisen in the United States revolving around these views. (Jafee, 1995 P. 133) A paradox emerges here – on the one hand it is assumed by those who believe environmental regulations are a net tax on the economy that in the past it was harder for firms to be green, and that improvements simply await the introduction of technological innovations that can make being green cost competitive. This “technological fix” view puts pollution and degradation behind us. Technoptimists like Bjorn Lomborg even go so far as to tout the virtues of renewable energy resources when claiming “the evidence clearly shows that we are NOT headed for a major energy crisis." There is "plenty of energy” he says, “there are many options using renewable energy sources. Today, they make up a vanishingly small part of the global energy production, but this can and probably will change. The cost of both solar energy and wind energy has dropped by 94-98 percent over the last 20 years such that they have become much closer to being strictly profitable.” (p. 135) But his sudden embrace of Green Technology in order to defend his utopian thesis that there is nothing to worry about comes after he spends an entire chapter putting down the claims of renewable energy advocates, saying dismissive things like “Virtually every year, Lester Brown makes much of the fact that the use of renewable energy sources grows much faster than that of oil… But such growth rate comparisons are misleading because, with wind making up just 0.05 percent, double-digit growth rates are not all that hard to achieve. In 1998, the amount of energy in the 2 percent oil increase was still 323 times bigger than the 22 percent increase in wind energy. Even in the unlikely event that the wind power growth rate could continue, it would take 46 consecutive years of 22 percent growth for wind to outgrow oil.” (p. 131)

This could be muddled thinking or it could be part of the disinformation campaign that Beder (1998) talks about. Either way it paralyzes meaningful change in the present because it tells us “the future will take care of itself. It is an inevitably brighter future than today, people like Lomborg contend, so all we have to do is let the invisible hand do its work and no matter the suffering we must endure to get there, paradise awaits. It is a decidedly eschatological, linear, Judeo Christian view.

It’s counterpart is equally eschatological and Judeo-Christian though (White, 1967). Its epistemology harkens to notions of lost Edens and Golden Ages. We look to the past for examples of “traditional practices” that were benign or gentler on the earth than modern mechanized industrial processes and we are taught to see new technologies as ever more threatening to ecosystems and human welfare. In this view, popularized by writers such as Jeremy Rifkin (Rifkin, 1980, 1984) the problem is seen as the inevitable result of commodification and the pressures of mass production. This view puts pollution and degradation still ahead of us, driven by the relentless demand of rising population. The end result isArmageddon. Bracketed by paradises lost and paradises to come it is no wonder that people find it hard to focus on what needs to be done today.

There is certainly support for the “golden past” view in agriculture. Harriet Friedmann’s, “Modernity and the Hamburger: Cattle and Wheat in Ecological and Culinary Change” shows that Science has not always and need not always create systems of simplification and degradation. She cites the example of English High Farming and how a mixed system of animals and crops kept the land fertile. She points to the problem of landscape simplification and its effect on the environment and points the finger at modernity for making this faulty system the worldwide norm. The “back to the land” movements and the neo-indigenous practice hybridizations of permaculture and biodynamic agriculture could be interpreted as merely a mixed bag of outcomes and best practices from global human trials and errors, but they are most often characterized as some mystical return to a mythical past when wiser forefathers and foremothers (who allegedly exist in indigenous cultures) used superior technologies (in the sustainability sense) and knew how to live more “gently on the earth”.

One can argue that in the long run we must return to mixed use farming not just to keep up profits but to be able to use the land at all. Environmental optimists shake their fingers in an “I told you so fashion” telling those who would despoil nature that the transition to the green economy is inevitable. But by that token, as Bridge an McManus (2000) inform us, Marxian economists have told us that capitalism will inevitably surrender to socialism. The problem is that by then the robber barons, true to their name, will have stolen everything the land has to offer and made a quick exit. And for some theorists that, in a nutshell, is what environmental degradation is really all about: theft.

Contemporary Egyptian scientists, like Environmental Engineer Dr. Salah El Haggar, who lives in one of the most polluted cities on earth, writes, “Environmental degradation is the exhaustion of the world’s natural resources; land, air, water, soil, etc. It occurs due to crimes committed by humans against nature…” (El Haggar and Gowini, 2004, p. 334)

It is rare to hear scientists make such bold statements. We are trained to beat around the bush, to disavow conspiracy theories, to soften our criticisms of those whose practices are forfeiting our childrens’ future or condemning other non-humans to extinction. It is considered extremely impolite to point the finger at specific firms or individuals. This is the job of radicals. For academics and politicians it is expected that the rhetoric will be blameless and generalized. But at a certain point one cannot help a certain amount of moral indignation. El Haggar continues, “To most investors over-exploitation of natural resources is more profitable in the short run, due to cheap means of disposing wastes, avoiding costs of waste treatment and the exclusion of social losses in cost calculations. However, in the long run natural resources will be depleted and the losses will be irreversible. Due to the severity of environmental degradation in the Arab world, the World Bank and the Mediterranean Environmental Technical Assistance Program (METAP) have conducted studies to present a cost assessment of environmental degradation” (Ibid).

But even though the World Bank/METAP COED studies have put an initial price tag on Environmental Degradation that demonstrates a net loss to the Egyptian economy of 3.2 to 6.4% of GDP (as much as 19 Billion Egyptian Pounds per year, equivalent to nearly 4 billion dollars) (Sarraf and Larsen, 2002) these costs are not borne by society as a whole. As the World Bank points out, discussing the costs and benefits of practices that affect the environment, “The poor are rarely the main beneficiaries of these changes and are often left without alternatives or compensation. Thus, although it is conventional to speak of tradeoffs between conservation and economic development or poverty alleviation, in many case the actual tradeoff may be between large-scale economic development and local impoverishment because natural ecosystems have not been conserved.” (World Bank, Directions in Development, 2002 p. 3)

Current Approaches

The current approach permeating the environmental movement is a "let's work within the capitalist framework now that it is the only game in town" ideology. In our chapter on environmentalism past I suggested that the dominant theme for the first wave of the environmental movement was the “rights” approach. Environmentalism was bundled up with civil rights, women’s rights and anti-war efforts that used moral indignation as leverage. In his encyclopedic review "The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics" (1989) Roderick Nash placed modern environmentalism within the mainstream of American liberalism (McEvoy, 1990). Today, with these approaches losing efficacy, environmentalists are turning to the toolkits of their former adversaries and competitors. We thus see a heavy emphasis on environmental economics, environmental services and environmental justice in approaches used by the second wave environmentalists, wherein all are trying to argue with, as Lebanese Environmental Economist Marwan Owaygen puts it, "dollars and cents rather than emotions and common sense". (Owaygen, 2005, pers. comm.)

Environmental Economics: The Market Approach

There is historical evidence for the idea that the market is and always has been the prime determinant of environmental policy, regardless of the political or ideological climate of the time. In other words, if economic circumstances favor (or at least permit) a given policy, it will filter into the mainstream from the background noise of dissent or ethical concern, but if there are no sets of powerholders who can derive economic benefits from said policy it will remain in the realm of marginalized or repressed ideas. By conceiving of the market as the driver of all policy, advocates of the market approach believe that the best way to solve environmental problems is not to champion the “rights” of living creatures and systems, but simply to calculate their net value through such devices as "Marginal Willingness to Pay" and other decidedly anthropocentric metrics. If the case can be made that it is more "efficient" to preserve ecosystems and maintain wildlife in their "born free" state (Adamson, 1968, 1987) then they will be left alone. Otherwise they will have to be brought into some form of price-capturing captivity, either by privatizing the commons or by creating managed parks and zoos, wildlife ranches and environmental-service-providing buffer zones. Freedom – in this case from human interference, management or exploitation – is an ideal that must be bought and sold at a competitive price.

The idea that freedom has a market price has also been extended by some scholars to other movements that appear to have driven policy changes favoring welfare and justice. For example, Domar (1970) used purely economic arguments to explain “the causes of slavery or serfdom” and economist Paul Krugman recently summarized his points agreeing that “there’s no point in enslaving or enserfing a man unless the wage you would have to pay him if he was free is substantiallyabove the cost of feeding, housing, and clothing him”. He states ironically “why hasn't indentured servitude made a comeback in the modern era? Yes, I know, human rights and all that - but if it was profitable to have indentured servants inthe modern world, I'm sure that Richard Scaife's think tanks would have no trouble finding justifications, and assorted Christian groups would explain why it's God's will.” (Krugman, 2003; The Washington Post calls Scaife the "the funding father of the right").

Krugman's logic certainly pertains to the environmental crisis. As Bill Moyer's pointed out on Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award in 2004[78], the Bush administration, having found that it is still quite profitable to degrade the environment at the expense of human and non-human rights championed by environmental justice advocates and deep ecologists respectively, have supported assorted Christian groups and are openly invoking God's will to justify an approaching ecological Armageddon.

Krugman’s economic perspective dismisses “human rights and all that” as being secondary to the evil machinations of power holders and assumes that all moral or ethical advances are predicated on the right economic conditions. This has been considered true in many rights movements. Along these lines Loyola College economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo has argued that the Civil War had very little to do with abolition sentimentality although he notes “One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States.” Still he argues that the emancipation of the blacks was more an effect of the rising economic power of northern industrialism which, in essence, introduced another kind of slavery to the American labor market that worked more efficiently through subsistence wages and without an overt racial bias. “Labor market protectionism was a basis for Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery” DiLorenzo claims. In this rather cynical view Abolitionist protests lent ideological support to a transformation that would have occurred anyway (see Engerman, 1986 for more on economic grounds for ending slavery and Carlyle, 1849 for economic grounds for perpetuating it).

A similar argument is made with regard to women’s liberation – some authors (LaFargue, 1900; Mitchell, 1971; Hayden, 1982, Cowan, 1983; Cohen, 1984; Hayden, 1995; Albee and Perry, 1998; Barnett, 2004) argue that the growing American economy and its global followers demanded a rising percentage of white collar women in the labor market (blue collar or working class women had been “liberated” from the home to work for hundreds of years in Western societies without gaining any political rights whatsoever), and that both new domestic technology, mass produced at a reasonable cost (washing machines for clothes and dishes, electric ironing boards, sewing machines) and the availability of women of color and immigrant women for cheap domestic services made it cost effective for white women to enter the market. This also created a new form of “slavery” (drudgery) that belied the promised emancipation (Zimmerman, 1982; Cowan, 1983; Hubbard, 1983). As one can see in popular films about the period from 1950 through 1975, such as Julia Robert’s “Mona Lisa Smile”, the highly educated class of ivy league graduated household reproducers could not be released into areas of managerial labor assistance without attendant improvements in “rights” and “status” and so a show was put on suggesting, by proxy, that as this elite group of women were “emancipated”, so were their struggling sisters. This view, described in extremis by Bob Black in his influential essay, “The abolition of Work”, grows out of a classic essay by women’s rights activist Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s nephew, called “The Right to be Lazy” (Lafargue, 1883). Both authors question the notion that work can ever be emancipatory; Lafargue, in “The Woman Question” (1904) went so far as to say “… Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and launched her into social production to emancipate her, but to exploit her more ferociously than man…” (p.11) Simone de Beauvoir held similar views and a despair that liberation movements are dependent on economic factors and production technology; the implication is that any gains in rights or freedoms can be quickly erased by a new economic regime (or the return to an old one):

"I never cheished any illusion of changing woman's condition; it depends on the future of labour in the world; It will change significantly only at the price of a revolution in production. That is why I avoided falling into the trap of 'feminism"' (de Beauvoir quoted in Mitchell 1973, p. 65).

Meanwhile, contemporary authors such as Hubbard and Zimmerman warn us that women must have political and financial control over new technologies and must gain control of the design and creation phases of technological development for there to be any meaningful change or “women will find themselves replaying a familiar scenario in which new technologies serve to reinforce old values” (Zimmerman, 1982, p. 355).

In a similar cynical vein some authors believe that now that we are turning to the market, the supposed extension of “rights” to ecosystems and non-humans that emerged during the first wave of environmentalism, inspired by Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, has likewise failed, producing only the illusion of freedom from inevitable destructive encroachment and exploitation. Indeed Environmentalism Present looks a lot like the early Conservation movement, merely nuanced by new dollar values for "intrinsic values" based on Marginal Willingness to Pay (MWTP) calculations. Indeed despite all the talk about "animal liberation" (Singer, 1990) and "deep ecology" (Sessions, 1995) nature, perhaps doomed to be eternally "feminized" as the powerless victim of the market's rapist tendancies (Merchant, 1982) is also replaying that "familiar scenario in which new technologies merely serve to reinforce old values." Without a true “revolution in production technology” that could make exploitation of key natural resources irrelevant, some authors, such as Fazlun Khalid (2002a, 2002b) who spoke at the Muslim Convention on Sustainable Development at Johanessberg, and Val Plumwood (2002) suggest that despite all the international protocols and regulations we are actually moving backwards , or, in Plumwood’s most startling metaphor, ahead to an even worse future:

“in the ecological parallel to the Titanic story, we have reached the stage in the narrative where we have received the iceberg warning, and have made the remarkable decision to double the engine speed to Full Speed Ahead and go below to get a good night’s rest.” (Introduction, p.1)

Khalid stated the Third World Perspective (one often ignored in the master narratives of the west) at the “parallel event” at the earth summit (the one that world media largely neglected):

“poverty and excessive consumption put enormous pressure on the environment and sustainable development remains largely theoretical for the majority of the world’s population of 6000 million people. In a sentence, in spite of all the talking, report writing, the legislating and institution building, very little progress has been made on the ground.” (2002a, p. 1)

If we turn to Amin again we read an Egyptian perspective that it isn't really Westernization per se that is plaguing the countries of the South (the greatest losers of environmental services and quality in the 21st century)

"it may also be that something more ominous is taking place. I personally am inclined to think that Karl Polanyi was right in putting so much emphasis on the emergence and spread of 'the market culture'. If this is as applicable to Egypt as it is elsewhere, it would mean that we are now witnessing the gradual encroachment of something much more sinister than open-door policies, capitalism and westernization. It could be nothing less than a process of metamorphosis in which everything is gradually being turned into a commodity, the object of a commercial transaction, including man's very soul." (p. 174)

Econometric Models Driving Policy


Yet numbers are so neat and equations resolve themselves so nicely, surely econometrics is the way to make sense of this mess and fix things. Numeric models impose a legibility on the chaotic landscape. In discussing why “…certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed” James Scott (1998) elaborated on Korzybski’s (1931) warning that “the map is not the territory”; yet, we continue to use abstractions to make predictions about what is really going on out there in the real world. Many authors have noted that World Bank Development policies, particular those in the 1992 report, seemed to have emerged from a confidence in one model in particular -- a fictive ‘Environmental Kuznet’s Curve” (EKC) that may not be empirically demonstrable at all. The EKC is an inverted U-shape relation with resource use or waste production on the Y axis and income on the X; as income rises consumption and externalities initially increase, but at some point, with affluence, they theoretically decrease because inefficiencies and residuals can be internalized as institutions and technologies and expertise grow in quality, consumer preferences change and environmental quality increases in value and there are increasing returns to scale for abatement techniques. (See Andreoni and Levenson, 2001, Arrow et. al., 1995)

Many people, from businessmen and economists to policy makers have been applying the logic of the hypothetical environmental Kuznets curve to argue that economic growth is somehow a panacea for environmental degradation. The World Bank declared “economic growth is essential for environmental stewardship” in its 1992 World Development Report and GATT (1992) delivered a similar policy message derived from the EKC literature (Deacon and Norman, 2004). Statements appear in influential and even peer reviewed journals like “existing environmental regulation, by reducing economic growth, may actually be reducing environmental quality." (Bartlett , Wall Street Journal, 1994)) and "in the end the best – and probably the only – way to attain a decent environment in most countries is to become rich," (Beckerman , World Development, 1992). These ideas are extant and seem irresponsibly close to statements made by the unabashedly anti-environmentalist, libertarian LM party member, financial journalist, Daniel Ben-Ami[79]. He represents a group of thinkers critical of Environmental Economics, not because the don't like the idea of putting a price tag on everything, but because they think shadow prices might be damaging to progress and thus lead to greater injustices.

One of the most striking but least noticed aspects of the rise of environmentalism is the way that it has helped to redefine economics. Economic production and consumption are viewed in a fundamentally different way than they were before environmentalism became central to the dominant worldview. Environmentalist assumptions that, at the very least, should be the subject of debate are unquestioningly accepted.Environmentalism has become central to the mainstream outlook, rather than the particular property of green parties or organisations. This development isn't just important at the level of ideas. A gloomy view of economic development plays an important role in holding back human potential. At its starkest, the acceptance of the idea that economic growth has to be curtailed is a tragedy in a world where billions of people still live in dire poverty. According to the latest available figures from the World Bank, 2.7 billion were living on less than $2 (£1.10) a day in 2001 of which 1.1 billion lived on less than a dollar… The implementation of environmentalist economics means consigning most of the world's inhabitants to poverty. Even in the developed world there is still a long way to go before material want can be abolished. In the third world the consequences of 'sustainable development', holding back economic growth, are even starker.” (Ben-Ami, 2004)

This popular attack on the supposed outcomes of environmental economics is driven by faith in the EKC model, which looks so elegant on paper. The irony is that the very "sustainable development" that was supposed to be an outcome of proper applications of the model is now being used against itself. This shows us how far what Daly calls "Hypergrowthmania" has gotten out of hand. This is a disease in which, even if the EKC were true, the boosters would look at the tail end of the inverted U curve and complain that the mature and steady state of sustainable development, once achieved, was still inadequate and even dangerous, because not only had environmental degradation fallen to zero, along with traditional Kuznetian income disparities, but growth had stopped too, and this must be a bad thing.

“It is important, therefore, to understand the nature and causes of the environmental Kuznets curve before adopting such far reaching, and to many quite alarming, implications for policy" argue Andreoni and Levinson, (2001,p.1)

Asking the "rising tide to lift all ships" ignores that the ebbing tide elsewhere leaves all the others stranded – in a global system there can be no high tide without a low tide in another part of the system. Due to the global nature of commodity production and consumption and attendant residuals, when one area cleans itself up, the materials balance nature of waste disposal or resource consumption suggests that in a zero sum game, one region’s environmental improvements are another's degradation (this harkens back to Gunder Frank’s Development of Underdevelopment Theory).

The failure of empirical studies to bear out the predictions of the EKC thus relates to the “spatial fix” of capitalism that we spoke of earlier – even when the curve seems to apply to an OECD nation, global analysis shows that rising income has not led to aggregate environmental improvements – instead of using their wealth to clean up their act, most polluting industries simply move their operations overseas (Suri and Chapman, 1998). This is shown powerfully by the graphs in Richmond and Kaufmann’s draft paper for the Boston University Center for Energy and Environmental Studies (2005) and argued elogently by Andreoni and Levinson (1998). Even if a rich country could show environmental improvement with rising income, they argue, “the process of environmental improvement will not be indefinitely replicable, as the world’s poorest countries will never have even poorer countries to which they can export their pollution.” (p. 2)

Despite this, many economists from the "third world", such as Tareik Selim of Egypt, aren't convinced they are at the bottom of the "pyramid scheme" and continue to believe it is worth facing "Kuznet's challenge", prescribing "patience" and "tax and subsidy" reform (Selim, 2004, p. 217). Nonetheless in an era when ecosystem services are being horribly degraded there may not be much that patience can promise or financial or social reforms can achieve. Selim recognizes this, and sees that the economic models and legislative maneuvers may paint a rosier picture than what is happening on the ground, saying

"Egypt's position in terms of social entitlements and livelihood is superior on paper. Access to water supply is 97% (compared to a world average of 80%)…this may imply that social entitlements in Egypt are not lacking in access but may be lacking in their performance. That is, although access to a water supply may be evident, yet water quality and water pollution remain a serious problem… from a social welfare viewpoint, Sen't entitlements are met whereas Sen's functionings are not met for the case of the Egyptian economy essentially due to lack of resource capabilities." (p. 217).


Panyatou (1993) looks at time series data and suggests that even where the EKC does apply it certainly is not monotonic and may have more to do with structural changes in industry than any drive for a cleaner environment per se.

Much of the intuitive appeal of the EKC comes from a perceived “income elasticity of environmental demand” – the assumption being that as people get wealthier they begin to care more about the quality of their environment (Borghesi, 1999). This assumption is resisted by studies in the Environmental Justice literature showing that poor people do care deeply about their environment but are simply unable to do much about it (El Haggar, op. cit.) This is a very controversial area that derives its basic arguments from a misreading of Maslow. EKC defenders will often say things such as "nobody can think about the environment while they are struggling to put food on the table" or "environmentalism is a luxury that developing countries cannot afford". But Egyptian environmental engineering professor Salah El Haggar feels quite differently. He writes in his paper on "the Missing reform in the Alexandria Declaration":

"… the assumed reform plan can not be complete without the inclusion of environmental issues because environmental degradation will obstruct the reform movement. Members of society can not sustain endeavors of reform in the presence of a degrading environment.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs reveals that individuals tend to fulfill certain needs before others. (this is a basic tenet of economics too). The most fundamental needs are the physiological needs; oxygen, food, water, etc. anything that they need to survive. The other needs in order of importance to individuals are safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem, and finally at the peak of the hierarchy are self-actualization needs [Sarma and Van Der Hoek, 2004).
Environmental degradation prevents individuals from attaining their two most basic needs; physiological and safety and security. Due to depletion of natural resources such as air, soil, water, etc. people are less likely to have clean food, water or air. In addition the wide spread of disease and disruption of natural ecosystems does not provide a safe environment for people to live due to high risk of disease break-out or natural disasters; hence safety and security needs are also unfulfilled. These two basic needs are deficiency needs; if a deficiency occurs in any of them individuals would directly try to eliminate it. Therefore individuals will be reluctant to undergo any effort towards political, economical, social or cultural reform unless their basic needs are fulfilled and sustained." (p. 343)

The Economic Exit Strategy

"In my country, even for those of us who really care about our environment, the idea is spend as little as you have to, make as much money as quickly as you can, and get the hell out" – Nour, Nigerian Environmental Science student studying at the American University in Cairo

When people call environmental reforms a "luxury" what they may actually mean is that faced with environmental devastation and loss of ecosystem services people consider it a luxury to try to fight the system and press for political reforms that they have little faith in to begin with. Without land tenure and any guaranteed return on your investment in a given bioregion it is often more rational to play along with the system and accumulate as much capital as you can, even if this further aggravates the situation, so that you or your offspring can get out. It is not that the poor do not think of their environment – they think of little else. But seeing that they are overwhelmed by the rich and powerful, over whom they have no control, they are trying to get off the sinking ship as fast as they can, even if it means using one of the leaky lifeboats and paddling like hell. This partially explains why the former hunter-gatherer and swidden cultivators in Sumatra I visited in 1997 were eager to poach and help deforest their land, ruin their "protected areas" and let it all be converted to oil palm plantations, where they could work as day laborers. "This land is finished anyway" a group of poachers captured by the game wardens told me, "The trees and animals in these parks are only for tourists like you. We can't support our families protecting them. We now wish the whole forest were wiped out so we could get real paying jobs. We are hoping we can one day earn enough money to get to Singapore" they explained.

The economics of wildlife preservation, once wilderness and life have been thoroughly commodified, suggest that only a few glorified mega zoos with rare charismatic megafauna like the Kruger National Park will be able to pay their own bills and show a positive B/C ratio. The supposed appreciation for the environment that theoretically accompanies affluence hasn't brought in enough hard currency paying tourists coming to see Rawanda's remnant population of Mountain Gorillas at over $100 a pop to offset the profits made from resource exploitation or habitat conversion. So as for wildlife preservation in the years following the Council on Biodiversity’s agreement to slow the rates of extinction (euphemized as ‘biodiversity loss’) there is little optimism that treaties to protect wildlife or habitat will endure – whenever the economic conditions are right we see a resumption in everything from deforestation to the hunting of elephants and whales (Plumwood, op.cit.) Even where wildlife and wildlands are preserved, the sheer pressure on these fragment lands and populations makes them vulnerable to everything from edge effects and spread of disease brought in by humans or domestic animals to psychological stresses that increase mortality. Citing overuse of national parks, disturbance of wildlife and harassment through gorilla watching and whale watching and jeep safaris, critics believe that wildlife and scenic landscapes are merely serving as the wage earners of a new market based “nature company” approach (Price, 1999). Economics drives the exploitation of wildlife as surely as it does marginalized or enslaved human beings. The threat of extinction, however, makes a quantum difference.

“Biodiversity belongs to a special class of environmental degradation because it involves complex ecosystems the loss of which cannot be recovered by technological advances” argues Asafu-Adjay (2003) in “Biodiversity Loss and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis ”. He determines that even if an Environmental Kuznet’s curve could be demonstrated for other goods, such as forests or polluted areas, it is inappropriate for wildlife because ‘at the global level, there cannot be a turning point in the relationship as income increases.”

According to this view, any environmental “gains” we perceive may stem more from economic necessity than ideological correctness, and the circus of death-defying stunts performed by eco-tacticians such as Dave Foreman, Greenpeace, Paul Watson, Luna and decades of other intrepid do-gooders crusading on behalf of the environment may very well have amounted to little more than that – a spectacle used by the defenders of Capital to give the illusion of participatory democracy while behind the scenes some of the much vaunted reforms were inevitable anyway.

Ecosystem Services and Industrial Ecology: The Materials Balance Approach

One of the most arresting ideas to emerge out of the econometric approach to environmentalism is the notion of Ecosystem Services. It is interesting that as the leading superpower economies transition from industrial production economies to service economies their environmental rhetoric tracks their economic experience. Thus we have “Valuing Ecosystem Services”, a report written recently for America's National Research Council, the "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the first global survey of ecological services", and "Ecosystem Services: Benefits Supplied to Human Societies by Natural Ecosystems" by some of the luminaries in the field: Gretchen C. Daily, Susan Alexander, Paul R. Ehrlich, Larry Goulder, Jane Lubchenco, Pamela A. Matson, Harold A. Mooner, Sandra Postel, Stephen H. Schneider, David Tilman, George M. Woodwell. Most are biological scientists of some sort (Goulder is an economist), many of them are from Stanford, and were key figures in the first wave of Environmentalism. Now they are playing the numbers game too, trying to show that,

"The human economy depends upon the services performed "for free" by ecosystems. The ecosystem services supplied annually are worth trillions of dollars. Economic development that destroys habitats and impairs services can create costs to humanity over the long term that may greatly exceed the short-term economic benefits of the development."( P. 15)

The Environmental Services approach is the vastest attempt at full cost accounting, employing a complete materials balance approach, involving scientists from every discipline, including physicists, to calculate the energy and materials budgets of whole systems. It isn't that far away from early general equilibrium models for all that. Ayres and Kneese (1969) used the first and second laws of thermodynamics to prove that externalities were pervasive, "a necessary outcome of all production and consumption processes." Their use of physics was the crux of what became the seminal paper in environmental economics. The field itself is a hybrid field that evolved out of interdisciplinary collaboration. AUC's ecology professor Jeff Miller has stressed that the more inclusive cost-benefit analyses done in modern economics owe a lot to behavioral ecology (pers.comm). Ecologists have been developing models for decades that account for rational choice in organisms faced with survival dilemmas in uncertain environments. And Game Theory, now applied to multiple-equilibrium models in economics, was the outgrowth of a cybernetics developed by computer scientists and instantly applied by both military strategists and evolutionary biology. Life cycle analysis and Least Cost Solutions and literature on double dividends through price-based policy instruments all owe debts to linkages between disciplines to produce ever better world models.

Weinberg and Newbold point out in their review of the Environmental Economics Literature (2002) that as computer clock speed and capacity improve and interdisciplinary/integrated modeling research efforts expand, environmental economics simply becomes "the logical extension along a path leading from a fork in the road long forgotten." (p.28). Their point is simply that we should have been including the costs of environmental degradation and the benefits of environmental improvement and the value of ecosystem services in our analyses all along, but we simply didn't have the sophisticated modeling and technological methodologies and tools to do a good job. Now we do.

The call to clean up environmentalism using the “rational, scientific principles” of "hard science" has been invoked by The Economist recently too, in a cover article entitled, “Rescuing Environmentalism”. The article starts with this paragraph:

“THE environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest.” Those damning words come not from any industry lobby or right-wing think-tank. They are drawn from “The Death of Environmentalism”, an influential essay published recently by two greens with impeccable credentials. They claim that environmental groups are politically adrift and dreadfully out of touch.
“Mandate, regulate, litigate.” That has been the green mantra. And it explains the world's top-down, command-and-control approach to environmental policymaking.
What is really intriguing are efforts to value previously ignored “ecological services”, both basic ones such as water filtration and flood prevention, and luxuries such as preserving wildlife. At the same time, advances in environmental science are making those valuation studies more accurate. Market mechanisms can then be employed to achieve these goals at the lowest cost.
1) prices must be set correctly.
2) A proper price, however, requires proper information. So the second goal must be to provide it.
3) the third goal, the embrace of cost-benefit analysis.
Ex. The marginal cost of removing the last 5% of a given pollutant is often far higher than removing the first 5% or even 50%: for public policy to ignore such facts would be inexcusable.”
…by advocating data-based, analytically rigorous policies rather than pious appeals to “save the planet”, the green movement could overcome the scepticism of the ordinary voter. It might even move from the fringes of politics to the middle ground where most voters reside.
In 1817, David Ricardo, a pioneering economist, noted that abundance in nature was rarely rewarded: “where she is munificently beneficent she always works gratis.” But if nature pays, who then will pay for nature?”

Is the valuation of “ecosystem” or “ecological services” and the framing of water and climate regulation as “utilities” (a service for which people will pay money) really something new? Or is it simply that certain interest groups have always valued those services that help them run their business and underpriced the utilities for which they felt they need not pay? Foresters, for example, considered trees to be “timber”, valued in board feet. Trees that were not in demand could be sacrificed; those that brought in money would be replanted. Mariners saw the ocean as a cheap way to get fish. They didn’t care about coral reefs. But the tourism industry wants to save the coral reef because it is an asset to theireconomy. Once fishermen learn that the fish they depend on demands the presence of a healthy coral reef or mangrove swamp and that nobody else will pick up the tab of protecting these resources, it suddenly becomes a utility to them too.

We need to demystify the whole “environmentalism” shibboleth. By casting “nature” as the damsel in distress in a passion play about good versus evil we are unable to see that the utilities of nature have always been hotly contested and that the romantics are just as likely to destroy an ecosystem as to save it so long as they don’t too don't debate the utility that environment has to them or others. For example, many would be environmentalists would drain a swamp to make a meadow and sacrifice a junk yard to build a park even though the biodiversity index of the latter are far inferior to the marsh or junk yard (see Michael Hough, 1984).

Still, no matter what we think about "nature" and its services, without a real change in the very nature of resource extraction, production and residual technologies, most of the optimism that drives policy seems fanciful, based on utopian or cornucopian enthusiasm generated by neat models and elegant equations that continue to ignore the laws of physics and the processes of biology. Boulding and Jarrett (1966) warned us of the damage done by our "cowboy economy" and urged us to adopt a spaceman economy. We were supposed to learn to cherish the "life support system" of spaceship earth, and look upon environmental degradation with the same horror Tom Hanks, playing real life spaceman Jim Lovell, looked at the leaks in the Apollo 13 spacecraft. But rather than conceiving of spaceship earth as a materially closed but energetically open system with limits to growth and seeing the economy as a subset of a finite ecosystem whose life support systems needed to be protected at any cost, a different kind of spaceman economy has emerged – one that sees no diminishing of marginal utility or opportunity cost from leaking ecosystem services, indeed one in which the ecosystem of the earth is merely a subset of an infinitely expanding economy that can move ever outward into the infinite and unlimited regions of outerspace (Daly, Uneconomic Growth, 1999 p. 7, Peet, 2003). Once we've costed out the ecosystem services we can decide which to keep and which to replace. If, for example, "extractions from biodiversity's 'genetic library' account for annual increases in crop productivity of about 1 percent, currently valued at $1 billion…" then we can expect some billionaire to put in half a billion to save some area of biodiversity and reap the profit. But this will not protect other areas with species that are redundant or whose utility is marginal. As the Minister of Bahrain told his nephew when the latter was alarmed about the loss of the coral reefs and pearl industry "we have enough money from oil andconstruction. If we want pearls and coral again, we will simply buy a new reef." It is useless arguing that the coral reef won't come back in all its glory in the next couple of centuries no matter how much money is spent – the ecosystem services Bahrain may want to recreate – tourism appeal and pearl fisheries, can be recreated. They have already sunk old cargo boats to build artificial reefs for sport divers, and aquaculture pearls are now in vogue.

The better we get at recreating just those services we depend on for survival or for pleasure, the less we will see the need to protect the entire ecosystem. This is the danger of an ecosystem services model coupled with the challenge of building space stations and "terraforming" other planets. There is tremendous intellectual appeal to the ever expanding spaceman model; instead of looking at the earth from space and feeling its fragility we can again look out at the stars, now aided by the Hubble Telescope, and dream of the abundant resources and unbounded energy contained there. Models based on this approach give a kind of emotional satisfaction that a blend of misplaced common sense and flawed abductive reasoning produces when confronting a novel and intractable problem. Rather than the stifling Existential "Huis Clos" (Sartre, 1962) that Wallerstein confronted us with, Daily et. al's intended cautionary thought experiment about colonizing the moon just seems more and more exciting to a generation that grew up with the cornucopianism of Star Trek. We now have a roadmap to the stars, and can set up about handling our resource crisis by building space ships with the same enthusiasm that the overcrowded Europeans had when building sailing ships and setting out for the "new world". There is a danger in extrapolating from the past to the future of course – particularly when the energetics of extracting resources from the vast reaches of space are considered. One has to wonder why life isn't abundant (or existent?) or in evidence anywhere else but Earth (Ward and Brownlee, 2000). This latest imagined spatial fix is qualitatively different from all past fixes and creating a new full service ecosystem, materially and energetically, may simply cost too much.

Elite Anticipations of the rising Phoenix from the ashes of civilization…

"Our "triumphant" species may be partying on toward the first collapse of a global civilization" warns Ehrlich in his new book, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future (2004).

"By accelerating depletion of our natural capital, the interrelated trends of population growth, rampaging consumption, and worsening political and economic inequality have put us on a collision course with nature and severely eroded our ability to create a sustainable future. The Assyrians were wrecking their environment gradually. . . . We're wrecking ours rapidly. The Assyrians didn't have a scientific community that was warning them they were going to go under. We do—yet it's largely ignored.”

The problem with comparisons like this is that while civilizations rise and fall, the elite seem to maintain much of their fortunes and fortunate circumstances after the fall. Capitalists, like Capital, shake off the ashes and simply move on. With their wealth, the wealthiest build again, somewhere e