Environmental Political Theory Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Viewed from one perspective, perhaps the most curious thing about environmental political theory (EPT) is that it should exist at all. Environmental concerns—climate change, species and forest destruction, toxic pollution, and so forth—are characteristically viewed as discrete interests or preferences to be weighed against others in the making of policy by liberal pluralist states. One might study public opinion regarding such concerns or examine the influence of interest groups in promoting them within the policy-making process. But from this perspective, there appears to be little place for normative theory. Even from a point of view critical of this liberal pluralism, environmental concerns would not seem to represent anything more than a particular application of a critique to this policy domain.

The very existence of EPT is therefore premised on the conviction that environment is something more than a particular set of issues or interests to be represented in political debate. Yet what this “something more” is has been contested. In the early 1970s, the popularization of the idea of limits to growth provided a provocative basis for this conviction. Perception of impending biophysical limits to human production and consumption highlights human embeddedness within— and dependence on—a larger nonhuman world. An outpouring of early writings, such as William Ophuls’s 1977 book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State and Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1980), supposed that biophysical limits would necessitate the authoritarian imposition of social and political limits on human societies. Yet then and now many others distanced themselves from this supposition, arguing for participatory and democratic approaches to environmental challenges while retaining the conviction that the recognition of human embeddedness required the sort of systematic reflection that normative political theorizing could provide.

The label “environmental political theory” itself, along with such related ones as “green political theory,” has been in play only since the 1990s. It is only beginning to become recognized within the broader disciplinary community of political theorists and political scientists. EPT is more than the mere application of political theories to environmental issues. The questions at its core could hardly be more pressing or encompassing: given what we know about the nonhuman world, how should we organize human communities? What is the relationship between the long-standing quest for such human values as liberty and justice, on one hand, and the quest for what has come to be termed “environmental sustainability,” on the other? If we accept the urgent need to address far-reaching ecological challenges including global climate change, what sort of political values and institutions can facilitate— or impede—these efforts? Are elite-driven processes required to ensure that authoritative scientific knowledge is the basis for change? Or can democratic values and institutions more effectively meet the challenge? Finally, to what extent do all the previous questions rely on assumptions about the nature of nature itself? The scope of these questions should make it plain just how vital a form of inquiry EPT can be. It also illuminates the ties between EPT and other forms of political theorizing—while the label “environmental political theory” emerged only in the 1990s, many of the questions are at least as old as Aristotle.

To situate EPT, it is helpful to consider its relation to other forms of academic exploration of environmental problems. Parallel to the emergence of EPT has been a growing body of empirical work by political scientists on environmental policies and agreements, environmental movements and organizations, and public opinion on environmental concerns. By contrast, EPT, like political theory in general, emphasizes normative argument and conceptual analysis. Yet unlike some other forms of political theorizing, EPT rarely strays far from the practices that motivate it and often engages in fruitful dialogue with empirically oriented work. As such, theorizing in this field tends toward what political theorist Ian Shapiro characterized in a 2002 article as “problem-driven” political theory.

Beyond Ethics And Ideology

Seemingly even more closely related to EPT, and sometimes mistaken for it, are two other fields of inquiry: environmental ethics and ecological, or green, ideology.

At times, environmental ethics has been used as a term for normative inquiry into environmental concerns per se, thus encompassing EPT. Yet environmental ethics, which exists largely within the discipline of philosophy, continues to be shaped by the particular ways of framing the field as it first emerged in the 1970s. Among the defining questions that have preoccupied environmental ethicists is whether (and if so, how) nonhuman entities—including individual animals, species, and ecosystems—might be recognized as having intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is an attribute that most other ethicists had reserved for human beings, contrasting it with mere instrumental value, which is defined in relation to human purposes. From this emphasis on intrinsic value, environmental ethicists have sought to distinguish between anthropocentrism (a human-centered perspective) and ecocentrism (an ecologically centered perspective rooted in claims to the intrinsic value of nonhuman entities), between weak and strong anthropocentrism, and between subjective and objective attribution of value. Authors have tended to focus on individual convictions regarding these attributions of value, suggesting an implicit confidence that the adoption of new environmental values by enough people would lead to a broader change in social and political order.

Understood in this way, EPT is also distinct from what some have termed a “green” or “ecological” political ideology. The promise of a self-contained worldview or ideology emanating from ecological concerns also relies on a division between anthropocentrists and ecocentrists. In this sense, it shares in the distinctions drawn by many environmental ethicists. If people can be divided in this way, then we might conclude that since all existing political ideologies are anthropocentric, a commitment to ecocentrism would be the basis for a radically new ideology.

Yet if we can draw one uncontested conclusion about recent work in EPT, it is that there is no singular set of political tenets on which authors have agreed (a thorough overview is provided by Peter Hay 2002 in A Companion to Environmental Thought). Rather than settle on the ecological or green conception of political order, EPT has focused on the character of this order itself, exploring the normative position of both the state and civil society, the role of democratic decision making, the institutionalization of particular forms of rationality or rationalization, the role played by ideas of nature as a source of political authority, and the ways in which dominant political and economic ideas embedded in liberal democracy may both enable and constrain possibilities for social change. The sections that follow offer an indication of the breadth of this recent work.

Reconsidering The History Of Western Political Thought

The so-called canon of Western political thought, contested though it is, represents a shared language among political theorists. In this sense, an engagement with these thinkers by environmental theorists should not be particularly surprising. In recent years, entire books have been devoted to an examination of the environmental implications of work by Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Henry David Thoreau. Articles and chapters of books have been devoted to these same thinkers as well as Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Theodore W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Michel Foucault, among others. In addition to their contribution to environmental discourse, such works offer the community of political theorists fresh perspectives and insights about these much-studied figures.

Yet in another sense, this body of work engaging historical texts is more striking because, of course, few if any of these historical figures offer direct commentary on contemporary environmental concerns. Moreover, other environmental writers have condemned the whole of Western thought and civilization as a root cause of environmental degradation. Environmental political theorists typically write neither to bury nor to praise these thinkers. What has attracted the attention of theorists in these works is their discussions of topics including the role of nature as a legitimizer of political authority; human alienation from nature; intergenerational relations; competing conceptions of rationality, ownership, and private property; and the relation of public to private spheres. Yet the very act of engaging these thinkers supposes that in the nuances of their arguments on these vital themes, they can offer a rich resource for critical reflection, for the illumination of important tensions, and for insight into some of the challenges faced by contemporary environmentalists.

Political Concepts

In his seminal work A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold famously writes that a new land ethic could change “the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (1949, 204). Yet what might such a conception of citizenship look like? Leopold’s writing offers few answers. In a similar vein, the past couple decades have witnessed the rise of the environmental justice movement. What might justice mean in such a context? Movement activists have rarely paused to offer an explicit definition.

Questions such as these have prompted a number of environmental political theorists to examine key, contested political concepts including justice and citizenship as well as virtue, rights, pluralism, property, place, sustainability, and nature. In some cases, the fruits of their labors have been to bring insights from the works of other political theorists to illuminate environmental topics. In Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (2007), David Schlosberg, for example, has drawn on the work of critical theorists Nancy Fraser and Iris Young to show how the normative claims of activists in the environmental justice movement not only are arguments for distributive equity through the redistribution of environmental harms but also are rooted in the movement’s demand for recognition of their injuries, identities, and communities. In other cases, environmental political theorists have reconceptualized an idea to capture the character of the challenge posed by ecological concerns. For example, while citizenship is conventionally understood to be closely tied to the political institution of the nation-state, in Citizenship and the Environment (2003), Andrew Dobson has developed a conception of ecological citizenship in which obligations transcend the boundaries of the nation-state but do so asymmetrically due to the differential ecological impact (or “footprint”) of citizens in rich and poor societies.

Perhaps the most potent term in environmental discourse has also come under extended scrutiny by environmental political theorists—nature. Heated debate often exists here, with opposing camps sometimes identified as those adhering to a realist conception, which regards nature as both objective and relatively transparent in its functions and lessons, versus those adhering to a constructivist conception, which highlights the many ways that our understanding of what counts as nature is mediated by culture, ideology, and history. Yet the depth of disagreement should not be exaggerated. Among environmental political theorists, critical scrutiny has focused on whether the claim to know nature can provide a basis for political authority. On this score, even hardened realists might acknowledge that one must be cautious in drawing lessons from nature for political argument, while constructivists can note that their argument applies to the idea of nature and ought not to imply that they regard the nonhuman world itself as infinitely malleable. In this vein, several recent works have sought to navigate between these poles, pursuing “a way of talking about nature that is sensitive to the truth value of both of these positions, but that does not succumb to their logical or political shortcomings” (Andrew Biro 2005, 9).

Challenging The Boundaries Of The Political

As noted above, some forms of normative environmental inquiry emphasize the need for a change in individual ethic, worldview, or ideology. By contrast, EPT has typically insisted on the inescapability of politics itself. This leads many environmental political theorists to criticize other forms of environmental discourse for their effort to elide or escape the often-messy realm of politics, power, and contention. Timothy Luke captures this argument well in Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx (1999), drawing on sociologist Ulrich Beck to argue that contemporary liberal democratic societies have eviscerated the realm of politics by transferring key environmental concerns to the realm that they term “subpolis.” In the subpolitical realm, decision making is, according to Luke, “all too often depoliticized by the professional-technical rhetoric’s of civil engineering, public health, corporate management, scientific experiment, technical design, and property ownership.”

When scientists foray into the realm of political action, for example, they frequently characterize solutions in terms of objectively necessary technological fixes derived from nature’s authority. In relation to climate change, one prominent author recently wrote of the potential for a “carbon dictatorship.” In Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), Val Plumwood has compared such an approach to a supposed need for (borrowing from Plato) an “eco-republic,” which she rejects as not only oppressive but ecologically disastrous as well. The eco-republic fails because it does not recognize the centrality of “remoteness” (distance in time, space, consequences, or knowledge) to the genesis of environmental problems. Her alternative requires the expansion of the political sphere to incorporate ecologically vital perspectives of those closest to the problems in all these relevant senses.

When state administrators and policy analysts rely on cost benefit analyses and rational choice models to calculate collective preferences for environmental protection, theorists have criticized them for relying on an overly narrow conception of rationality. Here, resistance to the narrow politics of state power, especially in an age dominated by the power of global capital, is envisioned as emerging from the vibrant yet dissonant voices present in what Douglas Torgerson has termed the “green public sphere.”

Liberalism, Democracy, And Environmentalism

Seeking to politicize the response to environmental challenges, environmental political theorists often invoke some form of democracy as necessary for the effective redress of these concerns. Yet the record of existing liberal democratic polities in this regard appears to many to be deeply inadequate. Moreover, there is a tension in arguments for a democratic response to environmental concerns that Robert Goodin, in Green Political Theory (1992, 168), captures well: “to advocate democracy is to advocate procedures, to advocate environmentalism is to advocate substantive outcomes: what guarantee can we have that the former procedures will yield the latter sorts of outcomes?”

As long as this dichotomy between procedure and substance remains in place, Goodin’s characterization of the challenge for environmentalist advocates of democracy seems undeniable. Yet a number of theorists highlight discursive and deliberative forms of participation to imagine a democracy that facilitates environmentally responsible outcomes. This approach, according to Robyn Eckersley in The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (2004, 115), “eschews the liberal paradigm of strategic bargaining or power trading among self-interested actors . . . in favor of the paradigm of unconstrained egalitarian deliberation over questions of value and common purpose in the public sphere.” Such radical democratic forms still cannot guarantee particular substantive outcomes, but they are argued to make such outcomes more likely.

Theory And Practice

As a problem-driven form of political theorizing, environmental political theorists cannot escape the question of how their ideas might translate into practice. No answer is embraced unanimously, but two distinct models can be identified in recent works. The first envisions the theorist as using his or her privileged opportunity for reflection to clarify the challenges and opportunities faced by activists and policy makers. Here, the theorist can serve as a guide to practitioners if the former is willing to ground his or her reflections in actual cases and real questions posed by these practitioners (cf. de-Shalit 2000). A second model is embodied in those works that seek to develop normative theory out of an analysis of environmental movements and socioeconomic relationships. Here, it is not just the questions but the perspectives, voices, and arguments of activists and other practitioners that become the subject for theoretical insight and reflection.

Conclusion

While the contours of EPT are increasingly clear, this must not be mistaken for widespread agreement among theorists. In fact, the recent outpouring of writing in this field has resulted in a proliferation of perspectives. At present, EPT is a cacophonous conversation of increasingly diverse voices. Yet this takes place in an era when the environmental challenges we face require ever more urgent action. To some, this may appear exasperating: EPT is fiddling while the world burns. While EPT strives to remain relevant to practice, however, its success ought not to be measured by its ability to agree on answers. Instead, it offers the promise of all good political theorizing: of calling our attention to the most important questions and of unsettling our assurance that we already have the answers we need. As human societies grapple with the urgent yet complex problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, toxic pollution, and many others, bringing these critical perspectives into the conversation is demanded by both theory and practice.

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