The Download of the Week is The Politics of Nature: Restoring Democracy to Environmental Law by Jedediah S. Purdy. Here is the abstract:
Legal scholars' discussions of climate change assume that the issue is
one mainly of engineering incentives, and that "environmental values"
are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the
emerging crisis. This paper gives reason to believe otherwise. The
major natural resource and environmental statutes, the acts creating
national forests and parks to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act,
have emerged from exactly the activity that discussions of climate
change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world
and its role in competing ideas of national purpose, citizenship, and
the role and scale of government. This paper traces several major
episodes in those developments: the rise of a Romantic attachment to
spectacular places, a utilitarian ideal of rational management of
resources, the legal and cultural concept of "wilderness," and the
innovation of "the environment" as a centerpiece of public debate at
the end of the 1960s. It connects each such development to changes in
background culture and values and the social movements and political
actors that brought them into public debate and, eventually
legislation. The result is both a set of specific studies and the
outlines of an account of the ways in which the argument and
self-interpretation of a democratic community have created and
contested new ideas of "nature" throughout American political history.
The paper then shows how past episodes cast light on the present:
today's climate politics, including the seemingly anomalous (even
"irrational") choices by municipalities to adopt the Kyoto
carbon-emissions goals, make most sense when understood as extensions
of a long tradition of political argument about nature, which does not
simply take "interests" as fixed, but changes both interests and values
by changing how citizens understand themselves, the country, and the
natural world.
And from the text:
[A]n initial typology of the appeals Americans
make in arguing about environmental commitments [is] of three broad
types, each with a variety of particular inflections. The first is a utilitarian ideal of
rational resource management, historically connected with Progressive images of
economy and society as complex systems requiring expert governance. It has market-
friendly and market-hostile versions, versions that disregard aesthetic and spiritual values
and others (important in the parks and wilderness movements) that treat these as
important resources for public well-being. It is marked by commitment to intelligent
mastery of the natural world, understood as an aspect of humans’ rational self-
governance generally. In the second type of appeal, nature figures as a source of
inspiration and instruction for human consciousness: whether through epiphany or more
measured contemplation, it changes us by helping us to change our minds. Important
versions of this appeal include the Romantic conviction that intense, even transformative
aesthetic and spiritual experiences are uniquely available in encounters with the natural
world, and an ideal, famously articulated in Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic,” that heightened
awareness of human participation in nature’s complex and interdependent systems is not
just prudentially useful, but a source of both humility and delight. A third type of appeal
is a warning, with roots in both jeremiads and the apocalyptic possibility of nuclear
warfare, that technological civilization will prove self-undermining unless it develops a
new relation to the natural world.
Environmental appeals may also be classified by the domain of values that they
invoke, rather than the substance. Some appeals are at the level of national identity,
asserting that the country will be diminished or fall short of potential in the absence of
certain public actions, such as preserving parks or wilderness. Others are in the register
of aggregate individual interests, arguing that these will be disserved without national
action, such as creation and scientific management of national forests.20 A third type of
appeal has affinity with perfectionist approaches to normative political theory: it relies on
the qualitative importance of the interests environmental law can serve.21
And later:
In the decade-plus that ran from the publication of Silent Spring to
the passage of the Clean Water Act, and particularly the five years
beginning in 1968, a new set of claims became available in public
environmental language. Ideas that would previously have been
parochial, eccentric, or even unintelligible entered into the
repertoire of arguments and authority by which Americans could appeal
to one another in disputes over the use of political power, the duties
of citizenship, and the character of the national community. These new
claims nonetheless had real limits. They were not asserted, refined,
and implemented against sustained opposition, nor did they arise from a
movement commensurate to the scale of the cultural and conceptual
ambition they expressed. A crisis and shift in values routinely
described as transformative, even revolutionary, was not thematized and
tested by opposition in a national election, although representatives
targeted as unfriendly to environmental issues proved vulnerable in the
early 1970s.215 The consequences of taking the new commitments
seriously, as a matter of public policy or personal conduct, remain
disputed at best, inspiring argument over whether the country has
adopted them in any real sense.216 This should not, however, lead us to
neglect that debate over their meaning continues today.
And from the conclusion:
Ideas about the value of the natural world are and have always been integral to the
repertoire of arguments by which Americans try to persuade one another of the character
and implications of common commitments. How we understand nature is part of our
civic identity. It has developed through interaction with changes in the other, better-
trodden themes of American public language: national purpose, civic dignity, and the role
and appropriate scale of government, to name those that have figured most prominently
in this paper. This understanding of the natural world is anything but monolithic: it is
one of the common terms that Americans interpret variously in setting out and battling
over their disagreements.261 The natural world has stood at various times, and for various
constituencies, for the idea of infinite material progress, the possibility of rational
resource management in the public interest, and the need to redefine human flourishing
beyond material mastery of nature toward a heightened aesthetic awareness and spiritual
response to it. The last idea has often served synecdoche for awareness of the
circumstances of one’s own life. The politics of nature has contributed to the civic
dignity of the free labor idea, in which the public domain was the acreage open to
settlement and exploitation; to that of progressive reformers, in which the citizen should
do her part in maintaining a social order that managed its complex and interdependent
systems for health and mutual benefit; and the Romantic whose loyalty to the political
community is paradoxically conditioned on its enabling him to leave its constraints from
time to time, escaping into solitude, reflection, and perhaps mystical ecstasy. More than
a century of development in these themes contributed to the rise of modern
environmentalism, sometimes inaptly described as an event without a history. These
themes contributed mightily to the specific shape that environmentalism gave to the
anxieties of its time, the 1960s and early 1970s, and that environmentalism in turn gave
the idea of nature’s intrinsic value and moral instructiveness a new reach in American
language. Understanding that era as one in which legislators joined movements and
commentators in adopting this new account of the natural world casts some light on the
peculiarities and limits of their landmark legislation. In turn, understanding today’s
politics as a continuation of the politics of nature casts light on the signal anomaly of
climate politics, the proliferation of local initiatives to control greenhouse-gas emissions.
Very interesting & recommended.