Natural enemies: An anatomy of environmental conflict

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 397-408

  Schmidtz, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0013539606     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics20002245     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Thanks to Don Scherer for his thoughts on how attitudes toward nature have changed over the centuries. See also Eugene C. Hargrove, "The Historical Foundations of American Environmental Attitudes," Environmental Ethics 1 (1979): 209-40.
2. I was the fifth of six children, and the first to be born into a house with running water and an indoor toilet. Before then, families like ours got through the summer on melted snow.
3. Malaria, for example, is transmitted by mosquitoes. As my ancestors were landing in New Orleans in the 1850s, malaria was widespread as far north as the Great Lakes. See Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1760-1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945). Malaria remains endemic in many tropical and even temperate regions. When I visited Zambia recently, a young woman told me that like everyone else in her village, she contracts malaria two or three times per year.
4. I use the term environmental conflict to refer to conflict in which at least one party is voicing concerns about the environmental impact of the other party's projects.
5. A commons tragedy occurs if and when individually rational use of a common resource culminates in a pattern of collective overuse that exceeds the resource's capacity for self-renewal.
6. A resource use has an external cost when some of the activity's costs are born by people other than the user, without their consent. Air and water pollution are the standard examples.
7. Such schemes seem to have had that effect in places where they have been tried. For a number of cases studies describing the successes and failures of attempts to turn wildlife to the advantage of local economies in developing countries, thereby turning local economies to the advantage of wildlife, see David Western, R. Michael Wright, and Shirley C. Strum, eds., Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation (Washington: Island Press, 1994).
8. Some people equate preservationism with environmentalism. In this paper, I use environmentalist to refer equally to conservationists and preservationists. I agree with Bryan Norton that it is all too easy to exaggerate the distinction's practical importance. Norton notes that it is tempting to insist on reaching a verdict regarding which side is right, but Norton himself argues on behalf of an integrated approach to valuing nature, and a consensus-building approach in the policy arena. Indeed, most of us have both conservationist and preservationist sympathies. Our diverse values need not stop us from agreeing on what we realistically can accomplish. See Bryan G. Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): 12-13.
9. I borrow the phrase from Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
10. Brian Child, "The Elephant as a Natural Resource," Wildlife Conservation, March-April 1993, p. 60.
11. Norman Myers, "A Farewell to Africa," International Wildlife 11 (1981): 36.
12. Urs P. Kreuter and Randy T. Simmons, "Who Owns the Elephants?" Wildlife in the Marketplace, ed. Terry Anderson and Peter J. Hill (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), p. 161.
13. Of course, the different kinds of conflict are not mutually exclusive. They can occur together.
14. Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting To Yes, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).
15. Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 16.
16. In passing, we also need to accept that what we stand for as a nation differs from what any of us want to stand for as a nation. The things for which nations stand are a product of ongoing piecemeal compromise. We do well not to glorify the expressive value of such compromised ideals.
17. Although books are no substitute for real experience, interested readers might consult Fisher and Ury, Getting To Yes, or Willett Kempton, James S. Boster, and Jennifer A. Hartley, Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
18. Although books are no substitute for real experience, interested readers might consult Fisher and Ury, Getting To Yes, or Willett Kempton, James S. Boster, and Jennifer A. Hartley, Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
19. It is far beyond the scope of this paper to defend a particular conception of substantive justice, but let me suggest what sort of conception could count as completing the circle. Consider the principle that people ought to take responsibility for environmental consequences of their own actions: not just legally relevant consequences as determined by some regulatory agency, but rather the real consequences, to the honest best of people's ability to ascertain them. In short, people ought to take responsibility for internalizing externalities. I believe such a principle is intuitively just. I also believe that promulgating this principle as a principle of justice could help mediators resolve real world conflicts in a principled way. (As far as I know, the connection between internalizing externalities and being substantively just has not been explored in the literature.)
20. Eugene C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 210.
21. See Mark Sagoff, "At the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, or Why Political Questions are Not All Economic," Arizona Law Review 23 (1981): 1283-98.
22. Authors who understand that economic analysis must play a role in environmental protection but who do not reduce all value to economic value include Robert Costanza and Herman E. Daly, "Toward An Ecological Economics," Economic Modelling 38 (1987): 1-7.
23. Of course, it can be bad for people too. Ramachandra Guha rails against those who assume that so long as they are "cutting edge radicals" they are entitled to think of themselves as champions of the oppressed and thus are relieved of any responsibility for finding out how their policy proposals actually affect the world's oppressed poor. See "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third-World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-83.
24. Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology," Socialist Review 88 (1988): 11-29. Bookchin's terms refer to our social environment as understood by social scientists versus our natural environment as understood by preservationist environmentalists.
25. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford Press, 1966), p. 240.
26. Norton, Toward Unity, p. 252.
27. Gary Varner, In Nature's Interests? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 129.
28. CAMPFIRE is an acronym for Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources.
29. An interview of Jacomea Nare, as reported in David Holt-Biddle, "CAMPFIRE: An African Solution To An African Problem," Africa Environment and Wildlife 2 (1994): 35.
30. See http://www.campfire-zimbabwe.org or write campfir@id.co.zw for further information.
31. PETA is an acronym for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.