by David Schmidtz
For those who live in modern cities, nature is a haven, a refuge from an urban jungle. The frustrations of the city make it easy to feel nostalgia for a simple life that never was: days spent hiking in the Grand Canyon, nights spent curled up by the fireplace after a hot shower and something nice from the refrigerator.
But nature is not a national park, as people who make their living in its midst are aware. My ancestors emigrated from Germany to North America in the 1850’s, settling in Minnesota and Saskatchewan. Like most settlers, they had mixed feelings about nature. [1] Beautiful it may have been, but it was not the innocuous beauty that city dwellers find in art galleries. Nature was wild, literally. It could be kind. It could be indifferent. Or it could be an appalling enemy, a promise of hard life and sudden death. My mother lost a brother to diphtheria. A mile down the road, her uncle watched his whole family, a wife and three children, die of diphtheria in the space of three days. She grew up on a farm that got virtually no rain for a stretch of ten years. [2] She said, "You’d see black clouds boiling on the horizon. If you didn’t know better you’d think the rain was finally coming. But it wasn’t rain. When you got up in the morning everything would be covered by a carpet of dust. Or grasshoppers." For many of the world’s people today, nature remains as it was for my ancestors–red in tooth and claw. It comes in the night to kill their children. [3] No hot shower. No refrigerator.
Western civilization has given me the luxury of being an environmentalist. I am insulated against nature, and this insulation gives me the luxury of no longer needing to see nature as a threat. Unfortunately, not everyone is so insulated, and thus not everyone is in a position to join me in treating wilderness preservation as an urgent priority. Therein lies a source of conflict, a kind of conflict that is bad for the environment and that we cannot resolve unless we understand that it is not like other kinds of conflict.
In the following sections, I describe three kinds of environmental conflict, concentrating on a subtle but crucial contrast between conflicting values and conflicting priorities. [4] I discuss what it takes to avoid, manage, and resolve these kinds of environmental conflict. I discuss the contingent connection between environmental conflict resolution and environmental justice. Finally, I argue that economics can help us understand how to resolve environmental conflict. While we need not (and should not) attempt to reduce all values to economic values, we do need to understand that there is a certain logic to the working of economic systems. To ignore the logic of human economy is to ignore the logic of human ecology and thus to ignore the logic of any ecology in which humans play a role. Anyone who truly cares about the environment would not do that.
Three Kinds of Environmental Conflict
I will treat as basic a kind of conflict in which people simply find themselves in each other’s way. I will refer to this as conflict in use. Conflict in use manifests itself in traffic jams, figuratively or literally. A pattern of overall use results in congestion, such that people trying to use a resource end up interfering with each other. [5] Conflict in use is resolved by institutions that literally or figuratively direct traffic, such as a system of property rights that lets people know who has the right of way when their intentions put them on a collision course. Such institutions help people avoid, manage, and resolve conflict when they facilitate orderly use of a common resource, when they facilitate orderly removal of resources from the commons, and when they help people cope with externalities, including new externalities that emerge as property regimes evolve. [6] Property regimes can be a kind of public good if and when they solve commons problems and induce overall patterns of sustainable use.
Some environmental conflicts, though, cannot be addressed merely by settling on a system of property rights. In particular, some of our most serious conflicts concern what should be property in the first place. Thus, there is a second kind of conflict that ultimately is a matter of conflicting values. Should Maasai tribes be allowed to own and sell elephants as if elephants were pieces of property? One thing to be said on behalf of conferring such rights is that it would give the Maasai reason to protect elephants against poachers. [7] However, some would say turning elephants into a commodity is another way of destroying them. Even when it does not literally destroy the elephants, it still destroys what elephants stand for in the minds of those who cherish the idea of nature wild and free. This is not a conflict we can resolve by deciding who owns the resource. The parties disagree on whether anyone has the right to regard elephants as a resource in the first place.
Environmentalists sometimes distinguish between anthropocentric (i.e., human-centered) and biocentric (i.e., nature-centered) orientations toward nature. Conservationists care about nature in an anthropocentric way, saying nature should be used wisely. Preservationists care about nature in a biocentric way, saying that, although we (like any living creature) cannot avoid using nature, nature nevertheless has moral standing independent of its utility for humans. [8] A preservationist will say some ecosystems or species should be left to evolve according to their own lights, as free as possible from human interference. We should not think of wilderness as a mere resource. Wilderness commands reverence; mere resources do not. We may call this clash a case of contested commodification. It exemplifies the second kind of conflict: conflict in values.
There is a third kind of environmental conflict: conflicting priorities. We misunderstand this kind of conflict if we see it simply as another case of conflicting values. The difference is that people’s immediate goals can be incompatible even when their values are relevantly similar. International conservation groups raise money by pledging to fight for preservationist "no use at all" policies. Sometimes, though, farmers do not join in pursuing cosmopolitan environmentalist goals because they cannot afford to.
This kind of conflict could occur even among people who all feel precisely the same way about where elephants should rank in our hierarchy of values. To give a crude illustration, suppose we all agree that our children outrank elephants but elephants outrank chess sets carved out of ivory. Even so, we could come into conflict when North Americans denounce hunting elephants to acquire ivory for carving chess sets, while Africans defend the practice because ivory revenues are feeding their children. Although both sides have the same values, they do not face the same cost. For one person, no elephant hunting means no ivory chess sets; for another person, no elephant hunting means no children. Subsistence farmers for whom getting enough food is a day by day proposition can have priorities that differ from ours not because their values are different but precisely because their values are the same. Thus, there is a kind of conflict that originates not so much from a difference of values as from a difference in which values people can afford to pursue under their differing circumstances.
Moreover, there is an additional problem, a feature of real-world conflict that some preservationists fail to appreciate. In parts of Africa, the dilemma for subsistence farmers is this: if they cannot commodify elephants (by selling ivory, hunting licenses, or photo safaris), then they will have to push elephants out of the way to make room for livestock or crops. In the abstract, exploiting elephants seems obviously wrong, but it stops being obvious after spending time in rural Africa, and seeing that when rural people cannot exploit elephants in some fashion, their only alternative is to convert elephant habitat into farmland.
Whether we like it or not, elephants will not survive except by sharing the land with people, which means their long-term survival depends on whether people can afford to share. Realistically, at least in parts of Africa where this kind of conflict is extreme, threatened species will have to contribute to the local economy if they are to have any hope of survival. Thus, according to Brian Child, "wildlife will survive in Africa only where it can compete financially for space. The real threat to wildlife is poverty, not poaching." [9] With equal bluntness, Norman Myers says, "In emergent Africa, you either use wildlife or lose it. If it pays its own way, some of it will survive." [10] Kreuter and Simmons conclude that, because elephants "compete directly with humans for use of fertile land, we believe elephants will continue to be eliminated unless they provide . . . direct personal benefits to the people who incur the cost of coexisting with them." [11]
And please understand: co-existing with elephants is costly. We are not talking about animals one looks at through a pair of binoculars, at a safe distance, while on vacation at a national park. Elephants are an integral part, and a dangerous part, of everyday life. Although we knew this at an intellectual level, such knowledge left us unprepared when the time came to learn it from experience. In July of 1999, we arrived at Oddballs’ Camp in Botswana’s Okavanga Delta in an airplane just big enough for three passengers. (The wings of the plane were reinforced with duct tape.) The airstrip was dirt. As we landed, baboons and warthogs scattered before us. The person who was to meet us was late because, while walking to the airstrip from the camp, he had to detour around a herd of Cape Buffalo, reputedly among the most dangerous animals in the world. After a fifteen minute walk through the marsh, we arrived at the campground.
That night, we slept with the sound of baboons howling in the foreground and lions roaring in the background. We were woken around 4 AM by what sounded like trees being shaken by a gale-force wind. I got up and found myself standing in the open air, right next to a twelve-foot elephant. The elephant had been pressing its forehead against a lala palm, whipping the tree back and forth (thereby making sound that woke us up) in order to shake down the fruit higher up. Tiring of that, the elephant had torn the whole tree out of the ground and was taking an experimental munch at the roots. (The elephant knew I was there and it may have deliberately avoided letting the tree fall on us. Some elephants are considerate in that way. Some aren’t.)
Elephants rarely sleep and spend about eighty percent of their lives eating, and there usually were a couple roaming the campground. It is important to grasp that these elephants were not pets. The camp did not adopt them. There was nothing domestic about them. There was nothing cute about them. They were magnificent by day and literally breathtaking by night. They were there because despite everyone’s efforts to keep elephants out of camp, the bottom line is that if an elephant takes an interest in something inside camp, it is coming in and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Our experience makes for a great story and an unforgettable visit, but imagine spending your whole life that way, going to bed not knowing what will be left of your crop or garden or house or children when you get up in the morning. Do you suppose the children grow up loving animals?
Again, even people who embrace environmentalist values will act contrary to those values when they cannot afford to act in accordance with them. There are times when conflict is a matter of conflicting priorities.[12]
Ideals, Compromise, and Stewardship
To some extent a philosopher’s job is to say how the world ought to be in the grand scheme of things. It is an honorable job. But where environmental ethics is a study of ideals, environmental conflict resolution is the art of compromise in a world that is not a blank canvas. Conflict mediation typically involves trying to help negotiate win-win solutions.
Sometimes the negotiation is between people who would not both win in a more perfect world. Often, though, conflicts are not clashes between good and evil. When we try to stop people from burning the rain forest, the situation may be a conflict of values between us and evil condominium developers burning forests for the sheer thrill of raping the planet. However, it is as likely to be a conflict of priorities between us and displaced farmers who just want to feed their children. If we understood each other, we might have no quarrel whatsoever with each other’s values, and might well have taken each other’s side if circumstances had been different. We often have no reason at all to be trying to win by making our adversary lose.
In choosing our priorities, we sometimes need to be sensitive not only to our own values but to other people’s as well, sometimes even when we do not care about other people’s values. Why? Because we cannot decide that people will act according to our view of what is best for Gaia. People decide for themselves. We have to ask what their values are, what their priorities are, and what could lead people with such values and priorities to act in environmentally benign ways.
The most basic principle of conflict resolution is that mediators should try to get people to focus on their interests, not their positions. [13] In other words, it is better if negotiation does not turn into a contest of wills (drawing lines in the sand, as they say) but instead revolves around the actual problem, as defined by actual benefits that might be realized if negotiation leads to agreement.
Consider what this implies for the familiar idea that we are not owners of the land so much as stewards of it. If we see ourselves as stewards, then we see ourselves as obliged to care for the land on behalf of future generations. But if we are to take our stewardship role seriously, we need to understand that honest stewardship is a commitment to environmental interests, not environmentalist positions. Commitment to interests sometimes mandates compromise on positions. It sometimes requires negotiation. Sometimes, what people call values are dressed-up positions that have little to do with any real interests. We make a huge mistake if we equate what is bad for our enemies (corporations, economists, ranchers, Western patriarchy, whatever) with what is good for the environment.
Mark Sagoff says government regulations have expressive and symbolic value. I agree that "regulation expresses what we believe, what we are, what we stand for as a nation." [14] Nevertheless, we need to be careful not to endorse a regulation merely because of what it symbolizes. If we want to make sure a law does not undermine a value in the course of symbolizing it, we must stop to ask what sort of behavior the law will induce when put in place. [15] Otherwise, when we glorify a regulation’s symbolic value, we glorify the taking of environmentalist positions at the expense of environmental interests. We will be doing exactly what experience in the theory and practice of conflict resolution tells us to avoid.
My father was a farmer. When I was eight years old, a pair of red foxes built a den and raised a litter in our wheat field. I can remember watching Dad on his tractor in the late afternoon, giving the foxes a wide berth, and leaving that part of our field uncultivated that year. He protected the den because he could afford to (and even then, I admired him for it). If there had been a law prohibiting farming on land inhabited by foxes, analogous to laws that prohibit logging in forests inhabited by spotted owls, then Dad would have had to make sure his land was not inhabited by foxes. Which is to say, Dad probably would have killed them. Although he loved them, he would not have been able to afford to let them live.
A Lesson for Environmental Ethics
Environmental philosophers often talk about environmental justice, but almost never talk about environmental conflict resolution. This is unfortunate. From a mediator’s perspective, progress requires negotiation and compromise. Moreover, achieving acceptable and stable compromise can be more important from an environmental perspective than getting it right in some idealized sense that abstracts from political realities. Where the world can go from here is constrained by the histories of stakeholders and by a plurality of values. Mediators deal with the situation as it is.
The practical relevance of environmental ethics depends on our ability to do likewise. We need to think about conflict, not merely about how the world ought to be in the grand scheme of things. If humanity were a decision-making entity, and if its component parts had no interests of their own, this entity might rationally decide to prune itself back, amputating overgrown parts for the sake of the whole, thereby leaving more room for wildlife. In Africa, though, and in the developing world more generally, if people manage to protect their land and wildlife, it will be because doing so is in their interest, not because doing so is in the interest of "the whole." If we fail to treat them as players with interests of their own, we will be our own worst enemies.
In formal terms, philosophy of law distinguishes between procedural and substantive justice. Substantive justice is, roughly, a property of outcomes. It is about people (or any entities with moral standing) receiving what they are due. Procedural justice is about following fair procedures: procedures intended to be impartial. When philosophers discuss environmental justice, they usually have one or another notion of substantive justice in mind. In large measure, though, conflict mediation tends to involve seeking justice in a procedural sense.
Perhaps mediators should and do seek to ground negotiations in principles of substantive justice as well. I am not a mediator and have no direct practical experience with institutions of conflict mediation, so it is hard for me to say. What I can say with confidence is that philosophers need to do their part to complete the circle. What I have in mind is that while mediators are trying to ground their practice in a sound theory, we could do our part by trying to ground our theories in the requirements of sound practice. If we say our philosophical principles ought to be put into practice, then we implicitly if not explicitly are warranting those principles as compatible with sound practice. However, if we make no effort to ground our theories in requirements of sound practice, then it would be fraudulent to recommend our theory to practitioners. In that case, if and when practitioners respond by ignoring us, they will be doing the right thing.[16]
Economics As Ecology
Conflict in priorities often is not only an environmental conflict. Often, perhaps typically, it is an economic conflict, too–a conflict rooted in differing economic circumstances–and it will not be resolved as an environmental conflict unless it also is resolved as an economic conflict.
Unfortunately, people who embrace ecological reasoning often reject that very reasoning as applied to human ecology. Environmentalists tend to be pretty far left of center, and they tend to think of economics as a tool of their enemies. It is not only ecofeminists and deep ecologists who tend to reject economics out of hand; even more mainstream philosophers such as Eugene Hargrove sometimes flatly reject what they call "the economic approach to nature preservation." [17] This attitude may sometimes be apt. I am an economist as well as a philosopher, but I too reject the economic approach insofar as "economic approach" refers to trying to reduce all values to economic values. [18]
However, rejecting economic value-reductionism and ignoring the real-world logic of economic systems are two different things. In cases of conflicting priorities, ignoring the economic approach to understanding the logic of human interaction is bad for the environment. [19] If in that sense we are not taking an economic approach, then we are not taking a genuinely ecological approach either. We need to pay attention to the logic of human ecology lest we stand rightly accused of not truly caring about ecology at all. Murray Bookchin offers what he calls "social" ecology as an alternative to "deep" ecology. [20] In Bookchin’s terms, my point is that if we are serious about promoting deep ecology’s values, then we must be equally serious in working with social ecology’s logic.
Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about equilibria and perturbations that keep systems from converging on equilibria. Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about competition and unintended consequences, and the internal logic of systems, a logic that dictates how a system responds to attempts to manipulate it. Environmental activism and regulation do not automatically improve the environment. It is a truism in ecology, as in economics, that well-intentioned interventions do not necessarily translate into good results. Ecology (human and nonhuman) is complicated, our knowledge is limited, and environmentalists are themselves only human.
Intervention that works with the system’s logic rather than against it can have good consequences. Even in a centrally planned economy, the shape taken by the economy mainly is a function not of the central plan but of how people respond to it, and people respond to central plans in ways that best serve their purposes, not the central planner’s. Therefore, even a dictator is in no position simply to decide how things are going to go. Ecologists understand that this same point applies in their own discipline. They understand that an ecology’s internal logic limits the directions in which it can be taken by would-be ecological engineers.
Within environmental philosophy, most of us have come around to something like Aldo Leopold’s view of humans as plain citizens of the biotic community.[21] As Bryan Norton notes, the contrast between anthropocentrism and biocentrism obscures the fact that we increasingly need to be nature-centered to be properly human-centered; we need to focus on "saving the ecological systems that are the context of human cultural and economic activities." [22] If we do not tend to what is good for nature, we will not be tending to what is good for people either. As Gary Varner recently put it, on purely anthropocentric grounds we have reason to think biocentrically.[23]
I completely agree. What I wish to add is that the converse is also true: on purely biocentric grounds, we have reason to think anthropocentrically. We need to be human-centered to be properly nature-centered, for if we do not tend to what is good for people, we will not be tending to what is good for nature either. From a biocentric perspective, preservationists sometimes are not anthropocentric enough. They sometimes advocate policies and regulations with no concern for values and priorities that differ from their own. Even from a purely biocentric perspective, such slights are illegitimate. Policy makers who ignore human values and human priorities that differ from their own will, in effect, be committed to mismanaging the ecology of which those ignored values and priorities are an integral part.
Africans seem to understand this, and in some cases they have been able to structure their policies in ways that do not slight the priorities of rural people who pay the price of co-existing with the wildlife. They understand that rural people must also benefit from co-existing with wildlife if wildlife is to survive. For example, consider Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program (as discussed in "When Preservationism Doesn’t Preserve," elsewhere in this collection). CAMPFIRE allows hunting. It does not treat animals as if they have rights. But in Zimbabwe, it is CAMPFIRE that protects the wildlife, not PETA. [24] It is CAMPFIRE that respects the priorities of the local people–that seems to understand the practical priority of what Murray Bookchin calls social ecology–and thus it is CAMPFIRE that offers some hope for the long-run survival of Zimbabwe’s wildlife.
Conclusion
Those who embrace economic values and those who embrace preservationist values are not natural enemies. If we want other people’s actions (or our own, for that matter) to be environmentally benign, then we will have to understand and work with human ecology. Environmentalists need to avoid thinking of economics as the enemy, because that antipathy interferes with understanding what it takes to resolve conflicting priorities in environmentally benign ways.
In cases of conflicting priorities, we need to think about people first, if we care about people, or even if we do not. If we care about wildlife, we need to accept that wildlife will survive to the extent that people who have to live with it are better off taking care of it. It is roughly that simple. Requiring subsistence farmers to cooperate in putting the interests of wildlife before (or even on a par with) their own is not a winning strategy for helping the wildlife. We need their cooperation, and the terms of cooperation will have to address not only our interest in preserving wildlife but also their interest in being able to live with it.
Wildlife will survive only if people can afford to share the land. If they cannot share, then they will not share, and the wildlife will die.
David Schmidtz. Natural Enemies. Environmental Ethics, 22 (2000) 379-408. Reprinted with permission of the author and the journal. Revised for the Humane Studies Review, Vol. 13, No.2. Invited presentation at the United Nations Convocation of World Leaders, January 2001.
[1]. I thank 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 1850's, 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, I met a young woman who told me that like everyone else in her village, she contracts malaria two or three times per year.
[4]. I will 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 partyís 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 Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation, ed. David Western, R. Michael Wright, and Shirley C. Strum, Washington: Island Press (1994).
[8]. Some people equate preservationism with environmentalism. This paper uses "environmentalist" to refer equally to conservationists and preservationists. I agree with Bryan Norton that it is all too easy to exaggerate the distinctionís 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 Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 12-13.
[9]. Brian Child, "The Elephant as a Natural Resource," Wildlife Conservation (March/April, 1993) p. 60.
[10]. Norman Myers, "A Farewell to Africa," International Wildlife 11 (1981) p. 36.
[11]. 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.
[12]. Of course, the different kinds of conflict are not mutually exclusive. They can occur together.
[13]. Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting To Yes (New York: Penguin Books, second edition, 1991).
[14]. Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 16.
[15]. 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.
[16]. It would be 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.)
[17]. Eugene C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 210.
[18]. 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.
[19]. 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 ipso facto champions of the world's oppressed poor and thus are relieved of any responsibility for gathering real information concerning the effect their policy proposals would have on the worldís oppressed poor. See "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third-World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-83.
[20]. Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology," Socialist Review 88 (1988): 11-29. Roughly, Bookchin's terms refer to our social environment as understood by social scientists versus our natural environment as understood by preservationist environmentalists.
[21]. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford Press, 1966, first published in 1949) p. 240.
[22]. Bryan Norton, Toward Unity, p. 252.
[23]. Gary Varner, In Nature's Interests? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 129.
[24]. PETA is an acronym for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.